Security (23 page)

The blood flow didn’t seem to be lessening, despite her hand becoming numb from holding her dress in place. And then it happened.

His eyes flickered open.

Chapter Forty

He felt as if his guts had been ripped open, and he was losing sensation down the left side of his body. He felt ice cold, like someone had immersed him in snow.

As his eyes opened up, a stabbing pain started to build in his chest, but it wasn’t enough to distract him from looking at Autumn.

Her bruised face was wet with tears
, and her lips trembled, her teeth chattering together as she gazed at him.

“Oh, thank God!” she exclaimed. “Thank God! Nathan!” An expression of joy lit up her face.

He reached his hand up to cup her cheek. She leaned her head into his palm and closed her eyes to his touch.

“I thought I’d lost you. I thought after everything we’d been through…” she started in a rush.

“I want you to get yourself to those music awards. And I want you to win…those awards,” he croaked.

Every movement he made, no matter how slight, sent pain shooting through every part of him.

She swept his hair off his forehead. “I will, and you’ll be there with me—not as my bodyguard—as my partner, as the man I want to spend my life with,” she insisted.

“I want you to thank Tawanda…not just for this mission…for every other time she bailed me out of trouble,” he continued.

He saw the look of happiness leave her face as she realized what he was doing. He wasn’t stupid. He had faced death before, but not like this. He felt as weak as a kitten, and the small amount of strength he had left was fading fast.

“You’re saying goodbye. Stop it!” she ordered.

“After you’ve won those awards, I want you to think about what you want to do with your life. You’re talented…and beautiful…but don’t waste time turning up at parties you don’t want to go to just because you think you should. Find out who you are, Autumn. Find out who you want to be.” He struggled to eke out the words.

“I won’t let you leave me. I won’t. You can’t leave me!” she yelled, though her voice faltered. “People don’t leave Autumn Raine!”

“Give your mother a chance. She’s kept secrets her whole life. I think she did it to protect you.”

He wheezed and began to cough. Every convulsion made the blood spurt out of the wound faster. He struggled to breathe.

“Please, Nathan, I can get help. There must be a damn phone in here somewhere.” She got to her feet. “I’ll find one.”

“No, don’t leave me,” he said, reaching for her hand and gripping it in his.

She burst into tears and laid her head against his chest, breathing in the scent of him. It was still there, his cologne, his perspiration, much stronger than the smell of his blood. This couldn’t be the end. She wouldn’t let it be the end. She needed him, and she was sure he needed her, too. They’d had no time to figure out what they could be together.

She raised her head to look at him. “Let me go and get help. I heard the helicopter
, too. I could go and look.”

“It’s too late,” he insisted. His voice was nothing but a rasp now, barely audible, unlike his breathing which had become noisier with every motion.

“What’s going to happen now?”

“What?”

“My dad didn’t come. What’s going to happen? Am I going to be running from kidnappers all my life?” she asked.

At the moment, she didn’t really care what her future held. But, she didn’t know how to make this situation better. She wasn’t sure that idle talk was the answer, but she couldn’t just sit there and watch him slip away. It was better he stayed conscious, and the longer she could keep him with her…well, help might come.

“He’ll come,” Nathan said.

“But he was too late, to save you.”

“He wasn’t coming to save me. He was coming to save you…but that was my job,” he responded with a smile.

She watched his eyes close
, then the loud breathing stopped and she panicked, dropping his hand.

“Nathan! Nathan, wake up! Nathan! Oh God! No! Please! Nathan!”

She shook him, took him by the shoulders and shook him as hard as she could manage, but his body didn’t react the way it should.

“British Army! Put your hands above your head!”

Autumn let out a scream of terror as half a dozen troops dressed in black combat clothing stormed into the room. They were aiming machine guns at her, gas masks covering their faces.

“Miss Raine, your father’s waiting for you. Let’s go,” one of the men said, grabbing Autumn’s arm and hauling her off the floor.

Autumn pulled away from the soldier. “You need to help this man, Nathan…he’s my…he’s my security,” she said.

Another soldier knelt down by Nathan’s body and shook his head at his colleague.

“You need to help him. You need to do heart massage or something. He was breathing, just a second ago. He was talking to me. Stop pulling my arm and let me go to him! If you won’t do anything, I will!” she shouted as fresh tears flooded her face.

The soldier grabbed a black jacket from his colleague and put it around her shoulders to cover her up. “Miss Raine, this area isn’t secure. We need to get you back to headquarters.”

“I’m not leaving him! I’m not going anywhere until you get an ambulance! I don’t believe there’s nothing you can do! I don’t!”

She folded her arms across her chest and tried to look as defiant as she could. It was a hard look to pull off when her heart was breaking in half.

“Flynn, start CPR. Give it five minutes, then call it in,” the soldier relented.

“I’ll help.” Autumn dropped to her knees beside Nathan.

“That I can’t allow. We need to get you safe,” the soldier ordered. He took hold of Autumn’s arm and dragged her back up to her feet.

“Please, I just want to be with him,” she pleaded, watching as the other soldier removed his mask and began the routine of resuscitation.

“There’s nothing you can do. I doubt there’s anything anyone can do,” he told her bluntly.

The helicopter had been hovering, confirming their location and liaising with the team on the ground. A van had been waiting outside the warehouse she’d been held in, to escort her to Secret Service headquarters. Since she’d arrived, she’d lost count of the number of times she had heard the words
“de-brief,” “operation,” and “target.” For her to lose count was one thing, for her not to care she had lost count was something else entirely.

