Medusa’s Master Read online

  She stepped past him into the dark, and as the hall door opened fully, the white sheers billowed into the room on a soft breeze.

  Kat dropped into a defensive crouch and spun right, away from the opening. What the hell? He didn’t question her reaction, though. He spun low and left, scanning the living room urgently as his eyes sluggishly adjusted to the dark. She glided on silent feet toward her bedroom door, and he headed for his. What in the world was going on? The room looked deserted. Felt deserted. Not that gut feelings were always reliable. A seasoned operator could fade into the woodwork right in front of you. He proceeded with caution, operating on the assumption that there was an intruder until a thorough search proved otherwise.

  A quick glance under the bed was clear. He flung the closet door open and pushed aside all his clothes. Nothing. That left only his bathroom. On the way past his backpack, he pulled out a pistol. Behind the door—clear. Shower—clear. Linen closet—too small to conceal a man, but cleared nonetheless. He’d just started to straighten to his full height when Kat called out sharply from her bedroom.

  “In here!”

  His heart leaped into his throat. Was she in trouble? The protective instincts of a lion roared through him, and by the time he reached her bedroom door, he was in full kill mode. Nobody was messing with his woman. He burst through the half-closed door, looking around wildly for a target to blow away.

  “Easy, Rambo. It’s just a note.”

  “A note?” His mind didn’t initially make sense of the word, so frantic was he to make sure she was safe.

  “Yes. You know. A piece of paper with words written on it that kids pass back and forth in school without getting caught.”

  “What note?”

  She pointed at her bed.

  He looked, and tucked partially beneath her pillow was an envelope. “Can I turn on the light?”

  “I doubt we’ll be able to read the note unless we do,” she replied dryly.

  Scowling, he hit the light switch. Bright light flooded the room, and he squinted in its glare.

  Kat reached for the envelope and he bit out, “Don’t touch it.”

  She looked up, surprised. “You want to treat this as an explosive device?”

  “Let’s assume the worst until we check it out.”

  She shrugged and moved to her closet. She pulled out a small nylon bag and unzipped it. “Stand back.”

  While he stepped back, using the doorframe to block him from direct line of sight of the envelope, she pulled out a handheld meter and passed it over the note.

  She announced, “No electronic or magnetic emissions.”

  He nodded tersely.

  She used a long pair of tweezers to lift the edge of the pillowcase away from the note and pointed a flashlight beneath the eiderdown pillow. “No visible wires,” she called.

  “Any fluid stains or visible powder?”

  She took out a magnifying glass and shone her flashlight on the envelope for extra illumination. After a minute’s examination, she shook her head. “Nothing. I think it’s just a note.”

  “Any writing on the envelope?”

  “Nope. It’s plain linen. Cream colored. The kind that might come with personalized stationery.”

  “Do you have gloves to pick it up with?”

  She glanced over at him. “If this is from who I think it is, he won’t have left any fingerprints on it.”

  Jeff stared at her for a blank moment and then his brain finally kicked into gear. The billowing curtains. An open window. And they hadn’t left any open this morning. Only one person he knew of would enter a fifth-floor hotel room through the freaking window. He remarked, “Let’s see what the Ghost has to say to us. This should be interesting.”

  Kat picked up the envelope gingerly and opened it. She unfolded a single piece of paper, and he moved to her side swiftly to read over her shoulder.

  I must speak with you. I appeal to the same honor you displayed last night in not killing me. It is a matter of utmost importance. My word of honor—I mean you no harm. Welchman Hall Gully. Tomorrow. Midnight. By the old entrance to Harrison’s Cave.

  It wasn’t signed.

  She tipped the heavy envelope over and a single Polaroid picture fell out into her hand. It showed a loosely unrolled canvas, its edges frayed like a painting that had been cut out of its frame. The Turner landscape.

  Kat frowned. “The Ghost wants to talk to me?”

  “So it seems. How’d he find you?”

