“I never thought it was you, Sabrina,” Jack said fiercely. “You kept me sane all those months. Your face, your smile, the memory of how you looked that day in Sapulpa, the way you curl into a tight ball when you sleep.”
He moved toward her.
Shell-shocked, her mind whirling, she brought the gun up and leveled it at his chest. She’d been through too much, had lived too long in fear to trust even her own instincts at this moment
“stop!”
“You were with me in that black hole, Sabrina. You were with me after I escaped and the desert almost finished what those bastards started.”
Deliberately, he rounded the end of the sofa. She retreated, almost stumbling over her textbook and the black-and-orange OSU throw she’d tossed aside.
“Jack, wait!”
“I wanted to marry you. I even bought a ring the morning I left for Qatar.”
“Josie showed me the ring. It was in the box she got of your personal effects, but I...I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t know....”
“All those months, I dreamed of you. Only you.”
“I have to think! I have to...”
“I’ve done enough thinking to last a lifetime, Sabrina. Now...”
To her utter astonishment, his mouth curved! She shivered with confusion and fear and the horror of what he’d told her...and Jack grinned! Sabrina couldn’t believe it, couldn’t comprehend how he could transform so swiftly from a haunted, shadowy ghost to the man she’d dreamed about and cried over and ached to hold just once more all these agonizing months since his death.
“Now,” he said softly, “I have to take you in my arms. I have to kiss you. The only way you can stop me is to shoot me.”
“I will!” she warned fiercely. “Take another step and I will!”
The utter implacability in her voice brought him up short. Either that, or the snicker of metal on metal as she cocked the Beretta.
“You weren’t the only one who went through hell! I did too, Jack. After you disappeared, someone tried to drive me off the road.”
“What!”
“Someone tried to kill me,” she whispered, her throat raw. “Me and the baby.”
Every muscle in his body whipped wire-tight. His gaze cut from her to the bassinet. When his head swung toward her again, she could almost feel the heat from the blaze in the blue eyes that had been so cold and flat only a few moments ago.
“If you think I’d harm you or our child, you might as well pull that trigger now.”
“How do you know that she’s yours?” Desperation gave her voice a shrill edge. “We only had those few days together.”
“You want me to ask?” he bit out, a red flush staining the cheeks above his beard. “You want me to demand a DNA test?”
“No!”
“Good, because I don’t intend to. Dammit, I don’t need to.”
He closed the distance between them in two long strides. In those two strides, Sabrina had to choose between her head and her heart, between instinct and uncertainty, between the man who’d claim his child without a single instant of hesitation and the doubts that had driven her to despair these past months.
She barely had time to raise the pistol and flick on the safety before his hand closed over hers. The weapon slid from her grasp. Jack dropped it on the table at the end of the sofa, then speared his fingers through her tumbled hair. Sabrina didn’t move, didn’t protest as he pulled her head back.
“I’m going to kiss you,” he warned savagely. “Hard and long. Then I’m going to hold my daughter. Then we’ll talk. You’ll tell me what the hell’s been going on in the past nine months, and I’ll try to figure out what the hell we’re going to do about it.”
Rough beard scraped her chin. Rough hands tugged at her scalp. He kissed her, hard...and long.
After the first heart-stopping seconds, Sabrina rose up on her toes, strained against him, locked her arms around his neck. Her own urgent need pushed the contact from a one-sided, bruising kiss to a cleansing. A healing. A mingling of her tears and his low, raw groans. A sharing of pain, of laughter, of the burning need that had brought them together so many months ago.
If Sabrina had still harbored any doubts after she raised her head, panting and wholly, joyously alive for the first time since that awful day she’d been told Jack was dead, they would have shredded the instant he slid his hands under the small, sleepy bundle who was their daughter and lifted her to the light.
“What’s her name?” he asked softly.
“Elizabeth. I call her Beth.”
He shot her a startled look. “That was my mother’s name.”
“I know. Joseph told me.”
