The whole time Daniel made love to her, he watched her face, his blue eyes blazing with fervor. She had never seen him this way, with energy pouring from him so blatantly, his pleasure and desire so naked on his face and body. He had been until now a more sophisticated lover. A more urbane and contained man.
This Daniel was raw and open.
He nuzzled her lips as his body moved against hers. Tasting. Sucking her lower lips between them. His tongue slid along both. “Peaches,” he murmured in Spanish. “Why peaches?”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered back, instinctively staying with Spanish. She realized he wasn’t even aware he was speaking Spanish. He had let down his guard. Just like that.
“Later,” he breathed.
But later didn’t come. He was indefatigable, playing her body like an instrument, time after time. She couldn’t get enough of him. Each time their heart beats slowed, one of them would turn to the other and tease and kiss and provoke until they came together again.
Until finally, exhaustion claimed her, stealing all her energy and blanketing all thought.
Daniel let her go, then—but only long enough to draw the sheet and blanket up over her. He slid out of bed and went to the door, to turn off the lamps.
He tripped over the pile of ruined clothes she’d left puddled next to that side of the bed. The wooden wedge fell out of the pocket of her trousers and he picked it up. “Where did you get this?”
Olivia explained sleepily.
“Well, that’s one on our side I didn’t know about,” Daniel murmured. He slipped the wedge under the door. “Use the wedge even when I’m not here. I’ll come in some other way. The night clerk is right. There are too many people with your key and with you in their crosshairs now. I’d put the desk chair under the doorknob, too.”
Then he turned off the light and came back to the bed. Her heart gave a little leap. He was going to stay here with her.
His hot body pressed up against hers. His lips touched her neck.
Then sleep claimed her.
* * * * *
Olivia jerked awake and blinked, trying to figure out what had woken her. She was disoriented.
Then there was a touch on her lips. Fingers.
“Shhh….” Daniel’s voice was low. Not a hiss, though. His voice reverberated underneath her, too.
She realized that she was lying on him. They weren’t lying flat. He was propped on the pillows, half sitting. One of the bedside lamps was on. She was lying on her hip and her head was on Daniel’s shoulder. She had one arm curled around his neck, the other around his waist. A big teddy bear.
No wonder she had been so deeply asleep.***
There was a sound at the door and she realized it was the second time she had heard it. It was what had woken her. The sound was the electronic “thunk” of the key being used.
Someone was trying to unlock her door.
Cold fear washed through her. Olivia sat up.
Daniel dragged her back down again. There was no arguing with the force in his hand. He held her against his chest with a steel grip. His other hand, which had been under the unused pillow on the other side of the bed, came out from underneath it holding an automatic pistol. He flipped off the safety with his thumb and lined it up on the door with a steady, unwavering aim.
That was why he had wanted her to lie down. He didn’t want her in the way, spoiling his view of the door.
Her heart was banging against the inside of her chest, making her sick, but Olivia stayed down.
The door groaned. Then groaned in stress again.
Daniel’s aim didn’t quivered by so much as a hair.
Then the door rattled as if someone was shaking the knob.
Daniel smiled, but still the gun didn’t move.
Olivia heard it, then. The soft squeak of boot leather.
She clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes growing wider as she realized who had rattled the door.
Daniel lowered the gun and pushed it under the pillow again as Olivia sat up. He held his finger to his own lips for silence, then slipped off the bed and moved to the door. Olivia padded after him. She was wearing, she realized, one of her nightgowns. Then she remembered.
She had pulled it on once she had found the strength to move, sometime after Daniel had come to bed. She had thought she was too wired to sleep, so Daniel had agreed to talk and turned on the lamp once more. Then her memory failed her. She must have lasted three nanoseconds after lying down before sleep had slammed her once more.
Daniel pressed his ear to the door.
The desk chair had been jammed under the handle and the wedge was under the door. He must have put the chair there after she’d fallen asleep.
A shudder ran through her. What if he hadn’t put in place for her the precautions he had insisted she take care of? What disaster would she be trying to cope with right this instant? She didn’t even want to think of it. She had to start thinking like Daniel, even a little bit, if she wanted to come out of this situation alive.
He straightened up, his chest rising as he took a breath and let it out. “He’s gone.”
“It was Serrano,” she said. They were still talking in Spanish.
“You know that how?”
“His boots. They have that little squeak, you know? It must be his weight.” She shivered. “I had to listen to it for hours.”
Daniel brushed her hair aside and kissed her temple. “He’s been thwarted. You embarrassed him by having precautions in place. He won’t be back again. He can’t risk being publicly humiliated. Just make sure you have the chair and the wedge in place at all times.”
She nodded.
