Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  “You should believe it.” His voice was very quiet, devoid of any trace of emotion, and all of a sudden Charlie was afraid. Not of him, but of something in the atmosphere around him, some feeling of darkness and latent violence. This wasn’t her gorgeous, tawny-haired, drawling Michael. This was a man she didn’t know. “Like I told you from the beginning, babe, I’ve done a lot of bad things.”

  His eyes had taken on a steely gleam. The set of his beautiful mouth was almost cruel.

  She remembered the scary convict she had first met. She remembered the strong wrists linked by chains, and the powerful body in the orange prison jumpsuit, and the deadliness she’d sensed behind those sky blue eyes whenever she’d looked into them.

  Then she remembered the man she’d gotten to know in what felt like a lifetime since. She looked at him steadily. “Tell me what happened that day.”

  Their eyes held for a moment longer. His went dark and hostile. Hers, she hoped, stayed serene. Then his mouth twisted. “You are a pain in my ass.”

  The crackling sense of menace that had swirled around him faded.

  “Right back at you, Casper. So talk to me. Please.”

  “Fuck. Fine. Whatever it takes to get you off my damned back.” He gave her a hard look. Charlie carefully kept her face impassive. When he started talking, his tone was cool, dispassionate. A defense mechanism, she knew. “We were in Afghanistan. A platoon got wiped out up near the Pakistan border. A couple of surviving soldiers were taken prisoner. We—Sean and Hoop and Cap and me—got the order to go in and get them out. We moved in at night. They were being held in a little village at the bottom of a valley, steep mountains all around, no real cover anywhere. We did what we had to do—that means we killed whoever got in our way, just so we’re clear—and we recovered the soldiers. We were on this narrow trail on our way out of the valley when all hell broke loose. Damned Taliban crouched behind every bush. It was an ambush and we were outnumbered twenty, twenty-five to one. Ain’t no way that’s going to end well.”

  He paused, and his face tightened. For a moment she thought he was going to stop there. She didn’t make a sound, just watched him steadily, and finally he continued.

  “Sean and I hung back to provide cover fire while Cap and Hoop got the soldiers out of there. They were coming at us like ants at a picnic, hitting us with everything from AK-47s to rocket-propelled grenades. There was so much ordinance blowing up it looked like Fourth of July. We were hunkered down near this little gnarled tree when Sean took one to the chest.” His eyes flickered, and he glanced away. It was, she knew, a classic sign that what he was talking about was causing him distress. Despite her determination to be a neutral vessel into which he could pour his worst memories, the sight of Michael in distress sent a chill rippling through her. “It was a bad one. He was bleeding like a pig, and when I tried to pack the wound and stop the bleeding I could hear it sucking air.” He grimaced and looked at her again, and she tried to keep any reaction to what he was telling her from showing on her face. “We were taking fire from everywhere, they had us pinned down, and if we stayed put it was just a matter of time until we got overrun. Plus, I was getting low on ammo. So I lobbed my last damned grenade toward what seemed like the biggest nest of them, hoping to create enough of a distraction so I could get us both out of there. Then I threw Sean over my shoulder and ran like a motherfucker. They spotted us, and opened fire, but the only way I was stopping was if they shot off my legs because I knew if I stopped we were dead. That’s when they hit us with a goddamned mortar and knocked us right off the side of the mountain. We fell about eighty feet. I wasn’t hurt enough to make any difference. Sean landed about twenty yards away. The way I found him was, he started screaming.” Michael looked up at the ceiling. A means of distancing, it was an instinctive reaction to a deeply emotional memory, Charlie knew. “When I got to him he was in a bad way. He’d taken another round to the back, and there was this big ol’ branch sticking up right through his gut. He’d landed on it and it had impaled him. When I got there he looked at me and kind of gasped and said, I’m not going to make it, Mike. Then he said, Don’t let ’em take us, because what they did to captured Americans wasn’t pretty. About a second later he started screaming again. The enemy was coming down the mountain toward us like a damned bunch of goats by that time and we were getting some gunshots flying overhead but it was obvious they couldn’t see us and didn’t know exactly where we were. I punched Sean in the jaw to knock him out, and I pulled that damned branch out of him because there wasn’t any way he was going anywhere like that. I thought he might bleed out but he didn’t. His gut was laid open, though, and it was bad. I looked for a way out but there wasn’t one. We were on a damned ledge. There was no way off it except straight up the mountain, right through the middle of the damned Taliban. I couldn’t make it on my own, much less hauling Sean. Our only possible chance was to hide. And Sean was in so much pain that the second he woke up he started screaming again.”

