by Milly Taiden
She scowled at him and pointed to the next location. The terrorists staged themselves at the reception area midway in the room. They had several more jumps to make before they got close to the desk.
His mate was doing a fantastic job of beam hopping, for a human. She had strength for the distance and balance when it came to standing. She probably could’ve done it without him. But he wasn’t about to tell her that.
The next crossing was a bit more difficult. A PVC tube lay on top of existing pipes, making it stick up in the air. He had to make sure his feet were high enough to clear it. He pointed at it when he made it over. She drew her brows down and swished her hand in the air like she would’ve hit him if he were closer and mouthed, I see it. She grumbled under her breath about men thinking women couldn’t do anything. That made him smile.
She’d better get used to it. That’s how it was going to be for the rest of their lives together. He would never let harm or danger come close to her. He would always be there to make sure she was safe, though he had a feeling she was good at getting herself into trouble.
Her eyes followed the length of the elevated pipe, running from the front to the back of the space. If she wanted to avoid the pipe, she was out of luck. He waved her over, mouthing, Come on.
She huffed at him then swung her arms back for the leap. When she was in midair, he could tell immediately she wouldn’t make it. And she knew as well. Her leg snapped down and pushed off the pipe giving her the needed oomph. The pipe bent under her weight, but she was off so quickly, no damage was done.
He reached out for her with both hands. Sorry, she’d have to get over it. This landing was not going to be pretty. Seeing what he planned to do, she twisted away in the air, but that wouldn’t stop him. He grabbed her arm and guided her body against his for a base to hold on to. Her feet tangled with his and his balance was thrown off. He was going down.
He wrapped an arm around her waist, holding her tightly to him while his other arm went under him to grip the beam. His hand broke most of the fall, but he curled his back and rolled along his spine on the beam instead of landing flat on his ass. Candy was able to stretch her arms to the sides and hang on to pipes to keep them still.
The look of shock and horror on her face made him want to burst out laughing, after he realized they were okay and safe again. He was sure the fall wasn’t what had scared her, but the fact that she was lying on top of him, her entire body aligned with his. The arm he wrapped around her waist remained.
Her mouth moved with no words coming out. He put a finger over her luscious lips and shushed her. “Calm down, love. You’re okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She stopped her wiggling, though he did like it. Her mask—the other person she became when she needed to protect herself—appeared. He’d seen her make this change a couple of times now. He wasn’t sure why she felt the need to hide herself, but even her smell changed slightly. It was less Candy and more machinelike. No emotions, no feelings.
He wasn’t sure she even realized she slipped into another persona, she did it so smoothly. Her brows came down and eyes narrowed at him. Her chin rose in indignation.
“I know you’re not going to hurt me,” she whispered. “It’s this.” She moved her arm in the air along their bodies to indicate the compromising situation. God, he wanted to kiss her so bad. To lay soft baby kisses down her slender neck to the spot he would very soon bite. He wanted those damn clothes off. To see her flushed and naked and slick with need. Fuck fuck fuck his body hated him. Now was not the time to get a hard-on.
Chapter Eight
Candy stared into the eyes of the hottest man she’d ever seen who was lying underneath her on an I beam over the heads of a terrorist hostage crisis. Could this day get any worse? His body was hard below her soft spots. And she meant hard everywhere. A fire shot through her that she hadn’t felt since she was a teen with raging hormones. No. This was not the time or the place. And most importantly, he was not the person. She’d just fired him and his team. What the hell was wrong with her?
Did she like this? It scared her. She didn’t feel helpless or overpowered—she didn’t want to feel anything. She had people to save and a job to do.
“You know,” Tumbel said, “to get up, you’re gonna have to slide over me.” She schooled her face to a neutral expression. Then she thought about what he said. The image of his body rubbing hers as she slid over him made her warm all over. He was right. She either dragged her v-jay over his nose, or her mouth had to go over his . . . johnson. Her face felt ready to burst into flames. This would be a great time to spontaneously combust.
He smiled at her as she tried to hide her true self from him. “Well,” she started, “I’m damn sure not sliding up so your face . . . your face . . . You know what I’m saying.” Damn, she was flustered. Why was she so embarrassed? When men had sexually harassed her before, she’d gotten fighting mad and made them back off. In camp, she’d been named the Virgin Bitch because no man had ever gotten a piece of her. She was even fine letting them think she batted for the other team.
Except, he wasn’t harassing her. He was stating facts. And he was the first man she’d found sexually attractive in as long as she could barely remember. The images going through her mind were so inappropriate she was glad he couldn’t know what she was thinking.
“Slide down, then,” he quipped quietly.
“I will,” she whispered. Her body squirmed and slid over his. Her breasts against his chest, her hot core gliding over his johnson. Fuck, he felt so good. When her head reached his crotch, she put a hand on the beam to lift her upper body. She wasn’t giving him any ideas. She may have let him touch her, but it was an emergency.
