The abrupt change of subject made her blink. It also made her realize she wasn’t the least tired. Probably because the hour was still relatively early. Either that, or the extraordinary conversation at the dinner table had stimulated her. Or just standing here, so close to Jack, set every one of her nerves to dancing.
“Not really. Why?”
“I’m staying at the Excelsior. It’s only a few blocks from here. Do you feel like getting out for a little while? We still need to talk about last weekend.”
Cold, hard logic dictated a negative. She still hadn’t completely sorted through the confused feelings left over from their weekend together. Luckily, Gina had never been particularly concerned with logic. At that moment, looking up into Jack’s brown eyes, all she knew was that she craved an hour or two or six alone with him.
She’d never been the kind to play games, much less hide her feelings. Coyness didn’t factor anywhere into her makeup. A smile of eager anticipation slid into her eyes as she tipped her head toward the dining room.
“Hang loose. I’ll tell Grandmama and the others not to wait up for me.”
* * *
They opted to walk to the Excelsior. The June night was too balmy and the city lights too enticing to take a cab for a few short blocks. When they reached the lobby of the Dakota, she steered him away from the main entrance on West 72nd toward the inner courtyard.
“This way. It’s shorter.”
They exited on 73rd and cut back to Central Park West. Somehow Gina’s hand found her way into Jack’s as they strolled past the imposing bulk of the Museum of Natural History. And somehow, when they were in the elevator shooting up to his suite, his lips found hers.
She couldn’t blame the heat that raced through her on hormones. It was Jack. All Jack. Only Jack. He stoked her senses. Fired her blood. She made herself wait until he keyed the door to his room before she pounced. Then there were no holds barred.
“I hope this is what you had in mind when you asked if I wanted to get out for a while,” she muttered as she tore feverishly at his shirt buttons.
“Pretty much.”
His voice was low and rough. So were his hands. Dragging up the hem of Gina’s T-shirt, he cupped her aching breasts. All it took was one flick of his thumbs over her supersensitive nipples to have her moaning. On fire for him, she locked her mouth and her body with his. They were both half-naked when she threw a glance around the luxurious sitting room.
“There’s a bed here somewhere, right?”
“Oh, yeah.”
The bedroom was as palatial as the rest of the suite. All crown molding and watered silk wallpaper. Not that either of them noticed. The bed was the center of their focus. Four ornately carved posts. Champagne-colored gauze dripping from each corner. A silk duvet in the same color just begging to be yanked back.
Jack did the honors before tumbling Gina onto the cool sateen sheets. Standing beside the bed, he stripped off the rest of his clothes. Her greedy eyes feasted on his muscled chest. His washboard ribs and flat stomach. His rampant sex.
Gina had to cup him. Had to taste him. Rolling onto her knees, she scooted to the edge of the mattress and wrapped her hand around him. He was hot to her touch. Hot and ridged and already oozing. The milky bead at the tip of his erection stirred a deep, feminine thrill. The idea that she could bring her man to this point with just a kiss, just a stroke, set a torch to her own wild desire. Dipping her head, Gina took him in her mouth.
Jack stood it as long as he could. Then the atavistic need that had been building in him since the moment he’d walked into the duchess’s apartment swept everything else aside. He wanted to claim this woman. Mark her as his.
Driven by that primal instinct, he pushed her onto the pillows and followed her down. She spread her legs for him willingly, eagerly, and Jack sank into her. Her hips rose, rammed into his. Once. Twice. Again. Then she opened her eyes and the red mist that had obscured Jack’s mind cleared.
This was Gina of the bright, contagious smile.
Gina, who enticed and excited him.
Gina, who’d erased everything and everyone else from his mind.
* * *
Jack came out of a deep sleep with his customary, instant awareness. The hotel room was still dark, the silence deep, although a faint gray light was just beginning to show at the edge of the drapes blanketing the window.
