Shadows at Midnight (2 page)

He looked down. Their hands were such contrasts. Her hands were long-fingered, slender, with fine bones under pale, smooth skin. His hands were almost double the size of hers, a workingman’s hands, big and rough.

Suddenly, at the sight of their hands together, dark and light, large and small, heat bloomed under his skin, a small sun of it. It was the most erotic thing he’d ever seen. Just holding this woman’s hand was sexier than being with a naked woman.

His vision narrowed in on their hands, fixing the image in his mind.

Whoa.

His entire nature and every ounce of relentless Marine training made him intensely mission-oriented. They were as close as dammit to a combat situation right now and he was obsessed with a woman’s
hands
?

What the fuck?

Dan lifted his eyes and nearly lost himself in hers. They were the most extraordinary color—the pale color of the noonday summer sky, a brilliant silver blue with a tiny rim of darker blue around the rim. He’d never seen eyes that color before and he couldn’t tear his own eyes away from them.

He stopped breathing for a second, then came back to himself when he felt her slipping her hand out of his.

Dan looked away for a moment, trying to get back into his own head. He definitely needed to go out and get laid, asap, if holding a woman’s hand briefly while looking in her eyes nearly overwhelmed him.

He turned his head back only to find her eyes still on him. Wide, gorgeous, silvery blue eyes. Solemn, serious. She shook her head slowly. “If something serious happens, my head will roll for not seeing this coming.”

His teeth ground together. “I didn’t see it coming, either, and it’s
my
job to keep the embassy safe.” Another RPG went off, close to the embassy. “I hate the thought that I allowed us to get caught with our pants down.” He slanted her a glance. “Sorry.”

She smiled slightly. “No problem. We
are
caught with our pants down, no question.”

Oh, shit. Now he had another image in his head he couldn’t shake out.

“What?” She’d just said something that he hadn’t heard because a vision of a naked Claire Day had blossomed in his head.

“I said,” she repeated patiently, “we can wait them out, can’t we? We should have food supplies for the entire staff for a month and you should have at least three thousand rounds in the armory.”

He raised his eyebrows. The extent of any embassy’s food and ammo supplies was top secret. Not even the ambassador was given the information unless it was an emergency and he or she needed briefing. So how the hell did Claire peg it so exactly? She wasn’t giving anything away, her face bland and guileless. “I’m just guessing, of course,” she said primly.

Well, she’d nailed it. So either she was really, really good at her job or security wasn’t airtight.

It didn’t make that much difference. Claire wasn’t the enemy.

The enemy right now was outside the embassy gates, shooting up a storm. Dan hoped he wouldn’t need the three thousand rounds in the armory because there was no backup. If the rebel army broke into the embassy, his five Marines a mile away wouldn’t have the firepower to shoot their way to him. Dan didn’t want to order his men on a suicide mission.

Right now their best bet was to lie low, be prepared and hope that whatever drama the Makongan Army and the Red Army had going would work itself out without involving the US.

Claire drew up her legs, clasping them and laying her cheek against her knees. She heaved a huge sigh.

“I just hope to God this all blows over soon before it hits the international news. My father will have a heart attack if he hears that there’s a revolution on the streets of Laka. He’ll be making arrangements to come over the instant he hears there’s trouble, which is not good. He’s almost eighty and has a heart condition. I just hope to reassure him I’m okay before he gets the news that he should be worrying. All the cell phone towers are down, otherwise I’d have called him already.” She looked up at him. “How about you? Who’s going to be worrying about you?”

Worry about
him
? Jesus. No one. His job was to worry about the safety of the ambassador and his family, the embassy staff and his men. In that order.

The idea of anyone worrying about
him
was crazy. Even as a kid, he’d learned the hard way to be tough and self-reliant. Dan couldn’t remember anyone worrying about him, ever.

“No one. But that’s okay. I can handle myself.”

“No one?” she persisted, her eyes searching his face. “Not a mom or a girlfriend?”

Dan nearly snorted. The women he bedded were way more concerned about their own pleasure than his well-being. “Mom disappeared when I was two. I don’t remember her. And no—” He looked down at her, at the smooth, high cheekbones, long lashes, beautiful mouth. It was impossible to remember any other woman he’d ever been with while looking at her. “Don’t have a girlfriend. Being a Marine embassy security guard isn’t conducive to relationships.”

Dan was brave. He knew he was brave. He’d been tested under fire and had held. After this posting, he was going to be reintegrated into his unit and would probably be sent either to Iraq or Afghanistan and he was fine with that, fine. So nobody could say he was a coward.

But right now, his palms were sweating and he felt like a blowtorch had been applied to his throat at the thought of what he was about to ask. Had to ask. Because he simply had to know.

“And—” His voice came out a croak. He coughed to loosen his throat. “And what about you? Is there, um—” Jesus. What to call the bastard she might be with?
Boyfriend
sounded lame, like high school.
Significant other?
Nah. “Someone?” he ended lamely.

This was a question he’d asked a thousand times in bars, because he had some hard and fast rules for his sex life, written in stone.

No bareback sex, ever. No married women, ever. Or engaged women. Not even women who were going out with someone else.

He didn’t need the hassle of fighting with another male over a woman. And most of all, anyone who cheated once with him would cheat again on him.

So at around the third or fourth drink, if they’d got to the point where he knew they’d be heading out together, he made sure she was a free agent.

Bars around military bases are full of chicks who want to party even when their men are away, and who aren’t too particular who they party with. It sickened him, to think of some man off defending his country while his woman was out trolling for sex. If he got even a whiff of that, he was history.

It was really hard to think of Claire not being with someone or engaged. Or hell, even married. What the fuck were men thinking? How could any man be around her for even a minute and not want her for his own?

