Take Me Tonight (23 page)

Maybe she could hide, or scale the cliff? Running toward the sound of the water, she stumbled down a few stone steps and then reached damp, cold grass. She risked one quick glance at the lighted window, saw nothing, and kept running to a low wooden fence that edged the cliffs. She could step right through that fence and face whatever was on the other side. Over the sound of the waves, she heard a door slam. He was outside now.

She pushed herself through a wide opening in the fence, inched toward the edge, and peered straight down at what had to be a thirty-foot drop of solid, sheered rock. She looked left, right, and straight ahead. There were no boats, no beam of light from a lighthouse.

“Go ahead, Sage. Jump.” She spun around at the sound of Alonzo’s voice, making out his shape moving closer to her. “That’s exactly how my first wife died.”

He approached slowly enough for her to see the needle in his hand. She took a step back, her bare feet hitting the first edge of rock. She was inches from death…and a few feet from sleep that would mean death.

Now, only the fence separated them. “I don’t want you to die, Sage. I only want your egg, your child. I really do. I’ve been so fond of you from the moment I met you. You reminded me of a daughter…a daughter I haven’t had. Yet.”

She had nowhere to go but down. “Okay,” she said quietly. “But isn’t there a better way than this to ensure you get what you want? If I cooperated, it would be better, wouldn’t it?”

“You were supposed to drink the hormone stimulator, but I understand you were too busy interviewing and investigating.” He climbed over the fence in one move, and her heel slid, making her gasp as she righted herself. “You’ve always been willful. I like that in a person. I’d like that in my child.” He reached out to her. “Come on, Sage. Come back to the house. I don’t want you to die.”

Maybe not like this, but he
did
want her to die.

She moved to a more secure spot, digging her toes into the grass as she reached toward his extended hand. She let him come to her—one step, then another.

The moment his hand closed over hers, she whipped around, yanking him toward the edge. The needle went flying and he stumbled to the ground, bringing her down with him.

He rolled them both over, almost to the edge. “You’ll die with me,” he vowed.

“No,” she gasped as she fought, taking them both perilously closer to the cliff.

He managed to roll on top of her. “You don’t want to die, Sage,” he said raggedly. “I can keep you alive. I have the power to do that.”

“So…
Do
…I!” She flipped him all the way over her. Now they were at the edge, locked in each other’s grasp.

“One more move and we’re both dead,” he growled.

“Just you.” She gave a hard kick to his ribs that sent his legs over the edge. As he fell, he managed to snag her ankle. Her fingers dug into wet dirt and grass, desperate for a hold as she slid partially over the cliff.

He must have found a foothold below, because they both stopped, suspended between dirt and death. If he fell, she knew he was taking her with him.

“Don’t do this, Sage,” he rasped out, pulling her so hard that rocks stabbed into her hands as she clung for life.

“
You
did it,” she insisted. “You’re the one who wants to play God!” She managed to pull back her right knee and slam it full force into his nose, hearing the bone crack and his pained grunt.

Swearing viciously, he reached for her but she managed to swing in the other direction. Her fingers sunk deeper into the wet earth at the edge of the cliff, but she knew it could give way at any moment. With a growl of fury, she arched her back and fired her knee into his head again, and he howled and freed her leg.

“Bastard!” If she risked another shot she might lose her hold; then she’d die.

“Sage!”

The sound was barely audible, but she heard it. The sound injected her with one last blast of power and adrenaline. With a sob of fury, she crashed her knee one last time into Alonzo’s face, and he let go. His scream echoed into the night as he plunged into a free fall, then disappeared into a crashing wave.

Her arms burned and her fingers ached and her body felt much too heavy for the wet earth that was keeping her from falling, too. Was his final cry loud enough for someone to hear?

“Sage!”

“Johnny!” Her voice was lost in the wind, drowned out by the pounding surf. If she could just pull herself up, she would hold him and love him and never let him go. “Johnny!”

Her fingers slipped an inch and she squeezed her eyes closed with an agonized cry. She pulled and kicked, and below her, vicious waves crashed against the deadly rocks.

She had nothing left. Her strength was gone. “Johnny!” She’d die now, his name the last thing on her lips. But she couldn’t stand the pain anymore. She had…to let…go.

Two powerful hands closed over her wrists and squeezed with determination. “I’m here, baby. Hang on.”

