And had proceeded to complain about her supposedly absent boss by describing the polar opposite of the man he really was.
It was only when she was well into it that she realized what she was betraying; by describing Josh in terms that were obviously the reverse of the truth, and of her view of him, she was showing just how deeply her feelings for him went. Not that their two captors would realize that, but she was very much afraid Josh would.
“He’s rude, and abrupt and impatient with people,” she said, grimacing inwardly as she described the man who was unfailingly polite, patient and infinitely generous with his valuable time. And when Josh glanced at her, one brow raised slightly, she gave a dramatic sigh so unlike herself that she knew he couldn’t miss it.
Brown Shirt wasn’t buying it completely, she could sense that. On some level he no doubt suspected she was angling for their sympathy, or trying to save herself by aligning herself with them against Josh. Pinky, on the other hand, seemed perfectly willing to go along, as if everyone in the world must hate their boss, simply because that’s the way he thought.
“What I’d like is a good boss,” she said, thinking she’d just keep chattering to cover Josh’s actions—she thought he’d gotten the pistol, in fact was sure of it because he was standing now—as long as they’d let her, no matter that chatter was totally foreign to her nature. “You know, one that cares about his employees, takes care of them, pays well and gives them respect.”
In other words, Josh, she thought. She flicked a quick look at him; surely he had to know what she was doing, describing exactly who he really was.
“No such animal,” Pinky said with a snort as Josh again glanced their way before explaining briefly to Brown Shirt that he needed to check something in the main cabin.
Josh was headed toward her. She didn’t expect a move, there was no way he could do anything with the two men right there, watching. The weapon he’d retrieved was hers, the 9mm Kahr P9 she’d picked to fit her smaller hands, and because she liked the balance and the grips. But she knew ruefully well that Josh wouldn’t hand off the only weapon they had so far to her. He’d lived off and on in some rural areas, hunting, and she knew Draven had refined his skills, so Josh was far from helpless.
“At the rate we’re going,” she grumbled, “we could have waited to leave from down south at noon and still have made it before he will.”
Josh gave her a quick sideways glance as Pinky made another nasty comment about arrogant CEOs, and she knew he’d picked up her inference that if the security team had mobilized immediately—and she knew they had—they would be arriving very soon.
“Keep an eye on her,” Brown Shirt said to Pinky. Then, apparently realizing that didn’t fit with the facade they were presenting to the “mechanic,” added hastily, “We wouldn’t want her getting hurt, now would we?”
“No,” Josh said as Brown Shirt followed him past the galley into the cabin, “we wouldn’t.”
Something in his voice sent a shiver up her spine. She’d heard that tone before. When he’d learned Harlan was missing in Nicaragua. When a mole selling Redstone secrets had threatened Ian Gamble. When Lilith had been in danger. It was steely, implacable determination. And no one, just no one, stopped a determined Josh Redstone. Tess knew that better than anyone.
The fact that they were presenting this facade to the man they knew only as a worker had to mean something, she thought. If they were totally ruthless, wouldn’t they simply have taken “Michael” hostage, too? Did that mean they weren’t pros? They certainly didn’t act like it.
Maybe they were just a couple of disgruntled failures grabbing what they saw as an opportunity. Had they heard Josh Redstone was here and come hunting? Or was it even simpler, had they just seen the Hawk V and figured whoever was flying on the private jet had to be worth something? Or was it some combination of both?
She supposed it still didn’t matter, the how of it. It was the fact of it she and Josh had to deal with.
And you can chalk anything you say up to the necessity of the moment, she told herself.
She put a little whine into her voice and said, trying to keep at least Pinky’s attention off Josh as he stopped in front of the polished wood panel that masked the power panel for the auxiliary systems, “There must be a boss somewhere who cares about his people.”
“You think somebody like this guy—” Pinky took a step out of the galley and gestured at the interior of the plane “—cares about anybody but himself?”
“That,” Tess said, slowly and with an almost fierce emphasis, more than loud enough for Josh to hear, “would make him a very, very special man. The kind you’d walk through fire for.”
Josh paused as he fiddled with more wiring. Turning to look at her, his voice almost deadly quiet, he spoke to her for the first time since she’d begun her charade.
“If he was that kind of man, he wouldn’t let you.”
She wasn’t sure if it was a declaration, or a warning. What she was sure was that he meant it. And she knew Draven had, if anything, understated when he’d told her all those years ago that the toughest part of her job in a situation like this would be to get Josh to let her put herself in danger for him.
“He’s going to get himself hurt trying to keep her from get ting hurt,” Beck muttered.
“She doesn’t need his help,” Alvera said. “She did great in our training, she can handle anything just about as well as any of us could.”
“But Josh doesn’t know that, does he?” Reeve put in. “He knows we absconded with her for a while, taught her to shoot, but not the details of what we put her through.”
They all looked at Draven, who shrugged. “Josh wouldn’t have okayed it. You know how he feels about bodyguards.”
“Same way my husband did,” Sam said. “But I’m glad you did what you did. Tess is as good as a secret weapon now.”
“And she would lay down her life for him,” Reeve said. The two women exchanged glances Draven noted, but didn’t quite understand.
