Men of Danger

by Lora Leigh

  “All right,” he finally said, glad that his larynx had decided to work again. “But don’t open the door for anyone while I’m gone.”

  “Where are you going?” She tilted her head ever so slightly but her expression was completely serious.

  “You said to go take a shower.”

  A half-smile pulled at her cheek. “There’s one in the other room, plus towels.”

  He didn’t move, dared not blink, fearing that if he did he might awaken from this desert mirage.

  “Are you sure?” he asked quietly, needing to hear her say the words.

  But rather than answer him she simply closed the gap between them and stared up, then took his mouth.

  It was the gentlest of offerings, a porcelain teacup between them; her warm palm on his cheek. When she drew her lemon-honey sweetened mouth away from his, it left an ache. He turned his lips into the palm of her hand, kissing the center of it as his eyes slid closed.

  “Go take a shower,” she murmured, slowly dragging her trembling fingers away from his face, but her body still brushed his, teased his, causing gooseflesh to pebble their skin.

  “I won’t be long,” he said softly, slowly stepping back from her.

  She didn’t move, didn’t blink, just took a very slow sip of her tea.

  CHAPTER 8

  A COLLAGE OF emotions pummeled his brain as the hard jet spray of the shower pummeled his skin. Desire, guilt, trepidation . . . as well as a few additional emotions that he wasn’t ready to name.

  There was no doubt that he wanted this woman; Zachary looked down and winced. His body had a mind of its own and had quickly made that fact obvious to both of them. But there was still a matter of professional conduct— Lowell had trusted him with this job, and once again, Lowell had taken the weight.

  Sobered by the thought, Zachary turned the water to cold and stood under the blast of it for thirty seconds before turning the shower off. Jesus H. Christ, he had to keep his mind on point. This was undoubtedly the toughest assignment he’d ever had. Mud, cold, sleep deprivation, danger . . . nothing had shredded his resolve like Anita Brown.

  Shivering, he quickly toweled himself dry, and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, and then went to the sink to roughly brush his teeth. He’d brought three suits with him, the one he’d just shed could go down to the hotel cleaning ser vice tonight. He had to keep his mind focused on logistics and not allow it to slip into the personal, into the areas of the forbidden.

  Anita Brown was a client. Anita Brown was just feeling frightened . . . rightfully so. Like him, she was lonely— but for her, the mood would pass. Soon another well-heeled suitor would be on the red carpet escorting her somewhere. He needed to find out who’d gone after Lowell and who was trying successfully to scare his client.

  Zachary set his jaw hard, looked in the mirror, and then shoved his toothbrush and toothpaste into his sweatpants pocket. Yeah . . . he needed to keep it real and not mess up the only permanent thing he had in his life— Lowell, Anne Marie, and his godsons. The last thing he needed to do was to sleep with that gorgeous woman in the other room.

  Balling up his discarded clothes, he tucked them under his arm and opened the bathroom door. Anita was in the bed, curled up like a sleeping baby. He turned off the bathroom light and crept into the adjacent room to toss his dirty clothes in a plastic hotel cleaning bag and to unload his toiletries into his duffel, then came back to gently pull the covers over her.

  Zachary stood in the doorway for a moment, just watching her draw in and out slow, peaceful inhalations and exhalations. In the semidarkness the light played across her soft cheek and long pretty eyelashes. To him she seemed like an angel, to hell with what the tabloids or anybody else said. He gently shut the door behind him and sat down on the sofa, staring at his gun on the coffee table, wishing like hell he didn’t need to carry one around her.

  HER INTERNAL CLOCK was all screwed up, and she sat up in the dark trying to remember what city she was in, what country she was in, what concert she was doing— panic tore through her until she looked at the clock radio and realized that she hadn’t overslept a show. Then it all came back slowly.

  Anita stared at the perfectly smooth bed and the blanket that had been pulled over her. Quietly getting out of the bed, she went to the door, hoping that Zachary Mitchell was still there.

