Safe Passage (14 page)

He collapsed, damp, into her arms, the sound of her cry still echoing through his head.

His breathing became regular. Consciousness crept slowly in from the corners of his mind. The sounds of the storm filtered back into his brain. He registered the cabin, the flickering apricot light.

And he blinked. The word she’d cried. It was foreign. Greek.

It stabbed through him.

He remembered why they were here.

He propped himself up onto his elbow, stared at the exquisite woman who lay dusky, naked, sated, in front of him.

She smiled lazily up at him, her cheeks flushed, her silver eyes liquid, haunting.

Something tightened sharp and hard across his chest.

His eyes trailed down her slick body, rested on the small tattoo on her olive-skinned hip.

Her eyes followed his, saw what he was staring at.

They darted back, met his gaze. She looked afraid.

But she said nothing.

A maelstrom of emotion swirled in him. He reached out, stroked the smoothness of her cheek, smiled softly back at her.

Her eyes fluttered closed in what he could only read as relief.

He pulled the comforter over them, lay down beside her, held her. She snuggled against him. Warm. Soft. She fit so perfectly. He felt so stupidly whole.

As much as he wanted answers, he didn’t want to lose her.

But he had to ask. Soon.

Because the world was going to come and get her. And he was going to betray her, hand her over to them.

He mentally shook his head. Since when had his mission become a case of betraying Skye?

He held her closer, drank in the musk of her female scent.

Since he’d begun to care.

Since he’d dared tread where he’d promised himself never to go.

The agent who feared no man had been rendered weak by this woman. And this was one wilderness he did not know how to traverse.

He’d known he was in trouble the second she’d stepped over that threshold and into his life only days ago.

Her eyes flickered open.

She blinked into the room, remembered where she was. Henderson’s cabin. It was dark.

A finger of ice traced down her spine. She reached out. Cold. He was gone from the bed.

Skye jerked up, clutched the quilt comforter to her breasts. She couldn’t say what it was that had woken her with such a jolt.

But something didn’t feel right.

The flames in the woodstove had died to glowing embers. And the night had gone deathly still.

The storm was over.

Then she saw him, a hulk of a silhouette by the window, looking out into the black night. He was wearing only his jeans. His dog cowered at his side.

“Scott,” she whispered.

He turned.

Then she heard it.

A sound so eerie it raised every fine hair on her body. A howl so primal it reverberated through every cell in her system.

It echoed through the still, dark forest, bounced off the mountains, rising in plaintive pitch upon pitch over the tips of trees.

Honey started a low moan in response. Scott reached his hand down, told her to stay quiet.

“Is it a wolf?”

“Our wolf. The one from the road.”

“How do you know?” She climbed out of bed, draped herself in the quilt, joined him at the window.

“Listen.”

She did. “What am I hearing?”

“It’s a lonesome howl. Hear the pitch?”

She nodded, shivered as the sound once again entered her soul.

“That high pitch, the modulations, it’s not an aggressive howl. I think it’s our old alpha male.”

“He’s lonely,” she whispered. “The sound…it’s so haunting.”

He put his arm around her, gathered her close. She could smell the warm maleness of him. She felt ridiculously safe in his hold. Despite all the uncertainty, the fear, a part of her felt oddly at peace in this tiny cabin in the heart of nowhere. And her own heart ached for the male animal alone in the cold woods.

“A wolf separated from its pack sometimes returns to an old rendezvous site,” he said softly. “A place where it was once happy, secure. It can howl there for hours.”

“Calling out to its past.”

“Calling out to its future. Looking for something he’ll probably never find again.”

Once again the strange and sorrowful sound rose, climbed, echoed into the dark wilderness.

It was immediately followed by another. But this one was different.

Scott went rigid beside her.

“What is it?”

“
That
was a confrontational howl. Can you hear the lower pitch, the coarser tone, especially at the end?”

She listened as the new sound died in low throaty threat. “Our old man has company?”

“Another male. It’ll probably kill him.”

She moved closer to Scott. “How do you know so much about them?”

He looked down at her. “My dad taught me some stuff. And the wolf has always stolen my imagination. It’s the voice of the wilderness. The song of the wild. A symbol of the battle to survive against encroaching civilization.” He turned and looked back out into the night. “Not like the jackal.”

Skye went stiff.

She felt as if her heart had clean stopped beating.

She said nothing.

“The jackal is associated with evil spirits, death.”

The muscles of her throat constricted. She tried to breathe through them. Why had he brought this up? Was he probing for reaction? She clenched her teeth, pulled the comforter tighter around her.

He threw her a glance.

He
was
watching for reaction.

Or was he?

Was she just reading too much into something that wasn’t there? Panic slithered up through her intestines. Cold.

