Share the Darkness

Hannah shuddered. “It’s okay. I get the picture. How long do you think it’s been? About an hour and a half?”

“About that long.”

She stood and a rush of air circulated his way. “Well, I can’t stand being in these clothes much longer.”

He heard the zip of her skirt and whoosh as it fell to the ground. He swallowed. Hard. He heard another whoosh as what he assumed was her blouse hit the floor. If he heard another, he could only guess what that particular item of clothing would be. Images of a nearly naked Hannah standing before him made his mind go fuzzy and his body grow hard. He didn’t need this rush of heat. He was hot enough already.

Thankfully, he heard no other whoosh.

“Umm. That’s better. This elevator wall actually feels cool against my skin.”

Ward cleared his throat and fought to find his voice. In the end, he gave up trying. A long, dark silence stretched between them.

“Ward?”

“Yes?”

“Talk to me.”

“What about? Cars, movies, advancements in security technology?”

“I don’t care.”

He’d been making a joke, but the steely vulnerability he’d detected in her voice stopped him from making another attempt at humor. She was reaching out to him, and he knew that was unusual for her because he shared the same symptoms. She reached out, but didn’t like the needing to.

Damn, Brett was right. He rubbed his leg and smiled at the irony of it. He was going to have a heck of a time proving this one innocent. Ward couldn’t see her as a true criminal.

And yet, Hannah was his number-one suspect.

Good to see he hadn’t lost his ability in finding the surest method of driving a woman away.

4

“SO, HOW LONG HAVE YOU lived in Gallem?” Ward asked.

Hannah tried not to fall into full-blown panic. It was just a question. A casual question normal people asked other completely normal people every day.

All she had to do was answer it like a normal person.

Ah, and there was the problem.

“I, uh—”

She took a deep, calming breath. Hannah Garrett knew her story backward and forward. Sideways even.

“A little over a year,” she told him. Excellent. No stutter. No hesitation. It’s not as if she hadn’t given out this exact same memorized information a dozen times before. So why was she tongue-tied with Ward?

“Yeah? I’m new to Gallem, too. Where did you live before?”

Okay, another normal question. A zero on the unusual scale. Ward was the security guy, of course he’d ask questions about a person’s background to pass the time.

“Oh, I moved around a lot, probably the same as you did in the military.”

Good. She was following procedure. When conversations grew too personal, turn the focus back onto the other person.

“Your parents didn’t mind?”

“They both died when I was little. I grew up in foster care. Once you’re eighteen, that’s basically it.”

“That’s rough. I knew a few men like that in the military. They couldn’t find anyone for you to live with?”

Kyle hadn’t cared about her past. Only what she could give him in the present. She couldn’t recall a single time he’d asked about her family. His living in the moment had been one of his appeals. Admittedly, she’d been kind of relieved, not really wanting to talk about the group home, her foster mother. Growing up, she’d felt judged her whole life. Kyle had never looked down on her. He was content to have her by his side, the perfect arm candy in a sexy dress and makeup. All that mattered to Kyle was the here and now.

Ward was different, though. She felt an odd comfort in talking about the past with Ward. Since Kyle hadn’t known her origins, she’d opted to keep her real history with this latest identity.

“Hannah, if you don’t want to talk about—”

“No, it’s okay. Actually, there could be a whole slew of relatives out there that I don’t know about. The father’s name on my birth certificate was left blank. I was told I lived with my mother until I was three, but I don’t remember her. She just dropped me off at the daycare center, and never came back.”

“That’s rough.”

“She was only sixteen when she had me. Maybe she thought leaving me would give me a chance to have a better life. At least that’s how I like to think of it.”

“I bet you’re right.”

She smiled in the darkness. Ward agreeing with her was practically erotic. Most people would probably flash her their most skeptical look at her fanciful need to think well of a mother who had abandoned her.

Ward’s sympathy, and more, for her, threw her off-kilter for a moment. Her purse still lay beside her, so she grabbed it, sinking her hand down to the depths. Anything to distract her.

“Hey, I think I found a package of mints at the bottom of my purse. Feels like three of them,” Hannah said, rummaging in the darkness.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars for them,” Ward said.

Hannah laughed. She hadn’t laughed in so long, her laughter sounded a little rusty even to her own ears.

He had the sexiest voice she’d ever heard in her life. Of course she’d been listening to nothing but that rich, deep baritone of his for the last few hours. She’d read that when someone lost one sense, the others became more acute.

She believed it now.

Her ears had become especially sensitive to his voice as it wrapped around her, surrounding her like a sensual fog.

“So, what brought you to Gallem?” she asked, suddenly needing to turn the focus of their conversation away from her life.

Ward had been with the FBI long enough to know when someone was trying to divert his attention. Not a smooth transition, but the way Hannah phrased her question would make his refusal to answer seem rude.

“Things had gotten a little stale. A friend told me I needed to get into life. When I saw the job at P&L I applied. I didn’t know Gallem was so hot.”

She laughed. He loved a woman’s laugh.

The fanning motion across from him stopped for a moment, then resumed. “So have you been more satisfied with your life since moving here?”

Here it was. His opportunity to open up. Share. He cleared his throat. He had an urge to say something glib, to pass his earlier statement off as a joke. But something in her voice, a hesitation before asking, perhaps a similar resignation, he didn’t know, but he sensed a kindred spirit. He and Hannah had both turned their backs on life.

Maybe being stuck in an elevator wasn’t such bad luck at all. Maybe it was Murphy’s way of giving him a wake-up call. But what could he say? He’d been undercover for most of his adult life. It was hard to know the difference between reality and make-believe. “My parents died when I was seventeen.”

“Mmm.”

The sound, almost a hum, didn’t really mean anything, but it was oddly comforting. An invitation to continue.

There was no need to close his eyes, his usual habit when thoughts of that day threatened to return. But it wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t be any darker than the elevator, and it wouldn’t block the picture of his mother and father dead on the living room floor. “They were murdered.”

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