Defensive Action

by Jenna Kernan

  * * *

  SHE WOKE TO find the daylight filtering through the fabric of the nylon tent, casting them both in blue. She now lay on her side with him spooning her. His knees bent so his thighs pressed to the back of her legs. One of his arms wrapped around her waist, his forearm pressed to her sternum and his hand splayed over her upper chest. She found his embrace one of support, rather than sensuality. But other parts of him made her skin tingle. His breathing told her he was sleeping, each soft exhalation fanning the crown of her head. But his body was aroused, his erection pressing to the soft flesh of her backside. Her eyes widened but she lay still. She didn’t know what surprised her more, her own response to his sleeping seduction or the recognition that she had not spent half the night trying and failing to fall asleep. She had experienced no nightmares and felt rested despite the soreness across her shoulders, which she attributed to the paddling and carrying the heavy pack.

  Something about his heart beating slow and steady and his breath brushing her skin made her relax. He shifted his hips, increasing the pressure between them and she rolled to her back.

  His eyes snapped open and shifted. He lifted his head to listen and then lowered it back to the thick pillow of his folded arm. He moved the opposite hand and his fingers formed the sign of okay.

  She nodded.

  “What woke you?” he asked.

  Her face heated and she was certain the blush reached from her forehead to her toes.

  He smiled and rolled to his back.

  “Bladder?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. Her shoulder and arm slipped from the cover of the blankets and she was surprised at the chill in the air.

  “Brrr,” she said, sinking deeper into the blankets they shared. The fit was tight, and she had to roll toward him to remain inside the cocoon of warmth. She lifted to an elbow to look down at him.

  The redness beneath his eyes had gone and his sleepy smile made promises she half hoped he’d keep. His scruffy cheeks were now looking more like a beard than a five o’clock shadow. His crisp haircut had failed on the top, making his hair tousled. She smoothed it back in place with a sweep of one hand. His smile widened.

  “What time do you think it is?” she asked.

  He glanced at the tent canopy. “Maybe eight in the morning. Six-to-seven straight hours of shut-eye. I needed that. But we have to get going.”

  He stretched, his feet and hands touching opposite ends of the tent. He wasn’t very tall, average, but much bigger than her. She’d say he was about five feet, ten inches in height.

  “I think it’s time for you to tell me what is happening,” she said.

  “Soon as I get back.” He threw off the blanket and pushed himself to a seated position. Now he sat hunched in the small quarters, giving her an eye-popping view of his muscular chest and impossibly ripped abdomen. The man was a walking advertisement for protein powder.

  “Be right back,” he said. He grabbed the poncho blanket and his boots before unzipping the tent flap and slipping away. She saw his shadow move along the nylon tent fabric before he disappeared with the rustle into the woods.

  Haley took the opportunity to locate her boots and replace them before following him from the tent. She was shivering as she replaced her thin jacket and stepped out to face the day. First order of business was to relieve herself. When she returned to the camp area it was to find Ryan squatting before a stove hardly bigger than a water thermos. Atop the single burner sat a small aluminum pan half filled with water.

  “I have water filters, so we do not have to conserve water. I’m heating this so we can wash up. Then I’ll heat some more water for oatmeal.”

  “You found oatmeal?” The man knew the way to a woman’s heart.

  He again wore the blanket poncho. Now all she had to contend with was his handsome face, charming smile and the sympathy raised from the cuts and bruises on his forehead and cheek. He dipped a bandanna into the aluminum pots and handed the warm wet cloth to her. She washed her face and handed it back.

  “I can give you some privacy if you’d like to wash anything else.”

  Her face flushed again and she dropped the contact of their gaze. Still unable to meet his eyes, she nodded.

  He rose to his feet, gathered his pack and set off out from the cover of the white pine.

  “Don’t be long,” he said.

  She waited only until he was out of sight and then used the cloth to wash her torso under her shirt, giving quick attention to the rest of her. He returned to wash his face. When he dragged the poncho over his head and stood with the cloth to wash his arms, she stood to give him privacy as well. Then she noticed again the abrasions across his shoulders and back.

  “Would you like me to give those a wash?”

  He handed her the cloth and folded to his seat, sitting cross-legged before the little single-burner stove. She gently lifted the cloth, wrung out the excess water and began the slow process of washing away the dirt and grime that covered his naked upper body. As she worked she allowed herself to become familiar with his taut skin and the tiny mole below his left shoulder blade. There was a thread-thin white scar across his lower back. She traced it with her finger and his skin puckered.

  “You’re killing me, you know?” He wiped his palm over his mouth. “Hard enough to sleep beside you all night, but this is a new form of torture.”

  She smiled, resting a hand on one broad shoulder. “The oldest sort, I believe.”

  He chuckled.

  She drew one finger along the scar again. “How did you get this?”

  “Knife wound after engaging the enemy.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  She finished washing his back and moved before him, handing him the cloth. His hand captured hers and drew it to his chest, pinning her there.

