Darcy's hands knotted in the sheet as if trying to anchor her to the bed, when she no doubt wanted to leap into the middle of the action.
No, his gut insisted. He burned to tell her to go back to sleep. He would handle everything.
Except if he voiced that gut reaction, she'd clam up. Walk away. And rightly so. He would feel the same. "We could use your help piecing this together."
Shock sent her eyes open even wider. He shouldn't be surprised. He'd done little to earn her trust. Even now he fought the urge to recall the words and plop her gorgeous ass onto the first plane off the island.
"I'll get dressed and follow you over soon."
His hand hesitated on the knob. "I'll wait for you."
She waved him away, the sheet still shielding her. "Get going. There's no time for you to wait. I won't be long. I can use a few minutes to get my head together before talking through all this again."
Vulnerability flickered in eyes already ringed with dark circles and shadows. He charged back over to the bed, kissing her hard and fast, branding her as his before he left. Darcy needed her space? Fine. He'd give her space. But that didn't mean he was walking away.
Darcy stepped out of the shower for the second time in a few short hours. Not as satisfying a cleansing as the first one, but enlightening. Every drop of water that rolled down her skin reminded her of sharing the same stall with Max. Soaked into her with reminders of how much she wanted him in her life.
She reached to swipe steam off the mirror, her hand slowing. As if guided against its will, her finger traced through the fog until a diver-down symbol appeared.
Her arm dropped. Geez, she was like some schoolkid scribbling "Mrs. Max Keagan'' on the back of her notebook.
Whoa! Wait. Where had marriage thoughts come from? She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
I'm the guy who loves you, damn it.
The walls crowded in on her as if she was in that bunker again. She wanted to trust everything would work between them.
Yet emotions were different and far more fragile than the body. A currently tender, well-loved body.
She wanted to trust Max would always be there for her, but she couldn't erase the sense that one day she might be left waiting. Hurting. She knew intellectually her father had found her in record time. She would have sworn she didn't blame him. But had she subconsciously been blaming him all these years?
Irrational. Stupid. And flat-out wrong, except who said emotions were logical? Hers definitely weren't these days.
Intimacy issues.
If she never let anyone get too close, no one could ever let her down. What an unrealistic expectation to set for herself and for any man—perfection with never a misstep. Of course she'd been the one to misstep.
He'd told her he loved her. And she'd hid in that mental bunker like a scared kid rather than take his face in her hands and thank him for the beautiful gift of his heart.
Even if she couldn't pull her own messed-up head and heart together enough to be the woman he deserved, she should have kissed him. At least been brave enough to tell him the truth, that, yeah, she was halfway there to being in love with him, too. She should have given reassurance that with his patience she could kick down her own walls and join him.
After twelve years of closing herself off, maybe it was finally time to let someone inside. Let Max inside.
Starting now.
Darcy slipped on a clean flight suit and laced up her boots. Heading out the door, she prepped her mindset for battle. Losing wasn't an option when the stakes were forever.
Steam radiated up from the parking lot even in the middle of the night. She strode down the open walkway, dim lights tracking her way toward her rental car while stars dotted the sky overhead.
Halogen lamplight silhouetted a man lounging on her trunk, his back stretching a preppy, blue polo shirt.
"Perry?" Darcy called.
Max's assistant straightened and spun to face her. "Hello, Darcy. The boss sent me over to pick you up. He said you didn't need to be driving after all you went through yesterday with the emergency landing and all."
That sounded like Max. She started to argue and assert that she could drive herself.
How ridiculous and recklessly prideful. Why not take the ride? She could use the time to settle her emotions before she faced him again, rather than climb behind the wheel with shaking hands.
One brick at a time. Pull those walls down and quit being so frigging defensive. "Thanks. I appreciate the thoughtfulness."
Night silence echoing, Darcy stepped around to the passenger side and slid into the sedan. The air conditioner blasted her with arctic air. No wonder Perry looked so crisp without even one stray hair mussed in spite of the hundred-plus degrees outside. "You must be eager to get back to your wife and kids. How much longer do you expect to be in Guam?"
Streetlights whipped past the windows, haloing his blond preppy perfection. "Not long at all. We've just about wrapped everything up."
"Good." Which meant Max would be free sooner. Her stomach performed aerial maneuvers.
Perry braked the car to a stop at the sign in spite of the nonexistent traffic, before turning onto a narrow road behind an oversize cinder-block building. "Too bad you can't go diving with Max since you just flew. Wouldn't want to risk an air embolism."
"Huh?" Darcy yanked her attention away from concerns about how she and Max would handle trying to make a relationship work in the real world. "Even once the time restriction wears off, I'm not so sure we'll be wanting to dive together anytime soon."
She stared out the windshield and steadied her breathing by counting fence posts in the distance, a fence with wire mesh tubes strapped to catch tree snakes. Spotlights showcased one long carcass trailing from the end of the tube.
She shuddered.
"That sure was a close call for you and Max, all those divers coming after you." A smile picked at the corner of Perry's mouth. "Good thinking on your part, using that red coral to your advantage."
