Kiss and Tell (26 page)

"When I was twelve I fell out of that big old tree, the one that crashed into Grammy's house. I broke my wrist." She grimaced. "When we got home my dad was furious. I cried. Not because it hurt, which it did. But because I'd done something really brave and daring, and I'd loved it, and by doing what I wanted I'd disappointed and frightened my family."

"It's understandable they'd be protective. You were a girl, the baby of the family, and sick."

"I wasn't bedridden. But I always had to be careful. Cautious, you know? Not too much activity, nothing to get me too excited. Stop that." She moved his hand. "It scared them when I rejected the first plastic valve – I scared myself.

"They love me. They wanted to protect me. And it was easy to let them. My dad and brothers tend to smother me with love. They take such good care of me that there was a time I wondered if I really had free will.

"I have to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. What
I
want to do. It's not so easy, you know? Suddenly trying to learn who I am at twenty-seven. The whole
world's
out there. I can have whatever I want. But I'm looking at the selection and the choices are so overwhelming, so diverse, so ... confusing. It almost seems easier to sneak back into my nice protective little niche and leave it at that."

"And is that the decision you've made this weekend?" Jake asked. "You're not going back to work at your dad's computer company?"

"That's one thing I
know
I don't want to do anymore."

"Then what?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe go to Paris and study. Maybe...I don't know.
Something
." Marnie smiled, sleepy, content to lie here with Jake, safe from the world for now.

"Why didn't you study in Paris instead of going to college here if that's what you wanted?"

"Because my dad was terrified something would happen to me, and I'd be too far away for him to get to me. And when he and the guys talked like that, I'd think, 'Well, maybe they're right. What if something
did
happen to me." So I put it off, and put it off."

"You could have gone to art school in San Francisco."

"I know. I didn't do that, either. I told you, I had to find some spunk. I'm working on it. Okay, now you. What was the biggest thing that happened to you before you were a teenager?"

"A lot more
big
things happened to me
after
I was a teenager."

She heard the smile in his voice and socked him on the arm. "Not sex. Kid stuff."

"I wasn't a kid. Not really. I tried to keep my nose clean at school. But everyone knew about my folks. It was humiliating. I managed to get reasonable grades. I signed their names for any school stuff. My folks weren't big on education. Most of the time they forgot I was around. We weren't poor or anything. Nice house, fairly decent neighborhood. They just – I stole money from them to buy school clothes before they drank it."

"Oh, Jake. That's terrible. No wonder you ran away."

"It wasn't terrible. It wasn't great. It made me extremely cautious and distrustful around people. I didn't want them to feel sorry for me, and I didn't want Child Protective Services taking me away, either. The navy was one of the best things that happened to me. I got an education, and I wised up fast."

She stroked his chest. "I wish I'd known you then."

"You would have been a kid yourself. What would you have done?"

"Shared Grammy and my dad and brothers with you. Loved you. Shared my sprouts with you."

Jake chuckled and kissed her palm. "Don't like sprouts, huh?"

"Not much. Duchess won't eat them, either."

Jake grinned. "Bummer." His hand skated up her spine, then down to her bottom where he lingered. "What's going on in that mind of yours? I can practically hear your brain ticking."

With her fingertip she traced the sheened stripe, the obscene half smile, around the base of his throat. "Tell me how you got this scar," she said softly.
Tell me about the woman who spoiled you for me. The woman you loved.

"Not important." He cupped one cheek of her behind in his hand and caressed her petal-soft skin.

She wiggled a little farther up his chest. "It
is
important. It's part of who you are. Part of what you are. Tell me."

Jake hesitated. Even after six years, the whole episode still stuck in his craw – part frustration, part red rage, part embarrassment.

Marnie's eyes were inches from his, clear, blue, languid from their lovemaking, and waiting for him to tell her things he'd rather leave unspoken until he could find some resolution.

She touched his face with her fingertips. "Start anywhere."

What the hell. The middle's as good a place as any.

"I told you about Dancer."

"Yes, but you haven't told me what he did to you."

