In Love and War

by Lovelace, Merline; McKenna, Lindsay; Irvin, Candace

  The mattress sagged as Jack added his weight. “What happened?”

  “Everyone pitched in, cleaning the exam rooms for the next day. By the time I finished, I was exhausted. I walked out with two locals without my purse.” Okay, so she was stupid. She’d also been subsisting on a thirty-six-hour jet lag followed by twelve hours of manual labor. Still, she should have known better. The screw-up had cost her. But not as much as she’d cost someone else. “A couple blocks away, one of the nurses noticed. They waited while I headed back. But when I rounded the last corner, Youssef slammed his fist into my jaw. Before I could recover, he’d stabbed a needle into my arm. That’s the last I remember.” Until she’d woken to Lina’s sobbing.

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t understand. If Youssef struck you, how do you know someone on staff’s involved? Anyone could have injected you with that needle.”

  “I recognized one of the girls from the clinic. She was treated a good six hours before I was kidnapped, yet we both ended up here.” Dani sighed. When she’d woken on the floor that morning she’d noticed her watch missing, so she’d decided to make a move for the emergency transmitter hidden in her shoe—until Lina’s struggle with Youssef changed her mind. In her lingering, drug-induced fog, she decided to take Youssef on instead. She’d never get those moments back now. She’d never know whether tripping the signal as she was supposed to would have made a difference. Would backup have arrived in time?

  Dammit, don’t. She’d been so out of it, she’d been little more than a punching bag herself. There was no way of knowing if she’d even have been able to trip the transmitter.

  But she hadn’t even tried, had she?

  “Dani?”

  She stiffened. Not from Jack’s touch on her arm, from the note in his voice. Like his fury toward Rurik on her behalf, his concern for her was far too seductive. She didn’t doubt it was real. It just hadn’t been enough. It still wasn’t.

  “I’m fine.” She shifted from his touch, dragging in her breath as she tried to ignore the hurt in his dark eyes. All she succeeded in doing was filling her lungs with his scent. Lord, did she have it bad! Less than an hour in Jack’s company and here she was, wanting him again. She couldn’t help it. For the first time in almost a year, Jack was in the same room as her, close enough to touch—even if he was staring at her as if he was afraid she was about to break. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, so many things she needed to know. Unfortunately, not a single question crowding her heart concerned their respective missions. They had to do with him. With them.

  Had he missed her? Had he wondered where she’d spent this past Christmas—and, more importantly, the day after? Or had Jack already found someone else to celebrate his birthday with by then? Had he been too busy torching those dark-blue sheets of his with her replacement to even care that she’d kept her vow?

  The lack of oxygen from Youssef’s attempted strangulation must have affected her brain. Either that or her guilt over Lina’s death had affected her heart. Because she finally raised her head and stared directly into that dark, simmering gaze. Before she realized her intent, she opened her mouth and asked the one question she’d sworn she wouldn’t ask.

  “How’s my dad?”

  Chapter 3

  She didn’t know.

  Jack stiffened as the realization socked in. He searched Dani’s gaze, praying he’d misheard. But when those soft blue eyes darkened to damp, pleading smoke, he knew he hadn’t. Dani had no idea that after she’d walked out on him eleven months ago, he’d finally scraped up the nerve to swallow that goddamned choking case of gratitude and do what he should have done years before. He’d walked out on her father.

  It might have taken all his hopes and his dreams crashing down for him to realize she’d been right that last night they’d seen each other, but eventually, he’d accepted the truth. He had been standing between Dani and her father—for ten long years. Whether he’d wanted to be there or not. And now, incredibly, almost another full year later, half a blessed globe away, he was still standing between General Stanton and his daughter. The irony of it would have bitten him in the ass.

  If it wasn’t already ripping through his chest.

  “Jack?”

  He swung his gaze to hers, the ache deepening as he watched the fear seep into her eyes. He’d do anything to erase it, he knew that now. Even lie. “Your dad’s fine.” He waited until the fear began to ebb, then changed the subject before she could question him further and he was forced to compound his lie. Now was not the time to come clean about her dad. And this sure as hell wasn’t the place. “How was it supposed to go down?”

