Midnight Fire (15 page)

She sighed. “It’s not that, it—
”
Her lips clamped shut.

“It’s what?” Jack asked. The road was broad and almost empty. He swiveled his head to look at her directly. She seemed a little less in a state of shock now. Sad and afraid but not devastated.

Summer shook her head. “Nothing.”

Jack slowed down. “This is a serious situation, Summer. You were about to say something. It wasn’t nothing. Tell me.”

“Or what?” She turned to give him a faint smile. It was a sad effort but he was happy to see she made that attempt. “You’ll beat it out of me?”

God.

“No, sweetheart.” Jack picked up one of her hands, brought it to his mouth. It wasn’t icy cold any more. He kissed the back of it, as if she were his liege lady. “I could never hurt you and you know that. But I’m trying to keep us alive here, doing my very best, and I don’t like question marks, things left unsaid. They could get us killed. So I would be very, very grateful if you could finish that sentence for me.”

“Not fair,” she complained, and this time the smile was less strained. “You’re appealing to my better nature.”

“Anything that works, sweetheart.”

She sighed. “It has nothing to do with
”
—she waved her hand “—with whatever is going on. Back there, at Hector’s secret little love pad, when I heard that my house had been booby-trapped with sarin, I flashed back on something that happened in my childhood. A bad memory. That’s all.”

Summer’s childhood had been really rough. Jack knew that. He’d heard his parents talking about her when she lived with Vanessa and Hector, who’d totally ignored Summer in their vicious fights with each other. His parents, bless them, had tried to take Summer under their wing.

“Tell me,” he said gently. “If you talk about it, it’ll pull the punch of the memory. I don’t know what else is going to happen, probably not a whole lot of good things, so I’d like to know what could be a trigger for you. Drag up memories that make you freeze.”

She sighed. Looked down at her lap. Clasped her fingers together then pulled them apart.

She was going to talk. She wanted to talk. Jack recognized the signs. He gave her the time she needed.

“Okay,” Summer said finally. She stared straight ahead, not looking at him, which was not a good sign. Summer always looked people right in the eyes. This was going to be bad. “The summer I was eight my parents and I were living in Cartagena, Colombia. It wasn’t a happy place. We were surrounded by cartel soldiers and pushers but I suppose that was sort of the point, for my parents. They got high a lot. Sometimes they left me alone for days. Once, they left to go somewhere—I have no idea where—and I ate something tainted. It gave me violent food poisoning. For almost two days—I think it was two days, I lost all track of time—I vomited and voided everything that could be voided.

“I spent two days and two nights curled around the toilet in blinding pain, drenched in my own waste, and I begged God to let me die. I’ve never been so sick before or after in my life. I thought I was going to die alone in a miserable hole in Cartagena and I didn’t want to die alone.” Her long lashes swept down as she looked at her hands again. They were trembling and she clenched them so hard the knuckles turned white. “That’s what I was flashing on. Being violently sick, all alone. Dying alone.”

Jack swallowed but didn’t allow anything at all to show on his face. Nothing. Because he felt such vast pity for the little girl who’d been left alone while so sick, and a murderous rage at her careless junkie parents who hadn’t taken care of her at all.

The summer Jack had been eight, he and his parents and Isabel—the twins hadn’t been born yet—had taken a long vacation in Disneyworld and it had been sheer heaven. They’d all had a fabulous time. The memory of that summer still made him smile. He’d been loved and protected when he was a little kid. He’d lived in a bubble of happiness all his childhood, looked over by loving parents.

It had never occurred to him that not everyone’s life was like that and he doubted he’d have understood it at the age of eight.

He’d had no idea of what the world was like and by the time he discovered it was full of fuckheads who liked inflicting pain and chaos, he was a man, and he’d started extensive training to handle them.

Not eight years old like Summer had been, helpless and vulnerable and abandoned. Nearly dying on her own in a foreign country would have been an imprinting experience—something that colored the rest of her days.

He understood completely how she flashed on that experience.

This was a woman who’d known adversity as a little girl beyond anything he’d ever had to experience. And now someone was after her.

