The Protector Read online

  Only it wasn’t a closet, she realized, shutting the door abruptly. A glimpse of Spartan furnishings and a whiff of her host’s woodsy scent told her there were two ways to access his bedroom.

  Turning back to use the towel, she caught sight of her reflection in the speckled mirror. Gads. The morning had taken its toll on her. Setting her purse on the sink, she grubbed inside it for her bronzing powder.

  A knock at the door nearly startled her into dropping it. “Yes?”

  “I’m coming in,” came the gruff warning, and the door swung inward.

  Baffled, Eryn stepped back. Ike Calhoun’s disapproving gaze went straight to the compact in her hands. “What are you taking?” he demanded.

  She showed it to him. “Nothing. I’m putting on make-up.”

  “I meant earlier. What’s in the pill bottle?”

  “What’s it to you?” The rude rejoinder appalled her but, really, was it any of his business?

  His eyes narrowed and he put out a hand. “Give it over.” He looked like he’d wait till Christmas or next Easter, but, by God, she’d give up the goods.

  With an exclamation of disgust, Eryn took the bottle from her purse and thrust it at him. “Fine, have a look. The FBI’s psychologist prescribed it to me for anxiety.”

  Angling the bottle toward the light, he read the label. Then, with an inscrutable glance, he twisted off the cap, stepped over to the toilet, and upended the little blue pills into the bowl.

  “No!” Eryn cried in horror. “What did you just do?” She couldn’t believe what her eyes were telling her.

  “You don’t need those,” he insisted, sliding the empty container into his pants pocket.

  Blood rushed to Eryn’s head, pushed by a heart that had started galloping. “Are you crazy?” The thought of being without her pills terrified her. Images of Itzak with his neck slit open made her prickle all over. “How am I supposed to sleep?” she demanded.

  “You’ll be fine,” he insisted.

  “Fine?” Her fears manifested into fury. That was the same damn word Jackson had used within hours of the safe house blowing up. “You call hiding in this hovel out in the middle of nowhere fine?” She was aghast at her own rudeness but unable to help herself.

  Ike folded massive arms across his chest. “I don’t give a damn what you think of this place,” he retorted in a voice that could freeze water. “My job is to protect you—from yourself, if necessary. Right now, you’re so strung out, you can barely stand up.”

  “Strung out?” Her mouth popped open. “You think I’m a drug addict?” She could barely spit the words out.

  He shrugged impassively. “You tell me.”

  “I already told you!” You asshole! “Those pills were for anxiety. I need them to sleep. You have no idea what I’ve been through!”

  “I don’t care about what you’ve been through. I’m not your therapist.”

  She gasped. His callousness was a slap in the face. She tried again. “You don’t know what it’s like—”

  “To know someone died because of you? To think you could have stopped it? To want your goddamn life back?” Each word brought him an inch closer. A ruddy stain crept out of his collar and up his neck to stand on his cheekbones.

  She stared at him, speechless, not altogether certain if he was talking about her or something that had happened to him. This wasn’t the time to ask, either, not when he loomed over her, his breath rasping in the volatile silence.

  He visibly reigned himself in. “You’ll thank me later,” he muttered, turning away.

  The pompous statement brought her anger roaring back. “The hell I will!” With no control over her impulses, Eryn shoved him toward the door.

  He turned back with a look of incredulity.

  She wanted him gone—all six-foot-something, 200-some-odd pounds of him. “Get out!” She knew she was seconds away from a meltdown. She could feel it gaining momentum inside of her. In desperation, she shoved him a second time.

  All her shove accomplished was to make him widen his stance and drop his arms. The extent of her absolute helplessness broke over her. Mortified, Eryn whirled around and pressed her hands to her burning eyes, fighting down the geyser rising up her throat.

  Awkward silence filled the small space.

  A tortured sob escaped her. Her lungs convulsed. She couldn’t contain it. Ike’s hostility coming on top of the fear she’d lived with these past weeks—the thought of Itzak’s last horrifying moments, her near run-in with a bomb this morning—coalesced into a storm breaking over her with fury.

  It sounded like someone else sobbing as she succumbed to the deluge. And Ike had thrown away her only comfort, dooming her to nightmares in which she envisioned her own violent death at the hands of a faceless terrorist. How could he have done that to her, the heartless bastard?

  Over her gut-wrenching sobs, she discerned a longsuffering sigh.

  In the next instant, firm hands settled on her shoulders, drawing her around. Begrudgingly, she let him pull her to the rigid but warm wall of his body. A thick arm banded her shoulders, holding her securely.

  “It’s okay,” he muttered, sounding subdued. “You’ll feel better once it’s out of your system.”

  He meant the medicine, she realized, with a surge of resentment. How could he even think for a moment that she was a drug user! With a moan of outrage, she gripped his jacket to shake sense into him, only to cling to him, instead.