He tugged her back to the bed. “Come and sleep. You’re exhausted.”
“You should be, too.” She let him pull her onto the bed. “Where did you get the gun? We weren’t allowed to bring weapons with us on the assessment tour. It was a strict requirement of the Insurrectos.”
Daniel shrugged. “I stole it, two days after they shut us in here.”
“You’ve had it hidden all this time? They’ve tossed our rooms at least twice. Where do you hide it?” She was amazed.
Daniel pointed up at the dark square above the bed where the still missing ceiling tile sat on top of its neighbors inside the ceiling. “No one ever thinks about the roof above their heads.”
She shook her head. “I certainly don’t.” She lifted herself onto the high bed. “Did you pull me on top of you?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “You did that. I merely tried to soothe you while you were sleeping by holding your hand. You kept moving until you were draped as you found yourself when you woke.”
She could feel herself blushing. “That’s not normal. For me.”
Daniel settled himself onto his stack of pillows once more, with a low chuckle. “Is anything about our sojourn here normal?”
“No, but—” She wanted to explain that her behavior around Daniel had little to do with the odd situation at the White Sands and more to do with Daniel himself.
“Then come here,” he said and patted the mattress.
The fact was, if she had met Daniel under normal circumstances, they would have maintained the instant disliking for each other they had formed and never burrowed any farther under each other’s surfaces. It had taken being held hostage here at the White Sands to rub away at the veneer.
So she shut up and moved closer to him. She touched the fine, almost invisible scar on his chest, over his nipple. It looked new. “There’s a story to this, isn’t there?”
He glanced at it. “Yes.” A shadow crossed his eyes. “Only, it’s not for nighttime telling.”
“Will you tell me one day?”
He sighed. “Maybe. It’s not an easy tale to tell.” He pulled her into his arms and settled her so that her head was on his shoulder and her arm over his waist. “I have no objections to being a pillow,” he told her. “You can blush all you want. I like to see you blush, anyway.”
She tucked her head against the soft mound of his pectoral muscle, as embarrassed as he intended her to be. She heard the laughter rumbling in his chest.
“You make me feel like a sixteen-year-old,” she complained.
“Good,” he said flatly. “When I first met you, I took you for forty years old. It’s about time you felt younger.”
“In my line of business, feeling younger is a handicap.”
“You can be as old as you need to be while you’re working. When you’re not working, you need to stay young.”
“You should listen to yourself. In your line of work, dying young is a real option. When I met you, you were a cynical old bastard who screwed young women because he was afraid an older woman would see through him.”
He was silent a long moment. “Ouch.”
“What happened to you to make you that way?” she asked gently.
He shifted. She could feel the muscles flex in him. His chest lifted as he drew in his breath. “You never did explain to me why everyone is so willing to sacrifice themselves for other people, anyway,” he said.
He was speaking English.
Olivia sat up.
Daniel hadn’t moved but she had been resting against him and felt the internal shift as his wariness kicked in. Now he’d switched to English.
She crossed her legs and studied him. His face was blank, held in rigid control. She realized with a start that he wasn’t emotionless, as she had first thought him to be when he had slithered through her window. There was a storm of emotions going on inside Daniel. He just wasn’t allowing any of them to show on his face.
Discipline.
This was as far as he was going to let her in.
“Okay, then,” she said softly. “I think you know the answer already. You’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
She took a deep breath. “Relationships are a two-way street. There’s give and there’s take. You see it as self-sacrifice because you don’t see the other side of the coin—what the other person has given up. There’s always another side. Always. It may not happen at the same time, but there’s always give and take in a relationship. Compromise. Sacrifice. You give things up for the other person’s sake because that’s how it works. They give things up for you, too.”
He sat for a long time saying nothing. She knew he was processing what she was saying. He was looking for the flaws, the way out.
She added the kicker. “You have to give a little to get something back.”
His eyes narrowed. “Really.” His jaw flexed. Even the corners got hard and defined.
She lifted her hands up, as if she was explaining the obvious. “You don’t give anything. You screw women, you do your job and you leave people behind. If you just once gave something, someone might give something back.”
“You have no idea who I am,” Daniel growled.
“I have a better idea than you think,” she returned. “I bet you live alone in an apartment or condo without a garden and the last time you were there was months ago.” She lifted her brow, as Daniel did when he was silently asking for an answer.
His eyes narrowed. “I haven’t been there for months because a revolution got in the way of going back.”
“I’m right on the rest of the details,” she insisted.
His chest lifted and fell. “Yes,” he said heavily.
“I’m betting you don’t have a best friend, or if you have someone you call a friend you haven’t seen them in years, perhaps even a decade, or maybe since high school or college.”
