Unleashing the Storm (41 page)

“I
hope he’s the understanding type, because I haven’t been behaving well around
men lately.”

Annika
fished her keys out of her BDU leg pocket as they approached her Jeep. “Dev
mentioned that.”
Don’t let Remy near her. She bites.
“Don’t worry.
They’ve been briefed. Remy’ll keep his distance. Haley’s a workaholic, so
she’ll give you plenty of space as well.”

Everyone
had been briefed on Kira’s issues, and Ender’s warnings had hammered them home.
He’d looked like hell, had sounded worse.

Annika
had never been his biggest fan—oh, hell, who was she kidding, she couldn’t
stand him—but she respected his Special Forces expertise and combat skills, and
if she had to partner-up for a mission, he was always a good one to have at
your back. She even identified with his arrogance and I-don’t-give-a-fuck
attitude that kept everyone away and lent an image of invulnerability. Which
was why it had been a shock to see him like he was today, pacing, intense worry
creating dark circles around his bloodshot eyes.

Vulnerable.

Seeing
him like that made her break out in an itchy sweat, because if
he
could
be brought to his knees, anyone could.

Yet
another reason that getting close to Creed couldn’t happen, and why she
couldn’t give him the commitment he’d asked for.

Annika
eyed Kira as she settled into the front passenger seat of her old green
Wrangler. Annika had seen some of Ender’s women, and Kira didn’t fit the
profile. He’d always done the tall, gorgeous, bubbleheaded blondes. Kira, with
her dark hair and petite frame, didn’t strike her as his type, and while she
wasn’t a classic beauty, her exotic features and full lips gave her a sleepy
kind of sensuality that seemed too subtle for someone as hard as Ender to
notice.

What
struck Annika the most, though, was Kira’s inherent air of innocence. She
hadn’t believed people like that existed. Certainly, they didn’t exist in her
world. Maybe Ender had gotten wrapped up in the need to protect Kira, but who
would protect her from
him?
Annika couldn’t imagine that Ender was all
that gentle with her.

And
why the hell did she care? Jesus, she was losing it. She needed an assignment—a
gritty, bloody one that would give her back some perspective.

“Do
Haley and Remy have any animals?” Kira asked, as they headed down the road to
Haley’s farmhouse five miles away.

“They
have a cat.”

“Good.”
Kira wrapped her arms around herself and stared out the window. “Good.”

Haley’s
house turned out to be the opposite of Tom’s. Ender’s. Whatever the heck his
name was.

Where
his was newer, with modern decor and appliances, Haley’s renovated farmhouse
could have graced the pages of a country living magazine. The mingled scents of
line-dried linens and banana bread permeated the air, and antique furnishings
completed the charm.

Annika
had been right: Kira had instantly liked Haley, and Remy had been at work when
she arrived at the house. Annika had stayed long enough to ask about some kind
of weather machine, and then she’d taken off with a brisk nod of good-bye.

Yesterday
Kira did nothing but lie in the guest-room bed with Haley’s cat, Geordie,
curled up behind her knees. Haley brought food and always offered to lend an
ear, but Kira didn’t feel like talking. Or thinking. Or eating. But she had
someone else to consider now, and for the baby, she choked down the vegan meals
Haley prepared.

“My
parents were vegetarian hippies,” Haley explained when Kira asked about the
complicated dishes that went well beyond the salads most people believed vegans
ate exclusively. “I’m an expert in this kind of cooking.”

On
the second day, Kira could no longer hang out in bed. Wearing a pair of Haley’s
blue silk pajamas, she migrated to the living room, where the other woman sat
on the couch and plugged away at a monstrous laptop computer. As Kira watched,
Haley sighed and dragged her hand through her long, caramel-brown hair.

“Do
you always work from home, or are you babysitting?”

Haley
looked up and smiled, a sunny contrast to the gloomy, overcast day outside.
“Babysitting.”

