She leaned farther forward, her voice lowering, like her larynx was dropping into her stomach. “You scare the hell out of me, Eric.”
His throat thickened. “I’m aware of that. Why?”
“Because I can’t keep my guard up when I’m around you. With other men, yes, but you…” She straightened.
“So, what happens if you lower your guard?”
Her lips went bloodless. “I’ll fall in love with you,” she whispered.
His heart skipped one beat, then tripped over the next one. “That would work for me, Nicole.”
“No. Don’t you see? I can’t ever be with someone. My life isn’t my own, Eric.” Her face lost some of its color. “I live every day with the threat of discovery hanging over me. If I’m found out, bad things will happen, very quickly. I’ll have to go into hiding again. Or I’ll get killed. Anyone close to me will suffer the same.” Tears rose in her eyes, but didn’t fall. “Please don’t fight me on this. You can’t have the life you want with me, and you can’t offer me the life I want, either.”
His heart pounded so hard he felt the pulsations through the arteries in his neck and temples. “What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re in the Navy, that’s why. When I was a kid, we moved anywhere from every six months to every three years, and I don’t want to live that way anymore.” A tightness ran through her jaw. “So why begin something with you that there’s no way I’ll ever finish?”
“You move with your job for the DEA.” He sounded very reasonable. Not at all like he wanted to shout and snarl and tear down this restaurant.
“Not often, and it’s my choice. If I want to torpedo my career and not move, I can.”
Eric’s esophagus felt impossibly thin, like someone was strangling him, squeezing all of the hope out of his system with the dead-sure feeling that this woman was steadily and inevitably slipping away from him. He sat there mutely, staring at the rubber band holding Nicole’s hair in a braid, listening to her breathe.
The hostess strolled by with another couple, probably starry-eyed on their date night and without a single hindrance ahead to their budding fucking relationship.
Nicole tossed her cloth napkin onto the table. “I need to get out of here.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nicole’s heels made a hard clacking noise as she thundered down the Gaslamp’s packed sidewalk, angling her body sideways from time to time to maneuver through the crowds of people. She needed air, space, physical movement—she needed to throw off these stupid shoes and run. Run, run, run. To escape this feeling of being turned completely inside out, and…drowning in a terrifying sense of closeness to another human being.
She gritted her teeth. Eric was supposed to be Mr. Perfect Rich Naval Aviator, untouchable, unapproachable. But then he’d gone and told her the story of his family and upbringing—his mother—and now everything Nicole had spent three months building up in her mind had been knocked down. Eric was real…human…very approachable. Not her complete opposite, but practically her freaking emotional doppelganger.
Two blocks up from the restaurant, Nicole skidded to a halt in front of The Tipsy Crow, a bar on the corner of 5th Avenue and F street. Eric, who’d been following close on her heels, quickly sidestepped around her. She knew this bar. Downstairs in the “underground” was a dance club, and that’s exactly what she needed: to dance so hard she sweated all thoughts of falling in love out of her head.
“How much is the cover?” she asked the bouncer.
“Twelve bucks,” he answered. “But you have to wait in line.” He gestured at the string of people queued up halfway around the building.
She cursed under her breath. She was too close to imploding to wait. “Sure.” She pulled her DEA badge out of her purse and showed it to the bouncer. “And while I’m in line, I’ll flash this around and see how many people walk.”
The bouncer hooded his lids. “Cover’s on the house tonight.” He waved her inside.
She grabbed Eric’s hand and towed him in with her.
He tut-tutted softly. “Abuse of power.”
“And you’ve never threatened to drop a torpedo on another nation’s head you shouldn’t have?”
“Ouch,” he said. “And that Colombian Navy submarine thing was a total misunderstanding.”
She led him through the main part of the bar, the interior all dark wood from the walls to the forty-foot-long mahogany bar and high, straight-backed chairs. Warehouse windows lined the wall above the door, and the floor tiles looked like something out of an old-timey barber shop. But that was the flavor of The Tipsy Crow, a touch of modern—the latest drinks served by pretty young woman in scanty tank tops—in an atmosphere dating back to the 1900’s.