  As she peeked through the door, she smiled. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t woken her up, and was asleep sitting up on the sofa, head back, facing the door and his weapon. A true officer and a gentleman. For a moment, all she could do was stare at the handsome man who’d restored her belief in honor.

  Anita wrapped her arms around herself wondering why it had taken her life getting so far out of control that she’d had to hire security. Why did it take all of this for an average guy to come into her life to put back together all the shattered pieces of it? But, then, Zachary Mitchell was no average man. Far from it.

  Aside from owning a decent soul and a sense of old-school values, he also had a stone-cut chest and a ripped abdomen that simply took her breath away. In a suit, or even in an Oxford button-down and slacks, she had only been able to imagine the definition covered by fine fabric and then allow her hands to roam over it. But seeing all that in a T-shirt that strained against chocolate-covered sinew, nothing was left to her imagination.

  Steel-cable biceps stretched his sleeves as slow, easy breaths lifted his rock-hard chest. She bit her bottom lip as her gaze slid down his torso and stopped at his groin. Damn . . . even at ease and in a pair of sweats, the man was gifted. She remembered feeling all of that pressed against her pelvis, making her want to savor every inch of it, but that had been a dream deferred.

  Her line of vision traced his thickly muscled thighs and finally came to rest on his mouth. Zachary Mitchell had a wonderful mouth, his kiss was so gentle, yet she was sure it could turn primal in a heartbeat. It had turned primal for a few glorious minutes until a letter stopped everything and turned the white-hot moment ice-cold.

  Desire pulled her through the door, across the room, and toward the sofa. She wasn’t sure what she’d say or how she’d approach him, but the burn for him had eclipsed any shame. She wanted this man, needed him in her life. She knew he thought they came from two different worlds and saw how much that mattered to him in his eyes. But they’d both been products of the same urban experience.

  That had to count for something, it meant everything to her. It had been the only reason she’d stayed with Jonathan as long as she had— needing someone from that familiar background to understand her; being so lonely, so tired of men looking at her fame and wanting her as a conquest or being too intimidated to stick around for more than casual sex. But Jonathan never had the honor, never had the values to go with all the money he’d made. And this man, who could have had her from the moment they’d entered the suite, had showered, covered her up, and gone back to his post.

  Tears of appreciation stood in her eyes as she bent to kiss Zachary’s forehead. But before her lips grazed his skin, he’d flipped her and pinned her flat on her back with a nine millimeter at her temple.

  She stared up unblinking, not breathing. He quickly sat back and cocked the gun.

  “Jesus—I’m so sorry!” He put the gun on the table pointing away from them. “You okay?”

  She didn’t move, just sucked in two strangled gulps of air and slowly placed her hand over her heart.

  “Baby . . . I’m so sorry,” he said, trying to help her up.

  Trembling, she sat up slowly, closed her robe around her more tightly, then bent over until her forehead touched her knees, hyperventilating.

  “Anita, I . . .”

  She just held up a hand to make him stop talking.

  “I’m going to get a bag and I want you to breathe into it slowly, all right?”

  He jumped off the sofa as she nodded and quickly returned with a bag. He held it out for her and she took it with trembling hands and placed it over her nose and mo
uth, huffing into it for a few moments.

  “You feel better?” he asked, taking it from her and trying to help restore her disheveled towel.

  Still numb, the towel fell away, leaving a cascade of damp hair to cover her shoulders.

  “You called me baby,” she said, looking up at him. “Nearly blew my brains out, but you called me baby.”

  Zach closed his eyes. “Anita, I’m really sorry.”

  “About almost blowing my brains out and body-slamming me against the sofa or calling me baby?”

  He just looked at her. “Both. I was on post and—”

  “What if you had kids? What if a toddler came and jumped in the bed with you?” She shot up off the sofa. “Is this some kind of disease or condition? Tell me now— I need to know.”

