Liam's Witness Protection (Man On A Mission 4) (16 page)

He sat up abruptly, bringing her with him. “Cate, are you sure?” He grasped her arms and held her away from him, as if he needed to see her face in the moonlight. “Don’t say it because you’re grateful and you think you have to.”

“I’m not.” She didn’t care anymore that she was gambling her heart in one reckless move. “When I realized how careful you were to make everything so perfect for me, I knew there could never be another man in the whole world as perfect for me as you. And that’s when I finally admitted to myself that I loved you.” She smiled tremulously. “I think I loved you almost from the beginning, but I wouldn’t let myself.” She suddenly realized just how absurd that contradiction sounded, and she laughed softly. “I wouldn’t let myself
acknowledge
it,” she clarified.

Liam smiled, but then his smile faded. “So where do we go from here, Cate? D’Arcy told me the original plan was for you to disappear after you testify. That the Witness Security Program would provide you with a new identity, a new life somewhere. I want that for you. I want you to be safe. But I...”

After you testify...after you testify...

Those were the only words she could hear. It wasn’t the plan for her to disappear that drove a stake in her heart without any warning at all. It was the reminder that once she testified, Liam would know the truth about her. “I don’t know,” she said, all lightheartedness gone. “I don’t even know if I will live to testify.”

Liam shook her once, as if to shock her out of the negative mind-set. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it. You are
not
going to die.”

“You can’t know that.” Suddenly she remembered saying the same thing to him earlier in the evening, about something completely different.

“Yes, I can.” In his eyes was the memory that he’d said those same words to her, too. “I won’t
let
anything happen to you, Cate. You hear me? I won’t. Even if I die for it.”

“Don’t.” She placed her hand over his mouth. “You think that makes it better for me? Imagining you sacrificing your life for mine?” Her breath was coming fast and ragged. “You really think if you died I would want to go on living?” She threw her arms around him and held him tight, laying her head against his shoulder. “I just found you,” she whispered, as if that said it all.

His arms were just as tight around her, and his voice was husky. “I feel the same way. I just found you, Cate. I’m not going to lose you. I won’t let it happen.”

* * *

D’Arcy hefted the suitcase. “I won’t bother counting it here,” he told Vishenko. “But if it’s short by so much as a dollar...”

“That is not a concern,” Vishenko assured him. “So where is she? My pilot must file a flight plan.”

“Tomorrow,” D’Arcy said. “Assuming there is indeed five million dollars in here, I’ll tell your pilot what he needs to know.” He smiled coldly. “This plane can make the flight without refueling if you start with full tanks. I’ll be here at seven. Plenty of time.” With that he was gone.

Aleksandrov Vishenko watched D’Arcy walk across the tarmac, carrying the suitcase instead of rolling it.
Five million,
he reminded himself. It wasn’t the first time he’d paid a bribe. And he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. But he had never paid so much at one time to one man. He had every intention of recovering the down payment after D’Arcy’s death tomorrow. His men were already working on a home invasion scheme that would, if necessary, force the location of the money out of D’Arcy’s wife if it wasn’t found in his house. There was still the slight possibility the money would be unrecoverable—in which case he would have paid five million dollars for his freedom. Expensive, but worth it. And he had the added incentive of making Caterina pay. Not to mention throwing the agency into turmoil once their highest-ranking official was eliminated in a gruesome fashion.

He walked over to a cabinet and removed the semiautomatic pistol it contained. The gun was new to him, but completely untraceable. He checked the action and the clip, even though he’d checked them several times before he left Long Island—he couldn’t afford to have the pistol fail when he killed Caterina and the man who had sold her out.

Once they were dead that would leave only the extradition to Zakhar to worry about. And Vishenko wasn’t particularly worried about extradition. He had money secreted in bank accounts around the world. If worse came to worst and his high-priced attorneys failed, he would buy himself a safe haven in some country with no extradition treaties. Not with the US, and not with Zakhar.