She took the stairs down to the underground, where things got really modern. Rainbow-colored lasers streaked every which way, and a DJ pumped out a steady selection of dance grind beats. On Fire Like This by The Mutaytor was currently playing. Nicole plunged into the undulating mass of bodies and danced her way to the middle, nudging a few people aside to get there.
Eric was right beside her, and as they carved out enough space to dance, his well-coordinated body instantly picked up the beat and owned it. Something caught in her gut as she watched him dance with a masculine fluidity impossible not to associate with skilled hip thrusts in bed. Demons, demons…and they all hung out in the gutter. She was suddenly back on Carrera’s dining room table, her legs spread, Eric’s lean hips pressed between them, the hard ridge of his sex shoved against her thigh. Sweat misted the area between her breasts. She wanted this man, wanted him with a hunger that spun the room.
Eric’s fingertips came to rest on her hips every few beats to check her positioning in relation to his, his touch sending icy-hot shivers of desire running along her spine. She wanted this man—wanted the scent of him, hot and aggressive, flooding her senses, his sweat-slicked body sliding against her own, his muscular form bearing down on top of her. She wanted him so deep inside her that for once she could feel solidly tethered to the earth.
She arched her head back, dancing a few steps away from him. She felt a tug on her hair, and checked eyes with Eric in time to see him pull the band from the end of her long braid. The rope of her hair unraveled. He crowded forward. Into her. She had nowhere to go with dancers wall to wall behind her, and his chest met hers. His chin lowered so he could latch a darkened gaze onto hers. He drove both hands into her hair and grabbed up fistfuls of it, then released and let the strands sift gently through his fingers.
She danced free and rotated away from his body, whirling around and around, her hair fanning out.
Eric caught her on one of her passes and hauled her back against him, her spine to his chest. Her ass burrowed into his hips. She heard him exhale, felt a rush of warmth by her ear. He set his palm to the plane of her abdomen to keep her pressed close as he rocked his body to the music. They became one rhythm. One heartbeat. One.
Panic stampeded through her.
He dropped his lips to the hair at her temple, then her ear, just a brush, and down to the curve of her neck. His breath on her flesh was a private caress, and the bulge that arrived at the front of his pants rubbed intimately against her butt cheek. Its fullness highlighted the emptiness inside her, how impossible her life was. Her heart shredded away in her chest, taking her ability to cope with it. On a surge, she bolted away, hurling into a run. Multicolored spotlights whooshed past her vision. Her knee caught soft flesh.
“Hey!” someone shouted.
She burst outside, careening three steps to the right before she was brought up short by a hand on her arm.
“Nicole!” Eric turned her to face him, his chest moving rapidly. “What’s wrong?”
“Let go of me,” she panted.
He released her arm. “If you’ve got a problem, talk to me about it. Stop running away.”
“Leave me alone. I can’t be near you.” Another coil of panic tightened in her chest. “I don’t
know who I am when I’m around you.”
He exhaled in a rush. “I don’t know who the hell I am when I’m with you, either. But why can’t that be a good thing? Like when we’re together, we give ourselves permission to be something other than what our fathers forced us to be.”
She shook her head. Her nerves were fraying as loose as her hair. “I don’t have a problem with who I am.”
“That’s crap,” he retorted. “You’re just like me.” The line of Eric’s jaw was a taut ridge. “I bet you’ve never been in a long-term relationship, have you? Same as me. Because how can we, when we haven’t figured out if we have anything of value to offer? You, trained as you’ve been to be the impossible best, and me—”
“Spare me your pop psychology, Eric. I don’t need it.” Tears filled her tight throat. “Not when you’re just trying to get laid.”
