Off the Grid

by Monica McCarty

  Her tone was lighthearted, and he responded similarly. “Yes, that particular skill has some positive uses at times.”

  She laughed. “I’ll say. I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel when you started digging in about the online poker, his kids’ tuition bills, and Mrs. Morrison’s ‘anonymous’ posts on social media. But when you started insinuating a possible connection to Retiarius . . .” She shivered. “I was glad he didn’t have a gun.”

  “I was too. He was pissed off.”

  “Pissed-off-you-offended-my-honor or pissed-off- guilty?”

  Colt shrugged. “I don’t know. As much as I’m not a fan of Morrison’s, I’m not sure I could see him selling out a platoon of men like that to cover his ass.”

  “Even if he is being threatened by the people who lent him money?”

  “We’ll see. He’s been poked. Now we have to see how he reacts. I assume you have everything in place?”

  She nodded. He suspected Kate hadn’t asked permission to hack into the rear admiral’s computers and phone lines, but she’d done it anyway. Being CIA had its advantages. Although he suspected she wouldn’t be CIA much longer if they found out what she was doing. He was pretty sure she was on her own on this.

  If he needed more proof of how much Taylor had meant to her, the fact that she was willing to risk the job that was so important to her—the job that she hadn’t been willing to sacrifice for him—was it. Which shouldn’t still burn so much.

  School must have just gotten out because there were all kinds of kids waiting to cross the main street as they approached. Most of them seemed to have a parent or nanny attached. He was tempted to steer clear of the kid chaos, which definitely wasn’t his thing, by crossing at the next block, but Kate had already worked her way into the crowd and was smiling down at a young girl.

  He felt something sharp stab him between the ribs and turned away. She used to do the same thing when they were married, and it had always made him uncomfortable. Guilty, maybe because he knew how much she wanted a baby. But he’d told her straight out before they married that he never wanted kids. She’d said it didn’t matter.

  But it had.

  He noticed an older teenage girl talking on her phone with one hand while pushing a stroller with the other. He assumed there was a kid in there, although he couldn’t see around the front. A little boy of about five or six—presumably the one she’d just picked up from school—was standing on the curb next to her. He looked like he wanted attention, but she was too busy talking to give it to him.

  As this wasn’t exactly the neighborhood for teenage mothers, Colt assumed she was the babysitter or nanny.

  He didn’t know why he noticed the kid, much less why he was still watching him when the light turned. Maybe he knew what it was like to want someone to pay attention to him. Or maybe he sensed the disaster that was about to come.

  The light change from “don’t walk” to “walk” acted as a trigger. The kid stepped off the curb into the street without a pause, and if Colt’s reflexes had been any slower, the little boy would have been run over by the SUV that went blowing through the light.

  Colt heard Kate scream as he lurched forward and grabbed the kid to pull him out of the way. But the SUV was so close that one of the side mirrors caught Colt and sent both him and the little boy headfirst into the asphalt.

  He felt the pavement connect with the skin of his arm as he tried to turn the kid away from the ground.

  They seemed to slide for a while, or at least the burning down his side seemed to last for a while. When they finally came to a stop, he heard more than a few screams as chaos turned to pandemonium.

  Kate was already beside him when he looked up. “Oh my God, are you all right?”

  She looked so upset—so concerned—it somehow made him angry. It was too late to pretend she cared now.

  “I’m fine,” he snapped. Then, realizing the kid in his arms was squirming and starting to bawl, he held him out to her. “Here, take him and make sure he’s okay.”

  The babysitter (or nanny) suddenly made her appearance—phone no longer attached to her ear—and was clearly on the verge of hysteria, saying “Oh my God” over and over and “It wasn’t my fault” to anyone who would listen.

  “Someone call nine-one-one,” Colt said, trying to unpeel himself from the pavement.

  Apparently, someone already had. He could hear the sirens blaring. In the neighborhoods he’d grown up in, they’d have been waiting hours for an ambulance or for the police to show up for something like this. There were too many shootings and stabbings to take precedence.

  Colt temporarily lost sight of Kate after the police arrived. He gave his statement—using his real name, which would show an honorable discharge from the SEALs three years ago—and was letting the paramedics patch him up a little when he looked over and saw Kate standing by the ambulance rocking a baby in her arms.

  She was smiling and cooing and looked so fucking happy it made his lungs burn with pain that was infinitely worse than the one that had torn a good portion of the flesh from his arm and lower leg.

  Kate was obviously taking care of the baby while the babysitter/nanny was in hysterics and the little boy was being tended to. According to the paramedics, the kid only had a few scrapes. Colt had taken the brunt of it. He was a real hero. Right. It would have made him laugh if he wasn’t so pissed off at the sight of Kate and a baby.

  It sent him into a cold rage that he didn’t understand. It was born of guilt and jealousy and maybe, in a very dark, hidden place that he would never acknowledge, hurt.

  The anger got worse when a young couple wearing scrubs came bursting through the temporary barricade that had been erected for the investigation in an obvious panic.

