Loreth White - The Heart of a Renegade

“It’s freezing,” she protested.

“You can have my jacket.”

“It stinks.”

He laughed softly. “I don’t mean this one,” he said as he shrugged out of the booze-drenched tweed. He reached under the dock, fiddled with some knots and rope, pulled a garbage bag free and opened it. “This one,” he said, withdrawing a black leather jacket and draping it over her shoulders.

He removed his tattered gloves, palmed the wool hat off his head and ruffled his hair before dropping to his haunches and floating the old jacket out into the dockyard water along with the hat and gloves. Bemused, Jessica watched as he dipped a handkerchief into the sea and wiped the black camouflage grease from his face. He stuffed the handkerchief back into his pant pocket, stood to his full height, and slung her camera bag across his massive chest.

There was enough light coming from the SeaBus terminal for Jessica to see his hair was sandy blond, short and rumpled. His features craggy, strong, and tanned against his startlingly pale gray eyes. He was now clad in black jeans, black boots and a black turtleneck sweater which emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and the muscle in his arms. Not the slightest hint of the broken homeless character she’d seen shuffling behind the shopping cart lingered in his physique.

A chameleon, she thought. One who shifted shape at will. And he’d clearly planned every step of their escape. A cool whisper of warning ruffled through her and with it came the renewed bite of fear.

He checked his watch, and hooked his arm casually through hers. “You’re my date, okay? Let’s go.”

“I’m…what?”

“The last SeaBus is coming over from the city now. We’re going to blend with the commuters as they disembark and drift toward the car park and bus loop. Then we’re going to walk up to a nightclub on Esplanade, grab a hot dog at the late-night stand outside the club and I’m going to hail a cab to take us to a false address. No talking in the cab, not one word, understand?”

“Luke, please—” she tried to draw him to a halt. “I need to know what happened to—”

“Later. All the cab driver must recall is an ordinary couple coming out of the club. Nothing else, got it?”

She pulled her arm free. “No,” she whispered angrily. “I don’t get it. There is nothing ordinary about us. I have no idea who you are or where you’re taking me. Do you think I’m nuts? You think I’m just going to along with—” she wagged her hand at him “—whatever some lethal cross between James Bond and Crocodile Dundee orders me to do? You just assaulted two cops back there. You killed two men. I—”

He seized her arm, pulled her close, his eyes narrowing to sharp steel slivers. “Dammit, Jessica, keep it down. I saved your life back there.”

“And I’m grateful. But I don’t trust anyone, especially foreign men with guns who want what’s in my camera.”

He studied her in silence for a long beat. “I know why you don’t trust anyone,” he said quietly. “It’s because no one trusts you.” He tilted her chin up. “Not since your abduction and torture in China. Am I right?”

She swallowed a ballooning hurt in her throat.

Luke was right. The incident had cost her everything, most importantly her career, her pride and her hard-won respect. As the unacknowledged, illegitimate daughter of a British diplomat and his Chinese mistress Jessica had felt driven all her life to prove her worth in this world, to dig herself out of her impoverished London background. To make something of herself.

She’d done it for her mother.

She’d done it to show she didn’t need the acknowledgment or support of her wealthy father. She’d done it for her own sense of self-worth, and she’d succeeded. She’d become a rising star with the BBC, one of their top foreign correspondents. There was even talk of hosting her own news show.

But it had all vanished three years ago, the day she’d been kidnapped from Shanghai’s business district and taken to a remote factory warehouse in Hubei province where members of the Dragon Heads and an official from the Chinese government had accused her of being a spy for the United States.

She’d been tortured for information and injected with mind-altering hallucinogenic “truth drugs,” designed and administered by the man she called The Chemist. A man she believed was a top level biochemical assassin for a covert arm of the ruling Chinese Communist Party which was using the Dragon Heads to further its political agenda worldwide.

Jessica had managed a harrowing escape, but the drugs had permanently damaged her brain, leaving her with horrific flashbacks and hallucinations. The hallucinations were so real that she could no longer be certain of her ability to discern reality from fiction. The Chinese government denied any involvement and she had no proof of a government cover-up. In the end, she’d been swept under the bureaucratic carpet. She’d lost her job, and she’d been left to languish in a British mental institution with severe depression, paranoia, hallucinations, labeled a schizophrenic.

But Jessica had fought back.

She knew what she’d endured in China was true, even if her own memories of the ordeal were sketchy. And now she finally had some proof. The film in her camera was going to show The Chemist really did exist and that he was here, right now, in North America, with Dragon Heads boss Xiang-Li.

“Not even the RCMP took your word that what you just saw in Chinatown wasn’t another of your well-documented hallucinations. That’s why they told you to come back with the prints, once you’d developed them. Am I right, Jess?”

She looked away.

But Luke drew her firmly against his torso as a bus passed on the road above them. His body was so incredibly solid, so warm. Big. He felt so confoundingly safe and dangerous at the same time.

A terrified and very lonely part of Jessica ached to lean into him, to have him hold her, have anyone hold her. To have someone care.

“Let me tell you something, Jess,” he said quietly. “I believe you. Those guys shooting at you in Gastown were real. That tells me that what you saw in Chinatown was real, too. And someone is prepared to kill to keep it quiet. They want the evidence in your camera and they want you dead. And now they want me, too.” He paused, watching her face intently. “That puts you and me pretty much on the same side, wouldn’t you say?”

She closed her eyes. The idea of an ally, someone who actually believed she wasn’t a total nut job, was so heady and alluring it hurt. After being alone and confused for so many years she’d come to a point where she’d actually believed she was crazy, where she honestly didn’t know whether she could trust her own mind. The doubt still whispered, even now.

Tears burned under her lids as she struggled to hold back the painful surge of emotion. “Why are you doing this for me, Luke?”

The question punched at him in a way Luke couldn’t explain. This woman got to him. He’d seen her file. He knew her background. He knew what she’d endured and he understood her kind of solitude. And while she was afraid and vulnerable, she was also brave. Never mind utterly physically compelling.

He exhaled heavily.

He didn’t want anything to get to him. He didn’t want to understand her. Hell, he didn’t even want to like her.

He didn’t want to like anybody.

“I’m not doing it for you, Jess.” His voice was suddenly blunt and he knew it but couldn’t help it. “It’s my job. I work for the Force du Sablé, a private military company that offers close protection to politically sensitive targets, among other things.” He paused, angry again that this mission had been thrust on him by FDS boss Jacques Sauvage.