“Robert. My God. I didn’t…” She blinked, as if trying to wake herself from a dream. “How did you…”
Neither of them seemed capable of completing a sentence. Slowly, he once again became aware of his surroundings. The ping of rain against the tin roof. The crackle of a fire in the hearth. The smell of bread and wood smoke and woman. His leg ached dully, the way it always did when he overexerted himself, but he barely noticed the pain. And for the first time since receiving the injury, he was glad for the distraction.
“C-come in,” she said.
When he only continued to stare at her, she stepped back. “You’re getting wet.”
“I’m already wet.” But Robert knew the weather no longer rated on his list of concerns.
His heart raced with his pulse as he stepped into the cottage. Warmth and a startling sense of comfort he didn’t quite trust embraced him. He looked around, seeing immediately that whomever lived here had somehow managed to turn a ramshackle hovel into a home.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Robert watched as she crossed to the fire and tossed another log into the flames. Before he even realized he was watching her, his eyes swept over her, taking in every detail. She’d lost weight, but the curves he’d once known intimately still defined her shape. Even through the thick cotton sweater she wore, he could see the outline of her full breasts. Her jeans were snug enough so that he could see the gentle roundness of her hips. And in those fleeting seconds her beauty made him remember all the things he’d tried so desperately to forget in the twenty-one months since he’d last seen her.
Robert cut the thought short with practiced precision. He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on but knew he couldn’t dwell on it. He couldn’t let himself think of her in those terms. Not when he’d worked so hard to get her out of his system.
“I could ask you the same question,” he said.
“I—I live here.” She glanced at him over her shoulder as she walked into a small kitchen area. “Were you looking for me?”
“No,” he said quickly and held his ground at the door. “I was supposed to meet someone here.”
He watched her pour Rebelian black tea into two mismatched cups. She looked cool on the outside, maybe even a little tough, but her hands were shaking, and for the first time he realized she was merely hiding her shock better than he was.
She carried both cups to the wooden chairs in front of the hearth. “Your contact?”
That she knew about his contact shocked him all over again. Lily didn’t know he was an ARIES operative. No one did, aside from his counterparts and other ARIES personnel. There was no way in hell he would ever tell her. The less she knew about him, the safer she would be.
Because he wasn’t quite sure how to respond, he didn’t answer. Instead, he followed her to the hearth, keenly aware of her scent, that her essence filled not only the room, but the entire house. “I’m doing some missionary work for the French government.”
She looked at him oddly, a student perplexed by a particularly difficult math equation. “I was supposed to meet someone here tonight, as well.”
A sinking sensation swamped his gut. And suddenly he knew this was no coincidence. “Jacques brought me here.”
Her knowing eyes met his. “Jacques is…with me. He’s part of the movement.”
With me. Of all the words that stuck in his brain, he hated it that it was those two. He stared at her, torn between turning around and walking out and forgetting this had ever happened, and shaking her until she told him how it was that she was alive and he’d spent the last twenty-one months dying a slow death because he’d thought her gone.
“There’s got to be some kind of mistake,” he said.
“There’s no mistake.” She handed him one of the cups. “I don’t have any sugar. That’s one of the many things we no longer have in Rebelia.”
Amazed that she could be thinking about sugar when his world had just been rocked off its foundation, he took the cup and sipped the strong, dark tea, trying desperately to rally his brain into a functioning mode.
“I just can’t believe it’s you,” she said, sipping her tea. “This has been planned for months. We need your help.”
“I’m here for information,” he said. “Not to help you.”
Holding her cup between her slender hands, she looked at him through the rising steam. “I’m your contact. And if you want information from me, you’re going to have to earn it.”
Chapter 2
Having spent the last two years in a country decimated by civil war, hunger and indiscriminate violence, Lily thought she had endured every kind of shock a human being could endure. She’d seen things she couldn’t fathom. Things she refused to think of once the lights were out and she was alone in her bed. A few minutes earlier, she’d thought she could handle just about anything fate saw fit to throw her way.