Dark Cover (The DARK Files #2) Page 16

  Sputtering with laughter, they cleaned up and dressed.

  Dinner was not ruined. They sat side by side at the round glass breakfast table in the sunroom and ate cubed beef in a garlic-and-cinnamon-flavored tomato sauce over noodles. By candlelight and over coffee and baklava, they talked companionably.

  “Tell me more about Sophie and your father,” she said.

  “Not much to tell. They’re happy. Perhaps it was the right time in their lives for them when they met, his career at sea nearing an end, children nearly grown — until Mikela came along. Family’s always welcome at the villa — hers or us two.” His gaze turned contemplative. “No, only me now. Not Alexei. Funny, we never got along, but going there next time will seem strange without him.”

  “Are you okay about tomorrow?” She placed her hand on his.

  The funeral would be a simple memorial service at a private chapel near Rock Creek Park. The ashes in their bronze urn would go to Greece for burial. Vanessa had spent the afternoon helping to coordinate security arrangements.

  He turned his hand, linking his fingers with hers. “Fine. It’ll bring closure and allow his employees and business colleagues to pay their respects. Perhaps our guy will show up.”

  “Husam Al-Din?” She laughed. “Don’t hold your breath. But speaking of him, I talked to Grant Snow on the phone this afternoon.”

  “What a rotten thing to happen.” He pushed away his half-eaten dessert. His eyes darkened to cobalt, and the muscles in his jaw bunched. “There should’ve been a way to prevent the ambush. To prevent his being shot. I should’ve seen it coming.”

  There was his overdeveloped sense of responsibility again. “You? Like you should’ve seen a different ambush coming? No. In Somalia, you weren’t alone. I’m sure of that.”

  His expression hardened. “It’s not the same thing.”

  Close enough, but she wouldn’t argue until she had all the facts. “Maybe. But yesterday’s security definitely wasn’t your job. DARK should’ve anticipated it, had better intel.”

  With a slow shrug, he seemed to shake away the distancing mood. He brushed a hand along her jaw line. “So how’s Snow?”

  She smiled at the caress. He was still touching her even though he didn’t need to convince her of his desire. The notion fed her ego and her all too vulnerable heart.

  “Grant’s doing all right. His first question to the surgeon was about what the injury would do to his golf swing.”

  They laughed together, the mood between them once again easy and intimate.

  Later they walked upstairs, his arm around her shoulders and hers around his waist.

  “Can I convince you to sleep in my bed again tonight?”

  The tension radiating from his big body at the notion she might refuse didn’t come from his need to protect her. That he wanted her again cheered her heart and heated her blood. She could no more refuse him than she could take him in hand-to-hand combat.

  At the door to the master suite, she paused, hands on hips. Tilting her head, she deepened her voice to what she figured was sexy. “I’ll sleep in your bed on one condition.”

  “What’s that?” His brows drew together.

  “That bed’s way too big for one. You have to join me.”

  Chapter 16

  NICK CROUCHED BENEATH a stunted thorn tree. Around him in the stygian night, unseen creatures slithered in the muddy stream and through the arid grassland. A man could step on at least ten varieties of poisonous snakes.

  No stars, no moon relieved the opaque blackness. Acacia smoke and the cloying stench of something rotting hung on the heavy air. The night pulsed with danger. The beat built to a strident throb like kettledrums.

  The op was going down.

  A figure hunched toward him, low, blending with the grass. Badger. A monster made of bunches of grass and leaves over a camouflage uniform. The man stopped short of Nick’s position. Why didn’t he just use the radio?

  “Yo, soldier. Sit rep,” Nick said. The throbbing accelerated, amplified. He strained to hear the soldier’s report over the pounding.

  The man stood there without speaking, without moving.

  A grenade or maybe a flash-bang exploded off to his right. The blast illuminated Nick’s position and the man with him. Dangerous. He flattened on the packed earth.

  Badger just stood there.

  Then Nick saw why Badger didn’t report in. His chest was gone. Missing. Blown away. Blood and bones within a hollow shell. His eyes were blank.

