by Paula Graves
“We’ll start with water and see how that goes.” He opened the drawer of the sink cabinet and pulled out a clean washcloth. “First, we need to clean your wounds and get them disinfected.”
“Don’t suppose you know a crooked pharmacist we could bribe for some antibiotics?” she asked as he turned on the hot-water tap and let the water soak the washcloth.
“Sadly, no, though I could probably throw a stick in any direction and hit a methamphetamine dealer.”
“We call ’em ‘meth mechanics’ or ‘meth cookers’ around here,” she said, a smile in her voice despite the obvious pain creasing her forehead. “I will say you’ve lost a little of your accent since the last time I saw you.”
“Perish the thought.” He wrung some of the excess water from the washcloth before adding a dollop of antibiotic hand soap to the rag. “Not quite Betadine, but—”
“Ow!” She sucked in a harsh breath, making him feel like a brute.
“Sorry,” he murmured, trying to take it easier on her.
“No, don’t be gentle. The cleaner you get it, the less likely I’ll end up in a hospital on an IV.” She twisted to give him better access to her injury, moaning a little as he washed the ragged edges of the bullet wounds.
“You’re likely to end up hospitalized no matter what I do,” he warned as he rinsed blood from the used washcloth and dug into the drawer for a fresh one. “Why is it that you think there’s no one you can trust?”
Instead of answering his question, she leaned forward, resting her forehead on his shoulder. Her low alto drawl came out weak and strained. “Hold off a second, okay?”
He put his hand on the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her curls. Her skin was hot and damp, and her breath burned against his throat when she turned her head toward him.
“I was so afraid you wouldn’t be here,” she murmured.
“I’m here.” He stroked her hair, fighting against an old familiar ache of longing. McKenna Rigsby had twisted him into knots once, a long time ago, and it had taken years to untangle himself.
“I know you have every reason to be mad at me, Darcy,” she whispered against his collarbone. “I wouldn’t blame you if you tossed me back into the woods to fend for myself.”
“I would never do that.”
She lifted her head, gazing up at him with pain-dark eyes. She lifted one bloodstained hand to his face. “I know. That’s why I came to you.”
He couldn’t stop himself from bending to touch his forehead to hers. Her breath came out in an explosive little whoosh, mingling with his ragged respiration. “You’ll be the death of me yet, Rigsby.”
“I never wanted to hurt you, Darcy. That’s why—” Her words ended on a soft sigh. “I don’t like to need people. You know that.”
All too well. “But you need me now.”
She pulled back, her gaze intense. “I do. I need your help.”
“You have it.”
To his surprise, tears welled in her eyes. She brushed them away with her knuckles. “Ready to give this torture another go?”
He reached for the hot washcloth and the hand soap. “Are you?”
She stripped her sweater over her head, tossing the bloody garment onto the floor, revealing her bra and a holster on her right hip the sweater had hidden. She tugged the holster free and laid it on the counter, the Glock 27 gleaming.
Bending to expose her side to him, she told him, “Finish it.”
He cleaned the wounds a second time, making sure to remove anything that looked like debris from the raw skin. The bleeding had nearly stopped, he saw with relief. If he could get a few pints of water into her, she should recover from the blood loss soon enough.
He washed the blood from his own hands and opened the cabinet over the nearest sink. He had a prepackaged first-aid kit stored there, though he wasn’t sure the maker had planned for a medical emergency that included bullet wounds. There were better kits stocked at The Gates, but he was on paid leave from the agency at the moment. He could hardly sneak in and spirit out supplies without someone taking notice.
Pulling out the best tools available—antiseptic wipes, antibiotic ointment, sterile gauze pads and some surgical tape—he treated and bandaged the wounds as quickly and efficiently as he could. “The sweater is a loss, I fear.”
“Just lend me a T-shirt.” She slanted an amused look at him as she picked up her weapon and holster. “You do own one, don’t you?”
“Several, actually.” He helped her down from the sink counter, trying to ignore the silky heat of her bare skin beneath his fingers. She wobbled a little, and he slipped his arm around her shoulders, keeping her upright as they left the bathroom and headed down the narrow hall to his bedroom.
As he dug in the large chest of drawers in the corner for a clean shirt for her, she eyed his large bed with a hint of dismay. “Not heart-shaped.”
“Sadly, no.” He handed her a black T-shirt and a long-sleeved fleece jacket. “It’ll get cold in the night.”
“Where are you going to sleep?” She eased the T-shirt over her head with a grimace.
“The sofa in my study is comfortable.”
“I should take it.” She swayed a little, her face paler than usual.
He caught her before she collapsed, easing her down to the bed. “Let’s get you under the covers.” He pulled back the blanket and helped her slide between the sheets. Tucking the blanket up around her, he added, “We need to get some fluids back into you. Think you could handle soup or some broth as well as water?”
She caught his hand as he started to rise. “Wait. First, I need to tell you something.” Her voice faltered, and her eyes began to droop again. “There’s a reason you can’t trust anyone. You can’t let anyone know I’m here. Not even someone you trust.”
