One Tough Marine

by Paula Graves

  She gave in. He saw it in the softening set of her mouth, the liquid surrender in her eyes. He felt color bloom over her throat, hot beneath his touch. When he bent closer, she moved in response, until her breasts brushed against his ribcage, setting his body ablaze.

  Nothing on earth could have stopped him from kissing Abby Chandler in that moment.

  Nothing but the loud trill of the disposable cell phone.

  With a groan, he stepped back and grabbed the phone, his gaze locked with Abby’s. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and dark, her respiration rapid. She licked her lips and looked away.

  “Yeah?” he answered the phone, not caring that his voice was gruff.

  It was Sam, of course. He sounded grim. “You need to get back on the road, Luke. As soon as possible.”

  Luke tightened his grip on the phone. “Why? What’s happened?”

  “Someone firebombed the Pattersons’ house three hours ago.”

  Chapter Eight

  Luke’s horrified expression felt like a punch to Abby’s gut. He paced away from her, his movements quick and angry. “How did that happen, Sam? Are they okay?”

  Abby wished she could hear the other end of the conversation. Luke’s reaction was scaring the hell out of her.

  “Thank God. Are they under police protection?”

  Had someone gotten to Luke’s family? She moved closer to him, braving the anger radiating from him like heat waves. “What is it?” she whispered.

  He rested his hand on the side of her neck. “The Pattersons’ house was firebombed,” he murmured. “They’re okay.”

  The remains of Abby’s dinner rose in the back of her throat. Swallowing hard, she dropped to the sofa and gazed up at Luke, flames of guilt licking at her gut.

  It was her fault. She’d brought this nightmare into their lives. Into Luke’s. She should have handled things on her own. For God’s sake, she’d been married to Matt for eight years. She should have fought harder to make him share more of his life with her. Then, maybe, she’d have half a clue what the hell these people were after.

  “No, that’s a good idea. I don’t think there’s anywhere to hide from these people for long. Better to go somewhere that they’ll have backup.” Luke’s hand remained, warm and strong, against her neck, his thumb sliding absently over her collarbone in a rhythmic caress that stoked the simmering flame he’d started a few minutes earlier. She pulled away from him, horrified that she could feel aroused in the middle of this newest crisis. What was wrong with her?

  “I agree. We stay on the move as much as possible.” Luke gave her another quick look. “Thanks for the call. I’ll check back as soon as we’re on the road.” He rang off. “I’m sorry. We’ve got to start prepping the RV for travel again.”

  “Are you sure the Pattersons are okay?”

  He nodded. “They were out in the garage when it happened, getting the car ready to head out of town. Someone drove by and threw Molotov cocktails through their front windows. They were able to get out of the garage and to safety.”

  “Did they save the car?”

  “Yeah. The fire didn’t spread much behind the front two rooms. As soon as they gave their statement to the police, and secured the house as well as they could, they headed north. They’re going to visit old friends in Wyoming.”

  “Thank God.” Abby grabbed Luke’s arm as he took a couple of steps toward the galley. “You didn’t get nearly as much sleep last night as I did. I’ll drive.”

  “Driving an RV isn’t like driving a car—”

  “My dad used to sell RVs back in Texarkana. I learned to drive rigs bigger than this one by the time I was sixteen.” She released his arm. “Haven’t I ever told you that before?”

  “You never talked much about your family,” he said quietly.

  She supposed she hadn’t. Losing both of her parents in a plane crash shortly after high-school graduation had been devastating. She rarely spoke of it, or the eighteen short years she’d had with them.

  She’d have to get over that now. Her parents were Stevie’s grandparents, even if they weren’t around anymore. They might be the only grandparents he ever heard about. He would need some sense of his heritage.

  But doesn’t he also deserve to know his father? His aunts and uncles? His grandparents on Luke’s side?

  She ignored the question. “So I’ll drive,” she said again. “You kick back, try to get some sleep.”

  He shrugged, which she took as assent. “Let’s get to work,” he said.

  Within an hour, they’d locked down anything in the RV likely to move around during travel. Stevie was already asleep again after stirring briefly while Abby had buckled him into his car seat, and Luke had finished unhooking the RV from the park’s hookups and returned to the RV cabin.

  He settled into the passenger seat, laid his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes.

  “Just head north to Albuquerque on I-25?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Then east on I-40 when you get there. And keep to the speed limit. We don’t need to be pulled over.”

  “It’ll be a strain,” she murmured, buckling herself in. “You know my lead foot.”

  He opened one eye, his lips curving. “Yeah. I was on that trip to Monterey, remember?”

  “I remember.” The trip to Monterey had been early in her marriage, when she still believed she and Matt had a chance at making their relationship work, but the strongest memory of the day was how Luke had taken her to the Defense Language Institute to introduce her to one of his former instructors. Matt had deemed the proposed side trip boring and headed to Del Monte Beach without them. Matt had never been the type to put aside his own passions to accommodate someone else’s.

  It had fallen to Luke to take her to the Defense Language Institute and wait patiently while she talked shop with his old language instructor, even though he wasn’t much more interested in the topic than Matt had been. She was pretty sure she’d started nursing a secret crush on Luke that sunny day in Monterey when Luke had forgone a trip to a beach full of bikini-clad beauties just for her.

