Ingrid Weaver - Eye of the Beholder

It was a little thing, to be sure, but taking pleasure in the texture of a strange man’s hair was something Glenna simply didn’t do. She might do lunch with a man. Or dinner and the theater, when her schedule allowed. Nice, sensible functions with no commitment, no expectations and no messy demands. She had found the situation completely satisfactory.

But it all seemed so impossibly faraway now, another world, a previous existence.

There was a furtive scrabbling along the far wall. Glenna’s smile faded as quickly as it had formed. Her situation was worse now than it had been hours earlier on the plane. She should be thinking about ways to escape instead of mooning over her fellow hostage.

Is that what she was doing? Mooning over a man, like some teenager with a crush?

Hardly. There was nothing juvenile about what she felt for this stranger. With one hand in the sensual softness of his hair, the other slick with the heat of his blood, Glenna had never felt more intimately connected to another human being in her life.

For however long that lasted.

Rafe came awake with brutal swiftness. His leg was on fire, and someone was slamming a sledgehammer into his head. His eyes had barely snapped open when he sensed a figure leaning over him.

Why was everything so dim? Had the blows to his head messed up his vision? Either that, or night had fallen. How long had he been out? Where was he? The questions buzzed through his brain as his hands shot out to grasp his assailant’s wrists. With a twist of his torso, Rafe reversed their positions.

There was a startled gasp. “Ow! What are you doing?”

The voice was female. It didn’t take Rafe more than a second to realize that the body he’d pinned to the floor was female, too. More than that, she felt familiar. She smelled familiar, a blend of sunshine and citrus that had his nostrils flaring for more.

Rafe blinked, trying to focus on the face beneath his. It was impossible to see anything more than a blur, yet he knew who this was. He might not be able to see her, but his other senses had no trouble recognizing her. It was the woman from the plane—the tall, classy redhead.

He knew the chances of rescuing her had been slim when he’d seen her fall to the tarmac. He should have remained with Flynn and the team to cover Sarah’s retreat with the other hostages. This woman who lay beneath him was a stranger, he reminded himself again. No less and no more important than the others…but the decision to go after her hadn’t been made by his brain, it had been pure gut-level instinct.

He breathed shallowly a few times, striving to control his pain the way he’d been trained to do. The pounding in his head retreated. The burning in his thigh settled into a deep throb. Bullet wound, he realized. He’d been hit five yards from the fence. He replayed the final moments, searching for an explanation for their present circumstances, but he must have been unconscious while they were transported here.

Wherever “here” was.

“Where are we?” he asked, careful to pitch his voice low enough not to carry. No point alerting anyone else that he was awake.

“I don’t know.”

He put his mouth close to her ear. “Keep your voice down. Is it a house? A factory? A warehouse? How big is it?”

“It’s a house,” she whispered. “It was hard to tell how large because it was already dark when they brought us here. They dumped us in this room and left.”

She had said it was already dark. That meant his vision was probably undamaged. One piece of good news. “They? How many?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Try to remember.”

She paused. He could feel her body tremble. She was struggling for the control she’d exhibited before. Her terror was there, just under the surface, but she was fighting it down. “There might have been six or seven men on each truck,” she replied finally. “There are more in this place.”

“We’re still on Rocama then?”

“Rocama?”

“The island where your plane landed.”

“Yes. We must be.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“What is it?”

He hadn’t liked the setup of this mission from the start. This proved his misgivings had been justified. “The locals were in on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“At the airport. Had to be. How else could the hijackers have gotten reinforcements through the police cordon and pulled off a raid of this scale?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“We weren’t allowed backup. That has to be why.” He squinted in the direction of his left wrist, but he saw no sign of the luminous dial of his watch. They must have taken it along with his gun and the knife he’d strapped to his calf. “How long did it take to get here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Minutes? Hours?”

“It felt like hours.”

“Damn.”

Her breath puffed past his cheek. “What are we going to do?”

“Escape.”

“How?”

“I’ll think of something, princess.”

She was silent for a moment. “Glenna.”

“What?”

“Glenna Hastings. That’s my name.”

It suited her, he thought. It was classy and feminine, just like the woman. “Master Sergeant Rafal Marek,” he replied.

“Sergeant? Are you with the police?”

“Army Special Forces,” he said.

“You mean like SEALs?”

“They’re navy. Special Ops Delta is army.”

Another silence. “You’re from Delta Force?”

He heard the note of awe in her voice. He had Hollywood to thank for that. They had built Delta into a legend, even though the government still didn’t officially admit the force existed. “I’m from Eagle Squadron. And most people call me Rafe.”

“Okay. Rafe?”

“Yes?”

“Could you get off me, please?”

Rafe knew he should have let her up as soon as he had realized she wasn’t a threat. Sure, he’d wanted to learn the details of their situation as quickly as possible, and he hadn’t wanted their conversation to be overheard, but those weren’t the only reasons he had delayed.

He liked Glenna where she was. Her body was warm and firm and very, very comfortable stretched out underneath him. Now that she had brought it to his attention, he was aware of every inch of her. Her long legs rubbed alongside his. Her breasts pressed into his chest with each breath she drew and the pulse in her wrists was fluttering hard against his fingers.

She was a good fit. He didn’t want to let her go. It was the same possessive urge he’d had when he’d first seen her through his binoculars. And despite the ache in his head and the throbbing in his thigh, he felt a quick stirring of masculine interest.

Adrenaline, that’s all it was. Battlefield lust. It was nothing more than his body affirming that it was alive, a natural albeit primitive reaction to a brush with death and a tense situation.

Concentrate, he told himself. He had to think of the mission, not the woman. They were on the floor in an unknown location, surrounded by an undetermined number of enemies. He should be investigating their prison, assessing their options and forming a strategy.

And he should get the hell off Glenna before she felt the physical evidence of the reaction he was having no success controlling.

“Sorry,” he said, releasing her wrists. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t startle me.”

Yeah, right, Rafe thought, rolling to his side. If his face hadn’t been covered with a mask when they’d met, she probably would have gone screaming off in the opposite direction, bad ankle and all. Lucky for him this place was so dark. He sat up, biting back a groan as he straightened his leg in front of him.

“Oh, be careful,” Glenna said. “The bleeding’s almost stopped. You have a wound in your left leg.”