Dana Marton (8 page)

Parker’s chest expanded, and his gaze locked with Kate’s. She was watching him and listening with interest. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” he said.

H
E WAS
finally going to tell her what was going on, was finally going to let her in. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or scared. Scared that she would find out that she had made some bad decisions in the past and had judged him unfairly.

She spoke before he had the chance to. “You didn’t just start this job, did you? This is what you did, even back when we were engaged and living together.” Nobody got to be this good without years of experience.

She waited, afraid now that she’d spoken that he would dodge the question, as he had dodged her questions in the past.

But he nodded.

She drew a deep breath, her mind going a mile a minute. Here it was, the truth coming out, finally. She owed him her own part.

“You know those times when you were gone and I couldn’t reach you? Sometimes I thought that you had somebody else.”

Thunder came into his eyes. “You thought I was cheating on you?” His voice was dangerously low.

She nodded tentatively, licking her lips in a nervous gesture.

His eyes flashed. “You said you loved me. How could you not trust me at all?”

Was that hurt in his voice?

“You said you loved me. How could you lie to me the entire time?”

That gave him something to think about. He held her gaze, a storm of emotions simmering under the surface.

“What was I supposed to think? You were moody a lot, you know, when you came back from assignment.” Her voice choked. “And your shirt smelled like perfume sometimes.”

“I work undercover. Sometimes I work with others. There are a few women on my team.” His voice was husky, toe-curlingly sexy.

She wrapped her arms around herself. “Why not tell me at least that? That you worked some law-enforcement job you couldn’t tell me more about. I could have accepted it.” At least, she thought she could have.

“I had no authorization. When we met, I was investigating an information leak that had some clues pointing to the State Department—where you worked and still work,” he emphasized.

That gave her pause and brought up more questions than answers. “Did you ask me out to get information from me? Was I your cover or something?”

He stepped closer, his eyes holding her in such a stark bind that the room around them seemed to disappear. She couldn’t look away.

“When you backed into my car—” He paused and her heart sank.

She remembered the accident clearly. She’d been distracted, leaving the parking lot of the Harry S. Truman building, that is, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of State. A few blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C., it was in a neighborhood called—no joke—Foggy Bottom.

“I was there watching someone. I couldn’t be sure that you didn’t make me miss my man on purpose,” he said.

She felt cold. He had only asked her out that night to investigate her. And she had been completely taken in by him. The attraction, on her part, had been instant. There he was pretending and, oh God—she had
slept
with him. Anger and embarrassment swept over her.

“I’d run a background check on you by the time we met for dinner. I knew you were clean. I could have skipped,” he was saying. “I went—And you were—” He shook his head. “I didn’t see
that
coming.”

She was still angry, but she wanted to hear him out. She wanted to be fair. It seemed she might have made some rash judgments in the past. They had cost her. She didn’t want to make the same mistake now—didn’t want to be ruled by her rush of emotions.

“I wanted you from the first second I saw you,” he said, carefully enunciating each word. “When I found out where you worked, I told myself I had to walk away from you. But I couldn’t.”

Judging by the harsh intensity on his face, she didn’t think he was lying. Some of the tension inside her chest eased.

“But don’t you think you should have told me at least some of the truth after the engagement?” She wasn’t ready to give in yet to the dizzying pull that drew her to him, had always drawn her to him.

“I wanted to. I didn’t get the authorization. I wanted to put off asking you to marry me until I could come clean. It just—Things got away from me.”

Yes, she remembered. Things had gotten away from both of them. They had been explosive together from day one. Dynamite. They couldn’t get enough of each other’s company, bodies. From their first date, she could think of no other man.

“You let me go without a word.” That had hurt. Even at that point, she had still hoped that something could be worked out if they both wanted it enough. She had expected him to try to keep her, had hoped he would heed the wake-up call. Instead, he had let her go without a fight. Which she took as a sign that he hadn’t really loved her at all.

“What did you expect from me?” he asked, tight-lipped, going very quiet.

Parker in quiet mode wasn’t a good thing.

“I expected you to give me a reason to stay.”

He turned away before she could have caught the expression on his face, walked to the blank computer screen and stared at it.

“Remember Jake Kipper? He stopped by one night with some car parts for me.”

She did. “Yes.” There hadn’t been too many people in Parker’s life it seemed. His parents were gone and he had no brothers or sisters. Only a handful of friends stopped by now and then, and out of those, she had only met Jake that one time. He had an infectious grin and had brought his wife along, a woman who clearly adored him.

