Hard to Hold (5 page)

Chapter Four

Already given the all clear by the medic Nick had insisted check her over, Anna waited
as Will—who she’d demanded be summoned to keep her mind off her desire to punch Nick—fixed
her a hot drink. Meanwhile, Nick held her in his relentless, unswerving gaze, his
arms tightly folded across his chest. She wasn’t certain whether it was the attack
that had provoked his silent fury or the fact that Will was sufficiently well acquainted
with her kitchen not to have to ask the location of her herbal teas and mugs.

The stool upon which she perched suddenly felt very high and uncomfortable, the ceiling
track lights seeming to zero in on her alone. “Maybe we’d be more comfortable in the…”

One frigid look from her ex had her shifting back onto the rigid melamine seat. “Or
maybe not,” she corrected with a defeated sigh.

Before he had a chance to respond, two men bullied their way into her kitchen. She
recognized them as detectives from the local precinct. Bullet-quick, like gunslingers,
both detectives and both Intelligence agents flashed their ID cards to assert territorial
rights. Trouble was, in a civilian complaint, the detectives trumped Nick and Will.

“Eat shit, spy-boys,” one of the usurpers muttered.

Nick had the man backed up against the wall in a flash, his fist full of tie and shirt,
his expression feral. Only Will’s intervention prevented all out bloodshed as he more
or less manhandled Nick out of her kitchen.

“You guys have got twenty minutes before I unleash him, by which time you’d better
have finished with your questions,” he warned over his shoulder, his hands flat against
Nick’s chest to keep him back.

…

The witless gate-crashers got to enjoy less than ten of the minutes allocated.

A furious torrent from Anna in response to one of the detective’s questions had Nick
pushing Will aside and thundering back to her.

“Out, all of you,” she seethed, whirling on him. “Especially you, Nick Marshall. You’re
not welcome here. Not now. Not ever.”

He knew from old that when she was that upset, there was little point in meeting her
fire with a blaze of his own. So he did what he’d always done to calm her. He dug
deep past the fury ripping his gut and replaced it with iced control to cool her down.
“What happened?”

She thrust between the two detectives standing shoulder to shoulder for mutual support.
“Ask them.” The scrunched photo the men had presumably handed to her, held tight in
her fist, fluttered to the floor like a broken-winged dove. “Now if you’ll excuse
me, I’m feeling a little nauseous.”

She didn’t as much stride from her kitchen as blaze in a stiff-legged stalk, the tile
beneath her heels almost cracking beneath her feet.

One detective dragged a trembling hand across his face. The other let his shoulders
slump and muttered, “She took that well.”

“What did you say to her?” Nick kept his tone even as he bent to retrieve the abused
image, having first pulled on a surgical glove with an ominous
snap
. Anna had a number of deeply private, emotional mines she buried beneath bravado,
and these idiots had tripped one of them. He’d
felt
the sting of humiliation beneath her angry words and cursed the fact that he hadn’t
been there to protect her.

Suddenly aware he was further creasing the photo, he forced his fingers to relax.

“All we did was ask if she had any family she could stay with for a while.”

He closed his eyes and began a slow count in his head. She was acutely sensitive to
the absence of any family, the fact that no one had wanted her. “And?”

“And she went bat-shit.” The man clicked his fingers. “Just like that. I know she’s
scared, but even so. Who’d have thought a gorgeous thing like that could possess such
a mouth? I can think of a number of better uses for it.”

Nick cracked his special smile, the one he’d been told was the wrong side of lethal.
“Careful, Detective. That’s my wife you’re talking about.” He noticed both men pulled
the edges of their suit jackets together as if suddenly chilled.

“Ex-wife,” one corrected unwisely.

Nick thrust his right hand into his trouser pocket to stop himself from reaching for
his gun. “Know much about directing traffic,
ex-Detective?
Because, right now, that’s the only kind of duty you can look forward to pulling.
And yes, I
do
have the authority to bust your ass. Leave now. I’ll take it from here.”

The man shut up, but his partner didn’t. “Not so fast,
Major
. Tonight. Where were you between the hours of eight o’clock and ten?”

