To the Brink (28 page)

He didn't last five minutes.

"Darcy . . . God, Darcy. Stop. Stop. I want to be inside you when I come."

She lifted her head, licked her lips, and he went wild. He reached for her, dragged her up the bed, and covered her mouth with his on a strangled moan. "I have to be inside you."

He flipped her to her back. Hooking both of her legs over his arms, he pressed her knees to her chest and drove deep.

The pleasure was cutting and sharp. Blinding. The speed and strength of her orgasm stole her breath as he pumped into her like a wild man, making her come over and over again in a stunning, staggering rush.

He came with a strangled moan that registered somewhere in the periphery of her mind while she rode heaving waves of sensation too huge to quantify, too intense to absorb.

"Darcy." He collapsed onto her, into her, burying his face at the hollow of her throat, and went boneless.

Good. It was too, too good. It took forever to catch her breath. And not nearly long enough to drift on the wake of pleasure.

She sighed his name.

He chuckled softly.

She smiled at the joy of it all, turning her face into his neck and thinking life had never been this good. Too good, in fact, to be true. The next day, she learned that it was.

"Have you given any more thought to requesting a stateside PCS?"

Darcy looked up from her breakfast. While Ethan had slept in—she suspected that more than jet lag had caught up with him—she'd arranged for the next two weeks off.

Then, wearing only his T-shirt so she could smell him anytime she wanted, she played hausfrau. She fixed a huge skillet of scrambled eggs with peppers and cheese, squeezed oranges for fresh juice, and brewed coffee—strong, the way he liked it.

He'd shuffled into her tiny kitchen in bare feet and boxers. His eyes heavy, his cheeks stubbled, his hair standing on end. She'd never seen anything so sexy. And when he'd drawn her against him, swayed with her in a dreamy little dance while her favorite CD played in the background, she'd never felt so happy.

"Packing heat, are you, soldier boy?" she'd teased when she felt his erection rise against her belly.

"Baby, I've always got fire for you."

Then he'd laid her down on her tiny kitchen table, buried himself deep, and blown the top of her head off.

"Oh, wow. And good morning to you," she'd laughed when her head cleared.

He'd only grinned. Cleaned her up. Cleaned up the table and asked, "What smells so good?"

That had been all of fifteen minutes ago. And with one question he'd broken the spell and the mood.

"Have you given any more thought to requesting a stateside PCS?" he asked again as he forked up the last of the eggs.

She reached across the table for his empty plate, then rose and refilled it from the skillet on her apartment-sized stove. "Let's not have this discussion, okay?"

She smiled. Set his plate back in front of him, then headed for the coffeepot. "Not today."

When she returned to the table, he'd leaned back in his chair. Her playful lover was gone. And she could see that he wasn't going to let this drop.

She met his eyes with a stubborn stare. "Please," she said finally. "Don't spoil what little time we have together."

"And what about spoiling it for me? Darcy, most men can look after their wives. They're there for them. With them. Protecting them. Looking out for them. I can't be one of those men. I don't know how else to protect you without getting you out of harm's way."

She set down the coffeepot and went to him.

"Ethan," she pleaded, sitting down in his lap. "I am perfectly safe here."

"Safe? Jesus. Don't you read the newspapers? Watch TV? People get blown up every day here."

She played absently with the hair at his nape. "No one has any reason to hurt me."

"You're an American. To a radical Palestinian extremist that's reason enough."

"You're looking for reasons to worry."

Instead of wrapping his arms around her, he planted his fisted hands on the table. "I'm being realistic."

"No." She pressed a kiss to his furrowed brow. "No, Ethan. You're not."

"You don't understand."

"I'm trying." She pulled back, rested her hands on his shoulders. "I'm trying to understand, but you don't give me much to go on. Tell me what's really bothering you."

He worked his jaw, refused to look at her. "Forget it." He stood abruptly, dumping her to her feet. His chair scraped on the floor and almost toppled over. "I'm going to take a shower."

She didn't try to stop him. She just watched him walk away. She'd hoped ... she'd so hoped that they'd left this argument in Peru.

But obviously, they hadn't. And during the next several days it came up often, hung between them like a curtain the rest of the time they had together.

They laughed, yes. They loved, absolutely. But the easy grace was gone. He seemed obsessed with worry over her, was overtly critical of the extra steps she took for her American citizens. Constantly made noises about her playing it safer, maybe even considering another career.

She tried not to let it get to her. Tried not to let it affect their precious few days together. But he made no attempt to guard his words while she worked overhard to guard hers. She didn't want to fight. She just wanted to love him.

