For the first time in nearly four months, she dared dream about afterward. She wasn't naive enough to imagine she would escape this hell without some emotional scars. She wondered if it would be easier to move forward with someone who understood the nightmare as Phillip and Kayla had done. Or would any relationship need to be a fresh start with no connections or reminders of...everything.
Of course, she would have one very tangible reminder in the baby. She wouldn't abort it. And even as she considered adoption, she just as quickly abandoned the notion because it smacked too much of her mother's leaving. As much as she tried to put a positive spin on that one, it still hurt.
Deeply. It had taken her a long time to share her real feelings about that with Blake.
She squinted into the rippling heat waves distorting the horizon. Could he see her? Focus in on her more clearly now than he had in those early months of their relationship when she'd kept so much hidden. Out of his reach. She tried to remember what sort of equipment he mentioned using on other missions. But then before long they'd avoided talking about work. Hers and his.
Until finally there hadn't been anything left to talk about but their jobs...
"If you quit, I will, too.'' Sydney delivered her ultimatum with hope, even while deep within her a voice much like her practical sister's insisted she'd just dealt the relationship a death blow.
Blake turned his head on the pillow. "What?''
"If you quit the Navy, I'll resign my position with the IFB. I won't go to Rubistan.''
He leaned to kiss her, inching the patchwork quilt higher to combat the Virginia winter chill. "You know I can't do that. I owe time. I can't walk away without risking a court martial.''
"Then stop being a SEAL. There are other things you can do in the Navy that won't take you into the same dark pits you've seen lately.''
He stopped adjusting the quilt around them. Morning sun glinted a halo off his golden hair, highlighting the swirl of his boyish cowlick so at odds with the honed man. "You're not really serious. You just want me to be the one to say no so you're off the hook.''
"Try me.''
"Fine, then." Rare strains of anger tightened his jaw. "I'll make this easy for you. Quitting is not an option. I'm a SEAL. It's who I am and if you can't live with that then apparently you can't live with me."
"Why can't you see the same applies for me, as well? The very things you want from me are the things that make it impossible for me to walk away from what I do."
"Bullshit. At least I protect myself.''
"We have protection. Escorts."
He snorted.
"More of you are injured and killed in your profession than mine. The only real difference I can see here is that you're a man and I'm a woman."
His eyes shut tight. Exploding into motion, he rolled away from her and buried his face in his hands. "Damn it, Sydney, you don't know what I've seen over there. What they can do to you.''
Because he wouldn't talk to her. Instead he let it swallow him whole until she, knew one day he wouldn't come back even if the shell of his body walked in the door. "I love you, Blake.''
Muscles flexed and rippled across his back, twitched in his arms. "You know I love you, too.'' His hoarse answer scratched the air.
"I'm not so sure love is enough anymore if we can't accept each other.'' She sat up, pulled her knees to her chest, the gulf between them widening by the second. "You tell me all the time I'm yourhaven. Well, you know what? You don't want me so much as somebody to save you the same way I save homeless kids in a Third World country.''
How damned ironic that now Blake would be the one saving her.
She stared out at the hard-caked sand and winged her thoughts toward him. I'm sorry.
If only she'd thought to say it then.
Sydney walked as close to the edge of the camp as she dared and talked to Kayla and Phillip in case Blake could hear with all that equipment they never discussed. The sound of his voice had brought her immeasurable comfort two nights ago. She hoped hers, if he could hear her, would do the same.
"Who won the last game of spades?"
A hand clamped around her arm. "Come with me," the guard ordered in guttural English. A flutter twinged in her stomach. Nerves. Again. Stronger until she realized...
Oh, God. Not nerves. The baby moved.
Before she could wrap her mind around the landmark moment in her pregnancy, the guard tugged her again, dragging her toward the center of the compound until they stopped in front of a stark, cement, one-story building beside her barracks cell.
Like all the other buildings.
Inside, down the hall they walked. His knock elicited a brusque command. The voice. Too familiar. She fought the urge to run.
The door swung wide, bringing her face-to-face with her worst nightmare. Her baby's father.