* * *

The cell phone chirped once, then stopped. Liam was out of bed in a flash and picked it up, but it didn’t ring again. He tried to see if a missed call had registered, but it hadn’t. And when he attempted to check voice mail it wouldn’t go through. “Guess I’ll have to go outside,” he told Cate, who was awake now and watching him from the bed. He tugged yesterday’s jeans on, not bothering with his boxers, zipped up but left the button undone and pulled on his T-shirt inside out. When he saw what he’d done he didn’t bother changing it. He grabbed his shoulder holster from where he’d left it on the nightstand and shrugged it on, then picked up the cell phone again and went out on the front porch.

The air was early-morning cool, despite being late August. It would warm up later in the day, but right now, with the sun not yet over the horizon, Liam could have done with more than a T-shirt. He didn’t worry about it—he didn’t plan to be out here very long. Just long enough to check voice mail, and if nothing was recorded there, call Callahan to see if he was trying to contact them for some reason. Voice mail yielded nothing, so Liam punched in the number of Callahan’s cell, which was answered almost immediately.

“Callahan.”

“It’s Liam Jones. Were you trying to reach us?”

“Yeah. I wanted to let you know two things. First, I’ve got an emergency here—a school bus hit a guardrail. Nobody hurt, but I’m not going to be able to make it out there this morning.”

“No problem. Cate and I don’t need—”

“Which brings me to the second thing,” Callahan said, interrupting him. “D’Arcy called and there’s a change of plan.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“The new prosecutors want to interview Cate now, not wait until the week before the trial. D’Arcy’s not about to let her go to DC at this point—too dangerous. And he doesn’t want the prosecutors to know where this place is—they don’t have a need to know, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He never gives away an edge if he can help it.” Admiration—not something easily earned where Callahan was concerned, Liam knew—was evident in his voice. “So he doesn’t want the prosecutors coming here. He wants Cate to meet them at the agency’s safe house in Casper. It’s not that far—if you take the other road and don’t go through Black Rock it’s only a couple of hours away.”

“How long will the interview take?”

“He didn’t say. Just that he needs her at the safe house this afternoon. He’ll meet you there. Knowing him, he wants to make sure security is airtight before the prosecutors arrive.”

“Okay,” Liam said slowly. “What time?”

“Around two. If you get on the road by noon that should do it. It’s not like you have to worry about traffic, even when you get to Casper. I don’t have the address or the GPS coordinates of the safe house with me—I’ll call you later, once I get back to the office.”

“Okay,” Liam said again. “Will we be coming back here tonight?”

“D’Arcy wasn’t sure, but if I were you, I’d take everything you brought with you. In case there’s another change of plan.”

“What about the generator? If I turn it off the food in the refrigerator will spoil. But if we’re not coming back here it’ll go to waste anyway.”

“Don’t worry about it. Leave the generator on. If you come back tonight there’s no problem. If you’re gone more than a day, I’ll swing by, empty the fridge and turn off the generator.”

“Sounds good.” He thought for a moment, then voiced his major concern. “You’re sure the safe house is secure?”

Callahan chuckled. “Funny you should ask that. I asked Walker the same thing a few years ago when Mandy and my children were brought there for safekeeping. He told me there are no guarantees in this world, but that he’d stayed there himself on an operation, and he knew the people who ran it. Far as I know, the same people are still running it.”

“And?”

Callahan’s voice went deadly soft. “And I trusted them to keep my wife and children safe. They did.”

And that’s the end of
that
conversation,
Liam thought to himself with sudden amusement.

Chapter 16

C
ate had already taken a quick shower and dressed for the day in jeans and a white cotton top with a blue eyelet ribbon around the neck by the time Liam returned. When he told her they were going to the safe house in Casper to meet with the prosecutors, she didn’t object until he added, “Callahan said we should take everything with us, just in case.”

“We’re not coming back here?”

