Claire’s satphone buzzed and she looked at Dan. Only Jesse had the number.
“I’ll get it,” Dan said, while Claire read through the article in
Le Temps
once more, on the off chance that a second reading would prove more enlightening than the first.
Dan was grunting now and again into the satphone, listening to Jesse’s report. He finally closed the connection and sat for a moment, head down.
Dan’s default expression was grim. Now he looked like he’d just been told the world really was going to end soon after all.
“What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. A big fat nothing, still. No trace of the guy from the hotel, no trace of the guys who attacked my house, no trace of the guy or guys who torched your house. Nada. They could have been beamed down from outer space to do the job, then beamed back up, for all we know. And we’ve got Marcus on our side, who’s no slouch, and Jesse said that Marcus said that the fire inspector down in Florida knows his stuff, too. This is bad shit.”
It was. Claire knew full well that, in police work, if nothing was found in the first twenty-four hours, it was a very bad sign. Cases went cold very fast.
Marcus was a DC cop, a homicide detective in one of the murder capitals of the country. Very soon he’d be knee-deep in new homicides and would have to relegate her case to the back burner.
“We can just hole up here,” Dan said, jaw muscles clenching. “Wait it out. No one can find us. I hate the thought of just sitting here, but at least you’d be safe.” He was wound so tight every muscle of his torso showed, the tendons in his neck standing out. “One thing is for sure. No one’s going to hurt you, ever again. Not while I’m alive.”
She looked at him. Bare-chested, he looked like a force of nature. Dressed, you just saw that he had very broad shoulders and looked very fit, but take those clothes away and he was breathtakingly ripped. She’d felt him all over, and all over he was like warm steel.
His muscles were the real deal, the kind of muscles you developed from a hard life, not in a gym. He wasn’t handsome, not by a long shot, but the billion pheromones of sheer utter maleness more than made up for that.
He was smart and capable, he’d been a good soldier, he was apparently a successful businessman now.
This magnificent man had just placed his life in her hands.
He’d just stated his willingness to put his entire existence on hold until they could eliminate the danger to her.
He wasn’t like her. He hadn’t spent the past year completely cut off from the world, doing nothing. No, he’d spent the past year building a new life and a new company from the ground up. And he was making a success out of it, too.
Claire knew perfectly well what being a one-man show meant. She’d barely begun dipping her toes into becoming a professional translator, and it was daunting working alone. Your company was as strong as the energy you put into it.
He didn’t have partners. If he didn’t do a job, it didn’t get done. Running a company like his entailed not just doing the job, but running the business aspects as well, pricing your services so you’d turn a profit, keeping books, client relations, getting out quotes . . . this was all stuff he had to do and if he was gone, no one else was going to do it for him. Not even his wonderful secretary, Roxanne.
Claire felt a sharp pang to her heart every time she thought about Roxanne going home to her mother. For the duration.
For what duration?
There was no end point at all, no deadline. They could stay in this limbo forever, while Dan’s business self-destructed and his life’s work went up in smoke.
Claire simply couldn’t allow that, couldn’t let Dan’s life be ruined because of her. They had to turn the tables somehow, go on the attack. It would be dangerous but she simply didn’t see an alternative.
A half-formed plan was starting to coalesce in her mind, but first she needed to communicate to Dan how much his offer meant to her.
She leaned forward and kissed him, a quick buss on the mouth, a little thank-you kiss you could give your favorite uncle.
She could feel him jolt in surprise—he wasn’t expecting it. He was still all wound up, having thrown the gauntlet down at their shadowy enemy, and his warrior’s blood was up.
But his warrior’s blood was able to turn on a dime.
What she’d meant as a gesture of affection, a sign of gratitude, turned almost immediately into pure sex. She was already pulling back when Dan fisted his hand in her hair, bent down to her and opened his mouth over hers.
Oh God. Instant heat, rising up from her toes throughout her body, as if she’d walked right into an oven. Her muscles instantly let go, so that it almost felt like he was keeping her upright by his fist in her hair. Then his other arm went around her waist and she was plastered against him, chest to chest and groin to groin.
Oh wow. It wasn’t just his blood that was up. He picked her up and settled her on his lap without breaking the kiss and just like that, they zipped right to Stage Ten Foreplay, the stage just before sex.
And Claire was up for it, no question. She felt every body part loosen and melt, including her brain. He had placed her so that the
V
of her legs was right over his penis and with each strong pulse of blood, making him longer and thicker, there was an answering tug in her own groin. Both their bodies were rushing blood to where, very soon, something important was about to happen.
This was so . . . strange. Claire had never been sex-obsessed, not even in college when hormones were at their peak. She’d had lovers, of course. A few, a very select few, because she was incredibly picky.
The candidate had to be smart and not embarrass her when he opened his mouth and above all, not be a creep or a jerk. And after she joined the DIA, it had been clear to her that she should keep her nose clean, otherwise her career would suffer.
So all in all, sex hadn’t figured too much in her life, other than as a pleasant distraction, a fun activity, to be enjoyed preferably after an elegant meal and a movie or a concert.
So this flash of white-hot heat in a crude cabin in the woods after a meal of canned baked beans and canned peaches . . . whoa. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
Dan held her so tightly she couldn’t move, could barely breathe, had to breathe through his mouth. Which must be a powerful narcotic because her head began swimming, while her body began this luscious spiral toward a climax . . .
Dan pressed upward with his hips and her vagina contracted, hard, readying to have him inside her, preparing for his penetration.
