Collateral Damage (20 page)

Jack inhaled hard and reared his head back; his flaring nostrils gave testament to the hot desire radiating from him. He stood in front of Lauren and thought he would surely die on the spot. Color rode high on her cheeks and her eyes, that could be the softest blue, flashed with hot emotion. From the contour of her breasts and defined shape of her nipples beneath her cotton T, he could tell she was aroused.

Talk about waving a red flag in front of a bull.

She touched a scar along his collar bone. “How could you ever think you aren’t a better man than Bill?”

He fought for control. “Because it’s true. I ki—”

“Did you get these scars by being a traitor like Bill?” she demanded, cutting off his confession.

“No.” He couldn’t seem to start his sentence over again. It was just three words.
I killed Bill.

“Did you do to your wife and child what Bill has done to us?”

“No.”

“So what happened between you and her?”

He clenched his fist. Talking about Bill and Jill—Ha, the names rhymed!—was the last thing he wanted to be doing at the moment. “When I go on assignment, I never know how long I will be gone and I’m not at liberty to say where I am. Though Jill thought she could handle it, she couldn’t. She grew very bitter, and in the end found comfort other places. As for Livy, that gets more complicated.”

“Kids have a way of doing that to life and situations,” she murmured. But he caught on that she wasn’t focused on wanting answers anymore. Her gaze was on his chest, and hunger was in her eyes. She slid her palm down from his shoulder to touch the bruising by his left nipple.

The purplish injuries had faded to a yellowish-green, but the extent of the trauma he’d suffered was still visible. He gritted his teeth and tried to suck air into lungs that had forgotten how to breathe. He grabbed her wrist, intending to pull her hand from his chest. Instead, he groaned and pressed her palm deeper into his skin. For just a moment, he told himself. It had been so long since he’d been touched, so long since he’d accepted physical comfort from someone else that he literally did not have the strength to pull away. That’s all his attraction was to her. He was a starved man and she was an appetizing woman.

Yeah right. He was old enough to have been both starved and in the intimate company of an attractive woman and never before experienced the strength and urgency fueling his desire now.

God help him. It was wrong, but he shut his eyes and absorbed her offering, wanting the impossible. Wanting to kiss her lush mouth and fulfill every promise throbbing in the air between them on the soft bed behind him.

He opened his eyes, meeting her gaze head on as he lowered his mouth to hers. The control that had governed his entire life lay in pieces at her feet.

“You’re a hero, Jack Hunter.” She tip-toed up and kissed the scar on his temple.

Jack shuddered hard at Lauren’s kiss, too far gone to correct her. Her scent was up his nose, her breasts were inches from his chest, her lush mouth was ripe, and he had to taste her or die. Before he could think twice, he groaned and planted his mouth on hers.

She gasped, hesitated a bare second, then leaned into him, meeting his tongue with hers. Her breasts brushed his chest, her hard nipples a ready invitation he couldn’t refuse. He let loose the full force of his desire. Cupping her ass with one hand, he lifted her and backed her to the wall, pinning her against it with a thrust of his erection to the heart of her crotch. He braced his fisted hand against the wall and pressed his chest into her soft breasts and groaned deep.

She moaned and arched into him, pressing impossibly closer as she wrapped her legs around his hips. She tasted and felt like pure lavender-scented heaven and he would have gladly died that very minute just to enter her pearly gates. The thought of sliding into her wetness, the feel of her body branding-hot against his, the taste of her sweet tongue, silky and seductive, had him trembling from head to toe. Her hands were everywhere, touching him, feeling him. He grew light-headed and had to fight off a wave of dizziness as his blood rushed south and filled his so-hard-he-hurt dick. Going for gold, he cupped her breasts, brushing her glorious nipples with his thumbs until she writhed against him. She was breathing and shaking just as hard as he. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. He wanted her flesh against his flesh. He wanted to taste her everywhere.

He snatched up her T-shirt, more than ready to fill his mouth with her fullness. He pressed a kiss to the center of her chest and slid his tongue to her nipple, feeling her heart pound hard against his face.

