I Dream of Danger (29 page)

What had that gotten her? Not much, besides more
work. And more work. The men who’d courted her had courted the face, not the
person behind it. When they discovered that her life was work, work, work, and
very little play, the infatuation disappeared.

It certainly hadn’t brought her love.

And now the face was gone.

“Not so beautiful anymore, Lucius,” she said
without any sadness. Crazily, her lost beauty had freed something up in her.
Everyone in her life now liked
her,
not her face.
Liked Stella, the member of an underground community and not Stella the remote
movie star.

She was no movie star now. She could never be in
the business again. The stalker had sliced her up too badly. Ninety-seven
slashes all over, fourteen to her face. One slice had gone right through her
cheek, making it impossible to smile on the right side of her face. She looked
like someone had put her into a kaleidoscope and shaken it.

His hand tightened on hers. “Beautiful,” he
repeated forcefully.

Oh God.

Sex, love—those were things that had completely
fled her life after the stalker. There’d been lots of sex before, though not
love. But afterward, both had been out of the question. She’d taken refuge in
anonymity while her scars had healed as much as they ever would, cooking near
Mount Blue in a small diner belonging to the cousin of her former housekeeper.
She’d needed to do something, something tangible, with her hands, the way she’d
needed to breathe. And Elena had sent her to her cousin, where she’d buried
herself in the kitchen in the back and started creating. The greasy spoon became
a diner and was on its way to becoming a restaurant when the news told her that
her stalker had escaped.

She’d been on a break, chatting with a customer, a
good-looking, mysterious guy who showed up from time to time and who never told
her his name. If there was one thing Stella had learned in her life to respect
it was privacy. “Don’t ask don’t tell” covered a lot of things, not just one’s
sexuality. She didn’t want to talk about herself and he didn’t want to talk
about himself, and that suited them both.

And then the news flash—Steve Gardiner, stalker,
slasher, and all-around psycho, who’d convinced the judge to put him in a mental
institution instead of the deepest darkest cell on earth, had escaped.

She’d been talking to Jon when she heard. Suddenly
she began to shake all over, the trembles coming from deep in her core. A fear
so great she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

He’d taken one look at her, seen how terrified and
broken she was, and simply brought her up to Mount Blue, to Haven, where she’d
joined the community of misfits and runaways and had been happy ever since.

Here in Haven she’d found companionship and
purpose. But love? It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might find it here,
of all places.

She looked down at the large hand covering hers.
She remembered well that terrible night three months ago when Lucius and Miguel
Romero, Larry Lundquist, and Bob Pelton had been rescued from a lab that had
been like something out of a Nazi concentration camp and brought to Haven. The
four men had been starved, full of surgical scars, so weak they couldn’t walk.
It had taken Catherine a week of IVs just to get them to be able to sit up in
bed.

That’s when Stella had taken over, making it her
personal mission to get them to eat as much good nourishing food as they could
hold down.

Particularly their leader. Lucius Ward.
Captain
as Mac, Nick, and Jon called him.

Their respect for him had been evident in every
line of their bodies, and once she got to know him, even the terrible tortured
version of him, a strong man who had been rendered down to bedrock, she
understood why. This was a formidable man in every sense.

She’d seen him put himself together inch by
agonizing inch. If Catherine said to walk ten steps, he’d walk fifty. Grimacing
with pain every inch of the way.

And though he never smiled and the lines in his
face clearly showed he’d never been a smiling kind of man, his face lit up when
she entered a room.

So, yes, wow, sex seemed to be on the table.

But something needed to be said first. “You don’t
have to call me beautiful, Lucius,” Stella said gently. “I know I’m not
beautiful, not any longer. And if you don’t care, I sure don’t.”

While she talked his dark eyes roamed over her
face, over every inch of it. It was something she was used to. When she’d been
beautiful, men had stared openly at her, as if she were something rare and
different, belonging to a different species. After she’d been sliced open,
people had stared for a different reason, the way you’d stare at a train
wreck.

