Hold on Tight (18 page)

His eyes scanned the area tirelessly—left to right, his periphery open to any movements. One agent remained inside the front door, just behind the closed blind. Every once in a while, Chris saw the man’s shadow when he shifted.

He didn’t see anyone else passing the other front windows, which meant Jamie and Kevin were in the middle of the house, the kitchen. A good spot for them. Safe. Nearly untouchable unless a bullet got lucky.

Two hours had passed since he’d arrived, one hundred and twenty minutes of him lying on the small stone retaining wall, staring at the house.

Mark had always been his point man on missions—had been a damned fine sniper in his own right, one who had no problem letting Chris take the majority of the shots. Mark kept him lined up, made him focus, especially in the early days when patience and practice went hand in hand. Now it had become a part of him, a religion, something he couldn’t turn off even when he wanted to.

He held his rifle steady, the stark realization that he might not be able to fire drumming through every nerve ending.

If you have to take a shot, you can. You will
.

He knew that much was true.

His mind kept flashing back to Mark—Mark in the morgue, Mark on the mission …

Fucking son of a bitch. Chris shook his head and then looked through the scope of his rifle.

The only thing he could see was what happened on that night at the embassy—the events he hadn’t been able to tell anyone about, the ones that had been keeping him from firing his rifle.

The screams had turned to wails—inhuman-sounding noises that ran right down Chris’s spine as if someone was walking on his grave
.

Mark put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. “Keep your eye on the prize, Chris.”

Chris was already belly-down on the wall outside the embassy, which was lit up like the Fourth of July. Except this was no celebration and the smell of blood, fresh and metallic, clung to the humid air around him
.

There would be no good end to this mission—every one of them knew it was a failure. And even though that was no fault of theirs, it still wasn’t sitting easily. Especially not when the ambassador’s children began calling out the embassy windows for help
.

“I’m going in there—I don’t give a shit about Josiah’s orders,” Mark told him suddenly. The men had been told to pull back, to get the hell out of Dodge before it was too late for them. And although Josiah had given the orders for all of them to stand down, Mark and Chris hadn’t been able to back away from what was happening around them
.

Josiah was as horrified by the sight as the rest of them were
.

Chris didn’t hesitate once Mark made his announcement. “I’m going with you.”

“Not this time.” Mark’s eyes were so serious—there wasn’t the usual glint behind them. His mouth was set, his rifle held loosely in his hands. “You get the kids out. I don’t care what else happens. Let Cam and Josiah deal with the parents—you get the kids.”

“That’s suicide.”

“And I’m not taking you with me. My choice.” Mark’s voice was firm—the man was dead set on going, and going alone. Chris had no doubt Mark would take him down if he tried to stop him
.

Mark laid out his plan, about how he’d sneak in and distract the rebels. Kill as many as he could. “Maybe I’ll get lucky for a third time—what do they always say, the third time’s the charm?”

“Yeah, that’s what they say.”

“Cover me. I need enough lead time that Josiah can’t stop me.”

“I can do that.” Chris felt like he wasn’t exactly in his own body at that point, that none of this was really happening. Everything had simultaneously slowed down and sped up, and he couldn’t catch his balance or his breath
.

“Listen.” Mark’s face was set in serious lines. “If they get me …”

“I’ll get you back from them. I won’t leave you here.”

“No, I don’t want that. If they capture me, they’re not going to let me live for long. Don’t let them kill me. I don’t want to die by their hands. If I’m that far gone …”

Chris looked at his senior chief in the darkness. “Don’t ask me this, Mark. Don’t you fucking dare.”

“I’m asking,” Mark said evenly, though Chris smelled the fear on the man. “Between you and me—only you and me—I’m asking …” A moment later Chris was alone in the dark, watching Mark disappear into the back door of the embassy
.

He knew it wasn’t the last time he’d see Mark alive, but it would be the last time they would speak
.

I’m asking …

Mark had known what he’d been putting on Chris. Had known Chris would have to live with what he’d been forced to do forever … which is why Mark hadn’t waited around for the answer to his question.

I’m asking you to kill me
.

Chris knew his part of the sacrifice was small as hell compared to what Mark had ultimately done. And when he’d watched the rebels carrying Mark’s body away from the embassy toward the large bonfire to the south, when he’d seen Mark’s left hand move with the familiar signal, Chris had pushed the children along with Cam and their parents and ignored Josiah running toward Mark. He’d centered his shot and he’d taken it, swift and clean. One shot, one kill—this time, not for a mission but for mercy.

