Midnight Shadows (2 page)

He was cool under fire. His heartbeat had been tested at 60 beats per minute under live fire. Every single SEAL was deemed ‘stress hardy’—able to immediately pump out neuropeptide Y in their brains at the first signs of stress. NPY acted like a fire hose extinguishing fear and keeping the neocortex thinking under stress when other people simply clocked out.

So where twenty years of having everything but a nuclear bomb thrown at him couldn’t shake him, watching Allegra nearly kill herself did the trick.

He was an expert on combat falls and his mind supplied a complete, 3-D, hi-def, Technicolor image of what was going to happen, a perfect storm of wrong place, wrong time. She was going to crack her head on the very edge of the swimming pool’s stone edge, then fall bonelessly into the water. For someone who had survived very tricky, highly experimental brain surgery, the crack on the head would either kill her or put her in a coma.

He’d never moved so fast in his life.

And while he clung to her, to his miracle wife, slender and perfect in his arms, his brain kept shooting him images of Allegra in her coffin, beautiful and perfect and silent.

And, of course, he’d have to crawl right into her coffin after her, because he couldn’t begin to imagine life without her.

She’d been running to him because she was so happy to see him and she was
apologizing?

Allegra was still mumbling
sorry
into his shirt and it broke his heart. Every time she tripped, every time it took a moment for her eyes to accommodate and see something, she apologized. He couldn’t seem to break her of the habit. The person who should apologize was the fucker who’d given her the hematoma and blinded her in the first place. Her former agent, now deceased via a shank to the heart in prison.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Kowalski curled himself over his wife as if he could protect her not only from the fall but from any danger coming from any quarter, including the sky.

“Man.” Yannis came up and met his eyes over Allegra’s short red hair. They’d had to cut her beautiful waist-length hair for surgery and it had grown into short curls over her gorgeous head, like duck’s down. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. It was close.”

Yannis understood body language and knew how close Allegra had come to knocking herself out. Kowalski closed his eyes for a second and clenched his jaws.

Allegra pulled away and smiled up at him. Man, her smile. She had a gorgeous smile at the best of times, but she reserved the real knockout just for him. Kowalski let her go and rubbed his chest, where it hurt when she gave him that special smile.

“You’re early,” she said. She reached out a hand and touched him. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

“Yeah, everything went really smooth. So I decided to come back early.” She didn’t have to know that he’d moved heaven and earth to cram four days’ worth of appointments into three. He couldn’t complain about having to leave her here. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Yannis would protect her with his life—though really on this luxury resort about the only thing that represented a threat was the rich food. And he owed it to his partner, John Huntington, aka the Midnight Man, to do some work while he was here. The past four months of Allegra’s rehab he had practically been AWOL from their company, without Midnight saying a word about it.

“So you can stay with me until we leave?” Allegra asked. She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice.

He smiled down at her, knowing his smile wasn’t anything compared to hers. “Sure. I might have to do some stuff at the computer, but I don’t think I’ll have to take another trip.” If the two bank presidents he spoke to had further questions, he’d just Skype. “So,” Kowalski said to Yannis, “how have things been around here? Anything happen?”

Allegra frowned, shot a glance to Yannis and shook her head slightly. What the fuck was this?

But Yannis merely smiled and shook his head. “Nope. Nothing exciting. As a matter of fact, for the next couple of days things are going to get really really quiet. We’ve got some bigwigs coming tomorrow and they’ve bought out almost all the rooms. Just a couple of guys and their entourage. Financial big shots, probably scheming to take over the world.” He shrugged. “As long as they’re paying premium prices I don’t care. Less work for us. As a matter of fact, they asked to be alone in the restaurant so for the next three days you and Allegra will be served room service on the terrace of your suite, how’s that?”

The last thing Kowalski wanted was to share any space at all with the money men. He dealt with money men on a daily basis in his work. The ones that weren’t creeps were fuckheads and they were all spoiled rotten. Staying on a gorgeous hotel suite terrace overlooking the most fabulous view in the history of views, dining alone with Allegra? Oh yeah.

“Sounds great,” he said. “Will the pool be off-limits too? Because we can always go down to the beach.”

Yannis frowned and hesitated. Which was unlike him. Kowalski got the impression Yannis wasn’t ecstatic about this little financial summit. Which he understood completely. Kowalski hoped fervently that Yannis was milking the money men dry.

“I don’t know about that, they didn’t specify anything about the pool area. I’ll get back to you on that.”

Allegra did a happy little jig in bare feet. “The beach! Let’s go to the beach, Douglas! Right now!”

Kowalski knew Allegra loved the beach of the resort. Strange for an Irishwoman who had countless generations of living next to freezing Irish Sea water and gray waterlogged dunes in her DNA.

“Well, you’ve got your answer, Kowalski,” Yannis said. “Take your lady down to the beach and enjoy yourselves. I’ll have complimentary drinks in your room at nautical twilight.” He gave Kowalski an ironic salute, Allegra a wink and then walked off.

Kowalski watched him go. Yannis had perfect gait. Good for him. Kowalski knew how many excruciating hours of physical rehab that perfect gait had taken. He’d sweated every single second of Allegra’s rehab and had to hand it to anyone who went through it and came out sane the other end. Him? He’d been lucky. He’d only taken a couple of bullets—one of them had been for Allegra—that went in one side and out the other and hadn’t messed up too much stuff along the way. Plus the fucker who’d messed his face up with the knife. But nothing requiring rehab. It would have driven him crazy.

Allegra tugged on his arm and he turned to her with a smile. “Yeah honey?”

“After the beach, I have a surprise for you.” She had a secretive smile.

