Shiver (25 page)

Marco was balanced on one knee, grabbing for his crutches and doing his best to get to his feet as she reached the open
bedroom doorway. Behind him, she heard Groves yelling something as he came bounding up the stairs. Then Tyler screamed again, a long, high-pitched scream that, even though she should have been used to it, still had the power to make the hair on the back of her neck stand up. The bedroom was dark, but not so dark she couldn’t see Tyler instantly. Racing across the carpet toward him, Sam felt her heart slamming in her chest. Her son sat bolt upright in the middle of the unfamiliar double bed, his small body rigid, his arms straight down at his sides, his eyes tightly closed even as his mouth opened to blast out another of those spine-chilling screams. In that instant she forgot all about Marco, and about those blistering kisses. She forgot all about the terrible situation they were in. She forgot about everything in the world except Tyler. Her entire focus was on her son.

“Tyler.”
She scrambled onto the bed, scuttling toward him as fast as she could. The skirt of her robe got caught under her knees, impeding her progress. Impatiently she jerked it out of her way. Just before she reached him his eyes opened. The fear and bewilderment on his face turned to instant relief as he saw her.

“Mom.”
He held out his arms to her. Reaching him, she enfolded him in a warm embrace. Wrapping his arms around her, he clung to her. She could feel him trembling. “You forgot to use the monster spray.”

This one had been bad. But then, was it any wonder?

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll get some tomorrow.”

“There were monsters. They were trying to eat me.”

“It’s okay, baby, I’m here,” she crooned into his hair, rocking
him back and forth, her knees folded beneath her, her hair spilling over them both.

“I couldn’t run. My feet wouldn’t move.” Tyler burrowed closer against her.

“You know it was just a bad dream. It wasn’t real.”

Marco appeared in the doorway, with Groves showing up a split second later just behind him. Both of them were staring in at her and Tyler. Neither said a word.

“I want to go home.” There was a quaver in Tyler’s voice.

“I do, too. We will, soon.”

She couldn’t see the men’s expressions because what light there was came from the bathroom in which she had discovered Marco, and was at their backs. But remembering how clearly she had been able to see Tyler from that same position, she knew that they had an equally good view of her. She frowned at them: the moment should have been a private one. Even with Marco leaning on his crutches again, he was slightly taller than Groves. His shoulders were wide enough to almost fill the doorway. His robe was closed and securely tied around his waist now. With Tyler safe in her arms, Sam found that the memory of what had just transpired between them came flooding back; all of it, the heat, the hunger, every tiny detail, flashed into her mind with fresh, vivid intensity.

She forced it out again instantly.

“What happened? Did he hurt himself?” Marco’s voice was low, and she realized that he was doing his best not to make a big deal, not to up the ante on the situation, not to further upset Tyler.

She shook her head.

“He has nightmares.” Her response was equally quiet. Her arms were around her son. Her cheek rested on his hair.

Marco said nothing for a moment. Then he spoke over his shoulder to Groves, too quietly for Sam to make out the words. The two of them moved away, Groves first with Marco turning to follow, out of the doorway, out of her sight. She could hear them talking as they walked down the hall, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying, and she didn’t particularly care. She gave Marco points for having the sensitivity to leave her and Tyler alone, and then she pushed everything else out of her mind and concentrated on Tyler.

He told her all about his nightmare. By the time he was finished, he was once again lying down, his head nestled on his pillow, although her arm was beneath his head now, too. Curled up beside him, Sam made appropriate comments and gave him the comfort of her presence and waited for him to fall asleep.

The thing was, she was really, really sleepy, too.

She would just, for the teeniest tiniest second, rest her eyes . . .

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

O
kay, it was official: he had a major case of the hots for the woman he had charged himself with protecting. Danny had stopped at the top of the stairs, both because there wasn’t anywhere besides the second floor of this nondescript town house cum safe house that he wanted to be under the circumstances and because negotiating the stairs while on crutches was tricky at best. Watching Groves head down, Danny recognized the fact that he’d made a major mistake. Too late: not a damned thing he could do about it.

He’d kissed the girl.

“Hey, Marco, I’d keep what I just said in mind, if I were you.” Groves threw that, along with an ugly look, up at him as he reached the bottom of the stairs. It was the tail end of the conversation they’d been having. Danny had said something like,
we need to give them some space, you can head on back downstairs,
to which Groves had replied along the lines of,
I’m just doing my job here,
whereupon Danny had said, no irony intended, that he appreciated that, which Groves had taken poorly
and possibly as sarcasm and in reply growled that if it was up to him he, Groves, wouldn’t be laying his life on the line for a damned traitor who deserved to be spending the rest of his life in jail. Or worse.

Danny had barely stopped himself from saying amen to that. The thing was, though, Marco wouldn’t. So he’d said
screw you
instead. Thus provoking Groves’s less-than-friendly reply.

What made it difficult, Danny reflected as he headed back down the hall, was that he could actually appreciate where Groves was coming from. Rick Marco had besmirched the honor of all federal agents everywhere, committed crimes as heinous as those of any of the drug kingpins they were chasing, gotten a bunch of agents and civilians killed, and then, when he was caught, cut a deal and started singing like the yellow canary he was.

Marco deserved every bit of Groves’s antipathy.

