by Cindy Gerard
“I’m sorry I didn’t know her.” Nate wrapped a strong hand around a post at the foot of the bed and leaned casually against it.
He worries about me, Juliana thought. He reads my moods and worries. It just comes naturally to him. Just as the way he carries himself with such understated confidence and ease, comes naturally. Beneath that quiet confidence, however, beat a warrior’s heart. A protector’s heart. That’s why he was here tonight, after all. To protect a child.
“I, too, am sorry you never met her. Angelina would have liked you very much.”
He nodded, his gaze searching hers in that way he had of seeing deeper than she wanted him to see. That was the thing about Nathan Black. He sometimes saw too much.
“I’m fine with this. Really,” she assured him, because she knew he wanted to ask. “Angelina would approve. She was always about helping the children.”
“She’s going to be scared,” he said.
“I know. But we’ll help her through it.”
Just as Nate had helped her through some difficult times. Had been helping her, in fact, for almost two years, before she’d realized that he’d been watching over her. He’d done it as a favor to Gabe Jones, who had been deeply in love with Angelina and feared that Juliana’s life might also be in danger because of the madman who had killed every living soul Juliana loved.
Despite her best efforts not to, Juliana let herself drift back to that fateful night two years ago when her world had changed again—only this time, for the better. If it hadn’t been for a break-in at Villa Flores, she might still be in the dark about Nate Black’s true identity. She might never have found out that the unassuming expat she’d known as David Gavin was, in fact, Nathan Black, the leader of the elite team of men, making up Black Ops, Inc.
As far as she’d known then, David Gavin lived quietly in a small flat in nearby Bahía Blanca and volunteered twice a week to balance the ledgers at her free clinic. But when David Gavin had shown up that horrible night after she’d dialed a phone number Gabe had told her to use if she ever felt threatened, the truth had come out.
And nothing had been the same between her and Nate since.
She’d been frightened and lonely and confused. He’d provided comfort and care and escape. He’d made love to her that next morning, and it had been wonderful. Lush. Intense. Caring. Because it had felt like a betrayal to Armando, she’d struggled with the guilt ever since.
Guilt, however, hadn’t stopped the longing.
She glanced at Nate again, her gaze caressing the short black hair that showed a distinguished hint of gray at his temple, then busied herself storing the pillows in the closet because he had that look in his eyes again. The one that suggested he might be reading her thoughts.
And what she was thinking was that perhaps she’d made a mistake keeping him at arm’s length, wondering if he thought it was a mistake, too.
Maybe he didn’t feel the same tug and pull. Maybe she was the only one who sometimes regretted the course they’d taken. But he would get a look in his eyes sometimes, a look rife with pain and yearning, and when he did, it was all she could do to keep from reaching for him and taking him to her bed again.
“I hear the chopper.” Nate walked across the room and looked out the window.
The lights of the Angelina Foundation helicopter, which Juliana had dispatched to Buenos Aires to meet the plane carrying the Reeds and Hope Weber, flashed through the bedroom window. “That’ll be them.”
Juliana didn’t know if she felt disappointment or relief that she’d lost yet one more opportunity to confront Nate about his feelings for her. Once again, she had almost gathered the courage to open herself up to broaching the possibility of life, the possibility of love after all these years of being closed off in the dark.
“Juliana?” His dark eyes searched hers, expectant, questioning.
Suddenly self-conscious, she averted her gaze and hurried out of the room ahead of him. “Let’s not keep them waiting.”
“Hugh left these maps.”
Wyatt turned away from the French doors that led to the patio when he heard Sophie return to the living room. Her arms were filled with rolled cylinders. The minute they’d arrived back at her house after leaving the theater, she’d made a beeline for her office. Apparently, she’d found what she was looking for.
“Maps of the surrounding area, each individual region, and an aerial map of El Salvador.” She leaned over and dumped them on the coffee table.
