Midnight Caller

by Rebecca York

  When he tried the door handle and found it locked, he breathed a sigh of profound relief. Then he bent to examine the lock. There was evidence that someone had tried and failed to pry the mechanism loose. Thank God the intruder hadn’t succeeded.

  With the guards on alert, he worked the keyboard on the wall, punching in the access code. When the lock disengaged, he took two men into the anteroom. There was nowhere to hide and no one in sight. The dressing area was also empty. Leaving the two guards on alert, he went through the procedure for entering the lab itself. Once inside, he checked his virus samples—the infected cells and the ones receiving the antidote treatment.

  “Everything okay?” Benson asked when he returned.

  “Yes.”

  He could feel some of the tension around him dissipate like fog burning off as the sun rose. Still, they were all on the alert as they returned the way they’d come.

  “I want a four-man, twenty-four-hour guard on the door to the lab,” Glenn said into his phone as soon as he’d climbed out of the contamination suit

  He longed to go straight back to his quarters—straight back to Meg. He imagined himself catching her in his arms, scooping her up and taking her back to bed. But they were still in crisis mode, and he wasn’t going to retreat into the little world they’d created together. Somebody had broken into the outer layers of the biohazards lab, and he was going to find out who it was.

  Back in his office, he put out an order for every available man and dog to search the grounds. As he recradled the phone, he caught sight of his reflection in a windowpane and grimaced. He looked as though he’d come out of a chimney stack. So he stepped into the private bathroom that was attached to his office and took a quick hot shower. Then he changed into clean clothes. He was just buckling on his holster when the phone rang again.

  Striding to the desk, he read the name on the caller ID: Tommy Faulkner. Tommy had phoned yesterday, and he hadn’t gotten back to him yet. Well, he could spare a few minutes for one of the men.

  “This is Glenn,” he said.

  “I was waiting for you to call me,” answered the weak voice on the other end of the line.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I’ve had some problems to take care of.”

  “Anything serious?”

  “Just nuisance stuff,” Glenn lied. “But I couldn’t pass it off to someone else.”

  “Good.” There was a pause on the line. “I’m still worried about my sister,” the young man blurted.

  “You said she was missing?”

  “Well, she goes on a lot of trips. For her job at Adventures in Travel. But this time…I can’t find a phone number where I can reach her. Do you think I lost it?” Tommy asked, sounding plaintive and a little confused.

  “Did you call her office?” Glenn asked.

  “Yeah,” Tommy replied slowly. “They said she had some personal business to take care of. But I don’t get it. Meg didn’t tell me anything like that. And she didn’t leave a phone number where they could reach her.”

  Glenn felt a tightening in his chest that made it difficult to draw in enough air to speak. “Meg. Your sister’s name is Meg?” he managed to ask.

  “Sure. Meg. Didn’t I say that?”

  Feeling as if he’d been shot in the chest, Glenn collapsed into his chair.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Meg. Tommy’s sister was Meg.

  His ears were ringing so loudly that it took several seconds to realize Tommy was speaking to him.

  “Glenn. Is something wrong, Glenn?” Tommy wheezed.

  “No,” he insisted, then made an effort to control himself while he dug for information. “Meg what?”

  “Meg Faulkner.”

  “Not Wexler?”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “I guess I’m confused.”

  Tommy laughed. “Like me.”

  Cradling the receiver under his ear, Glenn scooted his chair to the file cabinet where he kept personal data on the men from Operation Clean Sweep. Pulling out the correct folder, he quickly flipped through and found several pictures. One was a formal portrait of Tommy in his dress uniform. The others were candid shots. One showed a young man and woman at a picnic table, smiling for the camera. Tommy and his sister. Meg.

  Glenn’s Meg.

  His fingers dug into the edge of the file as he stared into her beautiful, innocent face. He knew now why she’d looked vaguely familiar. It was because of the resemblance to her brother. Except that her name was supposed to be Meg Wexler.

  His heart was pounding so hard that he thought it might careen through his chest wall.

  “You don’t have to worry about her. She’s here at Castle Phoenix,” he heard himself saying.

  “What’s she doing there?” Tommy asked, sounding even more confused than before.

  Glenn debated with himself, trying to come up with an answer that wouldn’t stretch the truth too much. “She came here to talk about you,” he finally said, hoping it was true. “On the way, she was in a car accident. She had a concussion. But she’s fine now.”

  Tommy gasped. “She was hurt? You’re sure she’s okay?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I know you depend on her a lot,” Glenn tried, making a reasonable assumption.

  “Yeah, with Dad gone, she’s all I’ve got. But…”

  “What?” Glenn prompted.

  “I wish she’d find herself a guy.”

  “Yes, she’s some woman,” Glenn agreed, then asked the question that had been in and out of his mind since he’d made love with her. “Why hasn’t she married?”

  Tommy made an exasperated sound. “It’s partly Dad’s fault. The colonel—”

  “You called your dad the colonel?”

  Glenn shuffled through the pictures and found a snapshot of a younger Tommy with a ramrod-straight military officer wearing a colonel’s uniform. With his piercing eyes and firm lips, he bore a resemblance to both his children.

