the younger man snap to attention and all but run from the room. Shot to hell the moment he saw this doe-eyed young woman, her look pleading with him to save her.
As if he were some bleeding angel of mercy. Hell, he was the reason she was here. And the sooner she knew it, and accepted what her role was, the better it would be for all concerned.
He felt the scramble of her pulse lessen beneath his hand. Her head lolled forward, the curtain of her midnight-black hair shielding all but the curve of her chin, the paleness of her complexion. One that had turned sheet-white when she realized what Tennison was doing to her with the hypodermic. Then her gaze had consigned him to a hell with no return. Not that he blamed her.
But that was his job. Make the tough choices, get the mission accomplished. Maybe he was getting old, or stale, since the thought sat heavy on him. But he meant what he’d said. So far this mission had been a disaster. If they’d had more time, they could have foregone the crudeness of a kidnapping. Avoided the emotional and physical costs the woman before him already was paying.
But if there was one thing he had accepted after years of service, there was no going back and correcting past mistakes. There was only going forward, and minimizing future ones. Someone always paid. In this case—her.
Jane Richards was his responsibility now. And he’d do everything in his power to keep her alive. Everything.
“I will keep you safe,” he whispered aloud to the woman who couldn’t hear him. He squeezed her hand, knowing it was a useless gesture, surprised that he was compelled to do it at all.
Chapter 2
“Here, drink this.” The voice was close to her. A male voice, like hot caramel over cold ice cream. One she thought she should know.
“Open your eyes and drink this.”
She didn’t want to open her eyes. Then there’d be no going back, no pretending she was safe and in Sioux Falls. But there was no avoiding it. The voice wouldn’t let her.
Slowly, as if they had been glued shut, she pried her eyes open. Then shut them quickly.
Gray-eyes. Mesmerizing, compelling, lying Gray-eyes. Like the crash of a wave—it all came back to her. Her apartment building. A cramped, airless room. A man with medals strung across his chest and another man—Gray-eyes—telling her one thing, holding her still while yet another shot her full of who knew what.
“You can’t ignore it. Better to face things head-on.”
Easy for him to say, she wanted to snarl, surprised at the clean edge of her anger. It felt good. Better than the terror she remembered so vividly. The helplessness and confusion in the small room. The willingness to trust a man who said one thing and did another. This man.
She opened her eyes again. Cowering was for cowards. While Jane thought she was a lot of things—shy, unprepossessing, ordinary—she didn’t like thinking of herself as a coward.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
The demand she heard in her voice pleased her. For a second she thought he might have felt the same way. A glimmer of a smile touched his lips, until he pushed forward a glass. It looked as if he’d been holding it, waiting for her. “Drink this. Then we’ll talk.”
She raised herself to a reclining position, balancing on her elbow and reaching for the glass, aware her hand shook as she grasped its cool surface. Even under ordinary circumstances it would have been difficult to appear unmoved when a man like this hovered next to her, close enough that she could smell the scent of his skin and feel the heat his body radiated. An awareness out of place with the man who had kidnapped her.
She willed herself to look away, to break the contact of his gaze pinning hers, and caught herself wondering what was in the glass he insisted she drink. More drugs? Something to keep her quiet and compliant? Until what? Or when?
“It’s just water.”
“Then you take a drink first.” She thrust it back into his hands, surprised she dared such a thing, even more surprised when he accepted it and took a long, slow draught, his gaze never leaving hers over the edge of the glass.
“It will help with the dry mouth.” He pressed it back into her hands. Obviously this man had dealt with drugged women before. Not a comforting thought. “Later, if you want, I’ll get you some aspirin for your headache.”
Yes, he definitely knew the aftereffects. Just who was this guy? And what did he want with her?
She watched him rise to his feet and cross to a chair several feet away. Only then did she sip from the glass, thankful for the cool sensation soothing her too-dry throat, yet wary as to why he was being so solicitous. He remained quiet until she had finished most of the water and placed the glass on a coffee table before her.
It was only then that she sat up and looked around her. Looked around and felt the flip-flop of her stomach. They were no longer in the small, cramped room. It looked like a plane, but not the passenger kind.
Instead it looked like a living room, with carpeted floors, two butternut-brown leather chairs on both sides of the couch she was sitting on, end tables and a series of oval windows on either side which showed nothing but blue, blue sky. With a feeling of detachment, or maybe it was hysteria again, she was glad to find that here at least she wasn’t tied to anything.
Not that she could make a run for it thousands of feet in the air, she thought, sure it was hysteria making her want to shake her head and close her eyes again.
But Gray-eyes had his own agenda.
“We’re thirty-two thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean,” he remarked, his voice calm and level. “We should be landing in a little over two hours, given our present rate of speed.”
“Landing where?”
“Dubruchek.”
“And Dubruchek is where?” Jane wrapped her arms around herself to keep from shaking.
“Dubruchek is the capital city of Vendari. A small, very important mountain country in the Balkans.”
“Important to whom?”
“To a lot of people.” He shifted in his seat, leaning forward, his fingers splayed across his knees as if they were discussing the weather. It was then she saw the gun peeping out from a shoulder holster he wore and knew, like a swift kick to the head, that this was not a dream. It was a nightmare.
“I know this is all very confusing.”
That was an understatement if she’d ever heard one. But something in his look told her he’d have little patience for pithy comments.
“Vendari is a monarchy sandwiched between two larger, and unstable countries, which makes it of strategic importance to the United States.”
Great, she wakes up to a strange man and a throbbing head only to get a geography lesson.
He continued. “It’s a monarchy with its own history of bloodshed and violence. Its last king, Zhitomir Vassilivich Tarkioff, was assassinated twenty years ago.”
“And this means
