Driven by Fire

by Anne Stuart

  Jenny felt when he left the bed, and it took all her self-control not to cling to him. She opened her eyes in the murky light. “Where are you going?”

  “Hunting,” he said.

  “For food, or for the Guiding Light?”

  “Just checking out the lay of the land. I want to find the smartphone and your little friend and get the hell out of here before things get dicey. Sleep some more—it’s very early.”

  “And rebel guerillas don’t get up early?”

  “These ones are fat and lazy. They’re not out for government reform, they want money, and once you lose your idealism you start sleeping late.”

  “Does that mean you’re still idealistic?”

  His laugh was humorless. “I never was. I just don’t need much sleep. You, however, are better off staying in bed. Once I find a trace of La Luz, we’re going to have a long day. And don’t worry about snakes—they’re solitary predators, and I killed the local one.”

  “Did you have to say the s word?” she said with a sleepy shudder.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  She dreamed of his hands on her. She dreamed of snakes and rain forests and blood. She dreamed of her baby brother, and the deeper she slept, the more anxious she felt. Something was wrong, something was profoundly wrong, and she didn’t want to wake up. She intended to stay exactly where she was, safe and sound, until Ryder returned, at which time she’d give him holy hell for having taken so long.

  Something jabbed her in the back, ripping her from an erotic half sleep, and she froze, unease washing over her. She slowly rolled over to stare into Soledad’s uncompromising face.

  “Oh, thank God,” Jenny said, collapsing back on the bed with relief. “It’s just you. We’ve been so worried . . .”

  “Do not waste your time. We know why you’ve come here,” Soledad said sharply, none of her usual sweetness visible. “Where’s your lover?”

  “He’s not . . .”

  Soledad slapped her across the face, the sharp blow a shock so severe that Jenny froze. “Do not lie to me. We had people watching in Puerto Claro. I should have known you weren’t the plaster saint you pretended to be. Tell me where Matthew Ryder has gone, or next time I hit you I will use my gun.”

  Jenny pulled herself up to stare at the innocent young girl she’d trusted. She looked years older, with her hair pulled back and the gun in her small, capable hand, and Jenny straightened her shoulders. All right, she’d been a trusting fool. Everyone had told her, and she hadn’t listened. There was no avoiding the truth now. “Unfortunately for you, Ryder’s a lot smarter than I am,” she said bitterly. “He never trusted you. He’s out looking for you and your soap-opera friends right now. You could have just waited for him to come to you.”

  “Soap opera friends?” Soledad echoed, confused. “You make no sense.” She rose, gesturing with the gun. “And we didn’t come here for Ryder. We came for you. Get out of the bed.”

  There were just the two of them in the room, but Jenny didn’t doubt that Soledad had backup. She scooted across the two beds carefully, still in her shorts and T-shirt, and set her feet on the floor. “What do you want with me?”

  “Any number of things, chica,” Soledad said. “Leverage, for one. Plus I imagine your father will pay very well for your safe return, which makes you twice as valuable.”

  “I think you overestimate my father’s affection for me. I doubt he’d pay a plugged nickel for my return.”

  “A plugged nickel?”

  “Nada,” Jenny said. “Nothing, zero, not a red cent. My father and I parted company a long time ago. I despise people who use guns and violence and lies to get what they want.”

  “And yet you are in love with Mr. Ryder,” Soledad cooed. “How does that make sense?”

  It was like a blow in the stomach. “I’m not in love with anyone, particularly a bully like Ryder,” Jenny protested. “He can go to hell along with the rest of you.”

  “Sooner than we will,” Soledad said with a catlike smile. “I intend to see to that.”

  Jenny understood the feeling in her stomach now—it was fear. “What has he ever done to you?”

  “You were on the boat when it was raided—you saw the bodies. We have a score to settle with Ryder and his friends.” Soledad nudged her with the barrel of the gun. “Where are your shoes?”

  “In the kitchen.” If Soledad was alone could she fling that iron frying pan at her head? Was there anyway she could outrun her?