It was also his new sister-in-law’s name, but the sight of Jack gazing raptly at his daughter made Sabrina’s throat ache so much she couldn’t share that bit of information with him. All she could do was tuck away in her heart the emotions that chased across his face, one after another.
There was awe. Amazement. A touch of wariness.
When a small, crinkled fist came up to rub against a scrunched-up nose, Jack shook his head in wonder. Eyes suspiciously bright, he studied each tiny, perfect finger with its tiny, perfect knuckle and tiny, perfect nail. Then Beth jerked into a little ball, stretched out again, and lifted her tiny, perfect lids.
“Her eyes are blue,” he announced, as though the baby’s mother wasn’t perfectly well aware of that fact. “She’s got my eyes.”
Sabrina didn’t have the heart to tell him that a newborn’s eye color could and often did change. She watched, mesmerized, as he hefted the little bundle of blankets and baby up higher. By the light of the glowing fire, father and daughter studied each other.
“My eyes, but your chin and hair and incredible skin,” Jack murmured. “She’s a beauty. Something tells me she’s going to wrap my grandfather around her little finger.”
“She already has,” Sabrina confirmed with a teary smile. “Along with my father, my sister, your sister, your brother, and your assorted in-laws.”
He turned toward her, his face blank.
“In-laws?”
She saw that she’d thrown him for a complete loop. “Didn’t your grandfather fill you in on anything of what happened while you were...while you were...?”
“Dead?” he supplied dryly. “No. All he told me was to haul my butt over to the guest house and not get shot in the process.”
How like Joseph to leave her to explain how Jack’s sister, Josie, had come in search of Sabrina at her cousin’s ranch, then ended up falling in love with the once grouchy, bad-tempered Max; how Jack’s old friend, Sam Arquette, had tracked Sabrina down to Dr. Amanda Lucas’s office; how Rachel had posed as Sabrina and led Sheriff Riley Hunter on a merry chase; how even Jack’s playboy younger brother, Michael, had become caught up in the chase and proposed a marriage of convenience to the very young, very pregnant woman he subsequently tumbled head over heels in love with.
She started to tell Jack about his host of new relatives, and that he would meet them soon. The clan was gathering at the main house for dinner less than an hour from now. They were coming to attend Beth’s christening ceremony this weekend.
But all that could wait. Right now, Jack needed a few moments with his daughter and Sabrina needed to watch them together. Just watch them. Then, she decided with a misty smile, they’d have the talk they were always promising to have and never seemed to get around to.
As it turned out, the explanations took a back seat to other, more immediate requirements. Beth had to be fed and changed. Jack scraped his hand across his chin and declared that his priorities at that moment included a cup of steaming hot coffee, a quick shower and another dozen or so kisses, not necessarily in that order.
Her heart and her mind still whirling, Sabrina tucked a gurgling, bright-eyed Beth back in her bassinet and provided the kisses. Finally, she ordered Jack to the upstairs bathroom and started for the kitchen. Instincts too strong for her to overcome wouldn’t let her leave
the baby alone, even for the few moments it would take to fill the coffeemaker.
Someone had tried to kill Jack.
Someone had tried to kill her.
That someone had yet to be identified.
For a long time, Sabrina had worried that perhaps one of the Wentworths wanted to destroy her, afraid that her child would cut them out of an inheritance. Or someone from Jack’s past had come after her, angered over a business deal gone sour or lucrative oil leases snatched up under his or her nose. Right up until the moment she’d given birth, Sabrina had feared that Joseph Wentworth would use his considerable wealth and influence to take the baby from her.
Those fears hadn’t been groundless or the neurotic imaginings of a desperate woman. She could still remember Trey McGill’s tense silence when she’d called him to ask his advice soon after she learned she was pregnant. Too late, she’d understood the reason behind his reticence.
