Damian (The Caine Brothers #3) (12 page)

Climbing up to her knees, she kissed him again, a fierce, determined, possessive kiss, as if she wanted to climb inside his very soul. When she finished, she collapsed into his arms. “Can we please get out of this place? I think I’ve had enough of Colombia.”

Elena rested her crossed arms on the edge of the infinity pool and watched the sun blaze a fiery orange inferno as it made its way behind the horizon.

Damian swam up beside her, echoing her pose of crossed arms resting on the edge of the pool.

“Another beautiful Costa Rican sunset,” he said.

“I can’t get enough of them,” she said. “This jungle is way better than the last one.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. The last few days have been great. I could get used to this place.”

They’d hauled ass out of Colombia and driven all the way to Costa Rica, stopping only once for Damian to communicate with his superiors. He reported that he and Elena were safe and where they were headed, that they’d call when they got there and make arrangements from there.

They’d learned her father had been shot in the firefight between El Jefe and the SEALs, and that he’d died making sure El Jefe didn’t get away. Because of him, at least in part, El Jefe would face justice. Elena grieved for her father, but wondered if he’d given his life more to avoid the humiliation of prosecution and jail than as some heroic deed. She’d never know.

She glanced over at Damian then back at the sunset. “Liar. You’re itching to get out of here.”

“I didn’t know I was that transparent,” he dunked under the water and came back up a few feet away, his tan body and blond hair dripping with water turned golden by the setting sun. He propped his elbows back on the edge of the pool. “I don’t like to sit still for long.”

Did he mean literally or metaphorically? He’d been damn cryptic since they’d left Colombia.

“I don’t either, usually. But I’m kind of exhausted after the last couple of weeks.” A massive understatement.

“Yeah.”

She waited for more, but he didn’t offer anything else. The awkward silence was maddening. “It was nice of your brother to let us stay here indefinitely, anyway.”

Damian waved away her comment. “Not like he can’t afford it. The resort’s making money hand over fist, and he never needed the money to start with.”

The small talk was killing her. They hadn’t talked about anything of consequence—including everything that had happened to them—since they stumbled into the resort filthy, bloody, and beat. She’d thought after they got cleaned up, they’d be tripping over words, falling into each other’s arms full of relief and emotion and possibility. Instead, it had been the exact opposite.

“It won’t be long before the Navy and CIA come to drag us back for debriefing.”

“I imagine.”

She couldn’t stand it anymore. If they didn’t talk soon, she’d more than likely strangle him, so she took a deep breath and picked around the edges of the things they needed to talk about. “You didn’t have to stay here with me.”

He swam closer, tucking a tendril of wet hair behind her ear. They’d been at the resort for several days and he had yet to make any physical contact with her beyond a few tender yet mostly platonic kisses or touches. He wouldn’t even share the same bed with her, offering the lamest of excuses, like she needed to heal. Right now, her raw, wounded heart and mind needed more attention than her body. Well, her body screamed for him, but not because of her injuries.

“Yes, I did.”

The first honest words he’d shared with her in days. Hope flickered to life in her heart.

“Why?”

Anger flashed in his eyes, followed closely by something that looked suspiciously like shame, before he looked away. “I failed you,” he said.

He flopped into the water, diving to the bottom of the pool and swimming like a dolphin across to the other side before jumping out onto the deck and plucked a towel from one of the chairs.

Despite her fear of the water, she’d tolerated it—even enjoyed it—as long as he was there with her. But she had no intention of letting him take advantage of her poor swimming as a means of escape. They’d talk, dammit, even if she had to dog paddle across the pool to make it happen.

He’d been working with her, so she’d progressed beyond awkward flailing, and managed to get to the other side of the pool and haul herself out. She snagged her towel and marched after him.

“Don’t you walk away from me.”

He spun at the doorway into their suite. The look of surprise on his face would have made her laugh if anger didn’t fuel her with purpose.

“You’re getting better in the pool.”

Poking him in the chest, she said, “Don’t change the subject.”

