Outlaw Derek (17 page)

Would time really make a difference?

D
EREK WANTED TO
sleep, and he certainly needed to. Unfortunately, he had found that his own weariness had little effect on either his body or his worried thoughts. He couldn’t stop thinking. He was losing Shannon, he felt that like a cold lead weight in the pit of his belly. Too much had happened too fast for her.

He couldn’t blame her for that. Couldn’t blame her for wanting to just get away from all of it—including him. She hadn’t said it, but he knew that was what she wanted.

He couldn’t be rational about it, even though he tried. It was no good understanding that she
needed
time, that he should just back off for a while. He was simply afraid that the bond between them was too fragile, that, once away from him, she’d be lost to him for good.

She had come alive in his arms last night, caught up in the wildness of passion between them. If they had not been torn so abruptly from their bed, perhaps … but they had. And the situation around them, so foreign and threatening to her, only compounded her uncertainties.

If only—

“Derek?”

He sat up quickly, looking across the darkened room, suddenly aware of his heartbeat because he could feel it throughout his entire body. Her silk pajamas caught the faint light as she crossed the room to the bed, and he was afraid to move when her slight weight settled beside him.

“Those two men—what happened?” she asked softly.

Derek cleared his throat. “They’re being held by a couple of Zach’s security men. They’ll be turned over to the police.”

“Then it will be over, won’t it?”

“Most of it,” he said steadily. “But
we
won’t be over, Shannon. I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”

Still in the same soft, distant voice, she said, “It’s an illusion, you know. They do it with mirrors and lights.”

He felt his jaw aching, realizing only then that it was clenched. “And what about what happened between us last night? Was that an illusion?”

“No.” She hesitated. “I never wanted to need anybody. I never did. But I need you, Derek. I don’t seem to have much of a choice about it.”

Derek reached out slowly and touched her face, aching inside at the reluctance in her voice. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, that reluctance. But at least she admitted need, and that was something to build on. He hoped. “Honey …”

She came into his arms instantly, naturally, no hesitation or reluctance in that. “Make love to me,” she whispered against his throat. “You make me forget, and I want to forget.” She lifted her face for his kiss, and a sound of stark need tangled in the back of her throat as the kiss detonated desire.

It swept over them even more powerfully than before, carrying them both in a surging tidal wave, an unstoppable force. As if the memory of that brutal interruption of before haunted them both, they were frantic, driven. There wasn’t enough time, there could never be enough time for them. They were greedy, their bodies ravenous for each other.

And when that shattering wave crested and Derek hoarsely whispered his love for her, Shannon held him and cried out wildly. But not of love, never of love, because she couldn’t love him. She
couldn’t
.

In the peaceful aftermath, Shannon was troubled by a niggling question, and even as she reminded herself silently that she didn’t have the right to ask, she heard her voice emerge. “Did you see Gina tonight?”

Derek shifted a bit to pull her even closer. “No. I just talked to Alexi.” His voice, like hers, was hushed. After a moment, he added, “We were never lovers, Shannon.”

She wondered if he could read her mind, or if her jealousy was so obvious. Jealousy? No, not that, of course. “It’s none of my business,” she whispered.

“Yes, it is,” he told her. “You have the right to ask any question you want and expect an honest answer.”

Shannon was silent, not agreeing or disagreeing. But his statement left her free to ask something she had wondered about, and she wasn’t sure how to phrase the question. Even in the frantic necessity of their passion, Derek hadn’t forgotten to take precautions, and she wasn’t
sure whether to be warmed or appalled by the fact that, in equipping all his burrows, he had apparently thought of everything.

“What is it?” he asked softly, aware of her slight tension.

She thought about it, discovering somewhat to her surprise that the darkness did indeed make her feel different—at least when she was with him. The question wasn’t as hard as she’d expected it to be.

“Um … did you plan to have a woman hiding out with you in your burrows?”

There was a moment of silence, and Derek chuckled. “Hardly. But the kind of training I’ve had teaches you to be prepared for anything, and I believe in being responsible for my actions.”

It was, she thought, a very important part of this man. And she didn’t believe another kind of man could have lived the life Derek had lived. The simple truth was that he was too much a caregiver and too responsible a man to allow anyone else to make the tough decisions for him.

“Shannon?”

“Hmmm?”

“I love you.”

She burrowed closer, silent, aware of hot tears dammed behind her closed eyelids. He’d gotten close, but not that close. She couldn’t let him get that close. When this was over and he was gone, there had to be a part of her he hadn’t touched. There
had
to be. She wouldn’t survive otherwise.

Derek lay awake long after she breathed evenly in relaxed sleep, holding her and staring up at the ceiling. Pushing. He was pushing, and he knew it. He could feel her slip away from him in some elusive fashion he couldn’t even name. And he was so afraid she’d slip away for good.

She came to him in the night out of need, but when her world was back to normal, would she still need him?

“They aren’t being very bright about this,” Raven said consideringly. “Sending two trucks out an hour apart is just inviting trouble. At least if they were together, one couldn’t be stopped without the other driver noticing.”

“Lucky for us it’s this way,” Shannon murmured.

They were standing together on the edge of a clearing a good twenty-five yards away from the main road, waiting for Derek, Josh, and Zach to rejoin them. The men were keeping watch over Civatech’s entrance and waiting for the first truck to depart on schedule.

Behind Shannon and Raven, looking peculiarly ungainly as it waited silently out of its natural habitat, sat a helicopter. The plan called for Josh to pilot the craft several miles along the expected route of the trucks, where they intended to divert the truck containing Cyrano and stop it.