  She blinked at the sudden shift.

  “Your kidnapping case? I’m assuming you had a plan. One my presence in that kitchen interfered with?”

  Her gaze cleared. “Yes. My watch contained my tracking device. Unfortunately, it was missing when I woke this morning. I have no idea who took it, or when.”

  “Maybe one of the other girls—”

  “No.”

  For a split second, her vehemence startled him—until he recalled the mottled bruises on the other girls’ faces. She was right. Those girls had had more to worry about lately than petty theft. He was about to confirm her assessment when he noticed the sudden glistening in Dani’s gaze. Her stark, distant gaze.

  Just like that, the fear surged back into his gut. The cold, nauseating terror. Youssef. She’d sworn the bastard hadn’t raped her, but what about Rurik and the rest of his thugs? While Dani was older than Rurik’s perverted tastes, rape wasn’t about desire. It was about a twisted need for power. A need Rurik had nursed since the siege of Sarajevo years before. Jack sucked in his breath, his own blistering rage. God as his witness, if he could turn back time, he would—and this time, he’d make damned sure that bullet landed deep inside Rurik Teslenko’s brain. Jack stared at the bruises mottling Dani’s face and neck and forced the words past his bile. “Dani, I know you said Youssef didn’t touch you…like that. But something happened here. Something more than a vicious beating. I can see it in your eyes.”

  Hell, he could see it in the way she’d wrapped the chain to his dog tags around her hand for the umpteenth time. Only this time, her knuckles turned white. Her fingertips followed. He swallowed the searing acid as it threatened to choke him.

  “Dani…what happened?” When she didn’t answer, he stepped closer. The folk music he’d switched on to provide cover for their conversation grated through him. He’d have given anything to strangle that shrieking accordion long enough for him to gauge the whisper of her slow, studied breaths. To know if she needed him to pull her into his arms and hold her as tightly and as desperately as he’d ached to hold her since the moment he’d spotted her in that kitchen. Dammit, why wouldn’t she look at him? “Honey, you can tell me anything. You have to know that.”

  She finally raised her gaze…and he damned near died.

  “Can I?”

  Those two tortured words ushered in a complete and profound understanding for her father he’d never thought he’d hold. “Yes.”

  “I screwed up.”

  “How?”

  For several moments, he didn’t think she was going to answer. As he watched the emotions churning through her eyes, he wasn’t sure if she could. But then she sucked in her breath and spoke. “When I woke this morning, I was on the floor. Where, I can’t be sure, my brain was still fogged from whatever they injected me with. Anyway, the first thing I did was reach for my watch, but it was gone. I had a backup transmitter in my shoe, though. I should have gone for it. I might have made it.” She sucked in her breath again. This time it came out in a rush. “Dammit, I was trained to go for the alarm first—because there might not be another chance. I should have tried.”

  “Why didn’t you?” But he knew. The blonde. The one the Swede had come for. The one Youssef had raped and murdered. Rurik’s complication. The tears welling in her eyes confirmed it.

  “I heard a girl. T
he same girl from the clinic. Her name was Lina. She was sobbing on one of the beds, half naked.” His heart burned as Dani stopped to scrub the tears from her battered cheek. She swallowed hard. “Youssef was all over her. He was…raping her.”

  “You went for her instead of the transmitter.”

  She nodded dully. “Yes.”

  “Dani—” He caved in to the need burning through him and reached for her, only to clench his fingers into a fist as she jerked away from his touch. From him.

  “Dammit, did you listen to what I said? Because of me that SOS was never sent. Because of me, a young girl was beaten more severely than she ever would have been beaten. I was too drugged up to help. Youssef was livid with me for interrupting. If I hadn’t passed out, I have no doubt he would have strangled me to death. Instead, he turned his rage on her.”

