Code Name: Daddy

by Marilyn Tracy

  They passed an old mill, a housing development of huge, graceful homes, and the rolling white countryside sparkling in the early light, as alluring as it must have been to the early settlers. And all Cait could think about was that she dared not consider the future. She’d created such a perfect fantasy and had pulled it out so often during the past two years, she struggled to reconcile it with the reality sitting so near her. To accept the man beside her she would have to excise the fantasy. Could she do that? Could she really let the dream go?

  With Alec now, soon to stop at a motel, once again in danger, trouble stripping away the veneer society usually could place on emotions, she didn’t know what to expect, what to think. They were strangers, yet not. She knew everything about him and, truthfully, nothing at all.

  Even as she wondered how they are going to get out of their present difficulties, she questioned how much she really wanted out. Terrifying as the night had been, she felt alive. Deeply, acutely alive. As vital and on edge as she’d felt in that damnable closet two years before.

  Weren’t those three days with Alec the most important days of her life? Danger surrounding them, they’d seized life and passion with every fiber of their beings, defiantly spitting at death. And now that danger was back and again she felt stretched beyond the normal limits.

  But, another part of her argued, those days were simply days, and days in the dim past. Danger was a peculiar bedfellow, distorting the mind and one’s sense of proportion. The important days of her life weren’t found in that utility closet two years ago, they were such days as the morning Allie was born, the day her daughter imperfectly said “Mama” for the first time. Allie’s first words, her first faltering steps, the first day at nursery school. The latest cute thing she did or said.

  All those little, extremely vital moments made up the important days, the ones that forged a real, full existence. No matter how lonely she may have felt during the wakeful, darkest hours of the night, no matter how pale those days might seem in contrast with dramatic exits, twenty-one-gun-saluted fallen heroes, and bad guys lurking out there in the dawn, the calm and peaceful days were the meaningful ones.

  Alec glanced over at Cait’s still form. One minute she’d been wielding a bright rapier of humor, deftly fencing, fighting fear and skewering the past. Yet at the mention of stopping at a motel, she’d laid her point to the floor and bowed out of the game.

  If she didn’t look so terminally serious, he could point out that he hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours, and was probably far more terrified of being alone with her than she could possibly be of him. It wasn’t her so-called friends trying to kill her.

  And she was trusting him to do the right thing by her and Allie, to protect them, to get them out of this mess somehow. He was so damned tired he couldn’t think straight. He’d had too many curves thrown at him in the past six hours.

  His best friend had lied to him, was likely a traitor to everything Alec believed in.

  Cait was alive.

  He had a daughter. A beautiful, trusting daughter.

  And the three of them were in big, big trouble.

  He wanted to tell Cait he’d been in plenty of tight spots before and managed to squeak through. But like not telling her about his involvement with the FBI during those days under terrorist seizure, what would be the point of discussing the past now?

  This situation was entirely different. On a mission he usually had someone covering his back, or at least faith in a person he could call when the going got too rough. But he wasn’t on a mission now. He was embroiled in one. With a woman and baby riding shotgun.

  He sifted through the kaleidoscope of emotions roiling in him. Disbelief, anger, outrage, joy, tension... the list seemed endless. The only feeling he could identify with any surety was fear. He’d been nervous, even scared, more times than he cared to remember. But he’d never experienced the kind of sinking, heart-jolting terror that flash-fired through him every time his mind skittered across the notion of something happening to Cait or Allie.

  Hell, he’d only just found Cait again. And several times in the course of their headlong dash through the dark streets of the city she’d looked at him as though he were the bad guy. As if he were a stranger. And his daughter, the baby he’d discovered just that night, called him Stranger Man. Both those discoveries were monumental and frightening in and of themselves, but to compound the enormity of the situation, someone—one of his closest friends—was undoubtedly looking for them right now.

  His hands gripped the steering wheel so fiercely that he had to force himself to relax them before he lost feeling. He flicked a look in her direction, suddenly, irrationally angry with her silence. It wasn’t his fault that she’d thought him dead; he’d thought the same thing of her. And it wasn’t his fault that someone within his own division had apparently lost his marbles.

  But she looked so pale, so fragile in the wan light of dawn.

  He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and inched upward a bit to see his daughter sleep. Like a cloth doll, her body draped in total abandon over the side of the car seat. One arm stretched above her head, almost to the top of the headrest, while her curly dark head lolled on the other. Her chubby legs splayed through the harness and seat support in what appeared the most appallingly uncomfortable position, yet a slight smile curved her full lips.

  Fourteen months old. Did babies that age walk already? He didn’t know, and a wave of despair shook him. He should know. He should have been there to see. His daughter obviously talked a little, even if he needed Cait as a translator. And he should be able to understand her as well because he should have been around long enough to be able to wade through the lisping, unusual sounds that comprised her baby language.

  God, he had a daughter. The natural result of an unnatural captivity, the human reward granted after despair and pain. Had Cait bated him for dying? Had she cursed him for not being there for her? He thought of the many times he’d been angry with her for dying on him.

