Trisha Telep (ed)

by The Mammoth Book of Special Ops Romance (epub)

  “Break it down for me,” Reese said.

  She glanced over at him, surprised he was going to let her run the op, until she realized he was giving her a way to steady herself. Then again, she was behind the wheel, so his life was in her hands. “Guy must’ve used a silencer,” she said. “I didn’t hear a shot.”

  “Me neither.” He braced himself between the door and the dash as she cut into a driveway, practically on two wheels. She blasted through someone’s backyard and into the alley behind a row of houses, her lights off the whole time.

  “There’s a car on the next street,” she said. “It’s 2 a.m., it’s a weeknight, and this is a working class neighbourhood. It has to be the shooter.”

  She stayed in the alley, whipping around garbage cans, parked cars, tyres galumphing over broken pavement. She kept the lights off, including the interior lights, which were just a distraction in the pitch black, as she paced the shooter’s car on the street beyond the row of houses to her left.

  “He knows he missed me,” she said. “He knows I’m on his ass. If he gets away, the hostages are dead.”

  “You think?”

  He was being sarcastic, but he’d hit a nerve, too. “I’ve handled more of these cases in the last few years than anyone working at the Bureau. It’s my specialty.” She’d even negotiated a successful hostage release. The woman was in therapy, but at least she was alive. “If word of the kidnapping gets out, Kashani is instantly useless to them. They’ll kill him, and everyone else who can identify them. If nothing else it gives them time to figure out their next move while another negotiator is found.”

  “Spending time finding another negotiator acceptable to both sides is risky. They’d rather neutralize your agency, a small business with only a handful of employees—”

  “Run by a woman. They think it’ll be easy.”

  “‘Easy’ is a term I’d never apply to you,” Reese said.

  “They don’t know me like you do.”

  “Lucky them.”

  She gave him a look and jammed her foot on the gas. The Camaro shot ahead of the car it was pacing. They hit the end of the alley and Kate cut the wheel hard left, the tyres screeching but holding around the turn so they were heading straight for the hit man’s late-model sedan when she flipped on her brights. Blinded, the other driver swerved into a parked SUV. Kate whipped the Camaro around behind his, blocking him in.

  Reese was out and at the driver’s door, and, before the shooter could fight his way clear of the air bag, he was cuffed and being shoved into Kate’s trunk. She took off, lights dark again, before any of the neighbours could identify her car.

  “Under a minute,” Reese said. “We always were a good team.”

  Kate looked over at him. “Except when we weren’t.”

  Four

  Kate paced, baggy sweats over her pyjamas, across the kitchen and back again. Her eyes never left the shooter, sitting across the room like it was any normal morning and he was waiting for Mr Coffee to back up the rich aroma on the air with a hot cup of Colombian roast. Except he was tied to his chair, and there wasn’t any coffee in his immediate future.

  Nothing to look forward to long term, either, she thought, sending him another sidelong glare. Not if she had anything to say about it. He’d messed with her and hers. He didn’t deserve a future.

  “He’s just a kid.”

  Kate shifted her glare to Reese. “A kid who tried to kill me.”

  “He can make it up to you by telling us everything we need to know about his friends, so we won’t be going in blind.”

  “I will tell you nothing,” he shouted in slightly accented English.

  Defiance she’d expected. But his voice wavered, just enough for her to take another look, this time pushing through her fury so that she saw what Reese saw: a kid, barely twenty, with a layer of bravado slicked over his fear. No challenge at all.

  She slipped behind him, giving Reese a wink as she bent to whisper in the kid’s ear. “I want a name.”

  The kid jerked a little then went sulky, clamping his mouth shut.

  Reese moved to stand in front of him, arms loose at his side, a bland, reassuring smile on his face. Good cop all the way. Only Kate knew how much he hated the role.

  “I don’t need your name to know who you are,” he said to the kid, cutting Kate out of the conversation because she was just a woman. The subject’s cultural background would respond to that. “You were born in Balykistan, but you’ve lived here most of your life. Your parents are Reformists and make frequent trips back to the mother country, but you haven’t been there since you were a teenager. You’ve established distance from them in other ways, living away at college, even during the summer. Not so far Daddy cuts off funding, but far enough to make it look like you don’t agree with their politics.”

  The character assessment earned Reese a sneer, which was confirmation, but not progress.

  “This is interesting, but let’s get to the really important stuff,” Kate said, taking way too much pleasure in the way the kid jolted. But then, she was the Bad Cop. She circled, got right in his face. “You have a problem with women. Is it skill, or skill and size?”

  “Untie me, woman,” he said struggling enough to make the chair jump around. “I will show you skill.”

  “Oh, I see, you can’t perform unless there’s violence. I mean, you’re the type of coward who shoots from hiding—”

  He spat something in Balyk, something both disgusting and insulting. “Wait until I am free. Then I will take you to my friends, and we will make you regret the day you were whelped by your bitch of a mother.”

  “I have nothing better to do than meet the man who sends a child to do his dirty work. Tell me where he is and we’ll go see him together.”

  “Pull it back,” Reese murmured, “he won’t know where the instructions came from.”

  “I realize that. I was having fun.”

