by Lara Adrian
And what could he ever hope to do to cushion the anguish he would inflict when he had to explain that he and Alec were now hunting a personal enemy of their own in her beloved brother?
“You gotta tell her, man.” Alec’s voice was sober. “She needs to know about Kyle.”
“What do I need to know about Kyle?”
Lisa’s voice came from behind them.
Duarte’s heart sank, as cold and heavy as a stone in his chest. He pivoted around and found her standing at the crest of the beach, just off the guest room veranda where they’d made love the night before. She wore an oversized terry bathrobe, her hair twisted up in a towel as though she’d just stepped out of the shower.
Her eyes were questioning on him now. Searching and uneasy. “What do you need to tell me, John?”
12
The fact that he didn’t answer made her breath catch in her throat.
But it was the bleak look in John’s eyes as he stood up to face her—the unmistakable guilt and dread she saw in him—that made Lisa’s heart stutter, suddenly frozen in her breast.
“What’s going on?” She glanced to Alec as he got to his feet now, too, but it was John she looked to for answers. She looked to him for honesty and trust, two things that seemed missing from the unreadable expression on his face. “Do you have information on Kyle? Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“Then what is it you need to tell me about him?” Her voice rose along with the acid of her mounting fear. “Is he hurt? Is he... oh God, is he dead?”
John shook his head. “We don’t know any of that—”
“Then what?” She couldn’t take his maddening, careful calmness. “Tell me what you do know about him, dammit!”
John swallowed and glanced at Alec, who looked equally reluctant to give her the truth. “We don’t know where he is, or if he’s alive, Lisa. But we do think there’s a chance Kyle’s working with the other side.”
The other side? It took her a second to realize what she was hearing. “Are you saying my brother is a bad guy? Because that’s not possible. It’s absurd. For crissake both of you, he’s been your best friend for more than a decade—”
“I had a vision,” Alec said, his voice grave, more sober than she’d ever heard him before. “The first time I saw the premonition was a couple of months ago. I’ve seen it half a dozen times since, and it’s always the same. I see Kyle giving up classified intel on Phoenix operatives. He’s betraying the program. The only question is, for how long?”
She shook her head. “My brother’s one of the most patriotic, devoted people I know. Just because you think you saw something in a vision, doesn’t make him guilty.”
Even so, she felt sick with the information. Miserable with the very idea, and the fact that John seemed to know about Alec’s premonition, yet hadn’t felt the need to talk to her about it.
And then, as she looked at the two men, at John in particular, a deeper concern took hold of her.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” She could see the weight of it in his somber brown eyes. She saw the other painful truth he’d been shielding her from in keeping Alec’s vision a secret. “If Kyle’s the one who betrayed Phoenix, then you intend to hunt him down. You intend to go after him like your enemy.”
John cursed, low under his breath. “Lisa, if the vision is true, then we don’t have a choice.”
“Will you use me to do it?” She barked out a raw, humorless laugh. “Have you already been using me? Letting me think you care, letting me think you were going to help me find Kyle... God, letting me throw myself at you like an idiot while you and Alec make plans behind my back—”
“It wasn’t like that at all,” John said sternly. “Don’t say it. Don’t even fucking think it.”
When he walked toward her, she backed up several paces. “When were you going to tell me about this? After you fucked me a few more times?”
He bit off a sharp denial, but she was already pivoting away from him. She couldn’t talk to him anymore. She didn’t want to hear anything more, could hardly breathe through the tumult of confusion and outrage and hurt that held her in its grasp.
Storming back into the guest room, she began picking up her clothing. John came in behind her, his presence sucking even more of the air from around her. Her skin tingled in reaction to him, all of her senses instinctively drawing toward him even while she struggled to ignore him.
“It isn’t like that,” he said gently at her back. “I didn’t mean to keep it a secret from you. I just knew it would hurt you to hear it, and I didn’t want to be the one to do it.”
She spun a pained look at him. “Do you think it hurts me any less to find out this way? To be blindsided by the fact that you and Alec are conspiring against my brother?”
John huffed out a curse. “We weren’t conspiring, damn it. We were hashing things out, trying to make sense of it all. You think Alec and I want to believe Kyle’s guilty any more than you do?”
Tears pricked her eyes, but she held them back with fury alone. “Tell me what you’ll do to him if you’re able to find him.”
“Make him tell us the truth. Give him the chance to convince us we’re wrong.”
“And then what?”
A tendon ticked in John’s bearded jaw. “That will depend on Talon.”
“Stop calling him that! His name is Kyle. He was your best friend, John. He thinks of you like a brother. I know because he’s told me so. You and Alec both are like family to him.”
John nodded soberly. “You’re right. Kyle Becker was my closest friend, a brother I’d never had. But when the three of us joined the Phoenix program, we all took an oath—to put the program ahead of anything, and anyone, else. We left our pasts behind us. We devoted our lives to it, Lisa. Our futures, too. That’s how important our work was. We all believed in that, but someone betrayed us. Someone betrayed that oath.”
“Not my brother.” Her voice sounded small, wooden. As if even she was beginning to doubt.