She’d been insanely young—too young to be married, early twenties at the most—beautiful and happy. The same happy Kate had hoped to be in her own marriage with Parker. Well,
that
didn’t happen.

And Jake and Elaine had died in a car accident a few months after that, the news sending Parker into one of his dark moods for weeks.

“The group I work for—” Parker drummed his fingers on the desk, his muscles tight, his face hard. “Nobody’s cover had been broken before. Jake was the first and so far the last.”

Her breath caught. “Are you saying—”

“It was a car bomb, Kate, not an accident.” Pain and regret swam in his gaze. “Elaine was pregnant.”

Her hand flew over her mouth. “You didn’t tell me.”

“It was still early. I don’t think they’d told anyone yet. It came out in the autopsy.”

Other things clicked into place. How Parker had said it was too early for a baby when she’d told him she’d like to start trying as soon as they were married. She had taken that as yet another rejection.

For the first time, she had to consider that maybe he’d just been scared. Hard to think of Parker like that. He was never scared of anything.

She shifted toward him. He waited, not moving a muscle, so still she thought he might be holding his breath. She stepped close, then closer, putting her arms around his torso and burying her face at last into the crook of his neck, inhaling his scent, the warmth of his body. And then his strong arms wrapped around her and held her tightly.

Moisture gathered in her eyes. God, she had missed this. Missed him.

“I was scared to death that I couldn’t keep you safe.” His voice sounded scratchy.

“Looks like I found plenty of trouble without you,” she said ruefully.

“I’m here now.” He lifted a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, put a finger under her chin to tilt her face to him. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Kate.”

She knew. And her heart leaped against her rib cage because she also knew that he was going to kiss her. His gaze was dropping to her lips already.

“Parker, we…” she started to say, but then changed her mind and rose to meet him halfway.

He kissed her so sweetly, so tenderly, as if he had put all the longing of their separation into that one kiss. Her body responded on autopilot. Nobody had ever gotten to her the way Parker did without half trying. He was the only person that she had ever slept with on a first date.

Her hands crept under his shirt. She needed to touch his skin, needed to feel the familiar landscape of his abdomen and his chest, needed to feel that he was still the same. Her Parker.

The thought pulled her back from the haze of pleasure and she untangled herself from him shakily, finding the strength somewhere to step away.

He wasn’t her Parker. He was no longer her fiancé. And if things were the same, they wouldn’t work, anyway. They hadn’t worked in the first place. Truth was, beyond the physical, they had failed to make their relationship a viable union.

Now she knew what he did for a living. But she didn’t know yet how she felt about that. She wouldn’t be any happier with him being gone half the time now than she had been before. And he could never tell her everything. There would always be secrets between them. That wasn’t her idea of marriage.

“Kate.” He reached for her.

She drew back. “I’m sorry.”

He gave her a rueful smile. “Let’s call a moratorium on apologizing to each other, okay?”

She nodded.

“Do you have any more questions about me? There are at least a few things now that I could tell you.”

But she shook her head. She knew enough. And what she really wanted to know, anyway, was whether he still loved her.

Did she still love him? Hard to say when the need for his touch still hummed through her body. For the moment, the physical pull still obscured the emotional side of things.

She didn’t want to love him. She knew that without a doubt. She didn’t want to open herself up to a world of hurt again. She had found out enough about him now to give more meaning to the events of their past, lay it to rest somehow and hope she could finally bury her regrets along with it.

“I think—” She didn’t get to finish what she was saying. They were interrupted by his cell phone.

“Okay, go ahead.” Parker put the phone on speaker then laid it next to the keyboard as he dropped into a chair.

“Hang on for a second.” It was the Colonel. “Before I hand you over, you should probably know that the rebels have made another demand. In addition to troop withdrawal, they also want some Tarkmez war leaders released. There’s a trial coming up soon at the international court at The Hague. All right, here’s Carly.”

“Hey, beautiful,” Parker said with a half smile and Kate’s stomach clenched.

“Sucking up right off the bat, huh? Must be in a lot of trouble, McCall.”

“Nah. Just wanted to hear your sweet voice. How’s the baby?”

“Intent on kicking his way out. As stubborn as Nick. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Hear you about that,” he said, then briefly ran through his problem. “You think you can help me?”

“I have to, don’t I, if I want a godfather for this kid,” she groused good-naturedly.

And Kate relaxed.

She was beginning to suspect that Parker had a slew of friends she hadn’t been allowed to meet because they worked for the same group or organization or commando patrol or whatever it was he belonged to.

