Atone in Darkness Read online

  Rather than let the conversation continue, he finally gave her the kiss she’d been asking for. Initially, her response lacked enthusiasm, but he could hardly fault her for that. Rather than up the ante, which might feel more like desperation rather than passion, he slowed down to coax rather than demand.

  His patience paid off, and Marisol let herself be seduced. Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, as their passion ebbed and flowed, the rest of the world retreated to a safe distance, leaving only the two of them in their makeshift bed. It might have consisted of two sheets of thin plastic and tree branches, but at that moment he wouldn’t have traded it for a room at the finest five-star hotel.

  The cool night air kissed their skin with the fresh scent from the cedar branches that cushioned them from the ground. The hour had grown late enough that the moon now hung directly overhead and bathed the mountainside with its silvery light.

  Marisol rested her head on his chest and stared up at the narrow sliver of the night sky. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars.”

  He gave her a quick squeeze. “I paid extra for the view.”

  She giggled. “And I hate to think how much all of that fancy food you’ve been feeding me set you back.”

  “Nothing but the best green beans and canned meat for my girl. And the good news is we’re having more of the same for breakfast.”

  “What a guy!”

  Had he ever laughed with a lover like this? If so, he couldn’t remember when. For sure, she was the only woman he’d ever bedded who knew that he wasn’t like other men, even if she didn’t know everything thing about the world he normally inhabited. It was so freeing not to have to watch every word and protect every secret in his life.

  He didn’t want it to end.

  For now, he would pretend that the sun wouldn’t rise and their enemy had given up the chase.

  “Marisol, do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  He lifted her so that she was stretched out along the length of his body. As soon as he had her positioned she put her hands on his chest and pushed herself upright. With her best siren smile, she rocked the core of her body directly against his, bringing his desire to full attention. He settled his hands on her hips, encouraging her to do that again . . . and again. Smart woman knew exactly what he was asking, what they were both needing. She rose and guided the tip of his cock to the entrance of her body, sliding back down until he was seated deep within her slick heat.

  She rocked again, her pretty breasts swaying gently as she moved. Her voice was husky with hunger when she said, “You never said what the favor was.”

  He smiled up at her. “Honey, if you haven’t figured that out by now, I must be doing this wrong.”

  Once again, her bright laughter rang out in the night as they did everything just right.

  17

  * * *

  It was only the second time Marisol had woken up in Chase’s arms. She hated knowing that it might be the last. Still, she’d always been one to face the realities of life head-on. Thanks to an absentee father and her feckless mother, she’d never had any choice in the matter. There was no use in pretending things were different than they were. That didn’t mean right now she wished she could believe in fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.

  For the first time in recent memory, the sting of tears had her blinking like crazy. It was too much to hope that Chase wouldn’t notice, but evidently being able to detect imminent tears was another of his superpowers.

  He gently swiped away the tears as they dripped down her cheek onto his bare chest. “What’s brought on the waterworks? Is it the threat of more canned meat for breakfast?”

  She huffed a small laugh and gave him a soft punch on his arm. “No, although you have to admit it is an awful way to start the day.”

  “I won’t argue that point.” He pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. “But, honey, I can’t fix the problem until I know what it is.”

  There was no fixing this, so she lied. “I’m fine. Really.”

  Because she wasn’t about to admit that her heart was breaking. Sometime during the long night she’d finally come to terms with how she felt about Chase. It had taken a while to put a name to the emotion because she’d never experienced it before. She loved him, pure and simple. Well, that wasn’t true. There was nothing simple about their situation. It didn’t take a genius to know that he still had secrets he couldn’t share with her, ones that promised to make him disappear from her life forever.

  As for her, once she got clear of this mess, she’d be back at ground zero and trying to rebuild her life again. Right now there was no way to know if her former employers had made good on their promise to pay off her student loans. If they hadn’t, there wasn’t much she could do about it. Contract or not, she couldn’t risk pressing the issue. She’d find a new job and keep her head down.

  “You sure there’s nothing wrong?”

  “Nothing you can fix. I was just thinking about everything my employer offered me to get me to take the job. I’m guessing they won’t actually honor my contract.”

  Chase rolled onto his side to face her more directly. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. You do know they can’t risk you going to the authorities about what happened. As soon as you show up on their radar, they’ll come hunting for you again.”

  A renewed sense of dread pulsed hot in her chest. “But I can’t hide forever, especially if I can’t access my bank account or credit cards.”

  Not that she had a lot of money squirreled away for a rainy day.

  He toyed with a strand of her hair, twirling it through his fingers. “I’ve got friends who can help you build a new identity, one that will stand up to close scrutiny.”

  “I appreciate the offer. But without my credentials, including my school records, I won’t be able to get a job as a doctor anywhere, much less at a top research facility.”

  His smile was a bit sad. “Again, I have friends who might be able to help with that, too. I can’t make any promises, but I’m willing to ask them if you want me to.”

