Glancing over at the bed, Catherine saw that baby Mac slept blissfully through it all. Maybe babies had some kind of radar that let them know which loud noises were dangerous to them and which were not. This roar was definitely benign. The roar of happy people, raising their glasses in a toast.
A toast to her!
It was dizzying. She’d never been toasted before. She’d never been at the center of so many beaming faces before. Faces beaming at her!
Someone spilled some champagne on her and laughed. “Drink up!” someone shouted, and they all did. Catherine, too. The champagne was delicious, heady. It tasted like bottled moonlight, crisp and clean and probably 90 proof since it went immediately to her head.
Jon was now a supercharged sommelier, walking around with a bottle in his hand, pouring constantly. When one finished, there’d be a pop and another would appear.
The noise and laughter rose.
An arm jostled her and she stumbled, felt herself start to fall. Mac caught her, held her upright. He simply wrapped his big hand around her upper arm and straightened her. The other huge hand was on the small of her back, pulling her to him. She was—she was in his embrace.
Looking up, all she saw was hard, square jaw, slight five o’clock shadow and shuttered eyes. From this angle the burn scar stood out, rippled skin casting small furrowed shadows. The knife scar on the other side of his face was a keloid slash, like a tribal scar.
Their eyes met. The raucous sounds in the room faded away to nothing. His eyes were deep brown with lines of lighter brown in them. Dark and compelling and impenetrable.
Did he dislike holding her? It was impossible to tell. It was impossible to tell what he felt about her. All she really got from him was strength and power.
One thing she knew, though. He wasn’t letting go of her. He held her tightly against him, so tightly she could feel the cut muscles of his chest through the black sweatshirt he wore, down to the individual muscles. Such amazing power. What must it be like to be so powerful?
“Great job!” A laughing elderly gentlemen threw his arms around her from behind, pushing her even more tightly against Mac. “Welcome to Haven!”
Someone on her left hugged her. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Someone else hugged her to her right. A woman this time, soft and smelling of lavender.
Someone tried a group hug and tripped, champagne spilling onto the floor. A laughing man and woman squeezed her shoulders. Behind them, others pressed forward until there was a tangled mass of happy people clustered around her like barnacles.
Her head swam. She was slightly claustrophobic but that wasn’t it, even though she was so tightly squeezed between a wall of flesh and the hard wall of Mac’s chest. Claustrophobia always came with a tinge of fear.
There was no fear here, none at all. Nothing to be afraid of, nothing threatening her. Just very happy people celebrating a happy event.
But . . . they were all touching her, as if it were a competition to see who could grab the biggest piece of her. However friendly the gestures, their emotions pulsed and swam around her.
Catherine had rarely had two people touching her at the same time. Now there were twenty, more, maybe, pushing and shoving and trying to hug her and kiss her cheek, laughing. A few wiped tears from their eyes.
There’d been suffering here, there was worry, there was sadness.
There was great joy and a sense of companionship.
Someone touched her neck—a runaway. He’d escaped with his life from somewhere, he was still scared. Someone else—determined to find a niece who was in the hands of a gang. Sorrow and anxiety, a burst of great affection for someone, for . . . Mac! For the larger Mac, not the baby.
The emotions fed on each other. Each person had a history, a highly emotional past, not always pleasant. They were happy to be here in this specific time and place but there was an outside world pressing in, threatening . . .
The threat felt like ropes around her chest, dark and burning. There was love here but no safety except the safety provided by the three men in command. Catherine perceived the underlying fear and the threats, and yet in Mac’s embrace, the part of her touching him was free of fear, while the part of her being touched by others was absorbing it, she was a sponge soaking up the dark tides rising, rising . . .
And her knees buckled.
Fuck.
Catherine crumpled in his arms. Mac tightened his hold on her and turned to everyone who’d been crowding her. He knew his community was celebrating, and not just the birth of the little girl.
Named Mac. Jeez. What the fuck was that about? You couldn’t call a little baby girl Mac. He’d have to talk to Bridget and Red about that.
“Okay, gang, listen up!”
Mac had a deep voice and he knew how to put command in it. In two seconds there was utter quiet in the room. Everyone had stepped back and were now recognizing that Catherine was unsteady on her feet.
“I know you’re all happy about the birth of Mac.” He had a straight line of sight to Bridget cradling the baby, Red by her side. “And you two—you’re gonna have to rethink that name.” He put a hard, stern note in his voice but Bridget just smiled at him sleepily. “And I know you are all grateful to Catherine for her help. But I think we’re overwhelming her.”
Yeah. Nearly freezing to death in a snowstorm, interrogated by professional soldiers who’d been subjected to SERE training, watching her home being trashed by thugs, delivering a baby . . . yeah, that would try anyone, let alone someone as fragile-looking as Catherine Young.
She stirred. “No, really.” She smiled weakly. “I’m fine, I—”
“Shut up,” Mac growled. He’d felt her buckle, felt now the weakness, could even feel the effort she was making to stand up straight. She was trembling.
The hell with this. He scooped her up in his arms.
He turned with Catherine in his arms and stopped when Stella put a hand on his shoulder. She was frowning with concern, accentuating the scars left by the knife slashes. “Take her to your quarters, she’ll be more comfortable. I’ll send some tea in.”
