by Paula Graves
“No kidding.”
He poured Betadine onto a cotton ball and pressed it to the entry wound, eliciting a soft hiss from her lips. “Sorry.”
“Don’t dally.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He applied the antiseptic liberally to both wounds and the skin surrounding them. “Do you stay in touch with anyone from the Tablis legat?”
“No.” She grimaced as he dabbed the excess Betadine with a clean cloth. “I don’t think many of us wanted reminders.”
“Is that why you never answered my calls?”
Her gaze flicked up to meet his. “Mostly.”
“Mostly?” He applied aloe vera gel to the wounds, taking care to be gentle.
“My reasons for not responding to your calls were complicated.”
“Meaning, you were still furious at me but didn’t want to have to admit it?” He tried to keep his tone light, but the words he uttered stung, even coming from his own lips. “You clearly haven’t forgiven me for what happened to Michael Cameron.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t forgiven myself.”
“For listening to me?”
“For not figuring out a way to get to him before the fire did.” A hard shudder rippled through her body. “They drummed it into us, over and over—know the layout. Know where the exits are, where the escape routes lie. And I should have known the place better, figured out another way to get to him—”
He wiped his hands on a towel. “There was no other way, Rigsby.”
McKenna shook her head. “There had to be.”
“There wasn’t. If there had been, I’d have taken a chance on trying to get him out of there.” He put his hands on her upper arms, forcing her to look at him again. “I did have the layout memorized. Completely. Backward and forward. The problem was, the wall took a direct hit. It blocked any outlet entirely. It would have taken heavy equipment to dig Cameron out, sweetheart. But there wasn’t enough time.”
She bent forward, and for a moment, he thought she was about to lose consciousness. But she pressed her forehead against his, lifting her hands to cradle his face. “Promise me that’s the truth?”
He closed his hands over hers. “I promise.”
She pulled back, gently tugging her hands away. Leaning sideways, she pulled her T-shirt hem up again. “Let’s get this over with.”
He bandaged her wounds as quickly as he could and put the excess supplies back into the first-aid kit. He pulled out a packet of ibuprofen and ripped it open. “Need more water?”
She looked at the empty bottle of water she’d set beside her on the bed. “I guess I need to get more fluids in me.”
“You’ll feel better if you do,” he assured her, pulling a second bottle of water from the backpack and opening it for her. “Take these ibuprofen. It will relieve your pain and bring down your fever.”
She took the tablets, washing them down with a long swig of water. “Be honest, Darcy. How badly infected are my wounds?”
“They’re infected,” he admitted, “but I’ve seen much worse. You’re in good health otherwise, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“And we’ve been aggressive about cleaning out the wounds and treating them. What you need most is to get fully rehydrated and get some rest.” He stood up. “I don’t think we need to go on the run again quite yet.”
“What about the visit from your friend?”
“He’s suspicious, but Quinn will keep him from going off half-cocked,” Darcy replied, wishing he felt a little more confident. “I’ll worry about Dennison. You worry about getting some sleep. Would you like another cup of soup before you rest?”
She shook her head, her tangled curls dancing around her face like living things. “I just want to sleep for about a week.”
“You can sleep as much as you want.” He couldn’t resist wrapping one of those coppery curls around his finger.
She looked up at him, her eyes liquid and as dark as the dusk falling outside the bedroom window, only a faint rim of green showing. “Where are you going to sleep?”
The question was innocent, but he couldn’t stop his body’s quick, fierce reaction. He tugged his hand from her hair. “I’ll be on the sofa. Call out if you need me. I’m a light sleeper.”
She caught his hand as he turned to go, her fingers no longer cold. The heat of her touch burned all the way to his core. “Darcy, thank you. For everything. I know this can’t be much fun for you.”
“On the contrary,” he said, entirely sincere. “I’ve been bored senseless for the past week. A rogue FBI agent falling wounded on my doorstep? I can hardly contain my excitement. So, no, Agent Rigsby. Thank you.”
As he’d intended, she smiled. “Anytime, Darcy.”
In the hall closet, he found a blanket and an extra pillow, to his relief. He might not have turned out quite as pampered and privileged as his parents had reared him to be, but he liked his creature comforts as much as the next man, particularly when he knew he might have to rough it soon enough. At any moment, they might have to run for their lives.
He knew Cain Dennison wouldn’t be a problem. Quinn would make certain of it. But someone was out there, looking for McKenna. Maybe several someones.
And until they figured out exactly who and why, they remained in grave danger.
Chapter Six
The wound on Nick Darcy’s forehead had finally stopped bleeding, but the previously unstanched flow had made a mess of his face and the front of his formerly snowy-white shirt. McKenna had gotten him as far as the embassy ballroom before he stopped short and looked around him as if trying to make sense of the chaos.
The staccato cadence of gunfire, punctuated now and then by booming rocket blasts, couldn’t drown out the cries of fear and pain that echoed through the embassy halls.
“Darcy?” She spoke in a whisper, but the sound seemed harsh and loud to her ears.
