Her Heart

by Christa Wick

  My ass did a little bounce. Breathing became impossible. I let go of his wrists, grabbed his biceps for support. My ass bounced again. A moan escaped me and I could feel my juices finally begin to penetrate the crotch of my panties.

  Contractions pulsed within me, the strength of the jerks tugging my clit up and down, tensing my labia.

  Collin slid his hands across my stomach and down to my pussy. His name shattered against my lips as he feather stroked my clit just once.

  "I'm not going anywhere," I rasped.

  His mouth sought mine. I wouldn't let him have it. He gnawed along my jaw instead. A tremor rolled through me, eyes straining upward behind closed lids.

  Damn it, why was I so weak around this man?

  "Tell me to stop," he said, his firm lips vibrating against my ear. "Or tell me what you want. Tell me something, Mia."

  What I wanted was irrelevant. It was a damn fairytale with a loving husband and healthy, happy children.

  What I needed was something different. I would make him give me that.

  "The truth," I whispered as my body stopped weeping at his touch and my heart turned to dust.

  As if he knew the exact question coming, Collin tensed against me.

  "Open your eyes." I pushed at his chest until he allowed a small gap between our bodies. "Tell me if there was a baby, whether I miscarried."

  I knew the answer with the way his breath thinned to nothing and then he stopped breathing altogether. But I had to hear it from his mouth.

  I slapped his chest with a loosely closed fist.

  "Open your eyes and answer, damn it!"

  He obeyed and I thought, for a second, that I saw the blue pools of his irises awash in tears, but my own vision was too blurry for me to tell. He swallowed, his forehead moving against mine in a nod.

  "Yes, you miscarried, lo—" He pulled back, his hands still caging me in. "I thought it would be easier on you if you didn't know."

  My loose fist balling tight, I raised my hand even with my collarbone, ready to land a punch wherever I could on the damn bastard.

  "Thought what would be easier on me?" I demanded.

  "Easier with you leaving."

  He moved one hand to stroke the side of my head but I evaded him, my fist landing twice on his chest in rapid succession.

  "I didn't leave!" I screamed. "You cast me out!"

  Collin captured the hand assaulting him, holding me by the wrist and pulling me to him. His face pressed against my neck, a million neurons firing inside my head at the contact. My legs threatened to fold if he didn't release me immediately.

  "No!" I jerked, pushed, fighting both his attempt to hold me and the memories of being in his arms that made my limbs numb and unresponsive as my brain ordered my body to flee.

  "I didn't leave," I accused again. "I didn't leave and it didn't help."

  "I'm sorry, baby."

  He tried to capture my head and I knew he would kiss me again if he succeeded. I didn't trust why he would do so, couldn't imagine myself trusting his motivations ever again.

  "Stop hurting me," I begged, my voice quivering as it built in volume. "If I ever meant the least little bit to you, then get out and stop hurting me."

  His hands fell to his sides. Sensing a moment's vulnerability in Collin, I started pushing and slapping him toward the door, tears streaming down my face.

  "Get out, get out, get out!"

  He didn't try to shield himself against my blows or otherwise stop me until he stood on the outside of the open door.

  "I can't leave until I know you're safe from your stepfather."

  His hands lifted as if he would catch the door before I could close it. I shook my head, warning him not to try.

  "I don't care what you do." I slammed the door inward, my gaze locked on his quickly disappearing face. "Just don't let me see you."

  "Don't worry, love," he promised with a whisper as the door shut on him. "You won't."

  10

  Collin

  For an hour after the door slammed in my face, I watched from within the tree line that overlooked Mia's little house. An hour was how long it took her to both break down and call Deputy Gillie and for him to arrive. In uniform but driving his personal vehicle, he had to coax her into letting him inside. He leaned against the doorframe as he persuaded her. A certain intimacy in his manner made my gums ache.

