by Kylie Brant
His enigmatic dark gaze surveyed her calmly. “I have a certain expertise in these matters.” He must have decided that his cryptic answer wasn’t going to satisfy her because he went on. “You remember the plane stopping to refuel in Brussels? One of the mechanics there is very obliging. For a fee he smuggles an envelope to the pilot, who takes the opportunity for a quick outside visual check of the aircraft.” He shrugged. “The documents won’t do you any good now, I’m afraid. I’ve already destroyed them.”
Ignoring the direct hit those words made, Sara stepped nearer. It was anger, rather than logic, dictating her actions, or else she never would have allowed herself to get so close. “You needed a picture for them, didn’t you, Nick? Want to tell me where you got it, or should I guess?”
He looked amused, damn him. “Your phony driver’s license photo doesn’t do you justice. And if your weight on there is accurate, you really are too thin.”
Although she’d half expected the admission, it didn’t lessen her fury. “You went through my things!”
His fingers curled around her wrist, and too late she let go of his shirt, tried to step away. He didn’t allow it. They remained close, their gazes locked, and then his grip on her wrist loosened, turned caressing. “I scanned the photo and sent it to my contact in Brussels. He’s adept at doctoring documents. I’m equally adept at picking pockets, but it wasn’t necessary. You were sleeping. Your purse was right there.”
His thumb rubbed over the sensitive skin of her wrist, lingered on the pulse pounding madly beneath the surface. “It was a bit impolite, perhaps, but hardly on the same level as shooting your host.”
She yanked at her arm, but he didn’t release her. “Where’s this interest come from, Sara, hmm?” His free hand went to her hair, toyed with the ends of the newly cut and colored strands. “Righteous indignation, or something deeper? You weren’t by any chance hoping to get your hands on those papers and take off, were you?”
Since the thought had crossed her mind, it took some acting to look disinterested. “What? And leave my gilded cage here? Why would I do that?” The heat radiating from his clasp on her wrist was distracting, his proximity more so. His gaze dropped to her lips and her throat abruptly went dry.
“Because you don’t trust me any more than you do Justice.” The words were uttered absently. He cupped her jaw in his hands and rubbed a thumb across her lips. Lightly. Seductively. Her senses began to thrum with heightened awareness, drawing her body taut with shimmering tension.
Alarms shrilled dimly in the corners of her mind. It was his words she should be attending to. For some reason they seemed important, but her concentration was splintered by the intensity in his eyes, the warmth of his touch.
He wanted her.
There had been a time not too many hours ago when she’d almost forgotten that fact. Shooting a man should have discouraged even the most blatant interest. And it had been easy to convince herself that Nick’s pursuit of her had been irrevocably linked to his connection with Justice. But there was no mistaking the primal emotion gleaming in his ebony eyes. The raw carnal need she saw there summoned an answering flame low in the pit of her belly, one that sheer will alone couldn’t banish.
The hand holding her wrist loosened to slide up her arm before resting on her bare shoulder. “If this is a sample of your new wardrobe, I approve.”
It was difficult to concentrate with his breath stirring her hair, his hand toying with the edge of her skimpy top. It would barely qualify as a shirt. It was little more than a shiny handkerchief held in place by some strategically placed straps across her back. It didn’t allow for a bra, and all Nick would have to do was slip his hands under the loose bottom, glide them over her ribs and cup her bare breasts.
And she found that she wanted him to. Quite desperately.
The strength of her longing was staggering. He had one hand placed lightly on her back, his fingers grazing her vertebra. His eyes had gone slumberous, and his head slowly lowered toward hers. When she felt him take one earlobe in his teeth to score it gently, desire rocketed through her system. And the alarms in her mind sounded even more loudly.
His mouth cruised along her jawline before sampling the sensitive cord of her throat, and a gasp shuddered out of her. It occurred to her, belatedly, that desire this strong, this overwhelming, was its own kind of trap. It could soothe fears, dull instincts and jumble the senses.
And it could tempt her to lower her guard with the wrong man, for all the wrong reasons.
She tensed at the realization. She knew, better than most, that some men didn’t hesitate to wield sex as a weapon. Given her reaction to Nick Doucet, sex would be a potent weapon indeed.
The thought evoked a glimmer from the past, one she usually took pains to avoid. Images scraped across her memory, trailing a chill in their wake. She shuddered.
“What is it?” His words rasped in her ear, sharp with need. With one deft hand he rubbed her back, as if he could smooth the sudden rigidity from her bones. Rearing back a bit, he studied her, and what he saw in her face had his mouth flattening, his eyes becoming abruptly shuttered.
She leaned back against the arm that was still holding her closely. “I was thinking how effective a weapon sex could be, in the right hands. I’ll bet you’re a master at those kinds of games, aren’t you, Nick?”
There was stunned disbelief on his face, quickly replaced by a savage temper, all the more frightening for being controlled. “You think I’d bind you to me with sex, Sara? Is that it? Believe me, if I thought that was possible I’d have been on you, inside you, before we left New Orleans.”
Despite his words, or perhaps because of them, he let her go, turned toward the phone. But not before she recognized the stamp of arousal on his face, its lean lines still carved with frustration.
