Page 50 of Atone in Darkness
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It was only the second time Marisol had woken up in Chase’s arms. She hated knowing that it might be the last. Still, she’d always been one to face the realities of life head-on. Thanks to an absentee father and her feckless mother, she’d never had any choice in the matter. There was no use in pretending things were different than they were. That didn’t mean right now she wished she couldbelieve in fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.
For the first time in recent memory, the sting of tears had her blinking like crazy. It was too much to hope that Chase wouldn’t notice, but evidently being able to detect imminent tears was another of his superpowers.
He gently swiped away the tears as they dripped down her cheek onto his bare chest. “What’s brought on the waterworks? Is it thethreat of more canned meat for breakfast?”
She huffed a small laugh and gave him a soft punch on his arm. “No, although you have to admit it is an awful way to start the day.”
“I won’t argue that point.” He pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. “But, honey, I can’t fix the problem until I know what it is.”
There was no fixing this, so she lied. “I’m fine. Really.”
Because she wasn’t about toadmit that her heart was breaking. Sometime during the long night she’d finally come to terms with how she felt about Chase. It had taken a while to put a name to the emotion because she’d never experienced it before. She loved him, pure and simple. Well, that wasn’t true. There was nothing simple about their situation. It didn’t take a genius to know that he still had secrets he couldn’t sharewith her, ones that promised to make him disappear from her life forever.
As for her, once she got clear of this mess, she’d be back at ground zero and trying to rebuild her life again. Right now there was no way to know if her former employers had made good on their promise to pay off her student loans. If they hadn’t, there wasn’t much she could do about it. Contract or not, she couldn’t riskpressing the issue. She’d find a new job and keep her head down.
“You sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“Nothing you can fix. I was just thinking about everything my employer offered me to get me to take the job. I’m guessing they won’t actually honor my contract.”
Chase rolled onto his side to face her more directly. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. You do know they can’t risk you going tothe authorities about what happened. As soon as you show up on their radar, they’ll come hunting for you again.”
A renewed sense of dread pulsed hot in her chest. “But Ican’t hide forever, especially if I can’t access my bank account or credit cards.”
Not that she had a lot of money squirreled away for a rainy day.
He toyed with a strand of her hair, twirling it through his fingers. “I’vegot friends who can help you build a new identity, one that will stand up to close scrutiny.”
“I appreciate the offer. But without my credentials, including my school records, I won’t be able to get a job as a doctor anywhere, much less at a top research facility.”
His smile was a bit sad. “Again, I have friends who might be able to help with that, too. I can’t make any promises, but I’m willingto ask them if you want me to.”
She managed a wobbly smile. “Why would you do that? I’d think after all of this that you’d want to put as much distance between yourself and anyone connected to this whole mess as possible.”
He flinched as if her words had somehow hurt him. “Is that how you feel, Marisol? Do you want to forget I ever existed?”
That was the last thing she wanted. She’d faced alot of scary things over the past few days, but telling the truth right now might very well be the scariest. “No, I wouldn’t want to forget you, Chase. Not ever, even if I could.”
“Because you feel guilty about being part of what happened to me back there? If that’s why, it would really piss me off.”
As he waited for her to respond, his eyebrows rode down low over his eyes as if her answer wereimportant to him.
“I do feel guilty, and rightly so. I should’ve been smartenough not to get sucked into that situation in the first place, but also to have figured out a way to get you out of there sooner. I was too busy trying to protect my own skin than to do the right thing.”
“But you were one woman alone against—”
She covered his mouth with her fingers, cutting him off. “Don’t make excusesfor me. I know what I did and didn’t do. But having said that, guilt isn’t the reason I don’t want to forget you.”
It was time to go for broke. She replaced her fingertips with her lips and gave him a soft kiss. “There are much better reasons I don’t want to forget you. The way you make me feel when you touch me, what we shared back at the cabin and here on the mountainside. The way you protectedme even though I slowed you down and put you at more risk.”
Another whisper of a kiss and then she laid it all out there for him. “And then there’s the fact that I’ve fallen in love with you.”
She regretted the words the second they left her mouth. Gone was her warm and caring lover. In his place was the stone-faced warrior who used to glare at her through the thick glass of his cell. Then heblinked, and the anger was gone. What replaced it looked a lot like regret... or, worse yet, maybe pity.
Which meant it was time to get moving. Using their thin blanket as a shield, she sat up and started gathering the clothes she’d so cheerfully shed the night before. When she reached for her pants, Chase already had ahold of them. She tugged on them, but he didn’t immediately let go.
“Please,I need to get dressed. It’s getting pretty light out. We should get moving.”
