"I love you, Dahlia." He sank down into the churning water and pulled her into his arms. "I love all of you."
She turned her face into his throat and wished she could cry like a normal person. She felt she was screaming inside, clawing at her own heart, yet she couldn't tell him.
Couldn't share it with him. This one person who had shown her kindness. Who proclaimed to love her for who she was, monster or not. She kissed his throat and pushed away from him.
"Did you bring the aspirin?"
"I left the tablets on the sink." Nicolas leaned back as she climbed out of the Jacuzzi. "This is one of those moments when the relationship manual would come in handy, don't you think?"
A fleeting smile curved her mouth and was gone. "I don't think the manual covers this, Nicolas. I don't think anything does."
She took the tablets and dried off, leaving him to the hot water as she paced through the house in her silken pajamas. Dahlia wandered through each of the rooms on bare feet wondering what it would be like to be a normal woman with a family, to have a house like this one and fill it with laughter and happiness. Her hair was damp from the Jacuzzi and made a wide wet column down her back. Even the water bubbling around her, as hot as she could stand it, could not take away the ferocious headache jabbing through her skull. She paused by the window and stared out into the night, feeling restless and moody. She wanted to walk away into the night and disappear. Had she been in the bayou, she might have done so.
Nicolas came up behind her and leaned over her, putting a hand on either side of the windowsill caging her in. "Come to bed, Dahlia. You need to sleep."
She didn't turn around but pressed back against his body. "It's strange knowing someone wants me dead," she mused aloud. "All of my life, I've known I was different and maybe in some way a monster, dangerous to others. I even knew I wasn't lovable, but I never once thought they would want me dead."
He rubbed his face against the nape of her neck. "No one is going to kill you, Dahlia, not if I have anything to say about. And you're very lovable. I don't love anyone else. I haven't since I was a boy."
She ignored his confession because she had to. She couldn't think about Nicolas and what it would mean if he were like the others. "I thought they were my friends, Nicolas. Max and Jesse. I thought they cared about me the way friends care about one another." How could she say she wanted to doubt him? That she was afraid if he was deceiving her in some way she would never recover? How could she admit she was a coward, wanting to run from him even more than the others.
"Calhoun was tortured, Dahlia," Nicolas reminded. "He refused to give them any information about you." He straightened up, turned her around to face him, catching her chin so she was forced to meet his black gaze.
"That's so," she conceded, "but then if his orders were to never say a word about me, wouldn't he follow them, the same way Max followed them?"
It was the first time he heard a trace of bitterness in her voice.
"Don't do that, Dahlia, don't let them change you. Don't let anything change who you are. You made your own world with your own code, and you did it yourself. It defines who you are."
Dahlia looked up at his sculpted face and the dark intensity of his eyes. "You believe that, don't you? You think I'm worth so very much."
"To me, everything," Nicolas admitted.
"Why? Why am I important to you, yet someone else would want me dead? Why would my mother give me up to an orphanage rather than keep me? She just threw me away, and the orphanage people followed her example. I don't even know the first thing about my culture, about my people. I don't even know who my people are."
"The GhostWalkers are your people. Does it matter so much where we came from? It's who we are now that counts." Nicolas led her toward the bed. There was too much pain and sorrow in her eyes. "You need to sleep, Dahlia, nothing is so important that you should put off sleeping. It will help your headache."
She just stood there looking helpless, very unlike his Dahlia. Nicolas lifted her easily into his arms, holding her tightly to his chest. He feathered kisses from her temple to the corner of her mouth. "You just need to sleep, honey. Let it all go away."
Dahlia allowed him to put her on the bed, and when he lay down beside her, she turned to him, familiar now with the heat and comfort of his body. She didn't want to need him, but she found she did. She didn't have any fight left in her and she needed his strength.
Nicolas glanced at his watch. His team was moving at three, to see what they could find in a soft probe of the NCIS agents' homes. He had plenty of time, it was barely dark. He gathered Dahlia close and rocked her gently. "All the gifts you have, Dahlia, are incredible. Yes, there are drawbacks to using them, but we saved Calhoun's life together. He wouldn't have made it without us working at healing him."
