Out of Time

by Monica McCarty

  He wasn’t alarmed right away when she didn’t answer, figuring she might be sleeping after the long night. But it seemed strange that she would have turned off the phone.

  He felt the first prickle of unease and decided to call the senator. Dalton answered and it took a minute for Greythorn to get to the phone. He started to apologize for the delay, but Scott cut him off. “I just called Natalie, and she didn’t pick up.”

  “She came down a little while ago and said she wasn’t feeling well,” the senator explained. “I assumed it was morning sickness. She said she was going back upstairs to rest and asked not to be disturbed. Do you want me to check on her?”

  Scott hesitated. He didn’t want to wake her if she wasn’t feeling well, but she’d never complained of illness before. Of course, he didn’t know squat about pregnancy. “That’s all right.” It was nothing that couldn’t wait. “Just have her call me when she wakes up.”

  When the phone rang a couple of hours later, Scott assumed it was Natalie. He was wrong.

  “She’s gone,” the senator said. He started apologizing, saying that he knew Scott had trusted him and he didn’t know how it happened, but Scott cut him off.

  His heart seemed to have stopped beating. “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

  “The night nurse went to leave and her car was missing. The guards said she’d driven out a while ago. But it wasn’t her; it was Natalie. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think. . . .”

  Scott didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. It felt as if he’d taken another knife in the gut. It was the same feeling he’d had when he’d discovered Natalie was a spy.

  He couldn’t believe it. She’d left him. She’d waited until he was gone, and she’d run at the first opportunity.

  He’d thought she trusted him.

  Blind spot.

  He was a damned fool.

  Twenty-three

  Natalie told herself she was doing the right thing. She didn’t have any choice.

  She’d been waiting to hear from Scott so she was surprised to see her parents’ phone number when the phone buzzed at a little after seven. Her parents woke up early, but they usually waited to call until after nine.

  It wasn’t her parents. The voice on the other end of the line told her he was in her parents’ kitchen right now, and he was going to kill her family if she didn’t bring him the laptop.

  She’d told him she didn’t have it and didn’t know where it was—which was the truth. He’d replied that she better find it soon. She had twenty-four hours to get it to her parents’ house.

  “But that isn’t enough time,” she protested, looking at the clock. Getting on a plane would be too risky. “It’s at least an eighteen-hour drive from here.”

  “Then you’d better hurry up and find it. And if I were you, I’d figure out a way to ditch that SEAL boyfriend of yours and keep him out of this. I wouldn’t want him to get in the way. Do anything, call anyone and they’ll all be dead.”

  And just in case she didn’t believe him, he handed to the phone to her sister.

  “I’m making pancakes with the policeman.”

  Natalie’s blood went cold at the sound of her sister’s voice; he wasn’t bluffing. The past few days fell away as if a dream. Without Scott around to fill her head with unrealistic fantasies, the truth of her situation came back to her full force.

  She’d made a mess of her life, but she wasn’t going to make a mess of his. And she wasn’t going to let anyone die for her mistakes. Not her parents, not her sister, and sure as hell not Scott.

  She’d figure a way out of this or suffer the consequences on her own.

  It ripped her heart out to leave him like this, but it was better than the alternative. They’d never had a chance. The reluctant Russian spy and the officer in America’s most elite SEAL team were hardly a match made in heaven. This had only hastened the inevitable.

  She knew that Scott would see her leaving as a betrayal, but that was better than him getting even more wrapped up in her problems or, worse, having him get killed in the cross fire.

  He’d put himself out enough for her already. She never should have involved him in any of this.

  But apparently he’d been right about the laptop being important. Not that that was going to help her save her family when she had no idea where it was.

  Of the many problems facing her, however, the most pressing had been how to get out of Fort Knox, as Scott had called it. She wasn’t going to be able to sneak past all the security, and she needed a car.

  She’d have to borrow one.

  While getting ready, she came up with a plan. The first part was to make sure no one noticed her gone right away. She wanted as much of a head start as possible.

  She hated to deceive the senator when he’d done so much for them, but she didn’t have a choice. After coming up with the excuse that she wasn’t feeling well and pretending to retire to her room for a nap, she instead made her way to the back entrance where the considerable staff came and went out of the main house.

  In the cubbies where the women left their purses, she riffled through a few until she found a set of keys with an alarm fob. She also grabbed a pair of sunglasses.

  After pulling her hair up and securing it in a bun, she put on the glasses and walked outside to where the cars were parked. She’d chosen her plain black pants and white blouse again, which happened to be similar to what most of the female staff wore.

  She hit the disarm on the key fob and headed to the car that beeped. Her heart stopped when one of the security guards popped his head around the corner to check on the noise, but she ducked into the car with a backhand wave and started it up quickly.

  It must have worked because the guard was nowhere to be seen in her rearview mirror as she backed out.