  Trying to draw comfort from such a hardened man was lesson in futility. Then again, nothing about the past two weeks made any sense. At the very most, he was an anchor holding her fast, as muddied waters threatened to sweep her away.

  Moment by moment, her sobs subsided and her self-control returned.

  Gathering what little remained of her dignity, Eryn dashed the wetness from her face, sniffed, and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, staring at the cracks in the tiled floor, aware of his emotionless scrutiny.

  “You’ll feel better in a day or two,” he finally predicted. With a glance at the toilet bowl and the dissolving pills, he left her standing there, bitterly humiliated, feeling like a junkie in rehab.

  Screw you, she thought, glaring after him.

  The spoiled princess was sulking over her lost meds, Ike decided, as he carried two bowls of stew from the stove to the field table that served as a dinette.

  Eryn sat stiffly in a ladder-back chair, clutching a glass of ice water. The sinking sun spotlighted her puffy, red-rimmed eyes and spiked eyelashes. How she managed to look beautiful, even regal, on the heels of her emotional outburst was a mystery to him. But thanks to her meltdown, her softness and her scent were now imprinted on his senses, giving rise to a nagging sexual awareness.

  “Back up,” he snapped at Winston, who stepped into his path while sniffing the air appreciatively. At his sharp tone, the Shepherd mix lay down, put his head between his paws, and gazed up pitifully.

  “He’s hungry,” Eryn growled in defense of her dog.

  Ike felt like an ogre. Placing Eryn’s dinner in front of her, he braced himself for a negative response. Being the daughter of a four-star general, he imagined she was used to eating at fancy restaurants and officers’ clubs. He doubted she’d ever seen grub like this before.

  When she studied the unappetizing mush without comment, he dropped into the seat opposite hers and dug in wordlessly, watching her reaction out the corner of his eye.

  She lifted her spoon, took a small bite, chewed and swallowed. “Do you always eat MRE’s?” she asked him.

  That got his attention. “How do you know this is an MRE?” She’d been upstairs when he’d dumped the stew out of the Meal-Ready-to-Eat Pouch.

  “’Cause that’s all we ate after my mother died,” she said, stirring her stew. “That’s when I learned to cook.”

  Now he really felt like an ogre. The memory of Stanley’s moist gaze as he talked about his wife at the Watering Hole returned to Ike with clarity. He wondered if Cougar wou
ld grieve for Carrie as long as Stanley had grieved for Irene—over a decade now. “You don’t have to eat it,” he heard himself offer. “I’ll find you something else.” Except the only thing growing in his garden was winter squash.

  “You know, I could cook while I’m here,” she suggested unexpectedly. “I make a really mean lasagna.”

  Ike’s mouth watered. When was the last time he’d tasted home-cooked lasagna?

  “We’ll buy groceries,” he decided. “Tomorrow.”

  “How long am I going to be here?”

  The question agitated him all over again. “Depends on whether the FBI can find the bomber and whether they can prove he murdered your student.”

  She put her spoon down, looking suddenly ill. “You heard about Itzak?”

  “Yes.” Stanley had relayed the story to Cougar, who’d told it to Ike. Her Afghani student had plotted with another man to abduct her on her evening commute, only the kid had changed his mind at the last instant and ended up paying for his loyalty with his life.

  “He had ties to the Brotherhood of Islam. That’s a faith-based group in D.C.”

  “I know what it is.” Bunch of homegrown terrorists, he thought.

  “The FBI says they want to avenge my father’s actions in Afghanistan by...by attacking me.” She lifted a dainty hand to her neck as if protecting it.

  Disturbed by the look on her face, Ike heard himself say, “No one’s going to find you here.”

  She nodded, blinking rapidly to staunch the tears that made her eyes luminous.

  “Eat your food,” he ordered. It annoyed him that he could feel himself getting sucked into her predicament. It had nothing to do with him—not anymore.

  She poked at her stew but didn’t eat. “Listen, I don’t mean to be a nuisance,” she said with hesitancy, “but I don’t have any clothes.” Her gravity conveyed that the world would stop turning. “Plus, I need a toothbrush.”

  Her perfect, white smile had probably cost a fortune in orthodontics. “I have an extra. Never been used,” he added when her eyes just widened. “You going to eat that or not?”

  She took a genteel bite to appease him. Ike acknowledged that she’d probably never called anyone crazy in her entire life, nor told anyone his house was a hovel. He had managed to bring out the worst in her, which had amounted to a storm of weeping and mild epithets, making her more appealing than ever, damn it.

  Truth was, she’d been through hell lately—like nothing she’d ever experienced before. He could at least try to be nice, whether she abused drugs or not.

  “Did you get a look at the man in the taxi?” They might as well hash it out now while they were on the subject.

  She fought to swallow the bite she’d taken. “Not really. It was dusk. I couldn’t make out his face, just the fact that he wore glasses.”

  “Didn’t anyone get the plates?”

