Guy reached across to take her hand. Enchanted by the woman who’d breathed new life into him, he absently rubbed the back of that hand with his thumb.
“It escaped your notice that we didn’t do a great deal of sleeping to begin with? I must be losing my touch.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” He remembered her touch in a delightful abundance and variety of places. “And my memory is excellent.”
He pulled on her hand, and the next second, she was lying beside him, eyes wide with surprise. He leaned over and was about to kiss her when he caught a whiff of minty freshness. Hell, he wanted to kiss her, but his mouth was less enticing than week-old used cat litter.
It seemed, however, she had other ideas. A hand curved around his neck, and in spite of his morning breath, she kissed him.
“Mm, nice,” she murmured against his cheek.
“Better if you let me shower first,” he promised. “I stink.”
“If you insist. I’m going to get breakfast started, so why don’t you freshen up now?”
“I fully intend to.” He pressed his lips to her knuckles, and shot a quick look at his overnight bag in the corner of the bedroom.
Maddie’s gaze followed his. “You could always leave a few bits and pieces here, if you wanted to,” she offered. “No pressure—just a thought.”
“I like the way you think. Now go, woman, and let me clean up.”
“Okay, then, if I have to. I’ll go and finish breakfast.”
He watched her leave the room. The way those hips swayed was downright sinful. He’d better get used to it, if he was going to keep Maddie in his life.
If? There was no doubt—she belonged in his life. As he let the scorching-hot shower hammer him clean, Guy decided he’d do whatever was necessary to achieve that goal. He’d find answers to his questions, simple explanations that would exterminate even the most sinister of his suspicions, and he’d get to keep her.
He was almost dressed when he heard the knock. Wearing a reassuringly bright smile, Maddie stuck her head around the door.
“Hey, Fawkes, breakfast’s ready when you are!”
Guy froze. That name. He hadn’t heard it in years. Only one person had ever used it. None of his family, none of his childhood friends or brothers-in-arms, none of his colleagues. Only one person had jokingly bestowed upon him a nickname relating to the infamous 17th-century Gunpowder Plot conspirator, and she was dead. Deafened by the blood pounding with a frantic, feverish drumbeat through his veins, he pivoted towards the source.
She covered her mouth with a trembling hand. As he continued to hold her gaze, all the little niggles and questions slotted into place, as if the pieces of a jigsaw had suddenly fallen to earth in the impossible picture he’d somehow known they’d form.
Ice-cold trepidation blasted the truth at him, burned it into his useless brain. The biggest question of all flashed in mile-high letters, and even though he knew the answer, he still had to ask it. He needed to hear her say the words and admit the terrible truth.
“Who the hell are you?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Maddie closed her eyes and swallowed hard. With one word, she’d brought her whole world crashing down around her head.
The deception she’d maintained for the last month was over. The truth had finally caught up with her, and she couldn’t help but feel she’d subconsciously engineered that downfall herself through her Freudian slip. She was so tired of the pretence. Hiding her natural responses from the man she’d never stopped loving had become an impossible, daily battle. She’d been living on borrowed time—now the debt was due, and it looked as if it would be repaid with the annihilation of their relationship.
Perhaps it would be better if it ended. Unless she was mistaken, her whole life was about to implode anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with Guy.
“I’ll ask you one more time—who are you?”
The harshness of his tone cut through her like a Samurai blade. Having just proved she wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was, it was no worse than she deserved. When she confirmed what she was sure he already suspected, he’d show no mercy.
Maddie dropped to her knees. She lowered her head and popped out the coloured contact lenses that had hidden the truth for so long. Her eyesight was fine without them—their purpose was purely cosmetic, because she didn’t need them any more than she needed her glasses. Once Guy saw the true colour of her eyes, the fire she’d been playing with would burn her alive.
A fitting metaphor.
Maddie lifted her gaze to meet his and took a shaky breath. Whatever happened, she’d do this with as much dignity as she could muster. “You know who I am. Hello, Fawkes. It’s been a long time.” Understatement of the century.
His initial reaction was plain—utter disbelief. She wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t often you saw a living ghost, one you’d buried a lifetime ago, on a freezing winter morning, with your breath misting in the frigid air. In his eyes, a thousand questions fought for prominence, yet he said nothing.
Maddie waited. This wasn’t about her—not in the sense of her feelings taking centre stage. After all, how she’d spent the last decade was no secret to her, but she’d just made a mockery of whatever coping mechanism Guy had used to deal with her loss. And if he didn’t hate her now, he surely would once he learned the whole story.
“Spare me the platitudes, Liz—”
“Maddie.”
“Whoever.” He spat the word, leaving her in no doubt about the contempt with which he viewed her. “I thought you were dead.”
His tone made her wonder if he wished that were true. “As you can see, I’m not.”
“Oh, I see all right. All these years, you let me carry on believing I’d lost you.”
