Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set

by Addison Fox, Cindy Dees, Justine Davis

  She’d told Mark she loved him, but still she couldn’t seem to find the courage to ask for what she really wanted. Forever had been a clear and tangible end point when Eaton was in control. Now it seemed like a wisp of something she couldn’t grasp.

  Life and freedom. They had both now. The wide-open possibilities of the future created a new kind of fear in her heart. Fear that these were her last moments with Mark. Her breath caught as the incoming tide swirled between her toes.

  The urgent need to tell him what she hoped for most faded much as the foam skittered away to rejoin the ocean. He’d been through enough, saving them both. She wouldn’t take the risk that he might see her feelings as yet another burden.

  Offering only comfort, she rested her hand on the top of his shoulder, well away from the injury. “This needs stitches.”

  “If you say so. You can see it better than I can.” He tilted his head up, blocking the sun with a hand. “You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  “Dumb time to lose it, I know,” she said.

  His long fingers circled her wrist and a new shiver went through her at the touch. He tugged her down beside him in the sand and pried the radio from her grasp. “And the gun,” he said, holding his palm open.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Unless he had oxygen tanks tethered right where I dropped him.”

  After what she’d seen, she wouldn’t put it past him. “You’re not serious?”

  “No. Logically, he’s fish food.” Mark cocked his head, his gaze on the soft rollers rising and breaking. “Although I wouldn’t have minded watching a shark frenzy in this particular instance.”

  “He didn’t deserve the fanfare,” she said.

  Mark chuckled. “I do like this bloodthirsty side of you.”

  Relief and need overwhelmed her. She climbed into his lap, straddling his thighs. Gently, gently, knowing he was sore and there were likely plenty of injuries she couldn’t see, she took his face into her hands.

  She was about as useless as could be with survival and fighting, but she knew how to bare her soul, to open that window and give back the beauty she saw in the world. With every heartbeat, she willed him to accept everything she offered, whether or not he could reciprocate.

  Right now, she only wanted him to feel this astounding awareness that life was new again, all options open. Where there had been terror and fear, she would have him embrace hope and love.

  When her mouth met his, when his hands cruised up and over her hips and stroked heat up the length of her spine, she started to believe the worst was done. Fresh need spiked her system and bright energy sparkled along her skin at every place their bodies touched.

  “I called for help,” she said as his lips and tongue glided down her throat. “On the emergency frequency.”

  “I heard. I knew you could do it.” His voice rumbled against her skin and she trembled. “How long do we have?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t care. Her hips rocked against his arousal. Yes, adrenaline was a contributor here, but it wasn’t the only factor. She needed all the physical affirmation she could get that they’d made it.

  His hands stilled her hips, holding fast when she tried to move.

  “You didn’t get an answer to the Mayday?”

  “I did.” His grip eased. “The coast guard answered. I told them what we know of our position.” She dropped her head to his shoulder and just breathed in the scent of him. If this was all he could give, she’d savor it. “I described the cabin cruiser and Muscle.”

  “What did they say?” he asked. “Exactly.”

  “Someone saw smoke from the fire we set. Help was coming since this is supposed to be an uninhabited island.” She would paint the feelings of this moment and their ordeal for years to come. All the ugliness they’d endured and the glorious passion they’d shared was imprinted on her mind, body and soul. Already she knew her brush would touch the canvas differently. She could hardly wait to explore the new facets this experience revealed.

  “Anything else?”

  Tears burned behind her closed eyelids. She could cry later. When she was home and Mark was gone, out of her day-to-day life. “I don’t know. You were fighting and I…I…” She just couldn’t put her deepest fear into words. Not even with Eaton gone.

  Mark had said she was light and joy and he was too dark, too jaded for her. Should she try again to explain the essential compatibility of light and shadow? As her first professor in Paris had said at the end of her time there, this interlude is at an end, but the memories would carry her as she reached for new stars.

  For once it would be nice if the journey toward new stars didn’t feel so lonely.

  “Shh, it’s all good.” Mark smoothed a hand over her hair. “You’re amazing. Just amazing, Lottie.” He shifted her to sit beside him again and then seemed to melt into the warm, damp sand. “Let’s just breathe here for a minute.”

  “You need water. First aid.”

  “Later. Just be here with me.”

  She stared into his face, still handsome under the mosaic of cuts and bruises Eaton had dished out. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

  “Now I know you’ve had a heatstroke.” His lips twitched in a faint echo of the teasing smirk he used to flash all the time. His eyes flew open, alert and ready once more. “Or hit your head. Did Quick-Punch Kid hurt you?”

  “Easy,” she soothed him this time. “I’m fine.” Especially now that she knew he was mostly okay. “You’re the one still bleeding.”

  He’d taken the brunt of Eaton’s vengeance since that first moment in the alley behind the gallery. It seemed a lifetime ago.

  “A scratch,” he insisted.

  “If you’re sure.”

  He reached up and cupped her neck, bringing her face close for a kiss. She lost herself in the gentle affection and now-familiar heat of desire. Until she recognized the bone-deep weariness that echoed her own.