  He looked confused, didn’t seem to understand, but she could see that his mind was seriously trying to process her request.

  “No, no, no,” he said, standing and beginning to pace. “When you have a family, when you’re with somebody, you know their sounds, unless you’re suffering Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, you don’t bug like that . . . it’s when you’re in a hostile terrain, expecting—”

  “You were in a suite with me,” she countered, folding her arms over her chest as total shock now gave way to indignation.

  “The last place I ever thought I’d be,” he said quietly. “I admit it— I was disoriented when I got startled awake and the last thought I went to sleep with was, protect her. I didn’t expect . . .” He looked toward the window as his words trailed off.

  She nodded, feeling foolish for walking up on a soldier unannounced, and still slightly shaken. “Okay, now I know better.”

  “You came to wake me up,” he said, clearly trying to change the subject. “What did you want? I can order—”

  She held up her hand. “I can’t remember what it was.”

  When she looked out the window, he briefly closed his eyes, knowing exactly what it was that she’d wanted. He might as well have put the nine to his own temple and pulled the trigger. Damn!

  The sound of his BlackBerry vibrating against the coffee table drew their attention. Zach paced over and picked it up, listening to Anne Marie’s distraught sobs.

  “What’s happened?” he said quickly, trying to make sense of what she was telling him.

  “I did what you said, Zach. I told the police.” Anne Marie’s voice filled the receiver in shaky bursts. “But now they want to take me in as a suspect saying that I could have tried to poison my husband— because his business is slow, he’s an amputee, and his life insurance would make him worth more dead than alive!”

  “Call Lowell’s attorney immediately. You stay calm, Anne Marie, you hold it together now, okay— I’m going to get to the bottom of all this. You’ve got three kids to be there for, so you can’t fall apart, all right?” Zach walked in a circle. “How’s our boy doing?”

  Anita watched the surreal conversation, knowing that too many innocent lives had been touched by the corruption in hers. No matter what, she made herself a silent promise to help right this wrong.

  Zachary nodded as Anne Marie filled him in, his gaze fixed on Anita.

  “Good, good, well at least he’s fighting to stay alive, and you fight too, okay? Are the boys all right?” Zachary nodded. “Good. You tell them to hang tough . . . okay, call Mike. Call me back when you can.”

  Anita watched Zachary hang up and rake his scalp with his fingers. “I’m going to help you find out who did this, okay?”

  He looked at her and shook his head. “This is so not your fight and you’re paying good money to be protected— you shouldn’t even be involved in any of this.”

  “I want you to lie down on the sofa,” she said, going to the bedroom. When she returned she tossed him a pillow and a blanket. “I want you to get a good night’s sleep— if you can. In the morning, I want you to eat a decent breakfast. We have a long day ahead of us, and a bunch more travel stops to make before it’s all over . . . and if I get any more bright ideas about, uhmmm . . . waking you up with a kiss, I’ll just call out from the doorway. All right?”

  FIVE OF THE longest days and nights of his life had passed. Every day, Anita had wowed U.S. troops, and each night he’d spoken to Anne Marie, he was encouraged that Lowell was coming along better as time passed. Soon Lowell would be up for police questioning and maybe something would jog his memory. It was a godsend that his buddy’s wife wasn’t being held, even though she was probably still being watched as a potential suspect.

  But he knew in his soul that the only reason poor Anne Marie was allowed to go free without charges was because he and Anita Brown had called New York’s finest from Kuwait. Celebrity did have its privileges, and Anita had cashed in a favor on his behalf that could well land her in the tabloids, if someone at the precinct decided to play hardball. Regardless, he felt somewhat better that a police investigation was under way. It just wasn’t right that Anne Marie should take the fall for something like this, and he’d do everything he could to protect Anita’s name, too.

  Still, there was that quiet, unspoken thing that stood between them every night when he took to the sofa and Anita went to her bedroom. It had followed them on the plane and then from Baghdad to Kuwait to Dubai to Oman, and now it had tracked them all the way to Yemen.