In one shockingly swift move, he jerked her up onto the grass, so hard she fell on top of him. His arms wrapped around her, strong and safe and pulsing with life and warmth.

“Sage, Sage.” He pressed his lips to her hair, her temples, her face. “Oh my God, I thought I lost you.”

She managed a whimper, unable to speak or breathe, her body quaking. He kissed her hair, her face, her tears, cooing her name, holding her against his pounding heart. “I don’t know how you did that, baby. I don’t know how you hung on.”

“She does whatever it takes, just like her mother,” a woman said.

Sage lifted her face as floodlights electrified the scene. A six-foot silhouette of a woman stood in a gun-fighter’s stance, a menacing black weapon in one hand. Her waist-length hair blew in the gust of the North Atlantic wind, one thin white strand lifting like a flag of surrender.

Johnny kissed her again and again, until Sage dropped her head to his shoulder, finally giving up her fight.

Chapter
Twenty-two

T
he image of Lydia Sharpe, her arm around a gap-toothed Sage, yanked a ragged breath from Lucy’s lips. She’d found the picture in a cracked porcelain frame, against the side of a cardboard moving box full of knickknacks from Sage’s living room bookshelf. She hadn’t meant to pry, but Sage was keeping her waiting a good long time, and naturally, being a former spy, she searched the half-packed room for clues about exactly who her niece had become.

She heard a man’s low chuckle, and Sage’s lighter laugh in echo.

In the weeks that had passed since they’d stormed the house on Marblehead Neck to save Sage, Lucy had realized that Johnny’s temporary hiatus from work had nothing to do with lack of dedication or a loss of passion for his job, but everything to do with Sage. She left them alone, holding tightly to the brief conversation she’d had with her niece after they’d all met with Detective Cervaris. Sage had simply thanked her for saving her life, and kept the cool distance they’d maintained for the last thirteen years.

A distance Lucy ached to close. She tightened her fingers around the two envelopes in her hand, praying she was doing the right thing. At the sound of Sage’s footsteps behind her, she dropped the picture back into the box and turned to meet her niece’s cool gaze.

“That was taken at Disney World,” Sage said, glancing at the box.

“I remember when you went,” Lucy said. “Your mother was morally opposed to all things Disney, but she gave in because you wouldn’t stop begging to go on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”

“And after all that, I hated it. Things kept jumping out of the dark and scaring the life out of me.”

Lucy crossed her arms, then shifted her weight from one stiletto to the other. “I suppose you wonder why I’m here.”

“Johnny said you wanted to talk to me about Dr. Garron.”

Among other things. “Yes. Here.” She handed Sage the less combustible of the two manila envelopes. “I was able to locate and destroy almost all of the eggs stolen from the dancers, as well as those of a network of college students he had infiltrated. A few have already been used for fertilization and one has resulted in a child. I’ll let you decide if you’d like to tell the biological mother.”

Sage took the envelope. “Thank you.” The note of appreciation was genuine. “I’ll speak to each of the dancers.”

“Have you finished the cover story you’re doing?”

“I have one more interview with the DA, now that Glenda’s out of the hospital and both the Hewitts are in custody. I’ve spoken to the doctors about their daughter, who is still alive though gravely ill.” She turned the envelope in her hand and looked expectantly at Lucy. “Is that it?”

No, that was not it. The urge to reach out and fold Sage in her arms squeezed the breath out of her. She’d already suffered the worst loss a mother could, and nothing would ever bring that child back. But this woman, her niece, stood two feet away…and yet it might have been a thousand miles.

Lucy took a slow, deep breath. She’d made her decision out there on the cliffs of Marblehead Neck. And once Lucy made a decision, she never second-guessed it. “About that trip to Disney World.”

Sage looked surprised. “What about it?”

“You may recall that your father didn’t go.”

Sage nodded. “He had to work. He had a case go to trial.”

Lucy swallowed. “No, he didn’t.” The envelope felt heavy with the weight of what she had to tell Sage. She turned it over very slowly, showing the CIA seal and the stamp of
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
to Sage. “Not as an in-house attorney for a consumer products company, anyway.”

She held the envelope out in the space between them. “Your father worked for the CIA, Sage. His role was quite high level and confidential. As a matter of fact, he was my boss. I introduced him to my sister, and was overjoyed when they married.”

Sage looked more stunned with each word.

