Nauti Dreams (11 page)

won’t.”

“She was a beautiful little girl. I saw her pictures later.” His voice was agonized,

tormented.

Chaya heard the pain-filled moan that left her throat. Even when she was being tortured,

she hadn’t made a sound like that.

“He stole her.” He groaned the accusation as she felt his forehead press against hers. “She

was safe with your sister, wasn’t she, Chay? If he had just left her there.”

“Don’t do this.”

“She looked like you. She had your smile and your hair. Your innocence.”

“Stop it!” She screamed the words at him, tearing from his embrace as she pressed her

fist against her stomach and swallowed back the sickness rising in her throat. “You didn’t

know her. You didn’t raise her, and you didn’t love her. And it’s none of your damned

business.”

Beth. Sweet Beth.

“She was three years old, and your husband had her flown to Iraq. While you were being

tortured, she was landing at the airport in a military transport believing she would see her

mommy again.”

Her heart felt as though it were shattering in her chest now, and she didn’t want to

collapse from the pain of it. She had lost everything in that damned desert. She didn’t

want to remember it, and she didn’t want to think about it or talk about it. Especially not

with the man who had been there to witness it, who had held her back, who had covered

her with his own body to protect her while her child died.

“Why?” She turned on him, tears she swore she wouldn’t shed escaping now. “Why are

you doing this to me? Do you think I don’t know what happened?”

Her voice was rasping. She sounded nothing like herself. She sounded like the demented

creature she had been the day she lost Beth.

“Army Intelligence didn’t know he had your child.” His expression looked as agonized as

hers felt. “They didn’t give the orders to bomb that hotel, did they, Chay? Someone else

did. Something fucked up like it always fucks up, and your baby was killed.”

She shook her head. Her body shook. Tremors raced through her as she stared at the

ceiling. But she didn’t see the ceiling; she saw the missiles, ribbons of steam flowing

behind them, the hiss of flight, the fiery destruction with impact.

“I know who killed her,” she whispered. She had always known.

Her husband. Beth’s father. He had killed their child just as surely as he had ordered his

wife’s torture and death. But she knew even more than that. She knew there had been

others, those who knew what her husband had done, and they had struck out. They had

killed her child when there had been a chance of saving her.

She lowered her eyes back to Natches and saw the pain, his eyes so dark with so many

emotions. Grief and sorrow and need.

“You hold her between us as though it were my fault,” he said then, his voice graveled,

accusing. “As though I ordered the attack or I arranged her death, Chay.”

Chaya swallowed tightly and turned away from him again. She didn’t know which way to

turn, which way to run. She wanted to run. She wanted to escape the shared memories,

and she wanted to escape her own loss.

Natches had been with her when they had learned where Beth and Chaya’s husband,

Craig, were staying. The suspected headquarters of a terrorist cell. He had raced after her

when she went to rescue her child. He had thrown her to the street, held her down, and

tried to shield her eyes as missiles slammed into the building.

“I held you when you identified her. I held you then, and I held you through the night.

Did you think I wouldn’t hold you longer, Chay, if you had given me the chance?”

FIVE

Craig Cornwell had been a major in Army Intelligence and a traitor. He had been selling

secrets to Iraqi terrorists, and when he’d known he would be identified for it, he had

arranged for his daughter to be brought to Iraq, believing he could hold her for Chaya’s

cooperation in helping him escape.

He couldn’t have known the cell he was tied to had already been targeted and that their

headquarters would be taken out so violently.

Natches stared into her face now, paper white, her golden hazel and brown eyes dark with

the memories that tore at him as well. And he wanted to howl out in rage, in agony.

Because he felt the need to wipe the horror from her. To tear aside that wall she had

placed between them.

“I don’t blame you.” She tried to tear herself from his hold again. “I never blamed you

for her death.”

“You blamed me for saving you instead,” he snapped, fury rising inside him at the

thought of losing her like that. “Is that what you wanted for me, Chaya? For us? To have

it all end that way?”

And despite his anger, he could only touch her with tenderness. He lifted his free hand,

brushed back the hair that fell over her forehead, and he ached.

“There was no us.”

She only infuriated him with that statement, because he knew better. He’d always known

better. From the moment he’d torn into that fucking cell and seen her struggling to drag

that dead guard’s clothes on, her eyes swollen shut, lips bloodied, and courage shining in

her face, he’d known there was going to be an “us.” It was just a matter of time.

And later, buried in that hole, waiting on extraction, he shouldn’t have been attracted to

her. She had been in shock. She had been hurt and fighting so valiantly to stay conscious.

And in such a short time, she had dug her way inside him. Into a place he hadn’t realized

existed within the killer he had been shaping himself into.

He’d breathed in her pain when she’d realized her husband had betrayed her to the

enemy, that he had betrayed his country and their marriage. And he had soaked in her

pain the night she’d lost her child. He’d stroked her trembling body as she’d begged him

to hold back the horror of what she had seen. He had taken her, amid both their tears, and

the next morning, when he’d awoken, she had been gone.

He released her now, grimacing, feeling his flesh tighten over his muscles, as though

something within him stretched dangerously, confined by his own skin and growing

impatient.

“I guess there wasn’t, because you were gone the next morning,” he bit out.

“And you were gone that night when I returned,” she snapped back, anger trembling in

her voice, anger and something else. A finely threaded emotion that had his gaze

sharpening on her pale face. “You didn’t come back.”

Natches stared back at her, his eyes narrowing. Had she come looking for him when he

had believed she was gone?

“I was called in that afternoon for a mission. It was a quick strike; I was flown directly to

my drop-off. I returned three days later, and you had left Baghdad,” he told her.