“We all would,” Alvera said with unwavering conviction.
“And you’d all do Josh a lot of good dead, wouldn’t you?” Draven pointed out.
“And so,” Sam said, turning a steady look on her boss, “would you.”
Draven resisted for a moment, but he knew every one of his team here knew the truth. They wouldn’t be on the team if they didn’t.
“My job is to protect Redstone, and I’d walk through fire to do it.” His voice harshened despite himself. “But I’d stand in that fire and burn for Josh.”
“ETA twenty minutes,” St. John’s voice said over the intercom.
“Facts,” Draven said abruptly.
“Two men, two weapons, Josh and Tess aboard,” Sam said quickly.
“Assumptions,” he said in the same tone. “Beyond that they don’t even recognize Josh.”
“They don’t know Tess is the pilot,” Reeve said. Draven nodded; Tess’s words had made that clear enough it almost went into the fact category.
“Josh is now armed,” Alvera said; although they hadn’t actually seen the weapon, they’d observed Josh’s movements in the cockpit and there was no other logical explanation. “And,” he added with a gesture at the screen Ryan Barton was still monitoring with a fierce concentration, “in a minute or two he’ll have the second weapon, which he’ll hopefully pass to Tess.”
“The cockpit weapon is hers,” Draven said, his eyes on the screen. “Her weapon of choice.”
That had been on his instruction, since Tess was most likely to be in the cockpit. It was a minute point, but having a weapon you were familiar with and that had been sighted in and maintained by you could make the hairsbreadth of difference between life and death in a situation like this.
But the explanation didn’t negate the fact that getting Josh to let any of his people take personal risks for his sake was an iffy prospect at best. And this wasn’t just any of his people, this was Tess.
“She’ll ge
t it from him,” Sam predicted.
Draven nodded. He knew her well. And they’d trained her well. And he knew the fact that Tess was also a hostage only compounded his team’s ferocity.
“Speculation,” he snapped out.
“They’re idiots,” Beck said, earning him a quick grin from most of the team.
“It does seem,” Reeve said in a more assessing tone, “that they are either stupid, careless or at the least amateurs.”
“Trying to take hostage a man you don’t even recognize when he’s standing in front of you?” Beck retorted. “Yeah, I’d say so.”
They spent the next ten minutes of the flight going over the various possibilities that had been presented by Josh and Tess’s clever maneuvers from on board the Hawk V. From the armed men’s responses to their various comments, they’d gathered the basics, although Draven warned it was, at this point, all speculation based on the assumption they were correctly interpreting what they’d heard and seen.
The last five minutes before they touched down they spent silently arming themselves, each of them with their own personal choices, from Sam’s Sig to Beck’s Glock 21. Additional weapons followed; they would assess carefully first, but if the time came when they had to move fast, none of them wanted to have to stop to gear up.
They began to drop. Draven knew the Hawk III was large for this small airfield, but it was especially equipped and stocked to handle almost anything short of an all out war. He wished they had Tess to get them on the ground; she could put the big jet down safely on runways any sane pilot would tell you were far too short for it. But no one at Redstone underestimated St. John, either.
“Brace,” that man said on the intercom, warning them all this was going to be an abrupt procedure.
And he set the plane down, not with Tess’s featherlight finesse but with a solid thump that spoke of his mood, and laid on the brakes almost instantly. Wedged in the cockpit doorway, Draven caught a glimpse of Josh’s plane sitting off the main taxiway at the north end of the strip.
As soon as the jet was slowed enough he would tell St. John—an oddity in itself—to stay here at the opposite end of the small airfield; if the men aboard the Hawk V hadn’t seen them land, no sense calling attention to the fact. The unmarked jet—plain-wrapped, Beck called it—stood out enough for its size alone at this small airport.
But before he could open his mouth St. John was doing just that, and Draven chided himself ruefully for not realizing the man had already thought of everything.
“I don’t think they saw us, or they don’t care,” Ryan said, his gaze still glued to the wide-screen, multipicture monitor he’d braced through the hard landing. “They didn’t react at all. Tess is still talking, and they’re paying more attention to her than to Josh, even.”
“They don’t think the ‘mechanic’ is a threat,” Sam said.
“Looks like they wish Tess would shut up,” Ryan said.
“I’m sure Tess would like to,” Reeve said. “Babbling is so not her.”
“But it’s working,” Ryan said, never taking his eyes off the screen. “She— Wait!”
They all turned as the young computer genius yelped.
“Josh saw us!” he yelped. Sam leaned over his shoulder. “He just turned and looked right at the camera and did something with his hand.”
Draven spun around and took two long strides to the monitor. “What did he do, exactly?”
Ryan lifted his right hand and slashed it across his neck from left to right.
“Doesn’t that mean to stop engines?” Ryan asked. “Like the ground-crew signal?”
“It’s context determined,” Draven said. “It’s a hand signal borrowed from ground forces. Jim taught them to Josh years ago.” He remembered Jim telling him about it, that it had been a way to share with his little brother the excitement he felt at going into special ops.
“So here it means…?” Ryan asked.
Draven answered quietly, saying what they all already knew.
