Pursuit (10 page)

“I can’t talk about it,” she said again. “There’s nothing I can say.” The words came out in a rush, impossible to stop, the stark truth. She covered her mouth with her hands, shaking, wondering what was going to happen next. They stared at each other wordlessly. Charlotte could feel the blood pounding in her veins, the adrenaline pumping, her hands and feet prickling. Her body was uselessly preparing to flee, though there was no place to escape to.

A full minute went by, while her heart thumped madly in her chest, so hard it actually hurt. Matt’s eyes fell to where a vein throbbed in her neck, then rose again to meet her gaze. He nodded once, gravely, accepting what she was saying.

Charlotte drew in a deep breath, only then realizing she hadn’t breathed for almost a whole minute. She felt as if her life hung in the balance.

Matt Sanders had been a military officer, which wasn’t far from being a law enforcement officer. For all she knew, if he discovered her identity, he would hand her over to the American authorities.

No, she could never tell him who she was.

“Is he alive?” he asked, his deep voice quiet.

“Alive?” Charlotte’s heart had finally stopped thudding so hard. She was able to breathe normally again. “Who?”

“The man who shot you.” The stark words hung there in the silent room. Charlotte met his eyes, so dark and so compelling. She couldn’t begin to imagine what he was thinking.

For an instant, the space of a breath, Charlotte was fiercely tempted to tell him the truth. Simply lay her burden down. Put the whole mess into those large, capable-looking hands. It was so incredibly tempting. For a moment, the desire to ease her huge burden off her shoulders and share it with another human being was so fierce she had to bite her lips to keep from spilling it out.

Telling the truth could be fatal, and yet she couldn’t lie to him. She nodded once, jerkily.

“Yes,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “He’s alive.”

The grooves around his mouth deepened. His big fists clenched once, hard, and relaxed. It was the only movement he made. He became, if possible, even more still. “No one will ever hurt you again, Charlotte. You have my word on it. I’m going to sit next to you now. Is that all right?”

Oh God.
Matt Sanders seemed to exert a magnetic field around him from where he was, a few feet away. If he sat down next to her, she’d fall right into it. Still, she hadn’t the nerve to deny him anything.

“Okay,” she whispered.

He sat down on the couch, far enough away so that they wouldn’t touch. His heavy weight made the small, cheap couch’s cushions dip deeply. Even sitting far enough away that she’d have to reach out for him intentionally to touch him, she could feel his body heat. He’d been in that freezing water, too, and his clothes were still slightly damp, but somehow his big body managed to generate heat.

“Give me your hand.” Startled, Charlotte looked down at his outstretched hand. It was large, strong, tanned, rough-skinned. He didn’t say anything else, just sat there calmly, large hand turned palm upward.

His big hand was rock-steady, unmoving. An almost unbearable temptation. How long had it been since she’d felt a man’s touch? It had been over two years since she’d even been out on a date.

So long. So very long.

The last male hand Charlotte had held had been her father’s. Her father’s hand had been bony, emaciated, with crepelike skin and dark age spots on the back. Toward the end they’d been deeply mottled with the bruises from the IV lines.

Matt’s hand was nothing like her father’s. It promised a strength she desperately needed, warmth and reassurance.

Touching this man was crazy, but she suddenly craved his touch more than anything else in the world. She had seen with her own eyes how strong and powerful he was. She desperately wanted a connection to all that strength and power.

Charlotte pulled her hand out from under the blanket, watching his eyes. His face was expressionless as he looked at her. He made no move toward her, just waited patiently, large hand open to receive hers.

Slowly, as if she were pushing her way through something much heavier than air, through a dense compound of time and desperation and fear, Charlotte reached a trembling hand out to him. A breath away from touching him, she stopped, fingers trembling. Matt waited, unmoving. He looked as if he could wait forever. Finally, Charlotte laid her hand in his, tentatively, shaking inside. From cold. From exhaustion. From fear. He looked down at their two hands. The contrast in color and size was so great it was shocking. His hand was almost double the size of hers and much darker in color. It was so different in its size and shape and texture, it was almost as if the two hands belonged to two different species. He raised his eyes from their joined hands to meet her gaze. Slowly, so she had time to protest or remove her hand if she didn’t want this, his hand curled up as his other hand covered hers in a warm, gentle clasp.

