Dahlia clung to him, his shirt bunched in her fingers. “I need to sit down. No one is chasing us, are they?” She didn’t feel anyone hunting them, but she was on overload and just couldn’t tell if they were in immediate danger.
Nicolas helped her walk to a bench. She sank down gratefully, putting her head between her knees to combat the dizziness and dragging in great gulps of air. “We have to go back.” She looked up at him. “We do, Nicolas. This may be the only chance we have to track them back to where they’re holding Jesse.” She raised her gaze to his. “We have to get him out. Those men are killers. I don’t want to think what he’s been going through all this time.”
Nicolas shook his head. “You aren’t in any shape to go rescue anyone, Dahlia. For all we know, he could be dead.”
“I have to know one way or the other. Please, Nicolas. I have to do this, and I don’t think I can do it alone.”
“Can you walk on your own?”
She listened for frustration. For impatience. She waited for the negative energy of his true feelings to swamp her, but he seemed as rock steady and as calm as ever. “Yes. I’m a little shaky, but I’ve been worse.” She forced a wan smile. “It always helps to pass out.”
“Let’s get moving then. We don’t have a lot of time to pick up their trail. It isn’t like I can carry a rifle through the streets of the French Quarter either. We’re both going to have to be fully alert.”
She watched as he broke down the gun with quick and efficient movements. She knew he was giving her a few more minutes to rest. When he was finished and the gun was safely stored in his pack, he handed her the canteen.
“You’re like a walking miracle. Prepared for anything, aren’t you?”
“It takes skill and dedication. What about you?” He watched her repeatedly rinse her mouth and spit out the contents. Finally ridding herself of the bad taste she took a long drink, and he found himself mesmerized by the way her throat worked as she swallowed.
Dahlia handed him back the canteen and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m a seat-of-the-pants kind of person.”
“I don’t think I entirely believe that,” he said with a small smile. He reached down and pulled her to her feet, retaining possession of her hand. “We’re just strolling through the Quarter, Dahlia. We have to avoid the condo if at all possible. With the firefight and a few men down, the police are going to be swarming around that area.”
“And the NCIS. They’ll send their people, and just about everyone else. My guess is they’ll put out an OPREP-5 Navy Blue. That’s an operational report, a high alert, to include outside agencies such as the FBI that there’s trouble.” Dahlia added. “Did everyone get out alive?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. I did what I could and then came after you.”
Dahlia looked away from him. Everything had gone wrong, and people were dying. She didn’t engage in fire-fights or assassinations. “I think I’m in the wrong business,” she admitted as she walked beside him.
Nicolas set the pace, a casual stroll. He knew the importance of blending in, of becoming what people expected to see. In the early morning hours just before dawn, street cleaners, deliverymen, and police officers would be out. With the shoot-out between military and unknown assailants, the Quarter would be buzzing with more activity and curious people than usual at such an hour. The French Quarter was a small place, and word of the firefight would spread fast. There would be so many rumors, no one would be able to sort them out for weeks.
Dahlia concentrated on breathing in and out. She shut out the fact that at any moment the police might stop them and ask questions, or that a member of her own NCIS team or the killers might spot them. She tried to look like a woman out for a very early stroll with her lover. The idea of Nicolas being her lover was almost more than she could handle. He made her feel ultrafeminine, and no one in her life had ever managed to make her feel that way. She didn’t think much about being a woman. What was the point, when her body temperature was either too hot or too cold? And what would happen if they did try to have sex? Just kissing nearly caused the eruption of a volcano.
Soft laughter played down her spine, made her shiver with awareness. Nicolas brought her knuckles briefly to the warmth of his mouth. “You’re thinking things best left alone.”
“I know.” She was unrepentant. “But if all I have in my life is just thoughts, then I’m not going to waste the opportunity.” She was still fighting to breathe, to shake off the trembling and feeling of sickness. She didn’t want to talk, except maybe to hear the sound of his voice. She wanted to walk the streets of the French Quarter and just for that short time pretend she was normal. She wanted to have her dreams of the man walking beside her and not think about death and spies and men selling out their country for money. Mostly she didn’t want to think about energy and the effects on her body. She needed a nice peaceful place to hibernate in for a while.
Nicolas glanced down at the top of Dahlia’s bent head. He tightened his fingers around hers. She was withdrawing from her surroundings. He could feel the way she mentally pulled back, the way she went inside herself, behind the protective walls in her mind she’d built for herself.
Lily had been working with the GhostWalkers for some time to teach them ways to build barriers in their minds against the continual assault from everyday life. Until Lily had worked with the men Whitney had experimented on, they were all in various stages of dysfunction. Dahlia had managed to find a much more flimsy version of a barrier, but she’d done it on her own.
Nicolas never minded silences. At times he needed silence nearly as much as he needed solitude and to be outdoors surrounded by nature. Finding that Dahlia was very similar made him surprisingly happy and at peace, even in the midst of their situation. As they crossed the street, he could see the police cars up and down the block where the condo was. He leaned down. “Your enemies have someone watching all this. We need to spot him before he spots us.”