  Lifting her head, she bumped her nose to his, then rolled to her back. Her hand found his and they stared up at the impossibly blue sky. “We’ll rest and breathe until the coast guard arrives.”

  It was the best plan they’d made in recent days.

  Hours or minutes passed. Quick-Punch Kid shouted and was summarily ignored. The shadows from the trees shifted as the sun moved higher into the sky. And the two of them rested, breathing it all in until at last the radio crackled to life and the commanding voice of General Riley asked for confirmation of their position.

  Mark handled that call while Charlotte tried not to cry.

  At the unmistakable sound of a helicopter rotor, she sat up and waved at the orange coast guard rescue helicopter overhead. A few minutes later a coast guard cutter came into view, trailed closely by the Rileys’ sailboat. Her emotions simply overflowed and she was laughing and crying with relief and joy as Mark pulled her to her feet and held her close, keeping her steady.

  Rescued! They could finally rest easy, completely safe for the first time in far too long.

  If only she didn’t feel as if her first steps toward rescue and freedom meant walking away from loving Mark.

  CHAPTER 14

  Mark watched Charlotte’s parents hustle her away, toward a guest cabin on the ship where she could clean up and a doctor would tend to any wounds. With each bit of distance, the ordeal they’d survived pressed heavier on his shoulders. He thought it would have been the opposite.

  When she was out of sight, his breath just stalled in his chest. This wasn’t how things were supposed to end. He didn’t want to be apart from her; he’d grown too close during their ordeal. Why now, when she was out of reach, did he finally have the courage to give her the words? As if tethered by some invisible bond, he lurched after her.

  His dad clapped him on the shoulder, steered him down a passage and into another room. “Clean up.
Let the medic deal with the mess you’re in while we talk.”

  He didn’t want to talk. Not to his parents and not about the man he’d hauled into the ocean to die. He wanted Charlotte all to himself for a month in Fiji. Even in his mind, he sounded petulant.

  Alone in the shower, he indulged in a fantasy of Charlotte in a skimpy bikini the same color as her eyes, reclining next to an infinity pool. She’d give him that slow smile and joke that any shot at fame had been wrecked by the rescue.

  His hand trembled as he reached for the soap dispenser. If she was here with him, where she belonged, she’d take his trembling hand in hers and steady him. The woman was a rock. Through it all, she’d been his touchstone, his focal point. Keeping him grounded and boosting his determination.

  He wondered if she felt as lost without him.

  Clean up now. Break down later. He showered off the days of grime, watching blood and dirt and sand swirl around and down the drain. He toweled off, regretting the streaks of blood his wounds left on the white terry cloth towel. He avoided the mirror as he brushed his teeth. There was no need for a visual to know where the bruises were. He trimmed his beard, careful around the tender spots on his jaw. His ribs would ache for another week at least.

  With the towel wrapped around his waist, he stepped out of the bathroom. His father and a medic were waiting in the cabin.

  “Feel any better?” his dad asked.

  “Ask me again after you give me a beer.”

  Ben laughed. The medic directed him to a chair and worked swiftly, taking a quick inventory of his wounds and treating each in turn.

  “You did well, son.”

  Well. Not the word he’d put to it. He’d killed a man, a former soldier, on American soil. He couldn’t work up an ounce of sympathy for John Eaton. However the man had started his military career, he’d lost his way and turned into a monster.

  “How’d you get to us so quickly?”

  “Your mom insisted we leave a half day earlier than Hank suggested. We were cruising up and down the shoreline, looking for likely hiding places when the coast guard arrived and organized the full search.”

  “Eaton chose a good one.” Mark winced as the medic prodded the knife wound that creased his shoulder blade. “It didn’t hurt that bad in the shower.”

  The medic game him an unconvinced hum. “Needs stitches.” Of course it did; Charlotte had told him so.

  “Is that really necessary?” Mark argued. “Won’t glue do it?”

  “Too deep,” the medic replied.

  Mark grunted his assent.

  “Hank moved on the compound Eaton built in Arizona,” his father said. “We should have an update in a few minutes.”

  “We’re a long way from Arizona.”

  Ben agreed with a slow nod. “Each layer we pull back proves the man had quite a reach.”

  Footsteps in the hallway rushed closer, followed by a rapid knocking on the cabin door. “Ben? Mark?”

  Mark caught the worry in his father’s gaze as he opened the door to Patricia. “He’s fine,” Ben said.

  “Good.” She peered around Ben. “You’re good?” At Mark’s nod, she looked back to her husband. “It’s Hank.”

  Mark jerked at the pain in her voice and the medic grumbled as the movement tugged on the stitches he was trying to finish.

  “Easy,” the medic said.

  “Wrap it up,” Mark ordered. His mother hadn’t uttered another word, collapsing into his father’s embrace. The rare display of emotion and despair rattled him.

  “What happened?” Ben asked, holding her close.

  “He was shot.” The words were muffled in Ben’s chest.

  Mark’s stomach twisted.

  “I don’t know how badly yet.” She leaned back a little and fanned her face. “He didn’t make the call. One of the other investigators did.”

  Ben glanced at Mark over her head.

  “Go,” Mark said. “I’ll find you as soon as this is done.”