Daniel licked his lips. “We had a disagreement.”
“And your pride wouldn’t let you patch it up,” Olivia guessed.
A furrow dug between his brows. “This isn’t funny.”
“Because I’m right?” She touched his thigh. “What did your friend do that was so horribly wrong?”
Daniel had to take two breaths to get it out. “He saved my life.”
She sat back, astonished. “So there have been people in your life who care about you. You just ruthlessly prune anyone out of your life who does care. When do you plan on booting me out the door?”
“God, don’t.” He leaned forward, resting his head on the heel of his hands. “Don’t do this, Olivia. Please don’t.”
“Relationships are an act of faith.”
“Please tell me you are not talking about love.” His voice was muffled by his hands.
She picked her words with care. “I’m talking about people. The human race. Perhaps you should try joining it. If you give back—”
His head shot up and his gaze stabbed her. “Give back? Like you give back? Like you gave and gave and gave for your ex?”
She recoiled. “How do you know…?” How could he possibly know about Jerry? Then she relaxed. “You don’t know anything.”.
“I know as much as you do,” he snarled. “I know that you married not long out of high school. I know he worked all day and left you at home without a career. I bet it was only after the divorce you found out about all the other women he’d had affairs with. A string of them, some of them women you knew well. He was fucking them every which way from Sunday while you were washing his socks and pressing his shirts. So after the divorce you got yourself a career and a defensive shell a turtle would be proud of and no one and nothing has got inside that shell since then.”
She swallowed. Daniel’s summary was so uncannily accurate it was scary.
Daniel leaned forward. “You might like sex, but you’re so scared of getting hurt again you keep everyone at elbow’s length with that ice wall around you. You’ll die a withered up old lady, wondering why no one loves you.”
The tears burned at the back of her eyes but she kept them at bay through sheer willpower. “Is this how you cut people out of your life, Daniel? Is this how you’re going to get rid of me? By making me bleed so badly I want to leave?”
Shock skittered over his face and his eyes widened. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her to him, holding her tightly against him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “God, I’m so sorry, Olivia. I didn’t realize I was doing it. It just comes out of me, like poison. You have this exalted opinion of me, but I’m really a bastard. I don’t want you to go. Not yet. Stay. Please stay.”
Her tears did flow then, for he was speaking Spanish again.
She slid her arm around his neck and let herself cry and let Daniel soothe her. His hands stroked her back and her face and he kissed her brow and temple and lips. Then his index finger slipped under her chin and tilted her face up so she was looking at him.
He took a deep, calming breath. “Vistarians have this idealized image of what makes a good Vistarian man. I’m not one of them, although I always wanted to be one. My friend, the one you guessed I had—Duardo…he’s one of them. He’s fine, honorable, a brilliant soldier. I’m just the son of a bastard, in fact as well as in nature.” He rubbed his hair with his hand. “I get my coloring and my eyes from my grandmother’s family tree. British. That’s why I pose as a British businessman with a built-in suntan.”
He dropped his hand to her shoulder and it stayed there, big, heavy and warm. “My mother left my father and me when I was seven. I don’t know why. My father would never tell me and he died when I was eleven. I didn’t have any other close relatives, so I got farmed out to families in Pascuallita. Duardo’s family took me in for a time. That’s when I met him. Then Duardo’s father got sick and they had to find another place for me. I got passed around a lot after that, so I joined the army when I was sixteen and that took care of the passing around.” He took a breath and she knew that it was costing him to talk about this. Perhaps this was the first time he’d ever spoken of it aloud.
“You still didn’t belong, even in the Army, did you?” she guessed.
“No, but I was good at it and it was something to do. Then they decided that the Intelligence Unit would be a perfect fit for me and they were right. It’s a good place for lone wolves, there. After that, it was much easier going.” He took a breath. “Except I found out the world has more people like me, than like the Vistarians I wanted to be like. That was a shock when I first realized it. It was my job to find and work with people who will betray their country and you know what? Women will do it faster than men and they will do it for love. Men can be bought quicker than women. I understand that, but not why someone will do it for love.”
He was silent for a long time. Olivia tried to sit up, but he held her still.
“No, wait,” he said softly. His hand came up, the fingers together. The tips touched her lips. It was an oddly formal gesture. A very Vistarian one. She wondered if Daniel was aware of just how much he reverted to his native gestures and customs when he was speaking Spanish with her. She didn’t think he was aware of just how much his personality had been changing in the last few hours. It was as if his real nature was unearthing itself—one that had been buried beneath roles and masks and fake personalities and nationalities and accents and customs. Repressed and kept out of sight. It wasn’t as if he was actually changing personalities or morphing into a different person. It was as though he was slipping on a different coat.
