by Cindy Dees
“Are you going to be able to walk inside?” Gray murmured to her.
“Sure.”
But there was a white line around her mouth by the time they reached the front door, and he guided her straight to the sofa, where she collapsed gratefully onto her side. He spent the next few minutes bringing her pillows, blankets, the TV remote, orange juice, water and one of the pain pills the medic had given him.
“Really, Gray. You don’t have to fuss over me like this.”
He asked her blandly, “Do you want me to take all this stuff away, then?”
“Well, no.”
“Then clearly I do need to fuss over you. Why don’t you try to get a little sleep?”
She turned on the television and did, indeed, fall asleep quickly. He collapsed in the chair next to the sofa and finally gave in to the emotional overload of nearly losing Sam. Had that shot been a few inches higher, or a few inches to the right, the outcome could have been entirely different. Hell, if the bullet had even just nicked a major artery, she’d have died on his watch.
He closed his eyes and visions of other blood, another beloved face frozen and contorted in agony, came to him. He opened his eyes fast and stared at the television screen blindly.
This was not the same. Sam was fine. She’d been winged by a bullet. No more. It was not his fault. It was just a bit of bad luck.
But no matter how many rational reasons he gave his brain not to freak out, he was completely, totally, 100 percent freaked. He dozed off, but the moment Sam shifted slightly and made a small noise, he was wide awake and at her side.
“Are you in pain?” he asked in a hushed voice. She blinked her eyes open. “A little. I’ve experienced worse.”
Sympathetic pain sluiced through him. “Are you saying you’ve been shot before?”
“Nah. But a good beating hurts a lot more than this.”
Rage enveloped him. “Who?” was all he managed to bite out past the red haze obscuring his eyes and his brain.
“Hey. It’s past history. I’m done with violent boyfriends, be they mine or my mom’s.” She tried to sit up but grimaced at the movement. He reached out to help her move to a slightly more upright position and to put another pillow under her shoulders.
“Sam, I’ll never let anyone lay a hand on you again.”
She reached out, smiling, to touch his face with cold fingers. “My knight in shining armor, huh?”
He blinked several times. He was nobody’s knight, armor or otherwise. “Can I get you anything?” he mumbled, flummoxed.
“I’m fine. I’m not used to having someone hovering over me like this.”
He shrugged. “Get used to it. I’m not going anywhere.”
She gave him a funny look that sent him to the kitchen to process. Now why had he said that? He only meant he wasn’t going anywhere in the next few days until she was recovered from her injury. Right?
Except the idea of returning to his regularly scheduled life seemed like a distant impossibility. He barely remembered what things had been like a mere week ago before Sammie Jo Jessup blew into his life. What on earth was he going to do with her?
Chapter 13
Sam watched Gray beat a hasty retreat and her heart fell. If he still felt a compulsion to run away from her when mention of anything more permanent than the next few days came up, she had no chance with him. None at all. She was stupid to hope that he might ever get past his issues enough to try out a relationship with her. The only reason he was being nice to her now was because she was injured.
Her side didn’t feel that terrible, considering. It felt like whoever’d treated it had put some kind of numbing substance on the wound. She hoped they’d given some of the stuff to Gray for later. Every now and then when she moved without thinking, the wound burned enough to hint at discomfort to come. But she would suffer the fires of hell before she’d complain to Gray about it. He was so messed up already that she’d gotten hurt on his watch he could barely see straight.
She watched television and dozed well into the evening. Yet again, Gray poked his head in from the kitchen to ask if she needed anything.
She replied, “Yes. I need you to go to bed and get some sleep. You look exhausted.”
He stepped fully into the room. “I’m fine. Can I get you something to eat? Another pain pill?”
“Gray, come here.”
Frowning, he tossed a dish towel on the table behind him and came over to the sofa. She shifted slightly and managed not to grimace as she did it. She patted the cushion in front of her belly. “Sit.”
“No. I’ll hurt you.”
“I’m going to stand up and drag you down here if you don’t sit, and that will hurt me.”
Frowning, he perched on the very edge of the sofa.
“Look at me,” she ordered. He glanced at her and then away. “No. Really look at me.”
“What for?” he mumbled.
“I’m alive. I’m going to be just fine. It was an unlucky accident that I got hit at all. I’m sure that gunshot was meant to herd us toward the Ladybug and nothing more. It’ll never happen again.”
“Darn straight it won’t. I’m putting you on a plane out of here as soon as you can travel.”
She took his large hands in hers. “I love you for worrying about me like this. But I need you to stop. I’ll be fine.”
“You lo—” He broke off and jumped to his feet. “Don’t love me, Sam. Ever. You hear me?” Hope and horror warred in his gaze.
“Why not?” She hadn’t exactly meant the words to be a grand declaration of her feelings, but she supposed she did love him a little for real. He was a remarkable man. And that glimpse of hope in his eyes told her that, at some subconscious level he couldn’t acknowledge yet, he really did want her to love him. Or was that just her being a self-deluded idiot?
