Darkness at Dawn (18 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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It felt as if he were vomiting life itself.
This, surely, was a curse. Someone had cast a black magic spell over his village, which was already dead.
It was his last thought as his body convulsed once more, taking his final breath with it.
THE PALACE CHILONGO, NHALA
 
Palace attendants dressed in rich, fluttering silks walked before them, leading them to their room.
Mike had been in the Pentagon plenty of times, but this building made the Pentagon look like the morgue of Corn Fields, Iowa. The Palace was enormous, of course, but he’d known that. Even a roughneck from Portland, Oregon, could figure out that a hundred acres of building was a lot of real estate. But where modern office buildings were spare and repetitive, it was as if the Palace were made up of a thousand buildings, each one different. Each corridor was painted a different vivid color, with temples or something temple-like every fifty feet or so. So much incense burned it gave him a headache.
He’d read the Palace had ten thousand statues, and he believed it, absolutely. There were statues everywhere, small, big, made of painted wood and brass and terracotta. Some of the Buddha, some of what looked like warriors of days gone by, some couples doing things he couldn’t slow down enough to check out, but that was definitely on his to-do list. Looked interesting.
Looked like sex.
Don’t think of sex
, he told himself sternly. This was a mission and sex was off the table. Though sex
on
the table sounded pretty damned good. On the table, on a chair, on any of the billion and one garishly painted wooden trunks that lined the hallways.
Hell, even the braided cotton rugs lining the slate floors looked pretty good. Oh yeah, lay Lucy right down and . . .
He wrenched his mind back to business and was surprised at the real effort it took, like turning a rusted lug.
It seemed amazing to him that he was thinking of sex constantly, and at the same time it seemed amazing that he wouldn’t. No one should have to withstand the temptation of Lucy Merritt. It went against every single rule in the US Army Manual.
Maybe this wasn’t a mission at all. Maybe it was a new training hell. God knows the army had a shitload of dangerous training exercises up its sleeve, most of them with live fire.
So suppose they were testing his resolve, to see if he could resist temptation, and suppose he failed? They’d haul him before a court-martial, and he’d turn to the judge and point at Lucy and say—
Judge, what man is going to resist that? I rest my case
.
And of course the judge would dismiss the case.
Christ, pay attention to your surroundings
, he admonished himself. He had an excellent sense of direction, but even he was getting lost. His watch was a GPS system, and he knew they were generally headed north, but that was it. There was no floor plan of the Palace existing on earth, the briefing he’d read on the flight over said. None. Or, it said primly, none that the NSA could find. Which meant none. Zip.
The NSA could map out the intestines of the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party if it wanted to, and when the NSA said no plans were available, that’s what they meant.
So Mike had to look sharp, keep his head and stay oriented, even though he had temptation itself by his side.
He chanced a look at her, saw how tired she was, and mentally kicked himself in the butt for his thoughts. Well, they weren’t
thoughts
, really. More like images. Bright, Technicolor images, high-def. Just like his dad’s brand-new plasma TV.
The images were crystal clear. Lucy smiling at him, kicking off her shoes. Lucy slowly taking off her sweater and sliding her pants down those long, slender legs. Lucy in bra and panties, which he just knew would be these frothy lacy sexy confections, reaching to unhook the bra and . . .
He gritted his teeth and willed all the blood rushing to his groin to go right back up into his head so he could think straight.
Now was not the time for this. And anyway, Lucy was looking dead on her feet, and anything but a shower and a meal was off limits.
He bristled when he thought of that two-bit dictator fuckhead Changa wanting her to start work right away, after having flown halfway around the world.
At the time, Mike had reacted strongly, pretending to himself that it wasn’t good for the op for her to be setting off so soon for the lab; they needed to regoup inside the Palace, there were things to discuss, he needed to sweep their room first . . . yada yada yada.
Noise.
The truth was that a white-hot flash of pure rage had shot through him as Changa made to escort her to the lab. He’d bit back the words he wanted to say—
Touch her and I will break your fucking arm, you son of a bitch—
so hard he’d nearly cracked a tooth.
If the fuckhead had touched her, Mike would have taken him down in a second and probably been shot, certainly arrested. So it’s a good thing he had won that staring contest, because otherwise, given what he knew about Changa’s gentle democratic rule, he’d probably be shackled to a dungeon wall right now, pissing into the rushes at his feet.
Not good for the op.
He looked back down at Lucy, who somehow seemed right at home here in the Palace. She was holding that white flower the princess had given her, twirling it under her nose.
They followed their guides around another corner and Mike was officially lost. “Do you know where we are?”
She looked up at him, and he nearly stumbled over a lump in the carpet covering an irregular slate. God, her eyes were so fucking beautiful, a light blue gray, a darker blue around the rim of the pupils.
Shit, she’d said something while he’d been mooning.
“What?”
“I said, we lived in the Summer Palace section, about a mile away, but still part of the building. This is the Winter Palace. Mostly bureaucrats and palace attendants lived and worked here. We stayed on the other side. But to answer your question, yes, I know where we are.”
“How far do you think—” he had begun, when the two attendants stopped in front of an enormous, garishly painted door.
“We’re here,” she said.
One of the men took out a huge iron key, like one of those that opened the castle in a Disney movie about princesses, inserted it into an enormous lock with a back plate as big as a table mat and turned it.
For such a huge door, it had good hinges, which was going to be useful if they had to sneak in and out. Mike had been prepared to steal some yak butter if necessary to oil the hinges, but it wasn’t going to be necessary.
