Boneyard Ridge (16 page)

He considered and rejected a salacious retort, knowing that such an obvious attempt at distraction would only make her more curious. “Some missing muscle tissue. A lot of scarring.”

“Can I see it?” Almost as soon as the words slipped from her mouth, her gaze snapped up to meet his, a flush of pink color darkening her face. “I’m sorry. I did not just ask you that.”

“I think you did,” he answered, stunned by the fact that he was actually standing here in the middle of Alexander Quinn’s kitchen, seriously considering dropping trou so she could see his bum leg.

All because she’d asked him to do it.

“I just—” She pressed her lips to a thin line, her brow furrowing. “I don’t know why, but I want to know—”

“What it looks like?”

She shook her head, still frowning. “It’s not curiosity. It’s—” She blew out a long breath. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

Perversely, her change of heart only made him want to show her what his jeans were hiding. It wasn’t pretty. It might even be shocking—there were still days, even now, when he looked at his scarred leg and cringed at the sight.

But it would be honest. As honest as the moment when she’d looked up at him with those big gray eyes and confessed she’d killed a man with a shotgun.

Before he lost his nerve, he unzipped his jeans and pulled them down, baring his bad leg to her searching eyes.

Chapter Twelve

Susannah’s gaze flicked down toward the road map of scars that circled his leg from thigh to ankle. Her mouth dropped open and she released a shaky gasp.

Hunter followed her gaze, trying to remember what it had been like to get that first look at his injury. It had been so much worse then, of course, the edges of torn skin raw and discolored and barely held together with hundreds of sutures.

Even now, with the wounds long healed, the contours of the leg were misshapen in places where the blast had destroyed muscle tissue. There was one particularly large patch of skin on his calf where doctors had used skin grafts to repair the damage from a large piece of flaming debris. And the scars were still purple and angry-looking, potent reminders of the horrors of that day in the Helmand Province.

“Oh,” she said. The word came out long and slow, like a lament.

He reached for his jeans and started to pull them back up, but in the span of a heartbeat, she was at his side, her fingers brushing over the long scar on his thigh with exquisite delicacy.

“Does it hurt?” she asked softly, her gaze lingering on the scar.

“No,” he lied. It hurt, horribly, but not the way she meant.

And even worse, her fingers on his flesh felt as good as anything he’d experienced in a long, long time. So good that every inch of his skin, even the broken patches that were still partly numb, seemed to burst into flames at her touch.

“I can’t believe I let you haul me around on your back.”

He pulled away from her pity, dragging his jeans back into place and zipping the fly with trembling fingers.

“I didn’t mean—” She broke off midsentence, frustration evident in her pale eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No. I shouldn’t have.” He scraped his hand through his hair, shocked by how effortlessly it ran across the short spikes of his newly shaved cut.

“You don’t think it makes you less—” Once again, she stopped short.

He made himself look at her and saw her gazing back at him with a look so full of misery that he felt like a heel.

“Less what? Less virile? Less of a man?”

“Do you?”

He didn’t know how to answer that question. The injury certainly hadn’t done a damn thing to quell his sex drive, if his current state of arousal was any indication.

But he hadn’t had sex since the injury. Never even really considered it seriously, not to this day.

And he was pretty sure the mangled condition of his leg figured into that equation somewhere.

“I know guys aren’t as sensitive as women about their looks,” she said quietly. She still stood close to him, close enough to touch. Close enough to catch fire if the flames surging inside him broke loose of his faltering control.

“Probably not,” he admitted. “I’m not ashamed of my scars.”

He was ashamed of what had led to them, however. If he was being perfectly honest with himself, a circumstance he mostly avoided these days. Honesty was painful, and he was tired of hurting.

“You shouldn’t be.”

He wanted to argue with her, the urge to spill the whole ugly tale so powerful it felt like poison in his gut. His leg was bad. It couldn’t do the same things he’d once asked of it. But he was stronger now than he had been in the middle of that burning hell.

