Plain Sight Read online

  “Greg…no…”

  Greg?

  “Birdie, please, please wake up. Come on, please.”

  She wasn’t waking and I couldn’t take it anymore. I pinched the skin of her shoulder as hard as I could without nearly leaving a bruise.

  Oh, she woke up then.

  I was flipped over, slammed on the bed with her hand around my throat and a gun pressed to my forehead. She straddled my hips and had her ankles pinning mine to the bed.

  It took just a moment for Bridget to realize what was going on and pull the gun away from me.

  “Holy fuck, Vaughn!” she growled at me.

  “How did you get that gun so fast?” I gasped.

  “Why are you waking me up like that?”

  I stared up at her big blue eyes, just barely luminous in the nightlight’s glow. “You were crying,” I said, cupping her chin and brushing my thumb over her cheek and wiping the tears that were still there.

  She swept the back of her hand over her other cheek and wiped the rest of them away.

  “Fuck.” She slammed the gun into the bed, and jumped away. She immediately saw the closed door. “Did I wake him up?”

  “No, no.” I sat up, touching my neck where her hand had squeezed. “Christ, you’re fast as lightning. I closed the door so you wouldn’t wake him.”

  “Did I hurt you?” she asked, rushing back over and turning my head to look at my neck.

  “No, damn it. I’m fine.” I gripped her arm gently. “Bridget, I’m worried about you. You were sobbing in your sleep. You kept saying no, and why, and you said a name.”

  Her eyes bore into mine. “A name.”

  “Greg.”

  She dropped onto the bed in front of me. “Shit. Shit shit shit.”

  She closed her eyes but it didn’t stop the new glut of tears that poured out of her. The sobs were wretched, and I couldn’t help but grab for her hand.

  Bridget pulled away, wrapping her arms around her middle. She walked around to the other side of the bed and started pacing the length of the room. She just walked back and forth, back and forth, sobbing, shaking her head.

  I couldn’t stand it and I finally planted myself in front of her to stop her. She tried to rip her arms out of my hands.

  “No. Talk to me.”

  “No.” She stared at me defiantly.

  “I’m not moving.”

  “I’m not talking.”

  “Then we’re at a stalemate, aren’t we?”

  She stared at the bed and I could hear her thinking. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but she was thinking hard.

  “It was just a bad dream,” she whispered.

  “It was a nightmare, Birdie.”

  She let out a sigh and looked at her pillow on the other side of the bed longingly. “Can we talk in the morning?”

  I shook my head. “Birdie, you’ve seen me at my worst, collapsed on a carpet weeping like a child, my heart in tatters. I didn’t realize at the time, I needed to trust someone with that, and you’ve been the best with it. You never poked or prodded or gotten upset or disgusted with me. Can’t I do the same for you?”

  With a giant sigh, she unwrapped her arms from around herself. It was a start.

  Lifting her head, she stared at me. “Greg was my fiancé.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Bridget

  The word lanced through me.

  “Fiancé.”

  Vaughn’s words were shocked, but not horrified. His eyes were surprised, but not scared.

  I took a deep breath.

  “One week. I’d worn his ring for less than a week when he was taken from me. I hadn’t even had a chance to call Killian and tell him the man had proposed.

  “I loved him. Madly.”

  Vaughn released his hold on me, and I sat on the bed. “No one knows, not even the men who fired me from the agency, that I had to watch the whole murder. They’d tied me up, and stuck me in the corner. I watched them kill him. I couldn’t get free from the bonds easily. It took me nearly four hours to get out, and by then… Even the two bullets in the brains of the two men there wasn’t enough to save him. He’d lost too much blood. I held his hand as the light went out in his eyes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone? How could they not know you were there?”

  “Because I didn’t want anyone to know. Not anyone. I was in position to get revenge in a matter of days. If they knew I’d watched, if they knew I hadn’t walked in on a robbery and shot the intruders, I would have been pulled from duty.”

