by Stacy Gail
“So...this could be a religious zealot after all,” Sara murmured after a long moment, turning it over in her mind. “You said chemical analysis has been conducted on the cross. What about the Communion wafer?”
“What about it?”
She sighed, struggling for patience. “Macbeth, I know active investigations aren’t Lynchpin’s specialty, but we’ve got to get out in front of this before it goes any further, if only to protect certain family secrets.”
“Yeah.” Macbeth’s sigh was gloomy. “I’d really hate to try and explain to the Feds I now work for the company that saved my pubescent horny ass from a succubus who loved me for my hacking skills and strong life force.”
“They’d probably think you’ve read too much manga, so I wouldn’t worry about it,” Sara drawled. “But with the need to keep our secrets in mind, I’d like to know if there’s anything unique in the evidence that’s been gathered. It would be nice if we could narrow the search down to something smaller than a billion Roman Catholics.”
“I haven’t found anything substantive in the reports, though I’m not done reading through all of them.”
“I’ll call for an update,” she promised.
* * *
Gideon couldn’t move. He couldn’t move, even though he knew someone needed his help. Even though he knew an explosion was coming—
“Gideon, wake up.”
The kid had stopped making noises, like he’d given up. Like he’d died. And Gideon hadn’t done a damn thing.
“Gideon—”
The explosion hit, as it always did, and at last his paralysis was broken. The yell that had been bottled up suddenly uncorked, and he would have fallen face-first on the floor if Sara hadn’t been there to catch him. He shuddered, the sick horror rising like his gorge, and he had to clamp his lips together and swallow hard so he wouldn’t be sick from the remembered fear and hatred of his own weakness.
“Gideon.” Sara’s calm voice, tinged with just a hint of sweet Southern charm, stroked over his nerves like cool water. Her hand smoothed his hair, soothing the chaos raging within. “That looked like a bad one.”
“Yeah.” Barely trusting himself to open his mouth without screaming all the madness out in front of her, her words took a moment to sink in. When they did, the sickness inside him twisted ever deeper into his soul, digging a dark and bleak hole nothing could ever fill, and he pushed her away to drop his head into his hands. “No, you’re wrong. The dream isn’t a bad one. I’m the bad one.”
She settled on the edge of the bed close to him, and he hated the welcoming warmth that radiated from her nearness. He didn’t deserve it. “I’ve never met a better man than you, Gideon. You hold your family dear to your heart, you’re devoted to both honor and duty to your country and the people you do your best to heal—”
“Don’t make me laugh. When the pressure’s on I choose to look out for number one.” He had to force the truth out, and the words were so jagged they tore at his throat. “Does that sound like a good man to you? Like someone you would ever allow to even touch you?”
“That’s a trick question if I’ve ever heard one,” came the measured reply. “If I say yes, you’ll deny it. If I say no, you’ll only be too happy to agree with me and push me even further away.”
“You’d be better off, trust me.”
“I’m one of those funny modern women. I prefer to make decisions for myself. I’ll decide whether or not you’re good enough to be in my life.”
“At the very least you should make an informed decision.” The twitchy rage that afflicted him so often these days boiled back to the surface, so fast he had no hope of stopping it. “You think I’m a great guy, but would a great guy just let a soldier die when he was no more than five feet away? I could have saved him, but I didn’t. I didn’t even want to.”
“If that were true, I would have doubts about you. But I don’t. Something must have prevented you from going to that soldier.”
A dangerous sound seethed from between his teeth as the anger turned in on itself and burned a fist-sized hole through his heart. “You’re right. Something did prevent me from going to that soldier. My own weakness. My own fear.”
“What were you afraid of?”
“The usual—getting my head blown off.” He raised his head to face her fully, so she could at last see his true ugliness. Anything else would have been as cowardly as he knew he was. “Usually med staff is based in safe zones in Kandahar and Camp Leatherneck, but there’s a rotating roster of a medical team that goes out into the field to take care of any wounded up at the front lines. It was my turn to be a field doc along with two medics. I was alert but not scared. I’d done the same amount of training that everyone else had to go through. At boot camp I even earned a reputation for sharpshooting and was put on the list for sniper training—something that’s unheard of when training medical staff. When we went out into the field, I was confident in my abilities as a soldier as well as a medical professional. I really thought I’d be able to handle anything that came our way, and get everyone out alive.”
She remained still, watchful. It was so strange, how he could derive a sense of calm even from her stillness. Or maybe, he thought with a twisted smile, it just felt good to finally talk about what a heartless bastard he was.
