CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I’m much safer, here with you.
She’d said that, and snuggled up against Wes’s hard, warm body, Chloe knew it to be true. It felt right. Not just now, but from the moment he’d invaded her office yesterday. No, even before that. When she’d come to Westen last month for Bobby’s wedding.
From the moment she’d arrived in town, he’d irritated her both verbally and with his constant presence at her side. Yet, she’d relaxed enough not to spend every waking moment looking over her shoulder until she’d left to go back to Cincinnati. From that moment until she’d seen him standing in front of the floor to ceiling windows in her office, it had been as if she’d been holding her breath, waiting for him.
That he’d taken the precaution of looking after Dylan’s safety even before he came to be by her side, spoke volumes to the kind of man he was. Dependable, efficient, prepared.
God, she was making him sound like a boy scout. Which was so wrong, because despite all those qualities she’d just named, there was something dark and powerful inside him. Something that made her trust him to protect her, no matter what it took.
Was it the abandonment of his mother at such a young age? Was it being raised by his grandparents? Was it his military training? Or the secret missions he’d survived? It was a combination of all these things. Early on she’d learned that no one event can forge a person, but the series of events that make up a life. Her parents dying was one event. Bobby stepping up to raise her and Dylan, another. Fighting bullies in school, both physically as a kid and then verbally as she matured, were more instances of experiences and memories that shaped her.
And right now she wanted to make another memory with him—one of passion and desire.
Shifting her body, she slowly came up to straddle him, her gaze locking on his. “I need something from you.”
He slid his hands around her waist and down to her hips, urging her in tight. “And what would that be?”
“Make me forget my anger.” She leaned in and kissed him slowly, letting her teeth pull on his lower lip for a moment. “My fear. My worry.”
“I think I can do that,” he said before claiming her mouth.
She slid her arms around his neck, running her fingers up through his thick, short dark hair. Sparks matching those cracking off the fire shot through her. With a growl from deep inside her, she pressed her body tight against his, taking control of the kiss by invading his mouth with her tongue. The mixture of wine from dinner, the chocolate from their dessert and the sensual feel of his tongue meeting hers triggered more excitement to course through her.
This man.
Her body needed him like the dry earth of a drought craved water.
Reaching between them she pulled the hem of his sweater upwards, breaking the kiss only long enough to pull the thick wool over his head and toss aside. Once again she wrapped her arms around his neck, the heat of his body filtering through her own clothes.
Geez, how could he feel like a furnace in the dead of winter?
Before her mind could process the answer, he moved. Not breaking the kiss and with a firm grip of her ass cheeks, he lifted her as he stood. She wrapped her legs around his waist, clutching him to her and adjusting her mouth to his as he carried her through the cabin to the bedroom.
He paused and grunted. The door slammed closed behind them. Darkness surrounded them. She didn’t care. Seconds later, they landed in the middle of the bed they hadn’t made from their earlier love making session.
Hands worked fast. Clothes flew onto the floor. The foil pack crackled as he opened the condom.
Then finally, he slid in deep.
“Yes,” she moaned at the fullness of him inside her.
Gripping his hips tightly to hers with her legs, she arched her back to meet him thrust for thrust. The pace quickened. This joining a pounding rush of need between them. He reached above her head to clutch the headboard, his chest rubbing her breasts with each hard drive of his body into hers. Desperate to take him with her over the edge of the sensual precipice she neared, she slipped her arms down and around his torso. As her body convulsed in passionate release, she raked her nails down his back. He rewarded her with a shout and the tensing of his body as he fell over into the abyss with her.
Slowly, Chloe opened her eyes. Wes leaned up on his elbows, staring down at her, his face unreadable in the darkness.
“Feel better?” he asked, no humor in his voice.
Good thing. If he laughed at her shameless behavior, she’d have to hit him. And right now, she didn’t think she could make a fist, much less put any punch behind it.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good.”
He lowered his mouth to hers. Softly, slowly. A kiss so tender it brought tears to her eyes.
Damn. Good thing it was too dark to see in the room. She was already embarrassed she’d cried on him earlier.
Breaking the kiss, he shifted to the side, sat on the edge of the bed, then disappeared out the door, giving her a brief glimpse of his naked body as he went into the bathroom to deposit the condom. Turning on her side, she watched the fire through the open door. Wes appeared again. He went to the fire, doing something with the fire poker.
Good lord, there wasn’t one ounce of fat on that man’s body. Each muscle well defined. The only thing marring all that masculine beauty? Long red strips where her nails had scored him.
She couldn’t help the inner fist-pump. She liked that she’d left her mark on him.
A moment later he hurried back into the bedroom, scooted in beside her and pulled the covers up on them both. Lying on his back, he pulled her in tight beside him.
Her head resting on his chest, she heard his heart beating strong and steady beneath her ear, the soft hairs of his chest tickled her cheek and nose.
“I’m glad you left the door open,” she said. “I hate the dark.”
“I didn’t think there was anything you were afraid of, counselor,” he said, with a hint of teasing in his voice.
