by Edie Harris
And she didn’t have a fucking clue.
He laughed the second the saline hit the wound—not because it was funny, but because it was laugh or cry, and crying was absolutely not an option around her. Her touch remained gentle as she irrigated him, wiping away the excess fluid and blood streaming down over his hip and staining the waist of his trousers. More gauze patted him dry, followed by a breathable adhesive bandage, and then she was moving away from him, gathering the trash and tools and making quick work of the cleanup.
Slipping his arms back into his sleeves, he kept the shirt unbuttoned over his chest and propped his elbows on the table. His eyes slid closed as he rested his forehead on his clasped hands and listened to Beth move about the kitchen: the zip of the case, the snap of latex gloves being yanked off, water in the sink, a cabinet opening and swinging shut. A quiet clink sounded next to him, and he opened his eyes to see that she’d set a glass of water and four white pills near his elbow. Grunting his thanks, he tossed back the painkillers and drained the water.
When he finally glanced up, he found her sitting across the table from him, body language casual and Beretta pointed directly at his chest. “Ah. I see. I forgot to say thank you.”
“Har har, funny guy.”
His lips twitched, but his voice was appropriately serious as he said, “Thank you, sincerely.” Performing surgery on oneself was, generally speaking, heinous, and regardless of how this evening turned out—judging by the gun pointed at him, it might still require him to bleed—he was thankful she had relieved him of that particular burden.
Beth inclined her head, but her mercurial eyes remained hard. “Do I even want to know how you ended up in the bathtub?”
“Probably not.” The shooter had caught him by surprise, the fiery bullet punching him in the gut as he stumbled back from the table, struggling to retrieve his Ruger from the briefcase. For a moment, his mind had blanked, forgetting who he was and why he was being shot at, and he’d given chase without thought, grappling with the intruder all the way into the bedroom. One solid punch had sent him sprawling into the bathtub, however, and, dazedly, he’d stayed down, bleeding and dizzy.
He supposed he should consider himself lucky he hadn’t received another round in his head and two in his chest for his troubles.
“You gonna tell me who you work for?” She stroked a finger along the barrel of her gun, almost absentmindedly, he thought, unable to tear his gaze from that slender digit with its nail painted a deep fire-engine red. Fingernail polish and firearms—two things he always associated with this woman.
Schooling his expression, he responded, “I’m unemployed,” spreading his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture.
“No, you’re a smart-ass. I don’t think I’m in the mood for smart-assery this evening.” That stroking finger never ceased its slow back-and-forth over her weapon.
“Oh?” He couldn’t seem to help the way his voice lowered, roughened. “What are you in the mood for, then?” His hand itched to cover hers atop the gun, to feel the contrast between cool metal and warm skin. The latex gloves had stolen that small, heated intimacy from him, with a cruelty only he realized.
Because only he remembered how it had been between them, once upon a time. Him and Beth, year after year, clashing and coming together until circumstance demanded they part.
Six months. He’d lived across the street from her for six months, and in all that time, she hadn’t recognized him. It didn’t matter that he knew he looked different now—in coloring, features and build, he was undeniably different. And yet undeniably him.
It gouged him a little deeper with every breath that she couldn’t see him when he smiled at her in the Starbucks line. He lived for those mornings, once or twice per week, when he risked following her closely enough to stand behind her in line and catch the cinnamon-and-vanilla scent of her hair as she ordered her tall soy latte.
Her gaze narrowed on him. “I’m in the mood to know why you’re still here, since you disobeyed what I’m assuming were direct orders. Why were you in your flat tonight, Barnes?”
Again, he gritted his teeth against that stupid, bloody name. “I was going to leave town.” It would have been so easy to get in the car he had stashed in long-term parking at one of Chicago’s poorer hospitals, slide into a new persona, and drive for Canada. Or maybe Mexico.
“So why didn’t you?”
