Hot Soldier Spy Page 9

  He jumped all over that one. “If only I’d what?”

  She winced. “If only you’d promise to give me some time. I won’t take any more than I need. I swear.”

  “How long do you need?”

  “I have to stay alive until—” She broke off, horrified at what she’d almost blurted out.

  “Until what?” he asked urgently.

  “I’m sorry, Dutch. I can’t. It doesn’t involve you.”

  He ground out, “Look. I’ve been busting my butt to keep you safe. Everything about you is my business right now. If you can’t give me the answers I need, then I can’t do my job. You and I are finished.”

  Her gaze snapped to his. That meant he was free to follow through on his promise to kill her. Not yet! Carina wasn’t free!

  He had her between a rock and a hard place, and they both knew it. She sighed. “Okay. Fine. I’ll tell you more. But not here. Not now. We’re standing out in the open with my father’s men poking around very nearby. Let’s get somewhere safe and then we can talk.”

  Thankfully, he didn’t split hairs over her choice of words. She hadn’t promised to tell him everything. Just more. That left her a lot of wiggle room.

  “Please,” she pleaded.

  He stared at her for a long time. Finally, he answered heavily, “What you’re asking of me goes against my better judgment.”

  She retorted desperately, “I’m asking you to save my life. And I’m offering to hand you my father. None of that has changed.”

  Another long pause. A sigh. “All right. You can have some time.”

  Thank God. Without thinking about what she was doing, she flung herself against him with all the abject relief of a death-row inmate who’d been given a last-minute reprieve. He caught her in his arms and held her close, sheltering her with his strength the way he always did.

  “But you have to promise me something, too,” he murmured against her temple.

  “What’s that?”

  “You won’t try to run away from me again.”

  She’d be crazy to run from the one person who could keep her safe. Even if he did pose a real threat to her safety when this was all over. What a choice. Probable death now without him, certain death later with him. She mulled over the idea for a moment. Ultimately, she’d rather face Dutch’s wrath than her father’s hired killers.

  Although his condition did raise the question of why exactly it was so important to him that she not leave him. Was there more going on in his heart than met the eye? Did he still harbor feelings for her? Interesting. All the more reason to stay. She answered solemnly, “I promise. I won’t try to run away.”

  He wrapped her tightly in his arms, burying his face in her hair for an instant. So fast she wasn’t entirely sure he’d done it.

  He murmured, “We probably ought to get going.”

  She sighed and let go of him reluctantly.

  With a last, reassuring squeeze, he let her go and unlocked the passenger door, holding it for her as she climbed in. He climbed into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition, but he paused before starting the car.

  He looked over at her grimly. “Last chance to leave me, Julia. Once we go to ground, we stay together until this thing is over.”

  She gave him a grim look of her own and nodded her understanding. “Let’s do it.”

  Dutch drove south for a couple of hours, stopping at the first decent-sized hotel they came to in Durango, in southern Colorado. He checked in quickly and parked around back. His need to hide her from her pursuers was overpowering. It went far beyond professional concern. And that was a problem.

  Somewhere along the way tonight, he’d come to a realization. He didn’t feel nearly the burning need to kill Julia that he had a scant twenty-four hours ago. He still wanted to get justice for his brother, of course, but he had set aside his wrath for now. Just for now, he assured himself.

  He hustled her through the door to their room, breathing a sigh of relief when its darkness enveloped them. He felt her move beside him and caught her hand in midair as she reached for the light switch. For caution’s sake, he pushed her down into a crouch by the door, and in the scant light creeping through the curtains, signaled her to stay put. She nodded fearfully, and he reached for his gun.

  Bending over at the waist, he raced silently across the room and plastered himself beside the bathroom door. Crouching, he spun into the room, pistol first. Quick scan. No targets. Same treatment to the tiny closet. All clear.

  He stowed his pistol and flipped on the lights. In the spill of yellow, Julia looked like a scared rabbit huddled shivering by the door. He strode over to her, picked her up, coat and all, and carried her to the couch. He sat down with her in his lap.