One of the many things she loved about Haven was
that no one seemed even to notice her scars.

Lucius smiled, pulling at the burn scar on his
right cheekbone. He brought her hand to his mouth and placed his lips in the
palm of her hand. He kept it there for a long time, so long that she moved the
tips of her fingers over the skin around his mouth, feeling a few scars, feeling
the small bite of his heavy beard.

He finally lowered her hand to the table, but kept
it in his.

“I never missed a movie of yours. I think I’ve seen
every one since you were a kid. You had a rare beauty and a rare talent. But I
find you more beautiful now and your talent is one that everyone here
appreciates.”

“I know they appreciate it.” She smiled at him. The
compliments on her cooking were frequent and fervent and she understood
completely. Before she arrived and reorganized the communal kitchen, Mac had
cooked. Every person who told her that had winced.

He was searching her eyes again, a look so
penetrating it was as if he were walking around inside her head. “You don’t
believe me when I say I find you more beautiful than before.”

She kept an easy smile on her face. “Lucius, it’s
not necessary for you to say that. I don’t need it.”

“I know you don’t. But I need to say it. Stella—”
he stopped. Licked his lips. Swallowed. Looked down at their linked hands, then
back up at her.

If Stella didn’t know better, she’d say he was
nervous. But that was impossible of course. Mac, Nick, and Jon were three of the
toughest men on the face of the earth. Capable and brave and determined. They
had defied—were still defying—the U.S. government and the entire military. They
were unbreakable men and this man, this man holding her hand, was their
commanding officer. Had led them into battle. That kind of man didn’t do
embarrassment.

And yet . . .

“Stella, I have something to say.” His voice,
already hoarse, had roughened. “And I’m finding it . . . I’m finding
it hard.”

“I’m listening, Lucius.” She couldn’t imagine it
hard for Lucius to say anything.

He drew in a deep breath. “I’m falling in love with
you. No, scratch that. I am in love with you. Since the moment I saw you when we
were brought into Haven.”

Oh God.
Tears pricked
her eyes. Lucius and the three others had been carried into Haven because they’d
been unable to walk. All four of them had been on the verge of death. She
remembered Lucius clearly lying on the gurney in the infirmary, a wounded and
broken man. It had hurt to look at him, a clearly once-strong man who’d been
tortured almost to death. Catherine had had a near-death experience herself and
was in a coma, so it had been up to Stella and their two nurses, Pat and
Salvatore, to take care of everyone.

After the attack, Stella had had four surgeries and
had spent months in the hospital. With nothing else to do, she’d observed the
nurses and had a pretty good handle on what to do.

Lucius had opened his eyes briefly when she
approached him on the gurney. “We’ll take care of you,” she whispered. He’d
nodded and passed out.

That was the first time he set eyes on her.

Since then, she’d looked after him. Not out of
pity, oh no. Partly out of rage. She’d been subjected to insane violence too,
just as he had. The violence of the cruel and cowardly. She knew exactly what
that was like and the idea of a man like this, a combat hero, who’d dedicated
his life to his country, being tied down like an animal and tormented—it drove
her half crazy.

But the real reason she’d looked after him was that
she’d seen right through the naked, half-dead man who’d arrived in Haven and
saw, very clearly, the extraordinary, strong man he’d been. His courage and
strength had been clear to her from the start. He’d been smart and strong and
brave. Handsome, even, as she’d been beautiful. And then they’d fallen into the
hands of monsters. But she came out of it and he was coming out of it, and in
watching him put himself back together, she’d lost her heart to him.

He reached out a hand to her face, finger trying to
trace the worst scar of all, running from her left eyebrow down to the right
jaw. The one that had taken sixty-four stitches to close. She was lucky to have
a functioning eye.

Instinctively Stella reared back. No one had
touched it since the surgeon had taken out the stitches.

“No, no,” he whispered. “No, darling. Shhh. Let me
touch.” His finger, slightly rough, traced the deep white scar over and over
again, slowly, from end to end.