"Healing is your gift, Nicolas, not mine." Her voice was drowsy, her long lashes feathering down toward her cheeks.
He kissed the top of her head. "I think you're wrong. I may have the power inside of me, but it's locked away. Without you, I have no key. That's what you are, you can focus the power and aim it exactly where it needs to go. I simply release it. We work well together."
"I'm tired, Nicolas. Really, really tired."
The sheer weariness in her voice was heartbreaking to him. Nicolas held her closer to him, wanting to find a way to comfort her. He kept rocking her, as gently as he could, brushing kisses in her hair until she fell asleep in his arms.
Nicolas lay awake just watching over her. He'd found himself in many tight corners in his life, but none had ever felt like this one. He looked down at her face and wondered how she had become so important to him, so necessary to him. She looked like a porcelain doll with her petal-soft skin and her exotic eyes. He smoothed back the tumble of hair when she curled up tighter into the fetal position.
She made a soft sound of distress, then a low keening noise. Nicolas felt his heart shatter when she sobbed in her sleep. Her fists clenched and her body trembled, and the sounds were wrenched from her as if she couldn't contain the overwhelming grief one more moment.
"Baby, don't do this." He whispered the words. Why had he thought if she cried she'd feel better? It was too much, too much sorrow for her. He pulled her beneath him, lying over her, somehow trying with his body to protect her from the grief.
She came awake, her eyes wide, black. Swimming with tears. "Nicolas? What is it?" She touched his face, the lines of worry there.
"You're crying, honey. I thought it would be good for you to cry, but not like this, not in your sleep where I can't share it with you."
"I can't be crying." Dahlia wiped at the tears on her face with a kind of horror. "I never cry."
"You are crying."
"I can't stop." She looked desperate. "Make me stop, Nicolas. Make it stop."
Nicolas found her mouth with his, kissing her deeply, taking the cries from her throat and swallowing them, making them his own. He took her breath into his body and swept his tongue over her tears, tasting them. Keeping them. He deepened the kiss, urgency mingling with tenderness, taking her away from a place he couldn't follow her to, bringing her back into his world. Their world.
The silk of her pajamas rubbed over his skin, her skin, feeding the growing need rising in a slow smoldering heat between them. He ran his hands over her body, cupping her breasts, feeling the tuck of her waist through the thin layer of silk, shaping every curve even as his mouth stayed welded, kiss for kiss, to hers. "It's all right, kiciciyapi mitawa," he whispered. "Everything will be all right." He kissed her eyes, his tongue capturing more tears before they could fall, going back again and again to her soft lips. "You're with me. You'll always have me."
He kissed her with long drugging kisses, making her almost senseless, unable to think anymore, taking every sorrow and replacing it with erotic pleasure. All the while his hands stroked and explored, slowly pushed the silken pajamas aside until he had bare skin. Until she lay beneath him completely naked, her eyes wi
ld for him, pleading with him, and her hips rising to try to meet his.
Nicolas shook his head, his expression tender. "Not this time. I want you to know I love you, Dahlia. I want you to feel it. I'm going to make love to you, a long slow assault on your senses. I want you to know you're mine, that you really belong with me." He bent his head to her throat, lapped at the valley between her breasts. "You're so beautiful." He murmured the words against her breasts, took her nipple into her mouth, heard her soft cry and took his time, paying attention to both breasts and her narrow rib cage before taking a small foray across her stomach to her belly button.
"Nicolas," Dahlia caught two fistfuls of hair. "I can't stand it. I want you."
"Yes you can. You can stand me loving you." He traced the path lower, spreading her thighs with gentle hands and dipping his head to taste her.
Dahlia's hips lifted for him, giving him the opportunity to cup her bottom and bring her to him. He took his time, enjoying her frantic little cries, a stark contrast to her earlier sobs. She tried to pull him over her, to wrap her legs around him, which only opened her more to his exploration. She came with a wild bucking of her hips. He entered her, felt the continuing ripples as her muscles gripped him tightly and spiraled out of control. He moved then, long deep strokes, robbing her of breath until her eyes began to glaze and he felt her nails dig into his back, and he laughed softly with satisfaction as she came again.
