To Trust Her Heart

by Carolyn Faulkner

  Maddie’s eyes bugged as she realized that he had a big black gun in his hand. Who the hell was he expecting to come to the door, for crying out loud? She frowned, realizing she probably didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

  But it was unusual for him to involve her in anything that might be a threat to her. She knew what he did for a living, well, vaguely, anyway. She knew it involved covert operations of some sort conducted by the government all over the world, and that he would never be free to talk about his work. Sometimes she’d felt like one of the Mafia wives in “The Godfather”, who were never allowed to ask their husbands about what really went on in the family.

  At first glance, they had the proverbial white picket fence of a marriage, as long as one didn’t look too closely. But he was gone for long stretches of time during which she was lucky if she had so much as a contact number for him, other than an old friend who might or might not be able to get a hold of him. Sometimes he came home wounded, she’d nursed him more times than she could count, and he almost always came home with a new scar of some sort, which meant that he’d been hurt badly enough that “they” had decided he’d needed to be hospitalized. But any inquires about what had happened, how he’d been hurt, had been met with a stony silence. He’d explained it to her even before they’d gotten married, that he’d been in the military for a while and now he was doing special assignments that would take him away from her and that he couldn’t tell her about. Ever. Maddie had loved him so deeply and so completely that she couldn’t imagine anything driving her away from him for any reason.

  Eventually, though, being married to an absentee husband who was apparently doing a good job of trying to get himself killed when he wasn’t with her made Maddie take a good, hard look at their marriage. Not at the man she was married to, because she knew she’d always love him, foibles and all, but at the relationship itself. She’d been sure she would be fine not having him around all the time, but it was driving her crazy never knowing if he was dead or alive from one minute to the next. Even the wives of the soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan had a reasonable idea of where their men were and had fairly dependable means of getting a hold of them. Maddie hadn’t been able to get an answer at the number he’d given for his “friend” when his father had died, so she tried to get the Red Cross to find him but they didn’t know anything about him.

  He hadn’t found out about his father’s passing until he came home a month later.

  But he’d always kept that part of his life very far away from her, from all of them. She’d never felt in any danger when he was home – just the opposite. Maddie felt she was protected by an ultimate warrior of sorts on those rare occasions when they actually shared a bed. He’d even deliberately claimed the side of the bed that was closest to the door. She’d never felt the least bit scared when he was around.

  But now he was standing at a hotel door with a gun drawn, his stance poised and ready for anything. Maddie felt a chill run down her spine and grabbed up what she could reach of the sheet and blanket to clutch against her chest. What the hell was going on?

  Chapter Two:

  “Hotel security. We got reports of a woman screaming,” a man on the other side of the door replied.

  Ty shot her a glare that would have smote a weaker woman, but she merely frowned back at him. He had a lot of explaining to do once this little incident was settled, she thought, and he had no right getting all bent out of shape about one little scream, to which he had driven her to by his own pigheaded stubbornness in not getting the hell out of her way when she’d wanted him to!

  She watched as he tucked the gun back into a duffle bag on the floor, then shoved that under the bed and walked calmly to the door, opening it only about four inches. “May I see your hotel security ID, please?”

  He took the proffered documentation and perused it so carefully that Maddie’s goose bumps returned. Something was definitely up.

  Handing it back, he opened the door and let the poor man in, closing the door behind him. “My name is Mr. Phipps,” he said in a deep baritone as he looked every inch of Ty and as much as he could see of Maddie over as if they were already suspects of something. “We had reports of a woman screaming and I came up to check it out. Is everything all right, Ma’am?” He deliberately directed the question to her, she noticed, obviously having taken Ty’s size and none- too-welcoming demeanor into consideration.

  Maddie realized that this was her chance. If she truly wanted to leave, this was a way to do it, just by mentioning that he was holding her against her will. But despite the fact that he was annoying as hell, as usual, she didn’t want to get him into trouble. And, she wanted to know what was going on that he found it necessary to draw his gun in a seemingly innocuous hotel room.

  Ty wasn’t about to wait for her to get herself, and him, into even more trouble with this rent-a-cop. So, he offered, “It was my fault. I…”

  Mr. Phipps kept an eye on Maddie, but spent most of his time eyeing Ty suspiciously. Smart man, Ty though wryly. Maddie wouldn’t, hurt a flea. He, on the other hand . . .

  Maddie interrupted loudly. “He startled me. I was in the bathroom and I didn’t know he’d awakened, and he came into the bathroom. I was just startled by him.”

  Ty was suitably impressed. She’d told him essentially what he would have if he had been her and as close to the truth as possible without giving anything away. That would make it easier to remember the story if need be.

  The older gentleman looked from the pretty, as far as he could see unbruised woman in the bed to the combat ready man who had never strayed far from the door, and sized the situation up fairly accurately, realizing that the version of the story they’d given him was partially true, although it obviously wasn’t all of it. There didn’t seem to be any problem here. He could only do so much, and if she was unwilling to come clean, then there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Well, then I’ll be going. I thank you for your cooperation.”

