Wiser Than Serpents (7 page)

He seemed to promise without words that he wouldn’t leave her.

“Don’t die,” she rasped.

“Right.” With a nod, he let her go and she sank into the water. In a second he’d pulled himself over, into the belly of the boat. More shooting, and she hugged the boat, like he had, kicking to keep her chin above the surface.
Hurry, David!
But he didn’t lean over for her; in fact, she heard the engines fight for life and the boat begin to move. “David!”

And then, just as the boat began to pull away, the last protection between her and a very angry Kwan, David grabbed her arms.

He dragged her over the edge, unceremoniously dropping her in a seat as he dove for the controls and hit it.

The boat surged to life and Yanna landed facefirst in the back of the seat, ground into submission by the gravity of however much horsepower Kwan’s machismo demanded.

“Stay down!” David shouted as a shot whistled over his shoulder and chipped out a portion of the windshield. He ran the boat in tight zags, making it jump and churn, and Yanna fell into the seat and huddled, praying she wouldn’t be sick.

“They can’t catch us, not in the yacht.”

Yanna stared up at David, breathing for the first time. He braced one knee on the seat, both hands on the wheel, glancing back over his shoulder now and again. The wind parted his long dark hair, which sailed out behind him, and, in his flamboyant silk shirt and wet jeans—which had torn somehow in their great escape—he looked uncannily like some modern-day pirate.

All he needed was a tattoo.

And, look at that. As his shirt flapped open in the breeze, what did she see but the etchings of a design. An eagle.

David Curtiss had turned into a high seas buccaneer.

She looked up at him, and for a split second couldn’t help but smile.

Apparently, however, he had the demeanor of a pirate, too, because he frowned back. “We’re not outta trouble yet, Yanna.” Then his eyes softened, and something so much like relief filled them that she felt herself completely wordless.

He was right. At least
one
of them was in serious trouble, indeed.

David could hardly keep up with what had just happened. Without hesitation, almost instinctively, he had reacted to Yanna’s bravado and suddenly here they were, he and Yanna, parting the ocean in Kwan’s cigarette boat. And, to his even greater shock, the woman he so wanted to love huddled at his feet, staring up at him as if he might be some sort of South Seas swashbuckler.

His head had most definitely checked out of the game. He exhaled, stifling a word his persona might use. Instead he slammed his hand down on the steering wheel.

At his feet, Yanna made a wry face. “That bad, huh?”

He looked at her, then sat on the driver’s seat and pulled her up. The wind buffeted her eyes and she looked down, blinking. Then she turned sideways, searching the ocean behind her. “I can’t even see them.”

“Trust me, they’re behind us. Maybe even tracking us with some onboard GPS. We gotta ditch this boat as soon as we can find another ride.”

Yanna hunched her shoulders and brought her legs through her handcuffed arms one at a time, until her hands were in front. David glanced down at the jewelry. “I’ll get you out of those as soon as I can.”

“I know you have your hands full,” she said, without looking at him. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“I think it might be the other way around,” he said, frowning. “What were you doing there?”

Yanna glanced at him, a pained look crossing her face. Then she shook her head and looked back toward their pursuers.

Okay,
don’t
tell me why I just blew a multimillion-dollar operation.
David concentrated on driving. Just. Drive. Get to shore and then maybe he’d confront the feelings roiling through him, the ones he couldn’t get a fix on. Relief? Fear? Anger?

Why was it, every time he got near her,
really
near her, he couldn’t seem to get a hold of his emotions?

Staring at the shivering mermaid next to him, he could see her as she’d been, a beautiful coed with a brain that could run circles around his, tying his heart into a messy knot of confusion as they sat in the kitchen of his Moscow flat, trying to unlock advanced calculus.

“It’s not so hard, David.” Her laughter always made him feel the wind under him.

“It would be a thousand times easier if it weren’t in Russian.” It was these times, with the night pressing against the windows, the cool spring air carrying in the scent of the late night, of rain, and the occasional bark of a dog, that he wondered how he would have made it through those years at Moscow University without her.

“If you want to graduate, you have to nail this final,” she had said, pushing the book toward him. “I’ll translate if you can’t get it.”