She had to pull back, right now, or she’d forget everything she wanted to say, but oh, heavens, it was hard. She couldn’t move her head back because he was holding it in his big hand and she couldn’t wiggle out of his embrace. Those steely muscles were too strong. So she did the only thing she could.
She bit him, hard.
“Ow!” he complained and pulled his head back. But he was smiling. And he was aroused. Massively. If she hadn’t felt it between her thighs, just looking at his face would have been enough.
That dark face was tight, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring, lips almost blue with blood and slightly swollen from her own mouth. God only knew what she looked like. Sex on a stick, if he was anything to go by.
“I need your attention for a moment,” she said softly, as he bent his head again, only to stop when she lay a finger across his mouth.
For just a second, Claire wavered. He was staring at her, those dark eyes circling her face, lingering at her mouth. A lock of his dark brown hair had fallen across his forehead and she reached out to brush it back. His head followed the curve of her palm, like a big cat asking to be stroked.
He was temptation incarnated.
She bent forward until her forehead touched his. “Dan,” she whispered, “I need you to pay attention.”
He nodded without breaking the connection between them. Though he wasn’t thrusting up at her, his penis was still huge and hard between her legs, big hand against the small of her back holding her against him. It was almost impossible to concentrate.
But they needed to take proactive steps or they would either die or have to live their lives cooped up in a rustic cabin.
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“I’ve been thinking.” Claire pulled her head up and back and watched his eyes. He didn’t even try a joke about how dangerous a thinking woman was. He simply watched her soberly, ready to listen to what she wanted to say.
“Shoot,” he said quietly.
Claire tried to gather her thoughts together, though
thoughts
was perhaps too strong a word, implying rationality and reason. She was going to use reason to sway Dan into doing something he probably didn’t want to, but reason had nothing to do with it.
Her idea sprang from a feeling, growing ever stronger in ways she couldn’t explain even to herself, that the answer to everything lay in Laka.
“I—I know you think this might be crazy,” she began slowly—
He immediately put a finger over her mouth. “Nothing you say can possibly sound crazy. Don’t even go there.”
Claire let out a long breath and felt the muscles in her chest relax a little. “Okay. I’m not entirely sure why I think this, but I am convinced that these . . . problems I’m—we’re having originated back in Laka. The thing is, I can’t tell you why, but it’s a gut feeling I have. I think we need to go there, as soon as possible.”
There was more but she just shut up and bit her lip, to see what his reaction would be.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, mulling it over.
He spoke slowly, reasonably. “These days, Makongo’s more of a military dictatorship than anything else. And the embassy is shut up real tight. No one in Mbutu’s government is going to talk to us and no one in the embassy will talk. Neither of us work for the government anymore and I think we’d simply be kicked out on our asses. Not to mention the fact that the embassy staff has almost completely changed.”
“The FNs would still be there,” Claire said. “And the Marines. You’d know some of the Marine contingent, even though most of the ones who were in Laka last year would have rotated out. You’re still plugged into the Marine network.”
Dan nodded soberly. “Yeah, I am.”
“So . . . there’d be someone there who’d be willing to talk, at least unofficially.”
“Claire . . .” Dan sighed. “Even if there are Marines from last year’s posting, they were all in Marine House. I know you don’t remember what happened the day of the bombing, but you do remember that I told you I was the only one on guard duty that day. So there isn’t anything anyone can tell you.”
She shrugged, uncomfortable.
Claire was an analyst and she’d been a damned good one. Except for the huge howlers regarding the Red Army in her last report as an analyst, she’d always been absolutely correct in her reading of situations. She had never put in a report an unsubstantiated rumor or conclusion that she couldn’t back up with facts she had checked herself.
She was a careful, rational thinker. Every time she wrote something down in a report, it came from her head and was based on her reading and knowledge and experience.
But it was her body that was talking now, almost violently.
Whenever she thought of Bowen, her whole body reacted with revulsion. Granted, Bowen was a creep, always had been, always would be, and his recent incarnation as philanthropist filled with the milk of human kindness didn’t convince her one bit. But the mild distaste with which she had thought of him before was now an almost violent, nauseating disgust. It was impossible to describe.
She looked Dan straight in the eyes and spoke soberly. “I don’t know if you’re going to enjoy hearing this, but . . . it’s as if the violence these past twenty-four hours has sort of . . . shaken something loose in my head, Dan. I have this feeling deep in my bones that there is something in Laka we need to know. I wish I could be more specific than that, but I can’t. It’s just—just a gut feeling. But it’s getting stronger. And my feeling is that we need to move fast. I mean like right now.” She looked outside the window at the utter blackness of the night. It was four a.m. “Or rather at first light. I have my passport with me. I always carry it with me, an old habit.”
She bit her lip and watched him. There wasn’t much more she could say, because she couldn’t reason her way through her feelings. She had no facts to parade before him to convince him. All she could do was baldly state what she felt and see what happened. See whether Dan would take her feelings seriously.
Dan didn’t say anything, just looked at her intently for a minute, two. Finally, he lifted her off him, reached for the satphone and dialed a number without looking at the keypad.
Someone answered. She recognized Jesse’s voice with its soft Southern inflection at the other end.
Dan spoke without taking his eyes off her. “Jess? Who’s your go-to guy for docs?” He stopped and listened to Jesse’s tinny voice reading out a number that Dan didn’t write down. “It looks like we’re going to have to leave the country, and we have to do it soon. I’m going to need a passport card for Claire, we’ll go up into Canada and exit from there. I’ll keep you posted. And Jess—we might need you and Frank and Dave in Laka, Makongo. Do you think you could manage that? Front the tickets and just keep pulling money from the ATMs. Great.”