Chapter 4
Chapter Four
She didn’t know him. At all.
Not anymore. Delaney stared up at the darkened ceiling. She should have been asleep. She should have been exhausted, and she should have crashed from the adrenaline high and went straight to dreamland.
Only she hadn’t.
Because Nash Quinn wasn’t a doctor. He hadn’t finished medical school and gone on to live his dream of being a trauma surgeon. He’d…become a spy?
In what world?
“You’re not sleeping, Delaney.” A growl from the bed near hers.
She rolled onto her side. She couldn’t see much of him in the dark. He was just a big, shadowy form. “How do you know?” She’d been very, very quiet. And surely at least half an hour had passed? Maybe an entire hour?
Nash is a spy. A spy.
And her groom had been an international criminal.
And somehow, this utter madness was her life. She knew because she’d pinched herself three times, thinking that she would wake up from this nightmare.
Turned out that she was awake.
“How do I know? You mean other than the obvious fact that you’re talking to me right now?” Mocking. “Your breathing is too tense. Far too hard and fast. And you keep shifting around on the bed every three seconds. The rustles are a dead giveaway.”
Their beds were so close together that if she’d reached out, she might have been able to touch him.
She did not reach out. But she wanted to touch him, even as she might have been afraid of him.
“You sent out some texts, after you got off the phone with Agnes.” After his big reveal about being a spy. “Who did you contact?”
“People who can help us.”
“People at the CIA?” Because he was a freaking spy. And her fiancé had been an international criminal. She kept circling back to those two important details again and again. And did anyone in this world not lie all the time?
“It’s kind of a down-low sort of thing,” he told her as his deep voice rumbled in the darkness. “Try not to announce my spy status to anyone, would you? It’s a secret, one between me and you.”
“And the people you contacted, the ones you texted.”
“Yes.”
“Because they are all after Kurt or Typhon or whatever ridiculous name he’s using?”
“The criminal with the codename of Typhon is no joke, don’t make that mistake. He’s got a kill list a mile long. He’s in bed with more major criminal players than you can imagine, and when it comes to the weapons trade, he is as dirty as they come.”
Clearly, she had incredible luck when it came to picking men.
“What I don’t get…” Nash muttered, seemingly more to himself than to her, “is why he wanted to marry you.”
Well, insulting much. “You don’t think he took one look into my eyes and lost his heart?”
“Delaney—”
“Because he didn’t. Not even close. Though that was what he wanted me to believe. Instead, he was after me because of what he’d gain once he became my husband.” The darkness was oddly comforting. Made it easier for her to talk. “I don’t know how much you may have heard about me over the years…”
“I tried not to hear anything.”
She swallowed. “Thank you for that. Really. Lovely.” Talk about a brutal response. As if her heart had needed to be crushed any more than it already was.
His covers rustled. “Delaney, wait, that’s not what I meant!”
“I left the US. Before my mother died, she wanted to reconnect with her father. They’d been estranged for my entire life.
I’d never met the man, not until I left with her.
I met him for the first time right before my twenty-third birthday.
” The first meeting had been brief. Awkward.
Cold. “My mother got a villa in Italy. I studied design, worked on my master’s, and the days passed.
” Slowly. “We spent more time with my grandfather. It became less awkward.” But, still somehow, just as cold.
“Then my mother got sick. She was in and out of the hospital, and before I knew it, she’d passed.
” And Delaney had just been left with the grandfather who felt like such a stranger.
“I’m sorry. Your mother was always kind to me.”
Sorrow pulled at her. “She tended to be kind to everyone. Which was why I never understood how she and her father had stopped speaking for so long. Then I met him. Got to know him and a lot became clear to me.” Her chest ached. “He was a difficult man. Demanding. Controlling. And stupid rich.”
“Excuse me?”
“Apparently, my grandfather didn’t approve of my father.
He’d told my mother that if she married him, he’d cut her off completely.
Obviously, she married my father, and they had plenty of wonderful years together before—” Delaney stopped.
She inhaled, then made herself finish, “Before my father was killed in a robbery at his garage.” Her father had been alone there, after hours, when the robber broke in and shot him.
A bullet in the head and one in the heart.
The safe in the garage had been emptied. The killer never caught.
