Dana Marton (5 page)

He looked breathtakingly gorgeous when he smiled. Not that the new Parker smiled all that much. But his smiles and those eyes had a way of breaking down her defenses.

“I can’t believe you hung up on the Colonel.” His grin widened another full inch. “I’m sure he can’t believe it, either.”

“You barely have any battery power left. We can’t waste that on pointless arguments. So what did this Colonel tell you?” Whoever he was, she wasn’t impressed. What kind of cold-hearted person would leave a group of defenseless people to their fate?
Politics.
She pressed her lips together.

“The Russian rescue team is here.”

Her heart sped at the news. “Is that what the gunfire was about?”

“Their Alpha troops are in the process of securing the building from the outside. They are already on the roof. We have to get out before they storm the place and we get caught in the cross fire. A few of their Vymple special forces are coming, too. They won’t be far behind.”

“Can’t we just all go to the roof? Then they can save us all?”

“To reach the Alpha troops, we’d have to get through the rebels. I’m not taking anyone into the cross fire. The roof is out. We have to find another way to escape. Before the Russians turn up the heat and attack full force. I don’t want them to shoot any innocent people by accident.”

She was trying hard to maintain a positive attitude about this whole mess, but it was slipping away from her as she listened to Parker. Sneaking out of here was already an impossible mission. Trying to help the other hostages while doing it added another level of difficulty. They really didn’t need a timeline. “How soon will they attack?”

“They’ll try to negotiate first. That can go on for as long as a couple of days, or they could lose patience with it in a few hours. We need to operate expecting the latter.”

The whole prepare-for-the-worst thing. Made sense. She nodded, recalling a number of Russian hostage crises that ended badly for the hostages. “They’ll probably shoot at everything that moves.”

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

“Okay, so we can’t go to the roof.”

“We’ll find another way out after we get the kids and the hostages to safety in the basement.”

“But we get the kids first?”

“Yes. We are on the same floor. It shouldn’t take long if they are still where we expect them to be.”

He didn’t say,
and nothing has happened to them,
and she didn’t dare to think it. She focused on the next step instead. “And help the other hostages.”

He gave a low growl. “Would you like to save the ice cream from the freezer, too, so it won’t spoil in case the Russians cut the power?”

“What? There’s ice cream? Head to the kitchen first,” she said, because she desperately needed a moment of lightness in the taut atmosphere.

“Tell you what. I’ll take you for ice cream when we get out.”

She couldn’t see him, but just
knew
he was rolling those gunmetal-gray eyes. She didn’t dare linger on the thought that he meant to take her anywhere after this was over.

“The Colonel said the rec room is in the west corner of the building,” he said.

“Which way?” Inside the vent ducts, she was completely turned around and disoriented. Directions like east or west were beyond her.

“Turn left up ahead.”

Not the best of news, since the sound of a small explosion had just come from that direction.

August 10, 05:40

W
HEN THEY
were in sections that opened to the various offices, their progress was excruciatingly slow; they stole forward at the rate of an inch a minute, never knowing who might hear them. But now they were finally in a section that had no openings to the outside, and could go faster. Kate kept the flashlight on. He didn’t mind, knew she was uneasy with tight spaces and outright scared of spiders. The light reflected back toward him, however, did outline her body as she crawled in front of him. He didn’t even try not to admire her curvaceous bottom.

He couldn’t help the flashbacks of that round bottom straddling him, images of Kate naked above him, the way he felt as he pushed into her soft heat, rising up to bury his face between her generous breasts.

“Parker?”

The insistent whisper brought him back to the present, although he noticed ruefully that one part of his body still lingered in the past and was bound to make the crawling more difficult. His body’s reaction to her was instant and powerful. It had always been like that with Kate. “What is it?”

“Can you hear them?” She turned off the flashlight, but they weren’t left in complete darkness, as some light filtered in through a vent cover up ahead.

