Chapter 5
“I’m sorry I haven’t had time to call. I was rushed to the ER and then, as soon as I got home, I jumped in the shower because I was covered in blood.”
Fisher watched Eliza’s fingers instinctively curl around the locket that held her mother’s photograph. He’d noticed she reached for the piece anytime she got nervous—which she did every time she spoke to her father.
Not that he blamed her. Leanord Meadows was as sharp as a tack and as gruff as a grizzly bear hungry from hibernation. It was an intimidating combination.
“No, no.” He watched her press a hand to her forehead. “I don’t want you to fly me to D.C. I’d rather stay here.”
Even through the phone’s small speaker, her father’s voice was low and commanding. Fisher couldn’t make out everything the man said, but he was pretty sure he caught the phrase safer here with me.
“Safer?” Eliza scrunched up her face and then quickly wiped the expression clean as if the movement hurt.
It probably did. The swelling near her temple would dissipate in a day or two. But the bruise on her cheek? That was going to last for weeks.
He’d learned many things in Delta Force. How to assess an injury was one of them. The bruise she’d sustained from having her face slammed into the ground when Charles McClean dove on top of her was a doozy.
Ol’ Charlie boy hadn’t exactly been a small man. What he’d lacked in height—Fisher would’ve guessed he topped out at about 5’11”—he’d more than made up for with muscle.
That’s what fine food and expensive personal trainers will do for a man,he mused resentfully and then reminded himself of two things. One, there was no longer any reason to be jealous of Charles McClean. And two, instead of disparaging the man’s lifestyle, he should be thanking the guy for saving the only woman Fisher had ever…
What?
What was it Fisher felt for Eliza?
Unfortunately, he knew the answer. It was possessiveness. The caveman kind where he wanted to throw her over his shoulder, cart her off to his lair, and then guard her from any comers who might think to cut even so much as a look her way.
Which sounded nice to the moon-eyed girls who went gah-gah over the heroes in those teeny-bopper books about sparkling vampires and bare-chested werewolves. But anyone with an ounce of intelligence knew possessiveness was about as far from nice as a person could get.
Possession was about ownership. Love was about freedom.
Sadly, Fisher didn’t know how to love. He had a hard, cold stone where his heart should have been. He’d inherited the damn thing from his father right along with the prickly legged monster.
“You know the security here is top-notch.” Eliza’s words dragged him from his unwelcome thoughts. “And what could be safer for me than being surrounded by a bunch of black ops soldiers? Besides,” she finished with a sticky-sounding swallow, “the danger to me is over. The shooter is dead.”
The physical danger might have passed. But Fisher knew emotional danger still loomed.
She was in shock. As soon as it dissipated, she was going to crash and crash hard.
His eyes tracked once again to the ring on her finger, a ring he couldn’t have afforded even on his best day. He didn’t envy her the coming hours and days when the realityof her situation set in. When it finally hit her, truly hit her that the man she loved was dead.
When the prickly legged beast snarled, venom dripping from its fangs, he mentally squashed it with his boot and forced himself to take stock of his surroundings.
He’d peeked into her room dozens of times over the years. But he’d been careful never to step foot inside. For one thing, living and working with folks meant there was very little privacy to be had. And what privacy any of them could find was held sacrosanct. For another thing, when he was inside her room he couldn’t escape her smell.
Her perfume lingered. That clean, crisp scent that always made him think of spring and the promise of something beautiful after a storm. And anytime he smelled it he wanted. He yearned. He wished for things that could never be and that just made him…well…sad.
Her bed was black metal. The blanket thrown over it was one of those cream, fluffy things that was basically a big pillowcase. And the painting hanging above her headboard was a blurry, nighttime cityscape—Chicago as seen through a rain-soaked windowpane.
The chair pushed into the corner was large and plush and blush colored. It matched some of the threads in the thick rug on the floor. There was one of those standing, full-length mirrors beside her dresser that reflected the two of them on the bed.
He looked large and hard and menacing.
She looked feminine and soft and…broken.
He wanted so badly to pull her back into his embrace. In fact, now that he knew what it was to hold her, to feel her heart beat in time with his own and appreciate how perfectly her head fit into the crook of his shoulder, he wondered how he’d ever lived his life without holding her.