  Colt didn’t need to ask who they were. The woman doc practically ripped the baby out of Kate’s arms before bursting into tears as they ran toward the ambulance that held the little boy.

  Colt made the mistake of looking at Kate’s face. The look of heartbreak and pure longing drove that knife of rage deeper into his gut.

  He knew just how badly she wanted a baby and how much she’d mourned the one she’d lost. The baby that hadn’t belonged to him. She’d been hit by a drunk driver when she was a few months pregnant and had been inches away from dying.

  The baby hadn’t been so lucky. He’d never forget racing into that hospital thinking that he might lose her—calling himself every kind of fool for trying to push her away—and seeing her and Scott together. He’d wanted to kill them both.

  Almost as if she sensed him watching her, she looked over and caught his gaze. She gave him a small bereft smile and came walking toward the back of the fire truck—yes, a fire truck for a small accident—where one of the paramedics was giving him instructions on changing the bandages. Colt didn’t bother explaining that he’d had more experience with blood and gore and patching up wounds than the woman would see in a lifetime.

  Kate waited patiently until he was done, which gave him a little time to settle down before she spoke. “That nanny owes you big-time. I think she just had the scare of her life.”

  “She’ll forget about it tomorrow.”

  Kate smiled. “Still a wild-eyed optimist, I see.”

  “She’s a teenager. They are missing the consequences-and-perspective chip.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew so much about child psychology.”

  He didn’t. But he’d been that age once. “We should go if we are going to make our flight.”

  “The boy’s father said he would call a limo. I suspect it’s going to be filled with champagne for the hero.” She didn’t give him a chance to say “hell no.” “Don’t worry. I knew you wouldn’t want a fuss. I told him I’d already called the cab company. But what you did back there, Colt.” Her voice got all thick and her eyes teary. “It was amazing.”

 
He didn’t like seeing that look on her face, so he brought up the subject that he knew would take it off. “I saw you and the baby over there. You look like a natural. I assume you and Lord Percy won’t wait too long to get going on the heir and the spare.”

  She froze. Any admiration she might have been feeling for him for saving the kid slid from her face.

  It took her a moment to respond. She gave a slight shake of her head and said, “No . . . No. I don’t think so.”

  There was something about her response that was off, but he read it wrong. “You aren’t that old—or is it the ambassador? He has a couple of kids from his first marriage, right? Two and out, is that it?”

  He didn’t think she was going to respond. She held his gaze until he felt like squirming. He who had withstood hours of interrogation (i.e., torture) training and never flinched.

  “There were complications after the accident. I can no longer have children.”

  Was there accusation in her tone, or did he just imagine it? He didn’t know, but whatever it was, it made him want to strike back.

  It was what he did. What he always did. “Karma’s a bitch.”

  She stood there just staring at him. She was so still he didn’t think she was breathing.

  He used to be so good at reading her, but her expression was so blank, so stark, she might have been dead.

  “Thank you for that.”

  And with that she walked away.

  They barely spoke on the return flight to DC. It was what he wanted.

  He didn’t understand why she’d thanked him at first. But then he realized that if she’d been softening toward him, the remark had reminded her of who he was.

  Twelve

  Brittany had been so wiped out by the time they’d finally opened the door to the hotel room in Copenhagen that she’d barely registered the king-sized bed. She’d been too tired to care, protest, or act missish about sleeping in the same bed with him. It was big enough to spread out and leave a nice safety-zone buffer in between.

  Besides, John had slept even less than she had in the past forty or so hours since she’d gotten out of bed yesterday morning—and he looked even more exhausted than she felt—so sex was probably the last thing on his mind.

  He’d been strangely untalkative—almost brooding—since they’d gotten on the train, and she suspected he needed sleep even more than she did.

  They both did the bare minimum in terms of preparing for bed—a few minutes in the bathroom to wash and the removal of outer layers of clothes—before collapsing in an exhausted heap on the bed.

  But at some point during the night that nice safety-zone buffer disappeared. Brittany must have inched her way across no-man’s-land because when she woke, she was practically sprawled on top of John’s chest. His naked chest.

  It was worse than that, she realized, as her mind slowly lost the fuzziness and awareness came barreling in with all the subtlety of a freight train. Their legs were entwined, and his hand was cupping her bottom as if to hold her in place.

  Her body temperature seemed to shoot up a good eight hundred degrees—at least. He radiated heat like an inferno, and with her plastered to him like this, it was flowing directly into her.

  She knew exactly the moment he woke. She had her cheek pressed to the smooth, bare skin of that incredible chest, and his heart, which had been beating nice and steadily in her ear, started to pound.

  She froze, hoping he wouldn’t realize she was awake. But her cheeks were burning.

  So much for staying away from him. Apparently he was catnip even in her subconscious.

  Mortified at finding herself in this position, Brittany was trying to think of ways to extricate herself when things went from bad to worse. If possible, his body heat seemed to go up a couple notches, from scorching to red-hot, and his hand spread across her bottom and began to lightly caress it over the jeans she hadn’t bothered to take off.