  It seemed to take forever for the medic to wrap things up. When the young man started to give him directions on wound care and pain relief, Mark shooed him out of the cabin.

  Dressing swiftly in shorts, a loose T-shirt and the deck shoes his mother had brought along, he bounded up to the cutter’s bridge to find his parents and get the facts on Hank. His heart rate steadied when he recognized Hank’s voice, tight with pain and temper, on the other end of the radio.

  “It will take us weeks to sort through this material,” Hank was saying.

  Mark went to flank his mom, who was still leaning heavily on his dad.

  Their bond was remarkable. Whether they were standing side by side or with half a world between them, their unity was a tangible force. Mark had taken their commitment to each other and to family for granted growing up. It was only after being out on his own that he’d realized not only the treasure of his parents’ bond but the beauty of it.

  He’d given up on finding a woman worth the effort and commitment, until he’d looked at Charlotte differently. Until, in the middle of the unimaginable, she’d given him a priceless gift. Now he couldn’t shake the idea that she could be that partner for him.

  Distracted with thoughts of how he might become the man she needed, he only caught bits and pieces of Hank’s report on Eaton’s compound.

  “In the meantime,” Hank continued, “Luke, Jolene and I can’t let down our guard.”

  “Wait. Why?” Mark asked.

  “Mark?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “How are you doing?” Hank asked. “Looked a little grim there for a while.”

  “Chicks dig scars,” Mark joked, dodging a glare from his mother. He leaned closer to the speaker. “Better now that Eaton’s dead. Why would you still be on guard?”

  “Thanks for handling that, by the way,” Hank replied. “I guess SEALs get the win this time around.”

  Mark laughed. “Always.”

  “We’ll see,” Hank replied. “I’m hoping your success there will be enough.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” Mark queried.

  Patricia gripped Mark’s hand, careful of the scrapes on his knuckles. “Eaton put a bounty on Luke, Jolene and Hank too,” she said.

  “What the hell? No one will follow through if he’s too dead to pay them, right?”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Hank said. He coughed a little. “But I don’t want to assume anything just yet. You’ll understand when you see what I’m looking at.”

  “Fine.” Mark believed him, though he wasn’t eager to take a deeper look at anything else they gathered on the scumbag. “Have someone else take over, all right? And let a medic take a look at you. Mom’s eyes are bugging out over here.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Patricia said.

  Her tone earned a pained laugh from both Mark and Hank, while Ben managed to keep a straight face, assuring her Mark was exaggerating.

  “It’s not that serious, I promise,” Hank said.

  “Come on. She won’t believe you until she sees you with her own eyes.”

  “I know.” Hank managed to sound greatly inconvenienced. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

  The update over, Mark walked out on deck, hoping to find Charlotte, but apparently she was still being treated below. She was safe now. That was the important point. They would see each other at family events and he could always ask his mom about her.

  “How are you really feeling?” Patricia asked, joining him at the rail.

  Inadequate and guilty. “Sore,” he answered instead. He noticed the look in her eye. He had to give her something close to the truth or she’d press him harder. He didn’t want to face any of the tough questions about being caged, beaten and hunted.

  Neither his confidence nor skill would change the fact that Charlotte had been
exposed to outrageous danger and trauma.

  “Do you want me to go check on her?” Patricia asked.

  “No.” It would take time for her to recover from their ordeal. “She’ll come up when she’s ready.”

  “You love her.”

  Mark stared out at the island they’d escaped. Eaton had been a monster, no doubt there. Quick-Punch Kid and the man Mark had cuffed to a tree were in custody. The coast guard expected to apprehend Muscle and the injured man presumed to be on the boat with him in due time. All of that should make Mark feel better.

  He didn’t. No matter the jokes Charlotte had cracked about dying increasing her value as an artist, he’d let her down. Deliberately he shifted his gaze to his parents’ sailboat, bobbing in the swells aft of the coast guard cutter. “How long until you and Dad head back?” he asked.

  She sighed at his diversion. They both understood she wasn’t fooled and he wasn’t ready to share.

  “Sue Ellen and Ron and your father and I agreed it was best to stay here with you and Charlotte through the morning at the very least.”

  “In case one of us falls to pieces? It won’t be her,” he said.

  She cocked an eyebrow. “You’re in a safe place,” she said. “It’s not the worst idea to relax and enjoy it. What Eaton did—”

  He didn’t need his mother to run that down. “I’m good, Mom.” He stared out at the island. From this vantage point all he could see was the beauty. In his mind though, he kept reliving the horror through Charlotte’s eyes. “He didn’t beat us.”

  “Rileys are a tough lot.”

  Mark agreed with her. Rileys were tough and as she’d so recently pointed out, far too jaded for an artist with mermaid hair and a gift for finding the beauty in everything. Including him.

  “Come in out of the sun,” Patricia said. “You need to hydrate.”

  “Mom.” He shook his head, cutting her off. “It was only a week.”

  “A week in hell from what we saw.”

  He winced at her choice of words. Charlotte had felt the same way. “I’m all right. I know the drill. I’ll have water even though I want a beer. And I’ll get something to eat in a bit.”