Code Name: Aries by Janie Crouch

30

Wavy

An Ian DeRose field trip was not to be missed.

I don’t know what I’d thought we would do. Maybe stay at a nice hotel suite for a business meeting he needed to attend. Maybe fly to Asia—one of the Zodiac offices was in Singapore.

A yacht in the French Riviera was not what I’d been expecting. Moreover, seeing Ian so relaxed was even more unexpected. It was a big boat, bigger than anything I’d ever been on. Ian told me it wasn’t his. He’d borrowed it from a friend.

“What kind of friend lends you a yacht this size?”

He grinned. “The kind who is a famous actor. We guarded him when a stalker tried to kill him.”

He told me the name and my eyes grew big. “Wow.”

“When I remembered the name of his yacht was Rainbow Bright, I took him up on his offer to borrow it anytime.”

Ian’s grin was bigger than I’d ever seen it. It had been that way the entire four days we’d been on the Rainbow Bright.

He was out on the deck, like he had been since we’d come onboard. He loved to be outside, no matter what the weather. I’d found him up here day and night, sunny weather and cloudy. Even when the waves were larger than I was comfortable with from a couple of storms we’d had.

At first, I’d thought it was because he really liked being out on the water. But as I watched him now, itching to paint him once again, I realized it was because he was outside. No walls, no ceilings, nothing boxing him in.

Like he could breathe.

I stiffened. I had no idea how I’d missed it before. “You’re claustrophobic.”

He looked up at me from his laptop on the deck table where he was doing some work. “I am.”

“Have you been that way your whole life?”

“No.” He closed his computer. “That was the thing I mentioned that Dr. Rayne helped me with. I’ve had to learn how to adjust to my phobia.”

“I remember in the cave you were . . . not nervous exactly, but tense.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “I’m uncomfortable in most enclosed spaces, and that’s probably never going to go away. The elevator up to the penthouse is something I live through each time I use it. Cars aren’t great for me either, but at least there are a lot of windows.”

“Windows,” I whispered, understanding more with each moment. “That’s why you have so many of them in the penthouse.”

He leaned back in his chair, pivoting so he was facing me. “It had the most windows I could find. And it’s why I like spending so much time out on the patio.”

“Will you tell me what happened?”

He came over to sit next to me where I’d been lounging and looking up at the stars. “I will, but I don’t want to do anything that causes you undue stress. Right now, you have to focus on you. I don’t want you to worry about me.”

“Maybe it’s time for me to start worrying about someone else besides me. Maybe that’s what I need. Maybe I’ve been so focused on myself that I can’t heal. And I know you. I know that if this is something you’re still struggling with years later, that it must’ve been pretty bad.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I need you to know that this is not the Pain Olympics. What I went through, what you went through, it’s . . .”

“It’s not something that we compare. I get it.”

He looped his arms around his knees, looking out at the glittering lights of France in the distance. “I guess I should lead with the worst. My brother, Grant, was the person who originally created Mosaic. He wasn’t into human trafficking then, but he had a laundry list of other criminal activity—weapons sales, espionage, drugs.”

“Oh.” That’s why he’d been sad about his brother. Not merely because of his death.

“My dad was into a lot of illegal activity, too, when I was growing up, so the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I joined the navy as soon as I could to get away from it all, and my family disowned me. Dad, at some point before he died, had a change of heart, went straight.”

“That’s good, right?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Although I still wasn’t interested in having anything to do with him. But I’m glad he at least tried to undo some of the damage he’d done over the course of a lifetime.”

Damage to Ian too, although I knew he wouldn’t say it. “Did you get to see him before he died?”

“No, although maybe I should have. Instead of leaving his fortune to Grant as both Grant and I expected, Dad left it to me. Grant never quite got over that.”

Ian laid down beside me so he was also looking up at the stars. “I was approached by a law enforcement agency back when I was still in the navy about taking my brother and his network down. I had the perfect alibi for joining their group. All I had to do was convince Grant that I wanted to get back into the family business. That I had seen how lucrative it could be based on what Dad had left me.”

“You helped make a bunch of arrests, right?” That much I knew.

