The Spy Who Saved Christmas (17 page)

“How badly are you hurt?”

“I’m ready to put my feet up.” His lips were tight with pain. But when guns went off outside suddenly, he stepped in front of them and was ready to start fighting all over again.

The budding love Lara felt for him, the one she’d been trying to stifle, welled in her chest.

“Probably Sparks and his goons.” Reid stood strong and tall, ready to lay down his life for them. “Take the boys, go out the back door. And don’t stop running.”

The door opened and more men entered. From the corner of his eyes, Reid saw that Lara was trapped. She squatted with the babies, using her own body as their cover. His muscles stiffened as he readied to fight for everything he held dear. But the shadow appearing in the door, coming in low with gun drawn, seemed familiar.

“If you tell me I’m late, I’m going to be ticked,” Cade called from the other end of the cavernous building as he straightened, taking in the bodies that littered the ground.

Reid backed up to a workstation and leaned against it, taking the weight off his bad hip. “What was that outside?”

Lara sat on the floor, her legs giving out at last. The babies quieted and snuggled tight to her chest, everything right in their little world as long as their mother was here.

He moved toward her as Cade said, “I pulled in and was about to come through the door when a black pickup came down the road and started shooting at me.”

“Did you get them?” Reid only had eyes for Lara and the boys.

“Bastards took off the second they realized I meant business.” Sirens about drowned out his last words.

“The FBI followed you after you dropped off Kenny and Billy?” Dismay shot through Reid. This was why he always worked alone. “Damn, man. This happens when you retire. You lose it,” he was only half joking.

Cade was examining his feet.

Suspicion had Reid doing a double take. “You let them follow you?”

Cade shuffled. “I figured, this was it, the endgame. I thought they might come in handy. Look man, I know how you get about asking for help, but it’s not a crime, all right? When you need it, you need it.”

For a second, Reid bristled. He didn’t
need
anyone or anything. On principle. But he didn’t have it in him to be angry for long. At this stage, whoever was coming couldn’t do too much damage. He glanced toward the back door. “I want to take Zak and Nate to get checked out.”

“Then you’d better go now. If you stay, they won’t let you leave for a while. I’ll stay and explain things.”

“You know you’ll catch hell for this, right?”

“Retirement was starting to get boring anyway.” Cade came closer and grinned at Lara. “Cute kids.”

She grinned back. “We got them back. We kicked terrorist butt, didn’t we?”

“You more than I,” Cade said sourly. And when Reid chuckled, the relief hitting him all at once, Cade punched him in the shoulder. The one that wasn’t bleeding. “Better get going.”

“Wait. What happened to the virus?” Lara was asking.

“The vials are in a safe place,” Cade told her. “The outfit we work for is set up to handle these kinds of things.”

Reid took one of the boys from Lara and they ran for the back. Reid figured they had just enough time to go around and get to the car he’d left in the bushes before his leg went completely numb. Lara would have to do the driving again. For the moment, he was too happy to resent that she had to help him out. She was right, whatever else happened next, the most important thing was that Zak and Nate were safe.

As he looked at the twins, looked at her, there was only one thought on his mind:
his.
A thought he couldn’t afford under any circumstances.

H
E DIDN’T WANT TO SEEM
presumptuous, but he wasn’t ready to leave her on her own either, so once they reached a hotel Reid compromised by getting one room but with two double beds.

“I should go back to the hospital,” Lara said as she came out of the bathroom. Their hotel was just down the road from where medical personnel were even now watching over their babies.

“Zak and Nate are fine. The doctor said they were only keeping them overnight for observation. You have to rest. You’re half-asleep on your feet.” Going home was out of the question. He could barely talk her into coming this far, less than five minutes away if they were needed.

She sank onto the bed, running a towel over her short hair. Another was wrapped around her body. “The dehydration—”

“Was fairly minor. And they both got IVs.” Man, he hated to see those kids hooked up to anything, even if they took it like the brave little troupers they were.