His grip was so warm it felt like a painless fire. The warmth made her cold hand tingle. She’d been so tense it had hurt to breathe, but that tight steel band around her chest loosened slightly. She took a deep shuddering breath, filling her lungs completely for the first time since the fall into the water.

There was a tiny ball of warmth that was her hand encased in his. It wasn’t enough to dissipate the icy chill in her bones but it was enough to remind her system of the idea of warmth. Being frozen with shock—from the spill in the ocean and from the exposure of her terrible secret—had numbed her feelings. But with his warm touch, the icy grip of shock loosened, and with it her self-control. Despite her best efforts, a lone tear tracked down her cheek.

Something—some strong expression—crossed his face. His jaw muscles jumped.

“Ah, shit,” he said, the deep voice soft and low, and reached over to pick her up. He didn’t ask permission, and he didn’t grab at her. He just lifted her up as if she were weightless and a second later she was sitting on his lap, his arms around her. He wrapped the colorful blanket around her. She trembled at his touch.

“No, I can’t—you—” She couldn’t even get the words out, she was shaking so hard, trying to hold back the tears.

Crying wouldn’t help in any way. Crying wouldn’t bring her father back. Crying wouldn’t get her life back. Crying wouldn’t help her figure out how to prove her innocence. Charlotte knew all that, knew it deep in her bones, but the double shock of almost dying, and now being encased in Matt Sanders’s warm, strong arms acted on her like a whiplash, and the tears were lying in wait, in a hot ball in her chest.

He eased her head down on his shoulder with a gentle push and stroked her still-wet hair away from her face. Charlotte shook, the hot ball rising in her throat.

“It’s okay.” His voice was so deep she could feel the vibration of his words in his chest. She shook her head sharply.
No.
No, it wasn’t okay. Maybe it would never be okay again. He smelled of the sea, of musk and man. Though his clothes were still slightly clammy, she could feel his body heat beneath the fabric. His skin warmed hers wherever they touched. Her forehead lay against his neck, right hand braced just above his heart. The beat was strong and slow, the beat of an athlete.

She felt warm and safe for the first time since that terrible night. He shifted her slightly in his arms to pull the warm blanket around her more tightly, and her hip came up against a steel rod. It took her a full minute to realize that it was his penis. His erect penis. His very
big
erect penis. Startled, Charlotte lifted her head from his shoulder and met his eyes. The corner of his mouth lifted very slightly.

“It’s okay,” he repeated.

She held herself very still, barely able to move in the blanket encasing her like a cocoon. She shifted again, her hip rolling over him, and felt the ripple as his penis reacted to her touch. Even through her clothes and his, she could feel him lengthening. A wave of pure heat rose from her loins in response. The heat took her totally by surprise. It had been so long since she’d felt anything like sexual heat, it took her a moment or two to even recognize it. It was like a little sun blooming in her belly, the warmth spreading instantly outwards. Every slight movement she made affected him, she could feel it. When he moved to tighten his arms around her, his penis surged against her hip. He wasn’t making demands, or pushing up against her. He made the situation a simple one—he was aroused but wasn’t going to do anything about it.

She wasn’t going to, either. The flash of heat was like a long-ago reminiscence of when she had been a normal young woman. There wasn’t anything remotely normal about her life now. She couldn’t even remember how you were supposed to respond to something like this. Even if she wanted to do something, act on the unexpected, unwelcome heat, she couldn’t.

Charlotte was beyond a normal life. Beyond the healthy response of a woman to an attractive man. Dating, courtship, sex. All of that seemed like something people on another planet might do, not her.

