“No. Your interrogation and interviews were sealed once the judge decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge you with a crime. I read Rory’s deposition and the investigators’ testimony, as well as Diego’s and Ryan’s. That’s all. No one from ICE reached out to me about you specifically, not even off the record. Sometimes I got the feeling that ICE suspected me of wrongdoing, too. Our whole crew, really. It didn’t make sense logically, and I didn’t have any proof of that until Logan McCaffrey came after me on St. Croix, but I got the feeling more than once during the trial that we were all being looked at as possible coconspirators with Rory, so no, they were pretty tight-lipped.”
He winced, shaking his head. Then he wiped his palms on his thighs and sat back. “My post during the RioBank operation was stationary monitoring of the perimeter of the bank building from the building across the street while you and Diego escorted the asset inside.”
She didn’t remember a lot about that day, but she knew that part from Diego’s and Ryan’s testimony.
“Ryan was stationary lookout in the bank lobby and Rory was mobile perimeter detail in the van. He went off radio less than a minute after you entered the building. After trying to reach him for five minutes, I left my post to go mobile, planning to cover both my and Rory’s zones while I looked for him.”
She seemed to have lost the ability to move her limbs. All she could do was lean against the side of the bed and hold the gaze John directed at her.
He gave a tense shake of his head. “I’d barely taken ten steps from the building I was stationed in when I was grabbed, my mouth taped shut, and dragged into an alley by the three men I mentioned. And they were ready for me. Professionals. I held my own, but they kept me busy. It’s clear to me now that Rory arranged for them to keep me out of the way. Because, right after that, Rory surprised you and Diego up in that bank. It happened so fast. I couldn’t get the tape off in time to warn you over the radio.”
Her mouth went dry. “You heard it happen?”
His mouth screwed up like he’d tasted a bitter lemon. Propping his elbows on his knees, he curled his right hand into a fist and wrapped the other hand over it. “The whole thing. I heard Diego say, ‘What are you doing out of position?’ and then there was the buzz of the stun gun and I could tell by the way Diego roared that he was the one who got stunned.” He winced again and shook his head. “Then I heard the gunshot. And I knew. Before you made that sound you did, I knew it was you he shot because of course that’s what he’d do. He’d take out Diego, then he’d take out you.”
“I made a sound? No one mentioned that to me.”
“It was a gasp like nothing I’ve heard before or since. I had nightmares about that sound for months. Dreams of me getting pummeled in the alley and hearing you get shot.” His voice was strained, his hands pressed together so hard that the veins in his biceps popped. She was struck by the urge to wrap her arms around him to remind him that she was all right now; she’d escaped the terror of that day and made a full recovery.
Instead, she willed her feet to unstick from the ground, shook the lead from her legs and walked to the window to stare at the rain soaked road. “You said you killed the men.”
“At the moment I heard the shot, I was going fist to fist with the guy who seemed to be the ringleader, but hearing what happened to you, I was filled with some kind of supernatural strength—you know how it feels when adrenaline does one of those mega spikes that makes you explode with power—and I almost crushed his face in. When I went for his gun, the other two jumped on me, but I kept repeating in my head...”
His voice trailed off, so she turned, searching his face. “Repeating what?”
He stood and shook out his arms. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I killed the other two men with one of their own guns, then I started running.” The emotion had drained from his voice, leaving his tone flat and cold.
He walked to the window and stood next to her, his eyes on the road. “I caught up with Diego, Ryan and Rory outside the bank. Diego was turning Rory into raw meat with his fists and when he saw me, he commanded Ryan to subdue me. I was so out-of-mind afraid for you that I let him do it. I just wanted him to tell me what happened to you and where you were now. ICE officials took me into custody right there in front of the bank, and, uh, I didn’t see the sky for two months.”
Two months. That was about how long it had taken Alicia to get out of the rehabilitation wing of the hospital. She remembered the night he approached her on the street not long after that as she was coming out of physical therapy. He’d been too thin, but still strong, with desperate eyes that had raked over her body.
“You must have come to see me right after your release.”
“Yes. And you’d already tried and convicted me in your mind.”
She’d still been rife with anger that the charges against him had been dismissed, and seeing him had triggered an avalanche of emotion inside her. Pain of the heartbreak she’d suffered because he’d conspired to kill her, panic of being alone with one of her would-be killers knowing she was still too weak to defend herself should it come to that. Fury because—for a split second on seeing him—her heart had lightened and she’d longed to touch him.
She’d poured the hate, fear and heartbreak into her words to him that night. She winced, recalling all she’d said. He hadn’t lingered long after that. She couldn’t remember his expression, his reaction; she was too caught up in the storm inside herself. She didn’t even remember him speaking. He must have, but the words had ricocheted right off her defenses.
“Unlike the Feds,” he continued. “They couldn’t find any conclusive evidence that I was innocent—not even any bodies in the alley—but they also couldn’t find evidence to support Rory’s claim that I was with him when he met with the mercenaries who hired him to take our unit out or that I’d helped him get into the bank undetected by the rest of our crew. They couldn’t find any because there was none. Because I would never, ever do that. To anyone. Especially not to you.”