  A muscle worked at the corner of his mouth, and Charlie felt that tiny giveaway all the way down to the bottom of her soul. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until he continued, and she let it slowly escape. “I punched him fast, but not fast enough. We got more gunshots, closer. They were homing in on us. I knew there was no way in hell either one of us was getting out of there alive if he let out another one of those shrieks.” Michael was still talking to the ceiling in that cool, impersonal tone, the hardening of his jaw a telltale sign of emotion. His fist stayed clenched. Charlie felt her chest tighten. For him, those were giant markers of suffering. And if he hurt, she discovered, so did she. “I had to make a decision. Our work was supposed to be under the radar, which meant our side-arms had silencers. I drew mine and I pressed it right up against Sean’s heart and pulled the trigger.” He stopped and she watched his nostrils flare for the briefest, most telling of moments. Other than that, Michael’s face was absolutely impassive. She was the one who had to press her lips tightly together to keep back a sound of pain. “After I shot him, I lay down there in the brush with his body for a couple of hours while the Taliban searched right on top of us. Then the rescue Cap and Hoop sent back for us finally showed up. I was pretty glad to see them big ol’ Apache helicopters, especially when they opened fire and the bastards went running. I waved and one of the choppers dropped a ladder down to me and I climbed up with Sean’s body slung over my shoulder.” He made a sound that might have been a short, unamused laugh, and his tone turned ironic. “We leave no man behind.”

  He regarded the ceiling unblinkingly for a moment longer, then looked at Charlie. His hard, handsome face was emptied of all expression. His eyes were as unreadable as stone.

  “Happy now?” His voice was harsh.

  She took a breath and sat up, curling her legs beside her. Her nightgown rode up so that the hem hovered dangerously near the top of her slim thighs but she didn’t care. He was still on his back, close enough so that if he’d been solid she could have laid her hand flat on the center of his wide bare chest. He looked big and dangerous and intensely sexual lying there like that, and her heart broke for him.

  “You need to let the guilt go. You had no choice.” Despite her best effort to sound clinically dispassionate, her voice was thick.

  “Like I said, I don’t feel any guilt.” He frowned, peering up at her through the darkness. “Jesus. Are you crying?”

  Charlie fought the urge to sniff. Damn the light coming in around the curtains: it must be hitting on the glimmer of the tears welling in her eyes. She wasn’t crying, exactly. Her throat was just a little tight and her eyes were just a little wet.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I never cry.”

  She said it with conviction, because she never—well, almost never—did.

  He sat up, looking at her closer, all powerful muscle and sleek skin just inches away. “The hell you don’t.” His voice got lower, huskier. “We both know you cry over me.”

  There wasn’t
much she could say to that, because it was true. She’d cried twice in the last five or so years, and both times had been over him.

  Since there was no hiding it, she did the only thing she could do: she owned it.

  “Anybody would cry after hearing that.” Her voice was both truculent—and thick with the tears she was refusing to shed. Now that he’d seen them, she gave in to that insistent sniff and at the same time glared at him. “If you weren’t totally emotionally stunted, you jackass, you’d be crying yourself.”

  And how was that for the calm, collected professional she’d vowed to remain at the outset of this?

  “Damn it to hell and back anyway.” He touched her tears where they trembled on her lower eyelashes. The brush of his long fingers against her skin was so unexpectedly tender that she closed her eyes in case any of those embarrassing tears should actually escape. He sounded almost angry as he added, “You and your damned soft heart.”

