Operation: Midnight Tango (17 page)

“Trust yourself, Emily,” he said darkly. “Trust your heart. Trust me.”

She was standing over him, looking down. In a single smooth motion he reached up, set his hand behind her neck and pulled her mouth to his.

The pleasure was instant and intense. She didn’t even realize her knees had buckled until they hit the
floor with a quiet thud. In the next instant he was out of the chair, pushing her back onto the Navajo rug and coming down on top of her.

His kisses stole her breath. Her body flamed with need. She could feel dampness spreading between her legs, the desire that was a sharp ache verging on pain.

“Who are you, Zack Devlin?” she whispered.

“I’m the man who will never hurt you. The man who would give his own life to keep you safe. If you believe anything about me, believe that.”

She believed him. There was no way he could look at her the way he did—kiss her the way he did—and not be telling the truth.

Pulling away slightly, he reached out and began unbuttoning her shirt. Neither of her previous two affairs had prepared her for the sensations coursing through her body or the emotions crowding into her heart. Deep inside she knew this was different. That this moment was profound. That it would change everything.

He worked the shirt from her shoulders. As he unfastened her bra, cold air whispered over her nipples as the scrap of cotton fell away.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said softly.

Leaning forward, he kissed her gently, his hands falling to her belt. She was breathing hard, shaking, anticipating the moment when he touched her….

Unable to keep herself from it, she ran her fingers over his hard-as-rock abdomen, careful to avoid the bandage. He shuddered and moaned low in his
throat when she ran her fingers over his pebbled nipples. Then he was tugging her slacks down, and she kicked them off. Next came her panties. He quickly removed the rest of his clothes. Never taking his eyes from hers, he kissed her. A groan escaped her when he brushed his palms over her breasts. Then he was touching her belly, caressing her hips, then the tender flesh between her legs. Sensation swamped her when he slipped two fingers inside her and began to stroke her.

She could feel her body pulse in response.

“Zack,” she whispered. “Please.”

She couldn’t believe those words had come out of her mouth. She couldn’t believe she’d meant them. Emily had never been a sexual person; she could go for months without so much as a single sexual thought. But being with Zack like this, wanting him with such intensity, was driving her to do and say things she would have never imagined.

Then he was over her, smiling down at her, but there was an intensity in his face she’d never seen before. A serious look that told her there were no pretenses between them.

Lifting his hand, he brushed the hair from her forehead. “Open to me,” he said. “Let me inside you.”

She could feel her body thrumming, her heart hammering against her ribs. He entered her with devastating slowness. She felt her body melting around his as she was filled to the hilt. Sensation rose in a swift tide to sweep her away. Then he began to move, and pleasure exploded into ecstasy.

Her body moved in exquisite time with his. For the span of a heartbeat they were one. One body. One heart. One mind. One soul. And when the heat reached a fever pitch, Emily came apart in his arms, shattering into a thousand pieces that would never be put together in quite the same way ever again.

Chapter Fourteen

Zack watched her sleep and tried not to think about what he’d done. The fire in the hearth cast amber light onto her flawless complexion. Her mouth was full and partially open, and it took every bit of discipline he possessed not to take her in his arms and make love to her again.

Exhaustion tugged at him, but Zack knew he wouldn’t sleep. His mind was too troubled. He’d slept with a woman while in the midst of a dangerous mission. Again.

Sometimes late at night he swore he could still hear the shot that had killed Alisa…

Restless, he rose and slipped into his pants. The cabin was chilly so he piled wood in the hearth. Then he walked to the window looking out over the snowy forest and tried to think of a way to salvage the mission. Instead he found himself cursing fate for sending this woman to him when there was no way in hell he could have a relationship with her.

“Zack?”

He started at the sound of her voice and turned to find Emily standing a few feet away. She was wearing her uniform shirt. Silhouetted against the yellow light from the fire, she looked slender and lovely and so tempting his heart ached just from looking at her.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, surprised by his hostile tone.

She cocked her head. “What’s wrong?”