  “Do not even think about it,” the woman said, reading her thoughts. “I wouldn’t kill you, but I would hurt you very badly. Too many men put a value on you to waste your life, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hand you over to my men to teach you a lesson. If they get too rough I can always lie and say you’re up in the mountains being held by rebels, though I must admit the loss of revenue would be annoying. Still, it might be worth it.”

  “Why do you hate me?” Jenny asked, dazed. “I was trying to help you.”

  Soledad’s mouth thinned. “Everything you did got in my way, and you were so determined to help the poor South American girl that I had no chance to escape from you. I couldn’t be sure you had the smartphone, or I would have simply cut your throat, but it’s a good thing I didn’t give in to temptation. I have people who can crack the phone, but they aren’t here and I can’t wait. In the meantime you’ll have to hope some man is willing to pay ransom for you.”

  “I can’t think of a single man who would care much about me one way or another.”

  “You undervalue yourself. Your father will pay for you—no father ever turns his back on his only daughter. Your brothers are also good for a ransom. And then there’s Ryder.”

  “Who doesn’t give a flying fuck about me,” Jenny said bitterly.

  Soledad sighed noisily. “You are so very tiresome. Ryder will risk everything to get you back. Which will give us Ryder, who has his own value. No, today will be a very fine day’s work, I think. Come along.” And she stabbed her in the back with the gun, hard.

  Jenny swallowed her grunt of pain. “All right,” she said. “But you’ll find out how wrong you are when no one comes to find me.”

  “Maybe. But even if he’s already tired of you he still wants the smartphone, and I’m counting on you to help me break into it. Your brother has it so protected that I can’t find anything.”

  “Why would you think I’d know anything about it?”

  “Because he’s your brother. You’d know passwords he could use.”

  “I don’t think I can help you.”

  “Oh, I think you can. I have friends who can be very persuasive.”

  Why did everyone want to hurt her? Jenny thought. How the hell had she gotten involved in this mess? It all led back to Billy and her father, two people who’d do nothing to ransom her from a militant army of thugs. Billy didn’t have the money, and her father simply didn’t care.

  “How did you even know I had the smartphone?” She rose to her feet at Soledad’s gesture. She towered over the smaller woman, but even if Soledad hadn’t held a gun Jenny wouldn’t have made the mistake in thinking she could best her. All the watered-down martial arts training she’d gone through in her teens would be nothing against the determination of one small, vicious woman.

  Soledad laughed. “How do you think? Your brother told me.”

  Ryder was in a particularly foul mood, one he attributed to simple lust. After all he’d spent the night pressed up against a nubile female, one who interested him far too much, and he hadn’t done a damned thing about it. A case of blue balls would put anyone in a temper.

  His life had gotten so fucking complicated since he’d met Ms. Jennifer Parker, Esquire. He wasn’t the kind of man who let women mess up his life, and Parker should have been nothing more than an inconvenience, one he could pass off to someone else, but from the very beginning he wasn’t letting anyone else near her. He was still furious with her about her lies, furious that she’d covered for her nasty li
ttle fuck of a brother, but he could understand. Reluctantly, of course, because he’d always made it a rule never to sympathize with the bad guys.

  Parker didn’t quite qualify as a bad guy, no matter what she did. She was just a misguided optimist who thought she could save the world. Definitely not the woman for him—he knew the world was long past saving.

  Why would he even think of that? There was no such thing as a woman for him—women screwed things up, complicated them, distracted men and got them killed. Women operatives were a different matter—the ones he’d known had been so cold-blooded they could probably mate and then bite their partner’s head off once they were done.

  When it came right down to it, men were more susceptible. Once they were deluded into thinking they were in love, then all bets were off. He had little doubt that many of the Committee operatives, both in the US and in Europe, would toss a mission in favor of a woman’s life. He’d never make that mistake. Collateral damage was an ugly fact of life, and he wasn’t about to let some misguided streak of sentimentality get in the way of procuring that smartphone. She’d insisted on coming along—if she paid the ultimate price it wasn’t any skin off his ass.

