Darkness (32 page)

That surprised a laugh out of him. First time he could remember laughing while he was in the middle of some serious foreplay, with his cock begging for action and his balls aching like they were getting ready to explode.

“Lucky me,” he said, meaning it, and rolled so that she was beneath him again.

Their gazes met as her arms came around his neck and he bent his head to kiss her. Her eyes were hot for him, just like her body was hot for him, but there was something else in those big baby blues of hers, too, something that he couldn’t quite—

“Lucky
me
,” she said softly, and lifted her mouth to meet his.

The instant before their lips touched, he had it. He knew what was looking out at him from behind the blaze of torrid passion in her eyes: vulnerability. And trust.

What do you do with a woman who looks at you like that?

He fucked her until she screamed.

Afterward, she passed out, while he managed to stay awake long enough to get up and retrieve the flashlight and his weapon, which he wanted to keep within easy reach.

Ordinarily the phenomenal sex would have been enough to occupy his thoughts, but as he rolled their coats into substitute pillows and then blew out the lantern, Cal found himself once again turning over in his mind the unwelcome scenario that had first occurred to him when Gina had described the Texas accent of the gunman she called Heavy Tread. Cal’s CIA handler, Lon Whitman, who’d hired him for this job, was from San Antonio, and his twang was as Texas as they came.

Was it possible that Whitman had sold him and the operation out?

That would mean that Whitman had gone rogue, a possibility that Cal ordinarily would have rejected as impossible. He’d known Whitman for a number of years, and the guy was a straight-arrow, by-the-book operative whose integrity he’d never had any reason to doubt.

But someone had gotten to Hendricks and Ezra. Hendricks he could, very dimly, envision being corrupted by any number of unsavory interests. Ezra? Cal once would have said, never could happen. It had happened, though, and the only way Cal could envision that going down was if Ezra was approached by someone like, say, Whitman, their trusted CIA handler. With some plausible reason why Rudy should be prevented from returning to the United States and why Cal should be kept in the dark about this, along with a promise, coupled with the power to follow through, to make the less-than-positive repercussions from their losing Rudy after obtaining him from the Kazakhs go away. Plus the money. Thirty million was a lot of money. Having that much on the table certainly would have inclined Ezra to listen when Whitman talked.

When Ezra had shot Cal, he hadn’t been shooting to kill. In what possible scenario could Ezra have thought that was going to work out? Not killing Cal after turning traitor on him and shooting him was like leaving a live grenade in your own house, and Ezra would have known that.

Unless Ezra had been assured that everything would be smoothed over and explained once the alternate disposal of Rudy was accomplished. Just about the only person Ezra might have trusted to be able to smooth over what he would have known Cal would see as a base betrayal was their CIA employer, Whitman.

Ezra had said Cal would get his share of the money. He would have been counting on ten million dollars going a long way toward mollifying Cal, too.

The scorched-earth magnitude of the response to his survival would have been exactly what he would have expected if the CIA—that is, Whitman—was directing it.

If he was right in what he was thinking, and Cal profoundly hoped he wasn’t, he and Gina were in exponentially more danger than he had thought. Cal knew his own skills and abilities, and had every confidence in them. But if Whitman, with his CIA resources, was behind this, the technology and manpower they might be facing would be overwhelming. With Cal alive, Whitman would have everything to lose. He would stop at nothing to make sure no one who could tell the tale lived to do so.

There were other possibilities, of course. So many bad players on the world stage made for a large pool of suspects. But Cal kept coming back to that Texas twang. What were the chances that there were two drawling Texans involved in this?

Very small, Cal judged. In fact, almost infinitesimal.

Shit
.

Nothing to do about it at the moment, he told himself grimly. Tomorrow would be time enough to deal. For now, he needed to sleep.

Gina was still sleeping soundly when he stretched out beside her, but she must have felt him slide the pillow beneath her head and then subconsciously registered the warmth of his body next to hers, because she turned over to snuggle against him. He managed to get her tucked up against his side and pull half the sleeping bag over them both without waking her. They had these few precious hours in which he judged they were relatively safe, and he had no idea when they’d get an opportunity to sleep again. If he had any chance in hell of getting them out of this alive, he would need a clear head and a body that was as functional as possible. On that thought he closed his eyes, concentrated, and was gone, falling fathoms deep asleep in an instant as his military training had taught him to do.

CAL WOKE
abruptly, shaken out of a sound sleep by—he didn’t know what. It was pitch dark. His body was comfortably covered, but the air around him was cool and smelled like musty earth. He couldn’t see a thing—but there was a woman in his arms, warm and slim and silky soft. Naked, just like he was naked. Then realization clicked, and he was fully alert, fully aware of where he was and of the identity of the woman sleeping with him and the deadly situation they were in.

In the total absence of light the cavern felt vast. Tiny sounds echoed, making it difficult to zero in on their source. His muscles tensed as his body went into automatic defensive mode. He turned every sense he possessed to rapidly scanning the surrounding area for a threat.

Gina didn’t move. Except for her breathing, which seemed abnormally fast. Was she awake? He couldn’t tell, and he didn’t dare to even so much as whisper her name in case someone was near. She lay with her back to his front. His arm was draped around her waist and her delectable ass pressed against his crotch, which was already sporting significant morning wood, although he was as sure as it was possible to be that they’d only been asleep for a few hours and it was still the middle of the night. Strands of her hair tickled his face, she smelled of soap and woman, and his hand was full of a soft, warm tit. She felt slender and supple and sexy as hell against him. So much so that he felt a stab of regret that at the moment he had more urgent things to think about than how horny she was making him.

