Midnight Remembered

Unspoken permission to put her own gun away, as she had asked? If so, she wasn’t averse. Especially since she understood that would mean Josh felt they were no longer at risk.

They would probably wait out the night here. It was as good a place as any, especially since the village had already been searched. In the morning, according to plan, they would head for the border, deliver what they had been sent here to retrieve, and then get the hell out of Dodge. And despite Josh’s teasing, that hot bath was going to feel very good.

She lowered her pistol, unwrapping the nearly bloodless fingers of her left hand from around those of the right. She usually kept the weapon in the side pocket of the fatigue-type pants she wore, and she wanted it back there, out of the way. She doubted Josh would approve. The location was not particularly handy, not if she needed the gun in a hurry.

Given her ambiguous feelings about engaging in any kind of shoot-out with the rebel forces, however, that was okay by her. She’d leave the quick-draw responses to people like Joshua Stone.

She looked down to guide the insertion of the barrel back through the opening of her parka. Josh’s hands were suddenly there, preventing her. Surprised, she looked up, expecting to find that she had somehow misinterpreted what she had thought was permission to put her weapon away.

As she hesitated, trying to understand, his left hand took the pistol and shoved it into the pocket of his own jacket. And then his right hand slipped into the opened placket of her coat.

Holding her eyes, he began to unbutton her shirt, fingers moving quickly over the task, as if this were something he had done a thousand times. He probably had. But not with her.

As soon as he had undone two or three of the buttons, his hand flattened and pushed inside the opening he’d created. And his palm encountered not bare skin, of course, but her long johns. She could tell by the sudden widening of those blue eyes that he hadn’t expected the thermal underwear, despite the climate.

“Think you could possibly have on any more clothes, Daniels?” he asked, the teasing note back in his voice.

She was almost too shocked by what had happened to formulate an answer. And more shocked when his palm moved upward to cup the softness of her breast. As it did, his eyes dilated slightly, the pupils expanding outward into that rim of sapphire.

She wasn’t wearing a bra. She wasn’t all that well-endowed to begin with. Besides, Josh was right. She had on so many layers of clothing as protection against the cold that she had known no one would ever be able to tell. Now, of course…

Josh’s thumb and forefinger found her nipple, pebbled with cold and the aftereffects of fear. It seemed to have hardened even more now with anticipation. Watching her face, he rolled it between his fingers, the pressure almost enough to be pain. And almost ecstasy. As the sweet, hot heat began to roil through her lower body, she closed her eyes, exhaling through her mouth the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“You like that?” he asked softly, increasing the pressure.

She nodded wordlessly. The juices he’d talked about flooded her body in a molten stream of sensation as he touched her.

“Then tell me,” he demanded. “Tell me you like it, Daniels. I need to hear you say it.”

“I like it,” she whispered, knowing only now that this was what she had been waiting for for four months. Right or wrong. Smart or very stupid, she had been waiting for Joshua Stone to touch her. Waiting for him to claim her body. To possess it.

She wanted him to do those things. Most of all, she wanted him. Wanted him with a need so sharp it, too, verged on pain.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” he whispered, seeming to echo her silent confession. “A very long time. Every night I’d listen to the rustle of your clothes, and I’d imagine I was undressing you. And then I’d hear that cloth moving over your skin, and I’d imagine my mouth there instead. My tongue touching all the places you were bathing. But I’d be bathing them. Caressing them. Caressing you.”

He had put his cheek against her forehead, and his mouth was moving beside her temple, his whiskers abrasive. His breath was warm and moist as it stirred over the fragile skin, which had already dampened with a fine dew of perspiration just at the thought of what he was saying. Another sensation to add to the dominance of his fingers, which had never ceased their movement over and around her nipple.

“All those cold nights, I’d lie in that bed thinking about how warm I’d be if you were under me, your skin sliding, wet and slick, against mine.”