  She felt like an ice cube and was shaking like a leaf. He held her close for a long time, gifting her with his heat until her trembling subsided. But then he made a tactical mistake. He buried his nose in her silky hair, inhaling the spicy scent of her until the fantasy spinning out in his head made it all but impossible to sit still beneath her. Business, dammit! It was an act of sheer will to drag his mind back to the situation at hand.

  “Okay, Julia. Talk.”

  “Before I give you my father’s books, we have to figure out which federal authorities you’re going to hand them over to.”

  “I’ll take them to the FBI, of course. And they’ll take it to the IRS, Treasury Department, Justice Department, and the Secret Service, depending on what the records reveal.”

  Julia frowned. “That’s what I thought, but here’s the thing. The FBI’s compromised. My father’s got a man on the inside. He could foul up the legal process. Make an intentional mistake to get the case against my father thrown out or something.”

  He lurched. “How in the hell do you know Eduardo’s got a mole in the FBI?”

  “I’m my father’s accountant, remember? I write the checks.”

  “Jeez. Who is it?” he demanded, fury simmering in his gut. He and his teammates busted their asses every day in the name of defending their country while some schmuck at a desk was selling it out behind their backs? Make that fury boiling in his gut.

  Julia answered, “I don’t know who it is. I wire the money to an offshore account in the Bahamas. I can give you the account number, I suppose. Your people could track it down and probably get a name.”

  “If you’ll get started retrieving your old man’s books, I’ll figure out where to go with them. And you can damned well be sure I won’t hand them over to any traitor. They’ll stay within the Blackjacks completely if they have to. Nobody’s screwing up this case.”

  She flinched.

  Now why did she react like that? Did the idea of the Blackjacks handling the entire case scare her? He had announced that he was going to kill her; she had good cause to be scared of the whole squad. He shouldn’t have threatened her. He’d put her on the defensive, dammit. He knew better than to let his personal feelings get in the way of the mission. Now that he needed her trust, she wasn’t about to give it to him. How was he supposed to earn it back?

  He asked as gently as he could, “Tell me a little bit about what you do for your father.”

  “If it involves his money, I do it or he does it himself. Nobody else touches it. Ever.”

  “How does he make his money?”

  “I imagine you know about most of his activities. Drugs, arms sales, smuggling, human trafficking. If it’s ugly and illegal, he does it.”

  He frowned at her. “Why wait for his financial records? If you turn state’s evidence with what you know about Eduardo, you ought to be able to get full immunity from prosecution right now.”

  “I just can’t.”

  He cursed under his breath. They were back to that black hole she wouldn’t let him see into. What in the hell was she hiding? If he didn’t have to stay glued to her side, he might be able to investigate it, figure out what she was holding back. Maybe he should call his teammates…see what they could scare up on her
. Right. Like that wouldn’t send up every red flag in the book back at HQ. He’d have some tall explaining to do about why he didn’t tell the team the moment Julia had called him to set up their meeting.

  He tensed when Julia laid her head on his shoulder, but then he set aside his turbulent thoughts to focus on the woman sitting in his lap. Shockingly, he gradually found himself relaxing. He allowed himself to savor the show of trust from her. A soft hand crept up to his opposite shoulder, her fingers toying absently with the neck of his sweater. He swore to himself.

  This woman’s slightest touch sent his hormones raging completely out of control. He was rapidly becoming dangerously, excruciatingly aroused. Faced with either embarrassing himself or moving, he chose the latter and disengaged himself from beneath her gently.

  She curled up on the couch as graceful as a newborn colt with her long legs folded beneath her. He was careful to sit on the far edge of the bed, well out of arm’s reach of the temptation she represented. But he couldn’t help imagining her sprawled on satin sheets beneath him.