Rory had accused John of so much more than that in his official statement, and Alicia had let herself believe it all. How had she reasoned that trusting Rory’s version of the events made her more in control? Whether or not he was right about John, she’d still believed him unequivocally and without proof, in essence letting herself be manipulated. Why had she not been able to see that at the time?
“When I was released from custody, it was made abundantly clear that I was no longer welcome in the United States.” His voice was a raspy monotone, like the effects of his quivering restraint had tightened his throat. “I had to see for myself that you were okay, and after that, the Virgin Islands seemed like a good place to go on a bender. It turned out that they’re also a great place for a man to disappear in.”
She battled against the compassion and tenderness building inside of her for the man her universe had once hinged on. She was on a mission. John was a means to an end. If only it were that simple. But she still had to try to force them back to the job at hand before she got irreversibly swept away in memory and feeling.
“Like Rory,” she said.
He turned to face her, the ice gone from his eyes, replaced by the same fire that burned bright in them when he’d rescued her from Logan’s van. “He’s not going to disappear. We’ll find him. You said at the airport that you wanted me to fight for my good name. This, going after Rory, keeping you from killing him first—” his heated gaze traveled the length of her body in a slow perusal “—torturing myself by being this close to you. This is me fighting with everything I have, at the limit of my endurance and skill, for my good name and my life back.”
Torturing himself being this close to her. He wasn’t the only one who was tortured by it.
She reached out and touched his cheek with her fingertips. He never tore his eyes from hers, that smoldering gaze that threatened to co
nsume her.
“That’s not what I meant. When I wanted to know why you wouldn’t fight.” God, could she say this out loud? Could she be that vulnerable? The thought made her heart race and her head dizzy. But John had been absolutely open with her. He’d exposed everything he’d felt and everything he’d gone through, so the least she could do was share a little of herself with him, even though it terrified her. “I wanted to know why you wouldn’t fight...for me. If you were really innocent, then why didn’t you try to make me understand? You left so fast. You didn’t even give me a chance to process it all.”
He seemed to shake himself awake, blinking, his brows furling.
Then he was in her personal space, pulling her close, making her aware of nothing but him and the flood of testosterone and need rolling off his body. A knot of delicious tension gathered in her belly as he slid a finger along her jaw and around her ear.
His fingers plunged into her hair and brought his forehead to hers. “I need to hear you say it.” She shivered at the sound of the husky pillow-talking tone she remembered well. “Tell me you believe I’m innocent.”
Panic knifed through her, sharp and painful. It was one thing to wonder why he hadn’t fought harder for her to believe him, but it was another to take that extra step. She couldn’t go there. She’d already given more than she thought she could bear. Because there was a slippery slope of exposure and weakness, so much more than she was capable of giving.
It meant acknowledging her loneliness, confessing that she needed John and had missed him so badly that she woke in the middle of the night aching, she wanted him so far beyond what was healthy for her—or him. He deserved so much more than being the lover of a black market assassin and one of America’s newest Most Wanted.
Closing her eyes, she brushed her lips against his. “It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
His hand tightened around her waist, in her hair. The knot of tension in her belly morphed into white-hot lust, battling hard for supremacy over her fear. She’d lived like a monk since being shot, her sole focus on transforming herself, body and mind, into a fighting machine. No sex—not even self-pleasure. Like she did with her loneliness and anger, she harnessed all her base needs and sexual frustrations and transformed them into power and purpose. And after a while, she’d realized that the sexual part of her soul was dead. Gone with that single shot of Rory’s gun.
But if that was true, then why did she feel so weak with John’s hard body pressing into her, raw virility radiating from every inch of him? Why couldn’t she transform the urge to bring his skilled lips to hers into something productive and functional?
There isn’t another man in the world who knows you like I do, who makes you feel the way I do.
He was right, damn it.
He backed his face up. She tore her gaze from his lips and met his iron stare. “Of course it matters.” The pillow-talk silkiness of his previous words was gone, but the growl remained. “Phoenix, I need you—”
Seizing a handful of his T-shirt at the collar, she pulled his lips to hers—to shut him up and end that slippery slope of a conversation...and because she couldn’t help it. She needed so badly to be kissed, touched. She needed John and his wicked lips and tongue and body. She’d been so lonely without him. So empty, alone with her pain. How was it that only now she was realizing that revenge was a cold, cruel bedmate?
He tensed, bringing her tighter against him with the movement, his hands clamping onto her backside, his chest pressing her upper body against the window. She groaned, wantonly, but she couldn’t help it. The feel and taste of him were too much and not enough all at the same time, leaving her dizzy and overwhelmed—and recklessly aroused. She wrapped a leg around his thigh and he took over from there. Grabbing her behind her knee, he ground his hips between her legs and stroked his tongue into her mouth with a low, deep guttural sound that told her he’d been starving for her the same as she had for him.
With sure, steady fingers, she unfastened the top two buttons of her shirt. When he noticed, he broke the kiss, pushed her hands out of the way and ripped her shirt open, spilling buttons over the floor.
