“Although if this was a dream, you wouldn’t snarl at me, you’d kiss me.”
Meg closed her eyes in exasperation. “John—”
He supposed he took advantage of the fact that her eyes were closed and her lips were parted. But frankly, he wasn’t thinking of much beyond what he wanted. He just covered her mouth with his and kissed her.
He could taste her surprise, mixed with sweet coffee and Meg.
After nearly three years, he was finally kissing Meg again.
She made a soft sound in the back of her throat that might’ve been despair, but then she kissed him back so hungrily, he was sure he had to be dreaming.
She was fire in his arms, her breasts dizzyingly soft against his chest.
Nils opened his mouth to her, letting her kiss him ferociously, drinking in her passion, straining to pull her closer. He couldn’t get enough of her, even at a moment like this, when he wasn’t quite sure where he ended and she began. He’d never been able to get enough of her—he doubted he ever would.
Her hands were in his hair, touching his face, his neck, and then his chest as she reached between them and unfastened the top buttons of his coveralls. And then, dear Lord, she was straddling him.
She kissed him again, even more deeply, as she pressed herself against him, as her hands continued to work his buttons free.
No, strike that. As one hand continued to work his buttons free. The other was dipping into his left pants pocket.
Shit. Nils opened his eyes to a sky that was a miraculous shade of blue just as she broke away from him, car keys in her right hand, gun in her left. “Don’t move!”
“Ah, Christ.” Nils let his head bounce back against the ground.
She was scuttling away from him, still on her butt. She put the keys into her pocket and held the gun with both hands. “Just . . . don’t move!” Her voice shook.
“I’m not moving,” he said. But then he did move. He sat up, fast, to hide the tent pole effect that being completely aroused created with the baggy coveralls. He felt his face heat from embarrassment—when was the last time he’d actually blushed? He didn’t know which was worse—being taken in by her again, actually believing that she’d wanted to kiss him that way, or having her witness such an obvious and crude proof of his desire.
“Stop,” she ordered. “Don’t come any closer!”
“What are you going to do, Meg, shoot me?” He would have preferred her shooting him over running that sexual con game. At least he knew how to deal with the pain from a bullet wound.
“I’m going to get into the car, and I’m going to go find Amy.”
She’d do anything to save Amy—she even would have slept with the guard at the hotel if she’d had to. She’d said that herself. The guard, or anyone, including Nils, apparently. If she’d had to. God damn her.
And god damn himself, too. This was his fault for kissing her. What did he think? She’d willingly take a time-out to neck by the side of the road when every cell in her body was screaming for her to go rescue her daughter?
Nils shouldn’t have kissed her, shouldn’t have taken advantage of her that way. And he couldn’t fully blame her for turning around and taking advantage of him. He’d been in her shoes plenty of times—on a dangerous op and in a position where he would have done and said anything to reach his single-minded goal.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, his anger snuffed, his voice quiet. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, but I wanted to and . . . I’m sorry.”
That got through to her far better than shouting would have. As Nils watched, Meg’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry, too.”
“Not sorry enough to take me with you, though,” he said with an attempt at a smile. “I’m afraid I’m not sorry enough either—not enough to let you leave me behind.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
If she had to ask that, she didn’t have the slightest clue about anything at all. He wanted to cry, too. How could she not know?
But she’d said she didn’t know him, couldn’t tell when he was being honest and when he was hiding behind some . . . what was it she’d said? Some well-conceived fiction.
Nils looked at her. Even sitting there, weapon clutched in both hands, she looked vulnerable and completely out of her league. A stranger in a strange land. Would she even be able to recognize if he answered her with the bald truth?
“You need me,” he said. That was the easy part, so he said it again. “I’m doing this because you need me.” The hard part was more difficult to spit out. But he did it. “Almost as much as I need you.”
She was surprised. He wasn’t sure she believed him, but at least he’d succeeded in surprising her.
“You don’t need me.” She spoke with such certainty.
“Oh,” he said, “right. I don’t know how I feel—whereas you do.”
“No,” she said. “Nope. No way. I would never presume to know anything about the way you feel.” She laughed in exasperation. “Not even when your tongue’s in my mouth and your hand’s down my pants. Who knows what you could be thinking.”
“I’m thinking that I need you.” He still had to work to say the words, but it wasn’t as hard as the first time.
“Why would you just suddenly say that to me now? We don’t see each other for nearly three years, and suddenly you need me?”
“It’s not sudden,” Nils said as evenly as he could. “I wasn’t in a position where I could tell you before. You weren’t free—”
“Dammit, I’m not free now!”
He just watched her, waiting for her to explain.
