by Edie Harris
Chandler’s heart sank. The urge to shout a warning to them lodged like a knot in her throat, but there was nothing for it. They were better off with the slimmest of chances at surprise than to alert everyone at the same moment.
Except... No no no. Worry mounted as she saw Freya take position barely three feet from the Priest. It should be Dare—sturdier Dare with his martial arts training and aggressive reflexes—taking point on the enforcer, leaving the old woman and skinny Cameron for Freya’s slim strength. This was bad. This was—
Without a word, Kuznetsov whipped around, grabbed the barrel of Freya’s gun and tore it from her hand. His huge paw shackled her wrist and yanked her forward, off-balance, catching her neck in the crook of his elbow. The muzzle of the gun pressed to the redhead’s temple with fatal intent.
Tobias made as if to move, but Chandler put a restraining hand on his arm, blocking out Dare’s angry shouts and Pippa’s squeak of fear. Adrenaline pulsed in her veins, and she felt her lips pull in an utterly out-of-place, gleeful grin. “Calm down, Cheekbones.” Flipping up the back hem of her maid-of-honor gown, she reached under and behind with one arm...and pulled free the assault rifle she’d pinched from the armory this morning. Checking the clip, she propped it against her shoulder and aimed straight at the Priest’s head. “I got this.”
Tobias stepped out of her eyeline, the darling man. “I don’t even want to know where you were keeping that.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Yes, I do.”
Yup, her awful smile wasn’t going anywhere. “Let her go, Rolan,” she demanded pleasantly, somehow managing to tamp down the fear the enforcer inspired in her. “You know I don’t miss a shot unless I want to.”
For the first time since his greeting, he spoke, that dead gaze of his boring into her with chilling intensity. “Take your shot, koshka,” he said in strongly accented English, his voice low and resonant enough to fill a cathedral, and a chill slithered down her spine. “Your bullets will not touch me.”
It wasn’t faith so much as arrogance, and it set her teeth on edge, dispelling the chill as her own arrogance came stampeding forth. “In about five seconds, your forehead will be begging to disagree.”
“Enough!” Victoria shrieked, surprising them into momentary stillness. The feathers on her hat trembled with the force of her exclamations. “Let go of the girl, you big brute, and shoot the Faraday, like we agreed!”
Shoot the Faraday? The Faraday? But Chandler didn’t have time to process because Kuznetsov was following the viscountess’s command and shoving Freya aside as he aimed the gun at Tobias, just as the sky opened and rain began to pour in torrential sheets.
Everyone exploded into motion at once. Dare dove for Freya. Keir grabbed Pippa around the waist. Cameron attempted to run and tripped on the slippery grass. Victoria squawked like an outraged goose. And Chandler...
Chandler bodychecked Tobias to the side and, during the heartbeat it took for Kuznetsov to re-aim, shot the Priest in the chest.
Wheezing, she watched in shock as Kuznetsov dropped like a tree, flat on his back as the rain pounded down. “We have to run,” she gasped, her gown completely plastered to her body in the space of ten seconds. “We have to run now.” She didn’t dare check to see if the Priest was dead or alive; if she didn’t have a target on her back before, she definitely had one now, either way.
Whipping around, Chandler took in the unforgettable sight of a completely drenched Pippa in her elegant wedding dress, her pale hair wet and straggling around her face with Keir’s heavy tattooed forearm banded about her tiny waist, staring at Chandler through the pouring rain as though she’d sprouted horns.
Chandler’s heart seized, but there simply wasn’t time to undo the damage caused by seeing her twin shoot a man in cold blood. Forgive me, she mouthed before quashing the ache in her chest. “Quinn, I need you to take her to my flat in London and keep her there until I call.” A quick glance at Freya and Dare showed they had the situation with the Noltes handled; the viscountess’s and her son’s hands were both in zip ties.
Keeping her gaze studiously away from the mass of black robes lying motionless next to a hedge, Chandler whirled to face Tobias, who stood watching her with a sharp edge in his stormcloud eyes she couldn’t interpret.
