Her mouth went dry. She knew she should look away, but… She'd never seen such an impressive-looking man. He wasn't much more than a shadowy impression of ropy muscles and wide shoulders, but he made her mouth go dry.
Just a man, she told herself. How many men's bodies had she seen? Seldom any as well-cared-for as his. Certainly none that took her breath away.
Her gaze finally roamed over his face, and she wished so much for just a bit more light. So she could see his expression more clearly. What she could see left her with the impression of a very stern frown and a steely jaw. Or irritation and maybe impatience and maybe anger still. Not that she could blame him.
"I…" She had no idea what to say. "I'm sorry."
He didn't move a muscle, seemed every bit as stern and imposing as before. Finally, he said, "We need to warm you up, Grace."
She nodded. She felt cold to the bone. Residual effects of the drugs that probably still weren't entirely out of her system, maybe of the head injury and dehydration, too, which made it hard for the body to regulate its temperature.
He sat down with his back against his supply pack, legs extended in front of him, feet on the floor, knees up at an angle, thighs open, and motioned for her to sit down in front of him. She did. His hand came around her waist, pulling her against him until her back was flush against his chest. She felt the heat of his thighs closing around hers. Even her cold toes were tucked between his warm feet.
He spread her blanket over them both. One of his big hands stayed around her waist, holding her firmly to him, a broad, warm band at her midsection. His other hand pushed her head back against his shoulder. She turned her head, her face and her cold nose pressed against his warm neck.
Grace sighed, thinking this was the best spot she'd been in in years, enveloped in warmth, held fast against him. His body was hard in all the right places, and he was still warm, even after getting drenched with her.
"Do you ever get cold?" she asked.
"Not often."
"But you do?" Basic physiology aside, she found it very hard to believe.
"I told you, I'm just a man, Grace. All human beings get cold from time to time."
"Tell me. About the coldest you've ever been."
He took a breath. She could feel his chest rise and fall with it, felt warm air passing over her forehead as he exhaled. "Bosnia," he said finally.
She nodded. It had been a cold, desolate place. No power. No heating oil. Absolutely nothing left to burn for heat, either, in the time she'd been there.
"What were you doing there?" she said.
"Did a stint with the UN peacekeeping force, and got into a little trouble with my plane."
So, he was a pilot? That certainly didn't surprise her. He had the ego for it. The nerve.
"I had to ditch," he said. "It wasn't the smoothest forced landing I ever made. Screwed up my knee in the process and ended up hiding in the woods for about thirty-six hours. In November."
Grace shuddered. Thirty-six hours, while injured, with whatever provisions he could scrounge out of a downed plane, in Bosnia in November?
"You're lucky you survived that little adventure."
"That's what they told me."
She laughed a bit, because he said it as if the whole thing had been no big deal. As if he'd hardly broke a sweat while hiding and waiting for thirty-six hours to see if he was rescued or killed.
"And I'm supposed to be reckless?" she asked.
"Calculated risk, Grace. I'm a damned good pilot. It was a great plane. A mission not without risks, but carefully planned and necessary. We flew a lot of missions there, most all of them without incident."
"I've never been hurt on the job," she bragged.
"Not yet."
"And I don't have a death wish," she insisted.
"Really?"
"Really. Think about it… Sean? Is that really your name?"
"Yes."
"Sean," she said, "think about it. I'm a doctor. I have access to all sorts of drugs, and I know how to use them. If I really wanted to die, I could. Quickly and painlessly. Any time I wanted."
"Maybe you don't want to die," he conceded. "But I'm not convinced you really want to live, either."
"That's not true," she insisted.
"You go to the most dangerous spots of all."
"So do you."
"I go where I'm sent," he said.
"So do I."
"You volunteer."
"And you don't?"
"I don't get into the field much these days. I've done my time, and I won't lie to you, I miss it at times. But I've bucked the odds long enough. I let the kids who are twenty years younger handle things, and I boss 'em around."