But she’d had trouble handing over the twins, even to the doctors. Then wouldn’t leave them until they were both asleep. She ran the towel over her hair one more time. “I hate that they have to go through this.”

“They’re fine.” Reid came over from the window—he’d been watching the hotel’s entrance, force of habit, although he didn’t expect trouble—and sat next to her. “I think Nate is starting to like me. We played ball.” He grinned.

He could tell them apart now. They might have looked a lot alike, but they had completely different personalities. Nate was take-charge, Zak was more easygoing. Reid had stopped by the gift store on his way up from the E.R.—he had gone there to have his arm treated—and pretty much bought it out as far as toys were concerned. He wanted to give them the world.

He’d felt fiercely protective of them from the moment he’d found out that they were his, but the love that had crept up on him with each second they’d spent together was on a whole other level.

“Here.” He pulled a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt from a bag at his feet, also from the gift shop. He’d already showered so he was wearing a matching set.

But Lara simply lay back on the bed, looking exhausted. “How are you?”

“Good as new.” The doctor had patched up his shoulder and given him some pain shots for both the shoulder and his hip that didn’t make him go numb, a definite advantage. He got up so he could pull the cover over her and let her get some rest.

“Stay. Please.”

He did, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Tell me about your wife.”

Okay. That came out of left field. He cleared his throat as memories he’d long kept locked up flooded over him.

Lara didn’t know what she was asking. Leila had been the low point of his life. Those memories still gave him nightmares. He hadn’t forgiven himself for all that had happened. And had a feeling that if Lara knew the whole story, she wouldn’t forgive him either.

And yet, he was the father of Lara’s children. She had a right to know what kind of a man he was, even if it meant that she would hate him for the things he’d done in the past. He cleared his throat again.

“Some time ago, there was a warlord on the Afghan-Pakistani border the army was having a lot of trouble with. We got the job. A few guys got sent into different areas. I was sent to a small village in the mountains. We had an old man there who was sick of the Taliban and the warlord who was their henchman. The old man was willing to work with us. I went in undercover as his American-born grandson, coming home from the U.S. to find my heritage and faith and all that.”

He drew a slow breath, remembering the day and the people clearly. “The village took me in readily enough. The warlord blew through every couple of months, taking food and recruiting. I was trying to get on his team, but he didn’t trust me.” He paused. “I had to get to his headquarters. We knew he was running training camps. I figured that if he wouldn’t take me as one of his men, he might take me as an enemy prisoner. I started to talk against him in the village.”

“Did they listen?”

He closed his eyes. “Not at first. These were people born and bred in fear. But after a while, yes. They started to look up to me and stand up for themselves. It was pretty slow progress. In the meantime, one day a man brought a young girl to me and offered her for a price. A bride price. It’s common.” He swallowed, still seeing the pale round face, how scared she’d been.

“And I knew if I said no, I’d offend the man, possibly the whole village, and all the progress we’d made would have been for nothing. If I said no, he would just take the girl to another man, maybe one of the warlord’s men when they came by next. The family needed the money. They couldn’t feed a girl who was already grown and should have been a husband’s concern.”

“How old was she?” Lara asked after a moment.

“Didn’t know. The poorest people, up in those mountains, they can’t read or write. They don’t keep close track. She was born in the winter after the earthquakes—that was all her mother told her, but they have earthquakes there pretty often. I figured her for eighteen. I was twenty-eight.”

“You married her.”

“To save her from a worse fate. But I didn’t touch her, I swear, for a long time. Then a year passed, two. I had information on one of the training camps at last, but I was kept in place, told to keep a low profile. New intelligence came in that the warlord had more important connections than we’d thought. Connections I was supposed to discover.”

“And things changed with her?”

“One day her father packed up all his belongings, every goat, rag, dish they had, to pay back the bride price—money he’d already spent—since she didn’t give me any children. His honor was at stake. I could barely talk him out of turning his family into beggars. And they would have been that. He would have taken Leila to the nearest small town and sold her to be a prostitute, along with her younger sisters. He wouldn’t have had any other choice.