“Danger zone.”
Chapter 9
Tess knew Josh had taken advantage of their two captors’ momentary attention to the sparkling water she had spilled. She knew he had retrieved a second weapon from its compartment beside the wiring panel. She knew they hadn’t noticed a thing.
What she didn’t know was if Josh would manage to overcome his instinctual, fiercely protective nature and do what she knew Draven would demand, give her the cockpit weapon.
As she cleaned up, she pondered ways to make the transfer. Finally, she settled on one that seemed feasible; it would get the job done and further cement their image of her as a rather brainless and clumsy ditz.
She looked around the galley as if searching for something. After a moment, with a shrug—and even though there were several towels in the drawer next to the small refrigerator—she tugged her shirttail out and dried her hands on it. She left it out; it hung below the hip on her petite frame.
She started out of the galley toward the main cabin, only to have Pinky frown and step in front of her.
“I have to replace that water out of the storage locker, or Mr. Redstone will be furious.”
Pinky laughed, using a foul word to describe the man he had no idea was mere feet away.
“Please,” Tess said, trying to inject as much fear into her voice as she could, a difficult task given what she was feeling was anger and disgust. “I don’t want him mad at me.”
That a spilled bottle of water would be the least of any sane man’s worries when confronted with two armed men intent on taking him hostage didn’t seem to occur to the man. And Tess’s opinion of his intelligence—or lack thereof—solidified as she crossed the cabin to the cabinet at the far corner of the main cabin, near where Josh was pretending to work.
She got out the bottle to complete the deception, and with a surreptitious move slipped a wine opener into her pocket; it might be small, but the blade used to cut the wrapping on the bottles could be useful. Then she turned as if to go back to the galley, looking down at the bottle in her hands. And walked right into Josh.
“Oh! I’m sorry, I—”
“Easy, there,” Josh said, steadying her with his right hand. For an instant they just stood there, pressed together from knee to chest—well, Josh’s chest, since she was so much shorter—and Tess’s heart began to hammer in a way that had embarrassingly little to do with the situation they were in. Which was beyond foolish, and she tried to quash her response fiercely, all the while hoping Josh would assume, if he noticed, that it was the situation that had her adrenaline pumping wildly.
And then, after what seemed like a long, drawn out moment she was certain had really only been a couple of seconds, Josh’s left hand, the one away from their captors, moved to her other shoulder. Slowly, almost as if he were reluctant to separate from her.
But in the process, he slipped the cockpit pistol to her. As he released her, she palmed the small weapon in her right hand, then slid it carefully into her waistband. The now untucked Redstone shirt was loose enough and long enough to hide it easily. The fact that it also masked her curved shape was a bonus, given Pinky’s frequent, too-intent stares.
She glanced up at Josh, relieved that he’d followed Draven’s strict rules. That he’d done it reluctantly was clear in his expression as he looked down at her. She supposed following his own simple rule, of getting out of his people’s way and letting them do their jobs, was sometimes harder than people realized.
“Careful,” he murmured.
She didn’t miss that he meant much more than her feigned stumble.
“You about done here?” Brown Shirt asked Josh. Impatience crackled in his voice and was clearly evident on his face. Great, Tess thought. The stupid one’s nasty, and the smarter one is edgy. Not an encouraging combination.
“Still have to isolate the problem in all that wiring,” Josh said easily. “No skin off my nose if the guy’s got to wait around. He’s kept you guys waiting all afternoon, hasn�
�t he?”
“Serves him right,” Pinky agreed, almost gleeful.
Brown Shirt ignored his partner. And when he looked at Josh, it was still with a trace of suspicion. Tess hoped it was because “Michael” was taking too long, and not that he was on the verge of recognizing him as their true quarry.
She felt much better now that she had the little eight-round Kahr within reach. Cooler, calmer. Josh would never want or allow anyone to die for him if he could stop it, but Tess knew practically anyone in Redstone would, if necessary.
She would, if necessary.
When the words coalesced in her mind, it wasn’t a revelation. Her feelings for Josh were simply a fact of life. The life she would never have had if not for this man. And if she’d spent a bit too much of it lately longing for the impossible, then that was her fault, not his. Her fault that she’d committed the sin of being impossibly cliché, falling in love with her rich, unattainable boss.
Her only consolation was that he never had to know.
Her only regret was, that if things went wrong, he never would.
The manager of the small airfield gaped at the Redstone team as they stood out of sight of the rest of the field, behind a hangar barely large enough to conceal the Hawk III. One look at John Draven’s eyes had the man nodding his head as he was questioned.
“Seen anyone you don’t know around this afternoon?”
“People come and go,” the man said, clearly puzzled. “It’s an airport.”
It was two short runways with an air sock and a Quonset hut, but Draven wisely didn’t point that out.
“Anyone not connected to a plane?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve been doing paperwork in the office all afternoon.”
“So anyone could walk out on to the apron where the planes are parked?”
“Well…” The man’s voice trailed off, and he shifted his feet as if uncomfortable. “It’s not like terrorists are going to show up here,” he finally said.
“Anyone else here who might have seen anything?”
Redstone Ever After Page 6