She knew the day she arrived that she would die here. She accepted that. Kavsak was as good a place as any for a solitary woman to meet her end.
She also accepted that when the inevitable occurred there would be a lot of media attention, but very little grief.
Her father would hold her memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., as befitted his position as a high-ranking member of government. Publicly, he would bemoan her death as a senseless loss. Privately, the thorn extracted at last from his side, he would feel relief.
At the graveside, her six older brothers would line up in their dark suits and overcoats, bow their heads in prayer, and kindly oblige the media with the iconic Rease Family photo opportunity.
Of them all, only James would actually grieve for her.
As for Luc—well, he’d always wanted more than friendship, but his emotions were dominated by the soldier in him. She snorted sardonically. How rich. Her, of all people, spurning Luc because his heart was inaccessible.
Jasha, Dr. J, and Mariana could have been closer friends, but Brenna—having learned in college that friendship led to confidences, and confidences ended up as tabloid headlines—had maintained her habitual reserve.
She dropped her aching head into her palm.
Her heart was scored, fissured, as cracked and fragile as the porcelain on antique china. She held herself together by willpower. One ‘ting’, one careless flick of a finger, could shatter her. Trying to protect herself after her mother’s death, and then her husband’s, she had kept human connection to a minimum, parried every hand extended in friendship, turned away every man since Ari.
It had worked until Daniel came. With no more than steady kindness, he had turned her inside out.
She heard the scratch of grit beneath leather soles, and turned.
Daniel entered, a specter moving through the gloom of dark green paint and dying day. He looked shabby and forlorn. It was a testament to the quality of his tweed jacket that he didn’t look downright homeless. He rested his blue-jeaned butt against the side wall and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“I wrote a note for my parents,” he said in a husky voice. “It’s with my passport, and has their phone numbers and address.” He hesitated. “I was wondering, if you…and I—”
“I’ll be sure they get it,” she said. But it was a lie, a false comfort. She had no intention of outliving him. No intention of being taken alive. Someone else could find it and mail it.
He stared at the floor. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
She shifted. “You didn’t bring me here,” she said softly. “This is where I live.”
“In a hotel room,” he said, as if it were the saddest fact in the world. “You deserve better.”
If he knew the fear that kept her from pulling him into her arms, if he knew how scared she was of giving him the one thing she knew he needed most—connection—he would not be so generous.
“It occurred to me…” he broke off.
Something about the tone of his voice made her tip her head to see his down-turned face. Wariness seeped through her like a spreading stain.
He lifted his eyes, a look of determination on his face. “If anyone can get out of this mess alive, it’s you.”
She straightened, back stiffening. He was becoming quite the wartime quarterback, seeing through the chaos on the field and identifying the play that could score the touchdown.
“No.”
“I’m going to stay with the children,” he said resolutely, “and you’re going.”
Her choler rose. “Because I’m the type of woman who would abandon you.”
“No.” He shook his head, emphatically contradicting her. “Because you’re the type of woman who would stay and not abandon us—even though you, traveling alone, could reach safety.”
She pressed her lips into a tight line.
“Right?” he insisted. “You could. In fact, I bet you cross enemy lines all the time. You’re almost as stealthy as Jasha. You just can’t do it with an armload of kids and a man who can’t tell a tank from a shadow.”
She looked away, out the window at the fading day.
He pushed off the wall, came up behind her.
She turned, lifted her chin in defiance. “I’m not going.”
His tired blue eyes scanned her as if he were re-reading a complicated paragraph. “This is just a different version of you standing in the clearing, isn’t it?”
No, she thought. This was the opposite of that. This time, she wouldn’t abandon him. At least, not until the last possible moment.
“Your life feels like a burden to you,” he said. “You don’t see its value right now. But I do. And I want you to save it.”
“Forget it,” she said. Her heart banged against her chest as if it were trying to escape. Everyone she loved was taken from her. And now Daniel wanted her to voluntarily leave?
