Darkest Before Dawn (KGI series) (23 page)

This wasn’t her room. Even if it had become hers over the last few days. Her room was at home. In her parents’ house. She didn’t maintain a separate residence in the States. It made no sense to do so. She was gone more often than she was home, and so when she visited between assignments, or simply needed a break when the pain and despair she faced on a daily basis became too much for her to bear without losing sight of her mission, she sought refuge at her parents’ home. She slept in her childhood bedroom, a room they kept for her. One that was purposely unchanged from when she was a teenager still in high school.

It had all the things she’d grown up with. Her favorite stuffed animals. Her beloved books. Her language textbooks and all the research books on the Middle East, its culture, the differences and nuances of each individual dialect that changed from region to region.

Even her sports trophies, though she’d laughed at the idea that her parents would keep what amounted to nothing more than a participation trophy. She’d certainly won no championships, nor had she stood out as an athlete like all her siblings had. She was the odd duck of the family.

Honor swore to her parents they must have adopted her or found her in a cabbage patch because she was nothing like her siblings. She was so much softer. More empathetic. She lacked the ruthless drive to succeed, to be successful at everything she did like her siblings did. They called her a softy. Too kindhearted and tender to survive in the “real world,” as they called it. And yet the world she lived in was the epitome of survival. Nothing at all like her family’s safe jobs, safe homes, safe lives.

Her father was a former all-star athlete. He’d played multiple sports but had gone to college on a football scholarship and had even been drafted to the pros. But by then he’d met and fallen in love with her mother, and he’d told his children often that he wanted nothing more than to be at home with her and for her to have his children. A house full.

Most doubted his sincerity, and Honor’s mother said that even she’d been skeptical at first. She hadn’t thought her husband would be happy just walking away from such a lucrative career in the spotlight. But he’d never displayed one ounce of regret, and only a year after they married, they had their first child.

Playing pro ball would have kept him from home for the majority of the year. There was spring training camp. There was the entire football season and the playoffs if the team made it to postseason play. There was no doubt her father could have been one of the greats, but instead, he’d taken a high school coaching job in Kentucky, where he and her mother had chosen to live and raise their family.

It was a small town in Kentucky, not so northern that it came too close to the line between north and south. It had the hallmark of every southern town. Open, friendly and welcoming. Small enough that everyone knew everyone else and as a result, everyone’s business was also known.

Honor and her siblings had grown up and thrived under the love and affection their parents had bestowed on them. Her brothers, every single one of them, excelled in one sport or another. As had her older sister. Her oldest brother had also played football in college and showed promise of being recruited by a pro team. He, like their father, hadn’t entered
the draft and no one had questioned that decision. But then their father knew well that some decisions were simply too personal to be discussed. They just were.

But where his father had gone into coaching, an adequate substitute for not playing the sport he loved, her older brother had chosen law enforcement and was the sheriff of their county.

Her second oldest brother
had
chosen a professional career in sports. Unlike his father and older brother, he wasn’t a football fanatic. His entire childhood had been devoted to baseball and he was a natural. Even now he was playing with a pro team and had just signed another long-term lucrative contract before Honor had departed that last time.

The two younger brothers were both businessmen and partnered in several ventures. But that didn’t mean they didn’t carry the same abiding love—and gift—for sports.

Even her sister, the second to youngest and only other daughter in a sea of sons, was athletic and as graceful and fast as a gazelle. She too had gone into coaching after a brief stint playing professional softball in Italy after attending Kentucky State on a softball scholarship. Honor was very proud of her sister, who was the youngest head coach of the softball team in the history of the small university where she worked.

In the two years since her sister, Miranda, or Mandie as she’d been affectionately nicknamed, had taken over the program, the team had made postseason for the first time in the program’s history. Her job was definitely secure. The university had seen to that. And she was very happy there because she was already being heavily recruited by other larger, more prestigious universities with much larger programs and that had long-heralded legacies in college sports.

But Mandie was a homebody at heart, while Honor was the complete opposite. Mandie liked her job. Liked getting her hands dirty and rebuilding a program from the ground up. She had no desire to walk into a program that was already well established and be a veritable figurehead. She wanted to make a difference in every aspect of the game.

Honor briefly closed her eyes, going back to the fact that her brother had signed another contract with his team right before she’d left. Her going-away party had been mixed with
joy and celebration but also with heartbreak and worry. None of them liked what she did. They didn’t understand it. They didn’t try to understand it. Each of them had gone their own way and no one ever questioned them for it. No one questioned Brad, who had simply walked away from pro football with no explanation. Or why his burning desire to become a police officer had never been known to his family.

They only questioned her. And she knew it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in her—they did. They loved her. She never doubted that for a moment. They just didn’t understand her. Didn’t understand why her calling took her so far from the people who loved her when all her other siblings’ paths had kept them close to home.

How could she explain the restless drive to make a difference in places that seldom received anything at all except death and violence? Brad should understand her better than anyone. He was a protector. The sheriff. He was responsible for a lot of lives. He was perhaps the only sibling she believed she had a kinship with. A shared burden. Surely their need to protect and save others had to come from somewhere.

“Honor, are you in pain?”

Hancock’s low voice, laced with concern, drifted through her melancholy and brought her gaze to his; she saw him intently studying her face as though he were privy to her every thought.

She sucked in her breath and impulsively slid her fingers through his where they rested on the edge of the bed at her side and linked them together with a gentle tug. He flinched as though he’d received an electric shock, but he didn’t remove his hand or pry hers away, a fact she was grateful for.

For this one brief moment, she needed the touch of another. Comfort. The promise of soon being held and surrounded by the love and support of her family. Every minute she was away was the worst sort of hell for them all. They likely thought she was dead, and if they were not certain of her death, then worse, they feared what her fate was. What she was enduring even now.

