Cooper Security 06 - Secret Intentions (14 page)

People were already on their phones, probably talking to 9-1-1, which meant the Metro police would be here soon. He and Evie needed to be far away from the scene before that happened.

“Evie—”

She had already pulled close to the injured man, edging through the onlookers to kneel next to him.

His injuries were grievous, Jesse saw, tamping down a rush of nausea. He’d seen his share of battlefield casualties, enough to know this man wasn’t likely to live long enough to make it to the hospital. Despite the efforts of a man trying to stanch the flow of blood pouring from the man’s half-severed leg, there wasn’t much hope of stopping the bleeding. He’d clearly torn an artery and was bleeding out.

The man’s eyes fluttered open suddenly, focusing with effort on Evie’s face. Jesse watched, his heart in his throat, as the man reached for Evie’s arm. He started forward, but an onlooker blocked him, and he could only watch, anxious and powerless, as Evie bent toward the dying man.

“He’s saying something,” one of the onlookers murmured.

Jesse pushed to the edge of the crowd in time to see the man’s hand fall away from Evie’s arm. She rose, her gaze scanning the crowd until it locked with Jesse’s. She stared at him for a mute, pained moment and started walking away, leaving him to catch up with her.

“What did he say?” one of the onlookers asked the man who had redoubled his effort to stop the bleeding.

The man didn’t answer.

Jesse hurried after Evie, who stopped near the clump of onlookers surrounding the body of the other accident victim. It was the man who’d been driving the Audiovisual Assets truck, Jesse knew, although his face was almost too bloody and mangled to recognize. Unlike his companion, this man hadn’t survived the initial impact of the car. He’d been thrown twenty feet down the street and hit headfirst. There would be no last-minute efforts to save him. It was too late.

Evie turned to Jesse as he caught up with her. “I didn’t want them to die. Even when they were shooting at us.”

“I know.” Wrapping his arm around her, he guided her out of the way of traffic. She melted into him, making it hard to walk, but he didn’t care. He liked the feel of her body aligned with his, a warm and welcome reminder that they were both alive and unhurt.

He led her down the next street, growing alarmed as he felt her body begin to shudder. They began passing neighborhood residents drawn toward the accident scene by the wail of emergency-vehicle sirens, earning looks of curiosity as they went against the tide of foot traffic.

With no desire to pique anyone else’s curiosity, Jesse looked for a quick exit, spotting the mouth of a narrow alley leading between two redbrick buildings. He guided her there, quickening his steps.

She pulled away suddenly, flattening her back against the hard brick side of one of the buildings closest to the alley. “He said ‘Katrina.’”

Jesse stepped toward her, but she held up her hand, keeping him at a distance. She bent slightly at the waist, as if struggling for breath, and her voice, when it came again, sounded as if she were speaking from a great distance. “That’s all he said, but he said it three times. His grip on my arm tightened. Just for a minute. Not much more strength than a baby’s, but it tightened.” She rubbed her wrist, tucking it close to her chest.

Jesse watched her struggle with emotion, his heart aching for her. He’d seen death many times during his missions with the Marine Corps. More times than he ever wanted to count again, although he’d had to account for each casualty when they’d happened, feeling the weight of them more and more the higher he’d climbed up the chain of command.

“It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. “You didn’t make them run into traffic after you.”

Her blue eyes lifted to meet his, red-rimmed and glittering with unspilled tears. “I know. But—”

“No buts.” He stepped forward, pulling her into his arms. She didn’t protest this time, melting into him again until he felt as if he’d absorbed her into himself. It was a disconcerting but strangely comforting sensation, her body pressed so liquidly to his, her heartbeat hammering into his chest as if it were his own.

“I should have gone to a safe house.” Her voice rumbled through his chest, setting off a tremor low in his gut. “I should have done as you asked. I’ve only made things harder for you.”

He threaded his fingers through her hair and lifted her face, forcing her gaze up to meet his. “I wouldn’t have found the connection to Gamble without you. And you’re the one who ferreted out the affair—”

“And where has that gotten us? Katrina? It could mean anything.”

“It’s a step closer.” He touched his forehead to hers.

