Come Gentle the Dawn (15 page)

“It’s picric acid,” he told her softly. “There are about four ounces of it.”

“Crystallized?” she croaked.

“Yes. Enough to blow this warehouse to hell and back. Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll leave through the opposite entrance. I don’t even want to risk walking by that stuff.”

Brie agreed, her fingers at the base of her aching throat. Her knees were suddenly wobbly, and it took all
her remaining strength to walk under her own power. Once outside, the cool night air hit them. Linc shut off his light, and darkness engulfed them.

“Come here,” he grated softly, taking her into his arms, realizing she couldn’t possibly be acting. In that instant, Linc knew she was a victim, not a suspect. As he folded her into his arms, he realized that all that remained to be done was to prove that to the satisfaction of everyone else.

She came without question, and his arms went around her, drawing her against him. A ragged sigh broke from her lips as she nestled her head beneath his hard jaw. The silence cloaked them, and all she was aware of was his sweaty male scent, the roughness of the uniform beneath her cheek and the drumlike beat of his heart. Brie sensed that some sort of emotional bonding was taking place between them. Time wound slowly to a halt as he held her tightly, his cheek against her hair. Nothing else mattered in that minute. Finally, Linc released her. She could barely make out the features of his face as she looked up at him. He gave her a grim smile.

“Come on, we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

*

They greeted the rising sun with bloodshot eyes. Brie watched as the bomb squad trailer, bearing the jar of volatile picric acid in a sand-filled metal case, slowly pulled away. Taking out the dynamite had been easy in comparison. Brie was grateful that the bomb squad removed the jar. She had lost count of how many times she had removed the liquid and crystallized form of acid. It took incredibly steady hands and no fear of
dying. She had neither right now. She lifted her chin, meeting Linc’s weary eyes, aware of the warmth that continued to throb between them.

“What do you say we go home and get some sleep?” she asked.

He pushed several strands of dark hair off his brow. “I’d say it sounds like one hell of an idea.”

Brie nodded. “You want to drive? I’ll go to the fire chief and sign the last of the forms.”

“Yeah, I’ll do it.” Linc started to turn away, then hesitated. “What about Homely Homer? Shouldn’t she be hungry by now?”

A softened look came to Brie’s features. For someone who knew little about animals and professed a dislike for them, Linc was turning out to be suspiciously different. She would ask him about that change some time. “Yes, there’s a jar of baby food next to the cage. Just put it in there for her. And don’t get alarmed if she starts nuzzling you with her beak when you do it. She’ll think you’re her mother.”

He snorted and turned. “First time I’ve been a mother in that sense of the word,” he grumbled, walking away. There was more to digest. As Linc fed the pigeon, he assessed Brie’s actions throughout the crisis. There were several times she could have endangered his life and hadn’t. Grimacing, Linc realized that Brie was a victim, and he disliked the sham he had to continue to play with her. Linc would rather have had Brie be a suspect. That way, he could continue to fight his attraction to her. Now that she was a victim, all his overprotective feelings would emerge, throwing an entirely different light on his relationship with her.

“A mess,” Linc growled, putting the bird back in the cage.

*

Brie handed Linc the last of the coffee from their thermos. The interstate highways were heavy with rush-hour traffic into Cleveland. Thankfully, they were leaving. She felt an inner glow as Linc gave her that heated look that always suspended her breath for an instant.

“When you finish your coffee, why don’t you stretch out in the back and catch a few winks,” he suggested.

Brie sipped the coffee. “No, I’ll stay up here and help keep you awake.”

His mouth quirked. “Anyone ever appreciate how the haz-mat people go beyond and above the call of duty?”

“No. It’s an expected part of our job, Linc. I warned you about putting in long hours.”

He nodded. “All I want is a shower. I smell.”

“Far be it from me to say that.”

“You’re a saucy cat for this time of the morning.”

Heat stole into Brie’s cheeks as she met his smiling blue eyes. “Jeff accused me of having a sense of humor at the worst of times. I guess it’s true.”

Linc squinted against the rising sun. “I like your humor. In my business I’ve found the people who can keep it in the worst situations are the ones who are the most reliable. They won’t buckle under the stress.”