  “Yeah, and pigs fly,” he said out loud, disgusted with himself. “You are one sorry son of a bitch, Ryder.” So okay, he’d do his best to keep her alive. But if something happened to her, those were the dangers she’d signed on for. Once she’d covered up for her brother, let him escape the justice he deserved, she’d sealed her fate.

  But even so, he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. He moved deeper into the jungle, every sense alert for signs of La Luz. His first stop this morning had been the cantina, and Rosario had been extremely helpful. She would have been more than happy to relieve him of his acute state of horniness, but he wasn’t tempted. No, Parker had gotten under his skin, and for some reason she was all he wanted right now. It was a temporary affliction—he’d get over it the moment they got back to the States, but all his commonsense lectures to his libido did absolutely nothing. If he’d ever possessed something as useless and vulnerable as a heart, it would have refused to listen, but he could imagine what another man, a better man might be feeling. He wouldn’t be off beating the bushes, leaving his woman alone and unprotected in an abandoned convent.

  Good thing he wasn’t that man, good thing she wasn’t his woman. He didn’t believe in all that crap anyway—love was a trap at worst, a business arrangement at best. Parker would be lying in bed, sound asleep, dreaming about God knew what. Him again?

  Well, tough shit. He had things to do. He needed to find some sign of the Guiding Light, and if that nagging feeling at the base of his skull weren’t so irritating, he wouldn’t give it a second thought.

  But one reason he was still alive was because he knew things. His senses were so highly trained he knew instinctively when there was trouble.

  Parker was nothing but trouble. He had work to do—he couldn’t be babysitting her on the slight chance that something was wrong.

  He turned, looking back the way he’d come. The overgrown track made for tricky walking, and he could just imagine her going down in a heap, a victim of the wrong shoes or the wrong terrain.

  And why the hell did he keep thinking of her when he had so many other things to do? He needed to forge on ahead, look for signs of La Luz, and ignore the uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Fifteen minutes later he gave in. She was perfectly fine, there were no more snakes, and La Luz was in a small town somewhere up the road. The most Parker was suffering from was boredom.

  Hell, he was bored too. He’d drag her along with him, listening to her gripe—yeah, that was it. Because leaving her alone in the last outpost from hell wasn’t really an option.

  He turned in his tracks, and a moment later he began to run.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Soledad hadn’t come alone. There were three large men in the hallway and another half dozen wandering around the place, turning things upside down. They’d bound her wrists in front of her with some kind of plastic tie, and it seemed as if Soledad took particular pleasure in hurting her. Jenny was more troubled by the gag and blindfold and her awful feeling of helplessness. A moment later she was shoved forward, stumbling her way toward some kind of vehicle, and then she was picked up and tossed into what she could only guess was the back of a truck. The hands that had thrown her had touched her between her legs, squeezed her breasts, much to the amusement of all the men, until a sharp command from Soledad silenced them. Not that Soledad had any interest in protecting her dignity, Jenny thought. She simply wanted them on the road.

  Men climbed into the back of the truck around her, and she knew she was lying at their feet, no shoes, no bra, trussed like a rabbit and completely vulnerable. “Not yet,” Soledad had warned them, and Jenny had to put up only with the occasional kick that was far from accidental.

  It was a long, bouncing drive, one that gave her plenty of time to berate herself for her epic stupidity. Why had she trusted Soledad? Why had she been so certain the woman had been an innocent victim of the traffickers? Ryder hadn’t believed her, and he was experienced in things like this, and yet Jenny had refused to listen, so certain her instincts were right. If she’d been this far off when it came to Soledad, what other mistakes had she made? Was her brother more than the foolish participant in something he didn’t understand, or had he lied to her? Why in the world would he tell Soledad that Jenny had the smartphone and put her in that kind of danger?

  Billy had always been so sweet, unlike her older brothers, who could be as vicious as their father. Only Billy had still seemed to care about her, and she couldn’t give him up without a fight. Surely she couldn’t have been that wrong about both Soledad and her baby brother.