  She shrugged. “He could’ve followed us back to the hotel last night. It wouldn’t be too hard to find out which room a certain petite Asian woman and her male companion are saying in. Heck, he probably knows the names we registered under.”

  “Perhaps he’s hoping to find a higher bidder for his prizes.”

  Kat shook her head. “I think not. He’d go straight to his contacts in the art world for that.”

  “Maybe you scared the hell out of him and he’s looking to negotiate a surrender?”

  Again, she shook her head. “He was confident as he jumped those roofs. He was sure of himself and his ability to defeat me until the last moment before we fell.”

  Stunned at what she was implying, Jeff asked, “Are you suggesting that he actually could have taken you in that fight if you two hadn’t fallen?” He found the idea of anybody matching her martial skills hard to believe.

  Kat shot him an offended look. “He didn’t stand a chance against me. I was trying very hard not to kill him, and that’s why it was taking me a while to put him down.”

  He gaped. “You mean you had a chance to take him out and you didn’t do it?”

  She drew herself up and replied defensively, “That’s correct.”

  “And why not?”

  She huffed. “He wasn’t trying to kill me.”

  “This isn’t the eighteenth century and your meeting wasn’t with pistols at dawn! Gentlemen’s rules don’t apply to hand-to-hand combat between you and some criminal you’ve been ordered to catch. You’re a soldier, for God’s sake. You’re paid to win, dammit.”

  She spoke with angry precision. “I have never done this job for the money. If I did, I’d be a private mercenary and make ten times what the U.S. government gives me.”

  “So you let our target go because it wouldn’t have been sporting to use all your skills on him.” It wasn’t a question. It was an outraged statement of fact.

  He could not believe her! He didn’t even know what articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice she’d just blasted to smithereens, but he had faith she’d broken a bunch of them. Great. And as her commanding officer, it fell to him to make the charges against her. How in hell was he going to destroy her career—and furthermore, her honor—and salvage anything at all between them?

  “Why does he want to talk to me?” Kat repeated, interrupting his furious—and increasingly panicked—train of thought.

  “How the hell do I know?” he snapped.

  “Focus, Jeff. I need your brainpower, here. We have to decide if I’m going to that gully or not.”

  “One thing I know for damn sure,” he burst out, “you’re not going to that meeting alone.”

  She sighed. “He wants to talk to me. If you come along, he may not show himself. He’d head for the hills and we’d never find out what’s so bloody urgent that he went to all this trouble to contact us.”

  “You could be walking straight into a trap.”

  “So could he. Why would he expose himself like this to such danger? I kept up with him across those rooftops last night, and he fought with me. He has to know that I stand a real chance of taking him down if he and I go head-to-head.”

  “Maybe that’s why he wants to meet you. He’s reveling in the thrill of finally coming up against a challenge.”

  “I don’t think so. He’d have taken more risks in his robberies to date if he was looking for a cheap thrill.”

  Jeff exhaled hard. She was right. At the moment, Kat was thinking a lot mo
re clearly than he was.

  He stated forcefully, “You need backup. No way am I letting you go to that meeting alone.”

  “Then we’ve decided that I am going?” she asked with infuriating calm.

  “Oh, you’re going, all right. But on my terms. Not the Ghost’s.”

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, Kat had just finished a grueling workout, punching, kicking, spinning and leaping her way through a difficult practice sequence, when a knock on the hallway door startled her. Jeff was not up yet, or at least he hadn’t emerged from his room where he’d retreated angrily—and alone—last night.

  Hard to tell what he was madder about—the fact that she hadn’t killed the Ghost or that fact that she was determined to go to this meeting without him. It sure had blown the mood between them last night. And she’d so been looking forward to making love with him. An urge to throw a petulant tantrum stunned her. She never threw tantrums, let alone pouted. And she was on the verge of doing both.

  She toweled off the worst of the sweat streaming down her face and cracked open the hallway door. She gasped in surprise and threw the portal wide open. “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed as four of her teammates piled into the suite.

