by Lara Adrian
Table of Contents
Title Page
HIDE
Book Description
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
SEEK
Book Description
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
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Lara Adrian’s Books
Tina Folsom’s Books
About the Authors
HIDE AND SEEK
PHOENIX CODE SERIES
Books 3 & 4
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHORS
LARA ADRIAN
TINA FOLSOM
HIDE
LARA ADRIAN
Copyright 2015 Lara Adrian LLC
Book Description
John “Ranger” Duarte was one of the Phoenix program’s deadliest operatives, a man with a dark past and a ruthless sense of justice. Since the fall of the program, Ranger’s gone deep off-grid in the mountains, preparing for war against his enemies. No one has found him in three years, until a woman in desperate need of help arrives on his doorstep—a woman he once vowed to keep safe. Ranger’s honor demands he uphold his promise, but with premonitions of a looming apocalypse haunting his dreams and killers edging closer by the hour, protecting Lisa Becker is a distraction he can ill afford. And when the passion that sparks between them becomes a flame neither of them can put out, Ranger will be forced to decide between the mission his own life depends on, and the woman he cannot live without.
1
Heavy summer rain pounded the roof of the cabin like a barrage of gunfire. John Duarte cursed as another thin stream of water began to drip from between the log rafters of his small, hundred-year-old mountain home.
The deluge had been going on all day. Driving, relentless. It showed no sign of slowing down, even as the clock on the stove in the single-room living space rolled past midnight.
Taking a swig of his freshly opened Coors, he glared up at the steady stream of rainwater that was splashing onto his living room rug. Fuck. He’d patched two ceiling leaks already tonight and was just about to take off his boots and settle in for a late meal and a cold beer.
No such damned luck. At this rate, the odds of him eating or getting any shut-eye tonight were slim to none.
Not that he made a point of doing either on a regular basis. Blame it on too many years deployed to one hellhole or another as a combat Marine, followed by too many years working covert missions for a different, less public and highly specialized program after his official tours of duty in the sandbox had ended.
Add to that, the past three years he’d been living up on this remote North Carolina mountain, hiding away from the very people—the very duty—he’d once pledged his life to as a Phoenix program operative.
Three years that he’d been waiting for the program’s enemies to catch up to him. Three years preparing for a battle he would unleash on whoever was responsible for the death of Phoenix’s founder and the subsequent threat against everyone else associated with the covert agency.
Duarte took another long drink of his beer as the sum of all those years washed over him. Now, he lived totally off the grid by choice. Alone by necessity. Just him and God and the elements—two of which seemed determined to drown him off the mountain tonight.
Scrubbing a hand over his dark beard, Duarte set the bottle down on the scuffed countertop. His meal would have to wait. He put a lid on the pot of bubbling venison stew he’d warmed up, then turned to take a closer look at the leak he needed to patch.
He didn’t get halfway across the old wood plank floor before a high-pitched beep sounded from the console of monitors on the other side of the room. Hard to hear it over the steady drum of the rain, but Duarte would know that sensor alarm anywhere.
Since he’d gone underground, he’d conditioned himself to register the faint warning even in his sleep.
And he knew what the alarm meant.
Someone was on the mountain with him.
He glanced at the blinking red light to see which sensor had been tripped. The one down by the road—if the narrow, twisting dirt path that led off the mountain pass and up to his cabin could be mistaken for a road.
Which it wouldn’t be, not by anyone who didn’t have any business coming up here.
And not by anyone fool enough to brave traveling this far and this high in the middle of the night. In the pouring rain.
Couldn’t be wildlife either. A few months after he’d installed the sensors around the perimeter of his property, Duarte had made adjustments so the deer, black bears, and other woodland animals didn’t trip the alarms. He’d painstakingly fine-tuned them to react only to the body temperature and two-legged gait of human intruders.
Like the one currently heading right for him in the dark outside.
Another alarm beeped, this one a motion detector situated in the woods off the main path, some hundred yards out from the cabin. Either there was more than one person coming for him, or whoever approached had now veered into the thicket to make a more circuitous route forward.
“Shit.”
He’d been anticipating the moment his hiding place would finally be discovered, but did it have to be on the darkest, soggiest damn night of the year?
Duarte strode over to his workstation and woke up his laptop. The remote feeds from his half-dozen surveillance cameras mounted in the woods filled the screen. He clicked to infrared mode and glanced between the array of night-vision green images of the woods and rocky terrain that lay beyond the cabin.
His bogey wasn’t hard to find.
Only one, but the son of a bitch was closing in fast.
The hooded, huddled shape moved hastily in the southwest quadrant of his surveillance field. Maybe he had the bad weather to thank for the way his intruder humped so carelessly through the thicket. Either that or Phoenix’s enemies had sent up one of the least professional assassins in their stable to try to take him out.