“Yes, and you let me believe you’d walked out on me—walked out on us.” The pain boomeranged back, all of it, every bit as raw as it had been all those years ago. “When you came back that last time… It nearly killed me when you abandoned me without a word of explanation. When you didn’t tell me anything about why you left the first time, or why you came back? The only thing that made any kind of sense was that all you wanted was a quick fuck—”
“You were never that! You hear me? You were never that to me. When I heard you’d died, I called in every favour I could to get back in time.”
For her funeral. She knew. Not about the favours, but she’d known he was there. “I saw you. What do you mean about calling in favours? Get back from where?”
“You saw me? You were there? Jesus, this just gets better and better.”
His sarcastic tone cut her to the quick, but what concerned Maddie more was a growing suspicion that there’d been factors at play of which she’d been unaware. “I asked you a question. The favours you called in? What did you mean by that? Why did you need to call in any favours? Where were you?”
He raked a hand through his hair. She knew that gesture of old, and now it was a knife thrust through her belly, a poignant reminder of how well she’d once known him. Or thought she had.
“What the hell does it matter now. I was on a mission, and I begged them to get me back in time for… They’d asked me to go deep undercover in the Middle East. Asked.” He made the word a derisory snort. “I was over there when I found out you’d been killed. I raised hell about getting back. Matthews wouldn’t approve my return, but I wasn’t about to let that oily bastard get in my way. I nearly screwed up the mission, and transport for the journey back was where the favours came in. I landed at Brize Norton that morning, and got to the service with about fifteen minutes to spare.”
“What mission? You never told me about a mission.”
“I was the only suitable candidate, and it was on a need-to-know basis. I couldn’t tell you—I couldn’t tell anyone.”
He seemed calmer now, almost defeated, in a way. Maddie didn’t like it. The picture she was putting together was screaming misunderstanding based on a fatal failure to communicate. What hurt mor
e, though, was the growing realisation that there hadn’t been sufficient trust between them. Oh, there’d been more than enough for them to have the kind of relationship where her masochistic needs had satisfied his sadistic desires, but when it came to their relationship outside the playroom, Guy had put his orders above all else, including her.
But she wasn’t an outsider—at least, she hadn’t been back then—and other officers who were more than just colleagues to one another had discussed mission details. It was an open secret. “Why not? What was so different this time?”
“There were complications.”
“What sort of complications?”
Silence created a chasm between them. Guy stood and crossed the room, as if he couldn’t bear to be near her. He even turned his back to her, so she couldn’t read his expression. Judging by the rigid set of his shoulders, she wasn’t sure she’d want to know what was going through his mind right now, anyway.
“I was the only suitable candidate.”
That was nothing new—there’d been other missions with an equally limited pool of officers to choose from. “So you said. That happened to other people we knew—what was different this time?”
“There was a very good chance I wouldn’t come back from it.”
“But… we all knew that. Every mission had that risk.”
“Not like this one.” He turned around.
His expression was so bleak, Maddie gasped. “Tell me.”
“When I say there was a very good chance I wouldn’t come back from it… it was damn close to being a suicide mission. At the briefing, they told me everything and gave me a choice, but… there was no choice. It was a matter of national security. Thousands of lives would be put at risk if we didn’t get someone on the inside. That person had to be me. Even though it was need-to-know, I would have told you—for any other mission I would have told you.”
“But not for this one.”
“I couldn’t work out how.”
A couple of steps brought him closer, but then he stopped dead and rammed his hands in his trouser pockets. “If I didn’t make it back, I didn’t want you grieving for me or what we’d had together. I figured breaking your heart and making you hate me was the most efficient way to achieve what I wanted. If I didn’t make it back, you’d have already moved on.”
“And if you did come back? What then?”
“I’d have moved heaven and earth to get you back. But it became a moot point when I was told you’d died in a fire, and no one would tell me what you were doing in that building. I couldn’t stay long enough to press anyone for answers, otherwise the mission would have been placed in even greater jeopardy. I went back, but after that, I didn’t care whether I survived the mission or not. You were gone.”
What an unholy mess. Maddie ran through everything Guy had just told her, trying to see the situation from his point of view, and balancing it against hers. A person could go insane, trying to make sense of something so… she didn’t even know the words to describe it.
“You were gone.”
Something about the bleak way he repeated the words set her alarm bells ringing. Even as she watched him, he was visibly withdrawing from her. “Guy?”
“So where did you go? You didn’t fake your death for the hell of it. Why?”
“You weren’t the only one with a mission. After the last time we were together, our lords and masters needed someone to go undercover in Moscow. I was the best Russian speaker available. With you gone, I had no reason to stay and every reason to go. And the mission wasn’t without its risks.”
Risks she hadn’t thought about in years, until recent events had set her instincts on alert.
“I have to go.”
Guy’s abrupt declaration sent an arctic blast through her—was she about to lose him again? “Guy…?”
“I have to go.”
“Call me.”
Please hovered on her lips. It died before the door closed behind him, and was buried the second the lock clicked into place.
For a moment, she wondered what had just happened. Her brain kicked into sluggish gear and began to process. It was for the best. Really, it was. Because if the monstrous, black SUV she’d first observed in the area a few days ago, and spotted several times since, proved to be the threat she suspected, she’d have to run.
