Darkness at Dawn (7 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Jennings
Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction
“You wanted something?” The words were harsh, but her face wasn’t. Again, he was struck by the melancholy of her expression. He could have expected fear, resentment, aggression. But melancholy?
He tucked that away for further consideration later. Right now there were more urgent things to talk about.
“I need to know something.” Might as well jump right in. “When Deputy Director Montgomery mentioned the flight, I saw you had a reaction. And it wasn’t one of joy. Are you afraid to fly? This isn’t a judgment, but I have to know. I need to know what condition you’ll be in once we land at the other side.”
“Fear of flying.” That luscious mouth turned up at one corner. “There’s a wonderful literary tradition of fear of flying. Yes, you’re right. I don’t like to fly and there is a reason for that. I walked away from a plane crash when I was seven years old. Ever since then, flying terrifies me. Though of course in this world it’s impossible to avoid flying, so I have my coping mechanisms. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll be operational by the time we land. Uncle Edwin knows that.”
Mike blinked, instantly distracted from the no-fly problem. “Edwin Montgomery is your
uncle
?”
uncle
?”
He didn’t know what surprised him more. That Montgomery used nepotism in such a blatant way or that he had blood relations. More or less everyone just assumed that Montgomery had been hatched from an egg, a fully formed adult, barking orders.
That sad expression deepened. “Not really, I just call him Uncle Edwin. He’s my godfather.”
Godfather, huh? That was almost as weird as the idea of Montgomery having siblings. That Montgomery could form an emotional attachment to others was . . . wow. Mike found it hard to wrap his head around it.
There was something so wrong about her expression, like that of a unicorn in the forest wounded by a hunter’s arrow. Sad and stricken.
Man, she was too beautiful to be sad. Beautiful women were nature’s aristocrats. They held the world in the palm of their hands. It was unnatural for someone who looked like her to be melancholy.
Then Mike kicked himself in the ass. The world was big and bad and it bit. What the fuck did he know about her? Nothing. There might be real tragedy there.
And that’s when he remembered the second half of her little info-dump. She’d walked away from a plane crash at the age of seven.
“Where?” he asked sharply. “Where did you crash?”
It wasn’t an idle question. Ever since his baby sister had required sedation at the age of five for a routine flight, he’d paid close attention to any plane accidents in his never-ending quest to help Kathy cope with her phobia. He thought he knew every crash-survivor story there was, though there weren’t many.
He couldn’t recall any plane crashes where a seven-year-old had walked away.
She looked him full in the face, gauging something. Coming from a man, that blatant study would have indicated aggression and he’d have bristled. But he wasn’t bristling. She was clearly studying him to see whether she could tell him.
And, well, it wasn’t exactly a hardship having Lucy Merritt stare at him, because then he got to stare right back.
It was as if he’d never seen a female face before. All that soft, pale skin. Pretty, dark eyebrows that had a lovely, flowing, arching shape like little wings, instead of being a smudge on the forehead. And, of course, that perfume someone had designed to mess with men’s heads . . .
“Nicaragua,” she said softly, and his entire notion of her turned upside down.
“Fuck,” he breathed, shocked. Then—“Sorry.”
She dipped her head.
Lucy Merritt was a fucking SpecOps legend. No one had ever known the name of the little girl, but the story had made the rounds.
The daughter of American academics in Nicaragua had been sent from Jalapa to Managua, where she was supposed to be bundled onto a plane for the States as the contracomandos war was heating up.
The plane crashed in the primeval jungle four hundred miles south of Jalapa. The pilot’s Mayday signal had been picked up by everyone and his cousin. Government Sandinista forces and two ragtag competing rebel armies converged on the plane, all intending kidnap and rape. The Sandinistas to punish the capitalist Yanquis, the contras to show their displeasure with the Senate hearings on Iran-Contra up north. The other rebels just because.
Mike’s first XO, Larry Gabriel, had been training troops in southern Honduras and was sent in with his men on what was considered a hopeless rescue mission. Gabriel told Mike he’d fully expected to bring home either a small burned corpse or a small burned, tortured and raped corpse. But the four groups wandered in the tropical forest for seven days and seven nights without finding anything but the shell of the plane and the charred body of the pilot.
Gabriel was about to call it quits when a slip of a girl walked into his camp at dusk. She was rail-thin, filthy, dehydrated and had burns all over her body, but she was, by God, alive. And she’d avoided all the bad guys combing the jungle for her. Once an entire platoon of Sandinistas had passed less than five feet from her, she told the captain. She hid and kept quiet, and they’d continued on down the trail.
“Brave little thing,” Captain Gabriel had said. “Pretty, too, under all that grime.”
She was still pretty.
“My former commander was Larry Gabriel,” he said, and her head whipped around to him from where she’d gone back to studying the rain-slicked streets, shiny hair belling around her shoulders.
“Captain Gabriel!” Her face turned rosy with pleasure, which was a lot better than seeing it white with tension. “Oh my gosh, how is he doing?”
“Fine. Retired to Florida. Fishes and runs marathons. In the one-hundred-degree heat.” Mike shook his head. “He was a fine commanding officer, but he’s also nuts. When this is all over, I think he’d appreciate a call from you. He never forgot you.”
She had opened her mouth to answer, when suddenly the driver swerved onto a leafy street. His tinny voice came over the intercom.
“Captain Shafer, Dr. Merritt. We’re here.”
LUCY studied the captain’s reaction to her apartment. Her parents had left her relatively well off, so she’d been able to buy it after college with part of her trust fund. The mortgage had been so reasonable she’d already paid it off. Uncle Edwin had found her the apartment, which had been miraculously cheap for the size and location. It was nice and she loved it. It was her bolt-hole, her refuge, her safe place. Nothing bad could happen to her in her home.