  Ready with a lie that she was a new maid if the guard at the gate stopped her, she was relieved when the gate opened automatically as she approached and he just waved her through. Even with the big sunglasses, she made sure to block her face as much as she could when she waved back.

  Her heart was still thumping a short while later when she got onto the highway toward the famous Route 66, which would eventually take her to the interstate heading northwest. She’d gotten past the first hurdle, but she had much higher ones ahead.

  She had about twelve hundred miles to figure out what she was going to do. How was she going to bluff her way through saving her family’s lives without the computer? Could she delay them? Convince them to give her time to find it? Offer to exchange their lives for hers?

  The ring of the phone beside her made her jump. She picked it up, saw the unfamiliar number, and put it down. It wasn’t the guy calling from her parents’ house, and if it was Scott trying to reach her . . .

  She couldn’t talk to him.

  She ignored the first call.

  And the second and third. But when she pulled the car over for gas a short while later, she looked down at the phone again. Natalie’s heart sank to her stomach as she read the short text on the screen:

  Trust me.

  Those two words were like a stab to the heart all over again. She knew how much trust he’d put in her to help her, and it felt as if she were betraying him all over again by running. But how could she let him ruin his life and destroy his career for her? How could she put his life in danger for hers?

  She forced her gaze away from the phone that tempted.

  Your mess. You have to do this alone.

  But then something happened to remind her that she wasn’t alone. She felt a flutter in her stomach. And just in case she didn’t realize what it was the first time, the baby moved again.

  Their baby.

  Natalie could go this alone and try to save her family, but without the laptop they would probably all die. Or she could do what she should have done the first time. She could put her
faith and trust in the man she loved.

  She did have a choice.

  Natalie looked at the phone and took a deep breath.

  * * *

  • • •

  Scott didn’t have to explain what had happened. Kate and Colt could figure it out from his expression.

  “She ran?” Kate asked.

  Scott nodded grimly, anger and humiliation curdling in his gut. He couldn’t believe he’d let Natalie convince him that he could trust her. That she wasn’t lying to him again. Deceiving him. Fucking him for . . .

  He couldn’t even go there. And he’d bought it all, hook, line, and sinker.

  He didn’t want to think she’d been playing him again, but what else could he think? She’d run the first time that he’d left her alone.

  He didn’t know whether to put his fist through the wall or sit down on the couch and put his head in his hands. He was devastated enough to do both. Aside from the personal knife through the heart, he was keenly aware that she might have taken the answers for avenging his men with her.

  But aware of his sister and his former chief watching him, Scott forced himself to calm down and think rationally. Or try to think rationally, which was damned hard when the woman he’d risked everything for had just left him.

  He drew a deep breath and sat on the couch. The past week replayed in his head over and over. What had he missed? Where had he gone wrong?

  She’d seemed so in earnest, so genuine. So terrified. He would have sworn she was telling the truth. Could his judgment really be that off?

  He shook his head. He didn’t think so. She had been telling the truth. He’d bet his life on it.

  The fist that had been wrapped around his insides released a little. There had to be another explanation. But what could have made her leave like that?

  “Where would she go?” Colt asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you think she is still working with them?” Kate asked.

  Scott didn’t like what his sister was implying even if he’d just had a similar thought himself. Did Natalie know who was behind this and was she trying to protect them?

  He thought back through what she’d told him over the past week. Looked at it from every angle and tried to put aside his personal feelings.

  He knew what would make her leave.

  “No,” Scott said with sudden certainty. “Natalie was telling the truth. If she ran, it’s because they got to her. They must have threatened her with something.”

  It wasn’t hard to guess what. There was one thing that he knew would send her running. Her family.

  But why hadn’t she called him? The anger started to build again. He told her he would protect her and her family. He thought she trusted him. She should trust him, damn it. He’d put everything on the line for her. What more did he have to do?

  “Maybe she’s trying to protect you,” Kate said.

  That took him aback. “What are you talking about?”

  Kate shrugged. “If I were her, I’d worry about you getting in trouble from helping me.” Both Colt and Scott looked at her as if she were crazy. “What?” Kate said. “Are men the only ones capable of protecting the people they love?”

  “Yes,” Colt and Scott said at the same time.

  She shook her head. “You are both cavemen. Women are perfectly capable of being stupidly overprotective, too.”

  Colt didn’t seem to like that any better than Scott did, but wisely he didn’t say anything.

  Scott swore. It made a perverse kind of sense and sounded like something Natalie would do.

  God damn it, hadn’t she heard him when he said he loved her? If she got herself killed to try to save him from losing his career, he’d never forgive himself. She was the most important thing in the world to him.

  The unhesitating realization of that even shocked him a little. For as long as he could remember the job and his career had always come first. He’d never seen a wife and family in his future. Although he supposed he’d never seen himself falling in love with a Russian spy and going AWOL after having over half his platoon wiped out by a missile strike in Russia, either.