Gina lay sprawled at his side. Soft puffs of air escaped her lips with each breath. Not quite snores but close enough to make him smile. With slow, careful moves he nudged down the knee digging into his hip and eased out of bed.
His slacks and shorts lay where he’d dropped them. He pulled them on but left his belt unbuckled and shirt lying where it was as he crossed to the window. Lifting the drape a crack, he saw the city hadn’t yet roared to life. Like Jack, it was enjoying the final quiet moments before the rush of the day.
He stared at the shadowy bulk of the Museum of Natural History across the street and tried to remember the last time he’d felt so relaxed. More important, the last time his world had felt so right. Not since Catherine, certainly.
Or even before.
The traitorous thought slipped in before he could block it. Only here, in the dim stillness, with Gina just a few feet away, could he admit the painful truth.
Catherine had been all brilliant energy. Athletic, competitive, totally committed to the causes she believed in. Loving and living with her had demanded the same high level output from Jack.
Would he have burned out? Would they?
Or would they have found what he’d somehow found so swiftly and so unexpectedly with Gina? Jack struggled to find the right word for it. It wasn’t peace. Or contentment. Or certainty. God knew, there was nothing certain or predictable about Eugenia Amalia Therése St. Sebastian!
Nor was what he felt for her wrapped up in the baby. The fact she was carrying his child played, of course. No way it couldn’t. But what had Jack by the throat right now was Gina. Just Gina.
Christ! Why didn’t he just admit it? He was in love with her. Everything about her. Okay, she pissed him off royally at times. And yes, she was one of the most stubbornly hardheaded females he’d ever encountered. Yet everything inside him warmed at the thought of waking up next to her for the next…the next…
His jaw locked. Whirling, he strode back to the bed and sat on the edge.
“Gina. Wake up.”
She grunted and tried to burrow into her pillow.
“Wake up.”
“Wha…?” She raised a face half-obscured by a tangle of hair and blinked owlishly. “What?”
“Sit up a moment.”
Grumbling, she rolled onto a hip and wiggled up against the headboard. The sheet came with her in a waterfall of Egyptian cotton.
“This better be good,” she muttered.
She shoved her hair out of her face and tucked the sheet around her breasts, scowling at him through still sleepy eyes. He figured that was as good as he would get.
“Okay, here’s the deal. I love you. I want to wake up beside you every morning for as long as we have together. The problem is, neither of us knows how long that might be.”
He gripped her upper arms. His fingers dug into soft flesh as he pressed his point.
“I learned the hard way there are no guarantees. You…we have to grab whatever chance at happiness we have now, today. I understand you’re still trying to sort through all the changes going on in your life right, but…”
“Wait! Just hold on!”
She pulled away from him, and Jack smothered a curse. He’d overplayed it. Pushed her too hard. He was falling back to regroup when she scrambled off the bed, sheet and all, and pointed a finger at him.
“You stay right where you are. I have to pee. And wash my face. And brush my teeth. A
fterward, I’m going to come back to bed and you’re going to repeat part of your speech.”
“Which part?”
She looked over her shoulder on her way to the bathroom. The smile she sent him lit up the entire room.
“The I-love-you part.”
Jack sat there, grinning like an idiot.
* * *
He was still grinning when he heard a faint click coming from the sitting room. A second later, the outer door thudded back against the wall and three men rushed in.
Jack reacted instantly. His one thought, his only thought, was to direct them away from Gina. Springing to the far side of the bed, he grabbed the only available weapon. He had his arm back to hurl the nightstand lamp when the bald giant leading the pack leveled a silenced semiautomatic. The beam of his laser sight painted a red eye dead-center in Jack’s naked chest.
“Don’t be foolish, Ambassador.”
He recognized the voice even before Dominic St. Sebastian stepped from behind baldy’s hulking frame.