A stray lock of hair tumbled over her forehead and fell across her left eye when she straightened. “We should be able to use them to pinpoint the drawing of the map Vega gave me,” she said hopefully, tucking the hair hastily behind her ear.
Wyatt knew she had never been aware of the effect she had on him. If she had, she’d be running scared, because that simple action—so alluringly female, so unconsciously sensual—had his gut clenching and his mouth going bone-dry.
It had always been that way when he was around her. His senses viscerally alert, his emotions raw to the point of bleeding. He wanted to lunge across the room, yank that wet dream of a dress above her waist, and bury himself hard and deep inside her. No finesse. No romance. Just lust. He wanted to consume and overwhelm and possess. And then, only then, did he want to settle her, gentle her, and make her achingly aware of how much he loved her.
Instead, he did what he had always done. He swallowed back the need, didn’t let on that he was boiling inside. He simply nodded in agreement, shrugged out of his black tuxedo jacket, and tossed it over the back of a chair. She turned to leave him there but stopped, slowly turned, and regarded him with serious eyes.
“I need you to be straight with me about this,” she said abruptly. “Do you really think we can find her before … before it’s too late?
Hope rode high on her question. He’d like to give her something solid to hang on to. The realist in him, however, wasn’t onboard. Human life meant nothing to the barbarians who had abducted Lola. Money was their god, and yeah, there was a very good chance that if they didn’t deliver the ransom by the Thursday deadline, Lola would become a casualty of greed and depravity.
But how could he look at those expectant brown eyes and tell her that?
“The biggest single thing in Lola’s favor right now is that the kidnappers will be smart enough to keep her alive until they get their money. They understand that no one is going to hand over that much cash without proof of life.”
She breathed deeply. “About the money …”
“Don’t worry about the money,” he said. “We’re going to find her before the deadline. It’s what we do. We find bad guys. Trust me on this, okay?”
He could see in her eyes that she wanted to believe him. She needed to believe him.
“Okay,” she said on a bracing breath. “Give me a minute to change. Then I’ll make a pot of coffee and help you with these maps. It could be a long night.”
No shit, Wyatt thought. Long day. Long night.
Like the very long silence in the car after he’d done the emotional equivalent of puking up his guts.
Two years, and you didn’t bother to contact me. So no, Sophie, I honestly didn’t think I had any right to know your business.
Christ. Like she needed to deal with his emotional baggage in addition to everything else.
Disgusted with himself, he went to work on the cufflinks and rolled the shirtsleeves up to his elbows. He sat on the edge of the sofa and reached for one of the maps.
Twisted up, he thought absently as he unrolled it. He was twisted up ten ways from Sunday because a woman he hadn’t seen in twelve years had been divorced for two of those years and hadn’t bothered to tell him.
Get over it.
Well, shit, Sherlock, that was the problem, wasn’t it? He flattened the map on the low table and used a set of coasters to pin down the curling edges. He’d never gotten over it. Never gotten over her.
He scrubbed his hands over his face and absently
scanned the map. And he thought about anything but the way she’d looked tonight. Instead, he thought about the brave way she’d opened herself up to attack when she’d gone out on that terrace alone at the theater. The guilt in her voice when she’d told him she was sorry she hadn’t contacted him.
Now, as then, it was crystal-clear that the apology translated to exactly what he’d always known.
She was sorry she hadn’t loved him.
She was sorry she would never love him.
Knife to the heart. Gun to the head. Pick a pain. He felt it.
He shot up off the sofa and paced across the room. He really needed to get a grip. He wasn’t a drinking man. The last time he’d gotten flat-ass wasted had been the night after Sophie and Hugh’s wedding. He’d stayed that way for a week.
Maybe he was overdue for another bender. He added it to his to-do list, right after “Save the child, then get on with your life.”
“Yeah, and maybe you ought to just suck it up and get it through your hard, thick skull you’re not the man of her hour, and you never will be,” he muttered.