He backed into the room and she followed, both of them dripping on the carpet.

“What was the subject, again?” he asked.

From the look on his face—pained, sad, desperate—he understood the subject perfectly, but still fought to avoid it. The scrunched lines between his brows, the haunted shadow in his eyes, the tight, closed-off way he held himself away from her all came into crystal-clear focus in an instant. The attraction and feelings they had for each other couldn’t have disappeared, so for some reason he ran from them or shoved them away.

Not if she had anything to say about it, and as half of the pair of them, she did.

“Us,” she said stepping up into his personal space. “We are the topic.”

Raising up onto her tiptoes, she placed her hands on his shoulders and reached to kiss him. He responded with a peck on her lips.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. She took him by the hand and dragged him into the bedroom. “Sit,” she said, pointing at the bed.

“Elena…”

“No. You’ve been running from me since we left Colombia. No more running.”

His expression closed into a scowl, but he sat on the end of the bed. She stood in front of him and untied the top of her bikini, tossing it to the floor in a wet splat. She followed it with the bottoms, until she stood naked in front of him, one hip cocked to the side and her hands planted on her hips.

At first, his brows went up in surprise, then he looked down at his hands in his lap. She glanced at his hands, too, but the beginning of a bulge in his swim trunks didn’t escape her attention. Good. At least there was still a little life left in him.

“Damian, look at me.”

“Put your clothes back on and I will.”

“Do you not find me attractive anymore?”

His gaze shot up to meet hers. She thought she caught him trying not to cringe when he looked at her.

“Of course I do.”

“But you can’t look at this,” she pointed to her bruised cheekbone. “Without feeling like you failed me.”

He glanced down at his lap again.
Bingo.

She glared at him for a minute, but he didn’t move. How was she supposed to get through to him? She could force herself on him. They’d probably have pretty good sex, but in the end it wouldn’t accomplish anything. It had to be his idea.

“Fine,” she said. “You win. Go ahead and feel sorry for yourself. Blame yourself for whatever it is you’re blaming yourself for. But leave me the hell out of it.”

She marched to the bathroom and snatched a robe, then walked past him to the kitchen. Throwing open the refrigerator door made the few glass bottles jangle against each other. She snagged a bottle of beer and slammed the fridge closed, then threw the cap into the sink where it clanked around before coming to rest.

Tipping the bottle to her lips, she guzzled half of it before turning and resting her ass against the counter only to find Damian leaning in the bedroom doorway. His arms crossed over his broad chest, and the scowl still furrowed his brow.

“What?” she barked.

“Reverse psychology won’t work on me.”

“Fuck you, Damian. I’m not using any psychology on you. I just want you to talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to say. I let you down. I let them capture you, and beat the shit out of you, and…”

He couldn’t finish, just looked down at the floor, kicking at some imaginary thing.

“Here’s the way I see it, and since it happened to me, I think my version wins.” She took another long pull on the beer. “The SEALs had a plan. It was a good plan, but like any plan, there are always variables you can’t account for, so the plan went south and didn’t work the way it was supposed to. You and I worked together and got out of there. You gave me a lovely, if muddy, orgasm. I still owe you for that, by the way.”

A tiny twitch flickered at the corner of his mouth. She took that as a good sign, and continued.

“After that, we discovered that we overestimated the guerillas’ gullibility. Lesson learned there. But what happened to me with Camacho was not your fault. If you’d come out of the river and charged the vehicles while they were hauling me away, you’d be dead and I’d still be at their warehouse a victim of a lot of unpleasantness.”

He grunted and tensed, likely thinking about all the ugly rapey things they would have done to her. She forged ahead.

“But none of that happened exactly
because
you didn’t fail. You. Saved. Me.” She enunciated each word slowly and clearly for him. “I’m an agent for the CIA, Damian. I’m trained to fight, trained to assess risk, trained to withstand torture. Did I want to? Hell no. But I did have a plan.”