  She shook her head again. “No one even noticed. They would have gotten away with it if Itzak hadn’t changed his mind.” She bit her trembling lower lip. “He saved my life.”

  Poor kid was probably half in love with her.

  “Did he say anything that could help identify the driver?”

  All color slipped from her face as she gave a nod. “He told me to run, that the driver of the taxi would find me, and...he would take my head.”

  The stew in Ike’s gut threatened a return. He stared at Eryn, aghast. Beheading the enemy was a fun little game that fundamentalists liked to play overseas. To date, it wasn’t a pastime of homegrown terrorists. That meant they were probably acting at the behest of the Taliban or al Qaeda. Had the FBI considered that?

  Feeling thoroughly worked up, he thrust his chair back and crossed to the woodstove where he busied himself stoking the flames, adding enough firewood to last till midnight.

  “Why did my father send you, Ike?”

  The soft question, spoken just over his shoulder, startled him. He hadn’t heard Eryn leave the table.

  Shutting the iron door, he brushed dirt off his hands and rose to face her. His first impulse was to shelter her from the truth, but then he decided it was best that she knew. “He figured the FBI was using you as bait.”

  Air whooshed from her lungs but she didn’t look too surprised. “That’s what it felt like,” she admitted, proving herself more astute than he’d given her credit for. As he watched, she hugged herself in an effort to quell the tremors shook her entire body. He started to reach for her, then thought better of it.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered. The pleading look in her violet-blue eyes begged for his comfort.

  Ike’s heart trotted. All this touchy-feely stuff awakened emotions in him he’d spent the last twelve months—a lifetime maybe—trying to deny. She made him want what he could never have

  “Give your dinner to the dog,” he said, fleeing for the door. What he needed right now was fresh air and a clearer perspective.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, whirling with a panicked look.

  “Not far.” He couldn’t get out fast enough.

  “Ike?”

  With one foot out the door, he glanced back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, unsettling him further.

  “For what?”

  “For intruding on your space.”

  He didn’t want her feeling bad for him, not after the way he’d treated her today. Not when he looked at her and thought about sex.

  Not going to happen. Without a word, he kept right on going, pushing into sharply cooler air, shutting the door behind him.

  The sun was starting to set behind the adjacent landmasses, Green Mountain and Lairds Knob. Stalking up the trail he’d extended for his survival course, Ike hiked through the sparse, shadowed woods to the man-sized boulder that marked the first tenth of a mile. Climbing onto its lichen-covered surface, he dangled his feet off the edge and admired the burnished horizon.

  Eryn’s struggle was a manifestation of the war he wanted no more part of. Recruiting Ike had been Stanley’s way of getting him back into the game, the sonofabitch.

  It wasn’t like Ike had a choice, either. He’d do anything to make up for the mistake that had cost four teammates their lives. Stanley knew that. He knew Ike wouldn’t fuck up again. He knew he’d keep Eryn safe from any threat that might come up his mountain.

  Keeping her safe from himself? Now that was going to be the real test.

  Chapter Five

  “Okay, so the UPS man didn’t martyr himself,” Ringo stated, bringing them up-to-date on his findings. “Ashwin Patel has been a U.S. citizen from the age of two, plus he practiced Hindu.”

  “That could have been a cover,” Caine insisted.

  “The manager said some little shit came in and mailed the package, paying for it in cash.” Ringo set aside the baggie with the cash in it for the Emergency Response Team to take back to Quantico for fingerprinting. “It’s all on the tape, which has been rewound for us.”

  Caine inserted the old cassette tape into a compatible player, and they all watched with baited breath.

  “That’s the kid,” said Ringo.

  “Christ,” Caine exclaimed. “What is he, like fifteen years old?”

  The little shit, Jackson determined. The boy was probably too young even to be in their system.

  Despite the cool thermostat setting in the sound room, Caine had sweat stains under his arm pits. “How the hell are we going to find a kid that young?”

  “Learner’s permit if we’re lucky,” Jackson drawled. He thought to himself that the mastermind behind the attack was pretty damn clever.

  As Caine queried their facial recognition software, Jackson studied the boy’s every nuance. Unlike the man pretending to be Pedro, he made no attempt to disguise his face. He smiled at the cashier, paid seven fifty in cash, and left. He’s not the bomber, Jackson realized. In deference to Caine’s worsening mood, he said, instead, “The kid has no idea what’s in the box.”

  “Yeah, I think someone paid him to
send it,” Ringo agreed.

  Ignoring both of his subordinates, Caine snatched up the report coming in from NCIC. “Patel comes up clean,” he relayed, stating what they’d already guessed.

  The UPS driver was not a suspect. The kid who mailed the box knew nothing, was nobody, as their facial recognition system attested when it flashed NO MATCH.

  SSA Caine wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “We’ve got nothing,” he admitted, looking stunned. “They bombed our fucking safe house, and we don’t have a fucking lead!”