Tom woke instantly, at full alert, when Annie laid her hand over his mouth in the predawn hours a couple of mornings later. Now where did she learn how to do that? It was the right way to wake him without getting strangled, but still.

She whispered in his ear, “We’ve got to leave. Now.”

He didn’t bother to ask questions. There’d be time enough for that later, assuming they got out in one piece.

She continued, “It would attract too much attention if I pushed you out of here in a wheelchair. Can you walk if I cut off your casts?”

“I’ll do what I have to.”

The Blackjacks were trained to be capable of superhuman feats of strength and self-discipline. Walking on two broken legs sounded doable.

Annie used a wicked pair of shears to cut away the plaster. While she worked, he methodically disconnected the tubes and needles still taped to him in various places. She whispered, “These were due to come off tomorrow, anyway. So you should be able to walk without injuring anything.”

“No worries,” he murmured back. He wasn’t kidding when he said he would walk out of here on two broken legs if necessary.

The last piece of plaster lifted away, and Annie helped him sit upright. He steadied himself with a hand on her shoulder while the dizziness of being vertical for the first time in nearly two months passed. The bones beneath his palm were slender. Feminine. But wreathed in the muscles of a fit woman. Nice.

Stop that, pal.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and gently eased his weight onto his feet. A thousand daggers stabbed his legs, as much from unused muscles as from protesting bones.

Annie raised a questioning eyebrow.

He nodded. She didn’t need to know he was gritting his teeth for all he was worth against the agony shooting up his legs.

She dug under her coat and pulled out men’s clothing. He sat back down on the edge of the bed and let her pull the slacks up over his bare legs. Hoo baby, her hands felt good easing up his legs under the edge of his hospital gown. Cue the hard-on. He must be well on the road to recovery to react like that. He pushed her hands away and finished pulling up the pants himself.

He noted with grim amusement the way her eyes went wide when he shrugged out of the hospital gown and reached for the shirt. Hopefully it was his muscles and not his scars that caused her reaction. He tugged the soft polo shirt into place and flashed several hand signals at her. She stared blankly. What was he thinking? Of course she didn’t know the Special Forces sign language.

Instead, he swept his hand toward the door in the universal hand gesture for You go first.

She nodded and placed her finger to her lips.

Well, duh. He knew things about being quiet she hadn’t even dreamed of. He could walk, stalk, even kill, in utter silence.

The hallway was dim and deserted. They glided past a nurse with her back to them, picking up speed farther down the hallway. Annie punched the elevator call button. He flinched when a bell dinged to announce its arrival. Before the door was barely open, he pulled Annie inside and pushed her out of the nurse’s line of sight, covering her body with his.

Aww hell. She felt luscious pressed against him from neck to knees. But then she looked up at him with dark, frightened eyes, and he mentally cringed. The worst missions were the ones involving civilians. They never could be counted on to keep their wits about them.

The hall remained empty during the eternity it took for the door to slide closed. Relief and chagrin warmed his skin. He swore at himself. He was going to get them both killed at this rate. This escape had disaster written all over it.

Tom closed his eyes. He wasn’t a religious man, but he offered up a rare prayer for help in getting him out of this one alive.

* * *

When Tom finally relaxed against her, shifting from hardened steel to muscular—wowser—man, Annie closed her eyes and gave a deep, heartfelt sigh of relief. The elevator began its quiet descent.

“Thank goodness that’s over! That was the hard part, Tom. Now we can just stroll right out the–”

She’d spoken too soon. Two hundred plus pounds of man abruptly sagged against her. Her arms came up around him. Good grief, he was big. He was also trembling violently. “Hey. Are you gonna make it? My car’s right out front.”

“Yeah. I’m just a little dizzy.” His voice was no more than a sigh. “I’ll make it. I gotta collect on that kiss you still owe me.”

“If you walk out of here under your own steam, I’ll give you two kisses.”

“Deal.”

He kept his end of the bargain and resolutely walked out of the hospital. But he practically collapsed into the passenger seat of her car. She had to help him lift his legs inside, and his head lolled back against the headrest.

She pulled away from the hospital and turned onto the street. “If you puke in here, you have to clean it up.”

“Yes, ma’am.” His lips curved upward faintly but his eyes stayed tightly shut.

What kind of pain must he be suffering? “Hang on. It’s not a long drive to the place I’ve rented.”

“What place?”

“An apartment. The owner of the building does a little work on the side for us.”

“Do you trust him?” Tom asked

“Yes, I do.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

“For what?”

“For trusting me.”

