The Warrior

by Sharon Sala

  “Hurry,” she begged.

  John was out of his clothes within seconds and left them where they fell. His erection was hard and aching. His only intention was to bury it deep inside her where she was tight and hot and wet. Then he crawled onto the bed.

  “Let me in.”

  Her legs parted of their own accord as he slid a finger into the V between them, testing to see if she was ready.

  She was.

  Considering the situation, foreplay wasn’t happening. He rose up, then moved over her, before slamming himself into her.

  Going deep.

  Falling fast.

  Losing what was left of his control.

  One long minute passed, then another and another, as Alicia rocked against him, taking everything he was willing to give. When she began to burn, she locked her legs around his waist and pulled him deeper, moaning softly as he rode her down. Over and over, thrust after thrust, mindless ecstasy built and built until there was nothing to do but burn out.

  One moment Alicia was flying with the feeling, never wanting it to end. Then the climax hit—hard and fast—rolling through her body in waves that wouldn’t stop. She threw her arms up over her head, grabbed hold of the headboard and screamed.

  Her physical reaction to their lovemaking sent John over the edge into an animal lust for completion. When it came, the emotions that came with it shocked him. Even though he’d started this without any motivation other than lust, everything changed when he finally let go. Spilling his seed into her should have left him feeling sated. But it was just the reverse. For the first time in centuries, he felt as if he would never get enough. Even more, the lost, lonely feeling that he’d lived with for so long was no longer there. With Alicia’s arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, he felt a sense of having come home. The muscles in his arms were trembling as he finally gave up and collapsed on top of her, burying his face against the curve of her neck as she quietly sobbed.

  He didn’t know if the crying was good or bad, but the sound killed him. He kissed the side of her cheek, then her eyes.

  “Alicia…baby.”

  “Shh…please…don’t talk…don’t move. Give me this time, I beg you. Let me pretend that this mattered to you as much as it mattered to me.”

  He groaned, then rose up on one elbow and cupped her tearstained face with the palm of his hand.

  “There was no pretense,” he said softly, and brushed his lips across hers, nipping, pulling, then teasing them apart before starting all over again. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, but you can’t pretend it hasn’t, and I don’t want to forget.”

  Alicia’s eyes widened. After all these years of thinking she would never find her soulmate, could John Nightwalker be the one? Right now it felt so, and she was too full of emotion to debate it.

  She ran her fingers across his back, tracing the scars scattered here and there upon his body, all the while wondering how he had survived them. He seemed invincible. And because she was learning to trust him, he made her believe they might actually make this work.

  Then he leaned down, whispered in her ear, and sent her right back to that place between heaven and earth where only lovers abide.

  It was almost dark when John woke up. Alicia was wrapped around his body so tightly that he couldn’t move without waking her up. He sighed, then slid his arm beneath her and pulled her even closer. To hell with staying still. He wanted her awake again. He wanted—

  An alarm began to ring. As sounds went, it was small, but it was deadly. It was the only warning they were going to get that the perimeter had been breached.

  “Alicia!” he said, and yanked her up into his arms before she was fully awake.

  “What? What’s happening?” she mumbled, startled by the sudden awakening, then scared by the look on his face.

  “He’s here,” John said. He pulled the sheet off his bed, wrapped her up in it and headed for his closet.

  “What are you doing? Wait!”

  “Shut up and listen,” he said swiftly as he pushed a rack of hangers aside and punched a switch at the back of the closet. A door swung open. “There’s a light on your right, just inside the door. It’s an old bomb shelter. It was here when I bought the land. I built the house over it. There’s food and blankets, water and light. Get down there, and don’t come up until I come for you.”

  He pushed her forward, watched until she found the light, then grabbed for his clothes.

  They had time for one frantic look at each other, and then John slammed the closet door shut and her inside. As he was putting on clothes, Alicia was scrambling down the steps, still wrapped in the sheet, trying not to fall.

  She got to the bottom step, raced across the cold concrete floor to the single bed and jumped up on it before pulling the sheet more tightly around her. It was cold and quiet—so quiet. How would she know what was going on up there if she couldn’t hear? What if he never came back? What if she died down here? Scared half out of her mind, all she knew to do was pray.

  John put on a pair of pants, slid his knife into his boot and managed to slip out the front door way ahead of the intruder’s arrival. He’d set the perimeter alarms a good distance away so he would have time to reconnoiter on his own. And he’d coded the different beacons so that he would know from which direction the perimeter had been breached.

  He allowed himself one last thought for the woman in the middle of this hell, then crouched down and began to move silently through the night. Once he was a good distance away from the house, he began to circle. A few moments later, he caught a glimpse of moonlight reflecting off metal and guessed it was a gun. He paused, watching, waiting for a silhouette to separate itself from the rest of the shadows. When the shadow took shape, he palmed his knife. Now he was the one on the hunt.