A few nights before he was due to leave for the panzer unit in Stuttgart where he would redeploy, they went out dancing. She'd just wanted to let off a little pent-up tension. Let her hair down.

And the unthinkable happened.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE NORTH PACIFIC

PRESENT

Ethan woke out of a sound sleep. "What? What's happening?"

A soft, sleepy voice steadied him in the dark. "It's okay. We just hit an air pocket."

Darcy. Air pocket. What the—?

Oh yeah. He wasn't dead. Wasn't drowned.

But the monkeys still had no tails in Zamboanga.

He turned his head on the pillow ... and saw her. She was raised up on an elbow beside him. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were heavy with sleep and concern. And he had a vivid memory of the many times in their brief marriage he'd awakened and seen her looking at him in exactly this way.

An ache that had nothing to do with the throbbing in his leg settled heavy and deep.

"Hey, babe," he said, wanting to erase some of her concern and because if he didn't say something he was going to beg her to kiss him. "How's it shaking?"

She smiled. Then yawned. "It's shaking just fine. How are you doing?"

"I think maybe I'm back among the living. Got the headache to prove it."

"I'll get you something."

He reached out, wrapped his fingers around her arm when she started to get up. "No. Don't. It's no big deal. Just... just, ah ... little muzzy yet, I guess. It's fine. Where are we, anyway?"

She checked her watch. His watch, actually. She must have taken it off of him and decided to hold on to it for safekeeping. "It's about four a.m. Pacific. And we're about four hours out of Anchorage," she said on another yawn.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"So. Present company excluded, it all went off without a hitch."

"Present company excluded," she agreed.

He closed his eyes and had almost drifted off again when he heard her voice, tearful and tortured in the dark. "I thought you were dead."

The tremor in her voice told him just how dead she'd thought he was. "Not a chance. Didn't want to miss this cushy plane ride."

"Ethan, I am so, so sorry I got you into this."

Okay. She wasn't going to lay out any cash to buy his "no big deal" shtick. But he wasn't going to let her invest any deeper in the guilt.

He turned his head to look into her eyes. Her beautiful green eyes. "And what if you hadn't?" he asked, leveling the playing field. "What if you hadn't called me?"

They both knew the answer to that. She
would
be dead. Amy, too.

He figured Darcy didn't want to think about the alternative outcome any more than he did. But he had to know. He'd put off asking long enough.

"Why you, Darcy? What did they want with you?"

She shook her head, looked away. "I don't know."

Interesting. There were still things he hadn't known about her. Like the fact that she was a lousy liar. And like why she thought she had to lie to him now when she'd never lied to him before.

"It's the body that's running on empty, babe, not the mind. You know what they wanted. You called me. Said you thought you were in trouble."

"It... it was just a feeling." She still wouldn't look at him.

"A feeling?" he echoed, making sure she understood that he didn't believe her.

"Yeah. I... I don't know. I just sensed that I was ... being followed."

"Big trouble," he said, throwing her own words back at her. Words that had tied him in knots until he'd found her alive. "You said you thought you were in big trouble. That doesn't equate to a sensation of being followed to me."

She lifted a shoulder still looking guilty as hell. "I don't know what else to tell you."

"I think you do," he accused, but was hit by a wave of fatigue that slapped him down like a lightweight. "And I think it has something to do with Amanda Stover's
hit-and-run
not so accidental death."

Her gaze snapped to his. "How did you know about Amanda?"

Frustrated with both her and the fog settling over him, he ignored her question. "Someone tossed your hotel room. And your apartment in Manila. Nolan checked. It was trashed, Darcy. So was Amanda's."

Even in the pale cabin light, he could see her face drain to chalk.

"You want to tell me now why I took a bullet and you would have rotted in that jungle if we hadn't found you?"

All the horror of her captivity showed in her eyes— along with guilt for placing him in harm's way. And yet she held her silence.

"Darcy, we both know that it wasn't an accident you ended up in the Abu Sayyaf camp," he stated, his voice as hard as his eyes. "Now, for God's sake, tell me what's going on. Who ordered the abduction? What were they looking for? What do you have that they want?"

"I... don't know," she said so softly he could barely hear her. "I don't... know."

He swore. "You lie for shit, babe."

She looked hunted. And very weary. "Go back to sleep," she said softly. "We'll talk about it later. You need to rest now."

The bitch of it was, she was right. He was fading fast.

"We ... will... talk."

But not now. Suddenly he felt like he'd run the twenty-seventh mile of a twenty-six-mile marathon. He sensed more than felt that she was going to leave the bed.

"Don't... go. Stay ... stay with me."