Her hands tightened on the front of his T-shirt, her fingers curling in the fabric. The air between them supercharged, making his heart skip a beat.

She gazed up at him, the first tear spilling down her cheek in a slow trickle. Naked need burned in her eyes, striking sparks against the hard ache of desire squeezing like an iron fist in the center of his chest.

All the self-control drilled into Jesse by over a decade in the Marine Corps wasn’t strong enough to resist the siren song of Evie’s desperate gaze. Jesse bent his head to hers again, helpless against the force of his own desire.

He captured her mouth beneath his, staked a claim he knew he had no right to declare. And as her lips moved fiercely, hungrily against his own, all thoughts of right and wrong disappeared into a gulf of pure, all-consuming need.

Chapter Eleven

The first kiss with Jesse had been something of a revelation, betraying a tenderness behind the ramrod-straight backbone of a born Marine. The second kiss, however, served as a shattering reminder that for all his moments of gentleness, he possessed a core of hard, polished steel, powerful and unyielding.

She had no conscious memory of moving, but suddenly the rough brick of the building behind her was digging into her back, the tactile sensation registering only faintly, swamped by desire so primal, so elemental, that even the rasp of brick against her flesh felt like raw pleasure.

She had promised herself, after their first kiss, that she wouldn’t let herself fall for the fantasy again. But her good intentions crumbled like a sand castle under the onslaught of Jesse Cooper’s seduction.

He had big, strong hands, slightly rough in texture despite his recent months behind an office desk. As she melted into him, boneless with surrender, he moved his hands slowly over the curves of her shoulders and down her arms, tracing a trail of fire across her flesh.

The small, sane part of her brain that still functioned sounded warning bells when he dropped his hands to her waist and pulled her lower body flush with his. A growl of frustration rumbled in his throat, and she echoed the sound with a soft moan of need.

Jesse pulled back suddenly, letting her go so quickly that she had to plant her feet and press her back against the wall to keep from sliding to the ground.

“Katrina,” he murmured, his brow furrowing.

She stared at him a moment, not understanding. Then she remembered the sound of the dying man’s words, the rattle of blood in his throat and the look of desperation in his fading eyes.

Katrina,
he’d moaned. She felt a sudden wave of nausea and bent forward, resting her hands on her knees.

Jesse laid his hand on her back. “Are you okay?”

She took a couple of deep breaths, her head clearing. The nausea settled down to a faint queasiness she thought she could bear. “Yeah. You had a thought about what that man meant?”

“I thought at first maybe it had something to do with the Gulf Coast hurricane by the same name, but that made no sense,” he said, starting to pace a little as if he was still forming the thought in his head. “Anyway, it’s kind of crazy, but something’s been niggling at me since we figured out where Gamble was going, and it finally connected just a second ago. St. Elizabeth’s.”

Evie scraped her hair away from her flushed face, not following. “St. Elizabeth’s?”

“This morning, before we left the apartment, I bought a newspaper from the stand downstairs. I thought maybe there’d be a story about the Espera Group or Gamble or something that could give us a little insight. There wasn’t anything like that, but there was a profile of the president’s chief of staff and her personal crusade to raise more funds for St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Seems she grew up in the Congress Heights neighborhood and her aunt, a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s, still owns a home in the area—”

A lightbulb went on in Evie’s head, too. “Oh, my God. The president’s chief of staff is named Katrina Hilliard.”

* * *

T
HEY MADE IT SAFELY BACK
to the apartment without drawing any more attention to themselves, although there had been a scary moment during their walk back to the Congress Heights Metro station when they overheard a couple of police officers mention wanting to talk to a female witness who’d helped one of the dying men, then suddenly disappeared from the crowd.

“If they put out a description of you,” Jesse had warned Evie on the train ride back to Annie Harlowe’s Arlington apartment, “we may have to get out of D.C. sooner than we wanted.”

She was in the bathroom now, while he was hunting through Annie’s supply of canned goods to find something to tempt her into eating a late lunch. He had heard the water running earlier, but not the shower. Maybe she was taking a tub bath instead.

An image flickered through his mind—Evie slick and naked beneath a shimmery layer of frothy bubbles, gazing up at him with invitation in her eyes. A flood of heat settled low in his belly in response, and he kicked himself for letting his thoughts run so freely out of control.