  “But you were let go.”

  “Not before I got my revenge.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, and paced back and forth in front of me. “Jesus, Bridget. You’ve been dealing with the same thing I have and you haven’t had an iota of support. How the hell are you still standing?”

  “Because they aren’t. Because I put a bullet in their fucking brains, and a week later I put a bullet in their boss’s brain, in his driver, and smeared one of his lackies all over the fucking Autobahn.” I looked up at him, expecting recrimination, horror, disgust—something.

  There was nothing. Nothing but a sympathy that seared into my soul, and had me weeping in an instant.

  Looking away for a moment, Vaughn seemed to make a decision. He grabbed the gun from where I’d dropped it and put it back in the drawer. Offering me a hand, he drew me up from the bed, and placed a kiss on my forehead as I trembled.

  Working quickly, he straightened the bed, then flipped the covers back. He walked back to me and wrapped me in a hug.

  “Come to bed, please. Tell me about Greg.”

  “Vaughn…”

  His finger was on my lips. “You’ve heard all my stories about Helen. I want to hear about Greg.”

  The door was locked. Dylan was safe. We were away from everything in this room. The only evidence of life outside were the two high windows above the bed and the one in the bathroom.

  I had never let me guard down about this. Ever. Greg was gone, his killers were dead and my life wasn’t like that anymore.

  Sitting back down on the bed, I slipped my feet under the sheets and wiggled out of his way. Vaughn didn’t let me get very far before he was there with me, an arm wrapped around my waist, my back to his front. He pulled the sheets up, and tucked them around us, settling in.

  “I want you to tell me about Greg, Birdie, but if you want to just go to sleep, we can do that too. I’m still waking you up if you have a nightmare.”

  God, he felt so warm and so nice against me. But it still took everything I had to force myself to relax into him…or at all.

  “Greg was no one. He was a secretary at the agency. He ran copies and filed and handled top secret documents. He was a very smart, sweet man and we’d struck up a friendship right away when I’d arrived. He was thrilled to be there. He’d dreamed about being MI6 since he was a little kid, but he’d been in a bad accident at sixteen that took his full range of motion in his right arm.

  “But being there, helping, being useful and trusted was everything to him. His family came from a town just south of York, and there were kings and princes in his blood. He had an adorable almost-Sean Connery accent and held himself so, so proudly.

  “We just fell together. One day we were chatting over a beer and the next thing I knew were back at his place, going at it like rabbits.” A little laugh escaped. “That was on his family crest. A rabbit. We had a good damn laugh about that.

  “I was from a good Irish family, with all kind of land and nobles in my tree too, as well as a brother who is a master surgeon in Pittsburgh. His family approved of our match, when we finally told them we’d been dating.

  “He proposed to me at the top of Tower Bridge at night. It was delightfully cliché, with flowers and fireworks and everything I never wanted until him. He’d put that ring on me and I couldn’t stop looking at it. He’d gotten a jeweler to set an heirloom diamond into an art deco ring and it was…perfection.”

  My vo
ice was cracking, and my hands were shaking so bad.

  “Breath, baby,” he whispered in my ear.

  I needed to hear that. I let out my breath slowly, and drew one in just as slow. He lips kissed behind my ear, a feathery touch that grounded me more than anything else had in a long time.

  “Greg sounds like he was an amazing man.”

  A wretched cry flew out of me, and I covered my mouth with my hand. “Fuck, Vaughn. He was amazing. He would never have made it as an agent. He was too gentle. He didn’t even like to squish bugs.”

  He chuckled behind me, and it relaxed me a bit. “Would you like to sleep?”

  I shook my head. “I want to tell you what happened. I’ve never told anyone the whole story. And the sanitized version of it the director got was worth squat.”

  Vaughn drew in a little breath. “He didn’t believe you?”