Twelve
“Now,” Gina said gleefully as she yanked open the bathroom door, “let’s pick up where we…”
She stopped dead. Clutching the towel she’d wrapped around her like a sarong, she gaped in stunned disbelief at the frozen tableau that greeted her. Jack, gripping a table lamp like a baseball bat. A monster with a shaved head aiming a gun at his chest. Another stranger eying her half-naked body with a leer. And Dom, his dark eyes flashing an urgent message she couldn’t even begin to interpret.
“Wh…?” She backed up an involuntary step, two, hit the bathroom door frame. “What…?”
“Very nice, Ambassador.” The leering stranger’s accent was so thick Gina’s shocked mind could barely understand him. “Your woman would bring a good price, yes?”
“Jack! Dom!” Her frantic gaze whipped from one to the other. “What’s going on?”
Dom stepped toward her, still telegraphing a signal that refused to penetrate her frantic brain.
“Listen to me, Gina. These men and I have some unfinished business to take care of, business that involves Jack. When you wake, you will understand.”
“When I…when I wake?”
A small, apologetic smile altered his grim expression for a moment. Just long enough to distract Gina from the blow that clipped her chin and snapped her head back. She felt Dom catch her as she crumpled. Heard Jack snarl out a curse. Sensed some sort of violent movement on the other side of the room, followed by a low pop.
Then everything faded to black.
* * *
She came to slowly, dazed and disoriented. As the gray mist cleared, she discovered she was stretched on the unmade bed. Alone. With the towel draped over her naked body.
She also discovered that her jaw hurt like nobody’s business. The ache cut through her lingering haze. A montage of images leaped into her head, sharp and cold and terrifying. The men. Dom. The gun with its ugly silencer.
“Jack!”
Terror engulfing her, Gina shoved off the bed. The violent lunge brought a dark, dizzying wave. She had to reach out a hand to steady herself for a moment, as the towel puddled around her ankles. As soon as the wave receded enough to reclaim her scant body covering, she rushed into the sitting room.
Nothing. No one. Not a table out of place. No overturned chairs. No Jack, or any strangers.
Or Dom.
She hadn’t fully processed those moments right before her cousin clipped her, hadn’t really understood the vivid images that had popped into her head. She strung them together now, and the pattern they formed made her want to retch.
Dom! Dear God, Dom! What was he involved in? Why had he led those men to Jack? What did they want?
* * *
Five exhausting hours later, Gina still didn’t have an answer to any of those questions. Neither did the small army of city, state and federal officials who’d descended on the Excelsior in response to her 911 call.
Two uniformed NYPD officers arrived hard on the heels of hotel security. They were followed in a bewildering succession by two plainclothes detectives; a CSI team to scour the suite for fingerprints and other evidence; a grim-faced individual who identified himself as being with the city’s counterterrorism unit; two agents from the regional FBI office; a liaison from the governor’s office in Albany; a Department of Homeland Security rep and a tall, angular woman from the State Department’s New York Office of Foreign Missions, who’d been sent at the urgent request of her boss to find out what the hell happened to Ambassador-At-Large Mason.
Senior FBI Agent Pamela Driskell assumed charge of the hastily assembled task force. It was done with tact and a smooth finesse that told Gina the agent had considerable prior experience dealing with prickly jurisdictional issues.
“Section 1114 of Title 18 U.S. Code assigns the FBI the responsibility for protecting officers and employees of the United States,” she explained in a peaches-and-cream Southern drawl at odds with her short, no-nonsense hair and stocky frame. “Now tell me everything you know about this cousin of yours.”
Gina started with the surprise visit by Dom and his sister and ended with last night’s startling revelations.
“I didn’t get all the details. Just that he and Jack—Ambassador Mason—crossed paths some years ago during a UN mission investigating white slavery.”
Driskell shot a look at the State Department rep. “You know anything about that?”
“No, but I’ll check it out.”
Whipping out her BlackBerry, the woman turned away. Driskell swung back to Gina.
“What else?”
