“But why? I’m of no value.”
Derian shrugged. “They don’t know that, and short of handing them the formula, all we have to do is convince them you know more than you do. While they take their time torturing it out of you, we’d have time to disappear. Never go back empty-handed, and always have a plan B,” he said with a cruel smile.
“Unless he—ol’ Nick, there—can get the rest of the formula to us by tomorrow night, no later. Then perhaps we will let you live.”
Della’s heart sank, her shoulders drooping. “I doubt that very much. Don’t do anything they tell you,” she pleaded, speaking to Nick. “That’s my choice. Whatever happens here, it’s not your fault.”
She needed him to know that, because of what happened with Janet. She saw the agony on his face.
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” he said, sliding his gaze to Derian. “I can find it. I’ll get it, but only if you let her go. I don’t care what you do to me, but if you don’t let her go now, we all lose. You get nothing.”
“Nick, no,” Della gasped.
“You’re all that matters to me, Della—period.”
Her heart caught in her chest, and then she saw it...a small red light reflected off of Cedric’s forehead.
Then another, on the man holding Nick by the car.
It was surreal as the bullet whizzed by her, and Pieter crumpled to the pavement. In the next second, Cedric was hit, and he also dropped to the ground.
Nick slumped next to Pieter just as something sharp hit Della on the back of her head, and her knees gave out, too.
* * *
NICK SAW DELLA fall and his heart gave way, the pain in his shoulder nothing compared to the loss he felt when he saw her crumple to the ground.
All hell broke loose around them, guys coming in from the edges, appearing out of the darkness like ghosts, and he had no idea whose men they were—from his government, or Cedric’s team, or both—as he crawled over to where Della lay on the ground.
She moaned when he touched her head. She wasn’t shot, but hurt. His hand came away from her head covered in blood.
Someone grabbed him and reflexively, Nick fought back, rolling to shield Della’s prone form as he did so.
He looked up into Derian’s face, ragged and clenched in pain as he gripped his chest, the shirt of his tux covered in blood.
Derian muttered something vile and raised his gun toward them.
Nick pushed off and launched himself at the man’s legs, hitting him hard as the shot went off. Derian went down again, and Nick crawled up over him, grabbing the arm that held the gun. He fought, and Nick struggled, aware of voices around him, but focused on Derian. The guy was still strong as a bull, even when shot.
Nick thought about Della, his only concern that he couldn’t let her fall into this man’s hands. He brought his hand down hard, and the gun went flying.
Picking him up by the shirt, he shook the criminal. “I’ll stop you no matter what it takes. I promise you that,” he growled.
“That won’t be necessary, Gabe...why don’t you back off. You’re bleeding all over our terrorist.”
The familiar voice cut through the fog of his anger, and he looked slowly up to find Bart—and five other agents in combat clothing—standing around them, weapons drawn.
“What are you doing here?” he asked them vaguely, his head spinning.
“Saving your sorry butt,” Bart said with a sharp grin. “C’mon, get up.”
Nick felt woozy, and reached out for the hand his friend and boss offered, but when he stood his knees gave out.
Someone barked for EMTs, and Nick shook his head, trying to focus. It didn’t work.
“Della? Where’s Della?”
“She’s fine. We got her. We got all of them,” Bart said, which was the last thing Nick heard before everything went dark.
* * *
DELLA WOKE UP in a dimly lit room, alone, and bolted upward, until a very sharp pain in her head had her falling back to the soft bed.
“Yeah, fast moves aren’t advisable for a few days, anyway,” someone said.
It was a strange voice, and she opened her eyes, refocusing on the man who stood beside her bed. She didn’t know him.
“Who are you? Why am I—”
Then she remembered—the wedding, the confrontation and the sound of shots fired. Nick had been shot, and she...
“What happened? Where’s Nick?”
The man narrowed his eyes on her, nodding.
“You must mean Agent Ross. He’s in surgery, but he’ll be fine. Just needed to repair some of the damage to his shoulder.”
Nick was in surgery? Hot tears burned behind her eyes, and she was unable to control sobs that seemed to take her over.
“Hey, he’s going to be fine—you, too. This is just the shock working its way out, don’t worry. We’ve all been there.”
Della tried to get hold of herself, but she didn’t seem to have her normal presence of mind to do so.
“You’re with DHS, too?” she asked.
He nodded. “Agent Bart Lowe. I wanted to be here when you woke up, so I could ask you a few questions, and remind you of your...responsibilities,” he said with a quick smirk. “But we’ll have to talk more at length, later, when you feel up to it.”
Della closed her eyes again, her head pounding and her heart hurting as she worried about Nick. That’s right, she remembered him telling her no one knew their real names on his team—so that if someone was compromised, they couldn’t give away the others.
“I guess I just blew the whole real-name thing,” she said stupidly.
“It’s okay, I knew his name, I just never let him know I knew. All part of being the boss.”
She smiled a little, but that hurt, too.
“What happened exactly?”
“You were hit really hard. Serious concussion, a laceration and some swelling. You’ll be okay, but they need you here under observation for a few days.”