A heart he’d yet to be honest with.

Had yet to tell that he’d killed Bill.

The father of her children.

Some hero…

He jerked back, releasing her shirt as he fought for air. She just gazed at him, stunned, mouth open, a mouth made plumper by his lust.

“Damn, I’m sorry,” he gasped, shell-shocked by what he had done. Keeping her steady with a bracing arm, he eased himself back, releasing her from the wall. She lowered her legs and leaned back heavily. He stepped away and fisted his hands, thoroughly disgusted with himself.

“You’re wrong, Lauren. I’m no hero. I kil—” he couldn’t force the words “killed Bill” from his mouth, but he did latch onto painting a real picture of who he was and what he did.

“You want to know what my job is? I kill people. I go into a situation and I take out targets. Sometimes the only thing separating me from the bad guys is whose point of view you happen to be in. Freedom, our freedom, comes with a price and sometimes that price is really ugly to face. We take out targets, and it’s my job to make sure each combatant is dead before I leave the room. As my ex says, in my line of work, hero is just another word for killer.”

She flinched, and he turned away. He didn’t want to watch her revulsion. He’d chosen which side he was going to fight on and he carried through with that resolve. Sometimes, there was a distinct line of good and evil, sometimes the line was blurred, and sometimes his side was in the wrong. But he’d given his oath and he stuck things out through the thick and the thin. Life wasn’t perfect and neither was any issue or situation. Killing came with a heavy price. He would always carry the burden of the deaths in his life, both of the teammates he had lost and of the men he’d killed in the line of duty. He never forgot for a moment that the target had to be someone’s son, husband, or brother. That the target believed just as strongly in the side he fought on as Jack did on his own side.

“Go to bed,” he told her. “And next time, leave me to my nightmares.”

They were so much easier to take than impossible dreams. She was an impossible dream.

His answer was to hear the door close. She’d left and only then did he let himself draw a painful breath.

Fayetteville, North Carolina

Though unable to sleep, Mari Dalton kept her eyes shut. Roger Weston was with her, his reassuring presence had eased her choking fear. In her mind, she could still hear the man promising to make her pay, promising to kill her, and every time she drifted asleep, his face, his hate resurrected and joined the jeering faces of the men who had violently taken her innocence. She had thought she would die then, had wanted to die then, for surely death was preferable to living with such shame, but her spirit wouldn’t let her die. She’d survived and she’d faced the shame and she’d learned to live even though her family had reviled her.

When Neil had found her and loved her despite her shame she thought Allah had forgiven and blessed her. Now she questioned if all the blessings she’d been given over the past few years were no more than just a greater punishment. To have found safety and freedom. To have found loving and friendship. To be given the miracle of a child, only to have them all taken away was a cruel knife to her heart. Though her stomach had stopped cramping, she just knew she would lose her child, no matter what the doctor said. She had tried to be so good. She had tried to be pure.

But perhaps she deserved no better, for she had failed.

For as much as she loved Neil and grieved his loss, for as committed as she was to be the perfect wife to him forever and yearned for his presence. For as determined as she was to ignore, and yes even cut out the part of her that had sprung to life, her insides clenched every time Roger Weston walked into a room. She remembered the first time it happened. Neil’s commander had been away somewhere that even Neil could not know of when she had first come to America. She and Neil had been married for six months and she could hardly believe the blessing that both Neil and Allah had showered upon her. Then Roger Weston had walked in the front door of her happy home and her stomach had knotted. She’d broken out in a heated sweat and had been so physically disturbed by what happened that she had had to excuse herself. She’d feigned an illness and had spent the rest of the evening alone in her bed while Neil and his friends had watched a special football game on the television.

Now she was pretending again. Pretending that Roger Weston didn’t disturb her, but it wasn’t working. She felt him there and, Allah forgive her, she was so thankful that he was even though it sharpened her grief for Neil. Made her loss more painful because deep in her heart she wondered if she had been unfaithful to Neil by her reaction to his commander.

She truly might deserve to die, but still her spirit refused to let go.