  It seemed as if they drove for hours, though Jenny could tell by the feel of the hot sun overhead that it couldn’t have been that long. She should have been starving but she’d lost her appetite, the softly murmured threats from the soldiers convincing her she’d never want to eat again. Fortunately her Spanish was of the schoolgirl variety, and she didn’t understand half their nouns and verbs. She was pretty sure that was a blessing. If she had she might have panicked.

  As it was, an almost unnatural calm settled over her. She had no more illusions about Soledad—the young woman would happily feed her to the sharks once she got what she wanted from Jenny. It was up to her to take as long as possible to unlock the phone, something that was going to be difficult. She wasn’t used to dissembling, and she’d been able to come up with Billy’s passwords when she first got the thing. The contents were incomprehensible—encrypted files, Excel spreadsheets, an address book full of code names. Unfortunately, all that probably made perfect sense to Soledad, and it must be important if they would go so far as to kidnap her.

  Where the hell was Ryder when she needed him? How long would it take him to return to the convent and find out she was gone? What would he do then—shrug his shoulders and decide she was no longer his problem?

  No, whether he gave a damn about her or not, he still needed the smartphone. Even if he was tempted to leave her to Soledad’s tender mercies, he still had to get what he’d come for, and he wouldn’t leave her behind.

  He also wouldn’t jeopardize his . . . his mission for her sake. He’d warned her of that when she insisted on coming with him. If he didn’t find them soon Soledad would lose patience, and what Ryder had done to hurt her a few days ago would pale in comparison with what the soldiers were suggesting. Rape was considered a fate worse than death, and gang rape would be unbearable. If it came to that, though, Jenny had every intention of surviving, if for no other reason than to slap her baby brother upside the head. She was a survivor—always had been, always would be, and sooner or later Ryder would show up. She could hold out until then.

  The air was thinner when they finally stopped the truck, and Jenny felt bruised everywhere from bouncing around on the floor of the truck bed as well as the occasi
onal kicks from the guards. They hauled her down with rough hands, but this time there were no insulting touches, and she suspected Soledad was watching. Someone took her arm, and she picked her way carefully on the unseen dirt beneath her feet. She was picturing some kind of jungle camp when she heard a door open and felt a sudden, shocking blast of air-conditioning.

  “Bring her inside,” Soledad ordered. “We have work to do.”

  Someone ripped off her blindfold, and she cried out behind her gag as the tape pulled her hair, but the sun was so bright all she could do was blink owlishly, her eyes refusing to focus. When they did she almost thought she was imagining it—the clean, elegant lines of the wood-and-glass house perched up high, backing up to a steep ravine. She staggered forward when someone pushed her in the back, tripping over the flagstone pathway, and stepped into the darkened, air-cooled comfort of the place. The sudden flash of cold made her dizzy, and she stumbled slightly as she was shoved forward once again.

  One soldier was still with her—the rest of them were left outside—and he dragged her into a large living room, pushing her down on a low ottoman so that her knees buckled beneath her. “Stay,” he said in Spanish, and ripped the gag off.

  “As if I have any choice in the matter,” she said caustically, but she was smart enough to keep it under her breath. The room was spare and sleek, with white leather sofas and thick white carpeting. It looked as if it belonged in a design magazine, not like the headquarters for terrorists disguised as revolutionaries.

  Soledad came up to her, and Jenny could recognize the phone in her hand with its distinctive New Orleans Saints case. How could something that supposedly held so much evil information have a football logo emblazoned across it? It was like having Sesame Street handguns.

  “You are to help me with this. No one here knows anything about technology, and I cannot even begin to guess what his password is.”

  “I’m sure there’s more than one,” Jenny said. “It’s going to take a while to get through them all.” In fact, her brother had been fairly unimaginative when it came to protecting his smartphone, more proof that he was no criminal mastermind but simply someone who’d gotten in over his head. If there was any way she could avoid putting all that information into Soledad’s criminal hands, then she would. Decoding it wasn’t going to do Jenny a damned bit of good—her father wasn’t going to pay one cent to get her free, and neither would her two older brothers, so it wasn’t going to save her life. As for Billy—how could he have told Soledad? They must have known each other, but it was hard to believe her brother was naïve enough to believe Soledad’s saintly act.