“You know this town better than I do.”

That might be true, but it didn’t mean she’d ever done anything quite this clandestine before.

The next hour passed in a nightmare of anxiety and physical strain as she drove around, verifying that they had no tail. Tom was grimly silent. He was obviously at the end of his strength, but he managed not to pass out.

Somehow, she managed to half coax, half drag him up the stairs to the third-story apartment she’d rented under a fake name and paid cash for. To her vast relief, he fell into an exhausted slumber the second she got him horizontal in the flat’s single bedroom.

Drained, she slumped on a chair beside him and watched him sleep, the way she had for the past seven weeks around the clock. Dawn lightened outside the window, and fatigue dragged at her.

By now she knew his features almost better than she knew her own. The smooth plane of his brow, the aggressive slash of his eyebrows, the sweep of dark lashes against lean cheeks. She’d only seen his eyes on the rare occasions he was awake, but their smoky-blue color was unforgettable. Intelligence burned like a beacon in Tom Foley’s gaze.

His personnel records verified her observation. Summa cum laude from Texas A&M, fluent in Spanish and Chinese, top graduate in his Special Forces training. Heck, just finishing that grueling course was an accomplishment.

He stirred in his sleep, and she leaned over him to trail her fingers through his thick hair. It was the one thing that always seemed to calm him. His forehead was warm under her palm, but she was familiar enough with him to know it wasn’t a fever. He just ran to the hot side.

Without warning his good arm snaked up around her neck. He yanked her down, twisting so she landed partially beneath him. She stifled a scream. Man, he was fast! She spoke carefully. “Good morning, Tom. Do you always tackle people like this?”

The corner of his generous mouth curved upward. “When they look like you, I do.”

His heavy, solid body pressed her down into the sagging mattress, and lust roared through her. He was her charge, her patient, for crying out loud. She had no business panting after him. “Any chance you could let me breathe, here?” she gasped.

His weight immediately eased off her, but he didn’t turn her loose. His thigh lay across her legs. One of her arms was trapped beneath him, and her free hand pushed to no avail against his muscular chest.

“Good grief, Tom. Be careful, will you? I haven’t spent all this time nursing you back to health just to have you break everything again in some macho display.”

Up close his eyes were the color of a stormy sky. “Let’s talk, shall we, Annie?”

His voice was dangerously soft. It hinted at violence if she didn’t give the correct answers. She gulped. He’d always seemed so harmless lying unconscious in a hospital bed. He’d responded like a puppy to her touch, eager, grateful even. Nothing had hinted at this deadly side of his personality.

“What would you like to talk about?” she asked, doing her best to keep her voice even.

“The apartment’s free of bugs?”

“Well, it’s got a cockroach problem, but I’ve laid in a good supply of bug spray.”

His eyes narrowed, and he stared at her with that saber-sharp stare of his. Suddenly he looked very much like the trained killer she knew him to be. And she was alone with him in a grungy apartment in a foreign city. A flippant attitude probably wasn’t the wisest choice right about now.

She cleared her throat. “No bugs. What do you want to talk about?”

“Tell me everything.”

Everything. Like how she’d nearly killed him? Like how she’d broken his bones and caused him weeks of suffering? Like how she was responsible for deciding his life was less valuable than her own? No way. She didn’t have a death wish.

“Everything covers a lot of territory. Could you be more specific?”

“When and where did you first see me?”

“On the helicopter pad at the American embassy seven weeks ago.” A glimpse of a heat blob on the infrared radar didn’t really constitute seeing him.

“What exactly did you see?”

“You, lying on the roof with a steel cable tangled all around you. A Marine guard cut you out while the embassy doctor and one of your men did some fancy first aid to stop the worst of the bleeding.”

“Joe Rodriguez. He’s the Blackjacks’ medic.”

“Your men haven’t introduced themselves to me.”

He leaped on her words like a prosecuting attorney. “I thought you said they came to visit me at the hospital.”

“They did. But they weren’t exactly chatty. They’d slip in, sit with you for a while, maybe whisper a word or two to you and then leave.”

“It was a risk to come see me. The government could’ve been using me as bait to draw them out. Were they disguised?”

She cast her mind back through the days and nights of her anguish and guilt to those ghostly visits by his men. “Come to think of it, I guess they were.”

“When was the cover story for me put in place?”

“Before you left the embassy. While the doctor and your medic stabilized you enough to move, the paperwork was done.”

Skepticism laced his voice. “That’s pretty damned fast.”

“You were pretty damned hurt,” she retorted.