She listened to him place an order with room service and knew the tight clipped tone he was using was evidence of temper. But she couldn’t regret her words, even if they’d wounded him. Because they’d caused him to release her, let her put some much needed distance between them.
And one thing was becoming increasingly certain—she needed that distance to protect herself. Regardless of Nick’s intentions, she couldn’t afford to lower her defenses with him. The man had a way of slipping through her guard as no other ever had.
She heard him replacing the phone in its cradle, then silence stretched, thrumming with tension. “So is Kim to be my permanent keeper?” The question had been nagging at her the entire afternoon. When he didn’t answer, Sara turned, waved an arm to encompass the room. “Is this my new jail?”
“You’ll stay with me.”
The words, although not altogether unexpected, weren’t the ones she’d hoped for. “But you said before that Justice had hired you to bring down Mannen.”
“That’s right.”
“How do you intend to do that from here?”
He looked up, and there was an indefinable glimmer in his eye. “I don’t.”
The two words hung suspended in the air between them. She stared at him, questions churning inside her, along with a looming sense of foreboding.
“Mannen’s in Chicago, so that’s where I have to go.”
His meaning was all too clear, but she backed away from it, and him. It was too horrible to even contemplate. “You mean…you’ll have to go there sometime. You’ll have to…”
The signs of his earlier temper had vanished. He was watching her with an impassive expression that lent his words a cold, dead weight.
“I promised I’d protect you—hide you—and I will. I figure the best place for that is in Chicago. Right under Victor Mannen’s nose.”
Chapter 7
Sara stared at Nick, shock and terror sprinting down her spine. “You’re crazy!”
“It’s the best way. It’s the last place Mannen would expect to find you…hell, it’s the last place Justice would expect to find you.”
“I’m sure the genius of your plan will be of
great comfort to me when I’m dead!”
In response to the rising emotion in her voice, his went lower, became more soothing. “That’s not going to happen. We’re changing your identity again as well as your appearance. Neither Mannen nor Whitmore will suspect a thing.”
She could feel sheets of ice glazing her insides. It was a measure of her fear that a hint of pleading entered her tone. “I could stay here. With that woman, or someone else. Or with lots of guards. As many as you want—” She broke off because he was already shaking his head.
“You had two choices when you came with me. That remains unchanged.”
Justice or Nick. She didn’t need for him to verbalize the words to remember the impossibility of the decision. For the first time she actually gave serious thought to changing her mind. Certainly the government would never take such a risk with a prize witness as to dangle her before Mannen.
But that thought was swiftly followed by another. The danger of putting her trust in Justice was just as real, if perhaps more removed than what Nick was proposing. Mannen would still have someone cultivated in the department. Someone who would report any information on her directly to him.
Turning her back on Nick, Sara walked to the window once more. Gazing sightlessly at the warm glow of lights, she hugged her arms around herself and chose to blame the river of cold coursing through her body on the hare-brained designer who’d dressed her. She’d have given anything for a sweatshirt.
“Would I have to see him?”
“There’s no point if you don’t.”
A shudder worked through her. She heard Nick approaching, but willed him not to touch her. She felt like she would shatter in a million pieces if he did.
“I thought on some level that might appeal to you.”
She whirled to look at him, her jaw agape.
“What is it you feel for him, Sara, besides the fear? Any lingering feelings of hate? Desire for revenge?”
An image of Sean’s surprised eyes, his lifeless body, flashed across her mind. She pressed together lips suddenly inclined to tremble, and refused to reply. But that didn’t stop Nick from continuing, his shaman’s voice drifting through her system. “I’m offering you a chance to stop running. A chance to stand up to the man, and help make him pay for everything he did to you…to your friends. How much longer are you going to take the easy way out, Sara?” A note of something indefinable entered his voice. “I can tell you from personal experience that you can’t outpace the guilt. If you could, half the people on earth would be on the move.”
The impact of his words was like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. She knew only too well that he spoke the truth. Six years was a long time, but she had yet to escape the memories. She’d never managed to run fast enough, far enough, to do so.
In that moment she found herself hating him. Feeling raw and exposed, she lashed out. “What do you know about it? Do you know what it’s like to have six deaths on your conscience, hmm? Can you imagine being responsible for the murders of innocent people?”
“Yes.” His expression became blank, and his voice was oddly impassive. “I know exactly how that feels.”
She had no idea how long it was before Nick entered the room to contemplate her sitting alone in the dark.
“Sara.”
That was all he said, but she couldn’t summon the will to fight anymore right now. She was weary, with a bone-deep exhaustion that went far beyond the physical. “I was the one to involve the rest with Mannen.” Her gaze lifted to his. “You knew that, didn’t you?”
He came farther into the room. “No.”
“There were five of us. An odd collection of kids who sort of found each other one by one and clung. We were all runaways—no diplomas, no skills. We took what jobs we could get, but when we pooled our money we could at least find a place to stay where the rats wouldn’t keep us awake all night. I’m the one who answered the ad in the paper. It was an upscale restaurant, not snooty, but nice. They needed a hostess. I used the ad as a reason to get inside one afternoon, hoping at least for a job as dishwasher.”