  “He wanted receipts. Witnesses. We were trapped in the house alone for four hours in the middle of fucking East Anglia. Our nearest neighbor was like a mile away and hated us.”

  I smeared away a few tears. My heart was cracking and dying all over again, but I had to tell someone who would understand. And for some reason, I knew in that same breaking heart that Vaughn was that person.

  “The men who attacked us worked for a man named Wittesburg. They thought I had a disk with some sensitive information involving the movement of stolen art. It was Nazi treasure, raided from wealthy families who had long since gone to the gas chambers. The disk was long gone, handed over to the authorities. We never, ever brought shit like that into the house for just that reason. My job leaked into our lives enough.

  “They came in the middle of the night and tied us up. They tranq’ed me so I couldn’t fight back. They knew me, they knew what I was capable of after seven years of training.”

  The horrible images of that night came back in a rush and the words tumbled out of me because I just couldn’t take them and stuff them back into me again. I didn’t have the strength to close the lid on them again.

  “They shoved me in the corner, tied up so I could see what they were doing. They didn’t gag me, they wanted to hear me scream and they want to hear me answer them.

  “They skinned Greg’s shin. They poked holes in him with ice picks. They beat him with shovels and burned him with hot water and the iron. I kept screaming that I didn’t have the disk, it was at the office. I kept screaming it. Over and over, and they didn’t believe someone wouldn’t want all that art for themselves. They were convinced I had a copy.

  “Then, they raped him. Each of them. Twice. And just when the second one finished with him, I finally got my hand free. I pulled out the gun I had in the drawer there and shot them each just once, right in the temple. One on the right, one on the left.

  “I tried to save Greg. I tried to stem the bleeding from the worst of his wounds, but halfway through desperately trying to figure out what to do, he grabbed my hand and looked at me, and shook his head.

  “He knew. He knew he was going to die. I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t get him to a car to get take him to the emergency room. All he wanted at that moment was to know I was there as he died.

  “I lay down in his blood, and pulled him close. I sang him our favorite song, and just tried to make sure he wasn’t alone in those last moments.”

  I heaved in a deep breath. “I took out anything I cared about in that house, put it in the garage in totes and burned the fucking thing to the ground. What I buried of my fiancé on his family’s land was nothing more than his charred bones.”

  Gasping, I tried not to weep, but there was no stopping it. No one knew I burned that house. I hadn’t even told the director.

  “You burned it so no one would know what happened to him. Why couldn’t you tell anyone after that?”

  “Oh, you can’t get away with a revenge killing no matter what you bring back, no matter what the receipts say. It’s a giant no-no.”

  He nodded.

  I pulled in some air and squeezed my eyes shut. “After I cleared out the place, I arranged everything, including my dead fiancé’s body to make it look like I’d walked in on a robbery and a fire.”

  Clutching his hand to my chest, I tried to calm my sobs.

  “What happened?”

  “After we buried him, I went to work. I wasn’t supposed to be on the job, but I knew that Wittesburg was after that disk and he’d keep coming after it. I also knew he had a drive with names and locations of all the agents in the world, from so many different agencies it was considered priority number one to recover that drive.

  “I knew where Wittesburg was and that he was going to be on the move that day. I followed and took my one single shot to kill him, his flunkies, and get that drive back.

  “I did it. And got fired for being good at my job.”

  Trembling and unsteady, I didn’t know what Vaughn was going to think of me now. Did he want a trained killer with him to protect him? Should I figure out how to get Nolan here to do the job? How long would it take me to pack my bags and disappear in the world? I could still make a good fake ID. One that could get me past passport control easily.

  “Hey,” Vaughn said. “Where’d you go?”

