Blamed

by Edie Harris

  Beth sat back on her heels and vomited, violently, into the dirt.

  Chapter Five

  So this is what a panic attack feels like. Lungs constricted, head dizzy, eyes wide and unblinking. With the Beretta in a death grip against her chest, Beth tried to slow her thundering pulse.

  Tried, and failed. “Who are you?” she whispered, the sudden wash of memory nearly causing her to pass out where she sat. He wasn’t—But he couldn’t be. She would have known if Preston Barnes was...was her spy.

  No, her spy was dead. Fire and stone had rained down on him, buried his body and snuffed out his vibrant life force, as it had all those little girls.

  Nausea roiled, as it always did when she thought of the bloody afternoon in Kabul one year earlier. That was the day when Beth had ceased to think of herself as someone with a “special skill set” and instead as a murderer. It didn’t matter that Rawad al-Fariq had been the one with explosives strapped to his torso—Beth had failed to take him out before he entered the building, and in so failing, had caused the deaths of twenty-three people, most of whom were innocents.

  It was a failure you didn’t come back from. Beth certainly hadn’t, though in the months following her resignation from the family business, she’d managed to construct a wall in her mind. Behind the wall were locked filing cabinets, filled with mental printouts of all her misdeeds, failures and crimes.

  She’d needed to wrap chains around the cabinet labeled “Kabul.”

  But so long as she didn’t peer inward, peeking at that wall, she could function in her daily life. So long as she didn’t consider how freaking unfair it was, that she had received a second chance she most certainly hadn’t earned.

  Which was why she was so determined not to fuck this new life up. When she and Gavin had arrived at the primary Faraday compound outside Boston, Beth had immediately sought out her younger brother, Adam. The ride from Afghanistan had given her plenty of time to think about her future, and she’d known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her future no longer involved killing.

  “Baby bro.” Beth had barely managed the breezy greeting as she strode into Adam’s lair. “How up-to-date is my cover identity?”

  Adam Faraday had swiveled in his tricked-out desk chair, running a lazy hand through dark hair about a month overdue for a trim. “That’s how you greet me? You haven’t stopped by the Cave in weeks.” He pouted as his light gray eyes darted around his office space, taking in the various monitor feeds mounted on the admittedly cave-like walls of his subterranean workspace. “If you’re not careful, Imma start thinking you don’t like me.”

  Crossing her arms, Beth had reined in her anxious impatience, content to banter with the only Faraday sibling younger than her. Less than two years her junior, Adam was brilliant, handsome and full of the easy charm only the baby of the family could feasibly get away with. “I’ll have you know, I swung by four days ago, before my assignment, but you weren’t here. Your assistant said you were...occupied.” An arched eyebrow. “Let me guess—Jennifer.”

  Adam had grinned, his smug smile nothing but blinding white teeth. “No.”

  “Hmm. Jessica?”

  “Nope.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t hook up with Jane again.”

  “Of course not. Bitches be crazy, yo.” Linking his fingers behind his head, he’d rocked back in his chair and waited a beat. “Jared.”

  At that, Beth had laughed and offered her brother a fist bump. “Dude, he’s totally hot.”

  “I know, right?” Adam’s expression had turned serious. “So why’re you wondering about your cover? Something happen?”

  The sudden knot in her throat had taken her by surprise. “Yeah. Something happened.” Then her jaw had clamped shut, and she’d been unable to say more.

  Instantly, Adam had jumped from his seat, rounding the desk to wrap his arms around her in a comforting, brotherly hug—exactly what she’d needed but been unable to ask Gavin for. Because Gavin, though a damn fine Faraday employee and a loyal friend, wasn’t family, and family always came first. “Anything you need, Bethie,” Adam had murmured against her temple, hand rubbing up and down her spine in an effort to soothe. “You don’t need to go through Pops. I’ve got your back.”