  And thought of the confused feelings he now had for Jack King. For it was Jack who had shown up at Cait’s house earlier that morning. It was Jack who had obliquely lied to him about Cait dying. But every instinct told him it hadn’t been Jack who had ordered the hit on the WHO two years before. What, then, had Jack been after at Cait’s?

  Cait sighed heavily and he felt his heart twist as she raised one hand to brush the hair from her forehead. Her hair stuck up in little blond spikes and her green eyes were lined with shadows and creased with worry. She stared at the cold, dawn-brightened countryside leading into Sterling as if it were the driest desert in an alien terrain. Her eyes were bleak, disbelieving.

  And she was so damned beautiful. Her features weren’t the classic, sock-you-in-the-stomach gorgeous. There was far more to Cait than a perfectly oval face, wide-set eyes and set of pouty lips, though he was sure she had all those attributes. What he liked best about her looks was that she seemed a study in contradictions, pixielike turned-up nose with a splash of freckles across the bridge that perched over a mouth that would have made Helen of Troy envious. And a voice that would lure the most hardened woman hater from his soapbox. She was slight but had full, rich curves that molded to a man’s in perfect symmetry.

  He felt short of breath and slightly dizzy.

  He’d been a fool to ask Cait where they were going from there. She couldn’t guess any more than he could. The past was dead, more dead than ever Cait had been. He understood now that what had been stolen from them—the dreams, hopes, even the reliability of memory—were gone forever.

  They had only now. And the present itself was mutable, fraught with danger. The responsibility for their safety rested squarely on his shoulders. He had to get them to safety.

  Alec understood Cait’s sudden leap into silence. Humor could only stay reality for so long. And the reality was too grim to allow laughter.

  Chapter 9

  Saturday, November 10, 6:30 a.m. EST

  The
motel room wasn’t a bit like the torrid picture in Cait’s mind. It was large, as motel rooms went, containing two double beds, a table with two chairs, a large cabinet hiding a television and beneath that a chest of drawers.

  Inspecting it, she found the room swung left at a vanity sink and mirror with a small dressing alcove leading to a fairly spacious bathroom. Seascapes, the kind found in a million motel rooms across the country, adorned the walls. Cait supposed they were meant to be soothing; instead they made her feel lonely, as turbulent as the seas that churned forever on the inexpensive canvases.

  No paint-and-blood-spattered drop cloth draped over either of the double beds, no hint of ammonia perfumed the air. It was simply a motel room, banal in its function, a place to eat and sleep while traveling the highways of America.

  The red digital readout on the alarm clock said the day was approaching six-thirty in the morning, and something about seeing the clock, so like her own left behind at home, struck her as incongruous.

  This can’t be happening.

  But her denial only stretched so far. It was happening.

  She watched as Alec carried the car seat with the still-sleeping Allie into the room. He stood just inside the doorway waiting for her to tell him where—and probably how—to settle his daughter.

  She gestured to the aisle created by the space between the two beds. In the old days, she thought, parents had used a bolster to separate unmarried couples in bed. A two-foot gap of floor space and a sleeping baby would surely have an even stronger effect.

  He deposited Allie and lingered, his hands hovering over her.

  “If you try to rearrange her, she’ll wake up,” Cait said.

  “But she looks so uncomfortable,” he whispered.

  “You don’t have to be quiet,” she returned. “Aunt Margaret convinced me early on that lots of noise during nap time was a mother’s best companion.”

  He pushed to his feet. He didn’t look at her, but Cait could feel his uneasiness from where she stood. They had been so much to each other those three days so long ago, and now they could scarcely talk.

  “I’ve got to get some sleep,” Alec announced and, punctuating his statement, yawned hugely.

  “And we have to take care of your arm,” Cait responded.

  He shrugged out of his jacket and then out of the shoulder straps molding his holster to his back.

  “Isn’t that uncomfortable?” she asked.

  “What, this?” he asked, holding up the gun. “Sure, but there’s more than one kind of discomfort.”

  He glanced around the room, studied Allie for a moment, then set the gun, holster and all, on top of the tall television cabinet. His shirt was stained with blood, but it didn’t look wet. “If you’re hungry, we can call room service,” he said. He picked up a menu from the desk and handed it to her.

  “Want me to bandage your arm for you?” she asked.

  Rolling up his sleeve, he studied his arm. “Looks worse than it is,” he replied.

  Cait was again struck by how natural the situation could appear, but how dreadfully awkward it was in reality. Mother, father and baby, pulling in to a motel from a hard morning escaping from bad guys and stealing cars. Order some croissants and coffee, will you, hon? Oh, and a side order of bullets.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  He turned and looked at her. “Yes,” he said, disconcerting her, making her feel the room was too warm, too small.

  He slowly unbuttoned his shirt, his eyes still linked with hers. He tugged the tails from his trousers and unfastened the buttons at his wrists. Cait’s mouth went completely dry. A warm rush of purely physical reaction swept over her, swiftly followed by a stab of anger.

  How dare he mock her? They were strangers now. Whatever they had shared two years ago, whatever might have produced that sleeping baby, whatever magic that had been had died back then.

  Alec continued to meet her gaze—challengingly? Hopefully? Certainly inscrutably. Then he turned aside, his own tension given away by his studied indifference. “All the same, I think I could use something. Some kind of breakfast, I mean. I don’t care what you order.”