“I need to think and I can’t do it with you standing there half-naked.”

She blinked as if she didn’t understand. When she started toward him, his temper flared. Couldn’t she see that this couldn’t lead anywhere? Couldn’t she see that the last woman he’d touched during a mission had died because of him?

Then her arms were around him and he felt the contact penetrate all the way to his bones. Need and desire coiled tightly inside him. He fought them, but his arms went around her anyway. When she fell against him, he set his chin against the top of her head and closed his eyes.

“I shouldn’t have let this happen,” he said.

“A lot of things shouldn’t have happened in the last two days, but I don’t think you were in control of any of them.”

He drew away and eased her to arm’s length. “I shouldn’t have been with you like this, Emily. I’m in the midst of a mission, for God’s sake.” Releasing her, he turned back to the window and rapped his hand hard against the sill. “Damn it.”

“Zack.” She started toward him.

“Stay the bloody hell away from me,” he said.

She stopped. “I don’t understand where this is coming from.”

He spun to her and immediately wished he hadn’t, because seeing her only made him want her and that ticked him off even more. “I’m trying to keep you safe, Emily. If something happened to you…”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” she said.

Angry because she was tempting him and he damn well didn’t want to be tempted, he crossed to her. He gently held her. “I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen innocent people shot down. I’ve had friends killed because of me. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Alisa Hayes.”

It was the first time he’d spoken her name aloud, and it struck him so hard he nearly staggered.

“I don’t know who she is,” she said.

“She’s the woman who died because of me.”

“Zack, calm down…”

He could feel his hands trembling. His heart pounded like a piston in his chest. Staring into Emily’s pretty eyes, all he could think was that he would give his own life to keep her safe.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

Even after two years it hurt to speak about that night. It hurt because Zack knew her death was his fault. The old pain taunted him. Guilt churned in
his gut. He could feel himself shaking. His hands. His legs.

“She was an operative with MIDNIGHT.” His voice was so rough he barely recognized it. “We were to infiltrate a terrorist group that had set up camp in the west Texas desert. They were smuggling weapons through Mexico and selling them on the black market in the U.S. and Canada. MIDNIGHT got involved when Internet chatter indicated they were planning to sell material for a dirty bomb to a terrorist group with plans to hit a major Southwestern U.S. city.”

“I never heard of any of that.”

“Nobody ever hears of any of the things MIDNIGHT gets involved in.”

“What happened?”

Zack laughed. “What didn’t happen?” he said, his voice sounding caustic even to him. “Everything that could have gone wrong did.” Remembering all too clearly, he tasted bile at the back of his throat. “This was a dangerous group, Emily. One wrong move and they would take you out into the desert, bind your hands and shoot you execution-style.”

“You infiltrated the group?”

“It took us a year, but Alisa and I were finally in. We were accepted by the group. We were relatively comfortable.” His mouth curved into a humorless smile. “As comfortable as you can be living with thirty murderers with sociopathic tendencies.

“We knew something big was about to go down, but the kingpin kept the details close to his chest,
telling only a couple of his closest associates what it was.”

“It sounds like you were doing exactly what you’d been sent in to do,” she said.

“I did a hell of a lot more than I’d been sent in to do.” Zack shook his head. “Alisa was a thrill seeker. Just about everyone at MIDNIGHT gets off on adrenaline in one form or another. But Alisa was…over the top. We were camped about fifty miles east of El Paso. Most of us used tents. The kingpin was so paranoid he slept in an underground bunker. Most of the weapons were stockpiled in underground bunkers, as well. So there we were, in the middle of the godforsaken desert, scared and bored and surrounded by killers. And Alisa…we were friends, you know? I knew her well. I liked her. Respected her as an agent. She was good at what she did, and we worked well together. Then one night she just showed up in my tent. I was sleeping. When she came in, I thought something was wrong. I went to her and the next thing I knew…” Remembering, he gritted his teeth. Being with Alisa Hayes had been like jumping off a cliff and landing hard. “We were together for the first time that night.”

