Armed and Dangerous (The IMA) (20 page)

On multiple levels.

“
Oh—look!”

“
What? What is it?” I touched the hilt of the blade strapped to my hip. Looked around for scorpions or four-wheel-drives.
Or scorpions
on
four-wheel-drives
. I was disappointed on all counts. She was pointing at a sandstone cave yawning open before us, reddish mouth wide and heavily striated, like a bad case of strep throat.

Perfect shelter.

The way she pointed it out—not so much.

“
Good eye.” I ignored the hesitant smile that flickered across her face at the praise. I didn't appreciate her crying out what could have just as easily have been a warning as an exclamation of delight. “We'll camp here for the night.”

She sucked in a breath. The small sound rippled through the caverns the way it did through my body. “It's beautiful.” She spun around, and my throat ached in a way that had nothing to do with thirst. “My God — look at the walls. It's like someone made a frieze of a red ocean.”

I watched her fingers trace the dusty red whorls trapped in the surface of the stone and found myself wondering what it would feel like to have her touching me with such reverence. It was a very appealing thought.

And a very dangerous one.

“Isn't it beautiful?” she whispered.

My cock bobbed in agreement. Yes, she was.

“Stop feeling up the walls,” I snapped. “We're going farther back, around the bend. If I light a fire I don't want the flame being seen from the cave mouth outside.”

“
Fine.” She lowered her hands and followed sullenly. I batted away the guilt that threatened to creep up on me like a rattlesnake. This wasn't a game. We didn't have time for her to exclaim over every rock and tree. Not if we were going to stay alive.

But this meant I was the goddamn bad guy again, setting parameters, curtailing her freedom. When we set down our gear for a quick dinner
a la
can, she sat with her back to me as if I'd had her sit in time-out.

Having her think of me as her captor, even now, was not conducive to our escaping. Knowing that I deserved it rankled me further. I didn't like being put in this position. “Look,” I said to her spine. “We are on a deadline.”

“I know.” She didn't turn around.

“
Emphasis on the dead if you don't start being a little more cooperative.” I dug two tins of cocktail out of the backpack. After playing the part of pack mule in our little desert parade, my body felt buoyant without the supplies weighing me down. “Goddammit. I'm not your enemy.”

No response.

“Are you going to eat, or are you going to pout? Either is fine by me, but only one of those options will put food in your belly. You need your strength.”

“
I'll eat.” She slid closer, watching with suspicious eyes as I passed her the water bottle she'd been drinking out of earlier. As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight.

“
You're welcome,” I said coolly.

She ate without speaking, save for the occasional smacking sound that wore quickly on my nerves. It sounded like a sloppy blowjob. “For fuck's sake. Chew with your mouth fucking closed.”

She jumped as if I'd slapped her, but after that her chewing was silent.

And I felt like a complete dick.

When we finished eating I gathered up the trash and tossed it into one of the empty plastic bags I'd saved. Christina made no move to help. My irritation crested again. I tamped it down and unraveled the thin, insulated blanket, flattening it out over the ground. I rolled out the stray pebbles, made myself remember my training.

However bad imprisonment had been for me, it had been twice that for her. Unlike me, she hadn't known what to expect. Unlike me, she hadn't been prepared for torture.

She hadn't asked for any of this.

It was hard to remember that.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We'll sleep here.”

“
W-we?”

“
Did I stutter?” I stretched out my legs. “I'm sleeping here. You don't like that, feel free to lie on the ground in the corner with the scorpions.”

“
You're an asshole,” she said.

“
I sure am,” I agreed, leaning back. My calves were burning. There was a heavy ache in my back from the double load. I was more than ready to sleep. If she thought I still had the energy to paw at her after all that, she was giving me too much credit.

I watched through half-shut eyes as she slung off her own pack and yanked a sweatshirt out. She wadded the sweatshirt into a ball to make a pillow and slammed it against her side of the blanket. As she leaned back, her dark hair fell across the fabric and I had to admit: few girls women her age would show such resilience in a situation like this. She was a trooper.

I sat up to strip off my shirt and folded it into a vague lump at one end of the blanket, following her example. She was still making a point of not looking at me, but her posture grew rigid. “My pants stay on,” I said dryly.

“
Please don't,” she whispered. “Please.”

The desperation and panic in her voice made my chest tighten like a vise. I sighed. “I won't. I didn't come out here all this way just to hurt you.”

I curled an arm around her waist, reeling her in until her ass was pressing against my crotch of my jeans. She tensed at the contact of my fingers on her bare skin but didn't pull away. She was limp.

“
I'm not going to hurt you,” I repeated.

“
You didn't have a choice. They made you come here. Don't pretend you're here for me.”

“
I chose to stay.” I pulled down the hem of her tank top so it was covering her midriff. “With you. For you.” I ran my hand back up her arm. “Here.” She let out a shuddering breath. “It ever occur to you that maybe my intentions are benign?”

“
People don't change,” she said. “Not like that.”

“
They can.”

“
No,” she said firmly. “They can't.”

Outside, I heard the roar of a helicopter. There was no telling how close it really was — not with the distortions caused by the many caves in canyons.

Christina heard it too. “Is that them?”

“
Maybe.” Possibly. Probably.

“
Oh God.”

“
They won't find us.”

