He scanned the room. When he spotted her, his pockmarked face showed only the faintest flicker of interest. At least, until he saw the cooler on the floor at her feet, then a polite smile ticked up the corner of his lips. It wasn’t real, though. There was something plastic about it. Calculated. Empty.
He slid into the booth across from her like they were old friends settling in for dinner together. “I’m so happy to meet you. I hope your trip here wasn’t too difficult?”
Although he spoke English well, his accent said he was native to a German-speaking country. But the words themselves… Polite as they were, he delivered them with zero emotion.
It was…disconcerting.
“Uh, it was fine. Here’s the research.” She grabbed the bag from the seat beside her and handed it to him, not bothering to hide her frown.
As a matter of survival, she’d learned how to read people a long time ago and saw through him like glass. His politeness was as empty as his smile. A ruse, a thin layer of manners hiding contempt.
He didn’t like her. Probably viewed her as beneath him, inferior.
That wasn’t anything new.
His gaze dropped to the cooler. “Is that the sample?”
She nudged it out from under the table with her foot and scooted out of the booth. “My job is done.”
He caught her arm snakebite fast. “What about Dr. Oliver?”
Her stomach clenched and all of her internal alarm bells clanged. She’d met a lot of bad people in her line of work, but none had ever made her want to recoil from their touch.
He did.
She scowled at him and shook off his grip. “She’s staying in this hotel. Top floor. She has two bodyguards with her. Good luck with them. You’ll need it.”
“I’m not worried,” he said and sat back with a mildly contemplative expression on his face. “Dr. Oliver will see the good in what I’m doing once I speak with her.”
Having met Claire Oliver, Mercedes doubted it.
She yanked off the red scarf as she left the bar and tossed it in the trash on her way out of the lobby. Outside, she drew in a breath of muggy air and tried to shake off the chill that had invaded her body. There was something not right about that man, she thought as she stepped forward to claim one of the cabs waiting at the curb.
Dr. Oliver will see the good in what I’m doing…
What was he doing, exactly? And if it was so good, why had Claire Oliver been so intent on keeping her research out of his hands? It couldn’t be about money. Dr. Oliver was such a goody two shoes, she’d probably qualify for sainthood. She didn’t have a greedy cell in her body.
Unease rippled through Mercedes and she glanced back through the cab’s window at the hotel. Not much gave her the willies, but she had them now.
Nope, not her problem. She made herself turn around, face straight ahead. She’d done her job and, despite that man sending up all kinds of red flags, she was cleaning her hands of it.
Her only goal now was to keep Sebastian alive.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“I think you broke me,” Claire said as she lay bonelessly in bed beside Jean-Luc. “I’m a noodle.”
“Mm. Noodles. I’m hungry.”
She smiled into her pillow as Jean-Luc jumped out of bed like he was spring-loaded. Did the man never run out of energy? She was exhausted and could barely lift her head to watch him grab a fresh pair of cargo pants from his pack.
He pulled them on, then returned to her side and leaned over the bed to nuzzle her temple. “Want room service, cher?”
At his question, her stomach rumbled so loudly there was no way he hadn’t heard it. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until that moment. Her last full meal had been in the mess hall yesterday with Sunday and Marcus.
Yesterday. God. It already seemed like a lifetime ago.
Jean-Luc laughed softly and straightened. “I’ll take that as a yes. Any preferences?”
She sat up and dragged the sheet up over her breasts. “No. Whatever looks good. I’ll eat anything at this point.”
“One order for whatever looks good coming right up. There’s time if you want to shower again.”
She didn’t. She liked that she could smell him on her skin. “No need.”
He flashed a wicked grin. “Good, ’cause after I fuel up I’m gonna want to spend more time between your legs worshiping that perfect pussy.”
His words, said so casually, made her throb and dampen in anticipation. She’d never had a lover speak to her in such a way before. Never had a lover rock her world like he had, either. “It’s all yours for the worshiping.”
