Heatseeker (Atrati) (11 page)

The problem was, they really hadn’t. Oh, they’d tied one on for sure once he’d told Neil about the engagement, but not a lot of intelligent discussion had happened then. And sure as hell not since.

“What did you mean, then?” Wyatt took a cautious step away from the door and toward Neil.

“You’re not married.”

“No.”

“Are you still engaged?”

“After leaving the bride at the altar? I don’t think so.”

“You what?”

“You telling me your intel didn’t include that tidbit?”

“I’ve done my best
not
to keep tabs on you.”

Hearing that hurt, though it was no less than Wyatt could have expected or deserved. “I couldn’t go through with it.”

“You left her at the altar?” Neil asked with disbelief. “That was cold.”

“I tried. Damn, I really did.”

“What stopped you?” Neil asked, as if Wyatt’s answer didn’t matter at all to him. The intense look in his dark blue eyes said otherwise, though.

“You. I dreamed about you the night before my wedding.”

Neil’s expression turned cynical.

“Not a sex dream, though the good Lord knows I’ve had plenty of those. You were old, sitting on the front porch of my family ranch. Another man was in the rocker next to you, giving you a look that said you were his.”

“You?”

“No.” And, waking from the dream, Wyatt had been sweating as if he’d had a nightmare worthy of a Hollywood B movie. “It was someone else, and I could see you were both happy.”

“On your parents’ front porch?” Neil asked, sounding strange . . . almost amused, but something else, too.

“Yeah. It was messed up. That should have been you and me. I wanted to kill the other man.”

“There is no other man.”

“But there would have been. If I didn’t get my head out of my ass, I was going to lose you forever. And on the morning of my wedding, on the cusp of having what I always thought I wanted, I realized that was the one thing I could not stand.”

“You’d already lost me. You threw me away.”

Wyatt couldn’t deny it, couldn’t change it, but he wasn’t living in that place anymore. “I screwed up. And maybe another man wouldn’t forgive me. Another couple couldn’t make it past that kind of mistake.”

“But you think we can?” Neil looked at Wyatt as if he’d lost his mind.

“I know it. What we have . . . it’s too big for my Texas-roots prejudices, or even my old dreams, to keep it buried.”

“Those prejudices are all over the place. Too many people think I shouldn’t have a right to love you.”

“But you do, anyway.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“If I let you in again, you could destroy me.”

“But I won’t.” Wyatt covered the distance between them, pulling Neil to him. “Trust me, sweetheart, please.”

Neil shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You will. I won’t give up.”

Neil didn’t believe Wyatt. It was in every inch of his tense frame, but he didn’t say it.

Wyatt was grateful for small mercies.

“If we share a room, you’re not touching me.” There was no give in Neil’s voice.

“Okay,” Wyatt agreed. “For now.”

Neil nodded, clearly smart enough to realize that was the best he was going to get. “Let me go.”

“One kiss.”

Neil opened his mouth, and Wyatt just knew he was going to refuse.

“Please.” Wyatt’s pride had cost him this man once before. He was never going to let that happen again.

Neil stilled, his body relaxing the tiniest bit toward Wyatt. “Not a sex kiss.”

They were all sex kisses, because for them sex was love, and their love made for damn good sex, but he knew what the other man was saying. And Wyatt would comply.

This time.

Their lips brushed, and electricity arced between them, the charge so intense, Wyatt’s eyes burned from the power of the moment. He didn’t press to deepen the kiss, didn’t push their bodies closer together, didn’t take advantage of the arousal saturating the air around them.

Wyatt kept his mouth closed as he moved his lips against Neil’s, relearning the contours he’d craved for every day of the year they’d been apart.

He didn’t want to stop the kiss, but if he didn’t, he was going to break his promise to Neil. This kiss was going to go carnal in about one second, and they would be in bed a heartbeat after that.

But that wasn’t what Neil wanted, or what Wyatt had agreed to. And he wasn’t going to break his word to the other man ever again.

Using all the self-discipline he’d learned as a Marine and later in the Atrati, Wyatt stepped back.

Neil’s eyes opened, their indigo depths hazy with an emotion Wyatt was hesitant to name. “You didn’t push the advantage.”