"T-FLAC has been after him for years. Various operatives have tried, and failed, to catch the son of a bitch. No one has been able to ID him, he's a master at disguise, and he always seems to be a step or two ahead of us."

Jake saw images flash through his mind like an old-fashioned newsreel. A step behind Dancer in Turkey after the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Istanbul. Just missing him in Beirut. Following him to Johannesburg, only to realize he'd caught the wrong guy. Close, but no cigar.

"He's a crazy SOB. Unfortunately crazy like a fox. He's masterminded two attempted presidential assassinations, both of them too close for comfort. He's responsible for countless bombings here and in embassies abroad. He's the one responsible for flying that remote-control plane into the White House last year. We had to work fast on that one. The bomb it carried would have taken out a quarter of DC."

Watching him as if he were telling her the most fascinating story in the world, Marnie shifted against him to retrace the scar with her fingertip. "I thought a woman did this to you!"

"Physically, she did. I found out later she acted on Dancer's orders. I'd been after him for a couple of years by then. Getting close, only to find myself holding smoke. His acts of terrorism started escalating. He took his business outside the States and started stirring the pot overseas. Riling Israel. Pissing off Bosnia. Starting riots in South Africa. Hijacking planes. Planting bombs.

"Six years ago, while I was in a hospital in New York, I met a woman named Soledad O'Donnel."

Marnie snorted. "Soledad
O'Donnel?
"

"She claimed her mother was South American, her father Irish. Petite, blonde, pretty in a fey kind of way. I had nothing better to do, and she fascinated me."

Fascinated, beguiled, seduced. He'd fallen hard and fast. The delicate blonde with the dark, soulful eyes had made him feel ten feet tall, invincible. Lovable. Loved for the first time in his life. It was heady stuff. For two months while he recuperated from a bullet wound, courtesy of Dancer, Jake had basked in Soledad's warmth. The moment he'd been released, he'd moved from the sterile hospital to Soledad's Fifth Avenue apartment.

She'd told him she'd come from a poor family, where they'd had little to eat. She'd still been extremely slender, with dark circles under her eyes, and had an air of frailty about her that made Jake terrified to touch her. He'd wanted to take care of her.

He'd thought of quitting T-FLAC. He'd bought land, sight unseen, in Wyoming. Analyzed his retirement plan. Imagined a life away from violence and mayhem.

"Why were you in the hospital? What was wrong with you?"

"Lead poisoning. Do you want to hear this or not?"

Narrow-eyed, Marnie tweaked his chest hair. "She was beautiful, and you fell madly in love with her."

Jake rubbed his chest. "No I didn't. I fell in
lust
with her." Until this weekend he would have sworn he'd felt some form of love for the beautiful seductress. Now he knew better.

Marnie had away of raising one pale brow as if to say
What do you take me for, bub? A fool?
"What color were her eyes?" she asked somewhat belligerently.

"Black. Why?"

"What was her favorite food?"

"What is this, Twenty Questions?"

"Just answer."

"Spaghetti."

"Did you ever watch her sleeping?"

"Yeah, so?"

"So, not a thing. Then what?"

"Soledad was a reporter. A stringer. She was an excellent journalist, and when I found out she too was on the trail of our mysterious friend, we pooled resources."

"How nice to share a hobby." She took a bite, not too gently, on his shoulder, then soothed it with her tongue.

"Three scientists from Livermore Labs were kidnapped. No ransom asked. There was talk of a biological weapons factory. I had to act quickly. Through her sources, Soledad discovered Dancer had gathered a small radical group of mercenaries in San Cristóbal and was planning bigger and better things. Like chemical and/or biological warfare."

He felt a warm huff of air against his chest as Marnie rested her head there. "Lord, Jake, that's so scary. Is that what they were doing in South America? Making biological weapons?"

"Satellite photos showed new construction just outside the city of San Cristóbal. There were too many indicators. Viruses went missing from a lab in Canada. It was confirmed that Dancer supplied the sarin gas used in the Tokyo subway. Each act provided another jigsaw puzzle piece to what he intended. We dared not take the chance of waiting. We had to close in. Fast."

"What happened?"