One that suited him far better than the last one, Olivia thought.
“I said some terrible things to you a few moments ago,” he told her, his thumb stroking along her jaw. That was another aspect of the Vistarian Daniel. He touched. He reached for her far more easily than before.
“You don’t have to do this,” she told him, knowing what he was about to say. “I wasn’t exactly gentle myself.”
He shook his head. “Only you were right and I was wrong. I was wrong and I’m sorry. You should never change except for one thing. You should break down the ice wall. Let people in again. The world has far more assholes like me and your ex in it than the sort of upstanding Vistarians you should love, like the Duardo Peñas of the world, but you should try to find one. You deserve one.”
“As it happens, if we ever get out of this, I know exactly where to find one.” She kept her face immobile, fighting to hide the truth that must surely blaze from it if she gave in to any expression at all. Surely he could see that truth?
Daniel’s jaw shifted just a little. The smallest amount. Shock. “You do?”
She gave a small nod. “I haven’t done anything about it until now. These events here, well….” She shrugged. “I’ve decided that if I make it out of here, I’m going to do my best to get him to stay in my life once and for all. I’m sick of waiting for him to figure it out for himself.”
“He’s an idiot,” Daniel declared. “Tell him I told him so and that he should thank God every day you choose to be in his life.”
She smiled. She couldn’t help it. “I will.”
* * * * *
There was no disorientation when she woke the next time, but there was no warm body beneath her either. Instead, she found a mound of pillows, heaped to hold more or less his shape. They smelled of him. Vaguely, she remembered being moved, earlier. A kiss on the temple. Soft sounds around her.
Late afternoon sun streamed in the windows.
The chair and wedge were still in under the door, but the ceiling tile was back in place. She slid her hand under the pillow that was nominally hers on the other side of the bed and felt cold metal.
Daniel had left her the gun.
She could almost hear his voice in her mind, the words in Spanish. She could guess the answer to the question if she had asked it. “Of course you must keep the gun. I can always steal another one. We are surrounded by guns, are we not?”
Olivia shivered and sat up. She was wide awake. She lifted the gun into her lap and looked at it. There was a stylized “HK” on the front end of the barrel and a more normal looking “USP” farther back from it. The letters were stamped again close to the bottom of the handgrip. The initials meant nothing to her.
The safety lever was sitting so that a white mark lined up with the red dot on it. She held the gun up now, miming Daniel’s movements and assumed that from the way Daniel had moved the safety to “off” during the night that it was now “on”.
Just that few seconds holding the gun up made her realize how heavy it was. Daniel had made it look lightweight, holding it motionless in the air for those long moments Serrano had been manipulating the door last night. Her hand had begun to shake within seconds.
She took a minute to figure out how to eject the thing that held the bullets and when it popped out an inch or so, she jumped. She pulled it out and examined it.
The top bullet in the clip seemed extraordinarily large to her eyes. Big, bronze and lethal. She wondered if these were .45s. They looked to be about 45 millimeters across.
There was no way to tell how many bullets there was in the clip. There was also no way to tell if there was already a bullet loaded in the chamber of the gun, as some professionals liked to do to have a spare up their sleeves. She wasn’t going to look up the barrel.
If it came to using the gun, it didn’t matter how many bullets there were in it. She was just going to fire the damn thing and try to hit lethal parts of other people’s bodies. Having an extra bullet or not wouldn’t matter a damn.
She put the clip back in and looked up at the ceiling. Like Daniel, she was going to have to hide the gun during the day. She was on Serrano’s shit-list. If she was found with a weapon, he’d do more than just slap her around.
She pushed all the pillows and covers off the bed and balanced the desk chair in the middle of it. The mattress was a hard and unforgiving thing and now Olivia was grateful for the uncomfortable box. She carefully balanced herself on the chair and found she could reach the ceiling. She pushed up the same tile Daniel had lifted aside, slipped the gun up inside the ceiling and rested it on the cross brace of the tile supports. It wouldn’t do to have the gun push through the delicate ceiling tiles because it was too heavy.
She used both hands to maneuver the tile and let it drop back into place, then climbed back down onto the bed, put the chair back under the desk and headed for the bathroom.
Time for a shower, then dress, makeup and to head downstairs to the public rooms.
She halted and leaned against the bathroom door as it occurred to her that for a handful of magical, wonderful hours she had forgotten to feel like a hostage. She had been Olivia Davenport. Free, alive and—although Daniel didn’t know it—in love.
He had given her exactly what she had asked for, a highlight to make the worst day of her life the best, instead.
Smiling, she pushed herself off the door and closed it.