  “I always figured you’d end up working there.” Luke’s voice sounded a little drowsy, as well. “Why didn’t you?”

  “How do you know I didn’t?” she asked.

  He glanced toward her. It was dark in the cabin, but she thought he looked a little guilty. “I guess I don’t,” he murmured, a little too nonchalantly, closing his eyes again.

  She turned her gaze back to the road, surprised by what he’d unwittingly revealed. The only way he’d know that she’d never fulfilled her dream of working at the institute was if he’d looked for her there. Had he checked up on her sometime in the past three years? It wouldn’t have been that hard to find her—he could have called any of the women she’d befriended during her time as a Marine wife.

  Unless he hadn’t wanted her to know he was checking on her.

  She didn’t know what would be worse—his simply putting her out of his mind altogether after their one brief night together, or his making the effort to find out about her while doing his damnedest to hide his interest. Either way, he still kept his distance for three years. Did it really matter why?

  She turned her focus back to the road ahead. Luke hadn’t given her any instructions, other than heading east. But she knew that the people who’d been following them had been able to stay on their trail pretty closely so far. If they had already figured out where she and Luke were headed, they might have people staking out the interstates, waiting for them to drive right into the trap.

  She wasn’t about to let that happen.

  Reaching the cloverleaf on North Main Street that led to the I-25 on-ramp, she made a snap decision to keep going on Highway 70 running east, bypassing the interstate altogether.

  Even sticking to the speed limit, she could have them in Texas by morning.

  “DID REID KNOW about the price on Cooper’s head before he sent us on this mission?” Tris snapped open the Colt M119 c
leaning kit and started to work, anger evident in his every movement. As usual, his upper-crust Boston accent slipped a little when he was upset, revealing his Southie roots. Tris had changed everything about himself—his name, his accent, his manners—when he’d been recruited into one of the government’s most secret of secret agencies several years ago. But some things a man could never change completely.

  Damon knew. He’d made a few changes of his own—new name, fancy education, better wardrobe—but nothing could change the fact that he’d been born Demetrius Miles in a rundown housing project in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother had never married the succession of men who kept her in bruises and babies, and though she’d made sure Damon got to school and did his homework every day, she herself lacked the education to give him a leg up on his academic studies.

  But Damon had been blessed with a quick mind and a strong body. He’d gone to school on the G.I. bill, working hard to overcome the deficits of his previous schooling. His stint in the Marines had taken him to Virginia and the man who’d become his mentor.

  The man who’d assigned him to his current mission.

  “It’s hard to imagine he didn’t,” Damon answered aloud. He knew the government kept tabs on Cordero’s cartel. They’d know whether or not Cordero had a reason to want Luke Cooper dead. And if the government knew, Barton Reid knew. Knowledge was currency to him. He knew things even the government didn’t.

  “Grady was a good man,” Tris growled. “We should’ve been warned of the possibility of ambush.”

  Damon didn’t know if forewarning would have been enough. Grady and Samuelson had been trained to handle anything that might arise during a snatch-and-grab mission. But all the training in the world could be trumped by a force of men with little regard for the rules of engagement and the advantage of surprise, as any number of guerrilla wars had proved over the years.

  Grady had gone down immediately, and Samuelson had been forced to fight his way out, sustaining life-threatening injuries. Luckily, he’d had a chance to call in an extraction team before his comm gear had been smashed. Damon, Tris and others in the crew had found him holed up in an abandoned building a couple of blocks from the motel, weak from blood loss. Los Tiburones were long gone by then, having had their fun with Grady after they discovered their real prey had already flown the coop.

  “Not the only thing Reid has neglected to tell us,” Tris added blackly. “Must be a hell of a secret he’s keeping.”

  It would make their assignment much easier to know what Chandler had taken from Reid. But Reid hadn’t kept his position in life by sharing his secrets. Quite the opposite, Damon suspected. He was sure Reid had risen so quickly in the Foreign Service ranks by using other people’s secrets against them.

  “Any word from the guys in the field?” he asked aloud.

  Tris shook his head. “We have units positioned along the interstate highways out of Yuma, but nobody’s spotted them yet.”

  As of their last mission briefing three hours earlier, nobody had yet figured out how Cooper had escaped the motel with a civilian woman and baby and disappeared into the night. His biographical dossier showed no close contacts in the Yuma, Arizona, area. Apparently the powers that be were so worried about losing track of Cooper and Abby Chandler that when Damon joked that they’d called a cab, someone had been assigned to contact all the cab companies in town.

  Whatever Reid was looking for, it must be big. Bring down the administration big, maybe. That kind of information was like gold in political circles. Or poison.

  Either way, Damon intended to be the one to find it.

  MOONLIGHT SLANTED in from the window, bathing Abby’s body in a soft blue glow that made her pale skin gleam like polished alabaster. Luke’s heart contracted as he stood by the bed, poised between surrender and flight.

  Stay or go? It was always the question, wasn’t it?