“Well,
at least you’re honest.”

The
thump of boots on the stairs startled Kira, and she turned to see a dark-haired
man in ACRO BDUs coming down them. “
Bebe,
I can’t find my jacket. Oh,
there it is—” He froze as he reached for the leather bomber draped over the
couch next to Kira, and she realized she’d been growling. Snarling, really.

“Sorry.”
She scampered to an overstuffed rocking chair across the room. “Dr. Lavery said
it’s some sort of weird instinct.” She smiled weakly. “Who knows what other
strange instincts will emerge once the baby gets here.”

The
baby whose father had been sent to kill its mother.

Raw
grief ripped through her insides, and she burst into tears. It was humiliating,
crying like this in front of an audience, but she couldn’t stop.

“Kira?”
Haley moved close, kneeled at her feet, while Remy eased into a chair at the
kitchen table. “What is it?”

“I’m
going to have to raise this baby alone,” she sobbed. “What will happen when my
season comes, and I can’t take care of the child because every four hours I
need, um, you know?”

“That’s
one of the best things about ACRO. You’re never alone. Everyone will help. And
I’m a great babysitter.”

“ACRO?
You can’t be serious. They wanted me dead. They sent Tom to kill me.” Palming
her belly protectively, she shrank back into the recliner, but her mind was
already working on a way to get out of there—not that she knew where she’d go.
“They aren’t getting near my baby.”

“No
one is going to touch either one of you if you don’t want them to. I promise.
But I don’t think you know the whole story.” Haley and Remy exchanged glances,
and Haley rested a soothing hand on Kira’s knee. “Do you know why Itor wants
you?”

“At
first, Tom said they wanted me dead. It was a lie.” The acid in her tone bled
through loud and clear, and Remy cocked a dark eyebrow.

“He
told you what he needed to in order to get you out of there and to gain your
trust.”

“Whatever,”
she muttered. “In the infirmary, he said they’d wanted to engineer my
pregnancy. God only knows what they want my baby for.” She wiped her eyes with
the back of her hand, and Haley handed her a box of tissue from the end table.
“It’s all insane and horrible, but not something for ACRO to kill me over.”

Remy
shifted in his chair, but when she bared her teeth at him, he held up his hands.
“Easy there. I’m not moving.” He stretched his long legs out in front of him,
more slowly this time. “I interrogated the Itor agent Annika captured in Idaho.
What I learned…” He grimaced. “Kira, I was a Navy SEAL before I came here. My
specialty was interrogation. I’ve seen things, done things, heard things, and
shit, I thought I’d experienced it all. But I’ve never been more sickened than
by what that Itor bastard told me.”

She
was afraid to ask, and didn’t have to, because he pierced her with a stare that
sent chills ricocheting up and down her spine.

“What
ACRO was afraid of turned out to be the case. Itor was going to use you, and
possibly your child, as a biological weapon.”

Okay,
she’d run a lot of scenarios through her head, but that one hadn’t come close
to crossing her mind. “A biological weapon? How?”

“Something
to do with your physiology. They planned to introduce a deadly animal-specific
virus into your body in order to mutate into something humans could contract.
Something that would take scientists years to develop a vaccine for because
they wouldn’t recognize the disease or be able to locate the source.”

“But
why? Why would they want to spread something like that so indiscriminately?”

“Profit.
Itor would develop a vaccine, but the rest of the world would be vulnerable.
They could have used you to infect huge populations, millions of people. Then
they could have sold the vaccine for billions. Or they could have sold you to
the highest bidder as a WMD.”

“Oh,
my God.” She was going to be sick.

After
a long silence, in which she thought she heard a distant rumble, Remy spoke
again, his voice quiet, deep like the thunder. “I know what you’re feeling.
Itor wanted to do something similar to me.”

Shell-shocked
and not a little bitter, she cut him a hard look. “And did ACRO send someone to
kill you too?”