He didn’t let it drop. “He’s a sly, cunning scavenger, the jackal.” His words curled low, dangerous, threatening. “But he’s too slimy to step out in the sunlight. He hides his nefarious deeds under the cloak of darkness. You only know he is there because of his eerie howl in the night.”

Skye coughed.

He spun to face her. “Did you know, Skye, that the jackal is one of the few mammalian species that mates for life?”

She cleared her throat. “Uh, no. I—I didn’t know that.”

“You ever been near a jackal, Skye?”

“N-no.” She attempted a laugh. It came out awkward. “They don’t have jackals in Holland.”

“No, I guess they don’t.”

She scrambled to swing the conversation. “And you? You sound like you’ve come across this animal.”

“I have. I’ve spent time in Africa, the Middle East…India. All territories of the jackal. And I’ve crossed his path. I’ve seen evidence of his presence. But he’s the darnedest creature when it comes to cunning and stealth. Can’t say I’ve ever laid eyes on him. Just known he was there. Could smell him in the shadows.”

The edge of sheer terror sliced into her stomach. It was as if he was talking of Malik. As though he knew of him, knew of her connection to Anubis.

Malik had business in Africa, the Middle East, India. His cells operated everywhere. “You’re…you’re personifying the dog,” she said nervously. “You’re talking about the creature as though he’s a man.”

“Am I?”

“You speak as though the dog’s a personal foe.”

He laughed suddenly. “I guess living in the wilds does that to you. You think about yourself on the same terms as the animals that survive…and hunt around you. You personify them, give them identities you can relate to.”

Skye relaxed a little. It made sense. Her own guilt was making her imagine things. She was reading too much into an innocent conversation.

Or was she?

The howl of the wolf snaked once more through her veins. She shivered. She couldn’t help wondering if an alpha wolf faced off against a cunning jackal, which of the dogs would win the war.

She reached for his arm. She desperately needed to connect with him, to find that center of comfort again, that sense of warm wholeness. But his muscles were like unyielding rock under her fingers. “Come back to bed, Scott,” she urged him. “The fire’s dying. It’s getting cold.”

He turned, hooked a knuckle roughly under her chin, jerked her face to his.

“Tell me about the tattoo, Skye.”

Chapter 13

T
he knife of terror twisted horribly in her gut.
Think, Skye. Think fast. It doesn’t mean he suspects anything.
She forced a laugh, kept her voice as light as she could. “It’s a symbol of precise, reasoned judgment. At least, that’s what I was told when I picked the design out of a book of symbols in an Amsterdam tattoo parlor.”

He stared stonily down at her.

She laughed softly. “I was nineteen. It was a lark. They had all sorts of symbols—Celtic, Egyptian, Asian. I liked the Egyptian dog one. I guess the head does look rather jackal-like.”

“And the sword?”

“For strength of character. I see it as a symbol of fighting for what you believe in.”

She could sense tension increase in his body. Inwardly her stomach jittered.

He couldn’t possibly know. No one knew. Only Jalil. She tried to shrug it off. But he’d knocked her off kilter.

Skye peered out the window at the black forest that surrounded them. But all she could see in the drab, mist-shrouded shapes, was the black face of a jackal. Malik.

A shudder shook through her limbs.

“You’re right.” He broke the silence, took her in his arms. Held her tight. Too tight. As if desperate to hold on to some notion. “It is getting cold out here. Go back to bed. I’ll join you as soon as I stoke the fire, get some warmth back into this place.”

But the warmth was gone from his voice.

She pulled the comforter tight around her body. It did nothing to chase the inner chill, the sense she’d failed a test.

Oh, God, she had to come clean. She couldn’t go on like this. The guilt was eating her, playing tricks with the shadows of her mind.

She had to tell him the truth.

She’d lied again. He was certain of it. She still hadn’t trusted him with the truth. And that cut him.

It shouldn’t. What in hell had given him the delusion of confidence in the first bloody place? Sex? The way she’d held him? The way she’d made him feel so ridiculously whole for the first time in years?

What a freaking fool he was. Scott jabbed the embers, thrust more wood into the flames. Honey settled once again on the rag rug in front of the stove, her ears flicking, twitching at unfamiliar night noises.

With fire crackling once again in the belly of the stove, Scott climbed back into bed.

Skye took him immediately into her arms.

His heart ached.

He wanted to thrust himself deep into her again, to fill that empty void, to find and hold on to that fleeting sense of center that had slipped like mercury through his fingers.

But more than anything he needed to chase away the lies.

He needed her to trust—to confess.

She moved against him, snuggled into the crooks of his body. Her breasts were warm and soft, heavy against his chest. Her arms were smooth, firm. He felt the silk of her hair, her breath caress his face. She was so essentially female.

His
kind of female.

A woman who could be both soft and tender and hard as nails. The kind of woman who’d challenge him, keep him
alive
for the rest of his life. A friend he could take on his wildest adventures. A woman he could take on the next leg of his journey. A woman who might share the passage of life with him.