The grief had nearly destroyed Delaney’s mother. And Delaney had felt like a walking ghost for weeks. Pain still pulsed through her when she thought of her father. He’d always had such a warm smile. Been willing to help everyone.
There had been no sign of forced entry at the garage, and the cops had thought that her dad might have let the attacker inside. Maybe her dad had believed the person knocking on the closed door needed help. He’d opened the door to help and been killed for his kindness.
Nash had gone with her to her father’s funeral. Nash had been steady and strong when everything else had been falling apart around her.
“Delaney?” Nash’s gentle prompt.
She realized the grief from the past had pulled her under. A few deep, long breaths, and she nodded. “Sorry.” Rushed. “I, um, I was talking about my grandfather, wasn’t I?”
“You don’t need to apologize to me. Not ever.”
His words eased some of the tension in her shoulders.
Delaney picked up her story, trying to keep her voice flat as she said, “My mother died.” A long and painful battle with the bitch that was cancer.
“Two years later, my grandfather died, and when he passed, that was when I discovered that I was in his will. His sole heir. He’d made that will on the day I was born.
My grandfather kept his promise to cut out my mother, but he left everything to me. ” And by everything…
I don’t know what to do with this new life.
I don’t know how to act. Who to be. “I wasn’t ready for that world, or the predators that would come calling.
My grandfather had land, property—everywhere.
He owned so much property that, hell, he practically owned towns.
And he died, and it all went to me, and I…
” She sucked in a deep breath. Slowly exhaled.
“Based on what Kurt told me when I was locked up in his closet, my grandfather’s holdings are not all what you’d call legal. ”
Nash grunted.
“Maybe that was another reason why my mother fled Italy and didn’t go back for so long.
” Delaney didn’t know for sure because her mother had never revealed much about the past to her.
“I know Kurt wanted what I had. He wanted everything that my grandfather left me. And I know when I die, as my husband, he would get it.”
“What was he gonna do? Fake an accident for you?”
“He promised to drown me on the honeymoon. Such a tragic end for me. Kurt swore that he’d play the grieving widower perfectly.”
“Fucking sonofabitch.”
Yes. Indeed. He—
She heard a creak just beyond the closed motel room door. Automatically, she stiffened. Her gaze flew to the door.
Just footsteps. Just someone going past to another room. Stop being so afraid. You’re safe. You are—
A hand pressed over her mouth. “Do not make a sound,” Nash ordered.
He’d moved in complete silence. And so quickly.
“Get out of the bed, Delaney.”
She inched out of the bed.
But she could hear the faint snick of the door’s lock. Nash grabbed her, he hauled her against his body, and they rushed toward the wall behind that door.
They reached the wall just as the door began to creak open. Inch by slow inch.
Nash pushed her into the corner. He stood near her, and she couldn’t see anything because the door was in her way and Nash was in front of her like a giant, very protective shield.
The door slipped open a few more inches. The light from outside spilled into the room. As before, the light flashed on. Then off. On and then…
Nash slammed into the open door with all of his strength. The door went flying, and it rammed into the side of the man who’d just broken into their motel room.
The man let out a loud, pain-filled howl, one that pierced Delaney’s ears, but the sound was abruptly cut off.
She heard the thud of flesh hitting flesh. A shudder worked over her.
The door shut. The lock clicked back into place.
Nash flipped on the overhead lights in the motel room, and she saw him standing over the intruder.
Her breath heaved in and out as she craned her neck to look down at—wait.
Hold on. Was their intruder some teen? He looked maybe seventeen years old. Eighteen?
The long-limbed figure on the floor threw back his head. Lots of curly hair covered his head and part of that hair was blue. He swiped his hand over his face and smeared blood across his chin and cheek and a rather sad little mustache. The guy glared at Nash. “You dick!”
“You little shit,” Nash snarled back. “Do you want me to kill you here and now?”
The intruder on the floor scuttled back, moving like a crab, and his frantic gaze jumped from the left, to the right, and then landed on her.
“Oh, no.” Nash immediately moved to stand in front of her. “You don’t look at her. Not even for a second.”
“He’s coming! I already put in the call!” A triumphant announcement from the teen on the floor. Only, maybe he wasn’t a teen. Maybe he was older than he’d first appeared. She tried to ease around Nash in order to get a better look at the intruder.
“I told him where she was!”