Dangerous Secrets (21 page)

He didn’t want anyone else, though. Just Charity.

His hand dropped down, fisted around his cock.

He sucked in his breath between his teeth and thought of her. He gave an experimental pull with his fist, then opened his hand immediately. His hand was calloused, rough. The exact opposite of the softness of Charity. His cock refused his hand, simply rebelled. He didn’t even try another stroke, just let himself go and lay on his back, naked, hard, and aching.

He didn’t want to be here, in this musty room smelling of hundreds of traveling salesmen jacking off and two bit whores selling twenty-five-dollar blow jobs.

He knew where he wanted to be. With Charity. In her lovely little house that smelled of lavender and lemon polish and the scented candles she continually lit.

He wanted—so fiercely he thought his heart would beat its way out of his chest—to turn the clock back.

He lay on the bed until gray light started to fill the room, then got up and dressed. He’d worn the same clothes for three days running now. They were rumpled and smelled of sweat.

He walked down the stairs to the lobby. Basic tradecraft: take the stairs if you’re undercover. Fewer people will see you and you won’t be trapped.

He’d paid the night before in cash, so he could walk right out without being stopped. He waited until the guy behind the desk was busy checking in a family of five, then slipped out the front door.

It was a cold day—gray and sleety. The cheap nylon parka he had on barely mitigated the cold. He felt chilled down to his bones and not just because of the weather.

When he was behind the wheel, Nick started the engine and drove to the feed road into the interstate where he’d been yesterday, braked, and idled.

If he turned left, he’d start the journey back to D.C., where he was already in a world of trouble for not showing up. Right was back to Parker’s Ridge. It would be crazy to go back to Parker’s Ridge, of course. If anyone recognized him, he’d blow the mission. Instant FUBAR.

Nick sat in the car, watching the exhaust rise like smoke in the rearview mirror. Even wasting this much time was criminal, a career buster.

Fuck it.

He gunned the engine and headed right, straight for Parker’s Ridge.

Parker’s Ridge
November 29

Charity lifted her head when she heard a car drive up the street outside her house, the sudden movement making her nauseous. She swallowed the tickle of bile, knowing from experience that bile was the only thing she
could
throw up. The only things she’d been able to choke down—half a dozen crackers, a glass of milk, half a peach—had come right back up again.

That she couldn’t eat didn’t surprise her. She could barely breathe. Sleep was almost a forgotten concept, which was for the best. When she did manage to nod off, she would wake up immediately in a cold sweat. Her dreams were filled with images of flaming cars flying off a mountain, explosions, and charred bones. Her nightmares were incredibly vivid, down to the smell, which would remain a part of her forever.

Charity had insisted on going to the coroner’s office to
identify Nick. The sheriff and the coroner both had told her that visual identification was impossible and so she was exonerated from viewing the body. What remained of the body.

Something, some Prewitt concept of honor, made her insist on seeing the remains, overriding the sheriff’s and coroner’s wishes. At one level, she wished with all her heart that she’d listened to them. Nick’s charred remains had been enough to make even the coroner wince.

What had been laid out on the autopsy table bore no relationship to a human being—it was simply a collection of blackened bones, some cracked open to the marrow, laid out in a terrible facsimile of a human shape.

Blackened skull on top, the flesh burned away, baring Nick’s mouth of perfect teeth in a macabre grin. The coroner had arranged all the bones in the anatomically correct positions, except for the right tibia, which had never been recovered. It left a blank spot in the sooty sketch of what had once been a human being.

The sheriff clutched her elbow, hard, in case she fainted.

Prewitts were made of sterner stuff than that, though. She didn’t faint and she didn’t break down. Whatever she felt was to be saved for the privacy of her own home. As she gazed at Nick’s remains, she could feel her own face, stiff and expressionless.

She’d stepped forward, away from the sheriff’s hand, and approached the table.

The sheriff had said that it wasn’t necessary to view the body, but it
was
necessary.

She had to stand witness for Nick, let him leave this life under a loving gaze. She was his family. He had no parents and no siblings, just like her. They were each other’s family and this was the last thing she could do for him.

Fate had stopped her from bearing witness for her parents. She never saw them again after the night of the fire, not their bodies, not their coffins. She didn’t attend their funeral. By the time she woke up from her coma, her parents had been in the ground for two weeks.

So she was determined that she would stand by Nick in the only way she could. If his spirit lingered anywhere near his broken, burned body, he would know that she stood steadfast by his side, no matter the cost to her.

