Aimee snuggled against the feverish plank of his chest.
He had done something to her, skinned her so she was just a morass of emotion.
His warm palm moved sensually up her thigh, caressing it in a slow, sensual rhythm that made her muscles jerk in response. He was so hot. His allure was powerful, so utterly unlike any man she’d ever known. His casual touch made her reflexively clench the warm tingle between her legs.
She felt completely exposed, bendy and transparent.
“Don’t hate me for this, but there is something else I need to tell you.”
Mark shrugged. “Lay it on me.”He looked into her face with that sexy half-smile playing around his lips. “Tell me. Everything. I can take it.”
She took in an unsteady breath, then said the words: “I was in that plane crash.”
Saying the words felt dangerous. She couldn’t dare to meet Mark’s eyes. She shut her eyes; it was easier that way.
“I wasn’t in a car crash, like I let you think. I was on Flight 134.”
She felt a little dizzy, like she was on a highwire, waiting for the fall.
“Jesus. That was a hundred miles from here. How on earth did you end up in my barn?” His voice was so disbelieving, so emphatic she had to open her eyes. Yet he didn’t appear angry – just shocked.
“I walked a long time. For two days, I think. At some point I came across a rancher in a truck who believed my story about the car crash. He said he’d take me as far as Spanner. He ended up dropping me off about three miles from here. Your barn was the first structure I came to. I went in and lay down and prepared to die.”
“Holy God.”
“Seth doesn’t think I am dead. He apparently doesn’t know that I was on the plane. I lied about my name because I am scared he’s going to track me down. He’s still after me.”
“Why?”
Moment of truth. Aimee struggled, trying to decide if she was going to tell the whole truth about the stolen cash or not. She thought suddenly of her ideal relationship. The ideal had been so remote for so long, she’d not allowed herself to even consider the parameters. It was … almost a place; a great carved cathedral – perfect, impregnable, a private place where two people pledged something to each other and defied time. Where each gave themselves to each other, without lies, in a state of purity.
That was not for her, she thought bitterly. Not with Seth certainly, and not even with Mark. She would be leaving soon. She could not give her whole heart to a man, with all that implied, knowing she would leave.
Her chatter about no lies, all that had been just… well, it wasn’t a lie if she omitted a fact or two. It would make this relationship perfectly normal. Nobody was entirely truthful – and she’d never seen any relationship that was perfectly honest. Even Kimberly kept a few things from Rob, such as the fact that Aimee had been desperately unhappy with Seth. Kimberly had tempered the truth in order to keep Rob from doing something drastic.
“Seth is just very possessive,” she replied, hating herself at that moment for lying to him even as she swore she was telling the truth. The money in her bedroom would remain a secret. A dirty, ugly secret but a secret that would give breath to her new life. She continued, growing confident. “He’s a control freak, as I’ve said.”
“Well he won’t find you here.”
The room fell silent for a moment. Aimee said, “Now, your turn. Why did you stop practicing medicine? Larissa said there was some ‘nastiness in Washington.’ What was she talking about?”
He shifted positions, rolling onto his side so they were face to face. He held her hand and looked at their intertwined fingers.
“Right after September 11, I applied for a job with the Central Intelligence Agency. I wanted to do something meaningful with my life and for my country. I was sent to the Hindu Kush in Nuristan province in Afghanistan.” His voice was flat and matter of fact, as if he’d told this story many times and had learned to delete all emotion from the words. “I was part of a team that interrogated the high-profile detainees that were captured on the field. Officially my role was to care for the detainees who might need medical care after being injured on the field.
“But the reality was quite different.” He paused for a moment, still avoiding her gaze. When he spoke again, an edge of bitterness had come to his voice. “My job was to keep the detainees alive after my teammates had performed enhanced interrogation techniques on them. Often this required me to revive legally dead detainees who had been too enthusiastically waterboarded. One detainee, known in the media as Abdullah 10, died during an interrogation. Memos and other documents related to the death were leaked to Wikileaks and an investigation was launched.”
Aimee was daunted. Cloudy memories of the incident floated through her mind, the loud, contentious debates about the limits of interrogation and torture that it spurred.
“I resigned in disgust. I had become disillusioned with the whole intelligence apparatus and wanted nothing more to do with it. But I was torn because I owed my team my loyalty. After I resigned, I was accused of torture. But what was never documented or found in those interminable memos was the simple truth.
“Abdullah 10 had been shackled in a crucifixion position in his cell for seven days. This was known as a “stress position” in the sterilized memos. It wasn’t pleasant, and it wasn’t deadly in itself. He was left there, fed there, forced to relieve himself in that position. I checked every hour, and recorded his vitals. On the seventh day, we brought him in to be questioned. He was shaking, his legs were grotesquely swollen from his blood pooling in the lower extremities for days at a time. I asked my teammates to give him some time to recover from the crucifixion, worried that if we waterboarded him, his heart couldn’t handle it.
“But that wasn’t my call. I was overruled. They waterboarded him. His vitals were very unstable. His BP was all over the map. I told them that we had to let him recover a bit or we would kill him. The last time, they pulled him up from the water, and his heartbeat was very high. He was hyperventilating, couldn’t get a good breath. I suggested we remove his mask and just blindfold him for a while. Again, I was overruled. I told them again we had to lay off for a while, he was ill, we weren’t going to get anything from him.”
