Blue Knight (23 page)

Instead she met his lips again.

And his arms.

She breathed her scream into his mouth.

Olivia jerked awake and blinked, trying to figure out what had woken her. She was disoriented.

Then there was a touch on her lips. Fingers.

“Shhh….” Daniel’s voice, very low. Not a hiss, though. His voice reverberated underneath her, too.

She realized that she was lying on him. They weren’t lying flat. He was propped on the pillows, half sitting. Only one bedside lamp was still on. She was lying on her hip and her head was on Daniel’s shoulder. She had one arm curled around his neck, the other around his waist. A big teddy bear.

No wonder she had been so deeply asleep.

There was a sound at the door and she realized it was the second time she had heard it. It was what had woken her. The sound was the electronic “thunk” of the key being used.

Someone was trying to unlock her door.

Cold fear washed through her. Olivia sat up, but Daniel dragged her back down again. There was no arguing with the force in his hand. He held her against his chest with a steel grip. His other hand, which had been under the unused pillow on the other side of the bed, came out from underneath it holding an automatic pistol. He flipped off the safety with his thumb and lined it up on the door with a steady, unwavering aim.

That was why he had wanted her to lie down. He didn’t want her in the way, spoiling his view of the door.

Her heart was banging against the inside of her chest, making her sick, but Olivia stayed down.

The door groaned. Then groaned in stress again.

Daniel’s aim didn’t quivered by so much as a hair.

Then the door rattled like someone was shaking the knob.

Daniel smiled, but still the gun didn’t move.

Olivia heard it, then. The soft squeak of boot leather.

She clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes growing wider as she realized who had rattled the door.

Daniel lowered the gun and pushed it under the pillow again as Olivia sat up. He held his finger to his own lips for silence, then slipped off the bed and moved to the door. Olivia padded after him. She was wearing, she realized, one of her nightgowns. Then she remembered.

She had pulled it on once they had found the strength to move, after Daniel had made her come that second time around, and after she had removed the dildo and cleaned up everything. She had thought she was too wired to sleep, so Daniel had agreed to talk. Then her memory failed her. She must have lasted three nanoseconds after lying down before sleep had slammed her.

Daniel pressed his ear to the door.

The desk chair had been jammed under the handle and the wedge was under the door. He must have put the chair there after she’d fallen asleep.

A shudder ran through her. What if he hadn’t put in place for her the precautions he had insisted she take care of? What disaster would she be trying to cope with right this instant? She didn’t even want to think of it. She had to start learning to think like Daniel, even a little bit, if she wanted any chance at all of coming out of this situation alive.

He straightened up, his chest rising as he took a breath and let it out. “He’s gone.”

“It was Serrano,” she said. They were still talking in Spanish.

“You know that how?”

“His boots. They have that little squeak, you know? It must be his weight.” She shivered. “I had to listen to it for hours.”

Daniel brushed her hair aside and kissed her temple. “He’s been thwarted. You embarrassed him by having precautions in place. He won’t be back again. He can’t risk being embarrassed publically. Just make sure you have the chair and the wedge in place at all times.”

She nodded.

He tugged her back to the bed. “Come and sleep. You’re exhausted.”

“You should be, too.” She let him pull her onto the bed. “Where did you get the gun? We weren’t allowed to bring weapons with us on the assessment tour. It was a strict requirement of the
insurrectos
.”

Daniel shrugged. “I stole it, two days after they shut us in here.”

“You’ve had it hidden all this time? They’ve tossed our rooms at least twice. Where do you hide it?” She was amazed.

Daniel pointed up at the dark square above the bed where the still missing ceiling tile sat on top of its neighbors inside the ceiling. “No one ever thinks about the roof above their heads.”

She shook her head. “I certainly don’t.” She lifted herself onto the high bed. “Did you pull me on top of you before?”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “You did that. I merely tried to soothe you while you were sleeping by holding your hand. You kept moving until you were draped as you found yourself when you woke.”