Kyle was her only family. He was all she had in the world. For that reason alone, she would cling to her faith in him.
“I hope you’re right,” John murmured. “Alec and I both hope you’re right. But understand, we have to find out.”
She stared into his handsome face, heartbroken by the solemnity of his expression. “Then I hope you understand that you’ll be doing it without me.”
Turning away, she walked into the bathroom to take the towel off her head. She finger-combed her damp hair and met John’s reflection in the large mirror over the sink. “I want to leave. Right now.”
“No, you don’t. You want to run away. From me. From us.” He shook his head slowly. “But I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?” she shot back. “Isn’t that what you did five years ago?”
A direct hit. She could see it in the way his mouth pressed into a flat line, his dark eyes piercing her in the glass. “Yeah, I did. And if you think I haven’t spent a lot of those years regretting it, then you’d be wrong about that, too.”
God, she didn’t want to be swayed by his tender words right now. She didn’t want to believe the raw honesty in his deep voice, or the way it made her melt inside.
She wrenched her gaze away from him and busied herself with the makeup and brushes left on the bathroom countertop where she dumped them out last night in search of the condom. Just the thought of making love with him made her legs go a little weak beneath her. Worse, it made her anger lose some of its edge.
She dropped a handful of cosmetics into the cloth bag, then gathered up the scattered brushes. “I can’t do this, Johnny. Please... just go tell Alec and his thug friends I want to get off this island as soon as possible.”
“It’s not that simple, Lisa. I can’t let you go. If anything were to happen to you—” He broke off abruptly, and in her peripheral vision she saw him cross his arms over his broad chest. “I need to keep you close to me, where I know you’ll be saf
e.”
“Safe? With you?” She crammed a couple of eyeliner pencils into the little bag and glanced up at him in the mirror. “I’m not feeling very safe with you right now, John. I’m feeling used. I’m feeling sick with myself that I came running to you as soon as I got Kyle’s text. Too bad I don’t have the gift of precognition, too, or I might’ve saved us both a lot of trouble.”
With the last of her things stuffed into the cosmetic case, she tugged on the zipper to close it. The lining had a small tear in it near the top, and the loose thread was caught in the zipper’s teeth. Frustrated even more, she yanked on it again, but it didn’t give.
Then she realized why.
The lining wasn’t torn.
It had been cut. A small, carefully opened slice.
She might have never noticed it...
John moved into the bathroom to stand beside her. “What’s wrong?”
She slipped her finger between the lining of the bag. Something small and flat and round was inside. She pulled it out on a gasp.
Her blood ran cold in her veins.
The tiny black disk was a thinner, more compact version of the GPS tracker her pursuers had placed on her car.
13
Duarte’s heart still felt clutched in a vise a few minutes later, as he and Lisa met up with Alec in the empty kitchen of the main house.
“They know she’s here.” Duarte put the GPS tracker down on the white marble countertop, barely resisting the urge to smash it under his fist.
“Holy shit.” Alec’s brows went up in shock. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“My makeup bag. It was hidden inside the lining,” Lisa murmured. She wrapped her arms around herself, looking small and vulnerable—frightened—in her T-shirt and faded jeans. “Now I guess I know what they were doing in my house a week ago. God, I knew someone had been inside my home. They traced my car, probably traced my phone, too. Now this...” She trailed off on a small shudder.
Duarte wanted to pull her into his embrace, but he didn’t expect she’d welcome his comfort. They’d left a lot unresolved back in the guest room, and this new emergency meant they would have even less alone time to talk things out and try to patch things up.
If that was even a possibility now.
He met Alec’s serious gaze. “It’s not safe for Lisa to stay here. We have to get her off this island ASAP.”
Alec nodded. “Agreed. You got an idea where you want to go, or should I arrange for another safe house somewhere?”
Duarte considered his few options. Time would be working against them. Hell, it already was. They’d been on the radar since the minute they had left his cabin. “Another safe house would be best. Your pal Zapata got a place to spare down in Colombia, by chance? The farther away, the more remote, the better.”
“No.” Lisa’s quiet but firm interjection drew both their gazes. “No more running. No more safe houses. I’m not going to live like this. I can’t.”
“You don’t have much of a choice right now,” Duarte told her, as gently as he could. “You have to keep moving. You can’t let these people get their hands on you. Damn it, I won’t let that happen.”
He sounded possessive and overbearing, but fuck it, he didn’t care. So long as he was drawing breath, he meant to keep this woman safe. Whether she felt he had that right or not.
Lisa’s jaw tensed as she stared searchingly into his eyes. “Kyle wanted me to hide. You’re telling me I need to run. But if I do either of those things now, when will I be able to stop?”
“I’ll make it safe so you can stop.” A promise he would uphold with his life, if it came down to that. With her brother’s life, too, even though he knew that price would come with Lisa’s hatred. “I’ll make it safe. You have to trust me, and give me that chance.”
