by Alison Kent
"Uh, Jack," she heard Christian say. "Can we have a minute here, please?"
"Switching you now."
A clicking sort of noise, a shift in the level of static, and then apparently she and the bastard were secured on some sort of private channel. Didn't matter. She wasn't talking. A cold day in hell and all that.
"Natasha."
She continued to stare out the window.
"I don't blame you for being pissed."
He'd better not blame her for a goddamn thing. He was the one responsible for this big fat mess she was in. Pissed wasn't even half of what she was feeling.
"I swear this will all be cleared up soon. And nothing's going to happen to you, I promise."
"And I'm supposed to believe that?" She sounded like a shrill harpy and didn't even care. "After you pull a gun on me and tackle me like I'm some sort of monster?"
"I'd tell you everything if I could. I just can't."
What? He didn't have the luxury? He was waiting for an engraved invitation? What? she wondered as stands of trees, one indistinguishable from the next, sailed by beneath them. There wasn't a house, a road, or identifying signage of any sort to be seen.
"But I don't want you to think the time we've spent together . . . what we've done . . . shit," he muttered, his voice cracking before he came back with, "what we've shared—"
She whipped around on him, cutting him off, feeling the heat as her nostrils flared. "What have we shared, Christian}" She practically spat out his name. "What exactly have we shared?"
His eyes darkened, the grooves at the corners gouging deep. His lips flattened, his expression stabbing her with his sharply felt pain. Good. Let him hurt. Let him feel what she was feeling. The betrayal. The deceit. God, why couldn't he have simply been married instead of. . . whatever the hell he was.
"Who are you?" she asked, her voice raw in her own ears. " What are you?"
He looked down to where her knuckles were white against the straps, but when he reached for her hand, she jerked away—and watched slashes of red flush over his cheekbones.
"Christ, Natasha. I'm not going to hurt you."
Right, she thought, even while she believed him. She wondered what he considered "cleared up." And then shifting in her seat, she was reminded by the sharp sting between her legs exactly how screwed up things were. "Are you sure you're okay?"
No, goddammit. She wasn't okay. She was bruised and scraped and her heart was in pieces. "Yes. I'm fine."
She heard him clear his throat then swallow. "I just wanted you to know that it wasn't nothing. What we did together. It meant. . . a lot."
She snorted. "A lot of kinky getting laid and getting lucky, you mean."
"No. That's not what I mean," he fairly growled. "I haven't been with anyone in, well, it's been awhile."
"For who? For Peter? Or for Christian?" Not that she cared.
"For me."
"Well, then. Glad I could help with the dry spell." And now she really couldn't tell a thing about the landmarks below. Everything was a blurry, teary wash of green.
"Don't do this, Natasha."
"Don't do what?" She wasn't going to sob. She refused to sob. "Don't be honest when I say I wish I'd never met you?"
And, at that, Christian jerked the headset off and turned away.
She kept hers on, listened to the static, needing the buffer to keep the hard silence at bay. Peter Deacon had been the most amazing thing to happen in her life.
And she hated Christian Bane for stealing him away as much as for the danger and the lies.
Sixteen
Hank Smithson stood at the corner of the helipad and watched Jackson Briggs set the chopper down. He chomped down on his unlit cigar and jammed a hand to the top of his head to keep his ball cap from flying off and getting chopped like beef. He liked this hat. He'd worked years to get the bill bent the way he wanted, and he'd open a ski lodge in Hades before he'd give it up without a fight.
'Course he was that way about most everything he considered his. Including his boys. And dad-gum if he was going to let a wisp of a girl destroy Christian anymore than she'd already managed to do. He'd heard it earlier in the boy's voice. Even over the static crackling between the chopper and the ground, that tone was as hard on the ears now as it had been all those years ago.
A tone that spoke more of giving up than of living. And Hank wasn't having any of it.
Briggs cut the bird's engine; the whine and whir of the props wound down. Hank shoved the cigar back between his teeth, crossed his arms over his middle, and rocked back on the heels of his boots to wait.