“What the hell is going on, Rigsby?” He cradled her face between his palms, not liking the flushed heat rising in her cheeks. “Who is after you?”
“I’m not sure exactly,” she admitted, her eyes fluttering to stay open. “But I know it’s someone I work with.”
He frowned. “Someone you work with?”
Her gaze steadied, locking with his. “Whoever shot me was working with someone in the FBI.”
Chapter Two
McKenna could see the wheels in Nick Darcy’s mind turning at turbo speed. Despite his recent clashes with hidebound bureaucracy, she knew there would always be a part of Darcy that tried to play by the rules. He’d grown up in a Foreign Service household, where protocol and diplomacy reigned, and not even the past few months of work as a private security contractor had freed him from those constraints.
“Someone in the FBI?” He dropped his hands away from her face and rose from the bed.
“You say that as if you’d never seen government corruption.” Her whole left side was beginning to ache like a bad tooth, and her throat felt dry and scratchy. “I don’t suppose we could discuss this further over a gallon of water and some ibuprofen?”
“Of course.” He disappeared through the bedroom door as if a horde of rogue FBI agents were after him.
She fell back against the pillows of his bed and stared up at the exposed beams of the ceiling, trying to pretend she didn’t feel like one big bloody wound. She was in a safe place, for now at least, which was a hell of a lot better position than she’d been in just an hour ago.
Only a handful in the FBI knew the dangerous game she’d been playing for the past three months. One of them had put her in the crosshairs of a deadly group of domestic terrorists and given them the go-ahead to pull the trigger. Literally.
But who?
Darcy returned to the bedroom carrying a wicker basket. When he set it on the bed and opened the latch at the top, McKenna saw it was exactly what it looked like—a picnic basket containing a large
bottle of water, a metal thermos and a bottle of ibuprofen tablets.
“I didn’t think you’d want anything heavy, so the soup is just chicken broth. I packed a few crackers in there if you want them.” He set the water bottle on the bedside table next to her. “How long since you last ate?”
She rubbed her gritty eyes. “Yesterday. I had a protein bar around dinnertime, I think.”
He went still, his hand closed around the top of the vacuum flask. His dark eyes slanted to meet hers. “How long have you been running, Rigsby?”
“Two days.”
Slowly, he withdrew the thermos and sleeve of crackers from the basket and set them on the night table beside the water. He picked up the bottle of pain-reliever tablets and set the basket on the floor before he sat down beside her.
“You’ve been running for two days.”
She tried to push up to a sitting position, biting her lip at the hard arc of pain that rushed down her side in response.
Darcy leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her upright until they sat in an approximation of an intimate embrace.
Except, it didn’t feel like an approximation. It felt right. So right.
Darcy’s arms fell away too soon, and he sat back, his eyes fathomless. “What sent you on the run?”
“It’s a really long story.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “One you don’t intend to share with me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Here.” He leaned forward, his chest brushing against her shoulder as he picked up the thermos. As he removed the top, the fragrant steam of hot broth drifted past her nose, igniting a storm of hunger in the pit of her empty stomach. “Eat. Then sleep. We can talk when you’re stronger.”
Watching him pour broth into the cap of the thermos, she sighed. “I will tell you everything I know, Darcy.”
His gaze angled to meet hers. “Yes. You will.”
The firmness of his tone should have irritated her. Instead, it sent a flutter of relief rolling through her, as if she’d finally reached the solid shore after an endless battle with a raging sea.
He gave her the thermos lid that doubled as a mug. “Drink.”
She drank a few swallows of the hot broth, trying not to shiver as warmth spread through her insides and started to warm her chilled bones. Darcy picked up the bottle of ibuprofen, shook out a couple of tablets and handed them to her. “Want the water or can you swallow them down with the broth?”
She took the tablets and washed them down with a couple of gulps of broth. “Thank you.”
“You are safe here, Rigsby. You know that, don’t you?” There was a soft tone to Darcy’s voice that she’d rarely heard in all the time she’d known him. She looked up to find him watching her from beneath a furrowed brow.
“As safe as I am anywhere,” she agreed.
His hand moved toward her, just a few inches, before falling back in his lap. She felt an answering tug low in her belly, a sensation so familiar it made her want to cry.
How long had she been fighting against the pull of him? As long as she’d known him?
The siege in Kaziristan had happened almost eight years ago. She’d been a rookie FBI agent, fresh out of law school and the Academy. Her first overseas assignment had landed her in the middle of a brewing civil uprising, working as an assistant in the FBI Legal Attaché Office in Tablis—the legat, in bureau parlance. The legat’s primary missions in Tablis had been to train the local police forces in counterterrorism strategies and to aid in the investigation of crimes against US citizens, especially embassy personnel.
She’d gotten a quick and brutal lesson in both during her time in Kaziristan. So had Nick Darcy.
“Do you still see people from Tablis?” she asked as she reached for the sleeve of crackers he’d set on the nightstand.
