Shadow, p.16
Shadow, page 16
part #6 of Linear Tactical Series
He didn’t touch her. “I’m not sure that will work.”
She brought her hand back down slowly. He still hadn’t touched her. “Okay.” She blinked away tears from her eyes. “You know what? I should definitely go.”
God, was this really over?
Keep it together, Lyn. Five minutes.
She turned back to the table and rapidly piled manuscripts back into the box, not using nearly as much care as she should. She still needed to wind up all the cords to her computer.
She wasn’t going to make it out of his house without blubbering like an idiot.
Skít indeed.
“You know what, I’ll come back for this later.” She turned toward the door without looking at him. “I don’t need it today. I—”
Now he touched her.
Both his big hands fell on her shoulders, stopping her progress toward the door. “Lyn. Almost. Wait.”
“What do you want from me?” She spun around. “I know you have secrets you don’t think I can handle. But I can’t stay here and pretend like everything is okay.”
“It’s not that I don’t think you can handle my secrets. I don’t want you to have to handle them.”
What did that mean? She swiped at a tear that had leaked from her eye. “Because what’s between us is temporary? Because why would you share your secrets with someone you don’t plan to be around long?”
His hands dropped to circle her upper arms. Almost how she liked it in bed. Not forceful enough to hurt in any way, but with enough pressure to let her know he wasn’t letting her go anywhere.
The thought was strangely comforting.
“Are you kidding me? Temporary? I have done temporary my whole adult life, so I am very familiar with what temporary feels like. And what is between us is not it.”
She stood there trapped in his arms and turned her face up to his. “Then tell me what it is you’re not telling me!”
For a moment, as he let go of her arms and took a step back, she thought he was going to refuse.
But she grabbed his hands and put them back on her biceps, wrapping her fingers around his and squeezing until she could feel him applying pressure. She dropped her hands but his stayed, strong fingers wrapped around her tightly as his thumbs traced a tender line up and down.
Yes, now they could talk.
He gave her a pained smile but didn’t drop his grip on her arms. “Before I worked for Linear Tactical, I worked for a covert government agency called Project Crypt.”
“The same one Dorian worked for?”
“Yes. I’m surprised you know about that.”
She shrugged. “I overheard Dorian and Gavin talking once. They weren’t speaking overtly about it, but I was able to put the details together.”
He shook his head. “Too smart for your own good. Yes, Dorian worked for Crypt. His wife, Ray, did too.” He pulled Lyn closer and kissed her on the forehead. “Crypt was closed down five years ago, but we’ve since found out that they were corrupt—the missions they sent us on weren’t government sanctioned. We were working for enemies of the United States.”
She reached up and covered his hands with her own. “That must have been devastating.”
“We found out Crypt did a lot of horrible stuff—brainwashing agents, sleeper missions.”
“To you too?”
“No. There’s no evidence that I was ever used for any sleeper mission, unlike other agents. Crypt is gone now. Someone killed almost all of the agents over the past few years, then Dorian and Ray made sure the files and research Crypt kept about the brainwashing were destroyed.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“No, it’s worse. I wasn’t used for sleeper missions, but I was brainwashed in some way. They put something in my head.” He lowered his forehead to hers, struggling to find the words.
She was pretty sure he didn’t have to. She already knew.
“Sounds. Nonsensical words,” she whispered.
He stepped back but still kept hold of her arms. “Yes. How did you know?”
“You say them sometimes in your sleep or when you’re doing some sort of menial physical task. And, well, I do almost have a PhD in linguistics. It caught my attention.” Now his hands dropped to his sides. It was her turn to grab his arms. “You don’t have any idea what the sounds mean?”
“None whatsoever. It’s gibberish to me. I should’ve known you would notice.” He shook his head and turned back toward the kitchen. “The problem is, the last of the Project Crypt leaders are gone. Dead. There’s nobody left to give me any answers. So I might be stuck with this inside my head forever. I didn’t want you to have to deal with that.”
Now it was her turn to stop him and spin him around. It wasn’t nearly as easy, but he didn’t fight her. “How about if you not be one of the men in my life who thinks they know what’s best for me?”
He let out a sigh. “It’s not that I think I know what’s best for you, Almost. Your brain is a crazy smart place. You have so much on you right now, I hate to add my issues too.”
She stepped closer and gripped his forearms. “If this is going to turn into a real relationship, we’re going to have to have to rely on each other more—trusting each other with our weaknesses.”
“I’m not good at letting myself be vulnerable around people.”
“I’m not people. And I’m stronger than you think.”
His forehead dipped to hers. “I know you’re strong. Just . . . I’ve accepted that the gibberish in my head is never going away, but now I have to accept that I may never understand what it means. It’s always going to be a part of me that doesn’t work right. I hate to throw that on you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “My heart doesn’t work right. Does that make me less appealing to you?”
His arms slipped around her. “No. Never.”
