Midnight Heat (16 page)

Her fingers dug into her palm, the pain there a welcome diversion from the pain in her heart. She’d had no idea of how ripped up she’d feel upon seeing him again.

“I loved you.” She flung it between them as an accusation.

“You sure as hell have an odd way of showing it.”

“I heard your press conference,” she said. “Congratulations on filing your report on time. Guess the system always wins.”

He said nothing. Simply stared at her for a long, very uncomfortable while. Adria spent her last bit of control facing him directly, letting him see that she would not be broken, not be devastated by what he’d done to her.

But when the last bit of energy drained from her, leaving her hollow and empty, he still stared at her, relentlessly holding her gaze, daring her to look away.

Daring her to let him see her truth.

As he was letting her see his.

But his truth confused her. His hurt, his anger.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?” she demanded. “That you could just keep me
tucked away until it was all over? Did you really expect me to take this lying down?”

“Get in the car,” he ordered. The mask was firmly back in place. It shone in his eyes, in his face, in his posture.

“Why should I? I can’t just—”

“You’ve proven quite effectively you ‘
can
just’ whenever you see fit. Now it’s my turn.” He turned and walked away. Knowing she’d follow.

Only when they were back on the road did she attempt to speak. “Am I allowed to ask where we’re going?”

“You have an appointment to keep,” he answered.

She didn’t waste time questioning how he’d found out. “It won’t do you any good to try to stop me,” she announced.

“I have no intentions of stopping you.”

“I’ve already told her about the third plane,” she lied.

“I know exactly what you told Ms. Greene. I spoke to her shortly after you did.”

Was he being honest? She couldn’t tell a damn thing from his blank expression. “Then why take me to her? I’m certain the last thing you want right now is for me to discuss my theory about that third plane.”

He suddenly swerved the car off the road and shut the engine off. He turned to her, his face no longer expressionless, the intensity of
emotion in his voice unparalleled. “You don’t have any idea about what I want.”

Startled, she spoke without thinking. “Until a few hours ago I thought you wanted me.”

For a split second his eyes looked bleak. “So did I,” he said. Then he did something totally unexpected. He turned away from her. He sat there, silent, staring through the windshield to the empty roadway ahead.

Adria couldn’t recall a single time when Dane hadn’t faced her down, no matter the circumstance—or consequence. He might hide behind his emotionless mask, but he never hid completely.

And then the truth struck her. His emotionless mask hadn’t been a mask at all. He’d actually closed down, locked away all his feelings, relying only on sharp instinct and dogged determination to deal with life. Which in his case was his career. A career that revolved around finding out why planes collided, crashed, or blew up. Usually, if not always, taking innocent lives with them.

How could anybody cope with such violence? Exactly as Dane had. By shutting down.

Shame and embarrassment flooded Adria. For her, he’d let down his walls, compromised his integrity, and put his faith in her when every piece of evidence pointed otherwise.

And how had she repaid him?

Shaking, she reached out, knowing he was
well within his rights to pull away from her touch. She covered the hand tightly gripping the steering wheel with her own. He didn’t flinch.

Somehow that was worse. As if she didn’t matter at all.

“Dane, please look at me.” When he made no move other than to tighten his jaw, she took a breath and added, “I need to say some things to you and I think it serves me right to have to look you in the eyes when I say them.”

He released the steering wheel and slid his hand from under hers. But she persisted.

“Please,” she whispered. “I know I hurt you. Please let me apologize. Whatever you want to do after that is up to you.”

He turned to face her. She’d expected his shields to be up and doubled in strength. Instead she found him open, all the way to his soul. No protection. His pain, his anger, his dashed hopes—all were laid bare for her to see. The enormity of what he had given her—of what she’d so hastily tossed back in his face—hit her with a force that literally shook her.