“Bad things happen in the dark.”
He brushed her face with the knuckles of his hand. “What bad things, Chloe?”
“My parents died at night.”
“What happened?” he asked gently.
“Daddy was a professor of engineering. He was invited to speak at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Since it was their anniversary week, Mom went with him, leaving us home with Bobby. The second night there was a banquet and awards ceremony, which my parents attended. It’s only about two hours away, so they started home.”
She paused, thinking back to that terrible night. “It was a sudden rainstorm. The kind that pops up and the roads get slick before anyone realizes it. Even though they were on the highway, a drunk driver plowed into them from behind, sending them careening off into an embankment of trees.”
Inhaling slowly, she ran her hand over the hairs on his chest. “The police came to the house just after midnight. The doorbell woke me. I slipped out of the room I shared with Dylan. The house was dark except for the light coming up the stairs from the front door. Bobby stood there talking to the policeman. I’ve never seen her so pale and frightened.”
Wes’s arm tightened around her, his heartbeat still steady beneath her. His body, strong and solid, just like him.
“Bad things can happen in the daylight, too,” he said after a few minutes.
The last mission. That had to be what he was talking about.
Slowly she slid her arm around his torso until she was hugging him in the loosest of hugs and waited. When he didn’t continue, she took a breath, and just like with a scared or hesitant witness, she gently prodded.
“What happened on that last mission, Wes?”
And there was the question.
Wes had been asked that very thing in the debriefing once he and Bulldog were finally safe on U.S. soil. What had happened? Or as his commander with the Agency had put it, What the fuck happened, Strong?
Straight up and with no flowery description, he’d told the suits in the room with him the facts of the mission. They hadn’t really wanted to know more than him admitting he’d fucked up. Not only had he lost the asset, but out of the six men on his team, only he and Bulldog had made it out of that jungle. It hadn’t taken them long to cut him loose. All of forty-eight hours after he was discharged from the hospital.
What he’d told them wasn’t what happened.
“The mission was compromised before my team even set foot in Venezuela. It was to be a simple extraction. A businessman on holiday was taken hostage. At first it was believed to be a simple express kidnapping.”
“Express kidnapping?” Chloe asked. Her breath whispering across his skin eased some of the anger humming just beneath the surface.
“Tourists are kidnapped by gangs, driven to ATM’s around cities, forced to withdraw money until they max out their cash and use their credit cards to buy high-ticket items. Usually, if they’re in a rental car, their vehicle is stolen, leaving them stranded in a city where they know no one.”
“How frightening.”
“It is, but it’s usually over quickly.”
“Are people hurt?”
“If they resist or try to fight, they’re beaten into submission. Rarely are they killed. Usually they’re only detained for a few hours.” He hesitated.
“What was different this time?” she asked.
Damn, the woman was smart.
“The guy panicked. Still acting the CEO, he flashed his Black Amex card around and figured they wouldn’t hurt him if he told them how much money he had and how valuable he’d be as a hostage. Fucking idiot,” he ground out. Still angry at the guy for putting them all in danger and subsequently getting his men killed. “So instead of a few hours of inconvenience and some embarrassment he bought himself days tramping through the jungle, which is where my team came in.”
“I thought you worked for the government?”
“Technically, I still do.” He hurried on before she could question that statement. “The CEO happened to be a contractor for a technical company—one that developed both physical intelligence equipment and the security programs that ran them.”
“So, you were sent in to retrieve him before they sold him and all his knowledge off to someone who would use the information to attack our country?”
“Give the woman a prize,” he said, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of her head.
“What went wrong?”
Everything.
The fire in the fireplace sparked and the flames moved, just as they had that night.
“It was a simple mission, should’ve taken us no more than a day or two. Fly into Columbia, meet a CIA agent with contacts in the area. Cross the border with the agent’s tracker. Find the CEO, secure him, and get back to the landing zone for a taxi home.”
“Taxi being a helicopter?”
“Fastest way home.” Should’ve been as easy as crossing the street for his team. They’d done it dozens of times before, in all kinds of terrains, all kinds of scenarios.
Chloe shifted, lifting slightly and adjusting her body so she could rest her arm on his chest, her chin on her arm, those soulful brown eyes studying him. “What went wrong?” she repeated.
He reached over to toy with some of the soft spikes of her hair. “Everything. I should’ve known something was up when we got off the plane. Our agency contact seemed nervous. He was a young guy I found out later was on his first in-country assignment. The guide seemed to be more in charge than he did. But my team’s job was go get the hostage, not train a field agent. So, we followed the pair into the jungle. Timing was right. Took us less than a day to find the camp. We spread out, isolating the small hut on one side where a guard stood. Obvious place for the hostage to be kept.”
“Was he?”
“Yes, only he wasn’t alive. My guess is they killed him within hours of us arriving.”
“Why? He wasn’t any good to them dead.”
“They’d gotten all the money they could from his account before the government put a freeze on his assets. If they were hoping to sell him off to the highest bidder, something must’ve gone wrong with the deal.”
“How did they know you were coming?”