He got there first, pulling open the airtight packaging and holding it out for her to retrieve a couple of crackers. “Sometimes. I ran into Maddox Heller a few years ago in the Caribbean.”
“Wow, that’s a blast from the past.” She nibbled the edge of one of the crackers. “Y’all so shafted him after the siege.”
Darcy’s expression tightened. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“Right. It was all Barton Reid, I guess?” She grimaced. Marine Security Guard Maddox Heller had saved dozens of lives during the siege in Tablis, but the State Department had made him a scapegoat for the security mistakes made at the embassy.
“It wasn’t all Reid’s doing. But he was the instigator, yes.”
“I knew he was a snake. Didn’t shed a tear when I heard he got life for his crimes.” She sipped some more broth. “How was Heller when you saw him?”
“He was living life as a beach bum.”
She winced. “That bad?”
“Beach bum is perhaps an exaggeration.” Darcy’s lips curved, almost forming a smile. “He’d inherited a good deal of money and invested well. But he dressed atrociously, worked questionable jobs and frequented shady establishments, so—”
“The horror.”
His lips tilted farther upward. “He’s married now. Moved back to the States to be with the woman. Has a young daughter.” There was more to Maddox Heller’s story he wasn’t sharing, she saw, but she didn’t push. Another lesson she’d learned from her year in Kaziristan—some secrets needed to remain unspoken. Lives could depend on it.
“Good for him.” She made herself swallow the remaining broth in the thermos cup before she set it on the nightstand next to the flask. “How’s Quinn?”
“Largely unchanged.” A hint of irritation edged his voice.
“He’s the one who put you on administrative leave?”
His gaze snapped to meet hers. “How do you know about that?”
“We’re the FBI. We hear things.”
The annoyed expression that came over his face was so familiar she could barely suppress a smile. “There’s an internal investigation into an information leak.”
“Right. A leak about what?”
He arched an eyebrow. “I’m not the leak.”
She reached across the space between them and put her hand on his arm. His gaze darkened, but he didn’t look away. “I know you’re not.”
He pressed his hand over hers briefly, then moved her hand away and stood. “I’ll leave everything here in case you get thirsty later. Call out if you need me. I’ll be listening.”
“Thank you.” A sense of calm reassurance swamped her suddenly, making tears of relief prick her eyes. She hadn’t been sure, even to the last second before Darcy opened the door, that she’d made the right decision coming here. But now she knew her instincts had been correct.
Nick Darcy might not like her very much these days. He probably didn’t trust her, at least on a personal basis, at all.
But he was still the only person she trusted to have her back in a crisis.
* * *
HE WAS HARBORING a woman with bullet wounds in her side. An FBI agent, to be exact, a woman who now claimed that someone in her own agency had targeted her for murder and nearly succeeded.
“Bloody hell,” he murmured, dropping onto the sofa in his study and sinking into the comfortable cushions, his mind racing a mile a minute.
His first instinct, he realized with some surprise, was to call Alexander Quinn. Only a few years back, his instinct would have been quite the opposite.
The trill of his cell phone sent a jangle of nerves jarring their way up his spine. He grabbed the phone from the nearby desk and shook his head as he saw the name on the display. “What is it, Quinn?”
“I’ve received notice of an APB out for an FBI agent suspected of aiding and abetting a domestic terrorist group.”
Darcy went still. “And you’re telling me
this because?”
“We know her. From Kaziristan.”
There had been only one female FBI agent in the legat in Tablis. “McKenna Rigsby?”
“That’s the one.”
“Aiding and abetting a domestic terrorist group how?”
“The information I received didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.” Quinn’s voice deepened. “She attended that law enforcement conference the Blue Ridge Infantry infiltrated a few months ago. Maybe they had more people on the inside than we realized at the time.”
“And you’re telling me all of this now because?”
“Because the last time anyone saw her, she was crossing Killshadow Road, about a mile from your place.”
Darcy tightened his grip on the phone, his skin prickling with alarm. She was spotted so near? It must have been a recent sighting. Searchers were probably close by.
Would they want to search his place?
“I haven’t seen her since Kaziristan,” he lied. “And I doubt she’d care to see me again, considering how strained our acquaintance had become by the time we parted ways.”
“You never told me what happened.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You will contact me if you spot her?” Quinn asked.
“You’re first on my speed dial.”
If Quinn noticed his reply was hardly an affirmative answer, he didn’t respond. In fact, he said nothing else before he disconnected the call.
Darcy released a pent-up breath and set the phone on the desk as he rose and crossed to the window. Killshadow Road was the only regular road leading into this part of the woods. Gravel and dirt roads branched off the paved road for a stretch of five or six miles, some leading to occupied cabins, while others ended in grown-over plots of land where cabins had once stood.
Back during the boom period for the area, when the Smoky Mountains became a tourist destination for people in the southeastern United States, entrepreneurs had tried to capitalize on the desire for short-term mountain living, and tourist cabins and resorts had begun to dot the landscape for miles just outside the national park’s perimeter. Some of those resorts had thrived, especially those easily accessed from the interstate and major highways.
