Page 8 of Beautiful Vengeance

She’d been trained not to feel. Allowing herself to feel now was hard. The infrequent number of times she’d experimentally given herself pleasure lately, it had taken total concentration and fantasies of Marcus to send her over the edge. That was probably unhealthy in the extreme, but harmless enough.

She aimed a smile at Megan and held up the biscuits. “Want some?”

Megan’s mouth twitched. “No, and you’re good. That shift in conversation to deflect attention away from the topic at hand was almost flawless.”

It better be, because she was an expert at it. In her world it meant the difference between survival and death.

Megan straightened up and grabbed the dishtowel from the counter. “I know you’re really close with Trinity, but I just want you to know, you can talk to me anytime too. About anything.”

The offer warmed Kiyomi’s heart and made her smile. It was true, she was closest to Trin, but only because they had similar backgrounds. They had both been “intimate assassins”, whereas the others had different areas of expertise. “Thank you. And I know that.”

“Good.” She rubbed a hand over Kiyomi’s upper arm, then started from the kitchen. “Give Karas a pat from me.”

“I will.” It seemed stupid, but nerves danced in the pit of her stomach as she carried the tea and biscuits down the hall. Megan’s rapid footsteps went up the stairs to the left as Kiyomi paused at the study door and knocked.

“Come,” came the deep reply.

She eased the door open and stepped inside with the sense she was entering Marcus’s most private, intimate domain as the smell of old leather and wood smoke wrapped around her. Marcus was sitting on the floor in front of the fire next to Karas’s bed. The dog perked her ears at Kiyomi’s entrance but didn’t raise her head, her bandaged right paw dangling over the side of the bed.

“I brought you some tea.”

His half-smile changed him from brooding and hot to heart-stoppingly sexy in his cream, cable knit sweater. If he ever gave her a full smile, she didn’t know if her heart could take it. “Cheers,” he said as he took the mug and plate from her. “You don’t want any?”

“No, I’m still full from that incredible dinner you made. I mostly drink green tea, anyway.”

He made a face. “That stuff’s bitter as hell.”

She laughed softly. “Yeah, but it reminds me of my mom. I don’t have many memories of her, but one clear one is us drinking green tea in little ceramic cups with a traditional Japanese tea set.”

He nodded, watching her. “What happened to her?”

Her smile faded. “She drowned. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but now I know she suffered from manic depression. I think she went into the ocean that day intending to end her suffering.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven. How old were you when you lost your parents?” All she knew was that they’d been killed in a car crash while he was in high school.

“Fifteen. Were you alone when she died?”

“No, she’d left me with family friends, or maybe with an aunt and uncle, I can’t remember. But whoever it was, I was taken away right after her funeral.” Soon after that, she’d been put into the secret CIA program that had changed the course of her life forever.

Not wanting to talk about any of that, she sank to the floor on the other side of Karas. “How’s our patient doing?” She stroked a hand over the dog’s head and neck. Karas stared up at her with sad eyes, looked decidedly sorry for herself.

“She’s sore. I put ointment on the burn before I dressed it, but I’ll be taking her to the vet first thing tomorrow to get antibiotics.”

Kiyomi nodded, unsurprised. The way Marcus took care of his dog and horses told her so much about the kind of man he was. “How did you first find her? I’ve never heard the story.”

“We were out on patrol one night. A large area of the sector we were in had been completely destroyed by an artillery strike. We were hiding in the rubble doing a recce and one of my troopers heard these tiny little whimpers coming from somewhere close by. She’d crawled into a hole between some cinder blocks in a wall that had collapsed.”

He stroked Karas’s head as he spoke, his long, lean fingers caressing her white-and-brown fur. “She was like a little gray ghost, covered in concrete dust, no bigger than me hand. She was shivering and half-starved, so I put her in my jacket, fed her some of my rations, and took her back to base with us after the mission was over.”

“Your CO must have loved that.”

“Eh, he didn’t mind. The lads all loved her. She was a morale booster on base, but Anatolians generally only bond to one person.”

She smiled. “She certainlyisbonded to you.”

The right side of his mouth lifted, stretching the scars around his left eye. “Aye. She slept on my bunk every night. When I was out on a patrol or a mission the lads told me she would curl up on my pillow and wait there, aloof as you please with everyone else. There was never any question that she was my dog, and that she would come home wi’ me one day.”

---