Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(78)

“You need to be at your best. For whatever’s coming down the pike.”

Panic surged, and I pushed it down. But it was like trying to drown an elephant.

“I’m afraid of you,” I whispered. “Afraid to be too close.”

“Rosie.” His voice cracked. He pulled back, and the light fell between us, dull and fly spotted.

“Don’t touch me.”

“I want to help you. Only that.”

I remembered the bloody rag at the strip club. Neatly folded and spattered with blood. “They hurt you, too.”

“He hadn’t really started.”

The room was overwarm, the air as thick and languid as the tropics. My blood throbbed under the weight of my confusion. For a few moments I let my mind run along a path into a future that included both of us.

“Maybe it’s not you I’m afraid of.” I touched a single lock of Dougie’s hair. “Maybe it’s me.”



I sat on one of the beds, my feet flat on the floor and my back snugged against Clyde, who lay sprawled down the middle. Dougie returned from the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. He switched on the table lamp so that the light fell across the bed, then knelt in front of me.

I’d long ago removed the Kevlar. Now I stripped off my filthy T-shirt. Dougie’s eyes swept past my bra and came to rest on my ribs. Gently, he turned me so the light slanted over my skin.

His fingers left burn marks where they touched.

Tenderly, he peeled away the blood-soaked bandage. He studied the wound for a moment, then rose and went into the bathroom, returning with more towels and a damp washcloth. He opened his backpack.

I stared. “You have medical supplies?”

“I’ve spent the last two years running deep ops in remote places. Had to be ready for anything.”

“The kind of secret ops that meant you couldn’t pick up the phone and call me?”

“Exactly those kind.”

“Three years, Dougie.”

His eyes met mine. “Having me back in your life would have brought you the wrong kind of attention. I wouldn’t risk it.”

“You should have given me a choice.”

“No.” He closed his eyes. Opened them. “Not even that.”

A storm surge of hurt washed up against me.

What kind of man chooses to remain dead to those who love him, just so he can get the job done? And how far into the covert world had he stepped by the time I met him in Iraq?

Maybe the Dougie I thought I knew had never existed.

“It was a mistake,” I said. “Falling in love with me.”

“It wasn’t in the plan.” His mouth ticked up. “But it was never a mistake.”

So perhaps even the strongest among us have an Achilles’ heel. Who would turn away love?

An image of Cohen rose, along with another surge of pain. Cohen didn’t know about Dougie.

Another part of my past I hadn’t shared.

As Dougie worked, I studied the top of his head, the thick, dark-blond curls. In Iraq, he’d worn a bandanna to keep his hair back from his face. Or a keffiyeh when he needed to move in secret. In the desert, riding horseback, he’d been exotic. Mesmerizing. A man both at home in the wilderness and startlingly alien.

Here, in this dreary hotel room, he was even more so.

I said, “How long have you known about the Alpha?”

He shook his head. “I knew we had a traitor in Iraq. But I didn’t know he was still active until I pulled Malik out of that shit-hole spy school. The Alpha knows more about me than I do about him.”

A needle bit my skin, and I jerked.

“Anesthetic,” he said. “Stay still.”

He was much as I remembered him. Still tall, of course. Still strong. Eyes brilliant in the semigloom, the blue-green of tropical seas. There were new wrinkles—crow’s feet around his eyes, two vertical lines like slashes on each side of his mouth. And the expression in his eyes had shifted from optimism to something darker.

I gasped when he pulled a different needle through my skin. He murmured an apology but didn’t stop.

Could a person be of two hearts? Could you walk through life loving one person as much as another? Or, with the sides irreconcilable, would your heart eventually break beneath the load?

I closed my eyes and focused on the pain.

“Done,” he said after a time.

I glanced down. He’d closed the wound with tight, neat stitches. “It looks good.”

His fingers smoothed a bandage over the wound. He ran one thumb up my rib cage, and the air shifted as we both sucked in our breaths. He removed my ball cap and fisted a tangled lock of my hair.

“You could have died in Mexico,” he said. “I should have stopped him sooner. I was afraid to show my hand.”

Gently I disentangled his fingers. “We should sleep now.”

“Just give me this moment.”

His thumb stroked the side of my face, his touch as light as if he had no more substance than one of my ghosts.

He said, “What kept me alive was the thought of being with you again.”

“Sh.”

“Every day in Iraq, a movie played in my mind. A movie of what our life would be when we were together again. You’d be a teacher, like you always wanted. I’d stay home and cook. Tend a garden.”