And there it is again. That toxic need to conquer and claim.
To distract himself from his shortcomings, he let his gaze swing around her room one more time. He clocked how the pattern on the curtains matched the fabric covering the little pillow tossed into the armchair. How the jewelry stand on her dresser held only a few delicate pieces even though he knew she could probably afford to buy out half of Tiffany’s. How the large wax candle in the glass hurricane holder on the occasional table by the door was half-melted and scented the air with the faintest tinge of vanilla.
Her room was sophisticated and inviting, just like the woman herself. A warm little sanctuary inside the cold, industrial expanse of the old menthol cigarette factory. And a far cry from the sparce furnishings and threadbare quilt that filled his own room.
If he’d ever needed more proof of their differences, all he had to do was compare the small squares of space they’d carved out for themselves there at BKI.
Where she was soft and refined, he was hard and coarse. Where she was tasteful and stylish, he was boorish and uncivilized. But, most importantly, where she was used to the finer things in life, he’d gotten used to making do with the bare necessities.
The society girl and the boy from the wrong side of the tracks indeed.
“Dad, please.” Her tone had grown exasperated, and he was sorely tempted to rip the phone from her hand and tell her father to fuck off. The last thing she needed was to get on a plane and fly halfway across the country. “I’m exhausted. My head is killing me. All I want is sleep.”
He watched as a line appeared between her eyebrows. Then she shook her head. “No. I don’t know why Senator McClean invited me over tonight. I mean, I guess I assumed he was just giving Charlie a chance to rub elbows with some D.C. dealmakers. You know Charlie was always looking for support when it came to funding his charities.”
Ah, yes. Charles McClean, the ultimate do-gooder.
The prickly legged thing blinked open an eye but Fisher shoved an imaginary finger over its eyelid and told it to go back to sleep.
“Yes.” Eliza nodded. “I got a chance to talk to the senator. Just for a few minutes before he was called away by a colleague. But, Dad? Why does any of this matter? It’s not like you can solve the case from the Oval Office. Let the FBI agents do their job. And let me get some sleep. I’ll call you in the morning when I can think straight and then you can ask me anything you want, okay? I promise I’ll be better at answering questions then.”
He didn’t hear what Meadows said next. He wondered if the man said anything at all, because Eliza sighed deeply and then simply thumbed off her phone.
“He’s worried about ya,” he assured her.
Leonard Meadows was a hard man, a harried man, always in a rush. But Fisher didn’t doubt the guy loved his daughter. He’d seen it in the old codger’s eyes the one and only time the chief of staff had made a clandestine trip to BKI with Madam President to check out the men they’d hired to do their dirty work.
Or, as Eliza liked to call it, their red tape and dossier-averse work. Because the only authority the Knights reported to was the commander in chief and the only mission reports they put together went straight to the top, stamped with the directive: burn after reading.
“I know.” She nodded slowly, her expression hidden from him by a curtain of dark, damp hair. “He just has a terrible way of showing it.”
There was a note of misery in her voice. It was nearly hidden beneath the more glaring note of longing.
He knew what it was to seek the approval of a parent incapable of giving that very thing. Unlike her, though, he’d stopped searching at a very young age.
Easy to do when your dad is none other than the notorious Nash Wakefield.
He wanted to tuck her hair behind her ear so he could see her face. But he knew better than to tempt fate. It was one thing for her to instigate physicality between them. But another thing entirely for him to do it.
If he did it, he’d want to do it again. And again. And again until all he was doing was touching her every chance he got.
Then he thought… fuck it.
Careful of her injuries, he gently brushed her hair over her shoulder and anchored the front strands behind the delicate shell of her ear.
Like the rest of her, her ear was pale and perfect. His fingers lingered longer than he’d intended, his thumb and forefinger following the curve of cartilage and then lightly squeezing her earlobe.
Soft.
What other parts of her are this soft?he wondered before quickly dropping his hand and calling himself every dirty name in the book.
She didn’t need his desire; she needed his support. She didn’t need his passion; she needed his friendship.
