by Lisa Hughey
John knew if coddled her, if he gave her the slightest bit of sympathy, she’d crumble. So he pissed her off. He talked to her like he talked to his Marine brothers and sisters in a tone that brooked no arguments. “So toughen up.”
Chapter 6
Rissa’s body went rigid. Who the hell did he think he was?
“We’ve got to move on this while the trail is hot,” John continued, ignoring her anger. “And we can’t do that if we aren’t honest with each other.”
The thought of being completely honest with him curdled her stomach. Bile and shame sloshed like an uneasy sea and she suppressed the need to throw up.
“So from now on, I expect you to keep me apprised, to tell me when there is a situation that will impact our mission.” His voice was hard. The lines in his face were carved from concrete, flat and stark. Like the walls of the Hoover Dam, unforgiving, and completely unrelenting. “Maria is counting on us.”
Rissa’s first instinct was to tell him she couldn’t do it.
To refuse. To give up. To go home.
But he’d known exactly what button to push. A noise from the bedroom drew her attention. Maria. How could she let the woman down? She’d survived in the face of nearly insurmountable odds. She’d rescued herself. Stayed sane for eight years of captivity and solitary confinement.
Now, instead of reveling in her own freedom, Maria had gone on a crusade to find and rescue her friends who were taken.
Maria had vowed to keep searching and never give up. Rissa had promised to help find the people responsible.
Rissa didn’t want to let Jillian Larsen down either.
Even though Maria had never voiced it, there was a hovering fear that the thugs who took her friends could come back from wherever they’d holed up and steal her away again.
Maria needed her faith in people restored.
If Rissa bailed, she’d be sending the message that Maria wasn’t worth it. And that was unacceptable. So as much as Rissa wanted to bail. She couldn’t.
All that anger and frustration at John’s edict disintegrated when she acknowledged that he was right. On several counts. She should never have kept the information from him. She hated him for being right. Her inadequacies laid bare for him to see and judge.
“Shit,” she whispered.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes,” she ground out.
“So we’re a team.” It wasn’t a question. But she answered anyway.
“Yes.”
“No more secrets,” he demanded.
“No more secrets,” she confirmed. Even if she did feel like throwing up.
There was a pause. Silent. Heavy. Fraught. She wondered how he’d ever trust her. Even as she promised, no more secrets.
“I’ve got your back,” John finally said.
A strange and unexpected peace flowed over her. He was there to bear her burdens with her. And the tension she’d been carrying since she landed in Las Vegas eased.
She wanted to reciprocate, but she wasn’t sure she could. “Thanks,” she managed.
John nodded curtly, as if he was as uncomfortable with her awkward hesitance as she was.
One hurdle at a time.
A curious warmth filled her. This big, bad warrior had her back.
“Then let’s see what our pal, Bunny, wrote on this receipt.”
John smoothed the slip of paper on the coffee table and bent to read the receipt. “It’s a web address. And two words.”
“What’s the address?”
“Backdoor/AdultServices.” John frowned at the paper in his hand. “/Hispanic hotties.”
She raised her eyebrows. Backdoor. “Really?”
“What is Backdoor?” John asked.
“You familiar with Craigslist?” she asked.
“Sure, people sell couches and tickets and stuff.”
“Yeah. Well they also used to sell ‘services’ on Craigslist. But after a few high-profile criminal cases, Craigslist decided to shut down that division. So all the people who used to advertise for illegal services, i.e. prostitutes, drugs, porn, moved over to Backdoor.”
John just shook his head.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing. “What?”
“Some days I’m frustrated that this is what I fought for.”
Rissa wanted to reach out to him. But she couldn’t make herself take that step. Even though the urge to touch him, comfort him burned through her.
“So she gave us a jump-off point.” A burgeoning excitement lit his hazel eyes.
Rissa hated to burst his bubble but she knew better than most that entire lives could be hidden behind legitimate fronts. The cornerstone of hiding people was legitimate structures, legal bank accounts, investments and savings accounts that had some small piece of falsehood and obscured the truth about where the person really lived.
“It’s a concrete lead,” she agreed cautiously.
“Come on.” John smiled, his teeth gleamed, and his perfect lips curved with a mischievous grin. “Get a little excited.”
“Just because we found this web address doesn’t mean the girls we are trying to find are going to be advertising on this site.” She couldn’t help but want to slow him down. There were so many ways this lead could go south that getting their hopes up was a mistake.
“I know.” John paced the small living area. “But damn, I want to find these girls.”
His protective side shone through the leashed energy around him.
“I know.” She hated to be the bitch. “But they’ve been gone eight years, John.”
Eight years.
Rissa shuddered at the thought. Even if they found these girls, if what they believed had been done to them was true, it would take a long time for them to get any kind of life back. That horrific type of trauma didn’t disappear overnight.
She could feel his censure, even though he hadn’t said a word. But he had to be realistic. “Just because she gave us this website also doesn’t mean those girls are going to be there.”