“It’s one possibility. Something we should plan for, just in case. I think we’ll come back here after you meet with the prosecutors. No matter how safe that safe house is, this cabin is safer. Especially since only D’Arcy and Callahan know we’re here. But Callahan wasn’t positive, so...”

“I see.” She considered this for a moment. “What about the laundry?”

He stared at her blankly. “Laundry?”

“The sheets, pillowcases, towels, washcloths—all the things we used,” she answered patiently. “This isn’t a hotel. We can’t just leave these dirty things behind for someone else to take care of.”

It hadn’t even occurred to him. There was no washer or dryer in the cabin, of course, so they’d been hand-washing their few clothes and hanging them to dry on the back porch in order to have clean clothes to wear every day—even their jeans dried in one day in the warm late summer sun. Now he wondered what Keira and Cody did about laundry. Everything had been clean when they arrived, so the Walkers had to do
something.
He just wasn’t sure what.

Cate raised her eyebrows at him exactly the way his mom used to do when something should be obvious. “You think maybe there’s a Laundromat in town?”

Duh,
he thought. “Maybe. Black Rock’s kind of small, but we can check. We don’t need to be in Casper until two. We have time.”

She didn’t say anything, just began stripping the bed. Liam went into the bathroom and gathered up all the towels and washcloths, then swung into the kitchen and added the dishrag and kitchen towels to his pile. “Here,” he said as he dumped his armful in the middle of the sheets she’d removed from the bed. Cate had already fetched the sheets and pillowcase Liam had used when he was sleeping on the cot, which he’d folded neatly and stacked on top of the collapsed cot he’d stored in the closet so it would be out of the way.

Cate said, “We can wash our dirty clothes at the same time.” She quickly added her pajamas and the clothes she’d been wearing yesterday to the pile, then glanced expectantly his way. “Strip.”

Liam grinned at her as he shrugged out of his shoulder holster and one-fisted his inside-out T-shirt off. “Why, darlin’, I thought you’d never ask.”

Her cheeks reddened, and Liam realized Cate was as much a novice at sexual banter as she was at sex. He was naked beneath his jeans, but he had no false modesty, so it took him only a couple of seconds to comply. He hadn’t counted on his reaction to her watching him strip, though—which she did...in little sideways glances she thought were covert. Her pretending not to look was more arousing than if she’d openly stared.
Stand down,
he told his body as he tugged on boxers and clean jeans, but it wasn’t very obedient, so the jeans were a tight fit.

He dropped his dirty clothes on top of the pile, then slid his arms around her and pulled her flush with his body. “I forgot something.”

She looked up at him, questioning. “What?”

“Good morning,” he said softly, kissing her forehead. Then his lips found hers and they stood there for several seconds, everything else forgotten. “Oh hell yeah,” he said when their lips finally separated. “It’s definitely a good morning.”

Her cheeks were flushed, but all she said was, “Yes, it is.”

When Liam finally let her go, Cate pulled the edges of the bottom sheet together and tied them firmly around the whole bundle. While she was doing that, he pulled on an olive green short-sleeved golf shirt and strapped on his shoulder holster. He grimaced, then added his blazer. “Can’t go out strapped without covering up, even if it
is
summer,” he explained, though she hadn’t asked. “Here, I’ll take that.” He hefted the bundle over one shoulder.

* * *

Liam used the GPS and had no problem finding Black Rock, although it took longer than he expected because of the speed limit in the mountains. As he’d told Cate, Black Rock was small, but they
did
locate a Laundromat two blocks off Main Street. And wonder of wonders, it was already open for business—the sign said it opened at seven and it was just past eight when they arrived. Cate filled two empty washing machines while Liam wandered over to the change machine and tried to insert a twenty. The machine kept spitting the bill back at him, so he tried another without any luck.

“Machine’s empty,” said a woman sitting in the next row over, reading a magazine and glancing up from time to time to check her laundry in the dryers. “The drugstore next door will give you change...if you buy something. The pharmacy counter doesn’t open until nine, but the store itself opened at eight.”