That didn’t make it weigh any less heavily on his soul. Chris suspected it never would.

But now, she woke, disoriented, with Chris over her bed.

“Come on, baby—we’re out of here.” His voice was calm, his touch gentle as he carried her out of the bed and the room, and finally the house. Halfway across the lawn, she found her voice and started to ask what was going on, but he broke into a run at that point, stopping only when they’d gotten through the woods and onto the road—and still, when he placed her on the ground, he shielded her body with his.

She struggled for a second, saying, “Chris, please—”

Seconds later, the ground rumbled and shook and the explosion shattered the early-morning quiet. She didn’t dare peek over Chris’s shoulder, simply buried her face against his shirt and breathed in his scent instead of what she knew would be smoky air.

His arms covered her head, his body a shield to hers—she felt a small rain of debris come down around them and knew that her house was gone.

Chris stared at her. “I just knew. Okay?” was all he said before he moved his weight off her and helped her up from the ground.

She hadn’t been aware that she was shaking until then. “What was that—what did he use to do that?”

“Your own gas lines,” Chris said, his voice low so only she could hear. “Probably on a timer. Basically undetectable with a minuscule leak. With the wind shift that happened half an hour ago, though, I smelled it.”

Her hand went instinctively to her belly. “The baby?”

“Everything should be okay—your windows in the bedroom were cracked. But we’ll get everything checked.”

“Lyle and Paul?”

“They’re all right—they went out the back after I came in. I told them to go, that I had you,” he told her as sirens rang in the distance. “The FBI hasn’t been keeping you safe, Jamie, not to my standards. Now it’s my turn.”

“I need to call Kevin.”

“You can do that from the road. You can’t go to Kevin’s house,” he told her. “I’ll take you to my house—or to Saint’s.”

She shook her head. “I won’t compromise those places.”

“We’ll check into a motel, then—you can call Kevin and your supervisor from there.”

“There’s one place we always use …”

“Then we’re going to avoid it,” he said grimly. “I have an alternative.”

She wanted to argue, but everything he’d said made sense.

Chris didn’t have his bike tonight—instead, he had an old Chevy Blazer, which he’d parked around the corner.

He helped her in and pulled away, just before the police and ambulance arrived. She turned to watch them pull up her driveway.

For the first time ever, she was grateful that the house was in such a deserted area—no neighbors to worry about. No one was hurt.

But if Chris hadn’t been there …

“Don’t think about it. I was there,” he said, handed her his cell phone. “Call Kevin and your supervisor.”

It was only then that she realized she had nothing but the clothes on her back.

Sentimentality wasn’t her strong suit. In fact, it had been carefully carved out of her life; she was more used to it than she should be.

There hadn’t been time to take anything from the old house after her parents’ murder. No, she and PJ had been taken out the back door, whisked away in the middle of the chaos, through the yard to a waiting marshal’s car.

She’d been crying, small, sobbing gasps and PJ held her hand, stoic. Blood still on her clothing and her hands, which later Jamie remembered finding on her own. And when they’d gotten to the hotel, she’d continued crying, for her parents, her blanket, her doll collection. Everything left behind. Everything but the nightgown she wore.

She stared down at her legs, barely covered by the long T-shirt she’d ended up in after her late-night shower, and wondered if anything would ever change.

The room was completely rearranged. He blinked as he stood at the opened door, because it hadn’t been like that before he’d left, but suddenly, the couches, the chairs, even the coffee table was in a different place.

He continued moving through the house, dropping his bag as he entered the lit kitchen. PJ was standing at the counter, pouring sugar on a bowl of corn flakes.

She glanced up and caught his look. “What? You’ve got nothing with sugar in this house. I had to improvise.”

“Because sugar’s not good for you.”

“Neither is the fast food you brought me,” she commented.

“It was a hunch.” Based on the Snickers bar wrappers he’d seen on his deck, plus the can of Coke. “Did you rearrange my living room?”

She shrugged. “Yes. Things were out of place.”

“My couches were out of place?”

“Yes. The arrangement was bothering me.”

“You’re not even sleeping inside the house.”

“But I have to look into this room from outside,” she pointed out, and he cocked an eyebrow at her.

“I could close the shades at night.”

“Trust me, this works better.”

The thing was, it did work better. The living room looked … well, it looked lived in. More than it had in all four years he’d lived here. It looked like … a home. Even with the tent out on the deck.

