by Lori Wilde
Time passed.
She didn’t have any idea how long it was. It could have been mere seconds. It could have been a dozen hours. She might have dozed. She might have only hallucinated that she dozed. She might have dreamed that she hallucinated about dozing. The isolation and visual deprivation were disorienting.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die in here alone without ever telling Shane that I still love him.
Shane arrived at the docks just after dusk. The location scared the hell out of him. He knew someone could easily go missing down here. He found the Acura parked behind an abandoned warehouse on the far side of the shipping channel.
That’s where his search ended, when he peered in the window and spied the cell phone he’d given Tish lying on the console. Shane’s gut spoke to him, and it was yelling some pretty ugly things.
You weren’t there for her when she needed you most, Tremont. Face it, you failed her. If she dies, it’s all your fault.
He gulped. Guilt and fear hitched a ride from his throat to his stomach and settled in like bad indigestion. He stepped away from the car, eyes scanning the night, senses attuned for danger. His Sig Sauer was nestled in its shoulder holster, but it gave him little comfort. Fear badgered him, too. What are you going to do? Shoot with your left hand?
Yes.
Your target better be as wide as a Wal-Mart.
He heard a sound in the darkness behind him. He whirled, simultaneously reaching for his gun, but his reaction time was too slow.
“Got the draw on you, Tremont,” said a voice from the darkness. “Throw down your weapon.”
“What the hell is going on here? Who are you? Where’s my wife?” Shane demanded, searching the shadows for a face.
Surprise tripped down his spine when he saw Pete Larkin emerge with his own Sig Sauer pointed at Shane’s head.
“Throw it down,” Larkin repeated. “You’re worthless with the thing anyway. I know what kind of shape your hand is in.”
“What are you doing, Larkin?”
“Stop yapping and do it.” Shane tossed his weapon on the ground. Larkin retrieved it and tucked it in his waistband.
Rage engulfed Shane, red-hot and blind. It wasn’t long ago that he could have as easily killed Larkin as look at him. “What the hell is wrong with you? Where’s Tish? Is she alive? If you’ve done anything to her, I swear I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t sweat it. I’ll take you to her. Reunite the lovebirds. Put your palms on the back of your head, turn around, and start walking toward the water.”
Calm down. You’re no good to Tish in an irrational state. Remember your training. Detach from your emotions.
“What’s this about?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice calm when he wanted nothing more than to launch himself at Larkin and rip his throat out.
“Something you shouldn’t have gotten involved in. It was none of your damn business. Nothing to do with you. Either one of you.”
“Clearly.” Shane’s mind was racing as he tried to formulate a plan. He didn’t want to act too prematurely, didn’t want to disable Larkin before the man led him to Tish. “Who are you working for?”
“CIA.”
“Fucking spook.”
“You think that’s an insult?” Larkin laughed. “Take a left at the next shipping container and don’t try anything or I’ll blow your kneecaps off.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“Then you’re very stupid. I have no problem with killing anyone who gets in my way.”
“I’m guessing your superior officers have no idea what you’re up to. Since when is a wedding videographer a threat to national security?”
“Those spineless pencil pushers. Please. They don’t have a clue what it’s really like out here in the field.”
“What did Tish do to deserve this?”
“She took my fucking picture.”
“And?”
“She got my voice on tape.”
“Sounds like your fault for doing business in a public place.”
“It was Sumat Kumar’s idea,” he grumbled.
“The Indian Ambassador?”
“He wanted the meeting at the engagement party so I could see Rana Singh.”
“He hired you to assassinate Elysee’s former nanny?”
“And some rebellious Indian chick whose father is some kind of cabinet minister in India. He wanted her dead for marrying a guy he didn’t approve of.” He smirked. “Imagine if we had honor killings in the States. All the teenage girls would be dead.”
“So what were you getting out of the deal?” Shane asked, as his mind frantically tried to come up with a plan. The only reason Larkin would be telling him all this was if he intended to kill him.
“Besides a shitload of money, you mean?”
“Besides that.”
Larkin smirked again. “Kumar’s promised to give me detailed info on their nuke capacity. The CIA won’t give me another shit babysitting assignment like Yuri Borshevsky after I drop that little Turkish delight in their lap.”
“All this for two honor killings?”
“These dudes are rabid about keeping the practice alive. They don’t want their women getting uppity.”
“So you’re just going to kill these women in cold blood for your personal gain?”
“Shut up, Eagle Scout, and take a right.”
Shane did as Larkin said, his mind in high gear as he mentally tried out several possible ways to overpower the other agent. But every idea he formulated would have to wait until he found out what Larkin had done with Tish.
They stopped next to a padlocked shipping pod sitting near the edge of the dock. Larkin pulled a set of keys from his pocket, tossed them to Shane. He reached for them with his bad hand and missed. They fell to the dock.
“Pick them up.”
He did.
“Third key on the ring.”
He found the key.
“Open the pod.”
He did.
“Get inside.” Larkin snatched back the keys.