“
I hope not.” She shivered, and I pulled her closer. “This wasn't supposed to happen.”

“
I know.”

“
I'm scared.”

I know
.

“
You've changed, you know,” she said suddenly, “but not as much as I'd hoped you would.”

“
I'm trying,” I murmured.

“
Not hard enough.”

Hard
being the operative word here.

I shifted uncomfortably so my dick wasn't jabbing her behind. “What do you want me to do? Apologize for the way I am?”

“It's not just about you, Michael.”

And there, I supposed she had a point.

Chapter Sixteen

Regret

Christina:

When I opened my eyes I was dazzled by the sandstone. The rising sun turned the serene waves of mineral deposits into a mural of fire, bringing out rich amber, gold, and cinnabar that had previously lain dormant.

I rolled over, still half-asleep, and humbled by the cave walls. My face mashed against a man's naked chest. I looked up through the screen of my hair to see him watching me back with an unreadable expression.

For a moment I couldn't breathe. I didn't like it when he looked at me like that. It made me feel like I was taking a test I'd never know the answers to.

It made me wish that he would kiss me.

“
W-why are you looking at me like that?”

“
Because you look like shit,” he said.

“
You — ” I'd forgotten that lazy, effacing grin. As if humor were something that could only be wielded with irony, because it made one too vulnerable. “You do, too,” I said lamely.

“
I know.” He raked a hand through his own mussed and greasy hair. “Ready for another day in hell?” His voice was husky from sleep, deeper than usual, with a gravelly edge.

This man was your kidnapper. Don't get attached.

I nodded. Yes, I was ready. Yes, I understood.

“
Good girl.” He rolled over, stretching his arms over his head. I didn't like myself much right now for being so weak and impressionable. I should not have been looking at him the way I was. But I didn't have the moral fiber to look away, either.

Breakfast was a bottle of water and another can of fruit. I drank the syrup down thirstily. I used to think it was gross but the sticky syrup soothed my sunburned lips.

Upon finishing, I packed up my things in silence and avoided Michael's eyes.

It was a few degrees cooler outside than it had been the day before. There was even a bit of a breeze to stir the heavy desert air, thick as whipped cream from the dust and the sand. A few clouds hung low on the horizon, though I had lived here long enough now to know that they would all evaporate before noon. By then, the temperature would be in the triple-digits.

The suffocating heat made it hard to think. I had lost focus on what was really important here: I still didn't know
why
I was running away in the first place.

Seeing Michael again under such dire circumstances had been such a shock I hadn't had the presence of mind to ask him for more details. He had said the IMA was behind it, but to what end? There was more to the story.

I said as much to Michael once we resumed our trek. His eyebrows knit together. “I was wondering if you were going to ask me that.”

“
Are you going to answer?”

I had several arguments ready to use in case he said no. If my life was at risk again, I thought I had the right to know why. Plus, he owed me for not turning his drug-bloated corpse over to the cops.

Not that he'd believe you would
.

I didn't believe I would.

“That all depends,” he said, drawing my attention away from the Michael in my head to the Michael standing in front of me.

“
On what?”

“
Will you stop cringing every time I look at you?”

His request surprised me. The fact that a man who could be so base could also be so complicated was frightening. “Maybe,” I said. “I'll try.”

“You'll try.” His skepticism cut like a blade.

“
It's the best I can do right now,” I said. “Try.”

“
If that's all you've got to offer, I'll take it.” He drank from his water bottle and began to tell me what he had been doing since the last time we had met.

The stories he told me made my own problems and concerns pale into insignificance. I listened with real horror as he told me that he had spent several months on the run from the IMA because he hadn't wanted to go back. They caught up to him at last because he had let them. Because out of some perverse sense of dignity he preferred to give in rather than be dragged in against his will.

He told me he had been taken to Scotland. He had been told he was going to head a mission against a rival group of mercenaries, only to find out that the whole thing had been a pretext for “retraining.” He drew the air quotes himself, saying in the next breath that he had been tortured for his failures. Despite knowing he could escape, he was still virtually a prisoner because he was afraid of what they would do to me as a result if he left.

Michael cared about me beyond a simple matter of quid pro quo. He cared enough to put his own life and well-being on the line. Something that had been hard to remember when his own life had been thrown into the mix right alongside mine.

Kent had been telling the truth that morning. In his own twisted way, Michael had loved me. He loved me enough to let me go — and it hadn't worked.

After completing his duties in Scotland, he returned to Oregon and found out immediately afterward that he was going to be deployed to England to deal with that same rival group, called the BN.

I interrupted. “Who are the BN?”

“
Remember when you were being held in confinement at our base, and I was returning you to your cell right before they sent me to Lake Angelus?”

That had taken place just before Adrian had beaten me half to death. I'd nearly died. I nodded slowly.

I remembered.

“
Remember that man you saw?”

“
Who?”

“
The other prisoner.”

At first I had no idea what he was talking about. I was doing my utmost to forget what had happened to
me, and little details like that were among the first to disappear because they were so inconsequential. But then I thought I might know who he was talking about. The handsome, dark-eyed man who had looked so thin and bruised. The one Michael had used as an example when he warned me about the IMA:
“As long as you're here, you still have a fighting chance. Just remember this: once they move you to one of our internment bases, it's over.”