He’d looked up at her. It hadn’t been the words that confused him. It was how he was supposed to pack up his bags and climb on an airplane and live the next decade without Yanna in his life.

His face must have shown it, because her smile dimmed. “Are you still hoping to go to grad school?” Those brown eyes had roved over him, her long elegant hand tapping her pencil on the linoleum tabletop.

At that moment, he hadn’t known what he wanted. Well, besides Yanna. Because it wasn’t just her exotic beauty—those dark, mysterious eyes, the silky dark hair, the strong frame honed by championship volleyball. But the way she had kept up with him, out-thought him, even challenged him.

They said that opposites attracted, but sometimes Yanna felt like the other side of himself, even in the way she could read his thoughts. “I don’t know. How about you?”

She had leaned back, rolled her pencil between her fingers. “I’m…being recruited for the military, or something like it.”

It had been the way she said it that made his eyebrow quirk up, made his plans unravel. “What kind of military?”

She made a face. “I can’t tell you.”

Oh, that kind. He didn’t say anything, but panic had reached up and wrapped around his throat. Yes, America and Russia seemed to be getting along pretty well, but if she joined the KGB, or something like it, and he planned on filling out the forms from the recruiting office, well…Somehow he had resisted the urge to pull her to him, perhaps run for Siberia.

“Hey,” she had said, smiling. “It’s adventure, travel, education. Power.”

Her words hadn’t sounded so different from his own to his father, when he’d told him he might join the military. But as he had seen her tap her pencil on her leg, he had heard the words behind her statement. Power…as in, not weak, not helpless. “This is about your mother, isn’t it?”

She had shrugged, not looking at him.

“Yanna, just because your mother made stupid mistakes with men, buried her pain in a bottle, doesn’t mean that you can’t get married, find a nice guy…” He had just about gagged on his words. Because even as he spoke, he had felt the words cut into his heart.

She had looked up at him, her mouth in a tight line. “No, David, I’m never getting married. Ever.”

And since that moment, he’d felt so deeply ashamed of his relief.

Now, they bounced over the waves, and David steered them in and around the fishing boats that trolled the sea. “If they have us on radar, maybe we can confuse them.”

Yanna still refused to speak. He noticed the wind had caused her eyes to water. If he didn’t know better, he’d guess that she was crying. But Yanna didn’t cry. Not his Yanna.

He finally maneuvered behind a large freighter, hiding the boat between the massive ship and the shoreline. He cut the motor down to idle.

In the far distance, the shoreline had become a dark shadow under an indigo sky. The moon traced a line across the now-settling waters, and the breeze turned calm, despite the increasing nip in the air.

With God on their side, they just might make it back to shore in one piece, sneak back to the safe house and sort out how to get Yanna home safely.

And him back in the game.

Yeah, that would take a miracle. David ran his mind over the fireworks that had played out on the yacht. Why would Kwan kill Yanna in front of David? Was it just to show how tough he was? Or could it be that Kwan had already figured him out? Had the mole blown David’s cover, too?

David looked out over the boat, toward the open sea and Kwan’s yacht, somewhere in the darkness hunting them down.

“These things usually come with a dinghy.” He climbed past her, toward the back and opened the hatch over the smooth stern. Then he reached inside, pulling out a bundled mass of rubber. He tossed it toward the water, hanging on to the rope. The dinghy unfolded as it flew and hit the water half-inflated. He went back and extracted a small motor. “That Kwan knows his water safety.”

Even in the darkness, he could see that Yanna didn’t smile at his attempts at humor.

“C’mon,” he said, reaching for her. Yanna offered her hands and he pulled her to him, helped her up to the side. “Climb in. I’m going to push you off, and turn the boat around.”

She scooted forward, then jumped off the hull toward the dinghy. She landed with a thud in the center of the dinghy and rolled to her back. David handed her down the motor, then shoved her away from the boat.

Turning the speedboat around, he cut a length of rope and secured the wheel. “Hopefully they’ll follow it out to sea,” he yelled to Yanna, a second before he gunned it. He jumped over the edge as the boat hurtled toward open water.

