by Cindy Gerard
He’d had it bad for the California-born model whose melting-pot heritage—a blend of Latino, African American, Irish, and Cherokee Indian—had created outrageously exotic beauty.
But now wasn’t the time for a stroll down teen-memory lane. Now was the time for some answers.
He was fairly certain they’d ditched their pursuers, but caution kept his voice low. “Okay, time for Twenty Questions. And you know what’s at the top of the list.”
She gulped down a breath and let her head fall back against the rock wall. Her thick black hair trailed halfway down her back and Jesus, he had another flashback to those long-ago nights with a flashlight shining on a magazine spread featuring her angel face and sinner body, doing what teenage boys with runaway hormones did in the dark, in their beds.
“What’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?” she suggested in a voice made husky by the effort to replenish her lungs with oxygen.
He was relieved she hadn’t danced around the issue.
“That’ll work for starters.”
She rolled her head to the side and glanced at him just as the clouds parted for the moon. The vulnerability on her astonishing face coupled with the moonlight that shadowed her perfect brow elevated his heart rate by at least a hundred beats per minute.
Down, boy.
“Just taking a little downtime.” She looked sad. “Anyway, that was the plan.”
Right—it all came back to him. A few months ago, he’d spotted her photo on the cover of a gossip magazine while waiting to catch a flight out of Buenos Aires. After checking to make certain the rest of the guys weren’t watching, he’d been all over it. And, after reading the article, he understood why she would want to disappear from the spotlight these days.
Couldn’t say he’d been brokenhearted to read about her very public divorce from Marcus “Irreconcilable Differences” Chamberlin, the golden-boy senator from California, but he had felt bad that the paparazzi’s constant hounding over the “fairy-tale couple’s” divorce had forced her into seclusion. Now he knew where that seclusion was—and it sure as hell wasn’t a spa in Switzerland, as the tabloids had speculated.
No need to explain why she was traveling in disguise, either. There wasn’t a corner of the globe remote enough for Valentina to hide in. Her legendary beauty had made her internationally famous.
Jesus—he was on the run with Valentina. Barely able to suppress a laugh, he wiped a hand over his face. Of all the gin joints in all the world . . .
“So,” he whispered, after scanning the shadows again, “who were those guys?”
“I told you. I have no idea.”
He raised a brow. “No. Seriously. Who were they?”
A hand flew to her chest. Eyes as dark as ebony narrowed in anger. “What did I just say?”
Hokay. The lady had a temper, and she clearly didn’t like being questioned. “Well, they sure as hell knew who you were.”
She hugged herself against a chill that he’d known adrenaline overload couldn’t stave off forever. Unfortunately, she’d lost everything—her poncho, her hat, her bag were all back on the train with his jacket.
“They couldn’t have been after me.” She looked confused but committed. “No one even knows I’m down here.”
“Darlin’,” he said, exercising what he thought was a fair amount of patience in the face of the obvious, “they killed a man to get to you. They were willing to die to keep me from taking you away from them. They obviously knew who you were and exactly where you were.”
3
Her look of mystified agony cut straight to Luke’s heart. She shook her head. “No one knows I’m here,” she insisted again.
“Seriously? You don’t keep in touch with anyone? Not even your parents?”
“My father was a nonstarter. My mother is dead.”
He’d forgotten. More tabloid journalism filled in those gaps. She’d never known her father. Her mother had died in a car accident several years ago. “What about a best friend, then? Or your manager?”
“If I stumble on an Internet café, I contact my manager to let her know I’m fine. As for telling her where I am, no. Even she doesn’t know.”
Well, someone knew. No one of her celebrity status dropped that far off the grid. And a simple tap on her office computer could back-trace those brief e-mail messages and provide a loose fix on her location. For now, though, he’d play it her way because now was all about getting out of here alive. If he managed to pull that off, he’d find out what she wasn’t telling him later.
They probably should get moving again but, damn, he still couldn’t catch his breath. The thin air at this altitude was a killer. She was having the same problem. Five more minutes—then they were out of here while their luck held.
“Why are you helping me?” she asked.
He couldn’t stop a confused blink. “Are you for real?”
She blinked right back.
“Because you need help, for God’s sake,” he said when her silence demanded an answer. “Well, not you, as in Valentina, but you, as in a kid who looked scared to death. Was I supposed to just sit there and watch them do whatever they planned to do with you?”
“So, you’re what . . . a natural-born hero?” The sarcasm in her tone was outdistanced only by her doubt.
He was surprised by the sarcasm; not so much by the doubt. Hell, he doubted himself. “Actually, I have to work at it these days,” he admitted. Until those bastards had shot that defenseless man, he’d been determined to save his own ass and to hell with anyone else’s.
But back to the sarcasm. WTF? Was there a raving shrew lurking beneath the goddess façade?
Please, God, no. Don’t burst my bubble.
He studied her perfect angel face. No, he told himself decisively. No way. He couldn’t have been wrong all these years. She was just scared; he got that.
“Who exactly are you?”
The last time Luke had been given the third degree, he’d been tied to a chair with a gun pressed against his temple. He hadn’t liked it then. He didn’t much like it now. But because she was scared, because she should be wary, because she was Valentina, he cut her some slack.