  As she lost herself in thought, her features relaxed, became more vibrant. Youthful. He blinked. And stared. An absolute certainty came over him. He’d seen her sit just like that somewhere before. But where? It tickled just beyond the edges of his consciousness. The way the light was playing across her skin…the dreamy expression in her eyes…damn! Why couldn’t he remember?

  What was it he’d blocked out with the help of all that booze? For surely that night ten years ago he’d drunk himself into a stupor with the intent to forget something.

  A chill of foreboding rippled across his skin. Why was he suddenly afraid of the gaping hole in his memory?

  A dull headache began to throb at the back of his neck. It beat a painful rhythm in time with the lust still demanding release elsewhere in his body. He felt crazy enough to climb the walls and hang cackling from the ceiling like a madman.

  If she weren’t sitting there, he’d be pacing the room like a caged lion. Of course, if she weren’t sitting there, he wouldn’t have reason to pace. He wouldn’t be rock hard with no prospects in sight for some seriously gnarly sex to relieve the discomfort.

  He shoved to his feet and growled, “I’m gonna go take a shower. You know the drill. Don’t open the door for anybody.”

  When he emerged, blue with cold and only marginally less randy, Julia was curled up on the bed, reading a magazine. He picked up a day-old newspaper but didn’t see a single word of it as he surreptitiously watched her.

  When she finally retired at midnight, the thought of her in bed beside him all but broke him. He headed for the minibar in the refrigerator and tossed back a double shot of vodka. It burned a modicum of sanity into his brain. For about a minute. And then he did give in and pace. As her breath settled into the steady rhythm of deep sleep, he prowled back and forth restlessly.

  She was the one who’d set up this meeting in the first place. Why, almost as soon as she met him, did she change her mind and try to get away from him? Surely it wasn’t his threat to kill her. She had to have known before she ever picked up the phone to contact him that he would blame her for his brother’s death. So what changed after they met? It was damned hard for a guy not to take something like that personally.

  He needed to get some rest if he was going to be sharp in the morning and stay one step ahead of both Julia and her pursuers. As much as he ought to stay on the couch, he didn’t want to.

  Girding himself to do battle with his baser instincts, he pulled on a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt and joined Julia. Her slim shape barely disturbed the covers in the bed, and her breathing was soft and steady in the dark. The warmth generated by her body wrapped around him under the covers and the sleepy, sexy scent of her wafted over him.

  He tossed and turned for what seemed like hours. But eventually, he fell asleep.

  He was the forward sniper, which meant he’d been lying under a gillie net for almost two days, motionless. His nappie, as the undergarment was fondly called, was almost full. The next time he took a leak, his leg was gonna get wet. Despite drenching himself in bug repellent, the effects of the chemical were wearing off and gnats pestered him incessantly. It was an exercise in sheer torture not to reach up and swat them from his face.

  Night had fallen and the relentless heat of the jungle had begun to ease, but under his mesh blanket woven full of grass and leaves, he still sweltered. Miserable work, but he would get the first shot at Eduardo Ferrare.

  And tonight was the night, here at Ferrare’s plush, South American estate. Security conscious and crafty as hell, he’d been a hard man to find, let alone kill. Without Julia’s help in pinning down his location, they’d still have been back at square one.

  Captain Foley’s whispered voice came over Dutch’s headset. “Movement on the road.”

  He eased the sight of his sniper rifle to his eye, only a few inches, but it took many seconds to complete the motion. A limousine sprang into focus. Four men stepped out. The smug, smiling face of Eduardo Ferrare moved into the crosshairs. Bingo. Dutch began a slow, steady squeeze on the trigger, cold and precise under his index finger.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  The jungle lit up around the Blackjacks with muzzle flashes from all directions. Was this an ambush of Eduardo…or of the Blackjacks? Was this a fucking trap?

  There must be twenty positions firing at him and his teammates from a ring of positions surrounding them in the jungle! A moment of indecision—did he move and reveal his position or hang his life on his gillie net, concealing his location?