“There had been a report of injuries from a skirmish west of Kandahar, so our med team headed out. Our coordinates led us to a place that was nothing more than a wide spot in the road—mud brick buildings no more than two stories high, and bombed out. It looked abandoned, and after searching through the place we decided the call had been off the mark. It happens more often than you’d think, despite the fact that we now have pinpoint-accurate GPS, so we thought we were in the wrong place. I never did find out if we were in the right spot or not, because at about the time we’d decided to pack up and head back to base, one of our guys bringing up the rear got sniped. He wasn’t one of the med team, but rather part of the unit that always escorted us whenever we went into the field, so I didn’t know him that well. I just knew that somehow he’d been hit, somewhere in the chest, and he needed medical attention, stat. The medic next to me and I turned back—I think we both had the same idea of dragging the downed soldier toward the nearest cover—when I felt something hot whizz past my cheek. Instinct dropped me down even as I got sprayed with...wetness.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, but it couldn’t erase the feel of it. “The medic next to me had his head blown off by the same bullet that grazed my cheek. He was dead by the time he fell on top of me, no more than five feet away from the first soldier who got hit.”
She listened without flinching, though a well of anguish was reflected in the gaze she kept trained on him. “My God, you almost died.”
“The sniper must have thought I had died, getting two soldiers for the price of one bullet, because he didn’t waste any more time on me.” His guts churned with the remembered fear and impotent fury. “The way I’d gone down, I wasn’t able to see the soldier who had originally fallen. But I could hear him. He was crying out for someone to help him. For over an hour he cried out for someone, anyone, to help him. I was no more than five feet away, close enough to hear the wetness of his breathing. I knew I could save him if I could just get to him, but I couldn’t. The Marine unit I was with kept yelling at him to stay down, to not move, that they’d rather shoot him themselves than have his wounded presence lure any soldiers out in the open. Our coordinates were called in and the sniper’s area was taken out by an airstrike. The moment the first bomb hit I could move again, but by then it was too late. Two soldiers died that day, and I barely had a scratch on me.”
Silence descended as Gideon at last showed her the hideous truth hidden within him, but instead of dreading her revulsion, he felt...lighter. As if he had been walking around with a weight the size of an elephant in his chest, and he’d at last managed to get free of it. For a moment he closed his eyes, the odd stillness inside him so profound it tightened h
is throat even as he waited for her to walk away.
“You said you were with a military unit and a med team. Where were they as you laid there, possibly wounded and also needing assistance?”
Gideon opened his eyes to stare at her uncomprehendingly. “Where were they?”
“Yes. They didn’t come out to where the three of you lay, did they?”
“Of course not, they were in the same boat that I was. Some were pinned down behind a bombed-out building, while others had to hunker down behind what was left of a thick garden wall. Though they had no idea that I hadn’t been killed, they knew the kid I’d gone out to save was still alive, so they did what they could—yelling encouragement to him, telling him that an airstrike was coming in. They couldn’t do much else.”
“Exactly.” She nodded as though he had managed to come up with something profound. “There are a couple of points in your story I think you may have overlooked, and that’s one of them. No one else stuck their head out because not only would it have been suicide, it was basically counter-productive. The second point is that both you and the medic who died reacted instinctively when the first soldier went down, and that instinct was to help despite being out in the open where you knew a sniper was having a field day. You didn’t run to save yourself, Gideon. You tried to help.”
“I laid there like a coward—”
“Forgive me, but from a tactical point of view, could you please tell me what purpose it would have served if you had shown you were still alive?”
His eyes narrowed when he realized she was perfectly serious. But then, she was a descendant of a legendary race of warrior angels; she was hard-wired to have a militaristic outlook. “What do you mean, tactical?”
She lifted a shoulder. “It seems obvious to me that for the good of the group, playing possum was your only option. If you had done anything else, you undoubtedly would have been the sniper’s third victim, and that would have been a pointless waste of specialized personnel. But even more than that, if you had made it clear that you were still perfectly healthy and pinned down, I have no doubt your fellow soldiers would have moved heaven and earth to get you to safety, and in that process more lives would have been lost. Yet none of this happened, because you were smart enough to not put either yourself or anyone else in harm’s way. Tactically speaking, I would have done the same thing had I been in your shoes.”
Gideon stared at her for what seemed like forever, as still as a statue. But inside all hell was breaking loose. It was a strange sensation, almost as though an internal climate change was going on. For months he’d endured being frozen from the inside out, as if a part of him were still lying there in the dirt, unable to move. That freezing had been there for so long he had forgotten what it was to not have that crushing ice holding him in place. But now something was happening. It seemed warmer within that barren icescape that was his soul, almost as though the sun had found a way to break through the clouds. He wasn’t going to kid himself. He’d never forget the eternity of lying face down in the dirt, helpless and desperate to reach the soldier he’d wanted to help. But maybe he wasn’t as monstrous as he thought he was.
“If anyone would know tactics, it’d be you.” Rubbing a hand over the chest where the warm glow was centered, Gideon couldn’t seem to stop staring at the woman who’d given him that gift. “You really are one hell of a soldier, Sara.”
An expression he couldn’t decipher flickered across her face. “I thought you didn’t like soldiers.”
“I like you.” He held out his hand to her without realizing that was what he was going to do. The sensation of sun shining inside him deepened when she slipped her hand into his. “I’m glad to have you on my side.”
“Your side. Your front. Your back.” That fleeting expression vanished under a breathtaking smile, and he quickly forgot the vague disquiet it spawned as she leaned in for a kiss. “Wherever you want me, that’s where I’ll be.”