Instead of trying to, she tossed him the assault rifle, which he caught deftly in one hand. Taking a fortifying breath, she tilted her head toward the garage. “Run with me?”
His smile, shocking in its brilliance and rarity, was all the answer she needed.
Chapter Twelve
Chandler reached the driver’s side door of his S-Class first and slid in, the key fob in the cupholder making it simple to thumb the push-button start and rev the Mercedes’s beautifully purring engine. Rifle in hand, Tobias climbed into the passenger seat and listened to the car hum against the downpour. “Where are we running to, Chandler?”
Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel, droplets of moisture beading along the exposed skin of her forearms, and she shifted the vehicle into Drive. “Far, far away.” Tires sped over limestone gravel. “When Rolan doesn’t check in with his master, others will come.”
Tobias didn’t like the way she said his name. Rolan. Intimate but not sensual, speaking to a nightmare’s worth of knowledge. His jaw tensed. “Will they be looking for you?”
“They already are.” The iron gates of the estate flashed by as she turned the car north. “Do you speak any Russian?”
“Nemnogo.” A little bit. Enough to handle business dealings but certainly not casual conversation, his vocabulary and pronunciation both limited. “Kuznetsov said something to you.”
“He called me ‘kitten.’”
Tobias worked, struggled, to keep his voice neutral. “I take it that carries some meaning for you?” With careful hands, he removed the magazine from the rifle and flipped the safety on before settling the weapon in the backseat.
Chandler’s swallow was audible in the confined space. “He knew I was there before he laid eyes on me, I could tell. I just want to know how.”
“I had Adam run detailed searches on the numbers from Nolte’s burner phone.” Dozens of calls had been made to Moscow over the course of several months, judging by the phone log, but only one in the week since Chandler had arrived—after he and Chandler had left the armory on Thursday. The timing didn’t match up; the Priest had already been on the grounds by that point. “I doubt Cameron’s behind the Polnoch’ Pulya knowing your whereabouts.”
“That’s almost worse.” A shiver wracked her.
Immediately, Tobias cranked up the heat, warm air blasting them from the vents. Tugging loose his bow tie, he unbuttoned his constricting wet shirt to his clavicle and openly studied Chandler as she navigated the roads circumventing the heart of Wolverhampton.
Her dress, before it had gotten soaked through, had floated around her body like a fairy dream in shades of lilac silk. Fluttering cap sleeves and shallow V-neck were modest, as was the hemline that carried the full skirt to midcalf, but though the gown was simple, Tobias had been entranced by how lovingly the delicate fabric hugged her subtle curves. The bodice cut in tight at her waist and made his hands ache to span the surprising smallness there and up her rib cage to the ever-so-slight roundness of her breasts pushing at the neckline. The upper body she covered up in flowy blouses and chunky sweaters was suddenly revealed to be astoundingly, exquisitely feminine.
Turned dark by the rain, her honeyed hair remained upswept in a high ponytail, the ends dripping still with water. Every time a droplet hit her skin, she shivered. Without thought, he reached over, fisted the heavy tail and wrung the remaining rainwater from the thick strands. Coldness coursed over his squeezing fingers, until it didn’t, and then he slowly returned his hand to his thigh. On his side of the car. Damn it. “Better?”
Again s
he shivered, but with it came a look of sincere gratitude. “Thank you, Toby.” Her nickname for him burrowed beneath his skin, but it no longer annoyed. Instead, those two soft syllables that, to her, constituted his identity resonated like the vibrations of a cathedral bell within his bones.
A day earlier, before her confession to her sister, before her nightmares, he might have tried to deny the foreign sense of recognition her words, her voice, instilled in him. But what was the point? He desired her, fiercely, body and mind. It went beyond temptation and straight into gut-wrenching need, a need that threatened to leave him sweaty and shaking the second he lost grip on his control.
So he would maintain his grip, even if it killed him. No matter that he’d toed the line with her over the course of the week, first with the kiss by the fountain, then in the alcove and again for those too-brief moments in the armory, and definitely when he’d had his fingers deep in her tight channel, stroking her to completion; if he acted on his need with Chandler, he would very clearly be taking advantage of her.
