Fallen Angel (17 page)

She hoped she might feel less vulnerable with her clothes on during the conversation they were about to have. As she felt the probing intensity of his gaze, she smoothed the thigh–length garment over her hips with shaking hands.

"Running away again, Geneva?" Still stretched out on the couch, he made no effort to conceal his nakedness.

She glanced away, trying to quell her response to his powerful body. Nonetheless, desire spilled like heated honey into her bloodstream, forcing her to take a steadying breath.

"Nothing to say?" he pressed once she looked back at him.

Anger sparked to life inside her. "I’m not a coward, despite what you seem to think. I’m just cold." She reached down to collect her slacks from a spot on the floor by the couch.

"I’ll get you warm." Extending his hand, he snagged her wrist before she could step away.

Geneva eased free. "You may not want to when you hear what I have to say."

"Shouldn’t I be the one to make that decision?" he asked, shifting into a seated position on the couch.

"You’re the only one who can, Thomas."

Geneva sank down onto the opposite end of the couch after pulling on her slacks. Her gaze drifted back to the fireplace as she tried to assemble her thoughts.

A chill traveled through her, prompting her to draw her legs up and wrap her arms around them. She finally looked at Thomas, but she didn’t speak right away.

"I’m listening," he prompted after several moments of silence.

She nodded, and then she plunged into the long–awaited truth. "As you already know, I make it a rule never to discuss with anyone other than my family the life I had before I moved to Cedar Grove, but I’m going to break that rule this one time. I owe you the truth."

He smiled at her, a wintery smile that sent yet another chill flowing into her veins. "I’m not a stranger or a curiosity seeker. I’m your lover."

"You’re many things, Thomas, not just my lover, and we both know it."

His jaw tightened, and he gave her a look that would have broken a lesser woman.

Geneva simply peered back at him, her expression steady. She didn’t feel at all intimidated. She’d dealt with strong personalities throughout her life. Besides, he wasn’t so different from Nicholas Benteen or the others who made up his gypsy band of ex–warriors. It occurred to her then that her family would respect a man like Thomas Coltrane, even welcome him into their ranks if he felt inclined to seek their acceptance and friendship.

Was she fantasizing? she wondered. Probably.

Geneva gathered up the threads of her courage and began to speak. "I’ve told you a little about my father and the years we spent together after Erin’s death."

He nodded. "Patrick, the engineer and self–confessed vagabond," he signed, accurately quoting her.

"You have an excellent memory."

"Goes with the territory when I’m after the truth."

She smiled faintly. "I trust you’re as prepared as you think you are to hear the truth, especially my truth."

"Let’s find out, shall we?"

"By all means, let’s find out. Patrick, as I told you, was a munitions specialist. He altered various types of weapons as a hobby or out of sheer boredom, depending on the circumstances in which he found himself. He also rigged and placed detonation devices in parts of the world that no sane man would ever venture, and he devised some of the most intricate bombs ever created. He did these things all over the globe for most of his adult life and for the highest bidders. He was a charming man, always filled with laughter and tall tales, but he was happiest when he was in the middle of an armed insurrection or some backwater revolution. People are still using his designs, even though he’s been dead for many years. He was a legend in his own time, but he was a mercenary, pure and simple."

Geneva paused for a moment, reached for the wineglass on the coffee table, and took a sip to ease her dry throat. She didn’t look at Thomas for a long moment. Then, she lifted her gaze and met his, all emotion absent from her face and her voice when she said, "Political upheaval thrilled him. Patrick was brilliant, but he was also reckless and quite amoral at times, which destroyed his marriage to Erin. His professional association with Nicholas settled him down, though. It also placed him in the position of supporting causes that were, to a certain degree, morally defensible or backed by the U.S. government during the last fourteen years of his life. He admired Nicholas, even loved him like a son, so he abided by his rules. Fortunately for me, Nicholas was already a part of Patrick’s life when I arrived on the scene, but I was still involved in the violence and destruction of their world."