Shane walked in, fully expecting to be shot in the back of the head. But to his surprised relief, Larkin slammed the door and locked him up inside.
Chapter 21
Tish woke with a start when the door opened. She was curled into a ball on the floor and by the time she jerked her head around, the door had closed again.
But someone was in here with her. She could hear them breathing.
“Hello,” she whispered. “Is someone there?”
“Tish?”
The sound of her ex-husband’s voice sent joyous rapture reeling through her heart. “Shane!”
They found each other in the dark, mouths melding, arms embracing.
“Tish, Tish, you’re alive. You’re okay.” He rained kisses on her face.
“How did you find me?”
“Through the GPS tracking in my cell phone.”
“Larkin got you, too?”
“Yeah, I didn’t see it coming. I had feared it was Cal Ackerman who’d torched your house—he had red lava rocks in the tread of his shoes and he smokes. I never suspected Larkin.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on.”
He told her then about his talk with Dick Tracy; the matches, the lava gravel; how Larkin revealed he had agreed to assassinate Rana Singh and Alma Reddy for Sumat Kumar in exchange for cash and detailed information about India’s nuclear weapon capacities.
“Larkin got a beeper message that the President wanted a workout session and a massage at the ranch. That’s probably where he was headed when he left here. If he didn’t go, he’d blow his cover. I suppose you ran into him on his way out.”
“Yeah.”
“I told him I made copies of the disk.”
Shane made a disturbing noise. “Did you?”
“Yeah.”
“How many?”
“Two. One burned in the fire and Larkin took my copy.”
“Who has the other one?”
“Elysee.”
He made that noise again, clearly frustrated.
“I know.”
“Larkin will be back as soon as he completes his obligation to the President. It’s an hour to the ranch and an hour back. A workout session and massage will last a couple of hours. We have about four hours to come up with a plan to defeat him or we’re dead,” Shane said.
They fell silent.
“We’re stuck here,” she said after a long while.
“We’ll probably die here.”
“At least I’m with you,” she whispered.
He held her close and she listened to the steady strum of his heartbeat. In spite of her fear she was overjoyed to be held in his arms once again, if only for a little while.
“We might as well sit down,” he said. “I have a feeling we’re going to be here for a while.”
They settled in on the hard, cold metal floor and he tucked her into the crook of his arm.
Emotion knotted up tight inside her. There was so much she wanted to say to him, but she had no idea where to start. She lay with her head pressed against his chest, feeling his warmth, listening to the beat of his heart.
“Shane,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“I need to talk.”
“What about?”
“You, me, the divorce… Johnny.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You still can’t talk about your feelings? Even with two years’ distance?” She heard his ragged intake of breath. She waited. Finally, finally, when she’d just about given up, he spoke.
“It hurt me deep, Tish, that you wouldn’t talk to me about the credit card trouble you were in. Why did you hide it? I was your husband. It was my job to help.”
“I didn’t talk to you because you shut me out!”
“How did I do that?”
“With impossibly high standards. Perfect credit scores and checkbook balanced to the penny. It was overwhelming. You were overwhelming.”
“You honestly believed I would put money above your feelings?” He sounded stunned.
“I was afraid you would judge me harshly and I didn’t want to disappoint you, Shane. What can I say? I hid the debt from you because I was ashamed.” She paused, struggling hard not to cry.
“Tish.” The whisper of her name twisted from his throat. She heard the anguish in it and a corresponding pain settled over her heart. “I really let you down.”
“No more than I did you.”
“Explain it to me now. Why did you buy all those things? Why did you rack up credit card charges we couldn’t afford? Help me to understand.”
“If I knew the answer to that then I wouldn’t have done it, or I could have stopped.”
“Was it to fill some kind of emotional void? Did it have something to do with your childhood? Was it about your mother emphasizing the importance of latching on to a man with money?”
“Partially, I’m sure.”
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was I the cause in some way?”
“I don’t know.”
She wished she could see his face. His voice hitched. “I felt so betrayed when the creditors started calling and I found out exactly how much in debt you’d sunk us. Those cards were in my name, Tish. It was my account. I was responsible. You went behind my back and sullied my name.”
“Well, you like being responsible,” she snapped. “Why was it such a problem?”
“Was that the way you wanted me to feel? Like you’d cheated on me? Were you trying to get back at me for not being there when you went into labor with Johnny?”
“I don’t know,” she repeated.
“I think you do know. Maybe not on a conscious level, but maybe subconsciously you were trying to get back at me for not being there when you needed me most.”
“No, subconsciously you’re feeling guilty for not being there when I needed you most. Don’t project your guilt onto me.”
“If that’s not it, then what were you getting back at me for?”
“I wasn’t getting back at you. I was just trying to relieve my own pain.” Her voice cracked loud and echoed off the metal walls of the pitch-black shipping container. “You didn’t even seem to notice how I was suffering. You forgot about Johnny so easily.”
“You’re wrong. I didn’t forget.” His tone was brittle.