  But that wasn’t all. She was suddenly aware of the significant bulge hard against her hip and experienced the overwhelming urge to press herself against it.

  He must have been having the same idea because the hand on her bottom suddenly grew a little more insistent. He was lifting her, pressing her . . . or maybe that was her lifting and pressing. She didn’t know.

  And she didn’t really care. Her body was getting that heavy, languid feeling. That insistent pull toward pleasure that made her limbs limp, her pulse quicken, and the place between her legs warm and melty.

  One little press wouldn’t hurt. But it did. It sent a flood of wanting racing through her.

  She was saved from doing something really stupid by the bell. Or in this case, the phone.

  She thought it was hers, but then realized it wasn’t Hawaii Five-0 and her phone was on the way back to DC.

  John swore and gently eased himself out from under her. “I’ve got to take this.”

  She pretended to be half-awake, unaware of what was going on, and grumbled sleepily as she rolled onto her side facing away from him.

  Freedom!

  “Yeah,” she heard him say. Someone must have started talking, but John stopped them. “Wait. Give me a minute.”

  She heard him fumbling with clothes, presumably putting his shirt, socks, and shoes back on, and shortly after that, the door clicked shut.

  She wondered who was calling him. Was it another survivor? Were there other survivors? Who else knew he was alive? Someone had helped him with that e-mail account.

  Whoever it was, John obviously didn’t want to talk with her around.

  Normally that would make her even more curious, but right now she was just grateful to have escaped major—major—stupidity.

  This had been a wake-up call. Big-time. Obviously she needed to be much more careful around him if she didn’t want to end up another notch in Mr. Donovan’s never-ending bedpost.

  One notch was enough.

  Although, apparently, given her reaction to being on top of him, not all of her was on board with that plan.

  Maybe they could just do the sex thing? He was good at that.

  But she didn’t think she could handle the meaningless aspect that went along with it, and she quickly discarded the idea. It would only confuse things, and with her luck she’d end up falling for his shenanigans again. Which would put her right back where she was five years ago: all alone with nothing but a broken heart.

  No, thanks.

  The best thing to do would be to get far away from him, but as they were stuck together until they could find out whether someone really was trying to hurt her—and who—that wasn’t an option.

  In the clear light of day, after a solid twelve hours of sleep, she had to wonder if she’d let John get to her and overreacted by fleeing Vaernes like that. He’d clearly wanted her away from Nils and the air base.

  But even if going on the run to protect her from bad guys fit with his objective, she couldn’t completely discount the possibility that the attack in the parking lot and the ransacking of her apartment were related.

  She would give it a few days. Maybe she’d try to get in touch with Mac and see what she could find out.

  Until then she’d concentrate on her next article. She wished she had been able to meet Nils’s friend, but his confirmation of the platoon’s presence at Vaernes closely before the “missile test” in Russia was a good start in tying the two together. If her brother was killed on a secret mission to Russia that the government now wanted to cover up, Norway made sense as the place from where they’d launched the op. It might even be enough to satisfy her editor.

  She pulled out the small laptop she carried with her everywhere from her messenger bag. She felt bad that she’d lied about it to John, but she knew he would have made her get rid of it, and she wasn’t going to be without the means to write her story. But she wasn’t stupid. She had it in airpla
ne mode, and she would keep it that way.

  She took it, along with her bag, a change of clothes, and her toiletries into the bathroom. She wanted to get started on her next article before jumping in the shower.

  She wasn’t hiding it from him as much as avoiding an unnecessary confrontation. As much as he might want to think differently, he wasn’t her master or her commander, and she didn’t have to take orders from him.

  Although she didn’t relish reminding him of that.

  But one thing was for sure: no more sharing beds.

  * * *

  • • •

  In retrospect, the sharing-the-bed thing had probably been a bad idea. If the LC hadn’t called when he did, John was pretty damned sure he would have forgotten his vow for the second time. Wake up with a warm, sexy female in his arms and his body was going to react.

  But he knew that was BS. There was react and there was react, and with Brittany it had been hard and fast. Really hard and fast. He’d been a few seconds away from rolling her on top of him and going for round two. Which he had hoped would go a little longer than round one, but with the way he’d been feeling a few minutes ago, he wouldn’t put money on it.

  What the fuck was the matter with him? What happened to his control? He wasn’t exactly a teenager anymore. But tell his dick that. It seemed to have forgotten the past fifteen years.

  Once he left the room, John hustled down the hall and didn’t speak again until he entered the stairwell. As their hotel room was on the fourteenth floor, he figured the chance of someone walking up or down the stairs was pretty unlikely.

  “Sorry about that,” he said to the LC. “Brittany was in the room, and I didn’t want you to say anything she could overhear through the phone.”

  There was a long pause. “You sounded like you just woke up.”

  “I did.”

  John knew that needed an explanation, so he told Taylor how he’d gone to Vaernes and found Brittany asking questions in a bar. He left out the part about him glowering in a corner while she flirted with a soldier. He also left out the part about finishing his beer before following her out to the parking lot and fighting off the attacker.