“They
sent someone for another reason.” He slid Haley a secret smile, and then he
made it disappear. “But that was a different situation. I was military. My
background gave me an edge when it came to Itor. And I was willing to do
whatever I had to do to make sure they never took me alive. You’re a civilian,
with a major distrust of the government, if what Ender told me is true. If you
wouldn’t join ACRO—”

“I
couldn’t be left for Itor to take.”

“Exactly.”

Somewhere
deep inside she got that. She may never forgive whatever bastard handed down
the order, but she also wouldn’t have wanted to be responsible for the deaths
of millions.

Tom,
though…that was a betrayal that drilled into levels of emotion she hadn’t known
existed.

“You’re
thinking about him, aren’t you?” Haley asked, and Kira dug her fingers into the
arms of the chair instead of answering.

The
jingle of metal swirling on wood as Remy played with a set of keys on the
tabletop startled her. “He didn’t know you.”

“Oh,
he knew me,” she ground out. “I assure you of that. And he still planned to
kill me. Even after…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
Even after all the
intimacy.
“How can I get past that?”

“Kira,”
Haley said, “he’s not my favorite person in the world, but you need to know
that to save you, he disobeyed about a thousand orders.” She tucked her legs
beneath her and got more comfortable on the rug. “He risked his career and his
friendship with Dev, who is pretty much the only person at ACRO he calls his
friend.”

Remy
shrugged. “He just won’t admit how much he likes me.”

“He’s
sort of stubborn that way,” Kira said, her chest constricting because, dammit,
she loved Tom so much.

And
yeah, okay, he’d done a few things he didn’t have to do. Like call the refuge
to arrange for her animals to be brought to New York. And he’d saved her from
being serviced by strange men at the training facility. He’d risked his life to
keep her from the Itor agents who were after them. He’d stopped eating meat for
her.

God,
she could go on and on, but doing so made her miserable. She couldn’t imagine
life without Tom, but she didn’t know if she could ever look at him without
seeing the face of the man people called Ender. The man who had gazed at her
with such uncompromising calculation as he held his hand over the gun he would
have used to kill her.

Everything
about him screamed warrior, from the way he moved to the way he took in the
world around him. And she’d been around predators long enough to recognize the
deadly focused look in one’s eyes before it took down its victim. So how could
she have been so naïve?

But
she knew. Desperate for love and acceptance, and under the influence of a
sexual pull, she’d been blind.

So
stupid.

Her
stupidity alone made her a danger to herself, to her animals, to the entire
damned world.

“Can
I get you anything?” Haley gripped Kira’s hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze.
“Tea? Water? A bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a beer chaser?”

That
got a smile out of Kira, the first in what felt like forever. She shook her
head as the low, rolling sound of thunder rumbled outside, closer than the last
time. Inside, a strange pressure built, a tangible thickening of the air. Haley
swung around to her husband, her hand absently rubbing her hip. When Kira looked
over at Remy, she nearly gasped.

Lightning
flashed in his eyes—not the reflection of lighting, but actual lightning. And
he was fixated on Haley. Leaning forward in his chair, he dropped his head low
to stare at his wife, utterly captivated in a way that took Kira’s breath away.
Holy cow, she’d known he was a handsome man, but now she saw more than that,
saw the animal intensity, the single-minded focus of a predator that hungered,
and hungered
now.
But what did he…? Oh.

Oh.

Then
he was up, taking the stair steps two at a time. Haley stood. “Will you be okay
for a few minutes?” she asked, sounding breathless. “Yes, fine. Thank you.”

Haley
hurried up the stairs, and thirty seconds later, the muffled noises that
drifted from above left no doubt as to what was going on up there.

The
storm picked up, mercifully masking the sounds from upstairs—and what had the
crashing noises been? She and Tom hadn’t broken anything during even their most
vigorous lovemaking, though a couple of bathroom sinks had been in danger.