  Sam Watkins was still riding the high of having located his target so quickly. He’d already made up his mind that this windfall was going to be the kickoff to his retirement. Two million dollars in Mexico was like twenty million in the States. He planned to head for the coast, maybe Puerto Vallarta, maybe Cozumel, and find himself a little hacienda and a pretty senorita to warm his bed and cook his food. He would be set for life.

  All he had to do was this one last job.

  Something moved off to his right. He paused long enough to identify the sound, as he’d done off and on since he’d left his vehicle miles away. His trek to the house had flushed out a half-dozen desert denizens, including a coyote, a lizard and a night owl. His only concern was making sure he hadn’t stirred up a rattlesnake. Confident that all he’d disturbed was another ranging coyote, he shifted his focus back to the house in the near distance.

  He could see what appeared to be a small glow from one set of back windows, which was most likely a light shining from a room on the other side of the house.

  He grinned. Either they were already asleep or they were otherwise engaged. This was going to be a piece of cake. He touched the butt of the semiautomatic in his shoulder holster out of habit, then shifted focus. He would check for a security system, disarm it if there was one, then pop right in.

  The last thing he expected was a touch on his shoulder. He spun, then caught a glimpse of a shadow between him and the mountains behind him. Suddenly the gun was no longer in his holster and he was spitting bits of desert out of his mouth.

  “You’re trespassing,” John said softly, and rested the point of his knife against the back of the man’s neck as he held him facedown in the sand.

  “Listen,” Sam started to say, hoping he could talk his way out of this.

  “No, you listen. I need the answers to two questions or I shove this knife right through your third and fourth vertebrae, at which time you will still be alive, but you’ll never move a muscle below your jaw for the rest of your natural life.”

  “Jesus…Jesus…don’t, mister, don’t.”

  John applied a fraction more pressure to emphasis his seriousness. “I find it ironic that you decide to c
all upon your God to spare your life when you came here with every intention of taking one.”

  Sam shuddered. The lack of emotion in the man’s voice was genuinely frightening.

  “I’ll talk. Just don’t cut me.”

  “I know you’re here to kill Alicia Ponte. Who hired you?”

  “Her old man.”

  Up until now, they’d been operating on assumptions, but hearing the truth from the hit man’s mouth was shocking.

  “How much?”

  “Two mil.”

  “Shame you’re not going to get to spend it,” John said, then hit the man on the back of the head with the butt of his knife. The moment Sam went limp, John pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and made one call. He waited, listening as it rang once, then twice, then three times. Just as he was afraid that his call was going to go to voice mail, it was answered.

  “Damn it, John, do you know what time it is here?”

  “It’s not that late, old man, so wake up and listen to me. Ponte sent another hit man.”

  Corbin was already grabbing for his glasses as he was crawling out of bed. “Are you two okay? Where are you? Do you need—”

  “I have everything under control,” John said.

  Corbin sighed. “Of course you do. What do you need?”

  “I think it’s time we called in the Feds, which is where you come in. There is a possibility that this man knows details that might lead them to Ponte.”

  “Fantastic! Tell me where you are and how to get there. I’ll make the necessary calls.”

  “I own a place in the desert north of Sedona.”

  “Give me directions,” Corbin said, writing quickly as John rattled them off, then added a phone number.

  “It’ll probably take at least a couple of hours to get everything together and get there. Are you going to be all right until then?”

  “Yes.”

  “John?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t kill him.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. If I wanted him dead, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “Yeah, right. Okay. I’m making the calls now.”

  “We’ll be waiting,” John said, then pocketed the phone and the semiautomatic, grabbed the man’s heels, rolled him over on his back and started dragging him toward the house.

  Alicia was so scared she was sick to her stomach. She didn’t know how much time had passed. She couldn’t hear anything. She had to trust what John had told her and remember the fierceness with which he’d kept her alive so far. Now was not the time to doubt him.

  And then there was the passion with which they’d made love. It had forever changed her life. She was never going to be the same—never going to be satisfied with the status quo again. She wanted a life with John Nightwalker in every way a woman could want a man. During the good times and the bad. In joy and in sorrow. But she couldn’t get past the memory of how he’d stood before the painting of his dead wife’s face, fearing that he would never love her the way he’d loved White Fawn. She would gladly take second best. She didn’t care if he didn’t love her enough. She could love enough for the both of them. She just didn’t know if he would be willing to go that far.

  She didn’t know how much time had passed when she realized she was hearing footsteps running through the room above. The breath caught in the back of her throat. Was it John? Or was it her killer?

  Then a door slammed loudly. She looked up. John was coming down the stairs on the run. She bolted up from the bed, the sheet falling to the floor as she threw herself into his arms.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, running her hands across his face, checking for bruising, then examining his clothing for blood.

  “I’m okay,” he said quickly, then grabbed the sheet and wrapped it back around her. “You’re freezing, baby.”

  “Is it over?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But it soon will be. You’re going to want to get dressed. We’re going to have company in a while.”

  “Company?”

  “The Feds. Come with me. I don’t want to leave our…visitor alone any longer than I have to.”