“Thanks,” Liam told her. To Cate he said quietly, “I don’t want you out of my sight, so come with me. I think it’s safe to leave the laundry here—we’ll be right back.”

Startled, she said, “You really think someone will find me here?”

“One in a million chance, but I’m not risking it.”

She gave him a somber look, as if he’d reminded her of the constant threat of danger she lived under. “Okay.”

Liam made a beeline for the back of the drugstore, Cate in tow. He knew exactly what he was going to buy. He’d used his emergency condom last night, and based on Cate’s positive reaction to making love they would need more. No way would he make love to her without protecting her. But no way would he turn Cate down if she wanted to make love again, either, just because he was unprepared. And despite the fact he had a reputation within the DSS for having a way with the ladies—just as his brother had before he’d gotten married—he didn’t carry a stash of condoms with him as a general rule. He’d been lucky he had one in the emergency overnight case he kept in his SUV—the case he’d transferred when he’d switched SUVs with the special agent from the agency. But now...

When he found the aisle he wanted he automatically reached for his favorite brand, then hesitated. He hadn’t really given it a lot of thought before, but there was quite a variety of condoms to choose from, some of which were designed more to heighten a woman’s pleasure rather than a man’s. He turned to Cate. Her cheeks were bright pink and she was looking everywhere except at him.

Her shyness over something as prosaic as this charmed him, and he said, “You probably don’t have a preference. Right?”

Her gaze flickered toward him, then away again. “Last night...” she managed before her voice trickled away.

Okay, so he wasn’t dense. She meant what he normally used was perfectly acceptable to her. He grabbed a box of twenty-four off the shelf.

At the checkout Liam added a couple of packaged honey buns since they’d skipped breakfast, then told the cashier with his most winsome smile, “I need change for the Laundromat, too. Could I get a roll of quarters, please?”

* * *

Cate and Liam headed back to the cabin near Granite Peak almost two hours later, with the clean and folded laundry sitting neatly stacked on the backseat. The drugstore bag—with its box of condoms—lay wedged in the space between their seats, and Cate’s gaze continually drifted in its direction as she thought about what that meant.

Vishenko had never worn a condom. Why would he? He didn’t give a damn about protecting her or any of the women he’d raped and abused in his life. She was profoundly grateful she’d never gotten pregnant, had never ended up with a sexually transmitted disease, either, but neither fact was a virtue in Vishenko—he hadn’t cared. If she’d gotten pregnant he would probably have forced her to have an abortion, a dilemma that had torn her apart at the time. Not that she wanted his child—the idea made her sick—but that in aborting his child she would also be aborting her own, something she couldn’t fathom.

But she hadn’t gotten pregnant. Maybe she couldn’t get pregnant at all—how could she know? Early on Liam had said his mother wanted more grandchildren, and the way he’d talked last night told her children were something he envisioned for himself, too...eventually. Which meant that even if he didn’t walk away when he found out the truth, would he still want her if she was barren?

Then other words Liam had said last night came back to her.
“What do you think love is, Cate?... It’s a choice. A commitment... I haven’t just fallen in love with you. I choose to love you...”

She wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe he’d chosen to love her and always would, no matter what, just as she would always love him. But that last little doubt clung to her, refusing to go away. Because if he could
choose
to love her, he could also choose differently—he could choose not to love her.

* * *

“Let’s pack up,” Liam told Cate once they’d put away the clean sheets and towels.

“Okay.” Cate pulled her small suitcase from beneath the bed where she’d stored it. She didn’t have much to pack. A few changes of clothing—including what they’d just washed that morning. Her toothbrush and toothpaste. The comb and brush the Morgans had provided her with at the first safe house.

When everything had been packed she stared at the pitiful contents of her suitcase for a minute, the sum total of her possessions at this point. It wasn’t all she owned, of course. She had a few belongings back in Zakhar, in her suite in the palace. And she had some clothes and things in her hotel room in DC—which reminded her she needed to ask someone about that.

