AWOL with the Operative (19 page)

He hated the idea of watching her walk away from him. As if it might be the last time they would part from each other, he stood there imprinting her image on his mind. Her lush mouth, creamy complexion, luminous green eyes, the shallow cleft in her chin.

He could bear looking at those. But not that sensational body. Not when over these last few days he’d fought himself to keep his hands off her. To do otherwise would have been fatal.

All he could manage was to remind himself how relieved he would be when this whole thing was done with. When he could safely hand her over and walk away. Eve didn’t need someone like him, all messed up inside, complicating her life. She was too fine of a woman for that.

“One more thing,” he said, his voice dangerously husky, threatening to expose the emotions churning inside him. “Keep the drapes closed and your door locked. Don’t open it to anyone but me.”

“Understood. How long do you think you’ll be getting to me?”

“Impossible to say when I don’t know what delays I might encounter. Probably a couple of hours after nightfall at least. You’d better go now.”

She gazed at him for a long moment with those wide eyes that had him struggling with the urge to kiss her goodbye. Only when she slid the sunglasses over her nose, shading her eyes from his view, was Sam able to restrain himself.

In silence, without another word, Eve turned and walked away from him. He went on standing there, needing to make certain that she passed through the American gate.

With an endless tension gripping his whole body, he watched her move slowly forward in the line. There was no delay at the Canadian station. The guards there didn’t care about who was leaving, only those wanting to enter. She was passed on down to the U.S. gate.

Sam held his breath as Eve removed her passport from her bag, displayed it to the young American guard who briefly examined it, poked through the contents of her shopping bag, exchanged what appeared to be no more than a few casual words with her, then waved her on through.

She had crossed the border without a challenge. Sam was able to breathe again.

He lingered there for another minute until she mingled with the traffic on the other side and disappeared from view. Only then did he walk away, intending to find a place where he could wait for darkness, when he would make his way out into the countryside. And back to Eve.

Sam, Sam, where are you?

It was after eleven o’clock, and Eve was frantic, hating the sight of the cramped room, feeling trapped within its walls.

How many Starlight Motels could there be across the country? she’d wondered. Maybe most of them were like this one, with outdated furniture, worn carpets and nothing to distinguish them from all the other Starlight Motels, except for the cheap prints on the walls. This one featured garish scenes of the Rocky Mountains.

Eve had grown so sick of looking at those pictures she had gone into the adjoining bathroom and sat on the toilet seat. But this was no better. It made no difference where she settled. Here or in the bedroom, her worry about Sam was just as deep and constant.

In the beginning, even more than two hours after nightfall, she had made every effort to exercise patience. Told herself there could be any number of understandable factors delaying Sam’s arrival.

It might have been necessary for Sam to travel a considerable distance away from Calhoun before he was able to find some spot isolated enough to ensure a safe crossing. That achieved, he would have faced a long hike back in the dark and then the need to find the motel with her cap on the door. All of it requiring time.

But this much time?

In the end, her patience had morphed into scenarios that had no harmless explanations. He had lost his way. The injured leg had failed him or, worse, had been torn open while he’d crawled through a tangle of barbed wire. He’d been discovered sneaking across the border and was now in a jail cell.

All those fears had been real to her. And any one of them carried the same outcome. Sam was not going to arrive. He was never coming, and tomorrow morning she would be alone when she boarded the first bus out of Elbow Bend.

Eve was sick with dread, prepared to unlock the door and check the knob again to be sure the cap was still there and hadn’t somehow been removed, even to risk venturing outside to hunt for him, when a sharp rap sounded on the door.

Breathless with a sweet relief, she flew to the door, where she heard Sam on the other side calling out a low “It’s me, Eve.”

Fumbling with the lock, she opened the door and swung it back. He scarcely had time to slip inside and lock the door behind him before she recklessly launched herself into his arms. The sight of him was so wonderful she didn’t care what the consequences might be. She wanted him holding her, his body pressed tightly against hers.

The miracle of it was he seemed to need the same long-denied embrace. More than that, better than that, he bent his head to cover her face with a series of feverish kisses.

Kisses she welcomed with equal abandon, and between which she managed wild murmurs of “I thought you weren’t coming. I thought maybe a border patrol stopped you. That they’d have dogs with them—vicious dogs.”

He chuckled, responded with an easy “No patrols, no dogs. The only thing I risked out there was the possibility of hidden sensors. Seems like, if they were there, I must have avoided them.”

There was no talk after that. There were just his kisses that branded her cheeks and throat, nipped the lobes of her ears. Kisses that escalated, with his mouth finally claiming her own.

Eve could hear her moans as his tongue parted her lips, seeking and achieving the entry she’d wanted for far too long.

It was a sizzling connection, a man and a woman communicating their desire for each other on the deepest, most intimate level. A mutual exploration that involved not just the contact of their moist lips and tongues, but flavor, scent and, for Eve at least, emotions that spiraled out of control.

Maybe it was that way for Sam, too. Maybe this was what the groans low in his throat expressed, a release of the restraint he’d exercised so rigidly ever since the recovery of his memory.

Whatever the explanation, when he lifted his mouth from hers, he registered his urgency with a raw “It just about killed me seeing you walk away to that gate.”

“How do you think I felt leaving you there?”

“We can do something about that separation.”

For this one night, anyway.

Sam didn’t add those words. But, spoken or unspoken, she sensed them. She refused to let them matter. Whatever tomorrow, or all the tomorrows after that, might bring, she was willing to settle for tonight.