In the meantime, the clock was ticking for Lola. It was a little after midnight, which meant twelve of their seventy-six hours were already gone. The kidnappers had given Sophie until noon on Thursday, at which time they would deliver their final instructions on where and when to drop the money. That gave him sixty-four hours to find a lost child before she became a dead child—a job that was much bigger than nursing his pathetic little wounded heart.
Wyatt’s cell rang just as Sophie came back into the room. It was Nate.
“They made it,” he said, and motioned Sophie over. “Hope wants to talk to you.”
She reached for the phone with trembling hands. “Hey, baby, how you doing?”
She listened, her eyes glistening, before a laugh that was a mixture of nerves and relief bubbled out. “A helicopter? And you weren’t scared?”
She was smiling now, a single tear rolling down her cheek as her daughter apparently filled her in on her big adventure.
“It turns out Juliana Flores does live in a castle,” she said after hanging up a few minutes later.
“Told you she’d be fine.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling her thanks and stirring up those feelings again that he didn’t seem to be able to control. “You did.”
“Should we be worried about the guys?”
Wyatt glanced at the clock. It was close to two a.m. He’d showered and changed into a T-shirt and cammo pants, and he and Sophie had been poring over the maps for damn near two hours. Side by side. Alone. In the night. The scent of her driving him crazy. The nearness of her testing his resolve.
“They’re big boys. They can handle themselves,” he said, hoping he didn’t have to eat his words. “If there was a problem, they’d call.”
At that precise moment, he was a lot less worried about them than he was concerned about how he could continue to handle himself around her. As the night grew deeper, his resolve grew weaker.
He glanced at her and realized, with surprise, that she was watching him. That she’d been watching him. She quickly looked away, her face flushing a pretty pink. And his pulse damn near went off the charts.
Beside him, she seemed to stop breathing. Beside him, she seemed to be as conscious as he was of the two of them, alone, together. The notion that she was on the same page, in the same place as he was, both stunned and scared the crap out of him.
They lapsed into an unsettling silence. The air surrounding them grew thick with an unexpected and acute awareness of each other.
Could it be? And did he really want to question it? Question that they’d been concentrating on pinpointing the coordinates on Vega’s sketchy map when the earth moved beneath them? Question that her silence had shifted from concentration to raw sexual awareness that encroached like a fog, crowding into the room and encompassing them in a warm, sensual mist?
Consciousness shifted to the tactile awareness of their thighs almost touching as they sat side by side on the sofa, leaning over the low coffee table. Of the closeness of their hands, his left, her right, his large, hers so small, where they were planted on the scattered maps. Their fingers were within a hair’s breadth of contact.
His heart, Jesus, his heart jumped so hard that she had to feel it. He had to get hold of this. He had to back away. But then she turned her head and met his eyes again. And he saw with staggering clarity that she was as caught up in whatever this was as he was.
Caught up in the heat.
Caught up in the need.
Caught up in the rush of insanity that was desire, her mind closed to the senselessness of acting on it.
And it was senseless. Senseless and stupid and … hell, it didn’t matter what it was. In this intense and immediate moment, the world could come to an end, and they wouldn’t notice. Just as they didn’t care that what was about to happen had the potential to be life-altering in its magnitude.
He wasn’t certain who made the first move. Who brushed whose thigh against whose. Who moved whose hand that microscopic degree until they were touching. Seeking. Connecting.
He was only aware of the astounding electric shock when their fingers linked, held, tightened. He lifted her hand to his mouth, tasted the silk of her skin, and felt a heat beyond fire. A need so strong it would have dropped him to his knees if he’d been standing.
And over it all, he felt a love so pure it demanded that he try to infuse reason.
God damn, he didn’t want to stop it, but someone had to.
“Sophie.”
“Shh …” She pressed her fingertips to his lips, hearing the denial in the way he had spoken her name. “Don’t talk. Don’t think.”