She shifted her head slightly, but even that seemed to encourage the pain.
“I need to ask you a few questions, and remind you also not to say anything to anyone about what happened over the last few weeks, okay? No one—not the police, or anyone other than me. Your clearance was raised to cover your knowledge of this event, and the people involved, so you are bound by that—do you understand?”
“I understand,” she murmured, trying to fight falling back asleep.
“Just a few questions, then,” he said.
Della answered his questions the best she could, until a nurse came in and hustled the agent out the door.
“These guys, they never know when to quit. You get some rest,” she said to Della, kindly fixing her blankets. “Things will be much better tomorrow.”
Della wondered about Nick, and if she would ever see him again as her mind and body started to sink back into sleep. She hoped so, because she still didn’t know his last name. As she drifted into oblivion, she feared that maybe she never would.
* * *
AS IT TURNED OUT, the nurse was right. And wrong.
The next time Della opened her eyes in the hospital, she felt much better—and then much worse. Physically, she was out of the woods, but emotionally...when she asked about Nick again, she was only told that he’d been released, and that was all they knew. The kind nurse who had hustled the other agent out of her room told her that Nick had come by, had come to see her, but Della hadn’t been awake.
She supposed that was his goodbye. The only one she was going to get, she realized a few weeks later, as she had not heard from him again in all that time.
So often she was tempted to find out, to talk to Bart, to whomever could tell her anything about him, but she knew they wouldn’t.
Was he back in D.C.? Off to a new assignment? Was that it? Just...gone?
She refused to let the hurt take hold. She was alive—they both were—and that was a miracle in itself. Maybe he hadn’t been free to come visit her, or able.
But even if he never came back, maybe that was for the best. She worked hard on convincing herself that that was true as she sorted out her life.
But no matter how she tried to go back to normal, nothing was the same. Two weeks before the start of the new semester, even her workplace didn’t feel right anymore. Every time she passed Chloe’s desk, all she could think about was how gullible she’d been—on so many fronts. She’d erased her online dating profile—as if she wanted to date anyone—and couldn’t believe how stupid she felt for...all of it.
And yet...she also wouldn’t trade it for anything.
She wouldn’t trade a single moment with Nick, even the bad ones, and she couldn’t help but be glad for how the whole thing had opened her eyes, even while breaking her heart and nearly taking her life.
Her life had been so protected, so narrow...for all of her education and travels, she really had no sense of the world at all. She’d quit the ivory tower, she thought. She needed to put herself out there, and see what happened.
As it turned out, the head of her department wouldn’t allow her to resign, but he did offer her a year’s sabbatical. She took it without question. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do—she would go to Italy, explore her options and keep her guest lecture commitment, and then see what she wanted to do.
It was reckless, leaving her teaching responsibilities behind, but all she knew was that she had to go. If she had died that evening, it would have been the only time she had really lived, those weeks with Nick.
She couldn’t go back to her cloistered existence again. The glass she’d lived under her entire life had been shattered by this experience, and in some ways, she was glad.
Maybe she would teach math to kids who needed good teachers, or perhaps she’d find new research of her own to do, or write a book. Maybe she’d join the CIA, she thought with a grin...then shook her head. No thanks. She wasn’t that adventurous.
Italy first, she thought resolutely as she closed her suitcases and left her home, unsure when she would be back. A cab took her to the airport, and soon she was boarded, settling in to start her adventure.
Alone, but that was okay, as well.
She took out a book and a headset, intent on practicing her Italian on the flight.
Just as she was getting comfortable, someone stood at her side, a khaki-clad, masculine thigh bumping her arm, causing her to nearly drop her book.
“Sorry, but I think I have the window,” a familiar voice said.
Della’s breath caught, and she was almost afraid to look up. Then she did, and her eyes met a set of café au lait irises, or maybe they were more of a lionish gold...she never had really settled on that, though she also knew they tended to change according to his mood. Sometimes, in the dark, when they were alone, she could swear they turned the color of melted chocolate.
“Um, you might have to stand up so I can get in there, if that’s okay?”
Della blinked. It was Nick...looking at her as if they had never met before. Talking to her like a stranger.
Perplexed, she nodded as she noted the impatience of the people standing behind him, and slipped out of her seat long enough for him to slide in and take the one next to her. She saw then that under the sport jacket he wore, his left arm was still in a light sling.
“Thanks,” he said in relief, turning to her with a smile. “I’m Nick. Nicholas A. Lassiter.”
Della’s heart leaped in her chest and she looked at the hand he held out, worried that she might be completely imagining this, or worse, that she was suffering some kind of mental breakdown, and only imagined this was Nick sitting here with her.
“Della,” she managed, lifting her hand to his. “Della Clark.”
“Nice to meet you, Della.”
Nick Lassiter, she thought. Lassiter. His real name.
She couldn’t play anymore. No more games.
“What are you doing here? Why now? I assumed...”
His expression changed, becoming intense, apprehensive, and...nervous? Nick, nervous?