  And he had. Man, had Adam ever come through for her that night. In less than an hour, just as Beth had been ready to blow the Faraday Industries popsicle stand and hit the road for a motel that didn’t require ID at check-in, her little brother had updated her fake résumé, printed off a new driver’s license, changed the expiration on her cover passport, set up two separate bank accounts and a Roth IRA, negotiated the purchase of a silver Volkswagen Jetta from a dealership in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs, and booked her a train to the Midwest. By the time she’d arrived at Union Station, Adam had lined her up a job interview with the Art Institute’s head curator, who’d been desperate to fill a maternity-leave spot.

  That had been one year ago, and in that year, Beth had never looked back. Sure, her parents had visited, but only once, a week after she’d purchased the third-floor condo. Casey had arrived soon after to set up security to his specifications. Tobias and Beth weren’t close, hadn’t been for years, so it was no surprise that her thirty-two-year-old attorney brother had stayed away, but Gillian’s absence had stung. Granted, her older sister was basically under lock and key at Faraday’s weapons engineering facility in San Diego, and her FBI watchdog, Agent Theo Rochon, was unlikely to think a jaunt to the Windy City was worth the risk to Gillian’s safety.

  When you guarded a woman infamous the world over for being able to construct weapons of mass destruction out of scraps found in the average American two-car garage, you didn’t tend to take vacays. Not even to hit a housewarming hosted by said woman’s sister.

  Beth’s knuckles started to ache with how tightly she gripped her gun. Oh, right, panic attack. “Your name isn’t Preston Barnes.”

  “No, thank fuck, because doesn’t he sound like a twat?”

  Part of her wanted to laugh, but she knew the abrasive, abrupt noise would make her appear...unsteady. Unbalanced. It was a show of weakness she refused to reveal to this man, a man who was quickly turning into something of a nemesis. Beth had plenty of demons already; she didn’t need another nemesis in her life. “I already told you I’m not in the mood for smartassery tonight.” A quick exhalation, and she forced herself to step away from the edge of panic and relax her grip on the gun. “So let’s try this again. Who are you?” When he opened his mouth, she shifted her aim to his shoulder. “Full disclosure, if I think you’re lying, I’m going to shoot you. So I’d urge you to attempt honesty.”

  He appeared to process her statement with a sobriety she appreciated, blue eyes flicking over her face in open study. “Your brother knows me as Wendell Martin,” he said slowly, gaze never leaving hers, gauging her reaction.

  Lucky him, she reacted. “Which brother?”

  “Which brother is less likely to piss you off?”

  “Casey.”

  “All right. Casey, then.”

  She glared at him. “Is it actually Casey who thinks you’re this Martin person, or is it Tobias?”

  His palms flattened against the tabletop, but there was nothing acutely threatening in the move. It felt more like a reminder—that this man may have taken a bullet tonight, but he was still battle-ready. “I’ve worked with both Tobias and Casey as Wendell Martin, and I’m certain even Adam would recognize the name if it popped up on his computer screen.”

  Her thumb toyed with her gun’s safety. “Not sure I like how familiar you are with my family.” Yes, the Faradays were famous the world over, with roughly two hundred and fifty years of recorded history in the business of war and violence. But the one thousand individuals who comprised Faraday Industries in its current incarnation were kept conspicuously anonymous—thanks
in no small part to her brother Adam’s wizardry with information security. “We’ve only collaborated with MI6 once in the past decade, and that was in—”

  “Colombia, four years ago.” When she arched a brow, he shrugged carefully. “Yes, I was there.”

  “So was I.” And she didn’t recognize him. It would be hard to miss those piercing icy-blue irises, the sturdy breadth of his shoulders. This man took up space and dared you to call him on it.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  Her thumb hovered over the safety. “Did we...did we meet?” Four years ago, Casey had recruited her and Gavin, to aid in a joint-venture rescue mission in the wooded region outside of Medellín. Two CIA operatives and a British intelligence officer had been taken hostage by a high-ranking leader in Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia organization...but instead of ransoming the hostages, the FARC leader, Felipe Marin Donado—better known as “Pipe” among international counterterrorism forces—had decided to indulge in some creative message-sending.