“It was your father who learned of the story Lydia planned to write on the CIA, and your father who discovered how damning it could be. Not to a covert operation, as you have been led to believe, but to the public reputation of the Agency. The American lives at risk were not citizens living overseas. They were agents. Very high-level agents, and what was in jeopardy was their jobs.”

“Whatever was in jeopardy, you killed the story, Lucy.” She reached for the envelope, her fingers quivering. “And with that, you killed my mother.”

“I did manage to stop the story from publication,” she conceded. “It was one of my first assignments with the Agency.”

“And you managed to ruin my mother’s professional reputation in the process.”

Lucy closed he eyes, hating that she had to do this. “At the time, we lived in a different world. And it was a different organization. Things were changing faster than many people could understand. There were those who manipulated others to maintain control and secrecy.”

“You must have fit right in.”

Lucy ignored the dig. “There were those,” she continued, “who believed that a top-level spy married to an investigative reporter was a very bad mix for the Agency.”

Sage just listened, but a hint of color began to seep from her cheeks.

“Those people are gone,” Lucy assured her. “Long gone. They’ve paid the price for their shortsightedness.”

“What are you saying?” Sage insisted. “That my mother’s suicide was somehow orchestrated by the CIA?” Her voice rose in a little panic.

“Not by me.”

The implication was obvious. “By my father?”

“Not by his own hand,” she said. “Perhaps by his lack of it. We’ll never know, because the answer lies in his lost memory.”

Sage dropped onto the sofa, stricken. “He killed her.”

Lucy fell to her knees in front of her. “No, no—I don’t think he did. He might not have known. I didn’t learn the truth until a few years after. I left the Agency immediately.” Her voice cracked and she dug for composure. “By then, your father was already very sick.”

Sage stared at her, then reached up and touched the white streak of hair that fell over Lucy’s cheek. “Is that what caused this?”

“No,” she said. “But I have spent every day aching for the sister I lost, and the niece.”

“What’s in this?” Sage tapped the envelope Lucy held.

“Some top-secret files that I managed to get. Your father’s name is never mentioned. No one’s is. But there is some closure here, I think.”

Sage thought for a moment. “Why did you let him blame you all these years? Why did you let me hate you?”

“Because you’d already lost your mother. I didn’t want you to lose your father, too.”

“I have one last question.” Sage took the envelope, fingered the seal, closed her eyes. “Why are you telling me now?”

“Because,” Lucy said, putting her hands on Sage’s knees, “I love you. Just as your mother did. And your father. I love you and I don’t want our lives to be separate anymore. We are all the family we’ve got, you and me.”

Johnny entered the living room then and sat next to Sage, his protective arm immediately around her shoulders. “You okay, babe?”

She nodded.

“Read the report, Sage,” Lucy said, standing to her full height. “Draw your own conclusions and place the blame where you think it belongs. And please.” She waited until Sage finally met her gaze. “Don’t ever stop doing whatever it takes to find the truth. That’s what she would have wanted most.”

“I know that.” Her voice tightened and she laid her head on Johnny’s shoulder. “I’ve always known that.”

Lucy left the apartment, heading straight to the limousine waiting outside, wishing she had a shoulder to lean on, someone who could dry the tears she was about to shed.

Sage did, now—and that gave her bone-deep satisfaction.

Johnny skipped “Volare” and “When You’re Smiling” and went straight for the heart of his Dean Martin file on Sage’s iPod: “That’s Amoré.”

Whistling, he crossed the bridge and paused to watch the late summer sunshine dancing on the pond in the Boston Public Garden. A swan boat with picture-snapping tourists slipped under the arch, their laughter floating on the breeze.

Leaning against the stone, he scanned the paths of the Garden until he found a familiar swinging blond ponytail, the rhythmic sway of her hips magically matching the music in his ears. That was
amoré
, all right. His
amoré
.

They’d been coming to the Public Garden every single day all summer. Ever since Sage had returned from a brief visit to Vermont, where she’d confronted a man who wasn’t able to confirm or deny his own name, let alone his dark secrets, she’d needed to run.

So Sage ran and he watched her, sometimes running with her. But not today. He knew she was getting an important call and wanted her to be alone when she received it. Then she could tell him her decision, uninfluenced by his presence.

In the shade of a willow tree across the water, he watched her slow down, then reach for her cell phone. He hit the Pause button on the music so he could study her body language without distraction. She nodded, played with her hair, stretched her legs, rested on the grass, and even laughed once. Every move shot a little hope to his heart.

