To the Edge (9 page)

"Lugged a lot of hay bales and wrestled my share of calves back home on the farm, ma'am," he'd said, the picture of modesty when he caught her staring at his massive biceps.

He'd been talking nonstop since Garrett had dragged him out of the middle of that knot of flying fists and booted him toward the door.

She was still amazed that Garrett had never drawn his gun
or his knife. Thank God. In fact, he'd never worked up a sweat. Once he'd grabbed the pool cue, it had pretty much all been over but the obscenities.

They'd been on the road for about five minutes when Garrett
carefully pried the .22 from her fingers—she'd forgotten she still held it—and, leaning over her, stowed it, without a word, in his glove compartment. Not that he'd had any opportunity to speak. Jason had been on a filibuster, extolling Nolan—
No-man
—Garrett's virtues, vices, and, in his humble opinion, godlike status.

She'd managed to piece together that Jason was a part of Charlie Company, First Bat—"that's Battalion, ma'am," he'd explained—at Fort Benning and Garrett had been his sergeant and squad leader until three months ago. Jason was on leave and headed for the Keys but had planned a layover in West Palm with the express intent of connecting with Garrett. Only problem was, he'd hit the bars first and the phone second and had called Garrett as an afterthought when he failed to come up with a compelling reason why the local populace shouldn't just kill him, feed him to the gators, and put everyone out of their misery.

No-man, she'd learned after Garrett had booted Plowboy into the backseat of the Mustang with orders to not even think about bleeding on the upholstery, was—in Plowboy's words—"... one motherfuckin', badass, genuine balls-out fightin' machine, excuse my French, ma'am."

She'd also been assured, as Plowboy babbled in obvious hero worship, that Nolan Garrett was
No-man
to those who'd trained with him and fought with him and would
die
for him because no man challenged him, no man bested him, and no man who knew him was dumb enough to try. No-man was the stuff, if Plowboy was to be believed, that legends were made of.

From what she'd just witnessed in Nirvana, there might be as much truth as hero worship in Plowboy's summation.

For perhaps the hundredth time in as many minutes, Jillian took a mental step back and wondered if she'd somehow stumbled through a time warp and landed a minor role in a B-rated adventure flick without so much as a casting call.

She was a professional career woman, for God's sake. She did not lead a life that invited cryptic death threats or participation in bar brawls. While surreal, the past couple of weeks of dealing with the threats had been nothing compared to the past couple of hours. Everything that had transpired—starting with seeing Garrett through the fog in her bathroom mirror—was too outrageous to even contemplate, let alone quantify. And yet here she was ... smelling of stale beer and cigarette smoke, keeping her eyes peeled for the bikers who had hopped on their hogs and tried to follow them, not to mention there was a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger bleeding all over the backseat, no matter that he'd been ordered not to.

"Is he all right?" she asked, concerned in spite of herself. "Does he need to go to a hospital or something?"

Garrett glanced in the rearview mirror. "How you doing, Wilson?"

"Haven't felt this good since Moby Dick was a freaking minnow, man. Hooah!"

Garrett let out a deep sigh that pretty much stated it all:
We were not having fun.
"What time does your flight leave?"

Plowboy mumbled a time.

Garrett checked his watch, swore, and turned on the Mustang's afterburners.

"The woman—she really heats your pool, huh, No?"

It was o-two hundred hours. They were standing at the curb by the terminal. Nolan gave Plowboy a look that said,
None of your business,
then glanced at the
woman
in question, who was less than a yard away, waiting in the car with the windows rolled down.

He suspected Jillian was just a tad shocky. And yeah, as the young Ranger put it, she heated his pool—which royally pissed him off. So did the kernel of tenderness he felt for her as she sat there, her eyes glazed, her expression stalled somewhere between denial and disbelief.

Wilson laughed, then winced at the pain from his split lip.

"Good luck with that. And hey—thanks for hauling my ass outta there."