She could still remember her first sight of the gleaming hardwood floors, the vaulted ceilings and brass-plated bar. She’d never seen anything like it in her life. The woman she’d spoken to had probably been only a half-dozen years older, but it had been glaringly apparent that there were miles between them when it came to background.
“The lady there wouldn’t even let me talk to the manager. She was showing me out when a man walked in the door. I knew from the change in her attitude that he must be someone important. He was the owner, though he apparently didn’t spend much time there.” And his name, she’d later learned, was Victor Mannen. He’d stood in the doorway, elegant and tailored in his custom-made clothes and immaculately groomed silver hair, and taken in the scene in seconds. “For some reason he stopped her. I didn’t understand why. Not then. But he invited me back to the offices, and after talking to me for a few minutes, he offered me a job. Just cleaning up and the like, but I was thrilled.
“I suppose he could smell my desperation.” She realized now that he’d been a man to sense that kind of thing, to feed on it. “I figured he might expect some kind of payback, so I was careful around him. But he wasn’t there that much, and when he was, he seemed okay. After a few months I finally screwed up enough courage to ask about jobs for my friends. It wasn’t long before we were all working for him, in one manner or another.”
They’d been, she remembered, stunned by their good fortune. So when they’d gradually come to experience doubts regarding some of the associates who occasionally met Mannen there, or about the nature of the errands they were assigned, those doubts were quieted by the steady pay and the dependable source of meals. Survival on the streets hadn’t allowed for ethical niceties.
“How long did you work for him?”
Nick’s voice was a velvet link in the darkness, one she seized gratefully to prevent the recollections from sucking her under. “About a year for me. More than half that for the others. It all changed when we lost the place where we were living. Our landlord threw us out when he found there were five of us in a studio apartment. It was my idea for us to sleep at the restaurant.”
The sick feeling of responsibility swam in her stomach, a familiar companion. “It was easy enough to lift the keys, get copies made. We’d wait until all the help had gone home, sneak in the back and crash in the office area. They were doing some construction there, taking out some walls, making Mannen’s office larger. We would just move the tarps off the furniture and stretch out for the night, put everything back in the morning. No one showed up around there before 10:00 a.m. It should have been okay.”
“Until Mannen came in unexpectedly.” There was a grim note in Nick’s tone, but she didn’t have time to reflect on it. She pulled up her knees and hugged them to her chest, as if to protect herself from the sting of the memories. They swarmed anyway, like vicious bees.
“We were sleeping. I think it was Sean who heard people moving around. He went to the office door and recognized Mannen’s voice. We barely had time to drag the tarps back over the stuff and hide before they entered the office.” With a grim sense of irony she remembered how their greatest fear then had been that they’d be fired for the liberties they’d taken. Instead, they’d embarked on a nightmare.
“Three of them dived behind a couch. Jason had wedged himself in a corner between a bookcase and the wall, and I was still rushing around looking for a hiding place. The door started to open and I crawled into the closet. It was the worst place to choose. The door had been taken off in the remodeling, and if Mannen had been in the right position, and looked up at the right time, he’d have seen me easily.”
“But he didn’t.”
She shook her head, forgetting the gesture would be indiscernible in the darkness. “He had two men with him. One we’d seen around before, and one was a stranger. It was late, around 2:00 a.m., and from the sound of their conversa
tion, they were discussing drugs. The other man was telling Mannen the price of the next shipment was going to double, and Mannen’s voice got really cold as they argued. Finally, though, he agreed and had the guy make a call to set the plan in motion. Then, when the call was over, he looked over at his associate…” She stopped, swallowing. Just the mental image of the scene still had the power to make her throat go dry “…and told him to shoot him.”
I think we’re done here, Peter. Kill him.
A chill eddied through her at the eerie memory. “There were three shots, and then the sound of something hitting the floor. The other man, Peter, asked if this was going to mess things up, and Mannen said that the shipment would arrive anyway, he’d just eliminated the middleman. He told him to get rid of the body and clean up the mess, then walked out.”
She rested her forehead against her raised knees. She’d recited this scene endlessly for the Justice agents, but it never lost the luster of terror. That emotion had merely been a prelude for what was to come.
When she raised her head again she was disconcerted to find Nick squatted down in front of her. Close. All too close. The shadows blended with his inky hair, left his eyes unreadable.
“So you were right, of course,” Sara murmured. “A while ago. It was my fault—all of it. They wouldn’t have met Mannen if not for me, wouldn’t have been in the restaurant that night if I hadn’t suggested it.” Wouldn’t be dead. The words she couldn’t bear to speak hung in the air between them.
“Feeling guilty isn’t the same as being guilty. And it’s a natural reaction for a lone survivor in a situation like the one you were involved in.”
The bleak certainty in his voice had her watching him carefully. “Do you feel guilty?” He was close enough that she saw the flicker in his eyes, although he didn’t answer. “You said you knew what it was like to be responsible for the murders of others.”
His countenance, usually so inscrutable, grew fierce, but she was strangely unafraid. She had a feeling the emotion was directed inward.