“Precisely the same. And I’ll admit I haven’t been exactly forthcoming with info about my heart condition. There are things you should know. Things you might be able to help with. The same is true with what’s in your head. We’ll research and learn and figure it out together.”
He walked her backward until her legs bumped against the far end of the dining room table, tilting his head at her computer and documents at the other end. “And you damn well won’t be taking this stuff over to Gavin’s. You’re staying here.”
She smiled as he began unbuttoning her blouse. “Okay. But if—”
“No but ifs.” He pushed her blouse off her shoulders, then reached behind her to unhook her bra and drop it on the table. She loved how his eyes narrowed, completely focused, as he stared at her breasts.
He’d seen her breasts nearly every night for almost a month, and he still stared at them almost like he was in awe.
“So gorgeous.” The husky depth of his voice made her feel gorgeous.
She watched as he reached down and lifted one peak—her nipples already hardened even though he hadn’t touched them yet—and pulled it into his mouth.
“Heath.” Her fingers came around his head, threading into his hair and holding him against her, as his mouth laved her flesh; she squirmed against the table.
He continued the onslaught with his mouth as he dropped to his knees in front of her, peeling her shorts off her hips and down her legs. He slid his hands all the way up her legs, leaving her splayed out in front of him on the table wearing only her plain pink cotton panties.
She gave a nervous laugh as he ran his finger along the edge of the bikini-cut underwear. “I wasn’t really thinking about attractive undergarments when I came here. I thought I’d be working.”
He kissed his way down her belly until he got to the front of the garment.
“Sexy.” It was less of a word, more of a growl.
He kissed across her belly again.
She gave a half sigh, half moan at the feel of his lips and the gentle nip of his teeth. “I’m chubby.”
“You’re soft where I am hard, and it’s fucking gorgeous.”
Her fingers threaded into his hair again as his lips moved down and kissed her through the fabric. He pressed the flat of his tongue hard against her in a way that made her hips bolt off the table.
“God. Heath.”
All concerns about everyday panties and everything else disappeared at the sight of his hands—those wrists—on her thighs, gripping them hard, holding them wide apart to drive her crazy with his tongue through the fabric.
“You know.” His lips never left her core. “The right barriers used the right ways, can bring about excruciating pleasure.”
She had to let go of his head and put her hands back on the table. It was that or collapse as he tortured her—driving her higher and higher through the thin fabric.
When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she reached down and grabbed his hair, ignoring his chuckling and pulling him up until they were face-to-face.
“Get inside me now.”
“Yes ma’am.” He made quick work of his clothes. “Let me grab a condom.”
“No, I’m on the pill. I want nothing between us.”
He growled as they both reached for the plain pink panties, now quite damp, and snatched them down her legs. She hopped up onto the table, and he gripped her thighs once again, this time watching as he slid inside her.
Yes. This. The way he stretched her.
He might be right . . . barriers had their place. But no barriers were even better.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lyn woke, sitting straight up in Heath’s bed, the new idea for her dissertation’s direction all but coursing through her veins.
She’d been thinking of Sahidic and Bohairic, the ancient Egyptian dialects her paper centered around, as an art—approaching it with a high respect for the beauty and creative nature of the dead language.
And she’d gotten a little stuck. Attempting to verbally recreate a language that hadn’t been spoken for centuries wasn’t easy, and it had just occurred to her subconscious sleeping mind that she was coming at it all wrong.
Everything known about the ancient western Nile Delta people suggested that they had been highly practical. Pragmatic. Maybe their language was more scientific in nature than artistic.
She eased herself out from under Heath’s arm at her hip, whispered for him to go back to sleep, and padded out to the computer at the dining room table.
Although exactly how she was supposed to work with the memory of what they had done right on this table was beyond her. She was never going to think of everyday panties the same way again.
She dove into her research, pulling up the files and soon lost herself in a language she’d never actually get to hear anyone else speak.
She had no idea how long she’d been engrossed in her research when she heard Heath mumbling from the bedroom, even with the door pulled nearly closed. The gibberish in his head he’d been so loath to tell her about. She walked over to the door and stuck her ear closer so she could hear the sounds more clearly.
She couldn’t blame him for not wanting to talk about it. She wasn’t sure how he managed to keep his sanity. Constant noise that didn’t make any sense? It drove her half-crazy just thinking about it.
They’d talked about the situation for most of the evening. How he’d researched the sounds in his head and eliminated every known language. She could only agree. None of what she’d ever heard him mumbling—like he was doing now—sounded like anything she’d ever heard.
It seemed like made-up sounds—the ones little kids would yell while sticking their fingers in their ears if they didn’t want to hear what someone else was saying.
But why would anyone deliberately put nonsense in Heath’s head? What purpose would that serve?
He’d told her what he could about the years he’d worked for Project Crypt. Some of it he would never be allowed to discuss, something she understood after growing up in her family. Heath assured her that part of his life was in his past.