Her stomach curdled. They were going to have to view the website. Look at the people being exploited. The odds of finding the women on the first try were astronomical. The reality was that for right now they weren’t going to be able to do anything about those other women and men, because Sophia and Graciela were the priority right now.
Plus, they needed to find enough evidence on Manuel Ortega who was responsible for their trafficking. Supposedly the top guy. On paper, in the media, he was squeaky clean. His reputation as a philanthropist supporting women’s rights was well documented.
John deflected her focus. “What time do you want to go to the range tomorrow?”
She knew what he was trying to do. Badger her into confronting her fears. But what he didn’t understand was she didn’t know if she could do it. She’d been to the range. The last time she’d tried to fire her weapon, her hands shook so hard, she’d had to put it down without firing a single round. Her inability to steady her hands was a serious liability.
He deserved to know what kind of partner she wasn’t.
Two years ago she’d have been right there with him. Two years ago she would have taken point on their mission to the strip club. Now, she couldn’t even watch the show without diving under a damn table.
God, she just wanted her confidence back. Sure she could fake it for a while but the truth was that at night in the dark, she wondered if she’d ever recover from the ordeal that had effectively ended her career.
A thick pall of grief and disappointment swirled in her gut. She hated what that moment had stolen from her. And clearly Jill had been wrong to put her back in the field. She wasn’t ready. She might never be ready.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” John insisted quietly. “We have a lead. We need you mission-ready. I need you to try. You can do it.”
She wanted so desperately to believe that was true. That she could fire a weapon again, if
need be. But the reality was that she couldn’t even fire under non-threat situations. “I haven’t been able to fire a weapon in two years.”
God the failure was intense, immediate, and pure agony.
She’d missed the adrenaline rush, the power, the noise. It had been almost euphoric. Better than sex. The endorphins that flooded the blood and brain, pumping the heart, getting every neuron firing. Now she couldn’t control the frantic beat of her heart, and the adrenaline made her want to blow chow and pass out.
In her peripheral vision, she watched his large scarred palm reach toward her. Finally his hand settled on her shoulder with a heavy comforting clasp.
“You can do it.” His voice was harsh as if he willed her to handle this. And she imagined full of pity.
Rissa shrugged off his hand and laughed bitterly. “Why? Because some macho ex-Marine says it should happen? Or if you insist long enough that it will happen just because you want it to?” If only it were that simple. If wishing would make it so, Rissa would have been okay the first time she’d tried to fire a weapon after the life-changing incident.
She suddenly regretted the urge she’d had to bare her soul to him.
A guy like him would never understand her insecurities and fears. Rissa stiffened her shoulders and lifted her chin. Screw him.
John had narrowed his hazel eyes. His jaw could be cut from the stone used to make the granite columns at the Bellagio. “My job as your teammate is to make sure the team functions at optimum performance. In order to do that, all team members need to be honest. I don’t appreciate being kept in the dark about your issue.”
Her emotions were all over the place. On one hand she wanted to curl up in a fetal ball and hide from him. On the other, she had the furious urge to get right in his face and argue. Even though she knew she was in the wrong.
She’d withheld crucial information about her skill set. The tension headache that had been at low throb all evening had bloomed into edges of a migraine.
Rissa dropped down onto the sofa, rubbed her temples tiredly, and changed the subject. “How do we know we can trust this lead?”
“It’s the only lead we have right now.” John said, “It’s not a question of trust, it’s a question of access to Ortega. We’ve got to follow it.”
Her brain kicked in to higher gear. “You let Jack know to keep a lookout for any background checks on our cover?”
“Con is already on it.” John rubbed his hands together.
“So if there are any nibbles on our fake background, it’s a good bet that the club is vetting us. Which could be why she gave us the website. If we make contact, they will already have information about us.” Rissa hoped they would find something on the missing girls.
Anticipation rose up. It had been a long time since she’d felt either useful or effective. While running an office and keeping track of details was an important skill that every business needed, it hadn’t satisfied the longing in her soul, that need for adventure found in fieldwork. Every job at Adams-Larsen was important. Every client they helped was a check in the win column for every single employee. But she also knew that she was being underutilized.
Jillian Larsen was a saint. Because she had never made Rissa feel like less because she wasn’t in the field. Except now Rissa wondered if Jill knew that she’d been having trouble dealing with the desk job, even if she wasn’t sure she was ready for the field again.
But she wished that Jill hadn’t pushed her out the door on this case, because Maria and her friends deserved justice.
“Yeah,” John replied. There was a note in his voice she couldn’t quite place.
“What?”
“It feels good to be doing something worthwhile again.” It was like he reached in her subconscious and ripped out her thoughts. It did feel good. The sense of camaraderie she’d felt beat at her like the throb of her headache.
John stood abruptly. “You mind?”