  Alicia’s eyes widened in disbelief as he pulled her up the steps and then back into his bedroom. She paused at the foot of his bed, watching as he began digging through a dresser. “You brought him here? The man who was going to kill me?”

  “He’s tied up out on the back terrace. Get dressed and meet me out there,” John said, then stopped long enough to slide an arm around her waist and pull her against him. He kissed her then—hard and fast, but with a silent reminder there was more where that came from—and left the room on the run.

  Alicia stumbled out of his bedroom, pausing long enough to gather up her clothes, which were still lying in the middle of the hall, then ran into her room to get dressed.

  Sam Watkins came to consciousness staring straight up at the night sky. It took him a few moments to realize he was lying on the patio of the house he’d been planning to invade. His hands and feet were bound so tightly that they felt numb, and he could see the silhouette of someone sitting in a chair about ten feet away.

  “So you took two million dollars to end my life? How much would you charge to kill my father?”

  Hearing a woman’s voice was surprising, but not as shocking as what she’d just asked. Suddenly he realized he was in the presence of the woman he’d been sent to kill. There was a moment of excitement when he wondered if he was going to get out of this after all, a moment when he believed he could make a deal with the intended victim and double-cross his employer.

  “I’d do him for the same as what he paid me to do you,” he said.

  “And what amount was that again?”

  “Two.”

  “Million?”

  “Yeah. I mean…he’s got the—”

  Alicia interrupted. “I know what he’s got. What I want to know now is…John, did you get that confession on tape?”

  “Every bit of it,” John said.

  Sam Watkins arched his back and looked behind him, saw the same silhouette he’d seen out in the desert, and realized he’d been had.

  “Son of a bitch,” he swore.

  “You certainly are,” Alicia said, then suddenly pointed upward. “John! I hear a helicopter. There…see the lights. Is that them?”

  “Looks like it,” John said, and picked up a remote from the table beside him and aimed it toward a box on the back of the house.

  Suddenly the whole place was flooded with light, along with a good hundred yards of land at the back of the property. Sam closed his eyes against the glare, wondering where it had all gone wrong. Part of it was his own greed. He would admit to that. But part of it was most likely complacency. He’d begun to believe his own PR. He couldn’t be caught. He didn’t fail.

  But that was before he’d walked into the wrong territory and underestimated the enemy. He had time for one moment of regret, thinking about the two million dollars that would never be spent, and then he watched a helicopter land, and a half-dozen men spill out and come running. At that point, the rest of his carefully laid plans fell down around his ears.

  “The money was wired into Watkins’ account from a numbered bank account in Switzerland, which tells us nothing about Ponte’s location. But it does add to the charges piling up around him. Treason. Attempted murder. And the county judge down in Georgia who let Dieter Bahn go is in hot water, too. With Watkins’ statement implicating Bahn as the go-between for the hit on Alicia Ponte, Bahn can no longer claim any kind of innocence as to his employer’s intent. Unfortunately he, too, has disappeared. If I were guessing, I’d say Bahn, like his boss, is most likely out of the country.”

  Alicia sat without moving, listening to the phone conversation between John and Special Agent Joshua on speakerphone as the FBI man filled them in on the latest details. Most of them she already knew, and her mind began to wander.

  It had been two days since they’d taken Watkins into custo
dy. Two days during which she and John had tiptoed around the obvious. They’d made love. But where did they go from there? When this was over—if she was still alive to tell the tale—was that also going to be the end of the line for their relationship? Even worse, was she kidding herself by calling what they shared a relationship? He made love to her, but the word love never crossed his lips.

  Then her reverie ended as she suddenly focused on something John asked.

  “Do you think the threat to Alicia’s life is as high as it was?”

  Joshua paused for a moment before he answered. “It’s hard to say. I mean, it’s obvious this has become personal to Ponte. He knows we have the goods on him, so it’s not as if we need her testimony for anything. In fact, she didn’t actually give us anything we could have used in a trial, although she’s the one who set the ball rolling. If she hadn’t told us what she did, it’s unlikely he would ever have been caught. Everything we needed for trial came from Jacob Carruthers. Even though he’s dead now, thanks to his sworn statements, we had probable cause to confiscate everything we could have hoped for, and it was all there. Both in Carruthers’ office and in Ponte’s computer records. So Ponte’s agenda regarding his daughter is obviously personal. I can’t say this won’t happen again. And if it does, we have no way of knowing who he’ll hire next. People will do a lot of wrong things for the right amount of money.”

  John glanced toward Alicia, then realized she was upset. But who wouldn’t be? He’d learned all he could from Joshua; it was time to wrap up the call.

  “Yes, you’re right, of course. I was just asking on her behalf.”

  “So what are your plans?” Joshua asked.

  John glanced over at Alicia. She shrugged, then looked away.

  “We’re not sure,” he said. “But if we leave this location, I’ll be sure and let you know. Oh…and when you see Woodliff again, tell him thanks for getting you guys out here so fast the other night.”