  She managed a wobbly smile. “Why would you do that? I’d think after all of this that you’d want to put as much distance between yourself and anyone connected to this whole mess as possible.”

  He flinched as if her words had somehow hurt him. “Is that how you feel, Marisol? Do you want to forget I ever existed?”

  That was the last thing she wanted. She’d faced a lot of scary things over the past few days, but telling the truth right now might very well be the scariest. “No, I wouldn’t want to forget you, Chase. Not ever, even if I could.”

  “Because you feel guilty about being part of what happened to me back there? If that’s why, it would really piss me off.”

  As he waited for her to respond, his eyebrows rode down low over his eyes as if her answer were important to him.

  “I do feel guilty, and rightly so. I should’ve been smart enough not to get sucked into that situation in the first place, but also to have figured out a way to get you out of there sooner. I was too busy trying to protect my own skin than to do the right thing.”

  “But you were one woman alone against—”

  She covered his mouth with her fingers, cutting him off. “Don’t make excuses for me. I know what I did and didn’t do. But having said that, guilt isn’t the reason I don’t want to forget you.”

  It was time to go for broke. She replaced her fingertips with her lips and gave him a soft kiss. “There are much better reasons I don’t want to forget you. The way you make me feel when you touch me, what we shared back at the cabin and here on the mountainside. The way you protected me even though I slowed you down and put you at more risk.”

  Another whisper of a kiss and then she laid it all out there for him. “And then there’s the fact that I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  She regretted the words the second they left her mouth. Gone was her warm and caring lover. In his place was the sto
ne-faced warrior who used to glare at her through the thick glass of his cell. Then he blinked, and the anger was gone. What replaced it looked a lot like regret . . . or, worse yet, maybe pity.

  Which meant it was time to get moving. Using their thin blanket as a shield, she sat up and started gathering the clothes she’d so cheerfully shed the night before. When she reached for her pants, Chase already had ahold of them. She tugged on them, but he didn’t immediately let go.

  “Please, I need to get dressed. It’s getting pretty light out. We should get moving.”

  He maintained his hold on her pants for another few seconds before finally surrendering them to her. “I’m handling this badly.”

  She wasn’t going to dispute that. Instead, she concentrated on getting dressed. Despite having spent the night skin to skin with the man, right now her feelings were too raw to want to remain so exposed both physically and emotionally. Chase turned away and also started putting on his clothes, perhaps sensing her need for a little privacy.

  When they were both done tying their shoes, he stood and then offered her a hand up from the ground. Even that small touch hurt. It didn’t help that he wouldn’t let go.

  “About what you said—”

  Oh no, they weren’t going there. Not now, when it was too late. Frustration and embarrassment had her fighting to get free. “Let. Go. Of. Me.”

  He did, but he continued to crowd close as if he was worried that she’d break and run.

  “Let me explain, Marisol.” He lifted his hand as if to touch her face, but then let it drop back down to his side before adding one more word. “Please.”

  She took a small step backward to give herself some breathing room. “Fine, I’m listening.”

  Chase stared past her for a long moment before finally turning those intensely blue eyes back in her direction. “There are reasons why you shouldn’t get too attached to me, but none of them are because I don’t care. I have strong feelings for you, too, but my life . . . Well, let’s just say I have commitments I can’t just walk away from and wouldn’t choose to even if I could. It has to do with all the effects those anomalies in my DNA have on me. They make me better suited to do certain things than humans who lack that marker you’ve been studying.”

  As if she hadn’t figured out that much on her own. “You mean your ability to heal at an accelerated rate, not to mention that you can come back from fatal wounds.”

  “Yeah. Although like I told you, there’s no telling how long my luck in that area will hold out. I’m pretty sure that what the guards did to me may have accelerated that process. That means I’m not safe to be around, especially if I sustain another major wound. The man I am now would never hurt you. The crazed killer I’d become would love to. Hopefully, I’ll learn more about the effects of what they did to me once I get back to our headquarters.”

  Okay, that scared her. “Isn’t there anything that can be done to reverse the effects?”

  He shrugged. “They’re working on that, but no one has found a magic cure as yet. They’ve got some of the smartest people I’ve ever met working on the problem, and I’m confident they’ll eventually find the answer. But I won’t lie to you, honey. By the time they do, it will likely be too late for me.”

  Her mind flashed back to that last day in the compound when he’d ordered her out of his cell for her own sake. “Because your eyes are already flashing orange?”

  He nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. “Yeah, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to pretend we could build any kind of future together when we know the countdown to disaster has already started.”

  For the second time that morning, her eyes started leaking a steady stream of tears. She swiped at them with the palms of her hands as she tried to come to terms with what he was telling her. It wasn’t fair. Not to her, and most certainly not to him.