He’d never known that level of utter helplessness before in his life. He prayed to God he’d never know it again.

He willed Susannah to step back from him, to take away her soft warmth, her sweet scent, her gentle, disarming gaze.

Of course, being Susannah, she stepped closer, her hands lifting to his cheeks, ensnaring him. “I have no idea what to say to you,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I don’t know what you need.”

You,
he thought with growing dismay.
I just need you
.

When she leaned in, he thought she was going to kiss him. But then her face turned, her cheek glided like silk against his, and she pulled him into an embrace that threatened to deconstruct him completely.

He tried not to return the embrace, tried not to let his arms wrap around her slim waist and tug her closer, tried not to bury his face in the curve of her neck. Tried not to need her so desperately.

He did not succeed.

Time seemed to slow to nothing, and still she didn’t move away from him. They settled there, his hips pressed back into the kitchen counter, her legs tangled with his as she settled her body against his. Despite his arousal, he felt no burning need to change anything, no desire to break away from her grasp nor to take control and push the closeness between them to a different place.

Slowly, the tension in his body eased, and even desire ebbed to a slow, sweet burn low in his belly. He felt her fingers brush through the crisp stubble of his buzz cut, exploring lightly, like a curious child.

A bubble of humor rose unexpectedly in his chest. “The ladies always love the buzz cut,” he murmured against her throat.

She laughed in his ear, but he felt it rumble through him everywhere their bodies touched. “It’s hypnotic.”

He eased her away from him, but not too far, still holding on to her waist to keep her close. “In case you’re wondering, my virility is just fine.”

She flashed him a sly grin. “Yeah, I can tell.”

She crossed back to the table, picked up her own pack and slipped her arms through the straps, adjusting them until they fit. By the time she put the backpack down and turned to face him again, she’d donned a mask of cool professionalism, as if the warm, sweet woman who’d just hugged him out of his bad mood had disappeared.

He felt the loss more keenly than he’d expected.

“I think we’re going to have to risk leaving the packs somewhere off the hotel property,” she said. “If we take them with us, we’ll stick out like sore thumbs, and I don’t like the idea of leaving them in the SUV, in case we can’t get back to the parking garage.”

“Good thinking.” He flashed her a grin. “Sure you didn’t spend some time in the Army?”

She smiled, but there was careful distance in her expression. “I’m sure. But I think my grandmother may have spent some time as a boot-camp drill sergeant.”

There was a thread of sadness in her voice, underlying the composure. It had sharp edges, pricking his conscience. He’d spent so much of the last few months with his head stuck in the middle of his own problems, it hadn’t even occurred to him that she had spent over a decade isolated from everyone she’d loved. “Do you ever get to see your grandmother?”

She looked away, her profile sharp with regret. “She died two years ago.” She turned her winter-bleak eyes to meet his gaze. “We made a deal before I left, you see. That she would take out a classified ad in the online Knoxville newspaper once a week, just to let me know everything was okay. Then, one month, it wasn’t there. And I knew. I checked the obituaries for the month and there it was. She died peacefully in her sleep at the age of eighty-nine.”

Despite the distance she’d deliberately put between them, he couldn’t have stopped himself from touching her again if he’d tried. Cradling her face between his hands, he bent and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry. I would hate to find out about my sister’s death that way.”

She covered his hands with hers, gently easing them away from her face and stepping back. But she kept her fingers entwined with his. “Does your sister know? What you’re doing? Where you are?”

Her question was as good as a bucket of ice water in the face. Janet knew he’d joined the BRI. But she didn’t know he was working undercover. Quinn had convinced him he couldn’t let her know the truth.

Now he wished he’d listened to his own instincts. But he couldn’t dwell on what he couldn’t change.

Avoiding the question, he let go of her fingers and nodded toward the back door. The garage that held their transportation was through that door. “Let’s get everything packed in the SUV for tonight. Then we should probably try to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long night.”

Without waiting for her, he headed out the cabin’s back door.