Gradually she’d learned that Jack had led a double life not even his family knew about, that he’d carried out secret missions for the government for years. The astounding bits and pieces of his other life had come out during the long, terrible months after his death, when Joseph and Josie and Michael had turned heaven and earth to find her. They’d been as astonished as Sabrina to learn the real reason for Prince Fashor’s visit to Oklahoma last summer, just as they’d discovered that more than concern for the security of Wentworth employees had taken Jack to Qatar.
The knowledge of his double life had handed Sabrina a whole new set of fears. The terrorists who’d killed him might have had a personal vendetta against him...which they’d extended to his child.
That was the reason she’d ultimately accepted Joseph Wentworth’s offer of sanctuary. The government hadn’t been able to protect Jack, one of its own operatives. After Beth’s birth, Joseph promised Sabrina and her child the safety of state-of-the-art security systems and round-the-clock ground patrols.
Still, she rolled the bassinet into the kitchen with her when she went to make a pot of coffee.
Chapter 14
Jack stood under the shower head, palms flattened against the tiles, head bowed. Hot, almost scalding water needled his back and shoulders. The pelting bullets cleansed his body, but he knew it would take more than water to sluice away the memory of the fear he’d seen in Sabrina’s eyes when she’d leveled that gun at him.
Her terse account of what she’d been through in the past year played and replayed in his mind. Jaws tight, he tried to pull his rioting thoughts together. He needed to shut out every emotion. He had to get past their tumultuous reunion. Think beyond the shock, the wonder, of knowing he had a child. He needed to focus his energies, concentrate his thoughts, as he’d taught himself to do during those months in hell.
He’d had nothing else to do but focus then. Closing his eyes against the streaming water, Jack thought of all the hours, days, weeks he’d spent recalling old nursery rhymes, retracing treks through winter-browned fields to quail hunt with his grandfather, remembering the childish squabbles he’d arbitrated between his sister and brother.
He’d relived his childhood, year by year, then his adulthood. He’d thought through the mistakes he’d made, wished he’d taken a different approach to problems a time or two, but whenever bitterness or fury or despair threatened to choke him, Jack reminded himself that all the paths he’d taken in his life had led ultimately to Sabrina. That realization alone could lighten the blackness. His implacable determination to get home to her, and to his family, had kept him alive.
Now he’d returned...only to find Sabrina battling the same demons who’d haunted him. Fear. Suspicion. Threats to her life. A desperation that put shadows under her eyes and a gun in her hand.
Jack cursed, low and long and viciously. He had a good idea who’d loosed those demons.
It had taken him a while, but he’d finally put a name and a face to his betrayer. He’d started by cataloguing everyone who might have wanted to arrange his death. One by one, he’d sorted through the enemies he’d made during his covert work. The executives he’d cut out of a deal. His friends. Even Ali, who could have wanted to demonstrate to the revolutionaries that he’d seen the error of his ways and wanted to rid Qatar of Western influence once and for all. During his darkest hours, though, Jack hadn’t been able to bring himself to add his family to the list. Or Sabrina.
Gradually, painfully, he’d narrowed the names, until there was only one left.
Trey McGill.
Trey had pressured Jack into taking this last mission. Trey had coordinated the flight from D.C. into Qatar. Trey, through his contacts at the consulate, had arranged the helo to take Jack out to the oil rig.
Once he’d focused on those pieces of the puzzle, others fell into place. Trey had also known about the stop at the Route 66 diner that hot, sunny afternoon in June. Jack himself had called and notified McGill of their stopover. The attack by the drunken truckers had come only a few hours later. At the time, Jack had assumed Ali was the intended target.
Now, he knew better.
Trey had wanted him dead.
Had he also tried to kill Sabrina and the baby?
Jack would know the answer to that question within the next twenty-four hours. First, though, he had to get his woman and his child out of the line of fire.
Willing himself to iron calm, he twisted off the taps. He left the hooded navy sweatshirt on the bed, opting for only the wrinkled white shirt he’d worn under it and the black slacks Ali had provided. A few moments later, he walked into the kitchen.
Sabrina glanced up from the sandwich she was making and bit her lip. The gaunt, bearded ghost who’d stepped out of the shadows had disappeared. In his place was a man she hardly recognized.
