Nightfire (16 page)

There was something wrong here. Ellen knew every single one of Harry’s expressions, and this one was sheepish-guilty.

“Harry?”

With a sigh, her husband sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. “You know that day when Chloe showed up and we were all just blown away?”

“Oh yes.” Ellen smiled and reached out a hand to push back a stray lock of his hair.

Harry rubbed the back of his neck, something else he did under stress. “I can’t tell you the impression she made when she first walked into our office. She moved so very carefully and slowly, not like now—”

“Well, Mike’s been making her work out for the past six months. She’s strong as a horse now. Mike saw to that.”

Harry cleared his throat. “Yeah. That’s true.” He bit his lip, Harryspeak for intense unease. Ellen sat up straighter against the headboard. Harry was normally the most controlled of men. He was having a real emotional moment. “Anyway, that day all I could see was this fragile woman. Uncertain and afraid. She looked like a strong wind could blow her away. And her story—Jesus. Ten years in the hospital. A father who was not her father trying to rape her. And don’t forget, I knew what had come before that. Living in terror in the home of a violent methhead who near as dammit killed her. Who I thought
had
killed her. Chloe seemed so terribly vulnerable, this young woman who hadn’t had any breaks in life. When I saw Mike coming on to her so strong, I just—it just blew my mind. He broke hearts left, right and center. And then when he was taken in for questioning . . . I mean I knew he’d never hurt that woman. I knew he couldn’t. But he did fu—have sex with her. Some crazy cokehead he’d just met. Because he’d have sex with anything that breathed and had the right equipment. Like he was seventeen instead of a grown man. The whole thing was so sordid. I just didn’t want any of that to touch Chloe. I didn’t want her to have her heart broken. So—”

He stopped, his jaws working.

“So?” Ellen asked softly.

Harry worked at getting it out, the words coming reluctantly. “So . . . when Chloe pulled that smart trick with her P.I. and exonerated him when he was looking at possible jail time, I thought . . . she’s going to fall for him. Maybe she already has. They all do. And she’ll get her heart broken. And I just couldn’t stand the thought. So I made him promise that he wouldn’t touch Chloe.”

Ellen blinked. “In those words? Those exact words? Don’t touch Chloe?”

“Yeah.” Harry hung his head. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess you’re pretty mad.”

Ellen laughed and Harry’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Oh, my dear darling husband.” Ellen held out her hand and smiled when his hand curled around hers. Her hand felt so wonderful in his. Always had, always would. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if she died first, he would be by her side and she would pass from this life to the next with her hand in his.

Ellen tugged and Harry obediently came to her. He buried his face in her hair and breathed out a deep sigh. “You’re not mad at me?”

“Oh, my love.” Ellen pulled away to smile into that beloved, worried face. “How could I be mad at you when you single-handedly brought two of my favorite people together?”

Harry looked around the room, then back at her, as if seeking understanding from the walls. “I did?”

“Mm.” She twined her arms around his neck, loving the feeling of the strength under her hands, knowing it was both physical and psychological strength. “It would have been a disaster if they’d hooked up immediately. Chloe was so uncertain of herself, so lonely. So damned vulnerable. You were right about that. And Mike—he was conditioned to having easy, emotionless affairs. He’s never had to work for a woman. He’s never really gotten to know his women, in any true sense of the term. It was really smart of you to force him to keep it in his pants. So, when were you thinking of lifting your ban?”

“Ah . . . Never?”

Ellen blinked. “Never? Wow. That would have been hard to work around, because as you saw, Mike took you at your word. I wish I knew this beforehand and could have told Nicole. We went bananas trying to figure out what was going on. He rarely left her side but he wasn’t making any moves. Drove us nuts.”

“The two of you could have simply minded your own business,” Harry pointed out.

As if. “Not an option. So I guess soon Chloe’s going to be my sister-in-law in all senses.”

Harry jerked. “Whoa. No, absolutely not.” He frowned. “Aren’t you going a little fast?”

“No, not at all.” Ellen kissed her husband. A peck, then a little deeper. “He’s crazy about her and she’s head over heels. And instead of having a disastrous affair at the beginning, where he’d dump her abruptly because he couldn’t deal with his feelings and she’d be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt, they’re in a really good place right now. Except of course for Russians gunning for her. But aside from that, they’re really on track. You did good work, Bolt. Very good work.”

“That wasn’t my intention. My intention was to cut Mike off for life, but I’ll certainly take the credit.”