Christian climbed out first, decked to the nines and looking enough like Peter Deacon to give even Hank's cast-iron stomach a turn. Natasha appeared in the doorway next. Pride kept her from accepting the Bane boy's help. She just up and jumped to the ground.
Hank had to admit he admired the way she held her head high as she followed Christian away from the chopper, not walking behind, just far enough to the side so that no one would make the mistake of thinking they were together.
Though he still planned to read her the riot act, Hank couldn't help but chuckle. It was like watching his own Madelyn, that way she'd always had of refusing to back down when she felt she'd been done wrong, and it hit him again how much he missed her.
He took a deep, aching breath, glanced back as Jackson Briggs raised a hand to signal he was shuttin' her down, and gave the pilot a thumbs-up. He didn't figure anyone would need to go anywhere in a hurry. In fact, no one would be leaving for a good little while. Snagging his cigar between two fingers, he pulled his ball cap from his head and returned his attention to the matters at hand.
"Miss Gaudet," he said as she stopped a good couple of yards away and hugged her arms tightly over her chest. "My name is Hank Smithson. And I have quite a story to tell you."
"Thanks all the same," she said, tossing her head to get her hair out of her face with the same sassiness he so loved in MaddyB. "But I'm too old for story time. I'd much rather have the truth."
He liked her plucky spirit. He did. He liked it a lot. What he wasn't feeling so kindly about was the tension hovering between her and the Bane boy. Christian looked to be on the edge, hands on his hips, standing and staring at the ground, his mouth drawn tight, leaving Hank to fight the churning in his middle that told him the boy had run face first into a wall even harder than Spectra IT.
He turned to Natasha with a little less admiration than he'd been feeling before realizing the damage she'd caused. "Then why don't we head back to the house and see about getting you what you want." He offered his arm. It took a minute, but she finally accepted, hooking her hand beneath.
He patted the backs of her fingers as they started off, Bane following while Briggs ran through his shutdown and maintenance routine. " 'Course, I was just about to sit down to a late lunch. It's not much. Tomato soup and grilled cheese. How does that sound?"
She hesitated a moment, as if weighing whether or not the offer was one she couldn't or shouldn't refuse. Finally she gulped down a nervous breath and said, "That would be nice, thank you."
"Good," he said, grimacing as he stepped badly on a tuft of grass and pain shot through his hip. The joint caught, bone grinding on bone grinding on metal, and then Christian was there, an arm around Hank's back for the support he hated to admit he needed for a second or two.
"Hank?"
"I'm fine. I'm fine." Hank caught his balance and waved Christian away. "Nothing a little replacement surgery won't take care of."
Christian raised a brow behind the fancy sunglasses he wore. "And you're going to take a break here soon and have it done, right?"
Hank snorted, picked up the pace. "Stormin' Norman's still usin' both of his legs. I think I'll manage with the original equipment a might longer."
"The general's managing because he hasn't been living with a piece of shrapnel buried in his hip as long as you have," Christian remarked, as if Hank needed the remin
der of how his military career had ended.
"You know Stormin' Norman? As in Norman Schwarzkopf?" Natasha asked.
Good. The lady knew her history. Easing into an explanation of who were the good guys and who were the bad might not be the challenge he'd originally feared. "That I do, Miss Gaudet. Would've served alongside him in Desert Storm if I hadn't run into a speck of bad luck in Panama."
"The shrapnel?" she asked, her voice softer now, losing the uncertainty he sensed in her trembling fingers.
Hank nodded. "Dad-blamed ambush during Operation Just Cause. Jeep in front of me hit a land mine. Lost my driver but managed to hold my own against the guerilla bastards, excuse the vulgarity, before air support arrived."
"I'm impressed."
"No real need to be. A soldier knows the dangers going in. Just as this man here knows what he'll be facing when I send him out on assignment," he said, gesturing toward Christian with the cigar still held between two fingers. "That doesn't stop him from doing what he's called to do."