He growled low in his throat and took a step toward the bed, but stopped when her belly grumbled again. His gaze dropped to her middle, then roved back to her face in a way that made her feel hot and flushed. She thought for sure he’d come back to bed, but he turned away with visible effort.
“Food first,” he said as if reminding himself. “Sex later.”
She settled against the headboard and watched him walk out into the living room, still shirtless. He’d lost some weight, but the man still had the kind of body that inspired wet panties. And it was all hers. She’d never thought of herself as an especially sexual creature, but when he looked at her like he wanted to spend hours ravaging her, she felt sexy and oh so powerful.
She liked it. A lot.
She snuggled down into the bed, luxuriating in the scent of him on the sheets. She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, Jean-Luc was crouched beside her, smiling as he pushed her hair back from her face.
“Dinner will be here soon.”
“Oh.” She yawned and stretched. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“S’all good. You need sleep, but I want you to eat first. Can you do that for me, cher?”
She nodded and on a groan, rolled out of bed. She yawned again. Her head was fuzzy like she’d been awakened mid-dream. She looked at her pile of clothes on the floor and frowned. She liked the Ankara dress, thought it pretty, but it was short and form fitting. She really didn’t want to put it back on.
Jean-Luc must have read her mind because he went to his pack again and pulled out a T-shirt and sweatpants. “Here. They’ll be big, but the pants have a drawstring. More comfortable than what you had on before.”
“Thank you.” She took the clothes with her into the bathroom. She used the toilet, washed her hands, then studied herself in the mirror.
Oh, boy. She looked haggard. The bags under her eyes would definitely be charged overweight fees at the airport, and here she was with no makeup to fix it.
Ugh. How could Jean-Luc look at her now and see anything he wanted sharing his bed?
She turned on the cold tap and splashed her face a couple times. That helped. When she glanced up in the mirror again, she not only felt more alive, but she looked it. Some color had returned to her cheeks at least.
Jean-Luc’s T-shirt fell nearly to her knees. The sweatpants still sagged even when cinched as tight as they would go, but he was right. The outfit was much more comfortable than the dress.
She padded out to the living room to find him standing in front of the TV, flipping through the channels. He noticed her in the doorway and shut it off, but not before she caught a glimpse of a news report about the militant attack on the hospital. The picture of Sunday sent a spear of pain through her chest. Another friend lost, all because of her.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly.
“It’s okay.” She walked over to sit in one of the cushy armchairs. She pulled her knees up to her chest. “Has the story gone international?”
“Yeah.” He set the remote aside and went over to the table, where his gun lay on a towel amid a mess of supplies. He must have been cleaning it while she slept. The room still smelled faintly of gun oil.
She nodded to the weapon as he cleared off the table. “Do you think you’ll need that?”
“If there’s one thing the CIA taught me, it’s better to be ready a
nd not need it than to need it and not be ready.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” A knock sounded at the door. His hands were full, so she uncurled from the chair and went to answer it.
“Wait! Claire—” He dropped everything except for the weapon and took up position by the door.
“Really?” She scowled at him. “Nobody knows we’re here. It’s room service.”
“Probably, but I’m not taking chances. Check the peep.”
She sighed. Just one night, she wanted a bit of normalcy. Was that too much to ask? She answered her own question: yes. Right now, it was. There was nothing normal about having a group of mercenaries try to kidnap you not once, but twice. Jean-Luc was right to be overly cautious.
Resigned, she rose up on her toes and checked the peephole. It wasn’t room service.
“Dayo? Oh my God.” She threw open the door. “What are you doing here? How did you find us?”
He looked gray and wild eyed. He gasped for breath like he’d sprinted up the stairs. “I came as soon as I heard. Is Sunday…? Where is she? This hotel was our rendezvous in case we were separated.”
Claire’s heart broke all over again. In her mind’s eye, she saw Sunday collapsing into the mud, a bullet between her eyes…
No. She shut down that mental image. “I’m so sorry, Dayo. She didn’t make it.”