“I can put it all back.”

“No, leave it.” He grabbed his bag and locked it in the closet with his weapons and then tried to figure out what to do next.

She was here. Adding more sugar to the cereal, shaking her head at him and saying, “You really eat healthy, don’t you?”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“No cookies at all?”

He shrugged. “You didn’t tell me you wanted cookies.”

She put the bowl down. “Saint, look, I’m … I don’t know—”

He stopped her. “Let’s not worry about this. Why don’t we let it play out, no matter where it leads?”

She took a bite of her cereal and chewed slowly. And then she nodded and walked back outside, to the deck.

She’d thought about packing up and leaving more than once in the hours since Saint left—stormed out, actually, muttering something about training exercises.

He was pushing her away, pushing her to make the next move. And so she did, by staying put in his house.

She hadn’t realized how much she missed being in a man’s arms. Relationships were a big no to her, but sex … sex was freeing. Sex always made her feel as if she was flying, each orgasm sending her higher than she’d been before.

She hugged her arms around herself for a second, the thin T-shirt not doing a great job against the night wind off the ocean.

The newspaper she’d been reading by the light above the deck was still on the outside table. It had blown open, and now she closed it. The front page held an article by K. Darcy—aka Kaylee Smith, the reporter who’d come to Africa to blow the lid off GOST.

Kaylee had lost her ex-husband to the organization.

“I know her.” Saint had followed her to the deck with a bottle of water in one hand and an apple in the other, and now he looked over her shoulder.

“Me too.” She ran a palm over the article as if that would help her commit it to memory. “I never spoke to her about this, about any of it. Not really.”

“Then how did Kaylee get all the information?”

“You really don’t know?”

He sat next to her. “I didn’t ask Nick or Chris all that much. I simply threatened to kill them the next time they went off half-cocked to help a woman.”

She couldn’t help it—she laughed, partly because he was so serious.

“If I’d only known then …” He trailed off, not finishing his thought.

“Kaylee got her information from Clutch, a man I worked with. The only other one who survived.”

“Where is he now?”

“Last I saw, somewhere in Africa, with the woman he loves.” She pushed the paper away. “Are Nick and Kaylee still together?”

Saint nodded the affirmative, and that made her happy.

“What about you, PJ? Was there ever anyone for you? There must’ve been someone.”

“Yes.” She leveled her gaze at him. “There were a lot of men.”

He didn’t react, at least not in the way she’d wanted him to. Instead, his gaze traveled down her body and back up again, and when his eyes met hers, there was a certain satisfaction in them. “None of them ever made you come the way I did today.”

She could’ve lied, but he’d know. “That’s true. But maybe it’s simply beginner’s luck.”

“This is the beginning, but it has nothing to do with luck.”

Her body rumbled alive at his words, shuddering from the residual ache of the earlier sex. But he didn’t move toward her and she noted he held his keys in his hand, felt a slight twinge of disappointment that he was leaving again.

But that was short-lived, because he said, “Come take a ride with me.”

She hesitated briefly, but he wasn’t giving her time to say no. He’d already started walking off the deck and toward the garage. She jumped down and landed in the soft sand, following him. “It’s late. Where are we going?”

“You’ll see when we get there.” He clicked open the garage door and they both walked inside—he climbed into the driver’s seat while she held on to the passenger-side door handle for a second and then jerked it open.

“I hate surprises,” she told him.

“Yeah, me too. It’s something you’ll like, all right? So just get into the car.”

She settled back in the big SUV, feeling lost in the black bucket seat. The windows were tinted and she liked that feeling of added protection. He backed the car down the long driveway and turned onto a road leading away from his house.

The music was playing low on the radio and he reached over to turn it up. She put a hand out and stopped him. “Are you okay?”

He glanced at her briefly. “No. But I will be. Seeing Mark was something I needed to do.”

She nodded and let him blast the music.

Fifteen minutes later, he pulled off the main road, into what she recognized almost instantly as a small, private airport. As he showed ID to the man at the gate, her gaze skipped across a row of Cessnas and she realized she hadn’t been behind the controls of a plane since the fateful crash in Africa, with GOST. The one she hadn’t talked about with Saint … with anyone.

She’d told herself that there hadn’t been the opportunity, which was a total lie. But the fact that she could admit it had to be a step in the right direction.

Finally, Saint pulled up near one of the planes parked against the far left gate, illuminated by the lights along the outer edges of the lot, and got out. She followed and found herself standing next to him and the Cessna.