But how could it ever really be if a constant reminder of it played in his head on repeat?
Lyn had never envisioned herself falling so hard and so fast for someone—especially someone from the same alpha-male world she’d been trying to get away from. But watching him sleep now, hearing those mutterings come out of his mouth, she couldn’t deny she was falling head over—
He’d said that before, in that exact order.
All her other thoughts came screeching to a halt, and she focused in on what Heath was saying. Had she heard him right? None of his mumblings ever seemed to repeat. And yet that three-second grouping had. She remembered because when she’d heard it before, it had reminded her of some version of modern Egyptian Arabic on steroids.
Not exactly that . . . the sounds he was muttering definitely weren’t any form of Arabic. Listening to him a few more seconds proved that.
But something about that particular phrase wasn’t nonsense. She would swear it.
They were missing something.
She pulled out her recorder, the decades-old one that still recorded onto mini cassettes rather than directly onto digital format. Everyone made fun of her for using it, but it had been her mom’s, and Lyn loved it. Loved the subtle vibration of the tape moving.
Feeling a little bit like a stalker, she stood over Heath as he slept, recording nearly fifteen minutes of his nonsensical words.
Not once did she hear the phrase that had caught her attention again. Maybe she was mistaken, trying to find something that wasn’t actually there because she wanted to help him so much.
Finally, she clicked off the recorder and went back into the kitchen. She made herself a cup of coffee, rewinding the tape and letting it play—this time at half speed.
Definitely flowed more like the specific patterns of a language when it was slowed down. But still nothing.
She set her coffee down and reached for her glasses, accidentally knocking the recorder into the sink.
“Damn it.” Then she heard the noise she dreaded. The one that made her wish she’d used a digital recorder rather than an analog tape.
The recorder was eating the tape.
“No. No. No.” She grabbed the recorder and yanked it out of the sink, quickly pressing buttons to try to stop it from continuing its damage. She cursed again as it made a crazy noise, then started playing the recording backward.
“Oh, come on.” She hit the stop button but that only slowed it down.
She was about to rip the batteries out but stopped, snatching her hand back from the recorder and staring down at it as it continued to play backward and at less than half speed.
“Merde. Palavra. Diarree.”
That was definitely a language.
She listened as a recording played on, years of studying the patterns of word usage coming to her aid. This wasn’t a language she was familiar with, but the most important thing was that it was definitely not gibberish.
She ran to her computer bag and pulled out her digital recorder. This one would allow her to play recordings backward on purpose rather than by happy accident. She snuck back into the bedroom and recorded nearly an hour of Heath’s mutterings before taking it and uploading it all into her computer. She played it backwards and was disappointed when none of her usual databases recognized it as a language . That would’ve made translation easiest. This language almost had mixtures of Latin in it, like Heath had learned his own dead language.
She sat staring at her screen. Wouldn’t that be absolutely brilliant—placing a configuration of a dead language in someone’s head? If you had someone like Heath, whose brain was already wired for languages, and you needed to hide information in his mind that he wouldn’t be able to understand but that could be decoded when needed . . .
He’d be the perfect storage unit, and a dead language would be the perfect method.
The problem with dead languages was that they were dead. Nobody spoke them anymore. For most dead languages, all researchers and academics could do was make an educated guess as to what they would have sounded like. Generally, it was based on an agreed-upon index. An algorithm, so to speak.
It looked like she needed to study the science of this language also, as well as her Sahidic and Bohairic.
But that wasn’t a problem. She knew how to research dead languages. She was almost giddy with the thought that she’d be able to help Heath.
When she found Pictish, a Scottish language that hadn’t been spoken aloud since the late Iron Age but that fit the vowel and syllable patterns of Heath’s backward gibberish, she knew she was definitely onto something. Now all she needed was some sort of software that could run the patterns, find the correct algorithm, and basically teach her the language so she could translate it.
But that sort of computer expertise was beyond what she could do.
But not beyond what Kendrick could do. She shot off an email to him explaining what she’d discovered and what she thought it meant. She sent him the data she’d downloaded, the basics of Pictish, and what she needed.
She ended the email by asking him not to tell Heath about this until they knew for sure. She didn’t want to get his hopes up.
But, God, her hopes were up. This was so logical. So brilliant. So devious. It fit with everything she knew about Project Crypt.
“If you fall asleep at the computer, I’m going to be forced to use that table again like we did yesterday.”
She spun around and grinned at Heath, looking so sleepy and rumpled and completely sexy. “Don’t you threaten me with a good time, mister.”
She couldn’t stop smiling. She flew out of her chair and launched herself at him, kissing all over his face.
“Wow.” He wrapped an arm around her hips and pulled her closer against him. “I should come interrupt your early morning work more often if it will get me this response.”
She just kept kissing him. Hopefully, in the next few days, she’d have some really good news. It may not stop the murmurings in his head, but at least he would know what they meant.