He shook the notion, tried to focus on the task that had brought him to this point in the first place.

She was a suspected terrorist. Brilliant. Perhaps dangerous.

And he was an agent.

He had no business even entertaining the notion of a future together.

But at the same time, the fact it had even entered his head shook him to his core. Scott Armstrong had not thought about the future. Not for the past nine years. Not since Kaitlin and Leni had died. Not since the Plague Doctor had killed them.

The acrid and familiar anger seeped bitter into his throat.

Was the woman in his arms allied with La Sombra? A man on par with the Plague Doctor?

He stared up at the rafters, watched the flicking light of the flame dance with pagan shadow.

She murmured, pulling him back. He turned, stroked her face. And deep down, a part of him prayed to God he’d find Skye Van Rijn innocent.

He sucked in a breath, filled his lungs to capacity, exhaled slowly.

You really are a fool, Armstrong.

Even if Skye was innocent, it could never work. He was a Bellona agent. And his job had killed his family. He could never put someone he loved in that position again, endanger them.

Ever.

He closed his eyes, drifted toward sleep. But on the gray fringes of sleep and consciousness, where misty dream toyed with reality, Scott felt at one with the old wolf. Inside, his heart was dark and lonely. He howled to go back to a happy place. He howled for a past to which he’d never return. He howled to a bleak future he’d never fill as he once had the past.

And all around, the wilderness heard him, echoed his baleful sound. On the periphery, a jackal prowled, growing desperate, sensing weakness.

Scott swam up from the dark depths of his dreams, up to the light that he could see above him, shimmering on the surface.

His eyes opened to a cabin filled with the bright yellow warmth of morning sun. He could smell flapjacks, hear coffee percolating on the woodstove. He could feel the warm weight of his dog sleeping on his bed at his feet.

And he felt an old familiar happiness coupled with an odd quirk of excitement. It was the feeling he’d always had as a kid on the first morning he and his dad had woken up on one of their fishing trips.

Scott blinked, momentarily confused.

It wasn’t his dog warming his feet. It was Rex’s dog. And it wasn’t his dad flipping pancakes at the woodstove.

It was the woman he’d made love to.

He nudged at Honey with his foot. “Off. Who said you could sleep on the bed?”

The dog looked up, brown eyes wounded.

Skye spun ’round, frying pan in hand, a smile as warm as the sunshine on her face. “I did—the floor’s cold. Morning, handsome.”

“Dogs don’t sleep on the bed in my house.”

“It’s not your house. C’mon, grumpy, breakfast is ready and the fish are biting.”

“Fish?”

“Don’t they bite in the mornings? I’ve decided you’re teaching me how to fly-fish today.”

He sat up, rubbed his hands through his hair. “Oh, you have?”

“Yep.” She set a plate of flapjacks on the table. “Look at this weather.” She waved her hand at the window. “We can’t let a day like today slip by.”

He smiled in spite of himself. Her energy was infectious. “Come here.”

She put her hands on her hips, tilted her chin. “Why?”

“I have a little secret to tell you about fly-fishing.”

She walked slowly toward the bed. As she got near, he lunged forward, grabbed her arm.

She squealed.

He yanked her down onto the bed. She wriggled against his hold.

“Want to hear my secret?” he whispered into her ear.

She stilled in his arms, looked up into his eyes. “What’s your secret, Scott?”

He bent, spoke softly against her lips. “I can’t get enough of you, woman. You’ve infected me. Whatever you’ve given to me runs thick in my blood.”

He pressed his mouth down onto hers. And he slipped his tongue between her lips as his hands worked to unclothe her body.

“You taste like syrup,” he murmured against her mouth as he undid her jeans. “Maple syrup.”

She was as hungry for him as he was for her, her arms reaching for him, her tongue dancing with his. Warm. Sweet. Wild. It was as though he was tasting life itself, tapping right into the core of it.

He forced her backward onto the bed and held his breath. Sunlight pooled warm and gold over her naked body, caught the fine blond hairs on her olive-toned skin. The cool morning air raised tiny goose bumps along her arms, and her nipples were tight, brown nubs.

He pulsed hot, hard with urgent need. He lifted his fingers, gently traced the swell of her breasts, ran his hand firmly down over her belly, found the folds between her thighs.

She wanted him.

She was slick, hot.

He sat back, grasping for a measure of restraint. But she pulled him down onto her and met him with the same raw energy that pounded through him.

The sun changed angles as it rose in the heavens, throwing new shadows across the floor of the cabin. Skye checked her watch—almost noon. They’d spent the better part of the morning in bed, and now she was more than ravenous. “See what you’ve done,” she accused. “The pancakes are cold.”