  “Taking your temper out on him isn’t going to solve anything.”

  Kate planted a foot on the kid’s chest and shoved him and his chair over. “I don’t know, I feel a little better now.”

  The kid muttered threats under his breath, staring daggers at Kate.

  “Bring it on,” she said.

  Reese shook his head, righted the chair, and told the kid to shut up. He did, but not because he was told to; it was the expression on Reese’s face that did the trick.

  “Like old times,” Kate observed.

  “He’s a zealot,” Reese said, “not a trained operative who thought about what it might mean to fail.”

  “Yep, just a tool, no brain.”

  “A tool who was sent to take you out,” Reese reminded her. “You and all the other people who work for you. Otherwise, when your guards don’t check in, someone will know there’s a problem and alert the authorities.”

  “I’m the only someone there is,” Kate said. “I don’t have an office. I only take referrals, and only after I’ve vetted them myself. All my other guards are working, and I’m the one who hands out the assignments so they don’t have any idea where their counterparts are.”

  “If they’ve done their homework, and I’m sure they have, they knew they’d only have to take out you and the guards with the Kashanis.”

  “Which we can make them believe they’ve already done.”

  They both turned to look at the kid. He wouldn’t know the other conspirators. They’d have kept the participants in the plot ignorant of one another, so if one of them got caught, the others could carry on with their operation. The guy in charge would be waiting for the kid to check in, though, verify that Kate was dead.

  Reese plucked up the cell phone out of the small pile of belongings – no ID, unfortunately – that they’d stripped out of the kid’s pockets. He flipped the phone open and waited for directions, but the kid snorted and looked away.

  Kate whipped out her Glock and put it to his forehead, right between the eyes. His stare cut to hers, still looking d
efiant, so she cocked the gun, making sure what he saw in her eyes was cold and hard and determined. Her eyes stayed that way until beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. When his gaze flicked away from hers, she knew she had him.

  “Reese is going to dial, then put it on speaker.” She bent close, whispered, “And don’t do anything stupid,” in a dialect of the same language he’d used earlier.

  A single drop of sweat trickled down the side of his face, and the light of defiance in his eyes went out. “Speed dial six,” he said. The call lasted less than five seconds. He told them Kate was dead, but then he had no choice.

  “There’s nothing to do but wait now,” Reese said. “The Reformists won’t make another move until after the treaty is formalized and signed. Then they’ll take out all the witnesses, probably stage it as a traffic accident.”

  Kate nodded. “We go in tomorrow – I mean, this morning,” she amended after a glance at the stove clock told her it was after three. “They’ll have to send at least two people with Kashani.”

  “Likely there weren’t more than five or six kidnappers to begin with,” Reese said. “Good odds. That leaves three, possibly four for us to deal with.”

  “Three or four? I could handle that many by myself.” Kate gave him a look. “Problem is, you won’t let me.”

  Five

  Reese secured the kid in Kate’s basement – dirt floor, stone walls and cobwebs. He pulled out his cell phone as he climbed the creaking wooden steps, then dialled Mike as he wound his way through the house. He took a seat on the front stairs, watching Kate tape cardboard over the broken window while he filled Mike in on the events of the last couple of hours.

  “We go in when they take Kashani out for the negotiations, when their forces are split,” he finished.

  “I’ll send a couple of guys into the bargaining room. Soon as you give me the sign and we know the family is safe, they’ll move.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Reese disconnected and traded a look with Kate, who turned away and started pacing. It surprised him that she’d tip her hand that way, since it was a sure sign of agitation. Then again, he was pretty torn up himself. Being around Kate again, realizing he wasn’t over her. Over her? Hell, just seeing her had been like taking a blow to the chest, the kind of blow that knocked the breath out of you, made you ache in places you didn’t know you had and left you just a little dizzy, waiting for the ground beneath your feet to stop rocking again.

  On top of all that, while he was still struggling to find his feet and sort out his emotions, he found himself on a mission with her, knowing neither of them could forget the way the last one had ended.

  But at least that one had started with trust.

  “So,” she said, clearly on the same wavelength, “why did Mike send you?”

  “The Feds don’t know anything about these guys. Hell, they don’t even have names. Mike didn’t want to risk alerting them by calling up the task force, so he asked me to take the op.”

  “I thought you were on the task force.”

  “I stuck for a little while after you quit, but . . .” He shrugged, left the rest to her imagination.

  Her imagination had no trouble coming up with reasons for him to leave the task force. Like he’d felt guilty over the way their last mission had played out, or because it wasn’t the same without her . . . But those were just wishful thinking, fairy tales with happy-ever-after endings. Not real life.

  “So why did you take this one?” she asked him.

  “I was already in DC when the tip about Kashani’s kidnapping came in. I came here to look you up.”

  Kate took a few seconds to get her breath back, to tell herself it didn’t matter. Then she said, “Well, you found me,” in a credibly cool and firm voice. At least Reese seemed to buy it.

  “Not exactly how I intended our reunion to go,” he said.

  “Really? How did you think it would go?”

  “I didn’t think there’d be shooting.”

  “Then you have a very convenient memory.”

  “Actually I was giving you more credit than you deserve.”