The captain looked in, winced, froze.
Lucy had spent a lot of her childhood in windowless huts, where the only light came from the door. She craved light, in all senses. Though the day was dark, a flip of the switch lit the place up. Lights everywhere, casting out the darkness.
And she liked light colors, too. Pale birch hardwood flooring, pale Kerman rugs, white couches, white lace curtains.
The captain looked down at himself, crumpled and filthy, boots mud-caked. He stopped at the threshold, afraid to enter.
“Shower,” he said.
Lucy touched his arm, letting her hand drop immediately. His arm felt like steel under the grungy material.
“Right away,” she said gently. The man had obviously been pulled from either a mission or field training. It wasn’t his fault he was filthy. “Don’t worry. Everything’s washable. Apparently people are coming later with your new things. Here, let me show you the way.”
She led him to the guest bathroom, peach and cream, with a large array of body lotions, which she guessed he wouldn’t be using anytime soon.
He stood in the doorway, nearly filling it, looking utterly out of place. Lucy took pity on him. “Here.” She pulled out clean white towels and slapped a rose-scented bar of soap in his hand. He just stood there, and she realized that after the shower he couldn’t just put his filthy uniform back on.
She had absolutely nothing that could possibly fit him. Okay. She disappeared into her bedroom closet, pulling out a bathrobe from the back.
“Here.” Her voice was froggy and she cleared it as she thrust the bathrobe in his arms. “It was—it was my father’s. You’re welcome to use it.”
He understood. He was filthy, exhausted, probably starving, no doubt dying to step into the shower, but he didn’t move. He simply stood there, with her father’s ancient dark blue terry-cloth robe in his arms. Those dark eyes held some kind of emotion. She couldn’t read him, she didn’t know him, but there was something there.
He reached out and ran a long finger down her cheek. Just a touch, but it tingled. She barely stopped herself from stepping back. She wasn’t used to being touched.
“Thanks,” he said softly. “I appreciate it.”
She made a strangled noise and fled the bathroom, closing the door behind her. He’d flustered her.
Lucy didn’t do flustered. She could only think that the shocks of the day—discovering that she had to return to the Palace in Chilongo, go back to where she’d lost her parents in a hail of gunshots and a raging fire had made her vulnerable to emotions she’d long since repressed.
The doorbell rang. The intercom video showed a small group of people on her doorstep.
A woman—girl, really—stepped up to the camera, artificially bright red hair sticking out in spikes, bold features distorted by proximity to the wide-angle lens. “Dr. Merritt?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve been sent by—” She consulted a piece of paper. “By a Mr. Montgomery. May we come up?”
Ah. The makeover team, here to transform the captain. Big, sinewy, with rough features and rough hands. Longhaired, bearded, smelling of woodsmoke and sweat and . . . the wild. So Uncle Edwin’s team was supposed to turn him into an investment banker?
Good luck with that.
“Come on up,” she said. “You’ve got quite a job in front of you.”
They trooped up, filling her entire living room, which was large. She settled them all, told them to prepare their work tools, and closed the living room door firmly behind her.
She went to meet the captain outside the bathroom, enveloped in her father’s terry-cloth robe. The hot shower had brought a little red to his swarthy cheeks. His ratty, filthy hair now hung clean and wet almost down to his shoulders.
He had an amazing physique—absurdly broad through the shoulders, unusually lean in the waist and hips. His shoulders strained her father’s robe, and her father had not been a small man.
Lucy had no intention of tipping him into the maw of the people camping out in her living room without feeding him first. She knew what the military was like. No one would have thought to feed the man. He was probably going on twenty-four hours without food and without sleep. She couldn’t do anything about the sleep, but by God she could do something about the food.
He raised his thick black eyebrows at the noises coming from her living room. The clanking of tools, excited voices. Even a squeal or two.
Lucy smiled up at him. “I’m afraid some hard things await you, Captain, but first I’m going to feed you. A few minutes more won’t affect anything either way. No man should have to face what’s in my living room on an empty stomach.”
He didn’t move, just looked down at her. He was very close to her, so close she could smell her own soap and shampoo on him. So close she could feel his body heat. He was very tall. She hadn’t appreciated how very tall he was before. As always, she’d slipped off her heels coming into the house and was in flats. He was almost a whole head taller than she was.
“Mike.”
His eyes were very dark, with small yellow streaks. So dark they reflected the light of her wall sconces.
“What?” She should step back, she was way too close. If she took in a deep breath, her breasts would brush against his chest. She should step back.
“Mike. My name’s Mike.” He smiled, the first smile she’d seen from him, besides that feral baring of teeth she’d glimpsed in the corridor outside the briefing room. “Call me Mike. Besides—aren’t we engaged?”
Lucy stepped back. It wasn’t easy. The man might be whipcord thin, but he exerted a force field around him, like gravity.
“Yes. We are. Follow me.” She rolled her eyes. “Honey.”
A couple of minutes later she seated him at her pretty cherrywood Shaker kitchen table and watched, amazed, as he ate everything in her refrigerator and started emptying her freezer. The microwave was working overtime. His manners were fine, but he tucked away an astonishing amount of food in an astonishingly short amount of time.
Two bowls of soup, a bowl of leftover tabbouleh, all the rosemary focaccia, a small loaf of whole wheat bread, half a round of brie, a huge slice of pecorino romano, a large bowl of sliced tomatoes, a portion of eggplant parmesan, the half bottle of Sauvignon blanc, some homemade biscotti and her two perfect peaches. The only thing he turned his nose up at was her array of deli yogurts. He drank two cups of fresh coffee, saying that he could sleep anywhere, anytime, even if he had a gallon of coffee in him.
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