  As in, he’d started overnighting bits and pieces of the hostages to their respective governments.

  It had been a power play, with no demands made by FARC, no ultimatums, and that, ultimately, had been what had scared the CIA and MI6 into hiring an extraction team. Faraday was the obvious choice, Casey the most decisive team leader they could have asked for, and in the end, the three hostages were returned home alive.

  Alive, but not necessarily well. Beth and Gavin had embraced their role as snipers, and when Pipe had come storming into Beth’s sightline, it had taken all of her willpower and every last tattered scrap of her morality not to do the world a service and end that monster. But there was a line she had long ago learned not to cross, the line that said she wasn’t the decider when it came to who lived and who died. Beth only killed on order, and Casey had very clearly stated that Pipe was not to be killed. Not that day, anyway.

  Aside from Casey, Gavin, Beth and four other trusted Faraday employees, the CIA and MI6 had both furnished the extraction team with two agents apiece. Beth thought back to the two British agents. One had been a short, athletic blonde not much older than herself but with a deadly gleam in her sharp gaze, the other a nondescript man of medium height, probably in his late thirties or early forties.

  Neither had been the man sitting at her table. “I remember the agents with us on that mission. I don’t remember you.”

  Something in the way he watched her caused her face to heat. “No, you likely don’t.” Again, his hands flexed in front of him, long fingers stretching, reaching, yet not moving toward her at all. “I was the hostage.”

  A heavy beat of silence passed as she stared at him, a tingle starting at the top of her spine and slowly creeping its way down. “You were the hostage,” she repeated, uncaring how stupid she sounded, parroting his brusque words. She scanned his face, his chest. No visible signs of permanent trauma. “But...but parts of the hostages were missing. Parts.”

  His smile was as quick as it was surprising. “For me, it was a toe, a few molars. I was collateral damage, for the most part. Pipe was far more interested in making a statement to the Americans than he was to my government, so I was mostly ignored.” He shifted in the chair, and she saw a wince cross his starkly handsome features. “Technically, you and I never spoke down there.”

  Technically, no, they hadn’t conversed. But she remembered the tall, too-thin man Casey had pulled out of that hut in the forest, beaten to a pulp, eyes swollen, lips broken and bleeding. No way she would recognize the man in front of her as the rescued MI6 agent from the mission in Colombia. But he wasn’t completely correct. “I talked to you on the plane.” He’d been unconscious, his battered body covered in a utility blanket as he rested on a cot in the hold of the transport jet, hooked up to a saline drip. “Your people had left you alone to check in with their boss, and I thought you looked...” Abandoned. Forgotten. Neglected.

  Would he have ever escaped that sweltering hell if Pipe hadn’t also taken two Americans? Something in her chest had tightened at him lying there alone, no one caring for him or fussing over him, not like was being done with the two rescued CIA agents. Beth had knelt next to his cot, checked his drip and adjusted his blanket higher over his lacerated chest. And then she’d told him that it would be all right, that he was safe now. That the nightmare was over.

  “I heard you. I just couldn’t respond.” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, his voice was a soft rumble against her senses. “Thank you for caring for me.”

  Swallowing past the heavy knot in her throat, Beth nodded and, in a show of faith, carefully set the Beretta in front of her. This must be what had drawn her over the past months—the knowledge, however faint, of her senses recognizing his. She mirrored his pose, hands flat on the tabletop. “So that’s when you met Casey.”

  “Owing someone your life is one means of forging a friendship,” he quipped, tone bland. “We got together for drinks a few months later, when he was in London. I got the feeling he wanted to make certain I was still in one piece.”

  Beth felt her lips quirk in a fond smile. “Casey’s a bit of a mother hen. He saved you, so now you’re one of his chicks.”

  “There is nothing about that analogy which appeals to me.”

  She couldn’t help the unladylike snort-giggle that escaped her at his grumpy scowl, but she quickly sobered. “You said my brothers ‘know you’ as Wendell Martin. Except that’s not your real name.”

  “I haven’t told a civilian my real name in fifteen years.”

