Chapter Twenty-Three

Niko watched her storm out of the bistro. He hadn’t handled that well, either. First, his reaction to losing himself to her during sex. Now this. Damn if he wasn’t batting zero. He left enough euros to pay their bill and headed for the door. Aly’s fine behind swayed as she marched up the street toward the apartment. By the straightness of her back, she was mad as hell. Guess he couldn’t blame her. One’s identity and name was important. So was one’s family, and truthfully, he hadn’t given any thought to hers. He’d been too focused on her safety.

He jogged to catch up to her, plucking the box from her arms. “I’ll put this in the trunk of the car.”

“One question. How far away is the closest airport? I’m going home.”

“You have no passport.”

She stopped and swung toward him. “Wait just one freakin’ minute, Jean-Luc can get me fake French I.D. papers and a fake birth certificate, but he can’t get me a passport?” She grabbed the front of his brown shirt. “Get me a French passport, you bossy, dictatorial Frenchman. You hear? Now! Or…or…” Tears pooled in her eyes again. She trembled with rage. Her eyes darted and she took a ragged breath, obviously trying to regain control for she teetered on the edge. “I don’t even know who I am anymore. I came to Paris as Alyson. You turned me into Aly. Now you tell me I’m Cally. Why is it so impossible for me to have my life back?”

“I promise to make your new life a happy one.”

“Are you that arrogant or just plain stupid? Would you allow another to tell you how to lead your life? Who you were? How you should live? To insist you couldn’t see your family again?”

Niko took her arm and led her to their car. “We’ll talk while we walk on the beach. We’ll make plans, mon amour.” Maybe he should have included her in making the plans all along, but he wanted, needed to shield her identity.

She jerked her arm from his grasp. “Look, I don’t need your help to make plans. I can make my own, thank you very much.” As they walked up the street, she mumbled under her breath. “I should have kept my fanny in North Carolina, where I belong, but noooooo I had to come to Paris. Had to have a bit of an adventure. Just had to get up early so I could be at the Louvre when it opened. Just had to pull my sketchpad out of my bag to draw her. Just had to look into the eyes of death.”

“Calm down.”

“Calm down, hell! I’ve lost everything. My identity, my name, my family, my job…my little girl.” Another sob escaped.

Dear God, how it hurts to see her like this. “I’ll make it up to you.” He never meant anything more in his life. If she gave him the chance, he would expend every ounce of energy to make her happy, to make her life complete again.

“How, Niko? How are you going to make it up to me?”

“Once we get you a passport, I’ll take you to see your family. Not to Asheville. We’ll meet them elsewhere for the first few times. Then, as time passes, we can go there. You’ll see Rhiannon again. We can take her to special places for little vacations. We’ll be a part of her life, I promise.”

She eyed him warily. “I can see my family again?”

“I’ll make it happen. I promise.”

“You talk like you expect to be a part of my life for a long time.”

Tread softly. “I’m hoping you’ll marry me. Eventually.”

They reached the Citroen, and he unlocked the trunk. She glared at him. “You really are a piece of work, you arrogant Frenchman. How much of all this secrecy is necessary and how much is your manipulating me to get your way?”

“I love you.”

She gave an unladylike snort in response.

He deposited her vase and purse in the trunk. Then he led her toward the beach. “Take off your shoes.” He removed his loafers. Together they stepped onto the sand.

“I know this is a lot to take in.”

She glared at him. Oh, yeah, she’s pissed.

“When I rode with you in the ambulance to the hospital, I knew the only way to throw The Red Hand off your trail was to register you at the hospital as another person, Alice Newman. Doing that gave you a measure of safety. Not enough. So I wrote up a report listing you as deceased and filed it with the police department, as well as my anti-terrorism unit. Jean-Luc found an unknown female at the morgue and used his influence there.” He laid his arm across her shoulder, and she jerked away.

They continued walking, cold waves lapping at their ankles and seagulls crying overhead. “As I told you, we had the woman cremated under your name. This thickened the layer of safety around you. Tell me, was I wrong to do this?” He grabbed her arm and turned her toward him. “Good Lord, mon amour, there was a handprint of your blood on the building’s façade where I found you. Do you have any idea what seeing that did to me? These people aren’t playing games. You have to accept that.”

Her hand trembled as it covered her mouth. “I didn’t know.”