His tobacco brown hair laid dark and damp against his head. He was wearing the same wrinkled slacks and white cotton shirt he’d had on before, but he’d used her razor to scrape away the rough, scraggly beard. Without it, he should have looked cleaner, healthier, more familiar. Instead, the hollows under his cheekbones and the coiled tension in his shoulders only emphasized the hard-edged stranger he’d become.
For an odd moment, he seemed out of place in the warm, cheerful kitchen. She had the sense of a hunter poised to go in search of its prey. Or a wanderer who found himself in uncharted territory.
And no wonder! After months in darkness, the kitchen must seem like a different world to him. Like everything else in the eight-room guest house, it had been elegantly furnished at the time of construction and modernized several times over the years. Copper pots and a scattering of hand-painted crockery added a counterpoint of color to the dark ceiling beams and pine cabinetry imported, Sabrina had learned, from a seaside Tuscan villa. High-backed stools cushioned in bright yellow-and-red plaid invited lounging at the massive cook island, inset with gleaming Italian ties. The same print curtained the casement windows and held the early March chill at bay. It was a comfortable, charming room, but Sabrina felt anything but comfortable as she stared at the whipcord lean stranger who met her gaze across the room.
Her heart twisted with the painful truth she’d been struggling to assimilate. This wasn’t the man she’d loved so briefly, so intensely last summer. Could she love the person he now was? Would he love the woman she’d become?
Her hands shaky, she nudged a plate across the tiled island that ran the length of the kitchen. “I...I made you a sandwich. I thought you might be hungry.”
“I am.”
He came around the counter, his eyes feasting on her. He wanted more than food, she saw, her pulse leaping in response. His arms went around her. His mouth came down on hers. She went up on tiptoe, meeting his raw hunger, feeding on it.
Another moment, another kiss, and the past might have been vanquished once and for all. But a gurgling little hiccup broke through her sensual haze. Sabrina pulled back, shaking, and went to check the baby. Jack stood beside her at the bassinet. The same wonder that had crossed his face when he’d held Beth earl
ier settled over his features once again as he stared down at the infant.
“God, she’s beautiful.”
The new mother wouldn’t argue with that. “Yes, she is. Even more beautiful than the day she was born.”
He brushed a knuckle down a cloud-soft cheek. “Was it a tough birth?”
She dismissed thirty-two hours of grinding, panting labor with a little shrug. “Not as tough as what you went through.”
His eyes raised to hers. Anger and frustration over what they’d missed flushed his cheeks. “I wish I’d been with you.”
“Me, too.”
“Next time.”
The fierce promise set her heart somersaulting. The Sabrina of ten months ago would have melted in his arms again. The woman she was now took a deep breath and said what needed saying.
“Maybe it’s too soon to talk about next time, Jack. Maybe we should take things slow and not...not commit to anything until we’ve had time to get to know each other again.”
He shook his head. “We tried slow, remember? It didn’t work.”
“We’ve got a child to consider this time. We have to be sure, for her sake.”
“I am sure, Sabrina.”
Sliding a warm, hard palm into her hair, he tilted her face. She saw the absolute certainty in his eyes.
“I wanted to marry you last June, and I want to marry you now.”
Her fingers curled into the wrinkled shirt. “You’ve been through so much. We both have. We’re not the same people we were in June. Even then, we barely knew each other!”
“I knew you well enough to ask a jeweler to open his shop at 4:00 a.m. the morning I left. I don’t know what happened to the ring—”
“Josie has it. She wanted to give it to me, but I didn’t know if... I didn’t know who you...”
“Who I’d bought it for?” His fingers tightened on her nape. “For you, Sabrina. Only you. How could you think otherwise?”
“Maybe because we never said the words.” Tears stung her eyes. “Oh, Jack, we laughed and we loved and then I lost you before we ever said the words. You can’t imagine how much I regretted that!”
The Mercenary and the New Mom Page 16