“I negotiated more time. He thought me a fool, even accused me of wanting to humiliate him. And that night, Leila came to me, crying, begging to be allowed into my bed.” He couldn’t, to this day, figure out whether he let her for her sake, or his mission’s, or because he’d been so incredibly lonely. And the fact that he didn’t know made him feel like dirt. Which was why he kept those memories locked away.

“It’s okay,” Lara whispered.

“It wasn’t love.” That simply wasn’t a requirement for marriage over there. “But I came to care for her. We’d been sharing the same house. She’d been cooking my meals, repairing my clothes. She was a smart girl. We spent a lot of evenings talking. I was a lonely man, she was a lonely young woman. She was begging me to give her a child, for herself, for her family. I wasn’t sure if I could, but I thought I owed it to her to try.”

“What happened to her?”

“Things went on like that for a while. Then the warlord noticed that the villagers weren’t as scared of him as before, figured out that it was my influence. His men came to the house while I was away. They killed her as a warning to me. He figured I’d be suitably cowed.”

“Reid…”

“When I got home—” He shook his head. “I went after him. The powers that be ordered me back. Called me into the city for debriefing. While I was gone, the warlord heard that I was out for revenge. He realized he’d misjudged me. He was afraid the village would stand behind me, and maybe other villages, too, if the news spread that his influence had weakened. So he struck first, and killed every man, woman and child.” His throat closed up.

The warlord and his men were rounded up, he’d seen to that, the training camps had been shut down. But none of that made up for those graves on the hillside, an image that haunted him still. And made him question his orders every time since, making him, and probably Colonel Wilson, wonder if he was still suited for the job. He sure as hell didn’t reassure the powers that be with this case.

He lay on top of the covers next to Lara. He wasn’t touching her, but she had her arms around him, her head on his shoulder. He’d just confessed that over two hundred innocent people had died because of him, including his own wife, and Lara didn’t tell him that he didn’t deserve to be alive, a thought that had crossed his mind more than once after the tragedy.

Of course, just because she didn’t think that he didn’t deserve her, didn’t mean that wasn’t exactly the case.

He moved to get off the bed.

“Stay,” she said again.

So he stayed on top of the covers beside her. Only that didn’t seem enough, all of a sudden, so he took her into his arms. And, slowly, his thoughts returned from the past to the present. Here he was, dumping his dark past on her when she had to be worried sick about the twins. “Everything is going to be fine now. I promise.”

Just holding her and not going any further took every ounce of his self-control. She was practically naked, her skin carrying the fresh scent of orange spice soap. But she was worn-out both in body and spirit. He wasn’t going to take advantage of her under any circumstances.

Not if it killed him. Not even if she wanted him, which he was pretty sure she didn’t.

He tried to think of all the flack he was going to catch for the last couple of days—a mental bucket of ice water—and held his body still.

But then she snuggled even closer. “I’m sorry about what happened to Leila and the others. I really am sorry for her, and I’m sorry that you have to carry all that around. But you saved us. You saved me and my babies. You stood in front of the bullets. And I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that we’re here, alive. I’m grateful that you didn’t die on that hillside in Afghanistan and came to Hopeville.”

She turned to him fully until her breasts were pressed against his chest, with precious little in the way of a barrier. He felt sweat bead on his forehead.

“I know you’re tired.” Her breath tickled his neck, shooting one-hundred-proof lust to key points of his body.

Worse were the powerful emotions swirling in his chest, emotions he hadn’t been prepared for and didn’t know what to do with.

“But if you’re not, you know, completely, terribly tired…?” She pulled back, a wary look in her eyes as if she expected him to reject her.

Like that was going to happen, no matter what he’d said to himself before.

“Are you asking what I think you’re asking?” he checked, to be sure.
Go slow. Whatever you do, go slow. And don’t get your hopes up.

Her only answer was a nearly imperceptible nod.