She prayed they thought she was dead until she could prove to them she wasn’t. It was kinder than them torturing
themselves with the endless possibilities of what could be happening to her. Besides, that wasn’t going to happen. Hancock had her. He wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.

It was foolish to think of anyone being invincible, impervious to the reach of A New Era, but she absolutely believed that Hancock could and would destroy anything in his path and would never let harm come to her. She knew it as surely as the sun rose in the east and slid into sleep in the west.

“What’s wrong, Honor?” Hancock demanded bluntly, his eyes narrowing further as he searched her face for any sign of what was causing her distress.

She wasn’t distressed.

She needed.

Heat crept up her neck and into her cheeks and she could only pray that the remnants of the dye as well as being in the sun for so long prevented him from seeing the evidence of the guilty blush.

She licked her dry, cracked lips and hesitantly, shyly, looked up at him from beneath lowered lashes.

“Kiss me, Hancock,” she said in a quivery voice that could be construed as fearful. But she knew better. And judging by the look on Hancock’s face, he also knew she wasn’t afraid of him. Or of what she was asking.

His eyes flashed with uncertainty, a rarity for him. She knew that without questioning how. She just knew. But there was also a spark of something else altogether.

Answering need. Want. Desire.

It was gone almost before she registered it happening, but the eyes never lied. They were the door to a person’s soul, or so the poets always said.

And just as she knew that Hancock was rarely if ever uncertain about anything, she also knew that it was even more rare for him to allow anyone to see what she’d just witnessed in his eyes.

She’d gotten to him and she knew it. Was stunned by it.

Good God, was she happy about it? What the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t know this man and it was presumptuous on her part, not to mention arrogant, to think that she could discern anything about him when others certainly couldn’t.

But she was already headed down a hazardous path that gave her a euphoric rush. Alive. She felt alive. Gloriously alive when death had been a suffocating fog surrounding her at every turn.

She’d made it free. Hancock had delivered what he’d promised. Her freedom from the horrible men hunting her like ruthless predators.

“Kiss me,” she said again, her voice dropping to a husky whisper laced with need. “Just one time when we’re both perfectly aware of it happening and neither of us can claim it never happened.”

His eyes widened in quick alarm and then surprise. Both reactions were chased from his eyes as they hardened with the realization that she knew. She remembered. Perhaps she’d never forgotten at all but needed time for all the pieces to drift back together. Now that she had them all in place, she would lock that memory into her soul for all time. Savor it. One pure, sweet moment amid so much fear and chaos and torment.

He swore softly, but even as he did so he slid one knee onto the mattress and leaned his big, tightly muscled body toward hers until he hovered mere inches above her. Heat licked from his skin, warming her to the bone. She suddenly took in the huge disparity in their sizes. He was a mountain of solid steel, not a spare ounce of flesh anywhere on his body that she could discern. And she had a very vivid imagination.

But he made her feel small and fragile. Vulnerable. But not afraid. She licked her lips, suddenly realizing that perhaps she
should
be afraid, provoking the beast when she was completely aware and had all her senses about her. Or maybe not
enough
sense to resist poking the wild animal.

With a harsh groan when her tongue darted over her bottom lip, he leaned down and swept her mouth into his, hot and hungry. There was none of the almost delicate tenderness he’d maintained when he’d kissed her so reverently when he thought she was unaware of her actions or that he was kissing her.

He devoured her mouth, consumed her, tasted every part of her hungry tongue, showing her the staggering difference
between a male trying to offer a woman comfort and a starving man demonstrating his ruthless dominance over her.

If it wouldn’t hurt so bad, she’d rip every bit of his clothing off and strip herself naked and throw herself at him, or rather on him. All she managed was a low moan that ended in a hum and then a breathy sigh of pleasure and sheer contentment that was quickly swallowed up and inhaled by him.

With considerable effort, he dragged his lips from hers but didn’t immediately distance himself from her. She wondered why she considered that a huge victory. He leaned his forehead into hers in a surprisingly tender gesture, his breaths blowing raggedly over her throbbing mouth.

“That was not a good idea,” he said through tightly clenched teeth. “Goddamn it, that was stupid.”

Okay, that hurt. She could admit it, and even if she couldn’t, the very real physical reaction—her flinch—would have betrayed her.

She scrambled for something—anything—to say to break the awkward silent tension that surrounded them, stretching her nerves to their breaking point.

“How soon will I be well enough to go home?” she asked anxiously.

It had the effect of a fierce blizzard. His face became shuttered, locked down as fury so cold blistered through his eyes and then blasted her, sending wave after wave of goose bumps racing across her flesh.

He abruptly rose, turning his back as if he didn’t want her to see any part of him or his reaction.

“You still have some healing to do before we can move you,” he said flatly.

And then he strode to the door, yanking it open and then slamming it behind him with enough force to knock one of the paintings on the wall askew.

CHAPTER 18

HANCOCK knew he was walking a razor’s edge in a true battle for his sanity. Worse, he was battling against what he knew must be done. The mission. The cost of completing his mission. All tied to one innocent woman with more courage and fire than he’d ever witnessed in one small female warrior.

He’d bullied her for days, ensuring that he and only he had access to the room where she was kept . . . prisoner. No way to leave the room, though as prisons went, he’d made sure it had all the comforts she could possibly need or want.

He avoided her questions. Natural questions. Questions she had the right to know the answers to. But the minute he answered them, all was lost. Because he wouldn’t lie to her. And he’d have to face her, those large trusting eyes, and watch the light shrivel to nothing but haunting resignation. And worse, betrayal. She would know that he was the very thing she’d run from and fought against, the thing she now believed she was safe from. She didn’t know—yet—that he was delivering her to the worst sort of evil, who would then hand her right back to the devil she knew.