  She went toe to toe with him, fury whipping through her blood. “I made the same mistake with you five years ago. Then I stopped waiting for you to show up.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to see me. Jesus, Kate, I helped screw you up. But you have to own your part of it.”

  “Part? I got to own it all, remember?”

  “I screwed up, I know that. I tried . . .” He scrubbed a hand over his head, fingers rasping over close-cropped black hair going grey at the temples. “I should have called you. By the time I figured it out too many months had passed.”

  “Years. You were always slow on the uptake,” she added grudgingly, “at least about that kind of thing.”

  Reese smiled a little.

  “We should get some rest,” Kate said. She tried to go around him, but he wasn’t moving. “The bedrooms are upstairs.”

  His gaze lifted, burning into hers.

  “On second thoughts, you can take the sofa.”

  “Nope.” Reese got to his feet.

  She refused to give ground. “Maybe you can pop back into my life, but my bed is off limits.”

  He crowded her back against the wall. “Who needs a bed?” he said, catching her hand and staking it to the wall. He lay his body on hers and took her mouth.

  She kissed him back, more aggression than surrender. He remembered her taste, but there was a dark edge to it now that raced through his blood like adrenaline, goading him to respond, to give as good as he got. He held back, let her spin him around and slam him against the wall. He let her use her teeth on him, and pound with her fists – not as an attack, but as a woman who’d been hurt by him. And then he let her collapse, her forehead resting against his shoulder as her breath sobbed in and out, and her tears wet his shirt. Then, because he knew she hated the loss of control, and because they both needed to remember this moment in a different light, he skimmed his hands up her ribs, lifting her sweatshirt and rubbing his thumbs across her nipples.

  Kate drew in a shuddering breath, pleasure spearing from her breasts to the centre of her stomach. Her back arched, pressing her closer to his heat. She lifted her arms, moaning when her sweatshirt disappeared, then her tank top. His hands were on her again, hot and strong. Need rushed through her and built. She remembered the need, how it felt to be filled to bursting with it – trembling one moment, energized the next, riding the edge of a wave of desperation that had her fumbling with the snap of his pants. They both shed clothing as they worked their way up the stairs, stopping every few steps for a drug-like kiss, an inciting caress.

  She was grateful for the bed since her muscles had gone rubbery, her head spinning by the time Reese laid her down. And then he took his mouth to her, from her breasts down her belly and lower, and every nerve ending she possessed seemed to fire at one time, all screaming with pleasure that built and grew. His eyes locked on hers and he whispered, “Let go,” and his fingers speared into her, shooting her to her peak.

  Before she could catch her breath, while she was still lost in the last shuddering wave of her climax, Reese slipped inside her, driving the pleasure to an impossible height. She loved the feel of him, his weight pressing her down into the mattress, heated skin over muscle that rippled and bunched, the sense of controlled strength that made her feel frail and protected, but not weak. Until he began to move and her pulse tripped, her breath rushing out again.

  “Give me a minute,” she wheezed.

  “I don’t think I have one.”

  Her lips curved, her gaze holding his as she shoved him on to his back, rose above him and shook him to the core with her beauty and strength, the kind of strength that made room for vulnerability. She was more than he could have hoped for, and then he was beyond thought, her body moving over his, heat and friction and raw sensation, driving him up and over, to a place that wrung every ounce of pleasure from him, until he was empty
, sated, floating back to earth to find her draped over him, just as wrung out, just as breathless, her heart galloping against his. Even the smile on his face was an effort. Not that he could have stopped it if he’d wanted to.

  “That’s a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.”

  “You got it, chickadee.”

  Kate rolled her eyes. “We never had any trouble in bed.”

  “That was a whole lot better than trouble-free.”

  “That was amazing.”

  “No,” he said, rolling until he was looming over her. “I’ll show you amazing.”

  Six

  Mistake or not, Kate had to admit she wouldn’t have slept so well – probably wouldn’t have slept at all, if not for Reese. She’d showered, and she felt remarkably alert and absolutely focused.

  When Reese came downstairs, showered and dressed, she was collecting weapons from around the house.

  “Definitely not a kid-friendly place,” he observed.

  “It is if the kids are being held by terrorists.”

  “Good point. Kashani is covered. As soon as they know his family is safe, the agents in the bargaining room will take out the Reformists and let him know he’s free to negotiate in good faith again. I’m going with you.”

  “No.”

  Reese didn’t make an overt physical threat, but he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. “We go together or stay together,” he said, prepared to back up his ultimatum.

  “You don’t trust me,” she said flatly.

  “It’s a two-man job.”

  “Then it’s just about right for one woman.”

  “This isn’t about feminism. All your people are compromised. The two at the house, if they’re not dead, are incapacitated in some way. Your other employees are on their own assignments, and you can’t pull them in and leave their protectees in the lurch. Go or stay, your choice, but we do it together.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “And I’ll keep saying it until it gets through that hard head of yours.”

  She sighed and gave up. She’d never take him in a contest of strength and, damn it, she couldn’t shoot him. “Always the eternal optimist,” she said and led the way into the den. The closet was an arsenal – metal lined, with a combination safe.