Whoever these fuckers were—and he suspected the DD of the CIA, among others—they weren’t going to touch Summer. He was going to make sure of that. He was going to stick by her side and he was going to take her away to the safest place he could think of.

And then he and Nick and the FBI and the guys at ASI were going to go on the attack.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said quietly and she nodded.

Now that he was close to the safe house, Jack made his usual rounds to check for tails. He drove three blocks in every direction, in a grid. Circled his block twice. And he was clean.

“We’re here.” He turned quickly into a little driveway then took a right under a canopy in the alleyway out back.

“Good thing.” Summer picked up her purse from the footwell. Her movements were smoother now, hands no longer trembling. “You went around the block a couple of times. I thought maybe you were lost.”

Lost. Jack
never
got lost. He was about to say so when he saw her smiling at him. A genuine smile. She was teasing him. He put on his seducer’s voice, the one he hadn’t used in years. “I always know where I’m going, darlin’. You can count on that. Stay here.”

He rounded the big vehicle and opened her door. She’d been unsteady on her legs when she got in. She didn’t seem to be unsteady now but...he wanted to help her down. He wanted that badly. He wanted his hands on her in the worst way. Layers of wanting. He wanted to make sure she wasn’t trembling and was steady on her feet. He wanted to reassure her that he was there for her, in the most basic way there was—by physical touch. And he wanted his hands on her because he wanted her.

Not now
, he told himself sternly. He’d learned to control his dick a long time ago. In college he’d been guided in most of his decisions by his dick, but that hadn’t been him for a long time now. So this sudden lust in the middle of the most dangerous op of his life, with the greatest consequences, danger at every turn for Summer too—that was wrong.

It threw him off his stride. He’d been a top operator for Hugh because he was focused like a laser beam on the op, always. The people he loved—his family—were far away and safe and that always allowed him to be concentrated on the mission. He had no idea how his fellow Clandestine Service operators managed to focus when they had loved ones living in the same city.

Now Jack had a taste of that and he didn’t like it. Didn’t like being operational and looking after someone he cared about. It messed with his head, big time.

The sooner they got out of Dodge the better, because right now all he could think about was Summer’s mouth and the feel of her beneath his hands. And memories of how sweet she’d been in bed filled his head so that he wasn’t calculating how many traffic cams they’d passed, even in a SUV that wasn’t being looked for. All he could do was keep his head low, Blake’s Fedora hiding his features. Making sure Summer’s face was covered, too.

This was amazingly stressful—hiding his tracks and hers while wanting her in his bed. She was a huge distraction and yet you’d have to get bolt cutters to separate him from her. She wasn’t going anywhere without him right by her side.

Damn.

Jack opened the passenger side door. Man, he’d swiped a humongous SUV. He’d been able to put his boots on the ground no problem but Summer was much shorter than he was. She’d have to slide off the seat and hop down.

Well, there was an app for that.

“Lean forward,” he ordered.

Jack had killed three of the four street lights at both ends of the alleyway. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where street lights were replaced often. Only one was working but it was enough to see the pale oval of her face inside the vehicle, light gray eyes almost glowing. She smiled faintly at him. She looked exactly like someone who was scared but was putting up a brave front.

His heart gave a huge thump in his chest.

She leaned forward until their faces were inches apart. He clasped her small waist through enough material to fashion a yurt and lifted her out and down, telling himself to let go of her once her feet hit the ground.

The entire world seemed to have stopped. The blustery wind that had shaken the tree branches had stopped, or at least here in the back alley they were sheltered from the wind. A full moon was rising above the rooftops of the buildings around them, pure silver magic.

Jack totally lost his situational awareness. He was aware of absolutely nothing but Summer as he stood there, hands still around her waist, so close he could feel her breathing. The only sound he heard was the roaring in his ears.

His eyes became heavy and hers did, too. He was bending down and she was stretching up when a loud clatter sounded behind him and he was wrenched back to where he was and why.