It might have been his imagination, but he’d swear he heard a faint tremor in her voice, her smooth whiskey voice that still carried a hint of Boston in its depths. So he answered her honestly. “I stayed...to protect you.”
A pretty, pretty pink rose in her cheeks. “You want to protect me. From the kill order your employer placed on me.”
“Former employer.” He couldn’t stress that enough. Fifteen years of covert service to his country, sacrificing any chance of personal happiness for the so-called greater good, down the proverbial drain with a single, two-word text. For her.
If he’d blinked, he would have missed the gun trembling in her hand before she steadied it. “Why?”
“Why what?”
The fine line of her jaw moved as her teeth clenched. “Why now? Why the hit now?” She rushed on before he could respond. “I’m going to hazard a guess you’re CIA, given your talent at blending in and the fact that you haven’t tried flashing some sort of badge at me. You’ve been watching me for months, so you know, you know, that I’m not in the life anymore. I haven’t taken a single job in a year, and I have zero intention of working for the family business ever again. So why now? You have to know that, in doing this, the Agency will lose every single Faraday resource you’ve got—and that’s a helluva lot of resources. Gillian and Adam and Casey, they will all be gone, whether you succeed in killing me or not.” Beth shook her head, a confused frown knitting her smooth forehead. “This makes no sense. So I want to know why.”
It was the most she’d said to him since—Well, since before, and it made the wound in his side throb. She was pleading with him, whether she knew it or not, which was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Beth Faraday did not plead. Not with him, not with anyone. She was the strongest person, man or woman, he’d met in all his thirty-seven years, and he would be damned before he listened to her beg when he knew she could—should—simply take.
He let his careful American accent drop. “I’m not CIA, Beth.”
For the second time that night, he watched all color drain from her lovely face, and instead of keeping her gun on him, she clutched it to her chest, as a small child might cling to a teddy bear.
The sight gut-punched him.
“Oh, God,” she whispered brokenly. “Kabul.”
“Kabul,” he agreed somberly. He remembered, because he’d been there in Afghanistan, same as her. If only she would remember him.
“You’re MI6.” The shock in her voice was a quiet slap.
“Nothing quite like a vengeful queen, love.” Leaning back in his chair, Raleigh Vick linked his fingers over his flat stomach and arched a knowing eyebrow. “The spooks are out to get you.”
Chapter Four
Kabul, Afghanistan
One year earlier
Oh, these games we play. Beth smiled wryly as the crosshairs of her scope framed him beautifully from six hundred yards away, unable to prevent the melty little sigh that escaped her.
Not that she’d ever admit to sighing over him, whoever he was this time around. Her brows knit in a scowl as she studied him, loathing the desert sun for the way it burnished him bronze—and loathing him for looking like a god in its glow.
How long had it been since Cyprus? Nine months, twelve days, and... Well, the hours and minutes didn’t matter anymore, because here he was. Granted, six hundred yards away and completely unaware of Beth lying belly-down on a hill in the outskirts of deadly Kabul, but
still—here.
Her pulse picked up its pace as she remembered the last time she’d seen him, nine months, twelve days and twenty-two hours ago. Yes, twenty-two. A girl didn’t easily forget the last time a pair of broad-palmed, callused hands had stroked her to orgasm. At least, not when those hands belonged to him.
He stood on a dusty street corner under an awning, talking animatedly with a keffiyeh-wearing man who appeared decidedly upset. Her attention focused on the hands she could still feel like a brand on the tender skin of her belly, her inner thighs. He gestured easily, attempting to calm his companion, clearly speaking the other man’s language with enviable fluency. She stared at his moving lips through her scope, unconsciously wetting her own as she caught a glimpse of the gap between his front teeth.
And there was her confirmation, dental and undeniable. Different as always, and yet the same, despite the change to his coloring and clothing.