“Dom—my cousin—was an undercover agent at the time. Working for Interpol.”
“That right? Well, we’ll check that out, too. Now I think it’s time we talk to your cousin’s sister.”
She flapped a hand to get the attention of everyone else in the suite.
“Y’all have any further questions for Ms. St. Sebastian? No? Okay, I’m taking her home. Kowalski and I will interview Anastazia St. Sebastian.”
* * *
When Gina and her escort arrived, Jerome was at his station. Concern etched deep grooves in his seamed face, and his shocked gaze went to the bruise that had blossomed on her chin.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she assured the doorman.
Actually, it was worse but Jerome didn’t need to know that.
“Two police officers arrived earlier,” he reported.
Gina nodded. Driskell had requested NYPD dispatch the officers. Just in case Dom made an appearance.
“One officer’s waiting in the lobby,” Jerome said with a worried frown. “The other went up to the duchess’s apartment. Can you tell me what’s going on, Lady Eugenia?”
Special Agent Driskell started to intervene but Gina held up a palm. “It’s okay. I’ve known this man all my life. I feel safer with him on the door than any five FBI agents.”
Driskell hiked a brow but didn’t argue the point. “We’re investigating the suspected kidnapping of Ambassador Jack Mason,” she said instead. “We have reason to believe Dominic St. Sebastian may be involved.”
“No!” Jerome reeled back a step. “I don’t believe it!”
“Why not?”
He had to stop and think about his instinctive denial. “I’ve seen Mr. St. Sebastian and his sister with the duchess,” he said after a moment. “They’re so good with her. So caring and solicitous.”
Driskell’s curled lip said what she thought of caring and solicitous. “What time did you come on duty this morning?”
“Nine o’clock.”
Too late for the events that happened at the Excelsior hours earlier, but Driskell tried, anyway.
“Have you seen two men loitering anywhere in the vicinity? One big a
nd bald? The other smaller, with a heavy accent?”
Jerome drew himself up, all wounded dignity under his summer uniform. “If I’d seen anyone loitering in the vicinity of the Dakota, you may rest assured I would have seen they were attended to.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Driskell said in her deceptively soft, magnolia-petal drawl.
The uniformed cop in the lobby reported no sighting of Dominic St. Sebastian, his suspected accomplices, or Ambassador Mason. The cop who’d been assigned to wait in the duchess’s apartment gave the same report.
Gina only half heard him. Her attention went straight to her grandmother. The duchess sat as straight-spined as ever in her high-backed chair. Maria huddled with shoulders hunched in the chair beside hers. Both women showed worried, strained faces. And both jerked their heads up when Gina walked in.
“Eugenia!”
Relief flooded the duchess’s face. Then she seemed to fold into herself, like someone who’d been granted a reprieve from her worst fears.
Gina rushed across the room and dropped to her knees beside the woman who’d always been her anchor. The terror she’d been holding at bay rose up again but she choked it back. She wasn’t about to aggravate her grandmother’s heart condition by indulging in a fit of hysterics like she really, really wanted to.
“I’m okay, Grandmama.”
“What happened to your face?”
She hesitated but couldn’t find any way around the truth. “Dom knocked me unconscious.”
“No!”
The single syllable arced through the air like summer lightning. Sudden. Tense. Electrifying. Gina jerked her head around and saw Zia leap off the sofa. Her face was ablaze, her eyes feral.
“My brother would not strike a woman!”
“Guess again,” Gina snapped.
“I don’t believe you!”
The savage denial pulled her up short. Jerome and Anastazia. That made two people in less than five minutes who refused to accept Dom’s role in the morning’s events.
Her grandmother made a third.
“I can’t believe it, either,” the duchess said in a more shaky voice than Gina had ever heard coming from her. “Please, Eugenia. Introduce me to these people. Then for heaven’s sake sit down and tell us what happened. Zia and Maria and I have been imagining every sort of horrible disaster.”
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