by S A Gardner
I struggled to pull back from the precipice of hysteria, sweeping my bangs off my steaming forehead. Gotta trim those damned things. Getting in my eyes, misting them up.
Blinking back the stupidity, I was surprised to hear my voice, steadier than I thought I could make it. “So—did we put on a convincing show?”
“Outstanding.” A grunt escaped him as he shifted in his seat, wryly eyeing his bulge.
I wanted to trephine his skull without anesthesia so he realized how I felt right now. Yet I couldn’t resist looking down, too.
Outstanding was not even half of it.
At least that wasn’t fake. And it must hurt, bad. Good.
I debated making it worse, grabbing him, burying moans and nibbles into him before sitting back and watching him blow his prostate.
He explained, probably saving his potency. “The militants didn’t buy it that as chief logistician and paramedic I had lots to discuss with you. It didn’t explain to their satisfaction the amount of time we spent together, or the dynamic we shared. Seemed we weren’t as opaque and misleading as we’d like to think, or as we should have been.”
Okay. I could buy that. But why was he saying “us?” It must have been me who’d given us away. On his part, Damian was impenetrable.
He went on. “Then today Vladimir said that if you’re not ‘spoken for,’ he’d make a move on you. I couldn’t let this come to pass.” He huffed a mirthless sound. “It wouldn’t do for one of the top men we deal with to end up in your ER, or worse.”
“Oh, yeah? You think I go around puncturing suitors’ lungs or crushing their larynxes?”
“The kind of suitor who thinks he can leverage his power to coerce you into a liaison? I know you leave those with permanent disabilities.”
Now how did he know that? Had his surveillance been that thorough?
I’d strangle him for it later. For now, I was still considering castration. He hadn’t given me a good enough reason to cancel the procedure.
I glared at him. “Said Vladimir has been nothing but gentlemanly, strangely enough. I’m sure he would have taken a simple ‘it’s not possible in our current situation’ for an answer.”
“Then you disastrously underestimate your effect.” I did? His scowl said I did. “At best, your rejection would have fractured his ego. And it would have given the other suitors the green light to try their luck.”
“Other suitors?”
“Yeah, every mushy-hearted terrorist has a crush on ‘the doctor with eyes of night and hair of sunset and moonlight’. Yes, this is how Vladimir described you. They’re standing in line in their mountain lair.”
“None of the militants even look at me, not after their initial sweep of compulsory chauvinism. Whatever you think…”
“I don’t think. I know.”
“How? They all told you they want to make a move on me?”
“It’s called being male. You’re born with a program installed to decipher other testosterone-based models.”
“Is that infallible program useless with estrogen-based ones, or with just me? It must be, if you think I would have jeopardized our mission no matter what.”
“You’ll excuse me if I couldn’t afford to put it to the test with an unknowable quantity like you.”
“Don’t you mean erratic and volatile?”
“I don’t believe you’re either anymore. You’ve matured into the real deal of unpredictability, the kind that marries convoluted premeditation with ingenious improvisation. It would be a full time job trying to fathom your next move.”
That had to be answered by a snort. “That coming from the world’s foremost chameleon.” Before he could retort, I plowed on. “And if you’d just warned me, I would have prepared a suitable deterrent. Or I might have taken him up on his offer. I bet that would have ironed out our mission but good.”
And if I could trust my senses where Damian was concerned, I would have believed that shockwave that emanated from him was possessiveness. Pure and primal.
But I’d just proved I couldn’t read him worth a used syringe. I should stop trying to fathom him.
He rumbled something to himself before exhaling harshly. “Listen, St. James, when Vladimir told me his intentions today, I had to say we’re—involved. I saw them circling in the background watching us, no doubt to get proof of what I said, and I decided to satisfy them. If we’re cut and dried, it will take their focus off of us.”
Hmm. Okay. Maybe. But… “If we’re involved, how come we’re not in one tent, taking our amorous workouts away from prying eyes?”
His fingers ran through the hair I’d made a feast of mussing, bunched it at his nape in a punishing grip. “I intimated we weren’t that far along yet, that you’re worried about our work dynamic.”
This time my snort was involuntary. “Another thing you should have told me. I just made a liar out of you, pouncing on you that way.”
His eyes did that glowing thing. “I told him I’ve been applying no overt pressure, but ratcheting up the sexual tension. They’ll think my keep-it-simmering strategy got you so hot. you gave in and jumped my bones first.”
That sounded too much like an account of our actual situation. Could it be he was doing this to me for real?
If so, then I’d just found out how men ended up dead in crimes of passion.
His next words probably saved his life. “I got you into the truck, was about to ask you to play along. When you just did it, I thought you’d realized the situation on your own.”
“How was I to realize anything, or know what to play along with?”
“Yeah, that possibility did occur to me at one point. Before everything but you ceased to exist.”
“Sure. For about two minutes before you flung me off like I was a skunk that fell in your lap. And you sure kept a hawk’s eye on them in between gropes.”
