“I’ll take it under consideration,” she murmured.
“The guy figured out we were onto him, and instead of meeting his handler as usual, so we could blow him away, he decided to send us a little message instead.”
“A boy with a bomb. Dressed up as a woman with her baby.”
“Yep. So there I was,” Rush went on. He couldn’t stop now to save his life. He’d uncorked this beast and by God it was coming out. The whole thing. “Rifle snug into my shoulder, eye to the scope, kill zone established. This thing was precision-engineered down to the second. Watches synchronized, the whole deal. I get the word that the target’s in the building, about to cross the crowded square I’m covering. About to sit down for a coffee with the handler at this outdoor café. So my finger’s on the trigger, taking up the slack, counting heartbeats now, and you know who walks into my kill zone instead?”
“The boy with the bomb.” Her voice was gentle, filled with the beautiful, boundless compassion she extended to everybody but herself.
“But I didn’t know that. As far as I could see, it was a woman. With her baby.”
“But it wasn’t, Rush.” She wrapped both hands around his biceps, warm and confiding. “It was a boy with a bomb. Not that that’s any comfort to you, I know. A child is a child, and I can’t imagine what it cost you to shoot. But your pulling the trigger had to have saved countless lives.”
“You’re missing the point,” Rush said. “Because it doesn’t matter what really happened. What I really did. What matters is what I
thought
I did. Because I didn’t
know
it wasn’t a woman in my sights. I didn’t even
suspect
. You want the truth? You really want to know what was going on in my head when I pulled the trigger?
Nothing
. It didn’t occur to me to even
wonder
if this person was or wasn’t the right target. I didn’t fucking
care
. I had clearance to shoot, she crossed my kill zone and I took her—and what I believed to be her baby, Christ forgive me—out.”
He didn’t dare look down at her. If he’d finally reached the limits of her compassion, her forgiveness, he didn’t want to know. Not right now. Not yet.
“That’s what’s inside me,” he said softly. “That’s what I’m capable of, and I needed to figure out if I could live with it. That’s why I came home.”
“And can you?” Her voice floated soft and small from the cradle of his arms. “Live with it?”
He sucked in a steadying breath, planted himself firmly in the here and now and said, “Yeah. Yeah, I can. Turns out my moral compass wasn’t dead, it was just frozen. Took me the better part of two years to thaw it out again, and it’s rusty as hell, but I’m starting to think it still works.” He cleared his throat of a suspiciously wet lump. “Touch and go for a while there, though.”
She slipped her arms around him, pressed her cheek to his heart and said, “I know what that’s like.”
Wonder blew sharp and wild through him, and he tightened his arms around her. “You do?”
“Yes.” She nestled closer, as if trying to get inside his chest and take his pain, his guilt, onto herself. “I know what it is to find something dangerous inside yourself. Something dark and unstable and unworthy. I know exactly what it is to do something unforgivable. And I know what it costs to tear down what you were and build someone better on the wreckage.”
So that was it. She’d scared herself somewhere along the line, just like he had. He’d suspected as much.
She laid a hand against his heart, gentle and merciful. “I don’t know who you were then, but I know who you are now. And the man I know earned forgiveness a long time ago.”
“Forgiveness,” he said slowly. A strange lightness filled his chest, new and yet somehow familiar. Gratitude? Peace? Love?
“Forgiveness,” she said firmly. “For all your sins, real and imagined. You’ve earned it. Now you just have to believe it.”
His throat simply closed and he gathered her to him, his lips in her hair, his heart a raw ache within him.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “That helps.”
And it was true, he realized. She
had
helped. He could still pull the trigger easier than most people flicked a light switch. No escaping that, not that he’d tried. His was an awful but necessary talent, and nobody who’d seen evil at work in the world could argue otherwise.
But he’d forced himself to face the living, breathing cost of exercising that talent. To realize that putting his particular skill set in the hands of anybody but himself—even the good guys—was abdicating responsibility. Because separating the act from the reason for the act—killing on orders—only separated Rush from his soul. Finding his way to wholeness again had been a long, bloody battle. One, God willing, he’d never have to fight again.
