Own (Command Force Alpha #1) (8 page)

“Yeah.”

A swallow contorted the lovely line of her throat. “Tell me?”

“Dr. Bascombe has induced a coma.”

She whirled to face him. “He said a coma was unpredictable. Why would he do that?”

“Yeah, they’re unpredictable, but there are also sound medical reasons for simulating them during recovery. The results of the third surgery haven’t gone as well as they’d hoped. Nicky needs time to shut down and heal. After that, they’ll bring him out. No problem.”

Shaking so badly that Evan could feel it jitter through the couch cushions, she pressed unsteady fingertips to her temples. This from the young woman who admitted she had no one to hold her when things got bad.

This was nearly rock bottom.

Evan didn’t think. He just did.

He pulled her into his lap and tucked her head beneath his chin. She offered no protest, only curled all four limbs into his embrace. Her face nestled at the bare base of his throat. She was so small, folded close like that. He felt powerful and helpless at the same time, especially when she began to weep. He would hold her all night if need be, right there on the couch, but Evan knew he wouldn’t catch a wink.

“No problem?” she repeated hoarsely. “Can the doctor promise that? Can you?”

Only when he grounded himself in the scent of her hair could he breathe again. “No, Katsu, I can’t.”

Chapter Seven

Settled in the front seat of Evan’s car, Kat ran the edge of her thumbnail over her teeth and stared out the window. Embarrassment heated the back of her neck. She knew Evan was sneaking glances at her. Thinking of last night, probably.

She hadn’t slept well for the first two nights in his house. She couldn’t blame it on the sumptuous bed, or the mattress being too firm or anything stupid like that. She wasn’t completely oblivious about herself. Her father was in the hospital, for Christ’s sake. She’d lain awake at night and stared at the wood beams that delineated the ceiling, and quite simply felt the burn of her eyes. Maybe she’d used up all her tears. That’d be a first. The need to cry had been something as acute as a heart attack, but she hadn’t managed.

Not until the latest news about her dad’s induced coma. Not until she’d been sitting in Evan’s lap.

The tears had come easily then, probably spurred by the fact that she still hated him. That bullshit at dinner, ordering her to eat a strawberry, and after she’d tried to be nice to him by bringing the clothes he’d obviously forgotten. They had to rub along in this house after all, though it was cavernous enough they could go whole days without seeing each other. They’d paired up for hour-long drives to see her dad, and for a couple brief hours of television in the evening. She didn’t even have work to keep herself occupied, since she’d distributed all her pressing projects to fellow freelancers.

She squirmed in the leather seat. She had been desperate for touch. Nothing more.

The only thing to fix that was contact, which was sorely, terribly lacking from her life.

That explained why she hadn’t protested when Evan ordered her to sit next to him, or why she hadn’t jabbed an elbow when he pulled her onto his lap. His legs were strong. His chest was thick.

She’d cried. And she’d fallen asleep.

By morning, she’d been alone again. He’d tucked her into the borrowed bed, stripping only her jeans. He’d left on her T-shirt, but he must’ve noticed that she wore only a scrap of green-striped panties.

While lying in bed, collecting her thoughts, she’d heard him speaking with Fletcher, possibly by computer. “The only intruder on the footage was a deer,” came Fletch’s voice. “Good to keep on your toes, though.”

Had Evan suspected something? Someone? There at his house?

Jesus.

He hadn’t said a word. Of course not. Why alarm her? This was supposed to be a routine precaution. Instead he’d kept the worry and suspicion locked in himself, until he released his own tension… How? How did he find peace and balance throughout all this crazy? Kat couldn’t be his only means of staying sane, or he wouldn’t have thrived with CFA for years.

He was coming to know every bit of this suspended life she played out in front of him. It wasn’t the same as her own life, where she scrambled for work and crawled over other candidates in the hopes of a steady, respectable job but was otherwise on her own to continue her love affair with Boston.