“None of your damn business. Why?”

“Because a couple of weeks ago, Mrs. Marshall provided our department with a list
of people who might want to harm her. Your name was on it. And you were conveniently
near at hand when she was attacked tonight. Can’t have been easy learning your ex-wife
was pregnant. That she’d gone to the extreme of anonymous sperm donation. Just how
angry did it make you feel,
Major
?”

His tone laced with blue frost, Nick described in graphic terms exactly what the man
could do with his current line of questioning.

Whether out of indignation or fear, the detectives chose that moment to leave. “That
won’t have helped, Nick,” Anna chastised as she stepped aside to allow the two men
to pass.

“Yeah, but from what I heard, you colored the air indigo first. You okay?” he asked,
running an open palm across his face. Damn. He’d come too close to losing control.
One move against Anna, a single cloud threatening her sunshine, and he lost his mind—a
madness he’d battled and thought conquered. Bad miscalculation. Jesus, he had to get
a grip, or all hell would break loose. Last time his rigid self-control had slipped
the leash this much because of Anna, he’d turned into an animal.

“No, not really. What the hell’s going on, Nick?” she asked, pointing to the photo
pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

He noticed her bangs were damp. Splashing her face with cold water probably accounted
for her much calmer demeanor. Not that he was deceived. Those eyes of hers were windows
to her raging emotions. Shame. Pain. Confusion. It was the fear he couldn’t stand.

A solitary bead of water traveled along her temple, then followed the outer contour
of her cheek, ducked beneath her chin, then continued the delicate line of her throat.
She didn’t seem to notice. He couldn’t drag his eyes away.

“I haven’t had a chance to look yet. I wanted to get rid of Dick and Dicker first,”
he answered suddenly numb. At least his weak humor raised a hint of a smile, though
her eyes remained flat, a deep purple-blue rather than their customary disconcerting
lilac.

The urge to cross to her, hold her tight in his arms, and promise to keep her safe
forever shattered his mind and sucked the air from his lungs. Cursing, he grabbed
for the last vestiges of reason and hung on tight. She wouldn’t thank him for daring
to touch. Nor would she believe him, certainly not the forever part. He didn’t believe
it himself. Time he faced facts. For both their sakes. This was a civil case. It wasn’t
his job to keep her safe.

His mind made up, Nick turned his attention to the rumpled photo Anna had dropped
earlier. And the floor tilted beneath his feet.
Sonofabitch!

Without his intervention, Anna and her child could die. He’d seen the aftermath of
beatings before. None had equaled the savage brutality inflicted on the victim whose
picture he held in his hand. The face was a twisted mask of agony, and the body had
been pulped beyond recognition.

He shot her a hooded look. She was naturally pale in a translucent pearl kind of way,
but she usually shimmered with vitality, a glow from within. Not right now though.
Her pallor was flat, chalky white, accentuated by the sable of her heavy, raggedy
bob. “Do you know this woman? Was she a friend?”

Anna’s head danced as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to confirm or answer
in the negative. “No, not a friend exactly, but she was kind to me. She was the nurse
who held my hand throughout the IVF procedure when she realized how nervous I was.
Oh, God, Nick, according to those detectives, she was working late, working alone.
They found her body in the alley behind the clinic. She…she tried to crawl to safety
but had been too badly beaten. She had my file clutched in her hand, just the cover;
my notes were gone. I don’t know what the hell is going on. I don’t understand the
connection to me.”

He’d had to lean close to catch her bleak whispering. He immediately stepped back.
Anna didn’t need to feel the fury sizzling his skin. She’d think it was directed at
her and would slam her defenses against him. Then they’d argue, and she’d do the complete
opposite of what he demanded.

Damn it, he needed her compliant. She was in danger. And much as he didn’t trust himself
around her, who the hell else would fight to keep her safe? “Maybe you should get
out of town for a while. I can make the necessary arrangements.”

“For how long, Nick? A fortnight? A month? Indefinitely…?”

