She frowned, thinking furiously. She didn’t believe the tension crippling communication could be put down solely to Alec’s refusal to talk. Cait felt something else, that not-quite-right frisson of unidentifiable emotions tickling at her. One was related to Alec, to how she felt or was scared to feel about him, and the other told her danger lurked just ahead.
More than anything else, that second sensation reminded her of the night Alec had shown up on her doorstep, alive again after two years. She’d known before he ever rang her bell that things were wrong, that something was off-kilter in the world. She had that same feeling now.
Studying him, she knew he felt it, too. His eyes continuously flicked from the Lee Highway to the rearview mirror. His lips were drawn in a thin, tight line and he seemed to be clenching his teeth. He never turned his head to glance her way, yet she had the sense that he knew her every gesture, each blink of an eye.
He’d located the street—it was Ocean, not Columbus—by the simple means of borrowing the hotel desk clerk’s city directory. And the word box translated to the number, 269, taken straight from the lettered numbers on a telephone. They knew exactly where they were going but the closer they drew to Vienna, the more nervous he seemed to become.
Vienna was less than fifteen miles away from Fairfax, but the beltway and the cruise up Route 7 made it seem shorter. The car seemed to be eating up the road, stripping them of the safety inherent in mere minutes. She wanted to yell at Alec to stop the car, to turn around, to disappear into America somewhere and forget all about the FBI, Fred Masters, Jack King. For each mile closer to the safe house they came, they grew further apart, as if the speedometer that registered the wheel’s revolutions also stole, bit by bit, second by second, any chance they had of a future together.
She had stalled their departure for the safe house as long as she possibly could. But in the end, it was simply time to go. And their uncertain future was at hand. And no amount of wishing it away was possible now.
Sitting beside him, aching just to touch him, reassure herself that he was with her, in body if not in soul now, she devoutly wished they’d had those fifteen years he’d shared with Jack, the years with Fred. And she wished she could have told him yesterday afternoon, or while in his arms last night, what she really felt about him. It wasn’t illusion or fantasy. What she felt, even if she didn’t fully understand then or now, was real, however confused, and he had a right to know about her feelings for him.
When loading their bags into the car, he’d taken extra care not to brush her fingertips, nearly dropping one of the suitcases in his efforts to avoid touching her, as if mere contact would scorch him.
Twice since then she’d caught him watching her via reflections in the mirror or the windshield. But she couldn’t break through that rigid control of his. Couldn’t make him give a single inch. Or was his fierce self-control a mirror of her own? Wasn’t it really her that wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t allow the possibility of a future?
It was her denial of the future, her refusal to accept even the glimmer of a future that stripped hope and dreams from the present. And it was her shying away from the all too nebulous “ever after” that sat between them like a palpable third presence. A very large and daunting presence.
Cait’s mind seemed to revolve with each cycle of the wheels on the pavement. Each leafless tree they passed, every sprawling and frost-covered farmhouse that leapt out and disappeared as the car whizzed down the highway seemed to sharpen her acuity, heighten her perceptions.
He’d sworn there would be no lies between them. He’d sworn it and she instinctively believed he’d held to his word. Sometimes that’s all a man can offer. He hadn’t lied to her, nor had she lied to him. But by leaving out the promise of any future together, they’d done worse. They’d stripped all beauty from the world, stolen all hope.
But worse than any lies, past or present, she was allowing the silence to write the future for them. She would be safely stashed away while he went to battle. For her.
What if she didn’t say anything and he never came back to her? What if...?
“Damn,” Alec muttered. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as though he’d felt a blow delivered.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I love you, Cait”
His words pierced her like a rapier through the heart.
“It’s unfair. I can’t even promise you a live ending, let alone a happy one.”
She didn’t say anything, somehow knowing he wasn’t finished.
“But I had to tell you. I can’t go into this without letting you know,” he said slowly, deliberately.
With his uncomfortable ability to think along the same lines, he’d unknowingly pierced the core of her greatest fear. Cait felt cold and hot at the same time. Life wasn’t a fairy tale, she wanted to tell him. An ending with both of them alive was enough. Living together was a huge next step and living together happily ever after was so far removed from the realm of possibility that she couldn’t even consider it.
“Are you afraid to say the words, Cait?” he asked softly.
Yes, she thought. She was more than afraid; she was terrified. But not of saying three simple words, difficult as that would be. She was afraid to mean them. Because if she let them out of her lips and she meant what she said, then losing Alec would kill her this time.
Until he’d spoken, she’d been afraid that not saying anything would haunt her until her dying day—which was all too likely to be soon, if Fred Masters got his way—but now she knew that saying them, meaning them, knowing she would always and forever mean them, would haunt her far more surely than the lack would do. Some things were better left unsaid, some gardens better left untended.
Because someday, if not today, some tomorrow or even next week, something would happen to him. While he was every inch the FBI professional driving the car, taking her to a safe house, he was also a statistic in one of her many computer constructs: peace officers didn’t have a high rating in the long-term survival department. And an agent — no matter that the agent was loving, kind, a father, the only man who could bring her to that cliff’s edge of blissful madness—was still an instrument of the law.
