Cover of Night Read online

  “Okay, one change of clothes coming up.” Another round punched through the living room wall, followed by the deep crack of the rifle shot. Creed flattened her in case the next shot was lower, letting his weight crush her against the floor. She was so soft beneath him, the way he’d spent years imagining, and the thought of one of those powerful rounds tearing into her was horrifying. He’d fought wars, lost men to every kind of violence possible, whether it was a bullet, a bomb, a knife, or a training accident, and every loss had been a scar on his soul; he himself had killed, and that was a different sort of scar—but all of that he’d borne with an inner stoicism that had allowed him to function. If anything happened to Neenah, though, he simply couldn’t bear it. Because of that he said, “You stay in the kitchen—lie flat on the floor where it’s safest. I’ll get your clothes and bring them to you.”

  “You don’t know where they are; you’ll be exposed longer—” Before she finished speaking, she was trying to wriggle away from him.

  Stunned, he realized she was trying to protect him. Shock made him a little rough with her as he blocked her effort to wriggle free, keeping her firmly beneath him.

  She pushed on his shoulders, her breasts straining into his chest. “Mr. Creed…Joshua—I need to breathe!”

  He eased his weight off her, but not enough that she could slide out from under him. He could piss her off, he thought, or he could keep her alive. To his way of thinking, the choice was crystal clear. He bent his head to her ear. “Here’s the way it is: Someone is shooting at us with a high-powered rifle, which makes this my game, not yours. My job is to get us out of here alive. Your job is to do what I say the second the words are out of my mouth. After we’re safe, you can slap my face or kick my shins, but until then I’m boss. Got it?”

  “Of course I’ve got it,” she said with remarkable cool, under the circumstances, one of which was not being able to draw a deep breath. “I don’t believe I’m an idiot. But it’s only logical that I would be able to get my clothes faster than you would, thereby making it safer for both of us, because if you get shot while you’re hunting for my shoes, then my own chances for getting out of here alive go down. Am I right?”

  She was arguing with him. The experience was both novel and infuriating. Even more frustrating was the fact that she made sense—again. He hung there over her, torn between logic and his overpowering instinct to protect her at any cost.

  With a sudden fierce movement he rolled off her and snapped, “Be fast. If you have a flashlight, get it, but don’t turn it on. Don’t stand up. Belly crawl if you can, get to your knees if you have to, but under no circumstances are you to stand up. Clear?”

  “Clear,” she said. Her voice shook a little, but she was in control of herself. Creed forced himself to let her move away from him, tracking her by the sounds she made as she pulled herself along on her elbows, and dug into the carpet with her toes to push. Once he heard what sounded like a muttered curse, but he was pretty sure nuns, even ex-nuns, didn’t swear, so he was probably wrong about that.

  He broke out in a fine sheen of sweat, waiting for her, knowing that at any second another round could rip through the walls as if they were made of paper. So far the shots had been placed about head high, designed to catch people who were standing. The people of Trail Stop were civilians; they hadn’t been trained to automatically hit the ground. Instead they would try to run, and not necessarily in the best direction. They might even try to look out the windows, which was about the dumbest thing to do in this situation. Or they might grab their flashlights and turn them on, pinpointing their positions for the shooters. He needed to get out there, get them organized, stop them from doing stupid shit.

  At least Cal was there, unless he’d been taken out in the first minute—and that wasn’t likely. That damn ghost had a sixth sense about survival. The entire team had learned to pay acute attention to him, because time after time he would do something that looked senseless in that exact second but five seconds later had either saved his life or put him in a much stronger strategic position. If Cal jumped, the entire team jumped with him. And when it came to moving covertly from point A to point B, Creed had never seen anyone better. Cal would get the survivors rounded up, organized, and in the safest position possible; then he would come looking for the stranded and the wounded.

  Neenah was taking too long. “What are you doing?” he asked sharply, barely containing his urge to follow and drag her into the kitchen.

  “Changing clothes” came her equally sharp reply. His eyebrows lifted a little. The nun had a temper. For some reason, that seemed a tad kinky; he liked it. Creed knew himself well enough to realize he’d never be able to tolerate a doormat.

  “Just get the clothes and bring them into the kitchen to change. Don’t leave yourself vulnerable any longer than necessary.”

  “I can’t change in front of you!”

  “Neenah.” He took a deep breath, managed to inject patience into his tone. “It’s dark. I can’t see anything. And even if I could…so what?”

  “So what?”

  “Yeah, so what. I plan to get you naked pretty soon, anyway.”

  Okay, so he had the finesse of a gorilla. If she exploded in his face, he’d know right now that he was wasting his time.

  She didn’t explode. Instead she went very, very quiet, as if she were even holding her breath. The pause went on so long despair began to rise in his throat. Then came the unmistakable sounds of her crawling toward him.

  His heart almost seized, literally almost stopped beating.

  He’d lied about not being able to see. At first, before his vision adjusted, he hadn’t been able to see shit, but now he could dimly make out the shapes of doorways and windows, the darker bulk of furniture. If he could see, then she could see—so she knew exactly how much he was seeing. No detail, of course, but definitely the pale length of bare leg. She already had her shirt on, but she was dragging her jeans and shoes and coat with her. Maybe she had on underwear, maybe she didn’t. He fought the urge to slide his hand over her ass to find out. He fought the even stronger urge to roll her onto her back and make a place for himself between those bare legs. If ever there’d been a bad time, this was it, but for once his libido didn’t want to listen to his training.

  She crawled past him into the kitchen, and in the darkness he made out the whiteness of panties in front of him, which solved the question of underwear or no underwear. He was following before he realized it, as if drawn by a magnet. Any red-blooded man would follow a woman’s panty-clad ass crawling in front of him, he thought, and once again he fought the urge to pounce. Get her to safety first, pounce later.

  In the kitchen, she sat on the floor and pulled on socks, then her jeans and shoes. Her shirt was light-colored, but there was no help for that now because he sure as hell wasn’t sending her back to change; she’d be wearing her coat anyway.

  “Flashlight?” he asked, wondering if she’d forgotten.

  “I put it in my coat pocket.” She pulled the flashlight out and passed it to him.

  He stifled a sigh as his big hand closed around the slender tube; it wasn’t much larger than a penlight. He couldn’t use it until they were safe, of course, but lights this size were basically made for a single task directly in front of the holder, not for helping them safely make their way across rough ground. Still, any light at all was better than none.

  “All right, let’s slip out the back door and get away from here.”

  Teague’s two-way crackled to life, a faint voice coming from the radio speaker.

  “Hawk, this is Owl. Hawk, this is Owl.”

  Owl was Blake, manning the farthest firing position. Teague moved away from Goss and Toxtel, taking care to remain behind cover. Those people on the other side of the stream had rifles, and he hadn’t forgotten it for a minute. He had the volume on the two-way turned down because noise carried at night; he sure as hell didn’t want to pinpoint his position for some lucky shot. With a large outc