He was behind his safe house with Summer, who had narrowly missed dying the most atrocious death possible thanks to the fact that she was with him. He had to yank his head out of his ass, and get them inside pronto. Some very bad guys, with an agenda so huge one death among so many would mean nothing to them, were after her. And him, too. Only he’d been trained hard to win in scenarios like this. Summer hadn’t. Her bulwark against danger was him.

And he was an idiot who’d actually contemplated standing outside kissing her. And fuck him if it
still
didn’t seem like a really good idea.

Another clatter and he moved forward, taking her elbow.

“Stray dogs?” Summer asked. She was keeping pace with him. Good girl.

“Hmm.” Knowing the neighborhood, it was more likely rats, but he didn’t say that. He concentrated on getting them inside as quickly and quietly as possible. There was a flimsy gate that wasn’t at all as flimsy as it looked. Actually, it was made of steel with a titanium core. It had a print-activated keypad that got them quickly into the backyard. Jack pushed the gate behind him and heard the soft snick of a well-machined lock close behind them.

The back door was much harder than it looked, too. Again, a thumbprint activated coded keypad to open the door.

The small backyard was bristling with hidden sensors including IR, motion sensors, audio sensors. Only blank brick walls surrounded the yard. At the push of a button, a covering that mimicked a dirt yard would stretch out from side to side and from the back wall to the gate. If he needed to be shielded from a drone or a satellite, all he had to do was push that button.

Hugh had chosen the safe house very well, but then he’d been a master of the game. For a second, Jack had a pang of pain in his chest. The fuckers after him had taken his family and the man who’d been like a second father to him.

Well, they weren’t going to get him and
by God
they weren’t going to get Summer.

Inside, Jack helped Summer shed Hector’s heavy overcoat and her own coat and helped her unwind the long scarf. He took his stolen overcoat and his own coat off and hung everything in the hallway closet.

His mom had drilled neatness in him but he also couldn’t stand the thought of being cooped up in a small apartment that looked like weasels nested there. He’d spent way too much time here over the past six months. If he didn’t keep the space clean he’d go crazy.

Crazier.

It wasn’t nice like Summer’s apartment was, but it was okay. If you squinted.

“It’s not that bad,” Summer said, turning around. Surprise was in her voice.

“What were you expecting?” Jack asked. “Animal house?”

She sketched a smile. “Not quite. But in thrillers, safe houses are stacked high with fast food and pizza boxes and empty beer bottles and they smell like a zoo.” She sniffed. “Doesn’t smell like a zoo, doesn’t smell of anything, really.”

Jack shrugged. “Yeah. I try to keep it livable.”

He tried to look at the space through her eyes. You could take the whole thing in at a glance. Living room, with round dining table near the kitchenette. Two other doors. One door open into the bedroom—thank God he’d made the bed—the other door closed. The bathroom.

It was a far cry from his family home, a sprawling two hundred-year-old complex on two acres of landscaped grounds. His mom had turned it into a showcase and he’d taken it entirely for granted until he’d come home for the first time from college and realized how beautiful his home was.

It had been lost after the Massacre. Yet another thing Hector Blake had taken from him.

“You hungry?” he asked.

Summer turned around, wide-eyed. “You cook?”

Jack lifted a corner of his mouth at her expression. “You don’t have to make it sound like rocket science, beyond my ability. Though, to be frank, I actually
don’t
cook. But there’s an excellent deli around the corner. And I happen to have four big pastrami on rye sandwiches I can nuke. And some beers in the fridge. You game?”

“God, yes,” she breathed. “I’m starving.”

“Danger will do that.” Jack sat her down at the round dining table, grateful that he’d swiped off the crumbs from that morning’s bagel. Max’s pastramis on rye were a wonder to behold. He put two huge sandwiches on a platter, stuck it in the microwave, put two plates on the table, two glasses, two napkins and for Summer a knife and fork if she wanted it. Personally, Jack wouldn’t let a knife and fork touch Max’s masterpiece.

When the microwave dinged he took the steaming platter and put one huge sandwich on Summer’s plate, the other on his. He’d nuke the remaining two when they’d finished these.