Scott chuckled, stretching like a lazy beast. “I need a shower. We can warm ’em up after.” He looked around the cabin. “So where’d the realtor say the en suite was?”

She jabbed him in the ribs. “You got two choices, McIntyre. The river. Or the river.”

He sat up. “Coming?”

“The river? You must be nuts. It’s like…freezing.”

He grinned, a devilish slash across his rough, unshaven jaw. Green sparks of life shot from his eyes.

She hadn’t seen him like this. So potently vital. He had a new energy this morning. And it near drove her wild, just looking into those wicked, flashing eyes. She could feel yet another hot little lick of lust unfurl in her belly. She laughed. “Okay. You win. I could handle a cooldown.”

They sat on rocks that hung over the river, sipping freshly brewed coffee. Honey explored the bank down below, snuffling in the shallows, trying to bat the shadows of fish with her paws.

Skye felt utterly cleansed after their dip in one of the eddies down below. It was as if the clear, cold mountain water had washed clean through to her soul. As if she’d been reborn and could start with a fresh slate.

She turned to the man beside her. A lock of his brown hair hung over his brow. His green eyes seemed very light out here in the sun, as if he, too, had been unburdened in some way.

He caught her looking, smiled.

She felt her cheeks flush and turned quickly to look at the burbling water, sipped her coffee. It was warm, sweet, tasted only like fresh coffee out in the wilds could taste. “How come stuff always tastes better out in places like this?”

“It’s the sex.”

She snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

He laughed. Then his tone turned serious. “Maybe it’s just being away from it all. Makes you see and feel things differently. New perspective and all that. My father used to come out to places like this to recharge his batteries.”

“And your mom?”

“She enjoyed her own space when we were gone.”

Skye shifted on the rock, turned to face him. “Tell me about your dad, Scott.”

He shrugged. “Not much to tell.”

“Yes, there is. You used to do these amazing things with him when you were a kid. He taught you about nature, wolves, fishing. I saw how you reacted in that tackle shop. Something happened between you and him. What is it that keeps you apart?”

The ledge of his brow dropped low over his eyes. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because it’s eating at you, I can tell. You haven’t resolved something. Am I right?”

He studied her face intently, turned away. Nodded. “Yeah.”

“Why haven’t you seen him in a while? What happened between you?”

He wouldn’t look at her. He hesitated. Then he spoke out to the water, to the trees and the sky. “Nothing. The only thing that happened was me. I cut him, my mother, out of my life. My whole goddamn family. Everyone. I just stopped seeing them.”

There was a cracked edge to his voice. Low emotion. She reached out, touched his thigh. “Why? Why’d you shut them out?”

He swallowed. “They made me remember. I wanted nothing to do with my old life. Nothing to do with my hometown.”

“Remember your wife, your baby?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” he replied simply. “They died in a car accident.” He lurched up onto his feet, turned his back to her. “It was nine years ago. Sometimes it still feels like yesterday.”

Skye set her mug on the rock, stood behind him, put her arms around his waist, rested her cheek against his back. “I’m sorry, Scott. I’m sorry I pressed you on this.”

“It’s okay. I’ve tried for so long to run from it. I can’t. It’s time I faced it. Dealt with it.”

He turned slowly around. “You’ve made me see that.”

Her breath caught at the sight of the pain in his eyes, in the set of his features. And she knew in that instant she loved the man. Rough edges and all. Because it all made sense. His distance. His brusque manner. He was in pain. And it wasn’t just his leg. His heart had been broken.

And Skye had a desperate desire to mend it. Make it better for him.

And more than anything, she wanted to trust this enigmatic writer. Implicitly.

Because she needed to share, to tell him about her own baby. About Malik. She needed to tell him who she was. Because hiding from him, lying to him now, when he was opening like this to her, made her feel dirty.

But she was still petrified at how he’d react if she told him she was not Skye Van Rijn. That she was a fake. A liar. An impostor.

A trained terrorist.

She didn’t want to lose him now that she’d found him.

She pulled him back to the rock. “Come sit by me. Finish your coffee.” They sipped in silence, watching the waters rush by.

It was a new experience for Skye. To sit like this next to a man, to feel such a deep, visceral connection to him, to feel so utterly at peace with him. It was as though she’d found some kind of center to the universe, a place where there was calm.

But she wasn’t going to kid herself. She knew she’d have to step back out into the storm eventually and choose a path. Whatever direction she went, the chaos raged one way or the other. She knew that. But maybe this time she could take an ally with her, a friend to hold on to. Maybe. If he didn’t hate her for being a liar once he learned the truth. If he didn’t detest who she really was.

All she wanted right now was for this quiet, intimate moment to last. But it was now or never. Leave it any later and she’d be breaking their new trust, their tentative bond. It would be betrayal.

She sucked air in deep. “I know how it feels, to cut out your past,” she said softly.