***

Damian brought his gaze up and glared at her. The swelling on her face had gone down some, but the bruises were still livid. He hated seeing her that way. It only reminded him he hadn’t got to her in time.

“Your plan was to get yourself killed.”

“Would you rather I stayed alive for whatever Camacho had planned for me? I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t really up for that.”

He stalked away from the door and up into her face. “What if I’d got there right after he choked you to death?”

Surprise flickered in her eyes, as if that hadn’t occurred to her. “I thought you were dead.”

“It takes a lot more than a bullet to kill me.”

She bit her lip. As if he’d said something funny. He glared harder at her.

“Well, I know that now. But I didn’t then.” Her expression softened as she continued. “I’m sure in all your self-flagellation it never occurred to you that maybe I felt guilty about that?”

He scoffed at her. “Why? I was doing my job.”

“Because we were in it together. Look, the point is…”

“No, the point is this,” he interrupted her, poking her in the chest as an echo of her earlier gesture. “I almost lost you. I almost didn’t get there in time, and that’s my fault. It’s my fault you got captured at all because I let myself fall in love…”

He shut his mouth with a snap and staggered back a couple of steps. He hadn’t meant to say that. Goddammit, she had him so fucking confused.

A grin started at the corners of her mouth, then spread until he thought it might burst her face. “You fell in love with me?”

“That’s not the point,” he grumbled, folding his arms across his chest.

“It is the point, exactly. You think caring about someone clouds your judgment, makes it difficult to do your job—in this case saving me. But if you have a family at home, you think you won’t be able to give yourself completely to a mission because you don’t want to leave your family without you.”

All he could manage was a grunt of acknowledgement. She might be able to express the sentiment in words, but he doubted she understood it in principle.

“Damian, you are so dense.”

“What did you just say?”

“Dense. You are dense. Okay, first, I fell in love with you, too, so that deal is sealed. Secondly, I’m a CIA agent. Do you think I don’t live in the same world you do? I may not wear a uniform and carry weapons and run into the middle of combat missions, but my life is in danger every time I go under cover. Having a family could compromise me, too.”

That hadn’t even occurred to him. He’d always figured his job was the most dangerous on the planet, but living undercover, alone, with the constant threat of discovery, without a team bristling with weapons to cover your ass might be pretty close to as dangerous as his job.

“Okay, fine. So we walk away and go back to our lives. That way, we don’t put each other in danger.”

She cocked her head and scrunched her brows together as if he’d spoken a foreign language and she didn’t understand it. He’d thought he’d been pretty clear.

“I have a counter-proposal. How about we explore a relationship. Get to know each other some.”

“How are we supposed to make a relationship work? What if we get in so deep we can’t get out?”

“You mean, if we fall in love so much we want to get married?”

He winced at the ‘M’ word. He’d assumed he’d never marry, and he’d been okay with that. “Okay, if you want to put it that way.”

She snorted. “Then we get married. I’m going out on a limb here in guessing you don’t plan to give up your career any time soon, and I don’t plan to give up mine, either. So any relationship between us will definitely be non-traditional. That works for me, if it works for you.”

“Don’t you want kids and a home and stuff?”

“Do you?”

“No, but you’re a woman. Women want that stuff.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Good grief, Damian. Not all women are the same. I don’t want kids, as it turns out. But I do want you. We can figure out the rest.”

Apparently done with the conversation, she put her bottle on the counter and stepped up to him, reaching a hand around his neck and dragging him down for a kiss.

He could work with that. The last few days had been torture having her so close, but believing he didn’t deserve to touch her. He’d beat himself up over not saving her soon enough. He couldn’t get the image of that asshole’s dick in her face out of his mind. But if it didn’t haunt her the same way, why should it haunt him? Maybe she was right. He may not have got there faster, but it could have been worse.

Elena was unlike any woman he’d ever known—smart, tough as any soldier he’d ever met, gorgeous, and all his. She loved him. She wanted him. Maybe he could make room in his life for a partner. They might not come home to each other every night, but did that matter? Was that what made a marriage?