The wake rocked the dinghy and he waited a moment before hauling himself aboard. When he did, he lay beside Yanna, breathing hard, staring into the now-dark sky. His wet clothes pressed him into the dinghy, sucking out his energy. He refused to let fatigue have its way. Not until he’d at least gotten Yanna to safety.

Beside him, he felt Yanna shaking.

“You cold?”

She said nothing and he turned on his elbow, staring down at her. In the rising moonlight, she looked painfully frail, not at all like the capable agent she’d become, and everything like a scared, broken woman. And yes, she was shivering.

“Yanna, what are you doing here?” He didn’t wait for her answer, but scooted his arm under her and pulled her tight to his chest. She let him and curled in close, bringing her arms up between them. He cocooned her with his leg, putting his chin on the top of her head. “Shh. It’s going to be okay.”

And then she started to cry. Deep, racking sobs that so shook him he didn’t know what to do. The Yanna he knew didn’t even cry at sappy movies—
Love Story,

Brian’s Song,
even
The Way We Were.
She hadn’t even emitted so much as a whimper when she’d been attacked on the streets of Moscow so many years ago.

And she’d never, ever let him hold her like he was doing now, like he’d longed to for way, way too long.

What had she been doing with Kwan? For the first time David let what-ifs fill his mind. What if she was on a special op for the FSB? If so, where was her backup? Where was Vicktor, or Roman, who dealt specifically with Mafia? What if Kwan had planned on selling her to the slave market?

What if David hadn’t come along?

The thought tightened his chest, made him suck in a long, deep breath.
Oh, thank You, Lord, for letting me be here.

He closed his eyes. Breathed in deep the scent of the ocean in her hair, felt her cling to him, heard her shaky sobs start to calm, tasted her skin salty against his and, in that moment under the stars, with the sea lapping against the dinghy, he didn’t care why she was here.

Just that she was.

S
he must be dreaming. Must be, because only in her dreams would Yanna wake up with David’s arms around her, holding her as if he’d never let her go. His heavy breaths made his chest rise and fall, and seawater scented his now-drying silky shirt. His skin was warm and dry and his arms secure around her. Yes, she could probably stay right here, forever, in this perfect world.

Except, this wasn’t the real world. In the real world, Yanna Andrevka didn’t collapse sobbing into anyone’s arms. And she didn’t let her fear turn her into a cowering ninny who let fate push her from one disaster to the next.

She opened her eyes, leaned back and was surprised to see that David was awake. He met her gaze, concern in his dark eyes. His long hair had dried, and now hung wavy and dark around his face. “Feeling better?”

“I feel like I could sleep for a year, thanks to the adrenaline drop.”

He smiled and ran his hand down her hair, pushing it behind her ear. “If it helps, you didn’t sleep long. And, most of all, you didn’t drool.”

She narrowed one eye. “How do you know? I’m sopping wet. I might have drooled all over you.”

“I would have noticed.” Of course, if he had, he still wouldn’t have said anything, because if she knew anything about David, honor came miles before his own comfort. That’s probably what had drawn her to him first—well, right after all that powerful
I will save you energy
he brought into their relationship. It had taken her years—long after he’d returned to America—to admit that his protective spirit had touched her in ways she could never express. David wasn’t just a hero at heart; he was also military—top-secret-go-up-against-the-extra-special-bad-guys-in-the-world kind of military.

Which was precisely why he’d been on that boat, acting like a gunrunner.

Oh, David.
Why was it that as soon as she thought she’d gotten him far enough away to breathe again, he rushed back into her life with a velocity that made her reel? Apparently, right into his arms.

He hadn’t released her, which felt more intimate than the moment demanded. Still, she didn’t exactly put up a fight. In fact, as she watched the moonlight caress his face, she knew it was now or never.

If she wanted to kiss David, show him exactly how she felt about him, well, she’d probably never get closer.

But she couldn’t. She’d tried that once, and it was quite possible she still harbored old wounds, if not scarring.

“Thank you, by the way, for what you did back there, on Kwan’s boat,” she said softly. “I know that I destroyed whatever undercover mission you were on.” She smoothed his hair against his shirt. “I’m not sure I like the fact your hair is nearly as long as mine. And since when did you get a tattoo?”