Carefully he removed his hand from her breast and reached up for his weapon, which he’d tucked beneath the coat his head was pillowed on, and brought it down to rest on the part of the sleeping bag that covered her hip.

Asleep under battlefield conditions, which he considered these to be, he almost never woke up for no reason. Something had jolted him back to awareness. But if there was anything that shouldn’t be there in that cavern with them, he wasn’t picking up on—

She gave a little mewling cry, startling him, and began thrashing around in what seemed to be a desperate attempt to escape the shrouding sleeping bag. Careful to keep his gun hand out of the fray, he grabbed her to keep her from throwing herself out onto the stone floor, caught a heel in the kneecap and an elbow in the ribs for his pains, and had his answer:
she’d
woken him up.

From the small distressed sounds she was making, he was pretty sure that she was having a nightmare.

“Gina.” Placing his gun carefully back beneath the pillow, he wrapped both arms around her, imprisoning her flailing arms. He threw a leg over hers to keep from getting kicked again and nuzzled her ear. “Gina, wake up.”

She did, with a gasp and a shudder, then went stiff as a board in his hold as, he thought, she struggled to get her bearings. She was still facing away from him, and he could hear her agitation in the raggedness of her breathing.

“It’s okay, I’ve got you.” He freed her trapped arms and legs while still keeping a precautionary arm around her waist, and at the same time reached for the flashlight, hoping that feeling less physically restricted and being able to see something besides utter blackness might help her get oriented. Switching on the flashlight, he was treated to a glimpse of a fall of tawny hair and a slim shoulder and a beautiful bare breast emerging from the confines of the sleeping bag as she turned her head to cast an alarmed glance back at him.

Her big blue eyes, awash in tears, glistened as the light caught them.

“Cal.” She breathed his name with obvious relief, then said, “Turn the light off, please,” in a constricted voice that confirmed it for him: she was crying.

The knowledge unexpectedly made his gut clench.

He switched off the light, returning the flashlight to its place beside the gun. She wriggled around to face him, and he gathered her up, turning onto his back with her, cradling her in his arms. She snuggled close, naked skin to naked skin, her head and a hand resting on his chest, a slender, sexy leg sliding over his thighs. He could feel her heat, her curves, the satin of her skin, pressing full length against him, but what got to him most, what garnered his attention and made his stomach twist, was the hot dampness leaking onto his chest.

Tears, he knew.

Her crying disturbed him on a visceral level, and why that should be he had neither the time nor the energy to try to sort out at the moment. What he knew for sure was that it wasn’t a positive development, details to be worked out later. Grimacing at the niggling unease his reaction to her tears caused him, he set himself to calming her.

He smoothed a hand over her hair: silk against his palm.

“Bad dream, honey?”

She replied with a sniffle and a shudder as she pressed even closer against him. Which might have worked fine for getting him to think about something else—like, say, sex—if it hadn’t been for the tears that were spilling like rain onto his chest. Or if the knowledge that she was crying didn’t make him feel like someone was working him over with a club.

“Gina. Talk to me.”

“It was just a stupid nightmare. I get them occasionally, okay? I’ll be all right in a minute. I’m sorry I’m crying all over you.”

Accompanied by a gasping breath, a tremor that shook her from head to toe, and more dripping tears, that truculent response made him tighten his hold on her and press his lips to the top of her head. He had a shrewd idea about the subject of her nightmare: the plane crash that had killed her family members. The difficulty she’d had talking about it earlier, along with her emotional response to the little she did say, told the tale.

“You can cry on me all you want. What I said earlier about crying women scaring me—that was just a dumb joke. Nightmares are the pits. I used to get one that made me cry every time I had it.”

He could feel her settling herself more comfortably against him. Silky skin, tits, legs, a beautiful naked woman in his arms who was his for the taking—and all he could think about was stopping her crying. She was shivering, and he tugged the sleeping bag more tightly around her shoulders. The softness of her breasts pressing against his chest, the slide of her smooth, taut thigh over his, the nudge of her bush against his hip, pointed him toward a hell of an enjoyable way to give her thoughts another direction fast. But her tears stopped him. Knowing that she was hurting stopped him. If he was right about the cause of her nightmare, and he was 99.9 percent sure he was, the pain she was suffering went deep. He knew, because he’d been there. What she needed most was to talk it out.

Forget the urgings of his cock: he was there to listen.

“Really?” She sounded deeply suspicious, but her tears seemed to be slowing.

“Yes, really. After my mom was killed in a car accident, I would dream that I saw her walking through my bedroom door. She would smile at me and disappear. I would wake up every time bawling my eyes out.” It was the truth, and although it had been at least twenty years since he’d last had that dream, he could still remember the wrenching agony of it—and how lost and alone he’d felt waking up crying in his bed and knowing that if he didn’t muffle his tears, if his father heard him, he’d come in and berate or beat some manliness into him.

He could feel her attention focusing on him like radar. “
Was
your mother killed in a car accident?”

“Yep.”

“How old were you?”

He told her.

“Oh, my God. Poor little boy.” Her hand moved up his chest in a sensuous slide that he was acutely aware of. Her arm curled around his neck and she pressed closer in silent comfort. He could feel the imprint of her naked body against his with every cell he possessed—right along with her sympathy, her sorrow for the little boy he’d once been. She said, “I’m so sorry,” and he dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“It was a long time ago. But I understand nightmares.”

She took a deep breath. He realized that he no longer felt tears falling on his chest.
Good
.