The last was so soft the words were little more than breath. Less sound than the suggestion of it. And the images they produced were as seductive as the husky timbre of his voice. His mouth on her skin, warm lips gliding over her cold, shivering body. His tongue touching all the intimate places that no man had ever touched in that way before. No one before Josh Stone.

Compared to him, she had known she was inexperienced. Maybe that had been one of the things she had found so exciting. She had known that if he ever made love to her, it would happen in exactly this way. He wouldn’t ask permission. Or give her warning. He would simply take her. Dominating. Controlling.

And even if she had no idea what she wanted, he would know how to please her. She had understood from the beginning that he would be this kind of lover. She had wanted him to be.

He lowered his head, putting his lips against her neck. His tongue followed the blood as it pulsed through the artery there. Then it traced to her ear, dipping inside, and slowly trailed downward again, until his mouth encountered the top of her shirt.

Think you could possibly have on any more clothes, Daniels? he had asked. But what she had put on, she could take off.

She wanted his lips and his tongue on her body. Moving over the hollow of her collarbone and across the small, highly sensitized swell of her breast. Circling her nipple, just as his fingers had caressed it, their movements sure and unhurried. So sure. So knowing. As his mouth would be.

She turned her head, bending her knees a little so she could put her lips under his. His head tilted to accommodate the kiss, his mouth fastening hungrily over hers. There was nothing tentative about the movement, but he didn’t push his tongue inside as she expected. His lips played with hers, making contact and then breaking it, only to touch her mouth again at a slightly different angle. A series of small weightless kisses, which gradually gave way to something else.

His mouth opened, his lips moist and warm, trailing languidly over hers. Breaking off and then coming back to hers again. And again. And yet again.

Only after what seemed an eternity did his mouth fully open and his tongue contact hers. Her lips had already parted, ready for the invasion that was not an invasion, but the long-awaited answer to an unspoken invitation.

His head turned slightly, the alignment again perfect. He eased her against the wall at her back, one arm around her waist. His fingers deserted her breast and worked at the buttons of her clothing, a barrier between them that neither wanted there.

He never released her mouth, however, plundering it even as he unfastened and pushed aside layers of fabric. He eased her parka over her shoulders, guiding it down her arms, and she let it fall to the floor.

She should have felt the cold, but she didn’t. She was aware of nothing but the movement of his mouth and his hands. After he had tugged her shirt out of her pants and unfastened the last of its buttons, it followed the jacket to the floor. Only when he pulled the top of her thermal underwear over her head did he break the contact of the kiss, just long enough to accomplish that task.

“Your turn,” he said, his mouth again over hers, so that the words were muffled by her lips, almost lost against them. Her mind seemed drugged by his kisses, so that she didn’t respond for a moment. And he didn’t wait.

He unzipped his parka, shrugging out of it and dropping it onto the floor beside hers. And then he took her hands and put them against the buttons of his shirt. Finally, she seemed to comprehend what he wanted her to do.

Her fingers trembled over the simple task, and after a moment his hands lifted, brushing hers aside as he pulled the shirt out of his pants and then apart, those two actions almost simultaneous. And as soon as he had, he leaned against her.

His bare chest pressed against her breasts, flattening them, and her breath released in a low moan. She was conscious on some level of the cold, damp stones behind her, but she was far more conscious of the warmth of the solid wall of his chest, hair-roughened, moving enticingly against the front of her body. Against the hardened peaks of her breasts.

Her arms went around him, spread hands caressing. Following the corded muscle of his shoulders and the long, elegantly sculpted back and narrow waist. Trailing up the smoothly ringed column of his spine.

They were completely naked above the waist, and oblivious to the cold. Their bodies were pressed tightly together. Hands exploring. And it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Not for either of them.

His palms cupped under her hips, lifting her into his erection. She gasped again as she felt the undeniable proof that he was as aroused by what they were doing as she was. A little danger gets the juices flowing.

Was that what this was all about? A reaction to what had just occurred? To the close call they’d had? And if it were? she asked herself, the intellectual question almost unimportant as her palms moved over the warm, smooth skin of his back. Did she really care about his motives? Were hers any purer?