“Luke. Luke Colter. But my friends call me Doc. And I guess now’s as good a time as any to confess that I’m a huge fan.”
Crap. That had sounded so much better in his head. From the way she scooted a few inches away from him, it was pretty clear that not only had he sounded like a dumbass of epic proportions, but he’d also spooked her.
He raised his hands to show her he was absolutely no threat. “Let’s take a little time out, okay?” he suggested, still keeping his voice to a whisper. “Don’t interpret fan to mean stalker. I’m just aware of who you are. Thought it might reassure you. My bad.”
Her gaze darted away, and he could see that she was thinking about running.
Yep, he’d spooked her good. Hell, she’d just been chased off a train at gunpoint. She’d seen him slit one man’s throat and bash in another one’s head. And in his grubby jeans and two-day beard, he looked more like a derelict than a Boy Scout.
She didn’t know him from the Unibomber, so from her perspective, what was to say he wasn’t the biggest danger in these mountains?
“Valentina,” he said quietly, shifting to look her in the eye.
Her head went down, but not before he saw the full-out terror on her face.
Aww, hell.
“I know you’re scared, but you have nothing to fear from me. I’m one of the good guys.”
She still didn’t look at him.
“Let’s try this,” he suggested. “What do you want to know about me? Just ask. I’m an open book.” Sort of. Right now she probably couldn’t handle the full truth about The Book of Luke.
She still didn’t say a word, which meant that spooked didn’t begin to cover it.
Man, he was blowing this.
“Okay. How ’bout I cover the basics for you? I’m an Aquarius. I love long walks on the beach, sof
t cuddly kittens, and my red Jimmy Choos. Fave movie—The Sound of Music. Favorite food—”
Her narrow-eyed glare was as good as a stop sign. Okay, humor wasn’t going to work, either. So how the hell was he supposed to make her relax?
“I’m from Montana,” he said, shifting into earnest mode as he swept another glance around them. “Grew up on a ranch, just like John Wayne. Cows. Horses. Big dumb dog who loved me.”
He left out the part about being voted “most likely to kiss the girls and make them cry” his senior year.
“John Wayne didn’t grow up on a ranch. He was born in Iowa,” she said, sounding accusatory.
“I know that,” he said, working for reasonable, but it came out sounding testy. “You weren’t supposed to, though. Give me a break here; I was just trying to find some level ground. So. Seriously. What do you want to know?”
She looked away, then back, her eyes narrowed. “You’re a doctor?” she asked, sounding doubtful.
“Doctor?” He rolled back the tape on his clumsy introduction. “Oh. No. Not a doc—a medic. Corps-man, if you want to pick nits. In the Navy. SEALs, actually.”
“For real? You’re a SEAL?” She didn’t want to be impressed but he could see that she was, marginally—if she believed him.
“I was a SEAL.”
“And now you do . . . what?”
How did he explain that he worked for a private contractor whose business was taking out terrorists, and not lose the little ground he’d gained?
“A little of this. A little of that.” He flashed his brightest smile, a tactic that had distracted a helluva lot of women over the years.
He should have known it wouldn’t work on her.
“Your open book has a lot of blank pages.”
Like a dog with a bone, this one.
“Okay, that’s fair,” Luke conceded and turned the floor back over to her. “Ask away.”
It was as much a dare as an invitation. She hesitated only a moment before accepting.
“What’s a Montana cowboy turned SEAL turned whatever doing in Peru?”
This, he could handle. “I’m on vacation. I was on my way back . . . home. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been working in the mountains with a medical team.”
That earned him another dubious look. “A medical team?”
“Humanitarian aid,” he said, relieved that she was finally more curious than wary. “A bunch of us—doctors, nurses, medics—hold clinics every year in the Quechua villages between Arequipa and Machu Picchu.”
She mulled that over, clearly trying to make up her mind whether she was going to buy it. “How very altruistic of you.”
Damn. She sure had snark mastered. He decided to ignore the fact that she’d managed to make it sound like an insult. “I had a SEAL buddy,” he explained, “who was born near Caylloma. Chewy was a five-year-old orphan when a missionary family adopted him and brought him to the States. He was the one who brought me to Peru the first time. Introduced me to his people, and to the sad state of their medical treatment.”
While the sense of loss Luke still felt over losing his Quechua SEAL team member several years ago wasn’t as acute now, it was still hard for him to think about it.
He touched the brim of the hat his old friend had given him and frowned, not wanting to walk that road right now. “That was a lot of years ago. Now I’m in the habit of coming back every year. My two weeks were up so I was on my way to Cuzco to catch a plane or I wouldn’t have been on that train.”
Though she still appeared to be uneasy, at least she was watching him with more interest than trepidation now. He could tell that she wanted to believe he was a good guy; she just wasn’t ready to take that final step.
“But you know all about humanitarian aid missions, right?” The press loved covering her visits to Sierra Leone, where she and her ex had made frequent trips over the past several years.
She blew off his mention of her charity work in Africa. “And you really were a SEAL?” Her tone was guardedly hopeful.