"Yeah. Make sure you lose my cell number."

Another broad, wincing grin. "Like old times, huh?"

Yeah,
Nolan thought grimly.
It had been like old times.

He hadn't wanted to admit it, but he'd enjoyed it. The adrenaline rush. Saving one of his boys. He'd enjoyed it a little too much. Since Iraq, he'd been edgy as hell, always on the lookout for bad guys. When he hadn't been dead drunk, the switch had been stuck in the
on
position. Facing a few out-of-shape bikers with ugly attitudes was like flipping a release valve after months of deadly face-offs with Ba'ath Party resistance and fedayeen armed with AK-47s and RPG launchers who lived to take out anyone in a U.S. military uniform.

"We miss you, No," Plowboy added, breaking into Nolan's thoughts. His expression was sober now. "Bat... it's not the same. Nothing's the same. Except the army bullshit. That never changes."

Silence stretched like the long shadows cast by the airport parking security lights. Nolan looked at his feet, then looked beyond Jason's expectant eyes toward the terminal. It was almost empty. As empty as he suddenly felt.

He had to ask. "How's Sara and her boys?"

Plowboy looked very young suddenly, looked every bit the boy he really was instead of the man the army and Iraq had made of him.

"Kids are doin' OK, I guess. They're in counseling," he said with a shrug. "Sara's folks are there now. Will's, too. Doing what they can, ya know. She's out of the hospital. They say there's still hope that she'll walk... and everything." He let out a weary breath. "You couldn't have stopped it, man."

Nolan swallowed. He could have. He
should
have. He was
supposed
to have stopped it. He was supposed to take care of his men. Keep everyone safe. Including Will. But Will was dead. And Sara was a widow ... and whether she walked or not, her life would never be the same again.

"Something just snapped in him, you know?" Plowboy continued. "Something—"

Nolan couldn't stand it anymore. "Look, you're going to miss your flight."

His voice was as rigid as his posture, and when Plowboy just stood there, looking as bleak as the night in his torn shirt and with blood smearing his face, Nolan forced a smile.

"Christ, you're a wreck. Make sure you hit the head." He shoved the duffel into the younger man's hand. "Clean up and change your shirt or they may throw your sorry ass off the plane. And so help me God, if you show up here again and pull another stunt like that, I'll feed you to the gators myself."

"Love you, too, Sarge." Plowboy grinned and stuck out his hand. "Take care, man."

Nolan clasped him on the shoulder, then shoved his hands in his pockets when the Ranger hefted his duffel. For a long moment Nolan simply stood there and watched him walk away.

Weary to her bones, Jillian keyed in her security code and opened the penthouse door. Garrett stopped her with a hand on her arm and a quiet command to stay put.

She was about to snap out a snide remark about the probability of someone breaching security twice in one night being slim to nonexistent when her better judgment popped right up and rallied against it. First, he wouldn't want to hear it. Second, given the way her life was shaping up lately, she wasn't all that confident that Norman Bates wouldn't just decide to show up yet. Third, she was too tired.

Let's face it. She wasn't programmed to handle everything that had happened tonight. In her entire life, she'd never figured on playing a lead role in the adventures of the criminally insane. The smoke stink from the bar and Plowboy's blood on her shorts were two very tangible reminders that, in Plowboy's vernacular, "shit happens" and that truth did, in fact, rival fiction.

"I'm taking a shower," she said when Garrett walked back into the foyer and gave her a grim all-clear nod. "I smell like a brewery. Oh—and Garrett... I do
not
want to find you in my bathroom when I come out."

She didn't wait for his response. She headed straight for her bathroom and locked the door behind her.

Yeah. Like a locked door would keep him out if he wanted in.