“I don’t know what to say, Alec,” she murmured finally, aware she was letting him down, aware she wasn’t being honest with him.
“I promise you—” he began, but she stopped him by simply covering his mouth with her fingers. Alec’s whole body jerked as if a jolt of electrical current pulsed through him. But he didn’t turn his head or say a word.
“Please don’t, Alec. You can’t make promises and I can’t bear to hear you try. It hurts both of us,” she said sadly, and dropped her hand back to her lap. Her heart pounded so fiercely, so rapidly she could barely breathe.
“You’re wrong, Cait,” he said. “And if it takes me a lifetime, I’m going to prove it to you.”
Cait looked out the window, unwilling to see the determination she knew would rest on his face. He was talking about a lifetime that could be measured in minutes.
Cait knew she should say something to him right at that moment. In days of old, ladies saw their men off to battle with the evidence of their love gaily fastened to their men’s armor. The scarves made the men brave and strong. Words could do that, too. But she couldn’t. She didn’t know how. Was it because her parents had been killed when she was so young that she’d never quite learned to accept death as a fact and not abandonment? Or had she learned that more recently, when she was told that Alec had perished?
“We’re here,” he announced, turning the car into the Vienna subdivision entrance.
Cait’s heart beat so rapidly she felt certain she would faint. The blood pounding in her ears blocked her hearing and clogged her throat. As Alec turned the car onto Ocean Street, she realized her moment to speak had come and gone. Again she’d allowed fear and doubt to steal the words from her, or more accurately, to steal them from Alec.
He slowed the car, as
if reluctant to approach the safe house.
“Alec, I —”
“There it is,” he said, interrupting her again.
“I need to —”
“Here’s the plan,” he interrupted for the third time. “I approach the house first, and if all is clear, you’ll join me. But not until I wave you in. Are you with me?”
The so-called safe house looked like any other splitlevel, attractive home in the neighborhood. A low pine hedge, in need of some trimming, flanked two sides of the place, while a stand of tall oaks offered protection and shadows to the back. The front lawn, white with November frost, stretched from the front empty flower beds to the curb at the street.
No cars were parked out front or in the driveway.
“I don’t like it,” Alec said on the second pass by the house, pointing at the darkened porch. “A light should be on. Signaling an all’s well.” Instead, it was dark, shadowed and menacing in its absence.
Cait’s skin tightened and gooseflesh rose on her arms as Alec pulled the car to an idling stop across the street from the house.
She could see that the curtains in the house were half open, but the street lamps reflected on the windows didn’t reveal what waited for them inside.
“Okay. No arguments, Cait. You get in the driver’s seat. I’m going to the door. At the least sign, and I mean least sign of trouble, you stomp on the gas and get out of here.”
“Define trouble,” Cait said, but she did as he asked, sliding across the seat and fumbling to shift the whole thing forward so her feet would reach the pedals.
Alec’s eyebrows rose as he leaned in the door to help her. “Trouble is anything that doesn’t look right. Like someone shooting me as I ring the doorbell, somebody conking me on the head, the house blowing up. Things like that.”
She could see he wished he could have taken the words back the second he uttered them, as her face had blanched while she pictured each and every one of those horrific events taking place.
“Hey, hey, Cait...I was just kidding.”
“It wasn’t funny,” she said, but she tried conjuring up a smile, anyway. It must have worked; he pressed a swift kiss to her cold cheek.
He started to turn away to walk to the house. She called him back. “Alec!”
For all his fears for her, she saw that most of his attention was already on the house across the street. And in a blinding flash of understanding Cait realized that a part of him was actually enjoying the moment, was wholly prepared and geared for trouble. This was his job. His profession. And he was good at it.
And she, like a million other women every day, in every town across the country, would let him do it. Bizarre as it seemed, she’d driven him to work, kissed him goodbye, fussed over him, and was now waiting for him to do his job and come back to her.
But she wasn’t like a million other women and Alec wasn’t her husband and she wasn’t going to let him walk across that street without hearing what she had to say.
“What is it?” he asked somewhat impatiently, his eyes on the front porch light.
“C-come back to me, Alec,” she blurted out. It wasn’t what she’d meant to say, but the words came straight from her heart. The deepest, rawest part of her heart.
He smiled then, a crooked, I’ll-be-damned grin that nearly broke her heart. And terrified her. What if something did go wrong? What if she never saw him again?
“I promise,” he said, and she realized that on some scarcely understood level her inept words had been exactly the right ones. They were words of the future, words that defied a negative conclusion to whatever might happen inside that house.
He gave her one long last look and turned to the other side of the street.
Before she could say anything else he was already halfway up the sidewalk, his hand behind him, tucked inside his jacket, undoubtedly around the handle of his gun.
And while her heart pounded painfully in her chest, she understood at that moment, with total and blinding clarity, that Alec was no stranger, had never been one. She’d known him from the very first second she ever saw him. His life, his job, even her fantasies about him, none of those were obstacles to their happiness. Not understanding him, not trusting him with every fiber of her being, that constituted the uncrossable, unbreachable chasm.