Mark shook his head slightly and drew in another breath. His gray eyes were sad. “They were convinced they were at the point when they were about to break him. Some big confession was just around the corner. They waterboarded him again. His heart rate fell to zero. He had no pulse, no blood pressure. I performed CPR, got his heart going again. They let him rest for ten minutes. I refused to do anymore. I said I wasn’t going to be responsible if they tried it again. But there was something different that night. Something driving them. And they did it again. And again, same result. I couldn’t just let him die without doing something. So I performed CPR again. I put him on oxygen for a few minutes. He was basically half alive at that point. He could no longer speak.
“When his vitals stabilized, about half an hour later, they waterboarded him again. It was purely gratuitous. He could no longer communicate at all. He was unresponsive. I believe he was brain dead by that point.
“We couldn’t have a brain dead detainee. It would have caused a scandal, and there would be investigations. It’s ironic, I guess. Considering what happened.
“The team leader instructed the interrogator to –quote – finish him off. I came to blows with the team leader. I realize it was far too little, too late, but I refused to let them intentionally drown that man. The others were pulling us off each other, and then there was a sound from the detainee. A little gasp.”
Mark licked his lips. His voice had gone very soft. “He roused. Everybody stilled. I listened to his heart and was pleased that it sounded pretty normal. They let him rest for about forty minutes. We then donned our masks and took off his. He was basically a vegetable. He could breathe on his own but he wasn’t responsive to stimuli. They decided they would finish him off for good.
“We fought again. Physically. Me against four other guys. In the end, there was nothing I could do to prevent it. They held his head under water for two minutes. I resigned the next morning.”
Tears trickled down her cheeks, her heart aching for Mark. His guilt was so raw, so tangible, that it hurt to witness it.
Mark finally looked at her, and seeing her tears, held her to him. She snuggled into his chest, holding him tight. “I don’t practice because for a very long time, I didn’t think of myself as a doctor.”
“You’re a good doctor,” she finally whispered, moved by his confession. “That was not your fault. You tried to stop them. You did more than most men.”
He shrugged his big shoulders. “Anyway, what was your –“
“Oh no, you’re not going to evade me like that.”
“Evade you?”
“You’re brushing this off when it is obviously important to you.”
“I’m not brushing it off,” he said. “I’m just… I think I’m getting to a point where it doesn’t define me. I never wanted to be one of those gloomy, haunted guys. I became that for a while. It sucks. I don’t want to be that way anymore.”
An involuntary smile tugged her lips. How strong he was. “You’re amazing. You’re doing what I want to do. Overcoming these huge obstacles. Being the person you want to be instead of the person the world tries to make you.”
“You can do it. You’ve got a lot of talent, you’re very smart and you have a lot of ambition.”
The room fell quiet again and Aimee grabbed his hand with sudden ferocity and kissed it. She felt a funny tug inside herself, an odd longing to take a step out of time, a vacation from reality. Just to give her a chance to take a deep breath and enjoy this man, this place. The ranch and the town seemed soaked with seductive magic; how she wanted to surrender, love him freely, tell him everything – including the money in the other room.
She’d begun to wonder where the money had come from. It had occurred to her, distantly, that whoever Seth took that money from would probably want it back. She wouldn’t put bank robbery past Seth. She just didn’t know, and it frightened her. It prodded her to leave, to stay on the move. To protect Mark from the craziness and consequences of her bad choices.
She was in deep. She had to get out. Just a few more days, she pleaded with some benevolent deity. Just a few more days to imbue his sweetness into every one of her cells. She would have to live on it the rest of her life.
Ten
“How’s the room?” The voice growled.
Seth almost dropped the phone. “How did you—“
“How did I find you? Look you piece of shit, did you think you could just hide from me? What’s that place costing? A hundred per night?”
Maybe it was the exhaustion – he hadn’t slept in days – or his frustration with days of trying to evade Carlos and his behemoth hitmen, but Seth felt insulted by the lowball number. “Four hundred. Hell, with your money I could stay here for a year.”
He shut his eyes, feeling his face go splotchy with fear. He didn’t have any of Carlos’s money. In fact, he had to ask his boss for a loan to sustain this hotel-hopping habit. It had been humiliating. The only thing that made it bearable was knowing he could say fuck you to his boss as soon as he had the money back. As soon as he could blackmail the commissioner, he’d have what he wanted more than money – power.
To his surprise, Carlos laughed. “You’re funny, Seth. You always surprise me. Yeah, my money. Glad you realize that. I want it. You didn’t think you could just take something that didn’t belong to you, did you? Didn’t you learn on the playground not to take what’s not yours?”
Seth turned off the light and walked to the window. He half-expected Carlos to be on the sidewalk, surrounded by his goons, looking up at him. But the street in front of the Crystal City Marriot was empty. Except for cars. Seth’s gaze roamed over the vehicles, trying to guess which one Carlos was in.
