THE PERFECT TARGET (16 page)

He slid a hand to her hips, where he slipped around to cup her bottom. She felt the hardness of his body against hers, the bulge against his pants that made it impossible to pretend this was just a simple, innocent kiss. There was nothing simple or innocent about the interplay of their mouths. Carnal was the only word to describe the little nips, the way he sucked her bottom lip, the way he seemed to be absorbing her inside of him.

But she didn't want to be inside of him. She wanted him inside of her.

The thought jarred her, thrilled her. She felt as though they'd tapped into the casks and drank greedily, as though wine now flowed through her veins, thick and rich, heady, intoxicating. How long since she'd been held with such possession, kissed with such delicious thoroughness?

Never, she knew. Never.

The fact that one of her father's men would be her first, her bodyguard of all people, shocked her clear down to the toes his kiss sent curling. She'd never understood how Elizabeth had let herself become involved with Hawk, but if this same fire had burned for her, even fractionally, she understood the wrenching sobs she'd heard from her sister's room after Hawk asked for a transfer overseas.

The sense of foreboding slammed in from nowhere and chilled Miranda to the bone. She fought it, intent on Sandro, the moment, the way he backed her against a cask. His mouth cruised down her neck, toward her chest, where he lifted a hand to gently tease her nipple.

She didn't mean to tense, but knew she had when his mouth stilled against her collarbone. They hung that way a heartbeat, body to body, heart to heart. In his kiss she'd found warmth, but the damp chill of the night pushed closer now.

"Don't stop," she whispered.

"I have to."

"No, you don't," she said, pushing up to brush her lips over his.

He took her shoulders and stepped from her, holding her at arm's distance. His eyes were dark, ravaged. His breathing was shallow. "If I don't," he practically growled, "I won't until I have you naked and under me, and I can't let that happen."

Miranda wasn't sure how she stayed standing. "And what's so bad about that?" Just the thought had her wet and wanting.

Or maybe she owed that to the kiss.

He swore softly. "Some lines," he said tightly, "can never be crossed."

Lines. Rules. Protocol. They were the stock and trade of her family's world. She'd always hated them, found them as restricting as a straitjacket. "You wanted to kiss me," she reminded, trying to keep the hurt from her voice.

The waning light of the candle emphasized the tight line of his jaw. "I want to do a lot more than kiss you,
bella.
But I've already told you a man in my line of work has to think about more than what his body wants."

His body. The crude dismissal of the passion between them stung.

"Call me selfish," she said, stripping the hurt from her voice. "But I've always believed if you don't go after what you want, then you're selling yourself short."

His expression gentled. "You're not selfish, Miranda. Just innocent."

There it was again, that tarnished nobility. "Innocent?" She was hardly a babe in the woods.

"You've never had your life blow up in your face," he said. "A fact for which I'm grateful."

Her throat tightened. The man always said more with what he didn't say, than what he did. "And you, Sandro? Have you had your life blow up in your face?"

The ache in her chest said that he had.

"I don't like to dwell in the past," he said as the candle at their feet flickered out. "My life has made me the man I am today, and it's that man who's going to make sure nothing bad happens to you. That's all that matters."

She wished to God she could believe that.

"Go to sleep," he whispered, releasing her. She heard his footsteps moving away from her. "With any luck, tomorrow is the day your nightmare ends."

* * *

Not all nightmares came under the cover of darkness. And not all could be vanquished. Some never ended. They lingered, Sandro knew, even in the brightest of light. Vivid images playing like a movie through the mind, over and over.

The boom always came first, loud, jarring. Then the horrific screams, contorted beyond the point of sounding human. Flailing bodies flung through the air. Glass shattered, sliced.

Then came the blood.

Always, always, the blood.

So much of it, pouring from his body, the bodies around him, turning into a river running down the cobblestone sidewalk.

Sandro swore viciously, demanded the nightmare go away. The hated images belonged to the past, not the present. He'd grown used to them penetrating his sleep, but he refused to let them encroach upon wakefulness. He had a job to do, couldn't afford the distraction.