“Just don’t.” He turned and raced out of the room like a ghost was chasing him. Which she supposed wasn’t far wrong. How was she supposed to convince him he was worthy of her love or that she was worthy of loving him if he wouldn’t let her even begin to try? Although why she was still beating her head against that brick wall, she had no idea. He’d made it perfectly clear last night that he neither wanted nor appreciated her interference in his life.
Just because he was being kind and solicitous of her now didn’t mean he wanted happily ever after with her. So he felt guilty that she’d been shot. Fine. Let him. Who was she to talk him out of such stupidity?
She lay back against the hot, uncomfortable pillows in frustration. She knew she had to let go of him, but she was having a heck of a time convincing her heart of that. She had to find a way. That was all there was to it.
* * *
Gray tossed and turned for much of the night, listening to the faint drone of the television in the living room. Whether or not Sam was watching it or merely sleeping in front of it, he didn’t have the courage to get up and check. If he knew what was good for him, he would stay as far from her as he could within the bounds of polite behavior. But since when did he do what was good for him?
Finally, when the first dim gray of dawn began to creep around his curtains, he climbed out of bed, grateful for an end to a sleepless night and being forced to be alone with his thoughts.
He tiptoed to the living room and was relieved to see that Sam was out cold. In sleep, she looked younger. Softer. Vulnerable. Sometimes he forgot how pretty she was behind the sheer force of her personality and those extraordinary eyes of hers. Her red hair spread out on the white pillowcase like a waterfall of every autumn color from gold to chestnut to burgundy. How had she described it to that little girl? God’s favorite colors? He liked the notion. How had Sam learned to love herself when so few people in her life had loved her along the way? In another life, he would have liked to shower her in enough love to make up for her rotten childhood.
But that wasn’t the hand he’d been dealt.
And in the meantime, he had to figure out what Wendall Proctor was willi
ng to blow up cars and shoot people to protect. Gray refilled the water bottle next to Sam, laid out another pain pill and her morning antibiotic, covered a plate of cut fruit with plastic wrap to keep it fresh and set it beside her, and eased out of the house on silent feet.
As much as he’d love to confront Wendall and suggest in the strongest possible terms that the next time the bastard tried to kill Sam the man would not like the results, Gray refrained. Punching Proctor in the nose would accomplish nothing other than pissing the guy off and letting him know who’d been watching him.
It was time to call in the big guns.
* * *
Sam blinked awake to painfully bright light streaming past the curtains. She shoved on a pair of sunglasses and squinted at the offerings Gray had left for her. She popped the pills and then called out, “Gray? Are you here?”
Silence was her only answer. She got up painfully and made her way to the bathroom. Her side looked okay around the bandage, and she eased into clean clothes carefully.
Even she could only take so much television before her brain turned to mush. She sat down gingerly at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and a pencil and began to doodle. The exercise usually helped her organize her thoughts as she jotted down names and started drawing lines between them.
The one thing that made everyone involved with this case jump was Echelon. Whatever Proctor was up to clearly involved Echelon. She highly doubted his intent was as simple as wanting to expose the program. He could’ve done it before now if he’d wanted to. Based on that folder she’d glimpsed in his guy’s truck, Proctor obviously had a fair bit of information on the program, possibly even a fair bit of classified information.
The obvious assumption was that Proctor wanted to destroy Echelon. How would she go about doing that if that were her goal?
Blowing up the antennas would be difficult. The dish antennas at the nearby William Byrd Observatory weighed many tons apiece, and the way she heard it, the NSA antenna was actually a massive array of sensors and wires spread out over a huge, circular area.
Not to mention, the security around the NSA’s Shady Grove complex would no doubt be extremely tight. At the other end of the Echelon pipeline, she expected the security around a massive array of supercomputers used for sorting and analyzing data would be just as heavy, if not more so. But the antennas and the computers had to be connected somehow. Underground cables, no doubt. A person could definitely go after those.
The mystery barn on the Proctor compound sprang to mind. In all the excitement of fleeing yesterday and getting shot, she’d temporarily forgotten about what she’d seen inside the structure. In between panicking about the armed men below, she’d gotten unobstructed views inside the barn twice as vehicles left the building.
A pair of state-of-the-art computers sat on a large table inside the barn, which didn’t entirely surprise her. But the workbench beside the computers had surprised her. Bits and pieces of small radios lay all over the bench. It had strained the limits of her eyesight to identify the components, but there was no doubt about it. The big secret in the barn, or at least part of it, was little radios. What on earth could Proctor be using them for? She’d seen just about every brand of bug and surveillance microphone in the business, and these weren’t that small or sophisticated. They frankly looked crude and homemade.
Additionally, she’d spotted the heavy cables that came into the barn from the generator outside. They snaked across the floor toward some unseen target within the barn. If the generator wasn’t powering just the computers, what else, then? She’d also caught sight of the edge of some piece of large equipment. It was about four feet tall and had a curved metal case. She sketched it as she remembered it, trying out various possibilities to complete the shape.