  Ignored desire was the constant companion that slid in and out of their conversations, slipped between them, licking at their emotions and straining their bodies over a cup of tea and cranberry juice. This thing they couldn’t talk about bled into their dreams, tossing and turning them about, threatening to spill onto the sheets.

  Refusing to be denied, it softened voices and increased pulse rates while they were only laughing about the day, or when they’d delve into their collective pasts to get deep and philosophical . . . talking politics and world religions, and discussing cultures without borders. Conversation became foreplay, raging debates were heavy petting that left them both spent when it was time to say good night.

  The more he got to know her, the more it was hard to deny just how magnetic their pull was on one another.

  Long days of frenetic activity and an entire entourage helped keep things at an appropriate professional distance. Group dinners and Anita being out on the town with her band and staff kept things from ever becoming too intimate. He and nine other men still had a job to do standing guard, standing watch.

  But it was the nights when all the hotel room doors had closed and the crowds were gone, that’s when the unspoken thing screamed the loudest and stomped its feet to demand attention. Tonight it was doing the cha-cha, dancing the salsa in the middle of the suite floor, and all he could do was stare out the window.

  “Do you want some tea?” she said, towel drying her hair.

  “Sure,” he said, knowing their ritual was always the same.

  It was an invitation to sit up and talk, to keep her company and listen to her beautiful voice. It was a private audience that was evaporating day by night, one that was making him sad because he knew it would end.

  She chuckled softly and he heard her filling the coffeepot with water to heat. “You always say sure, when you really want something else.”

  “You have no idea,” he said under his breath, staring out at the blue-black velvet sky.

  “Uh, huh, cranberry juice, he mutters,” she said, rooting around in the minibar.

  He was glad she hadn’t heard him and his body tensed as she neared him.

  “One cranberry juice,” she said with an easy lilt.

  She smelled so good, the shampoo and lotion, all things female collided with his senses as she came beside him.

  “Thanks,” he managed to get out and then took the glass from her without fully turning around.

  She gave him a quizzical look; he took a sip of his juice and almost choked on it.

  “Aren’t you gonna take a shower? Road dust and heat—”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said, pacing away from her. He set down
his cranberry juice and grabbed his duffel.

  “You okay?” She looked at him with a slight frown but her tone was gentle.

  “Yeah,” he said, hustling past her.

  He closed the door and leaned against it, dropping his bag on the floor. He was living the life of a crazy person. It had taken nearly two days to get to this side of the world, would take as long to get back. He was safe from himself on the plane— but five days of this was living hell. One more day, one more night . . . he could keep everything in perspective.

  Zach pushed off the door and then froze when he heard her. Anita’s voice floated on the air, her soft melody wrapping around him in a sweet caress. She was singing and making her tea . . . and driving him crazy.

  He turned on the shower, almost wetting the arm of his suit and his watch. If things were still cool once they got back state-side, once he got to the bottom of things, once they were out of this surreal tour mode, then, yeah, he’d be game to see how far this could go. But right now, while she was in potential danger, Lowell was lying in a hospital bed, Anne Marie was under suspicion for attempted murder, his godsons might— oh, shit . . . he might become an instant father, just add water, if the worst happened to their parents . . . no. Now was not the time to have a discipline lapse that could mess everything up.

  Determined to hold fast to his mission, he yanked off his clothes and stepped into the freezing spray and almost yelped. He could do this, he could do this. Zach soaped his body, willing away the painful erection, rinsed off and then stumbled out of the tub. Not sure why he was rushing, he hurriedly dried off, threw on some sweats and collected his items and cleared out of what now felt like a too-intimate space.

  Cool water was still streaming down his neck, chest, and back when he went to hunt for his suit bag to stow his watch and shoes. Fumbling at the task, he didn’t look at Anita while he brought order to his possessions. But when he finally looked up, she held a teacup midair and was staring at him.