She could feel herself blushing. “That’s not normal. For me.”

Daniel settled himself onto his stack of pillows once more, with a low chuckle. “Is anything about our sojourn here normal?”

“No, but—” She wanted to explain that her behavior around Daniel had little to do with the odd situation at the White Sands and more to do with Daniel himself.

“Then come here,” he said and patted the mattress.

The fact was, if she had met Daniel under normal circumstances, they would have maintained the instant disliking for each other they had formed and never burrowed any farther under each other’s surfaces. It had taken being held hostage here at the White Sands to rub away at the veneer.

So she shut up and moved closer to him. She touched the very fine, almost invisible scar on his chest, over his nipple. It looked new. “There’s a story to this, isn’t there?”

He glanced at it. “Yes.” A shadow crossed his eyes. “But it’s not for nighttime telling.”

“Will you tell me one day?”

He sighed. “Maybe. It’s not an easy tale to tell.” He pulled her into his arms and settled her so that her head was on his shoulder and her arm over his waist. “I have no objections to being a pillow,” he told her. “You can blush all you want. I like to see you blush, anyway.”

She tucked her head against the soft mound of his pecs muscle, as embarrassed as he intended her to be. She heard the laughter rumbling in his chest.

“You make me feel like a sixteen-year-old,” she complained.

“Good,” he said flatly. “When I first met you, I took you for forty years old. It’s about time you felt younger.”

“In my line of business, feeling younger is a handicap.”

“You can be as old as you need to be while you’re working, but when you’re not working, you need to stay young.”

“You should listen to yourself. In your line of work, dying young is a real option. When I met you, you were a cynical old bastard who fucked young women because he was afraid an older woman would see through him.”

He was silent a long moment. “Ouch.”

“What happened to you to make you that way?” she asked gently.

He shifted. She could feel the muscles flex in him. His chest lifted as he drew in his breath. “You never did explain to me why everyone is so willing to sacrifice themselves for other people, anyway,” he said.

He was speaking English.

Olivia sat up.

Daniel hadn’t moved but she had been resting against him and felt the internal shift as his wariness kicked in. Now he’d switched to English.

She crossed her legs and studied him. His face was blank, held in rigid control. She realized with a start that he wasn’t emotionless, as she had first thought him to be when he had slithered through her window. There was a storm of emotions going on inside Daniel. He just wasn’t allowing any of them to show on his face.

Discipline.

This was as far as he was going to let her in.

“Okay, then,” she said softly. “I think you really know the answer already. But you’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

She took a deep breath. “Relationships are a two-way street. There’s give and there’s take. You see it as self-sacrifice because you don’t see the other side of the coin—what the other person has given up. But there’s always another side. Always. It may not happen at the same time. But there’s always give and take in a relationship. Compromise. Sacrifice. You give things up for the other person’s sake because that’s how it works. They give things up for you, too.”

He sat for a long time saying nothing. She knew he was processing what she was saying. He was looking for the flaws, the way out.

She added the kicker. “You have to give a little to get something back.”

His eyes narrowed. “Really.” His jaw flexed. Even the corners got hard and defined.

She lifted her hands up, as if she was explaining the obvious. “
You
don’t give anything. You fuck women, you do your job and you leave people behind. If you just once gave something, someone might give something back.”

“You have no idea who I am,” Daniel growled.

“I have a better idea than you think,” she returned. “I bet you live alone in an apartment or condo without a garden and the last time you were there was months ago.” She lifted her brow, as Daniel did when he was silently asking for an answer.

His eyes narrowed. “I haven’t been there for months because a revolution got in the way of going back.”

“But I’m right on the rest of the details,” she said.

His chest lifted and fell. “Yes,” he said heavily.

“I’m betting you don’t have a best friend, or if you have someone you call a friend you haven’t seen them in years, perhaps even a decade, or maybe since high school or college.”

Daniel licked his lips. “We had a disagreement.”

“And your pride wouldn’t let you patch it up,” Olivia guessed.

