“You’re worried about him. That’s why finding him is so important to you. Isn’t it?”
He met her mahogany eyes, drinking in the compassion and unnerving insight reflected there.“He’s my partner. It’s my duty to find him.”
She shook her head. “He’s more than your partner. He’s your friend. You said he was like a brother to you.”
Alec sat straighter, an uneasy prickle slithering up his back.
“You’d feel the need to find him even if he weren’t your partner,” Erin said. “Because you care about him.”
Alec tensed and furrowed his brow. “No. It’s not like that.”
Agents for the black ops team couldn’t afford to care. Emotions had no place in the deadly operations and delicate tightrope they walked with enemy forces, double agents, skittish informants and calculating mercenaries. His survival in the cutthroat world of espionage and counterterrorism meant using his brain, his training, his instincts. Emotions muddied the waters and weakened resolve. A moment’s hesitation given to remorse or sympathy or misplaced allegiance could prove lethal.
Erin’s thumb stroked a hypnotizing pattern on his wrist, and her mouth pulled in a sideways grin. “Alec, I can see it in your face, in your eyes whenever you talk about him. I’m not saying there’s anything funny going on between you. But it’s obvious he’s important to you.”
Her caress left him off balance and feeling exposed. How in Hades was he supposed to survive the next several days cooped up on this mountain with her? She distracted him with her every breath, her every smile.
Alec carefully extracted his hand from hers and smoothed the edges of the map. Rather than address her observations regarding Daniel, he ducked his head to study the images, the words he’d already memorized. To no avail. He waved a hand at the map and scowled. “What the hell does all this mean?”
Erin made a raspberry at him and pushed back from the table. “Okay, I can take a hint. Bradley was the same way. Men don’t like to talk about their feelings. I’ll drop it.”
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
As she sauntered back to the kitchen, she cast him an I-don’t-buy-that look. “Just as well, since I’ve been pregnant I’ve had enough feelings for three people. My hormones are off the charts. I cry over the silliest things.”
Great. He was cohabitating with a sexy, emotional roommate. He could defuse a brick of C4 explosives without blinking, but a teary woman left him in a cold sweat. Alec suppressed a groan and picked up the edges of the map. He held the fake parchment up to block his view of long legs and tousled hair.
“Like the other day…” Erin chuckled. “I had a roach in the kitchen. Blech! Nasty little creatures. I squashed it, of course, but then I got all sniffly because maybe that roach had a family that would miss him. I had to laugh at myself. Grieving a roach… Sheesh.”
Behind the screen of Daniel’s map, Alec lifted a corner of his mouth. Sheesh was right. The tender heart.
And so the gabfest begins for another day… .
Alec blew a slow breath through pursed lips and turned the map ninety degrees to study one of the pictures from a different angle.
“Alec, do the letters l-i-l-x-t-r-a-o-c-o-m mean anything to you?”
He peered over the top of the map and raised an eyebrow. “Should they?”
She pointed to the map and wiggled her finger. “When you hold the paper up like that, those letters show through, like someone traced them in dark ink and it soaked through.”
“Really?” A spark of revived hope jump-started his pulse.
“Here, I’ll show you.” She padded across the floor and slipped the map from his hands. After clicking on the floor lamp by the sofa, she held the map so that it was backlit.
Sure enough, the letters she’d read off stood out when viewing the sheet from the back. Along with a set of lines. Partial tracings of the swirling designs.
“Lilxtraocom?” Alec wrote the letters on a notepad and scratched the two days’ growth of stubble on his cheek. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
Erin brought the map back to the table and helped herself to a sheet from his notepad. “Maybe they’re scrambled up.”
“Maybe.” Alec bent over the pad and applied several theories, various codes to the letters. Nothing jumped out at him. He sipped his coffee and shook his head. “Nothing. I got nothing. What are you telling me, Lafitte?”
He glanced at Erin’s sheet and found her doodling. Filling in the O’s and enlarging the dot over the I. He rolled his eyes and returned to his own work. But something about her pad niggled at him.