  Jack forced the latest wave of his own rage from his mind and his heart and locked it deep in his gut. Stored it. Nursed it. Youssef would pay for what he’d done and soon. But not now. For now, he had Dani to deal with. Her grief and her guilt. He ignored her subconscious retreat as he lowered himself to the bed. Somehow, he kept from reaching out as she wrapped the chain about her fingers once again. Though her fingers were bloodless now, he knew that chain was the only thing holding the rest of her together. “Dani, what happened to Lina? Where is she?”

  She kept her gaze fused to his tags. “I don’t know. Rurik, Zorah, Youssef, none of them will tell me what happened. But I haven’t seen her since. The other girls are too terrified to talk to me. Youssef threatened to beat them if they did. I had hopes Lina was in the dairy barn. Maybe to keep her separate as she healed. But given why you’re here, it’s looking unlikely.”

  She was right. But until they had evidence to the contrary, she couldn’t be sure. Neither could he.

  “I’ll talk to Rurik tomorrow. I may be able to get him to tell me what happened to her. Either way, you and Lina may have spared the other girls from Youssef’s wrath. The bastard might have threatened to beat the remaining girls if they talked to you, but I don’t think he’ll dare because I also overheard Rurik ordering Youssef and the rest of the thugs to leave the girls alone. I got the feeling Rurik’s worried about something. He may need the money to pull off the embassy attempt.” Why else had Rurik accepted three hundred dollars? Dani was worth six, seven hundred to the man at least. “Dani, did you hear me?”

  She nodded numbly. Still, she wouldn’t tear her gaze from his tags. And her fingers. They’d progressed beyond white. The tips were turning gray. Unwilling to jeopardize her circulation, he reached out, gently but insistently unraveling the chain. That done, he risked reaching for her again, sliding his arms around her shoulders to pull her close. It was a mistake.

  She flinched. This time, the recoil wasn’t even subtle. The message was even clearer. Don’t touch. But at least his blunder allowed her to pull herself together. She drew in her breath and waited patiently, if stiffly, for him to release her. Though it cut deeply, he did, abandoning the bed as she pulled her knees up to tuck them beneath her chin. Her stare evaded his once again, sliding out across the room. Nothing had changed between them. Why had he even hoped it could?

  Habit? After all these months—hell, after all these years—it wasn’t going to change. She wasn’t going to change. She didn’t want to. It was time he accepted it. Dani would never see him as anything but the usurper of her father’s affections. God knows he’d tried to change that view eleven months ago. Well, he’d failed. Hell, she didn’t even know he wasn’t with Delta anymore. From her question about her father, she had no idea he hadn’t even seen the man but once in the past six months. But that pointed to something even more startling. She hadn’t seen the man either.

  The rift between Dani and her father was finally complete.

  He might never have been able to capture this woman’s heart, but he did understand it. He understood her. After the chilling discovery he’d stumbled across last month through an old war buddy of her father’s, he understood Danielle Stanton better than she understood herself. If he confessed that he wasn’t with Delta, she’d demand to know the rest. What then? She was already hanging by a thread over Lina. There was no way he could bring himself to sever it. If he did, he might lose more than the promise of her heart this time.

  He could lose her life.

  He shoved his hand into the cargo pocket of his fatigues as he worked to ease the tightening in his chest as well as his growing private terror. Despite the accordion still wailing out from the tiny radio, he caught her sharp intake as he retrieved the open pack of Marlboros he’d brought along for the job.

  “When did you start smoking?”

  He tapped the base of the pack on his palm. “I don’t. Sgt. Jackson’s trying to quit.” And as far as Rurik was concerned, Sgt. Jackson had just finished one hell of a steamy romp. Might as well use the misconception to strengthen their covers. He shoved his hand in his pocket again, withdrawing the unopened pack. He flipped the cigarettes to Dani, pointing to the sealed cellophane wrapper as she caught it. “That one contains my emergency transmitter. I’ll talk to Rurik about your clothes. Maybe we’ll get lucky and your shoes and watch will show with them. Until then, hang on to those. If we get separated and things go south, open the pack and activate it. Hamid will hear the signal and send backup. He’s loitering less than a mile away with some distant relatives of his—a band of Roma gypsies.”

  She tossed the pack back. “I can’t.”