“The guide.”
“He sold you out?”
He clenched his jaw tight for a moment, fighting the anger that shot through him. “The group worked often as security for the drug cartels up in the mountains and in the jungle. Our guide was a go-between for them and the cartels’ leadership. Apparently, they didn’t like our little mission into their territories. So we, along with our CIA contact were to die down there, too.”
“Only you didn’t.”
His mind slammed back into the hot, steamy jungle. Gunfire and shouting filling his ears.
“Mostly thanks to Bulldog and Snake. The group ambushed us as we came out of the hut. Cannon got hit in the leg, then in the neck. Bulldog put pressure on it while Snake set up cover-fire for us. The CIA agent helped Bulldog get Cannon to the edge of the forest before he took one in the head. Bruno, who had taken one in the shoulder and arm, dragged him as far as he could. Snake and I took out as many of the enemy as we could, including the traitorous guide, so the others could get into the surrounding jungle. We managed to go about two klicks before I realized Snake wasn’t keeping up. He’d taken a shot just beneath his tactical vest. Bulldog said it must’ve hit his spleen.
“By the time we found a place to take cover, we realized that the guide had lead us in a serpentine route, backing up on our own trail at few times, so finding our way out on our own with three wounded men—two near critical—was near impossible. We dug in and pulled the sat phone out to contact the agency and ask for an extraction team with a helo to get us out. It was shot to hell.”
“Dear God, you were trapped with no help coming?”
He nodded, biting down on his lower lip to stop the rising anger the memory elicited. “With the wounded men, Bulldog did his best. Cannon died first. Mere minutes after we found our hiding spot inside what looked like a spider web of tree trunks surrounding this huge thick tree. The bullet nicked his carotid artery. If he’d been in a city with a major trauma center and he’d gotten on the table quickly he might’ve made it.”
“But not in a jungle with little medical aide,” Chloe said with quiet compassion.
Tears stung his eyes. He clenched his jaw tight and fought to stop them. “Bruno didn’t tell us how bad his wounds were. Bulldog had me holding pressure on Snake’s side to stop the bleeding there and went to check on the stubborn Italian. He’d been hit in the brachial artery and what we thought was a shoulder shot turned out to be in his chest and his lung collapsed. Bulldog tried a tourniquet on his arm, but he’d already lost a lot of blood from it and in his chest. It was just after dark when Bruno died.”
“And Snake?” she asked.
“God, he was the worst. There was nothing Bulldog could do. The spleen is such a vascular organ, he bled internally even with us keeping pressure to the site. He lingered for hours. Begged us for water, then talked about his kid sister. Then begged us not to let him die. Then asked us to kill him. At some point, he started bleeding out his eyes and nose. Bulldog called it DIC. Something about the clotting system knowing there’s bleeding somewhere, but not sure where. All these clots form in capillaries but not where they’re needed. And your body just bleeds out.”
“Oh, how awful.” Chloe wriggled up to press her lips to his chin, wrapping her arms tightly around him. The tears started and this time he didn’t try to stop them.
“I’d never seen anything like it. The other guys went quickly. Poor Isaac. His lungs gave out before his heart.”
A shudder ran through him and he clutched Chloe to him like an anchor in a violent storm, the tears and pain ripping from his body. She held him tight as he finally let those memories out. He’d refused counseling of any kind when he got home. Choosing instead, to leave the agency and wander until he landed in Westen.
The fire had died to a few burning coals by the time he’d settled down, Chloe’s body draped over him like a warm, soft blanket.
“How did you get home?” she asked.
“Once we buried all four of the others, Bulldog and I headed south, following a river that wound through the jungle. We were hoping it would lead us to a bigger tributary, maybe into the Amazon. We walked for days. Then the funniest thing happened.”
“What?”
“We stumbled upon a team of American scientists studying flowers and trees indigenous to the area for possible use in medicines. They fed us and helped us to get to a place where we could get picked up by our agency.” He sucked in a deep breath, then let it out in a slow shuddering motion. “Such a fucking waste. The hostage lost. The young agent gone. And three of my men. I knew it was a bad set-up deep in my gut. Should’ve called the damn mission off.”
Suddenly, Chloe was up on her arms, leaning over him. “Stop it. Stop it right now. This was not your fault. You had a job to do, get that idiot home. The CIA agent should’ve vetted his guide better. You can blame the CEO for getting himself in the mess in the first place. You can blame the guide for selling you out. You can blame the agent for not doing his job, but you will not blame yourself for not being psychic. That’s an order, do you hear me?”
The fierceness in her face did two things to him. First it washed over his own sense of guilt like clean water over a dirty car, taking most, but not all the grit and grime away. Secondly, having her get all dominatrix on him had him hard as a rock again.
Slowly he grinned up at her. “If I don’t follow your orders?”
Her face softened and heated with desire at the same time. She climbed up to straddle his hips, his erection pressed between their bodies. “Then I might just have to convince you who’s in charge here.”
As she leaned down to capture his mouth with hers, he’d decided he’d be a very willing pupil.