  Cait crossed to the telephone, suddenly feeling the effects of the strange morning. She felt tired in a manner far beyond mere weariness, more a fatigue of the soul. When she’d thought Alec had died, she’d railed against fate for leaving her alone. She thought now that fate had been far more cruel than simple abandonment.

  At least alone, she’d felt at ease with the memory of him. Together in this motel room, too aware of him standing within touching distance, hearing the rustle of his shirt, catching a faint whiff of his male scent, she couldn’t think of how to do something as simple as just talk with him. Each word carried too much weight, too much meaning. Layers upon layers of nuances hung between them like swords waiting to fall at the slightest unwary statement, ready to slice them apart.

  She ordered the motel restaurant’s breakfast special of eggs, bacon, fresh fruit, juice, muffins and a pot of coffee with extra cream. When she woke, Allie would be able to eat heartily from the leftovers.

  She replaced the receiver and turned around.

  In the soft glow of the lamplight, and without his shirt, she thought Alec looked like an advertisement for men’s cologne: classic profile of rugged features, dark hair curling at the nape of his neck, broad, muscled shoulders flaring wide over a muscled chest and a rock-hard torso.

  But as he turned from his overnight bag, Cait could see the scars that marred the muscled shoulders and drove bolts of pale lightning across his chest, shoulders and sides. And she remembered how the bullets that had formed some of them had slammed him back against the wall of the closet. Each mark on his beautiful body was a grim reminder of how close he’d come to truly dying, the scars a collection of near misses.

  Her hands shook in primal, elemental need to touch those scars, brush her fingers against his warm skin, to test her memory, to see if he felt as velvet hot as she remembered.

  Alec used a washcloth to remove the blood from his arm, then tugged a fleecy sweatshirt over his head and turned to face Cait. Involuntarily, he checked when he saw her expression. In all his life he’d never known someone so easy to read, so starkly honest with herself, with the world. His heart began to pound in harsh, thunderous rhythm.

  Her full lips were parted, her eyes dazed, confused. Her cheeks were stained with color and her breathing was shallow and light. This was no foray down memory lane. She was reacting to him now. Here. In the very real present.

  The desire he could see smoldering in her ignited a flame in him, as well. He wanted her. More than he’d ever wanted anything before, except perhaps for moments too strongly remembered from two years ago. And it had been Cait then, too. Was that the secret? If they only gave in, succumbed to that remarkable chemistry that still flared so naturally between them, would the rest follow—the trust, the faith, the acceptance of each other? Was that even possible?

  Somehow, without being aware of it, he’d moved closer to her. All he had to do was lift his hand and he could touch her. “Cait...”

  She dragged her gaze from his chest and looked up to meet his eyes, a spark of fear flickering in the dazed flame already burning.

  He couldn’t bear to see her confusion, the longing mingled with doubt, the uncertainty warring with memory. He cupped her silky cheek with his hand. Against her warm face, his fingers felt cold and trembled slightly.

  He wanted to hold her against him, remember how she felt and discover her again. He wanted to taste her and to linger there for a thousand years. But he did none of these things, only lightly stroked her face and said her name.

  She closed her eyes and frowned slightly, as if in pain. And he knew she was hurting, knew it was the same torture he felt. Closing his own eyes, he used his thumb to trace the delicate planes of her face, remembering, memorizing anew.

  He heard her breathing catch, then resume, could feel the thready beat of her heart through his
fingertips. He opened his eyes to see her, to watch her reaction to his touch, and found her staring directly at him.

  “You’re tired,” she said hoarsely.

  “Yes,” he lied, agreeing with her but not moving away, not dropping his hand.

  “You need sleep,” she said. With relief? Regret?

  “Yes.”

  She lifted her hands, either to draw him close or push him away. She dropped them back to her sides.

  “Two years is a long time,” she said, her words flaying him raw, and her sad tone poured salt in the wound.

  “Yes.”

  All he would have to do was lower his lips the merest inch. His entire body shook with the need to taste her.

  “You’re going to kiss me.” It wasn’t a question but rather a simple acknowledgment of inevitability.

  “Yes,” he said, not feeling a stitch of inevitability about it. He felt as if he moved against an incoming tide, the tension between them was so strong. He both needed to kiss her and wished himself any other place on earth. Then his lips met hers and the battle was over.

  Except for his lips, and the hand on her face, their bodies didn’t meet. He forced himself to remain still, not to allow his other hand to rise to her shoulders to draw her into an embrace, although he wanted to, craved doing just that. He didn’t run his fingers through her hair or pull her against him to let her know the extent of his want for her.

  He only kissed her. Slowly, achingly sweetly. Poignantly. It was both a singular farewell to the past and acknowledgment of the present, the very real now. For Alec, and he suspected for Cait as well, the entire world shrank to a single point of contact, a universe of emotion expressed in a single velvet meeting of lips. He knew that apology and regret flavored his caress, while he could taste the bittersweet tang of long-ago tears that salted hers. Their breath mingled and combined as they mutually sampled the curious present, contrasting it with the almost equally strange past.