“Dear God,” she whispered. “What have I done?” Eyes burning, voice shaking, she lifted a badly trembling hand toward him, but couldn’t quite touch him. She wondered if she’d ever truly touch him again. “I was so busy protecting myself,” she began hoarsely.
“So busy making sure no one ever took advantage of me again. No,” she said, ruthlessly digging deeper. “That’s not really true. I was trying to make sure I didn’t
allow
anyone to take advantage of me. And then the incident happened.” She let her hand drop lifelessly to the seat between them, then slowly curled it into a fist. “I was scared. Scared that I’d lose the one thing I had control over—my career. I had made the mistake of thinking that control extended to my whole life.” She laughed, but it was a hollow, bitter sound. “Then you came along. I got to know you, to want you—” She took a shaky breath when heat flared in his eyes, almost, but not quite, vanquishing the bleakness and anger. Still, it gave her strength to go on. “And I realized I was fooling myself. I had no life. Just a career.”

She swallowed and tried to control the wavering note in her voice that threatened to make it impossible to speak at all. “But even when the evidence piled up against me, you had faith in me. You … wanted me.
Me
. And I began to fall in love with you.” Tears burned their way past her eyelids and trickled down her face. “I did fall in love with you. Do you know how frightening it was to realize how much I counted on having you there for me? How badly I needed to lean on you? It was such a huge risk for me, I couldn’t see past it. Couldn’t see what you had risked to believe
me, to let yourself care for me, or what you had to overcome to give so much of yourself to me.” She pulled her hand into her lap and clutched at it with her other. He sat there, unblinking, unmoved.

“But worst of all,” she continued, knowing she had to say it all, for both of their sakes. “After all that has happened between us, all that you have taken from me on faith when I knew you’ve found your security in life relying only on fact … The first time it appears that you used me, might have had ulterior motives for what we’d done together, I panicked and ran. I assumed I’d let myself be duped again, and I felt righteously angry and betrayed.”

Her voice dropped to the merest whisper. “When all the time, the only person being betrayed was you. Your trust. Your faith. And for that, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself. And I understand that you won’t—shouldn’t—either. But I’m sorry. It doesn’t make it right, and God knows I’ve never been more ashamed of myself, but I’m sorry I doubted you.”

She lapsed into silence, feeling emptier than she could ever recall feeling. Not even when her father had died. No longer able to look at Dane, she dropped her gaze to her tangled fingers.

They sat there like that for a while. Adria counted each heartbeat. It seemed to mock
her. How could life continue when she felt so dead inside?

“Of all the people in the world, I can understand the need for proof. For solid evidence.”

Adria looked up, startled to hear him speak.

“Perhaps I didn’t give you the kind of solid proof you needed. Maybe it’s been as … scary for me as it has been for you.”

“Dane—”

He cut her off with a gesture of his hand. “When I heard from Jarrett that you’d left,” he went on, “I was angry that you’d doubted me, but my first instinct was to come after you to give you evidence. To prove to you that I wouldn’t betray you.”

“And now?” Adria forced herself to ask, knowing she deserved the pain of his certain answer.

“Don’t you want to know what I found out? Isn’t that the only important thing left?”

“No,” she said instantly. “I meant what I said, Dane. I don’t need to hear.”

“Yes, you do.
I
need you to hear.” His gaze challenged her to interrupt as he went on to explain about the foreign coating.

“Eliot had a hunch that it might be military. With Forster’s apparent involvement, I figured air force. Then I immediately thought Stealth plane. If they were testing something
like a surveillance plane in the area that night, they certainly wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. So what if this plane happened to wander in to your airspace by accident? Maybe it didn’t cloak itself from radar detection until the pilot was alerted to his mistake? That would explain why it appeared in your display from out of nowhere. And then it gets involved in a midair collision that could have ended up in a huge ball of fire if not for the quick thinking of an air-traffic controller and some fancy maneuvering by two very well-trained pilots. Three if you count the military-plane pilot.”

“What about the ARTS tapes? It should have been on there.”

Dane shook his head. “I hadn’t figured that part out when I heard about the news conference. I didn’t have time to contact you. And when I got to the conference, Forster was careful not to let me speak. But I cornered him afterward. I knew enough, had pieced together enough, that I was certain I could bluff him.”