But he lifted a hand to his neck anyway, his fingers idly tracing the scar across his throat. Sometimes, he'd swear he could still feel the pulsing pain, the searing, the blood draining from his body. Who would have guessed the elderly woman with the white crocheted shawl had been an army nurse back in World War II? Who could have predicted it was to be her quick thinking, her handiwork with a napkin, that saved his life?

When so many others died.

The doctors said plastic surgery could remove the scar. His family had wanted that. They'd wanted to erase the incident, eliminate all traces of the horror. But what they hadn't understood was that while external scars could fade or be removed, those on the inside never went away.

Sandro had refused to pretend otherwise.

Miranda would be different. Her nightmare would end. He would make it so. She would go back to her life, go back to the freedom she craved. He would make sure she never paced the darkness, refusing sleep because of the nightmare she knew awaited her. He would ensure she never awoke bathed in a cold sweat, with a scream burning in her throat. He would make sure she had no scars, not of the body, nor the spirit.

If she'd spent one more second pressed to his body, there would have been scars.

He watched her now, curled peacefully on the pallet. The candles surrounding her had flickered out, leaving the only light stemming from the one in his hand. Shadows played beneath her eyes and in the hollow of her cheeks, along her mouth, down to her neck. He wanted to trace his finger along that same path. He burned to use his mouth, like he had before.

And like before, he knew she would let him.

He'd felt that in her response to him, the warm fluidity. He'd felt her breasts pressed into him, felt the way her hands had eagerly run along his body, possessive, exploring, pressing his hips against her. She had, no doubt, discovered the response he couldn't hide.

Just the thought had him painfully hard. Again.

Because torture wasn't his schtick, he turned from her, stalked to the end of the row and picked up his knife. He wanted to stab the blade into one of the casks and watch the red wine bleed, to open his mouth and let it trickle down his throat. He wanted to taste.

He needed to forget.

But of course he couldn't, wouldn't, do any of that. He couldn't risk losing his edge for even one sliver of one second. He'd come close enough just holding Miranda in his arms.

There was a spark to her, a glimmer, he didn't want to dim. She reminded him of the dragonfly tattooed on her arm, vibrant and colorful, full of life and an innocence he didn't want to shatter. She was pure sunshine, a rebel with a cause, a free spirit determined to make her way in a world of rigid rules, restrictive obligations and suffocating protocols.

Forgive us our trespasses…

Taking advantage of her would be unforgivable. Because even though he'd felt the willingness in her, he'd seen the vulnerability, the hurt, shimmering in those wild gypsy eyes of hers. He'd indulged in affairs before, affairs of the flesh. But Miranda made him think of more than flesh, more than the moment. She made him think of tomorrow.

Tomorrow was a gift, a luxury, he could neither afford nor offer.

The ache in his chest caught him by surprise. He fingered the scar at his throat again, turned to look at her sleeping in the shadows. He wanted to return to her, to ease down alongside her, mold his body to hers. He wanted to slide his hands along her curves and feel the heat of her body. He wanted to hear those sexy little sighs, to taste freedom.

Lead us not into temptation,
Sandro thought again, but this time he realized the truth. Miranda Carrington was more than temptation. She represented that crucial piece of himself he'd lost in a crowded open-air café five years before. She made him feel alive, he realized. Painfully, dangerously, seductively alive.

More alive than he'd felt since the cold night the news of his tragic, violent death broke to the world.

* * *

Javier's message came just before dawn.

TONIGHT. ORUM.

Chapter 8

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S
andro stared at his mobile phone for a long time, his eyes going dry and the words blurring. He was the kind of man who prided himself on working efficiently and relentlessly to turn goals into reality. And until just five minutes ago, he'd been cursing Javier for taking so damn long to make arrangements.

Now, the end to this nightmare blessedly in sight, something deep inside him twisted.

Anticipation, he told himself. Relief.

Not dread.