“I’ll stand guard by the door,” she whispered, not wanting to interrupt.

Parker nodded. They set up a voice connector on the computer to save his cell-phone battery as much as possible, then started the work with Carly, and between the two of them, a grainy image flickered onto the screen after a couple of hours. Kate had spent that time listening at the door, peeling her ears for any noise that might indicate that rebels were coming their way.

“How about the rest? I can only see with one security camera,” he said toward the phone.

“We have to reroute the feed from the others to the one working monitor you have. Then you should be able to scroll through the images,” Carly told him, and they got working on that right away.

Three more nerve-wracking hours passed before they got anywhere. Some of that time Kate spent by taking a sponge bath in the bathroom sink, with the dead body locked in the stall behind her. She tried not to look at the feet in the mirror.

But finally they did have the pictures, one hallway after another, the front entrance, the back, Parker flicking through them one by one.

“Thanks. Does Nick ever tell you that you are as brilliant as you are beautiful?”

“Not enough. He’s barely home,” she said then went on with some admonitions about Parker proceeding very carefully.

So she was very pregnant, close to birth from what she’d said, and her husband, who seemed to be on the same team with Parker, was obviously off on some mission. Yet it didn’t seem to bother her. There had been humor in her voice when she’d brought it up and an enviable amount of love.

And Kate wondered if she could ever be like that, if what Carly had would ever be enough for her. Carly seemed happy. She was still giving some last-second instructions to Parker.

“What if the rebels try to contact those two you took out in the gym? If they get no response over their radios, they might go over to check that out. They’ll see that the hostages are gone and start a search. Won’t they figure out that someone got in to help?”

“They’ll probably figure that the hostages overcame the guards themselves.”

“But—”

“Look, even if they do realize that the hostages are gone, they can’t afford to send too many men after them. They need all the muscle they have to fight off the Russians. Ivan and the hostages we’ve given guns to should be able to handle a rebel or two.”

“You’re right. I was just…”

But he didn’t look as if he was listening to her anymore. He was leaning toward the screen, narrowing his eyes at one of the grainy images.

“Damn. That is the dead-last thing we needed,” he said.

August 10, 21:30

Their situation was getting wilder by the minute. Parker stared at the screen. He shouldn’t be surprised. Nothing that had to do with Kate had ever been easy.

He was only here to save her, but would she come willingly and speedily? Hell no. Always had to save the whole world and then some.
Easy
was not in the woman’s vocabulary. Still, he could probably have handled it all, except for what—or who—appeared on the computer screen: Piotr Morovich.

He could have done without that complication. “What in hell is he doing now?” he hissed through his lips.

“Know him?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, and it gets worse. He knows me.”

“Nice friends. Who is he?”

“A known anarchist and mercenary. His father was a Russian spy who was assassinated after defecting to France. He hates the Russian government and blames the French for not protecting his father well enough.”

“Is he Tarkmezi?”

“Russian. From Kiev. But lately he’s been hanging around with one of the Tarkmezi warlords.”

“How do you know him?”

He stayed silent.

“I thought the Colonel said you could tell me things.” Her emerald eyes flashed with impatience.

“On a need-to-know basis.”

Her chest expanded as she drew a deep breath, getting ready to singe the hair off the top of his head. He braced himself for it.

“He is part of a group that has taken me hostage.” She drew herself to full height, and even being several inches shorter than he was and much more slightly built, she did manage to look intimidating. “I’m stuck in an explosive-riddled building with him. My life is in danger. I
need
to know.” The last words were said in a seriously pissed-off diplomat voice.

He drew an uneasy breath. She was right—to a point. And he was only too aware that this was the very issue he had lost her over in the past. “Piotr was looked into as a possible liaison.”

“For what?”

He clamped his lips, aware that he had probably said too much already. He was walking a fine line here. But she was a smart one and, after a moment, put it all together on her own.

“You tried to recruit him to spy for the U.S.?” Her eyes widened.

“I evaluated him. A long time ago.” Recruitment wasn’t his territory. The SDDU had a handful of selected people for that—a task that had to be handled with the utmost delicacy. Since the group was top secret, before they approached anyone and revealed even the slightest information, they had to be a hundred percent sure the possible recruit would say yes.

“And?” She still had that dazed, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole look on her face.

Made him want to kiss her senseless. Just about everything she did or said made him want to do things he could not, under any circumstance, do. And not all of them had to do with sex. Some had to do with turning back time. Good luck with that.