  Then her eyes flew open again as she realized that she could feel his fingers, feel him, that he was actually there, all six-foot-three, two hundred some-odd pounds of him, solid and present in her bed. On a note of alarm, she gasped, “Michael.”

  At the same time he, too, must have realized what had happened, because he went statue-still as their eyes locked. With that look, the memory of Tam’s warning, the specter of Spookville, the threat of hunters and oblivion passed between them in a thunderclap of shared comprehension.

  As it had before, intense emotion had enabled him to materialize. And afterward there would be a price to pay.

  “Oh, my God.” Charlie stared at him, appalled.

  He looked down at himself, looked at her, and said, “Fuck it.”

  Then he reached for her. His hand slid around behind her head and his fingers threaded through her hair and he pulled her toward him and kissed her, his lips warm and insistent. The kiss was carnal as hell, hungry, demanding. Their chemistry was electric: she was instantly shivery with desire. The inside of his mouth was hot and wet and so real, so earthily male, that she was dazzled. As their tongues met her heart started to pound and her pulse rate skyrocketed. Deep inside, her body tightened urgently. She clutched his shoulders—sleek solid shelves of heavy muscle, warm and strong and there—and closed her eyes and kissed him back like she might never have another chance, desperate with the knowledge that this couldn’t last, that it was the briefest moment out of time and there would be consequences.

  No matter how tempted she was, she couldn’t let him just shrug off the consequences.

  “Michael,” she pulled her mouth from his long enough to whisper, meaning to put her warning into words, to point out the risk, to do her best to apply sanity and logic to a situation that had gone way past both in hopes of somehow mitigating what would come after, but he slid his mouth down the side of her neck, his lips and tongue trailing fire over her skin. Suddenly she was so turned on she forgot how to form words.

  “Don’t talk,” he ordered against her skin. His voice was low and faintly hoarse as he pressed his mouth to the sensitive area where her neck and shoulder joined. He still cradled the back of her head, holding her in place, while his free hand came up to fondle her breasts, caressing her through the satin. His hand felt firm and strong, and the sensation of having him touch her like that through the slippery cloth was mind-blowing. Her nipples tightened with need and she swayed closer, loving the feel of his hand on her breasts, loving the feel of him. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Her breathing came short and fast. She was touching him, too, delighting in the ability to touch him, running her hands over the hard muscles of his arms, stroking the unyielding wall of his chest, trailing her fingertips across the tightness of his abdomen. His skin was smooth and warm, and his body felt honed and strong and utterly masculine beneath her hands, and she couldn’t get enough.

  “I want you like hell.” Muffled by her skin, his voice was fierce.

  She knew she ought to argue that this probably wasn’t the moment, to point out that maybe if they got it together and focused they might be able to come up with a way to ward off the consequences before they happened, but then he was kissing her again, kissing her like an eternity in hell was a small price to pay for the taste of her mouth.

  And all she could do was cling to him and kiss him back, as the torrid heat of his mouth robbed her of her reason and her caution and everything else except a throbbing, insistent need.

  “I want you, too.” She sucked in a much-needed breath as his mouth left hers again to find her breast, opening over the sensitive tip through the thin layer of her nightgown. She could feel the wet heat of his mouth practically scalding her through the cloth, and she remembered that he’d done the same thing before. Only he’d done it that time in Tony’s body, and the effect hadn’t been nearly so intensely sexual. The inexplicable magic that was her and Michael blazed between them, a white-hot conflagration of lust that turned her brain to mush and her body to flame and the air around them to steam. Passion surged like hot sweet liquid through her veins. Deep inside, her body clenched and burned. Her bones melted. Her muscles dissolved. His tongue moved back and forth across her nipple, deliberately tantalizing, and a shaft of pure desire made her tremble. The sensation was incredible enough to make her forget everything except the way he was making her feel. She clutched at his hard biceps and made a tiny moaning sound and pressed her lips to his shoulder. She kissed the broad expanse, openmouthed, loving the salty taste of his skin.