  Aleesha Gautier, temporary commander of the Medusas while Major Vanessa “Viper” Blake was on maternity leave, laughed richly. In the thick Jamaican accent she affected when she was stressed or amused, she replied, “Ahh, girly. De way me hears it, our little Cobra got herself a big ol’ mon-fish on de hook.”

  Kat stared. “Where in the world did you hear that?”

  “Why, from de fish hisself. He say to me, ‘Git your happy self down here to de islands. Your sniper girlie need someone to watch her six.’”

  Kat gaped. “Jeff called you?”

  Aleesha nodded. “Dat he did.”

  “When?”

  Misty, the team’s resident gorgeous blonde, replied. “Last night. He said you’re insisting on—I believe his exact words were—being a damn fool and not letting him back you up. He said you needed us.”

  Kat didn’t know what to say. She was elated to have her teammates here to help. But she was shocked that Jeff had called them. Why not call in his own team, whom he was accustomed to working with and knew like the back of his hand? The answer was obvious, of course. Because she knew the Medusas like the back of her hand. Apparently, he’d deemed it more important for her to feel safe and in her comfort zone than for him to feel that way. The generosity of the gesture stole her breath away.

  Karen Turner, the team’s Amazon look-alike Marine, glanced around the suite. “So where is the good captain? The way we hear it, he’s quite an eyeful.”

  “Who told you that?” Kat demanded.

  Dark-haired Isabella Torres laughed gaily. “Captain Steiger was on Dex’s team until Maverick was given his own team to command. Dex says he’s quite the ladies’ man.” Dexter Thorpe was Isabella’s significant other and a Special Forces operator, himself.

  Embarrassed at this third degree about her love life, Kat asked Isabella by way of blatant distraction, “So, when is Dex going to make an honest woman out of you, anyway?”

  Isabella sighed. “His father’s trying to coerce him into taking over the family business again and Dex is frantically taking missions to stay out in the field and out of contact with his family. Which means we haven’t had much chance to discuss that recently.”

  And given that Isabella’s family wasn’t too keen on her career either, Kat supposed Bella wasn’t about to throw stones at Dex for hiding from his parents.

  The door behind her opened and Kat turned swiftly. Jeff wore a pale blue polo shirt, white Bermuda shorts and deck shoes. He looked like a bronzed god. His hair was neatly combed, still damp from his shower, and his eyes glowed bright blue, so sexy her knees went weak just to look at them.

  He flashed a cover-model smile and drawled in his irresistible Southern accent. “You must be the Medusas I’ve heard so much about. It’s a pleasure to meet y’all.”

  Misty muttered under her breath, “Way to go, Cobra!”

  The other women grinned appreciatively as Aleesha held out her hand. “I’m Aleesha Gautier. Or you can call me Mamba. I’m nominally in charge of this gaggle.”

  Jeff stared at her hand cautiously, then spared a quick glance over at Kat. “She’s not going to do the same thing you did the first time you shook my hand, is she?”

  Kat did something she rarely did. She blushed to the roots of her hair. “Not unless you call her baby, too.”

  The other women’s eyebrows shot up en masse, and unholy amusement glinted in their gazes. She’d forgotten how nothing was secret or sacred among them. Becoming a Medusa had come with inheriting five nosy, if well-meaning, sisters. If they caught wind of the depth of her infatuation with Jeff, they’d razz her until she wished she’d never met any of them.

  Kat sighed and made introductions all around, including the snake field handles of all her teammates.

  Aleesha asked briskly, “So. What’s up?”

  Kat sat back and let Jeff bring the team up to speed. He gave a good briefing. Quick. To the point, but thorough.

  Aleesha said to him when he finished, “Since you’re the expert on this case and have already been named mission commander, how ’bout you take point on this? Has Cobra briefed you on our various specialties?”

  “No, ma’am. She hasn’t said much about you ladies. But if she’s any indication, you’re a hell of a team.”

  More amused glances shot Kat’s way.

  Aleesha smiled broadly. “Call me ma’am again, boy-o, and I may ’ave to hurt you. You makin’ me feel olduh dan dirt.”

