Bare Witness (13 page)

Shifting on his lap, she settled her creamy pussy over his cock. She rubbed herself against his cock and he tightened his lower body, spasming as he shifted against her.

She reached between his legs and fondled his sac. As she cupped him in her hands, he shuddered. He needed to be inside her now. He shifted and lifted her thighs, wrapping her legs around his waist. Her hands fluttered between them and their eyes met.

He held her hips steady and entered her slowly, thrusting upward until he was fully seated. Her eyes widened with each inch he gave her. She clutched at his hips as he started thrusting. She held him to her, her eyes half-closed, head tipped back.

He couldn’t resist the long length of her neck. He leaned down, biting carefully against her skin, and felt her shiver in his arms.

“Yes, Nigel, bite me again,” she said.

And he did, enjoying the taste of her on his tongue and the feel of her in his arms.

He leaned up and caught one of her nipples in his teeth, scraping very gently. She started to tighten around him. Her hips moving faster, demanding more, but he kept the pace slow, steady, wanting her to come before he did.

He suckled her nipple and rotated his hips to catch her pleasure point with each thrust, and he felt her hands in his hair clenching as she threw her head back and her climax ripped through her.

He varied his thrusts, finding a rhythm that would draw out the tension at the base of his spine. Something that would make his time in her body, wrapped in her silky limbs, last forever.

He held her hips to him to give him deeper access to her body. Then she scraped her nails down his back, clutching his buttocks, drawing him in. His sac tightened and blood roared in his ears, as he felt everything in his world center on this one woman.

And he called her name as he came. He knew then that he was going to have a very difficult time giving her up, and he hoped that this relationship could survive once he was back to his normal life and he had his daughter with him again.

It bothered him that the woman he wanted so badly and needed the way he did pulled away the moment he dropped his arms. She got to her feet and dressed quickly. He didn’t allow himself to get offended, simply got up and took a shower. When he came out of the bathroom, there were dark clothes laid out for him, and a note that said thank you.

He smiled to himself at the thought that she was once again thanking him for making love to her.

J
ustine looked again at the clock, waiting until it was time to go to the compound to meet Emile. She found herself in the kitchen and she knew what she wanted to try, but the last time she’d attempted to cook, it had been a full-blown disaster. There was no way she was trying again now.

Except they had three hours in front of them, and she’d already checked in with everyone about a dozen times. And if she wasn’t careful, she was going to sit by Nigel on the couch again, but this time she wasn’t going to have sex with him. No, this time she’d do something far more dangerous, like sit down next to him and put her head on his shoulder.

And then she’d never leave.

So it seemed like the lesser of two evils to open the cabinet and try to make a batch of cookies. Cookies were a normal girl thing. She and her sister had never made them, but they’d always talked about doing it. And Charity and Anna had at one time or another brought in cookies, usually around Christmas and birthdays.

So she stood there in front of the cupboard with the door open, staring at the containers marked flour and sugar.

“What are you doing?” Nigel asked, coming up behind her.

She jerked like he’d caught her doing something illegal. “Nothing.”

“Hungry? I’m a fair cook. I can make you something.”

“You can cook?” she asked. She couldn’t even do that. Forget cookies, her dinners consisted of microwaveable specials.

She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

She started to move away from him, but he put his arm around her waist and kept her close. She relaxed for just a second, leaning against him and resting her head on his shoulder.

“I can’t cook,” she said.

“So? You can kick butt and shoot a gun like nobody’s business,” he said.

“Well, that’s not really helpful when it comes to doing the girlie things. The things that women are supposed to do.”

“Like what?” Nigel asked.

She rolled her eyes at him. Was he really unsure, or did he simply want her to say it so he’d know she knew? “Cooking, cleaning, all those womanly things.”

“I don’t think those chores make you womanly.”

“Every man does,” Justine said.

What the hell was wrong with her? Was she really going to argue with him about this? She needed to just let it go. To just let him say his piece and then walk away. She would clean her gun again. That was something she could do, and it didn’t require talking or cooking.

“Maybe because I’m British, I look at women differently.”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Where did you get those ideas from?” Nigel asked.

“I don’t know,” she said at first, but then she remembered they had come from Franklin.

That he had said she wasn’t going to be worth anything as a woman because she couldn’t really cook, and wasn’t very feminine.

It bothered her more than she wanted to admit that Franklin Baron was the reason she felt like a failure when it came to making cookies.

That she was trying to prove that anything that bastard said was wrong made her feel like a complete idiot.

“It was my stepfather.”