"You can't keep up with the twenty-somethings? I don't believe that for a minute." He could keep up with anyone.
"It's time to let someone else do the job, Grace."
"Why?"
"What are you afraid of?" he asked. "Sitting still? Too much time to think? Too much time to figure out what's really going on inside your head? Why you've been running all these years?"
"I'm not running from anything."
"Give it up, Grace. You've been running for twenty years."
Twenty? She froze. It had been twenty years. The anniversary was coming up.
"I know," he said. "I know all about what happened to your family. And you can't run from it anymore, Grace. I won't let you. I don't want to make it any harder on you, and I don't want to hurt you. But this is a conversation you should have had years ago. If you're not going to talk about it with anyone else, it's going to have to be me."
Grace let the silence stretch painfully between them. He waited her out, damn him. He had more patience than any man she'd ever met, more stubbornness, it seemed.
Finally, she said, "You couldn't possibly know."
"James Evans Porter. Teacher, historian, writer, world traveler, lay minister, outspoken peace activist. Nobel prize winner. Your father."
Grace shuddered, and his arms held her more firmly.
"Anne Wright Porter, nurse, missionary, world traveler, lay minister herself, your mother. John Evans Porter, your older brother, showing all the signs of following in your father's footsteps. All wiped out by a terrorist bomb when you were eleven," he said softly. "I know, Grace. It'll soon be twenty years. I think it's time for you to start living again."
She closed her eyes, wishing that was enough to block out his voice, to stop the words. It wasn't.
Grace didn't move, scarcely seemed to breathe. There was pain in the pit of her stomach. A hot, hard ball of it that seemed to expand with every passing second, filling her entire abdominal cavity. Heat and pain. Rushing over her, overtaking her. Spreading all the way to her fingertips and toes. It hurt so badly. She thought she might have slid to the floor in a dead faint, if not for his strong arms around her, his body cradling hers.
She had no energy, no way to even move, no will. And her tears started in earnest again. Hot, angry, useless team.
He shifted her in his arms, drew her against his chest, her face tucked into the spot at his shoulder against his neck, below his whisker-roughened jaw. She thought it might be the best spot in the entire world. Hot, smooth skin and strong, gentle arms. His hand pressed her face against him and stroked her hair, and he was everywhere. Everything she touched was him. He'd done just what she'd wanted earlier. Enveloped her body in his, in the heat and strength.
"Don't you ever talk about them?" he asked.
"No," she said miserably.
"You can't bury it inside of you forever, sweetheart. Pretending they never existed won't make it go away."
"Nothing makes it go away."
"I know."
"You don't," she argued.
"I don't know as much as you do about pain and loss. But I lost one of my brothers in the Gulf War. I think about him every day. Even now."
"I don't think about them. I don't let myself."
"No, you just let it sit there inside
you like a poison. Eating away at you."
"Dammit, Sean, if I need a shrink, I know where to find one."
"I don't think you need a shrink as much as you need a life," he argued. "Don't you ever let anyone get close to you, sweetheart? Isn't there anyone who's really important to you? Anyone you can trust and depend on?"
"That is the last thing I need."
"Grace, I know how capable you are. How strong. How stubborn. How brave. But even you need someone—"
"I don't want anyone."
"Because you're scared. Because you think it's all going to blow up in a puff of smoke someday."
"Don't," she said tightly. Because she remembered the smoke, the blast. The heat, the noise. The blood, the terror.
"Oh, baby. I am so sorry. If I could bring them back for you—"
"You can't. No one can. Nothing can change it. But I don't have to talk about it, dammit. I can bury it inside, if that's what I want."
"Until it eats you alive? Until it ruins your life? Until you might as well have died with them yourself? Is that what you want, Grace?"
"I don't know."
"It is. God, that's what scares me the most. I'm afraid that's exactly what you want."
And maybe it was. Maybe it was.