She didn’t know what he meant until his hands rested on her shoulders. He dug his thumbs into the muscles at the base of her neck and rubbed in long slow strokes. Rissa’s head tipped forward until her chin practically rested on her chest. She fought the urge to moan. “That feels…amazing.” He had the perfect touch. Not too light but not overly harsh either. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“When I was first at Walter Reed, I suffered from massive headaches,” John said. “The concussive blast gave me recurring migraines for the first few months.”
John’s fingers eased her pain and Rissa nearly moaned as her body went liquid.
“There was an orderly who was able to give me some relief. And he explained what he was doing so my girlfriend could give me the same massage.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you know what to do.”
“My girlfriend passed on the massage right about the time she passed on me,” he confided mockingly. “So I had to learn to explain what I needed to other people.”
And then she felt like a complete asshole, for multiple reasons, but most especially for complaining about her current inability to fire her weapon.
She could hear the humor in his voice. The absolute acceptance of the event that had obviously changed his life. “How did you get to this place?”
He didn’t even hesitate. He knew exactly what she meant.
Because she’d been a wreck for two years and the anger and rage still haunted her regularly.
“Therapy.” John laughed, his chuckle low and mocking. “Great way to strike fear into every soldier’s heart. But I didn’t really have a choice. Pretty much had two options, accept and move on. Or reject and be miserable. I chose life.”
She could learn a lot from him. His inner strength was beautiful while hers was an unwieldy beast full of anger and frustration. “That’s so….”
“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. Christopher Reeve said that.” His simple acceptance humbled her.
“You are amazing.”
“Hardly.” He flushed as if uncomfortable with sharing, and stood awkwardly.
But she couldn’t let it go. “I can’t imagine.” She hadn’t moved past the tragedy that had taken her partner’s life. Hadn’t managed to put anything back together. John had gone through unimaginable tragedy and had clearly moved on without bitterness or regret.
“I wish I had your strength.” Instead of being so damn weak.
“How can you admire strength in others and yet not see it in yourself?” John said. She didn’t know whether to be thrilled that she managed to hide her insecurity so well, or to be ashamed because he was so open about his faults.
But he was wrong. She wasn’t strong. His comments rubbed her already teetering emotions raw. She needed to hide, get away and reset her internal compass before he realized how much on the edge she really was.
“Good night.” She stood abruptly. Rissa carefully opened the connecting door to the room she shared with Maria and ran the hell away.
And she was safe.
Chapter 7
Damn phantom pain.
John rolled over and stifled a groan. His leg, the calf that wasn’t there anymore, ached like a son of a bitch. He’d pushed his body in a few ways it wasn’t quite ready for today and now he was paying for it.
Didn’t help that besides the residual pain in his missing limb, he had a hard-on that rivaled the steel-girded Eiffel Tower at the Paris.
He’d thought that he and Rissa had been forging a connection when they’d been confessing their secrets earlier. But then she’d abruptly disappeared.
That hint of vulnerability had been a surprise.
After a long pain-filled hour wherein he tried unsuccessfully to go back to sleep while going over the day and how his perception of her had shifted, John gave up. He might as well review the case file, maybe do some research on Backdoor, see if any of the ads jumped out at him. Find a way to locate those girls—women, now.
&nbs
p; He needed to send the website info to Connor and get him running facial recognition analysis on the individual women listed on the site. He should have done it earlier after he and Rissa were done talking, but he’d been distracted by her abrupt departure.
He’d grab a glass of scotch and get some work done while he was dealing with insomnia and pain.
Fuck him. The scotch was in the other room.
John grabbed the crutches by the side of his bed. He wasn’t going to put his prosthetic on to get a drink. The worn elastic waistband of his basketball shorts sagged low on his hips. Fuck it. He wasn’t putting on more clothes either.
He pushed to standing, fitted the crutches under his arms, and headed to the common area of the suite. The glow of the light over the stove was the only illumination in the impersonal living area.
Quietly, he unscrewed the cap of his twenty-one-year aged scotch. That was one tick mark in the pro column about going to work for Jack. He could afford a much nicer brand of alcohol than he used to drink. With a thick glug, he poured a generous serving of the top-shelf single malt into the cheap glass then humped over to the sofa carefully. The very sparse file on this job rested on the fake wood coffee table. John lowered to the plush sofa and rested against the upholstered back, letting his head loll on the edge.
He propped his stump on the coffee table, and pressed his other foot flat on the floor. With a heavy sigh, he took a sip of the smooth, peaty liquor and then braced the glass on his bare stomach while he contemplated the ceiling.
Thoughts, impressions, memories from the past few days whirled in his mind, forming pictures then disintegrating again; like a kaleidoscope, the conflicting images kept changing. But one specific image haunted him, reforming and coalescing in his mind.
Rissa. On the floor. Under the table. The panic and terror on her face in that strip club, concurrently illuminated by the flash of fireworks and hidden by the shadows. That sexy body hidden and revealed by wide strips of silky fabric. The dichotomy of her personality fascinated him. Taunted him with vulnerability and confidence by turns. Each glimpse only intrigued him more.