Her best guess was an industrial-size fan. One of the big floor models that moved massive amounts of air through warehouses or factories. Now why would Proctor have one of those in a relatively small building? Did it have something to do with the dirt Molly had mentioned?
Something else Molly had said clicked in Sam’s brain. The child said the grown-ups were dumping dirt from the building in the fields. That meant a lot of dirt was coming out of a small building. And that, combined with the giant fan, could mean only one thing. Wendall was digging a tunnel. The dirt was coming out of it, and the fan was being used to ventilate it. Those power cables could be powering lights or even something like a jackhammer.
Was it possible Proctor was targeting Echelon’s underground cables? But surely if the signals were interrupted the NSA would be all over it immediately. And besides, cut cables could be quickly repaired, would give away Proctor’s sabotage and would get the guy sent to jail for the rest of his life.
Was it possible to do something less obvious, like siphon signals off the cable? She’d read an article from the CIA a few months back that had to do with photon leakage off fiber-optic cables. But she doubted such leakage would be enough to deliver any meaningful intelligence to Proctor’s people. What else could Proctor be up to?
A car engine’s noise made her look up sharply from the kitchen table. She started to leap to her feet to check it out, but a sharp knife of pain in her side forced her back down onto the chair. Whoops.
She breathed fast and shallow, willing the pain away, and wilting in relief as Gray’s voice called out from the front hallway, “Sam?”
“I’m in the kitchen,” she managed in a relatively normal voice that didn’t give away the shooting pain in her side.
He joined her quickly, concern on his face. “You’re not trying to cook, are you?”
She grinned up at him wryly. “Does that worry you because you don’t want me to overdo it or because you’ve tasted my cooking?”
He rolled his eyes. “Does your side hurt?”
“Nah. I’m fine,” she answered cheerfully. And now that he was here, she was better. He just had that effect on her.
“I didn’t know you could draw,” he commented as he moved around the kitchen, whipping up egg salad sandwiches.
She shrugged.
“You’ve got talent. Maybe you should think about developing it.”
“And get out of the field where bad guys shoot guns at me and blow up my car?” she asked lightly.
“What’s wrong with wanting you to be safe?”
“Nothing. It’s just not going to happen. I’ve got this crazy eyesight, and I’m supposed to use it to help people.”
“Yes, but...” He trailed off.
“If you finish that with some snarky comment about my being only a girl, I’m going to have to beat you up, stitches or no stitches.”
“Don’t you dare tear those out,” he threatened. “You could get an infection.”
They glared at one another in one of the standoffs that were becoming commonplace between them. This time, he looked away first. “Fine. Girls can play superhero if they want to. Just not you.”
“Why not?”
He burst out, “I don’t want you to die!”
She was a little taken aback at his intensity. “I have no intention of dying anytime soon, thanks.”
“I’m serious, Sam.”
“So am I. I like being alive, thank you very much.”
He shook his head. “If you hadn’t spotted those fingerprints in the Ladybug yesterday...if you’d been just a little more out of it...that would’ve been it for us. Life is so damned fragile—” His voice broke and he stopped speaking.
“You think I don’t know that?”
“No, I think you don’t.”
“But you do?” she challenged.
For once, he met her gaze and said grimly, “Yes. I do. I know all too well how easily life can be snuffed out. When you least expect it, poof. Done.”
“Tell me what happened, Gray.” She winced as the words slipped out. She knew better than to ask. He wouldn’t tell her. Besides, it felt almost as if she were lying to ask like she didn’t already know the answer.
“I
lost someone I loved. Terribly. Tragically. Without warning.”
She stared at him in shock. He’d actually offered her an answer of sorts! “I’m sorry for your loss,” she managed to choke out.
“Thanks.” The pace of his chopping increased and he spent the next few minutes pulverizing lunch. She left him alone to work out his agitation.
Gray spent most of the afternoon working feverishly around the house before his overall tension seemed to ease. He made a delicious vegetable stew for their supper and then slipped outside to have a look around.
He was back far too quickly, however, and wearing far too grim an expression. “We’ve got a problem, Sam.”
She looked up in alarm from the newspaper spread across her lap. “What’s up?”
“Someone’s watching the house, and I don’t think it’s Proctor.”
“Man, if even you can spot them, they must be making no attempt at all at stealth.”
“I’m not blind,” Gray retorted, “and I do have a little training. I know what to look for.”
“And what did you see?”
“There’s a truck down the street. Not the usual pieces of crap Proctor’s guys drive. This thing’s big and in great condition. Diesel model. Darked-out windows.”
“Show me.” She started to get up from the sofa by herself, but Gray was beside her instantly, lifting her gently to her feet. His hands felt so good on her skin. Her body craved more of him, and memory of their intense passion flooded her mind.
Gray stepped back hastily. She sighed, deflated. “Turn out the lights, please, so I can look out the window.”
He turned off not only the lights but the television, too. She moved to the side of the curtains and peered down the street. The truck might as well have a neon sign over it announcing that a bad guy was inside and watching them.