Breathless, Dahlia could only lie beneath him as Nicolas began to ride her in earnest, his body surging with strength into hers, bringing her to another fever pitch when she thought it impossible. She clung to him, watching his face, the stern, almost harsh angles and planes that were so beautiful to her. She could see his pleasure growing with each thrust of his hips. His hands bit into her hips and dragged her to him with each stroke so that they came together hard, so that the pleasure was so much it bordered on pain. She could feel him moving in her, deep in her tight folds, her heat surrounding him, drawing him to her very core. The pressure built and built and the air sparkled and sizzled and the flames flickered everywhere, and deep inside when the volcano thundered and spread fire through her body, through his, she felt utter contentment and total peace.
Dahlia lay still, so spent she couldn't move. He should have been too heavy but she wanted him draped over her, tangled with her, arms and legs everywhere so she couldn't tell where he started and she ended. "What does kiciciyapi mitawa mean?"
He kept his head on her breasts. "What?"
"You called me kiciciyapi mitawa. It sounded so beautiful. It wasn't Japanese. What was it?"
"It's the voice of Lakota. It would sound silly in English." He cupped her breast, his fingers moving lightly over her skin. His breath warm on her heart.
"I want to know. It didn't sound silly when you said it. It sounded . . . beautiful. It made me feel beautiful. And loved."
He kissed her breast. "I called you my heart. And you are."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The street, in the upscale neighborhood, was empty at three in the morning. The wind blew gently through the flower beds and across recently mowed lawns. A dog lifted its head as the breeze carried an unfamiliar scent. He got stiffly to his feet and faced the west, a growl rumbling deep in his throat. Dark shadows darted through the street, moving fast, a blur as they scattered to surround the large, two-story house at the end of the quiet cul-de-sac.
The dog barked a warning, but stopped abruptly when one of the shadows turned back and stared at it. The dog retreated slowly, the hair settling on its back as it once again lay down on the porch, eyes brightly watching the intruders moving around the house into position.
The light from the streetlamp didn't quite reach to the house itself, set back as it was from the road. Trees darkened the surrounding yard even more. Shadows flitted around the yard, and swarmed up the sides of the house in complete silence like dark wraiths.
Nicolas went up the side of the house, a spider crawling up to the second story. He studied the window for some time before proceeding to the roof. Crouching on the slope he spoke into his radio. "We've got ourselves a real operator," he whispered. "I found a string across the window. Use extreme caution."
"One on the front door," Kaden confirmed.
"And back," Sam intoned.
"So they're either expecting trouble or want to know if someone is nosing around. How many good citizens go to that much trouble?" Kaden asked.
"Soft probe," Nicolas reminded. "We're going in soft, information hunt only. We want to get in and out without being detected. If they have silent alarms on the outside, I'd say we're going to have a little trouble inside. Be ready."
"We're always ready," Gator's soft drawling voice replied.
Nicolas silently lowered his body to the edge of the windowsill. The smartest and easiest of all alarms was a tiny bell hooked in place to tinkle a warning. If the NCIS agents had been Special Forces, they wouldn't look to easily bypassed security systems for protection. Already, Ian was circumventing the system. It wasn't hard with their particular psychic skills.
The house was used when three of the agents were in town. The intelligence Lily had given them was that the three agents, Neil Campbell, Martin Howard, and Todd Aikens, were all out of town. The house should be empty, but if not, and they awakened at an inconvenient time, well, Nicolas was remembering Dahlia's sobs in her sleep, and he wasn't feeling particularly generous or gentle.
"Two cars in the garage." Ian's voice was a soft whisper in his ear. "Security system is down. There was a backup, but it didn't last long."
The team had decided to use radios instead of telepathic communication just in case anyone in the house was like Logan Maxwell or Jesse Calhoun. They might feel the subtle flow of power or even hear what was said. The team was used to working mind to mind, but their first training had been the miniscule radios so they were accustomed to them.
