Maverick

by Lisa Marie Rice

  He’d held them off for six hours, had slept well that night, and had gone back into the field the next day.

  Part of the job. Part of the mission. No sweat.

  But now he was shaken to the core, the adrenalin of the escape coursing through his system like poison, and the only antidote was Claire, safe in his arms.

  He lowered his cheek to rest it on the top of Claire’s head, shuddering. For a few moments, he lost all tactical awareness, another thing that would astonish him when he could think rationally later.

  In danger, a soldier is aware of everything, always. Tunnel-visioning, fear that narrows the world down to what is immediately in front of you, like seeing through a straw, is one of the best ways to get killed.

  Dan was always aware of everything, his senses moving outward, even under fire. Especially under fire.

  But right now, his senses, everything that made him the man he was, focused narrowly and tightly on the woman in his arms, on her softness and vulnerability. He was aware of her hair tickling his nose, the soft puffs of her breath against his neck, her arms around his back, her slight weight pressed against him.

  And, oh God, pressed right against his hard-on.

  She moved slightly and he was instantly hard as a rock. It was uncomfortable, inconvenient, totally uncontrollable. Post-op horniness, all that adrenaline sloshing around with nowhere to go except straight to his dick. She shifted again and, damn, felt it.

  It would be hard not to. He was hard as a hammer. And when she moved against him, he lengthened and thickened even more. She couldn’t help but feel it. Oh, Christ.

  Claire pulled away, arms still around his neck, nose an inch from his.

  “What do we do now?” she asked softly.

  Go to bed. Have sex until we pass out.

  Oh man, for just a second there he was so tempted. He’d never been this tempted before, to have sex no matter what the consequences. He’d never felt this horny before, either. Whenever he needed a woman, there’d always been one handy. No big sweat. This past year of celibacy had been totally self-enforced. Hardly a week had gone by when he hadn’t had an offer to break it.

  So he wasn’t used to this level of desire, as if he would die if he didn’t have sex right now.

  And he could picture it, too. Right now and right here. Both the Yukon and the Cherokee were plenty roomy, though he hadn’t been tempted by car sex since the age of seventeen. The seats were large, comfortable, and could be let back. Just recline them. Claire on top. His own personal fantasy, one that had kept him awake more nights than he cared to count this past year.

  All he’d have to do was unzip, and there he was. All ready. More than ready. Claire’s clothes would need a little more work, but hell. He was a Marine, he didn’t sweat the small stuff. He’d just slide her pants and panties down those long, slender legs, right off her feet. He’d let her keep the boots. And well, her sweater…

  And then, oh Christ, her breasts with those small pink nipples would be right there…

  Wait. What the hell was he doing?

  They’d just escaped twice with their lives and his head was in his dick? He was responsible for Claire’s safety while she was in the red zone and he was thinking about sex?

  He was appalled at himself, ashamed. He willed his hard-on back down and met Claire’s eyes. This beautiful woman’s life was in his hands. He had to think with his big head.

  He stepped back and helped Claire up into the Cherokee then got behind the wheel.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “We’re safe, if that’s what you want to know.” Dan blew out a breath. “This is the house of a friend of mine. He’s away for the week.”

  “How’d they find us before? At your house? Were we followed?”

  “Good question. And it needs an answer because we weren’t followed.” He was going to kill the guy responsible.

  Dan reached into the duffel bag and pulled out one of his two burner cell phones. He fit a receiver to his ear and punched in the number.

  “Stone.” There was a loud background noise, like a diesel engine. Dan could barely hear him.

  “Marcus? Dan here. You’ve got a leak on your team. It nearly got us killed.” He could barely suppress the anger in his voice. His vocal cords were as clenched as his jaws.

  A leak out of the fucking cop shop. It was the only explanation. Someone on Marcus’s team was in the pocket of whoever was after Claire. And whoever the fucker after her was, he was powerful and connected. That was becoming very clear. The officer who leaked info might not even be aware of the consequences of what he did.