As she stood there she realized she’d spent her entire adult life expecting to move on at a moment’s notice. She’d always told herself she couldn’t afford to become attached to
things
she might have to abandon. And not just things. People, too. She’d made no friends in the six years she’d been on the run—for their safety as well as for her own. She’d reconnected with Angelina after Alec rescued her, and Queen Juliana had been exceptionally kind and friendly toward her once she’d moved into the palace, but Cate had made no attempt to get in touch with any of her former friends in Zakhar—she couldn’t have lied about where she’d been all these years, but she couldn’t have borne to tell anyone the truth, either, and have them look at her with disdain...or even worse, with pity.

But she wasn’t the same woman she’d been a year ago. Not the same woman she’d been a month ago, or even two weeks ago. Liam had changed her. Despite telling herself not to hope...not to dream about the fairy-tale ending, she
was
hoping. She
was
dreaming. Despite her fear that Liam would no longer love her if he knew the truth, hope refused to die.

She absentmindedly picked up her book from the nightstand and tucked it beneath her pajamas, then closed the suitcase lid and zipped it up. “I’m packed,” she told Liam in a voice that didn’t betray any of what she’d been thinking.

“Me too,” he said as he swung his duffel bag over one shoulder. “How about a late lunch on the road? I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of eating stuff out of a can. If we leave now we can stop in Kaycee and have a nice lunch, and still be in Casper by two.”

“Sounds good.”

Cate realized she was going to miss the cabin as she followed Liam out the door. And not just the cabin—she would miss her life here. She would miss hiking the trails with Liam, which reminded her of hiking the mountains around Drago when she was a girl. She would miss the quiet serenity. She would miss the isolation. Most of all, she would miss the sense of peace and security that had flowed around her this past week.
You were happy here,
she told herself now. And not just because of Liam, although nothing would have been the same without him.

“I hope we come back,” she told him as she pulled the door shut behind her.

* * *

Aleksandrov Vishenko’s Learjet landed at the airport in Buffalo, Wyoming, and taxied toward the terminal. The two passengers—Vishenko and D’Arcy—had barely spoken to each other for the entire duration of the flight. Now D’Arcy unbuckled his seat belt and said, “I’ve arranged an agency car for myself. I knew you’d want to rent your own.”

Vishenko turned his cold gaze on the other man. “You are not taking me to Caterina? What did I pay you for?”

“You paid me for her location. And you paid me to make sure her protectors were out of the way, which I’ve done. So I’ll take you to her, but I won’t stay. I’m sure you don’t want a witness to murder.”

Vishenko’s mind was working furiously. He’d planned on killing D’Arcy first, then taking his time with Caterina. But if D’Arcy had his own transportation, if he merely pointed him in the right direction instead of taking him all the way there, that could throw a kink in the works. He would have to somehow lure D’Arcy into accompanying him to wherever Caterina was located. He would also have to assume D’Arcy would be armed, and take that into account. He wasn’t armed now—his men would never have let the other man board the plane otherwise—but D’Arcy wasn’t a fool. Just because he’d never been able to legally pin anything on Vishenko didn’t mean he was foolish.

Perhaps D’Arcy suspected a double cross, and that’s why he’d arranged his own transportation. Perhaps he suspected what Vishenko had in mind for him—he
did
have the reputation for being uncannily omniscient. If that was the case, Vishenko would have to postpone killing him.

The other five million was sitting in a suitcase by Vishenko’s seat. He’d brought it along just in case D’Arcy had insisted on seeing it before their departure—and he had. But Vishenko had no intention of giving it to him now...or ever.

* * *

Liam and Cate were almost all the way to Kaycee when she suddenly gasped and turned to him, dismayed. “My books! I left my books in the cabin.”

Liam eased his foot off the accelerator. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” She pounded the heels of her hands against her forehead as if to knock some sense into her head. “I put them in the closet so they’d be out of the way. I only packed the one I was reading.” She grasped his arm. “We have to go back. We have to!”