To Trust Her Heart (2 page)

“Excuse me,” she said loudly, knowing full well that even appealing to manners and courtesy were going to get her anywhere with him.

Annnoyed, and sick of him staring at her as if he could see into her soul, Maddie crossed her arms over her breasts in a self-defense maneuver, and sighed in exasperation.

His only response was to bring his free hand up to her chin to tilt it up. She watched, mesmerized like a rabbit by a snake, as his lips descended confidently towards hers.

But Maddie moved back several steps, away from him and his roving hands and lips. “Oh, no, you’re not.”

His thick eyebrows rose. “I’m not what, little girl?”

He’d called her that since she could remember, but his use of it now just didn’t seem to fit. She was no longer his little girl, his girlfriend, his wife, his anything. All of that was over quite a long time ago, and she had the divorce papers to prove it. He couldn’t just come waltzing back into her life any time he wanted to and expect that she would fall down at his feet, legs spread in welcome.

It wasn’t going to happen.

The problem was that it apparently already had.

“We’re not going down that road is what. I want you to get the hell out of my way so that I can go home.” He hadn’t moved an inch. “Alone,” she felt it was vitally necessary to add.

Ty took a deep breath and leaned further against the door frame. “We’ve already been down that road two or three times last night,” he rumbled, “if I recall correctly,” watching first a high pink then a cherry red splash across her fair face, “and no.”

It was his very calmness, his refusal to meet her very righteous anger that had always driven her insane. Ty didn’t get mad. He got even and he did so very slowly and methodically. When she was in trouble, she always felt it on her bottom, and then in other very sensitive places on her person.  He never spanked her without turning her onto her back and loving her with a devastating thoroughness afterward. It was as if he wanted to impress upon her that although he’d hurt her with his palm, he could also bring her to unbelievable heights with the very same hand.

“No?”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

Maddie had had about enough, and she knew from long experience that talking to him when he’d made up his mind about something was a waste of breath. So she stepped back from him, watching him subtly brace himself, expecting her to make another run at him. She always knew that the few times she’d confronted him physically, all of which she’d lost, that she had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through him.  However,  she also knew that no matter how wildly she struggled, he would make sure that she remained entirely unhurt. She’d scratched him with her nails and drawn blood, kicked those rock hard thighs and shins hard, and once tried unsuccessfully to sink her pearly whites into his bicep, although she almost got lock jaw trying to open her mouth far enough to bite.  At times she knew she’d succeeded in hurting him at least a little because he’d grunted occasionally from her efforts. But regardless of what she’d done to him, he’d always brushed it aside like she was some sort of annoying mosquito.

Instead, she’d always found herself subdued in an embarrassingly short amount of time and with almost no effort on his part.  He’d always made sure that he’d accomplished it in a way that would cause her absolutely no harm too.  She’d never so much as get a broken a nail when she was with him.

So, having no other outlet for her frustrations and no other avenue of escape, she fell back on old reliable, she threw her head back and screamed bloody murder at the top of her not inconsiderable lungs.

Maddie felt a split second of pure satisfaction when she saw the absolutely stunned look on his face, but it was a short lived spark of glory, since he snapped out of it almost immediately and came after her with that familiar evil glint in his eye that meant she was in deep, deep trouble.

She was just drawing in her second breath in order to start screaming again when the paw that had awakened her this morning secured itself over her mouth again as he lifted her against him, carrying her to the bed as if she weighed no more than a feather. He laid her carefully down on her back and followed her down, positioning himself atop her as if he had every right to be there, even going so far as to use his bulk and weight to insinuate his legs between hers.  There was no denying him. He sank down onto her from stem to stern as if he had every right to do so.

If looks could kill, the eyes above his hand would have struck him dead right then and there. Ty looked down at her, those deep black eyes revealing nothing, and stated in his most placating tone, “No more screaming unless you’d like me to give you something to scream about.” No lie, just fact.

Maddie knew that if she so much as opened her mouth again he would flip her onto her stomach and bare her already nearly bare bottom for a spanking. So she merely nodded, and he removed his hand.

She was surprised to see a trace of laughter about his eyes when he said, “I’d forgotten that you play dirty.”

“Learnt from the best,” she quipped without a thought.

He nodded, not immodestly but merely acknowledging the truth of her statement, just as a loud knock came from the door. All remnants of good humor left his face at that sound and that wary aloofness that was never far below the surface came to the fore as he levered himself off the bed and dragged a pair of jeans up his legs before going to the door. Without opening it, he asked, “Who is it?”

Maddie’s eyes bugged as she realized that he had a big black gun in his hand. Who the hell was he expecting to come to the door, for crying out loud? She frowned, realizing she probably didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

But it was unusual for him to involve her in anything that might be a threat to her. She knew what he did for a living, well, vaguely, anyway. She knew it involved covert operations of some sort conducted by the government all over the world, and that he would never be free to talk about his work. Sometimes she’d felt like one of the Mafia wives in “The Godfather”, who were never allowed to ask their husbands about what really went on in the family.

At first glance, they had the proverbial white picket fence of a marriage, as long as one didn’t look too closely. But he was gone for long stretches of time during which she was lucky if she had so much as a contact number for him, other than an old friend who might or might not be able to get a hold of him. Sometimes he came home wounded, she’d nursed him more times than she could count, and he almost always came home with a new scar of some sort, which meant that he’d been hurt badly enough that “they” had decided he’d needed to be hospitalized. But any inquires about what had happened, how he’d been hurt, had been met with a stony silence. He’d explained it to her even before they’d gotten married, that he’d been in the military for a while and now he was doing special assignments that would take him away from her and that he couldn’t tell her about. Ever. Maddie had loved him so deeply and so completely that she couldn’t imagine anything driving her away from him for any reason.