  Tommy sighed. “Yeah. He ran our house like a military base. And when she got to be a teenager, he drummed it into Meg that guys were after her for her great body. Unfortunately, there were a few jerks who proved the point. When she was in college there was a guy who…tried to rape her.”

  A curse sprang to Glenn’s lips.

  “She fought him off.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “But that made her cautious.”

  Glenn closed his eyes for a moment, understanding Meg better. She’d been wary of men. Vulnerable. But she’d reached out to him. That had to mean something, didn’t it?

  “She’s away from home so much,” Tommy was saying. “When she’s here, she’s taking care of her sick brother, ‘cause she’s got this tremendous sense of obligation, you know? I guess we both got that from Dad.”

  “Meg loves you. That’s why she takes care of you,” Glenn answered, knowing in his bones that it was true. He could imagine exactly how she’d react to her brother’s illness.

  “She can do anything a guy can,” Tommy said proudly. “Shoot. Jump out of a plane. Climb a mountain. That’s why leading adventure expeditions is the perfect job for her.”

  Adventure expeditions! No wonder she could handle a gun and think so well on her feet.

  “But sometimes I think she’d secretly like to settle down with a guy who’d appreciate her.” He paused, then added, “You know, she’d be perfect for you, Glenn. You go on those trips to all sorts of remote places. She’d be a real asset to you.”

  “In more ways than one,” he said before he could check himself.

  “Are you saying you two clicked?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he cautioned, dishing out the advice for himself as well as Tommy.

  “But you like her! Good. It would take a load off my mind to see the two of you end up together.”

  “Me, too,” Glenn replied, knowing he was giving too much away. Closing his eyes,
he worked to clear away the lump in his throat. “I’ll have her call you later.”

  “Thanks for letting me know she’s in good hands.”

  “Tommy, hang in there. I’m almost ready for clinical trials. If you want to be one of my first guinea pigs, we can bring you up here soon.”

  “You mean it?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded stronger.

  “I mean it.” Glenn concluded the conversation, glad that he’d given one of his men new hope, glad that he’d managed to keep saying the right things even with his brain on fire.

  When he hung up, he had to clasp his hands together on the desk to keep them from shaking violently. The answer had been there all the time. But he hadn’t known where to look.

  Meg Wexler was Meg Faulkner. Tommy’s sister. So now he had a plausible reason why she’d come here. To help her brother. He clung to that by his fingernails—to the simple logic of it. The trouble was, he was pretty sure her motives hadn’t been simple.

  When a knock sounded at the door, he recoiled, then sat up straighter and cleared his throat. “Come in.”

  Blake stepped into the office, his arm in a more officiallooking sling and his face drawn.

  “You’re supposed to be in the medical center,” Glenn objected, glad to have another focus for his thoughts.

  “So are you!”

  “I discharged myself.”

  “So did I,” Blake countered.

  Before Glenn could point out that only one of them was a physician, the security chief handed him a piece of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “My resignation.”

  Glenn flicked his eyes over it. “I hope it didn’t hurt your arm too much to write it, because you’ve just wasted your time.” Tearing the paper into pieces, he dropped them into the trash. “Care to explain your reasoning?” he asked.

  “If you were counting on me for security, I’ve been doing a pretty miserable job.”

  “You’ve been doing your job as you saw it. I need you to keep doing that.”

  “Even if I’ve screwed up royally?”

  “Like how?”

  “Pushing an amnesiac for information. Focusing on the threat from my own men.”

  “You have a better angle?”

  “Yeah. I had a hunch about the car that I wish had paid off sooner. I had it dusted for fingerprints. When I got back to my office a little while ago, there was a report from a friend in army intelligence. He can get access to FBI files. The prints are from a guy named Leroy Enders. Wasn’t there an Enders in the Clean Sweep group?”

  Glenn crossed to the cabinet and pulled out another file. “Leroy is Paul Enders’s father.” He shuffled through the folder, found a picture of a tough-as-nails older man with a military haircut—not unlike Meg’s father, actually. “He’s a former Green Beret.”

  Blake took the folder and paged through it. “Good training—for infiltration and dirty tricks. I’m thinking now that he came in in the trunk of her car, then had some sort of spray that drugged Lipscomb.”

  Glenn’s mouth tightened.

  “I thought the prints might match the ones on the gun from the guest suite.”

  “You found it?”

  “I had guys combing the place. It was wedged under the credenza. Unfortunately, whoever shot the place up was smart enough to wear gloves.” The security chief sighed. “Too bad, because we could have avoided this whole mess with Sparks.”

  Blake’s gaze dropped to the folder again. “Enders had the training to cause a lot of trouble around here. And he’s been in a couple scrapes with the law. Nothing major, but he did six months in a state prison for assault.”

  Glenn sighed. “I was going to give you the theory that his prints are all over the car because he helped Meg get ready to come here. That maybe they were just part of a support group for families of the men from Clean Sweep.”

  “How did you come up with that?”