Red coral? How did he know?
A tingle iced up her spine so cold it canceled out even the a/c blast. Surely she and Max would have recognized Perry as one of the divers attacking them.
Had she or Max told anyone about the red coral?
She couldn't remember for certain. But if she hadn't, Perry could only know by hearing from someone else who'd been there.
The tingle flamed to a burn.
Trust instincts.
Darcy reached for the door handle and eyed the approaching stop sign. She didn't care if it looked silly, her falling out on the sidewalk. Crusty and Perry could tease her later if she was wrong. After the week she'd had, no way was she ignoring her instincts.
Instincts fired to full alert.
Screw waiting for the next stop sign. She yanked the door handle. The door wouldn't move.
Don't panic.
A hand banded on her arm. "Careful, now," Perry crooned. "If you want to stop, just say so."
She balled up her fist. "Okay, I want to stop."
"No problem."
Her eye caught a flash, low, in Perry's hand.
She arced back to punch. Nailed him in the face.
A pinch, then a sting spread through her leg. Confusion swirled. A spider again? She looked down.
A syringe dangled from her thigh, piercing through her flight suit into her skin. An empty syringe. Oh, God.
"You son of a bitch." Darcy knocked it aside, kicked, screamed, prayed like hell someone would hear her before whatever he'd given her...started to...slow her reflexes.
The edges of consciousness sucked inward like in a rapid decompression. Fogginess rolled over her. Consciousness faded with Perry's voice echoing in her dazed mind as he pulled from behind the building and drove through the front gate.
Perry swiped the trail of blood from his nose, his blond hair not so neat anymore. Darcy didn't have time to appreciate the damage she'd done with her right hook as reality drifted with his fading voice.
"Let me tell you about an episode of Batman and Robin where Robin decides it's time for him to run the show."
Chapter 15
Max peered through the window into the security police station interrogation room where Lieutenant Colonel Kat Lowry sat, ramrod straight and not budging on her responses. Her voice echoed through the speaker as she answered routine questions from the steely-haired OSI Special Agent.
Alone in the narrow observation hall, Max processed her answers piping through the speaker. But more important, he studied the Army intel officer's eyes to gauge her reactions. He absorbed her every betraying twitch, already compiling a list of rebuttal questions to pass along to the interrogator.
After a quick briefing from Crusty and Max, the OSI had picked her up hours ago—a cold victory, revealing a traitor. Hell, it all made sense. Her encryption specialty with the tap. Her knowing precisely when Max and Darcy had left to dive. Her ensuring Vinnie was in the wrong place at the wrong time to appear guilty.
How many other minds and lives had she played with? The scope of damage could ripple for years. The Army CID officer perched in the steel-backed chair with a calm no doubt honed from years in the field.
He'd waited for this moment since Eva's death, longed to find a link to the intelligence leak in the South Pacific. Still, the closure didn't settle within him.
Max rested his palms on the ledge and canted closer to the one-way mirror while she answered another round of questions. His gut told him they had the right person. She insisted she didn't need a JAG, but he could sense the edginess in her even through glass.
Yeah, it fit. Almost. He couldn't reconcile the image of this woman wasting time on spiders or tampering with a plane to taunt Darcy.
The tension in Lowry built until Max could almost see it pulsing from her, like the heightened Technicolor world he'd missed underwater for so long. Darcy challenged the hell out of him, bringing all senses alive until the world sharpened.
Focused.
Until he could see Kat Lowry was ready to...
"I want to cut a deal."
Max exhaled the victory.
Her voice remained calm through the speaker. "You can arrest me—just one solitary little leak." She leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Or I can give you at least fifty military and CIA leaks in exchange for immunity."
CIA? Alarms jangled in Max's head.
"Colonel," the interrogator intoned, "I don't have the power to grant that and you know it."
"Find someone who does. You can buy me off with a deal. Piece of cake. Other countries have been doing it with money for years. And while you're at it, here's a token of good faith, a freebie to give you a sample of what I know. Maybe soften the folks farther up the chain."
The interrogator folded his arms. "I'm listening."
"Max Keagan's assistant."
Perry? Max searched Lowry's face, deeper, wondering what game she was playing with them this time. Confusion shuffled the new piece of information in his brain seeking a place in the puzzle.
The interrogator shot her a skeptical look.
She waved a hand through the air. "Your choice whether to believe me or not. Your loss if you choose wrong. He was placing encrypted phone calls to me right up to a few hours before he left San Diego. I'm telling you, he turned and he's out of control. He's got some kind of vendetta against Keagan. A person like that is dangerous. Damned emotional bastard blew this whole operation."
Max scrubbed a hand across his face to clear away lack of sleep and search for what reason Perry would have to go gunning for him.
Kat Lowry drummed her fingers along the steel-topped table. "Perry Griffin's been selling information for years. Hell, he's the one who tipped off the other side so I could wrangle myself in on the intel team to control the fallout. He's definitely got an agenda this time, and he won't accept less than the personal satisfaction of watching Keagan suffer."