No. She wouldn’t let him send her away. She paced, restless as a jaguar behind steel bars, her emotions churning. She’d be damned if she was going to lose him twice. She was staying, giving him and the children a fighting chance.
His eyes followed her ceaseless movement. “Go now,” he said. “Run while you still can.”
She spun on him. Run? The only thing of value in her life was standing in this room with her.
“Return to the States,” he continued. “Piece a new life together. I have faith you can do that.”
She strode up to him. The toes of her boots struck the tips of his once-gleaming lace-up oxfords. She stuck her face in his, irrationally angry. He’d made her love him. He’d unsettled her at this eleventh hour. She’d resigned herself to being loveless, learned not to want anything. She’d closed her life and he’d torn it open and inserted himself into it. What the hell was he thinking, proving she was capable of loving again, just when there was no hope of surviving?
“Don’t even think of kicking me out,” she snarled. “Or I swear I’m walking into the nearest gunfire I can find.”
He grabbed her elbows, visibly fighting the urge to shake her. “For the love of God,” he hissed. “Go! Don’t make it easy for me to be selfish. I’m not that good a man.”
She caught his face in her hands, feeling the warmth of his skin. “Yes,” she declared, fixing a hard stare on him. “You are a good man.”
“No,” he protested with ragged ferocity, “because what I want right now is to lay you the hell open. I want to peel you naked and make such hard love to you that I strip you of every single one of your damned defenses. I want you unprotected—body and soul fully exposed. For me. I want the woman in you, not the warrior.”
The ground tilted beneath her feet. She flung her hands out, flailing blindly for balance.
He caught her and righted her, keeping her safely at arm’s length. “See me now? This is the catastrophe I would bring on you.”
She blinked, astonished by his open emotion, by his willingness to portray himself so baldly, by his blunt and driving intensity. If he had taken an axe to the backs of her knees, he couldn’t have toppled her faster.
He was right, she knew. If she consented, he would open her, leave her gasping and exposed. Without her emotional armor, she would be defenseless.
But he had found a small ember of love in her, cast a gentle breath on it, and fanned it to life. Pissed off—scared—as it made her, he had made her capable of love again. This was the man who, like Roza, dared to love in the face of monstrous odds. She wanted to honor him for that courage, to be like him. She wanted to think she had the capacity to love, even in Kavsak. Love meant more than survival. If she could hold onto that, she would die a better woman.
Courage—recklessness, maybe—welled up in her heart. Touch was confession, an admission that she loved him, a gesture deeper than words.
She caught her breath. Stepped forward. Heart open. Give him everything. Don’t hold back. He knew the difference. And she didn’t want to cheat him. He was adrift and needed
an anchor. For these few minutes, she could be that for him.
He jerked toward her, body quivering, taut as a bow pulled to its limit, ready to snap. But he waited, a supreme act of self-control. Evidently, she who had the most to lose must take the first step. He wanted her to be sure, wanted her to come to him of her own will.
She lifted her face to his. “Well, cheesh,” she whispered. “If that’s all you want…”
He groaned and bowed his head. She saw the rush of emotion sweeping through him. All that feeling, unconcealed. Her dear, courageous man, who took her breath away.
Haltingly, she rested her open palms on his chest. Solid planes of muscle divided left from right. She felt the hard nubs of his nipples and the rapid thump-thump of his heart. Her hands drifted, a slow voyage of discovery, her palms so sensitive they felt electrified, charged, hot to the touch. She suddenly felt tentative, shy, as if she were a girl discovering the contours of a man’s body for the first time. Her hands glided over him, so exquisitely attuned that firmer contact would have blunted the sensation.
His eyes traced every move she made. But still he didn’t move.
She tipped her face up, slid one hand over the swell of his shoulder muscles and the other up the column of his neck, cradled the back of his head and lifted her parted lips to his mouth.