His hair was shaved down to a close buzz, appearing to be some shade of brown; in Cyprus, he’d been a sun-streaked, shaggy blonde, all surfer chic as his cover had demanded. She couldn’t see his brows behind the large aviator sunglasses he wore, but as he turned his head, she caught a glimpse of his other identifiable marker—the scar cutting across his jaw to the left of his mouth, earned years ago during an incident in Serbia.
Coincidentally, Beth had been underneath him during said incident.
Again, she focused on him, unwilling to lose this opportunity to drink him in, even from a distance. Below his aviators, his nose took a jagged turn to the right, a bump from being broken long years before she had first met him. The angled planes of his face were more gaunt than usual, his darkly tanned skin pulled taut over a visage that seized her chest with its very dearness. Not handsome, of course, because he was too battered and bruised from his years of spying to have stayed pretty, but no face except his had the ability to make her stomach flutter and her breath catch like this.
She wanted to trace the line of his nose, kiss his scar, lick the small gap in his teeth. She wanted to know him, this man who’d chased her across the globe for ten years, whom she had chased in turn. The real him.
As she watched through her scope, he nodded to the Afghani man with a reassuring smile and pulled the pale blue scarf at his neck up over his nose. His rangy body moved with lithe grace down the street, away from the awninged building under which he’d been talking with the man, his broad shoulders squared as the sunlight fully blasted him with its heavy rays. The dust and dirt of the dangerous street swirled around his ankles, whipping against the tanned leather of his military-issue boots. Cargo pants the color of coffee grounds clung to leanly muscled thighs, and the white tee beneath his structured sand-hued jacket appeared to have been lacquered on.
Another sigh escaped as the comm in her ear crackled. Gavin Bok’s voice, a low murmur. “Target incoming. Black SUV, tinted windows. Looks like five occupants total—two in front, three in back.”
“Okey-dokey.”
“Copy that, Beth. You’re supposed to respond with copy that.” Her partner made a grumbling noise. “Remind me again why I got babysitting detail.”
A running joke between those in the upper ranks of Faraday Industries hierarchy. Beth was accustomed to being teased about her age, having worked for the company since the tender age of sixteen as the youngest-known contract assassin on current record. Lucky for Gavin, her longtime field partner and the best friend she had, she was in a magnanimous mood today—likely due to having unexpectedly seen her favorite spy on the ground—so she let the kidding slide. “Because your other option was going with Casey to Venezuela, and, let’s face it, your Spanish is abysmal.”
“Funny, I don’t recall having any problems communicating the last time I was in South America.”
Beth snorted. “Oh, is ‘communicating’ the new word for ‘sex with the floozy café waitress’? I must have missed the memo.”
Gavin’s good-natured chuckle filtered through the earpiece. “Ah, Marisol. She was so very good at...communicating.”
She made a face. “Gross. I don’t want to hear about your love life any more than I want to hear about Casey’s.”
“No lovin’, just livin’, sweetheart,” he drawled in his syrupy Georgia accent. “Now, what’s the correct response when I give you a status update?”
“Copy that,” she mumbled, but she was smiling as she tracked the progress of the black SUV carrying her target down the road, watching as it braked in front of the same three-story building where her spy had conversed just moments ago.
“It took three years, but I knew you were trainable.”
“You can’t see it right now, but I’m giving you the bird.” Beth swallowed, throat parched from the unforgiving heat of the midday sun, and depressed a small button to digitally display the time inside her scope. “Ninety seconds.”
Gavin was all business with his murmured, “Copy that, B.”
Clicking her sightline the barest of degrees to her right, she waited for the target to step out of the vehicle. Her mark, Rawad al-Fariq, had scheduled a meeting on the top floor of the building with Karlin Kedrov, a noted Russian arms dealer suspected of having some less-than-sterling ties to both the British and French covert intelligence services. Rumors had swirled for years about Kedrov’s nasty habit of taking and turning Western spies, but nothing on record.
