Silent Warrior: A Loveswept Classic Romance (3 page)

“You needed to deal with what happened and get on with your life, to function in the present,” he said to her retreating back. His gaze dropped to her shorts and the long legs that showed beneath the ragged hem. Swearing silently, he looked back to his empty bottle. “You weren’t exactly the type to take a pat on the hand and soft words of comfort.”

“I think that was understandable.”

Understandable. Yes, John thought, excruciatingly understandable. “No one else was getting through to you,” he said, persisting even as he questioned the wisdom of not just letting it go. “I did the only thing I
knew to do. If you were mad at me, at least you had a focus and a vent for all your anger.”

She just snorted. That stung. Even though he knew he’d had the bedside manner of a tiger with a thorn in its paw.

Cali paced the length of the room twice, then suddenly halted in mid-stride. With a brief sigh, she slumped back against the counter, arms folded. She looked at John, her expression tired but not defeated. “I know why you did what you did,” she said quietly. “I knew it then. And you were right. I wasn’t any good to anyone the way I was, least of all myself. If you recall, I did finally thank you for it.”

Yes, she had. John heard her last words to him as clearly as if she’d just repeated them. The doctors had wanted to send her home for several days after they’d finally stopped the hemorrhaging and stabilized her. But she’d lingered with one complaint or another, so unlike herself that her own family had been at a loss as to how to handle her. He’d been with her during the worst of it, and he knew she was beginning to regret his having seen that side of her. Defeated and embarrassed, despite the understanding though somewhat claustrophobia-inducing support of her father, she’d sunk into a depression.

John had known that someone needed to shake her up a bit and get her focused on something other than the trauma she’d just endured. He’d elected himself for the job. Making her angry, and focusing that anger at him, had helped him deal with the guilt of his unwanted feelings for her too.

He’d gone into her hospital room that day and bullied her, pushed her, hating the pain and betrayal he’d seen in her eyes. She’d finally lost her temper, coming out of the numb, almost trancelike shell she’d lapsed into, yelling at him.

“You tell me you miss him, too, that you understand, but you don’t,”
she’d yelled.
“You never have. Underneath all your nice, sympathetic words you’re just a coldhearted son-of-a-bitch. You say you feel things, but there is no evidence of them on your face. Not once have I seen even a glimmer of feeling in your eyes. The ultimate super-spy, Nathan called you. He admired the hell out of you. I have no idea why. I still don’t. You’re hard and emotionless. It seems to me to be good at your job you have to feel something, anything. You don’t feel, you don’t react. You just act
.

“Nathan told me I just didn’t understand you. Well, he was right, I don’t. I don’t know why you’re here now when you’d obviously rather be anywhere else. But I’ll be damned if I’ll lie here and take any more of this abuse from you.”
She’d eventually wound down, but anger still flashed in her brilliant green eyes when she’d said,
“Now go find me a nurse and get me the hell out of here.”

He’d willingly taken her flaying, silently begging her to give him her worst. He deserved it even as he felt shame for the relief of guilt her well-earned outburst had delivered to him. He’d left her room, arranged her release, and contacted her father to come for her. Then he’d left. Gone back to work. He’d seen it as his only choice.

Only now it seemed a whole lot more like running away.

“Did you ever get the letter I sent you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I got it.” And would go to his grave before admitting he still had it. He started to explain why he’d never written back, even though the note hadn’t required a response, but she spoke first.

“I meant what I said, John.”

“Which time? In the letter or in the hospital room?”

She smiled. It made his chest ache.

“Both, actually. I resented that I needed someone to push me so hard, to make me do what I knew I needed to do. But I also meant what I said to you in that letter. You were Nathan’s friend. You honored that by taking care of me through some very rough stuff you didn’t have to stick around for. I may not have liked your methods, but I never forgot what you did for me.”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about this,” he grumbled.

To his further chagrin, her smile widened, reaching her eyes this time. God, she was beautiful. Inside and out.

“I think it was better to get it out of the way,” she said. “I know it’s awkward. But you’re right, it’s been long enough now. It shouldn’t be so hard to talk about. I couldn’t go on, asking for your help again, without at least talking about how we parted last time.”

“You said I didn’t know everything. Tell me the rest.”

Her smile turned a bit sad, acknowledging that he’d just closed the subject.

“I think the meeting Nathan was on his way to the day he died involved this project.” She crossed back to the table and sat down, bracing her forearms on the table.

“Meaning what?”

“What I’m saying is that ten years ago Nathan was working on this project and he died. Now the project surfaces, falling into my hands. And now someone wants me dead too.”

TWO

Cali looked across the table at the man she’d asked to save her life. What had she been thinking with anyway? Certainly not with what was left of her brain.

Ten years spent building a rock-solid, independent life should have inured her to the overwhelming effect of one John McShane. He was just a man.

Right. And she was just a hacker.

She’d told herself she’d exaggerated the power of his steely reserve, of his rigid, unemotional control. That she’d no longer suffer the irritation of discovering that despite his obvious faults, she’d found herself intrigued by those same traits more than once.

As her father’s hostess, she’d held court for princes and rebels with equal ease. Surely one United States super-spy shouldn’t throw her. Surely it had been her youth and the circumstances of their initial meeting that had caused her reaction.

A decade later she had to face the truth. She was still intrigued by him.

Had he always been so impossibly rugged? Had his eyes always been that cold, steely gray?