“You made me take apart the nursery before I was ready to let go. You never talked about him. You cut me off whenever I tried to talk about him.”
“Tish, I couldn’t talk about him. I’m the strong one. I’m the protector. Don’t you get it? If I talked about him, I couldn’t have stayed strong for you.”
“Dammit, Shane, that’s the problem. You want to take care of everyone. Like you’re ten feet tall and bulletproof. But if you’re always the strong one, your loved ones never get the chance to prove their strength, or to help you. It’s lopsided and unfair.”
Silence stretched in the void of darkness.
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Well, think about it. You grew up with all that flag waving, gotta-live-up-to-the-family-legends-and-be-a-hero stuff. Not that you shouldn’t be proud of your family history, but come on, nobody can live up to all that hype. By always striving to be this great heroic figure, you never let yourself be a real human being with less than honorable impulses.”
“I struggle plenty with my less than honorable impulses,” he said. “I just try not to show it.”
“But that’s what you’ve got to do! Let me see that my big hero is reluctant once in a while. That he’s conflicted over his decisions. That he’s not some frickin’ perfect Dudley Do-Right who makes everyone else feel like dirty rotten scoundrels because they can’t live up to his standards.”
“You mean like this?” Even in the complete blackness, his mouth found hers with unerring accuracy.
The minute their lips touched, Tish was electrified. She felt like a desert flower joyfully blooming after a rare soaking rain. God, how she’d missed him!
Their tongues met, starving, two years without this delicious meal. They kissed and kissed and kissed. The joining of their mouths was more intense than that night on the ferry. This was a kiss of reunion.
Of forgiveness.
Of coming home.
They melted into each other, eyesight cloaked by the blanket of blackness. But they didn’t need to see. They knew each other so well: by touch and taste, smell and sound.
She uttered a low sound and slipped her arms around his neck. His fingers knotted in her hair, his energy blazed as hot as her own. They were tuned to the same frequency, both vibrating with heightened awareness of each other.
The ridges and swirls in her fingertips traced the landscape of his face as they kissed; absorbing the subtle yet distinct changes in terrain from the apples of his cheeks to the hollows below. She moved, feeling the shape of his head like a sculptor. Her fingers traveled over him with complex precision, felt with delicate, indefinable intuition. She ran her hand through his hair and traced the ridge of the scar at his temple.
Wounds.
They both had so many wounds.
How different things might have been if they could have had this conversation two years ago. If they’d both been able to find balance in their lives.
Transcended. She was transcended and emotionally reborn.
Balance.
It was what she’d been after all along. With balance came closure.
Closure. It was where Elysee had been trying to lead her. She’d found it now, in this dark container, with her ex-husband, whom she still loved with all her heart but was finally able to let go on to his new beginning.
He kissed her harder, as if sensing her changing mood, pulling her back with him to the passion, to the flame. His tongue swept her up in a divine pleasure that she’d thought lost to her forever.
It was as thrilling now as it had been before. Maybe e
ven sweeter now, because of what they’d been through, of all that they’d suffered.
His hand snaked up underneath her shirt and he ran his hot palm up her belly. She moaned softly, encouraging him, shooting the rapids of desire, riding the river of reward. She didn’t care if this was right or wrong. She wanted him.
Tingles of anticipation started at the base of her neck, crept across her face, over her scalp, darted along her shoulders, trickled down her arms and finally shuddered softly down her spine.
She sat in his lap, between his spread thighs: such big, muscular thighs, full of power and promise.
He tried to pull her shirt over her head with his injured hand, but he kept dropping the hem. “Dammit,” he swore.
“Shh,” she said. “Let me.”
Stripping off her shirt and then unhooking her bra, she flung her garments away.
“Ah,” he said. In the darkness, his mouth found the hardening tip of her nipple. Tish sucked in her breath at the delicious shock of his warm moistness suckling her tender breast.
He curved one arm around her waist, pulling her closer against him. She sighed as a strange blend of electricity and chemistry fused with her emotions and sent a surge of bittersweet pleasure flashing through her.
The blackness surrounded them, encompassed them, defined them. She could feel his erection through the material of his pants, prodding against her pelvis. He rubbed his beard-stubbled jaw along her sternum, his mouth seeking her other nipple. The sensation sent a fresh set of chills tripping over her spine.
He pulled lightly on her nipple and she sank closer to him, pressing her pelvis into the seam of his jeans. She pressed her head alongside his, nuzzling him like a colt. He laughed and the sound was of delight.
He went for her lips again, but in this sightless chamber ended up kissing the tip of her nose.
She had been so foolish. So blind. To her faults and motivations, to his needs and expectations.
All this time, she’d fled from him. She’d hidden from him in shopping malls and behind cash registers. She’d run away down the long corridor of the past two years, through the labyrinth of her own distrustful mind.
Run away, not just from him, but from her betrayal of him. Of what she had done to their marriage. Run from the searing pain of loss. All this time wasted. All this extra heartache because she hadn’t had the courage to face her emotional pain, accept it and move through it.