She was someone different in the space
he
owned, the space he expected her to keep tidy and neat. The things in his kitchen cabinets were stacked like boxed soldiers, tallest to shortest within a nutritional category. Everything as orderly as possible.

The different person he was unveiling sat quietly in the passenger seat of his Lexus.

Initially.

Kat sat up straighter in her seat. At first she’d thought they were on an alternate route to the hospital, but they’d deviated farther and farther north. “Where are we going?”

“Does it matter?” He drove so calmly and competently. His hands were broad. They practically dwarfed the wood ring of the Lexus’s steering wheel. The car was expensive enough to suit his arrogance without standing out on the streets of Boston. He wore another long-sleeve henley, this one open at the throat to show off his golden skin. His hair was nicely shaggy, skimming over his ears and hinting at a curl at the ends. It made her wonder where he’d been that long hair would make him blend in.

Could a man like him ever really blend in?

“Yes, if it means we’re going to see Dad,” she said. “I want to.”

White creases spread from the corners of his eyes, evidence of his own strain. She shouldn’t care, but she wanted to reach out and touch those lines. Would he crack if she were so bold as to be the one to touch first? Would she? She felt ready to crack in his presence, although she couldn’t tell anymore if that would make her weaker or stronger—stronger by breaking free of the constant, amorphous fear.

“He’s in a coma, Kat. It wouldn’t do any good.”

“They say people in comas can hear what’s going on around them. And maybe they don’t remember, but it sticks with them. The…” she swallowed so hard that there could have been a baseball in her throat, “…the feeling of not being alone.”

He was the one to reach for her. He didn’t even need to take his eyes off the road, because he knew where her hand was on her knee. His fingers wrapped around hers. “If that’s what you’re worried about, don’t be. There’ll be a different CFA agent by his side every day. And every night. We’ve already gone as often as we can risk for now, and taking different routes only helps so much. I can’t take you so regularly that we cement a pattern, not while we’re in the dark about what’s going on.”

“You’re babysitting me instead of being the one out there figuring it out.” She shouldn’t say such stupid things, or he might take his hand away. Then where would she get her strength from? That weak thought was almost as scary as the potential loss of his touch. “I bet that just eats you whole.”

He pulled over so abruptly she wondered if it was because of what she’d said. Maybe he’d grab her and punish her, and she wasn’t sure what kind of thing that would mean, but at least it would calm the chaos in her head. She could think then. Think about whatever evil and nasty thing he was doing to her. Think about how much she needed it.

Only temporary. It’ll pass when Dad gets well.

Apparently he was more interested in the duplex that he looked at through the passenger’s side window. He reached past her and popped the door. “You’re going to have to come with me, Kat. I don’t trust you alone.”

She slid out and waited for him to shut his door before folding her arms across the top of the car. She couldn’t have done it if she wasn’t standing on the curb, but the details didn’t matter. “It’s not when I’m alone that I get up to the most trouble.” The smart-ass tone she affected was entirely bullshit. “It’s when I’m with someone else. That’s when you should really watch out.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. Every bit of his attention was focused on an ordinary clapboard house. The porch looked like it had once been open to the elements, but it had since been enclosed. The windows were six-paned, probably original.

“Where are we?” she asked.

He led the way up the concrete steps. The whole neighborhood had a slightly listing, desperate quality. The trees were old enough that they towered over three-story houses. The homes had been rehabbed the best that people could manage. Here and there were hints of structural decay, with cracks in windows and chips in paint that hadn’t been scraped properly.

Not the building that stood in front of them, though. It matched those around them in style and age, but it stood prouder than the rest. The paint was smooth and even. Whole casement windows had been replaced. This was…better in ways that Kat couldn’t identify.

Evan was incredibly tense, considering how ordinary the house seemed. She could dig her fingernails into the sharp line of his shoulders, and he wouldn’t feel it.

“Evan,” she said, infusing his name with her exasperation. “Answering me would be really cool.”