He seized her. Crushed her mouth. Kissed her greedily. The sound of a lost man tumbled out of his chest. His self-control snapped. His hands ran down her torso, over her breasts, down her back, onto her hips. He cupped her bottom, desperately pulled her against his hard body. He was ready.
At this rate, he would take her dry.
She pulled her mouth away from his, gasping, and caught his face in her hands. “I’m not going anywhere, my love. I’m not changing my mind. But I need you to go slower.”
He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. He was too far gone. His pelvis rocked forward.
“Sweetheart. You’ll hurt me.”
He stopped abruptly. “Oh, Christ,” he said in a gruff voice. “I’m sorry. Sorry.”
“It’s alright,” she murmured. “Just catch your breath.”
He straightened, breathed deeply, circled her wrist with his left hand, and drew her toward him again. “I wish I could shelter you. Wish we were somewhere else. Not this ugly room and filthy floor.”
From out of nowhere, tears filled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes. It does,” he said. “You deserve a bed strewn with rose petals. And a lover who isn’t so desperate.”
His face swam before her. Her chin quivered. She hid her face in her hand. Don’t let me weep.
His right hand slipped firmly onto her waist. He stood straight as a man listening for the beat of a formal waltz. “Head up, sweetheart. Look me in the eye.”
She pushed away the tear running down her cheek and lifted her face.
He held the pose. “You like irises?” he asked, his voice so deep and warm it hung between them, unshared with the rest of the room.
She blinked, taken aback. “What?”
“The blue flowers,” he said, and stepped gracefully forward with his left foot, guiding her with his right hand. “With the flat leaves.”
She stumbled, off balance, not realizing at first that he meant to dance. She caught herself, resting her hand on the curve of his left shoulder, close enough that her breast brushed his upper arm.
He stepped forward and to the right, tracing the imaginary, letter ‘L’ of the box step.
She fell into the tempo, smoothly following the cadence only he could hear. “My mother loved them,” she finally replied, not sure why she whispered, except that it seemed so intimate to reveal her mother’s loves.
“The irises in my garden come from my grandmother’s,” he said. “I planted them near the house so I could see them through the French doors in my family room. The borders of the garden path are lined with blossoms, a succession of brilliant reds, oranges, yellows, pinks, blues, from Spring to Fall.”
He kept her close, moving in effortless unison with her, deftly advancing, brushing her pelvis with his own, and skimming sideways. “In the morning, the sunlight falls across the hardwood floor in shiny rectangles. First thing I do is swing the doors open so I can hear the mockingbirds.” He guided her through a graceful circle. “And—ah, Brenna—the scent. Lilacs. Honeysuckle. Jasmine.”
He was painting a picture for her, she realized, of a brighter, more hopeful place than their squalid, dangerous reality. Using verbal artistry to portray a safer place. A home. The thought, the idea of it broke over her. She relaxed, imagining him, bristly-haired and sleepy, lurching unsteadily toward his sunny doors before his first coffee. She slid her hand across his shoulder to the back of his neck and raised her lips to his ear. “What are you wearing, when you open the door?”
He pulled her right hand against his chest, nestled safely inside his own, spread his other across her lower back, and rested his cheek against hers. “Silk boxers,” he chuckled into her ear. “Bare chest.”
“Mm.” She swayed with him, her breasts brushing his chest, as they turned together. His thighs tantalized hers. She skimmed her body against his swollen shaft. “This garden sounds fine.”
His breath caught, rough as a cold engine on a winter day. He caressed her ear with his mouth, his breath warm and passionate. He nuzzled her neck with soft kisses. A moan of pleasure slipped out of her throat.
Violating all the rules of the classical waltz, he tightened his grasp and pulled her body into full contact with his own. Sex sparked through her core, intimately slicking her, preparing her to receive him.
She laced her arms around his shoulders, leaned in, and kissed him, savoring him gently, using her mouth to feel the contours of his lips, igniting passion to its fullness.