“So you stuffed me in your car, drove me and both our fake visas to the hospital, and strolled into the emergency room?”

“More like I ran screaming into the emergency room, but yes.”

“Then what?”

“Five hours of surgery to repair your kidney, set and pin your arm, fix the rest of your settable fractures and sew up the worst cuts that the doc and Rodriguez hadn’t already gotten to. Then you slept for six weeks.”

“When did my men come see me?”

“One of them came right after you got out of recovery and were put in your room. The tall, blond one.”

“Dutch.”

The nickname fitted the guy. He was a solid six foot five of Nordic blond good looks. “He came in, read your chart, nodded at me and left. The next guy didn’t visit for about a week. After that, one of them came in every couple days to check on you.”

“That would’ve been enough time for them to establish covers. Excellent. They didn’t lose their cool and do anything stupid.”

“I didn’t think any of you Special Forces guys were stupid.”

“We’re not. But we are intensely loyal to each other. There’s always a chance emotion will get in the way when one of our own is hurt.”

“You guys get pretty close, huh?”

“You could say that.” The very flatness of his voice spoke volumes.

“Anyway, you woke up eventually, and you know the rest.”

“I remember you doing things to me.”

Discomfort blossomed in her gut. She’d taken over most of his day-to-day care, not only to help out an overburdened nursing staff, but also because she’d gotten, well, possessive of him in the weeks of watching over him.

“What do you remember?” she asked hesitantly.

Surprisingly, he was the one who looked uncomfortable all of a sudden. “You gave me massages.”

She nodded.

“And you gave me medicine. Painkillers.”

She nodded again.

He frowned. “And sponge baths?”

She winced and nodded a third time.

“Damn! And I slept through it?”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’m still going to have to help you until you get your strength back. The embassy doctor wants you to stay in bed for another couple weeks.”

“Two more weeks? No way.”

“Tom. You were terribly injured. You’ve got to give yourself time to heal.”

“I’m sick of being laid out like a slab of meat.”

She wiggled out from under him and sat up, glaring down at him. It was hard to concentrate when his hand settled in the small of her back like that. “Tom.” Drat. Her voice sounded as breathless as she felt. “You’ve got to stay in bed.”

“And just how are you planning to make me do that?”

She was intensely aware of how much bigger and stronger than her he was. There was no way she could forcibly make him do anything. “What’s it going to take to keep you in bed?”

Sexy sparks lit his eyes, making them glow bright blue. “If you kept me entertained enough, I might be convinced to stay here.”

“Entertained, huh? How do you feel about gin rummy? I play a mean game of it.”

“Hate gin rummy.”

“Cribbage?”

“Nope.”

“Strip poker?”

A grin split his features. “Now you’re talking.”

She shook her head, grinning. “My father taught me never to gamble with strange men, especially when clothes are involved.”

“Too bad. But he’s right.”

She stared at him thoughtfully. “Would you accept some sort of bribe to stay in bed?”

His grin widened, took on a suggestive slant. “What did you have in mind?”

“Outrageously expensive chocolate would work on me. How about you?”

“I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.”

“Oh. Isn’t that un-American?”

He shrugged. “There is one thing I might like enough to stay in bed for…”

She perked up. “If it can be had in Gavarone, it’s yours.”

“Oh, it can definitely be had in Gavarone.”

“Name it.”

“You.”

She blinked. He sounded serious. “Come again?”

“You. If I can have a taste of you, I might be convinced to stay in bed a little longer.”

She felt hot all of a sudden. “And just what constitutes a ‘taste’ of me?”

He considered her for a moment. “A kiss.”

She gazed at him narrowly. “What’s the catch?”

“Just one thing.”

She groaned. “I knew it. What?”

“I need a preview. To make sure you taste as good as I think you will. Besides, you owe me two kisses for walking out of the hospital.”

“You’ll stay in bed if I play along with this foolishness?”

“I pinkie swear.”

A shudder of pure delight whisked down her spine. He was a job, dammit, not her boyfriend! “Two kisses to pay you back for not making me carry you out of the hospital. Then we’re square.”

“Three kisses. You owe me one for staying in bed today.”

She did her best to sound resigned. It was better than letting on how her heart was racing and her breath was suddenly strangely short. “You realize, of course, that this is blackmail and you’re a bully.”

“Poor little good girl,” he crooned as he levered himself upright. “A big, bad sinner like me had to come along and spoil everything.” The smile faded from his eyes, leaving them as bleak as a cold winter sky. He leaned forward and his mouth descended toward hers.

“Welcome to hell, angel.”