He was her captor. Her jailer. Her keeper, as she termed it. Therefore, she was in his keeping, and he refused to betray any tentative trust or deny her feeling of safety—and he did hope she felt safe under his watchful eye—by thrusting actual, full-blown sex into the mix. No matter what he longed for every time he closed his eyes, and opened them again to see her at his side.
As if sensing his inner turmoil, her probing gaze flicked to his before returning to the road ahead. “So.”
“So.”
“Maybe you ought to have paid them the fifty million, after all?”
He chuckled at her cheeky tone. “Perhaps you’re right.” As warmth from the heated seats seeped through the chill of their clothing, Tobias tore his attention from Chandler’s pale face, processing all that had happened in the west garden that morning. “Would’ve prevented that embarrassing ‘kill the Faraday’ crap, right?”
“Indeed.”
He wanted to touch her, and his hands fisted on his knees as he fought the urge. “What are you running from, Chandler?” he asked again, quietly, no longer familiar with the countryside through which they drove. “Where are you taking us?”
“Nowhere. Anywhere.” A shuddering exhalation escaped her, and she shifted in her seat. “I killed the Priest.”
Tobias said nothing, sensing her need to purge herself of the emotions roiling in her compact frame. Again, he struggled against the instinct to touch, to soothe with a hand on her shoulder or neck, fingertips digging into her scalp, but he couldn’t act on instincts he barely understood.
Her voice, when she spoke, trembled. “During my military service, I killed people. Enemy combatants and the like. But I never killed a civilian until I went to Russia. It was the first thing they made me do—my first test, so to speak. There was a woman who’d sold secrets to a rival bratva faction, and Nash had been torturing her for hours.” Chandler’s throat grew thick around the words. “Her name was Yuliya. She was a prostitute, and she looked exactly like the women Reggie had chosen—a thin peroxide blonde. They had me come to an abandoned shipbuilding warehouse near the south river port, handed me a butcher knife and told me to...to do what was in my blood.”
The beast inside rattled its cage, and not only at the sound of Nash’s name. Reaching out, he settled a hand at her nape, his palm warm against her clammy skin. Visible goose bumps raced over her skin, chased by a vivid pink flush. Pride welled within him as the animal settled, mollified for the moment now that he was touching her.
“After Yuliya was Afya, and Dima, and Grigoriy. They were brought to my flat over the course of several months, gifts I was supposed to indulge in. An offering for my predilections, yeah? I swear, every week I snuck away to phone Colleen, and every week she told me, ‘The lone soldier can never retreat.’ But, Toby—” she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, not that she noticed “—I wanted to retreat. I knew Nash was sick and obsessed with the high Moscow gave him, with all those people he could hurt piled six feet high outside his door each day, but I believed he could handle our mission for the Polnoch’ Pulya without me. I could barely remember why I was there in the first place, until I finally reached my breaking point and was hours away from going AWOL.”
“And did you?” His voice sounded scratchy to his ears.
“No. Because Nash came to my flat and said ‘we’ had a way out, and that Beth Faraday was it. I don’t know how he chose her, or if it was even him, I swear.” She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. “Except he didn’t want out, and all I knew about Beth was that Agent Vick had been in love with her for as long as I’d been at MI6. So...I retreated and prayed I never needed to return to that hell.”
Without warning, Chandler took the car off the main road and onto an unpaved cart path—or so it seemed—peering past the rhythmic swipe of the wipers over the windshield. “I knew it was around here somewhere,” she murmured.
Before he could ask what it was, he saw it. A square two-story house with cheerful light streaming from every window, cutting through the dreary daylight like a beacon guiding them home. Painted shutters open against the clapboard siding, a fenced-in front yard with riotous greenery clinging to the property line, ancient trees that no doubt provided fantastic shade on a sunny afternoon—and a sign with buttery yellow lettering. “The Lupine Bed & Breakfast?” he read as she parked the car on a patch of grass beneath one towering tree.