And yet scuttlebutt—and Dan kept his ear very close to the ground—had it she was single.

God, he hoped so.

If she was with someone, he’d just had himself posted to Laka for nothing, and was going to waste a year of his life in West Africa when where he’d really wanted to be was in the new Baghdad Embassy. If she was with someone, all these . . . things roiling around in his chest, all this obsessive thinking about her this past year was bad news. Really bad news.

Showdown time.

But she only blinked and looked blank. “Someone?” she asked. “Me?” She gave a half laugh. “What you said was absolutely true, Gunnery Sergeant—”

“Dan.” His heart had taken a leap in his chest at her blank look and he had to breathe carefully to get it to steady out.

“Dan. Okay, right. Well, Dan, I’ve lived in Durban, Singapore and now Laka over the past six years. No man would put up with that.”

I would
, he thought.

Her eyes seemed to glow in the room when she looked at him. “I guess it’s a little like being a Marine security guard.”

Dan looked at her hands, long-fingered, fragile, soft, with small wrists. Her shoulders and torso were narrow, the line of her collarbones delicate. The long, pale blond hair completely unlike his own dark brown high-and-tight.

She spent her days—and more hours in those days than she was supposed to—in a windowless secure room doing God knows what on computers. Everything she did, she did with her head. And pretty as it was, he knew she was smarter than she was beautiful, which was saying a lot.

He thought of his men. Ward, Martinez, Buchan, Harvey and Lopez. Tough bastards, hell with a rifle, hard drinkers, good to have at your back but light-years away from being like Claire Day.

No, she wasn’t anything like a Marine security guard.

He scrolled back in his head to what she’d said earlier. “Tell me about your father.”

“Dad?” The thought of her father made her smile. Good. Dan sure couldn’t smile at the thought of his own father, the bastard. He still had the scars.

“Yeah. You smile when you mention him. That’s nice.”

“He’s a great dad,” she mused, picking at a thread of her tan cotton pants. In the rush to hustle her into the safe quarters of Post One, her pants had caught on a protruding nail from one of the billion unfinished or botched restructuring projects going on in the embassy. There was a big rip just above the knee.

Underneath, Dan could see smooth white skin. He closed his eyes for a moment. He was here to protect her, not to get all hot and bothered because he saw several square inches of skin. No matter how soft and beautiful.

“Yeah?” he prodded. Get the conversation back to something that would cool him down, like her father. “What’s he do?”

“He’s a—he
was
a professor of French literature. At University of Massachusetts Boston. He’s retired. Has been for a long time.”

“I thought I heard some Boston in there.” Dan frowned. He had a pretty good ear for accents and could usually pick out where new recruits came from. “Not much, though. A Boston accent is usually a pretty strong regional accent, but yours isn’t very heavy.”

She nodded. “You’re good. Got a good ear. We lived in Boston until I was thirteen, but we spent all our summers in France, where Dad did his research. Well”—she wrinkled her nose—“research coupled with eating our way through the country while he was doing it.” She smiled, obviously thinking of happy memories, then her face clouded over. “We had a pretty good time until my . . . my mom was killed. In a mugging. Just one of those wrong time, wrong place things that makes no sense whatsoever and rips your heart out. It was really . . . hard. I think my dad went a little crazy for a few years afterward. He took early retirement when I was fifteen and we moved down to Florida, to a town called Safety Harbor.” The smile was back, only sadder. “I think he chose the town for its name, but it’s a pretty place and it
is
quite safe, which was exactly what Dad was looking for. A place where nothing bad would ever happen again. My dad, he’s—he’s overprotective. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing me after Mom was killed and I understood what he was trying to do, so I just went along with him. I was studious anyway, so basically I went to school and then came straight home and did extra homework. I took a correspondence course from a French Lycée and got my baccalaureate at the same time I graduated from high school. Then I buried myself in my studies at college, with a double major in French and political science. When I graduated, I sort of took a deep breath, looked up from my books and realized that I hadn’t done much else but study since I was fifteen years old. And I realized I wanted more out of life. I wanted to travel. I wanted to stretch myself. I wanted to do something exciting, something adventurous, you know?”

She looked up at him and he nodded. He knew, though that wasn’t why he’d joined the Marines. He’d joined because it had been either military service or juvie or an early, violent death. Still, joining up was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

A lot of his men, however, had joined out of boredom and a sense of adventure. Which made them smart because you never got bored in the Marines and if you could stay alive, it was a hell of an adventure.

Another long burst of gunfire, louder and longer. They were bringing out the heavy artillery. Dan could hear the deep, sharp sounds of a .50 caliber machine gun, probably mounted onto the back of a jeep.

“Fifty cal,” he said, just as she said, “Sounds like a fifty caliber machine gun.”

Fifty cals were bad news.

She clasped her hands around her knees again, bringing her legs up closer to her torso in an unconscious move to protect herself. It was the animal in her wanting to present a smaller target, but however great her instincts were, they was absolutely useless against a .50 cal bullet.

Everything in the building was useless against a .50 cal, including the thick stucco walls of the embassy and the bullet resistant walls of Post One. They’d crumple in a heartbeat. If the machine gun was close enough, a .50 cal could go right through the building, front to back, smashing through everything in its way. One 120 pound female would be no barrier at all. She’d simply explode.

Claire blew out the breath she’d been holding while the burst lasted. “Yeah, well, this is kind of Dad’s nightmare. If we make it, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

That he could help her with. “You’ll make it,” he said quietly. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll make it. That’s a promise.” Certainly he wouldn’t let her fall into the rebel army’s hands. That was a promise, too, though he made it to himself, not her.