  I hadn't received any fresh intel from Trent on Mia's life in Keeling in over fifteen hours. That meant my knowledge of Gillie came from the hundred-dollar "tip" I'd given the waitress at the roadhouse. I had no idea how well Mia knew Gillie from before she left Keeling. He could have been the first man to part her legs and sample her sweet stores or the one she had dreamt of opening to as a teenager.

  At least she hadn't let him stay the night or for any real amount of time. His interior security check had lasted no more than fifteen minutes before she pushed him out the door—far more gently than she had ousted me and with a smiling laugh instead of tears.

  As far as competition went, I liked Deputy Gillie a lot less than old man Keppler.

  I watched as he slowly worked his way inside. Her face told me she was hurting. A ruthless part of me was glad. It meant she still had feelings for me. Then the sane part of me reared up and I remembered I didn't want her to have feelings for me. If Gillie sat her down on the couch, wrapped his arms around her, stroked her hair and she let him, not once thinking about me, that would be a good thing.

  It would hurt like hell, but it would be a good thing.

  With both of them inside and the door shut, I finished securing a remote camera to the tree I had watched from. I checked the video feed on my phone, then shouldered the small gear bag that had kept me company through a cold night outdoors.

  Gillie would get Mia safely off the property, hopefully for her to file a complaint against her stepfather, but at least for her to go to work. By the time she was done at the hardware store, I would have four men watching her in teams of two while I worked on removing Evan Morris without killing him or getting him put on the terrorist watch list and sunk in a dark hole for the next five years while the mistake was worked out.

  Walking through the trees to where I had left the SUV, I dialed Trent.

  "Morning, Collin."

  The false sunshine in his voice immediately put me on guard. I had left him with orders yesterday, tasks to do that were not yet done because the four-man team should have had their boots on the ground in Keeling yesterday evening. I had ordered a background check on Gillie and half a dozen other items.

  "Where's my team?" My heart rate accelerated like I had stepped into a boxing ring with Trent, but I kept it out of my voice.

  "Your team?"

  "You better be getting a blow job or having a fucking seizure if you can't remember the team I ordered—"

  "My memory isn't at question, brother."

  I heard him lean back in the overstuffed leather chair he kept in his office. His use of "brother" made my teeth grind. Not that he didn't have a right to call me such. I was closer to him than my sister. Our blood had mixed on battle fields. We were closer than most real brothers, but his use of the word told me things were about to get personal in a way I wouldn't like.

  "You remember when you went on the warpath in Dubai, the protocols you set up for your absence?"

  He had stopped moving in the chair just as I had stopped walking along the ground strewn with pine needles. Of course I remembered the protocols. For six weeks I had been in constant danger of being taken prisoner by those I pursued or the sheiks whose laws I defied. In custody, the information in my head would have been able to unlock the servers on Stark International and thereby bring down entire governments, if not countries. Accounts worth billions could have been drained—the whole company could have imploded within hours.

  "You re-activated them?" My grip on the phone tightened, the plastic casing creaking from the pressure I wanted to apply to Trent's throat.

  "And im
provised a few others." He shifted, the prolonged sound of the leather protesting and the angle of the air traveling over his vocal chords making me picture him leaning far forward as if he were virtually getting up in my face as he had done so many times in the past. "There's an open ticket at the Martin County airport for your return. No one here is taking your calls but me and all your accounts are closed except for the LINT fund."

  I snorted. The LINT fund was so named because it had twenty-thousand in it. Pocket lint meant for minor tight spots. Cutting me off from my money meant nothing. Not all of my accounts were legal, at least not in the United States. They didn't hold the billions he had just cut me off from with a few keystrokes, but several days of navigating a network of banks would open up millions. Far more than money, I needed highly skilled human resources—both in the field protecting Mia and the programming jocks running intel algorithms to make connections between Morris and anything that would put him in jail. I needed the software and hardware resources of Stark International.

  "It's my company," I growled.