"We've got at least one, possibly two or three inside," Nicolas reported to the others. "Proceed with extreme caution." Lily always supplied them with state-of-the-art equipment and the latest was an air-cooled, sealed CO2 mini laser glass cutter. It had a circular suction cup pivot and cut completely silently. The laser cutter was microcomputer controlled, with the computer built into the case of the laser assembly. A computer was necessary to prevent the laser from cutting completely through the glass and passing into the room and burning things in its path. It cut almost through, leaving the suction cup with its levered handle to pull the glass out. Lily would be happy to get the report that it worked silently and efficiently, allowing him to remove the glass without triggering the alarm set on the inside sill. He set the glass aside carefully in preparation to enter the room.
"Strobe, damn it, strobe," Gator reported.
Nicolas bit back a particularly ugly curse. Gator shouldn't have made such a mistake. A tiny strobe light was often used. If the switch were tripped at the window, the light would flash brightly. The light was tiny, but the strobe would awaken anyone trained to sleep lightly.
"Fall back," Nicolas ordered. His gut was churning. He was taking his men into the line of fire armed only with nonlethal ammunition. They didn't want to take a chance on harming a civilian, and being GhostWalkers, they were certain they could get in and out of the house unseen. But the house wasn't empty, and the men inside were combat trained.
"Negative, sir, the room's empty."
"Fall the hell back now, soldier," Nicolas hissed, his voice implacable. "He's in there waiting for you. Secure that position and let's contain him."
"Yes sir," Gator responded. "Securing position." Nicolas felt carefully along the inside of the windowsill for the trip wire to a bell or the switch for a strobe he was certain would be there. The others would be more alert now that they knew there were alarms inside.
"In," Kaden announced. "Downstairs, dining room. Don't like the feel, Nico. There's power here, and someone's using it. Shotgun strapped to the tabletop. Ninja stars in the silverware draw
er. Dining room's clear."
"Intercept," Nicolas ordered immediately. Kaden was a strong telepath. He could hunt down another without breaking a sweat.
Nicolas held the bell still with his mind while he made his entry. "In. Left bedroom. I feel a surge here as well. They've been warned. Be ready."
He felt the first assault to his brain, a jab, much like a punch coming at him, but mental rather than physical. He blocked it before it could incapacitate him. The GhostWalkers had practiced such attacks as well as fending them off, but they had never used them or had to defend against them, and Nicolas found he was slower at it than he would have liked. "Game seven. They're using our game seven to attack," he announced. Each of the mental attacks had been choreographed much like a chess game. Whitney had done the choreographing. He sent his own move crashing back before they could follow up, a blaring punch much like shards of glass jabbed into the skull. He wanted them to know they weren't the only GhostWalkers in town.
He felt the instant withdrawal. The shock. Much like the shock Jesse Calhoun had exhibited when they'd first touched mental paths.
"In," Ian's whisper was in his ear. "Through garage into kitchen. Two booby traps, one fairly lethal. Found interesting food in the freezer. A Beretta. Isn't that your weapon of choice? Kitchen's clear."
"Their communication path is shut down," Kaden said with evident satisfaction.
"In office, ground floor," Ian said. "Checking for IDs and any incriminating evidence. Keep them the hell off my back."
"Kaden, stay on Ian," Nicolas ordered.
"Naughty, naughty, handgun taped under desk," Ian added.
Nicolas stayed to the shadows of the room, checking the ceiling, the closet, and the corners for an occupant. There was no sound. No breathing. But someone was close. He could feel him. Smell him. Knew him by his finely honed instincts. He waited in silence--a heartbeat, a second. Survival instincts took over, and he upended the bed, rapid firing his weapon, the rubber bullets spraying in a tight arc across the floor where the bed had been. In the small confines of the room, the shots were thunderous, hurting his ears. He saw the flash of fire as the agent snapped off live rounds simultaneously. Upending the bed knocked the aim off and the bullets thunked into the wall somewhere behind him. Nicolas heard the impact as the rubber bullets struck flesh. Something metal clattered to the floor. He rushed forward, kicked the gun away from the downed agent and hastily checked him, knowing the agent felt as if he'd been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer.