She heard it. Or she thought it. She didn’t know what came first, but his hand was still burning a brand through her skin straight to her bones, and all of a sudden his stupid conspiracy theory was actually beginning to make sense and that scared her all the more.
“Really?” Wyatt straightened up, taking a step back from the bed to lean against the wall. “Not when you think about it. He used my sperm and I suspect your eggs and enhanced them in vitro. They were planted in surrogates there in France where they had you in their little laboratory. He gave the babies to you to ensure a bond. He knew your maternal instincts would kick in and that, because you’re highly intelligent, you might even figure it out.”
“But I didn’t,” Pepper denied.
“Yes, you did. You know you did. You suspected they were yours, and you let yourself love them because you couldn’ help yourself. You played right into his hands, not that any normal person could have resisted three innocent babies. He waits for the right moment, and believe me, Dr. Peter Whitney is a master at creatin’ right moments.”
“I told you, he was there only a couple of times. It was Dr. Thomas Braden who was in charge of the laboratory there in France.” She didn’t want any of it to be true. If it was true… she was in far more trouble than she could ever handle alone. How could she possibly keep her daughters safe from such a madman?
“It doesn’ matter who was in charge. Whitney can’ possibly be in ten places at the same time. He has to have men who run the various laboratories for him. Others have to conduct the experiments. He has a network now, a large one, but it’s Whitney at the helm, and this is classic Whitney.”
“What is this?” Pepper demanded, feeling like her head might explode. She raised both hands and covered her ears as if that could drown him out. “Because I still don’t understand.”
She didn’t want to understand. If she understood the actual scope of the forces against her, she might give up and she had three little girls depending on her. She felt terrified and exposed. Vulnerable. Never ever show that to the enemy. That had been drilled into her.
“Sugar.” Wyatt caught both her wrists in a gentle but unbreakable grip and pulled her fists to his chest.
Sugar. That was all he said. It was the way he said it. Soft. Whispery. Into her. Sugar. Who would ever want to be called sugar? It was bad enough that her name was Pepper. But Sugar? She couldn’t believe she melted inside when he said it, but she did.
“You always forget to breathe, baby. This is just a fact. Nothin’ huge goin’ on here. Nothin’ we can’ figure out together and beat. A little over four months ago I received orders to go to Afghanistan. It was my third tour, so I didn’t think anythin’ about it. We’re usually sent into the hottest zones because we’re enhanced. We always run the night rescues. The last one resulted in taking heavy fire. No one should have known we were comin’. No one. We knew they had to have been tipped off.”
She was horrified. The thing was, she didn’t know if she was horrified at the thought of Whitney betraying soldiers that way, or by her reaction to the thought of Wyatt in such danger. Her entire body rebelled at the idea, and what did that mean? If he kept holding her hands against his chest, they were both going to be in trouble. Snakebite, IV and gunshot wound aside.
She licked her lips and forced herself to try to carry on a conversation while subtly pulling at her wrists. “This Whitney would work against the United States for the enemy? Do you really think he has the power to know your orders and to get word to the enemy that you were in the vicinity?”
Wyatt acted like he didn’t even notice she was in a small struggle with him for possession of her hands. She sighed and gave up, curling her fingers into his shirt. Into that heated rock wall. She felt the definition of his muscles behind the thin material and it did things to her body she hadn’t expected.
Wyatt smiled down at her, a cocky, masculine grin that might have meant he knew he wasn’t only curling her fingers but also her toes.
“Absolutely he does. He’s still workin’ for the government, or some covert branch of it. We can’ uncover who has his back. We chop off one head and two more seem to grow. I was wounded. Several of us were, and around that time, probably the moment Whitney heard we were safe and back in the States, he issued a termination order on the babies so you’d grab them and escape. The timin’ is just too coincidental for me to stomach. He brought you here, created a reason for you to escape and a reason for me to come home.”
She closed her eyes briefly. He was making sense. She was so screwed. How could she fight alone against a man who could set up an ambush of a rescue helicopter in Afghanistan? The thought was absolutely, utterly, terrifying.
“How could he know your grandmother would go out to harvest plants at the precise time the sirens went off?”
“Why did they go off? Were you spotted?”