His expression crumpled and he leaned an arm on the doorframe. “I had hoped… I wanted her to be with…” He sucked in a sharp breath and nodded to himself as if making up his mind about something. “It doesn’t matter now. We have to leave. They’re coming for you.”
“Who’s coming?” Jean-Luc asked and stepped up beside her, still holding his weapon, but now down at his side. He set a protective hand on her shoulder and the simple touch fortified her in a way nothing else could.
“The people who want her research,” Dayo said, desperation thick in his voice.
“But they already have it,” she protested.
Dayo returned his attention to her. “They want you too and they’re here. I saw them.”
“How do you know?” Jean-Luc asked, still suspicious.
“I recognized one of them. Claire, she was there when we went to Lagos. She was following us and I made sure to lose her, but she’s here now with backup. If I tricked the front desk into giving me your room number, it’s only a matter of time until they do, too. I ran up the stairs to find you before they did.”
Oh, God. Was this ever going to end?
Heartsick, she glanced back at Jean-Luc. “If that’s true, we can’t stay. I don’t want to be the cause of another hostage situation.”
Jean-Luc said something in another language that sounded like a string of profound cursing. Russian again? It seemed to be his go-to preference for swearing whenever he was extremely upset.
“Hang on,” he said.
“We gotta go, man,” Dayo said.
Jean-Luc ignored him and disappeared for a second, then came back with his rucksack and a phone to his ear. “Marcus isn’t answering.”
He crossed the hall and lifted a fist to knock, but at that moment, Dayo tugged on her hand hard enough that her only choices were to follow or fall on her face.
“There’s no time. They are here now!” Dayo dragged her toward the elevator.
She wasn’t wearing shoes, and the tile floor was cold under her feet. She wasn’t dressed to go anywhere and tried to tug her hand free of Dayo’s. “Please, can I at least change and get my shoes? Dayo—ow!” His grip tightened. She was going to have a bruise. “Jean-Luc,” she called over her shoulder. “My shoes!”
Jean-Luc looked at Marcus’s door one last time, then ducked back into their room. He emerged a second later and sprinted after them, her sneakers in hand. He caught the elevator just before the doors slid shut and nipped inside.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Claire breathed a sigh of relief as the doors slid closed. Just having Jean-Luc beside her, she felt safer. He passed her the shoes, and she sat down to pull them on. “What about Marcus?”
“I’ll keep trying to call. Your safety has to be my first concern. How many are there?” he asked Dayo and checked his weapon.
“Too many to take on by ourselves. Our best option is to run.” Dayo stopped her from pressing the lobby button and instead hit the one marked basement. “I have a car waiting in the loading dock.”
The elevator doors slid open, and Dayo led them through a series of hallways. Finally, he opened a metal door and there was indeed an SUV waiting in the loading dock for them. He ushered them out, shut the door, and stepped in front of it as if blocking it.
Only then did Claire get an inkling that something was wrong. “What…? Dayo, what’s—?”
Jean-Luc pushed her behind him and swung his weapon from Dayo to the SUV. “Putain! You’re setting us up.”
The SUV’s doors opened and three men got out. All of them had blond hair and blue eyes. All of them were muscular and well armed.
“I’m sorry,” Dayo said softly, tears rolling down his face. “My family is all infected. Without Sunday and without them, I’ll have nothing to live for. He told me you have a cure and you weren’t going to use it to save anyone. He said he would save my family if I brought you to him. He could give them the cure then give me money to move them away from here. I had no choice!”
Desperate people. She had warned him weeks ago about the dangers of desperation, and she hadn’t listened to her own advice. “Dayo, there is no cure. Not really. Not yet, at least. Please, don’t do this.”
His face contorted. He was no longer the easygoing, happy man she’d come to know and like. Instead, this was the man she’d gotten a glimpse of at the militant camp, the one who had kicked over an oil drum out of anger.
