Page 115 of Damaged Desires

I didn’t stop as I’d buzzed past a half a dozen agents running in the opposite direction.

“Who has eyes on Tanner?” I demanded as I slammed into the safe room. On the computer screens, the ants buzzed around the hallways and lobby. Inside the theater, everyone was clapping as some pop diva finished a song, the music onstage having disguised the sound in the corridors. All the attendees were still sitting there, smiling and laughing, while I felt like my entire world had almost ended.

I sank onto a chair as the last agent abandoned the room as Malone demanded the theater be searched.

I cradled Dani in my lap. Her arms were wrapped around me tightly, and I finally got to look at her. “Are you?”

My eyes landed on the red welts at her neck. And my eyes filled with water I wouldn’t let spill. I hadn’t been there again.

I’d been seconds too late.

“You saved me, Nash,” she was saying, voice scratchy and harsh, with her hands on my face as tears poured from her gorgeous eyes.

I crushed my lips into hers, and she let me. Not only let me but returned the ferocious kiss with the same strength and fervor. Lips and tongues joining together as if to reassure each other we were both okay. That she was alive. That we were both here. But the anger at the fact that Fiona had reached her once again, marking her on the outside this time, was enough for me to want to go back and fill the already dead body with another twenty rounds.

“Nash, look at me,” Dani said, voice straining. I put my finger on the red welt, wanting to absorb the pain as my own. I met her eyes with ones that felt like they were bleeding. “Are you listening to me?”

I nodded, a barely noticeable movement because I didn’t trust my voice yet.

“You saved me.” She grabbed my chin to make sure I was focused on her and her words. “You saved me twice. You taught me how to fight, and I did that first. I thought I’d knocked her out. Maybe I had. I don’t know; maybe she just recovered faster than I expected. But you saved me a second time with your gun and your aim. I’m safe because of you.”

I buried my head in her chest, her hands traveling to my hair and then my back, squeezing me tight as if I’d been the one wounded instead of her.

“You weren’t too late,” she whispered, hearing the words I hadn’t spoken.

My thoughts went spiraling to my team in pieces on the ground in the moonlight that slid out from behind the clouds. To my mom’s body, being hit with the gentle waves from the pond as it blew in the breeze in another moon-swept scene.

To the men whose lives I’d taken. To the men I’d fought with who were now buried.

Back to Dani, in my arms, body quivering in the aftershock. And I focused through it all to her. Her eyes boring into me. Her thumb stroking my face, grounding me.

And it hit me that there was blood coming from wounds on her hand.

I took her slim fingers into my own. “You’re bleeding.”

She looked down as if surprised by the fact.

I pulled off my tie, wrapping it gently around the knuckles that were already turning colors.

“You hit her,” I said.

She nodded. “I thought I’d knocked her out.”

She repeated the words, and I heard them this time. She’d saved herself first. I bent and kissed the red welt on her neck, softly, breathing her in. The lemon scent of her clouded with another scent. Fear. Adrenaline. A perfume that wasn’t hers.

The door to the room opened, and my gun came up, trained on the doorway before seeing the one directed at us. Tanner…with hatred in his eyes.

Dani was in my lap, in the line of fire, and as I attempted to shift her, he said, “Move and I shoot her.”

“You’ll die first,” I said, the panic disappearing back into a mission calm as I protected the person I loved most in the entire world.

“I fucking hate you. We had a plan! We would’ve gotten back every goddamn penny they took from us if you hadn’t shown up.”

Money. Of course this was about money. Greed. It was one of the deadliest sins on this planet. It had been behind almost every damn operation I’d ever been on.

“Money. The money in the Caymans?” Dani’s ragged voice was full of shock, and she tried to move, but my arm not holding my gun locked her in place as I stared at his finger on the trigger.

“Money we earned working just as hard as him!” Tanner bellowed. “What did he do? Sing a few songs? Did he ever once think about sharing the wealth? No, not even when we’d been with him since the beginning.”