Thomas interrupted. "Are you taking responsibility for your father’s actions again? Because if you are, you needn’t. Just because Patrick had the poor judgment to drag you to hell and back as a teenager and a young adult doesn’t mean that his sins are your burden to carry, Geneva. They never were. His penance is his own to pay, for God’s sake!"

Her chin trembled, but Geneva smothered the emotions rising up inside of her. "People died. Sometimes, the innocent died."

"That’s what happens in wartime," he reminded her, his own experiences as a Green Beret making his facial expression grim.

She pushed forward, determined to make all of her points. Half of the truth was like no truth at all. She knew that all too well.

"For many years now there’s been a contract out on my life, and I’ve had to exercise a certain amount of caution in order not to place myself in further jeopardy. I’ve never lived the way most people do, and I doubt I’d even know how to if someone gave me the opportunity."

Thomas interrupted, "I figured out that much the first day we met. Jamal, a terrorist of some note, the Mossad, Nick encouraging you to stop worrying because the guy was neutralized." He shook his head in amazement. "Hell of a word, by the way. It got my attention, and I drew the obvious conclusion."

"I… am… my… father’s… daughter, Thomas." She enunciated each word with great care.

"But you aren’t his conscience," Thomas insisted. "You were an innocent witness to global mayhem for too many years to count. He should never have… "

She shot to her feet, surprising him into silence. "You’re not listening, or you refuse to understand. I am not innocent. I really am my father’s daughter," she said as she paced the sitting room. "In every possible way, and then some. I inherited Patrick’s technical skills. I am regarded as an expert bomb maker. I’m also considered to be as good, if not better, than Patrick was, and I took his place when he was shot in Afghanistan on my nineteenth birthday."

She didn’t look at Thomas then. She couldn’t. "Jamal put out that contract on me, because I destroyed the headquarters of his Middle East terror operation and his largest training camp. In point of fact, I was neither an observer nor an innocent. I was, and still am, a highly skilled explosives expert, and I worked in that capacity, primarily for the CIA, for several years until a faulty piece of equipment malfunctioned, nearly killed me, and destroyed my ability to hear. Without Nicholas and the others, I… would… be… dead, not standing here trying to explain my past to you."

He stared at her.

"And there’s something else you need to understand," she said, finally looking at him and registering the shock in his eyes. "I am not ashamed of who I am or what I did, nor am I ashamed of the people who cared for me before and after the accident, so do not ever presume to judge me, my life, or my friends. I already know how different we are, and I also know that damn few people are capable of accepting us. My sole regret about the past is that violence is how much of the world solves its problems. I know from very personal experience that there are much better ways."

Geneva made herself wait then, her eyes darting back and forth between the clock on the far wall of the sitting room and the disbelief etched into Thomas’s hard–featured face.

Silence stretched tautly between them.

Two full minutes passed.

Then, a third.

Still, he did not speak.

Only her pride kept Geneva from succumbing to the anguish she felt. Certain that his continuing silence translated into outright rejection, she reached a point in which she could no longer endure his silence. She turned away from Thomas, her shoulders sagging with defeat.

"This is exactly what I expected. This is why I didn’t want to tell you," Geneva whispered more to herself than to him.

She stepped into her knee boots, shrugged on her coat, and gathered up her purse and briefcase. She paused for a final brief look back at him. "Have a nice life, Counselor."

Then, Geneva walked out of the sitting room, her pride and self–respect intact, her heart breaking. She felt so empty and cold inside, she thought she might never be warm again.

Yes, she’d reinvented herself, but she could not erase her past. Not ever. The stunned expression on Thomas’s face assured her of that fact. It also validated her belief that he would never be able to love or trust a woman who had destroyed lives.

Geneva hardly remembered getting into her car, let alone driving out of Cedar Grove and along the back roads through the falling snow, but she arrived in one piece at Nicholas and Hannah Benteen’s home an hour later. Only then did she let herself grieve for what might have been.