Javi's text message was vague, but Sandro knew that was by design. Whatever went down tonight had to appear like a rescue mission, which meant to protect his cover, Sandro couldn't look prepared. There had to be an element of surprise. Navy Seals, maybe. Army Rangers. Other, less known special forces operatives. They would converge upon him and Miranda at an undisclosed time, in an undisclosed manner.

And they would rescue her.

From him.

The thought turned everything inside him ice-cold.

Already, he could see the look in her eyes when she connected the dots and realized the magnitude of the lies he'd told. Not real lies, of course. He really was trying to protect her. And he'd never
said
he worked for her father, even if he had led her to believe that.

He knew she would make no distinction.

He didn't want her, too, either. He didn't want her thinking about him after tonight. He didn't want her trying to figure out why a man who kept a carved statue of his childhood dog in his pocket had crawled into bed with a criminal on the FBI's ten-most-wanted list. He didn't want her pondering details he shouldn't have mentioned, ferreting out secrets that could not only destroy his mission, but also place countless lives in jeopardy.

He didn't want any of that, but the alternative, the hate she would feel
toward him, didn't make him feel any better.

Feelings, however, didn't enter the equation. He was a highly trained operative, and this was just another mission. The next few hours would be critical. He had to be casual, play it cool. He couldn't let her sense the anxiety already coiling through him. He would need his Kevlar, he figured, just like the day of the original kidnapping. Shots could easily be fired tonight. He could be hit.

But somehow, he didn't care. It was a risk he had to take.

For her.

For Miranda.

* * *

"Do you believe those children really saw the Virgin Mary?"

Sandro shrugged. "It's not for me to say."

Standing near the middle of a wide, crowded esplanade, Miranda glanced toward the celebrated basilica, where pilgrims from all walks of life flocked toward the shrine built on the site where three young farm children reported seeing apparitions of the Holy Mother in 1917.

There was a serenity to the pristine site, even though limestone and concrete had replaced rocky slopes and gnarled olive trees. Two curved galleries flanked a massive white church that almost seemed to glow against a backdrop of pure blue sky. From somewhere unseen, inside the sanctuary maybe, the innocent voices of a children's choir echoed through the esplanade.

People were everywhere, men and women, young and old, prosperous and penniless. A few of the extreme devout made their way down the long, red-carpeted walkway leading to the holy site on their knees. One older woman looked so frail, a considerably younger man walked beside her with his hands on her shoulders as she inched her way toward the shrine.

Such was the power of belief.

Miranda had grown up Methodist, but the reverence embracing the plaza extended beyond religious affiliation.

"It's … breathtaking," she said.

"So are apparitions, I'd imagine."

Frustrated by the distance she'd sensed from Sandro all day, she turned toward him. And just like that first day, she felt her breath catch. Sunglasses again concealed his eyes, but tight lines fanning out from the corners of his mouth gave away the tension she sensed churning behind those dark lenses.

She just didn't understand why.

Because of last night, or something else? Something worse than almost making love.

"So you
do
believe," she stated with a little smile. For some reason, she liked the thought of tough, gun-toting Sandro believing in intangibles, things that could neither be seen nor heard, touched nor smelled, but that were real and powerful all the same.

"I never said that,
bella."
His jaw tightened as he stared beyond her toward the throng of believers clustered around a fountain of holy water. Many cupped their hands and drank greedily.
"They
believe. That's all that matters."

The early afternoon sun shone brightly from a sky so clear and blue it barely looked real. Yet Miranda shivered. Forsaken, she thought again. Now that the word had taken root in her psyche, she couldn't shake it. People milled about everywhere, but Sandro seemed to stand alone, like a 3-D image against a pencil-sketch background, larger than the life around him.

Miranda felt her lips twist at the foolishly romantic thought. Of course the man stood out. He was almost a head taller than anyone else around, he wore dark sunglasses and a silly banana-yellow Hawaiian shirt dotted by surfboards in every color imaginable, and he held a sleek, severe-looking attaché case in his left hand.