  But he’d nearly got them fucking killed.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” The background noise, like a loud throb, grew louder. “A leak? What kind of leak?”

  “Get to someplace quieter,” Dan growled. “I can barely hear you.”

  Half a minute later, Dan could hear a door shut and the noise level dropped. “Better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s this talk of a leak? My men and I don’t do leaks.”

  No, they didn’t. Marcus ran a tight ship. But goddammit. Someone had talked.

  “I took Claire home. We weren’t there an hour—" Dan’s eyes met Claire’s. He felt a surge of heat in his body as he remembered exactly how they’d spent that hour. Though he could barely see her, he could almost feel her blush. “About an hour after we arrived, the house came under attack.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Real pros, too. Five of them, wearing tactical suits. Night-vision goggles, carrying MP-5s. They knew what they were doing. We got out by a miracle. So you tell me, Marcus. You and your men were the only ones who knew that I was with Claire and that I was taking her home with me. Someone talked. Someone wrote a report back at HQ and e-mailed a copy to the wrong guy. Or blabbed to a reporter. Or called it in to someone outside the force. I don’t know how the hell it happened and I don’t care. All I know is that we nearly died because someone on your team dropped a dime on us.”

  Dan was ready to expect a blast from Marcus, but instead he got a thoughtful tone. “I don’t know, Dan. The thing is—we haven’t filed a report yet.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the entire team that was at the hotel—except for the techs who took the body away and didn’t know who you were—has been called to another crime scene. A double homicide on a boat moored at the New Town Marina. The murderer chopped a hole in the hull and we’re sucking out the water now. You heard the diesel engine of the bilge pump. The team’s been with me. We came directly here and no one’s talked on the phone except for me. And I didn’t tell anyone about you. I will, in the report, but I haven’t yet.”

  Dan tried to think it through and stiffened. “Goddamn,” he breathed. “From Florida. They traced the call from Florida.”

  “What?”

  Christ, time was tight. He signalled to Claire to buckle up. They had to move fast.

  Dan pulled out into the street, still heading west. “While we were at my house, Claire got a phone call to her cell from her neighbour in Safety Harbor, Florida. The neighbour said that Claire’s house was burning down. Claire spoke briefly with the Fire Chief there and they suspect arson. Said the house went up all at once. So someone traced that call to her cell and triangulated her location and sent five men to my crib. All in the space of an hour. You need to send your men to my house fast. Go in silent without sirens. They had at least one wounded, maybe more. Get some prints, some DNA, get something. And for Christ’s sake, find out who these fuckers are because they’re still out there.”

  Dan could practically hear the gears grinding in Marcus’s head. The same gears that were grinding in his own. There were conclusions to be drawn, none of them good.

  One—Whoever was after Claire was ruthless and wanted her dead, badly. There had been two attempts on her life, and they’d burned down a home to smoke her out.

  Two—Whoever wa
nted her dead was either very powerful or very rich or both. Probably both, which wasn’t good. Someone who commanded huge manpower, too, spread out over the country.

  His blood chilled. Just about the only entity he could think of that could field men on an instant’s notice almost anywhere was… a government entity.

  Christ. Was the CIA after her? NSA? Some shadowy agency even he didn’t know about? If that was the case, their lives as they knew them were over.

  “Do my best, Gunny,” Marcus said, and rang off.

  Dan stretched out his hand. “Let me have your cell phone, honey.”

  Without a word, Claire handed it over, blue eyes huge as she watched him. She nodded. “They tracked the phone,” she said. “They can follow our movements.”

  “Uh huh. But not anymore.” Dan buzzed down his window and threw her cell phone out. He watched in his rear-view mirror as it bounced once, twice, on the paved surface, and came to rest in the middle of the lane, where the next car would crush it.

  Whoever was following the signals put out by her SIM card would expect them to keep tracking west. Instead, on a deserted stretch of residential road, Dan pulled a neat 180, and backtracked.