  He growled, and tipped her backward on the bed, shoving her nightgown up out of his way with rough hands. The sliver of satin was twisted up under her armpits but she barely noticed and didn’t care as he stretched out beside her and his hand slipped between her legs.

  “Oh.” Scarcely more than an indrawn breath, it was a sound of surprise—and anticipation. She knew how he could make her feel. She suddenly wanted to feel that way again with an intensity that would have scared the daylights out of her if she’d had even a fraction of her rational mind remaining to her. But she didn’t.

  His mouth was on her bare breasts, kissing the soft slopes, sucking her nipples. Farther down, he touched her where she burned to be touched, a light, teasing touch at first, making her wordlessly beg for more. Finally he gave it to her, rubbing her, sliding his fingers inside her. She was already all soft and pliant with arousal, but that made her wild.

  “Oh.” It seemed to be all she could say. He was good at turning women on, good at ramping up the excitement, good at sex: she knew that. But he was just now reminding her exactly how good he was. She was drowning in waves of pleasure, pulsing with need, making small excited sounds as she moved beneath his hand and mouth and he expertly pressed every erotic button she had.

  He started kissing his way down her body, hot wet kisses that slid over her skin, and her fingers sank deep into the thick strands of his tawny hair.

  By the time he had kissed his way to just slightly south of her belly button, she was shivery with anticipation. She knew what he was doing: exactly what he earlier had promised her he would do if he got the chance.

  She knew where he was going, too.

  He lifted his head, and for the briefest of moments their eyes met. The dark restless glitter in his was purely predatory. It made the hot quickening inside her start to spiral out of control.

  “Tell me what you want.” There was a guttural undertone to his voice now.

  “Michael.” Hers was a soft, hot breath of protest. A plea.

  “Tell me.”

  So she told him. Then, just as he had foretold, she parted her legs for him. And her heart pounded and her blood raced and she responded with a series of the soft little moans he had praised as he licked her and kissed her until she came in a great undulating burst of ecstasy.

  She was still quaking in the aftermath when he shoved his jeans down his legs and covered her body with his. She wrapped her arms around his neck, loving the feel of the sturdy column and of the soft thickness of his hair where it brushe
d her skin. The strong muscles of his back were bunched and tight beneath her fingertips and she loved the way they felt, too. She loved his weight on her, the feel of him on top of her, the hot urgent nudge of his erection against her.

  Even before he bent his head and kissed her she was tightening with arousal again.

  She had time for one coherent thought: This is Michael. This is real.

  Then he pushed inside her and the feel of it was so amazing that she cried out. Senses reeling, she reveled in the sheer pleasure of the physicality of penetration. He was huge and hard with wanting her, the answer to all the erotic fantasies she had ever had, stretching her, filling her to capacity and then some, and she wrapped her legs around him and clung and moved with him in sensuous need. Every sound she made after that was muffled by his mouth as he kissed her, deep lush kisses that made her woozy, and moved inside her, making love to her with a controlled savagery that found its answer in a primitive part of her own nature that she only ever realized existed when she was with him.

  It was sex at its rawest, at its most elemental. He kissed her and touched her and drove into her in a relentless rhythm that made her wild as it burned through every inhibition she had ever had. She dug her nails into his back and matched his thrusts with her own and lost herself in the urgency and the heat until she was mindless with passion, writhing with it, burning and quaking and panting with it.

  When the dark waves of lust that were rolling off him peaked, she got swept away, too, coming with a shattering intensity. As he thrust deep inside her and found his release, he groaned out her name.

  “Michael,” she moaned in answer as the wildfire he had ignited inside her consumed them both in its flames. “Michael.”

  Afterward, Charlie spent a moment or so wrapped in his arms while she floated in a state of postcoital bliss. To say he had rocked her world was an understatement. He had rocked her universe, upending it around her in a way she could have never in a million years foreseen.