This was about two people coming together after a long and tantalizing physical awareness. Maybe that’s all it was for him, despite what else it was for her. And if, as his reputation indicated, this was all Joshua Stone was ever willing to give, she would take it. Her decision. And her choice.

She arched her back, changing resolution into action. His hands were still cupped under her hips, and as she moved, he pulled her closer, groaning as their bodies came together, as close as they could get physically, given the situation.

And then he released her, dropping her back to the ground so quickly she staggered. His hands, working at the fastening of her pants, steadied her by the simple expedient of grabbing a handful of their fabric.

Then, he was unbuttoning and unzipping with a frenzied urgency. Her hands found the waistband of his trousers, working as hurriedly, as desperately.

Given that frenzy, she expected him to take her standing up, pressed against the wall behind her. Instead, he bent, putting one knee on the floor, and pulled the two down-filled parkas together to form a makeshift pallet at her feet.

When he looked up, the slant of fading light from the crack over his head fell on his eyes, highlighting them. Their pupils were wildly dilated now, either from the darkness in the cellar or because of what was happening between them.

She could barely see the rest of his features, but his mouth was set again, almost stern, unsmiling. And for some reason a jolt of anxiety moved through her stomach. That was not the way a man about to make love should look.

When he held up his hand, inviting her to join him on top of the two parkas, she never thought about refusing. She put her still-trembling fingers into his strong, dark ones, letting him pull her down to the spread coats. As his body lowered over hers, moving as if he had all the time in the world, the last thing she saw before the subtle remains of daylight faded away into night were Joshua Stone’s eyes looking down into hers.

And no matter how many times she recreated that scene during the next three years, she found she could never quite be sure what had been in them.

Chapter One

“Special Ops is asking for you.”

Paige glanced up from the magnifier through which she was studying the latest satellite images of a site along the Russia-Afghanistan border. Her boss hadn’t stopped at her desk. He had simply tossed the paper that held the message he had delivered down on it and then disappeared into his own office.

Special Ops, she thought, wondering how long it had been since she had heard those words. Not nearly long enough.

She wished she could treat the summons as casually as Pete Logan had. Instead, the phrase created an unwanted frisson of anxiety. Almost in self-defense, she looked down through the magnifying glass again, ignoring the paper Logan had dropped on her desk and trying to bring her concentration back to the photographs that had come in only an hour ago.

She had been totally absorbed in them before the interruption. After all, this was her job. Being at the beck and call of Special Operations was not, she thought fiercely, feeling her anger build, despite her attempt to focus on the satellite images. The days she had spent with the spooks were over and done. Long gone. Long forgotten.

Which was why, of course, her ability to concentrate was all of a sudden shot to hell, she thought in disgust. She pushed the magnifier away, the motion almost violent.

Special Ops. What the hell could Special Ops want with her? She glanced at the paper lying on the outer edge of her desk, as reluctant to pick it up as if it were something vile.

The print was facing the other direction, and she couldn’t quite manage to decipher the upsidedown signature of whoever had issued the request. After a fruitless few seconds of trying, she reached out and turned the paper around, her eyes automatically scanning the one-line message before they fell to the name at the bottom. It was one she recognized.

Her gaze lifted to the door of Logan’s office, but she resisted the impulse to go in and ask if he knew any details. Even if he did, it wouldn’t change anything. She knew that. She would have to answer this summons, no matter how unpleasant reentering that world, if only for a little while, might be.

Too many memories, she thought. Too many ghosts. And she wasn’t looking forward to resurrecting a single one of them.

“WHY NOW?” Paige asked. “I told you people everything I knew when it happened.”

“You people?” Carl Steiner repeated pointedly, his tented fingers resting under his chin. His dark eyes were amused.

She understood why he had questioned her wording. She had once been one of the people assigned to the CIA’s Special Operations Branch, which Steiner was now head of.