The big lout didn’t even leave me the pleasure of my violent thoughts, the appeasing image of neutering him.
He turned fully to me, his voice dipping into an unknown range of sincerity. “Do you think I wanted to stop?”
I squeezed the still-pounding ache between my thighs and damned him and everything else stopping me from assuaging it to hell.
Think about work. That should freeze your libido solid.
“Whatever. Score one for the team, and the security of our mission. On to important stuff.” His eyes lowered. Good. My barb had connected. Assigning him and what had just happened to irrelevance restored the balance, and the facade of detachment I’d lost. “This morning, I finally met three more cooperative refugees. There were all younger men…”
“Sure they were.”
Implying they’d buckled under my feminine compulsion? After he’d just proven me terminally resistible? Any other time, I would have taken any ego supplements he gave me. Right now, this only made me mad. And sad.
Refusing to be either, I puffed out my chest. “Younger men with no family, no emotional attachments, no one to fear for. They also jumped at the chance to exercise the English they know.”
He gave me a disbelieving smirk, but shrugged. “So what info did they give you?”
“Zilch, where our original questions are concerned.” Those were designed to probe the workings of the militants’ outfit, the presence of dissension…etc. Instead, I’d gotten info I wasn’t looking for. “But each mentioned loathing the digging duty that kept increasing in the last year, and that the cemetery outside the camp is overflowing. When I asked what caused the spike in deaths, each started babbling, saying his English was very bad. I reverted to Russian and each insisted he didn’t understand me.”
“I met the same opacity. About anything.” He had? With his superior Russian, and no chance of his being misunderstood?
“It’s a pact of silence, then.”
He nodded. “They’re scared. They can’t afford to blab to us about their captors.”
Frowning, I told him about the children’s overreaction and my suspicions.
His own frown deepened as he listened.
He finally exhaled. “We can only speculate. It could be they’re just paranoid, and the children hypersensitive. Justifiably so.”
“Could be. But you know what, De Luna? They might have every right to be suspicious of us, even contemptuous of our efforts. Giving them hope only to abandon them again sometimes feels worse than never giving them anything at all. At least the militants are consistent.”
“Cut the melodrama, St. James. You were the one who insisted on going all out in our aid efforts. The one who said it’s a big and lasting thing, even if it’s temporary.”
“Yeah. Even if we are a cruel and fleeting glimpse of relief, I am doing everything I can for them, while I can.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
Yeah, him, too. To my surprise—a surprise I was becoming more ashamed of as time passed—Damian was totally passionate about our work. It jumbled my image of him as a relentless black-ops agent and remorseless assassin. It also reminded me again that I had no idea why he was in this line of business in the first place.
He’d turned out to be a world-class aid worker. It took a lot to be one, even on a temporary basis. He had way more than the job needed, gave it far more than anyone I knew outside of my team.
I’d always teased him during CDP’s survival course that he lived up to his namesake, Damian, the patron archangel of physicians. As he had been mine.
But Damian had also proved to be a patron archangel of the oppressed, too, not just the harbinger of death to the oppressors.
I had to give him his dues. “I know you are doing that and way more. I couldn’t have come this far, done all this without you.”
For a long moment, he didn’t look me in the eye, stared at my lips, my throat.
Then he just said, “Ditto.”
This ditto. The meanings it contained. Simple. All-encompassing. Devastating.
But hadn’t I already learned not to read anything into his words or glances or actions? I was usually an astute character reader. But Damian De Luna had the ability to wipe my mind clean every time he as much as came near me.
My turmoil redirected again to my previous worry. “But all we’ve done and will still do doesn’t stop me from feeling that inhuman filth like the militants are somehow the lesser evil.”
His gaze slammed into mine now. “You’re indulging in self-doubt and self-blame. Why? I find that when people insist on beating themselves up it’s because it makes them feel good. Is that it? Does it somehow turn you on?”
“No. Only you do. Damn you.”
There. Out in the open. Declared.
How would he respond to that?
The last thing I could have expected, of course. He grabbed me, dragged me over his body, crushed me against his chest. As if I was the heart that had been snatched from his ribs, and he was trying to shove it back where it belonged. Then he opened his lips on mine, took them, took me.
This. The exact level of license, of violence.
This was a kiss then.
According to this kiss, I’d never even come close to being kissed before. Not even by him. The two other occasions when he’d kissed me, it had been mutual. He’d let me wrestle with his desire, let me take as much as be taken.
But this…this was an invasion. A subjugation. An assimilation. What I’d never admitted to myself I’d starved for. What I’d instinctively known only he could give me, and I’d take from only him.
Just as I gave myself over to his dominance…I was bereft.
He wrenched his mouth away, lifted me above him. His arms trembled when he could bench press five times my weight easy. I hung there, suspended, dazedly looking into eyes that for the first time were raw, open.
“And only you turn me on.” His rasp abraded my exposed nerve endings as he let me down across the seat, only holding on to my hand. Then he pressed it to his erection. Some adjective that hadn’t been invented yet was in order. “And on.” He threw my hand back at me. “Damn you.”