He halted abruptly, almost as the words came out of his mouth, pressing her back into a small alcove, shielding her with his larger, heavier frame. Nicolas allowed his pack to rest on the ground, just out of sight of the street. He placed one palm against the wall, effectively caging her in, his body language blatant, possessive, deliberately easy to read. He bent down toward her, looking every inch her lover. “He’s on the roof across the street, watching the cops. I don’t see any military personnel, but I feel them. Someone is nosing around trying to figure out what happened. We could find them, identify ourselves, and get you somewhere safe.”
Her face was pale. Small beads dampened her face around her hair. Her skin was hot to the touch. “I’d have to allow them to lock me up. I’m classified, and can’t just blurt this out to anyone. I have to get Jesse out before I turn myself in.”
“The NCIS have no idea what happened, Dahlia. They could very well be suspicious that you’re somehow involved. You have the brains to be behind something like this, and you’re different. Anything or anyone different is an easy target.”
“You sound worried that they’re going to try to kill me.” His fingertips were moving over her face, just brushing back and forth as if he enjoyed the texture of her skin. Dahlia felt the touch all the way to her toes. Deep inside where heat collected and pooled in her most feminine core, she felt her body clench strongly in reaction.
“I just want to know if you want out now, Dahlia. I can go after Calhoun myself.”
“While I’m nice and safe.” She was looking out from under his arm, searching for the man on the roof. “I don’t think so. This is my mess and I intend to clean it up. Don’t be fooled just because I get a little sick around people and violence. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”
He didn’t point out that he shot a man to keep her alive. “Can you see him? The blond on the roof?”
“Yes, he’s glanced this way a couple of times. He has a pair of binoculars.”
“Then we’d better giv
e him something to look at.” He stepped closer, his body nearly touching hers, but not quite.
Dahlia instantly felt the temperature around them rise. “This is risky.”
“Kissing you?” He cupped her chin firmly, captured her gaze with his.
“You can’t kiss me, Nicolas.” Her heart pounded so hard she was afraid it might burst. His face was so perfect to her, etched in granite, the hard lines and planes that of a man, not a boy.
He bent his head slowly toward hers, holding her gaze.
He stopped when his lips were a mere breath away. When she could taste him. When her heart went from pounding to fluttering and her body began sizzling with electricity. “I think kissing you is a very good idea.”
She felt his words vibrate through her entire body. He didn’t actually need to kiss her for her mind to go into meltdown. It happened just thinking about kissing him. “You have such a great mouth, Nicolas. Tempting, you know? But lightning happens when we kiss. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves do we?”
“Is that a trick question? If I say no, does that mean I don’t get to kiss you? Because right now, kissing you seems the most important thing in the world.”
She loved the way his magic voice roughened and his eyes went from ice to a blaze when he looked at her. “Well, then, who am I to tell you to have good sense?” The words came out in a whisper. She could barely breathe with him so close to her. How was it possible to form a rational thought?
He smiled. Right before he kissed her, he gave an arrogant, self-satisfied male smirk. And then she couldn’t think anymore, not even to reprimand him. She was lost in the hot urgency of his mouth. They merged, fused together, burned up in each other’s arms. And the strange thing was, only their mouths were touching. His body remained so close she felt the heat of it arcing through her, around her, but he was careful to keep their bodies apart. And it was the only thing that saved her from melting into a puddle at his feet.
She went weak in the knees and light in the head. The earth shifted and moved. Colors danced behind her eyes, and a strange purring was in her mind. She wanted to climb inside of him and take refuge, take shelter in the cool pools she saw in his mind. How he could be so cool inside and heat up her world so rapidly, she didn’t know. And she didn’t care. Only his mouth and the magic it made mattered.
* * *
CHAPTER NINE
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Nicolas lifted his head with more reluctance than self-control. He should never have initiated a kiss with her on the street. His body reacted immediately with urgent demands. Worse, his head seemed to be spinning along with his surroundings. He dropped a brief, hard kiss on her upturned mouth and turned his head slightly to get a view of the watcher on the rooftop across the street from them.
“I think my vision’s blurred,” he murmured.
She responded with a hesitant laugh. “If that’s all that happened, you’re a heck of a better kisser than I am. I can’t stand up.”
“I’m afraid to touch you. We might both go up in flames.”
She sighed. “The story of my life. What’s our friend doing?”
“He’s climbing off the roof. People will be all over the streets soon. He can’t afford to get caught up there. He would have done better to be on a balcony watching like everyone else is.”
“If you ever decide to get out of the business, you might want to write a manual.” She couldn’t take her gaze from his face, not even to look at the man they needed to follow. She felt mesmerized by Nicolas. The pad of his thumb was caressing her chin, stroking back and forth in a small rhythmic movement that both fascinated her and sent a shiver down her spine. “Have you ever been anyone’s obsession?”
The faintest trace of a grin softened his mouth. “Only those who want to kill me.”
“Are there many?”
“Not alive.” He shifted and scooped up his pack. “I don’t like people trying to kill me, obsessed or not. I have a rule about that. Come on.” He took her arm. “He’s on the move. Just walk with me, flirt a bit and hold my hand. We’ll catch an early cup of coffee.”