“X marks the spot?” she mumbled.
“Let me see that.” He slid her doodle page from under her fingers and studied it, the filled in O’s. “Ocom… Dot com.” He surged out of his chair and jabbed the power button on his computer. “Maybe it’s a website address. A URL.”
Erin came to hover behind him, and her sweet vanilla scent teased him. His hands flew across the keyboard, typing in the address. A blank screen popped up, then a prompt for a password to enter the site.
“A password?” Erin moaned. “How are we supposed to know the password?”
“I told you. Daniel and I think alike. The password is something I’ll know.” He twisted his mouth as he thought. He tried P-I-R-A-T-E first.
Invalid response.
“Hm. Too obvious.”
C-O-L-O-M-B-I-A.
“Why Colombia?” Erin asked.
“Last place I saw Daniel. We were on a mission in the Colombian rain forest when—”
Invalid response.
“When?”
He gave her a side glance. “Never mind.”
She grunted. “Try muleheaded. If Daniel knows you like I do, that’s as likely as anything else.”
He entered her suggestion to humor her. And gloated when Invalid response popped on the screen. He rocked his chair backward and steepled his fingers against his lips as he racked his brain. Lafitte, Ramirez and Blackbeard received similar results.
“You said Daniel is from Louisiana, right?” she asked, tapping her tooth with a fingernail.
Alec typed in Louisiana while she continued thinking aloud. “And the site is ‘lil xtra.’ Little extra as in—”
“Lagniappe,” he finished for her.
“Yeah.” She sounded surprised that he knew the term. “The Creole word that means a little something extra, like a special gift.”
“Or the name of his hometown.” Alec hit the enter key. “Bingo. We’re in.”
Chapter 6
Before turning his attention to the website, Alec presented Erin with her own lagniappe. A smile.
Not one of his corner-of-the-mouth twitches or his sarcastic grimaces, but a light-the-room, stop-her-heart smile. Erin’s breath stuttered from her lungs, and weak-kneed, she dropped onto the chair next to him. Alec’s smile transformed the craggy features of his face, softening the hard lines and warming his blue eyes. Devastating.
But the all-business facade returned as Alec studied the images on the screen. “What the—? This can’t be right.”
“What’s wrong?” Concern plucked at Erin as a confused glower shaded Alec’s face.
“These pictures…the date stamp says April twenty-eighth of this year.”
Dragging her attention back to the computer monitor, Erin scrutinized the picture of a Hispanic man stepping out of a black limo. “So?”
“That’s Ramirez, the rebel leader Daniel and I were tracking on our last assignment. On April twenty-sixth, two days before this picture, we were set to capture him. But all hell broke loose.” He sent her hooded glance. “Ramirez was shot by snipers from a rival militia.”
A chill settled over Erin, imagining Alec in the midst of such a volatile scenario. Her mouth dried. “Dear God, what did you do?”
“Daniel and I aborted our mission and got out of the area before our cover could be blown.” His face darkened. “Or at least I got out. Daniel’s been missing ever
since I gave the order to pull back.”
Anguish washed over Alec’s face, but he visibly shoved the pain down, firming his jaw and blanking the emotion from his eyes. The pain he denied burrowed to Erin’s core and stung her eyes. He could avoid the truth all he wanted, but avoidance didn’t change fact. The man grieved for his friend.
And if he could feel that deeply for his work partner, how much more could he love a woman? Erin shivered remembering the leashed passion in his kiss last night, the intensity she saw whenever she looked into his eyes. Beneath all his rigid control and focused energy, she had no doubt Alec Kincaid was a wellspring of complex emotions—whether he chose to address those feelings or not.
He tapped the monitor with a finger. “This date has to be wrong. If Ramirez wasn’t dead on the twenty-eighth, he should have been close to it. He took at least one head shot. No way he survived. So how—”
“You’re sure that’s Ramirez in the picture?” Erin narrowed her gaze on the mustachioed man in the photo.