  “Where are we going now?” Claire asked quietly.

  Dan reached over, picked up her hand and kissed the palm. “Where no one will ever find you.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Claire listened as Dan talked to his friend, the detective. Marcus. Dan looked grim, face drawn, nostrils pinched. Completely different from the man she’d made love to. The face above hers, nose to nose, as they made love, had been tight and focused, smiling into her eyes.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  She’d forgotten everything while in his arms—the dead man, her trashed hotel room, the past year. All set aside while her body exploded into a bazillion powerful orgasms.

  She hadn’t been poor Claire then, a shell of a woman, alive by the skin of her teeth, barely together, barely there. No, in Dan’s bed she’d been hot Claire. Hot in every sense of the term. The way Dan looked at her, touched her, made her feel like the most desirable woman in the world. Having this strong, uber-male man completely focused on her… it had been so wonderful. Even the notion of cold had been banished in the bed, as he warmed her inside and out.

  It was all gone, now. The heat and the desire and the sheer joy of life tingling throughout her body, from fingertips to toes. Gone as if it had never been.

  They’d taken it away from her. Her world had been barren and cold and empty, but at least it had been safe. And now even safety had been snatched away by unknown forces. Someone or something that wished her harm had come ravening up from some dark, hellacious pit to take away what little had remained of her life.

  Someone or something that had killed a man, tried to kill her, torched her home, come swarming at Dan’s home like a multi-headed monstrous beast.

  She’d gotten a good look at the men as she lobbed the grenade and flashbang out the window. In their black tactical suits and night-vision goggles, they’d looked like aliens. And maybe they were. Because surely nothing human would come so suddenly, so ferociously.

  The instant she had that thought, she put it aside. If there was one thing her time in the DIA had taught her, it was that there was no end to the wickedness of man. Humans were violent and avaricious. There were men who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted.

  She’d seen it so often, especially in the third-world posts where she’d been stationed. Tyrannical dictators, who ruled by the sword and crushed anyone who threatened them. Somehow, these men were always able to lift rocks and unleash the crawling monsters who lived beneath them.

  She’d seen cruelty and monstrous evil, but it had never touched her personally. She’d been protected by her job, by the fact that she was an emissary of the most powerful country on earth.

  And now the monsters were after her. Personally.

  Claire had seen cruelty and violence in her postings, but she’d also seen amazing courage.

  NGO workers who refused to be intimidated and continued dispensing medicine, vaccines, food, books, despite death threats, sometimes from the very people they were trying to help. Women who banded together to fight for their rights, even though they knew that some of them would be tortured or stoned to death. Men and women who marched for freedom and democracy at the cost of their lives.

  They’d done it.

  So could she.

  Whoever ‘they’ were, they’d made a mistake in torching her house. Everything Claire had, everything she owned, everything that was a souvenir of her parents or her past, had been destroyed.

  There was nothing left of her old life. She’d been stripped bare. But by the same token, she had nothing left to lose.

  Claire glanced over at Dan. “That was a remarkable piece of driving back there. Did you take a defensive driving course?”

  He shot a glance at her. A faint smile lifted his mouth. “Actually, I’m a combat-driving instructor.”

  Oh. Well, that explained a lot. “You saved our lives.”

  “Actually, you saved our lives. If you hadn’t kept your cool and thrown the grenade and flashbang exactly right, at exactly the right moment, at exactly the right spot, they’d have gunned us down. You kicked ass. I’d say we’re about even in the Saving Lives Superbowl.”

  Claire sat up straighter, smiling a little. “You’re right. I did kick ass.”

  “Damn straight.” He was grinning now. “I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley.”

  Claire looked at him. Immensely broad-shouldered, immensely strong, good with weapons, combat driver, ex-Marine. All-round tough guy. “Oh yeah. Watch your step around me, mister. I take no prisoners.” And she laughed.