She brushed away more tears of guilt and grief with the end of her blanket and drew another deep breath. She had vowed she would never use the phone number Roger Weston had given her after telling her that Allah had taken Neil away from her. But then that man today had left her no choice. And even now, she did not have the strength to deny herself and send Roger Weston away. Maybe tomorrow she would be stronger.

Every noise, every time the door opened, her heart would race with fear. Sure that man had found her to deliver the punishment he promised. She—

A rough groan brought her eyes wide open and had her sitting straight up in bed. Her heart leapt to her throat and pounded hard in her chest as she searched the shadows of the room for danger. She knew in her mind that the door to her room was closed and had not been opened. She knew it was impossible for that man to be there, but she could not stop her fear. It wasn’t until she heard another groan that she realized it was Roger Weston. He slouched low in the chair across the small room, his long legs sprawled out, and his head resting against the chair back and the wall. He appeared asleep, but it was not a peaceful rest. His breathing was rapid, his hands gripped the side arms tightly, and his head jerked slightly in a repetitive denial of whatever nightmare had gripped him.

“Mr. Weston,” she said softly then repeated a little louder. He didn’t wake and looked as if he was in such distress from his dream that she couldn’t just leave him. Though her body was sore all over, though her hands and knees throbbed with every movement, she slid from the bed and walked across the chilled floor. Wearing only the thin material of the hospital gown to cover her practically naked body was so sinful that she turned back to the bed and pulled the blanket from it and covered herself. By the time she finished, she was nearly groaning from the sharp pain in her hands. As she turned back to Roger Weston, she heard his jagged whisper. “No…God…no. Not Neil. Not DT. Not Rico. Not Pecos. I didn’t have a choice. I had to…had to decide. Don’t you understand, Beck? I had to. God help me… I had to.”

Roger Weston’s cry for his God so matched Mari’s own cry to Allah that her already hurting and grieving heart twisted with even more pain. She moved closer to Roger, spoke to him again, but still he did not hear her. With no other choice, she reached out and touched him, more aware of the power and heat of his muscled shoulder than she ever had the right to be. And that was through her bandages. Touching him skin to skin would be… Allah, forgive me.

“Mr. Weston.” She shook his shoulder this time. He jerked awake with a start, nearly coming straight up out of the chair. She reared back and wobbled for balance, even crying out a little in shock.

He caught her arm, balancing her. “What is it? You shouldn’t be up. You should have just called me. Do you need the nurse?”

Before she could find her voice to answer him, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to the bed.

“I tried calling out to you,” she told him, barely finding her voice amid the flooding sensations of his scent, his heat, his strength. “But you were asleep.”

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. What did you need?” he asked, setting her back in the bed as if she were made of glass. And perhaps she was; she thought she would break apart at any moment from the emotions battling within her breast and the pain trying to drag her under a dark abyss.

She drew the blanket to her, too aware of him so close. “I-I didn’t need anything. You were in pain, a nightmare. I think. You spoke of Neil and others and were so distressed from your dream that I had to wake you.”

“What did I say?” His jagged, almost angry tone surprised her and made her peer closer at his face in the shadowed room. His rough jaw, hooked nose, dark unruly hair and blue eyes were all familiar to her, but there was something completely different about him that wasn’t there before Neil had died. And whatever nightmare he was having about Neil and the other men, it was still with him. She could see it in his eyes and read it in the sudden tension gripping his every visible muscle.

“Only that you didn’t have a choice. That you had to decide.”

He exhaled sharply.

“What is it? What happened?”

“Nothing. Forget anything you heard. It was just a nightmare. Not real. Not important. Go back to sleep. I won’t disturb you again. I’ll be in the hallway stretching my legs.” He turned away from her and didn’t look back as he left the room.

Mari blinked at the closing door, realizing Roger Weston had just lied to her. His nightmare had been important and he was as haunted by ghosts as she was.

Roger stepped out into the hospital hallway and braced himself against the wall, barely curbing the urge to bang his head against it. What he’d almost revealed in his sleep—what really happened in Lebanon and how Neil had died—made him sick inside.