Despite their situation, she was cool and collected. Almost as cool as she’d been when she had walked away from him two years ago, telling him that she had gotten a chance for the consul post in Paris and she was going to take it. She hadn’t felt that what they had was enough to keep her with him.

And now for the first time, he wondered if he shouldn’t have done something to stop her.
Stupid idea.
She was too nice. He was too dark. His life was—She was better off without him.
Safer.
The only mistake he had made had been asking her to marry him in the first place. That had been irresponsible, given his position. And yet, he couldn’t regret it.

He took a few slow, controlled breaths and focused on the task at hand.

Men were talking up ahead, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. “Move closer. Careful.”

But getting closer proved to be difficult, as the duct narrowed ahead. The building was an old one. Whoever had put in the system had had to adjust to some restrictions, he supposed, going around existing beams and structural elements.

Kate was nearly at the vent opening when she stopped. She looked back at him without saying a word. He could clearly hear the men below now, which meant they would hear Kate if she spoke. The best they could do was to communicate with hand signals. He did that, motioning forward.

Kate shook her head.

Okay, so she was stuck. Damn. They had to crawl back and look for another way. But first he wanted to take a look at the men below, see how many there were, how well they were armed. He listened. They were talking about Russian politics, not terribly useful to him at the moment.

He signaled to Kate to press herself to the side then moved up, parallel to her body. His face was in line with her ankles, then with her knees, her thighs.
Her hips,
heaven help him. He couldn’t get as far as she had, his shoulders being wider. He got stuck with his nose about buried in her chest.

Her scent, her being, her energy surrounded him and filled him with a sharp longing that stole his breath.

She stayed absolutely still. Frozen. The men chatted on below.

He filled his lungs slowly and reached for his cell phone, set the camera on Record and handed it to her, pointing toward the vent cover. She only hesitated a moment before holding it up to a slot. Her breasts lifted as she stretched her arms.

He felt sweat bead on his brow.
Don’t think about it.
He motioned to Kate to move the camera around a little. She did so, then when he signaled a minute later, she passed the phone back to him so he could view the file she’d just recorded.

He selected Play, then Mute.

Six men, their rifles propped against the wall, hand grenades and handguns clipped to their belts next to their gas masks. One of them left, then came back in a few seconds. End of recording. Parker turned off the video as talk in the room switched to the expected harvest at the men’s village. They cursed the Russian tanks that had destroyed half their fields.

He doubted he was going to find out anything important here in the near future, and they didn’t have time to wait around and hope that the men decided to chat about more important things, such as where the rest of the rebels were and what their plans were for the siege.

He pocketed the phone and moved back a little, but she did, too, at the same time. And she had moved faster, bringing them face-to-face. The duct gave a low popping sound as both of their weights centered on the same spot.

The conversation stopped below.

He could see the sudden fear and questions in Kate’s eyes. He put a hand on her arm. They just had to stay still for a while.

Touching her was a mistake.

The heat of her body seeped into his skin. He could smell her skin, her body lotion, which she had changed since they’d lived together, her shampoo, which was the same.

The men in the room resumed talking. He wasn’t listening.

He could remember, as if it were yesterday, massaging that shampoo into her hair—she had worn it long back then. The two of them in the shower. Water sluicing over her curves, followed by his hands as they slicked over her soft skin, his mouth on hers, then on her neck, then everywhere.

“You’re a maniac. We’re going to break the stall.” She had laughed, an indulgent look on her fine-featured, delicate face, water glistening on her long dark lashes.

“It’ll be worth it.” He’d reached under her buttocks and lifted her, pushed her against the tile wall then wrapped her legs around his waist.

She’d been ready, had always been ready for him, and he had pushed into her hot, tight, welcoming body, losing himself to the insanity of needing her more than the next breath he took.

Her low gasp brought him back to the present and he realized he had gripped her arm harder than he had meant to. Also, a part of his anatomy was pressed against her, making it pretty obvious what he’d been thinking about.

He was grateful that they couldn’t talk so he couldn’t be expected to explain. The pull of chemistry between them had always been unexplainable, anyway.