Or did she?
When she turned to look at him, her heavy-lidded eyes—those bedroom eyes of hers that were seductive without meaning to be—showed more than simple sadness. More than pain or grief or even vulnerability. They showed…hunger?
He’d been with enough women to recognize when one wanted him. Except…
That can’t be right.
She’d spent four years batting away his every advance and rolling her eyes at his every offer of getting her naked and horizontal. And surely, tonight of all nights, she wouldn’t suddenly decide to change her mind on the matter.
The lamps on her bedside tables had those old-fashioned Edison bulbs screwed into them. They gave off a golden glow that bathed her in sepia-toned warmth and apparently had his eyes playing tricks on him.
That’s it. It’s those damn fancy bulbs that have me seein’ things that aren’t there.
Even so, his tongue felt tacky. Like it couldn’t unstick itself from the roof of his mouth. His blood ran hot, rising to the surface of his skin to warm him all over. Then there was the dull ache low in his belly, the one that told him?—
That’s my cue to leave.
“Welp.” He slapped his knees. “Reckon I better adios myself next door.”
“Wait.” When her cool hand curled around his wrist, his heated brain conjured up an image of how good it would look, how good it would feel, curled around something else entirely. “Don’t go. I?—”
She swallowed and shook her head. It caused her hair to fall over her shoulder again and conjured up a quick, feverish fantasy of what it would feel like to have that long, dark hair brushing over his chest. His belly.
“You need sleep.” He’d trained his heart to remain steady even when bullets were buzzing and bombs were bursting. But all it took was feeling her hand on him and it beat forcefully against his ribs, making them ache.
“I don’t want to be alone, Fish.” Her pretty mouth thinned. Her unpainted lips were usually a soft pink. But now they were so pale they faded into the skin over her face. “When I’m alone, I can’t stop the memories.”
She wasn’t asking for Britt or Graham or any of the others. She was asking him to stay, to be the one to help keep her demons at bay.
The feeling that rose up inside him felt like happiness. But he’d experienced so little of the emotion, he couldn’t be sure.
“Probably not a very good idea,” he managed through a throat that had gone as dry as the Sakhir Desert that time he and the Knights had been tasked with doing business in Bahrain.
“Why?” Her expression showed confusion.
’Cause I won’t be able to stop myself from touchin’ ya.
The words made it as far as the back of his throat before he closed his teeth on them. She tilted her head and there was a plea in her eyes, a request that spoke without words.
He couldn’t deny her.
He’d never been able to deny her.
“I’ll stay until ya fall asleep,” he relented.
The smile she gave him then, that sweet smile that was quintessentially Eliza and just a little lopsided, winged across the space between them and hooked into his heart.
Well, the hard, cold stone that acts as my heart,he silently corrected.
“Let me put on pajamas.”
She was off the bed in a flash. Too quick for her scrambled gray matter, because she wobbled and threw out a hand to steady herself.
He instinctively caught her fingers and rose to support her elbow. “No sudden moves with a concussion,” he warned. “Sends the room spinnin’ like you’ve had too much wine.”
She bit her lip and the sight nearly drove him to his knees. How many times had he wanted to do exactly that? Catch that plump bottom pad between his teeth and give it a quick nip before soothing the sting with his tongue?
She made a face. “Something tells me this hangover is going to kick my ass.”
He winced. “Wish I could tell ya otherwise, but experience says you’re probably right.”
“Great,” she muttered and let go of his hand to walk over to her dresser. She fished her pajamas from the top drawer and then disappeared into the bathroom.
Curling his fingers around the space where her fingers had been, he sank down on the mattress.
What the hell are ya doin’, Fish? You should be callin’ in Britt or Hewitt. Yeah, Hewitt’s perfect for this job. He’ll slouch over there in the chair and read until she falls asleep.
Just about the only time Hewitt Burch didn’t have his nose pressed between the pages of a book was when he was at the controls of a helicopter or sitting atop the black marvel that was his custom Harley.
Fisher was about to go search for the former Night Stalker—the nickname given to those in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—when the bathroom door opened.
One look at Eliza and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
Staying with her was dangerous.
Leaving her was impossible.