“Fuck if I am.” Emotion rolled off Eric’s body in heated waves. “I’m in love with you—Don’t.” He grabbed her arm again.
She’d started to take off down the street. “I don’t care,” she blasted back. “I hate myself when I’m around you. You make me weak, and I can’t be that. I have to be strong and in control. It’s what keeps me safe.”
“You’ve kept yourself alive because you’re smart,” he countered hotly. “And there’s a huge difference between ‘weak’ and ‘human.’ Being controlled is about pleasing your dad. Trust me, I’m an expert on the subject.” He took a step closer, his eyes so dark a green they looked like a forest at the blackest, most treacherous time of the night. “You know when I told you my mom saved me? It’s a lie. I am a rage machine, deep inside. I just don’t allow myself to turn it loose. I make it go away…but everything else gets put away in the process. You pull me back from that, Nicole. I’m all out on a plate when I’m around you. It’s frightening, yes. I fucking get what you feel.”
Her tears shoved into her nose. “That’s not real love,” she nearly growled. “It’s one dysfunctional person leaning on another to help him not be dysfunctional.”
His laugh was both incredulous and bitter. “I don’t feel the way I do about you because I’m too many cans short of a six pack. The total opposite. You’re the pinnacle of non-screwed-up things in my life, because you’re the only person I’ve ever met who can relate. And it’s not because of any damned demons in my head, either. Hell yeah, I want us to have sex. But I also want to cook pancakes for you on Sunday morning, laze around on the beach with you, get silly on margaritas, and find out all the stuff there is to know about you.”
A lump rammed into her throat.
“Be my girlfriend.”
“Eric—”
“I know you like me, Nicole. You gave yourself away with that thing you did to my ear in Carrera’s hacienda.”
“What?”
“You kissed my ear.”
“So what? We were putting on a show.”
“Yeah, that’s the part that’s been niggling at me, though. It was a show, but you kissed the ear facing away from Carrera. He had no way of seeing what you were doing, so it wasn’t part of the show, Nicole. You did it because you wanted to, because you like me.” He steered her into a doorway and shoved her back into the shadows, his chest crushing her breasts. “What happened on Isla Gorgona wasn’t just a job,” he said on a soft snarl. “We’re not colleagues, and we’re not buddies.”
She parted her lips on a breath.
His eyes followed the movement of her mouth.
Three months’ worth of passion sizzled in the air between him, a typhoon circling, ready to consume.
Eric’s lips came down on hers and parted, opening the way for his tongue to steal into her mouth. He touched her, just tip to tip, a tender caress that had more to do with love and caring than sex.
Her heart beat more loudly, and her lungs expanded as she breathed him in, the clean scent of a healthy man. The lust she’d felt on the dance floor returned with a vengeance. She slid her hands up Eric’s shirt, along his warm, solid chest, and clasped him around his neck. And just like in Carrera’s hacienda, she was the one who forged her tongue deeper into his mouth.
His arms turned to steel around her.
Just like in Carrera’s hacienda…the thought needed to be put to rest. For good. She twisted her mouth beneath Eric’s. Have sex with him, just tonight, chase the demons from your head…
Impossible.
She’d only end up wanting more.
I can’t keep my guard up when I’m around you….
You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can relate.
She wrenched her lips away, panting.
“Be my girlfriend,” he repeated breathlessly into her ear.
A group of bikers passed by their doorway, shouting drunkenly.
“It’ll be a long-distance relationship,” Eric said, “which sucks the root, but I don’t care.” His nostrils flared. “I love you.”
She pressed her eyes closed, unable to look at him. Too complicated…Her life needed to be simple, unencumbered. Nothing could be allowed to burden her ability to get moving, fast. Nothing could be allowed to hurt this man, who…who… Dios mío, who she loved, too. She grabbed two fistfuls of Eric’s shirt. “No.” She shoved him back a step.
His face hardened.
“Don’t look at me like that!” A couple of tears tumbled down her cheeks. “I’m trying to protect you.”