“I said I wouldn’t.”

“You used to say I was it for you, but you were dating her on the side.”

“I never had sex with her. Not once.” Hell, they’d never even come close.

“Didn’t she think that was odd?”

“She wanted to wait for marriage.”

“You hurt her, walking out on the day of your wedding. Like you hurt me.”

“Yes, I hurt her, but not like I hurt you. She didn’t love me like you do.”

“But she did love you.”

“She thought she did, but she didn’t know me, so how could she?”

“She loved the man you let her see.”

“Yes.” Wyatt would regret using a good woman and a good friend like that until his dying day, but following through on the marriage only would have added to his sins, not mitigated them. “What I did wasn’t fair to her, but marrying her would have been worse.”

Understanding and agreement burned in Neil’s gaze. “You didn’t love her.”

“Oh, I loved her . . . like a little sister. I wasn’t
in love
with her.” A major disaster had been avoided on what would have been their wedding night—and all the nights thereafter.

“Do your parents know?”

Wyatt stepped back, needing distance if they were going to have this discussion. “Why I called off the wedding?”

“Yes.”

“They do.”

“And?”

“Daddy said he didn’t raise any of his sons to use a woman like I used Candace.” Wyatt turned away and grabbed his duffel, dropping it onto one of the smaller beds. “He’s disappointed in me.”

Not because he was gay, as Wyatt had expected, but because his daddy had raised him to man up, and, well, he hadn’t. He had now, but he’d never be able to erase the look of disappointment in his daddy’s eyes from his memory. He wished he could.

“He still loves you,” Neil said with certainty, a lot closer than he had been a moment before. Wyatt turned, and Neil was there, his hand reaching out to squeeze Wyatt’s arm. “You’re still his son.”

Wyatt nodded. His daddy would never deny him, but things weren’t the same as they had been, either. “I’m not one of his heirs, though. Not anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s leaving the ranch to Jericho and Travis.” Exactly what he’d expected his daddy to do when he heard the news his middle son was gay.

“I’m sorry. Maybe he’ll change his mind after he’s had time to think.”

“He’s had six months, and I don’t see him changing even if I gave him six years.” Wyatt shrugged. It didn’t much matter, anyhow. “I knew I couldn’t go back there and live like I’d always planned, not and have a male partner.”

“It’s a pretty conservative place.”

“It ain’t Houston, that’s for sure. Or even Austin, for that matter.”

Neil sighed. “I never wanted you to give up your heritage.”

Wyatt knew that. Just like he knew that, as a man, he had to make choices about how he was going to live his life. He could spend a lifetime lying and pretending to be something that he wasn’t, or he could be honest about himself and live with the consequences.

It had hurt like hell to do the latter, but he didn’t regret it. Couldn’t. “Mama says she’ll pray for my soul, but I’m not welcome for Christmas this year.”

Neil paled, hurt covering his handsome face. “That’s not right. What did your dad say?”

“Daddy rules the ranch, but Mama rules the house. He won’t go against her.”

“I’m sorry.” Suddenly, shockingly, Neil pulled Wyatt into a hard hug. “I know how much that hurts.”

Wyatt wasn’t about to turn down the contact. “True.
Your
mother is an idiot.” He’d always thought so. How any woman could write off a son as honorable and loving as Neil was beyond Wyatt’s ability to understand. “At least my mama still sends me my care packages.”

She’d told him she loved him but couldn’t agree with his choices. Since he hadn’t
chosen
to be gay, he figured she meant his decision to stop hiding it.

“There is that,” Neil said with a suspicious-sounding laugh.

“Yeah, sugar, there is that. I saved you some pecan cookies from the last one. They were always your favorite. I put them up in the freezer.”

Neil laughed again, and this time the sound was even more strangled. “I’m not sure your mama would approve.”

“She’ll love you once she meets you, and maybe she’ll learn to accept me this way, too.”

“You really want to try again?” Neil stepped back, and Wyatt made himself let the other man go.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Think on it.” To Wyatt’s way of thinking, neither of them had much of a choice.