She didn’t regret it, not once, though what she’d seen would, she knew, forever color her nightmares.

And until the end of time, on her deathbed, she would smell that terrible stench of charred bones and burnt flesh.

Her stomach quivered again and she swallowed heavily.

The car rolled slowly to a stop outside her house. She had visitors. Her heart beat slow and heavy in her chest.

Whoever was coming, they were not welcome.

In a token attempt at trying to stem her bottomless, dark grief, she’d switched on the living room lights. Unfortunately, they were visible from the street. She couldn’t even pretend nobody was home, as she had done for the past three days.

Her living room window framed the big black limo parked at the curb. She could see everything perfectly.

The driver, dressed in elegant black livery, came around the car and opened a backseat door, extending a hand to the man who emerged. The man’s deeply lined face was sharply handsome. An expensive Borsalino covered his longish, graying blond hair. He was dressed for the cold—a heavy midnight blue overcoat and thick leather gloves covering what she knew were scarred hands. One hand was clutching an ebony walking stick with a polished ivory knob.

He was making his limping way slowly up her walkway, leaning heavily on the arm of his driver, who held Vassily’s arm with one hand and a big black box with another.

Vassily.

He’d come out in the freezing cold, just for her.

Charity winced. Vassily coming out on a cold day was a big deal. A very big deal. He made no secret of the fact that he hated the cold, venturing out only when necessary in winter. Watching him make his slow, laborious way to her, it was painfully clear that this cost him sacrifice.

It was a magnificent gesture. Charity knew she should be grateful, even flattered. This was something Vassily would do for very few people in the world. Maybe she was the only person he’d do this for. But though she was touched, she was in no condition to receive him.

She wanted to be left alone and not have to gather her scattered, grieving self together enough to make conversation. There was no conversation in her, not enough energy left in her to deal with anyone.

But this had to be done. Vassily was an old man. Well, if not old, much older than she. He was a great man who had suffered great tragedy, and he was making an effort to come to offer her comfort in the hour of her own tragedy.

On any possible scale of suffering, Vassily’s suffering far, far exceeded hers. He’d been to hell and back, and for five long years. He’d not only lost loved ones, he’d been injured, tortured, forced to work in mines in subzero temperatures, whipped and beaten.

No, her suffering was a paltry thing in comparison. Shame made her stiffen her spine. Somehow, she had to claw her way up out of the slippery, gory, deep, dark well of mourning she’d fallen into. For the next half hour or hour, or however
long Vassily chose to stay, she had to somehow take her suffering and compress it, tuck it away somewhere, just long enough so she could function while he was here.

Afterward, when he’d gone, when she was alone, she could let the grief unravel and swell to monstrous proportions again, until it occupied every cell of her body and mind, as it had for the past three days.

But for now, whatever it took, she had to cling to control.

Vassily’s slow walk up to her front porch allowed her to rush into the bathroom and dash some cold water on her face, pull a comb through her tangled hair. She looked up into the mirror above the sink and shuddered, hardly recognizing herself.

Her eyes were red rimmed and swollen, testimony to her sleepless nights and the endless tears. Dark bruises shadowed her eyes. She’d lost weight, in just these three days. Her cheekbones were sharper, the line of her jaw more pronounced. Her skin was paper white, bloodless. She looked caved in, beaten. She looked ready for the grave herself.

The grave…in a flash she was at the cemetery again. The dark gouge in the earth yawned at her feet, the heavy mahogany coffin’s gleaming brass handles starkly contrasting with the frozen black earth. The smell of unearthed sod rose in her nostrils, churning her stomach. The smell of death and…

She froze on the threshold of her bedroom.

Oh my God.

There was another smell in the room, lingering in the air. Musky, faintly citrusy. Familiar, unmistakable.

Impossible.

Nick’s smell.

How could—

The front doorbell rang and her head whipped around, making her faintly nauseous again.

Every hair on her body rose because together with his scent, she somehow felt…
Nick
. Felt his presence, felt his aura. Nick’s aura was strong. He was a force of nature. Whenever she’d been near him, it was as if the molecules in the air speeded up. He cast an energy field around him. He punched a six-foot-two Nick-shaped hole in the universe.

The bell rang again, longer this time.

Charity should be rushing to the door, opening it, and welcoming Vassily into her home. It was beyond discourteous letting an elderly man wait outside in the freezing cold. But Charity was frozen herself, with horror.

She was drenched in Nick’s scent, drowning in his aura and it terrified her.

