She held up her hand. “I can’t remember what it was.”
When she looked out the window, he briefly closed his eyes, knowing exactly what it was that she’d wanted. He might as well have put the nine to his own temple and pulled the trigger. Damn!
The sound of his BlackBerry vibrating against the coffee table drew their attention. Zach paced over and picked it up, listening to Anne Marie’s distraught sobs.
“What’s happened?” he said quickly, trying to make sense of what she was telling him.
“I did what you said, Zach. I told the police.” Anne Marie’s voice filled the receiver in shaky bursts. “But now they want to take me in as a suspect saying that I could have tried to poison my husband— because his business is slow, he’s an amputee, and his life insurance would make him worth more dead than alive!”
“Call Lowell’s attorney immediately. You stay calm, Anne Marie, you hold it together now, okay— I’m going to get to the bottom of all this. You’ve got three kids to be there for, so you can’t fall apart, all right?” Zach walked in a circle. “How’s our boy doing?”
Anita watched the surreal conversation, knowing that too many innocent lives had been touched by the corruption in hers. No matter what, she made herself a silent promise to help right this wrong.
Zachary nodded as Anne Marie filled him in, his gaze fixed on Anita.
“Good, good, well at least he’s fighting to stay alive, and you fight too, okay? Are the boys all right?” Zachary nodded. “Good. You tell them to hang tough . . . okay, call Mike. Call me back when you can.”
Anita watched Zachary hang up and rake his scalp with his fingers. “I’m going to help you find out who did this, okay?”
He looked at her and shook his head. “This is so not your fight and you’re paying good money to be protected— you shouldn’t even be involved in any of this.”
“I want you to lie down on the sofa,” she said, going to the bedroom. When she returned she tossed him a pillow and a blanket. “I want you to get a good night’s sleep— if you can. In the morning, I want you to eat a decent breakfast. We have a long day ahead of us, and a bunch more travel stops to make before it’s all over . . . and if I get any more bright ideas about, uhmmm . . . waking you up with a kiss, I’ll just call out from the doorway. All right?”
FIVE OF THE longest days and nights of his life had passed. Every day, Anita had wowed U.S. troops, and each night he’d spoken to Anne Marie, he was encouraged that Lowell was coming along better as time passed. Soon Lowell would be up for police questioning and maybe something would jog his memory. It was a godsend that his buddy’s wife wasn’t being held, even though she was probably still being watched as a potential suspect.
But he knew in his soul that the only reason poor Anne Marie was allowed to go free without charges was because he and Anita Brown had called New York’s finest from Kuwait. Celebrity did have its privileges, and Anita had cashed in a favor on his behalf that could well land her in the tabloids, if someone at the precinct decided to play hardball. Regardless, he felt somewhat better that a police investigation was under way. It just wasn’t right that Anne Marie should take the fall for something like this, and he’d do everything he could to protect Anita’s name, too.
Still, there was that quiet, unspoken thing that stood between them every night when he took to the sofa and Anita went to her bedroom. It had followed them on the plane and then from Baghdad to Kuwait to Dubai to Oman, and now it had tracked them all the way to Yemen.
Ignored desire was the constant companion that slid in and out of their conversations, slipped between them, licking at their emotions and straining their bodies over a cup of tea and cranberry juice. This thing they couldn’t talk about bled into their dreams, tossing and turning them about, threatening to spill onto the sheets.
Refusing to be denied, it softened voices and increased pulse rates while they were only laughing about the day, or when they’d delve into their collective pasts to get deep and philosophical . . . talking politics and world religions, and discussing cultures without borders. Conversation became foreplay, raging debates were heavy petting that left them both spent when it was time to say good night.
The more he got to know her, the more it was hard to deny just how magnetic their pull was on one another.
Long days of frenetic activity and an entire entourage helped keep things at an appropriate professional distance. Group dinners and Anita being out on the town with her band and staff kept things from ever becoming too intimate. He and nine other men still had a job to do standing guard, standing watch.
But it was the nights when all the hotel room doors had closed and the crowds were gone, that’s when the unspoken thing screamed the loudest and stomped its feet to demand attention. Tonight it was doing the cha-cha, dancing the salsa in the middle of the suite floor, and all he could do was stare out the window.
“Do you want some tea?” she said, towel drying her hair.
“Sure,” he said, knowing their ritual was always the same.
It was an invitation to sit up and talk, to keep her company and listen to her beautiful voice. It was a private audience that was evaporating day by night, one that was making him sad because he knew it would end.
She chuckled softly and he heard her filling the coffeepot with water to heat. “You always say sure, when you really want something else.”
“You have no idea,” he said under his breath, staring out at the blue-black velvet sky.
“Uh, huh, cranberry juice, he mutters,” she said, rooting around in the minibar.
He was glad she hadn’t heard him and his body tensed as she neared him.
“One cranberry juice,” she said with an easy lilt.
She smelled so good, the shampoo and lotion, all things female collided with his senses as she came beside him.
“Thanks,” he managed to get out and then took the glass from her without fully turning around.