They hadn’t discussed the kiss in the alley, both of them clearly avoiding the topic in favor of less volatile subjects, like running for their lives. But if they planned to share this apartment much longer, Jesse knew they were going to have to talk seriously about boundaries.

As he searched the cabinets for more food choices, his cell phone rang. The untraceable phone he was using on this trip didn’t have caller ID, so he couldn’t know who was on the other end of the call without answering.

He let it ring two more times before he answered. “Yeah?”

“It’s Megan,” his sister said briskly. “You haven’t checked in since yesterday morning. The natives are getting restless around here.”

“Sorry. We’ve been busy. We’ve had a hell of a day.”

“Been a little rough here, too,” Megan said flatly. “General Marsh dropped by the offices, demanding to know why the hell you’d taken his daughter with you when he’d clearly set things up so that you’d leave her behind in a safe place.”

Jesse grimaced. “If I thought she’d have stayed put anywhere I stashed her, I would have, believe me. But she was really pissed off by the ambushes the day of the wedding, and she knew I was heading to D.C.—”

“So she planned to go to Washington with or without you,” Megan finished for him. “She always was the more headstrong of the Marsh sisters.”

Jesse’s grimace curved into a smile. “Still is.”

“I know you can’t stay on the phone long. Anything you need to catch us up on?”

“Yeah, one or two things.” He gave his sister a terse, bare-bones version of the past two days. “I don’t know if the guy survived his injuries, but I really don’t see how he could.”

“Wow,” Megan said after a brief silence. “A party at the British ambassador’s home and a foot chase through the streets of southeast D.C. all in a forty-eight-hour period. And you call
us
trouble magnets.”

Jesse heard the bathroom door open behind him. “Meggie, I’ve got to go. Tell everyone we’re fine, and tell the general Evie’s safe and we’ll catch him up on everything as soon as we can.”

He hung up after a quick goodbye and turned to greet Evie. But she wasn’t there. And her bedroom door was closed.

He set about heating up cans of turnip greens and pinto beans, wishing he had some corn bread to go with them. But he did find a pleasant surprise in one of the lower cabinets—a box of white-chocolate macadamia-nut cookies that hadn’t been opened and hadn’t yet reached their expiration date.

Evie had a sweet tooth. Always had, ever since he’d met her. When he’d first been pursuing Rita, he’d made Evie his conspirator, keeping her supplied with her favorite candy bars as payment for her efforts on his behalf.

He kept waiting for Evie to emerge from the bedroom to join him, so he could show her the closest thing they’d had to a home-cooked dinner in several days. But the bedroom door remained closed, and he heard nothing but silence from within.

He crossed to the door. “Evie?” he said quietly.

There was no answer from inside.

Fingers of unease prickled up his back. He tried the door handle, relieved to find it unlocked.

“Evie, I’m coming in to check on you.” He eased the door open and looked inside. The room was dark, the curtains on the window near the bed closed to block out the late-afternoon light. It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the darkness enough to spot Evie curled up on the bed beneath a brown plaid flannel blanket. Her eyes were closed and he could hear her slow, even breathing.

He started to retreat, but a soft whimpering noise from the bed drew him back inside. He walked quietly to her bedside and crouched next to her, watching with concern as her forehead crinkled and her lips began to quiver.

Tears trickled from the corners of her eyes, spilling over her nose and cheeks to fall on the pillow. “No,” she whispered, even that soft sound drowning in despair. “No, please—”

“Evie, sweetie.” He touched her cheek, brushing away a tear. “Evie, wake up.”

She stirred, her eyes fluttering open. She jerked to a sitting position, scrambling backward until her shoulders hit the headboard.

“It’s just me, Evie. Jesse.”

“Jesse.” His name escaped from her throat in a soft hiss.

“You were dreaming.”

She covered her face with her hands for a moment, letting them slide down and away. “Right.”

“Was it about this afternoon?”

She shook her head. “It was weird. I don’t really remember all the details, but someone was in my apartment. Back home. It was dark and I don’t think I ever saw his face, but he was everywhere I turned.”