But mostly she listened…while Lucy talked. The conversation continued long enough for Johnny to get way too optimistic about his wild idea, seized on by Lucy.

Sage finally flipped the phone closed, so he crossed the bridge and headed to the bench where he always met her after her run. In a few minutes, she jogged toward him, ponytail flying, smile beaming, as sleek and graceful and alluring as the first time he’d seen her, running straight into danger in the middle of the night.

Now their troubles were behind them, and they’d found consolation, acceptance, and love in each other’s arms. But the respite had to end eventually. He had to go back to work, and then…

That’s where his plan came in.

“Hey, gorgeous,” she called as she reached him, then swooped down on the bench with an exhale. She popped an earbud out and kissed him on the cheek. “Whatchya listenin’ to?”

“Two guesses.”

She rolled her eyes. “We’re going to have to get you into some twenty-first-century tunes, baby.”

Was she not even going to mention the call? He lifted her ponytail and blew softly on her neck. “You’re sweating.”

She winked. “The way you like me best.”

“I like you any way best, and you know it.” He slipped an arm around her and resisted the urge to tug away her phone and see if it really was Lucy who had called. “How was your run?”

“Okay. I got distracted.” She fanned herself with both hands and leaned back on the bench. “And now I’m starved. What are you making me for dinner?”

“Dinner?” He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. Lucy had just called with a life-changing offer, and she was worried about food?

“Yeah, you know, that meal we have between late-afternoon Limoncello and midnight cannolis? You make it, I eat it.”

He laughed. “All you ever think about is food, Sage.”

“And the sex that comes after the food.” She nudged him.

Wasn’t she even going to tell him that Lucy had called? “What about the future? Your work? Life? Don’t you ever think about that?”

Her smile was slow, but she kept her eyes on the swan boat that passed. “Sure I do. Whenever we’re not eating or making love. Which doesn’t leave a lot of time, you may have noticed.”

“Yeah.” She hated the idea. That had to be it. She still thought Lucy was the dark angel of death, and that this was a fling that would end as soon as the hot weather did. “When you run, do you think about the future?”

“Sometimes.” She pointed and flexed her toes. “Today I did.”

Finally. “What did you think about?”

A swan boat floated by, two rollerbladers passed, and an endless minute dragged on.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that the future…” Every pause was killing him. “Looks bright.”

“Sage, come on.” He let out an exasperated breath. “Did she call or not? Are you taking the job or not? Are you moving to Upstate New York or not? Will you—” He cut himself off and took her hands. “I need to know, baby.”

She threaded her fingers in his and lifted his hands to her mouth. “Yes.” She kissed his right knuckles. “Yes.” She kissed his left knuckles. “Yes.” She opened his hand and kissed his palm. “Now, what was the last question? Will I what, let you be my boyfriend while I work as Lucy’s assistant?”

He smiled, the sun as warm on his face as the love in his heart. “No, that wasn’t my question. So you’re going to do it? You’re going to take the job with the Bullet Catchers?”

She narrowed one eye at him. “Think I can do it?”

“In a heartbeat.” He tapped his chest.

That earned him a smile and a kiss. “Thanks for the recommendation. I understand you live up there between assignments.”

“Usually in a hotel, but I’ve had my eye on a house on the river. It has a big kitchen with a gas stove and a huge master bedroom—”

“The important stuff.”

“And lots of room for…”
Kids.
“Us.”

She inched closer to him. “You’ve been thinking a lot about the future beyond dinner, haven’t you?”

“Sage.” He leaned his forehead against hers. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about. I love you and I want to spend every minute I can with you, and I want to cook for you and make love to you and share my messy past and spotty present and anything beyond that with you, and I—”

“Shhhh.” She put her finger on his lips. “I love you, too. You are my boyfriend. I promise.”

He half smiled. “I don’t want to be your boyfriend, and you know it.” He took her hand in his, his heart galloping as he looked into her eyes. “I want to be your husband.”

She drew in a soft breath.

“I want it all. I want to take you to Italy to meet my sister, I want to marry you on the soil where I was born, and I want to spend every day of the rest of my life next to you.”

“Sweetheart,” she said softly, “you had me at the first rescue.”

“I hate to break it to you, but you rescued
me.
Here.” He put her hand over his heart. “You saved me from a lonely life of hotels and regret and hiding who I am.”