Holding his gaze, smiling, Ellen shimmied her shoulders in a move she wouldn’t have been remotely capable of two years ago. The straps of her nightgown fell from her shoulders, the entire nightgown now resting on the tops of her breasts. She stood up by the bed, shimmied again, and the nightgown pooled in a silky heap on the floor. In her brand-new sultry and sexy voice she said, “I think good deeds require a reward, don’t you?”

She reached down and placed her hand on his groin, in complete and utter faith she’d find him hot and hard as steel. Bingo. Did she know her man or what?

A quick pump of her hand had him hissing in a breath. “I do deserve a reward, don’t I?” he asked, his voice low and rough. “Being so astute and all. So smart at planning this out.”

He pulled her back down on the bed, coming down on top of her. Though he was much taller than she was, they fit perfectly. They always had. They always would.

She felt him pressing against her mound. A wave of heat rose from her groin and she pressed upward, loving the feel of him. He lengthened and thickened against her.

She loved this. Loved that she knew his body so well and he knew hers. Far from becoming stale, it made their lovemaking infinitely rich and complex. She’d pitied Mike that in his bed-hopping fervor, he’d never know this.

Maybe now he would.

Harry bit her behind the ear, knowing she would break out in goose bumps. She smiled into his shoulder, brought his big hand to her belly.

She bit his earlobe and smiled again at his shudder. She whispered directly into his ear. “I think you deserve another reward, too. An extra-special one.”

“Yeah?” he whispered back, interested. “Better than sex? This sounds good. I can’t wait.”

“You’ll have to wait, because it’ll take time.” Ellen pressed her hand over Harry’s lying on her belly. “You’ll get your present sometime around St. Valentine’s Day. In about eight months.”

Harry’s big body jerked on top of hers as if an electric shock had been applied. He lifted himself up on his forearms, looking her deep in the eyes.

“Ellen.”
She nearly cried at the raw emotion in his voice, at what she saw in his eyes. “Another child? Oh God. Another child?”

She knew what it meant to him. The same that it meant to her. They were without family, had been alone in the world for a very long time. They’d found each other and made Gracie, who filled their lives with joy. Then Chloe had been found. Now another child.

It was almost too much happiness.

Harry collapsed on top of her as if his arms suddenly couldn’t support his weight. His shoulders shook and she held him tightly, tightly, kissing his ear, his neck, his face. Anything her mouth could touch. She embraced him with her arms and legs, trying to wrap herself around him, and as they kissed, he slipped inside her and they rocked gently together, Harry, Ellen and the child she was carrying.

Chapter 13

M
ike wheeled in Chloe’s suitcase and parked it against the wall. They’d stopped by her apartment so she could get some things. She could go back anytime she wanted for things she might need, as long as he was with her. Or Barney. And only for about ten minutes.

Otherwise she was going to stay in his apartment until they figured out what was going on.

Because his apartment had a steel-reinforced door with steel panels extending either side and security cams outside.

His gun locker had two Glock 19s, two Glock 23s, a Colt 1911A1, a Browning Hi-Power, a Sig Sauer P226, an HK USP Compact Tactical .40, a Colt AR-15A Carbine, two M4 rifles exactly like the ones he carried in the Marines, an enormous Mossberg 590 Combat shotgun, good for killing anything including bears, a Remington 700, a Barrett M92, a Barrett M95, and his baby, a Barrett MRAD, which could probably take down a bad guy on the moon. And fifty thousand rounds of ammo.

Two scopes, combat helmets and night-vision goggles that fit over the helmets, two sets of specially made body armor tailored for his extra-wide frame. All his weapons were spotless and oiled. A hundred feet of cable, four grapples of varying sizes. Ten flash bangs. Fourteen ounces of perfectly illegal C4 with a mile of det cord. Five pairs of combat boots. Two combat vests. Five prepared syringes of an animal anesthetic, guaranteed to put a man down in seconds.

And knives. He loved knives. He had a black titanium SOG Aegis, a Zaccara bowie, a Garrison Fighting Knife, a Gerber Fast, a Balisong and a kerambit.

So if the zombie apocalypse ever came? Mike was so prepared.

Chloe stood on the threshold of his door, looking at the ground. In these past six months in which Mike had been her shadow, she’d been in his place exactly twice, for two minutes each time. That was probably because there wasn’t much there.

He’d lived here almost five years and it wasn’t as welcoming as Chloe’s place a week after she moved into her apartment.

His place was an upscale bachelor pad with a place to sleep, a place to eat and a place to watch TV. That was it. In six months Chloe had made her small apartment up on the same floor as Harry’s apartment a little haven, the kind of place where you heaved a sigh of pleasure just as soon as you crossed the threshold. Everything there was soft and colorful and smelled great.