She buried her head against his chest and cried some more, pain racking her, cutting her to shreds. She wept miserably, weakly, until her throat was raw and she could barely lift her head.
"Why couldn't I have gone with them?" she said finally, her face buried against his neck. "We would have been together. Whereever we ended up, we'd have been together."
"And they left you all alone."
So wretchedly alone. She would never have believed it possible for anyone to be so absolutely alone. Her family had been her whole world. They'd always been together. Everywhere.
Wherever her parents went, they'd taken her and her brother. There were pictures of Grace as a baby, strapped in a sling across her mother's chest, somewhere in China. Pictures of her and John in crude classrooms all over the world where her father taught them along with all the other children in all the villages they visited.
Her parents had been so open, so loving, so welcoming, drawing people to them wherever they went. Always surrounded by a crowd, but always, too, the four of them together. They'd been so tight, so strong together. Capable of doing anything, her father always said. People could do anything they set their minds to.
Grace liked to think she'd done all she could, that he would have been proud of her. She'd carried on, buried her identity right from the start because she'd been a very reluctant celebrity then. The sole survivor of the blast that killed her family. She'd been just inside the entrance to the building when it blew up. Someone had grabbed her and gotten her out, and someone had snapped a photo of it. Smoke billowing behind them, fire eating away at everything, Grace limp and scared, her face blackened and bleeding, in her, rescuer's arms. She'd been on the cover of every major daily newspaper in the world. The press had followed every aspect of her recovery, sung her father's praises, mourned him, buried him, and she'd been in that awful glare in the media spotlight as it happened.
Anonymity had sounded very good to her after that. She'd taken her father's mother's maiden name and gone to boarding school in an obscure corner of England after the bombing, and she'd never said a word to anyone about what she'd gone through. She'd finished her education early and gone straight into medical school, volunteering with the IRC even then.
It had been a bit like coming home. As close as she'd been able to come to home – being in the field, doing the kind of work her parents had done. It had challenged her, given her a purpose when she desperately needed one. She would have said it filled her life, but he seemed so sure it hadn't.
"I miss them so much," she whispered. God, even now. So much she could hardly breathe when she thought of them.
Her father had just gotten word that he would be given the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway in December when, two months before, they'd gone to an international peace conference in Rome, where he was scheduled to deliver the keynote address to leaders from all over the world.
They'd all just arrived. He was checking out the hall where he was to speak when terrorists blew it up with him and her mother and brother inside. Grace had run into an old friend, a little girl whose father had been a friend of her father's for years. They'd stopped for a few minutes to catch up with each other, outside in the sunshine, and barely missed getting killed themselves.
Grace could be sick just thinking about it, even now. The noise. The smoke. The heat. The screams.
"I know you miss them," Sean said. "But I can't believe they'd want you to live this way, Grace."
"I'm doing the best I can," she protested. What did he want from her, anyway? She had a job, a very difficult, challenging job. What else did a woman need?
"After twenty years, Grace, I think they'd want you to be happy."
"I…" Oh, hell. She'd started to argue that she was happy. "Tell it to the rest of the world, sweetheart. Not me. I don't buy it."
So she simply lay there miserably against him. Cried out, it seemed. Exhausted. Drained. So very tired.
"I'm doing the best I can," she said again.
"Well then, we'll just have to find a way for you to do better. You're going to have to trust me a little bit. Listen to me. Let me help."
Grace sighed, thinking that as much as she hated him for saying all these things, he had helped. He soothed with the touch of his hands and his mouth, moving softly down the side of her face, kissing her tears away. He took that bone-deep coldness away. When he held her, she wasn't afraid. In fact, with him she felt more alive than she had in years. Twenty, maybe.
And she couldn't stand it, couldn't let it go on. After all, there was safety in being alone, in depending on no one but herself. She'd never, ever disappointed herself. She could never leave herself all alone. She'd found a way to live her life, and maybe it wasn't the kind of life other people had or the kind he thought she should have. But who the hell was he to tell her what she needed, anyway?