* * *

S
HE SHOULD BE
feeling anxious, Susannah thought. Jittery. But somehow the mere act of doing something besides running and hiding had a calming effect on her nerves, so that by the time they pulled up to the ticket gate of the executive parking garage, she rattled off the employee access code without even having to think about it, though it had been months since she’d parked there.

“Will hotel security be able to identify you by the code?” Hunter asked a moment later as the metal gate rose and they drove into the belly of the concrete garage.

“No. It’s a universal code. They do change it whenever an executive leaves or is fired, but there’s not a lot of turnover here. The company treats executives well, and it’s hard to beat the view from our offices.”

“I didn’t spot a camera, but I assume there is one?”

“I honestly don’t know. Like I said, security expenditures tend to lean heavily on the guest-protection side of the equation. If there is a camera, it’s probably not great quality.” She glanced at him, taking in his pin-neat appearance. “And trust me when I say, even up close, you look nothing like the maintenance man I ran into in the elevator the other day.”

The corner of his lip crooked. “Should I say thanks?”

She grinned back at him. “Entirely up to you.”

He picked out a parking spot halfway between the exit and the basement entrance, close enough that they had a chance of winning a footrace to the SUV but not so close that they’d have to drive the whole curving length of the garage to reach freedom.

They’d stashed their rucksacks behind a fallen tree about a quarter mile up the winding two-lane road that led to the Highland Hotel and Resort. If they managed to ditch pursuers by the time they reached that spot in the road, they could pull off down a dirt road about two hundred yards past the hiding place, hide the SUV in the trees and circle back to get their supplies.

For the hotel invasion, they’d agreed to take a minimum of tools. Their weapons, of course—Hunter’s Glock still safely hidden in his ankle holster, hers tucked into a pancake holster at the small of her back, the bulge covered by her loose-fitting rain jacket. Susannah’s multiblade Swiss Army knife was tucked in the pocket of her jeans. She’d packed another pocketknife she’d found at Quinn’s place in Hunter’s backpack, but she’d forgotten to grab it when they stashed the packs. It probably didn’t matter—she assumed former First Sergeant Hunter Bragg was probably carrying something even more useful, and deadly. And they both carried small pen-size flashlights, in case they needed to provide their own light.

They entered the hotel through the basement door and stopped just inside a narrow corridor that ended at a simple steel door about ten yards away. “Tell me that door isn’t locked,” Hunter said quietly.

She had no idea whether it would be, she realized with dismay. She hadn’t even remembered there was a second door into the maintenance area. “Only one way to find out.” Bracing herself, she strode forward and turned the door handle.

It gave easily, the door swinging open with the faintest of creaks. A shiver of relief washed through her and she edged inside the larger maintenance area.

The mysterious, humming source of the hotel’s electricity, air-conditioning and heat wasn’t visible from this part of the basement, hidden behind a row of doors that lined the left side of a wider corridor leading from the garage to the service elevators located near the center of the room. Susannah bypassed the elevators and went to a large steel door just beyond. E
MERGENCY
E
XIT
was written in bright red letters on a sign just over the doorframe.

The door opened into a roomy stairwell. Once she and Hunter made it inside the relative safety of the enclosed area, Susannah let out a gusty sigh of relief.

“On the service elevators, this is marked
P
for Parking. I think the stairway doors to the floor levels should be marked the same way—lobby will be one, second floor two, etc.” She realized he was looking at her with a faint smile on his face. “Oh, right. You worked maintenance here. You probably already knew that.”

He shrugged. “I did. And you’re right. That’s how they’re marked. So where do you want to go first?”

“My office,” she said. “I want to see if Marcus Lemonde is hiding anything in his desk that we need to know about.”

As they reached the lobby level, she reached for the door, but Hunter caught her wrist before she could push the handle. “Let’s go up another flight. If I’m remembering the floor plans correctly, this door comes out in view of the lobby desk. We go up to second, we can go down the hall, come back down from the other side and none of the night staff is likely to see us.”