  “But you’re going to tell me.”

  “I think I will, yes.” His gaze assessed her, a healthy pink flushing his neck, the tips of his ears. “Vick. Raleigh Vick.”

  Bond. James Bond. “So I should call you...?”

  “Vick, please.”

  “Then Vick it is.” Why was her chest clenching tight, her breathing suddenly ragged? There had been an echo in his voice when he told her his name, a layer of something familiar couched within the foreign shape of his syllables, and it plucked painfully at the threads holding together her damaged heart. Recognition tickled the back of her brain. “I know you,” she whispered, uncertain. “I know you, but...but I don’t see someone I know in your face.”

  “Being crushed in a pile of rubble tends to give a man a good excuse to pretty himself up.”

  Her mind blanked. Rubble. Crushed. “Wh-what are you saying?”

  “I need you to know me, love, and it’s killing me that you don’t.” For the first time, his hands moved. One fingertip touched the aristocratically straight bridge of his nose. “This was the easiest to fix. Followed by these.” He bared his teeth, tapping the front two. Then he rubbed his cheek to the left of his mouth. “One of my surgeons was nothing less than an artist, as you can see.” His hand scrubbed over the back of his neck. “Five months in and out of rehab centers for my leg and away from the desert sun brought back my typical English paleness. And I hated being saddled with desk duty, so I spent every spare moment in the gym, once my doctor gave the go-ahead.” Big shoulders lifted in a jerky shrug. “I finally had the opportunity to bulk up some, since I wasn’t busy chasing you across the globe year after year.”

  She was crying. She knew she was crying, hot tears tracking over her cheeks, but hell if she cared. Her lower lip trembled as she forced herself to look at him—really look at him—for the umpteenth time that night. The nose was different, as were his teeth, and his coloring, and yes, his face was heavier and more mature, the old scar nearly invisible thanks to the work of an obviously talented plastic surgeon, and his body seemed somehow more...solid. Yes, solid. And wasn’t that amazing? That he was here in one piece.

  That she hadn’t killed him in Kabul. Her spy.

  “I didn’t see you. After,” she babbled, giddy and terrified all at once as she pressed the heels of her
palms into her eyes in order to block out his image and prevent more tears from falling. “There was the fire and dust, and Gavin...Gavin said we had to go, like now, and I didn’t see you. I didn’t see you, I didn’t see—” A sob high in her throat cut her off. Oh, God. “I’m s-so sorry.”

  “Beth. Beautiful girl. Get in my arms.”

  Her name in his low, rumbling voice was too much. She launched herself across the expanse of her dining table, jerking at the last minute to avoid digging her knee into his wounded side, and landed haphazardly in his lap, legs dangling on either side of his.

  He held her like...like.... Oh, hell, like she was precious. One arm banded around her waist as his other hand speared into the hair above her nape to cup the back of her skull with a tender possessiveness that shook her to her bones. His bare chest through the open panel of his dress shirt was a firm pressure against her breasts, an intimate crush.

  The chair wobbled briefly as she clung to him, burying her face in his neck, and oh, he smelled amazing. Like winter and warm blankets and manly soap and utter aliveness, and she was still crying—probably looking like nothing so much as a blotchy snot monster, because Lord knew, Beth Faraday was not a pretty crier—but it didn’t matter. Looping her arms tight around his neck, she whispered brokenly, “You’re alive,” unable to keep from nuzzling the hot skin of his throat, stealing his scent into her greedy lungs. “I’m so happy you’re alive.”

  “Of course I’m alive,” he rasped in his wonderful British accent—his real accent—as he squeezed her closer, though the movement must have painfully jostled his injury. “You promised me a ‘next time’ in Cyprus, remember? I wasn’t going to take you up on it in bloody Afghanistan, of all places.”

  Beth laughed, a watery sound, and pulled away enough to rake her gaze over his very-much-not-dead face, unable to keep from beaming at him. “You’re alive, and I know who you are, finally. I know you, Raleigh Vick.” It was the best thing to happen to her in over a year.