Midnight Kiss

by Lisa Marie Rice

  If she wanted to, she could find out what the airfield was called. But what would be the point?

  She was going where Luke was taking her.

  This was new. She wasn’t used to not calling the shots. But this whole situation was so baffling, so out of her wheelhouse, beyond her skill set, that she just yielded control to someone who very much looked like he knew what he was doing.

  The skies finally opened up and rain fell in thick, rippling gray sheets. The vehicle’s windshield wipers had trouble keeping up, rain drumming on the roof, bouncing off the road. The sky was low and steel gray.

  Hope hated driving in bad weather but Luke didn’t even seem to notice it.

  Luke drove them onto the airfield, right up to a small business jet. She didn’t know if it was the same one. Its number was painted on the tail but she hadn’t had enough bandwidth to notice the number of the plane that took her from Boston to Portland.

  Luke parked with the passenger side right up against the moveable steps. She didn’t even get a drop of rain on her as she exited the vehicle and climbed the stairs. No one could see her, not even with binoculars. And if someone were checking using IR, all they’d see was a red blob that could possibly be a woman, possibly a small man. But certainly nothing that could identify her.

  Luke drove past the steps and exited the driver’s side, grabbed both their wheelies and his duffle bag, head down in the rain, and ducked into the steps, coming up right behind her.

  She had a whiff of jet fuel then crossed the threshold into the climate-controlled cabin that smelled of expensive leather and, incongruously, lemon. She sat and Luke sat down right next to her.

  He’d morphed instantly, from super vigilant warrior to travelling companion, in the time it took to climb up the steps into the jet. From the moment they stepped out of the hotel room, she could sense the tension in him. Not anxiety. He was preternaturally calm. But he also seemed attuned to everything going on around him. His walk even changed — a deliberate heel-to-toe step that looked like he could spring into a run at a second’s notice.

  A gunslinger’s walk, actually. Wildly sexy. Blue eyes cautious, scanning the environment, a gun a microsecond away, ready to draw — yep. An Old West gunslinger. He even had that old-timey sheriff vibe and damned if that wasn’t wildly sexy, too.

  He oozed pheromones and testosterone without even thinking about it. Hope felt he was ready and willing, and to a certain extent even eager, to engage with the enemy. Gunfight at the OK Corral, coming right up. Though in this case the enemy wasn’t the Clanton gang but shadowy entities that shot from the darkness. No matter, Luke was willing to face them.

  That taut suspicious look was gone from his face as he sat down beside her with a slight sigh. His face relaxed into easier lines that were just as attractive as before, when he’d been ready for a gunfight at any moment.

  He leaned his head back for a moment and closed his eyes.

  A suspicion crossed her mind. “Did you sleep last night?” she asked, her voice more harsh than she intended.

  “Some,” he said without opening his eyes.

  He was lying but she didn’t call him on it. Had he stayed awake on overwatch, to keep her safe?

  With his eyes closed, she could study his face without it seeming skeevy. He had a fascinating face. It was so classically handsome, enough for him to be a male model. Beautifully shaped head, ice blue eyes — when they were open — arrow-straight nose, high cheekbones, sculpted jaw softened by light-colored stubble.

  But it was more than a pretty face. It was a face that showed character and determination without a shred of vanity. He had lines in his face that looked brand new.

  While they’d been making their way from the hotel to the airplane, Luke had seemed to occupy more space than usual, projecting himself outward. Now he was relaxed.

  There was no danger in a seat on a private jet that was now revving up to taxi. Arguably there was no possible danger within hundreds of miles. Someone used to physical danger would be able to let down that shield of vigilance.

  Hope didn’t know how to do that. Unlike Luke, she wasn’t used to physical danger at all. Danger for her came over fiber-optic cable and through the screen of a monitor, and from black hats who at times were halfway around the world. Ever since she’d heard Kyle being killed, seen the men entering her building and on their way to her apartment, the adrenaline had been coursing through her veins and she didn’t know how to turn it off.

