Page 25 of Heart of Danger
Everything ached, everywhere, inside and out. Her body and her head and her heart. A wave of loneliness washed over her. Touching Mac had reassured her that he wasn’t dangerous to her, not in the sense that she feared.
But…what did she know? Could she be sure? Her gift was so unreliable. Maybe she should have cultivated it instead of pushing it away with both hands, forcing it back into the deepest corners of her mind like a nasty, broken, misshapen twin of herself.
The gift had never been wrong, though it had so often been incomplete. Discerning top notes, the emotions of the moment, utterly missing crucial underlying emotions, because she didn’t want to explore, couldn’t stand delving into the truth of people. So she often got people wrong because she hadn’t been able to discern tones and shadows underneath the strongest emotions.
Mac might not be planning her death, but he had no particular incentive to keep her safe, either. And yet…yet there’d been…something. Something there, something elusive. Some faintest feather tickling her mind, like a gentle finger touching her.
It felt like safety.
Was it real? Probably not. Why should this man care in any way for her? Anyone she’d ever dated considered her a freak. She put off touching a date for so long she came across as frigid. And nine times out of ten, touching a date meant learning something she didn’t want to know.
And sex…well, that never worked out well.
She was tired. Tired beyond today’s stressful events. Tired of being who she was, tired of being pushed and pulled by things inside her she had no control over, tired of knowing things she shouldn’t.
Tired…
The lights went suddenly out and she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
“Maybe I should just keepher locked up until she starves to death,” Mac said sourly the next morning.
Nick and Jon didn’t pay him any attention at all. They were riveted to the hawk emblem, Nick studying it carefully then passing it on to Jon.
Jon looked up briefly, white teeth flashing. “Nah. I’ll bet you’ve already sent Stella to bring her breakfast.”
Mac’s teeth ground together. Busted.
Right now his prisoner was being tortured, lashed with the whip of the best breakfast ever cooked in the history of breakfasts.
Nick didn’t look up from the hawk. “Wouldn’t be efficient. To kill her. Until we figure this thing out.”
“Shit.” Jon cocked his head as he stared at Nick. “More than ten words from Nick. All at once. I think that’s a record, isn’t it Mac?”
Mac met Jon’s eyes for a second. Nick had only been a team member for a week before the shit came down. He’d been introduced by Lucius—and goddamn, there it was again, that blow to the heart—as the sixth man after Randy Higgins had been lost in a HALO jump. Parachute malfunction two miles up was unforgiving.
Nick had quietly joined the Team, doing exactly what he was told, efficiently and well, without speaking more than a word or two at a time. None of the Ghost Ops teammates had a life they could or would talk about, but clues would come out. Mike Pelton’s southern accent. Jon’s California Surfer Dude drawl. Rolf Lundquist’s love for skiing and intimate knowledge of the Rockies.
Not Nick. It had been like he was hatched in a lab for all the clues he gave to his past.
“Fuck off, Jon,” Nick said unexpectedly and it was so unusual for him to react that Jon blinked and shut up.
Nick had been scrutinizing every molecule of the Hawk. He finally placed it carefully down on the table and looked up, meeting Jon’s eyes then Mac’s.
“It’s real. And it’s his.”
Mac nodded. He’d come to the same conclusion himself.
“Yeah? And so?” Jon finally broke the silence. Surfer Dude didn’t do too well with silence when they were off an op. Nick frowned. Expressions on his dark face were even rarer than words.
Jon turned the emblem over in his big hand. “I mean—if this is real, then—then Lucius what? Gave it to the woman? Instead of lazing about in his villa on Capo Verde or Bali he’s in a lab in Palo Alto with his ass hanging out? Does that sound real? Is that even possible?”
“I didn’t know him like you two did. So I don’t know, but…” Man, Nick was on a roll. Several sentences. “Could it be we’re wrong about him?”
“You mean about what went down?” Mac asked harshly.
Nick nodded.
Mac and Jon exchanged glances. Jon had been as devastated as Mac. Like Mac, he’d considered Lucius a surrogate father and had taken the betrayal hard. Nick had simply gone into stoic mode, the betrayal one more shitty thing in a shitty situation. It had brought Mac and Jon nearly to their knees.