  Dammit, they’d already established whose mission had priority. As abhorrent as Rurik’s slave racket was, Dani’s case held three innocent young lives in the immediate balance, if they located the missing soldiers, five. His held hundreds, perhaps thousands. That meant she followed his orders until they figured out how to get out of this mess, not the other way around. He sighed.

  “Relax, will you? I’m not defying Gage the Great. I’m being realistic.” She dropped her knees, revealing the T-shirt and shorts he’d loaned her. “Where exactly should I hide the pack? Between my breasts?” She was right. With her bra missing, the thin fabric of his shirt clung to every generous curve—right down to the nipples that stiffened beneath his errant stare.

  His palms betrayed him, itching in memory. Unnerved, he tapped out a cigarette from the pack in his hands and retrieved his lighter before the rest of his body decided to follow the insurrection. The moment she gasped, he realized his error.

  “You kept that?”

  Talk about getting caught red-handed. His fingers tightened about the silver casing before he could stop them. He loosened them as he shrugged. “Why not? It comes in handy from time to time.” He flipped open the lighter she’d presented to him upon his graduation from West Point and lit the cigarette, then tucked the lighter firmly home. “Besides, I heard it was the thought that counts.”

  And they both knew what she’d been thinking when she’d bought it, didn’t they? So had her father. He could still hear the man bellowing at her through the door of his study. Dani turned as beet-red as she had the moment she’d marched out—a barely seventeen-year-old slip of a girl, but the very picture of Betrayed Woman. At least this time she wasn’t glaring eternal hatred. “I’m just…surprised you still have it.”

  So was he. Other than that sultry night a decade later, it was the only gift she’d ever given him. He’d thrown the thing in the trash a hundred times since, only to fish it right back out. Jack shoved the cigarette between his lips and punished himself for each retrieval with a deep, searing drag. He knew from experience it would be enough for the stench of tobacco smoke to cling to him for hours. If only Dani had been as experienced as she’d pretended to be the first time they’d kissed…with cigarettes and with men. Who knows? He might have ended up with her on graduation day instead of the lighter.

  Right. He spun around to the dresser and settled the smoldering cigarette over the lip of the ashtray Rurik had dropped off. By the time he turned back to the bed, she was lost in the
distant past, too. In the night they’d met and the day after. He doubted she’d ever forget that first weekend. Eleven months ago, he had thought she’d forgiven him, though. Worse, he actually thought she’d cared about him. But she hadn’t.

  Though they’d parted in a torrid rush in his driveway, he hadn’t minded. Mainly because all the way in to Ft. Bragg, he’d reveled in the fact that despite that amazing shower, he could still smell Dani’s scent on him. He’d savored the fragrance all morning, along with the memory of her touch. They’d made plans for dinner that night, but he couldn’t wait. By noon, he’d decided to stop by Dani’s temporary office across post and surprise her with lunch. Unfortunately, another Stanton had opted to head down the hall for an impromptu chat. At the time, it had seemed prudent to forgo lunch with Captain Stanton and dine with the general. In retrospect, it had turned out to be a lousy decision. By the time evening rolled around, Dani had changed her mind about more than dinner. She’d decided to pass on him.

  He still couldn’t believe she’d chalked up the hottest night of his life to a case of cold chemistry.

  Adrenaline. Too bad he couldn’t lay claim to the hormone. Not then. Those erotic hours they’d spent together on his bed had been anything but a byproduct of the flush of a successfully completed mission. Not for him, anyway. He’d long since accepted that this heightened awareness and fiery rush that scorched through him whenever Danielle Stanton was around didn’t have a thing to do with some chemical pulsing through his blood. Well, he was just going to have to get over it, wasn’t he?

  She obviously had. For a few blinding moments at that door, he’d actually believed differently—until he’d pulled away and watched as the adrenaline had worn off—in her. Hell, even now Dani’s body language screamed the truth. The woman he’d tried so hard to purge from his mind and his memories these past months would give anything to be anywhere but here with him. He was sure of it when he retrieved the lighter and pack of cigarettes and stepped up to set them on the nightstand beside her.