  When the rug had been pulled out from him about his father, it had felt like he’d lost his family. But Natalie had given him that back.

  He was probably still a little too much “my way or the highway,” but she’d helped him see gray in situations where he’d previously only seen black-and-white. Right and wrong weren’t always clear-cut. People made mistakes. He might not be all that tolerant in his professional life where mistakes got people killed, but that rigidity didn’t need to extend to his personal life.

  “What should I do?” he asked Kate.

  “Keep calling and texting.”

  The suggestion worked. A few minutes after he texted Natalie to trust him, the phone rang.

  Recognizing the number, his heart jumped. “Thank God,” he said answering. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a broken sob.

  He was so glad to hear her voice he could have cried. He forced himself to be calm, not wanting to scare her off. “What happened, Nat? Where are you?”

  When she told him—and what she planned to do—his heart stopped beating for a good minute. When he thought of what would have happened to her, and how close she’d come to walking into a situation where she likely wouldn’t have come out alive, he had to fight to control his newly discovered temper. Instead of blurting, What the fuck, Natalie? he managed a much less angry, “I’m glad you decided to trust me. We’ll figure this out together, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  “I mean it, Natalie. Nothing is going to happen to them. Your family will be safe. You have my word.”

  He didn’t care what he had to do; he would make sure of it.

  “Okay,” she repeated in a much stronger voice.

  “Good. Now, where are you?” She told him, and he gave her directions to get to Kate’s. “I’ll be waiting. And Nat?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  She paused, sounding relieved. “I love you, too.”

  As soon as they hung up, Scott was on the phone to Baylor. He didn’t bother trying to control his anger when informing him that at least one of the men at Natalie’s parents’ house was dirty. “God damn it, Tex! I thought you said you could trust these guys?”

  Baylor swore. “I’m sorry, LC. I don’t know what to say. Marino”—Steve Marino was Baylor’s fiancé’s stepfather—“personally vouched for every one of them. I’ll have him run the names and see what we can find.”

  Even though he suspected Marino’s intelligence department was full of former operators and spooks and quite capable, Scott said, “Send them to Kate, too.”

  “Will do.”

  “And Tex, tell Marino to look for a connection to General Murray.”

  There was a dead pause on the other end of the line before the sharp curse, which told Scott that the senior chief understood the implications. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Scott said.

  Baylor swore again and said he’d get back to him as soon as he could.

  Scott spent the better part of the next two hours staring out the window and trying not to climb the walls.

  “You’re making me dizzy,” Colt finally said from his position on the couch. He’d managed to get up and use the bathroom to clean up a little, and he looked at least a good few steps from death’s door. “Why don’t you just sit outside on the doorstep? It will be easier than going back and forth to the window.”

  Scott gave him colorful instructions on what he could do with that suggestion. “She should be here by now,” he told him.

  “Not if she doesn’t want a speeding ticket. Especially considering how many times sh
e probably had to slow down to answer your phone calls.”

  “I’m sure you’d be totally laid-back if you were in my position.”

  Colt might have smiled. It was always hard to tell with him. “No judging, man,” he said, holding up his hand. “Just a friendly observation.”

  Colt had distracted him so when the doorbell rang, Scott jumped. He raced to the door and a moment later Natalie was in his arms.

  Only then did he realize how amped up he’d been. His body seemed to calm instantly. The rapid heartbeat, the rush of blood, the on-edge nerves . . . all settled. Life was good again.

  Christ, she’d scared him.

  He didn’t realize he’d said the last aloud until she looked up at him, her worried, big brown eyes as wide as saucers. “I’m sorry. I was terrified and didn’t know what else to do. He is in their house, Scott. He was standing right next to my sister when he called.”

  He could hear the tears in her voice and pulled her in tight against his chest. Instead of shaking her as he wanted to for running, he stroked her hair and murmured soothing words until she calmed.

  He would have kissed her, but Natalie had pulled back. “I’m sorry. You must be Kate.” Apparently his sister had come up behind them. He could tell from Natalie’s expression that she was uncomfortable and maybe a little anxious. “I . . . I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Kate came forward, extending her hand. “And I’ve heard a lot about you.” As that could be taken more than one way, Scott was glad when she added. “I’m very happy that you are here.”

  Natalie took Kate’s extended hand and seemed to relax a little. Scott showed her into the living room to introduce her to Colt. But seeing him only made her upset again.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said to Colt. “I didn’t have any idea that he had a gun.”

  “That makes two of us,” Colt said wryly. “But in my line of work I should have expected it. Besides, you did me a favor.”

  Colt looked at Kate and something passed between them that Scott wasn’t sure he liked. Not if it was going to mean his sister was hurt again.