  Work. Work would do it. Work always helped. No matter what she was feeling, no matter how lonely she got, work helped. Work would help her now.

  She’d seen on the tail end of Felicity’s work request another issue, one more in her field of data analysis than security. It took her half an hour but she resolved it and smiled. One less thing for Felicity to do. She shot the whole thing off to Felicity in the HER room — Hope you’re resting. Here’s the analysis plus the data sets.

  Thanks. The answer came immediately.

  Hope sighed. Shouldn’t you be resting? Shouldn’t your husband just confiscate your keyboard?

  He did. I’m on my cell under the covers.

  Hope smiled. Rest now or I’m telling.

  Argh! Not you, too!

  Go.

  Going.

  The connection was broken.

  Hope looked at Luke. He seemed to be sunk deeply into sleep, nothing moving except a slight rise and fall of his broad chest.

  Everything about his body was just so unfamiliar, a new kind of male. This wasn’t how most of the men she knew were put together. Maybe there was something to the theory that symmetry was beauty. All the men she knew had something ungainly about them. Kyle — poor unfortunate Kyle — had had extremely short legs, slightly bowed, as if he’d spent his entire life on horseback. Both men on either side of her cubicle at the hedge fund had been awkwardly put together. Larry’s left eye had a permanent squint and Ben walked with one shoulder down, as if weighed down by an invisible but heavy bag.

  Not Luke. He seemed to have been put together by another, finer hand. Long lean muscles, broad shoulders, big elegant hands. Everything perfect and perfectly symmetrical. Though he could stand to put on some weight. That story he’d told her was horrifying. Enough to make anyone lose weight.

  She was glad she’d heard the story firsthand and not from Felicity. Hope appreciated Felicity’s discretion. She didn’t like gossip. If someone wanted you to know about their problems, they’d tell you. As Luke had done.

  She herself was fiercely private, unused to sharing her troubles. Right now all her troubles were right out there for Felicity and her company, including Luke, who apparently wasn’t quite with the company yet, to see. And presumably for everyone working at Black Inc to see.

  It was horrible.

  Nothing to be done about it, though. She couldn’t go back and erase what had happened. As always in life, the only way was forward.

  She closed her eyes for a moment trying to center herself. And by that she meant trying to be less aware of Luke, who was sitting completely still beside her. He could have been in a coma. So why was her attention focused on him, as if he were this huge black hole? He seemed to exert his own gravity, big body so still next to hers, so close she could feel his body heat.

  It was so unfair that her senses were filled with him. She could almost feel the molecules of his big body mingling with hers. She could smell him. Some kind of soap and leather. Even closing her eyes, she could tell he was there, right next to her, because he created a sort of disturbance in the Force.

  She’d had crushes before, tepid things in comparison, like a mild case of the flu, mostly for men who were far away. A few actors, the vice president of her company who was French and who she saw twice a year during enlarged board meetings, a great science fiction writer who’d once signed a book of hers.

  Certainly never to a man who was right here. Right next to her, so close. She brushed his hand every time she moved.

 
This was so distracting, for a woman who never got distracted, ever. Her focus was legendary, at least wherever she’d worked. In the university computer lab, at the NSA, at her hedge fund. A nerd’s nerd.

  Not right now. The nerd’s nerd was at this very moment filled to the brim with raging hormones, for a man who was beside her strictly for professional reasons and who would probably be annoyed if he knew just how attracted she was.

  Focus on the job at hand, she told herself sternly. Something she rarely had to say to herself. If anything, her problem was breaking the focus. She’d find herself climbing out of eighteen-hour work stints, groggy and disoriented, not knowing whether it was day or night outside.

  The. Job. It had always been enough, had always filled her life.

  She finished another small task that had been on Felicity’s to-do list, then concentrated on what Felicity had been able to find out.