  "Then come home," he answered. "Fire my ass, kick it. Choice is yours. Until then, you have to work your Mia issues out on your own, no more proxies. This needs to end now. I don't care if you fuck her or forget her, your head hasn't been in the game since the bomb in Dubai."

  That wasn't true but I didn't correct him. My head had been in the game after the bomb, all the way up until the doctor told me Mia had miscarried. And I wouldn't fire Trent, there wasn't any other person I trusted more to run my company in my absence. We were cut from the same steel, forged in the same fire and sharpened by the same rough hands of the cadre at Fort Bragg.

  But, as much as I loved him, the same held true for Trent as for Morris—if his actions caused Mia injury, I would take a month killing him.

  Without another word, I hung up and dialed Reed Henley's number as I resumed walking toward the SUV. The first ring was followed by an almost imperceptible click. I froze as the phone rang a second time before the call was answered.

  "I told you no one is taking your calls," Trent purred.

  That was true, but only because he was making the Stark communication servers re-route any call from my cell—and probably the entire area code of Martin County—to his phone. With Reed and any other resource I could think of willing to redirect a resource my way having company phones, I would keep coming up against the brick wall of Trent Kane.

  Heat flushed my cheeks as an angry sweat began to bead beneath my clothes.

  "Mia is in danger, Trent. And it's just as real as Dubai."

  He sucked in air through his teeth then snorted it out his nose. "Can't think of a better motivator, brother. There's a ticket at the airport for her, too. Tell her the truth, get down on your fucking knees and beg, tell her you love her and were stupid and fucked things up, give her that damn ring you've had around your neck for the last four months..."

  Trent was wrong. I needed to eliminate the threat Morris posed, just as I had eliminated Omari and his brothers. I needed it done before any harm came to Mia, including the soul deep hurt she seemed to experience whenever her gaze landed on me.

  Expediency would only come with company resources. To get them, I had to undermine Trent's confidence, make him doubt an earlier decision so he would doubt having initiated the protocols and return control to me without my leaving Mia unprotected to straighten things out.

  "You fucked up putting her under Reed's supervision," I accused, my voice soft and cold as steel.

  That earned me a hiss.

  "I had to think about the company, too, had to keep the affair and your...tastes...from winding up on the front page on the National Enquirer or an actual fucking newspaper."

  "Once upon a time, they were your tastes, too," I pressed. "Your mistake was telling Reed about the miscarriage. With his history, you should have known he would keep her at arm's length and that everyone around him would fall in line."

  I heard the hard slap of flesh hitting leather and pictured Trent punching his chair.

  "What did you want me to do, let him find out from Mia, tears streaming down her face?" Anger bubbled over in his voice. "You really want to do that to him after everything he went through with Katherine? He fucking transferred to Miami because our inner circle is filling up with too many babies. You get that don't you?"

  "You still screwed up," I pressed.

  Trent hadn't, not on either count, but I couldn't back down without losing the larger argument that I desperately needed to win.

  "If you couldn't put her there without telling him, you should have found another solution."

  "Fuck you, Stark." A moment's silence was followed by the sound of his back hitting the seat cushion and a breathy chuckle. "I'm not deactivating the protocol. You want your company and the resources to protect the woman you love, come back and fight me for them."

  The line went dead. Propelled by my fist, my phone bounced off the nearest pine tree. My knees hit the ground, all the adrenaline I'd bottled up during the phone call overloading my system at once.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  I glared at the still intact phone. I had other ways to get to key personnel within the company, but Trent wasn't stupid. The Stark servers spied on themselves, generating user reports for "hot" keywords. Any search related to Mia, her stepfather or any other person in the entire county would get flagged and sent to Trent. That's if the keywords weren't blocked on the servers to begin with.

  Someone else could reason with Trent. I could contact Vivian and she could reach Reed. Reed would want to protect Mia. But if we then failed—if I failed in protecting Mia—what would be the cost to Reed?