Duarte knew better than to discount the incoming threat based on initial appearances. Overseas, he’d seen more than one battalion nearly blown to smithereens by decrepit old men dropping IEDs in the middle of a village, or smiling goatherds shuffling along the road wearing forty pounds of explosives wired to them under their tunics.
Hell, in his thirty-two years of living, he’d seen enough bar brawls and domestic disputes to understand that anyone with an inclination or motivation toward violence was to be taken seriously. And dealt with appropriately.
Permanently, when the situation called for it.
As for the creeper who’d infiltrated Duarte’s domain tonight, the bastard was about to get an unfriendly welcome courtesy of Mr. Smith & Mr. Wesson.
Duarte opened the desk drawer and pulled out one of several firearms he kept at the ready around the cabin. Tucking the pistol into the back of his jeans, he got up and killed the flame under his pot of stew.
<
br /> Taking one more long swig of weak beer for the road, he quietly exited the cabin’s back door and headed out into the rain to greet his unwanted visitor.
2
How much farther could it be?
Lisa Becker reached into her jacket’s hood to smear a wet hank of hair away from her eyes as she peered through the gloom to the path ahead of her. At least, she thought she was still on the path. Hard to tell. It was possible she’d strayed off it a few feet back.
Shit. Or several yards back.
The last thing she needed was to get herself totally lost in a thousand acres of dark woods on the side of a steep mountainside. What the hell had she been thinking, coming up here at this hour, in a torrential downpour besides?
Find him.
That’s what she’d been thinking. For the past six hours, she’d been running on confusion and fear and desperation. She needed answers. She needed safety. Someone she could trust.
She needed help like never before in her life.
And she prayed she’d find it here.
Picking up her pace again, she pushed through the tangle of wet ground cover and spindly saplings. Her foot squished into the soggy pine needles and spongy earth, mud sucking at the soles of her shoes.
Rain poured off the forest canopy overhead, soaking her from head to toe. Brush smacked her in the face as she hustled along. With each hurried step she took, the small backpack she wore under her jacket bounced between her shoulder blades. Aside from her purse, the pack held only a change of clothes and basic toiletries, but in the rain, fatigue clawing at her, the damn thing felt like it had gained ten pounds since she’d left her car about an hour ago.
Lisa wrapped her arms around herself and tried to gauge her progress. She had only been up here once before, and even though her visit had been memorable, it had been years ago. It had also been daylight, which she sure as hell would prefer right now.
Maybe she should turn around and make sure she hadn’t veered off-course. Better yet, maybe she should go back to her Camry, which was stuck in a trench of sticky mud down on the pass, and wait until morning to make the rest of this trek.
Panic edged in, but she pushed it away.
Keep moving forward. The cabin is up here somewhere.
He’s up here somewhere.
Please let him be here.
The uneven, rocky terrain was difficult enough to navigate in the moonless dark, but the relentless deluge made every step an obstacle course of thick, slippery mud and slick, matted leaves.
God, it was tempting to turn back and wait out the night and the storm.
Except time was one thing she didn’t dare assume she had. Not based on the cryptic communication she’d had with her brother a few hours ago.
HIDE.
That text from Kyle—that startling, single-word message—had sent her rushing out of her house in Cincinnati minutes later. She’d driven across three states in the rain and darkness to look for shelter in the only safe place she could think of.
All she had to do now was find the remote cabin she’d been to just once before in her life. She had to find him.
Find John Duarte.
It was the mantra that had begun playing in her head from the instant she received Kyle’s text. John was one of his best friends, a fellow former Marine who, along with another named Alec Colton, had been like brothers to Kyle from the day they’d all arrived at Camp Lejeune some twelve years ago.
Lisa hadn’t been in touch with either of Kyle’s friends for a long time. And after the way she’d left things with John the last time she saw him, she didn’t imagine he’d want anything to do with her problems now.
But she didn’t have anywhere else to go.
If anyone might be able to help her make sense of her brother’s message—and help Kyle out of whatever danger she feared he was in—John Duarte was her best hope.
Regardless of how he might feel about her.
Lisa plunged deeper into the dark woods, her breath gusting through her parted lips, her heart beating a hard drum in her ears. She was soaked to the bone, shivering with the cold and an icy fear that had only taken firmer root in the time since she’d received Kyle’s message.
HIDE.
What did he mean? Hide from what...or whom?
What was going on? Was Kyle in some kind of trouble?
Was she?
Lisa had asked all those things in reply, but Kyle didn’t answer back. His private cell—the number only she had access to according to him, had gone dead.