  A lot, actually. Felicity was not only very good, she was tricky. Able to see under and around, probably because her parents had been Russian spies under Witness Protection. Felicity, too, had grown up in a situation where nothing was what it seemed. So Felicity had a sixth sense for deceit.

  The Sacramento connection was tenuous, but definitely there. A reference her parents had given when opening a bank account in Boston. Their first. No previous bank accounts in the city of Boston or in the state of Massachusetts could be found. Digging, Felicity had seen that there was absolutely no record of them in Boston before 1996, though their birth certificates said they had been born there.

  On the first application for a bank account, her father had given a reference in Sacramento, California. It puzzled her because they had no connection with Sacramento, or California. But there it was. Their reference was a Bernard Teller, manager of Happy Trails, a trailer park on the edge of the city.

  But what was unusual was that two days after giving that reference, it was deleted and another reference given, a man with a Boston address. The new reference was a man Felicity could find no trace of.

  Bless her thorough heart, Felicity had found this in a cache of digitized documents covering the ’90s.

  But the link to Sacramento was there and so they were pursuing it.

  Hope was reading this for the first time. She sat there for a long moment, her mind completely disengaged. Feeling her heart beat, slow and steady, feeling her breath moving in and out of her lungs, her fingers numb, her brain a blank.

  “ — ten minutes.”

  She turned her head slowly, as if her neck muscles had suddenly turned to wood. Inch by inch toward the sound, feeling as if something were going to crack.

  “Hope?” Luke’s ash brown eyebrows were drawn together. “ — okay?”

  She was processing one word out of ten.

  Luke raised a big hand and cupped her shoulder. Later, when she was able to think, she’d remember that his touch had been like someone touching a wounded comrade, to see if they were still alive.

  His hand shook her shoulder slightly. “Hope?”

  Happy Trails. Bernard Teller. Bernie?

  Thoughts raced, jumbled in her head. So very frightening because she was used to reasoning through things calmly. The world was knowable if you approached it rationally. Things in her head were always clear, never a jumble.

  What was in her head wasn’t reasoning, it wasn’t verbal or mathematical, it was visual. Broken images floating in front of her eyes, disappearing so quickly she barely had a chance to see them. A park, swings, a jungle gym. A swimming pool. The sounds of men’s voices, a friendly rumble in the background. A blonde woman, there and gone immediately.

  Her heart gave a painful thump, then another and another, faster, rattling against her rib cage. She brought a hand to her chest, where it hurt. Was she having a heart attack?

  “Hope?”

  She stared at Luke, wide-eyed. Her chest seized up, her throat closed, her muscles froze. She couldn’t breathe! Trying to pull in a deep breath, but only wheezing painfully.

  “Hey.” Luke leaned forward. “Hey.”

  His face was close to hers, so close she only saw him, those ice blue eyes looking deeply into hers. So deeply that she wondered whether he understood what was happening to her, since she didn’t.

  She tried to breathe but no air would come.

  And then Luke put up the arm rest, leaned closer and took her gently in his arms. She froze, uncertain what to do. He simply held her so close she could feel his broad chest moving and hear his strong, calm heartbeat. A minute went by, two. Neither of them spoke.

  Then something in her chest unlocked and she drew in a deep gasping shuddering breath. Luke dropped his head to rest his cheek on the top of her head and her arms went around him, as naturally as if she’d been doing it since forever. She leaned against him and time stopped. She didn’t think about the trouble she was in, the mysteries she couldn’t penetrate, the puzzling images in her head, the dangerous men pursuing her, what might await them in Sacramento.

  She thought of absolutely nothing at all, she only felt. She felt Luke’s warm, hard, lean muscles, the steady beat of his heart. The hard muscles of his back against her arms. That feeling of utter and complete safety. She was safe because she was in a plane, of course, but she was safe because she was in this man’s arms.

