He’d been nearly thirteen when he’d decided to take off and find his mother. The old man had always sworn the feds had gotten her, but he’d never believed that. He figured she’d just gotten tired of him and his father and left. One day, she’d just left him a note that she had gone to look for food and never came back, and he’d figured, because that was what he really wanted to do, that she’d just kept going.
By the time he’d turned twelve, he had outgrown his father in size and decided he’d outgrown needing somebody to tell him what to do, too. His father had been training him as a rebel pretty much as far back as he could remember. Mostly it was just talk at first, but it wasn’t long before he began showing him how to make war, how to fight, how to kill quickly and quietly, always teaching him the art of warfare.
His mother had hated that. He supposed, in the back of his mind, he’d thought that was probably the main reason she’d left, because her husband was a conspiracy fanatic and her son was a budding killer.
As it turned out, he wasn’t as ready to take off as he’d thought. The first time he decided to take his old man on, Morris had beat the hell out of him in about two seconds flat.
The second time, he’d had time to add weight and muscle to his height and he’d put Morris down.
And then he’d left.
And it turned out that Morris was right. The gov had gotten his mother, rounded her up in the middle of a food riot, hauled her off to one of their camps, and kept her there until she died.
He’d cried like a baby when he had finally tracked her down and only found a grave that didn’t even have a name marker on it--just a fucking number.
He hadn’t gone back, though. He’d hated Morris then almost as much as he hated the gov and for the same reason.
He’d spent a lot of time trying to decide the best way to pay them both back for his mother and finally ended up focusing on the gov. They were the real villains, after all. It was because of them that his father hadn’t been around to protect his mother.
He’d been seventeen the first time he’d gone back, the first time he’d set eyes on little Lena. She’d been just about as big as a minute, spindly arms and legs and not much to her besides huge blue eyes.
She’d hidden behind Nigel and stared up at him like he was the boogie man until his father had gathered his ‘baby girl’ up and cuddled her protectively.
And she’d still peered at him over his father’s shoulder, her eyes as round as saucers.
He’d been torn, because he could see why his father wanted to protect her and her brother, because neither one of them had been much more than breath and britches, and at the same time he resented the fact that his father, who’d never treated him like a child in his life, had found the nurturing side of fatherhood with two children that weren’t even his.
Maybe Morris had needed them as badly as they needed him. By that time he no longer had the family he’d been fighting the great battle for. He was still in the game, thick in the middle of it, but he didn’t participate in actual operations any more, and he didn’t do undercover, and he didn’t handle any of the leg work. He was too old, he claimed, to be any good anymore. He’d gotten slow and become a liability to his fellows in arms. He was a coordinator, nothing more.
That job kept him in the know, but it also kept him on the sidelines so that he could devote himself to raising Lena and Nigel.
Dax, his father had made it pretty damned clear, had also become a liability. He was already a wanted man, pretty high up on the gov’s hit list, and Morris didn’t want to take any chances that Dax might lead a hit squad to his door.
It had rankled. He couldn’t help but resent that his father favored Lena and Nigel above him, but he also couldn’t help but see Morris’ point. He was grown. He was used to taking care of himself. Lena and Nigel were still just kids and they needed somebody to look out for them.
She’d grown into those eyes since the last time he’d seen her, but they were as wide and innocent and vulnerable now as they’d been when she was little more than a baby.
The body that went with those baby blues was another matter all together.
Setting his empty glass down on the desk, he got up, shrugged out of his uniform and sprawled face down on the bed bedside her before his body had a chance to catch up with the direction his mind had taken.
His last thought before he dropped off was that he hoped to hell he’d managed to save Morris’ baby girl, because if it turned out the woman he’d rescued was a forgery, he didn’t think he could handle the termination.
Chapter Seven
Truly bizarre dreams haunted Lena’s sleep. Some of them were distinctly unpleasant dreams about Morris, or a man that looked like Morris but wasn’t. Some of the dreams were scary, because she kept trying to climb this thing that seemed to go on forever and she knew if she fell she would just keep right on falling.
She dreamed even scarier dreams than that, though, where she was running from something in the dark, something she knew was evil, terrible, even though she didn’t really know what it was, but she couldn’t run because suddenly something was holding her down. Sometimes the things that scared her hardly even seemed like a dream at all, because there was nothingness and then a man would leap out at her from darkness, just burst into her mind like a jack-in-the-box popping out of a box.
Pleasant dreams mingled with the unpleasant, though. She would feel a man’s weight, hear his harsh breath as he drove into her body, feel heat and need surging through her blood--and then everything would stop, leavingher feeling horribly let down and disappointed.
A woman kept appearing in the dreams, too, a complete stranger who always bullied her, dragging her up from her bed and sending her to relieve herself, or making her eat or drink and then stabbing her with something sharp and smiling at her and talking to her as if she was a child. “Good girl!”
Lena wasn’t certain what had wakened her, but she awoke with a clearness of mind that seemed almost as strange as the dreams that began to dissipate from her mind as soon as she opened her eyes. Oddly enough, even though she felt completely alert, nothing looked the least bit familiar to her as she stared up at the ceiling for several moments and finally rolled over to look around at the room she found herself in. Maybe she wasn’t as awake as she thought she was?
A faint sound caught her attention and she went still, closing her eyes.
When she opened them again, she discovered that she was looking straight at a naked man that was looking straight at her. She’d surprised him. He’d frozen in the act of drying the water off that was running in tiny rivulets down his chest and legs.