“Please don’t do me that favor,” he shot back through a rigid jaw.
Her lungs were working too hard; she was starting to feel dizzy. “It’s so easy to stand there and pretend my past doesn’t matter when you have no idea what it’s really like to live on the run. Could you spend a week sleeping in a car, eating only what can be bought out of a vending machine? Could you get used to walking into a Walmart and imagine that everyone is looking at you funny? Could you give up flying, Eric?”
His throat moved.
But the noble-minded idiot still spoke words to break her heart. “I all but exiled myself from my own family with a decision I made once, Nicole, so I think I’m capable of defining what I am and am not willing to do in my life.”
“No,” she repeated hoarsely. Because I love you! But she couldn’t free the three words from the cage where all her disappointments dwelled. Lips trembling, she stepped out of the doorway, hurried to the street, and hailed a taxi.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Nicole slept restlessly for the next two nights, plagued by bizarre, unpleasant dreams. In one, she was a young girl, crying because she wouldn’t be able to play the role of Queen of Hearts in her elementary school’s Alice in Wonderland play. Daddy had one of his “funny feelings” again, and they were moving…even though that nice marshal-man had assured them they were okay.
To make her feel better, her dad had given her pancakes in a margarita glass.
Then the wind was in her face, the sky so blue it hurt her eyes. She was hanging from a rope line. Not smoothly rappelling down it, but twisting in the wind. The sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades pounded above her. She squinted upward. Eric’s helmetless head was poked out over the edge of the helo, a knife in his hand. “Since you seem to like disappointment so much in your life.” Then he cut her rope.
Another dream came, one she’d had many times over the last three months, with her on the dining room table in Carrera’s hacienda, naked, her legs spread. But this time it wasn’t sexy. Her heart raced painfully as an ominous, shadowy figure moved between her thighs. Not Eric. The face of her former WITSEC case worker, Marshal Bowry, slowly took shape before her vision. “Be careful with the choices you make, Nicole,” he warned her, then shoved his hips forward.
She snapped awake on a gasp. Gulping down one breath, then another, she stared at the ceiling for a long moment, a heavy feeling behind her eyeballs. Not the best way to be reminded that today was Monday so she needed to call her old case worker, that dream. In fact, gross.
She checked her watch. It was seven o’clock here, which mean
t it was ten o’clock on the east coast in D.C. where WITSEC headquarters was located. They were open for business. Groaning herself out of bed, she shuffled into the kitchen and poured herself a large cup of coffee, then grabbed her cell phone. Plopping down on a bar stool, she scrolled through her address book until she came to the number labeled “dentist.”
She pressed dial, and the phone rang.
“Dr. Malgrove’s office.”
“Good morning,” Nicole said. “I need to speak to someone about my case.” Weird, it sounded like the same fake receptionist who’d answered the phone years ago. “Number five-nine-zero-two.”
Nicole heard computer keys clacking. “That case number has been deactivated.”
“I know. However, this is—”
“But I see a note here to put you through immediately if you called,” the woman added.
Immediately…?
“One moment.”
Several clicks sounded on the other end. There was a long pause—no doubt while Nicole’s file was being retrieved and reviewed—then a man’s voice came on the line.
“Marshal Russell here. Nicole?”
“Yes. Hello, Marshal, um…I’m sorry, but Marshal Bowry was my case worker.” And since I’ve called to rat out a fellow marshal for giving up confidential information about me to a dickhead DEA agent, I’d rather not speak to a stranger. “If he’s not in today, I can call back.”
“I’m sorry,” Russell said. “But Marshal Bowry is no longer with the organization.”
Mierda. “Where has he gone?”
Silence stretched through the phone line. The hair on Nicole’s nape prickled as Marshal Russell hesitated longer than he should have.
“I think you should come in,” Russell finally said. “I can send a car. Where are you? We haven’t been able to locate you at your last known address.”
Wings of Gold Series Page 17
