Duke’s brow furrowed at the question, one he doubted she’d like the answer for. “For the moment, I’d like you to rest and heal.”
Beneath him, Caitlyn froze. “You said we were going home. What aren’t you telling me?” she asked in a dangerously soft voice.
His long exhale of frustration tickled across her flesh, raising the delicate hairs along her neck and arms in alarm. “There’s nothing to tell, darlin’. We don’t yet know what we’re up against.”
Caitlyn processed his statement in a soporific haze. She hurt. And her body was so tired that her exhaustion felt like a drug, her limbs heavy and unresponsive. From the little that she’d gleaned, both from her kidnappers and from Duke and her rescuers after, his statement made no sense.
They’d taken out the rogue agents. They’d incapacitated the terrorist agents and turned them over to Interpol.
“I thought—.” Her voice trailed off as an irrational panic fueled by fatigue washed over her. If this was l
As soon as Caitlyn woke, immediately she reached behind her, seeking Duke’s reassuring presence and warmth. Instead, her fingertips found only empty space, and she frowned, rolling to her back to look at his side of the bed. Her fingertips hadn’t lied. He was gone, and by the cool feel of the sheets, he had been for some time. She squeezed her eyes shut against the brightness of the sun against the curtained windows, then gave a soft grunt as acknowledgment of her body’s lingering pain. She continued to lay as she was, contemplating all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. All that she’d learned from Richards and Jantzi. All that she’d learned from Duke and his remarkably resourceful and strangely unnerving friend, Jay Ellis and his sister. Her thoughts strayed to what Duke had said about envying Alex. The vulnerability she’d heard in his voice when he’d admitted it made her tense and agitated, and left her feeling guilty and defenseless in an unhappy marriage of roiling
When he opened the bedroom door, Caitlyn was seated on the foot of the bed. Her hands rested, relaxed, in her lap, and her eyes fixed without seeing on a random spot on the floor. She’d showered, and looked the better for it without the smudges of wiped off blood from the day before, but she was still dressed in her filthy clothes. Now that she was clean, every mark and bruise on her body conveyed the full impact of what she’d been through in aching detail. The fine hairs on the back of Duke’s neck lifted and stood on end suddenly and he cursed himself in his head. She was waiting. Something was very wrong. “Darlin’?” Her eyes lifted and focused as he drew her replacement luggage into the room, then shut the door behind him. When she eyed the new suitcase, he explained. “It’s—they destroyed yours. Had Allie pick you up a replacement that she thought you might like. Your clothes are still here.” “Something from her bag of tricks?” she said softly, but t
Duke lay along Caitlyn’s side, his bicep pillowing her neck. It had taken a boring wander through the villa’s library, then a long walk through the guarded forest around them, and finally a sedative before she’d relaxed enough to drowse. His fingers twisted into her hair and he pressed a kiss against her unbruised temple, solely so he could inhale the scent off her. His entire life, he’d lived essentially without fear, trained to protect, prepared to die. Which suited him just as well. Fear pissed him off. The paralyzing characteristics of it pissed him off, and he had no use for that kind of emotion. Not in his line of work. But now, he knew what it meant, how it felt to be vulnerable. He’d become all too familiar with being afraid in a way he didn’t like. He slid his hand across her flat belly, gripping her hip gently to pull her closer against him, feeding his warmth into her. Under the effect of the sedative, she never stirred. What the hell am I going to do? He’d wracked his br
The kitchen was busy, with small packs of Jay’s men coming and going. Distracted by all the activity, Caitlyn retreated with a plate to a far corner, watching the goings-on with a keen eye. There were a lot of men here. Big men. With a lot of weapons. An army to protect one woman with only one thing of value. As Rachel entered the kitchen, she saw heads turn to follow the pretty blonde. One of them was Jay’s. Immediately, his chair slid back and he was on his feet following her, despite the plunging mercury surrounding her. “Hey, princess.” Even in the noisy room, Caitlyn could hear him clearly. “Let me fix you a plate. Or something else if you don’t like what’s here already.” Pivoting sharply, Rachel heaved a barely tolerant sigh when he crashed into her, then threw his hands off her hips where he’d caught and steadied her. When she glared up at him, his lazy smirk widened. Beside Caitlyn, Duke leaned in and whispered, “He’s got a thing for her.” She snorted at the understateme
Having seen the kind of security detail that Allie and Jay employed, even for their traveling army, Caitlyn knew there was no way the protection at her lab had ever been enough to keep someone out. What she and Alex had always counted on was the fact that little was known about the kind of research they were doing. That few would understand its potential, even if they did.Yet the connection that Allie had found had ties to arms dealers. And Agent Richards had told her the group that had helped him kidnap her was some sort of terrorist organization. What she’d seen as she’d slipped past was that her enemy was a billionaire recluse.One with a penchant for a lot of illegal activities.Unseeing, she drifted by rote towards the room she was sharing with Duke. For an organization based in Europe to have learned of her work, there had to be some more personal connection—a family member of one of her patients, maybe the family member of one of the lab employees. She turned the handle to the
Duke had been expecting the worst almost since the moment he’d recovered Caitlyn. But he’d been especially on edge after their last conversation. She’d fumed moodily but silently in the circle of his arms for perhaps another half hour, then she’d fallen asleep.That was a mercy he’d be denied long into the night.The situation was simple. He couldn’t let her kill anyone else, especially not the way she intended. He’d been in this business long enough to know how revenge paid out with Karma in the end. All his connections—all Jay’s connections—they could only do so much if she used her signature medical treatment to outright kill someone.Even the kind of scum they were talking about now.It wouldn’t matter that she’d eliminated someone that the planet was well rid of—she’d be wasting her life’s work, undoing all the good she’d already done for the world and all of it she had yet to do. All to kill a man who was probably sanctioned in at least some capacity by at least one government.
A thick white fog swirled through Caitlyn’s returning consciousness, writhing with the tumbling flow of wild emotions and overpowering perceptions. It glittered with silvery motes of light, a colorless sky full of dreams, sailing and bobbing like the spume of waves. With a blind eye, she watched them each in turn, letting the cascade of memories sweep over and into her. The sparkling particles caressed her like waves, some gentle with forgiveness and others that scraped across her agonized recollections with painful regret. From some long-forgotten corner of her mind, they drew the early yearnings as her childhood friendship with Alex had morphed into what should have been a lifetime of love. Only now, the pristine white stained with a dark ripple of black varnished red with guilt knowing his reaping came at her own hand. But his killer had come. He’d come for her exactly as she’d known he would. Suspended in that deathless instant when her heightened senses had detected the impact
Caitlyn hadn’t ridden in a helicopter since medical school during clinical rotations, when she’d volunteered as an EMT physician for eight weeks. She hadn’t regretted it. The helicopter flight to the picturesque costal city against strong wind coming from varying directions hadn’t been pleasant with a throbbing headache and the rush of adrenaline nauseating her. She doubted even without those and the gusty winds that the noisy, shuddering machine would have been much better. It didn’t help that it was dark either. There was little to focus on in the gloom to help keep the vertigo from adding to her queasiness. At least not until the moon-kissed spume of the waves off the Adriatic came into view along the coast. Not long after, the golden glow of the street lamps and windows of the terraced, hilltop city appeared, and mercifully, soon they were landing. Escorted again on both sides, she quickly lost her way inside the twisting stone corridors of the fortress perched at the summit of