“We need to get dry and warm, and my guess is that we’d both be better off if we stole a few hours of sleep. Please.” Lifting his hand from the back of her neck, she held it clasped between both of hers. “Please give me a few hours to get my courage back, so I don’t just tell you to bugger off and handle Moscow on your own.”
His heart lurched against his rib cage, hard enough to make his stomach clench and his breath catch, so he simply nodded and reached for the door handle, noting how her shoulders slumped in relief when he’d acquiesced.
Rounding the car, Tobias popped the trunk and pulled out their bags, looking up from slamming the trunk shut to find Chandler staring at him in surprise. “How do you have our stuff?”
“I packed everything from our suite this morning.” Hefting her suitcase in one hand, his overnight bag across his shoulder and matching luggage in the other hand, he herded her through the quaint garden gate and up the front walk of pebbled pavers, wanting to get her out of the now-drizzling rain and into the beckoning warmth of the house. “I’d assumed we would leave immediately following the reception, if not the ceremony.” The wedding hadn’t quite gone as planned, to say the least, but at least they were in possession of their belongings.
At least they were alive. Anger coiled as he remembered her bumping him aside as he stared down the barrel of the Priest’s gun, placing herself in the line of fire. No, it was more than that—she’d saved him. Her actions had been quick, decisive and dangerous, giving him a glimpse of the soldier she had once been—and the spy she’d become—brave and daring, and perhaps slightly crazy.
She could dry off. She could sleep. She could even partake of a belated breakfast. But then—oh, then—they would have words; on that, Tobias refused to negotiate.
The front door opened to reveal a plump woman in her fifties wearing the most welcoming of smiles. “Well, aren’t you a fancy lot! And drowned to the bone.” The woman hustled them into a wood-paneled foyer, directing Tobias to settle their bags on a rug near the foot of a curving stair. “I’m Miranda. Welcome to the Lupine! I take it you poor dears need a room for the night?”
“Please.” Tobias reached for the wallet in the jacket pocket of his damp tux. “And if there’s any chance we could get a meal, too, that would be wonderful.”
Bustling behind a spindle-legged escritoire that obviously served as a check-in desk, Miranda opened a leather-bound accounting book and put pen to paper. “Of course. You’re the only ones
here at the moment, besides myself and my wife, Ella. May I take your names?”
Minutes later, Tobias had traded pound notes for a physical key to room 4, with a promise that “two cottage pies and two cuppas” would be on a tray outside their door in approximately an hour. He and Chandler were now standing in their still-wet wedding clothes on either side of a large sleigh bed, staring bemusedly at the lace-topped ivory quilt. “I didn’t think to ask for two rooms,” he said quietly, frowning at the frilly pillow shams.
“I didn’t think to protest the one.”
Humor colored her tone, causing him to glance up and catch her whiskey gaze drinking him in. “Chandler?”
“I’m freezing.” Abruptly, she turned her back on him, her hand fluttering near the zipper hiding within the purple silk. “Help me escape this wet rag, Toby.” Her head angled forward, tilted so that it seemed she nearly peered at him over her shoulder, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, though her eyes remained downcast.
His entire body hardened.
No. No. The care and keeping of Chandler McCallister did not, in fact, require that his dick stand up and salute every time she murmured his name—her name for him. Still, he found himself saying, as if from a great distance, “Let me go get some towels. Don’t move.” Then, again, pausing as he strode toward the minuscule attached bath, “Don’t move.”
Her breath hitched, but she didn’t speak and, thank God, didn’t move.
Two fluffy pink towels in hand, Tobias stripped off his sodden jacket, coming to a halt mere inches from Chandler. Tucking the towels beneath one arm, his hands hovered over the delicate zipper resting atop the faint bumps of her spine. Not breathing.
That was interesting. Why wasn’t he breathing?
Because she was waiting. For him. For him to do...something.
Inhaling deeply, he drew the zipper down in one smooth motion. The panels of lavender silk parted beneath his careful fingers—careful in that he didn’t dare touch her lovely skin—and she shrugged, efficient movements of her strong shoulders that sent the sopping garment to the floor.