So he’d accepted himself, but he’d never thought to forgive himself. But she had. This sad, valiant woman in his arms had not only seen him but forgiven him.
Now if only she could forgive herself as easily as she’d forgiven him.
Chapter 23
RUSH WOKE the next morning to the muffled buzz of a blow-dryer. Damn, he’d slept hard. He flexed his empty arms and blinked gritty eyes at the ceiling. Power must be back. Which meant Goose was probably back, too. Sleek, polished, slippery Goose.
The hair dryer cut out and, yep, sure enough. She stepped out of the bathroom, her cheeks flushed from the blast of hot air, her hair ruler straight, her eyes perfectly made up with some kind of smoky bronze stuff. She gave him that friendly, keep-your-distance smile and he smiled back, slow and hungry.
Her smile faltered, and she veered toward the kitchenette.
Good, he thought. She ought to be nervous. What, did she think he was going to roll over and play dead? Did she think he could be defeated by a
blow-dryer
? Fuck that. He didn’t want this perfectly manicured, exquisitely groomed doll. He wanted
Maria
. Funny, sharp, wounded Maria. The woman she kept as hidden as her curls and her shocking ability to kiss a man into near insanity.
And he meant to have her.
“Power’s back,” she said with determined cheer.
“So I see.” He studied her for two long beats, then pointed his chin at her. “You really think that’s going to work?”
She touched the smooth spill of her inky hair. “What’s going to work?”
He sat up to run a squint over her face, her hair. “All . . . that. It seems like a lot of effort for nothing.”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “It’s not nothing.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “No, I can see that. But why bother? I mean, I’ve already seen what you really look like. Who you really are.” He rose to his feet and she averted her eyes, as if she weren’t already intimately familiar with what he looked like, too. Even without the boxers he currently wore. “Plus I like you better curly. Way better.” He let his smile spread as he moved toward the kitchen. Toward her. “So why don’t we just head straight back into the bathroom and start again? Come on. I’ll scrub your back.”
She shot out a hand, palm first, the universal sign for
Stop right there, buster
.
“As it happens, I didn’t do this”—she waved a hand toward her exquisitely groomed person—“for you, okay?” She glared at him. “I did it for me.”
Rush stopped. “For you?”
“For
me
.” She threw him a bitter glance. “I’m not stupid, Rush. I’m well aware of what you saw last night. Who you saw.” She made a noise that was half disgust, half regret. “It’s hard to miss when I left the evidence all over your body.”
He glanced down at himself, then back up at her. “You’re upset because you gave me a hickey? So what? I’m pretty sure I gave you one, too.” He took a moment to consider that. “More than one, actually.” He smiled. “Want me to find them for you?”
She pressed those perfectly glossed lips together, hard. “Check out your back, Rush.” She turned away to fiddle with the coffeemaker. “You look like somebody zipped half a dozen feral cats into your sleeping bag last night.”
Rush followed her into the tiny kitchen. “So you scratched me. Big deal. Did you hear me complaining?” She didn’t turn to face him, stayed stubbornly focused on the coffee, so he grabbed the counter on either side of her hips and leaned in. He left a few inches of space between their bodies, between his mouth and her ear. He treated himself to the clean, green smell of her hair as he murmured, “Did you hear me say anything to you that wasn’t ‘harder,’ ‘more,’ or ‘God, just like that’?”
Even the shell of her ear went pink but she stayed silent. Still. Unhappy. God, that broke his heart. How unhappy she was.
“Will it make you feel better if you go back into the shower—alone—to have a look at all the marks I left on
your
body? Because you weren’t alone last night, Maria. I was there, too. And—I have to be honest here—the fact that you could drive me far enough around the bend to forget to be gentle with you? The fact that I can do the same to you? It turned me on. A lot. I’m turned on right now just remembering it. So if you want to talk about it much longer, you’re going to have to deal with the consequences.”
He closed the gap then, erased those few electric inches of space between their bodies. A hiss of agonized pleasure escaped her when the ache of his desire nestled into the soft curve of her behind, and he said, “I know, right? It’s crazy, what you do to me. But it’s so”—he rolled himself against her, slow and hot—“. . .
so
good.”