Oh God, this was infinitely worse than smelling charred bones, horrible as that was. The moments by Nick’s poor, ravaged body had been traumatic, the memory seared into her very being. No wonder, in her grief, that she could revisit them. She knew she’d revisit the images until the end of time, in her nightmares.

Still, smelling Nick’s death, however awful, was normal.

But smelling and sensing Nick—the live, vital, sexy Nick, not the sad charred sticks that were all that was left of his mortal body—in her bathroom and bedroom took horror to a new level. This wasn’t a memory, something real, something she could hold on to, however horrible. No, this was her mind playing tricks on her. This was insanity.

That slippery hold she had on reality was starting to fray.

She looked down at herself. Her forearms were covered in goose bumps.

The bell rang again, two long rings.

The idea of feeling Nick in empty rooms for the rest of her life was terrifying. Her stomach rejected the very notion.

She bolted for the toilet where she miserably retched the few remaining molecules of milk left. Her stomach spasmed and spasmed again, bringing up only green bile, until she didn’t have the strength to stand and sank down to her knees.

She rested like that, feverish cheek against the cold porcelain bowl, for a full minute. Vassily was waiting outside, but she simply didn’t have the strength to get up.

Another ring, this time with impatience behind it. Vassily would be feeling the cold. His leg ached when the weather was damp and cold, like today. She simply couldn’t make him wait any longer.

Using the toilet for leverage, she stood slowly, straightening and waiting a second to see if her stomach had settled. It had.

She rinsed her mouth out with water to rid herself of the terrible taste.

Gritting her teeth, Charity forced her feet to move, using sheer willpower to make it to the door. One foot after another. Left, right, left, right. Spooked, trembling.

Fuck, that was close!

Nick’s heart was still pounding as he crouched in the space between the garage and the house. His thermal imager had shown that she was in the living room, so he’d taken the chance to seed the back of her house with bugs. In her purse, in the vase on the sideboard, in the pockets of her jackets. He was fast and he was quiet, but she’d almost caught him.

Checking in with the head office this morning had driven
his anxiety levels off the charts. After giving him a scolding Nick barely listened to, the boss provided an update.

Chatter in Sandland was off the charts, spiking yesterday, about an upcoming meeting with “the Russian.” They’d intercepted a call between Hassad al-Banna and Abu Rhabi, who were a little less circumspect with their cell phones than Worontzoff was.

There was going to be a meeting, soon. And something else was going to happen, soon. And it was going to be big. The details weren’t there but it was enough to make the office crap its collective pants.

That was the only reason Nick hadn’t been sent to Alaska or North Dakota to check on terrorist ties there. And since he’d flat-out refused to come back to D.C., he was allowed to continue with the mission. Under strictest orders to stay in the surveillance van and not even crack the door open for a piss.

But Charity’s house was a magnet, he simply couldn’t stay away. He’d get on the road to drive to the surveillance van, then find himself driving back in. It was as if Hit Man’s SUV was sensitive to some kind of force field around Parker’s Ridge.

The operator who could never get lost now found himself lost beyond saving, unable to leave.

Being here, now, outside Charity’s house, was breaking every single rule in the book, and about a dozen beyond that.

He wasn’t going to be recognized. Dressed in black from head to foot, with thin black shooting gloves and a black Nomex balaclava, nobody could possibly recognize him even if they saw him, which they wouldn’t.

He had his head against the downstairs bathroom wall.
Through the siding, he could hear her vomiting, then quietly crying. He heard it twice—through the wall and over the mikes he’d scattered through the bedroom.

Her misery came through, loud and clear.

Nick reached out a hand and lay it against the cedar siding. Not a foot from his hand, he knew, was Charity. He’d give his left nut to be able to hold her, ease the tears, though they were for him.

His hand curled into a fist and he beat it, gently, against the wall, body tense with frustration, while Charity whimpered.

A big black limo with smoked windows had come to a rolling stop in front of the house and Nick crouched even farther, watching through the alleyway between the house and the garage. A big rhododendron bush hid him from sight.

He came to high alert when an ivory-tipped black cane came into view, followed by an elegantly shod foot. The man’s uniformed driver held a back door open for him. The driver was carrying a big black box with one arm and supporting the man with the other.

Several minutes later, Nick heard the doorbell chime through his headset. In the bathroom, silence, then the sound of running water.

Vassily Worontzoff, world-famous writer, international crime syndicate boss, had come calling, to console Nick’s widow.