“Stepfathers don’t always get it right.”

“He got a lot of other things wrong, too. I don’t know why I was clinging to that idea like it was the truth.”

“I don’t know. Do you want to talk to me about whatever happened to you in the bedroom to make you not comfortable with making love?”

“I am comfortable with it. I haven’t had any inappropriate reactions to you.”

He rubbed his hand up and down on her arm. “No, you haven’t, but you always jump out of my arms after we make love and get dressed as fast as you can.

“I’m not comfortable being nude,” she said. She wanted to leave it at that. She couldn’t even get changed at the gym in town when she went to work out. She just didn’t like to get caught naked. It had nothing to do with her scars, and everything to do with the sexual way that Franklin had looked at her.

And he had ogled her each time she’d been partially dressed.

“I love your body, love. The next time we make love, I’m going to want to hold you in my arms afterward.”

She thought about it. She could try to stay there for his sake. And she did want to hold him. She liked touching his body.

“Okay, I’ll try it next time. I didn’t think you’d want to linger after,” she said. “Most men don’t.”

“Well, I do. I like a nice cuddle after making love.”

“Are you ready to go get Piper?” she asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be. Is Charity close by?”

“Yes. She’s going to meet us at the compound and provide cover when we go in. Anna’s on her way and will provide backup.”

They had been drinking water and taking it easy all afternoon, letting their bodies acclimate to the higher altitude.

And now she realized she might have to acclimate to something else. She might need to acclimate to Nigel. And she didn’t know if that was safe. She didn’t know if being comfortable with this one man was going to be the right thing for her.

Nigel made dinner for Justine and himself, thinking that would ease her worries about cooking, but instead, it seemed to make her quieter. He wasn’t nervous about going after Piper. Action was what they both needed and he suspected she knew it, too. He would have liked to have made love to her one more time.

Anything to cement the bond between them, but another part of him thought it might be better to just let things lie. To just let Justine and he remain essentially strangers who’d shared a couple of really intense moments.

“Thanks for making this,” she said.

“It was nothing. I learned to cook a long time ago—couldn’t face another boxed dinner.”

“That’s what I have most every night,” she said.

And he knew he’d said the wrong thing again. But Justine wasn’t like other women he’d dated in the past, and she never reacted the way he expected her to.

“Well, there is nothing wrong with that.”

“I know,” she said. She wandered around the small kitchen area, stopping to open drawers and fiddle with their contents. “Have you thought any more about the initials on the note?”

“Yes, actually I did. Can Anna send us an image of the fax? Maybe seeing the way it’s written will jar something for me.”

“Yes, she can.”

Justine put her fork down and called her friend. But there was no satellite signal and she had to leave a message. Anna’s computer genius had saved the day more than once, and Justine knew if there was a way for her to make something happen in this case, she’d do it.

Anna had been kidnapped as a young girl, and that event had made her determined to try to keep other kids from being kidnapped. Anna was a child of privilege, and she’d always said there was more responsibility than money in her background.

Having been on the rough terrain, he now understood why they’d lost the signal to Constance and Piper a few times. As convenient as cell phones were, he knew they made life damned inconvenient when they didn’t work. And right now, he thought he should come up with a device that would enable them to work wherever you were in the world. Even a jungle in the Amazon Basin.

“Once we have Piper, where are we going?”

“There is a second safe house that I think we should take her to, just in case this location has been compromised. I’ll show you where it is on the way out.”

“You don’t have to,” Nigel said. He wanted to concentrate on what was happening later tonight, and he really didn’t want to imagine being separated from Justine. He needed her by his side.

“It’s just in case anything happens to me. In fact, you should have Charity and Anna’s cell phone numbers,” she said, rattling them both off. He saw she had that look in her eye that meant she was focused on work again. And her career meant a lot to her.

To him it meant she wasn’t thinking about her failures as a woman again. And he had the feeling she viewed things like not being able to cook as a failure.

He wished he knew who her stepfather was. Anyone who was in the paternal role needed to put aside his own petty ideas about what an ideal child was, and realize that kids were unique and different. And they needed to be shown that whatever they were good at doing was enough. That each person in society was good at something different, so they could all make up a whole.

“You are staring at me again. You do that a lot.”

“Well, you are very pretty.”

“I’m not. I’m not even classically beautiful. Everyone always says how gorgeous Charity is.”

“What do they say about you?”

“How good I am with the weapons,” she said.

“You are good with that, but you are also very beautiful. Even Piper thought so.”

“Well, I don’t think a eight- or nine-year-old girl is really the best judge.”

