CROSSFIRE (21 page)

And then he was gone, or rather, she was gone, no longer able to see their joined bodies in the mirror, only able to feel his breath feather against her flesh, his hands, so wide and strong and capable, cruise along her back, holding her close to the hard lines of his body. She felt the ridge against her belly, responded instinctively to the width of him pressed close, the width she'd never been able to forget.

"
Elizabeth
," he murmured, skimming his mouth along the sensitive skin at the base of her neck.

She shivered, melted. Confusion clashed with desire. This, she realized. This was what she'd never been able to understand, how this man who made her want to scream, could also make her want to cry. Emotion jammed into her throat, burned the backs of her eyes. Tenderness shouldn't destroy, she thought in that hazy corner of her mind, her heart. Tenderness shouldn't shred.

I never knew it was possible to love someone so much. Sometimes … it's almost as if it hurts.

Miranda's words whispered deep, unleashing a stream of denial. This was different, she told herself. What flared between her and Wesley had nothing to do with what Miranda felt for Sandro.

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life with a man who doesn't know how to make you feel anything?

"Whoa," he said, pulling back and tilting her face to his. One of his hands slid to cradle her face. "What just happened?"

She stared up at him, didn't understand what she saw in his eyes. "We were dancing," she said. It took effort, but somehow she kept her voice fluid, free of the emotion drenching her like a summer downpour. "You were proving a point, remember?"

His expression darkened. "Not that, sweetness," he said, and the endearment rolled over her like a caress. "You went all tense on me."

She couldn't help it, felt herself tense even more, even as she mourned the moments of weightlessness. "Just thinking."

"Maybe you shouldn't, then," he said with a carnal little smile. "Maybe you should just concentrate on feeling."

That's what she had been doing. And in the process she'd almost let herself slip so far away she doubted she could reclaim the pieces vital to survival. "It's not smart to do one to the exclusion of the other."

"Then why is it you only allow yourself to think, Ellie?" he asked quietly, lowering his face to hers. "Why won't you allow yourself to feel, for even a few moments?"

He didn't give her time to answer, to think. He skimmed his mouth over hers, those ridiculously soft lips feathering against hers, enticing her to press up on her tiptoes and tug his face closer.

He pulled back, frowned. "I don't think you want to do that,
Elizabeth
."

The cry of confusion and frustration rose through her, tightening her chest and jamming in her throat. "Isn't that what this little demonstration was about?" she asked with a bitterness he didn't deserve. "To prove you could unravel me?"

His eyes took on that glitter she remembered from so long ago, the one that made her pulse sing and her body hum. "Tell me something, Ellie. Is this cold white bathroom really where you want to make love again?"

That got her. She stood there, locked in his arms, pressed so close to his body it was impossible not to know how badly he wanted her, and finally, finally, sanity returned. "There won't be another time, Wesley." Couldn't be. Couldn't.

He released her abruptly, stepped back completely. "Go, then. Go back to Nicholas."

The backs of her eyes burned with an emotion she didn't understand, didn't dare name. "Just like that," she said. Like a switch turned off.

His lips twisted. "The demonstration is over."

God help her, the moisture started to do more than burn, it started to spill over. "Thank you, then," she said, "for a lesson I won't forget."

Dragging together a poise she didn't come close to feeling, she flashed a tight smile, then turned and walked away, through the bathroom doors, where Lucy stood like a soldier, Nicholas glaring down at her.

"
Elizabeth
," he murmured, reaching for her. "Thank God."

She bit back the tears threatening to expose her. "I didn't mean to keep you waiting."

"Are you all right?" He stared at her queerly. "You look a little flushed."

"I'm perfect," she lied, then flashed a smile to prove her point. "Just perfect."

The concern on his face lightened into a smile. "How about a dance, then? Everyone's been looking for you."

"A dance sounds…" Horrible. "…terrific." Woodenly she tried to move with him, but couldn't forget the feel of another man's arms around her, another man's soft words of encouragement that had whispered through her like intimate kisses.

The sensation hit immediately, a disturbing combination of hot and cold. But this time she knew why. Lifting her chin while Nicholas tried to dance with her, she turned toward the discreet hallway leading to the rest room and, just as she'd known she would, found him standing there, watching her through eyes not hot or burning, but ominously emotionless.

With a little smile, he lifted a wine goblet toward her in a mock toast, drank deeply, then dropped the glass and walked away.

* * *

"Dead? What do you mean, dead?" Ethan asked.

Hawk kept his back to the dance floor, not the least bit interested in seeing
Elizabeth
pressed to another man's body. "I got the call this afternoon," he told her brother. "Search crews found the crash site, but the three men I left behind had been lined up and shot execution style."

"That's not how you left them."

Vividly, Hawk recalled the men, bound and gagged, secured to trees. "They weren't happy, but they weren't dead."

Ethan's eyes went hard. From the moment Jorak Zhukov had been apprehended, he'd been hot to make an example of him, show the world that the
United States
did not play softball. "Z got there first."

And eliminated any possible trail back to him. "Dead men don't talk," Hawk pointed out.

Failures had to be punished.

Ethan swore softly. "Two attacks in twelve hours, both on
Elizabeth
." Glancing beyond Hawk, he frowned. "She shouldn't be here tonight."