Feeling clean and at least marginally better afterward, she dragged a pick through her hair and applied lotion, then slipped into a pair of clean panties, and back into her oversize white silk nightshirt. She was beyond exhaustion but revved on residual adrenaline. From past experience, she knew that when she felt this kind of edgy discomfort, it could keep her awake for hours. So she headed for the kitchen in search of the bottle of chardonnay ... and found her bodyguard standing with his back to her in the dim kitchen light.

She stopped cold as surprised by the sudden kick of her heartbeat as she was to see him standing there in half shadow. He hadn't heard her approach. It stunned her further to realize she had relished a moment like this to simply look at him. Unobserved. Unguarded.

Despite the fact that the kitchen was lit only by pale light cast from the hallway and by the soft glow from the tiny lightbulb on the refrigerator's ice dispenser, he stood out against the shadows in startling clarity.

His back was bare, his tanned skin roped with contoured muscle. But for the occasional scar—she assured herself she didn't want to know how he'd gotten them—he
could
been a model advertising the stunning results of a state-of-the-art physical fitness machine. Only this was no cover boy standing with his bare feet braced wide apart in her kitchen.

This was a man.

This was a warrior with the battle scars to prove it.

If she'd had any doubts about it before, he'd allayed them tonight as he fought his way out of the bar. Every move had been precision, calculated and efficient. Controlled. He could have done much more to those men than left them bruised and battered and littering the bar floor. And that said more about him than Jason "Plowboy" Wilson's worshipful commentary.

Warrior.

Garrett's shoulders were broad with it. His ribs were lean, and where his waist narrowed beneath the low-slung and well-worn jeans his incredible backside was hard and tight. Everywhere she looked, she saw strength—of body, of purpose, of mind.

Everywhere she looked, she saw a man unlike most of the men she knew. Men who were civilized and sophisticated. The men she knew didn't wear shoulder holsters and wouldn't have a clue—much less the inclination—how to rescue a friend from a mob of mean-minded men like the ones he'd encountered in Nirvana.

The men she knew didn't make her nerves sing and her pulse jump when she looked at them, either. He did. And that reaction was something she didn't like and had yet to figure out.

She'd sort it out when she wasn't so exhausted. For now, she just let herself look.

Like her, he'd showered again. His hair was still wet. A trickle of water ran down the deep indentation of his spine and disappeared beneath the waistband of his jeans. As he tipped his head back and downed a long pull from a bottle of root beer, he looked too raw, too masculine, and too big for her kitchen. And yet he looked oddly vulnerable.

Maybe it was the way his jeans broke over the arch of his bare feet. Maybe it was the bruise on his shoulder that even now was transitioning from red to smudgy blue. Or maybe it was the weariness she sensed in him. Not a physical weariness, though she was sure he felt that, too, but an emotional fatigue.

It occurred to her then that she was watching a man who may actually be weary of the fight, weary of being strong, weary of carrying the scars on his body that undoubtedly scarred his soul as well. It was yet another unsettling kernel of the notion she'd been nursing that he was human. A reinforcement of her theory that he harbored secrets and sorrow and pain.

Against all odds, she felt an overwhelming urge to go to him again. To touch him. To tell him she was on to him. Let him know what she knew—that he wasn't as hard as he looked. And that it was OK. He didn't have to be. At least not with her.

And where, for God's sake, was this coming from? Why was she even going there again? He was a hired thug. She didn't like him. She didn't want to like him. Didn't want to know him, either. And most of all, she didn't want him here.

Still something about him compelled her to... to what?

She shook her head. She must be really tired. Or maybe feeling a little vulnerable herself.

Still standing like a thief in the shadows of the hallway, she thought back to the scene when they'd dropped the young Ranger at the airport. She'd stayed in the car, but the windows were down as the two men stood at the curb by the terminal doors. She'd seen. As gruff as he'd been, he cared about Plowboy. The feeling had been mutual.

There had been more than respect and responsibility between them. There may even have been love, but as with most men of his ilk, they'd buffered that emotion with grunts and name-calling, dancing around their true feelings with silences and insults.