“What did he do?”

“He made a deal. No way was he going to chance me going to the press, or worse, someone higher up than him.”

“Didn’t he realize you’d flip when you heard about his announcement? He’d turned in a falsified report with your name on it!”

“At that point he pretty well figured he
had me over a barrel because of my personal involvement with you.”

“He knew?” Then she put it all together. “The military got to him after the incident. Convinced him to help cover it up.”

Dane nodded. “I’d already been put on the case by the time they got to Forster. After the preliminary report, it was obvious to him that you would be the easy fall guy. You’d had two reprimands recently, both taken without defense or protest. He figured with some pressure on me about another case I was on, I’d get this one in. He didn’t count on you pushing your third-plane scenario despite the lack of evidence in the ARTS tapes.”

“How did that happen?”

“The military immediately had someone back into the computer and erase the data.”

Adria couldn’t have been more astonished. “Boy, that third plane must be very high up on the security ladder.”

Dane nodded.

“So, Forster was behind the calls?” Adria asked. “The fake reporter?”

Dane nodded again. “When it became obvious to him that neither of us was going to let the case drop easily, he got another intelligence officer to contact you in the guise of a reporter, to check up on exactly what you were talking about and to whom. The first warning
call was to keep you from contacting Sarah Greene at the
Post
.”

“Thereby blowing her cover.”

“Right. But when you kept seeing me and I kept stalling for time, they pressed harder. On both of us. They had no idea that I was there that last time. They thought by dropping my name, you’d back off for good.”

Adria shook her head, boggled by what had really been going on, but even more boggled by the fact that it actually made sense. “How did you find out all this?”

“I had an ace in the hole. I’d had Eliot send a second piece of fuselage with the paint on it to the metallurgy lab. I started bluffing Forster with what I had put together so far, and when I realized how nervous I was making him, I took the risk of telling him I already knew what was on the fuselage. I told him Eliot or the lab would find out shortly if we didn’t cut some sort of deal.”

“Which was?”

“That he tell me everything. And that you be exonerated.”

“He couldn’t have had the clearance to do that.”

“Time was of the essence. You’d be surprised how swiftly things can be declassified when national security is at stake. I was ushered into the air-force offices in fifteen
minutes, and less than thirty minutes later I had the whole story.”

“What happens to the information now?” Adria asked. “The report has been filed.”

“The unofficial records will be sealed. Officially, the FAA will rule that your negligence couldn’t be proven to their satisfaction. You’ll receive a documented reprimand for the TCAS you overrode, but otherwise it will be over. I had to sign a statement prohibiting me from discussing this matter with anyone. Ever. You were to come in for the same debriefing and signature. That’s when I called you.”

“And I was gone.” Adria’s mind returned instantly to the fact that while, in the end, she’d kept her job, she’d ultimately lost the only real thing of value. Dane.

“So that’s why you came after me?” she asked. “To get me to the debriefing and sign the statement?”

“I knew from Jarrett that you’d called the
Post
. I had to stop you before you talked to Sarah Greene.”

“Is that the only reason?” It almost killed her to ask, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself.

Dane looked away for a brief moment, then back at her. His expression shuttered. “Halfway here I changed my mind. I knew that what you planned to do would ruin everything, but at that point I had stopped thinking
like an investigator. That was when I got angry.” His gaze was heated, but not with passion.

Adria fought the urge not to shiver.

“I got angry like I haven’t been since I found out my father had died. And it’s a useless, unproductive, exhausting emotion, that sort of anger. I learned that lesson the hard way as a kid. But this time I couldn’t seem to stop it,” he said quietly. “Or control it, harness it and turn it around and make it work for me. Like I’ve been doing for most of my life.”

Adria didn’t know what to do. She felt her insides winding into a knot of despair. She hated that she had brought him to this. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It sounds so stupid and clichéd, but I never meant to hurt you.”