His unfocused gaze slid toward her but didn’t quite connect. “The ambassador—”
“Can’t be helped now.” She caught his hand in hers, ignoring the sticky warmth of his blood against her palm. At least he was alive. They were both alive. So many others weren’t. They’d already passed three dead embassy employees to get this far. “Darcy, we have to find a way out.”
“No way out,” he murmured.
“I know there’s an underground exit. I’ve heard people talk about it. We just have to find it.”
“It’s beneath the west wing.” His gaze met hers, finally focused. “It’s covered with rubble. We can’t get to it.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “So we’re trapped?”
His fingers tightened around hers. “I didn’t say that. We simply must think our way through this.” He lifted his free hand to his forehead, wincing as he touched the bloody lump the flying shrapnel had left over his right eye. “Unfortunately, thinking isn’t coming easily to me at the moment.”
“That’s why you have me.” She tugged his hand, moving toward the ballroom exit. This area was too exposed, too easy a target for the rebels. “Let’s find a place to hunker down and think.”
He didn’t resist, following her from the ballroom into the narrow corridor that led toward the events kitchen. Once there, they found three of the embassy food staff huddled in the corner. One of them rose at the sound of their footsteps, brandishing a large meat cleaver. It was Jamil Guram, she saw, the embassy’s sous chef from Punjab—the one in India, he was always quick to specify, not Pakistan. His dark eyes locked with hers and the cleaver clattered to the floor. “Agent Rigsby,” he breathed.
“Just the three of you?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered in his lightly accented English. “Will you be able to get us out of here? The terrorists are not far away. I have heard them shouting nearby.”
<
br /> She couldn’t promise him anything, she realized with dismay. She wasn’t sure any of them would get out of here alive.
Behind her, she felt Darcy move closer to her, the heat of his body spreading across her back, seeming to imbue her with added strength. She straightened her spine. “We’ll do our best,” she promised Jamil.
But before the final word escaped her tongue, hell descended in a roar of fire and brimstone.
McKenna sat up with a gasp, her ragged breath loud in the darkness, joining the cacophony of her hammering pulse and the throbbing agony in her side. She was surrounded by darkness so deep and impenetrable that she thought for a moment she was still dreaming.
Then, as her eyes began to adjust to the gloom, she made out the shapes of ordinary things—a dresser, a closet door, a window where the faintest of ambient light trickled past the barrier of curtains.
She was holed up in Hunter Bragg’s cabin in the Smokies, she remembered, her pulse still racing. She had been shot by someone in the woods, someone in cahoots with one of her FBI colleagues.
And Nick Darcy was sleeping on the sofa in the front room, playing the role of her protector after eight years of silence and distance between them.
She slumped back against the pillows.
Why had she really come here? Was it what she’d told Darcy—that he was the only person in the area she felt she could trust? She supposed there was some truth in that statement, but it wasn’t the whole truth, was it?
She’d come to him because she’d been afraid she might be dying. And she wanted to see him again, one more time.
He was so not her type. If her high school friends had been around at the embassy in Tablis, they’d have been shocked if she’d admitted to finding buttoned-up, very formal Nick Darcy attractive. Her tastes had always run more toward the sweet-talking, hard-living country boys she’d grown up with, all brazen flash and Southern charm.
Darcy was nothing like those guys, but still, there had been something about him, some dangerous gleam in his dark eyes, that had piqued her curiosity and made her want to know him better.
And then his quiet competence and courtly manners had sucked her in completely, even though he was so off-limits to her it wasn’t funny. Their relationship—if you could even call it that—had been carried out in lingering gazes and furtive touches, stolen conversations and one near kiss that had left her aching for days.
She knew he’d grown up in London for the first eighteen years of his life, with the occasional summer in his father’s native Virginia. His mother was a British citizen, a lesser peer whose name had once been bandied about as a potential bride for the royal family—a fact that had been a source of amusement to Darcy, who described his mother as a down-to-earth horsewoman better suited for hunts than balls.
“My mother’s rustic leanings used to drive my father crazy,” he’d shared over a quick lunch one day in the embassy kitchen. “Until he figured out that she knew where all the skeletons were hidden because of all that time she’d spent as a girl, wandering about on the country estates of some of England’s most influential parliamentarians.”
That he loved his mother had been obvious. That he’d respected his father had been equally clear. What had most intrigued McKenna, however, was how distanced he seemed to feel from both of them.
“You’re awake.”
The sound of Darcy’s voice in the dark sent a delicious shiver sliding down her spine. She turned her head to find his dark silhouette in the bedroom’s open doorway.
“Just woke.” Her voice sounded raspy. She cleared her throat and spoke again. “What time is it?”
“A little after midnight. Time for you to take some more ibuprofen.” He flicked the switch on the wall and light flooded the room, nearly blinding her. “Sorry.”
