by Lora Leigh
“We have to get to Chalah.” She gasped as Tariq threw the door open with one hand. He carried the powerful automatic rifle in the other.
She considered it completely unfair that his gun was bigger than hers.
“She’s probably the reason they found us so fucking fast,” Tariq snarled back at her.
There was nothing of the lovers who had held her so gently, who had touched her so heatedly earlier. These were hardened warriors, and though she appreciated the need, she did not appreciate the delivery of the attitude in her direction.
“Tariq.” Abram’s voice was warning as they stepped into the darkened hallway.
Tariq turned to the left, ignoring Abram and heading for the staircase that curved down to the main floor. The opposite direction of the room Chalah had been taken to.
Without a word Paige turned to the right, breathing out a sigh of relief as she felt Abram following closely behind her as she moved quickly for Chalah’s room.
Tariq cursed furiously behind them.
Reaching the door Abram gave a hard, quick knock before pushing it open.
Darkened, silent, the room appeared deserted as Tariq pushed in ahead of Abram. Paige caught the disgruntled look Tariq shot him.
Another explosion shook the house, this one closer, the flare of light blazing white outside the tall, wide windows. Paige barely managed to hold back her cry, or at least she thought she had. It must have escaped as a small, frightened squeak that seemed to drift through the room.
She could have sworn she heard Tariq curse again. Striding past her he threw open the closet door and a heartbeat later dragged a terrified Chalah from the small, enclosed space.
“Let’s go!” Abram ordered as they moved quickly down the hall. “Tariq, has Conover contacted?”
“Nothing,” Tariq answered from behind him. “And he should have radioed.”
“They managed to get past him and his men once before when Ayid and Aman came after Kahlid and Abram,” Paige stated. “They could have managed to overtake them again.” They, being Jafar and his men.
Jafar.
Paige glanced back at Chalah’s pale, tearstained face. Abram’s father, and Chalah’s brother. How horrible it must be to face the reality of their hatred.
“Tariq, take Paige and Chalah—”
“Oh hell no,” Paige protested. “You’re not going anywhere without me.”
“No women are giving us orders,” Tariq growled as they neared the steps. “Next thing we know, children will be teaching us.”
Paige had every intention of telling him exactly what she thought of the comment when they heard the first, sharp report of a weapon.
Tariq and Abram both moved quickly, pushing Paige and Chalah against the wall. The sound of shouted orders from below had Paige’s heart racing in terror. She felt a bone-deep knowledge that Abram wouldn’t be able to handle hiding for long.
“The safe room,” Abram said, turning to Tariq. “There’s one on each floor. Activated it sends out an alarm to police, fire, and rescue, independent of the phone lines.”
“Why can’t you use the phone lines?” Paige whispered.
“I checked them,” Tariq stated. “They’re out and cell phones are jammed. The safe room sends out a call to law enforcement through cable Internet which is buried underground. If they cut the lines there, it sends out a call then as well.”
The phones were out. Paige knew after the last attack Khalid had had a special security system installed that used the backup Internet connection emergency notification.
So why hadn’t there been a response yet?
“Abram, it’s Daniel Conover.” The sound of the security consultant’s voice rang up the stairs.
“Conover,” Abram called back as he placed his body carefully in front of Paige’s.
Tariq had done the same, standing in front of Chalah protectively. “What’s going on?”
“Too much, Abram,” Daniel called back. “But not enough to give a man a sense of satisfaction.” The safe code came back with an edge of amusement.
Abram relaxed marginally.
“I’m coming up, Abram,” Daniel announced.
Seconds later he strode to the top of the stairs, dressed in black and looking almost as dangerous as Abram and Tariq. “Police will be here any minute,” Daniel stated as he stopped at the top of the stairs, his blue eyes gleaming like hardened gems. “We caught a man armed with a piss-poor shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and a few homemade rockets. We have him in custody but he’s not talking. We’ll see what the police can do with him in a few minutes.” The sound of sirens wailing in the distance had Abram turning to glare at the window at the far end of the hall.
The flash of lights, blue and red, flared in the distance as the sirens moved closer.
Fuck.
Abram glared at the window, aware of Paige behind him, her hand moving to grip his bicep as she whispered his name.
“I could have made him talk,” he stated quickly. “Azir sent him. I could force it out of him.”
“Yeah, well, that shit seems to be against the law here in Virginia,” Daniel grunted. “Give me a chance to help them load up our prisoner and then we’ll talk.” About what?
Abram didn’t voice the thought. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing left to talk about if he was simply going to pack the man his agents had caught off to the local police station. “We can talk come morning,” Abram growled as he turned, catching Paige’s elbow and turning her back to the bedroom. “I have other things to do tonight.”