The purpose of the meeting, according to the info Beth’s hacker brother Adam had gathered, was to arrange the shipment of weaponized biochemical explosives from a transport station in Peshawar, over the Pakistani border and safely into Jalalabad. From there, the explosives would be dispersed among various Al-Qaida terror cells, and the United States government—who’d contracted Faraday for this hit in the first place—would be royally fucked.
And how. Rawad al-Fariq was believed to be the second-in-command to Aariz Javed, a man so scary even Beth would hesitate if the order ever came through to take him out. Because if you failed with Aariz Javed, and he caught you...well, you were pretty much guaranteed to never be heard from again.
Ignoring the unease gathering at the nape of her neck, she took a moment to adjust the light scarf she wore over the lower half of her face. The rear door to the SUV opened, and out came two guards in forest-green camo carrying assault rifles, followed swiftly by al-Fariq. He was heavier than he’d appeared in the grainy black-and-white picture in his file, his dishdasha oversized to accommodate his thick torso. He didn’t glance at his surroundings as the guards covered him, preventing her from taking the shot, and she swore under her breath as he disappeared into the building. The SUV with its remaining two passengers sped away as soon as al-Fariq and his contingent cleared the door.
“B?” Gavin, his tone concerned.
“Too quick. I’ll get him on the third-floor landing. Has Kedrov moved in the room?”
“Nope. Heat signature says he hasn’t left the couch along the north wall of the unit since he arrived twenty minutes ago.”
“Right. Okay.” Adjusting the rifle sight on the busted stairwell window, she disengaged the safety and settled into the slow, familiar deep-breathing she’d learned early on in her training. Her finger curled around the trigger.
A flash of reflected light crossed the path of her scope. Lifting her head, she squinted into the distance and saw it again. One flash, then two—a signal of some sort.
She peered through her scope again, clocking al-Fariq’s progress. “Great, now he’s moving slow as fuck up those stairs,” she muttered.
“B, you seeing this?” Gavin asked, voice grim.
“I see it.” Gritting her teeth, Beth shifted her sightline until she caught another flash of light and immediately zoomed in...on none other than the man she shouldn’t have had to think about today. In his hand, he held what appeared to be a coin.
She adjusted the sight once more, zooming i
n further. The shiniest British pound she’d ever seen in her life glared back at her, the face of a disapproving Queen Elizabeth clearly defined on its gleaming surface.
Beth knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that he was signaling her. “Shit.”
She swung her scope back to the building, to the landing visible through the broken window, to Rawad al-Fariq’s broad white-draped back. Maybe it was the increased magnification from her zoom that showed what hadn’t been obvious before, but there, beneath the terrorist’s long tunic, was the faint outline of explosive charges belted around his middle. Quickly decreasing the zoom, her breathing no longer controlled, she saw the detonator gripped in his hand, his thumb hovering over the depressor...and noticed that his guards were marching him into the third-floor flat, like a prisoner being led to execution with their guns pointed at his back.
“Bomb,” she snapped at Gavin, and took the shot.
For a few silent moments, she thought she’d succeeded. Gavin’s voice sounded in her ear, but she couldn’t make out the words over the pumping of her blood as she swung her scope toward her spy.
He was running hell for leather toward the building. Shouting—Beth could see he was shouting because he’d yanked down his scarf, but the sound didn’t carry to where she lay hundreds of yards away.
That was when she saw the children.
Little girls. Ten...fifteen...eighteen middle-school-aged girls, veiled and smiling. Happy smiles, just like his, but he wasn’t smiling now. He was yelling and his face, his lovely bruiser’s face, it was terrified, and Beth started to shake. The girls congregated in the open doorway beneath the ground-floor awning, staring around in concern as he raced to them, arms waving.
Between one second and the next, the building exploded in a symphony of orange and black, with white fire at its heart. The boom traveled across the distance to echo in her ears as eighteen little girls, four terrorists and one brave, stupid man with hands that had loved her so very well disappeared into the rubble.