Lots of things shouldn't happen, Hawk thought grimly, but God help him, they still did. Bracing himself, he turned toward her, found her standing near the display of antique jewelry up for auction with Nicholas at her side, his arm plastered around her waist. The tendrils of hair he'd pried from her twist toyed with her cheekbones, like his fingers, his mouth had done a short time before. Even from a distance he could tell her skin was still flushed from his touch.

"Your sister has a mind of her own," he said, watching her put her hand to Nicholas's arm. "Once it's made up, no power on earth will change it."

Ethan chuckled. "How well I know that."

There was no laughter from Hawk. "She's safe, though. Aaron's the best. No one's going to get to her on his watch."

The amusement drained from Ethan's eyes. "I thought you were covering her."

Hawk bit back a few choice words
Elizabeth
's brother would not want to hear. "Not tonight." Not when Nicholas would be escorting her home. No way was he going to blend into the shadows, watching while she twined her arms around another man, lifted her face to his, invited him in for more.

His blood ran cold at just the thought.

"How often do you want me to report in?" Aaron asked forty minutes later, with the clock nearing
midnight
. "Every hour?"

From his vantage point one floor higher on the mezzanine level, Hawk watched Nicholas lead
Elizabeth
to the elegant hotel lobby, his arm draped around her shoulders.

"Every hour," he agreed, and something deep inside him twisted. Six times between now and sunrise, Aaron would call with a detailed accounting of what was happening at
Elizabeth
's town house. A report included a synopsis of all persons on the property and their whereabouts. Their activities. He could just imagine:

"She and the boyfriend went up to bed about thirty minutes ago. The lights just went off."

"She and the boyfriend are still upstairs." A chuckle. "Not asleep though. Not yet."

"She and the boyfriend are still at it, lucky bastard."

Unable to look away from her, he said, "If the wind so much as blows the wrong way, you call me, got it?"

"Got it."

Hawk watched Aaron join Elizabeth and Nicholas. She twisted toward the main ballroom, hesitated, then Nicholas nudged her toward the hotel's ornate front door. Aaron was a good man. They'd met in
Somalia
, had fought side by side during a fierce gun battle it was a miracle anyone had survived. But they did survive, both of them, and as a consequence, there was no one in the world he trusted more with his life.

Or with
Elizabeth
's.

Swearing softly, he pushed from the railing and strode down the sweeping staircase, into the darkness of the night.

In combat, a man learned to play smart. In combat, a man learned it only took a slight miscalculation to destroy the best-laid plans, a minuscule mental slip to wind up very, very dead.

Tonight he'd forgotten every lesson he'd learned.

A soft wind scattered high thin clouds across a full moon, not yet orange for the harvest, but not fully white, either. Soon, the temperatures would be falling. The trees would drop their leaves, and everything would go dormant.

Dead.

Scowling, he grabbed the helmet from the back of the vintage Harley he'd allowed himself after leaving the Army, then swung his leg over the seat. He cranked the engine, then roared into the night. Instinct nudged him left, toward
Elizabeth
's tidy town house in the historical district of Church Hill.

Self-preservation demanded he go south.

A dance, damn it. That's all he'd planned. An impromptu, unconventional demonstration of a point Elizabeth tried desperately to deny. And from that press of body to body, he'd hoped to gain all he wanted from her. An admission. The acknowledgment that what went down between them that night two years before had been the result of a red-hot desire neither could control.

A mistake, Wesley. Can't we just leave it at that?

The burn spread like a virus out of control, searing everything inside him.

A mistake.

Yeah, he'd made one, all right, he thought, veering off the highway near the
James River
. A dirt road took him to the shore, where he yanked off his helmet and let the bike idle to the rhythm of crickets and cicadas, the occasional toad. He'd made a mistake the second he'd taken her into his arms and allowed himself to feel her so soft and fluid, the moment he'd breathed of her, that subtle scent of vanilla that clung to him even as he breathed in the thick scent of mud and decay along the riverbank. And God, the way she'd looked up at him after he'd kissed her, not with desire, but a raw vulnerability that scorched somewhere deep.

And now she was going home with Nicholas. How long before she'd crawled into his bed, he'd always wondered. How long before she let another man touch her?

He smacked a mosquito against his neck.

Didn't matter. None of it mattered. He wanted an admission from
Elizabeth
, not a heart forged in duty and responsibility, hardened by a rigid sense of right and wrong. She wouldn't let go, wouldn't let herself live and laugh and take life moment by moment, and by God, despite trying, he couldn't make her.

It was after one by the time he reached the run-down neighborhood of row houses established well over a century before, to provide housing for the Tredegar Iron workers. The houses here weren't brick and stately like everything else in Richmond, but wood clapboard, shaded by ancient maples and elm and oak, with welcoming front porches, a few of them screened in to protect from mosquitoes. He turned off the engine and started for the house that had once belonged to his mother, and her mother before that, but then he heard it, the electronic ringing of his mobile phone.

And his heart just about stopped.

"
Monroe
," he barked the second he'd answered the call.

"You better get over here," came Aaron's grave voice. "There's been an attack."

* * *

Police cars flooded the quiet, tree-lined street. Red lights flashed garishly against a sky as dark as the urges ripping through him. There were no sirens, though. The night hung with an unnatural stillness.

And then he saw the ambulance.

Just one, parked on the cobblestone street outside her renovated Greek Revival town home, the back doors thrown open. No medics in sight.

Hawk skidded the bike to a stop and turned off the engine. Then he ran through a wrought-iron gate, not toward a blaze of lights through windows and an open front door but toward a house insidiously dark.