His hands roamed down her back, cradled her bottom and drew her forward. He held her snugly against his erection, teased her, brushed against her, tipped his hips forward and pressed, seeking intimate contact. His hands molded her to him, then eased, releasing her as he pulled back for the next light incursion.
She moaned. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. More. She wanted to demand more heat. More contact. Daniel Ellsworth was the master of foreplay, and she was at his mercy.
She pushed his jacket off his shoulders and down his arms until it dropped to the floor in an expensive heap. She tugged his shirt out of his waistband.
“Try not to tear it,” he panted, unable to keep his hands still. “It’s my only shirt. Filthy as it is.”
She didn’t care that it was filthy. It was in the way.
One by one, she punched the buttons through the holes, until she glimpsed the fine dark hair spread across his chest like a meadow of soft grass. “Ooh,” she breathed, gliding her palms over the raised planes of muscle, and across his tiny brown nipples. She pushed his shirt onto his shoulders. The collar fell open and she saw the purple bruise staining his left shoulder—the one he got when he caught her flying through the windshield of Luc’s van. “Oh, honey.” She pressed a soft kiss above his heart.
She slid her thumbs down the trench between the left and right sides of his chest, between the short hard bundles of his muscled belly, and tugged the leather strap out of his belt buckle. It fell open with a muted clink. She stepped back, and using both her hands, she pulled open the top button of his Levi’s.
Her eyes roved over him. His eyes were hooded with lust, his shirt open, pants enticingly unbuttoned, thumbs hooked in his waistband above his bulging erection. His upper body was powerful, deep, with the solid frame of a mature man. His hips were narrow, legs long and strong. Her photographer’s eyes pored over him, yearning to capture this astonishing image of him—broad chested, jeans unbuttoned, body ready for her. Daniel Ellsworth, blatantly sexual. Deeply arousing.
Exhaling shakily, she stepped forward again. She wasn’t a girl. She was a woman. And she knew precisely what she wanted. She captured the masculine ridge firmly.
He hissed, wi
ncing with pleasure.
He stayed her hand. “Wait.” He caught her sleeve and pulled her jacket off, grasped the sides of her turtleneck at the waist and pulled it over her head in one fluid motion. His eyes slid down to the tight sports bra flattening her breasts. He growled, tugging impatiently at the front clasp. “No woman should have to hide herself like this.”
Her breasts floated free, relieved.
His growl changed into something more primal than social outrage. He cupped her, eyes roaming over her, reveling in the curve and heft of almost-C cups.
“Well, now.” He bent and kissed her nipples, mouthing, inciting them with his thumbs, provoking them into tight peaks. A wave of sexual arousal crashed through her.
Her knees buckled.
Just crumpled without warning.
He caught her, chuckling with self-satisfaction. He grinned, steadying her with casual strength. “Hmm.”
With one arm still around her, he cleared big arcs of grit and sharp concrete off the floor, spread his jacket beneath her, and eased her down. He leaned over her, caressing her breasts with his dexterous tongue, ratcheting her pleasure, coaxing a song of delight from her throat.
She caressed his back, circled his shoulders with her arms and pulled him downward. She couldn’t keep still. She wanted him. Now. Intensely.
She pulled him away from her breasts and clamped her mouth over his. He kissed her with hot, wet kisses that burned with his own fever. Her hips rose, rocking, trying to make contact with him, beseeching him to fill her need.
“Lift,” he ordered, breathing raggedly, opening the waistband of her pants.
She obeyed.
He peeled her pants and panties down to her ankles, plucked impatiently at her bootlaces, grasped the heels and pulled everything off.
She parted her knees for him, absolute acknowledgement of vulnerability.
His eyes darkened. She was nude. Exposed. On her back. Just as she knew he wanted her.
His erection was burgeoning, pushing uncomfortably against the constraint of the denim. But he didn’t release himself. He slid his hands up her inner thighs, spread her, and brought his mouth down on her sodden crease.
Day Three Page 25