That had been the first slash, the stalker having
taken her completely by surprise. Her entourage had known for years that she had
a violent stalker. Nobody told her, the idea being that she’d “lose her focus.”
And they’d lose their gravy train. The stalker had sent her menacing letters,
horrific gifts, had made threatening phone calls. All intercepted. The man she’d
considered her personal assistant was a bodyguard. His dead body had been found
just outside her bedroom door, lying in a pool of blood.

It was the cut that had hurt the most, slicing her
face and her life in two.

Lucius’s touch was so gentle, his eyes so
understanding. They just sat there in the quiet room, his finger tracing her
worst nightmare from temple to chin. His thumb wiped away the fat tears that
welled from her eyes.

His eyes—they
knew
her
somehow. No one had known her. Her fame had been like a stone wall between her
and the rest of humanity. Even her lovers pleasured her body without ever
touching her heart. They didn’t want to touch her heart, anyway. That had always
been very clear.

This man, with the ruined face and broken body,
this man touched her heart.

A sob escaped her, quickly stifled. She never
cried, ever. The tears were . . . a mistake.

“Hush, darling,” he said, that deep voice so
tender. “I haven’t finished talking yet.”

She nodded, throat too tight for words.

“I love you, Stella. I know I have nothing to offer
you, not even myself. I can barely stand upright. I have no career, no place to
call my own but here. I am a hunted man, together with the others. Should we be
caught, we’d be court-martialed, but I don’t think we’d make it to a tribunal.
They’d shoot us first. I don’t have anything resembling a future. I’m not even
fully a man again. But I swear no one else could ever love you like I do.
Someday I’ll be whole. I believe that completely. It won’t be today and it won’t
be tomorrow. But, do you think—do you think you could wait for me?”

That strong, scarred beloved face was open for her
to read, to see his anxiety. Those dark eyes were locked onto hers.

The tears were falling freely now, catching on her
upturned lips. She cupped his face with her free hand.

“I’m not going to wait for you, Lucius.” He
flinched and she clutched his hand harder. “I don’t have to wait. I’m already
yours.”

D
o
you think Jon will find a clue in Elle’s house?” Catherine came out of the
bathroom with perfumed steam billowing behind her, like some goddess coming out
of the mists of time.

Billowing steam, goddesses, mists of time.
Christ.
Mac didn’t recognize the thoughts in his head
these days. They were totally unlike the thoughts of Mac BC—Before Catherine. He
seemed to be having a lot of those thoughts nowadays, though.

Everything in his life had changed since Catherine,
not least the small bump showing in her belly. When he saw it, when he touched
it, his heart gave a huge kick in his chest. His child. Their child. Though
Catherine was his heart and life, this child would be his only blood relative in
the world. Just thinking about it gave him the shivers.

Catherine walked to their bed, smiling sadly. If
anyone knew what it was like to be hunted down by the goons of Arka
Pharmaceuticals, it was Catherine.

Mac held his arms out and grunted with satisfaction
when she went into them. The world was fucked-up almost beyond repair, but when
his arms closed around his wife he could almost hear an audible
click,
as if a piece of sophisticated machinery were
working well.

He ran a hand down her dark, soft hair. “If Jon
doesn’t find what we need tonight, we’ll just attack it full bore tomorrow.
Everyone will pitch in. We’ll figure it out.”

Looking down, he could see her smile, felt her head
nod against his shoulder.

She wasn’t quite convinced. True, there were only a
few of them against a huge multinational corporation, but they were the best.
And they had two secret weapons—Catherine and Elle.

Between them the two women had about a billion
advanced degrees and they were highly motivated.

“I appreciate what you and Nick and Jon are doing.”
She looked up at him, cupped the burn scar on his face. As always, when she
touched him there was a sensation of deep warmth and well-being. And something
else. Her eyes opened wide because she also got a blast of the surge of lust
that took him. It wasn’t anything new, he felt a low-level desire whenever she
was around and they were alone.