All right. Okay.
I messed him up as much as he messed me up.
Now we knew where we stood.
Something eased inside me. Like a stream of cool relief flowing through me. Among the rapids of molten frustration, of course.
So I had been going crazy not knowing for sure, huh?
Seemed I handled frustration better when it wasn’t accompanied by uncertainty. Better, but not well.
Only thing ameliorating my condition was feeling his equal suffering. Not much made me ecstatic. Or glad to be alive. This sure as hell did both.
But since it was clear he wasn’t acting on our mutual insanity, I fumbled for my professional switch. “So we’re even. Business then. You got the sat maps into a search path? The week you gave me is over tomorrow.”
He stared at me, his eyes turbid, startled amber. Tonight was one for firsts.
Then he shook his head. “I get so sucked up in our work I keep forgetting the reason I’m here. I have to keep reminding myself.”
Same here. But coming from him, that was some admission. And another revelation. That he was more than what I’d long summed him to be; a self-made slave to his job and rules.
I’d always thought that everyone were inmates in one prison or more, of their own volition or of their own surrender, each equally hard or impossible to escape.
I was a prisoner myself. Of causes, of vocation. Of memories. But I was still the freest person I knew. I owed it to the world to use this most powerful of weapons.
Maybe this was what drove Damian, too.
“But yeah,” he said. “We have the path the militants travel till they enter obscuring mountains ready. And their schedules down to the last detail. Good thing they’re punctual and systematic.”
“Their command must have zero-tolerance. So…not so sucked up in our work after all, are you? If you amassed all that.”
“I’m good at multitasking.”
I bet he was amazing at it. The images of him applying his simultaneous skills on me…
Stop. He wouldn’t do any of that. Not now.
Probably never.
Focus on the job and stop torturing yourself.
I inhaled. The freezing air hurt forging through my constricted lungs. “So—we’re ready to make our move?”
He opened his door. “Get your surgeries done. If you’re still awake by then, you can come with us. Reconnaissance at twenty one hundred sharp.”
“I’ll be there.” He swung his long legs onto the stepping ledge. “And De Luna…”
He swung back to me, the very image of a man at the end of his tether.
I surged into him, gave him one brief, all-the-way kiss. My own lacking effort to mimic his earlier devastation.
Pulling back, my agony was attenuated at the sight of his.
I grinned, feeling powerful and reckless and aroused out of every inhibition, kissed him again, murmured into his mouth, “Just in case someone’s still taking notes.”
Twenty-Five
All good things came to an end.
Well, all things, period. We just noticed it, hated it, when good ones did.
And here was a good thing ending right now.
In catastrophe.
As usual, in moments of extreme peril, my mind did this detached recapping thing. It replayed the previous four nights in detail, leading up to this moment.
Each night, when all the camp’s inmates succumbed to oblivion, we stole out. We had a maximum of eight hours to get back before the first refugees woke up.
Endless running was involved. I was beginning to believe that Damian and his team were the product of some super soldier experiment. The punishing pace they kept on that ghastly terrain at a steadily increasing incline said so.
That first night I accused Damian he was trying to make it impossible for me to keep up.
He didn’t bother to answer.
But I did suspect he’d do anything to make me give up, and let them go alone. Good th
ing giving up wasn’t in my program.
I stuck it out that first night even when I felt it might kill me. Next night wasn’t as horrible. The following two nights got progressively easier. Before we started our search tonight, I thanked Damian for making me punch through my fitness plateau. He appreciated my thanks so much I found myself talking to his receding back.
Beside the distance, another obstacle was the loss of our night-vision goggles. There was a waxing moon, but the cloud cover rarely allowed its emergence. Good thing I’d disguised two specially made ones among the head-harness binocular microscopes. Damian confiscated one, and the rest of us rotated on the second.
We already found out vital stuff. Like that path no satellite imaging had shown, leading to a massive cavern. We found the militants’ vehicles and the supplies they’d confiscated from the aid efforts and drip-fed the refugees with. After that, the road diverged into many, navigable only on foot. The first one we followed headed south, and Damian hypothesized they used it to smuggle their own supplies and weapons from Dagestan through Georgia, and couldn’t be one of the routes leading to their base. We couldn’t eliminate any other route with our ticking time limit. The last three nights were a vicious circle of going only so far before having to turn back.
This was why tonight had started out more ambitiously.
It was supplies day. With one of the militants’ trucks going back empty, I’d proposed to hitch a ride, gaining us hours and the possibility of going farther. It had to be a smaller team, three or even two. Maybe only one. I’d said I’d go.
Damian had vetoed my plan as too risky, proposed we leave earlier, explore longer, with the others making a diversion to obscure our departure and return.
I’d been considering overriding him, when the militants demanded our presence during rations handover. It had been ten pm—or twenty two hundred like Damian liked to say—before they’d left, making it pointless to make the trip the usual way. Staying out later wasn’t an option either. No diversionary tactics would work if we returned in broad daylight.