Shannon, thinking about the fact that only she
and Derek were unarmed, said slowly, “He really doesn’t use guns?”

Raven smiled. “He really doesn’t. With Derek, it’s almost an abhorrence. If you ever see him use a gun, it’ll be because the situation is so desperate, and the outcome so important to him, that he’s putting aside the beliefs of a lifetime.”

Shannon looked at her searchingly. “You know him very well, don’t you?”

“Not as well as you do,” Raven replied calmly.

Startled, Shannon said, “You’ve known him so much longer, worked with him—”

“I haven’t been in love with him.”

Shannon moved jerkily in unconscious denial. But Raven spoke before she could.

“It’s tough when your world is knocked off balance by a situation—or a man.” She was gazing at nothing, her expression abstracted. “Worse when it’s both. And when the situation is larger than life, something right out of a suspense novel or a James Bond movie, it’s easy to believe nothing’s real.” She looked at Shannon
suddenly, her lovely face intense. “But don’t let yourself be fooled by that, Shannon. Because it’s in a situation like this that
everything
is real.”

“What do you mean?” Shannon asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

Raven hesitated, then spoke in a tone that needed no dramatics to be emphatic; the words were enough. “Shannon, from the moment your apartment blew up in front of you, you were thrown into a world where everything’s black or white. Everything. Truth or lie. There are no shades of gray in this world. Not in
this
world.

“Don’t think about the life you’ve known in twenty-some-odd years. Don’t think about the roles people play, the games they play, or the ways they pretend when a man and a woman get involved with each other. There’s no room here for that. The civilized layers get stripped away, and the only thing left is truth—and instinct. Because tomorrow we
really
may die.”

Shannon felt cold, but forced a small laugh.
“But this isn’t the normal world. It isn’t my world.”

“It is now,” Raven told her. “You can’t go back, not completely. Shannon, you’ll have a foot in this world for the rest of your life, because you’ve seen the reality of it. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing; because of these last few days, you’ll cherish all the future ones. And you’ll realize that what you feel is truth, because there’s no time for lies.”

“What if—what if I don’t know what I feel?”

“Trust your instincts. There are moments when you have to make choices, especially in this world. And it’s in those moments when your instincts will tell you the truth. Just listen to them.”

A silence fell between them, and Shannon brooded over what the other woman had said.

She had slipped out of bed early this morning while Derek slept, and he had found her almost an hour later cooking breakfast. He had said nothing about their night together, and neither had Shannon. It was afternoon now, and the
hours since breakfast had been busily filled with preparations, with phone calls to arrange things, and conferences with their confederates, and all the other details of a plan.

They hadn’t really talked.

Shannon was acutely aware of her own lack of response when Derek had said he loved her. Three times, he had said it to her with calm and utter certainty, not in the heat of passion. The first time, he’d been gone too quickly for her to respond. The second time, she had called love a trick of mirrors and lights. The third time, she had said nothing at all.

She had believed this strange new world was a thing of illusion, of deception, yet Raven said it was—the ultimate reality. And as she thought about it, Shannon slowly began to agree. Hadn’t she been conscious all along that time was something snatched, stolen from events? Hadn’t she felt smothered by the sensation of too little time with too much happening?

It was so different from the life she was
accustomed to, where time dragged and emotions maintained a steady balance between uncomfortable and puzzling extremes. Now every moment was sharply etched, every emotion poignant. Was this what so many people searched for in vain, this heightened awareness of time and events and emotions?

Had she in fact stumbled into a world more real than anything since man was young, a place where civilization blunted nothing because this world existed on the sharp edge of what was primitive and real?

And if that was true, why were her own instincts telling her nothing? She didn’t know if she believed that Derek loved her. She didn’t know how she felt herself, because there was something inside her she was afraid to see, something distant and protected. And she was still afraid nothing was
real
.

Not real … and almost over.

“There it is.” Derek raised the binoculars and focused on the unmarked van pulling out of Civatech’s shipping area. He watched it as the vehicle reached the main road and headed east, and Josh, watching him, saw him tense slightly. After a moment, Derek laid aside the binoculars and reached for the walkie-talkie that was beside him on the ground. “That’s ours.”

“How can you tell?” Zach asked.

Derek hesitated, then said, “I recognized the driver.” He pressed the send button on the walkie-talkie and spoke softly. “Alexi.”

“Go,” a voice whispered back.

“The second truck is yours. Good luck.”

“Same to you. See you in the want ads.”

Derek chuckled as he picked up the binoculars and rose to his feet, and as Josh and Zach rose also, the former asked a polite question.

“Want ads?”

“Where else would you expect to find two out-of-work spies?” Derek asked reasonably.

Josh thought that over as they headed back
into the woods to join the two women. “Alexi,” he murmured. “Could be a Russian name, I suppose. Possible. And on our side, too. Just making an educated guess based on the fact that he’s wearing a white hat at the moment, I’d say he’s going to be running his ad in U.S. papers.”

“Good guess,” Derek said.

Glancing aside at Zach, Josh said dryly, “This guy could give you a contest when it comes to clams.”

Derek chuckled again. “You didn’t ask me anything.”

“All right. Is the second out-of-work spy yourself?”

“That depends on Shannon,” Derek said lightly. “If she gives me my walking papers, I may well join the Foreign Legion. If not, I think I’ll dust off my seat in the boardroom.”

The other two men might have replied, but they didn’t get the chance. The clearing where the women and a helicopter waited came into
view, and they were greeted by Raven’s pained voice.