Clearly frustrated, she’d thrown her arms wide, the thin cotton of her shirt stretching
tight across her breasts. He swallowed. Definitely didn’t trust himself. Not around
her. Much as he hated to admit it, when not stoking his temper, she fired up an unwelcome
lust, every curve of her body calling to his. The memory of her hot and trembling
beneath him, keening with need, fried his brain.

“…the police are nowhere near identifying who’s doing this, let alone stopping him.
I’ve worked too long and too hard to abandon my business and home for some sick freak.”

Nick snapped back to the present. “At least you’re finally prepared to accept he is
sick, that this is something more than a sad obsession. And you’re going somewhere
safe. I want you out of the way.”

Back teeth clenched hard enough to score steel, he marked the slow rise of pink as
it climbed her face, chin to brow. The one thing he’d hoped to avoid was a head-to-head
fight. Why the hell couldn’t she just accept he only wanted what was best for her?

Gentling his tone, he tried again. “Anna, this woman was most likely killed because
she knew too much. Something connected to you—”

“No. Just no,” she said, spearing the air in front of her with her forefinger. “You
do not get to guilt-trip me into running away, not when Sarah—yes, she does have a
name—must have died because of me. I’m staying put, Nick, to help find out who did
this and why. My paper medical history may be gone, but when it comes to hacking electronic
records, few can match me.”

He knew that she was struggling to hold the floodgates in place. That tears were never
far behind when Anna yelled like that. He’d watched it happen on more occasions than
he could count—hell, he’d been the cause of the tsunami most of the time. Crying would
calm her down, douse her fury as quickly as it had flared. She’d be more rational
and easier to convince after a meltdown. If he pushed.

“What if it’s not you he’s after? What if it’s the baby pissing him off?”

For a moment she looked stricken, then rallied. No tears, which didn’t bode well.
“No way is anything happening to my baby. I won’t go through that again.”

He was having a hard job keeping up with the speed of her shifting emotions, especially
those he couldn’t fathom. Like fear, she didn’t do bleak. She was too damned devil-may-care
and optimistic. “Again? What do you mean again?”

“I’m done with your hateful what-ifs. Just how sick does a person have to be to immediately
leap to the assumption that someone would want to harm an infant? An unborn baby for
Christ’s sakes?” She spun on her heel and stalked toward the front door, her spine
so upright and tight it was a wonder it didn’t snap.

“Anna—wait, damn it.”

She stopped dead in her tracks. “You, I stopped waiting for, years ago.”

She swung round to face him. Instead of the fire he’d expected, her eyes spat his
weapon of choice—ice chips—and the shock nearly retracted his balls.

“Now—Get. Out. And I swear to God, if I find out you’ve interfered again, that you’re
still having me followed, I’ll call my lawyers. No damn it, I’ll call the press. This
is not a matter of national security. It’s not about some agent on the double cross.”

“Maybe not, Anna,” Will interrupted, emerging from the corridor from which, judging
by the phone he held in his fist, he’d been making some discreet calls. “But you had
better be ready to tell Ballentyne to back off and hope to God he listens, because
otherwise the streets of London are going to run rivers of blood.”

“What the fuck’s happened now, Will?” Jesus, he hoped no one else had caught the almost-defeated
note behind his rasp.

“One of the Fortress men assigned to guard Anna is dead. Garroted. Ballentyne’s pissed,
and you know what that means.”

…

After more or less manhandling her to the sofa—Nick countered it was merely shepherding
when she protested—and insisting she take a seat, his questions were demandingly exact,
and he tore apart her muddled answers with surgeon-like precision. She was on her
third run-through of everything that had happened to her since she’d become pregnant:
the gifts, the attempts on her life, when he imperiously held up a finger to halt
her flow.

A gesture that damn near sent her blood pressure into orbit. She clamped her palms
together and sought out Will’s sympathetic gaze.

“The gifts suggest gratitude,” Nick continued. “He’s thanking you for something, rewarding
you even. Which is squirrely enough when we can’t work out what for? But what flips
him into wanting to hurt you? Stop you? Punish you? It doesn’t make any sense…” Clearly
perplexed and irritated as a result, he paced the long space next to the bank of arched
windows, hands deep in his pockets, his broad shoulders hunched to discourage any
interruption of his thought process.