  Nick could only stare. He couldn’t move.

  More explosions shattered the night. The pounding rose to a deafening pitch that filled his head.

  Another soldier shuffled toward him. Slick. He held his head in his only hand. And another man and another, bloody and blackened and blown apart, came to stare sightlessly and silently at him. The four raised bony fingers and pointed their awful accusations at him.

  The subtropical night wrapped around his mouth and nose. He struggled to breathe. Flaming debris rained around him in a crimson wall. Only then did he realize that the frantic throbbing was his heartbeat. He thrashed and clawed at the binding that smothered him.

  “Nick, wake up. You’re dreaming. Nicolas!”

  As the feminine voice parted the haze, he wrenched into a sitting position and peeled away the clammy sheets. He must’ve thrashed and nearly choked himself with the damn covers. He gulped in great draughts of air. Swiping at the sweat running into his eyes, he blinked and tried to focus.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her hand on his arm brought him back to reality. Vanessa. Sweet Vanessa. They’d made love a second time and fallen asleep in each other’s arms. As the present penetrated, his icy soul seemed to expand with warmth, and a shimmer of renewed sensation curled through him.

  She sat beside him, the sheet tucked under her arms and over her breasts. Her rust-gold hair formed a nimbus in the low light of the bedside lamp. An angel come to haul him from the depths of his personal hell.

  “Just a dream. I’m okay.” He twisted to peer into her shadowed face. “I was fighting the sheets. Did I hurt you?”

  She shook her head. “You were fighting something, but it wasn’t the sheets.”

  He scrubbed his knuckles over his jaw and wished he could scrub away the ugliness that still flashed in his mind.

  “You were fighting what happened in Somalia. It haunts you. Does the nightmare come often?”

  “Not in years. A couple of times a week recently.”

  She didn’t comment. She probably knew as well as he did what had brought the horror back. Alexei, protecting her, this op, DARK — all of it was too similar to a Special Forces op. He’d tried to avoid anything that brought back that part of his past, but the memories and guilt dogged him anyway.

  Perhaps telling it to someone as caring and understanding as Vanessa would quell the ache in his chest, would lighten the darkness within him. She knew the basic story, but by spelling out his culpability, he risked losing her.

  The irony and irrationality punched him in the heart. Lose her? He’d never had her. The closeness they shared was temporary. He had nothing to offer. She wouldn’t want a man without honor. Was she really different from other women? The ordinary sister-buddy issue, was that for real? Or was her enjoyment of affluence and her elegant portrayal of Danielle for real? Deception was her profession. He could trust her with his nightmare and his passion, but with no more.

  He refused to examine the erosion of his limits.

  “I want to tell you about it, about the mission in Somalia.” As soon as he’d uttered the words, the dark weight in his chest eased.

  “The more I know,” she said, “the more tools I can use to dig out all the facts.”

  Facts? He had all the facts he needed to know that responsibility sat squarely on his shoulders. If she wanted to look under rocks, why the hell not? On a mental shrug, he tossed back the sheets and pushed to his fe
et.

  Cross-legged in the middle of the bed, Vanessa watched as he paced in front of her. Unabashedly naked, a beautifully sculpted warrior, hard-eyed and savage, he girded himself to bare his pain. Strain stretched the skin of his face into a taut mask of tragedy. Her heart fissured at his suffering.

  “We received humint — intelligence from locals — of a warlord and a cache of arms in the foothills. Other sources bore out the intel, so the exec and the team sergeant had me coordinate the mission. We were to destroy the arms and arrest the guy. He was just a small-time gangster.”

  “That was your job as assistant operations sergeant?”

  “Collecting and analyzing intel, yes. And planning and executing small unit strikes.”

  “Like that one.”

  “The village was only a few huts by a stream. Remote. No town or road within miles. After the helo dropped us, we crawled on our bellies through tall grass to within a hundred yards. There were six of us. I was in the rear, on the radio, coordinating deployment. The others fanned out to make the assault. There were supposed to be only the warlord and two men in the target hut.”