But that made the relationship tricky for Danny while he was being Marco.

He couldn’t wait for the damned gig to be over. For many reasons. One of which, of course, was that it would be a nice change not to have to worry anymore about being tortured and killed, at least until the next death-defying assignment came along. Which it would. See, he was a troubleshooter. The Bureau had a team of them, under-the-radar players who were sent in on the most dangerous undercover assignments as needed. For security reasons, none of them knew the identities of the others. Crittenden was their boss. Crittenden knew them all. Except for Crittenden’s superiors, who Danny expected but did not know
for sure were kept in the loop, and the tight little cadre of agents who were Crittenden’s support staff, Crittenden was also the only one who knew the details of their assignments.

It helped that Danny was armed again; Crittenden had delivered on the gun. When they had arrived at the town house last night, and he had gotten a good look at the crutches that had been provided for him as they were unloaded, Danny had almost been surprised. Almost, because not much Crittenden managed to pull off surprised him anymore. But this, a piece of masking tape stuck to the underside of the shoulder support of the left crutch with the number 342 scrawled on it, had done the trick—342 was Crittenden’s top-secret extension at Quantico. Only his team knew it. Seeing the tape with the number on it had been like seeing Crittenden’s signature. It had told Danny that there was something up with the crutch. After he’d insisted on switching out the wheelchair for the crutches and then hauled his ass up the stairs on them—an exercise in pain, danger, and frustration that he didn’t relish repeating any more than he had to—he had hobbled into his bedroom, locked the door, and proceeded to take them apart.

A 9mm model 26 Glock, known in the business as a pocket Glock because of its small size, was concealed inside the left crutch, cleverly inserted into the triangle that fit beneath his armpit. The long shaft that stretched from the triangle to the floor was hollow, and contained two ten-round magazines. In the same place in the right crutch, he’d found a cell phone. Generic, disposable, untraceable. Just to be on the safe side, he’d taken the battery out.

Hot damn, he’d thought at the time, he was in business again. After careful consideration, Danny had decided to leave both phone and gun concealed in the crutches. Otherwise, Sanders and company might well spot them. And take them: as a fed turned criminal turned protected federal witness, Rick Marco was allowed neither a personal cell phone nor weapons. Then after they took them, they would start asking questions. Like, how the hell had he gotten them?

Since Danny couldn’t tell the truth, the whole thing just got awkward from that point.

Even if he had to disassemble a crutch if the shit started hitting the fan again, it was a lot better than being unarmed, as he had been the last time the cartel had found him. An optimist might believe that there wouldn’t be a second time, but Danny considered himself a realist.

And realistically, the whole point was for the Zetas to be chasing him rather than the real Marco. The exercise got kind of pointless if there was no trail. And if there was a trail, the team the Zetas had in place would sooner or later pick up on it. Because Marco knew where all the bodies were buried, and they were desperate to silence him before he could point them all out.

Dangerous situations were what he excelled at, the latest fiasco notwithstanding, and Danny wouldn’t even have been much more than glumly resigned to the prospect of being found again if he’d just had himself to worry about. But now there were Sam and Tyler.

They added a whole new layer of concern to the situation.

The kid was a kid. By virtue of that fact alone, Danny wasn’t
about to let him get hurt or killed. Whether he liked him—which he did—or not didn’t matter.

And Sam—well, he wasn’t about to let her get hurt or killed, either.

For a whole host of reasons, including the fact that she was a girl, and an innocent bystander, and he owed her, and . . .

Face facts, she was getting under his skin.

He should never have kissed her.

Danny would have cursed himself for letting it happen, except that was an absolute exercise in futility. Bottom line: learn from your mistakes, don’t do it again.

Ordinarily he wouldn’t have done it the first time, no matter how hot Sam was or how attracted he was to her. He was on the job, working undercover, and he was professional enough to maintain a certain degree of detachment from an unsuspecting civilian who had accidentally gotten caught up in the investigation and was now, as a result, under his protection.

He blamed the damned painkillers. They made him just loopy enough so that his inner self-control system was shot to hell.

The solution was easy enough, even if he cringed when he thought about it: no more pain pills for him. When the pain came back, as it was going to do, and pretty shortly, too, he was just going to have to hurt till he healed. Dangerous as the situation was, he needed a clear head anyway. Along with no distractions: as in, lay off the girl.

She was beautiful, sexy, just his type with her lovely face, long black hair, and big blue eyes. He liked the attitude she
gave him, admired her guts. Add to that, her lips were soft, her mouth hot, her body killer. Plus, she’d been surprising him from the beginning, when he’d looked up from his prison in the car trunk to see her frowning down at him. She’d kept surprising him at every turn since. The biggest surprise of all might have been the way she had caught fire when he’d kissed her. He definitely hadn’t seen that coming. In his experience, beautiful girls—the latest woman he’d been seeing (read sleeping with) in the weeks between assignments being a case in point—tended to be lacking in the passion department. Not Sam. She had caught fire as quickly as he had. Impossible to miss the fact that she had been vibrating with eagerness to get naked and get it on with him.

Hot and horny: when it came to women, it was his favorite combination. How could he resist taking what she was obviously ready, willing, and able to give?

Libido-squashing answer: because he had to.