She got to her feet as did he. Time to focus on the job at hand, getting intel. After leap-frogging a few more I beams, they were in the center of the space. She couldn’t hear much, just the mumbling of the men below. Tumbel kneeled and put his ear onto the ceiling tile.
“They’re directly below us,” he said. That was good. She pulled her phone from her pocket. “They’re speaking a foreign language,” he added. Just like Dotson had said.
“Can we get my phone in for a visual?” she asked.
Tumbel sat back on his heels and pointed behind her. “Scoot back. If we get behind them, we can lift one of these tiles and they won’t see it.” He was smarter than she gave him credit for. Maybe he did know what he was doing when it came to agent work, even though the department’s record showed otherwise.
Moving back several tiles, she settled and looked to him for an okay. He gave her a single nod. While he pried up the mineral-fiber square, she pulled up her camera on her phone. His look waited for hers. She nodded and he lifted the tile. Her fingers slid the phone through the narrow gap.
“Don’t drop it,” Tumbel whispered.
“No shit,” she replied. She kept her head down so he wouldn’t see the smile on her face. What a dweeb. Like she planned on letting her phone fall.
With the fiber material raised, she now heard the men talking. She didn’t know what language, either. It wasn’t a Romance language, didn’t sound Asian. So that left northern Europe and at least five languages. Not a lot of help.
After several moments, she pulled her phone out of the slot and stopped the video recording. She looked around, wondering if there was anything else they could do while they were here. She climbed to her feet and slipped the phone into her pocket. Then she noticed her hand was in Tumbel’s.
The instinctive reaction was to jerk away, run so he couldn’t hurt her. His grip tightened slightly, keeping her there. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the back of her fingers. Her heart raced. No one had ever done that before. She saw it in movies and rom-coms, but never in real life. Her life. She stood staring at him, at a loss for what to say or do. Her stomach flipped and fear grew wings in her chest.
A tangle of emotions she
didn’t know how to deal with bubbled up inside her. Away. She had to get away from him. She had to pull herself together and push down the feelings she’d suppressed almost her entire life.
Screw the fact of him going first. She leapt to the closest I beam and her momentum kept her going until she reached the wall. With little effort, she was up and out of the air return shaft. She never looked back to see where Tumbel was. Didn’t care. He knew where her office was.
Reaching the door to her sanctuary, she stepped inside the dark room and froze. What was going on? She never turned the lights off.
“Sergeant Major?” a familiar male voice came from the darkness.
It took a moment for reality to catch up with her. Pulling her cell from her pocket, she chastised herself for being so pathetically out of it. Shit like that would get someone killed on the battlefield. The light from her phone got her to her desk.
Staring at the laptop’s screen, not much had changed since they’d left the office. Wait. In one of the monitor’s squares, she noticed someone was standing, no—sitting—in front of the entrance doors, back turned so he faced outside. She brought up the video footage on her phone and zoomed in on the screen, making the person in question larger.
With a gasp, she recognized the back side of Director Pommer. He was sitting in a chair, hands tied behind the seat’s back and staring ahead at the darkness outside. Smart, she thought. Any attempts to get inside, shoot through the glass, or throw in a gas bomb were effectively blocked. Okay, fine. That didn’t change much on her part.
Candy tapped the green Play triangle on the screen. The others in the room crowded around her. The voices were low, so she turned up the volume as much as possible.
Agent Day said, “They are speaking Russian.”
She looked at him. “You’re sure?” How could he know when no one else did?
“I spent a year in that part of northern Europe, scouring for clues. I know Russian and five other languages,” he said with a bit of snobbishness. That was a bit impressive. She’d give him that.
“What are they saying?” she asked. They were quiet for a moment before he spoke.
“Their discussion is weird. They are talking about a movie one of them saw last week,” Day informed.
“A movie?” She found that hard to believe.
“Yeah,” Day affirmed. “One just asked if the others were going to a wedding. Strange.”
She never gave thought to what hostage captors talked about, but she doubted it was so casual. It was like this was nothing out of the ordinary in their day. Why were they here and what did they want? Why weren’t they making any demands? She paused the footage.
Accessing the classified files in the National Intelligence database, she searched for Russian-born men. “Guys,” she addressed the group, “what you see here goes nowhere. All of it is highly classified.” After a general mumble of agreement from them, she continued her search.
There were so many, a lot of them from the Cold War. Most of those spies were probably dead by now, she thought, if even still in the business. She came across a set of brothers she knew all too well. A couple of years prior, the bastards had abducted a French family on vacation as hostages for money. In a joint top secret mission with France, she flew the transport that was to whisk the family away once freed by the American and French forces. In and out. Easy peasy.
Well, the brothers weren’t giving up their cash cow that easily. In a desperate attempt to salvage their cowardly act, they attacked her chopper when she landed nearby, damaging it beyond repair. She and the family had to hitch a ride on the assault team’s getaway, aborting the mission before the brothers were apprehended.