Her eyes adjusted quickly to the brightness, quickly enough that she could enjoy the sight of Darcy’s slow, long-limbed approach to the bed. Barefoot, wearing a pair of worn jeans and a rumpled gray T-shirt, his hair mussed and longer than she remembered from his time at the embassy, Darcy looked a hell of a lot more like one of those redneck boys she’d always favored than he ever had before.
But when he sat beside her and spoke, the illusion disappeared, and the cool, competent former DSS agent she’d known in Tablis reappeared. “I thought I heard you call out.”
She tried to remember her dream, but it was a tangle of images and snippets of memory she couldn’t seem to make cohere. “I think I was dreaming about Tablis,” she murmured as he pressed the back of his hand to her cheek, then her forehead.
“Your fever seems to have subsided.” He reached down and pulled his backpack onto the bed beside him. “Let’s check your temperature.”
She caught his hand as he started to unzip the bag. “I know you made the right decision in Tablis. I do.”
His dark eyes lifted to meet hers. “I wasn’t going to let you get killed for nothing. And without heavy equipment and a full extraction crew, we weren’t going to get Cameron out of there.”
“I lost my head. So much death—”
He brushed his fingertip against her cheek, and she felt the wetness of tears she hadn’t been aware of spilling. “You were brave. And strong. I wouldn’t have survived the siege without you.”
“Back at ya,” she murmured.
He pressed the temporal artery thermometer against her temple and waited for the beep. “Ninety-eight point eight,” he murmured. “That’s good.”
“I feel better,” she admitted.
“Also good.” He shook two ibuprofen tablets from the plastic bottle and handed them to her. “Finish off that water washing these down and I’ll get you a fresh bottle.”
She did as he asked and handed over the empty bottle. “Have you gotten any sleep?”
“Some.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him. “Don’t make yourself sick trying to take care of me. I’m better already, I promise.”
“I’m fine,” he insisted.
“Is the sofa uncomfortable? Maybe you should be in the bed—”
His eyebrows ticked upward. “You want to share?”
His tone was light, but the look in his eyes was sultry and serious, and despite her still-weakened condition, despite eight years of separation and a million very good reasons why giving in to lust was a bad idea, she was sorely tempted to call his bluff.
She managed to resist. “I could take the sofa.”
He made a face. “That’s no fun.”
“Seriously, Darcy. I’m feeling better, and I’ve slept on so many office sofas so many times I’ve lost count. Bragg’s sofa can’t be worse than those.”
“It’s not. It’s quite comfortable. Truly.”
He seemed sincere, and now that she’d found a position on the bed that seemed to be mostly pain-free, she wasn’t in a hurry to change her accommodations. So she didn’t argue further. “Any more unwanted visitors? Threatening phone calls from the boss?”
He shook his head. “Silent as the tomb.”
She winced. “Lovely metaphor.”
“Simile,” he corrected with a twitch of his lips.
“Still an insufferable grammar scold, I see.” She softened her words with a smile.
“It’s part of my charm.”
Her smile widened. “Sadly, it’s most of your charm.”
He laughed. “I see some things haven’t changed in eight years. You can still smart off with the best of them.”
“Lots of practice, working for the government.” Before she could quell the urge, she caught his hand in hers. “I was surprised to hear you’d left the DSS. I thought you’d be a lifer.”
Looking down at their hands, he curled his fingers over hers, his thumb rubbing lightly against the back of her hand. “After the siege, a lot of
things changed for me.”
“You stayed on for seven more years.”
He nodded. “I did.”
“But your heart wasn’t in it?”
He grimaced. “It wasn’t that, exactly.”
“Then what was it?”
He let go of her hand and stood up. “Let’s table any long stories until we both get some sleep.”
“Darcy—”
“We’ll talk in the morning.” He left quickly, closing the door behind him.
She slumped back against her pillows, frustrated. He’d always been careful and self-protective, she remembered, and if anything, the passing years had made him more so.
But she needed to know she could trust him. And how could she trust him if he was hiding things from her?
* * *
DARCY WOKE TO light filtering through the curtains of the front windows. Rubbing his bleary eyes, he checked his watch. Almost seven. He’d overslept.
Grimacing at the ache in his back from a night on the unfamiliar sofa, he pushed to a sitting position and stretched his arms and legs, trying to get some of the kinks out.
“Good morning.”
McKenna’s voice, close behind him, gave him a start. He twisted to look at her and found her looking surprisingly alert, considering how weak she’d been by the time he’d tucked her into bed. “You look better.”
Her lips curved just short of a smile. “I feel a lot better.”
“That could change quickly,” he warned as he rose and turned to face her. “You hungry? I think we can come up with something from the pantry.”
“Yeah, I’ve already been scoping it out. There’s frozen waffles in the freezer and some syrup and peanut butter in the pantry.”
He grimaced.
“You’d prefer kippers, I suppose, Prince Charles?”
“Not a Brit.”
That time her lips made it all the way to a smile. “Good, because we’re fresh out of kippers.”
He followed her to the kitchen and waved at the small table by the window. “You sit. I’ll see what our options are.”