They were each other’s one true thing. It was time they celebrated that truth instead of fighting it.

After forty-eight hours of forced inactivity, Rachel was ready to go AWOL. And with the help of Kadin’s boss, Roman Chernichenko, she just might get away with it.

Kadin had refused to give her a situation report except to say that Abasi Chuma and his muscle were still on the mountain looking for her, convinced a woman could not truly have gotten away from them. Especially a woman who had spent the day before her disappearance hooked up to a car battery.

Rachel wanted more information than that. She wanted to know if Jamila Massri was safe. She wanted to know what the man’s plans for his innocent fiancée were.

Rachel needed to get Jamila out of Egypt before Chuma went home and started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. She couldn’t rely on his remaining ignorant of Jamila’s newly developed friendship with a woman from the West.

The man was a sadistic monster, but he wasn’t a stupid one, and Jamila herself might well give the game away with her own innocent comments. And if Chuma questioned her, that would be even worse. The young Egyptian wouldn’t know any better than to answer him with complete honesty.

She still thought the man her father had chosen for her to marry was charming and sophisticated. She had no idea where the man’s tastes ran and what life married to him might be like.

Just like Linny.

And just as Arthur Prescott had done with Linny, if Chuma had his way, he’d chew Jamila up in his twisted pleasures and then spit her out a broken woman.

Rachel swung her legs over the side of the bed. It was time to find out exactly what was going on. With both her case and Jamila.

Kadin’s commander had called in for a sit-rep, and if she was quick about it, she might get a chance to listen in.

Moving a lot faster than she had been able to two days ago, Rachel crept from the room on silent, bare feet.

The hall was unsurprisingly empty, but she could hear faint voices from one of the rooms on that landing as well as Kadin’s rumbling tones from somewhere below.

She snuck down the narrow stairway, Kadin’s voice growing more discernible as she did so. He was in a room right off the bottom of the stairs, talking on his satphone.

“No, she hasn’t talked to Whitney yet. She’s still recovering.”

Silence while the other man spoke.

“Well, he’ll just have to wait. She’s not talking on the phone until Eva gives the go-ahead. Rachel’s voice box was strained from screaming while she was tortured, damn it.”

Another silence, this one longer.

“No. I take full responsibility for not returning Stateside yet. It’s my call, and I made it.”

Rachel could just imagine how well that was going to go over with the Old Man, much less Kadin’s boss.

“That’s not going to happen, Chief.”

This time the other man’s response wasn’t so quiet, because Rachel could hear the raised, angry tones if not the actual words coming across the satphone.

“That’s not going to happen,” Kadin repeated in a tone Rachel knew too well.

It was the one that said he wouldn’t be moved. Full stop. Period.

So, he wasn’t going to force her to return to the States without Jamila. Today, anyway. She’d take that and let tomorrow worry about itself.

Realizing that Kadin and his chief’s focus was going to be on his orders—to get her safe and out of Africa—she stepped back from the door. She’d heard what she needed to on that count. Now she wanted answers about Chuma and Jamila.

And she
didn’t
want to get caught disobeying Kadin’s order to rest. He wasn’t her boss, but he hadn’t figured that one out yet, and right now she was reliant on his good will. So, she wasn’t going to spend a lot of time disabusing him of his faulty notions of authority.

When the appropriate time came, he’d learn the truth.

She snuck down the hallway toward another doorway.

“We need to let Kadin know,” a thin blond man was saying to someone not in her line of sight through the partially open door.

Chapter Eight

E
ven though it was a safe house, Rachel wasn’t sure she would have been as quick to talk with doors open, but then, she’d learned the hard way to be overly cautious.

“He knew the ruse wouldn’t keep them on the mountain forever. Even a West Texas tumbleweed-humper would have cottoned on eventually,” the unseen man said with a pronounced Texas twang.

The thin blond turned slightly so he faced the other speaker. “It worked for two days, and that’s twenty-four hours longer than I thought it would.”

Rachel moved a silent step to her right to keep herself out of the man’s line of sight.

“Only because that Chuma guy seriously underestimates what a woman is capable of doing. My granny woulda had his guts for garters afore he knew what hit him.”