  “What can you tell me?” she asked.

  “I can tell you what they already know.”

  Haley felt a chill nestle at the base of her spine. Telling her only what his opponents already knew was a way to ensure that she could not reveal any of his secrets. She drew her hand free and deposited the cloth back in the aluminum pan. He retrieved it and then began methodically washing beneath his arms and across his chest as he spoke.

  “My assignment was to collect intelligence from a foreign agent, a courier, who delivered it across the Canadian border. This intel came directly from the men who hired the mercenaries pursuing us now. They know the contents of the intel and will do anything to prevent it from reaching US government officials.”

  Haley shifted, suddenly uneasy.

  The normal sounds of insects and the branches of the trees creaking together as they moved in the morning breeze suddenly seemed more ominous. The sunshine filtering down in great beams all about them served to reveal their position. She almost missed the night.

  “What does the intel look like?” she asked.

  “I believe it is a simple flash drive. Do you know what that is?”

  She smiled. “Ryan, I make my living with computers. Private contractor.”

  “What do you do, tech help?”

  “The opposite. I’m paid by corporations, utilities and the US government to locate and exploit weaknesses in their network security systems.”

  “You’re a hacker?”

  She worked for various entities as an independent contractor with a very specific skill set. But she wasn’t telling Ryan that she was paid by DHS and the Defense Department to expose and exploit vulnerabilities in their firewalls and then to seal them up.

  “Consultant.” She smiled at the look of respect and surprise now spreading across his features.

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  “So I not only know what a thumb drive is, I know how to access files from a corrupted Master Boot Record, PBR or directory structure. And I can figu
re out if the corruption is physical or logical due to malware, bad sector or file system or inaccessible drives, for example.”

  “Any other hidden talents?”

  “I’m in the top 100 for World of Warcraft and I’m fifth in Counter-Strike, look out Doltnugget06.”

  “There’s more than one Doltnugget?”

  “Apparently.”

  “What’s your gamer name?”

  She looked away. “You don’t have the security clearance for that one.”

  His smile said he accepted the challenge as he smoothly changed the subject.

  “You seem very fit for someone who spends so much time online.”

  “I went to college on a tennis scholarship and worked part-time in my dad’s landscaping biz. He’s a landscape architect.”

  As a teenager, she worked every summer on so many job sites customers thought she was a regular part of his crew. She may as well have been. She could operate any of the heavy machinery he owned.

  “Planting flowers?” he asked.

  “Operating the backhoe, mostly, and the Bobcat.”

  His brows rose in speculation at this revelation.

  “I also am a regular at my neighborhood gym. It’s dope.”

  “Goat yoga?” he asked, but the uncertainty in his tone told her that he no longer was so certain that he could read her at a glance.

  She laughed. “Tae kwon do. Green belt.”

  His brows lifted high on his broad forehead. “You are full of surprises.”

  “Same goes for you, 007.”

  “I hope my courier got away. If not there won’t be a package to recover and deliver to headquarters.”

  Haley folded into a seat, crossing her legs freestyle before her and resting her hands in her lap.

  “If it’s so important, why send one man to recover it?”

  “It’s how it’s done. The less attention drawn to our business, the better.”

  “If you are a central intelligence agent, you are not supposed to be conducting operations on US soil. Isn’t that correct?”

  “We operate worldwide.”

  She made a face.

  “How are you going to reestablish communications with your courier?”

  “I don’t need to. He gave me the drop location.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  Ryan shook his head.

  He wouldn’t tell her because that was a detail that his pursuers did not know.

  “Once we reach the hiking trail, wouldn’t it be safer for me to just go in the opposite direction?” she asked.

  “Not if they happen to be in the opposite direction. They know what you look like, Haley. They’re coming after you, the same as they’re coming after me. I’m your only chance. I’m not saying it’s a great chance but it is all you’ve got.”

  Ryan dumped the water from the pot, selected a smaller frying pan, added water and increased the flame height.

  “Apple and cinnamon or maple walnut?” He asked, holding up two small packets of oatmeal.

  “Apple.”

  He returned the maple walnut packet to the bag and collected three similarly colored pouches. When the water began a slow boil he reduced the flame and tore open the packets, adding them one at a time as he stirred with a wicked-looking knife.

  “I think we have a spoon somewhere,” she said.

  “Save it for eating.” He drew out a plastic cup. “Now, how about you explain why your dad thinks that you need summer camp at the age of...”

  Haley pursed her lips but then answered. “The age of twenty-three.”

  The oatmeal thickened. Ryan slopped a third of the breakfast into a cup and handed it over with a plastic spoon. He ate his from the pan with a second spoon.

  He lifted his brows and blew on his meal, waiting.

  Haley wondered how much to tell him.

  “I’ve been having a rough time.”

  “Why?”

  “I just don’t feel safe. I spend a lot of time inside with my work and I don’t go places I don’t know. I don’t make new friends or really have much of a social life.”