  The distance between them was too much. She took a hesitant step forward and was instantly rewarded by Chase reaching out for her, pulling her into the safe harbor of his arms. “What if I want whatever time we could have together?”

  The noble jerk was already shaking his head. “I can’t ask that of you.”

  She rested her face against his powerful chest. “But that’s what I’m offering, Chase.”

  “You deserve to go back to your own world, not a screwed-up one like mine.”

  She laughed even though there was nothing funny about the situation. “You think my world was perfect before all of this happened? Like when my father walked out on my mother and me when I was little? One day he was there with us. Things weren’t perfect, but at least we had food on the table and a roof over our heads. The next day he left to get smokes. They must have been some special cigarettes, because he’s still out there somewhere looking for them.”

  Chase’s arms tightened around her. “Only a fool would walk away from a daughter like you.”

  She appreciated the sentiment, but it wasn’t one her mother would ever agree with. “My mom always insisted he left because of me. Evidently before they got saddled with a screaming brat, they’d had a lot of fun together. Then I came along, and there was never enough money for the good stuff like alcohol and drugs. She never forgave me. It took her a long time to accept he wasn’t coming back, and it was up to her to be the adult in the house. Unfortunately, she never finished high school, so she could only get dead-end jobs, each worse than the one before. I still have nightmares about waking up alone in the house and not knowing where my mother was or when she’d be home. Or if she’d be home at all. After all, my dad left. No reason she wouldn’t, too.”

  “I’d like to kick both their asses for them.”

  Chase’s anger on her behalf eased some of the pain she’d never quite been able to shake. He didn’t really need to hear all about her pathetic past, but the words kept coming. “That wasn’t even the worst part. She started bringing one loser after another to the house. At first, they’d stay for a few months; eventually, only for a few hours. They’d leave a little money on the kitchen table on their way out. I did my best to ignore the revolving door of ‘uncles’ and buried myself in schoolwork. I figured out early on that education would be my ticket out of there. I graduated from high school early and never looked back.”

  “Have you had any contact with your mom since then?”

  “I tried a couple of times. The last time, she barely recognized me and didn’t even invite me in.”

  Might as well lay it all out there. “She did ask if I had the money I owed her. You know, to pay her back for all the years she had to support me. When I said no, she said I was still worthless and not to bother coming back again. I took her at her word and haven’t reached out to her since.”

  “Good. She doesn’t deserve to have a gift like you in her life. She never did.”

  She lifted her eyes to meet his gaze. “Thanks for listening.”

  Chase drew a deep breath. “I didn’t have a father at all. Gwen and I didn’t learn until I was almost eighteen that he had died without knowing Mom was pregnant with me. By all reports he was a good man, but knowing that doesn’t erase all those years of growing up without him. Mom never got over loving him, and she died before we learned the truth about Dad. She never knew that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to come back to her, but that he couldn’t.”

  Marisol put the pieces together. “I take it he was like you.”

  “Yeah, and his time ran out, just like mine is doing.”

  She thought about what he was saying and what it meant. “Let me ask you one thing, Chase, and I want an honest answer.”

  “Anything.”

  “Say your mom had known the truth about your father and that she loved him as much as you say she did. Don’t you think she would’ve wanted to spend all the time with him she could, no matter how long that turned out to be? That she would have relished every minute they shared? That those moments would be all the more precious because they knew going in that it wouldn’t last forever?”

  B
efore he could answer, the sound of someone clapping rang out across the hillside. Then Edgar called out, “This is all so touching. It’s like listening to our very own soap opera. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to see how it all turns out. Right now, I need you both to come out from behind those rocks with your hands up.”

  Chase responded by shoving Marisol to the ground and then following her down. She landed hard, but she was glad he had when a bullet hit the boulder just in front of where they’d been standing. Chips flew through the air, one of which hit Chase’s cheek and drew blood.

  He ignored the small wound as he leaned in close to talk to her. He pointed back in the direction the two of them had come from the night before. “Edgar and his friends are lined up along the hillside in that direction. I’ll lay down covering fire while you take the other rifle and make your way down to the creek and away from here.”

  No way she was leaving him behind. “How do you know I won’t be walking right into a trap?”

  “I can hear them. If I hadn’t been stupid enough to get caught up in telling you my life story, I would’ve noticed them before they had a chance to corner us here.”

  She accepted the rifle when he shoved it at her but made no effort to leave. “The fault is just as much mine. I won’t leave you here to face them alone.”

  “Our ammunition is limited. There’s no telling how long we can hold them off. We both know I stand a better chance of surviving if they manage to overrun our position.”

  She leaned in for a quick kiss. “Then we die together, Chase.”

  He glared at her. “God save me from stubborn women.”

  “You know you love me just the way I am.”

  Then he surprised her by kissing her again, this time hard and fast. “Yeah, I do, so don’t get yourself killed. I’ve got plans for us.”

  Then he went into that amazing warrior mode of his and turned to face their enemy.