Ammar al-Khayr sat behind a desk like any businessman on a lunch break, plate in front of him. His dusty khakis and loose, linen shirt rippled with gusts from the fan in front of a window, the same fan wafting spices into the air, gagging her. She remembered too well the smell of them on his breath inches from her face, over her.
She forced herself to blink and breathe evenly. He was just a man. Quite ordinary in appearance actually, average height and weight.
Deceptively so.
God, but he was strong. Fearfully strong even when he had to be nearing fifty. Fanaticism defied age. He might harm her, but he wouldn't win. She just had to stay alive a little while longer.
His gaze roved her, but not sexually—it had never been sexual. She knew without question he hated her simply because of what she represented. He didn't lust after her, in fact, found her disgusting, to be used. Abused.
Still he continued to evaluate her while she struggled not to fidget in spite of the creepy feeling spidering up her spine. Had she somehow given Blake away? Or had they been found out? Bile burned hot in the back of her throat. The stifling heat, stench, and memories wreaked havoc on her already queasy stomach.
"Have a seat, please, Ms. Hyatt. It seems we have a problem on our hands and since you are the senior member of your group, I decided to bring it to your attention first."
He definitely knew something. And between Blake and the baby, she carried two colossal secrets that could cost her life. Or worse—theirs.
Jack hated dreams because there were no secrets.
Dreams attacked with a no-holds-barred approach while a guy's defenses were down. Everybody had to catch some Z's eventually and dreams' agendas were patient. Even as he tried to wrestle himself out of the nightmare of the moment, he wasn't having a helluva lot of luck.
This particular one had its claws in deep, submerging him in a skyful of blood and wives with life-and-death stakes. His dad kept chanting over Jack's headset about how a man kicks ass for his woman.
Jack understood he'd screwed up that lesson. He turned over control of the jet to Rodeo so he could crawl down into the cargo hold and ask his brother Tony for absolution.
And crap, but his dreams always seemed to enjoy digging those claws deeper with irony and humor as if to pay him back for his own smart-ass ways. Because then damned if Tony didn't deny forgiveness with a resounding rendition of "Don't Be Cruel" before hopping into Grandma Korba's Pinto and driving off the back load ramp into a wide-open sky.
Shit, he was trying with Monica. This time he had his uniform and M-9 and military airplane. He was doing his best to kick ass and take names, to save her sister. Keep Monica safe. He wouldn't screw it up again.
He had himself reined in. Always, slow and easy. No losing control like some reckless college kid who was so horny that half the time he forgot to walk across the room for a condom when making love to his wife even though they had both decided to put off kids until after graduation.
Hell, no. He held it together with Monica.
But still she was standing beside him with blood all over her uniform and he knew it was hers. Except he couldn't find where she was bleeding from. And if he couldn't figure out what she needed from him, then he would lose her. He would have failed again.
He didn't have much longer left. The load ramp was shutting, cranking up, almost there, soon would shut off all the light and he wouldn't be able to see where the blood was coming from. Closing. Darker.
Thunk.
Thunk. Thunk Thunk.
Jack jolted awake, Monica's legs heavy in his lap, the room dark from her blackened window.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
The door. Someone was knocking on Monica's door.
Her legs stirred against him. She flung an arm over her face. "Jack?"
"Shh." His hand rested on her feet. "It's okay. Just someone at the door. Go back to sleep. I'll take care of it."
She bolted upright, jerked her feet from his lap to the floor. "For God's sake, this is my room. I'll get it."
Swiping a hank of dried-wild hair from her face, she padded to the door, cracked it open while blocking the view inside with her body. "Jesus, Rodeo. Do you know what time it is?''
"Uh, sorry to bother you, but, uh, I'm looking for Cobra."
Jack strode up behind her, rested a possessive hand on her shoulder. "This better be important, man. Your timing sucks."
"Sorry, bud." Derek winced. "I wouldn't come here unless it was serious and I figured better me than someone else. The Colonel's looking for you two. There's a...situation...with Doc's sister."
Drew didn't need to see outside the office window to feel the sandstorm brewing. The blocked window prohibited view, anyway, since being boarded up after the looting peasant incident.
