Shadow Alpha (5 page)

Dair didn’t know whether to feel glad that Kat was no longer acting like a zombie, or tell her to move her butt—now—or he would move it for her.

She could have all the answers she wanted once they were far away from here, but until then…! “You already acknowledged I’m Dair Grayson.”

“I fed you that line.”

“What about the doll?” he reasoned impatiently. “How the hell would I know about the doll if Gregori hadn’t told me?”

“Take-off-the-goggles!”

Dair’s jaw tightened at her stubbornness. So much for the sweet and innocent Katya he remembered! “Fine!” He ripped off the night-vision goggles to glare across the hood of the SUV at her. “Satisfied?”

Kat wasn’t anywhere near to being reassured. Yes, she had followed this man into the woods, because he seemed to know where he was going. But five years of being Sergei Orlov’s wife had taught her never to take anything at face value. That nothing was ever as innocent as it looked. Least of all Sergei.

“Open the door of the SUV so that the interior light will come on and I can see you properly,” she instructed tautly.

There was the sound of an impatient sigh in the darkness. “And allow the light to alert anyone looking for us to exactly where we are?”

“We could stop wasting any more time if you just did what I asked,” Kat reasoned.

“I think I preferred you when you weren’t talking!” The driver’s door was wrenched open, giving Kat her first clear view of the man who had carried her out of the clinic.

Those dreadful tweeds and the dark-rimmed glasses of yesterday morning were now gone, allowing Kat to look her fill of those harshly hewn features and that livid scar at his temple.

His eyes were a curious color between grey and green, cheekbones sharply etched, nose long and straight, sculptured lips set in a grim line, his jaw square and determined.

He was dressed from head to toe in black; fitted tee, jeans, and heavy boots.

He looked like a warrior.

He looked like Dair Grayson.

Not that much younger Dair she had fallen in love with when she was only fifteen, but a hardened soldier who looked as if he could take on a whole army single-handedly—and win.

“Satisfied?” he growled, his scowl emphasizing that scar on his temple.

A scar that hadn’t been there the last time Kat had seen Dair Grayson. How had he gotten it? There had been lots of rumors after his disappearance all those years ago, and one of them had been that he had gone into the army to get away from his family’s reputation. That livid scar on his temple seemed to indicate, if that had been the case, that he had seen action.

Dair really was a warrior.

“Okay.” Kat nodded as she wrenched open the passenger door of the vehicle and climbed inside. “Well?” She looked at Dair expectantly as he still stood outside.

“I definitely preferred it when you weren’t speaking!” he muttered as he pulled the goggles back on and climbed in beside her.

Kat was having difficulty holding back a smile. Whatever happened next, for the moment she was free. And that freedom had never tasted sweeter.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have told me how to avoid taking the drugs I hadn’t realized they were putting in my food.” She shrugged dismissively.

That her brother Gregori had chosen Dair Grayson, of all men, a member of the Montgomery family, to come and rescue her, seemed slightly bizarre; was it any wonder she’d had trouble believing her own eyes and ears?

Although it perhaps also made a certain sense, when Dair had no connection to the Markovic family, allowing Gregori to deny any involvement if questioned by Sergei, or more likely, Ivan Orlov.

Dair’s own reasons for agreeing to come here were harder to understand.

“Buckle up and hold on,” he now instructed grimly as he turned on the ignition. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

That had to be the biggest understatement of the evening.

Dair didn’t switch on the headlights of the vehicle, and the complete blackness outside the windows made it impossible for Kat to know when or if the four-by-four was going to go down and up on the rough forest terrain, and she couldn’t help her gasp of terror every time she saw the dark shadow of a tree looming in their path.

Even hanging on to the handhold above her head, Kat felt as if her brain was being shaken about inside her skull, and her gritted teeth and clenched jaw weren’t too happy about the situation either.

“Close your eyes,” Dair instructed after she had given yet another gasp of surprise at those looming trees.

Like that was going to happen.

Kat may have lost several weeks of her life in a drug and despair-induced state, but that only made her more determined not to miss a moment more of it. Even the dangerous parts.

Especially the dangerous parts.

For the first time in weeks Kat felt truly alive again, the adrenaline pumping through her veins and filling her with a light-headed exultation.

“You’re enjoying all of this, aren’t you,” she said wonderingly as she saw the grin on Dair’s face.

He scowled darkly. “Risking my own life to save someone else’s?”

Dair had saved her life, yes. And with him beside her Kat felt safe for the first time in weeks. Possibly years. Besides which, she was as elated as he was by this wild ride. “Where are we going?” she prompted as she clung even tighter to the handhold.

“Private airport. Five miles away. I have a private jet fueled and waiting,” Dair dismissed economically.

Of course he did; they could hardly stay in the New York area. The Orlovs owned New York, knew if someone sneezed in the wrong direction. There was nowhere here for them to hide, nowhere for them to run where the Orlovs wouldn’t find them.

Which had become the story of Kat’s life since she married Sergei.

Something she really wasn’t going to think about right now. For the moment she was free, and when the opportunity arose she was going to make a run for it and get as far away from Sergei, Gregori,
and
Dair as she could. She hated doing that to Gregori, but hopefully she would be able to find some way later on of letting him know she was safe. And it may be a bit ungrateful of her, when Dair had put himself in danger by rescuing her, but it was the only way she could see out of this situation. With her out of the picture, both Gregori and Dair would have deniability, if—when—the Orlovs questioned them about her whereabouts.

The fact that she and Dair were shortly going to board a plane complicated things a bit, but once they landed in England, she would surely be able to find an opportunity to slip away and go somewhere far away from London?