  “That’s concerning, especially to a father. Any reason?”

  She held her untouched oatmeal in her cupped hands as she looked away, up to the bright green leaves that blocked the sunlight and the lacework of branches overhead.

  “Haley?”

  Chapter Eight

  Haley unlocked her jaw, ignored the pain twisting her stomach and spoke. “My sister, Maggie, was murdered five years ago.”

  His hand was on her shoulder now, giving a squeeze. She told herself not to cry but the great racking sobs bubbled up as tears rolled down her cheeks, as if on a conveyer belt.

  He set aside his breakfast and gathered her into his lap. She curled against him, clutching the coarse blanket he wore and burying her cheek in the musty wool weave.

  “I’m so sorry, Haley.” He stroked her head, lowering his mouth so that his words were a whispered caress against her temple. “What happened?”

  The great jumble of emotions flashed through her with thoughts of the police reports, missing persons photos, news reporters. It was all a tangle and she did not like to go back there, but she carried it with her every day.

  “She’d just graduated from Skidmore College. She had her first job in Brooklyn on a PR team for a consortium of local businesses in an area called DUMBO. Do you know it?”

  “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. I’ve worked there.”

  “Right!” she brightened until she recalled what she still had to put into words. “Maggie had her first place in Williamsburg. Nice building. Nice neighborhood. She and her new coworkers went out on a Friday night on Bedford Avenue and got separated. Maggie didn’t come home. My family went a little crazy. We were on the news, in the papers. Hired a private investigator. Hounded the police. That was November. Christmas that year was...” She shook her head. “No word, no leads. She just vanished. We were called for a Jane Doe in early January. Not her.”

  He rubbed her back and she struggled to control her breathing, blowing out a long breath.

  “Her body was located in late January, less than a mile from where she disappeared.” Haley covered her face for this part. “Near the water in a shallow grave on the East River between a park and an old warehouse. I made the identification, her clothes and bag, calf-high boots that she loved.”

  “You IDed her?”

  She pressed her hand over her mouth as the bite of oatmeal she’d sent down threatened to come back up. The cold air helped keep it down.

  “Yes. She’d been stabbed multiple times, murdered. The cold preserved her so we learned she’d been bound and some of the bruises were several days old. I don’t know how they know that but someone kept her. We don’t know for how long.”

  “Oh, Haley.” He wrapped her in his strong arms.

  He’d been a Marine, he said. Had he lost friends while serving his country?

  “Since then, I just can’t seem to find myself. It’s like part of me died that night, too. And I can’t risk anything happening to me. I saw what that did to my parents. If I got killed, it would kill them.”

  “Why do you say you died?”

  “I’m different, scared of things I never was before. Second-guessing decisions, staying where I’m safe.”

  “Brooklyn? Some would argue that’s not very safe.”

  “I’m in a good neighborhood, a building with a good security system, it’s...” Mine, she almost said, but stopped herself.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Dad is still in Colonie, that’s near Albany. But Mom moved down to Beacon, NY, after they divorced.”

  “Divorced because of your sister’s death?”

  She nodded. “How did you know?”

  �
��It happens.”

  Haley slipped back off his lap, feeling awkward all of a sudden. She lifted her cup, stirring the lumpy cold glue that had recently been a tempting meal.

  He ate all of his meal with efficiency as she toyed with hers. Swallowing was hard but she tried.

  “Why Brooklyn?”

  “My work is there.”

  “Your work is anywhere and everywhere.”

  “True.”

  “So why Brooklyn?”

  She tucked her chin and whispered her answer. “It’s Maggie’s old place. She had been there two months and...”

  “You moved into her apartment?”

  Haley nodded.

  “I was supposed to clean it out but I just...stayed.”

  She nodded, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “I see why your dad is worried.”

  “That’s not why. I just, I agreed to clean out her place, so they wouldn’t have to and I... I just couldn’t.”

  “What was she like?” he asked.

  Before she knew it Haley was bubbling with stories about the mischief they had gotten into and the family adventures. Skiing in the Adirondacks in the winter, sailing on Otsego Lake in the summer. The two rode horses, competing in jumping and cross-country courses. Maggie did gymnastics and Haley played tennis on their high school teams.

  “One year we went to Lake Placid and got to try the luge. It was summer but they let you run part of the course on sleds with wheels. I crashed, but Maggie made it all the way down.”

  “Crashed?”

  She nodded, lifting her head to grin, and thrust up her jacket sleeve to show him a small scar on her elbow.

  “Sounds like you two were a couple of daredevils.”

  But not anymore. Haley dropped her chin and nestled against Ryan, letting his big body wrap around her as she drew comfort from his heartbeat and the heat of his skin.

  “We’ve got to move. Finish your breakfast. I’ll pack the gear.”

  He rose. She stared at a place somewhere in front of her as she thought of Maggie.