He remembered his rage. He had torn apart his quarters with it, and then he had torn apart

the hotel room they had shared. The MPs sent after him hadn’t fared very well either.

As he stared at her now, he remembered all the reasons why he had gone insane over

losing her. The lush lips, the stubborn angle of her chin. The way she knew how to smile,

the feel of her coming alive against him. He had known all that before the day she had

lost little Beth. He’d known it because he had spent two weeks haunting that damned

hospital, teasing a kiss out of her, a laugh. Knowing she was married, knowing she was

bound to a traitor.

And she had known. She had known, and like a flower opening to the sun, she had slowly

begun opening for him.

She shook her head now, her eyes, that deep golden gaze locked with his, the color

shifting, shadowed with so much pain. “Timothy said he checked. He was there that

morning I went in to finalize custody of Beth’s remains.”

She crossed her arms over her breasts as though she were huggingthe pain inside herself

when all he wanted to do was wipe it from her. “He wanted me to leave immediately to

take Beth home, then join DHS. I wanted to talk to you first.” She shrugged stiffly. “You

were gone. He said he checked to see if you were on a mission and you weren’t.”

Lying bastard. Natches grunted at that. “DHS ordered the mission. They had a line on

Nassar Mallah. I went out after him. When I finished and returned, you were gone.”

Chaya bit her lip as she moved across the room and lifted herself heavily onto one of the

stools that sat at the counter. She looked tired; she looked hopeless. And that look tore at

his heart.

“Sounds like Timothy.” Her voice was nearly toneless. “But it didn’t matter, not really. I

couldn’t function then, Natches. Not for either of us.”

God he wanted to hold her now. What the hell was it about this woman? She was inside

him, and five years of fighting it hadn’t managed to push her out of his soul.

Was it love? Hell if it felt like anything he had seen out of Dawg and Rowdy. He didn’t

feel gentle. He felt like he wanted to devour her from head to toe. He wanted to roll

around in oil with her. He wanted to lift her to that counter and spend hours eating the

tastiest flesh he’d ever found between a woman’s thighs.

She was hurting, enmeshed in memories that he knew had to be ripping her guts to

shreds. The sight of it made him crazy. He would do anything, say anything, to ease her

pain, but by God she wasn’t hiding from him anymore.

She held that past between them like a spiked shield, and he’d had enough of it. Five

years. He’d let her torment him through endless, aching nights. He’d suffered every

nightmare he knew she suffered, and his pain for her sliced through his soul with each

memory.

“You’ve had long enough to begin functioning then.” He had to force himself to stand

back from her, to not touch her.

She looked lost, lost and lonely, almost as broken as she had looked the day they told her

her husband was the traitor who revealed her to the terrorists who had kidnapped her.

He watched as her shoulders straightened then, her chin lifted. He didn’t know what the

hell she had in her mind now, but he knew exactly what she intended to do, and he’d be

damned if he would let her.

She was not walking out on him again. Not like this. This was the closest he’d managed

to get to her since the night her daughter had died. And then, it had been comfort, not

need, not hunger. She had needed someone to hold on to. Someone to take her away from

reality while she found a way to handle the coming grief.

He’d given her that. He wasn’t willing to be that someone to her again though. He wasn’t

a warm body to hold back the pain, and damn her to hell, he was sick and damned tired of

being relegated to her past. A part of a memory she desperately wanted to forget.

“I would have divorced him for one night with you.” And all the need, the hunger, the

driving, aching desperation he felt himself was echoed in her voice.

Her declaration surprised him though. And he could tell by the tone of her voice that it

filled her with guilt.

She turned to him then, her gaze haunted. “Using the excuse that our marriage had been

lost before then doesn’t help. I took vows, and I meant them. But I was going to leave

him, even before I knew he had betrayed me. I was going to leave him, Natches, and I

made that decision because of you.”

He could feel the “but” coming, and he knew it was going to piss him off. He could feel it

in the tension gathering in the air around them.

“He was a bastard,” he snarled before she could say anything more. “You knew it, even if

you didn’t have proof of it.”

He had known it. Any man who allowed his wife to face danger alone deserved to lose

her to another man. Women were precious. Women who loved, who honored their vows,

were more precious than the finest gems. And Chaya would have honored those vows

until the ink dried on the divorce papers. He knew it. And sometimes he wondered if he

hadn’t hated that part of her.

“That doesn’t excuse it,” she said, staring at him from where she sat, her expression

somber, her gaze flickering with guilt. “I wanted your kiss, Natches. I wanted you; I

wanted your touch and your voice whispering all those naughty little secrets you used to

whisper to me when I was in the hospital. I wanted it. I was married, and I ached for it.

And I paid for it.”

It took a moment, one long, disbelieving moment, for that comment to soak into his head

and light the spark of his normally rational temper.

“Son of a bitch.” He stared back at her in complete amazement. “I’ll be a son of a bitch.

You’ve let that bastard steal your soul even from the fucking grave.” His voice rose as he

spoke. “Is that how you’re blaming yourself now, Chay? That Beth was taken from you

because you wanted me?”

Anger poured from him as he watched her flinch, saw the truth in her eyes. Stubborn

pride lined every curve of her body. She actually believed what she was saying. Believed

every word of it.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.

“I understand this, by God. If you were my wife, Chaya—my woman—you’d never,

fucking never, be on a mission without me. You’d never face danger alone, and you’d

never know a night that I wasn’t in your damned bed. How long had that bastard been out

of your bed?”

“That’s not the point.” Her voice trembled. He could see the fear in her eyes now, a fear