“I told Griff,” she said. “It’s in the incident report.”

“Tell me,” Steiner said. He hadn’t raised his voice, but that was obviously an order. As an assistant deputy director, he was entitled to give them.

Paige didn’t know why she would hesitate to tell him. Other than the fact that she couldn’t see any point in bringing something to life that had been stone-cold dead, maybe even back when she had reported on it to Griff Cabot. Nearly three years ago, she realized with a sense of disbelief.

It didn’t seem possible it had been that long since she had sat in this room pouring out that painful story to someone she considered a friend. Her eyes rose to study the face of the man who now sat behind Cabot’s desk. A man who wasn’t her friend and never had been.

She didn’t have any reason to dislike Carl Steiner. Not any concrete one, anyway. When the External Security Team had been disbanded, however, there had been a lot of rumors that this man had had a major role in that decision.

They had all known, intellectually at least, from the moment of Cabot’s death that the demise of his team would follow. But when the order had come down, none of them had been prepared. The team and their relationships to one another had been too important. Too much a part of who each of them had been then.

“I want you to tell me about Joshua Stone,” Steiner said, his eyes on her face.

Paige had no idea what it might reveal, but that same sensation she had felt when she had heard her boss say Special Ops lurched through her stomach again. Just at the sound of the name. His name.

“He disappeared,” she said. And then nothing else.

She didn’t know what Steiner wanted from her. Or why they were bringing this up after all this time. Joshua Stone was almost certainly dead and buried in some frozen wasteland thousands of miles from here. There was no reason not to let him stay buried, she thought, resenting Steiner’s stirring of the ashes of her life. Particularly these.

“Circumstances?” Steiner prodded, glancing down at a folder in front of him.

Paige’s eyes followed his, wondering if he were looking at Griff’s report. And wondering if Cabot had written down everything she had told him. Even those parts she had clearly intended to be for his ears only.

Maybe there ought to be an official designation within government communications for the kind of conversation they had shared that day. She had never told anyone else the truth about what had happened in Vladistan. No one but Griff. And no matter what Steiner said, she knew she never would.

“We had completed our mission,” she said. As soon she uttered the word “mission,” her mind had gone back, reliving those long-ago events, in spite of the fact that she had sworn never to revisit these memories.

Steiner hadn’t given her much choice, however, and she supposed it would be better just to get this over. Tell him only as much as she wanted to and no more. And trust that Griff hadn’t betrayed her confidence about the rest.

“We were supposed to meet our contact the next day,” she continued, forcing the words through her throat, which seemed constricted. “There was more rebel activity along the border than we had expected. We had to hide a few times from patrols, the last time just a few miles from the border. We knew we were cutting it close, but…it hadn’t been an easy assignment.”

Her voice faded, thinking how true that was. The area had been unstable when they had been sent in, and in the months they had spent there, everything had fallen apart. Including their in-country support. At the last, it had been just her and Josh.

“Go on,” Steiner prompted.

“And then…Stone disappeared,” Paige said, her voice softer than she had intended. More emotional? People like Steiner didn’t like emotion, not of any kind. That’s why they were here. Why they were the ones in charge.

“You woke up the morning before you were to cross the border and found that Stone was missing.”

She nodded, determined not to remember the events of the night before that discovery. She had done that too many times. Especially during that first year.

A long time ago. Just saying those words in her head was a form of comfort, putting distance between her life now and what had happened then. Do it, she told herself. Tell him the rest and be done with it. Put it behind you again.

“Russian tanks rolled in less than four hours later, and Griff, through our contact, ordered me out. I wasn’t given any choice about whether I wanted to leave or not.”

“And exactly what did you do in those four hours?”

There seemed to be accusation in the tone of the question, and Paige’s eyes narrowed against it. “I tried to find Josh. We had to get out before the Russians came, so I tried to find him.”

“And the nerve agent?”