The room they had put her in had a view of the London Eye, just like her apartment. It was farther along the river, but the sights were all there, laid out before her. The Thames, the Houses of Parliament, they were places of significance, but, what she really wanted to catch sight of was the motel she had stayed in with Nathan and the Marisson. Those places were important to her now. Nathan was important, and no one had even mentioned his name since she’d been brought here. She wanted to hear that he was alive, that he was in hospital recovering, that she could see him.

She hadn’t spoken to anyone, not one word, since she had been brought into the offices. She was tired, her throat was dry through a mixture of dehydration and anxiety, and she didn’t see what good talking would do. She had nothing to say. What was there to say?

The door to the room opened, but she didn’t raise her head. It was probably the exceedingly irritating woman who had headed in an hour or so ago. She’d been wearing an Audrey Dupont skirt. Autumn had noticed
, and the realization had sickened her. Now, she’d gladly clean her keyboard with the designer skirt she had worried about creasing just days ago. It was immaterial, and it had taken a bodyguard from Hull to teach her what she should have known already.

“Claire.”

The voice was male and vaguely familiar, but it took her a second to realize exactly who had come into the room. Her head jerked up, attentive at last, and she looked at her father for the first time in seventeen years.

The numbness fell away, and she crumpled before him. The whole trauma of the past week overrode her, and she reached across the table for him, clutching at his hands and letting the anguish pour out.

Through her tears, she could see the man she had missed for so long. The man she remembered as such an important figure in her childhood. The man who had provided her with all those most cherished memories.

The years had aged him. He was no longer the thirty-something from her photos. His once thick, auburn hair was lighter now, receding and flecked with
gray at the edges. He had lines etched into his forehead, and a scar on his chin she didn’t remember, but those eyes, the eyes that mirrored hers, hadn’t altered at all.

“Oh
, Claire, I am so sorry,” Rick spoke. He took his hands from hers and rested them on top of her head as she curled into the table.

She cried, and he let her until she had nothing left to give. Her breathing eventually calmed, and once she had raised her body from the table, he passed her a handkerchief. Not a Kleenex from a box, but a proper, old-fashioned, gentleman’s handkerchief, like the one he’d used to wipe ice cream off her face years ago.

“If there had been any other way, believe me, I would have taken it,” Rick said.

“What do you mean?”

“Pretending to be dead, living a lie, moving from country to country in hiding. I was trying to do what was right for everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t please everyone. I ended up pleasing no one and hurting those that mattered to me. Like you and your mother.”

Autumn shrugged. She knew it was an inappropriate response, but she didn’t know what else to do or say. She knew nothing about what he’d done, who he was, what he’d been through. She had judged her mother for keeping the secret, but how could she sit in judgment on a man she adored, who had lived half his life on the run?

“Your mother and I agreed back then that it was better for you to believe I was dead than to get caught up in a web of deceit. You were only ten. You wouldn’t have been able to understand, and I couldn’t ask you to keep a secret that big. Just imagine having to trot out a lie to friends, to teachers, to boyfriends. We did what we thought was right at the time,” Rick told her.

“I missed you…every day,” Autumn admitted, sniffing into the handkerchief.

“And I missed you. You’ll never know how much,” he said.

His voice was thick with sentiment, and Autumn squeezed his hands a little tighter. Then her heart lurched in her chest and she looked at him with widened eyes.

“How’s Nathan? Which hospital did they take him to? If they didn’t take him to New Hall, could you get him moved? I’ll pay, make sure he gets a private room,” Autumn said in a rush.

She felt, rather than saw, her father suck in a mouthful of air. He didn’t let go of her hands, but he dropped his eyes from hers momentarily. She started to count when he didn’t reply
, and didn’t even try to stop herself from mouthing the words.

“I’m sorry, Claire,” Rick finally said.

“What does that mean?”

“You were close to him?”

“I won’t believe he’s gone. I won’t,” she stated, holding her breath and the tears in.

“He was a good man. We worked together, you know, years ago, when he first joined the unit.”

“I loved him…I love him,” Autumn told.

“If he hadn’t have made that break for it, we might not have been able to save you, we might have been too late. I’ll always be indebted to him for that,” Rick said.

“He can’t be dead, he just can’t be. I won’t believe it.”

Her whole chest felt like it was lined with lead. The dad she hadn’t set eyes on for seventeen years sat opposite her
, yet she didn’t feel it. She needed Nathan. She wanted Nathan. He had become her everything. He was going to be her new future. Where did she go from here?

“I haven’t got long, Claire,” Rick told her, his voice breaking through her thoughts.

“What?”

“I can’t stay here. I have to tell the government everything I know about As-Wana and the life I’ve been leading for the last five years. Then I have to leave again. Things weren’t safe for me under the assumed name I’ve been using most recently. I had to disappear and lie low. The British weren’t sure whether I was being loyal to them. I think they thought I’d defected.”

Autumn wiped her eyes again. “I don’t understand,” she said.

What was he saying to her? She’d just got him back
, yet he was going to leave her again. Then who would she have? Blu-Daddy and Nathan were dead. Her father may as well be because he couldn’t be with her. Who else was there? Her mother? No, Alison had never had time for her before. Why would that change? She didn’t want to be alone. She’d spent most of her life alone. She didn’t want that any more.

“I have to get a new identity, and I have more work to do. I didn’t defect, Claire. I believe in truth and honor, and I will always work to defend my country, but I can’t do it here. I can’t do it with you and your mother.
It would put you at too much risk, and that’s the very last thing I want.”

Truth and honor. Where had she heard that before? From Nathan’s lips. The lips that had kissed her so roughly, sought out every part of her, inside and out. She felt sick and panicked, overwhelmed by nausea.