Demonstrating his own eager readiness for this, his arms still around her, Sam backed her up to the queen-sized bed. All it needed was a nudge from him to send her falling onto the bed.

Did he release her? He must have, but with her every nerve ending on fire she couldn’t be sure. If he had, he joined her instantly, his strong body covering hers, pinning her to the bed.

His hands were all over her, stroking her breasts, sliding over her hips, parting her thighs. Eve felt the heat of one of those hands squeezed up hard against the juncture of her legs, his long fingers rubbing that most sensitive area of her body so skillfully it didn’t seem to matter that she was still fully dressed.

It mattered to Sam. “The hell with this,” he growled. “I want us naked. I want every part of me feeling every part of you with nothing in the way.”

Lifting himself away from her, he began to tear at his clothes in a frenzy. Garments flew off the bed in every direction. She watched in dry-mouthed fascination as his body swiftly emerged. The sleek muscles of his arms and chest, his narrow hips and long legs And between them the dark-framed shaft that defined his manhood.

“You, too, Eve,” he commanded her.

With trembling fingers, she obeyed him, shedding her clothes and casting them aside. Somehow in their mad scramble, he managed to remove the coverlet from beneath them, exposing the sheets to the same naked state as their bodies.

Eve’s emotions were in a turmoil of sensation when he pressed her down against those sheets. The joy of his hard flesh against her soft flesh. His hands licking down her sides, tracing the contours of her body. His deep voice demanding, “What do you want, Eve? Tell me what you want.”

“You, Sam. Just you.”

“Like this?”

She gasped when, head dipping, his mouth closed on the nipple of one of her breasts, suckling so strongly that she cried out in blind pleasure.

“Or maybe this?” he asked, moving on to her other breast, where his tongue tugged the peak into a diamond-hard rigidity.

“Enough,” she pleaded.

“No, not nearly enough.”

And it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t, even though she was fast losing all control. Did lose it when his mouth descended to the mound between her thighs, found and fastened on the nub within the center of that mound. Refused to release it until Eve was bucking in a wet, furious climax.

Had the spasms been long enough for Sam to extract a condom from the supply in his coat pocket, sheathe himself with it? Again without her awareness? He had to have done so because, when the last waves subsided, he was poised above her and ready.

Just before he joined himself to her, he captured her gaze. Eve found herself looking directly into those compelling, brown eyes. The amber lights in them had never been brighter. Or affected her more deeply, conveying— What? She was afraid to call it anything like love, settling instead for a profound tenderness. That she knew he was capable of.

For now it had to be enough.

With his gaze still holding hers, Sam’s swollen length surged into her. He barely gave her time to adjust to him before he began to deliver a series of long, deep strokes. Slow at first, then increasing in tempo.

She dug her fingers into his solid back, clutching at him, endeavoring to match his rhythms with her own in a storm of lovemaking unlike any they had engaged in before.

How was it possible, Eve wondered, that a drab, ordinary motel room could be transformed by their passion into something that was pure magic? But magic it was as Sam’s body consumed hers, lifting her into a second release so intense it had her crying out his name.

His own satisfaction followed almost immediately. Sealing their completion with a gentle kiss, he rolled away from her, gathering her close against his side.

For long moments, she savored the mellow aftermath of their union. It should have been all she needed. It wasn’t. Not when, God help her, her love for him was so hungry it called out for a commitment.

That, Eve knew, was not possible. Not as long as Sam continued to keep his dark, bitter secret locked inside himself. Maybe not even if he released it to her. But she could no longer tolerate his emotional withdrawal. Felt she had a right to share his pain, to understand it.

Fortifying herself with a deep breath of air, she lifted herself on one elbow to look down on him. “Sam?”

“Mmm?”

“There’s something I have to ask you.”

“Yes?”

She felt him stir uneasily against her side, as if anticipating something unpleasant. Which, for him, it probably would be.

“I think you know what it is. Knew back on the river I wasn’t going to let it rest. I want to know what you’ve been hiding from me. What’s got you suffering so terribly inside.”

He shot up to a sitting position on the bed, shoving his hand through his hair. “I told you then, and I’m telling you now—”

“I know what you told me, that you’re not suffering from anything. I didn’t believe it on the river, and I don’t believe it now. Why won’t you let me help you?”

Chapter 11

H
e was angry. She could see it in the way he scowled down at her, hear it in his voice.

“Why the hell can’t you just let it go?”

Eve wasn’t going to permit his resentment to stop her—not this time. She sat up beside him and put her hand on his arm, expecting him to shake it off. He didn’t. That much was in her favor.

“Because I care,” she answered him softly. “Probably far too much, but there it is.”

He was silent. Maybe that, too, was a good sign.

“Sam, we both know you’re hurting. Why can’t you trust me?”

He laughed. A brittle laugh. “Yeah, I know. You want to help me. And just how do you figure on doing that when the best shrink in the Chicago division couldn’t manage it over the past ten months?”

“At least you admit you have a problem. That’s something, anyway.”

“Uh-huh, I have a problem. And it’s going to stay
my
problem.”

It was time, she decided, to take off the velvet gloves. To challenge him on the kind of tough level he would understand and relate to. She hoped.

“You’re afraid,” she accused him. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re afraid to let me know that Special Agent McDonough, who can deal with the worst of the bad boys and win, is actually capable of being vulnerable.”

“Why you little—”