He put a hand on the plane’s door and then quickly took it away, stuffed both hands into the pockets of his jeans and stared at the sky. And then, when he took them out, he lifted his palm toward her—in the center was a black key. “Here you go.”

A key, presumably to the plane they stood next to. “What’s this for?”

His gaze settled directly on hers. “I thought maybe you’d take me up sometime.”

“Saint—”

“It was Mark’s,” he said quickly. “He left it to me. Now I’m giving it to you.”

“What? Wait—you fly?”

“He was teaching me. Mainly, I just liked the feeling of being up there. The plane would be wasted on me. But you … All the papers are inside the plane. You let me know when you’re ready.”

“I can’t accept this.” She held out the key to him but he shook his head and shoved his hands back into his pockets.

“You found him. That was what I needed. Let me do this for you.”

“Why are you being so good to me?”

His chin lifted. “Because right now, it’s helping me a hell of a lot.”

“I told you what happened to me in the Air Force. Then in Africa, I survived an airplane explosion meant to kill me and three other men on board. The men died—men who had protected me for months. There was nothing I could do but walk away and leave them there.”

“I’m sorry, PJ.”

She nodded and held out the key again, but he shook his head no. “Please take it. I—”

“You know, Mark was captured twice. On top of that, he escaped certain death more times than either of us cared to count. He’d always tell me,
My luck’s not going to hold out forever, but it’s sure nice to have around.”
Saint rubbed the back of his neck as he pictured his friend coming off a plane after he’d been released from the hospital. “One time, they’d kept him in a hospital for three weeks, to get him back in shape after a two-week-long capture by the FARC in Colombia. Mark and two other private contractors had escaped and hid along the border until we grabbed him. He’d looked like hell, but the first thing he asked the doc was when he could fly again. Doc told him that he should stick to the water, like a good Navy boy.”

She smiled.

“He never once doubted his ability to get back in there and do his job. He lived for it. For us.”

“I wish I’d known him. I feel like I do, when you talk about him. He’s not so different from a lot of the guys I knew in my past.” Her voice had a wistful quality to it.

“I think he would’ve really liked you,” he said. “He’d think that this was right.”

“You really were his family, you and your team.”

Saint nodded. “Mark’s family was all kinds of fucked-up. He’d been on his own since he was seventeen. He was sitting on a huge trust fund that I don’t think he touched much.”

“His parents died?”

Saint looked up at the sky and then at her. “His father killed his mother and then killed himself. They were wealthy as hell, and they were so unhappy.”

“That’s horrible.”

“He never dwelled on it. So please, stop arguing. Just accept the plane. Enjoy it.”

“I don’t know where I’m going after this.”

“So take it with you.” He paused. “Where are you thinking about going?”

“I have no idea. I never think about the future anymore. For so long, I’ve never let myself look more than one day ahead. Never let myself dream about tomorrow—any tomorrow.” She stared down at the key in her hand. “I sound like a real downer, don’t I?”

“You sound like you’re lying to yourself. You’ve thought about the future.”

She had no answer for that. She’d left so much of her life on another continent that sometimes she felt like she was walking around half-naked, with no cover. Vulnerable. Soft. Weak. Her future always seemed cloudy, like she was seeing it through fogged glass—she could make out the edges, but the middle, the most important part, remained blurred.

“I can kill someone with my bare hands,” she told him quietly, even as she stared down at her own palms as though they would betray her at any second. “A woman shouldn’t be able to do that. I shouldn’t know the things I’ve learned … everything in my life has revolved around violence and guns and death.”

She could smell death even when she wasn’t close to it—its scent sticky sweet and cloying, which quickly gave way to the stench of decay. “I don’t feel like a woman should.”

“You feel like a woman to me,” he said quietly.

She hadn’t realized that he’d put his arms around her, that he was holding her close, and that she was holding him too, had wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his chest. She hated herself for needing. “This is happening fast … between us. It’s happening too fast.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Until you figure it out, you’re free to stay on my deck or in my bed. Free to have your way with me too … on the deck or in my bed.”

She smiled. “I don’t know anything about you … except that you’re kind.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re not going to call me sweet, are you? Because I’d really hate that.”

She laughed in spite of everything—found herself doing that a lot when she was around him. “I don’t know much, but sweet’s not something I would call you. At least not to your face.”

“Accept the gift and I’ll tell you anything you want to know about me.”

It was a promise she couldn’t resist.