He nodded and walked out.
“I can walk,” Catherine protested.
Yeah, she probably could. But shit, she felt really good in his arms.
He had spacious quarters—a large apartment really—two floors down. He stood for a second outside his door. The lock was biomorphological, set to recognize his body shape, together with the shapes of Nick and Jon. It didn’t recognize his shape with Catherine in his arms so he had to enter in a code in the alphanumeric keypad hidden in the wall.
Mac had to suppress the shocking thought that he’d better reset the biomorphological lock because it wouldn’t be the last time he’d have Catherine Young in his arms.
Where did that thought come from?
Mac walked into his quarters and moved into his bedroom. Bending, he pulled back the covers and laid her down.
He missed that warm, slight weight in his arms immediately. For minutes, he hovered over her, still touching her, unwilling to let her go completely.
New terrain.
Mac’s body did what he told it to do, no more, no less. The idea that he’d hover over a woman because his arms simply didn’t want to obey him shocked him as much as the boner in his pants.
Christ.
Get a grip.
It took every ounce of self-discipline he had to straighten up and let her go and that scared him.
Her eyes were half-open when he unzipped her boots and removed them.
“What are you doing?” she whispered. Her eyes were such a brilliant gray he was almost glad they were half-closed. They were mesmerizing. It was hard to look away from her.
“Making you comfortable. You’re dead tired. You delivered a baby.” She looked so lost in his huge bed, he picked up her hand. “Rest now,” he said, keeping his voice low. “You’re safe now. Don’t worry about anything. I’m here.”
Man, how could he expect her
to feel safe when last night he was interrogating her, fully armed, suspecting her of being a government spy? What a fucking stupid thing to say to her.
But to his surprise, her lips turned up a little as her eyes closed. “Safe,” she murmured. Her hand curled trustingly around his, then she turned her head and went out like a light.
Mac pulled up the covers, smoothing them over her shoulder with his free hand. He wanted to sit down at her bedside. He stretched with his foot for the chair because, well, he didn’t want to let go of her hand.
Sitting, he wrapped her hand in both of his and watched her face, trying to figure out the enigma that was Catherine Young.
She looked so very fragile, lying there. She was pale, nostrils pinched with stress, frowning even in sleep. The rest of her was fragile, too—slender, fine-boned.
Catherine Young seemed so heartbreakingly delicate, almost frail. Like she’d break if you touched her too roughly, though he’d treated her roughly and she hadn’t broken, not at all.
Whatever her motives, it took balls the size of refrigerators to set off on a quest to find him with just a few clues from a madman.
The idea that the madman might be the Captain was shunted aside. It hurt to think about it. He’d deal with that later, with Nick and Jon.
Whoever sent her on that chase had given her crumbs to go on, and by God, she’d done it. She’d tracked him down when no one else had. She hadn’t crumbled under interrogation, either. She’d stuck to her story and had been meek but not intimidated.
And watching her help Bridget give birth. Man. She’d been gentle, reassuring, utterly competent. He shuddered to think that he might have had to do that. Mac knew all about stopping bleeding, broken bones, bullet holes. But helping a child be born took a whole set of skills he didn’t have, never would have, either. Though she said she wasn’t a practicing physician, Catherine had stepped right up to the plate and delivered a healthy baby into the world.
Into their world. Their first new citizen, delivered by the latest addition to their community.
Because Catherine was now one of them, there was no hiding it, no running away from it. It was a simple fact.
His people had come to him one by one, sometimes in twos and threes. They recognized him and they recognized each other and they now had recognized Catherine.
So what the fuck was he supposed to do with her?
He watched her, holding her hand in his. She’d turned in bed and now her face was in profile, only her head and hand outside the covers. She was so fucking beautiful. He’d tried so hard not to notice, but his body laughed at him and reacted the way a healthy male body reacted to a spectacularly beautiful woman.
Usually, that wasn’t a problem, he had himself under control. He could control his heart rate, his reflexes, his thoughts, his cock. They’d been taught that in BUD/S but he’d already known how. You didn’t survive his childhood without massive self-control.
And he’d learned early on that it was useless getting a hard-on for beautiful women. He’d been born ugly, grew up ugly, and the fucker with the knife and the massive firestorm at Arka that had melted part of his face had just made things worse. He rarely looked beautiful women in the eyes because it could come across as aggression. He’d learned long ago to tuck his dick between his legs when he desired one because it just wasn’t going to happen.
He’d been aroused in the interrogation room, but had been able to dial his dick right back down because she’d been so scared. Mac was scary-looking and if you were his enemy duck and hide, but the thought of intimidating a woman for sex made him physically ill. And besides, Nick and Jon had been watching, so the hard-on just had to go.
And it went.
It was harder to rein himself in now. By some magical alchemy, Catherine Young was inside his perimeter in every way there was. She’d been accepted by his ragtag town and he accepted that her safety was now his responsibility. He didn’t like it, but there it was. She was in.
She wasn’t awake to see him look at her with heat in his eyes, so he could, well, fantasize.