“When you love someone the way I love you and you see their blood running down a wall, believe me, you’ll do anything—anything—to keep that loved one safe. Even if it means bending laws to achieve that purpose.” He glanced out toward the English Channel. “I never thought I’d feel that way. My job always came first. Always. Until I looked into your soft blue eyes. Until you, mon amour, nothing mattered but the job. Now, nothing matters, but you.”

“So I can never be Alyson Moore again?” She stepped closer and regarded him.

Lord help me, I want to give her the answer she desires, but I can’t.

“If you do anything in your name, use your charge cards, access your bank accounts, notify anyone back in the States, The Red Hand will find out. Then all my carefully laid plans will be for nothing. You’ll be in danger again.”

“How long? How long do I have to live this lie?”

He lowered his head to kiss her, and she backed away. She was killing him. A cold sense of panic gripped his heart. “Until I catch the leaders of this terrorist group. That’s the most honest answer I can give you.”

“How long have you been trying to apprehend them?”

His Aly was no dummy. She was making a point. His eyes locked on hers. “Over three years.”

Aly turned to walk away. Niko reached out and snagged her arm. “Okay, if you’re going to be mad as hell, let’s get this all out in the open and deal with it.”

She tossed her shoes onto the sand and planted her fists on her slender hips. “I’m waiting.”

“I love you.” She turned her head, and he grabbed her chin and turned her face toward his. “You might be too pissed to admit it right now, but you love me, too. What happened between us this morning wouldn’t have been as mind-blowing as it was, if you didn’t.”

Two huge tears spilled from her blue eyes and floated down her cheeks. “I hate you.”

He enveloped her in his arms and rested his chin on the top of her head. “I know you do. Right now I hate myself, too, for hurting you after we made love and for upsetting you over this name change business.”

“Why did you act that way? Earlier, I mean.”

The moment of truth had come. He knew it was barreling down on him like a runaway train. Niko had to tell her. If he wanted her to trust him—and he did—he had to share his secret. Still, how would she react? Would she understand or walk out of his life forever? If she left him, he had no doubt all the color would drain out of his world, for this woman was the rainbow of his heart. Knowing this, he forged ahead, hanging desperately to the hope she’d understand.

“No one knows this. You’re the first person I’ve told.” His hands slid up and down her back. “In my job I deal with a lot of top secret data. I’m entrusted with this.” He blew out a ragged sigh. The next five words were the hardest he ever had to speak and he did so on a whisper. “I betrayed my country’s trust.”

Aly leaned back and gazed up at him, her eyes searching. “How?”

He kissed her, for at this moment he needed his lips on hers, to draw on her strength perhaps. “One of the things that drew Hae-Won and me together was our mutual ambition. I wanted to head my unit one day. She wanted a Pulitzer in photographic journalism.”

“How long did you see each other?”

“Eight months. I came to her rescue at a hotel bar in Kuwait. Some guys were pushing her around, grabbing her. We barely exchanged names. A month later we ran into each other at a news conference in London. The Red Hand bombed a bus, and I was heading the investigation. My last job with Interpol. I’d already been recruited for my current position. Before long we were involved. My long hours became a sore spot between us. I often worked late and on weekends.”

“If she was ambitious, certainly she could appreciate the same quality in you.”

His arms tightened around her. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? We made plans to go see her family in South Korea. Two days before we were scheduled to leave, there was a café bombing on the Right Bank. Four French citizens were killed. Two more injured. I suspected The Red Hand. I told Hae-Won I couldn’t take time off work and she’d have to go see her parents without me.” In his mind, he could hear her yelling. See her snatching the picture of the two of them off his desk in the den and flinging it against the wall. “We had a terrible argument.”

“I see. What happened?”

“She was hysterical. Crying and throwing things. I went to the kitchen to get her some wine, hoping it would calm her down. It was late and I was working at home. My laptop was running.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I failed to log out of a secret file when I left the den to go to the kitchen. My negligence. I’ve cursed myself a thousand times for it, but I was so wrapped up in her, so upset that she was worked up.”

He exhaled a long, loud sigh. “While I was getting her some wine, Jean-Luc called with some new intel. I was on the phone with him quite some time…”

“…and she snooped on your computer.”

Niko nodded. “I had the list of Red Hand’s hideouts on the screen and how we’d learned of each location.” He lifted a shoulder. “If the accuracy of a particular location had been verified and how. She evidently wrote the addresses down and went in search of her elusive ‘Pulitzer Prize picture.’ She was gone by the time I returned with the wine. A note was scrawled on a notepad that she’d see me after her trip. Hell, I thought she meant the trip to see her parents in Korea.”