Brie agreed. “I think our brand of comedy is labeled black humor at best.”

“To an outsider hearing us, I’m sure it is. What they don’t realize is that it’s a way to relieve the stress and pressure we’re feeling.”

“Speaking of stress, did you manage to feed Homely Homer?”

He smiled, and she noted how his teeth were white against his growth of beard.

“Yeah.”

“You like her?”

He gave a slight shrug. “She’s okay for a pigeon, I guess.”

Brie was watching him closely. “I think you like animals a lot more than you want anyone to know.”

“Just never was raised around them much as a kid,” he mumbled evasively.

“What happened, Linc?” Brie asked in a softened tone. “You try and make me believe you’re a big, pushy bully who hates women, children and animals. I know you don’t hate women too much, or we wouldn’t be working so well as a team. I haven’t seen you around children, so I’ll reserve my opinion on that. The other night when you met Homely Homer, I saw the look in your eyes.”

Linc shot her a disgruntled glare. Brie was too damn good at people watching. Much better than he gave her credit for. Agents had that knack of noticing the most minute of body language signals, not someone like Brie. “What look?” he growled, trying to bluff his way out of the situation.

Brie chortled delightedly, putting both feet on the dash and relaxing. “What look?” she mimicked. Her green eyes, although ringed with exhaustion, were filled with tenderness. “Despite all your growling, I think you wanted to pet and hold her.”

“You have an unnerving habit of being insightful, Ms. Williams,” he muttered.

“But I’ll never use it against you, Linc.”

“My experience has been different with women, Brie.”

“Time will prove me on that point. You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not.”

Now she was teasing him, he was sure. “Am I complaining?”

Brie met his smile, drowning in the warmth she saw in his face. “So, tell me about the animals in your life, Linc Tanner. Why are you so afraid to reach out and share yourself with that little bird?”

He sobered abruptly, twisting beneath her laserlike insight. “You missed your calling,” he muttered. “You should have been a shrink.”

Her laughter was spontaneous and lilting. “Oh, please! Why should it bother you that someone besides you has the ability to see past walls and facades of another human being? Do you think I’ll use that information against you, Linc? No, on second thought, don’t answer that.”

“The more someone knows about you, the more vulnerable you become to them,” he stated stubbornly. “You bare your soul to another person and you’re practically telling them where your Achilles heel is located.”

Brie had the good sense to remain sober beneath his assumption. “You’re right.”

“And I don’t think either of us is the kind of individual who gives much of himself away to anyone.”

She was quiet for a moment, digesting their conversation. Linc was right, as usual. Gently, Brie steered him back to the subject she wanted him to talk about. “Who took the joy of loving animals away from you as a child, Linc? I can tell you like Homely Homer or you wouldn’t have remembered to feed her or offered to do it.”

Linc rubbed his face. “A long time ago, when I was about eight years old and living in the Bronx, I found
this little gray kitten under a cardboard box by a trash dumpster outside an Italian restaurant. He couldn’t have been very old, because his eyes were barely open. The family I was living with at that time had six foster kids, including me.” His voice turned grim. “The old lady was getting a hefty allotment check for keeping the six of us. She spent it on new clothes and a car while she fed us cheap junk food.

“The kitten was mewing, and I rummaged through the boxes around the bottom of the dumpster until I found him.” He smiled softly. “He was the furriest little thing. I’d seen cats before in the neighborhood, but they always ran when you tried to go up and pet them. Not that I blamed them. A lot of the kids hated cats and would throw anything they could get their hands on at them. I guess he thought I was his mother or something because he kept crying and sucking my fingers when I held him. So I tucked him inside my shirt and went to the back door of the restaurant.

“There was a cook there by the name of Davis. He always knew I hung around. I got up my courage and pounded on that back door until someone answered it. Thank God, it was him. I showed him the kitten and he broke into this big, toothy smile and told me what I had to do. He came back about ten minutes later with some warm milk and a glass eyedropper. He showed me how to fill the eyedropper and feed the kitten. So, before school, I’d race over to the restaurant where I had a box by the back door, feed the kitten and barely make it to class on time. After school, I’d run back there and feed him again. And at night, I’d sneak out the window in our bedroom where we all slept, and feed him a third time.”