  If Ferrare’s thugs were using IR equipment—infrared scopes that painted heat—he was toast. Screw it. He rolled and fired behind him at the black-green wall of jungle over his shoulder. Dammit, the whole place was lit up! How the deadly carpet of lead had so far missed him was a mystery.

  A cry over his radio. “I’m hit. Gut shot. I’m in trouble here…”

  The nightmare spun away from Dutch, lost in the mists of his subconscious. Who in the hell was hit? He struggled to recall the dream, to pull it back into the front of his mind. He had to know! But it slipped away from him like a mysterious whale, only partially glimpsed, sliding slowly and majestically into the blackness of the abyss, where no man could follow.

  Hell, they’d all been hit that night. Not a single man on the team had escaped with less than two gunshot wounds. He’d brought out four lead slugs. He didn’t have to remember that part. He’d seen the scars he and his teammates bore from that ambush.

  A hand touched his shoulder. He jumped, ready to take out bare-handed whatever bastard of Ferrare’s had found him.

  “Julia.” He sagged back to the mattress and his hands fell away from her neck. He was soaked in sweat and breathing like a marathon runner. The aftermath of the nightmare receded slowly, reluctant to give up its thrall over him. But gradually, awareness of his present surroundings overtook the heat and darkness of that elusive jungle. The violence remained, though. And the unreasoning terror.

  Julia lay half across him, her small breasts smashed against his chest and more out of the top of her nightgown than in it. Her hand smoothed his hair, and she murmured a string of soothing nonsense sounds. Her raven hair fell in a dark curtain around them, blocking out the rest of the world, narrowing down his reality to her smoky, dark eyes and the husky murmur of her voice.

  He watched her lips move, moist and full, mesmerized by the dark magic she spun around him. He reached up. Pulled her head down to him. Took her mouth more roughly than he should have. But she just moaned deep in her throat and gave way before the raging storm he unleashed upon her. Like a willow, she bent but did not break beneath his onslaught.

  He rolled over, pinning her beneath him, expecting fear from her but unable to control the fury ripping through him. Instead, she smiled. And reached up with her slender arms, twined them around his neck and opened her thighs to cradle him against her.

  Earth magic flowed from her, warm an
d welcoming. It embraced his rage, containing it but not quenching the fire. Like a drowning man, he stared into her eyes, clinging to the thread of hope she’d thrown to him. Fist by excruciating fist, he hauled himself back from the void, up the lifeline she anchored. And when he finally saw light once more, his spirit soared. For a split second, he knew infinity as all of Nature came together in her.

  He drew a shuddering breath, and the beastly whale within retreated. Just like that nightmare colossus, it pulled back slowly into the depths of his mind. He gazed down at her in silent awe. Her mouth curved into a smile, without a doubt the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.

  “Welcome back,” she murmured.

  He rolled onto his back and flung and arm over his eyes. “Christ, I’m sorry.”

  She rolled over, propping herself up on his chest. “Whatever for? You had a nightmare and woke up a little disoriented. There’s nothing to apologize for.”

  He pulled his arm down to stare at her. “I damned well do owe you an apology for nearly strangling you, not to mention kissing you like that.”

  “But you didn’t hurt me,” she whispered with aching gentleness. “Maybe you need to lose control more often.”

  He snorted. “You have no idea what you’re suggesting.”

  She reached up to stroke his cheek, and he felt his whisker stubble abrade her delicate fingertips. “You might be surprised, James Dutcher,” she murmured.

  “Trust me, you couldn’t handle it. I’d hurt you.”

  Her eyes gleamed with warmth and inner strength. “You didn’t hurt me just now.”

  “Yes, I did. You’re lying to be polite.” He carried her palm to his mouth and kissed it. “I’m sorry.”

  A dimple winked in her cheek. “I’m telling you, you didn’t hurt me. But, if it’ll make you feel better, apology accepted.”

  “Thanks,” he mumbled gruffly. He cleared his throat. “And about kissing you—”