He couldn’t see much in the dimly lit duct, but it sure looked as if her eyes were throwing sparks. Well, hell, as long as she was already mad at him…

He dipped his head forward and took her lips. She was soft and sweet, as mind-bending as he remembered. He had been craving this reunion from the day she had walked away. He liked to think that now and then she had thought of him, too.

So it came as a surprise when she put a hand to his chest and pushed, not even whispering, but breathing the words, “No. Parker, no,” against his mouth.

And like the bastard he was, he kissed her anyway. Because he could.

And felt immensely gratified when in the next second she melted against him.

She’d had this dream too many times, always woke with her body and soul full of aching and yearning. Except, this was no dream, as every cell of Kate’s body attested. This was the real McCall.

Surprise had her resisting for an embarrassingly short moment, then pure gut reflex, body reaction, took over and all she could do was feel, all blood flow to her brain cut off. Minutes passed—not that she was aware of anything as mundane as the passage of time—before she could think again and pulled away. Breathing hard.

He came after her, but she turned her head—the small movement requiring an inordinate amount of effort—and those sensuous lips of his landed on her cheek. She became aware of his large hands that gripped her waist and had been inching upward. They stopped. Fell away.

I don’t want this anymore,
she wanted to tell him, but they couldn’t talk, and even if they could, the words would have been a lie. She wanted him still. Her body throbbed with need from head to toe.

But her mind was emerging from its pleasure-induced stupor at last, and it reminded her that as spell-binding as the pleasure had always been with Parker, the pain of their breakup had been too devastating to bear.

She had given him her trust, her heart, her body and soul. She had believed with everything in her that he was
it,
the one for all time, the man to grow old with. Their breakup had caused her to lose not only her faith in him and marriage, but in herself, as well.

She bit her lip and squiggled down, anxious to separate their bodies. When her head was in line with the strong column of his throat, she tried not to think of how much she used to like to kiss that spot. Then came his wide chest and she blocked the memories of it rising above her, of how she would rest her head over it at other times and listen to that strong, steady heartbeat. The space was tight, but she managed to turn her head when she reached his flat stomach, hurried on as she moved lower, ignoring the all-too-obvious signs that he still wanted her.

Jason.
She thought of one of the administrators at the embassy who had taken her out twice now to dinner.
Jason, Jason, Jason.
He was the same age as she, but with the heart of an old-fashioned gentleman. He was soft-spoken and into the arts. Had promised her tickets to Bizet’s
Carmen,
the most popular French opera of all.

Jason left her pleasantly entertained and always looking forward to their next meeting. There was none of the mind-spinning heat that confused her and scared her so much with Parker, that had her acting out of character. Jason had not even asked for a goodnight kiss when he had escorted her home. And she found his patience and his European good manners admirable.

Focusing on him got her through crawling over Parker’s body. For the most part. She drew her lungs full of air when there was finally a foot or so of distance between them.

She crawled in silence, up to the nearest intersection of ducts.

“Left,” Parker murmured.

And she went that way, as fast and as quietly as she could. Until she felt his hand on her ankle, his hot palm on her bare skin. Her pant legs had ridden up from crawling.

She couldn’t deny the jolt. Did he—Then she heard footsteps from outside. She held her breath as men passed by them. When Parker removed his hand, a signal that she could move again, she resumed crawling until he told her to stop.

She reached a vent cover that looked out at a hallway and a door opposite. She crawled a few feet farther so he could look out, too. His bulk coming toward her in the narrow space should have made her feel more claustrophobic, but instead, she found his presence comforting.

“That’s the rec room,” he said.

She wasn’t surprised that he’d been able to go right to it. He had a near-photographic memory. If someone had told him the building’s layout, he would be able to navigate it as well as if he had a map in hand.

She drew a deep breath. The girls.
God, let them still be there and unharmed.
She pressed her lips together, forgetting everything else for a moment but the two sweet little girls with the big silk bows in their pigtails. “How do we get over there?”