"And what exactly is that?"
They'd reached the back of the one-story ranch that at three thousand square feet was at least two thousand too big without Madelyn to share the space. Hank pulled open the storm door. Christian took it out of his hand, allowing Hank to push on the heavily reinforced door leading into the kitchen. He gestured for Natasha to go ahead, then followed her in.
Christian closed up behind, and Hank heard the boy mutter a coarse, "Christ," under his breath before raising a hand to greet another member of the Smithson Group who sat at the end of the table, nursing a mug of coffee, a bottle of brandy half an arm's length away.
SG-5 operative Eli McKenzie dragged a hand over his bearded face, and grunted when Christian clapped a hand to his back and asked, "Hair of the dog, eh, Eli?" before circling the table to sit behind.
"Leave it alone, Bane," Eli growled in answer, shoving his chair back as he did. Lumbering to his feet, he grabbed the coffee, left the brandy, then left the room. Christian watched him go. Natasha, too. Hank simply shook his head.
"You'll have to excuse our Mr. McKenzie," he said to Natasha. "I just pulled him off assignment in Mexico. He hasn't quite recovered his usual good humor. Give him time, and he'll charm you down to the toes of your socks."
Frowning, Natasha pushed Eli's vacated chair up beneath the table, one hand curled over the back to hold on. "I'm really confused. These assignments you're talking about. . ." She let the thought trail, tugging with her free hand on the silver chain she'd pulled from beneath her collar.
Gesturing for the girl to follow, Hank made his way to the fridge, pulling out mayo, butter, sliced cheddar, and a loaf of Rainbow bread. "There are some bad men in this world, Miss Gaudet. Living in New York City as you do, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. What I am saying here is that too many times these men don't show their true colors until it's too late for countermeasures to be taken."
"What do you mean, countermeasures?" she asked as he offered her a knife. She took it, spread mayonnaise on the eight slices of bread he'd pulled from the wrapper and set on a cutting board.
After situating a warped griddle over the stovetop's low flame, he poured soup from a jar into a saucepan to heat. "I spent forty years of my life serving my country. It pained me to have to retire. But I couldn't get around anymore to do anyone any good. And then my wife took sick."
Ten years gone, and even a small reference to Madelyn's illness cut him to the bone. He flicked his wrist sharply, slinging a pat of butter from his knife to the griddle, where it sizzled and spread.
"Hank?" he finally heard Natasha ask, and he turned. She handed him the first sandwich; he slid it to the heated surface to cook.
"Being alone gives a man too much time to think. Too much time doing nothing. And nothing much to lose. I started checking the wires. Got wind of a soldier in trouble in Thailand." Hank paused to look after the sandwich, heard the scrape of Christian's chair on the old linoleum, the boy's footsteps heading for the back door, the door opening and closing as he walked out on the conversation.
Hank cast a glance to the side, where Natasha was staring at the sandwich makings, her eyes wide, her mouth plain ol' grim. "He was a young man who'd been part of a military detail escorting a team of doctors up the Mae Kok River. Seems the medical supplies being delivered on up to the Akha hill tribes in the Chiang Rai province were actually drugs headed for Myanmar."
"What happened to him?" she asked after a few seconds passed, handing him a saucer and a second sandwich. "And please make sure it has something to do with the reason I'm standing in your kitchen making lunch instead of on the road to Lake Placid."
Pluck and mettle. He could grow to like this girl. "Pretty simple. He was caught, accused, tried, and convicted of trafficking illegal drugs, and was left to serve out his sentence."
Frowning, she shook her head. "But you just said he didn't know what he was transporting."
"That didn't make him any less guilty, did it?" Hank remarked, raising a brow and hoping her indignation was at least a bit on behalf of Christian and what the boy had suffered. "Not to local law enforcement. Especially with the organization supplying the drugs paying the village elders to make sure he never again saw the light of day."