“I’m ready to die,” she said more quietly. “To save Amy. There’s no question, John, if it’s her or me, it’s me I’ll sacrifice. But I can’t—I won’t—let you die, too. And the only way I can be sure that won’t happen is for you to stay here, now. Please. Let me leave without you.”
Her calm acceptance of her fate made his chest and throat feel tight. So naturally, he made a joke. “If you don’t want me to die, threatening to shoot me seems a little counterintuitive.”
She didn’t laugh.
They might’ve sat there, staring at each other, at an impasse for much longer, but the sound of a car approaching made Nils lift his head.
Shit. “Police car at four o’clock.”
“What?” She didn’t understand him.
“Back and to your right,” he quickly explained. “We’ve got a visitor and it’s a cop.”
Once Meg understood, she made the handgun disappear, fast, turning to peer worriedly up the street at the approaching police vehicle.
The cop was local, male, and riding alone.
Come on, keep driving, Billy Bob. Everything’s fine here. Just a man and woman stopped to take a little rest, maybe have a picnic and a little roll in the grass by the side of the road.
Nils watched the cop’s eyes, saw what the man saw. That the car was nice, a white sedan in good condition. The woman looked nice, too, but the man—Nils—wasn’t so fresh. He needed a shave. Looked like he needed a shower, too.
The cop looked at him harder and Nils knew what he was thinking. That Nils had either just gotten off from work, or he was an escaped convict who’d stolen some coveralls from some garage a few miles up the road—maybe after killing everyone in the service station.
The cop looked at Meg again, his eyes narrowing. On second glance, she definitely looked frightened—as if she might’ve been taken hostage by an escaped murderer.
“Smile,” Nils hissed to Meg, but it was too late.
The cop was young and full of himself, probably itching to throw his weight around. He wasn’t in any kind of hurry to get to the donut shop—if they even had a donut shop in Nowhere, Georgia. As Nils watched, he stopped his car and got out.
Ah, shit.
Meg’s car was between them and the cop. He would surely look inside as he went past—and see Osman Razeen, handcuffed and tied up in the backseat.
No, Officer, th
at’s just my wife’s crazy cousin—went on a bender and beat the crap out of Aunt Doreen. He’s nasty when he gets this way. We had to restrain him so we could take him back to the rehab center in Florida. Although he’ll probably just escape again.
“Everything okay here?” the cop called out in his Georgia drawl. It was much thicker and gooier than Starrett’s Texas twang.
“Everything’s fine, Officer.” Nils stood up, and Meg was right beside him.
But the cop wasn’t talking to them. He’d stopped alongside the car where he’d leaned down to speak to . . .
Razeen. Who was sitting up in the backseat. Wide awake.
While Nils and Meg had been arguing, he’d managed to roll down the window. The car was childproof—he couldn’t unlock the backdoor—but the bastard had been about to escape out the window.
Shit.
Nils felt Meg touch his arm. “What are we going to do?” she breathed.
We. Now it was we. Thank God. Nils suddenly loved this cop. He loved his meandering gait, his tough-guy squint, his cheap mirrored sunglasses. This cop had turned them back into a we.
“Give me the handgun,” he breathed back.
She shook her head. “No.” She had that look in her eyes again. That on-the-verge look that made him think it wouldn’t take much for her to find the motivation to unload her weapon into Razeen’s head.
“Meg, stay cool,” Nils said just loudly enough for her to hear.
But she didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t even seem to know he was there anymore. Just like that, we didn’t mean Meg and John. We meant Meg and her little handgun.
“You all right in there, sir?” the cop asked Razeen.
Nils felt Meg tense as she reached into her pocket for her weapon.
Shit. This was going to be really bad.
“I love you,” he whispered, throwing the last of his cards faceup onto the table. “Meg, please don’t do this.”
It was only late afternoon, but the neon in the window was bright and beckoning. Sam took Alyssa’s arm and pulled her into the bar.
“You need a drink,” he told her.
“A drink is the last thing I need.”
The fact that she didn’t physically resist, that she didn’t immediately yank her arm free from his grip convinced him that she did need something stiff that would burn all the way down, despite her listless protest.
It was a working class establishment. Dim with no frills. But it was clean and it had padded stools at the bar.
Sam pulled one out for her. It wasn’t meant to be chivalrous. He would have done the same for Nils or WildCard if they were walking around like some kind of zombie, exhausted and embarrassed for giving too much away in public.
But she didn’t know that. He sat before she did, trying to cancel out the implied respect of pulling out the stool.
“A bottle of my favorite Uncle and couple of shot glasses,” he told the bartender, setting a pile of money on the bar.
Alyssa sat down. “You don’t fool around, do you?”
“Hell, no.” Sam poured them both a shot of the Jack Daniel’s. He didn’t wait for her. He just tossed back the shot, letting it roar down his throat.