Part of her wanted to call out to him, to bring him back long enough for her to spill this new awareness into his ears. But she had to trust him, had to trust her newfound understanding of him. She had to hold on to the memory of the way he played with Allie, the laughter in his incredible blue eyes, and even the gun that he casually tucked on top of a cabinet to keep out of Allie’s sticky reach, for it was as much a part of him as his smile or his touch.
And if she already knew Alec, if trust was a given, then the future wasn’t a blank, nor was it something that could be analyzed, picked apart and studied. It couldn’t be prescribed, planned, as carefully constructed as one of her software programs. But like the data contained within one of her programs, they had all they would need for a future together: dreams, passion, wishes, goals. A future, any future, was only the combined aspirations and hopes of a lifetime.
That’s what she’d wanted to say when she’d told him to come back to her, that she would try to believe in a future with him.
And watching him go away from her, walking into danger for her, she knew she’d never wanted anything so much in her whole life.
Alec pressed the doorbell and tensed, waiting for the door to swing open. The chimes rang through the house, lending the place an abandoned air, as if it weren’t merely empty, but sadly wanting. He glanced up at the dark porch light. Something was wrong.
He started off the porch, ostensibly to search for a key beneath a flowerpot or doormat, and froze when he heard the rattle of locks being drawn. This, too, wasn’t the usual setup.
He glanced from the car to the door and half turned, slipping his gun into his belt and keeping his hands at his hips, openly displaying his chest... and his seeming lack of weapon.
From the gloom inside, dark there as well, Jack pushed the storm door open. “Good God, Al,” he said, “It’s good to see you! Damned good. You got my message, then. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to engineer your way here.”
Alec hadn’t needed the full phrasing to know that everything was glaringly wrong. In any normal safe house operation, Jack would have met him outside for a quiet conference; he would never have held the door ajar. Secondly, Jack never called him Al; nobody in his right mind ever had. And thirdly, he’d used the word engineer.
“What’s wrong with the porch light, Jacide?” Alec asked, letting his old pal know that he’d caught the references.
“Something’s wrong with it. Keeps going out.”
Translation: Fred Masters wasn’t in the house with Jack. But was somewhere nearby. Probably watching the two of them. A shot of fear raced the adrenaline coursing through his system at the thought of Cait alone in the car. What if Fred had anticipated him leaving the car first?
Another part of his mind was working on an allusion to toss up to Jack, something that would allow him to question and answer covertly.
Jack beat him to the punch. “I don’t recognize the car.”
Dear God. Fred was at the car. Fear for Cait swamped his mind, driving out all logical, professional reactions. He wanted to bound across the street and empty his gun into Fred’s damnable face. If he hurt so much as one hair on Cait’s head, he’d kill him and damn the consequences.
But right now he didn’t dare turn around, didn’t dare call out a warning. Fred was as crazy as a loon. He couldn’t trust him not to start shooting in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. And the one he’d be shooting was Cait.
His Cait.
He thought about his promise.
He thought about his daughter.
And he thought about all the millions of things he hadn’t told Cait, things he wanted to give her, promises he needed to keep.
Fr
ed would attack Cait if he saw Alec or Jack doing anything but standing there talking.
Cait would drive away if she heard gunfire.
Was that the answer?
Alec shifted slightly, surreptitiously drawing his gun and laying it against his thigh, pointing at the ground. He circled his finger around the trigger.
Cait put her foot on the brake. Surely whatever Alec had to say to Jack King about the past could have waited until they were all safely inside the house and out of the cold. Something was wrong. Her nerves all but jangled with the urge to flee, the need to rush out of the car and into Alec’s arms.
Even in the gloom she could see Jack King’s pale, pasty face. His dark eyes glittered in the doorway of the safe house that seemed anything but safe. He wasn’t looking at Alec but at her. Then up the street, then back at her, then again up the street.
Alec’s broad shoulders were as stiff as concrete and even from that distance and despite the darkness she could see that muscle in his strong jaw leaping as he clenched his teeth together. He flexed slightly and she saw the tip of his gun peek out on the right side of his jacket.
She knew no one else, even someone watching him closely, would have seen the gun. No one but her, because she was utterly focused on his every movement, waiting for a signal. She felt her entire life depended on noticing each stray detail.
This wasn’t a time to search the memory banks of her mind and select the correct option; she knew relying on pure instinct would offer her the only viable solution. Without taking her eyes from Alec and without thinking about the ramifications of what she did, she threw the car into Park and slammed the heel of her hand on the horn.
It blared into the night like Gabriel’s horn. Long, loud, shocking, it was a trumpeter’s trumpet of an alarm, a magnificent, defiant call to arms.
As she’d known he would, Alec whirled, his gun stretched at right angles to his rigid body. She could see his wide eyes scanning her, the car, the bushes flanking the stolen car. He lifted the gun the merest fraction and fired into the air.
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