Eventually, though, being married to an absentee husband who was apparently doing a good job of trying to get himself killed when he wasn’t with her made Maddie take a good, hard look at their marriage. Not at the man she was married to, because she knew she’d always love him, foibles and all, but at the relationship itself. She’d been sure she would be fine not having him around all the time, but it was driving her crazy never knowing if he was dead or alive from one minute to the next. Even the wives of the soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan had a reasonable idea of where their men were and had fairly dependable means of getting a hold of them. Maddie hadn’t been able to get an answer at the number he’d given for his “friend” when his father had died, so she tried to get the Red Cross to find him but they didn’t know anything about him.

He hadn’t found out about his father’s passing until he came home a month later.

But he’d always kept that part of his life very far away from her, from all of them. She’d never felt in any danger when he was home – just the opposite. Maddie felt she was protected by an ultimate warrior of sorts on those rare occasions when they actually shared a bed. He’d even deliberately claimed the side of the bed that was closest to the door. She’d never felt the least  bit scared when he was around.

But now he was standing at a hotel door with a gun drawn, his stance poised and ready for anything. Maddie felt a chill run down her spine and grabbed up what she could reach of the sheet and blanket to clutch against her chest. What the hell was going on?

Chapter Two:

“Hotel security. We got reports of a woman screaming,” a man on the other side of the door replied.

Ty shot her a glare that would have smote a weaker woman, but she merely frowned back at him. He had a lot of explaining to do once this little incident was settled, she thought, and he had no right getting all bent out of shape about one little scream, to which he had driven her to by his own pigheaded stubbornness in not getting the hell out of her way when she’d wanted him to!

She watched as he tucked the gun back into a duffle bag on the floor, then shoved that under the bed and walked calmly to the door, opening it only about four inches. “May I see your hotel security ID, please?”

He took the proffered documentation and perused it so carefully that Maddie’s goose bumps returned. Something was
definitely
up.

Handing it back, he opened the door and let the poor man in, closing the door behind him. “My name is Mr. Phipps,” he said in a deep baritone as he looked every inch of Ty and as much as he could see of Maddie over as if they were already suspects of something. “We had reports of a woman screaming and I came up to check it out. Is everything all right, Ma’am?” He deliberately directed the question to her, she noticed, obviously having taken Ty’s size and none- too-welcoming demeanor into consideration.

Maddie realized that this was her chance. If she truly wanted to leave, this was a way to do it, just by mentioning that he was holding her against her will. But despite the fact that he was annoying as hell, as usual, she didn’t want to get him into trouble. And, she wanted to know what was going on that he found it necessary to draw his gun in a seemingly innocuous hotel room.

Ty wasn’t about to wait for her to get herself, and him, into even more trouble with this rent-a-cop. So, he offered, “It was my fault. I…”

Mr. Phipps kept an eye on Maddie, but spent most of his time eyeing Ty suspiciously. Smart man, Ty though wryly. Maddie wouldn’t, hurt a flea. He, on the other hand . . .

Maddie interrupted loudly. “He startled me. I was in the bathroom and I didn’t know he’d awakened, and he came into the bathroom. I was just startled by him.”

Ty was suitably impressed. She’d told him essentially what he would have if he had been her and as close to the truth as possible without giving anything away. That would make it easier to remember the story if need be.

The older gentleman looked from the pretty, as far as he could see unbruised woman in the bed to the combat ready man who had never strayed far from the door, and sized the situation up fairly accurately, realizing that the version of the story they’d given him was partially true, although it obviously wasn’t all of it. There didn’t seem to be any problem here. He could only do so much, and if she was unwilling to come clean, then there was nothing he could do about it.

“Well, then I’ll be going. I thank you for your cooperation.”

Ty grunted an answer for the both of them, and let him out the door, then turned to glare at Maddie as he carefully relocked every lock on the door. “You nearly got us into a lot of trouble, young lady.”

Maddie hugged her knees to her, but met his eyes and didn’t back down, pointing out sharply, “And if you’d let me go when I wanted to, then I wouldn’t have had to scream, now would I?”

She often made him want to tear his hair out, but she wasn’t afraid of him when most women were. When they were married, she’d have her women friends over sometimes when he was home, and they would all look at him google-eyed, tittering nervously around him as if he was some sort of bomb that might explode all over them. Most women had some sort of a sixth sense about him.  Somehow they knew that he was inherently dangerous and that is was an extremely accurate description. He’d always been a loner, and even the girls in high school had had a healthy fear of him, even though he’d never done anything to support or deny their perception. He just kept almost completely to himself and managed to grow bigger and taller than most of their teachers, rarely smiling, rarely even speaking. His father had never wanted anything from his only child but hard work and obedience.

Those two traits had helped him enormously when he’d enlisted in the military right out of high school, and he had excelled at pretty much anything they’d thrown at him, especially marksmanship and covert surveillance techniques. He’d gotten his degree while he was still in, and advanced through the ranks in record time due to his exceptional reconnaissance abilities and deadly accuracy.

When he’d decided he wanted out, the powers that be were extremely reluctant to let him go, but he’d served his hitch and nothing they could offer was enough to entice him back. He’d met Maddie by this point and although they weren’t involved, he’d had a feeling they were going to be. Eventually, they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse that didn’t involve being a military officer any longer. Instead, he became a Black Ops agent and was given an inordinate amount of autonomy in choosing both his assignments and the cohorts that would accompany him on the missions.

He and Maddie had met through the closest thing to a friend a man like him had, another agent, Rafe Estevez; One of the few men he would trust with his life and an asset on any operation. Rafe’s wife was having a dinner party one of the rare times they were both in the same area at the same time when they weren’t under enemy fire, and although he knew that he was going to regret it the moment he agreed to go, Ty was feeling a little antsy and wanted to get out.