“Oh, but kids are. They don’t lie unless they’ve been taught to.”

Justine watched him with her gray fairy eyes, and he felt like she was stripping him bare, all the way to his soul.

“How do you teach someone to lie?” she asked. She really had no idea how that habit was formed.

“By always lying to them,” Nigel said. “Are you done with dinner?”

She stood up and took his plate. It was the least she could do after he went to the trouble of making dinner. She knew Nigel wasn’t judging her and she appreciated that, but she was judging herself and she knew she came up lacking. She’d been coming up lacking in the woman department for a long time.

A few minutes later, her BlackBerry beeped and she realized she had a message waiting. She opened the attachment in her email, and saw it was from Anna. She went into the dining room where Nigel stood looking out into the jungle-filled backyard. They weren’t quite in the Amazon Basin here, but they were close enough for the vegetation to start creeping into the cleared-out space.

“Here’s the fax. Does this signature or handwriting jar anything for you?”

He glanced at it. She watched him studying the signature and waited. “It looks familiar to me. Let me see the list of former Baron employees.”

She pulled up the scanned image so he could see it, and looked over his shoulder while he looked at it. None of the names were the same. But Nigel saw something.

“Have Anna run a background on Marshall Fermann.”

“Who is he?” Justine asked while sending the note to Anna.

“He was my assistant nearly a year ago. He left in the middle of a merger with Johnson Ellis Brands. They were a small pharmaceutical house.”

“Why did he leave?”

“He thought he would be promoted and given the new company to run.”

“How certain are you that he’s our guy?” Justine asked. She needed to know where they stood.

“He’s the one. He made a few threats on his last day, and left a note blaming me for ruining his life.”

“Why didn’t you think of him before?”

“The man wasn’t self-motivated. That was the main reason I didn’t want him in charge of any operation we had. He just didn’t have the balls to really go to the wall for our company.”

“Seems like he wants to prove to you that he’s changed.”

“Seems that way,” Nigel said. “But once a person reaches adulthood, they really don’t change. I think with Marshall, it’s a case of being so focused on hating me that that’s all he can do. He’ll never be able to adapt to the marketplace again.”

Justine agreed with Nigel’s assessment. But it gave her a chill to do so. She could tell from the way he was talking that he believed no one could change has an adult, and her entire adult existence had been about proving she was more than the juvenile killer she had been.

They left the car half a mile from the compound and went on foot through the jungle terrain, up to the complex where Piper and Constance were being held.

“Remember when we get there that this might be a trap. You have to listen to me and Charity. She’ll tell you when it’s clear to move. If she says to drop to the ground or to run, you do what she says.”

“I will,” he said, his accent crisp.

“I’m not saying this to yank your chain, but if you die, then who will Piper have?”

“I know that, Justine.”

She didn’t say anything else until Charity came on. “I’m in position. You have a guard unit in front of your position, and they are walking away. From what I observed earlier, they move in intervals that bring them by that exact spot every ten minutes.

“We’ve just wasted a few minutes,” Justine said. “We’ll move after the next unit goes past.”

Justine took Nigel’s arm, pulling him further into the brush behind the house. They were both equipped with rappelling hooks and rope they would use to climb over the wall.

They watched the armed men with the guns on their back circle the grounds. The men were clearly guards, and obviously knew what they were doing.

Justine realized they’d found the mercenaries Marshall had hired. She hoped that Emile had a way of distracting the man or men who were guarding Piper. Because otherwise, she was going to have a real struggle getting the better of these guys.

It would be just the kind of fight she didn’t want, with a little girl caught in the middle of another firefight, like they’d had yesterday at the airport. Had it really only been a day since they’d gotten to Peru? It felt like a lifetime had passed.

Night fell early in the mountains, and Justine was ready to move as soon as it was fully dark. She had on her special earpiece that was modulated so she could communicate with Charity and Anna. Nigel had one on, too. They’d tested them at the house before they left.

“Ready?” she asked, keeping her voice low and monotone.

“Yes,” he replied. She took the rappelling hook and rope she’d brought and tossed it up to the top of the fence. They both climbed up and over the fence, dropping down on the other side. Having Nigel by her side was the first time she didn’t mind having a partner. And he was starting to seem more a partner in this endeavor than a client.

He had changed to fit the circumstances, something she suspected he did a lot of. She could see now why he was such a good executive, and imagined that was part of the reason he was such a good father.

Piper was well-adjusted to her lifestyle because of Nigel, and that was the first time Justine had ever seen a parent change and adapt to fit the needs of their child.