Thomas recognized his error in judgment the instant the door to his office slammed shut. The sound jarred him beyond the paralysis of disbelief, infusing him with a sudden burst of energy.

He surged up from the couch and reached for his clothes, furious with himself. In his determination not to overreact to anything Geneva might say to him, he hadn’t reacted at all. He’d just sat there and stared at her with all of the animation of a tree stump.

"You damn fool!" he muttered as he hurriedly dressed, then made his way into his office.

He controlled his first impulse, which was to go after her and tell her that he didn’t give a damn about her past. In truth, he didn’t. But the pragmatism and cold logic that guided his instincts when he was threatened with failure in a courtroom told him that he needed a more complete picture of Geneva and what she faced in the future before they spoke again.

Thomas loved her, but love wasn’t always enough between a man and a woman. He needed to be absolutely certain of his ability to protect her before he found her and persuaded her that her past counted as one thing—life experience. It had nothing whatsoever to do with his love for her, although he expected to have the devil’s own job persuading her of that fact.

Keeping Geneva out of harm’s way was his first priority, his only priority at the moment. If he couldn’t keep her safe, then he would fail them both. That sobering realization enabled him to contain some of his emotional turmoil. His memory of her shattered facial expression stayed with him, though, haunting him as he picked up the telephone and punched in a local number.

Nicholas Benteen answered on the second ring.

"This is Tom Coltrane. We need to talk. Now." He paused briefly, grabbing a blank notepad from a drawer in his desk. "Give me the directions."

He fell silent, listening to Nicholas, who spoke in a terse, unemotional voice. He didn’t bother to write down the directions once Benteen revealed that he lived high atop Eagle Ridge summit, a locale Thomas had often frequented as a boy in search of adventure in the mountains that surrounded Cedar Grove.

Putting on his coat and pocketing his keys, Thomas made his way downstairs to the parking lot behind the building and climbed into his car. As he drove through the darkness and the falling snow, he grappled with an array of emotions. One in particular, one that he hadn’t been forced to deal with in many years, emerged to dominate the others.

Fear.

His gut–wrenching fear that he might have already lost Geneva.

Gripping the steering wheel, Thomas promised himself that he would move heaven and earth before he allowed her to disappear from his life. No matter the cost, no matter the sacrifices required of him, she would be a part of his future. With or without Benteen’s cooperation.

** ** **

The two men faced off in the office that Nicholas kept in his home. Furnished with state–of–the art security equipment more suitable for a war room in the depths of the Pentagon than the office of a successful author, it served to reinforce Thomas’s concern over the jeopardy that Geneva and the others still lived with on a daily basis.

"You look like you could use a drink," Nicholas observed. "Help yourself." He gestured in the direction of the bar.

Thomas shook his head. "A drink is the last thing I want right now."

Nicholas sat down at his desk. He pressed a button on the console built into the desktop, then settled back in his chair, his expression speculative as met his guest’s gaze.

"What do you want?" Nicholas finally asked with his usual bluntness

"Facts. All of them." Thomas sank into a chair that offered him an unobstructed view of Benteen. "Start at the beginning. Start with Patrick Talmadge, and tell me why in hell he dragged his only child through the cesspools of the Middle East and then trained that little girl to follow in his footsteps as a bomb maker."

Nicholas pondered Thomas for several silent minutes. Then, he nodded and began to talk.

** ** **

In another wing of the house, Hannah Benteen closed the door to her infant daughter’s room and made her way down the hallway. She paused in the open doorway of a small sitting room.

Geneva looked up when she felt Hannah’s presence. "Is the baby alright?"

Smiling, Hannah entered the room and sat down. She signed, "Asleep for now, but that will end as soon as she’s hungry again." She studied Geneva for a long moment. "What about you? Are you feeling any better?"

Geneva shrugged. "I think I’m all cried out for the moment. I’m just tired. I should go home and leave the three of you in peace."

"Stay, why don’t you? Mom and Dad are spending the next few days with Sean, so you aren’t interrupting anything. Besides, we’ve missed you."