“Yeah.” Alec enlarged the picture and zoomed in on the man’s neck. “See that mole. Next to it, the line there. That’s a scar he got while in prison.”
“So it’s either him or a really good imposter, huh?”
“It’s him.” Certainty set the grim slash of Alec’s mouth.
“So then the man you saw in the jungle that day. He—”
“Was the imposter.” He banged the desk with his fist. “Damn it, I knew something wasn’t right with the whole scene. Ramirez always travels with a whole entourage of bodyguards. See here in the photo, all these guys he’s got with him?”
“Mmm-hmm.” But rather than the picture, Erin studied Alec. His expression reflected the rapid succession of realizations that unfolded in his mind.
“The guy in the jungle that day only had one guard with him. Before I could reason through the anomaly, the shooting started.”
“You were watching the wrong man?”
“We were set up.” Anger flashed in his dark eyes, and a muscle in his jaw jumped. “Fed phony intel. I’d bet the whole deal, the plane, the meeting in the clearing was all for our benefit. Someone wanted to flush us out, wanted to snare us in a trap.”
“The other militia?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t fit. Why storm the clearing and kill the players before Daniel and I showed our hand?”
“So maybe this rival militia caught wind of the same phony intelligence you had and thought they were going to bag the leader of their enemy.”
“Maybe. That still doesn’t tell me who sold us out.”
She studied the fire in his eyes as he analyzed the new information. Energy vibrated from him, and a ripple of sensation rolled through her like a shockwave. Just being near this man, seeing him operate, knowing his mind was as strong as his body, filled her with an awe and respect that pooled low in her belly.
“Daniel knows.” The low grate of his voice and the piercing stare he sent her echoed with the same conviction. “That’s why he disappeared. He knows who set us up.”
Erin swallowed hard. “So why doesn’t he just tell you! Why all the hidden messages and obscurity?”
“If I was being followed, stands to reason he had a tail, too. He’s lying low, watching his back. He can’t just send me the information without risking a leak. He has to stay invisible for some reason.”
“No written or electronic record. Plausible deniability. The whole theory behind black ops. Right?”
He hesitated. “That may be true for the bureaucrats. Our reasons for being careful, for leaving no physical trail, are more personal. Lives are at stake if we screw up. Not just our lives. Our informants. Other operatives in the field. Innocents.” He reached out and brushed his knuckles along her cheek, and a dizzying tingle raced through her. “People like you who get caught in the crossfire.”
Regret softened the hard edge to his jaw, and he cupped her chin in his hand. “I’m sorry for getting you involved in this mess. If there’d been another way to keep you safe…”
The lulling rasp of his voice skimmed over her like a caress, and a warm lethargy flooded her body. Despite the harrowing trip to this hideaway, she felt safer with Alec than she had in years. But how long would he feel compelled to guard her? Once he left, how did she know she and the baby would be out of harm’s way?
“When will I be able to go home?”
His mouth tightened as he thought. “As soon as I find out what Daniel knows, find the people behind the fiasco in the jungle.”
“The same people who hired Manny and his sidekick, I bet.”
His lips quirked sideways, and she longed to see another of his full-fledged smiles.
“You catch on quick.” Alec turned back to the computer and clicked through the series of surveillance photos of Ramirez. “More of the same.”
His nimble fingers danced across the keyboard, and she imagined those same deft hands moving over her body, skillfully bringing her pleasure. A shudder of anticipation rippled to her marrow. She sighed and stroked a hand over her growing belly. As if he’d want anything to do with her and her pregnancy-swollen body…
“Hello, what’s this?”
Alec’s voice shook her from her daze. A map of Louisiana glowed from the screen, and he studied the monitor with assessing scrutiny.“Will you bring me the pirate map from the table?”
Erin retrieved the fake parchment and handed it to Alec. The jangle of excitement stirred in her gut, the sense that they were onto something important.