  Ty grunted an answer for the both of them, and let him out the door, then turned to glare at Maddie as he carefully relocked every lock on the door. “You nearly got us into a lot of trouble, young lady.”

  Maddie hugged her knees to her, but met his eyes and didn’t back down, pointing out sharply, “And if you’d let me go when I wanted to, then I wouldn’t have had to scream, now would I?”

  She often made him want to tear his hair out, but she wasn’t afraid of him when most women were. When they were married, she’d have her women friends over sometimes when he was home, and they would all look at him google-eyed, tittering nervously around him as if he was some sort of bomb that might explode all over them. Most women had some sort of a sixth sense about him. Somehow they knew that he was inherently dangerous and that is was an extremely accurate description. He’d always been a loner, and even the girls in high school had had a healthy fear of him, even though he’d never done anything to support or deny their perception. He just kept almost completely to himself and managed to grow bigger and taller than most of their teachers, rarely smiling, rarely even speaking. His father had never wanted anything from his only child but hard work and obedience.

  Those two traits had helped him enormously when he’d enlisted in the military right out of high school, and he had excelled at pretty much anything they’d thrown at him, especially marksmanship and covert surveillance techniques. He’d gotten his degree while he was still in, and advanced through the ranks in record time due to his exceptional reconnaissance abilities and deadly accuracy.

  When he’d decided he wanted out, the powers that be were extremely reluctant to let him go, but he’d served his hitch and nothing they could offer was enough to entice him back. He’d met Maddie by this point and although they weren’t involved, he’d had a feeling they were going to be. Eventually, they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse that didn’t involve being a military officer any longer. Instead, he became a Black Ops agent and was given an inordinate amo
unt of autonomy in choosing both his assignments and the cohorts that would accompany him on the missions.

  He and Maddie had met through the closest thing to a friend a man like him had, another agent, Rafe Estevez; One of the few men he would trust with his life and an asset on any operation. Rafe’s wife was having a dinner party one of the rare times they were both in the same area at the same time when they weren’t under enemy fire, and although he knew that he was going to regret it the moment he agreed to go, Ty was feeling a little antsy and wanted to get out.

  He ended up doing what he usually did at social occasions – standing in a strategically advantageous point not too far from the door, by himself, and watching everyone else have fun. He wasn’t a chummy type of person; not an easy type to be around. He’d seen and done too much to be easy going. But Rafe’s wife Carolyn was trying her best at matchmaking for him. She thought he was too much of a loner and that he needed a woman.

  Ty might have laughed when he heard her disturbingly accurate assessment of his love life, but, of course, he didn’t. He would have loved to have a real relationship, but neither his personality nor his job lent well to being a family man. He’d gotten out of the military with a thought towards wanting to settle down, but honestly hadn’t considered that a woman might be a part of that scenario. Most of them spent so much time back-pedaling away from him that he never got the chance to really know them. Rafe had done it, and the couple was obviously very happy, but then he was a fairly jovial sort, damned good at his job, but not at all somber about it like Ty.

  His wary eyes had already settled on a woman who was the life of the party, one Madison Victoria Evers. She was surrounded by people and was always laughing about something, most often herself, it seemed, and she invited everyone else to laugh with her. He didn’t think he could remember seeing her without a smile on her face. Apparently, he was the only one in the room that didn’t know her, all of the other guests milled and talked around her much more so than their hostess.

  But what had impressed him the most about her was the fact that she didn’t appear to be afraid of him in the least. In fact, she’d touched him voluntarily, casually, not like she was on the make while trying to talk to him about what he did. No woman of casual acquaintance had ever done that. She was either being deliberately obtuse or she really didn’t feel any particular danger from him, which was unusual enough to intrigue him.

  His experience with the opposite sex was spotty at best because of the vibes he threw off. Some women were attracted to men who exuded danger but even they steered clear of Ty. He’d never seen that predictable wariness in Maddie’s eyes. He’d never seen her starting to inch away from him slowly, like a rabbit caught in the sights of a half-starved wolf, except this morning in the bathroom, and that didn’t count. She wasn’t afraid of him. Rather, she was just trying to circumvent him.

  He didn’t want to be intrigued by Maddie Evers. She was the keeper type, the two point five kids, three dogs and a cat type. Exactly what he didn’t want or need. Well, need anyway, he’d thought, wishing he could reach down and adjust his uncomfortable self, but that move was only likely to garner unwanted attention in a crowd like this.

  So he contented himself just watching her, teasing himself with that which he knew he could never have or really shouldn’t have. A man in his situation, more involved in cloak and dagger stuff than Rafe by a long shot, couldn’t afford to have a family. Not for his sake, and not for theirs.

  They ended up leaving at the same time, very early, although he couldn’t understand why she might be leaving early. He was going because he figured he had subjected himself to quite enough wall-flowering for one evening.