  His body still hummed from the aftermath of their passion, and in her soft, delicate curves he read the promise of endless nights spent wrapped in each other. Both lovers and friends, sharing fire and sweetness. Men spent their whole lives looking for exactly what lay before him.

  But in his gut, he knew the costs would be too high.

  He waited for her to stir, needing to talk to her one more time before he walked out of her life for good. But she lay motionless, as still and pale as a Grecian sculpture bathed in moonlight. He found himself bending to touch her to see if she’d turned to stone in the night, but he paused with his hand inches from her arm.

  His skin prickled, as if a cold finger had traced a warning on his spine. “Abby?” he whispered.

  She didn’t move.

  His hand trembled as he reached out to touch her shoulder. She felt cold to his touch. Too cold.

  He knelt on the bed and cupped her face where it lay on the pillow. Something sticky clung to his fingers.

  His heart stuttering in his chest, he turned her face toward him and saw her sightless stare. Something black and wet stained the pillow where she lay.

  Only then did he see the dark, jagged ribbon of blood across her throat.

  “Abby!” He grabbed her, shook her hard. She gave no resistance, limp in his grip. His heart fluttered against his chest, ravaged by grief and the acid of guilt. He laid her back on the pillow, lifting shaking hands to close her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he moaned, taking one of her cold hands in his. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her eyes snapped open, and her lips parted. Air passed through her mouth in a dying hiss. “Too late.”

  Luke jerked awake, his heart galloping. It took a second to reorient himself, to escape the cottony prison created from the potent elixir of bittersweet memories and fear. As the vivid images of his dream faded, he realized he was in the Pattersons’ RV, belted into the passenger seat. Abby sat in the driver’s seat next to him, her eyes slanting his way for a moment at his stirring. “You okay?”

  He stared at her for a moment, too overcome with relief to answer immediately. He drank in the reality of the pink stain of health in her cheeks, evident even in the pale lights from the RV dashboard. He just watched her breathe for a moment, in and out in steady cadence. Even the way she was looking at him, as if he’d lost his mind, was a welcome sight.

  “I’m fine,” he managed. “Just a bad dream, I guess.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Can’t remember,” he lied, pushing himself up from his slumped position. “Are we on I-40 already?”

  “I didn’t go north to Albuquerque,” she answered. “I got to thinking about it—the people after us probably have connections all over the country. They may have people staking out the interstates. So I took a less obvious route east.”

  The dashboard clock read 4:24 a.m. “Where are we?”

  “Just crossed the state line into Texas near Plains.”

  “Good thinking.” He should’ve thought of taking an alternate route himself. He needed to get his head together and focus on a plan. He just didn’t have much experience running away from danger. He was the guy who was usually leading the pack straight into the mouth of hell.

  He twisted around to look at Stevie. The little fellow was sleeping soundly, seemingly unbothered by being strapped into the car seat like a papoose.

  Luke envied his innocence. Stevie was still young enough to see this whole thing as an adventure. He’d been good for them on the drive from Yuma to Las Cruces, singing songs with Abby and proving himself to be a lot better-natured than Luke would have been at his age, if his mother’s stories were anything to go by.

  Definitely got your mama’s good nature instead of your daddy’s, huh, Little Bit?

  “Is he always so easygoing?” he asked Abby, the need to know more about Stevie overcoming his intention to keep his emotional distance. “He’s been such a good trooper.”

  “He’s usually happy. He likes to laugh.” Abby’s voice swelled with affection. “Life isn’t always stable with us—working freelance as much as I do
, my schedule can be irregular. And without steady job benefits like a pension or insurance, I’ve had to pay for a policy for us out of my own pocket.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I still had some money from the sale of my parents’ RV dealership—I’d kept that rolling over in investments for a while, but after Matt died and I had a baby on the way, I had to start drawing on it to supplement my income. There’s a little left. Not a lot. I was already planning to look for a full-time job when all of this happened.”

  He looked over at her. She looked tired, wrung-out and sleep-deprived, but he still found himself wanting to drag her from behind the wheel and pull her into his arms to finish what they’d almost started the night before.

  The phantom image of death and despair from his earlier nightmare flashed through his head, saving him from saying something he’d shouldn’t. He turned his gaze back to the flat, barren highway illuminated in the RV’s headlights.

  West Texas sprawled around him, punctuated by scrubby stands of winter-bare trees and the occasional farmhouse or outbuilding. Power poles lined the highway like silent soldiers standing guard. “How much farther to Lubbock?”

  “A couple of hours. We can stop there for breakfast.”

  Luke didn’t want to think about food. He was still queasy from the aftereffects of his dream about Abby. But they had a lot of miles stacked up ahead of them, and food was fuel, as he’d learned in the Marines Corps.

  His feelings were irrelevant. Marines did their duty. His duty was to get Abby and Stevie to safety and help them find out what Matt had been hiding.

  And that’s what he’d do, come whatever hell that may.

  LUKE AND ABBY traded driving duties over the course of the long day, managing naps here and there to keep up their stamina. Stevie, on the other hand, was quickly beginning to tire of life on the road. Right now, he was occupied watching cartoons on the RV’s television set, but Abby didn’t know how much longer they could keep traveling without stopping for more than a few minutes at a time every few hours.