But Parker was already laying down his rifle and reaching for the vent cover. He pushed it out, handed it to her. “I need the handgun.”

He tucked the weapon into his belt, then squeezed through the hole, right arm first, then his head, then the left shoulder. She could barely hear the small thump when he dropped to the ground.

“Hold the cover back in place in case somebody walks by,” he whispered when she stuck her head out to look after him.

She did that while watching him cross the hallway in two long strides and listen at the door. He had his gun in his right hand now, inching the door open with his left after a long second, keeping low to the ground. She wished she could point the rifle at the door and cover him if necessary, but since they were in a narrow section of the duct again, she couldn’t turn the long weapon, couldn’t aim it to where she should have.

Parker opened the door another inch. He could see in now, but she couldn’t. She held her breath, desperately wanting to know what he’d found, but his body language gave away nothing. Then he turned a fraction and she could see the thunder on his face and the way his lips flattened into a grim line. Her heart stopped as he disappeared inside and closed the door behind him.

He wasn’t going to say anything? He expected her just to sit there? She stared after him, stunned, and waited—not too patiently—a full minute. When she heard no sound of fighting, she eased the vent cover out of place and pulled it back in, slid it out of the way.

She considered the rifle for a second. She couldn’t climb out with it; she needed both hands to manage that, and it was too big to stick into her belt. If she swung it over her shoulder, it would get caught and stuck in the small vent hole, and tossing it out ahead of her would have made too much noise. And she couldn’t reach it after she slipped out. The vent holes were too high on the wall. Parker had to help her each time she had to get up there. She left it, knowing Parker wasn’t going to be too happy that she’d abandoned one of their only two weapons.

She went out feet first, dangling from her fingertips soon and still a four-foot drop between her and the floor, thinking of her bad ankle, her most recent tennis injury. Putting out her ankle would be disastrous. She wasn’t going to think about that. If she focused on something going wrong, for sure it would. She visualized landing with the grace of a ballerina then let go, tilting her weight so she would fall on her behind rather than on her knees if she toppled over.

She made more noise than had Parker, who was there the next second and dragged her into the room behind him, shutting the door quietly. A thunderstorm was brewing in his eyes.

“What do you think you are doing?” he asked through clenched teeth, the expression on his face making him seem a foot taller and much wider in the shoulders. He had looming down to a science.

Not that he could have scared her. Not Parker.

She was about to tell him to cut it out when her gaze caught on the body on the floor. “Oh my God.” Her hands flew to her chest from where cold was spreading through her.

Tanya lay in a limp heap a few feet behind Parker, her throat cut, blood everywhere on the geometric-patterned carpet. Even in death, she had a determined look on her face.

Kate blinked as her stomach roiled, getting ready to reject the gourmet dinner she had eaten a few hours ago. Then Parker stepped in her view, blocking the gruesome sight, his hands coming up to her shoulders.

“Hey, take it easy.” Concern replaced the earlier annoyance in his voice, the angry lines of his forehead smoothing out as he watched her. “You know her?”

She swallowed again. “She’s the ambassador’s wife. She was going to come back to dinner as soon as she handed off the kids to the nanny.” Just a few short hours ago. Sure seemed as though a lifetime had passed since. “Where are the girls?”

She had hoped that they would find the children here with their mother and their nanny, had counted on it. Maybe under rebel guard, but here. It seemed a logical assumption since they hadn’t been brought back to join the rest of the hostages at the gym. Every extra minute Parker and she spent wandering around the embassy, searching, decreased the chances of any of them making it out of here alive.

“Could have been taken someplace else. There are sixty-eight rooms and offices in the building, not counting storage closets,” he said.

Her brain scrambled to come up with an idea as to where the girls might be, thinking of every area of the embassy that she had seen before. She tried not to think of how scared they probably felt, that there was a good chance that they had seen their mother killed. She absolutely refused to consider that the children themselves might not be alive.