  By default, they had ended up walking towards their cars together. Maddie had fallen into step right next to him, startling him by looking up at him and saying, “We met earlier. Ty, is it?”

  He gazed down at her with not a small amount of disbelief and answered shortly, “Yeah.”

  “I understand that you do essentially what Rafe does, some sort of hush-hush work for the government.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I just want to thank you.”

  She had done what probably no one else in the world could do with this statement of sentiment. She accomplished what an aggressive show of tanks and machine guns could likely not, she stopped him cold in his tracks. “What?”

  Maddie had stopped too, looking up at him with that beautiful, open face of hers that nearly took his breath away. “Thank me?” he parroted back mindlessly, lost in her eyes and damned annoyed by it.

  “Yes. Although I really have no idea of what you or Rafe do, I know it must be very important to the safety of the country. I’ve seen Rafe come home all broken up and battered, and I know it must not be an easy job. I just wanted to say thank you. I’ve already thanked him.”

  Damned if that little speech didn’t make him feel better than he had in a long time about what he did for a living. “I don’t do that much now,” was all he could come up with as a reply.

  “But still. I know that Rafe considers you one of the best, active duty or not, and I, for one, am glad that you’re on our side.”

  Her clear, apparently heartfelt expression of gratitude as well as her distracting nearness had reduced his normally iron trap mind to mere Jello. If he had been in his right mind, he might have bothered to argue with her, just to draw her out and keep her there so he could drool over her a little longer, however masochistic a pursuit. Instead, he was even more taciturn than usual. He felt silly saying it, but there it was. “You’re welcome.”

  She smiled up at him, and he found himself even further entranced. He’d tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to shake it off by ambling awkwardly off to his own vehicle. He’d wanted that to be the end of it, but her sweet face kept popping into his mind at all odd hours, and finally Ty ended up calling Rafe to get her number, and that was all she wrote.

  Now she was sitting primly on the bed where they’d made love four or five times ravenously last night, meeting him eye for eye, not even thinking of backing down. He couldn’t remember a time when she’d hesitated to meet him toe to too about something she felt strongly about. Luckily for him those times weren’t very often though. In general, Maddie was very easy to get along with, but when she felt it was necessary to stand up for something, she got in his face with the best of them, even when most men would have backed down. At first it had annoyed him a bit that she challenged him, he wasn’t used to it even from men, but it also gave him a warm feeling that she felt comfortable enough with him to do that. She didn’t seem to have a care in the world about the fact that he knew more ways to kill her in one move than probably any man alive.

  Just thinking about her like that, about how she must’ve felt about him, brought him to a full, painful erection. Ty walked back to the bed, dropping his jeans casually along the way. He wouldn’t need them for what they were going to be doing shortly. He never took his eyes off Maddie, though, watching her face grow cloudy with anger at his actions.

  “Stop!” She held up her hand just as he reached the side of the bed, his rampant thickness mere millimeters from her palm, so close it branded her with the heat it radiated.

  Ty was literally aching for her to wrap those soft fingers around him, but he stopped, giving her an intent, quizzical look, hands on his hips in impatience.

  It would never do for her to let him know just how much she itched to reach out and caress him gently, so she snatched her hand back and tucked it under her toweled butt. “I know exactly what’s on your little mind, both of them, and we’re not going to do that.”

  He bent down, his face inches from hers. “Are you sure you don’t want to?” Ty was excruciatingly careful not to touch her, but let her feel his breath on her cheek, just barely nuzzling her neck, blowing the tendrils of baby fine hair around her temples. He could feel the sensual shiver that racked her entire body. She’d never had any defenses against him sexually. He could, and had, done j
ust about everything with and to her, and she’d always been a joyful participant. Come to think of it, the only time she’d ever denied him access to her body, barring when she was sick, was when they’d split up.

  His mouth twisted at the memory that still had the power to wrench his heart.

  Maddie’s nipples were so hard they hurt, plumping out with her ever present need for his touch, but then he’d always had the ability to do this to her, distract her with sex. It was always so damned good between them, and her body retained every mind-blowing ecstatic memory even as she did her best to try to forget them. All he’d ever have to do would be to look in her direction, and she knew she had to guard herself against just that. She could fall into bed with him right now, but then where would they be? Nowhere, as usual, and still miles apart in there beliefs of what it took to make a successful relationship.

  “No.” She said it flatly and with as little emotion as possible. Come to think of it, she sounded just like him, she thought with an almost smile.

  “No?” Ty repeated with a frown. He straightened, his stiffness poking out at her accusatorily without his having to say another word.

  “No.” she said again, quietly but strongly. “And would you please do something with that thing?”

  His comeback was instantaneous. “I’d like to, but you just declined the pleasure.”

  Annoyed at herself and at him, she turned and disrobed a pillow, hanging the case on his natural handle. “There. That’s much better.”

  He growled and turned, removing the cover she’d so thoughtfully provided in favor of his jeans. “Since you’re not interested in a repeat performance of last night, I guess we might as well go.”