Kowalski barely refrained from patting his pocket. In it was a case with a diamond-cut emerald on a gold chain. “Well that’s handy. Because I have a surprise for you, too. You want to show me yours?”

“Now?” Allegra looked around. Kowalski looked down into her beautiful heart-shaped face and was struck, for the millionth time, by how incredibly lucky he was. She shook her head. Her smile was blinding. “After the swim. It’ll take a while.”

Kowalski froze. Oh God, no. She wasn’t talking about sex was she? He couldn’t possibly do that. No. No way.

* * * *

Allegra saw her husband freeze like a deer in the headlights and managed not to sigh. She also managed to pretend she had no idea what he was thinking and that everything was absolutely normal.

The fact that he froze was proof enough that Douglas was deeply troubled. Nothing on this earth made him freeze.

She’d heard countless stories from the men in his company, who’d served with him in the battlefield. The stories were different and yet somehow always the same. They were in Afghanistan/Iran/Iraq/Colombia/Indonesia. It was always either The Fucking Sandbox or The Fucking Jungle. And they were always in a desperate situation until the Senior rode to the rescue and everything got solved, usually with some blood being spilled, usually not theirs. Everyone who knew him as other than a rough-looking but canny businessman, everyone who knew him from before, in his military incarnation, worshipped the ground he walked on.

Everyone always, always mentioned how tough he was. How cool under fire.

And yet here he was, frozen at the thought of sex with her.

God.

After the operation, he treated her as if she were made of spun glass, feather-light, capable of shattering at the sound of a too-loud voice. Yes, the surgery had been risky, she’d known that going in. Yes, it had taken a lot out of her. It took her a full month to be able to stand upright. But she’d been a good girl, done all her exercises without complaint. Well…maybe a
little
bit of whining, but Douglas took it in his stride like a champ.

She wouldn’t shatter if they made love. Yet she had no way of showing him that unless they actually did make love. You couldn’t prove a negative.

But she was a trouper. Instead of rolling her eyes at him she just smiled, put her arm in his and guided them to the elevator that would take them to Hagios Nikolaus’s amazing beach.

The elevator was posh—polished bronze and teak. The beach was posh—with wooden walkways flanked by potted palm trees, white canvas and wood cabanas along the back.

Douglas disappeared into a cabana and emerged a minute later in swim trunks. There weren’t many people on the elegant and comfortable teak lounge beds with white linen canopies, but when Douglas walked down to the beach Allegra could see women’s heads popping up like prairie dogs in the Midwest, as if a silent whistle had been blown.

Allegra didn’t blame them, not one bit. None of the women were looking at Douglas’s face, they were too busy ogling his body. He was amazing. Huge, with shoulders out to here, completely ripped, all long lean but big muscle. There wasn’t a Greek statue back in the National Gallery of Athens that could hold a candle to him.

And the way he moved—with athletic grace, each muscle moving exactly as it was designed to do. Just his stride, fully clothed, was enough to make heads turn—as long as no one looked at his face. Nearly naked he could bring traffic to a standstill.

Sorry, ladies. That’s my man,
she thought smugly.
You can look but not touch.

Allegra put down her beach bag, laid out beach towels on two lounge beds and walked hand in hand with Douglas into the water.

The beach faced southwest and the late afternoon sun turned everything on the beach golden and the water an incredible shade of turquoise. The bottom was sandy and touchable for several hundred yards. The water was warmer than the air and Allegra felt its effects immediately, enveloped by gentle heat. Every single therapist had stressed the benefits of swimming and Douglas had spent a lot of time in the past four months with her in pools, giving her lessons.

Not many people got taught to swim by a Navy SEAL.

“Ahhh.” Allegra fell back slowly, lifting her legs, and closed her eyes, trusting in the water, trusting in Douglas, who wouldn’t leave her side. She wasn’t any great shakes as a swimmer but she had floating down pat.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Douglas’s rumble of a voice carried under water. She sighed and nodded her head, reaching out with her hand. He took it and everything bad in the world disappeared.

The blindness, the surgery, her physical weakness…all gone. She rocked gently in a golden world under a golden sun and music played in her head.

All the music that had fled her life returned now, Dagda was back in her head, the music coming in great arpeggios, the music that had always been the center of her life until Douglas. He’d entered her life and then the music fled but she had always clung to the hope that she could someday, somehow have both.

Douglas mourned the loss of her music as much as she did. These past three days had opened her heart to the most dangerous emotion there was—hope. Hope that the music would come back.

Allegra opened her eyes unexpectedly and caught Douglas unawares. Caught the tenderness of his look and the worry between his brows.

Their eyes met. “Hey there,” she whispered.

He instantly smoothed his face out, to the extent that his scars let him. “Hey there yourself.”

She let her legs drift slowly to the white sand beneath the rocking turquoise water and walked up to him. “I saw all the ladies ogling you on the beach.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right.”

It was a running joke that, for her, had a vein of seriousness running through it. “I did. Including the lady with enough diamonds to sink the
Titanic
. She sat up and pulled down her sunglasses for a better look. Her necklace nearly blinded me.” The lady in question was dark-haired and very voluptuous. And drowning in bling. Her jewelry covered more of her than her bikinis did.

“She must have had something in her eye.”

“Oh, of course she did. You.”

By this time she was plastered against him, arms around his neck, and oh yes. There he was, fully erect. As he was most nights in bed with her. All dressed up with nowhere to go.

He was shaking his head, hard mouth slightly uptilted, eyes half closed against the huge golden sun.

For just a second Allegra was overwhelmed that this man who looked like Neptune without the pitchfork, so huge and strong and capable in every way, was hers. And he was. Every single line of that big body told her that he was completely hers and would remain so to her dying day. When they’d taken their vows, she knew he meant every single word of the ageless ceremonial phrases.