Hell on Wheels (35 page)

“Nate!” Ali grabbed Nate’s broad shoulders and shook him, hard. His dark head bounced against the flat pillow. “Nate, for the love of Pete, wake up!”

She’d never in her life heard a more terrible sound than the one tearing up from the back of Nate’s straining throat. Even the screams of her mother that horrible day they’d learned of Grigg’s death didn’t hold a candle to the god-awful noise Nate was making. It was like the furious, helpless call of a dying animal mixed with the roar of an angry dragon swirled together with the convulsive sorrow of a hundred lifetimes.

Then, like someone flipped a switch, the sound ceased.

Thank
goodness
.

“You’re dreaming,” she assured him, sucking in one petrified breath after another. She felt dizzy, but it was not the time to hyperventilate.

His black eyes snapped open and lasered in on her face. For a brief moment, he didn’t seem to recognize her. “You’re just dreaming, Nate,” she said again, trying to reassure him and herself simultaneously.

Cripes.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple slowly bobbing in the column of his tanned throat where his pulse pounded so hard she fancied she could actually hear it. His nostrils flared wide, and for a brief moment she saw such utter despair…such gut-wrenching pain in his eyes. Then he turned away, hiding his misery from her as if it was something he should be ashamed of. Lifting the stupid fishing-lure-printed sheet up to his cheeks, he brusquely scrubbed away the wet evidence of his tears with enough force to take the first layer of skin off his face.

The scouring was useless; she’d already seen the tears. Those heartbreaking tears…

She feared she might see them for the rest of her life, them along with the horrible, dark emotion she’d glimpsed in those first few moments of consciousness.

“You, uh…you wanna talk about it?” she asked when he reemerged from under the sheet.

“No,” he jerked his head once, refusing to look at her.

“Okay,” she blew out a steadying breath and hesitantly wrapped comforting arms around his shoulders—she couldn’t quite make the whole circumference, but she wrapped as much of herself around him as she could. Tucking her head up under his stubbled chin, with her cheek against his broad, heaving chest, she could hear the maddening cadence of his heart racing nearly out of control.

Crapola, hers was doing the same. She’d never been so scared in her life as when she’d been yanked from a deliriously peaceful sleep by the sound of Nate’s terrible screaming.

Double, triple cripes!

It had to be flashbacks from the torture, right?

Or, on second thought, maybe not. He’d been through so much, seen so many awful things she couldn’t possibly comprehend, there was probably no way on earth for her to begin to fathom what hideous demons stalked him while vulnerable and unconscious.

She remained silent for a long time, listening to the second hand on his big, complicated looking wristwatch tick away the seconds, taking the opportunity to catch her breath and letting him do the same.

Finally, when her heart no longer felt like it was going to pull an
Alien
impression and burst through her rib cage, she asked, “Does that, uh, happen to you often?”

She couldn’t imagine.

“Often enough,” he told her, his voice hard, cold, so much different than the night before, when he’d hotly whispered her name into her ear while emptying himself into her body.

“Is it…is it about the torture?”

He pushed up from the bed; the quick movement nearly had her bouncing right off—which was saying something considering the dang mattress was about as soft and cushiony as a cement block. Then, without a backward glance, he swung his long legs over the side, grabbing his bloodstained jeans. “I said I don’t wanna talk about it,” he growled, pulling worn denim up and over his bare butt.

Even while being coldly rebuffed, she couldn’t help but notice just what a fine specimen of masculinity he represented, which probably meant she was a little loco where he was concerned.

Yeah, well, what else was new?

“Okay,” she soothed. “I just…” she shook her head as she pushed into a sitting position. She didn’t even begin to know how to handle this situation, where a man sounded like he was dying in his sleep and was obviously embarrassed at having been witnessed at his most vulnerable, but she’d give it her best shot. Or, in this case, fall back on an old cliché. “If you ever
do
want to talk about it, I just want you to know I’m here.”

He swung around, his handsome face unusually harsh in the unflattering yellow light of the bedside lamps. “I thought you said this was a one-night stand.”

Whoa. What?

“I don’t—” She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I just thought—”

“Well
don’t
,” he hissed. “Don’t think anything.”

“Nate,” she held out a hand to him as she lifted the ridiculous sheet up over her naked breasts. Suddenly
she
was the one feeling unaccountably vulnerable. “Please stop this. You don’t have to tell me what you were dreaming about, but don’t…don’t use this as an excuse to close yourself off from me. Don’t use it as an excuse to push me away. I just want—”

“I’m not usin’ anything as an excuse,” he cut her off with a scornful snort. “I don’t need to. We agreed to one night,” he motioned jerkily out the window toward the faint pink light lining the eastern horizon. The new day looked like it was putting on its lipstick. “It’s morning, now. So…” he made a rolling motion with his big hand, “the dawnin’ of the new day brings this little experiment in lunacy to an end.”

His words cut her to the very marrow of her bones.

Experiment in lunacy?

“But I thought—”

“What?” he turned his head slightly, cupping his broad palm around his ear. In that moment, she wanted to hit him. Again. Only this time she wanted it to really,
really
hurt. To hurt him as badly as he was hurting her.

“Look,” he said, bending to grab his boots when she just sat there, staring at him in mute horror. “It was really great sex, sugar. Probably the best of my life. But we knew what it was going in. Don’t ruin it by tryin’ to turn it into somethin’ else.”

Probably
the best of his life?
Probably?