Maybe with Mike’s place you could heave a sigh of relief that you’d be safe against just about anything except an RPG launched from a boat on the ocean, but no points for softness or color coordination or even nice smells.

His Moldovan cleaning lady was a big believer in zapping germs with Lysol. No wimpy lemon polish for her. His place had no germs. They’d be too terrified of Alina to thrive.

No warmth, either.

Once the door closed behind them, Chloe looked around carefully, as if she’d never seen the place before. Just as carefully not looking at him.

Mike should offer her . . . something. What? He had plenty of beer and chips. Full array of liquor, including every whiskey known to man. Frozen fries and pizza. Frozen steaks. Nachos and cheese. Some chorizo.

Christ. No milk or tea. Come to think of it, no vegetables or fruit or even bread and jam, either. Nothing that could even remotely be considered comfort food or drink.

What was there for Chloe here? Nothing.

They looked at each other, then looked away.

Man, this was so not how Mike had planned it. Because plenty of nights, awake, with a massive hard-on and nowhere to go with it, he came up with a lot of different scenarios.

First, of course, he had to somehow get Harry to lift the Curse. He had no idea how that could work so in his daydreams and even night dreams, it just happened, like magic. Whoosh, curse gone.

Then, he’d charm her.

Except Mike had no fucking charm in him at all.

His daydreams didn’t go very far. Usually, he skipped the entire beginning with the complicated negotiations with Harry and just shot straight to imagining Chloe naked in his bed. That was always his starting point.

Now there was a real starting point and words just died in this throat.

“I’d, ah, offer tea, except I don’t have any.”

That made Chloe smile. Jesus, he liked seeing her smile. Her face just glowed, even when it was a small smile, like now.

She rummaged in one of the side pockets of the suitcase and came up with a number of small packets. “Well, I must have sensed that, because I took along a selection of teas from my flat.”

She might be looking lost, but man, she also looked so fucking beautiful. Worn and weary, with a bandage on her arm, all her makeup worn off, she outshone any woman Mike had ever set eyes on, including Nicole, which was saying a lot.

There was just something so . . . so golden about her. The soft gold hair, the gold eyes, that beautiful pale skin now suntanned the lightest of golds. She simply stood there, looking at him, taking her cue from him. And he was just standing there, staring at her.

Willing his hard-on down.

Okay. Well, hard as it was to understand and hard as it was to do, Mike was going to go against every single instinct he had and be a perfect gentleman. Harry might have tacitly lifted the Curse on touching Chloe, but the fact was she’d been through violence and had been sexually assaulted.

Jesus, every time he thought of that he wanted to go to the morgue and revive the guy he’d killed and whack him all over again. Then go to SDPD where the other fucker was, and whack him, too.

He was used to violence. He thrived on violence. You could say he was a violence expert, always had been, as of five minutes after his family was slaughtered. He’d made it his life’s work to understand it and to master it.

Violence was a language, the only language bad guys understood, and Mike was really fluent in it.

But the kind of violence Mike believed in had a purpose. To protect people like Chloe, who weren’t supposed to be touched by it.

And yet, Chloe had been touched by it all her life.

He’d trained since boyhood for violence and he
still
couldn’t wrap his head around it. How Chloe’s mom’s boyfriend could take a little girl, break her arm and slam her violently against the wall. How her adoptive father could break that same arm and want to rape her. And how those two Russian fuckers could try to rape her and then throw her across a room.

How could men
do
that? How could any man do that to Chloe?
Just look at her,
he thought, standing quietly in the room, sad-eyed and nervous, unspeakably beautiful, a spirit so gentle you instantly felt better the minute you saw her.

Everyone felt better when she was around. Gracie and Merry, with the sure animal instinct of the very young, gravitated to Chloe like plants to sunshine. Everyone loved her.

Including him.

Jesus.

He rubbed his chest.

Get this back on the ground, you understand
.
Get her into your bed.

But instead of one of his usual smooth lines, what came out was . . . “So, you want some of that tea you brought?”

She was looking more and more lost. “Yes. Please.”

He didn’t move. Neither did she.

Something had happened to Mike’s brain. It had ground itself into a new gear he didn’t recognize.

Over the years, he’d perfected his seduction patter. He had whole bits of dialogue memorized, little logic trees he followed like a bot. If she said this, he said that. But if she said
that,
then he’d say this.

He also had it timed perfectly, and within half an hour, tops, he could get any woman he wanted naked and into his bed. Or hers. Actually he preferred hers, so he could leave as soon as it was over.