Falling back against the pillows, he was shocked at how easily the laughter came as he pulled her with him. “Right now, I think I want you...” With his hands gripping her silk-covered hips, he adjusted her so that his swelling arousal pressed against her cleft. “On top.”
Chapter Twelve
“It’s way too early for this.” Gideon’s complaint was barely understandable as he pushed the words out through a jaw-cracking yawn. “For crying out loud, it’s still dark outside. Crickets are still doing that chirpy thing they do when it’s nighttime.”
“I love that sound.” Dressed in black bike shorts and a pink spandex top, Sara led the way down the wrought-iron stairs to the main floor. “Isn’t it great to be active while everyone else is zonked out?”
He made a choking sound and collapsed onto the nearest couch in the living room. “Great isn’t how I would describe it. Insane...now that feels about right.”
“We got plenty of sleep last night. Well, enough, anyway.” She smiled at the memory as she tugged a rolled-up yellow yoga mat out of a closet and headed for the open area in front of the couch where he was sprawled. “Don’t tell me you’re not a morning person.”
“Don’t tell me you are.”
“Not only am I a morning person, but I love getting a jump on the day.” Turning on all the lights—and ignoring his pitiable groan—she unfurled the mat, then grabbed up the remote to the satellite radio. “You could have gone back to sleep, you know. I’m worried you won’t be coherent for the rest of the day.”
“What matters is that I’m coherent now. I’m just not happy about it.”
“You could always join me. I’m just going to be doing some light yoga. I’m still pretty wiped out, so I’m going to be smart and not push it.”
“You’re up at oh-dark-thirty, and you don’t think you’re pushing it? Unbelievable.” Gideon yawned again and rolled onto his stomach to cradle his head on his folded arms. “I don’t think you know how to take it easy.”
“Guilty.” And with that she began to stretch, reaching her hands high over her head before sweeping them all the way to the ground, folding herself so completely she was able to rest her nose against her knees while locking her hands behind her ankles. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“I’m supposed to look after you.” His tone was absent, and she turned her head to see he was looking at her ass. “I consider myself a man of my word.”
“That’s very honorable of you.” Enjoying his distraction as much as she did the zinging stretch of muscles that needed to be loosened up, she hid her smile against her legs. “Well then, why don’t we get some work done?”
“Work?”
“I’m assuming you’re aware the Feds are moving in the direction that some sort of religious fanatic is behind the organ recipient killings, right?”
“I’ve heard something like that, yeah.”
She released a low breath as she unfolded herself, then went down on her knees and curled into a fetal position, arms stretched out. Her deltoids and trapezoids sang with the release of tension. “Do you have any thoughts on that?”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re more flexible than a double-jointed snake?”
“Gideon, focus.”
His sigh was heavily put-upon. “There are times when you remind me of my old drill sergeant.”
Something inside Sara flinched, but she pushed the insecurity away as the counter-productive pest it was. It didn’t matter that Gideon no longer had an affinity for soldiers. Both in words and in actions he’d proven he didn’t have a problem with her. So what if he could never fall in love with a woman who was wired to use violent measures if there was no other option? She could live with that.
Only the sick, empty darkness carving out a hollow in her chest said otherwise. She knew Gideon’s body as well as she knew her own now. Better, even. But what would it be like to know those dexterous, ecstasy-inducing hands reached for her because he believed she was his other half, and not because he had a horny itch he needed to have scratched? What
would it be like to have those depthless eyes of his showering her in the radiant warmth of love, instead of burning her with the white-hot sizzle of lust?
It would be nothing short of miraculous.
When the world lost some of its color, she gave herself a mental shake. She should be happy he’d overcome his bitterness to this extent. The mental scars Gideon had endured during his time on the front lines were enough to make anyone turn his back on violence in all its forms. Taking a woman who came from a long line of warriors as a lover was a huge leap. To imagine that he could come to love her was asking too much.
But, oh, more than her next breath she wanted to be selfish enough to ask.
And that led her to one inescapable fact, around which she’d been fumbling for a while. Somewhere along the way, she’d fallen in love with Gideon. It had happened so subtly, so quietly, she couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment when he’d gone and stolen her heart. It was simply gone, lost to his unknowing, unloving possession, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
Unless she could find a way to make him love her back.
“Hey. Have you fallen asleep?”
“Maybe.” Since hiding in a fetal position wasn’t an option, Sara rolled up to her hands and knees and tried to focus on her breathing. “The Feds are looking at lunatic fringe possibilities, including investigating groups who believe modern advances in medicine are works of evil. Think that’ll go anywhere?”
“I’m open to anything, though I don’t believe there’s a so-called lone gunman behind this.” His voice was low, caught between sleepy and distracted, and she could feel the weight of his gaze slide over her. “I know I saw two silhouettes by that car a fraction of a second before my vision was filled with flaming Molotov cocktail.”
“That’s news to me.” Her brows rose in surprise as she arched her back, then flexed, then arched it again, focusing on working all the kinks out of her lower back and tailbone area. “Are you sure about seeing two people? It was pretty dark.”