And that, more than anything else, had terrified her.
He’d always been her protector, from the time they were kids, bouncing through one foster home to another after their so-called parents had lost custody of them to the State of Ohio. Kyle had always looked out for her, kept her safe.
He’d always looked after her, even when he was on active combat duty overseas. And later, too, after his service to the country had taken on a more clandestine purpose that he’d refused to divulge to her.
All that changed about three years ago. Lisa didn’t know why. She only knew that her strong, doting older brother had suddenly stopped calling to check in on her. No more emails or texts, and no replies when she tried to reach him.
There had been no more postcards from far-flung places—silly, unexpected notes that always held the power to make her feel that no matter where his duties had taken him, Kyle was still close. Still watching over his kid sister—his Little Lisa Lizard—a nickname he’d given her when they were kids and had affectionately used with her ever since.
No, the last time Lisa had seen Kyle, he’d acted strange, paranoid somehow. He’d tried to brush off her concern, but she knew him too well. He’d been involved in something mysterious. Dangerous, she’d guessed, even then.
And now this.
Fresh fear streaked through her as she picked up her pace, running now, needing to get out of the wet and cold before she collapsed. She misjudged her step across a patch of loamy ground littered with old leaves and pinecones. Her ankle twisted as the earth gave way beneath her foot.
She slid off balance and the slippery ground took her down.
She made a flailing grasp at the branches overhead, but her wet fingers closed on nothing but empty air. She fell hard, dropping flat on her ass down a shallow, sodden incline.
Dammit.
A miserable-sounding groan leaked out of her as the rain continued to pelt her and her ankle sparked with pain from the fall. Wet leaves and pine needles clung to her everywhere. And in the distance, lightning cracked, briefly illuminating the vastness of her surroundings and what might yet prove to be a massive mistake.
And as a roll of thunder set a tremor in the earth beneath her, Lisa heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked from the top of the incline at her back.
“Move a muscle, motherfucker, and I’ll blow your damn head off.”
She froze instantly, even as the deep, dark molasses sound of John Duarte’s voice and Southern accent set her pulse racing with relief. “Don’t shoot.” She swallowed, tried to catch her racing breath. Rain pelting her hooded head, she braved a slight glance over her shoulder. “John, don’t shoot. It’s me, Lisa. Um...Lisa Becker.”
There was silence for a brief moment, then Duarte’s curse hissed out on a sharp exhalation. She heard movement behind her, heard him disarm his weapon before he started scrambling down into the sodden trench to reach her. He gave her his hand and helped her to her feet. “Lisa. Jesus fucking Christ.”
She hadn’t expected a warm greeting, but his disapproving scowl stung anyway.
Her first glimpse of him took her aback. He looked very different now, even in the dark. A beard covered part of his cheeks and square jaw. His espresso-brown hair was longer, thick waves instead of the high-and-tight Marine trim he’d always worn whenever Lisa had seen him before.
But, oh God, he was just as heartbreakingly handsome as ever. Still had those dark, intense eyes that could melt
a woman right out of her panties. And that line of perfect white teeth that was so devastating when he smiled, but was currently bared at her in a snarl.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Now that she was standing in front of him, even though he couldn’t look less pleased to see her, emotions rose up on Lisa like a wave. Her words tumbled out in a breathless rush. “I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, anyone else to trust...”
His expression hardened even more as she spoke. “Tell me why you’re here, Lisa.”
“It’s Kyle.” She saw suspicion edge into Duarte’s level gaze at the mention of her brother’s name. Along with an instant flicker of concern. She was tempted to call it dread. “I think something’s happened to him, John. Something really bad. He tried to send me a warning today. I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do.”
Duarte ground out another low curse. “We shouldn’t talk out here.” Calm words, but there was an intensity in the way he lifted his head to scan the dark forest that surrounded them. “You came alone?”
“Yes,” she said, shuddering as a chill swept over her.
He grunted, but his frown didn’t lessen. “Let’s get out of the rain.”
She took a step and grimaced as her ankle protested the shift of her weight.
He eyed her with a scowl. “You’re injured?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing. When I slipped, I twisted my ankle a little, but I’m—”
Duarte didn’t wait for her to explain any further.
Hoisting her up onto his shoulder as if her hundred-and-thirty-odd pounds was no effort at all, he carried her out of the trench like a wounded soldier and didn’t put her down until they had reached his cabin.
3
Duarte sat Lisa down on his couch then went into the bathroom to grab a couple of fresh towels out of the cabinet. As he collected what he needed, he stole a quick glance into the other room where she waited. Huddled in her wet jacket, she shivered on the edge of the cushion, her hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks, water dripping off the shoulder-length strands.