"I don't want anyone to help me," she said.
She felt the smile on his lips, which were somewhere very near her cheek. "Why not?"
"I don't."
"And I don't know how to walk away from this, Grace. I don't think I can anymore. Not until I know you're okay."
"Why?" she said. They'd done enough digging into her, and he hadn't told her anything but his name. "Why do you even care?"
She put her hands against his chest, trying very hard to ignore the way it felt beneath her palms, and pushed against him, enough to put nearly a foot between them. Even this close, the light was so faint, she could scarcely see.
He was still very much her mystery man, the one who came to her in the dark and never showed his face in the light. The picture was hardly any clearer now than it ever had been.
"Why?" she asked. "Give me that at least."
He frowned. She gave in to the urge to confirm that for herself by tracing the flat line of his full, soft lips with her fingertips. She felt the disconcerting heat all around her, coming off his body in waves, was aware all the more of the way they were still pressed together in all those interesting places, the way she was still lying against him. She eased back, until her breasts were pressed against his chest. She felt the change in his slow, even breathing, felt the way his heartbeat kicked up, as well.
His jaw was intriguingly rough, his breath warm against her lips, and already it seemed she was addicted to him in so many ways.
She didn't want to feel this way. Didn't want to need him. But wanting him the way she did – in a purely sexual way – while disconcerting, was something she could handle, she thought.
Could it be just about that? Pure sexual need? Everyone had that instinctive need. At least, that's what she'd been taught in school. She'd dismissed it without much thought at all, having more important things to worry about. Until now. Now she'd b
een forced into close quarters with an absolutely magnificent, sexually charged man.
She inched closer, her mouth instinctively seeking his. He swore softly and didn't so much as budge. He wasn't going to help her with this.
But she thought she was definitely onto something. He wanted her to live, to feel. Well she felt alive now, and she thought maybe this was the one thing that could burn all those awful memories from her mind. The ones he'd dredged up and dragged out into the open and demanded she deal with.
She didn't want to feel anything to do with her family, her past, but dammit, she could feel this. He owed her, as she saw it.
Take it away, she thought, pressing her lips against his. Take it all away.
* * *
Chapter 8
« ^ »
Sean had never fought such a battle to deny himself anything he truly wanted, and he very seldom lost any kind of battle at all. But this one … he was lost.
He had a woman he'd only dreamed about for so long in his arms. Had so much of her smooth, soft, bare skin plastered against his, her mouth no more than an inch from his, and he might have managed to do nothing but try to console her and warm her with his body. He might have.
But when she put her hand against the side of his face and traced the pad of her finger across his lips, his body reacted with a jolt of pure, sexual need. Her soft, sweet mouth came down on his. She opened herself completely to him, her arms coming around him, tugging his head down to hers.
She was so soft, so delicate, her shoulders and hips so narrow. He knew if he wasn't very careful, he could hurt her without meaning to, and he would never, ever hurt her. He wouldn't let himself.
"Aah, Grace," he groaned.
Her breasts were driving him insane. Those pretty, rounded mounds, encased in his shirt that she was wearing, pressing against his bare chest. And she had the longest legs, the kind he wanted to grab and wrap around his waist while he thrust into her. Outside against the tree … as scared as he'd been, as angry, he'd still wanted her. Right there. Just like that.
She didn't have a thing on except the shirt, and he'd been fighting for what seemed like forever not to slip his hand beneath the hem and tunnel up. To find the smooth globes of her breasts and take them into his palm. Tease at her nipple. Cover it with his mouth. Stroke it with his tongue. Bury his face in that sweet spot between them and then suck greedily, one after another. He could let his hands roam over her back, her belly, her hips, between her thighs. There was nothing in his way except one thin cotton shirt.
HER SECRET GUARDIAN Page 9