He was pissed, though he knew it was no one’s fault that his need to kick Jafar’s ass and shoot his own father was tearing through him.
The rage was building, and it was a rage he knew was only beginning to fester inside him.
“Abram, we’ll stop it,” Daniel assured him as Abram turned away from him.
“Will we, Daniel?” He grunted. “My brother is in the hospital near death, my lover must live in fear of being killed because she is my weakness, and my cousin, the only one willing to stand at my back has forever gained Azir’s hatred. Just as I did so long ago. Perhaps it’s time to realize there is nothing we can do in this fight. Had I not insisted on being here, where I was safe to feed my hungers, then neither Tariq nor Paige would be facing the danger that now stalks them.” He didn’t give Daniel a chance to answer.
Turning away he headed back to the bedroom, his fingers curved around Paige’s upper arm before drawing her into the bedroom.
“Abram, I will see you later in the day,” Tariq stated as Abram paused just inside the bedroom.
He turned and stared back at his cousin, then at the young woman watching everything silently, her dark eyes glittering with tears and with pain.
“Leave Chalah alone for the night, Tariq,” he told him quietly. “Jafar would have known where we were staying with no help from his sister.”
Tariq inclined his head in agreement, but Abram saw something in his gaze, in his expression, that warned him that in this, Tariq would have to cut his own throat before realizing the truth.
Abram closed the door, locked it securely, then turned back to Paige.
Pale, weary, yet with a strength he had always known she possessed. The strength to stare adversity in the face without losing her spirit or her courage.
God, she was the epitome of feminine strength and passion. A woman unlike any he had known before her.
He wanted to protect her. He wanted to place her in his bed and never allow her to leave it. At the same time, he wanted to stand before the world with her and proclaim her as his own. Each time that temptation rose inside him, though, memories of Lessa were there to haunt him.
“I’m sorry.” And he was, clear to the bottom of his soul he fully regretted the fact that Paige had been drawn into this hell.
Weary, worried, and frightened, she gave a hard, brief shake of her head.
“There’s no
reason for you to be sorry, Abram.” She sighed. “This has been coming since the day Mother escaped Azir, and we both know it.” Had they? Or, had he orchestrated it with his desire for her? With a look, or a word spoken at the wrong time to Azir, or possibly an edge of hunger not as clearly hidden as he had hoped whenever he saw her in public.
He shook his head.
“You know it has,” she whispered bitterly. “He couldn’t break Mother, and you refused to attempt to break me while we were in Saudi. You knew when we escaped, just as you knew years before he took me that it was coming. Azir wouldn’t have had it any other way.” And perhaps she was right.
Moving to her, he could do nothing but wrap his arms around her and hold her tight as he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer that God would keep her safe. That he would protect her, and that somehow, some way, there would be a chance for the happiness he had always dreamed of.
A chance that included holding Paige in his arms forever.
Pressing his fingers beneath her chin he lifted her head, watching as her lashes fluttered and those incredible green eyes stared back at him. Emerald eyes. Cat’s eyes. And she was just as fierce, independent, and courageous as any cat he had ever seen.
There was so much he wanted to say. So much inside him. How would he find the courage to tell her how much of him belonged to her?
Feeling her hands, so light, so delicate as they moved to the nape of his neck, he had to grit his teeth against the arousal that suddenly flared to life once again.
He would never get enough of her. It simply wasn’t possible.
“I love you, Abram.” She said the words he could feel beating in his heart.
“You amaze me, hellcat,” he said, feeling an amazement growing inside him. “How can you know how you have always softened the hell I’ve been forced to navigate as I fought to come to this place in my life? I could never express to you how you have eased the wounds I thought my soul could never heal from.”
“And why do I amaze you?” That mysterious little smile played at her lips. “You’ve always known I love you, Abram, don’t pretend you haven’t.”
Had he? Had it been that knowledge that had eased the nights for him, at first because he had seen the innocence and childish acceptance she gave him just after Lessa’s death, and later, after the death of his second wife, there had been so much more.
“Do you know how I’ve loved you?” The words felt torn from his soul. “Do you know, Paige, how I have sought sight of you each time I’ve visited Khalid? How I have lived for the visits here?” His hand cupped her cheek. “How I have lived for you?”
He had lived for her for years, and he knew it. There wasn’t a part of his soul that wasn’t aware of the fact that for so long, she had followed him through each second of his day, each second of the long, dark nights that seemed filled with blood and death.
And now, there was hope. The hope that when the sun rose there could be her laughter, her gentle touch, her loving light that shined for him alone.