In the meantime it would give her the opportunity to see if Dair had any money on him she could ‘borrow’, enough perhaps to see her through the first couple of days, until she found somewhere to hide and a job to pay her own way. At which time she would be able to pay Dair back the money she intended on borrowing from him. She wasn’t fussy about what work she did, and certainly no one would think to look for Katya Markovic working in a café or as a maid in a hotel.

Maybe she could go to Scotland, or North Wales; she had never been to either place and both of them looked ruggedly beautiful from photographs she had seen of them in magazines. It was—

“A few more minutes and we should be out on the road—damn it!” Dair swore profusely as they hit a particularly deep dip in the forest floor. “You okay?” He gave her a quick glance once he had the SUV straightened up.

“Fine,” Kat managed to mutter between her clenched teeth.

Dair gave a grin of satisfaction even as he concentrated on getting them safely out of here. It would have taken much longer by road, and there were no headlights visible to show any vehicles were following in the woods behind them. But he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that his intentions hadn’t been obvious, and one of the police cars wouldn’t have doubled back to be waiting for them when they emerged out onto the highway. If that was the case they were in for a car chase too.

He had to give it to Kat, though; she had taken all of this in stride, once reassured he was who she thought he was.

It was curious that she had recognized him earlier just from the sound of his voice when he had spoken to her in the darkness; he couldn’t claim he would have been able to do the same in regard to her own voice. Damn it, he had barely recognized Kat yesterday morning, and he had been looking at her in full sunlight.

That bastard Sergei had a lot to answer for. Luckily Dair knew that Gregori Markovic was exactly the man to make sure that he did.

Dair had been involved in some serious fighting during his years in the army, and several of the security cases he had worked on during the past few years hadn’t always been resolved without bloodshed. But a man drugging his own wife, and then locking her away in a secure clinic, leaving her totally defenseless, went against every code of honor Dair possessed. And his investigation indicated Kat had been at the clinic since shortly after arriving back in New York following her father’s funeral.

If Gregori didn’t kick Sergei’s ass hard enough then Dair was going to do it for him!

Dair didn’t have any time to give more thought to that subject as the SUV barreled out of the cover of the trees and out onto the highway, the vehicle skidding briefly as the wheels lost traction on the smooth surface of the road.

Luckily there was no other traffic on the road for them to hit, but even so it took Dair several seconds to get the SUV under control and accelerating in the direction of the private airport.

He kept the night-goggles on and the headlights of the vehicle off, but even so he was able to ease up on the tension in his shoulders a little as he leaned back in his seat, the adrenaline still pumping hotly through his veins.

Only for him to tense up again the moment he spared Kat a glance. She was staring at him with those huge dark eyes a man could find himself drowning in if he allowed it.

Dair didn’t allow it. Instead he raised his hand and rubbed the scar on his temple, as a reminder of what had happened the last time he had trusted a woman with those same limpid dark eyes. He had been lucky to survive the experience.

Nor was he the adrenaline junkie Kat had implied he was. At least, he didn’t think he was. He had been given a job to do, and he had done it to the best of his ability. No personal involvement, no emotions, just the job he had been trained to do. End of story.

Yeah, and that was Santa’s sleigh and reindeer he had just seen winging their way across the sky.

It
had
been just a job, until his first glimpse of Kat in the clinic yesterday. Then it had become personal. Protectively personal. Sergei Orlov wasn’t going to get to Kat again without going through him.

“What?” the anger rasped in his voice. “Would you rather I hadn’t bothered to come for you, that I had just left you sitting in that place, strapped to the chair?”

There was silence inside the vehicle for several minutes, and then the sound of Kat’s raggedly indrawn breath. As if she had forgotten to breathe for those same minutes. “They always strapped me down before Sergei came to visit me.”

Dair gave her another quick glance. “Why?”

She gave a shrug. “Probably because the first time he came to see me…in there, I tried to stab him with the knife from my breakfast tray.”

“What—! Why?” So much for his having believed Kat to have a ‘gentle soul’; there was nothing gentle about wanting to stab your husband with a dinner knife.

“Shouldn’t you put the headlights on now?” she prompted calmly. “I think we will attract more attention, from other drivers, as well as the police if they should happen to drive by, if we don’t have any lights on the car.”

Dair was well aware that Kat was deflecting the conversation, but that didn’t make her point any less valid. They were only about a mile from the airport now, and ran the chance of meeting other traffic the closer they got.

He turned on the headlights before ripping off the night-goggles and throwing them onto the back seat, the lights from the dashboard now allowing for some vision inside the vehicle. For instance, he could now see Kat’s face as a pale oval, and that her hands were clasped together so tightly in her lap the knuckles showed white.

As if just talking about her husband made her feel violent.

“Why Kat?” Dair prompted again softly. “Not that I don’t understand the sentiment; I could happily put a bullet through Sergei’s heart myself right now, and not give a damn.”

It wasn’t a subject to laugh over, and yet that was exactly what Kat found herself doing. It helped a little to know that her violent feelings towards Sergei, the hatred she now felt towards him, weren’t as insane as she had thought they were.

“Obviously, whatever my reasoning was at the time, I didn’t succeed,” she drawled self-derisively.

“Didn’t help your case at the clinic, though, I’m guessing?”

“No,” she acknowledged heavily, remembering the humiliation she had felt at being strapped to her chair before each of Sergei’s visits after that. In retrospect she also realized they had probably upped the meds they were giving her too, because her memories became a little hazy after her first week at the clinic. “I really don’t want to talk about this right now, Dair.”