by Cindy Gerard
“My wife, Jenna.” Gabe smiled back at B.J. “Jenna— this is B. J. Chase.”
“We’ll talk.” Jenna offered an apology over her shoulder. “Soon as we get our girl settled. Gabe. Hot tea. Rafe, get the pillows from the guest bedroom. Today!” she ordered with two quick, direct glares that sent both men scrambling.
I could like this woman, B.J. thought, but even as the notion took root, she knew she’d never invest the time or the effort to make that happen. She was the outsider here. The speck of white lint on a black sweater. This was clearly a closely knit group, one she wasn’t and would never be invited to be a part of.
That was fine. That was life. Her life, at any rate. In the meantime, she was comfortable using both Jones and Mendoza. She needed to keep Stephanie safe until she heard back from Sherwood, who was arranging a safe house for her. Frankly, she couldn’t think of a single place where Stephanie would be safer than right where she was at the moment.
Whoever these guys were, whoever they worked for, they weren’t in the mix at NSA. Considering NSA might be the seat of the problem, it was a damn good thing. So what did that leave? She’d figured Mendoza for CIA in Caracas. CIA or a merc. Now she was leaning more toward independent contractor. Frankly, right now, she didn’t care. All she cared about was that they had the skills, the means, and more important, a personal investment in keeping Stephanie safe.
Mendoza, if she didn’t miss her guess, had a very personal investment if the way he looked at Stephanie with those Latin brown eyes was any clue. An unexpected little twinge of jealousy caught her off guard. Way off guard.
Jealous? Of the way Mendoza looked at Stephanie? No. Not jealousy, she decided. Maybe she’d cop to a little bit of longing. She still remembered what it had been like to feel the unconditional love of someone who cared about you. And no matter what her mother said, her father had loved her.
Watching these three people who clearly loved Stephanie fuss over her—well, it reminded B.J. of what she didn’t have anymore.
Get over it.
“I’ll take those,” Jenna Jones said as Mendoza returned with the pillows. “Here we go, sweetie. One for your head, one for your poor wrist. How’s that?”
“I’m fine,” Stephanie said, finally offered the opportunity to speak. “I appreciate all this concern, but please stop fussing over me. All of you,” she added, turning her doe brown eyes to Mendoza.
B.J. was saved from watching Mendoza’s reaction when her cell phone rang. She checked the display. It was Sherwood. She didn’t want to talk to him in front of these people. Not until she found out more about them.
“Out there.” Jenna hitched her chin in the direction of a pair of French doors behind a large dining area to the left of the kitchen. Apparently, she’d read B.J.’s expression and realized she wanted privacy.
B.J. nodded her thanks and made a beeline for the doors, which led to an outdoor terrace. Night had fallen on the city. Two exterior lights cast a soft glow as she stepped outside onto carefully laid slate tiles. They were ten stories up. Traffic crawled like ants with headlights on the streets below. This high, the exhaust smell was faint. The night air had started to cool after the heat of the day. On the terrace, lush ferns filled huge terra-cotta pots. Pansies and petunias nodded in the slight breeze. A glass-top table and a set of chairs in shades of taupe, lavender, and green occupied one end of the large outdoor space. A couple of matching chaise longues filled the other. All the signs of an affluent, comfortable couple.
“Talk to me,” she said when she was sure she was out of earshot.
“Where are you?” Sherwood’s tone was all business.
“D.C. An apartment where Jones and his wife— here’s another name for you: Jenna—live.” She rattled off the address for Sherwood to add to the cache of information she’d passed him when she’d called him from the hospital.
She’d used her phone to snap a photo of the dead shooter and his Steyr AUG rifle before Mendoza and Jones had tossed the rifle in the back of the SUV. Then she’d e-mailed the picture to Sherwood. She’d also snapped photos of Mendoza and Jones without them knowing it and sent those too, along with the names they were going by and the plate number of their vehicle. In addition, she’d advised Sherwood that Mendoza had been the man who had mucked up her Caracas operation.
She was hoping Sherwood had some answers for her.
“How’s the Tompkins woman?”
“Broken wrist.” She walked to the edge of the terrace, leaned a hip against an iron railing painted a pale cream. “Other than that she’s fine, but you’d think she was on her deathbed the way these people are fussing over her. Speaking of them… are you going to tell me what you found out?”
When her boss hesitated, she felt a premonition of doom.
“You’re not going to like it,” Sherwood said finally.
Not going to like it? Sherwood was a master of understatement.
There wasn’t enough chocolate in the world to make the news he delivered palatable. By the time he finished filling her in, B.J. not only didn’t like it, she was quietly fuming and frustrated and wishing she’d never heard of, run into, or crossed swords with Raphael Choirboy Mendoza.
9
Rafe was waiting by the door when a silent, very pissedoff B. J. Chase stepped back inside the apartment. When she saw him standing there, she stopped short, her shoulders stiffening.