“You want me to blend.” She sighed and tossed back her abundance of hair. “I’ve never been much of a blender. I prefer the dark corners myself.”
“I don’t want him to get a look at you.”
“They don’t know me. I was trained under another name. Even if they manage to find that information, it won’t do them any good.”
He glanced down at her. “The name you trained under was Novelty White. Which of course translates to Dahlia Le Blanc. Not very clever.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t my idea. How would you like to be called Novelty?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I was a teenager, for heaven’s sake.”
“You have a point. I would have thought you would strenuously object.”
“At the time, I gave very little input. I was going through my silent stage.” She glanced at him with a small smile. “You know the ‘I’m the superior teen and you’re just lint’ stage. Mostly I wanted to defy and irritate Whitney. I took great pleasure in making him angry. Did he really get rid of everyone but Lily? Because if Lily is real, so are the others.”
“Do you remember them? The other girls?”
“Some of them. Most are vague, but there are a couple of the others like Lily I remember. Flame. She had another name, but I’m not certain I remember it.”
“Iris,” he supplied. “Whitney really hated anyone calling her Flame.”
“Whitney hated us all, period. We didn’t do what he wanted, when he wanted. He needed robots, not children.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, Dahlia, he didn’t do much better when he recruited us. We were a failure to him as well. All military trained. Good backgrounds. Strong and disciplined, yet we didn’t fare much better than all of the little girls he gave away.”
“Poor Lily. It must have been such a blow to her finding out the truth about him. I remember her as being gentle and kind. She was smart, really smart. I remember sitting up with her at night talking about planets and the Earth’s rotation, but it may just have been a dream, after all, we couldn’t have been more than four or five. If I ever snuck out of my room and Whitney caught me, I was punished.”
“How?” Nicolas was intrigued with the conversation, but his attention remained on the man they were shadowing along the street. “How did he punish you?”
Dahlia looked up at his face. She had told him more about herself in the small space of time they’d known one another than she’d ever told anyone. She wondered if he really had cast a spell. How else could she explain the way she felt and acted around him?
He tilted his head and raised an inquiring eyebrow.
There was no point in fighting it. She was going to tell him. “I had this old ratty blanket. I used to pretend my mother made it for me and that she sent it with me when she gave me up. More than likely he bought it along with purchasing me, but still, it was a fantasy that helped me keep calm on the days I thought I’d go mad and my head would explode.”
“You kept it, didn’t you?”
Her gaze shifted from his. “Sure. It was one of the few things I had of my past. It’s not like I had grandparents and uncles and aunts. I treasured the small things.” She pushed her free hand through her hair. “I try not to think about them too much—Milly or Bernadette or my home, or my things. If I do, this terrible sorrow and rage wells up and mixes together until I know I’m dangerous.” She glanced at him. “It’s probably a good thing I met you. I’d be accidentally starting fires all over the place.”
“I saved the blanket for you.” He wanted to gather her into his arms when she talked about her past. Hold her against him where he knew he could keep her safe and shelter her from the pain of not having the most simple of necessities… a family. What had Whitney been thinking, sending the little girls into the world with no one to protect them? He’d given them money and thought that would be enough.
She looked up at him from under long lashes. “You’re angry.”
“I’m sorry. Are you feeling it?” She was pressing her hand to her stomach. It was the third time she’d done it, almost without thought.
“No, your energy level is very low. I’m getting to know you better. You do this thing with your eyebrows.”
“I do not. I worked at learning how to keep my face perfectly without expression.”
“It is,” she assured, “all except the eyebrow.”
His hand tightened around hers, and he drew her fingers to his hip, holding her hand there as they boarded the ferry to take them across the river to Algiers. Nicolas kept her a good distance from their quarry, keeping the early morning crowd between them for a screen and making his body language shout possession and jealousy. Few men were going to approach them when he was keeping Dahlia so close to him.
“Thanks for saving the blanket. It means a lot to me.” She felt absolutely silly admitting it. A raggedy blanket from her childhood. Her only memento of her fantasy mother. It was a pathetic thing to have to admit to him… to herself.
His fingers brushed her face in a gentle caress. “I managed to snag a few of your books and a sweater as well. I wish I could have gotten more for you.”
“I didn’t have all that much that mattered, Nicolas. Better that you got out alive.” She peeked under his arm. The wind was cool coming off the water in the early morning hours. Dahlia lifted her face to feel the breeze. “He’s coming this way.”
“Is he looking at us?” Nicolas sounded calm, almost bored. He shifted his body slightly to better protect her.
“No, at the water. But he’s coming right toward us.”
Nicolas concentrated on connecting with the man as he approached the railing of the ferry. He wanted to get a feel for him, to “read” him in the way of the GhostWalkers. Sometimes it was easy to read thoughts if they carried a strong enough emotion, but oftentimes, it was very difficult to find the right path for one person in a crowd. Most of the time he caught a jumble of impressions, rather than clear thoughts, when there were many people around.
GhostWalkers 2 - Mind Game Page 16