Now, she didn’t just want to hit him, she wanted to chop his frickin’ head off.

“I think you are the most—” The shrill
riiinnngg, riiinnngg
of his cell phone interrupted the scathing condemnation bubbling up the back of her throat.

He raised a sardonic brow.

Yeah, saved by the bell. Talk about cliché.

She snapped her mouth closed and angrily watched him pull his iPhone from the hip pocket of his jeans. He cut her a grim look before holding the device to his ear. “Ghost,” he barked, giving her his broad back, a back that revealed the garish evidence of her raking nails and the hot ecstasy of the previous night.

A night that was
probably
the best of his life, but one he obviously had no desire to repeat.

She turned away. She wouldn’t listen to the rest. She didn’t need to. Everything she needed to know had been written all over his dastardly handsome face.

It was over.

He’d agreed to one night, and that night had reached its inevitable conclusion.

So that left her with…what?

Nothing, that’s what.

Nothing but the poignant memory of the sweet passion they’d shared. Nothing but the awful knowledge she’d never love a man the way she loved him. Nothing but a heart that’d been burgeoning with hope and was now smashed into a thousand bloody pieces.

She flung the sheets aside and clambered from the bed. Scurrying to the bathroom, she threw on her discarded clothes and refused to give in to the hot tears waiting enthusiastically behind her eyes.

What had she expected?

He was Nathan Weller, Ghost, the Ice Man, Mr. Emotionless—as Ozzie liked to call him. Had she really thought one night with her would suddenly transform him into someone else?

Well, he
had
been transformed, but like Cinderella, his metamorphosis came with a time limit. Not the stroke of midnight like the fairy tale, but the first appearance of the new day.

Only he didn’t leave behind a glass slipper.

Oh, no.

He managed to leave behind her stupid, impulsive, shattered heart.

Chapter Seventeen

“I’m gonna need you t’hold on tight,” Nate instructed Ali as they wove in and out of Chicago traffic, Phantom squeezing between the cars that hadn’t already made room for the roaring beast of a bike. “Ozzie just called and told me the river tunnel is inop, so we’re goin’ in the front door hot and fast.”

“River tunnel?” her voice sounded scratchy, unused. Well, no surprise there, considering these were the first words they’d spoken to one another since Nate fucked up royally back in that despicable motel room.

Nearly fifteen solid hours of total, you’re-
such
-an-asshole silence where Ali didn’t deign to touch him save for the few instances when she’d had to brace herself as they leaned into curves. He’d never thought it possible to crave or…
miss
simple contact from another human being so much in his life.

“Oh, you mean the Bat Cave,” she said, answering her own question. “What happened?”

Man, just the sound of her voice made his heart rate kick up a notch. Maybe if he took the next corner real fast, she’d be forced to wrap her arms around him and then…no. Considering she was perched all the way back against the sissy bar, she’d likely choose to go flying off the back of Phantom rather than submit to laying a finger on him.

Damn. For a relatively intelligent guy, he sure could be a grade-A dumbass on occasion. That morning being a shiningly shitty example.

“Somethin’ about a problem with the hydraulics in the motor that runs the door back at Black Knights Inc.,” he told her. “We could access the tunnel via the terminating door in the parkin’ garage across the way, but then we’d be stuck down there for God only knows how long before Rebel fixes the problem and I don’t know about you, but the thought of sittin’ in that dank tunnel under however many gallons of fishy Chicago river just doesn’t sound like my idea of a good time.”

Whoa. He was suddenly all Chatty Cathy? He wasn’t sure he’d strung that many words together since…well, since she’d held him safe in her arms and sweetly wheedled the story of Moscow out of him.

Maybe he was trying to make up for all the hours of silence today…or maybe he was just an asshole.

He figured
she’d
bet on the latter.

“Hmm,” she grumped, unaware of the turmoil of his thoughts, “I’ll agree with that, but I don’t understand why we need to go in hot and fa—Hey! You moron!” She shook her fist at a cab driver who’d nearly T-boned them while trying to push a light.

Wow, put the girl through a couple of days of high-level stress, dress her in black leather and give her a gun, and suddenly she went all
Xena: Warrior Princess.

The cabbie must’ve read her I-can-castrate-men-with-just-a-thought expression. He lifted his hands, the universal
my-bad
signal, and Ali growled. “Anyway, I don’t get why we have to go in the front door hot and fast. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

He could hardly believe they were having this semi-rational conversation after the way he’d handled things back at the Happy Acres. He’d behaved like such a douchebag, but dear lovin’ Lord, he’d never expected to wake from the reoccurring dream of Grigg’s horrendous death to Ali’s beautifully concerned face.

Talk about a dagger straight to his already shredded heart.

And because he’d been hurting, humiliated over having her see him when he was crying like a friggin’ baby and screaming his idiot head off, because the sight of her there, naked in his arms, looking at him with such compassion and sweet, sweet sympathy when he’d
killed
the one person in the world she loved more than anything only made him feel unimaginably guilty, he’d pulled out the prick card, played his hand like an ace, and said things he didn’t mean. Things sure to make her turn away from him so he wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that he was dying inside.

Shit.

Just the thought of the look wallpapered all over her face before he’d been forced to turn his back on her—or drop to his knees and confess everything—made him want to curl up in a ball and cry. It’d been a look of such surprise, such disillusionment, such…
hurt
.

Someone should just shoot him and put him out of his misery.

Oh, wait. Someone
had
shot him and that only
added
to his current list of This Is Why My Life Sucks.