“But she went in search of Red Hand instead.”

“Yes. When she did, Red Hand captured and killed her.” He glanced out over the English Channel. “Or did I kill her by carelessly walking away from top secret information?”

“So you’ve blamed yourself for her death?”

Niko released her and bent to scoop up some seashells, tossing them one by one into the sea. It was a stalling tactic, but he needed to settle his emotions. “I’m responsible for two crimes. A crime against my country and a crime against the woman I loved. My negligence caused her death.”

“Carrying around all that guilt must weigh you down.”

A harsh bark of laughter escaped. “Guilt? Oh yeah, I’ve lived with guilt every day since I walked away from my computer with secure information on it. A few stokes of the keys and that information would have been locked away, but I was too upset over her anger. In my frantic state to hang onto her, I lost control and allowed her access to information about The Red Hand. Information my country deemed top secret.”

She took his hand, and they started walking again. “I’m the only one you’ve ever told about this?”

He nodded. “I think Jean-Luc suspects, but we’ve never talked about it. I hold some of his secrets, too.”

“Why have you taken on all the blame?”

“What do you mean?”

“Snooping on someone else’s computer is wrong. She was evidently an intelligent woman. She had to know you were working with files from work. Top secret files. She had no business looking. Had no business stealing that information. She was wrong. Not you.”

“But…”

She gave him that hard glare she had. “No buts. She snooped through top secret information. That’s a crime in my book. Yes, you were careless in leaving that file open, but you didn’t do it on purpose. Her actions. on the other hand, were deliberate.”

“You don’t blame me? You blame her?”

“Hell, yeah!” She cut him a look. “Pardon my French.”

Niko laughed, finding enormous relief in her ability to sooth him. He brought their entwined hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “I’ve lived with a lot of shame for the past two years.”

“It’s time you let it go. You didn’t do anything wrong. Not really.”

She was trying to ease his guilt. If he hadn’t loved her unconditionally before, he did now. “I wish your questions held some merit. No one had access to the intelligence I did. To mollify her anger over the trip to see her parents and to show her how important she was to me, I lost control of my sense of duty worrying about Hae-Won’s anger. That was wrong.

“I promised myself I’d never lose control with another woman again. Then this afternoon, you literally rocked my foundation with your foreplay. What a delightful combination you were. Provocative minx and sweet innocence. I lost control. Total control. At that moment, I couldn’t tell where you left off and I began. It scared the hell out of me.”

Aly turned and wrapped her arms around his neck. Her soft blue eyes seemed to drink him in. “You honor me with your secret. I will honor you by keeping it, although in my humble opinion, you did nothing wrong. I love you, Niko Reynard.” She pulled his head down to hers and whispered against his lips, “I love you.”

This woman, this soft little woman who held him in her arms was so strong, so sweet, he could barely stand it. As waves tumbled toward the shore, its foamy fingers trying to grasp the sand, Niko and Aly embraced and kissed. Slowly the guilt and shame he carried flowed out to sea amid those foamy sea caps.

“Take me back to our apartment, Niko. Make love to me. Show me delights I’ve never known before.”

Their loving was slow and gentle, full of sighs and promises. Piece by piece, they undressed each other. No games were played this time. Honesty flowed between them. Feelings were shared and hearts joined.

Niko covered her with kisses from her forehead to the soles of her feet. He turned her over and kissed her from her heels to the tips of her ears. No part of her body was ignored. He turned her onto her back again and cupped her breasts. “You are so beautiful, mon amour.” He dipped his head and drew her nipple into his mouth. Her back arched and she moaned. His fingers slid down, seeking her core. Her fingernails dug into his back as her moans grew louder.

When he was sure she teetered on the edge, he entered her. He raised himself to keep the weight of his body off hers. “Look at me, cherie. I want to see the emotions play out on your face.” He pulled out and slowly entered her again. “You feel like hot satin. You belong to me now, and I to you.” He set the speed of his strokes, withdrawing until he nearly left the warmth of her body and then pushing in to the hilt. As his slow strokes quickened, he fought the need to climax.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he was nearly undone. When he felt her spasms start, he covered her lips with his, swallowing her cries as she tumbled into ecstasy. With one final hard thrust, he threw his head back and cried out her name, finding his own private rainbow of blinding colored lights.