Maybe on Earth, a man and a woman could meet and act on a strong tug, but not where she lived. Two months ago, Charlotte had moved to a planet of her own, spinning in deepest space. Pluto, maybe. Big and dark and silent and airless.

It was warm on her planet now, though. In her dry clothes, inside the blanket, surrounded by an immense amount of hard, warm man, she could feel muscles relaxing that had been tense for over two months. Charlotte shifted until she was turned more fully into his arms, laid her head down on that massive shoulder, and closed her eyes.

Warrenton

Three thousand miles away, the man known as Barrett emerged from Robert Haine’s luxury condo. Head down, he breathed in the frigid night air, longing for summer. Soon, very soon, he’d be warmed by the Caribbean sun. If Barrett never saw upstate New York again in his lifetime, he’d be happy.

Barrett had excellent peripheral vision. He could see the CCTV surveillance cameras with motion-detector software swivel to follow his progress, but he knew how to hide his face for surveillance cameras. Haine thought he was so impregnable with his fancy security equipment. The fucker had no idea. Barrett’s biggest weapon right now wasn’t his Barrett sniper rifle, his MC5, or the four pounds of Semtex, all of which he had back in his hotel room, in hidden compartments in his luggage.

No, Barrett’s secret weapon was right there in his shirt pocket, in plain sight—a voiceactivated microbar digital recorder with voice-recognition software disguised as an MP3

player. He’d digitally remaster the recording back in the hotel with his laptop, disguising his own voice and keeping Haine’s voice intact. Together with the microcamera in his third shirt button, it was enough to take to any DA in the country and get an indictment in five minutes.

Barrett smiled as he drove sedately away, refraining from giving a one-finger salute to the surveillance cameras.

Four hundred K for a hit made him probably the best-paid assassin in America. The four hundred K topped up his bank account very nicely and put him right over the top of his self-set goal of $5 million in savings.

But Haine’s contribution to Barrett’s personal pension plan didn’t stop there. Barrett was going to make a neat and tidy little package of evidence and put it in the vault of a bank just around the corner from Feeb Headquarters in DC with instructions to forward it to the FBI should something happen to him. And let Haine know he had it. Oh, yes, Haine would fund his retirement nicely. Barrett would make sure Haine won his big Pentagon contract, because if he did, Barrett figured Haine would be good for a million a year, easy.

Barrett had twenty little packages, just like this one.

Much better than any 401(k).

Now all he had to do was find this woman, Charlotte Court. That was the hard part. Killing her would be the easy part.

San Luis

She fell asleep like a child, between one breath and the next. Matt had never been around kids and had no brothers or sisters or even cousins to give him secondhand experience, but his married buddies told him that’s what happened. When kids ran out of steam, they dropped to sleep in a second, sometimes right in their tracks.

Charlotte did just that, her muscles relaxing in an instant.

Matt felt the pulse at her wrist. It was slow, but the fact that he could feel it was a good sign. Below a body temperature of 91° the radial pu lse disappears. He judged her temperature to be about 95°. In an hour’s time it w ould be 96 and by morning her skin temperature would be back up to 98, with a core temperature of 98.6. He had every intention of being there in the morning to make sure of it.

She dropped off to sleep like a child because she was shocked and exhausted, but also because she knew she was safe. She was a woman who’d been in danger and that fired up all the senses. Animals who were prey had keener senses than the predators; they had to.

Charlotte had been in combat mode, all senses firing all the time. Judging by the state of the undressed wound, she’d been in combat mode for about two months now. Battlehardened warriors who trained daily for the stress of combat found it hard to sustain two straight months of imminent danger and vigilance without bleeding off the stress in some way, let alone a young woman who couldn’t have trained for it.

He knew exactly how she’d survived. By sleeping lightly, if at all. By being mindful of her surroundings at all times, ready to take flight at the first untoward movement. By keeping her adrenaline levels dangerously high, so high that the by-product of adrenaline, cortisol, would eventually ruin her kidneys.