“We’re going to get through this, Abram,” she promised, and for the first time in his life he felt the knowledge that he had no other choice but to survive.
He only had one job to complete before that security would be assured.
The death of Azir Mustafa.
Chapter 16
The weariness that had dragged at them found Paige sleeping in her lover’s arms, exhaustion dragging her deep into that well of slumber that obliterated the senses and dimmed even instinct.
That instinct was too closely honed to ever sleep within Abram though. At least, not at this moment, not this day. And God only knew if he would have another day to ease himself into such peaceful sleep.
His eyes came slowly open.
He didn’t blink. He didn’t pretend to sleep. He didn’t hide the knowledge that he was acutely aware of the company they had acquired.
Dammit, he knew he should have questioned the single terrorist they had captured last night.
He should have beaten the truth out of the murderous bastard.
He had to forcibly restrain the urge to tighten his hold on Paige. To take that one last moment to attempt to pull her beneath his flesh, to protect her forever.
There was no chance, no possibility of doing such a thing though. She was vulnerable, and he had slept too deeply, his instincts not quite honed enough to have felt them slipping into the room. He hadn’t awakened until he had felt his cousin glaring down at him with irritable amusement.
Jafar waved the gun at him, an indication that he should arise from the bed.
Abram allowed himself to caress the thick, heavy strand of hair that flowed over his chest as her head lay on his shoulder. Forcing himself to ease from her, his gaze tracking the three men that stood next to the bed, he ensured that the sheet covered her as he pushed it from his own nudity.
Azir’s gaze narrowed on his son’s nakedness as a grimace of distaste twisted his features. The other man that stood with them was stony-faced, his brown eyes like muddy chips of ice, his scarred, cruel features never shifting in expression.
The lieutenant Abram had glimpsed over the months at the Mustafa fortress had never spoken much, never socialized. He’d always managed to keep himself distant, as many of the terrorists had once done.
Until more of their compatriots had arrived after Ayid and Aman’s deaths. Many of them now moved in groups, socialized with each other, and had begun slowly drawing the people of the Mustafa province into their grip.
Hell, Abram realized, he was one of the men they hadn’t been able to identify at all. He and Tariq hadn’t even been able to collect his fingerprints as they had for most of the suspected terrorists.
The other man’s gaze was locked squarely on his as Abram pulled his jeans from the floor and eased them up his legs, feeling the small Beretta handgun he had kept shoved in the pocket at night.
His fingers itched to push into the pocket and jerk it free. But the military-issue P90s Jafar and his lieutenant carried were still aimed squarely at Paige rather than at Abram.
Abram let his gaze slide to his father, Azir. The old man was staring at Paige with such a gleam of crazed hunger that suddenly, Abram understood exactly how Azir could have realized his son’s attraction to her.
Azir had developed a fixation on Paige that Abram had missed.
How the hell had he managed to miss it?
As he eased from the bed a small, lonely sigh slipped from her. She shifted beneath the thin sheet as though searching for his warmth.
Trying to keep the movement slow, unthreatening, he pulled the comforter bunched at her knees up to her shoulder.
Azir moved faster than Abram could have expected.
Before he could counter the move, Azir, for all his girth and normal slowness, managed to strike with cobra swiftness and jerk the comforter from his grip.
Abram stared back at him through the dim light of the room, hatred and murderous rage rising inside him.
“Before I die…” He kept his voice barely audible, but even he heard the resounding promise in it.
“I will kill you with my bare hands. Hear me, old man, because I swear to you before God, you will pay for what you have done in this life long before you meet Allah.” Azir’s eyes narrowed, but Abram saw the flicker of fear in the depths for the briefest second.
“Let’s move,” Jafar ordered him. “We’re leaving the house, and you will be going with us.
Ensure, Abram, that no one stops us. We have proved to you that we can get past Khalid’s defenses, and that we can access your woman. Don’t make the mistake of believing you can escape again without consequences.”
“That is why you shot Khalid rather than me.” He smiled mirthlessly. “How you have changed, Jafar.”
Jafar’s eyes narrowed. “No Abram, I have changed not at all, I promise you this.” Mocking, condescending. Was his cousin actually attempting to convince him that he had neve
r dreamed of the freedoms they had both enjoyed while attending college in the States, or that both of them hadn’t, at one time, enjoyed their membership in the Sinclair Club?
“May I dress?” he asked sarcastically.
“By all means.” Jafar shrugged. “Dress well, cousin. Your return to the fortress will be noticed, and we would prefer it appears voluntary.”
Abram dressed without hurrying, though he didn’t move with deliberate slowness either. But he needed the time, he needed a moment to think.