Or becoming the kind of man that she could love.
Don’t go there, McCall.

“Too unstable,” he said, focusing on Piotr. An understatement, really. Piotr was one scary son of a bitch. But, God, what a relief it was to finally be able to level with Kate, at least about some of his work.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes shut for a second, visibly gathering herself before drawing herself straight and shaking off any momentary discouragement. “Great.”

He kept an eye on the screen as Piotr moved along the long corridor, all alone. The man looked around then pulled a small package from his shirt.

No, no, no. Let it be a sardine sandwich.
Parker’s fingers tightened on the computer mouse, all of his attention focused on the man.

“What is he doing with the Tarkmezi rebels?” Kate was asking.

“That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?” He watched the man step up onto an overstuffed, antique armchair and pry off a vent cover, shove his package in there.

“What is that?”

He wasn’t exactly sure, beyond that it couldn’t have been anything good. And if his gut instinct was right, Piotr’s little package could be something downright disastrous. “We’d better check it out.”

He scrolled through the screens again, noting the rebel positions, how many of them there were at each spot, mentally mapping an escape route. The basement was completely closed off to the outside world, the roof occupied by Alpha troopers. He had to find a way out somewhere in between the two. And it wouldn’t be easy. For one, all the windows had bars on them. Then there was the distinct chance that if he stuck as much as his head out, the Russians would shoot from the roof without stopping to ask questions.

They would need a distraction. He hefted the two TNT belts onto his shoulder as he stood, running all the possibilities through his mind one more time.

“There are two balconies,” he told Kate as he headed for the door, weapon drawn. “The large one is on the second floor and it faces the front.” All ornately carved stone. This was where the Russian flag flew. “The smaller one in the back is on the third floor and overlooks the yard.” It was used for private dining for the ambassador and his visitors in the summer. “We’ll try that one. We might be able to get over to the garage roof.” Embassies had their own fleet of cars, a number of them bulletproof.

Since there were most likely no rebels in the garage or any of the outbuildings that belonged to the embassy, it was unlikely that the Alpha troops focused any serious manpower on those, after having swept them initially.

For a moment he considered getting Kate safely inside one of those bulletproof vehicles and sitting tight until the embassy was liberated. But he didn’t much like that idea unless he had no other choice. Ideally, he wanted her far away from here by the time the serious fighting started.

They made their way over to the elevator shaft without trouble and he got them inside one more time. He was halfway up the ladder behind Kate when the Colonel called.

“The State Department is trying to work with the situation. The Russians know that our consul is in there with a bodyguard. All offers for help have been refused. They assured us of Ms. Hamilton’s safety.”

Which they both knew meant exactly squat.

“The media is camped outside the building,” the Colonel went on. “There’s a live feed to most TV stations. Special news break and all that.”

Great. That would make it that much harder to get out without drawing attention. He could not afford to have his picture pasted all over television as he was dangling from a rope down the side of the building with Kate Hamilton, the U.S. consul, in his arms.

“Piotr Morovich is here,” he reported.

“For what?” The Colonel sounded as surprised as Parker had felt when he had spotted the man.

“He hates both the Russian government and the French. Beyond that, I have no idea. I guess this is why he came to Paris.” They had figured he was here to put into place some weapons-exchange deal. Someone had passed on incomplete intel. On purpose? He needed to look into that once they got out of here.

“I’ll check into it.” Apparently the Colonel was thinking the same thing.

“Appreciate that, sir.”

“Any change of status?”

“There are twenty-two rebels left as far as I could tell from the security cameras.” Not all areas of the embassy had cameras, unfortunately. “I neutralized five so far. Had to be done, sir.” He felt it necessary to defend his actions since the Colonel had asked him to get in and out with a minimum of interaction with anyone.

“Well done,” the man said, not sounding upset by the news.

“Do we know who’s leading the rebels?”

“Not yet. Wouldn’t be Piotr, though.”

Right. He wasn’t Tarkmezi. Those fighters might have worked with him if he had something they needed, like information on the embassy, but they wouldn’t follow a man not their own.

If he knew who the leader was, the most likely way to end the conflict quickly would be for him to locate the man and take him out. But with Kate by his side, his main goal was to avoid the rebels and not to go charging among them. More than anything, he wanted to keep her safe.

“How is Ms. Hamilton?” the Colonel asked. Didn’t seem like he had taken offense over Kate hanging up on him earlier.