Xena, warrior princess.
He didn’t know why that thought came to mind. She wasn’t an Amazon. In heels she might possibly have made five-six, maybe five-seven. And she wasn’t a brunette. But she was fighting mad and itching to lock horns as she squared off in front of him, her blue eyes hardening with anger.
That amazing head of wild blonde hair was backlit by the light from a wall sconce. Curls drifted to her shoulders, flared to the middle of her back, and framed her face like a halo—although there was not one damn thing angelic about the look in her eyes.
She still wore the remnants of the shootout at the park. A smudge of dirt on her right cheek. A small, triangular tear in the leg of her shorts. A skinned knee. A thin trail of blood tracked down the inside of her bare arm that he hadn’t noticed before.
“You really ought to take care of that.” Rafe nodded toward her arm.
She scowled, then followed his gaze, looking surprised and then dismissive when she saw it. “It’s fine.”
Yeah, you’re one tough cookie, aren’t ya?
“Call from your boss?” he asked carefully as he walked to the kitchen cabinets. He and Gabe had used the first aid kit often enough that he knew Jenna kept it in a drawer near the sink. He dug it out and when she didn’t answer, glanced over his shoulder to see she was still glaring.
“Guess I’ll take that as a yes.” He ripped open an antiseptic pad. “And judging from the warm and fuzzy look on your face, I’m also guessing that he called because he’s been talking with our boss.”
Again, her lack of response was all the answer he needed. It also told him how much the news that she was now taking her orders from him appealed to her.
“I said I’m fine,” she insisted when he squatted down in front of her.
He ignored her and went to work on her knee.
She flinched when he cupped her calf to hold her steady—and out of nowhere, he was hit by an acute and magnified awareness of everything female about her. Most of all, though, he was aware of that flinch.
That sure as hell didn’t compute. He’d manhandled her in Caracas—shoved her against the Jeep, dragged her down a street, cuffed her, blindfolded her, then picked her up and tossed her sweet little ass inside the back of a van. He hadn’t seen any vulnerability then. He hadn’t seen it today in the aftermath of a shootout where she could have been the one killed instead of the bastard who’d been after Stephanie.
No. DIA Officer Chase hadn’t shown vulnerability when they’d come barreling in, guns blazing. She’d been ready to face off with them, just as she’d faced off with an assa
ssin. It was all the more fascinating, then, that a little non-hostile, male-on-female contact had her tensing.
He stood up, satisfied that her knee was mostly bruised and barely scraped, and started in on her arm. She flinched again when he touched her but she stood her ground.
As he wiped at the blood, she didn’t say a word but she didn’t pull away either. She just looked up at him with those big blue eyes full of something that could have been challenge, could have been annoyance… or, he realized, could have been bafflement over the fact that he was taking care of her.
That was it, he realized. She wasn’t used to having anyone take care of her or sticking tight when she’d done her damnedest to warn him away. He guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that. This one would chew her own arm off before she’d ask anyone to help her out of a bear trap.
“Can we please get this over with?” she grumbled.
He looked up and straight into her eyes. This close, he could see that they weren’t merely blue. They were much more intriguing than that, with specks of silver and gray.
He finished cleaning the wound, which wasn’t more serious than a long scratch. “Yeah,” he said. “I think we can finish up now.”
He reached behind him to the counter, snagged the bottle of peroxide and a cotton ball. “Might sting.”
“Already does.”
He knew she wasn’t talking about the peroxide he was applying to the abrasions.
A tiny kernel of guilt wound through him. “I know you’re not pleased with the arrangements. And I know what it feels like to have the rug ripped out from underneath me like what just happened to you.”
“Rug? Try wall-to-wall carpeting.”
“Look,” he said, carefully affixing a Band-Aid, “for what it’s worth, it wouldn’t matter what agency was involved—yours, FBI, Homeland Security, whatever. Where Stephanie’s life is concerned, protection is non-negotiable. It has nothing to do with your ability, but we won’t take any chances with her safety. And since we don’t know who we can trust, we’re going to run the show.” She narrowed her eyes. He understood that look. “Your boss fill you in on who we are and who we work for?”
“You’re private contractors.” Disdain dripped from each word. “You work for a man named Nathan Black out of Argentina. Got quite the ‘shadow warrior’ legend building.”
He cocked a brow. “Do tell.”
She shrugged. “I’ve heard the stories. I wrote them off as intelligence community legends that circulate among the ranks. Guess I have to believe them now.”
“But you don’t approve. What a surprise. Like most ‘legit’ federal agents, you hold our kind in roughly the same regard as, oh, say, roadkill, right?”
Her silence pretty much confirmed that it didn’t matter that Nate Black ran Black Ops, Inc. with the precision and integrity of a special ops military unit. Didn’t matter that the BOIs worked exclusively for Uncle. The “legit” warriors—those with badges and dog tags—still considered the BOIs guns for hire, cowboys, rule breakers. It pissed them off that the BOIs got a little more latitude because they worked off the grid.