Aimee was out there too – probably in Portland. With half a million dollars of Carlos’s money. He hated that scheming bitch but he wanted to be the one to find her, not Carlos. If he found her, he at least had an opportunity make her realize that she had been an idiot to leave him. Not that he had any intention of taking her back, no matter how much she begged. But the beg would be necessary anyway.
“Let me put it this way,” Carlos was saying. “If I don’t get that money, I’m going to kill you.”
“If you do get the money you might kill me anyway.”
“Maybe, just for putting me through this shit. But you have a better chance of staying alive if you give me back my cash. Are you gonna give it to me?”
“Yes,” Seth said. “I just need a little bit of time.”
“Time for what? That’s my money! I’ve been very generous with you, Seth. I only broke your finger when I could have broken your dick. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I know, Carlos. It is your money. I’ll get it to you. Just give me just a little more time. I promise, I’ll have it for you. I’ll do whatever it takes to get it.”
Aimee jumped out of the SUV and wrapped the jacket tighter around her body. Evenings were getting chilly in mountain country. Mark opened the door of Glacier Outfitters and she walked inside, surprised to see a crowd of women chatting while waiting for class to begin.
She spotted Carrie Graham from Carrie’s Apothecary and Jane Flowers, and other familiar faces she’d seen around town. To her relief, Mark wasn’t the only man. He had never taken either yoga or pilates and she had the feeling as an alpha guy he wasn’t exactly comfortable with all this no-impact stuff. John Jenkins would be there to commiserate with Mark, as well as a tall, well-built man Aimee didn’t know. He actually had the long, lean look of a man who regularly practiced yoga.
“Who is that?”
“Ed Fredricks,” Mark replied. “The cook at the One Horse Town Saloon.”
Aimee felt even better about eating his food; he clearly understood the importance of taking care of one’s body.
Mark’s hand was on the small of her back, natural and comforting. She spontaneously reached on her tiptoes to press a grateful kiss on his cheek. Oh God, bad idea. The rich masculine scent of him worked on her like a fast-acting sex tonic. He looked surprised and smiled at her. “You’re going to be great.”
Larissa maneuvered her way through the crowded room to Aimee. She held Aimee by the shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Told you I’d get a nice crowd for you.”
“Wow, small town folks really do pull together during an emergency.”
Mark laughed, eyes blazing with that sweetness that sent her heart going like a delicate, caged bird fluttering in her chest.
Larissa hooked her arm through Aimee’s and led her to the large cork-floored demonstration room with a wall of mirrors. Mats hung on the wall. Some light weights and balls were arranged on shelves. She liked the studio very much; it appeared modern and new agey. A little too minimalist, perhaps with the white walls. Had it been her own studio, Aimee would have preferred a soft sage green or clarifying yellow.
“How do you feel?” Larissa asked.
“Great. It’s been a while since I’ve taught but I’m eager to get to it.”
“Well the way you described the class – yogalates – seems pretty cutting edge for Spanner. So you’ve got your work cut out.”
Maybe in another context, those words would have terrified her. But for the first time in a very long time, they invigorated her, infused her with a sense of challenge and excitement.
The room began to fill with the chattering patrons. Mark got a mat and took a spot in the back with the rest of the guys. At exactly seven, Aimee stood in front of the class. “Yogalates is a mix of yoga and pilates. It can be kind of intense, so take breaks when you need to. So let’s get started.”
She put on the music, and immediately began to relax into the rhythm of the class. Her eyes constantly found Mark in the reflection of the big mirror, and
she was pleasantly surprised when she saw that he was quite limber and moved through the asanas and pilates with aplomb.
The hour whipped by. She finished by leading the class in three deep, cleansing breaths. For a moment, nobody moved. Every person wore that glazed expression of deep relaxation after intense physical exercise. After a pulse of silence, applause broke out.
“You need to make these regular events,” one woman said.
Aimee smiled, for once not letting her departure to Portland put a damper on the evening. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said noncommittally.
Larissa, standing nearby, agreed. “I think we should do this twice a week. I can pay you thirty bucks a class.”
The thought of honest money for honest work was so seductive that she almost said yes right away. But she couldn’t be irresponsible and promise something she couldn’t deliver. “I’ll definitely think about it, Larissa. Thanks for the opportunity.”
When she saw Mark, his hair damn with sweat, she was so proud. “You did very well.”
“You were inspiring. The class was nothing like I thought it would be. Much more fun than I expected.”
Aimee playfully punched him in the arm.
“I liked how you would walk around correcting people’s posture. That was very nice.”
“I’m glad you had fun,” she said. “Actually that was very impressive. First that you’d actually do it, and second that you did it so well.”
“We’re heading over to the One Horse Town,” Larissa said. “You guys want a beer?”
Mark looked to Aimee, who shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
At the saloon, Mark ordered a huge plate of nachos and beer for him and Aimee. The table was loud and boisterous. On the other side of Larissa was Sarah, a woman Aimee hadn’t met before the class, but whose natural flexibility Aimee envied. There was talk that Sarah’s boyfriend would show up, but so far she was alone, eating a burger and fries and chatting to another woman, Babette, who was Carrie’s cousin.
Crash Into You Page 13