Brie swallowed, her eyes luminous. “That was wonderful. And Davis…the man had a heart.”

Linc nodded grimly, keeping his eyes on the road before them. “Yeah, things went pretty good for a while. The kitten grew fast. He had big yellow eyes and long gray fur. And it got so he’d hear me coming and meet me. I couldn’t believe an animal would do that. He’d begged to be lifted and carried. And when I would pick him up, he’d lick my chin and purr like crazy. I really liked that.”

Brie heard the pain in his voice. “Something happened to the kitten, didn’t it, Linc?”

He nodded his head. “It seemed like everything I touched, no matter how much I loved it, was taken from me. At one foster home I was happy. The man and woman really loved me. And then she finally got pregnant and they reluctantly gave me back to the orphanage because they just didn’t have the money to support two children. Then I landed in that viper’s nest where the woman used us to obtain extra money.” He shook his head, silence settling between them. Finally, Linc said, “The kitten was hit by a garbage truck. When I found him that night, I just sat huddled against the brick building in that alley holding him and cried my eyes out. After that, I swore no one would ever hurt me again. I wouldn’t let any human or animal get close enough to me to make me cry. I just couldn’t accept it anymore, and in my eight-year-old mind, it was the only acceptable solution to the situation.”

“And that’s when you joined one of those street gangs?”

He turned, aware of the compassion written so clearly in her face. “Yeah. I became a real hard nose.
Started skipping school, getting in trouble with the cops, and finally I got dumped into juvenile court. The only good thing out of that was that the viper gave me back to the orphanage because she didn’t want to have to keep coming down to the police station to pick me up.”

Brie felt the ache widening in her breast for him. Their lives were so completely different from one another. “And yet, you’ve made something decent out of your life despite a bad start. I think that says something about your caliber as a human being, Linc.”

“Don’t put me on any pedestals, Brie. I still carry a lot of that inner toughness around with me on a daily basis. At age fourteen I met this parish priest who used to walk the worst alleys of the Bronx. He changed my life. He took me under his wing and straightened me out to a large degree. Father O’Reilly got me a scholarship to a local university and told me I had to have a degree in order to make it out in the world. So I scraped up the funds by working at a restaurant at night and going to college by day. I got a BS in chemistry.”

“So your unimpressive grades weren’t from the girls and partying? They were from working until odd hours of the morning, getting a few hours’ sleep, studying, then going back to class.”

He grudgingly nodded. “If it hadn’t been for Father O’Reilly’s belief in me, I’d never have gotten through. At the time, I felt so proud of myself. I’d made it. I’d made something of myself. I was no longer a pawn someone could push around. I wouldn’t be known as ‘that orphan’ or ‘foster brat.’ From then on, I was a graduate. I had respect, Brie.” His brow furrowed. “I don’t know if you can understand that. I was raised in
Italian neighborhoods where respect was the thing. If you didn’t have respect, you didn’t have anything.”

“You’ve come a long way.”

“Now don’t get moon-eyed over my life. There’s no such thing as a happy childhood for any kid. I don’t care if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth or was a ghetto rat.”

“I wasn’t getting moon-eyed, to use your words,” she defended swiftly.

“You’re such a marshmallow. I should have known better than to tell you about myself.”

A smile touched her lips, and she reached out, placing her hand on his broad shoulder. She enjoyed the strength she felt beneath her fingertips. “I’m glad you told me, and I promise I won’t cry. Okay?”

“You’re still a marshmallow, Williams. Through and through.”

She allowed her hand to slip off his shoulder. “If you call being kind to animals and people being a marshmallow, then I guess I am.”

“My definition of one goes further than that,” he muttered. “You wear that heart of yours on your sleeve.”

“Nothing wrong with that, Tanner.”

He snorted and rubbed his watering eyes. “Like hell there isn’t. Every vulture in the world can spot a patsy like you a mile away and take advantage of the situation.” Like he was doing, and it ate him. Brie didn’t deserve to have her trust twisted like this, and manipulated.