"The clandestine ground assault was a culmination of years of intensive research into how his terrorist cell operated, where they were, and how many he had with him in South America. Soledad's information was the last piece needed."

Jake scrubbed a hand across his jaw as he stared into the middle distance. "By then we'd rounded up several of his small cells in Israel, Brazil, and Scotland, but we realized San Cristóbal was his new home base. We planned to get him and his factory before he could do any more harm. If it hadn't been for the information supplied by Soledad's source, they wouldn't have known about it.

"We knew someone in our organization was leaking information to Dancer. It was the only way he could possibly have kept a step ahead of us for all those years. Knowing that, I kept it on a need-to-know basis and took only a four-man team in with me.

"We scoped out where they were and got ready to take them out. All of them. We weren't taking any chances that time. Skully, Lurch, and Brit were with me. It was a small team, but hand-picked. Men I trusted implicitly. We knew Dancer was coming in a couple of days; he'd left for Buenos Aires the morning we arrived.

"Taking turns keeping watch, we sacked out in a small hotel on the outskirts of town to wait. Soledad showed up."

He'd returned to his room after his watch to find her naked on his bed. Like a horny high-school kid, he hadn't questioned how she'd found him or why the hell she was there.

Until this weekend, it was the last time he'd thought with his equipment instead of his brain. One would think he'd learn...

"Jake?" Marnie brought him back softly. "If it's too painful for you to tell me, let's change the subject."

"Nothing painful about it," he told her shortly. Nothing other than having his heart ripped out twice in a matter of moments.

It was too goddamn late to change the subject anyhow.

He removed her hand from his chest and sat up, then, without looking at her, swung his legs over the side of the bed.

"Oh, damn it. Why do I always open my big mouth? Jake, I'm sorry..."

He remembered the room. Dim. Hot. Muggy. The melodic sound of a guitar floated through the window from the cantina downstairs, accompanied by the fragrance of frying meat and cheap wine. A fly had buzzed around their sweating bodies.

He'd forgotten Dancer. Forgotten the mission. Judas. He'd forgotten to guard
himself
.

While they'd made love, Soledad told him of the child she carried. The moment stood out in Jake's mind, strobe-lit, crystal clear.

His joy. The marvel of it. The unexpected gift of renewal.

Then the ice-hot slice of the knife.

The paralyzing, unexpected betrayal.

"She was quick, I'll give her that," he said, grim as he remembered his shock. The stunned incredulity. The dumb-ass sensation of amazement. The disbelief that she was wielding that sharp, lethal knife in her delicate little hand. Laughing as she told him she was going to abort the baby the next day.

"While we were, ah, doing it, she sliced my throat. When I threw her off, she kneed me in the balls and tried to finish the job."

"Oh, please! Give me a break," Marnie snapped from behind him, where she'd been silent up till now.

The mattress shifted. Jake turned his head as Marnie sat up, reached to pull the silk throw up to cover her pretty breasts, and gave him a disgusted look. "You said Soledad was delicate. How could a woman like that take a trained professional like you?"

Because he'd taken his heart and soul into that bed and left his brain on the floor with his pants.

"A guy isn't
thinking
when he's
coming
. There are a few seconds there when a man can only think with his— What do you call it? Winkie?"

"I don't call it
anything
when you're doing it with another woman!"

"Jealous?"

"Is she dead?" Marnie demanded, jaw tight, blue eyes glittering.

"Lurch burst in and shot her."

"Good. I hope she died slowly."

"Not fast enough," Jake told her grimly. "She used my weapon to shoot Lurch. I was too busy trying to prevent Lurch and myself from bleeding to death to give a damn how she went. My best friend died before Skully arrived like the cavalry."

He rubbed his eyes. "If it hadn't been for Skully hauling my ass out of there and getting me to a hospital, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"Oh, God, Jake." She pressed against his back, reaching down to splay both hands on his chest. He shuddered, but she didn't let go. "That's terrible. Horrifying! To discover in the space of seconds that the woman you loved was going to give you a child, and then to realize she'd betrayed you... And she tried to kill you. The bitch!"