“Yeah, but not before Grant found out I was working to take him down. He lost it. Me doing that, plus Dad leaving me the money . . . I’d underestimated how much he hated me.” He fell silent.

“We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.” Not talking was definitely something I understood.

He took in a breath, and his words came out in a rush. “When Grant discovered I was working undercover against him, he locked me in a wooden casket—an old one like something out of the Wild West—and buried me alive.”

My entire body froze. This was so much worse than I’d thought. “How did you survive?”

I reached over to take his hand, but froze midmovement, afraid that was the wrong thing to do. For the first time, I understood his hesitancy when he touched me, finally understood wanting to touch someone so badly to offer your support but knowing that your comfort might make things worse. This was about what he needed.

My hand fell back to my side. “Did someone rescue you?”

“No, I wasn’t rescued. I died.”

I swallowed, bile burning in the back of my throat.

“Once I ran out of air, Grant dug me back up and had me resuscitated. After I was conscious and functional, he put me back in the box and buried me again.”

“Oh God. How many times?” Damn it. Why had I asked that?

“Honestly, I’m not sure. My mind has kind of protected me from remembering it in too much detail. I remember certain things, my nails coming off because I scratched at the wood so hard. Trying to headbutt myself to unconsciousness one time, hoping I would die while I wasn’t awake. But they all blend together. I think probably half a dozen.”

He had died half a dozen times. I had no words. How did someone come back from that?

“What I remember most was the overall feeling of helplessness. That’s something Dr. Rayne and I worked on a lot—my claustrophobia is tied to it. All my training, all my strength . . . none of it was enough. No matter how hard I pushed on that wood, I couldn’t do anything to save myself.”

I put a hand over my mouth to hold back my sob.

“At some point, I realized there was a camera inside the coffin with me. That was how they knew when to dig me back up. The sick bastards wanted to watch.”

“Your brother did this to you?” Given my relationship with my brothers, how protective they were of me, it was impossible to wrap my head around.

“Yes. Grant and his best friend, his second in command.” Ian looked over at me. “Erick Huen.”

Full circle. “You killed your brother. That’s why Erick Huen hates you.”

“Yes. I knew that I wasn’t going to survive another time in that coffin, and when they resuscitated me, I came out fighting with whatever strength I had left. I knocked Erick unconscious and strangled Grant with my own hands. Erick came to, and he would have taken me out, but by then, my team had realized things had gone wrong and had breached the area.”

I couldn’t stop myself this time. I reached out and grabbed his hand, closing my eyes in thanks when he didn’t shun my touch.

“Erick got away by jumping over a cliff. We thought he was dead. Obviously, he wasn’t.”

“You couldn’t have known that.”

We both stared up at the stars.

“So, I’ve spent the past two and a half years learning how to keep my panic under control,” Ian finally said. “And believe me, it hasn’t been easy, and it’s taken a long time.”

“You’ve taken something horrible and created strength from it.” I knew I should be horrified at what had happened to him, but that was all that I could really see: he’d recreated himself into something better, something stronger because of what had happened to him.

He scooted a little closer to me. “Was telling you the wrong thing to do? I know it’s a pretty gruesome tale.”

“No. I’m so sorry for what happened, but . . .” I hope he would understand what I was trying to say—that it wouldn’t seem like I was making light of it in any way. “You found strength in something terrible. I want to do that, but I’m afraid I’m never going to.”

He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me so I was lying half on top of him. “You’re already in the process of it. I can tell every time you put a new color into your paintings. You don’t have to be a warrior in order to be strong. Quiet strength is the most enduring.”

It was the most perfect thing he could’ve said, because someone with his strength recognizing it in me meant everything.

I wanted to make love to him right here out on this deck. I wanted to absorb more of his strength through my pores. I eased my leg over his hips until I was lying on top of him.

“Can you make sure that this deck is cleared and no one will come out here?” I whispered.

I wanted to make love with him here, in the open, in a place where he had no restrictions or fears pressing on the back of his mind. Where we could focus on being with each other.

He grabbed the walkie-talkie that was always nearby. “Tristan, can you see that we have complete privacy on the rear starboard deck? Including cameras.”

“It would be my pleasure, boss.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Is that Tristan Zimmerman?”