He held the map against the monitor image, and the light from the screen seeped dimly through the paper. The scrawled lines Daniel had drawn in black ink stood out.
“Look.” Alec couldn’t hide the excitement in his voice. “His marks corresponded perfectly with the highways and country roads between his hometown in the north, southward to this tiny X on the map.”
“Is he telling you to go to this place he’s mapped out?”
“So it would seem.” Alec’s countenance radiated a hopefulness and assurance. Seeing Alec’s morale raised buoyed her own spirits. When she looked closer at the map of Louisiana, she sent Alec a dubious frown. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that part of Louisiana mostly marshland and bayous? Why would Daniel want you to go into the swamp?”
He refolded Daniel’s letter, hit Print to make a hard copy of the Louisiana map, then pinned a penetrating stare on her. “That’s what I intend to find out.”
* * *
Restless, Alec prowled the main room of the bunker, examining the new facts of the case from every angle while he gathered gear and supplies in preparation for leaving.
By contrast, Erin was still and quiet while, with steady artist’s hands, she drew the lines from Daniel’s letter on the Louisiana map. GPS coordinates made her efforts a waste of time, but the task kept her occupied while he planned their trip to the alligator-infested swamps of south Louisiana.
He hadn’t informed Erin yet that he was taking her with him. He didn’t dare leave her alone, even here in the relative safety of the bunker. Learning that he and Daniel had likely been set up that day in the jungle rattled Alec, shook him to the core. Someone he’d trusted had betrayed him, had nearly gotten him killed. Until he knew what he was dealing with, who he was up against, he wanted Erin at his side, where he knew he could keep her safe.
He paused for a moment from his packing to watch Erin draw. A loose curl of hair skimmed her cheek, while she hunched over her work, her slim fingers gracefully sketching. Admiration tugged in his chest. She’d been a surprising help to him in the past two days, her insights and instincts sharp and accurate, her artistic talent commendable. The woman was both bright and beautiful. A potent combination.
Erin bit her lower lip in concentration, and his senses were assailed with the memory of sucking that same lip into his mouth and sampling it with his tongue. Heat spun through him, remembering her hungry response to his kiss, her sweet taste. A low growl rumbled from his throat as
the desire to kiss her again swelled like a storm inside him.
Her tempting chocolate eyes angled up from her work with an exasperated glance. “You’re hovering.”
Alec gritted his teeth and reined in the tempest brewing in his blood. Chocolate eyes, vanilla scent and caramel hair. Damn it, the woman was a sensual feast for a starving man. A sexy sundae he longed to melt with his heat, then lap up each last drop. He envisioned her naked and pliant in his arms while he licked sticky sweetness from her skin… .
Holy freakin’ moley! His body on fire, Alec rocketed from his chair with a loud huff.
“I’m doing my best!” she protested, misunderstanding the source of his current agitation.
“I’ll be back,” he muttered as he strode toward the ladder that led out to the cave. “I need air.” More accurately, he needed the shock of the icy outdoors to bring him back to his senses and cool the lava in his veins. I’d bet you’ve never run from a problem… .
If only she knew.
Alec raced up the rungs, his body taut with tension, and he shouldered open the trapdoor. Escaping. Running. Coward.
What was wrong with him? Where was his self-control? The need and desire that pounded through him were overwhelming, staggering. He’d been dangerously close to breaking his promise not to kiss her again, moments away from tossing her across the Murphy bed and sating the raging beast that howled inside him. Oddly, knowing she was pregnant added a sharp-edged twist to the need pulsing through him. He was more protective of her, more determined to defend her and…at the same time, to claim her for himself.
He leaned against the wall of the chilly cave and laughed bitterly as he cast his gaze along the dank rock. He even had the right setting for his caveman mentality.
Get over it, buddy. You’ve no place in your life for a woman and her kid. Family, loved ones, friends made him vulnerable to the scum that wanted to manipulate him. If he didn’t allow himself personal relationships, his enemies couldn’t use the people he cared about against him.
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