  “But the intel was wrong?” At the agony on his face, she fought back tears.

  He slumped and came to sit on the bed beside her. He smoothed back her hair, then clasped her hand. His eyes were stark with pain and longing. “Wrong or false or compromised, I never found out. We went into an ambush. The arms and explosives there were used against us. As my men deployed to attack, gunfire from rock outcroppings beyond us cut them down. Then the huts exploded. Blew what was left to blood and gore.”

  “You and one other survived.”

  “Cruiser was wounded. He lost a foot later. I had a few scratches.” The survivor’s guilt, a clawed demon, rode on his shoulders. “After the firefight ended, I gathered up the others’ dog tags. We made it back to the pickup zone and got lifted out.”

  “The warlord and his men?”

  “Dead. We got ’em.” His lip twisted in self-disdain. “Mission accomplished.”

  “Those men … they were your friends. I can’t imagine—”

  “Friends, yes. I’d been SF for only a short time, but when you’re hunkered down in dangerous country, you become tight damned fast.”

  Clearly he needed to keep talking. “Tell me about them.”

  He looked down at the floor. Finally he began in a hoarse whisper. “Antowan Donaldson. He was called Badger because once he latched on to something, he never let go. He was our weapons specialist, for all the damned good it did him.” He moved his shoulders as if gathering strength to relive the memories. “Joe Ramirez, known as Slick because of his way with women. And Gerry Saban. He— You sure you want to hear all this?”

  “Go on. I want to know about the others.” She listened, rubbing his arm with her free hand and wishing she could absorb his pain.

  With gentle prompting from her, he recounted personal memories about each man in the squad. Five brave and skilled men, the wounded and the dead, with buddy names like Donut and Cruiser and Shark. Toward the end, his voice was raw, as if each word was jagged shrapnel gouging flesh from his throat.

  She squeezed his hand, damp with cold sweat. “You said the human intel had been verified. Reliable. You couldn’t have known you were going into an ambush.” Her chest and throat clogged, she pulled him into her arms.

  Moisture glittering in his eyes, he wrenched away and stalked across the room. Every muscle in his sweat-sheened body bulged with tension. He fired out a string of obscenities, clenched his hands into white-knuckled fists. “When we returned to base, the local informants had disappeared. I should’ve seen through their lies. Checked more sources. Something.”

  “Maybe the translation from Somali to English was the problem. Or the interpreter.”

  He shook his head, slowly and with difficulty, as if his skull was too heavy to move. “No interpreter. We spoke in Italian. Odd, but that’s one of the local languages.”

  He’d told her that one reason Special Forces had recruited him was his language fluency. There had to be more to the story. “How was their information verified?”

  “Flyover surveillance, other reports. The exec gave me the file.” He faced her, the low lamplight sketching harsh shadows on the angles and planes of his bold features. “Your investigation doesn’t mean squat. In the end, I’m still responsible. Those men died because of my screw-up.”

  Her breath hitched at the desolation in his words, at the emptiness of lost honor and pride in his voice. “Your story hasn’t changed my mind about a cover-up. I’m convinced there’s more you don’t know. Missions fail. Mistakes happen. Look at all the roadblocks in this op. And DARK is supposed to be the elite force.”

  His gaze softened, crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Vanessa, sweet Vanessa. Ms. Optimist. My only defender.”

  “Did you see anyone afterward? I mean like a counselor?”

  “The army shrink. I know all about PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder. Counseling might’ve helped more if you’d been my shrink.”

  The tension in his body slowly transformed from fury to something else. He ambled toward the bed. Hunger darkened his eyes and set his shadowed jaw. He stared at her with such intensity that her pulse stuttered. The potency of his male beauty held her gaze. Naked, his rock-hard strength displayed in taut muscles and defined abs, he made her heart nearly leap from her chest. Heat rose in her and licked up her belly.

  Nick saw her eyes go wide at the realization of his intent. Afraid she’d refuse him, he hesitated at the bed’s edge. “I need you. Latrea mou.”