She slowly shook her head. “I can’t do that, John.” The fear he’d seen grip her just a few moments ago began to fade into a subtle, but stubborn determination. “I’ll never have answers if I don’t go after them. I need to know where my brother is, and if he’s in trouble, I need to know why. Even more than you or Alec or anyone else in the Phoenix program, I need to find him. I can’t do that if I’m on the run or in hiding somewhere.”
She was right. He knew in his heart that she couldn’t hide forever. She couldn’t run far enough if the men trying to reach her had any part in Phoenix’s demise.
Hell, he and Alec and the rest of the program’s operatives had been running and hiding for too long already. It was time to put an end to that, too.
“Whoever put that tracker on Lisa knows she’s here. They don’t know we’ve found this.” Duarte picked up the small disk. As much as he wanted to smash the damned thing to dust, he wondered if it might serve them better to keep the tracking device operational. “And since we took out the first guy who followed her to my place—”
“I believe you mean since I took out the first guy. With a flawless shot, I might add,” Alec said, arching a brow. “Credit where credit’s due, man.”
“Whatever.” Duarte didn’t try to bite back his smirk. “Since their first guy’s at the bottom of a cliff in North Carolina, they may not know he’s dead yet. And they may know Lisa’s on the move now, but that doesn’t mean they know who she’s with.”
Alec nodded, conspiracy glinting in his eyes. “So if someone comes looking for her here—”
“We’ll be waiting,” Duarte said. “We’ll be ready. I don’t think they’ll make us wait too long.”
“What if they send more than one next time?” Lisa asked. Her anxious gaze bounced between the two of them. “What if they do know their first man is dead? I’ve been carrying around that tracker all this time. Someone else could have tailed us to Florida. What if they know exactly who I’m with and they decide to send a full team armed to the teeth next time?”
She was smart, thinking strategically, like a partner. His partner, even though he knew she still didn’t fully trust him when it came to her brother.
Duarte wanted to tell her they’d sort it all out—the same promise he’d made to her the night she’d shown up at his cabin, rain-drenched and terrified, pleading for his help. He wanted to explain to her that five years ago, he’d been an idiot to let her leave his place thinking the night they shared hadn’t meant anything to him... that she hadn’t meant anything.
Right now, when she was standing beside him yet never further away, he wanted to tell her that they’d find a way to make it work between them this time.
But the truth was, he wasn’t sure if that could happen. He wouldn’t be sure until the questions surrounding Talon were answered and the threat pursuing Lisa was eliminated.
Duarte cleared his throat. “We’ll be ready.”
“The two of us and the four men guarding this house will be ready,” Alec said.
“Are you sure about that?” Lisa frowned at him, lowering her voice. “Isn’t it just as risky to put your life in the hands of a bunch of drug dealers?”
Duarte grunted. “He’s sure. Long story.”
He set the GPS tracker back down on the counter, his tactical mind already running through various attack and ambush scenarios. None of them were without potential problems. Then again, the same could be said for every other battle he and Alec had lived to talk about. “So we’re agreed? We sit tight for a while and see what turns up on the other end of our hook?”
“Agreed,” Alec said, grinning like the fearless bastard he always had been. He gestured for Duarte and Lisa to follow him. “Let me show you what we’ve got in our tackle box.”
He led them out of the kitchen and down the main artery of the big house to the spacious great room. At the far end of the space stood a massive built-in bookcase filled with countless volumes from the classics to commercial potboilers. Alec strode up and ran his palm down one section of the hand-carved wood. There was a small electronic beep, then the bookcase popped open to reveal a hidden room.
As Alec stepped inside ahead of Duart
e and Lisa, lights snapped on inside the cool, climate-controlled room. Guns of various types and calibers lined the walls of the space. Gleaming hunting knives and blades of every size bristled on shelves, ready for action. There were enough boxes of bullets to supply a small army.
“Holy shit.” Duarte had seen some sizeable weapons caches in his day, but this was impressive. He walked farther inside, taking note of the pump-action rifles and Russian semiautomatics that made his hands itch to hold them. “Which ones can we use?”
Alec shrugged. “Any of them. All of them. Whatever we need.”
John nodded and continued with his mental cataloguing of the tools at his disposal should he need them. He was aware of Lisa moving alongside him as he strolled past one collection then another. This wasn’t her world—dealing in violence and death. He didn’t want it ever to be her world. But to her credit, she didn’t shrink away or flinch at the sight of so many lethal instruments.
She was virtually unshakable, except when it came to her beloved brother.
And for what wasn’t the first time, Duarte found himself wishing things were different. Wishing he was different. Just a man, not a warrior. Not a precognitive freak whose life had been defined, then forfeited, by the power of his gift. Not the former Phoenix operative whose duty and commitment to the program now stood in the way of what he felt for Lisa Becker.
She drifted past him, taking a sweeping look at a case filled with sniper sights and night-vision equipment. “What’s in this cabinet?” she asked Alec, already heading toward it.
“Ah, those are Mr. Zapata’s favorite rifles.”
A knot of panic lodged in Duarte’s chest as he glanced up and watched Lisa reach for the door handles on the tall gun cabinet. The familiarity of it froze his blood.