The attendant indicated with a graceful wave of his hand. “Dr. Merritt. Mr. Harrington. Your quarters.”
Mike was nearly blinded by the colors of the room visible from the corridor. “Mike,” Lucy said quietly, and he stepped inside.
Every color on earth was in the huge room, bigger than most apartments. All the walls were covered with colorful frescoes. There were Buddhas, yes, sitting and standing and thinking and smiling in elaborately painted golden frames, but also dragons, dragons everywhere, and mythical beasts and flowers and fantastical landscapes.
The floors were covered in brightly colored rugs, the windows had deep yellow silk curtains. Intricately carved wooden furniture everywhere and . . . Mike gulped. Against the opposite wall was a huge bed. Enormous bed. The biggest bed he’d ever seen, big enough to put Hugh Hefner’s to shame.
With a carved and painted headboard, gilt frame, huge silk pillows, painted birds, carved dragons and acres of embroidered silk bedspread.
And the instant he saw it, every other aspect of the room fled from his mind because he could see, so clearly, Lucy in that bed, dark shiny hair spilled over the silk pillows, slender arm out, beckoning to him . . .
Mike closed his eyes and swallowed because dammit, he had just swelled erect. This was so bad on so many levels it wasn’t even funny.
He was on a mission, a highly dangerous one. True, he was here basically as muscle, but he was necessary muscle. He was here to protect Lucy, and he wasn’t going to be able to do that if he was going to get a hard-on every time he thought of her.
She was gorgeous and he liked her. Actually, he liked her more the more time he spent with her. It would be better if he liked her less.
This unexpectedly powerful effect on his libido was dangerous and could get her killed. She deserved better muscle than someone who got erect every time she breathed. He was going to get her killed if he didn’t watch out.
She wasn’t some pretty woman he met in a bar. She was his op and she was doing something hard and dangerous for her country. It was his job to keep her safe.
His eyes roamed once more over the room, this time avoiding that bed. Someone was very fast. Their suitcases had been delivered and emptied, the clothes hung neatly from hangers in a big wooden closet whose doors had been left open. A royal courtesy, as in Buckingham Palace. And, of course, an opportunity to go through their bags.
Lucy walked the servants to the door and bowed. They bowed back, and one of them said something to her in a low, musical language. She answered back in the same language and closed the huge door behind them.
“What did they say?” he asked.
“Dinner’s coming soon.”
She smiled at him and reached up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, whispering inaudibly, “Can you sweep for bugs?”
He smiled back, tucked a lock of her dark, shiny hair behind her ear and kissed the soft skin just under the ear. “Yeah,” he breathed without moving his lips.
She pulled away just in time, because the temptation to let his lips just linger there was enormous. “I’m going to take a shower and there’ll be time for you to take one, too. Wash the trip off us.”
When she disappeared behind a huge, carved wooden door, Mike sniffed himself and winced. This was one of those female-male mysteries he was never, ever going to solve. They’d taken the exact same trip, spent the exact same number of hours in a plane or helicopter. So how was it that she smelled like spring and he smelled like a goat had died in his crotch?
He was going to have to solve this some other time. Now he needed to know if Changa had bugged the room.
Mike picked up his empty suitcase, stored it in a corner as if simply getting it out of his way, and casually palmed what looked like a decorative element in the handle. It was a miniature, very powerful signal detector with a radius of a hundred feet. If it found a signal source, it vibrated instead of beeping.
Mike walked slowly around the room, picking up objects, fingering silks and sweeping for bugs. The device in his hand remained inert. At the end of fifteen minutes, he was as certain as he could be that there were no listening devices in the room. There wasn’t even a phone.
As far as vidcams were concerned, he was also certain that there were none. Covert vidcams were harder to install than people thought. The walls here were thick and ancient, one solid block without any modern ports of egress such as air-conditioning or heating vents. As a matter of fact, there weren’t even radiators. Heat radiated from a green enameled wood-burning stove in the far corner, and several braziers lit with coal and some aromatic herbs emanated warm, scented air.
He’d just finished his third visual inspection of the walls when the bathroom door opened and fragrant steam billowed out.
Then Lucy appeared, lit by the bathroom light from behind, as if on a stage. Oddly enough, she hadn’t put on a nightgown. She was dressed in black from head to foot. He’d been looking forward to seeing her in a nightgown.
Her dark, shiny hair had curled up from the steam and fell to her shoulders in glossy ringlets. Her ivory pale skin had a rosy undertone now from the hot water, and she simply looked luscious enough to eat.
As if picking up on his thoughts, a knock sounded at the door and two servants rolled in a stainless-steel cart, looking incongruously modern in this ancient room. Steel domes covered big earthenware plates, and the fragrant scents of good food filled the air. Silently, the servants carted a big heavy wood table to the center of the room, brought two carved wooden chairs, transferred the food to the table, bowed and left, having never spoken a word.
Lucy crossed her arms over her pretty breasts and looked at him and then, pointedly, at the bathroom.
Okay, he got it. No food while smelling like he did. He would be allowed food once he’d washed.
Obediently, he loped off to the bathroom, grabbing the toiletry kit someone at Christians in Action had packed for him back in Langley.
When he opened the door he had an
oh, fuck
moment. Steam still billowed, soft and fragrant, and it arrowed straight to all the male lobes in his brain and pinged them. Hard.
On a wooden shelf was the reason why. An ungodly number of lotions and creams and perfumes and things he didn’t even recognize were lined up in a neat row.
For some reason, they entranced him.

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