“Seems everybody forgets,” he went on after he’d put the first aid kit back where he’d found it, “that the jobs we take on are generally ones no one else will touch. Why, you might ask, cara? I’ll tell you why. Because, one, they’re too risky; and two, there’s too much of a chance of ending up good and dead.”
“You screwed me over in Caracas.”
Ah. Now they were getting somewhere. The woman held a grudge. So, fine, he’d had to relent and give up Eduardo—a sanctioned DOD operation did trump the BOI directive—but he’d made her pay for screwing up his op. It couldn’t have been easy for her when she’d filed her report.
“You kept my weapons,” she pressed on. “You kept my team’s weapons. And you did it out of spite. You knew what would happen.”
Yeah, he’d known. The government didn’t consider it good form to lose military-style weapons in a not-sonice country. A major no-no.
“I took ten kinds of heat over it,” she continued. “Had to appear before a disciplinary board. They threatened to reassign me to Nebraska, for God’s sake. I’m lucky I didn’t get a demotion.”
“Yeah, well, I was pissed at the time.”
“Gee, guess that makes it all fine and dandy.”
Right. This was going nowhere fast. “So how long have you worked for DIA?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Long enough. You don’t have to worry about me pulling my weight.”
He stared at her long and hard. “Okay. If you’re going to be pissed off for the duration of this op, I don’t need the grief. Just say the word, I’ll make a call and you’re out of here.”
She looked away, then expelled a deep breath and met his eyes. “I’ve been unprofessional. I apologize. I want in on this.”
It was as close to her saying “uncle” as he was going to get. He held her gaze, finally nodded. “And I want you in. Now what do we need to do to make this work for you?”
“Answer some questions.”
“Shoot.”
“What’s your connection with the Tompkinses?”
Rafe crossed his arms over his chest and leaned a hip against the kitchen counter. “Your boss didn’t tell you?”
“What he told me was that you’d be calling the shots from this point on.”
He actually felt a little sorry for her then. She was used to taking charge, taking risks, and taking orders only from DIA. No wonder the news that she was now taking orders from him had settled about as well as a jalapeño would settle a sour stomach.
He glanced over his shoulder toward the living area, where Stephanie was still resting on the sofa with Jenna and Gabe sitting and talking nearby. “Come on. Let’s go back outside where we can talk.
“You thirsty?” he asked suddenly. “Because I’m thirsty. Hold on.”
He dug into the fridge, where he knew Gabe always kept water, grabbed two bottles, then followed her out to the terrace.
“Steph had a brother, did you know that?” he asked after he’d shut the door behind them.
“Stephanie and I worked together in a strictly professional capacity.”
Of course they did. No “girl talk” allowed in B. J. Chase’s world. He handed her one of the bottles, then lifted a hand, indicating she should sit with him at the outdoor table.
She shook her head, unscrewed the bottle cap, and took a long drink. Then she got all matter-of-fact with him. “So. You said Stephanie had a brother. Past tense. What happened to him?”
He uncapped his own water and took a long pull. “Bryan—that was his name.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and saw Bryan Babyface Tompkins’s perpetual grin. “Bry was part of a special military task force. A cross-branch compilation of Spec Ops personnel. SEALS, Delta, Special Forces, Rangers… hell, we even had a couple of spooks on the team.”
“And who was we?”
Just because she didn’t want to sit didn’t mean he couldn’t. He pulled out a chair and sat. “Bry, Gabe, me… those guys on my team in Caracas. Several others. Anyway, back then we were military. Did the dirty jobs then, too, you know?”
The outside lighting was dim but he could still see by the look on her face that she did know. Anyone in the intelligence community knew the history of American warfare. They knew about covert ops, the ones that never made the papers, never showed up on any disk or dossier. The ones that were sanctioned under the table by the president and were known only to him and the Joint Chiefs.
“What happened?” she asked, and he thought he actually saw… hell, he didn’t know. A little softening around her eyes, a little give in the set of her shoulders as she moved to the railing and leaned against it with her back to the flickering lights of the city beyond and below them.
“What always happens to the good ones,” he said, forgetting about her reaction and thinking back to that day in Sierra Leone. That horrible, shit-ho
le day when remote intelligence made a wrong call and sent the Task Force Mercy team into an RUF ambush. There wasn’t supposed to be a handful of the murdering Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front militia within a mile of their location. And Bryan, well, Bry wasn’t supposed to have taken a bullet that severed his femoral artery. He wasn’t supposed to have bled out while they’d been helpless to save him.
“Sniper,” he finally said, more to himself than to her, as he cupped his bottle between his hands and absently rocked it back and forth on the tabletop.
Blood. There had been so much blood. Running like a river into the dirt. Making mud. Making death. “Doc tried. He… he couldn’t—”
Her hand on his arm jolted him back to the Washington, D.C., night.