He pushed open the storm door, and then the porch door. The left half of the duplex was obviously occupied by a family with kids. Baseball bats and basketballs and a rusting bike gave that one away. The right side was empty.

Naturally Evan headed for that door. “This is Lawrence’s place.”

She jolted to a stop. “Laurie? Why? I thought he was still on assignment.”

He ignored her probe, which sped her heart. She knew things about CFA agents that she shouldn’t, and Laurie Madigan’s status was one of them. Had something changed…?

He didn’t have a key for this one. Instead, he slipped an olive-green case from his back jeans pocket and flipped it open. Maybe he’d only been issued her apartment key after Dad assigned him to guard her. That was somewhat reassuring. The bulk of his body shielded the flashing silver, but she knew what he was doing. Raking pins. It took him less than two minutes before he picked the lock and tossed the door open.

“Get inside, Kat, before the alarm goes off.”

She shouldn’t have obeyed. Breaking and entering was too much, even for her. This was five steps up from hustling in pool halls based on her too-innocent looks. But she stepped into the front hall, ignoring the
chirp-chirp-chirp
of the keypad next to the door.

Evan ignored it too, crossing the entry in four bold steps and jerking back a painting of a hunting spaniel. There was another keypad there, and he punched in a sequence of six numbers.

The chirping stopped, but Kat was far from relieved. “What are we doing here, Evan?”

“The mission…” He paused, obviously ordering his mouth around whatever it was he was going to tell her. His eyes were frantic, something she’d never seen of him before. “Laurie was on assignment, but we lost contact with him about nine months ago. Now we have what may prove that Laurie’s dead.”

“Dead,” she echoed. She locked her hands together. Her lungs felt like rocks.

He shrugged, so tightly that his shoulders barely moved. His gaze darted away from hers. That was unusual. She was used to looking at Evan and finding him looking right back at her. Part of that was why she’d tried to avoid him for the last four years, the whole time she was in school. She hadn’t wanted to see all that…
nothing
reflected back at her. No feeling, as if they’d never done that stupid thing from
Lady and the Tramp
with a spaghetti noodle, there in a small neighborhood dive near Columbus Park. He’d gotten sauce on his otherwise pristine shirt, which had sent her into peals of laughter. He’d retaliated later when they took a pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs to bed.

Now… Now anything would do, even a complete lack of emotion, but that he avoided her eyes added power to his words. He wasn’t exaggerating. He wasn’t trying for some sick misdirection.

Laurie was really dead?

She swallowed back the nausea that had been a constant companion since learning of her father’s wound. “Then what are we doing here? Burning the place down so he never existed?”

“That decision will be made soon.” His mouth twisted upwards at the corners, but only a fool would call it a smile. His eyes were still coldly blue. “In the meantime, I’m claiming a few things to send to his mother and stepfather.”

She gasped. She couldn’t help it. She twisted her hands into fists, as if she could ever take down someone as big and trained as Evan.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I don’t know what that look means, but I have a mission and I can’t do it if you’re a mess.”

“Shut up, Evan,” she managed. Anger was a fist of heat at the small of her back. “You can’t say something so perfect to me and prove you still have a soul, and then expect me to suck it up, on a mission like a good little jarhead.”

“Something so perfect?” he echoed, looking absolutely confused.

He reached for her, holding her close, and she allowed it only because she was too frozen to do anything else.

“Don’t you know what my greatest fear in the world is? Not knowing that Dad is dead. That he’ll be killed on a mission so far away and no one will ever tell me. One of your
team
will come in and clean everything up as if he’d never lived and breathed. But you’re going to set Laurie’s family free of that nightmare. It proves something about you. Something good.” She pushed away from his arms, fighting him now, her hands flat on his stomach. “In fact, this proves how much worse you were all those years ago. Jesus, you actually have a heart. I assumed otherwise, because why else could you dump me so quickly?”