Ian nodded. “I needed at least one of my inner team on board, and we wanted someone you knew on the ship. He’s been keeping a low profile.”

In case I freaked out, he meant. But honestly, it was a fair concern. “I’m glad he’s here. And I’m glad he’s giving us some privacy.”

Ian reached up and brushed the hair off of my face before cupping my cheek. “We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. And you can change your mind at any point for any reason. We can just kiss. Or lie out and watch the stars.”

“Both. All.” I knew I was back to not using full sentences. I didn’t want to talk, but not for my normal reasons. I wanted to be with him. Breathe him in. Feel his strength in every possible way.

I sat up, straddling him, and pulled my shirt over my head. I ought to be nervous, but the feel of him hard beneath me, the heat in his eyes as he watched me, chased away any fears before they could form.

This was Ian. This was me. There was no space for demons between us.

I unbuttoned his shirt, trailing my nails across his chest as I eased the material to the side.

This time was different, and we both knew it. We’d made love almost every way a couple could. In the six weeks before I’d been taken, it had been the urgent passion of a new relationship: the discovery, the teasing and the delight, and all the pleasure. It had been wonderful, and I’d loved every second of it.

But this time was different. This time, we both knew what it was like to have almost lost each other. This time was with reverence and with the knowledge that no tomorrow was ever guaranteed.

This time, when I looked at his strong fingers as they slid from my hips up my back to my shoulders, I could imagine them bloody and torn where he’d scratched to get out of that casket. And I saw their strength now.

This time, we weren’t taking anything for granted.

I eased myself off of him so I could remove the rest of my clothes, trusting him when he said that there was no one watching. It was just him and me and the open seas and the stars above us.

He unbuckled and unzipped his pants. We came back together, my lips crashing onto his, the feel of his naked skin against mine intoxicating.

“I want to be on top,” I whispered.

He slid his arms under his head, a slow grin spreading across his handsome features. “Yes, please.”

Normally, on top wasn’t my favorite. I liked to have him over me, surrounding me with his strength, or behind me, his hand fisted in my hair.

But today, I wanted to be the one in control. He knew that and was more than happy to let me.

I straddled his hips again, this time with nothing between us. Air hissed out of both of us as I lowered myself onto his length. His fingers gripped my hips, the force almost bruising, but I didn’t care. I knew what it meant. He felt the same way I did. That we’d both been afraid that this would be lost forever, but it hadn’t been.

I fell forward and braced my hands on his chest as I took him all the way inside. And then I began to move. His brown eyes watched me, burning.

“I wanted you out here,” I said. “I wanted you out in the open, the way you belong. I wanted to ride you while we couldn’t feel anything against us except each other and the night air.” My voice sounded different to my ears.

The doctor had told me that I would always be a little hoarse given the damage I’d done to my vocal cords. But now that I had found my words, I couldn’t seem to stop talking. The fact that he jerked a little bit with everything I said made me want to talk all the more.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, thrusting up into me. “You’ve always been beautiful to me from the first time I saw you, but right now in this moment . . .”

Now he was the one who’d lost his words.

“Make me yours, Rainbow.” His fingers gentled on my hips, stroking up and down as I leaned forward and ground myself against him in a pattern that had both of us breathing hard within seconds. I teased us both, loving the feeling of control. Easing backward to slow things down when either of us got too close. His laugh was as hoarse as mine. “You’re very good at this.”

I rose up on my knees so that he was almost all the way out of me, then slammed back down. He groaned, and I did it again. Like I’d been learning with my painting, I let the rhythm take me, let my body do what it wanted. Faster, then slower, than finally at a pace that left me burning with anticipation. I couldn’t tell where I ended and Ian began.

“Help me,” I whispered.

He knew exactly what I needed without having to ask. His fingers gripped my hips once again, and he set a pace for us that drove us both up and up.

“Yes.” My voice was hoarse, but not weak. “Yes, Ian.”

My fingers scratched along his chest as the orgasm ripped through me. He pulled me down hard against him and ground up, calling out my name. I collapsed against his chest, and his arms came around me, both of us breathing hard.

Many things had been taken from me during my captivity, things I might never get back.

But this wasn’t one of them.