  She smiled and opened her arms. “Come to me, Nick.”

  Tumbling her back onto the cool silk, he covered her with his body. They gathered each other close, fitting softness to hardness, swells to hollows. Her heat surrounded him, seeped into his body, into the dark, aching places, a balm to his unseen wounds.

  She clung to him with the same fierce instinct that drummed in his blood. A vise of more than sexual need gripped him, a need greater than he’d ever known, greater than he’d thought possible, to possess this generous and gentle woman who fitted in his arms as though she belonged there. She was ready, wet and reaching for him. Passion surged in the heavy beat of his heart. He barely had enough control to sheath himself before he sank into her welcoming body.

  Pleasure erased boundaries, so he didn’t know where he ended and she began. She pulsed around him almost immediately, her climax wringing urgent whimpers from her and ecstatic groans from him. Then all he could do was ride the shock wave to a shattering release that exploded from him like spasms of thunder.

  ***

  Vanessa sat beside Nick at his half brother’s funeral service. A black-suited woman played the organ. The dolorous chords of Brahms’s Requiem echoed against the stone walls of the small chapel. Candles flickered beside an open bible at the altar.

  A wreath of flowers draped a bronze coffin. An empty coffin. Alexei Markos’s ashes lay in an urn ready for shipment, but Mr. Falstone had asserted that at a funeral people expected to see a coffin.

  Rain drummed on the chapel’s slate ceiling and dripped from their umbrella, propped against the pew in front of them. With each drop she felt her time with Nick slipping away. For now, she just wanted to make it through the service and return to the house safely.

  She shuddered, but not from the damp and cold.

  Last night’s lovemaking and his tormented confession had brought them closer. Gradually the tension and anger had seeped from Nick. He’d been romantic and tender and both gentle and demanding. The mere memory left her breathless and dizzy. He held her and loved her as if he’d never let her go. Reminding herself that this rush of elation was only temporary took every ounce of willpower she possessed.

  She awakened alone. When she found Nick at his desk, he said only that he needed to catch up on N.D.M. business before the funeral. Perhaps that was true. Or perhaps he was pulling back
from a relationship that could go nowhere. The notion seared her chest, but she refused to dwell on it.

  The housekeeper arrived early and insisted on preparing them a hot breakfast. As usual, she clucked her tongue at Nick’s lack of a tie, but Vanessa had no complaints about his attire. The charcoal suit and slate-gray turtleneck conveyed perfectly the requisite somber attitude as well as the formidable bearing he wore like armor.

  A new driver, an African-American DARK officer named J. T. McNair, brought them to the funeral in the scarred Mercedes. SpeedIt Glass had replaced the windows, but the scrapes and bullet holes would have to wait.

  Janine balked, insisting she could take a bus or the Metro, but Nick ignored her protests and hustled her into the back seat with them. When he winked at her, she responded with a tiny smile and seemed to relax.

  Though he’d begun the day with outer calm, the tension locked his jaw as they approached the hearse and other cars parked on the circular drive to the chapel. Between the stress of his tortured memories and that of his half brother’s crimes, he found little respite. He sat beside her now, eyes forward and shoulders rigid. His woodsy scent floated to her with the less pleasant ones of wet wool and hot dust from a seldom-used furnace.

  As he had on the day they visited the funeral home, he kept a constant grip on her hand. Did that mean he wasn’t withdrawing from her? No, she wouldn’t go there. But if she could offer him this small lifeline, he could have her hand forever. At the unintended double entendre, a tremor shot through her. He thought he desired the real Vanessa, but desire was fleeting. The tomboy and the tycoon? Her love would find no forever with him. All she could expect was one day.

  One day at a time. To play her part.

  She needed no reminders to be Nick’s loving fiancée, but today she struggled to concentrate on who else she was. Vanessa Wade, DARK officer, specializing in undercover love and self-delusion.

  Clamping her lips together to keep them from trembling, she turned her head and caught Simon Byrne’s eye. The mission control officer nodded almost imperceptibly, then scanned the sparse gathering of mourners in the ten rows of pews.