Damn it, but the brain was an annoying-as-hell organ battling for control with another organ that seriously wanted jurisdiction over this moment.
He looked down at her, so vulnerable in his grasp in spite of her bossy ways and take-no-shit attitude. Passion took a nosedive.
A man kicked ass for women. Protected them. Honored them. And he'd been lying to her by omission about Tina, as well as about the stoning incident.
Monica chose just that second to capitalize on his weakening grip and slid her hands free, brought them down, into his gaping flight suit and into his boxers again, gripping his ass and guiding him. Her nails bit an arousing urgency into his skin.
Three more seconds and he would be inside her.
Her teeth grazed his bottom lip.
Two.
The press of her body jammed the e-mail pager against his hip with an uncomfortable reminder of all the lies between them.
One.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
He manacled her wrists again and tore himself away from her, the toughest thing he'd done since his first spin recovery in pilot training. "I can't do this."
Chapter 12
Mission accomplished. Belly to the ground, Blake crawled back toward his sandpit outside the terrorist compound.
Gunshots echoed across the stretch of desert with more night maneuvers and training for al-Khayr's operatives. And the perfect distraction when he'd slipped in and out to check on Sydney. An even better cover to obliterate any sound from the faint Predator drone unmanned spy craft gathering additional intel and monitoring to ensure the hostages weren't moved.
She was alive.
Finally he let his brain wrap itself around that fact. The knowledge filled him like Sydney's scent
still clinging to him, overriding the dank must of the sand under him.
He should be relieved. Grateful. But he couldn't feel anything more than the scrape of the desert floor against his skin and the dense haze of something too violent even to call anger.
His hands clawed at the ground, propelling him forward. He'd known the bastards would rape her. Knowing it, and facing the tangible reality were two different beasts.
Blake inched across the last patch of ground. He landed in the hollowed trench still empty of his partner who'd been monitoring guard patterns for him, feeding possible threat info through the small boom mike headset.
He stowed the briefcase-size UWB sensor—ultra wideband motion detector—that could track the movement of people through walls in 3-D. The cutting-edge technology should have kept him from risking going all the way inside to see Sydney.
Except nothing could have kept him away from her.
He forced himself to lie flat, breathe, hold back the urge to slip into the compound again. He could do it, too. Easily. See her one more time before his shift ended when he and Carlos would swap out with another pair before sunrise to snag some sleep.
But he shouldn't risk it. Less than forty-eight more hours. Hang tough.
Some other poor bastard had lost a sister, girlfriend, wife to the stoning today, but not him, and he forced himself to remember to be grateful for that much and not think about those goddamned bastards brutalizing Sydney.
Pricks of light popped from the training field. Shouted orders in Arabic echoed, muted to unintelligible by the wind and distance.
He forced breaths in and out. He would uplink and give his report back to the command post in a minute. First, he needed to let his body switch gears and taper off the adrenaline buzz from stealthing into the compound. A few seconds more and his hands would stop twitching.
And what would he say when the time came? If he told command post about her being pregnant, they would know he'd gone in against orders. Not that he gave a shit about much of anything right now except getting Sydney out of here. But the information had no bearing on the rescue attempt.
She wouldn't want him to tell. He knew that. So he would keep his mouth shut and not broadcast it over the radio waves. He wished he could prepare her sister, but there would be too many listening ears over the frequency.
God, things had been easier when they hadn't known everything about each other. When he and Sydney were still in those early days of discovering...