  I settled from my knees onto my ass, the air I inhaled feeling thick and jagged as it moved through my windpipe and circulated in my lungs. Reed had been with Trent and me from Fort Bragg all the way through our last tour in Baghdad. He had married his childhood sweetheart along the way. Gotten her pregnant, too, right before we rotated into Iraq.

  I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight to relieve the tension cementing in my face. A dull, internal roar vibrated against my eardrums, blocking out the chirping of the birds around me. Opening my eyes, the forest floor slowly rotated beneath me.

  Fuck—my body was ready to fight. Trent had brought that on. But there was no one to punch, no immediate adversary to chase or flee. The adrenaline just kept pumping, sending my heart racing, the air moving through me in a rate that quickly approached hyperventilation. If I didn't calm the fuck down and breathe slower, the carbon dioxide levels in my blood would plummet, increasing the dizziness and bringing with it an unpleasant, tingling numbness.

  My best course of action would be to grab the phone, run to the SUV as fast as I could, and let the physical exertion eat up the adrenaline. I got on my knees, my hands on the ground to push up. With the buzzing in my head increasing, I rolled onto my side then onto my back, my vision filled with the green needled pines above me.

  Green like Mia's eyes.

  Old man Keppler had been right. She belonged in Keeling, seemed to spring up from its ground with her sweet, fresh looks—looks she shared with Reed's ex-wife, Katherine, each woman having dusky hair, lush bodies, and pale skin that colored easily.

  How painfully ironic the other details they would come to share because of the men who chose to love them. What happened to Mia in Dubai had been collateral damage in the minds of Omari and his brothers.

  What happened to Katherine in Baghdad had been impersonal, too. Instead of a car, the mortar shells had hit an old office building repurposed as temporary housing for those traveling on government business. Walls and ceilings had collapsed.

  Katherine, five-and-a-half months pregnant, had been on a two-week visit before she could no longer fly. Our unit's duty restrictions insured she would not see Reed again until months after the baby was born. He had ordered and begged her to stay home, but she had found a way to secure the permissions without his authorization. A family frien
d who served as chief of staff to a senator on the Committee on Armed Services greased the paperwork. From his office in D.C., the damn fool thought it was safe, not understanding that it was never safe, no matter how many days passed without gunfire or explosions.

  An official stamp on a piece of paper and a plane ticket to Hell culminated in a doctorless labor in her fifth month, her husband's torso over hers the only thing separating her pregnant belly from the wall that crushed down on them. Trent and I were visiting when the attack began. We pulled at the debris covering them with broken fingers as the pool of blood beneath Katherine slowly expanded.

  The baby wanted out.

  We all wanted the fuck out.

  On the ground in North Carolina, my breathing finally slowed. The air shook as it entered and exited my body. Not quite sobs—I'd stopped crying over Reed's lost child a long time ago. I had moved on from the frequent replay of images in my mind, Katherine's screams and moans echoing in my head. I had taken my lesson from the tragedy, too.

  You can't protect what you can't control.

  Reed hadn't been able to control his lovely, willful wife. They had both suffered for it, long after the original loss. The damage from the explosion and the hours before medical care could be received had left Katherine infertile.

  Three years passed before she formally left Reed, but the dissolution of their marriage had started in a Baghdad hospital and intensified with each visit Reed took stateside to find her more and more withdrawn.

  He lost his mind when he got the papers, the sounds coming from his throat eerily reminiscent of Katherine's howls as they bounced off the rubble trapping her. Emergency leave denied—he went AWOL. Who wouldn't—you give the Army your blood and that of your wife and child and the gratitude comes back as a piece of paper with a thick, red DENIED stamped on it, no officer in the company having the balls to sign the form.

  We nursed Reed back to sanity, Trent and me. We shredded our re-enlistment papers when they came, overturning the commander's desk before finding that stamp and marking both the man and his walls.