  Jeff grinned back. “Duly noted, Mamba.”

  Aleesha gave him a quick rundown of who did what on the team. They all were cross-trained in a wide variety of skills, but Karen was the pro at things mechanical, Isabella was the team’s intelligence analyst, Misty was a pilot and a whiz with computers and Aleesha was the team’s medic. In fact, she’d been a trauma surgeon prior to becoming a Medusa.

  Jeff looked faintly shell-shocked when Aleesha finished the recitation of the team’s skill set. But he said calmly enough, “Have you ladies had breakfast?”

  Karen laughed. “We’re commandos. We’re always hungry.”

  Kat made a room-service order for six while Jeff pulled out a detailed map of Barbados and showed the Medusas where tonight’s meeting was supposed to take place.

  The four other Medusas spent the afternoon casing Welchman Hall Gully, a gorgeous park/walking trail tucked into one of the many gullies slashing across the island’s landscape. Kat retreated to her room to meditate until they returned, and Jeff left after mumbling something about getting some special gear for tonight.

  It was just as well they stayed apart. Her teammates were far too perceptive to miss the sparks—either of sexual tension or anger—that inevitably flew between them when they spent more than two minutes together. And Kat really could do without the Medusas’ teasing.

  Late in the afternoon, they all reconvened to finalize a plan of action. The caves beneath the gully were going to be a problem. They were extensive, and there was no way the Medusas could reconnoiter, let alone cover, all of them tonight. If the Ghost wanted to emerge from or escape into the caves, they’d be hard put to intercept him. The team settled on forming a loose net around Kat and planning to let the Ghost slip into it unmolested.

  “And are you going to let him leave in peace as well?” Kat asked Jeff as they sat around the dining table, with maps and sodas scattered across it.

  He looked her square in the eye for the first time all day. “No, I am not.”

  “But—”

  He cut her off. “Don’t argue with me on this, Kat.”

  “I am going to argue with you on this. There’s no way the Ghost would have set up this meeting unless he has something of the utmost importance to tell me. We owe him the courtesy of hearing him out and giving him free passage a
way from the meeting.”

  “We owe him nothing. He’s a criminal.”

  “He could’ve tried to kill me last night. But he didn’t.”

  “You could’ve killed him, too, but you didn’t. I’d say you two are even on that score.”

  Kat flinched as her teammates stared at her.

  Aleesha asked quietly, “Cobra? Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she grated. “I’m fine. Jeff seems to think that honor counts for nothing, however. And he’s prepared to trample mine.”

  Aleesha looked over at Jeff soberly. “Mon, de girl, she take dat honor wicked serious.”

  He exhaled heavily. “Yeah. I know.” He paused. “Our orders are to stop the Ghost. Using whatever means necessary. Nothing in our orders precludes use of force. As mission commander, I have to assume that implicit in our mission orders is not only permission to use force but a directive to do so if it will accomplish the mission.”

  Kat winced. Jeff had resorted to legalese for one reason and one reason only. He was warning her that he’d given her a lawful order—to use force if necessary to apprehend the Ghost. And furthermore, if she failed to do so, he’d hold her liable for having disobeyed a direct order.

  Sure enough, on cue he said grimly, “Do you understand me, Captain Kim?”

  “Yes, and I acknowledge that you have given me a lawful order. Do you want that in writing?”

  She looked up from her tightly clenched hands at him across the table. His stare gave away nothing. No pity, no compassion, no caring. Just the hard, cold gaze of a military commander putting a subordinate sharply and unquestionably in her place.

  So. That was how it was going to be.

  Anguish wrenched her heart messily in two as she sat there, frozen, her face totally devoid of expression. Damn Hidoshi for teaching her this terrible control, anyway. She wanted to scream and cry and rage, to argue with Jeff about the stupidity of his decision, to demand to know how he could cut her off like this. Worse, she desperately wanted to beg him to look at her the way he had last night in the moonlight. To love her a little. But here she sat, as cold and lifeless as some plastic mannequin who didn’t feel a damn thing.