“Zack, you had been working under extremely stressful circumstances for a long time. I don’t think it’s terribly unusual for two people to turn to each other at a time like that.”

“It didn’t stop after that night, Emily. She came to my tent every night. I knew I should stop her. I was getting distracted. She was, too. I couldn’t keep
my mind on the mission because I kept thinking about her. I was beginning to…I was starting to care for her.” Feeling the old pain twisting in his gut like a dull knife, he closed his eyes. “But I couldn’t stop. We were burned out. Scared. Lonely. Being together was the only thing keeping us sane.”

His gaze met hers. “By the time I realized I’d fallen in love with her, it was too late.”

LOVE.

The word rang hollowly in the confines of the cabin, and Emily felt it like a physical punch. The slow, uncomfortable burn of jealously singed her. She knew it was small and petty of her to be jealous of a woman from Zack’s past. Especially when the woman was nothing more than a ghost that haunted him. But she was.

“What happened to her?” she asked.

Turning away, he crossed to the hearth to stare into the flames. “MIDNIGHT had provided us with a radio transmitter so we could report in occasionally. We kept it inside an airtight trunk, buried in the ground a couple of miles from the encampment. We were supposed to check in every couple of days. Report any activities or plans. Let our contact know we were all right. Because it was risky, I usually did the contacting. I’d do it at night. Sneak past the patrols and steal away from the camp on foot. I could cover two miles in about nine minutes. I had a hand shovel buried beneath some rocks. It took me about a minute to get the
case out of the ground. I would set up the antenna, spend about two minutes passing along whatever information I could. Then I would bury everything, hide the shovel and get back into the camp without ever being discovered. It was a relatively good system.”

“It sounds incredibly dangerous,” Emily said.

“It was.” Zack scrubbed a hand over his face. “One night when she’d come into my tent, I told her we had to stop. I told her we were compromising the mission. We were distracted.” His expression was tense. “We had a fight. She stormed out of my tent. I let her go, thinking we needed some time to cool off. I had no idea she was going to go to the radio.”

“Why did she go to the radio?”

“She’d had enough. She was burned out and wanted to quit the mission.”

“What happened?”

He sighed. “A shipment of weapons had come in just that afternoon. Neither Alisa nor I realized that night-vision goggles were part of the shipment or that the guards were wearing them that night.”

“Oh, Zack.”

“It was my job to know what kind of equipment was coming in, Emily. Guns. Explosives. High-tech devices. Whatever. It was my job to know.” Setting his hand against the mantel, he leaned. “I woke to voices a couple of hours after she left my tent. One of the guards had seen her leaving the compound and followed her. They caught her using the radio.”

“Oh, no.” Emily’s heart began to pound because she knew what he was going to say next.

“They dragged her back to the camp and woke the leader, a man by the name of Guy Hind. I stood just outside my tent while they questioned her. Alisa was belligerent and tough as nails. She didn’t tell them squat.” His voice broke off and he seemed to struggle with what he needed to say next. “And so they began hurting her.”

Emily could see his hands clenched into fists. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He was blinking his eyes rapidly, as if trying to erase from his mind the images of his lover being tortured. “I kept hoping she’d gotten through to our contact at MIDNIGHT, that they would send someone in before things got out of hand. But not even MIDNIGHT could get a team there fast enough to save her. And I knew I had a decision to make. I could either save her life and blow the operation. Or I could let her die and salvage what was left of it.”

He raised tortured eyes to hers. In their depths Emily saw deep and terrible pain.

“I ran back to my tent and grabbed my weapon. I was outnumbered twenty to one, but there was no way I could let them kill her.” His voice was so low and hoarse that she had to lean close just to hear him.

“I had the son of a bitch in my sights when he pulled the trigger,” he said.

For the first time Emily felt the sting of tears in her eyes. She could see the same pain etched into
Zack’s every feature. It was a pain that was a part of him. An agony he’d accepted into his psyche and learned to live with.