"You've got to be kidding." She took the second sandwich, handed him a third. "How sheltered have I been that I thought that only happened in fiction?"
"No, Miss Gaudet." Hank took a deep breath and prayed none of his boys ever suffered Christian's fate again. "It happens in the real world more often than anyone ever knows."
"You went to get him, didn't you?" she asked softly a minute or two later, her words nearly disappearing in the emotion of her voice.
"I did indeed. Then I recruited him." They switched out sandwiches again. Waiting for it to cook, they said nothing until Hank slid the fifth from the spatula to the griddle. "I recruited him and now he works under my command rescuing others."
"But you're retired military."
"Exactly so. Which means I have no one but myself and my maker to answer to."
"You do this on your own, then? Like a team of mercenaries?"
Hank screwed up his mouth, shook his head. "The idea of mercenaries leaves a bit of a bad taste. None of what we do is done for money."
"I still don't see what this has to do with me," she said, her frustration having grown by leaps and bounds while the soup and sandwiches heated.
Hank turned off the fire beneath the griddle and the saucepan. No need to grill up any more for now, considering no one was going to have much of an appetite when he was done saying what she needed to hear.
"I need to tell you about your godfather. You need to know the truth about Dr. Wickham Bow."
Two hours later found Christian standing in a dark corner of Hank's office-cum-satellite ops center, Eli McKenzie propped against the paneled wall at his side. The two had said nothing since returning from an equally silent stint watching MaddyB take a turn around the track.
Eli's eyes were red and bleary, and as much as Christian wanted to ask what he could do, he didn't. Because the truth he well knew was that he couldn't do a goddamn thing. This trip was Eli's to finish. And coming home was often the hardest leg to make.
When Christian had returned to the kitchen earlier, he'd found leftovers still on the table. Two glasses of milk, one half full. Two bowls of soup, both empty. One plate of nothing but crusts and crumbs, a triangle of toasted bread and melted cheese gone cold on the other.
He'd moved the dishes to the sink, dumped the milk, tossed the sandwich half into the trash. The idea of Hank telling Natasha the story of Thailand—even a simplified, Disney-rated version—had driven him out of the room. The thought of her learning the truth about Wickham Bow brought him back.
And now here he stood in the dark, the office lighted only by the lamp on the desk where she sat flipping through transcripts, headphones delivering the audio of Bow mak
ing his deal with the devil. The very same devil who'd cost Christian well over a year of his life, who was now a part of stealing away so much of Natasha's.
Protect the innocent, his conscience shouted, his mind recognizing the reality that it was too late in the game.
There was no innocence here.
And then he startled, brought back to the present by Natasha shooting to her feet. She jerked the headset from her head, freeing strands of hair caught in the cord's coils, knocking the portfolio of transcripts she'd been following to the floor in the process.
She stared at the binder as if it would bite off her fingers should she reach down and pick it up. And so she didn't. She stood there like the clichéd doe caught in headlights, her chest heaving, tiny, injured animal sounds spilling from her throat.
It was all Christian could do not to go to her, to stay where he was, to let the ugly truth of what she was facing sink in. Nothing he could say or do now would ease any of what she was suffering. The pain of having her entire life, everything she'd thought she could count on, all of what made her feel safe and secure ripped away . . .
He literally flinched when she bolted from the room and slammed the door behind her. He glanced at Eli, who did no more than shake his head, push off the wall that was holding him up, and follow. It was all Christian could do not to head out after the both of them.
Had he been able to breathe without feeling the knife of betrayal sink deeper into his gut, he would have. Instead, he glanced across the room to where Hank sat in a worn leather recliner, the only nod to comfort or personalization in the high-tech surroundings.
"Let her go. Briggs is outside, and Eli will see that she doesn't go far."
Christian crossed his arms over his chest, then dropped his head back and beat it against the wall. "Eli's in no condition to chase down more than roadkill."
"He's got a hangover to walk off. Keeping an eye on Natasha will give him a reason to shake his drunk that much faster."