Breathing hard, he molded his palms to her breasts and pressed his lips to her scar, kissing it as if it was a thing of beauty, a pleasure point. It lit up the scar’s sensitive nerve endings in a way that was—shockingly, unexpectedly—euphoric. She had no idea it could feel that way, as that part of her had never been touched in any way other than clinical or as a symbol of her vengeance. She arched forward, holding his head to her chest while his hands mapped her breasts with slow, reverent movements.
“Do you believe I’m innocent? I need to hear you say it.”
But she didn’t want to go there right now. She didn’t want to talk at all, because talking meant admitting she’d been wrong. It meant handing over even more power to him beyond her current blazing lust, beyond needing him to find Rory and evade Logan. Lust that demanded she let him take her hard and fast against the wall like he had during their last time together on the balcony of her condo in Panama while the rest of their black ops unit members slept inside.
She dropped her hand to the button fly of his jeans and peeled the buttons open one by one until his cotton-clothed erection pushed into her hand. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
He lifted his head and gaped at her, his nostrils flared. He pushed his hips forward, thrusting into her hand. This time, it was he who kissed her, aggressive and deep, demanding her surrender. She gave it to him—at least, everything she had to give. Not her power. She’d never surrender that to anyone again. But her body, her heart, her loyalty from this day forward, she gave it all to him.
He gathered her tighter against him, sliding his hands from her breasts around her ribs to her back, kissing her so ravenously that she had no more room to worry about her fears and fantasies. There was only room for John and the way he made her feel.
Then, with a startling abruptness, he released her body and mouth and pushed away from the window, away from her caressing hand. His shoulders hunched; his lips contorted into a scowl as he refastened his pants and drilled her with a fierce look. “It might not matter to you, but it matters to me. You matter to me. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”
He spun away and strode to the bed, where he picked up his gun, checked the magazine and chamber, then stuffed the gun in the back of his waistband. “I’m going to check the perimeter. Stay here. I won’t be long.” He stared at his bag and, after a moment’s hesitation, pulled out a white T-shirt, which he tossed to her.
Speechless, her mouth still open and dewy from his kiss, she held the shirt in front of her chest and watched the play of his shoulder blades as he left.
Chapter 10
By the time John returned to the room less than an hour later, Alicia had followed the wisdom of her idol, Elizabeth Taylor, and had poured herself a drink, put some lipstick on and pulled herself together.
The white T-shirt he’d intended for her to wear smelled like him, so much so that she’d buried her nose in the fabric and had taken a moment to imagine what the two of them would have been doing right then if she hadn’t panicked. But she had panicked and she’d been unable to tell John the one thing he wanted to hear—what she now knew, in her heart, to be true. She put the shirt on and eyed the scattered buttons on the floor. If she had the time later, she’d sew them back on, but for now she had work to do and a quarry to catch.
While her computer warmed up, she’d reapplied her favorite red lipstick and just that simple act made her feel more grounded. She found mini bottles of alcohol in John’s bag, which she hadn’t been able to keep herself from taking a look inside. She’d forgotten that he’d cleaned out the minibar in the last hotel, but was grateful for the accidental discovery because she was famished and in need of some liquid courage. She popped the top on a can of mixed nuts,
emptied a mini vodka into one of the glasses she found on the bathroom counter and returned to the bed to snoop through the bag.
There wasn’t anything remarkable inside it that didn’t make sense for a warrior to carry: cash and IDs, spare ammo, guns, grenades, a compass, rations and all kinds of other survival kit odds and ends. If she’d been hoping to find a tattered photograph of her, like a corny movie cliché, she would’ve been disappointed.
With a fond smile, she picked up the only personal effect in the bag: a copy of Michael Jackson’s Bad album—John’s talisman and good-luck charm. That album was the sound track of her life for the two years they’d worked together in black ops. He’d played it every time he drove and in every hotel they stayed at. Sometimes, he sang along or broke out in dance.
Her heart ached, thinking of the ice in his eyes, the hardness he exuded now. He said he didn’t dance anymore. She believed it. And she knew, without a doubt, that she’d had a hand in destroying the man he’d been. Because of Rory.
She held the cool plastic of the CD to her chest and let anger toward Rory wash away her regrets. He was going to pay. Not only for what he did to her, but what he did to John, too. She set the CD on the bed. Maybe she’d put it on later tonight during the long hours of internet surveillance and let her mind wander back to old times when their black ops crew was together and happy.
After a halfhearted attempt to put his bag aright, she set up her computer and tapped into the Wi-Fi of the restaurant next door, then got busy hacking into the St. Croix police department network to see if they’d yet discovered that Rory had left their island.
Before she’d barely cracked through the police network’s security, John returned with a plastic bag filled with what looked and smelled like curry takeout. His attention zeroed in on his bag on the bed, then her. “You’re still here.”
He sounded genuinely surprised. As if he’d expected her to take his bag and disappear, which she supposed would have been a viable option, if, one, it had ever entered her mind, and two, if she had no integrity at all. But they’d made a deal to be business partners, a deal she’d insisted upon, and after giving herself over to the mercy of his kiss and touch, she knew now that she still cared about him the same way he professed to caring about her, as much as that terrified her to admit.
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