“I’m sorry. The last few weeks were...tough. I saw you in the hospital, unconscious, and I knew that you had almost been killed because of me...because I put you in that path of danger. I knew I had to get as far away from you as I could, to stay away...but I couldn’t.”
She swallowed, her fingers tightening into fists around the edge of the armrests as the door on the plane closed. No escape now. She couldn’t get up, couldn’t get out. For better or worse, she was trapped with Nick on a plane, again, for the next seven hours.
* * *
NICK WASN’T SURE what to do, even though he had it all planned out in his mind. When he’d called the university, and found out that Della was on sabbatical, that she was heading to Italy, he’d had to pull the few strings he had left with Bart to find out which flight, and when.
“That’s why I’m here. Because I realized, finally, that I couldn’t stay away,” he said baldly, watching her expression, her body so tensely held in the seat.
He wanted to touch her, to stroke away the tension, but not yet.
“You stayed away for weeks. I figured you had...moved on.”
He nodded. “I tried. I convinced myself it would be best, for both of us. I didn’t believe that I could make up for the lies, or for what happened. And even if you could forgive me, I couldn’t forgive myself for not seeing Derian, so many times, right in front of me. I still don’t know how I missed it. Missed him. So close to you,” he said, pausing as he searched for the words.
“He didn’t look anything like the photos,” she agreed blankly. “He didn’t even have an accent, and he had Chloe covering for him, inventing his backstory about their college romance. There was no way to know. How did you figure it out? How did you end up out at the car with them that night?”
“When we were in the church the night before, at the rehearsal, there was something about the best man that kept bugging me, something familiar. I realized I’d seen the tattoo on his arm in the files that came with the information on Derian. They both had it—he was Cedric’s brother, Pieter. It didn’t hit me until I was at the reception and by the time I put it all together, it was too late.”
“But not before you had a chance to let Bart know?”
“I left my phone on the table with a coded message, and just hoped to hell he got it—he didn’t, but he’d been tracking me since he set me loose. Good thing, as it turned out, or we probably wouldn’t be sitting here.”
She remembered the gunshots, the confusing chaos around her as she had fallen to the pavement, in too much pain to move.
“I saw you get shot. I saw the blood on your shirt. That was the last thing I remembered,” she said thinly, her fingers still holding on to the armrests for dear life as they made their ascent. He didn’t know if she was afraid of the takeoff, as she had once mentioned to him, or if she was afraid of him.
The thought shook him.
“But surely someone told you I was okay?” he asked, frowning.
“Bart did, and the nurse told me that...you had come to see me and then left. I hoped maybe when I was in D.C., being debriefed, you would be there. But you weren’t.”
“My debriefing was considerably more in-depth, it took a while, because I quit. I had to report on what happened with you, and Derian, but also close every case I had been involved in. It turns out there’s a lot more paperwork and steps to go through getting out of the DHS than there is getting in,” he said with a light laugh, turning to look out the window.
She was stunned. “What? You quit your job? Why?”
“It wasn’t right anymore. Too much happened after this...after I met you. Being with you made me come out of the dark place I’d buried myself in for all that time. Made me want to reconnect with life. With my family. I had to get my head straight, so I went out to Denver, saw my brother and his wife and kids, and tried to decide what was the right thing to do.”
“And that helped?”
“Seeing them, it
clarified everything. I knew that all that matters, really, is being with the people you love. My work was important, sure, but I’m ready to move on to something new.”
She looked wary, still, and unsure. That stung his heart, but Nick knew he’d earned her lack of trust. He took a deep breath.
“I love you, Della. I know that might sound crazy, and I’m not trying to scare you, or pressure you, but even if you can’t forgive me, or never want to see me again, I needed to tell you. And...” he said, taking a chance to take her icy fingers from the armrest and wrap them in his own. “And to thank you. For giving me my life back.”
“Nick, I—”
He interrupted, needing to get it all out before she shot him down.
“I guess what I was hoping, that eventually, maybe, after some time, maybe you might want to share that life with me. If you can ever forgive the lies, and that you were almost killed, because of me.”
She swallowed hard, but didn’t take her hand away. In fact, she leaned in, meeting his gaze.
“I didn’t almost get killed because of you—I ended up in that situation because of me. Derian was right about one thing—I was gullible, and so...desperate,” she said on a note of self-disgust, “to have friends, to be connected, that I never questioned anything about them or the situation. I never gave myself enough credit. There were small signs along the way, strange things that happened, but I ignored them, and my instincts. Except when it came to you. I couldn’t ignore what I felt for you,” she said softly. “Even when it hurt. Even now. I needed my eyes opened, I guess.”
He held his breath and asked, “What do you feel? For me?”
She paused for several beats as the plane leveled out at altitude.
“I knew I loved you at the cabin... I knew it because of how terrible I felt when I thought it was all fake, all a ploy, when I found the tracker, and then, even after that, how I couldn’t stop wanting you, even knowing you didn’t feel the same.”
He squeezed her hand in his. “But I did, and I do. I just didn’t know how to deal with it. Can you believe me, Della? And if you can’t, can you give me the time to prove it to you? I want to spend every day showing you how much I love you, if you’ll let me.”
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