He swallowed hard. “One of us needs to.”
“No doubt both of us will,” she whispered, moving into his arms. “No doubt we’ll think it to death. Later. Please. Let’s save the second guesses for later.”
He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead to hers, and somehow assembled the will to shake his head.
She wasn’t having any of it. “I need you now,” she murmured, pulling away far enough to cup his face in her palms. Her beautiful brown eyes met his with soulful longing and unleashed a hunger inside him that had gone too many years without being fed.
“Don’t make me beg, Wyatt. Don’t make me analyze. Just help me feel something that doesn’t start and end with anger or hopelessness or fear.”
She kissed him then. Softly parted lips. Sweet, quivering breath. Her determined hesitance was heartbreaking in its vulnerability. He didn’t want her vulnerable. He wanted her strong.
Hell, he just wanted her. It didn’t matter that she’d never loved him. It didn’t matter that she didn’t love him now or that she needed him for all the wrong reasons. Didn’t matter when she walked him to the bedroom that the condoms she pulled out of the nightstand drawer had been purchased with another man’s use in mind.
Knife to the heart. Gun to the head.
Yeah. He’d feel the pain later, all right. But now, right now, he was going to let her use him to numb her own pain. Maybe in the process, he’d take the edge off some of his own.
Use me, he thought as he covered her mouth with his and kissed her until he couldn’t breathe or taste or feel anything but her. Use me up.
13
Wyatt had spent the better part of a lifetime fantasizing about this woman. He’d spent a damn lot of lonely nights in other women’s arms trying to find something with them that he knew he’d never find. And in all those years, in all those nights, he’d always known that Sophie would never be his. Not even once.
Yet here he was. Here she was. And in his wildest dreams, she’d never been this beautiful.
Jesus, God, look at her, he thought as he stood above her where he’d laid her on the bed. Reality bucked the odds and beat out the fantasy. A diluted slice of light from the hallway washed over her as her trembling fingers gripped the hem of her shirt, lifted it over her he
ad, let it drop to the floor. She was so fucking beautiful. Her thick dark hair spread across the bedding; pale smooth skin and lean soft curves sank gently into the mattress. The waistband of her jeans rode low on her hips, her navel just peeking above the snap and zipper.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to see you this way,” he confessed as he worked the zipper on his jeans and watched her do the same.
“I do. I do know,” she said breathlessly. Lifting her hips, she shimmied out of soft denim and kicked it impatiently away. She lay before him in nothing but her bra and panties. Both were black and lacy and silk … and just transparent enough that he could see the dark tips of her nipples jutting against the fine fabric of the cups, the tight triangle of dark pubic hair between her thighs.
She reached between her breasts, her unsteady fingers struggling with the clasp of her bra.
“No.” He stopped her with a look and shrugged out of his shirt. Pressing a knee into the mattress, he leaned over her. “Leave it. I want to taste you like this.”
Her eyes darkened as he bent over her left breast and sucked her into his mouth, silk and all. She arched into him with a shivery sigh, then gasped in pleasure when he bit her lightly, wetting her flesh through the bra cup, tugging at both it and her with his teeth.
She seemed to come apart then, came to him with open abandon as she gripped his head in her hands and pressed him harder against her, inviting him to do anything, everything he wanted. And everything was exactly what he was going to do, he thought through a haze of pure carnal lust as he moved to her other breast, sucking with greed, then shoving the cup roughly aside and baring her breast to his seeking hand and hungry mouth.
She cried out. For a moment, he thought he’d hurt her, until her urgent demand of “More” and the frantic way she reached for him assured him it was a cry of pleasure. “More,” she demanded again, groaning in frustration when she couldn’t shove the pants down his hips fast enough to suit her.
“Easy,” he murmured against her breast, knowing that if they didn’t slow things down, this was going to be over long before he’d had his fill of touching and tasting and possessing. It was an illusion, yes, but tonight, she was his to possess.