And not just for her life. For her enemies, she would be a means to an end. She couldn’t allow them to find Yana, even if that meant giving up the life Maddie had made for herself since they’d fled to the West.
Even if that meant giving up her life, period.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Guy stroked Khamseen’s soft, velvety nose, smiling as the black stallion tried to nibble his hand.
“Will there be anything else, sir?”
“No, it’s fine, thanks, Kim. I’ll see to bedding him down for the night when I get back. You go when you’re ready.”
Absently patting the horse’s neck, he watched his stable manager leave, then swung up into the saddle and headed out of the yard.
Memories and hurt feelings buzzed like angry wasps. Maddie was Liz. Maddie was Liz? Even now, his head still refused to believe it, in direct contrast with a heart that now claimed to have recognised her the moment he’d laid eyes on her. At least it gave him an explanation for all those irritating little nibbles of uneasiness at the edge of his consciousness.
He needed some mental clarity, but hacking around the quiet lanes near his home wasn’t going to give him that. At the first gate that gave him access to the wilder areas of his property, Guy left the road behind. Once the gate closed behind him, he urged his horse on with his heels, accelerating to a full gallop when the empty meadow stretched before them.
Riding into the wind blew the cobwebs and the problems from his mind. He knew this part of the estate like the back of his hand. He’d ridden it for years, ever since he’d first graduated beyond a rising trot. When Ros had come to live with him after her parents died, he’d brought her here too. There was something cathartic about riding hell for leather for the peace and solace of the ancient woods in the distance. Perspective helped too—bar some sort of disaster, the woodlands would outlive both him and the generations that followed him.
Christ, children. He slowed Khamseen to a canter, then a trot, and finally to a walk. He hadn’t thought about that in years. Maybe if he’d said something…
Guy gave a snort, impatient with himself for playing the what-if game, but unable to prevent it. What if he hadn’t taken such a pessimistic stance about the outcome of his mission? What if he’d disobeyed his orders and told Liz—Maddie about what he’d been asked to do, and they’d actually discussed what might happen in a worst-case scenario? What if he’d told her he wanted a serious relationship that extended beyond the playroom, one that included the little details, like a wedding ring and children?
What if he hadn’t looked into the eyes of the woman he’d buried on a freezing day over a decade ago?
Guy dismounted and led Khamseen between the trees. When he reached his ultimate destination, he unsaddled his horse and tethered the animal so he could move around but not go too far.
Jesus, what the hell did he do next? Seated at the foot of one of the trees, Guy let his head fall back against the gnarled trunk. He had no fucking clue, and that in itself set his internal alarm bells ringing. She was the woman he’d loved, damn it, the only woman he’d ever loved, and he’d buried her, but here she was, alive and well, a living, breathing miracle. Why the hell had he behaved like an insufferable jackass?
When he’d turned his back on her a couple of hours ago, he’d been riding high on an ego saddled with self-pity. Wounded male pride had a lot to answer for. He’d surfed a tidal wave of it when he’d walked away from Maddie, but now that common sense prevailed once more, he saw the truth of the situation. Without knowing it, he’d been given a second chance, and with his reprehensible behaviour, he might just have thrown that second chance away. Losing her—a
s Liz—had shattered him into fragments no one else had been able to put back together. Like a prize dick he’d walked away from the one person, the one situation that could undo that damage.
How crazy was it that he’d fallen in love with the same woman twice? Was Fate trying to tell him something? If it was, then maybe he should listen.
A clarity almost blinding in its brilliance exploded in his mind. Liz had been everything to him, but Maddie was so much more. A future without her was a horrifying prospect. Thanks to his boorish behaviour, that was what he could now be facing, unless Maddie allowed him to repair what he’d so foolishly torn apart.
Would she do it? There was only one way to find out.
Picking up where they left off was out of the question, no matter how he looked at the situation. Even if Maddie was prepared to let him back into her life, something else stood between them. They needed to draw a line under both the ancient past and the recent past, so they could start again. They needed something. Not a ceremony, but closure of some sort. A scene, maybe? In his playroom at Stonehaven? Would she agree to that?
God, he was going to drive himself crazy with thinking. For a moment he contemplated another set of what-ifs. The questions tumbled through his head like crazed acrobats. What if Simon had accompanied Ros on her visits to potential wedding venues? What if she hadn’t chosen to visit Maddie’s hotel? What if he’d carried on believing he’d lost Liz over a decade ago? Liz or Maddie, she was still the same woman, and now he thought about it, he could see so much of Liz that remained in Maddie.
How had Liz become Maddie anyway? And why? What had happened to her in the intervening years? Why had she had to die? Bastard that he was, he hadn’t even granted her the courtesy of allowing her to explain.
A sharp nudge to his shoulder jolted him out of his head. Guy shot a wry grin at Khamseen, who’d apparently finished investigating the clearing and grown bored.
No Going Back (Club Aegis Book 6) Page 12