  She laughed.

  It sounded so odd, coming from her throat. Odd and dry, a sound she wasn’t used to making. She hadn’t heard herself laugh in… what felt like forever.

  “Sounds good,” Dan murmured. His eyes were scanning the road ahead and the rear-view mirrors constantly. “You laughing.”

  “Particularly when there’s nothing to laugh about.” Claire shook her head, still smiling. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Oh yeah.” He pulled out his cell, and punched in a number on speed dial.

  “Hey,” he said suddenly. Someone must have picked up at the other end. “No names. I need to meet you at that place where you tried to pick up that Swedish girl. Uh huh.” He listened for a couple of seconds. “Well, I can’t help it if you didn’t score. Can’t stay on the line very long. I’ll be there in ten.” He pocketed the cell and turned to her. “Good buddy of mine. He’ll help us out. We need to go to ground, and he has a place that’s off the grid.”

  “Former Marine?”

  “Yeah. Like a brother.”

  They all were. It was something Claire admired enormously in the Marines. They belonged to a vast brotherhood for the rest of their lives.

  Unlike DIA analysts.

  Spooks were unsociable by nature, by training, and by command. There was nothing sadder than a DIA or NSA party. Secretiveness was so ingrained in them, they had no social skills at all. They just sat around not talking, getting morosely drunk, and no one ever drove anyone home afterwards.

  She hadn’t gotten one call from a colleague this past year. She was out of the service and therefore untouchable.

  “Are you sure that’s an untraceable phone?” she asked Dan. No one knew better than Claire what cell phones really were—huge transmitters emitting one giant here I am, come get me signal, like an enormous arrow in the sky, pointing straight at you.

  “Yeah. My name doesn’t figure on any paperwork in connection with this phone. But just in case, I was travelling east while talking and now we’re going north and I only stayed on the line for a second or two.” He buzzed down the window, tossed the cell out. “And now it’s gone.”

  “Theoretically, we can be traced,” Claire mused. “If they have your voice on file, th
ey could be trolling the airwaves and trying to come up with a voiceprint match, then put out a watch for that signal.”

  “Yeah, they could.” Dan’s mouth tightened. “But only the NSA has those types of resources. And if the NSA is after us, we’re fucked. Pardon my French.”

  It was true. If the NSA was after them, they were royally fucked. She shook herself. There was no reason on earth for the NSA to be on their tail. She’d never broken security, and she’d been out of commission for a year. Dan was a former Marine, for God’s sake.

  As a matter of fact, it would be hard to find two citizens who were less of a security risk to their country than her and Dan.

  Claire felt a bolt of heat run through her body, electric and fierce. It wasn’t sexual heat. It was—it was rage. She was so angry at whoever was after them—or after her. They’d burned her house down, so the efforts of this shadowy ‘they’ were directed against her. Dan was collateral damage.

  Never mind that he was a hero, had put himself in harm’s way for his country, had saved two children and a mother only a few days ago. He was with her, and this phantom someone was willing to kill him the way you swat down a troublesome insect.

  The shock of losing all her worldly possessions was starting to wear off, and in its place was a white-hot anger at the devastation they were willing to wreak, and to no purpose she could understand.

  Claire had no enemies. She was sure of that. She’d been a loyal team player. She’d been a good, smart analyst and had been on good terms with all her co-workers and superiors.

  Furthermore, she’d been at the beginning of her career. She’d barely begun to climb the ranks. Even if she’d been the type to do so, which she wasn’t, she hadn’t walked over anyone to be promoted because she hadn’t been promoted yet.

  For a second, she mourned what might have been. Claire had worked hard because she was ambitious. She wanted to advance in her career, maybe even go all the way to the top.

  The bomb in Laka had done more than shatter her life; it had brought an end to her career. All her hopes and dreams had been cut off, forever. There was no way she could ever hope to join DIA again. The job was too important to be put in the hands of someone who was damaged goods.