  I swallowed and turned around in his arms. “There was a bar Greg and I used to go to when we went to see Aunt Sian. It was the smokiest, dingiest, darkest remnant of the Dickensian ideal of Ireland you ever did see, but the Guinness there was the best I’d ever tasted. Maybe because those pipes had carried the same beer for two hundred fifty years. We loved it there. We’d spent hours there, talking, arguing, just being. I don’t miss much about Ireland and England anymore, except that place. I stole away there so many times in the three months it took me to clear and close everything I had there.” I stared down at his bare chest. “Sometimes, when I get tossed off balance, I like to think about that place and remember it, and it calms me down.”

  “Good, I’m glad you have that.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Thank you for telling me about him, Birdie. You do you know you’re in just as much need of therapy as I am, right?”

  “Who the hell am I going to talk to that’s going to able to handle what I did for a living?” I whispered. “Those men were not the first I’d ever killed, Vaughn. There were dozens more, all for Queen and Country.”

  “You got a get out of jail free card there, Birdie?”

  “It’s called a CHEP-ULF, Certification for Home Exclusion of Prosecution For the Use of Lethal Force.” I stared him straight in the eye. “License to kill.”

  Vaughn

  Okay, that I did not fucking expect.

  “You’re…”

  “It’s not as simple as you think it is. It’s only protection from prosecution in the Commonwealth. If I go to another country and shoot to kill, I’m subject to their laws. So if they catch me, they can prosecute.” She let out a long breath. “It’s not even as simple as that. Intelligence is Goddamn complicated. Most cases, I won’t be brought to court for, because of international alliance and unspoken rules of engagement.

  “And I don’t even know if they cancelled it. If Harding cancelled it.”

  “Bridget, will you consider talking to someone?”

  “Who can report me for killing those two men today?”

  “Who would never do that?”

  “Who is this unicorn?”

  I chuckled. “Doctor Billings.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Very. You know he’s discreet. He has to be. At least, if you’re being honest about his kinky proclivities.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. Running her hand up and down my arm. “You’re very serious about this aren’t you?”

  Placing a hand on her cheek, I nodded. “I have spent five months trying to put my life in order—with your help and with his help, and I can barely do it. How you’re still standing is beyond me.”

  Bridget blinked a few times, and looked away. “I have a crazy ability to compartmentalize. It’s been easy
to divide it up and shove it in to the right boxes for now. But you…” There were new tears in her eyes. “You did something to me and I couldn’t push it back anymore.”

  She lifted herself off the pillow and pressed a soft kiss on my lips. “Thank you. It’s been breaking my soul that I couldn’t tell anyone what really happened with Greg.”

  “I may not be a therapist, or even the best person you could talk to about it,” I answered, “but I will always listen and believe you. Even if we were still back in the office considerably more clothed and formal than we are now.”

  “A little less fugitive-y?”

  Chuckling, I brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “That would be a bonus.”

  “Mister Willard, are you making a pass at me?”

  Was I? Was this appropriate right now? But then my brain seemed to catch up with real situation: I was fugitive from some kind of vigilante justice and the beautiful blue-eyed, flamed haired woman in this bed was my bodyguard, protection, and guide through this mess.

  “Well, Agent McInnis, if it’ll get me another one of those spectacular hand jobs in the shower…”

  Her fingers turned circles on my shoulder. “Does it have to be the shower?”

  “No. And doesn’t even have to be a hand job.”

  There was just a heartbeat of silence and tension—and then we were all over each other like two horny teenagers after the prom followed by underage drinking.

  I couldn’t kiss her enough. She was trying to memorize me while I tried the same, and her hands were around me, sliding down my back, slipping under the waistband of my pajamas…

  “Hey!” I gasped as her hands grabbed the globes of my ass.

  “You have a magnificent ass.”

  I slammed my mouth on hers again and nibbled and sucked at her lips. She groaned softly and kneaded my ass with her hands.

  My hands finally found the hem of her shirt, and yanked the whole thing up and over her head. The beautiful breasts I had felt and only glimpsed the day before were there, waiting and blushed. My hands found their way there, and wrapped around them, plumping them softly, finding her nipples and teasing those with my thumb.