Mac shifted in his chair, his hard-on like some heavy, uncomfortable thing hanging onto the front of his body. He hadn’t had a woman in a long long time. While he was a SEAL, it hadn’t been much of a problem. Ugly as he was, there were plenty of women who got off on nailing SEALs. It gave them bragging rights if nothing else.
He still remembered the SEAL groupie in Coronado who’d asked if she could make a plaster cast of his cock. But first she wanted him to depilate.
She already had twelve trophies, lined up on a bookshelf. With names, dates and number of times they’d fucked.
Jesus.
In Ghost Ops, everyone’s dicks were lashed down, including Jon’s, who used to go through women like good ole boys went through free beer.
Ghost Ops was all about being invisible, untraceable, hidden. They became non- people with no credit history, no leases or mortgages or utility bills or cell phones linked to ordinary providers, no car registrations, no driver’s licenses—nothing. That went with no sex life because you had to tell a woman something. Women were curious and if they liked the sex they were likely to want to stick around, and inevitably they’d find out that Joe Smith didn’t really exist.
So Ghost Ops was mainly a no-sex zone, not to mention the fact that since the day they were established, the six-man team had been almost constantly on ops. And their downtime wasn’t at home—because they didn’t have homes anymore—but quarters on some scrubland a hundred miles from the nearest town or road, a place they’d dubbed Fort Dump, a place no woman would put up with on pain of death, let alone for sex.
And after the Arka disaster—well, being on the run for your life and hiding out didn’t really bring out the warm and sexy.
So Mac sat, watching Catherine’s face, holding her hand, vainly trying to will away the blue steeler in his pants and trying to remember the last time he had sex.
He couldn’t.
It wasn’t just that it was probably lost in the mists of time, or not just that. It was that he had problems remembering anything about other women while looking at Catherine. It seemed impossible to him that he could ever have wanted another woman because the most desirable woman in the world was right in front of him, sleeping in his bed, her hand in his.
Every other woman in the world just slid right out of his head, never to return.
Catherine’s eyes moved under her lids, back and forth, as if she were reading something. Her hand gripped his and she opened her eyes.
He moved his hand so that his thumb rested on the inside of her wrist.
“Hi,” he said softly. “You’ve been asleep. You were exhausted. I brought you here so you could rest.”
Her eyebrows pulled together as she slowly looked around the room then brought her gaze back to his face. “I’m in your room?”
Quarters was more like it, but he nodded. “Yeah.” He held up the hand that wasn’t gripping hers. “But don’t worry. You’re in no danger from me. I’m not going to hurt you.” His mouth quirked. “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, every single person in this community would rush in and beat me up if I touched a hair on your head.”
She listened to him carefully, hand gripping his. It was strange, how she wouldn’t let go of him, just hung on tight. Where her hand met his, his skin was warm, and it was almost as if there were some kind of glow.
Shit, he really needed to get laid if holding a woman’s hand was making him hot.
She took her time answering, searching for something in his face.
It made him almost—but not quite—uncomfortable. Women’s eyes didn’t linger on his face. Certainly not beautiful women’s eyes. People looked at him briefly, then usually focused on a point past his shoulder. Only his men and the people of Haven looked him straight in the face.
And Catherine Young.
After looking at him for a long time, she finally spoke in a soft voice. “No, I’m not afraid you’re g
oing to hurt me. Not at all.” She stopped, bit her lip.
“You have something else to say? Spit it out.”
Her hand moved in his, warm and soft and spreading . . . something where skin touched skin.
“You’re not going to like it,” she warned.
Hell, there were a lot of things he didn’t like. That didn’t mean he couldn’t face them. In the field, you faced what came at you, dodging whatever was incoming if you could, dealing with it head-on if you couldn’t.
“I’m a big boy,” Mac answered.
She smiled, her first smile since waking up. Gentle and sad. There was no happiness there, only pain.
“I know you are, Mac. I know you. I know you inside out, whether you want to believe me or not. I know you are a dangerous warrior on the battlefield and that you couldn’t hurt an innocent. Simply couldn’t.”
His hand had jerked but she just tightened her grip. It was ridiculous. His hand was almost twice the size of hers. His grip, like that of all SpecOps soldiers, had been tested on a dynamometer and had clocked in at two hundred pounds. Over, in fact, the scale. And yet he couldn’t pull his hand from hers.
Her eyes searched his. “We have a connection, Mac. Whether you like it or not. And I think you can feel it, too.”
He shook his head even as he knew he was lying to himself. He felt it. Some kind of electric thing, a prickling warmth spreading from his hand up his arm . . .
“Did you somehow drug me?” he blurted out.
Catherine gave a startled laugh. “No, of course not.”
It was the only thing that made sense. What else could explain this feeling, something warm coursing through his system? And Catherine—she was glowing from within; whereas before she’d been pale and pinched now she was slightly flushed and radiant, as if there were a lightbulb inside her.
What was this shit?
His cell gave a soft two-note beep. Incoming text. A white beam shot out, moving until it found a dark surface to project on.
Outside the door. Stella
Grateful for the distraction, Mac pulled his hand away and stood up. Goddammit, his fucking knees felt weak. What had she done to him?