To her further dismay, his intense return scrutiny had her averting her gaze. She watched the condensation trickle down the side of her bottle. The direction of her life seemed as random as the beads of water on the glass. She hated the loss of control more than anything else. Hated that she was about to hand over what little control she had left to anyone, but in particular to this man. Once in a lifetime was enough. Never mind that she’d asked him to take control both times.

And for whatever reason, he’d come. Again. She looked up. Beating herself up with the whys of their past, with guilt over dragging him into her messy life once again, helped no one. She was desperate. She’d figure out how to pay him back later.

“You think his death wasn’t an accident,” he stated. “You think it’s related to what’s happening to you now?”

“I have no concrete proof of the connection. But yes, I do,” she said. “When you came to our apartment and told me that Nathan had been killed in a car crash, it never occurred to me that it was anything other than an accident. I know you and the Blue Circle investigated it anyway and concurred with that conclusion. But someone in the Blue Circle was also part of the chain of command on the project. So the fact that they found nothing proves nothing.”

“He died in a car accident on the way to a meeting, Cali. There was absolutely no evidence of foul play. There was nothing else to investigate. We questioned you on his current projects, and you had no specific information about what he’d been working on. No one we talked to in the Circle knew anything about it. His contact never stepped forward.”

“Mighty convenient, don’t you think? And neither driver survived. Hard to get a confession from a dead man.” She leaned back and crossed her arms, holding his gaze intently.

He stared at her. She waited for the argument. Instead, he asked, “How did the project surface again?”

“It was literally handed back to me. By an insurance company.” A fresh rush of frustration pushed at her. “Nathan apparently understood better than he let on just how sensitive the project was. We’d already decided not to discuss particulars for my protection, but he must have felt the need for more insurance. So that was exactly what he did. He insured it.”

“The project? Or himself?”

“Himself. But I know it was the project that made him do it.”

“Explain.”

“He’d received the first payment, an advance based on some preliminary work he’d delivered to them the day before his accident. I didn’t know about that. The deal hadn’t originally been set up that way. Anyway, as it turns out, he took the money, a substantial
sum, and set up a convoluted funding system to pay against a policy he bought to cover himself.”

“Sounds like something Nathan would do.”

She nodded, surprised at how much comfort there was, even now, in being able to share her past, to share what she had with Nathan, with someone who knew him as she had. She smiled softly. “I’m sure he relished the challenge, despite the concerns that drove him to do it.” She sobered. “He died that same day. I was the sole beneficiary. I never saw the policy or got any paperwork on it, so the bank and the insurance company weren’t notified of his death. The bank account paid into the policy automatically on a regular basis. It was set up as a ten-year note.”

“Which just paid out.”

“Exactly.”

“And the paperwork generated by all of this?”

“Stored in a safety-deposit box in the same bank, filed automatically by some arrangement he worked out. I was only to be notified of all of this if anything happened to him.” She stopped, sighing. “I guess he didn’t want to worry me.”

If she expected any compassion, she was waiting on the wrong man to deliver it. In a way, that relieved her. It
had
been many years. And though all of this had dredged up a lot of old, buried emotions, grief wasn’t one of them. She’d long since come to terms with her losses. What she couldn’t deal with was the idea that Nathan’s death might not have been accidental.

And she’d let ten years lapse without bringing the killer to justice.

“So you got the money,” John said, making some notes in the column of his notebook. “What about the program? You went through his things when he died and—”

“Whatever had been done on each contracted project was turned over to the contracted group. I never did find any work on the Blue Circle project.”

“You weren’t suspicious, though.”

“I had no real reason to be. He’d just started it, as far as I knew. They never contacted me asking for anything. I assumed anything he’d had, he’d turned in. I was dealing with so much at the time, I was more relieved than anything.”

John was silent for a moment. She could almost hear the wheels turning. Nathan had often boasted of McShane’s almost fanatical persistence in analyzing situations. It was the one thing she’d trusted about him back then. It was the reason she’d given herself for asking him to help her now.

“Okay. So ten years have gone by. The project is—or was—as dead and buried as it’s creator.”

She flinched. He may have well earned his super-spy reputation. However, his status as a sensitive human being was still up for discussion.

He didn’t apologize, though she had no doubt he noticed her reaction. He noticed everything. She worked not to shift in her seat as he continued to stare at her.

“Why are you so sure the insurance payoff ties in with the Blue Circle project?”

“When I found out the policy had been paid for with a direct deposit, I traced the payments with my computer to the bank where he’d set up the account. It was on Grand Cayman. As private as a Swiss account and all the transfers done by wire. Luckily my name was on it as well, or I’d have never cracked it.”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“Okay, so maybe I could have. But not legally.” When he simply continued to look at her, she sighed and went on. “Anyway, there were two automatic payments on the account. One to the insurance policy and a second one for a safety-deposit box in the same bank.”

“The policy papers you mentioned already. Was the program work in there too?”

She shook her head. “But along with the paperwork, there was a diskette. It contained his preliminary notes, the ones for which he’d been paid. I’m assuming he expected to continue putting up-to-date work in there for safekeeping, only he never got any further. Regardless, that ties the insurance policy and the program together.”

“There wasn’t anything else? Personal notes to you?”

Cali glanced down for a second, then met his even gaze. “There was one other thing. A copy of the picture I sent to you.”

“No note on the back?”

She shook her head.

He was silent for a few seconds. She watched him scratch out a few more notes. “How did the feds get involved?” he asked without looking up.