Due to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and the media’s hunger for breaking big stories, most of the world knew about the U.S. Spec Ops units. Along with the Marine Force Recon and the Army Rangers and Special Forces, the Navy SEALS got their fair share of ink and sound bites.
He smiled, upping the “trust me” ante, because he needed her to trust him if he was going to get any cooperation out of her. “Savior of God, country, and the American way.”
He was pouring it on thick, but luckily, it worked.
Her shoulders relaxed the slightest bit, and she finally smiled. More of a grimace, actually, but it beat a stick in the eye.
“I guess I really don’t have much choice but to believe you, do I?”
Resignation—he’d take it. It worked better for him than her doubt.
“You know, it’d be a lot easier to protect you if I knew who the baddies were.”
She bristled right up again. “How many ways can I say this? They couldn’t have been looking for me. Once they saw me, maybe they recognized me and figured they could hold me for ransom or something. Other than that, I haven’t got a clue.”
Once again, she was convincing. But if she kept looking at him with those ink-black eyes and beseeching him with that “kiss me, baby” mouth, she could probably convince him that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a front-runner for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Maybe it’s a stalker,” she suggested in a frustrated tone. “I’ve had plenty of problems with overzealous fans. Or . . . I don’t know . . . I recently fired my agent. Maybe he’s gone off the deep end or something.”
She was reaching, but he humored her. “Why’d you fire him?”
“Because he was trying to control me instead of work for me.”
Luke shook his head. “If what you say is true, that no one knows where you are—”
“No one does,” she insisted again.
“Then neither option computes. Stalkers and agents wouldn’t have the kind of international connections to find you, let alone send out hit men to the end of the earth. There’s gotta be something you’re not seeing. Something you’re not remembering. Just keep digging into your memory banks. It’ll eventually surface.”
Her frustration showed on her face. He hoped to hell that his fascination wasn’t showing on his. He should probably stop staring at her and keep a keener eye out for the bad guys, but Jesus God, she was stunning. Even more striking now and in person than when he’d first laid eyes on that billboard damn near twenty years ago.
She’d been fifteen or sixteen when she was discovered by a Hollywood modeling agent, whose savvy marketing had used her knock-out beauty and wholesome sex appeal to launch a designer French perfume and catapulted her to international fame. In a world where beauty was generally fleeting and popularity fickle, she had built a career that spanned nearly two decades and was still going strong.
Even eighteen years later, she was still a major fox. Now, however, was not the time to get caught up in one of his all-time fave adolescent fantasies—stranded alone with Valentina and rescuing her from the bad guy of the day—that had bizarrely turned into reality. Just his freaking luck, he finally had her where he wanted her and his hero quotient had hit rock bottom.
He jerked his gaze away from her face. He had to get his shit together: They were a long way from being clear of trouble. It was the middle of the night. The temp had dropped below freezing in the last half hour and the adrenaline rush was letting down fast. If the boys with the guns and night-vision scopes didn’t get them, the elements could.
He stood up abruptly, picked up his backpack, and settled the straps on his shoulders. “We’d better get moving. You ready?”
“Like I have a choice?”
She finally smiled, which showed him what he needed to know about her state of mind.
She had spunk. He liked that. She was going to need a lot of it if they were going to get out of these mountains alive.
4
> “You are telling me that you have not yet secured the target?”
After excusing himself from the dinner table where his wife, Jin, and their three-year-old daughter, Cho, now awaited him, Ryang Wong Jeong pressed the phone tighter to his ear and closed his office door behind him.
The room smelled of new leather and lemon oil. The furnishings were so recently purchased Ryang wasn’t yet comfortable with the placement of the antique black lacquered desk, and was uncertain whether he was pleased with the boldness of the pattern in the woven silk rug. The four-thousand-square-foot Macau high-rise apartment was his latest extravagance. His oasis. His most recent reward to himself—and to Jin and Cho, of course—for the success of his business endeavors.
Now his sanctuary had been compromised by this insult of a report.
“How difficult can it be to detain one woman—a pampered Western woman—and deliver her to me?”
He listened as his operative on the ground in Peru, where they had tracked the woman via her Internet connections, related the deaths of two of Ryang’s assets, killed by a man who had intervened on the woman’s behalf.
“This man—he was accompanying her?”
“Unknown. We only saw a glimpse of him after he’d eliminated the men we had sent to remove her from the train.”
“Tell me why you are not dead like the others.”
A long pause. “We were securing the engineer, ensuring that he did not radio for assistance. By the time we arrived in the passenger car—”
“Two assets on my payroll were dead,” Ryang broke in, “and the woman had escaped.”
The ringing silence was telling.
“Find and secure her,” he ordered with a deadly calm. “Find and dispense with this man who has cost me time and money. And be advised, I have no patience for another phone call advising me of failure.”
He hung up, willed his breathing to a steady cadence, then rejoined his family with a smile in place. Jin and Cho were everything to him. He would never allow any of this aspect of his business to touch them.
“My apologies.” He plucked his napkin from beside his plate and settled himself at the table. “The kimchi is delicious, do you not agree?”