Often it took only a few minutes to close the sale. It was all so familiar it had worn a huge groove in his brain, so he didn’t have to actually think about anything.

Put the mechanism into gear and it rolled along all by itself, while he was thinking of where to leave his clothes and where was the exit, for after.

None of this was any help with Chloe. There was no script here, none at all, because, well . . . because this was
Chloe.

Mike knew he should be heading for the kitchen because she wanted—what did she want? He couldn’t remember. Didn’t make any difference, because he didn’t want to leave a room she was in.

Say something.

“And, uh. We’ll get you settled in my room. Just dump my stuff out of the drawers and there’s plenty of room in the closet. Towels and . . . ah, stuff are . . .”

Fuck. Where did he keep his towels? The cleaning lady took them away from the bathroom, did something with them, and brought them back to the bathroom. He never saw any of it.

“In the closet in the hallway,” Chloe finished for him. “That’s where Alina keeps them.”

Oh. Okay.

Mike felt awful. Awkward. Hands and feet and tongue too big. He couldn’t move, could barely speak.

“So . . . I guess I’ll just bunk down on the sofa. No problem. I’ve slept on a lot worse, believe me.”

Chloe took a step toward him, then stopped. Her eyes searched his, looking for something. “Is that what you want, Mike?” Her voice was low, barely above a whisper. “To sleep on the couch?”

Hell no!

The words were on his tongue, the tongue that wasn’t working. He opened his hands helplessly, unable to speak.

Chloe took another step forward, and another. She was so close he could smell her now. Seeing her like this, so beautiful and soft and golden, feeling her body heat, smelling her . . . it was sensory overload. He couldn’t take it and closed his eyes.

A gentle hand landed on his shoulder. “Mike? You didn’t answer my question. Do you want to sleep on the couch?”

Mike’s eyes popped open to find her face so close to his he could see each individual eyelash. The question wasn’t teasing. She wasn’t being coy or playing games. It wasn’t an idle question. She was dead serious.

She really wanted to know whether he’d rather sleep on his couch than—God!—with her. How could she wonder about that?

And then something strange happened. Mike drifted outside himself for the first time in his life. He wasn’t looking at a situation entirely from his point of view.

Mike saw Chloe, really saw her, looking past himself. Saw how scared she was, how brave she was. Saw what she felt for him right there in her eyes. Saw that whatever his answer, she’d accept it.

Pale, bruised, Chloe was asking whether he wanted her. And even as he looked, he could see her bracing herself for rejection.

“No.” The word came out raw, rough, as if he hadn’t spoken in days. “No, I don’t want to sleep on the damned couch.”

Mike reached out a hand, looked at the bandage on her arm, stopped himself. His arm dropped back to his side. “You’re wounded.”

Man, just the thought of hurting her . . . it made him nauseous. Mike was rough in his sex. He never really thought about it. Most times his brain just switched off and his body took over.

When he thought about it, which wasn’t often, he realized he fucked the right kind of women, ones who got off on him, and a good thing, too, because he didn’t work too hard for their pleasure.

In taking care of his own, they got theirs. Win-win.

Right now, he was crazy excited, hard as a club. Muscles tight with sexual tension. This was familiar ground, this was right about the time when his mind switched off and his cock took over.

But . . . suppose—just suppose he forgot himself and hurt Chloe’s arm, or was rough where she had bruises? It could happen, if he wasn’t paying attention. He felt slick hot bile rise up in his throat at the thought.

The picture of Chloe in pain because of him bloomed bright and clear in his mind, cool and precise. Hearing her cry out in pain, pain he’d caused . . . oh Jesus. Fuck no. He’d rather tear out his own heart.

Because he could. If he went with fucking-as-usual, he’d be entirely concentrated on his own dick inside Chloe, and experience told him he wouldn’t be thinking at all.

And he could hurt her.

“I can’t do this, Chloe,” he whispered, the words almost physically grating against his throat. “I just can’t.”

She stepped back sharply. Her face closed up completely and now she looked like a little doll—porcelain and perfect and lifeless. Somehow she was far away from him, out of reach of his touch though she was only a foot away. She was utterly closed to him.

“No problem,” she said smoothly. “I need a shower and then I’ll go to bed. I don’t need tea. I’ll just, um, go into the, um, bedroom. Right now.” Her voice started shaking, breaking up. She turned around fast, but not fast enough for him to miss the pain on her face, and he nearly burned up with rage at himself.

He didn’t want to hurt her?
How about right now, slick?
You’re goddamned hurting her right now.