“Holding up well, sir. I’m going to try to get us out of the building and to the garage. I plan on checking on a package on the way out that Piotr put into the vent system. I’ll report in if it’s something important.” And it was going to be, he knew that from the sick sensation in his stomach every time he thought of it.

They exchanged a few more words about enemy positions before hanging up.

“Are we going back into the vents again?” Kate asked with trepidation. But she looked ready to do it if he asked her. That was the kind of woman she was: strong, loyal and courageous.

He’d made a few whopper mistakes in his life, but he was beginning to think that letting her go might have been the biggest of them all. He struck that thought from his mind. He couldn’t let himself sink into regret or the tempting fantasies of what could have been. They needed to get a move on.

“Not if we can help it. Keep your gas mask close at hand.”

She nodded and resumed climbing—they had stopped for the phone call—and even in their dire situation, he couldn’t help admiring her tempting lines and long-legged grace. A man would have to be dead not to notice. He saw something else, too. The tension in her body. He needed to distract her from the danger around them.

“Remember the orange duck at Meiwah?” he asked without meaning to. Meiwah, a high-end Washington, D.C., restaurant had been the venue for their first date. Obviously, he had food and sex on his brain. Not necessarily in that order. Hey, he was a guy; he wasn’t going to apologize for that.

“Parker.” Her voice was a soft plea.

She remembered it, all right, but didn’t want to.

He’d walked her home after that first date, still deluding himself that he was doing it for the sake of his investigation. It had begun to rain.

Why don’t you come in for a second? I’ll dig up an umbrella for you.
She looked mind-boggling in a white summer dress that had gotten just damp enough to stick to her curves.

Couldn’t turn an invitation like that down, could he? A chance to look around her place—strictly in the interest of the case.

And then,
kaboom.

To this day, he wasn’t sure how they’d ended up kissing, how they’d ended up making love on the chaise lounge. It was pure insanity that first time, then the next and the next. He had waited for the breathless feeling in his chest to go away. It never did. They saw each other every day for the next two months—he was stateside for his investigation. The day he solved the State Department case, he proposed to her. Not that he had planned to. And he could barely believe when she had said yes.

He moved in with her the day after that, thinking it could work. Hey, there were a handful of guys in the SDDU who had families. Then, two days later, he got his marching orders to Taiwan for his next mission. For the next year or so, they barely saw each other.

He realized then that the relationship was probably torture for the both of them, but he would have married her in spite of his own judgment and the advice of his superior officer. Except that he had to lie to her the entire time, until she got sick of him and booted him right out the door.

And the hell of the thing was, he wanted her still, even now. Given half a chance, he would have found a way to make love to her in the dim elevator shaft, mark every inch of her body with his, sink himself deep into her soft heat. He wanted to hear her moan his name.

Sweat beaded on his upper lip by the time they reached the door to the third floor and she moved up on the ladder so he could get into position to open it. Better focus on the here and now if he didn’t want to lose her. He opened the panels a crack as he’d done before, just enough to sneak a peek. The hallway was clear.

They got out and reached the turn in the corridor without trouble. But there was some muted noise up ahead. He used his phone camera to look around the corner, pushing it out low to the ground where he didn’t think it would be noticed against the black marble tile. Five lounging rebels were doing nothing in particular up ahead, looking out the window. That portion of the corridor faced the courtyard. What were they looking at? Couldn’t have been anything important, judging from their body language. Probably just passing time while their leader negotiated a deal.

They didn’t look as though they were inclined to move anytime soon, which meant that he had to find another way to get around them. To reach the back balcony, he could have simply rounded the building with Kate. But he did want to take a look at what Piotr had left in the vent. That was crucial information he could pass along.

He motioned to the row of doors across the hallway. Kate followed. None of them were open. And he couldn’t make much noise. The rebels were just around the corner.

He got out his knife and the belt buckle from one of the TNT belts. The blade was too wide, the prong of the buckle not strong enough on its own.

“Flashlight,” he mouthed to Kate.

She handed it to him and he took it apart, popped out the spring that kept the batteries pressed to where they needed to be. He bent it until it resembled the shape he required, then tried again.
Bingo.

“We’re gonna have to go back into the vent,” he whispered when they were inside. Not knowing what in hell Piotr had put into the vent system, he really hated the idea.

He was torn between telling her to stay here in relative safety and taking her with him because he didn’t want to take his eyes off her.

“Put your gas mask on,” he said, deciding at last, pulling the stretch band of his own mask over his face. He made sure hers was on just as tight.