“You’re lying!” His eyes bugged, even more wild now, and she noticed the spider webs of red in the whites of his eyes. Spittle flew from his lips. “There is a cure and you have it! You used it on him. Give it to me!”
“Don’t touch him.” She backed away, pulling Jean-Luc with her by his shirt, which had the unfortunate consequence of putting them closer to the SUV. But that was not her main concern at the moment. “Dayo, you’re infected.”
Jean-Luc glanced at her, horror in every line of his expression. She read his thoughts loud and clear because they echoed her own. Dayo had touched her.
Her heart beat a wild rhythm, threatening to knock right out of her chest, but she tried to keep her voice even. “It’s spread through bodily fluids. I should be okay.”
Dayo lunged forward. “Give me the cure!”
Jean-Luc brought his gun up and leveled it on Dayo’s chest. “Touch her again and I’ll drop you.”
That cold, implacable tone raised the hair on her arms. This situation was bringing out the worst in everybody that meant anything to her. First Dayo, and now Jean-Luc. The man standing next to her now wasn’t the sweet, funny man she was falling in love with. This was the version of Jean-Luc that scared her. Ruthless. A killer. She set a hand on his arm and felt his muscles tense under her fingers. He wouldn’t let her push his gun down, so she stepped in front of him instead. He cursed.
She ignored him and pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth as a makeshift mask before focusing on Dayo. The man was scared for his family and hurting. He’d made bad decisions but that didn’t mean he deserved to die. “Dayo, please listen to me. I only have research. It’s not complete. Who filled your head with this other nonsense about a cure?”
“I did.” A fourth man climbed out of the SUV, carrying a cooler Claire recognized. He had a German accent. She recognized him, too, but she couldn’t place a name with his pock-scarred face.
She dug her fingers into Jean-Luc’s arm to get his attention. “He has Akeso.” And just like that, she flashed back to the first time she’d seen the man. She couldn’t recall his name, but he’d approached her at a conference last year and offered her an obscene amount of money for Akeso. When she flatly refused, he’d
offered her a job working for…
“You’re with Bioteric.”
“I own Bioteric.” He tsked. “We could have done this the easy way, Dr. Oliver, but you refused my every offer.”
She huffed out a breath in disbelief. “So you killed Tiffany and Sunday and all of those people in Martinique and here at the field hospital—”
“Claire,” Jean-Luc said with a soft bite of warning in his tone.
She ignored him. “All for what? To corner the market with Akeso so you can make more money?”
The man gave a serene smile that contorted his scarred skin, pulling it tight in weird ways, making him look like a Halloween skull. “No, Dr. Oliver. Don’t you understand by now? This is much bigger than money, as you’ll soon see.” He made a slight hand motion and his bodyguards drew their weapons in unison, performing like trained dogs. Every single barrel targeted Jean-Luc. “Now get in the car and we won’t kill this man.”
She didn’t believe that for a minute. As soon as she set foot in that car, they’d open fire on Jean-Luc. They couldn’t leave him alive to come after her.
“No!” She didn’t think. She just ducked under his arm and used her body to block his. “If you want Akeso, you can’t kill him.”
She’d piqued his interest. She recognized the flare of it in his eyes as he considered Jean-Luc. She could also feel Jean-Luc all but vibrating with rage at her back. Whether he was angry at her or Bioteric was anyone’s guess.
“And why not?” the man finally asked. “He’s not a scientist. He’s nothing but a mercenary.”
She glanced back at Jean-Luc, hot tears blurring her vision. But she still saw his features pulled taut, his eyes spitting hatred at the scarred man. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed. Because although she was about to save his life, she was likely also about to condemn him to torture.
“He has to come with us,” she said, turning back to the Bioteric man. “He’s the first human test subject of Akeso.”
He studied Jean-Luc with cool calculation in his blue eyes. “Interesting. I had no idea you’ve made so much progress.” He motioned to his bodyguards. “Bring them both.”
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