She spun around suddenly but not—to his everlasting regret—to hop onto the counter and wrap her legs around him.
“Rush.” She met his gaze head-on, made no attempt to hide the heat leaping in her eyes. The heat that was so at odds with her straight-arming him back to a civilized distance. Rush decided he fucking
hated
civilization. “I’m going to be honest here, too. That’s what you want, right? Honesty?”
“No, Maria. I like it when you lie to me. Because I’m
so
into subterfuge.” They both glanced at the massive erection tenting the front of his shorts. He sighed. “Yes. Please be honest.”
“What happened here last night. What I . . . did to you?” Her eyes dropped to the faint teeth marks on his shoulder. “It scared the hell out of me. It’s been a long time since I lost control like that and I’m feeling kind of fragile, okay?” She swallowed visibly. “I realize this is something we’re going to have to talk about eventually. But if it’s all the same to you, can we please just table it this morning? At least until I get my balance back?”
“Not if by ‘balance’ you mean painting your face and terrifying your hair.”
“Terrifying my hair?”
“Honey, you’re scared straight.” He frowned at her head. “I don’t know what you do with that blow-dryer of yours but it’s clearly hard-core. And I’m starting to have a real soft spot for those curls. I won’t have them bullied.”
A smile ghosted across her lips, faint but real. “No more straightening. Fine.”
“But as for the rest of it?” He tipped his head, considered. “Fine. I’ll give you today. But I’m not going to wait forever. What happened last night? What you did to me? What I did to you? I’m planning to do it again as soon as possible.” He leaned into the eye contact. “As
soon
as possible, Maria. Count on it. And when we do? You’re going to talk to me the whole time.”
She closed her eyes as if praying for strength. She kept them closed for a solid ten count. Then her cell phone did a little dance on the counter and sang its you-have-mail song.
“We have a deal?” he asked.
She nodded slowly, her pupils huge, her lips parted. He backed away from her open palm before he could talk himself off the high road. She’d come to him next time, he swore it. With that
yes
not only on her lips but in her heart. Even if it killed him.
“Go ahead,” he said, nodding toward her phone. “Go to work.”
She blinked, a flutter of blinks really, then focused and scooped up her phone. His own cell phone chirped like a demented cricket a little farther down the counter, indicating he ought to download his messages, too. Well, crap. He dialed his voice mail and scrolled through to the most recent messages.
Einar’s voice drifted small and tinny into his ear.
“Hey, Rush. Some storm, huh? Listen, Sir Humpalot demolished half my chicken coop this morning. Are you ever going to shoot that damn thing? Because I’m about ready to put a cap in his ass myself. Poor chickens, all crowded and traumatized and shit. I’m not going to bother rebuilding, either. Not until you’ve figured out the fucking wildlife around here, Mr. Park Ranger.” He paused. “I guess I could move up the slaughter a month or two. I might borrow your ski team for slave labor. Team building, you know?” He laughed. “Hey, speaking of chickens, I’m scheduled to fly out tomorrow morning, Tuesday. I won’t be back till Wednesday afternoon, earliest. Feed the girls while I’m away, will you?”
The sun pasted a watery yellow square on the old wooden floor and Rush realized that his cousin had just provided the perfect opportunity for Rush to invite Maria into Einar’s cabin for that search she was so anxious to perform.
He glanced down the counter at her as he dialed his boss at the Park Service and explained the moose situation. The glare off Maria’s hair was blinding, but he could still see the frown pinching her brows together as she scribbled on the pad in front of her. She flipped her phone shut, and he did the same.
“Lab results are back on that sample I sent in,” she said.
“Sample?”
“Blood sample. From the Stone Altar.”
“Yeah?” His chest tightened.
“It was chicken blood.”
“I . . . don’t know how to feel about that.”
“I know. I mean, thank God it wasn’t human, right? But still, chicken blood points pretty strongly in the direction I was already looking.”
“Einar.” He tapped his phone against his thigh. “Speaking of whom.”
She lifted her brows.