And again here he stood, Yasmine on the wrong end of an OSI inquisition about her presence at the airfield.
He focused on the impending sandstorm and its implications instead. If it weren't for that damned storm due to start rolling in right around midnight, they'd be prepping to leave and finish this whole operation. He and his men never would have been out in the field last night running training maneuvers, making use of the extra time to perfect their battle plan just a little more because of the bad weather predictions.
PFC Pete Santuci would still be alive.
Which brought him right back around to Yasmine again, anyway, as she answered endless questions. When the hell had he thought about anything but her since she shoved that note in his hand?
He felt like an old fool.
Old being the operative word for a man stuck smack-dab in the center of some damned midlife crisis. She'd read him and played him right up to the moment she stared down at him with those bottomless brown eyes, her nubile, na*ed body fogging his brain.
Drew, I need to tell you something I have been keeping hidden. Ammar al-Khayr sent me here to find out the truth about your mission.
Everything inside him had shut down at that point.
He didn't remember much afterward other than that he'd hauled her up, barked at her to get dressed while he'd yanked on his own clothes. No turning his back on a woman who might knife him. No, he'd kept his back to the wall and watched her stoically drag her dress over her head.
Then he'd led her here to let Max Keagan and Daniel "Crusty'' Baker do their work because apparently his objectivity was shot to hell. She'd concocted some story about their maps of the terrorist compound being incomplete. Helpful guidance? Or a deadly trap?
Drew crunched a LifeSaver since he'd already been through every other goddamned letter in the alphabet over the past hour. Sure, she'd 'fessed up, right after she hooked then reeled him in. Did she expect to play him as her sympathy card? Think again, Sheba.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
His involvement with her already put him in a sticky-as-hell situation. From here on out, it was by the book.
Anger sparked from her eyes as she repeated answers to questions already asked. Tough shit. This was how the game was played to check her story. Let her get mad.
Or was she spitting fire to keep from crying? Damn it. Damn it. Damn it! He would not fall into that trap of hers again.
Her spine straight against her chair, regal as ever, she insisted, "I genuinely want to go to the United States. So when he—"
"Ammar al-Khayr," Crusty Baker interjected from beside the window, his voice tight, "a known terrorist responsible for targeting Americans around the world simply because of their nationality, a man directly linked to assassinating our ambassador here."
Who also happened to be Baker's father. The interrogator had more cause for his anger than even Yasmine knew.
She paled, dark circles from her night with little sleep staining a deeper purple. "When he offered me a way into your camp, of course I said yes."
Keagan stepped in to take over the questioning from Baker, stopping by the desk. "This would have all carried more weight if you'd told us straight up."
She looked down, displaying a stretch of daisy scarf along her head. Her hands in her lap twisted around her rose scarf. Damn her. "I did not know who to trust."
"And now you do," Keagan prompted.
"I hope so." She didn't even glance Drew's way. She didn't have to. "I will tell you whatever you want to know about him if that will help your people."
"Why would we be interested in this man?"
She raked her best haughty gaze over the unconventional OSI officer's spiky hair and bright yellow polo shirt. "You must really think I am stupid."
The clock on the wall ticked. How much did she know and how had she found out?
More important, who had she told?
Keagan hitched a hip on the desk corner. "Now's the time to prove to us just how smart you are."
She pleated the scarf in her lap faster. Nerves? Or lies? "It is obvious you are here for more than dropping off food for starving locals. Ammar al-Khayr has escaped justice in the States once. I sincerely hope you are here to dispense it now so he cannot appropriate the funds of every orphan who happens to share a distant relative with the man. I am not the first he has tried this with. A simple search will tell you that. As you so eloquently put it, your own unfortunate ambassador here was assassinated. And only because the ambassador's wife was related to Ammar who wanted control over the man's wealth through his children."
She paused, frowning. "Or maybe you already know that."
That and more. Baker's father, the man's wealth and political influence was far spread and well known in the States. The very damned reason Baker and Jack Korba together had been able to land themselves on this mission.