A furrow dug between his brows. “This isn’t funny.”

“Because I’m so right?” She touched his thigh. “What did your friend do that was so horribly wrong?”

Daniel had to take two breaths to get it out. “He saved my life.”

She sat back, astonished. “So there have been people in your life who care about you. You just ruthlessly prune anyone out of your life who does care. When do you plan on booting me out the door?”

“God, don’t.” He leaned forward, resting his head on the heel of his hands. “Don’t do this, Olivia. Please don’t.”

“Relationships are an act of faith.”

“Please tell me you are not talking about love.” His voice was muffled by his hands.

She picked her words with care. “I’m talking about people. The human race. Perhaps you should try joining it. If you give back—”

His head shot up and his gaze stabbed her. “Give back? Like you give back? Like you gave and gave and gave for your ex?”

She recoiled. “How do you know…?” How could he possibly know about Jerry? Then she relaxed. “You don’t know anything,” she told him.

“I know as much as you do,” he snarled. “I know that you married not long out of high school. I know he worked all day and left you at home without a career. I bet it was only after the divorce you found out about all the other women he’d had affairs with. A string of them, some of them women you knew well. He was fucking them every which way from Sunday while you were washing his socks and pressing his shirts. So after the divorce you got yourself a career and a defensive shell a turtle would be proud of and no one and nothing has got inside that shell since then.”

She swallowed. Daniel’s summary was so uncannily accurate it was scary.

Daniel leaned forward. “You might like sex, but you’re so fucking scared of getting hurt again you keep everyone at elbow’s length with that ice wall around you. You’ll die a withered up old lady with a dildo in your pussy, wondering why no one loves you.”

The tears burned at the back of her eyes but she kept them at bay through sheer willpower. “Is this how you cut people out of your life, Daniel? Is this how you’re going to get rid of me? By making me bleed so badly I want to leave?”

Shock skittered over his face and his eyes widened. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her to him, holding her tightly against him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “God, I’m so sorry, Olivia. I didn’t realize I was doing it. It just comes out of me, like poison. You have this exalted opinion of me, but I’m really a bastard. I don’t want you to go. Not yet. Stay. Please stay.”

Her tears did flow then, for he was speaking Spanish again.

She slid her arm around his neck and let herself cry and let Daniel soothe her. His hands stroked her back and her face and he kissed her brow and temple and lips. Finally, his index finger slipped under her chin and tilted her face up so she was looking at him.

He took a deep, calming breath. “Vistarians have this idealized image of what makes a good Vistarian man. I’m not one of them, although I always wanted to be one. My friend, the one you guessed I had—Duardo…he’s one of them. He’s fine, honorable, a brilliant soldier. I’m just the son of a bastard, in fact as well as in nature.” He rubbed his hair with his hand. “I get my coloring and my eyes from my grandmother’s family tree. British. That’s why I pose as a British businessman with a built-in suntan.”

He dropped his hand to her shoulder and it stayed there, big, heavy and warm. “My mother left my father and me when I was seven. I don’t know why. My father would never tell me and he died when I was eleven. I didn’t have any other close relatives, so I got farmed out to families in Pascuallita. Duardo’s family took me in for a time. That’s when I met him. But then Duardo’s father got sick and they had to find another place for me. I got passed around a lot after that, so I joined the army when I was sixteen and that took care of the passing around.” He took a breath and she knew that it was costing him to talk about this. Perhaps this was the first time he’d ever spoken of it aloud.

“You still didn’t really belong, even in the Army, did you?” she guessed.

“No, but I was good at it and it was something to do. Then they decided that the Intelligence Unit would be a perfect fit for me and they were right. It’s a good place for lone wolves, there. After that, it was much easier going.” He took a breath. “Except I found out the world has more people like me, than like the Vistarians I wanted to be like. That was a shock when I first realized it. It was my job to find and work with people who will betray their country and you know what? Women will do it faster than men and they will do it for love. Men can be bought quicker than women. I understand that, but not why someone will do it for love.”