Not long after that, she was promoted then asked to work in DC.
Wondering what the brothers were up to, she Googled their names on the Internet to see if any news had been posted about them: Yulian and Mikhail Steganovich.
“Holy fuck,” she spit out and clicked on the link to YouTube. The brothers had posted a clip a while back for the world to see. Of course, they spoke Russian and she had no idea what they were saying, but she had a clue. They wore paramilitary uniforms and were in front of a graffiti-covered wall. It was nighttime and small fires glowed in the background.
Day grunted. “They’re idiots.”
“What are they saying?” she asked.
“Nothing of big importance,” he responded. “They’re talking about some French family and how they—the brothers—released the family out of kindness in their hearts—”
“That’s a load of horse hockey,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her. “Lying sacks of shit.”
Day pointed to one of the brothers in the video—Yulian. “He’s one of the guys talking on the video you recorded.”
The voices all sounded the same for the most part to her. “What about the brother?” she asked.
Day shook his head. “Don’t hear him. He’s not one of them.”
“You’re sure?” she asked, trying to make sense of the insane situation they were in. “They do everything together. One of the others has to be the brother.”
Day shook his head again. “I’m sure. Play the video on the phone.” She tapped the green arrow button and listened to the hollow echoes coming from the small speaker. Day and the guys all nodded. Consensus was it was Yulian.
“How can you tell it’s not Mikhail?” she asked. “They sound identical on the video.”
All three guys shook their heads. Hamel said, “There is a slight pitch variation between the two. The one on the left is higher than the brother on the right.” The rest of the team agreed.
“You must have damn good hearing because they sound the same to me,” she said. Exceptional ability to see in the dark, extremely sensitive hearing, ability to think on their feet and remain calm under tense pressure. They seemed to be decent agents. She wondered why none of them had military careers or even served.
That was what clued her in to the group being a bunch of screwups. They had no formal military training. How could they possibly perform as well as the SEALs and Rangers if they had no experience in the armed forces? It was unheard of. Maybe there was more to these guys than what was in their files. She still wasn’t convinced they were worth keeping.
She paused the image of the lobby filled with guests and the four men wearing all black with knit hats covering their faces. “Can you tell which one Yulian is?” From the high camera angles, she couldn’t assess how tall the terrorists were. “Yulian and Mikhail are short for males.”
“That should be easy to figure out,” Dubois said as he came around the desk to her side. “They’re carrying ASh-12.7s which are about forty inches long—”
She sucked in a breath and leaned closer to the laptop. “Are you sure that’s what they’ve got? How can you tell in this stupidly small image on the screen?”
Tumbel, who had followed her in, pointed to an image where one of the men leaned against the elevators keeping watch over the back area of the lobby, his gun hung from a strap over his shoulder. “Look at the bullpup design,” he said. “All the action is behind the trigger.”
Good god, he was right. A sick sensation took over her stomach. Things were a lot worse than she realized.
“And the short nose.” She turned to Tumbel. “Did you know the old KGB asked their designers to specifically make this gun for urban terrorists?” she asked.
Tumbel’s face showed surprise at her question. He probably never expected a female to know anything about weaponry. He replied, “But have you noticed the design similarities to our cartridges that used to hold .50 Beowulfs?”
“What?” she shot back. Excitement about talking guns almost made her giddy. “Like the Russians need to copy us? Besides, they have longer cases and heavier bullet loads.”
He smirked. “Our lighter weight makes it more practical for clo
se urban situations.”
“Really,” she said, “have you given thought to stopping power—”
“Hey, guys,” Dubois interrupted. “Let’s focus, here. We’re working on height, not combat assault rifles normal people know nothing about.”
Candy sat back in her chair and rolled her eyes, but noticed the grin on Tumbel’s handsome face. She quickly moved her gaze to the laptop. Enjoying his company wasn’t on her to-do list.
Dubois tapped the screen on one of the men downstairs. “I’d say this guy is the shortest at about five-and-a-half feet. This guy is over six foot.”
Looks like they had their man. But why just one brother? Where was the other?
Chapter Nine
Victory rushed through Josh’s body. The fact that he and Candy had something in common thrilled him to death. This was only the beginning of their coming together. They needed to get this shindig over with so he could take her home. His girl liked guns. Goddamn, that was something he never expected. Candy seemed so uptight. But he bet she would be soft and sweet when he got to know her.
Finding out who their terrorists were was good, but did nothing for him. He wanted them gone. “We need a plan,” he said.
“Agreed,” Candy said. “We should take down the outer perimeter first, then we can focus on inside. But we need to watch for the brother. He could be outside, ready to pick off anyone trying to get in.” She sighed. “What can we do until backup gets here?”
The guys looked at her. “Backup?” they said in unison. Josh and his men didn’t even know what backup was. On their assignments, it was them and no one else, for several reasons.
By her incredulous look, he needed to clarify. “Sergeant Major, we are used to doing things on our own. Backup does not exist in our world.”