  Glenn steeled himself. “I found out a few minutes ago that Meg’s name is Meg Faulkner. She’s Tommy Faulkner’s sister.”

  The security chief’s eyes widened. “You’ve made a positive ID?”

  “The guys call me when they’ve got problems. Tommy was upset because his sister, Meg, has been missing for several days.” Glenn pushed the snapshot from Tommy’s file toward Blake.

  His friend studied the brother and sister, then nodded. “It’s her, all right. And now that I see the picture, I remember meeting Tommy. Nice guy. You and he were close, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Glenn swallowed. “I’d like to think she came here to beg me to do something for him. But I’m not stupid. I have to assume there’s more to it than that. Do you have every available man out there beating the bushes for Enders?”

  Blake sighed. “We had a perimeter alarm forty minutes ago. The fence was clipped in the south quadrant. I’m thinking that when our friend couldn’t get into the secure lab, he decided to cut his losses and make his escape. Or maybe he had a deadline.” His eyes narrowed. “But I think your next step should be tell Ms. Wex—Ms. Faulkner her real name and some of her background and see if you get any reaction.”

  “I intend to,” Glenn retorted. He picked up the file and started to step around Blake, but the security chief put a hand on his arm.

  “Glenn, I know you’ve gotten in pretty deep with her. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to be,” he said, still daring to hope for the best as he gathered up the Faulkner file and headed for his quarters.

  HE FOUND MEG IN THE bedroom, huddled under the covers with her knees drawn up. She was sleeping, and she looked so sweetly innocent that his heart gave a painful squeeze. She had said she loved him, and he believed her. But that was the woman who thought she was Meg Wexler.

  Meg Faulkner was another matter. She had come to his castle to lay open his defenses. Glenn didn’t know what she’d had in mind—specifically. But probably she’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

  His hands clenched at his sides as he fought the need to sink down beside her and gather her into his arms. From the moment she’d awakened in the medical wing, something magical had wrapped itself around them. Now he longed for one more sorcerer’s spell that would bind her to him.

  He knew that if he reached for her, she would pull him close and give him anything he asked. But he couldn’t ask Meg Wexler for any more favors. He could only ask Meg Faulkner.

  He stood there for another few seconds, drinking in the sight of her, silently praying for everything that had happened between them to be true. Then, pulling a chair from the corner of the room, he sat down and gently touched her shoulder.

  She woke, and her incredible green eyes blinked open and focused on him.

  “You’re back. I tried to stay awake….” Her smile faded when she took in the grim look on his face.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’ve found out who you are,” he said, watching her. Hope, fear, uncertainty all crossed her features in rapid succession. He was certain they were all genuine, the mix too complex to fake.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I talked to your brother. He was worried about you.”

  Again he saw perplexity. “My brother?” She shook her head. “Do I have a brother?”

  “Yes, he’s one of the men from Operation Clean Sweep. Come into the dining room. Let me show you some pictures.”

  Reluctantly she followed. But when he moved toward the folder that he’d laid on the dining-room table, she grabbed his hand.

  “Wait.”

  “Meg, you need to find out who you are.”

  “I don’t want to know!” Her voice was edged with desperation. Darting around to face him, she took him in her arms and held him as if she never intended to let go. When she raised her head and found his mouth with hers, he was helpless to stop the rush of emotion that surged through him. Not simply desire or wanting, but need—at the most basic level.

  Her mouth moved over his, urgent,
demanding, desperate, and it was impossible to hide his response from her or from himself.

  She kissed him with the same passion, the same greedy fury, her hands stroking and pressing, then sliding down to his waist so that she could mold her body to his.

  He needed no urging to lean into her, bond himself to her like honey dripping over the bowl of a spoon. And when she found one of his hands and brought it to her breast, he groaned his approval as his fingers began to stroke her stiffened nipple.

  “Come to bed, Glenn. Love me. Please love me,” she begged, her words vibrating against his lips.

  They were moving down the hall when sanity finally overtook him. God, he couldn’t think when he had her in his arms, her body all soft and yielding. But he had to think.

  “Meg, we can’t.”

  She lifted her large green eyes to him. “Of course we can. We love each other. I realize we haven’t known each other very long. But what happened between us happened fast!”

  “That’s why I owe it to you to stop.”

  She searched his face for truths. “What do you mean?”

  He forced the words out of his sandpaper throat. “When you remember who you are, you may think I’ve been taking advantage of you—that I pushed you into something you weren’t ready for.”

  She gave a high, broken laugh. “Is that what this looks like to you? From my point of view, I’m trying to drag you into the bedroom—only you’re stronger than I am, and you’re digging in your heels.”

  Searching for the right words, he struggled to make her understand. “You’re not dragging me. Don’t you think I want you as much as you want me? But you’re trying to prove something in bed. And that’s the wrong place for certainties.”

  Her eyes flashed. “All right. I get it. You’ve found out why I came here, and you think you’ve made a mistake.”

  “No. I only know you’re connected with one of the men who got sick because I sent them to raid a biological-weapons plant. I don’t know your motives for showing up here, probably with a man in the trunk of your car.”

  “What?”