  Her breathing slowed, her heartbeat slowed, she no longer had flashes of frightening images that meant nothing to her yet made her heart beat harder.

  Luke adjusted his hold so that she was lying against him. A chill had come over her as if there’d been a sudden blast of Arctic air, but now warmth seeped in, even across her back, because his arms seemed to cover her. A cold tension had held her in its iron grip. Then the grip loosened. Warmth and calm penetrated through her clothes and through her skin. She never wanted to move, just stay like this forever.

  Time passed. She had no idea how long. Didn’t make any difference because she didn’t want to move from where she was. It was like being … on a beach vacation, floating in the water only it was the beat of a strong heart she was riding instead of the ebb and flow of the waves.

  Under her cheek, Luke shifted, pulled her gently back by the shoulders.

  Oh no! He was pulling her away! It was so great leaning against him. But — he was right. Much as she’d like to, she couldn’t simply spend the rest of her life leaning against his chest. Magnificent as that chest was. There was, like, a time limit on that kind of thing, otherwise she’d do it forever.

  He was holding her away from him. Yeah. This was much too nice to last. She didn’t want to open her eyes, because she knew what she’d see. A nice man, really handsome, trying to hide his exasperation at having to be nursemaid to a grown woman. Trying to ease her back gently, to be polite, but wanting to put distance between them.

  Sheepish but firm.

  She sighed and opened her eyes and saw — heat. And fire and flame and red-hot desire. Face taut, eyes closed to slits as he leaned down to her and kissed her.

  And kissed her.

  And dear sweet Jesus kissed her.

  Hope had been kissed before but not like this. This was deep and hot and she felt it down to her toes. He kissed her mouth but it felt like he was kissing her all over. Even — even between her thighs. A bit of a shocker, that her vagina contracted sharply when he licked inside her mouth. The back of her head was held in his big hand, as if trying to keep her from running away. When running away was the absolute last thing on her mind. If anything, she wanted to be closer. She reached and wound her arms around his neck and opened her mouth more deeply. Her nose was right against his cheek and she couldn’t breathe through her nose but that was ok. She’d breathe through him.

  Luke lifted his mouth, just for a second, not enough for her to panic at him leaving her, then his mouth settled down at a slightly different angle, a better angle to taste her.

  There was some kind of weird noise in the background that penetrated the fog. She heard it over the heavy beating of her heart that poun
ded in her ears.

  There was a massive jolt that separated them and she looked up. His face was flushed a deep red over his cheekbones. His mouth was wet and slightly swollen. From her mouth! Had that ever happened before?

  Why were they separated?

  “What happened?” she asked, appalled at her voice. It sounded sexy, almost sultry. Deep and throaty. She almost looked around to see whose voice it could be.

  Luke cleared his throat and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “We’ve landed,” he said.

  Sacramento, California

  The SUV was waiting at the bottom of the steps. It was a Black Inc vehicle and they were going to a Black Inc safe house. It was all good.

  What wasn’t so good was his breach of protocol. What the fuck? Kissing Hope was not a good idea. He knew that, he knew the rules. The rules were imprinted on his DNA, rules so strong they didn’t even have to be stated. You do not kiss your protectee.

  Normally that wasn’t a problem. Luke had been on a protection detail four times and his protectees had been male, mainly over sixty and overweight and kissing them hadn’t been a temptation.

  But damn it, Hope was temptation itself. He hadn’t known he was going to kiss her until he was kissing her and it was too late to stop it. And, well, once he started kissing her, stopping was impossible. Insane, even. Who would want to stop kissing that soft mouth, stop holding that luscious, small body?

  All the danger signals in his body were switched off and the plane could have been hijacked, the pilot could have jumped out of the plane with a parachute or put a gun to his head and he wouldn’t have even noticed. As it was, he was able to let go of her only because they actually landed and it would have been uncool if the ASI pilot came out and had to report back to the head office that Luke was kissing Hope like there was no tomorrow and had a boner to boot.