Heath came up beside her and put a hand on her lower back, warm and strong and firm. It shouldn’t have done things to her the way it did. Especially not with all of his teammates in the room and all that still hung around them, but it did. Lord, she wanted to turn and sink into him, to let their bodies come together so the heat she was feeling deep in her belly could spread to all of her.
“All set?” He asked, the simple question seeming to carry so much weight.
It was just a question, she reminded herself. It wasn’t him asking if she needed anything, if she was all right given all that had happened. If he could help her.
It wasn’t all of that. And yet, it seemed like it was.
They hung back as the others checked the hall outside the door to the room. When Merlin ducked his head in and gave the all clear, they moved together to the SUV. And when Heath settled in next to her in the back seat, she felt safe. Despite all that had happened and all of what was to come, she felt safe.
Chapter 8
Heath shook Eleanor awake. He hated to do it but he had to. They were coming up on their chosen border crossing and he wanted her awake and alert for this. They’d been driving straight through, stopping only for the bare essentials for the last eight hours. They would be meeting up with her team the following day before making the final approach to Demir’s compound.
She came awake slowly, blinking up at him before flushing and lifting her head off his shoulder. He cursed the loss. He’d liked having her leaning on him like that.
Come to think of it, he liked the way she looked waking up next to him, mussed and dazed.
Fuck. He shifted in his seat. He needed to stop that train of thought before he embarrassed himself in front of his team.
Eleanor wasn’t making it easy. She had pulled her hair out of the ponytail she’d had it in and was running her hands through it. Her smell drifted to him, soft and slightly sweet, tempting and teasing. He wanted to reach out and pull her to him. To bury his head in her hair and breathe her in. To lose himself in her body.
She looked out at the darkened night sky. “Where are we?”
“We’re a half mile from the border to Kazarus. We’re crossing over on the property of a guy we’ve worked with before. When we come up on his property, he’ll signal us if it’s okay to come onto his land. If it’s clear, we’ll be using a tunnel that goes from his property to his cousin’s on the other side of the border. If there are patrols nearby, he’ll signal us to wait.”
“Patrols?” She asked.
Zip answered from the other side of her. “Shouldn’t be an issue. We’re just being cautious. It wouldn’t really be a good thing to be caught bringing a representative of the state department into the country without clearing it with the royals.”
Merlin slowed the SUV and Eleanor watched the road ahead of them.
“What will the signal look like?” She whispered the words and Heath couldn’t help but laugh.
He stage-whispered back at her, “I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you,” and she rewarded him with a playful elbow to the gut.
He loved when she joked with him like she used to. When she let go with him and let down those walls she always kept around herself.
A light came on up ahead and Merlin picked up speed again. They were good to go.
Still, somehow Heath felt more anxious than he had before on a mission. He didn’t have to be a genius to figure out why. It was the woman sitting between him and Zip. Having Eleanor here was messing with his head big time and he didn’t like it. It didn’t help that his injury meant he had to let his team step up and take on most of the protection detail for at least the next couple of days.
They needed to get her through this mission and home safe. The idea of it lanced through him, even as he knew it was what he wanted. He wanted her safe but that meant having her far away from here. Far away from him.
They pulled onto the farm of their host, Aksan, and toward the barn that housed the mama sheep and their babies when Aksan wanted to separate them from the rest of the flock. It also housed the tunnel.
Aksan waved them into the space and they all piled out of the SUV while Merlin paid for Aksan’s trouble in American dollars. A lot of them.
The sheep and lambs began to bleat at them and Zip tipped a head toward the side of the aisle that held most of them. “Take care of that will you, Woof?”
Heath laughed, but crossed to the sheep, letting the lambs nuzzle at his good arm as they waited. They did get quieter and he saw Eleanor grinning at him and shaking her head.
Then Aksan signaled his men to lift an enormous trap door in the center aisle of the barn. The ground beneath the floor had been hollowed out into a steep ramp and Merlin steered their SUV down the slope to the bottom of the space.
The precarious slant of the car would make most people nervous but Eleanor didn’t seem to bat an eye at it. Nor did she question it when she was handed a pair of night vision goggles and they all had to clamber past the car and head into a tunnel that was small enough they had to crouch and walk single file to fit.
Heath hoped like hell she continued on without issue for the mile-long trek underground. It was different than being in a tunnel in your car. One built by engineers and shored up with concrete and metal. This was nothing more than rock and dirt and without his training, it would be easy to let panic kick in at the idea that the whole thing could collapse and bury them alive.
“How we doing up there, Eleanor?” Heath asked, pitching his voice low. They didn’t have to be completely silent since they were only crossing under the open grazing land of Aksan’s farm at the moment, but he wasn’t exactly going to shout to her.
“Oh, just dandy.” There was a small squeak to her voice that said she was fighting the very fear he’d just wondered about. “And you?” she asked.
He chuckled. “Hanging in. We’ve made this trip before. One foot in front of the other. Piece of cake.”
“Piece of cake, huh?”
Jangles chimed in from in front of Eleanor. “Now would be a bad time to let us know you’re claustrophobic.”
“You never asked,” Eleanor said and Heath didn’t miss the tremble in her voice. “And besides, I didn’t think I was until now.”
Heath slung the strap of his weapon around to hang on his back and reached out to rest a hand on Eleanor’s side, squeezing as they continued through the tunnel. At the pace they were moving at, they had a good twenty to thirty minutes to go. They needed to keep her calm through this.
“Remember that cave in the Philippines?” Zip chimed in.
Jangles groaned. “No, I don’t. In fact I do my damned best not to remember those caves. Ever.”
“What happened?” Eleanor asked.
“We had a little down time in the Philippines so Zip schedules this caving expedition,” Heath said, ignoring how damned good it felt to have his hand on Eleanor as they moved in the dark. “Only he decides to go with this discount tour operator because, as he put it, we know what we’re doing so what does it matter if our tour guide does?”
“Oh no,” Eleanor said.
“Oh yes.” Heath laughed at the memory. “The guy got stuck head down in a crevice. He was wedged so deep it took us three hours to get him out of there.”