The rebels wouldn’t do that. They couldn’t.
These were innocent little girls, for heaven’s sake. She wouldn’t allow herself to remember the Russian school-hostage crises when hundreds of innocent children had died. She held Parker’s gaze and believed with all her heart that he would find the children and save them. Because she had to.

She sank to her knees next to Tanya and raised a hand to the woman’s face, gently closed her eyes. “You don’t know how nice she was. She was so helpful with everything I asked. Just open and forthcoming and…” Her voice broke.

She reached for her top button, meaning to take her borrowed kitchen jacket off and cover the woman’s face at least, but Parker put a hand on her shoulder.

“We can’t. Have to leave everything the way we found it. If the rebels come back this way and figure out that there’s someone loose in the embassy, they’ll come looking for us.”

Her hand fell away. “You think they have the girls?” she asked, but hoped with all her heart that the kids were hiding someplace with their nanny.

“They could still be here,” he said, and squeezed her shoulders briefly before he let her go to look around again. He pointed at Tanya. “No defense wounds.”

How could he tell with all that blood? She couldn’t make herself look that closely. She shook her head as she got up, not understanding what he was getting at.

“Don’t you think she would have defended the children? I would expect the body to be in the farthest corner, where she would have drawn back with them, shielding them behind her, fighting to the last drop of blood. But she was cut down right in front of the door, without defending herself.”

“Almost as if she stood here, waiting for the rebels.” She swallowed hard. “Trying to draw their attention to herself.”

“Right.” He was going for the armoire already and throwing open the doors. Not much there but video games, board games and books.

“But still, why wouldn’t she at least go out fighting?”

He waited a beat before he answered. “She wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. If she had the children hidden, she wouldn’t want a prolonged fight. She wouldn’t want to risk that the girls would cry out, or come out to help her. She wanted her attackers to spend the least amount of time in here.”

His words painted a vivid picture she could only too easily imagine. She rushed to the built-in closet and found a hundred or so paperback novels in a messy jumble, her gaze returning over and over to Tanya. Where else could she have hidden two small kids? Her heart was pounding as she scanned the room, her gaze halting on the TV stand that had one of its doors slightly ajar. The piece of furniture was small and low to the ground, just large enough for a DVD collection.

The next second, she was crossing the room. She opened the door slowly and stared into a pair of round eyes that watched her, frozen with fear. The older girl. There was movement behind her.

Kate drew the first full breath of air since Parker had dragged her into the room.

“It’s okay, Elena,” she whispered as the tension eased in her chest. They’d found them. The girls were here, unharmed. “Do you remember me? We had dinner together.” According to their proud parents, the girls had an English nanny and a French babysitter who popped in when the nanny wasn’t available. They spoke both languages, in addition to Russian, fluently.

Elena nodded slowly. Kate opened the other door and found the younger one, Katja, curled up asleep, her tear-streaked face squinched up as if she was anxious even in her dreams.

Then Elena looked behind Kate and screamed, waking the smaller girl, who started to cry immediately, repeating a single word, something that sounded like
matj,
which Kate thought meant
mother
in Russian.

“Shh.” She reached forward to pull the girls out.

But Elena pulled back, holding back her little sister. “Mommy said we can’t come out until she told us.”

She couldn’t force them, not even for their own good. They had to cooperate and do it quietly. “Your mom told me to come and get you if she got hurt.”

Elena nodded. She understood that her mother was injured. “Did the bad people hurt her a lot?”

“Just a little,” she said. “We have to go before they come back.”

Elena eyed Parker.

“I’ll move back,” he said.

He had probably scared the girls; no wonder when they had witnessed a brutal attack by men in uniforms just like his.

“He is a friend.” Kate wrapped her arms around the girls, who burrowed against her body, just about melting her heart.

Parker was talking in a calm, low voice a few steps away, in Russian. After a moment, that set the children somewhat at ease and the younger one peeked over Kate’s shoulder at him.

“He’s not going to hurt you. He is my friend. He is a very good man. He is going to take us from here so we’ll be safe.” She didn’t let them go for a second, knowing that they needed the comfort of her touch.