Glory be to God.
Alyssa picked up the glass and sipped it before emptying her glass. She probably got her toes wet before jumping into a lake, too. She didn’t make a face as Jack elbowed his way down her throat and into her stomach. She didn’t flinch, didn’t react, didn’t so much as blink. Which meant that she had a reaction. She was working too hard to hide it.
“Good, huh?” He refilled their glasses. “I know I feel better already.”
She didn’t say a word, she just poured back the second shot, drinking right in sync with him.
He reached for the bottle, but this time she stopped him from refilling her glass.
“Mind if I get a real glass with ice?” she asked. “I’d like to return to the illusion that I’m civilized.”
“Bartender, two glasses with ice.”
“Thanks, Starrett,” she said, as Sam poured them both another drink.
He glanced at her only briefly, aware that her gratitude had nothing to do with the whiskey he was pouring into her glass. “It’s no big deal.”
“It’s actually a very big deal,” she told him. “And . . . I owe you an explanation.”
He pushed her glass toward her, took a sip of his own drink, staring into the amber liquid so that he wouldn’t look at her.
She had tears in her eyes again. It was hard work—this pretending not to notice.
“You owe me nothing,” he said.
“My mother died when I was thirteen,” Alyssa told him, her voice low. “I was the oldest, and I fought hard to keep my sisters and me together. I’d promised my mother I’d take care of them, and I made damn sure that I did.”
Sisters. Plural. Hell. Sam knew what was coming. He swallowed a shot’s worth of whiskey from his glass and braced himself for it.
“But . . .”
Here it came.
“Two years ago, my littlest sister, Lanora, died while giving birth.”
Lanora. It all made sense now. God damn it . . .
“It seems almost absurd, doesn’t it?” she asked in that same low, controlled voice, her face expressionless. “I mean, here it is, the twenty-first century. With all this technology—” She broke off, shaking her head. “There were complications. She had an aneurism during premature labor, and neither she nor the baby survived.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. Crap, it sounded so inadequate.
But she met his eyes, and whatever she saw there made her nod. “Thanks.” She gave him a smile.
It was just a little smile, and it faded almost instantly, but oh, sweet Jesus, Alyssa Locke had actually smiled at him.
“Burying Lanora was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said even more quietly than before. “I felt as if I buried my heart with her.”
Sam looked at Alyssa Locke, sitting there, staring down into her glass, and he wanted to cry. For years, he’d thought of her as heartless and cold. He’d had no idea what she’d been living through.
“My cousin Jerry died of AIDS five years ago. He was my best friend back in grade school,” Sam told her, gazing down at the ice cubes in his own glass. “My sister Elaine and I were the only cousins who went to the funeral. Lainey came to the base and forced me to go back to Texas with her. She wouldn’t let me be a coward and hide from it—from the AIDS and what it meant—like all our other cousins. I’ve always been thankful to her for that. I don’t know what I’d do if she died. I know how I felt when Jerry was gone, and we hadn’t been close for years.” He looked up at her and put it all out on the line. “I can’t even imagine the depth of your loss, Alyssa.”
She held his gaze a long time before looking away. “I was just starting to come back to life last year, when Tyra got pregnant . . .” Alyssa took a sip of her drink.
Dear God. “So you’ve been in hell for the past nine months.”
She met his eyes again and nodded. “Yeah. It’s stupid, I know. All the doctors told me that what happened to Lanora was some kind of freak thing. It wasn’t genetic. Tyra wasn’t in danger. Intellectually, I knew this. Emotionally . . .” She shook her head. “Emotionally, I’ve been a wreck.”
Her tears back in the hospital had been from relief. After nine months of fear and anxiety, the relief had been too much to handle.
Sam knew from his own experience that positive emotions were harder to control than the negative ones. Grief, anger, pain, and frustration. You got used to stuffing those feelings back down inside. But relief, when it hit, had a knockout punch. It could smack you flat on your ass, make grown men cry like babies.
Like Alyssa Locke had cried.
Sam toasted her with his glass. “Tonight, the waiting is over. Tyra is fine. Her baby is perfect, with a perfect name, too, I think. Tonight, s—” He stopped himself from calling her sweet thing, but just barely.
She looked at him sharply, right in the eye, and he knew that she knew exactly what he’d been about to say. He cleared his throat. “Tonight, Ms. Locke, you can relax.”
Alyssa Locke laughed. She was looking straight at him, and she actually laughed and then gave him a smile that nearly rivaled the wattage of the smiles he’d seen her shoot her strange little partner.
“Well, praise the Lord,” she said, lifting her glass in a salute. “It’s a bonafide two-miracle night.”
Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero Page 28