That’s why they had been sent into Vladistan. To find and bring out a deadly neurological toxin, a new class of nerve agent for which there were no antidotes. It had been developed in one of the old Soviet weapons complexes, located in the region. When the rebellion started, the fear in the West was that the rebels might use the agent against the invading Russian troops, provoking a nuclear retaliation.

And then suddenly, feeling stupid that she hadn’t figured it out before, Paige realized this was what Steiner’s summons was all about. There was again unrest within Vladistan. Some people were already predicting another rebellion. Had that nerve agent now shown up in the wrong hands?

It could, of course. It could have at anytime during the last three years, she supposed, because when Joshua Stone had disappeared, that lethal toxin had disappeared with him.

“Josh was carrying it in his backpack,” she said. “I never saw it again.” Or him.

She had told Griff the truth about what had happened between them. A truth that might even be included in the folder Steiner had in front of him, but she didn’t intend to mention her personal involvement with Joshua Stone unless Steiner brought it up. The uneasy silence built until he broke it.

“When you woke up,” Steiner said, his voice flat, no longer questioning, “Stone was gone.”

Paige nodded.

“And you never saw him again?”

Something about the question bothered her. Not the words themselves, which were only the truth, but the nuance of tone in which he had asked. Was that skepticism she heard?

“Griff believed Josh must have been killed shortly after he left the building where we had taken shelter. The whole area was in chaos. Full of rebel patrols.”

“Yet Stone, an experienced operative, left the safety of your hiding place. And he left it alone, leaving you asleep.”

“Maybe he heard something and went out to investigate.”

She had tried for three years to come up with a viable explanation for Josh’s actions. That was the only one that made any kind of sense to her. She could tell by Steiner’s eyes that it made none to him.

“Or maybe he had an appointment,” Steiner said. “A highly lucrative one.”

At the time of his disappearance there had been elements within the agency who suggested Joshua Stone had seen an opportunity to make a fortune and had taken it. A new and very lethal nerve agent would bring millions on the terrorist black market. Stone had both the skills to get it out of the country, and, with his External Security Team experience, the contacts that would be necessary to sell it.

Griff Cabot had never credited that explanation for Josh’s disappearance. Cabot had always had complete confidence in the integrity of his team. Stone, however, wouldn’t have been the first CIA operative to have gone rogue, Paige admitted. And there had been something about his eyes that last night…

“If you’re suggesting that Joshua Stone turned traitor, then you need to review his record,” she said aloud, blocking that niggling, disloyal image. “Griff Cabot, who knew Stone better than anyone else, dismissed that possibility out of hand.”

“Griff would never admit that one of his operatives had gone bad. I’m afraid I’m not quite that…trusting.”

“If you seriously believe Joshua Stone sold that nerve agent to the highest bidder, then how do you explain why it’s never been used?” A shot in the dark, Paige acknowledged, but she had heard nothing in the last three years to suggest it had.

“Maybe whoever bought it is biding their time, waiting for the right opportunity.”

“Or maybe whoever killed Stone never found the toxin,” Paige said. “Maybe they never realized what he was carrying.”

“I confess I prefer your scenario to mine,” Steiner said. “I suppose only time will tell which of us is right.”

“It seems to me that three years is time enough to tell. Joshua Stone wasn’t a traitor.”

“And I sincerely hope you’re right about that, too,” Steiner said, closing the folder and getting to his feet. “If we need any further information, we’ll be in touch.”

His face was unreadable, but it was clear from his words that he considered the interview to be at an end. Paige knew she should be relieved, both that it was over and that his questions had been no more probing. For some reason, however, there was a letdown after the abruptness with which this questioning had ended. The whole thing seemed anticlimactic, especially in the face of the frightening suggestions he had made.

Paige stood, pushing the heavy leather chair back from the edge of the desk. She wondered if she should offer him her hand and decided, illogically, that she didn’t want to shake hands with Carl Steiner. She didn’t want anymore contact with him than was necessary. She reached the door to his office and then, very definitely against her better judgment, she turned back.