Darkness(94)

“I do.” She put her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers felt delicate and cool.

“I think you’re pretty great, too.” His voice was husky. Coming from her, the faint, clean scent of the same soap he’d showered with that hadn’t done a thing for him at the time now teased his nostrils like the headiest of perfumes. “And beautiful. And sexy as hell.”

“You do?” She snuggled close, and he got treated to some full body contact with a whole lot of Downy-soft flannel. Suddenly he was so consumed with lust that he ached. Jesus God, maybe he had a granny nightgown fetish. Who’d known? His hand closed on a firm round breast with an eager little nipple that he could feel nudging his palm through the cloth.

“Mm-hmm.” He kissed the breast his hand had captured, opening his mouth and teasing her nipple with his teeth and tongue until the flannel was wet and she was gasping and clutching at his shoulders and straining up against him.

Then he kissed her mouth.

By the time the nightgown finally came off—half a dozen confoundingly tiny buttons at the neck made removing the damned thing more of a challenge than he had foreseen—her legs were wrapped tight around his waist and he was thrusting hard inside her. His mouth was on her bare breasts and her hands were buried in his hair and she was moving beneath him and moaning. He couldn’t have been hotter if he’d been set on fire.

His last semilucid thought before he succumbed to the flames was, I ain’t letting this woman go.





Chapter Twenty-Eight





Whitman showed up on schedule, as Cal had been sure he would. The moment Whitman realized that Cal had escaped from Attu, it would have been his top priority to hotfoot it back to his office in Seattle, because as far as he knew, Cal had no inkling that Whitman had been involved, and he would take the greatest precautions to make sure Cal never found out. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Gina and her description of Heavy Tread’s voice, Cal might never have suspected. Also, if it hadn’t been for Gina, he probably wouldn’t have been alive to worry about it.

So he owed her a lot. And as he’d told her that morning when he pulled her into the shower with him, he always paid his debts. In full. With interest.

Whitman arrived at Eielson that afternoon.

They were ready and waiting for him.



CAL IN a blue hospital gown, stretched out in a semireclining position in a hospital bed, white blanket tucked around him up to the waist, an IV taped to his arm, in a white-walled hospital room complete with beeping monitors, should have looked a lot more helpless and vulnerable than he did, Gina thought.

Watching through a two-way mirror from the room next door, she decided that the man looked about as helpless and vulnerable as a rottweiler.

“Boy doesn’t look sick a bit,” Cal’s father observed with disgust. He was beside her, sitting in a cushioned office chair just as she was. With them were two D632 agents, also seated. All of them were focused on the room next door. When she’d been driven to the hospital some hours after Cal had left early that morning, Gina had thought that she was being taken to visit him in his sickbed. It had been obvious to her from the moment she’d been ushered into this adjoining room and discovered that she could both see Cal and most of his room through the two-way mirror—what kind of hospital room had a two-way mirror?—and hear everything that was going on in said room, that something else was up.

Just what it was she wasn’t quite sure, but she was tense with anticipation.

“He had surgery this morning,” Gina pointed out mildly. “To remove a bullet.”

“Outpatient surgery. Could have popped that thing out with his fingers.” The general shook his head. “Doctor told me that it was right there under the skin. Not much worse than a splinter. Damn it, he’s supposed to look like he’s on his last legs. He never could pretend worth a flip.”

Pretend? Gina cast him a sharp look, but was distracted by the opening of the door in Cal’s room.

A man walked in, closing the door behind him. He looked to be around forty, with short, well-groomed, tobacco-brown hair and an open, pleasant face. He was over six feet tall, slightly stocky in build, well dressed in a camel overcoat over a dark suit. Gina supposed he could have been described as possessing all-American good looks, although the broad smile with which he advanced on Cal struck a wrong note in her somewhere.

“Whitman,” Cal greeted him, and held out his hand.

“Was I ever glad to hear from you.” Whitman shook Cal’s hand. “The intelligence I got—it said you were all lost along with the plane. I—”

Whitman kept talking, but Gina stopped listening. His words, uttered in a slow Texas drawl, seemed to buzz around her head like bees. Then she realized that the buzzing was in her ears, and that her ears were buzzing because she was light-headed, and she was light-headed because—

“Gina. Is something wrong?” The general leaned toward her, gripping her hand as it rested limply on the arm of her chair. His hand felt surprisingly like Cal’s, big and long-fingered and strong. The realization gave her something to focus on, an anchor to help pull her back from the dizziness that threatened to swamp her, and she gripped his fingers in turn.

“I know that voice,” she said. “That man was on Attu. He was involved in the murders of my friends.”