Jonas's Redemption: A Standalone Romantic Suspense (Titan Security Book 2)

by Cynthia P. O'Neill

  His grip was a tight one. I’d bet he was a military man. “Peter. Let’s just say Rick, Derrick, and I used to run ops together.” Still gripping my hand and slapping the other against my upper arm, he added, “May your journey be safe and your mission quick.”

  I nodded at him in understanding and watched as he walked away. “Thanks, Peter. Hope to see you around.” He seemed like a nice guy. I wondered if he was one of the men Rick was trying to recruit for Titan.

  Russ cleared his throat. “We need to get you airborne. The dawn is approaching quickly.”

  Wondering if they were part of the same operative group in the Air Force, I motioned my hand between Russ and Peter, but I didn’t even get to the point of asking my question. He simply nodded.

  Russ held the door to the plane open and helped Erica inside, and then I climbed in after her. I motioned for Erica to put on the headphones hanging by a hook in front of her while I put on mine. I pulled out the contents of the envelope as Russ quickly untied us and wished us well. I found a GPS device, one I’d seen Sophia and Ethan—another computer and electronics expert who helped out Titan from time to time—working on. Knowing them, they had made the device untraceable. God, I loved working with these people. The coordinates were already put into place, so I found a mount on the plane’s dash for the device to sit and guide me to our location. It looked to be in the middle of the ocean. I was about to say, “What gives?” but Russ yelled out, “Start the plane now. We have incoming.”

  I started the engine and pushed the throttle forward, forcing us out into the water and away from the docks. A couple of bullets ricocheted off the dock area as Russ ran toward Peter, ducking for cover before returning fire in the direction of the parking lot.

  I yelled into the mic, “Can you hear me okay?”

  Erica nodded.

  “Good. We need to hightail it out of here. Once I get this baby in the air, I’ll need you to read me the instructions so we can get to our destination.” I handed her the paperwork along with some kind of device with a few buttons on it. The thing almost looked like a garage door opener, but in the middle of the ocean?

  I was thankful it was still dark with little to no activity in the marine area. I punched the throttle forward, trying to pick up enough speed to get us airborne. When I felt the pontoons begin to lift, I pulled the yoke back and had us in the air and following the course plotted out for us on the GPS. I made sure to fly below a certain altitude to avoid being picked up on radar. Knowing Titan Security, they probably had a jammer on the plane so we were undetectable, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  Silence filled the cabin, and I could tell Erica was scared and breathing fast. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t know you could fly a plane?” Her voice held a note of curiosity.

  “I took some courses in the military but found a love for intense missions, so I gave it up. However, I picked it back up when I came out of service, needing something to do with my weekends besides sit around and mope when I wasn’t on assignment.”

  Glancing over, I saw a smile spread across her lips, ones I kept thinking about kissing but not daring to do so. It would be so much easier to portray someone who didn’t give a shit than to get involved. “What’s the smile for?” I wondered.

  “You’re a thrill seeker, an adrenaline junkie, much like me.” She admitted sheepishly.

  I did a double take. Not quite sure I’d heard her correctly. “You are? With what?”

  She half laughed, half cried from the stress of the day’s events. “I guess that gives us something to talk about.”

  With the assistance of the sun rising up across the horizon, bringing the dawn of a new day with it, Erica looked over the paperwork and began to read:

  She turned the papers this way and that, but didn’t find any more information. I hated flying blind, so to speak, but at least the horizon looked promising, as far as this assignment went. I could see deserted tropical islands, and then some isolated one’s dotted with vacation homes belonging to someone famous or something. At least it wasn’t the desert. Thank goodness for that. I couldn’t let anyone know, not even my shrink, how I still had nightmares about the last mission there. All the blood spilled, the soldiers and civilians dying. If I’d only been quicker.

  “Jonas? Everything okay? You’re scaring me.” Erica’s voice penetrated through my thoughts. I suddenly realized we’d dropped closer to the water.

  I pulled the yoke back causing us to climb a little higher, when I suddenly saw an island the size of five or six football fields. The GPS started buzzing with activity. I flew over the island low enough to see what was there but high enough to clear the trees. I didn’t see any shelter, but that’s not to say there wasn’t any. The foliage and trees were quite thick in one area, making it difficult to see the ground.

  “Are we supposed to stay there?” Erica’s voice sounded scared.

  I tried to reassure her. “I’m sure there’s more than what meets the eye.”

  I went to the outer banks of the island, circling it as directed, and told Erica to point the device toward an area that looked like part of the beach and trees but had a hint of an unnatural shape that lie beneath its surface. Sure enough, the area split in two to reveal a dock to keep the plane. Whoever owned this island sure liked their privacy. I would’ve never found the “garage” for the plane otherwise. The damn thing looked like something out of a spy movie.

  Circling once more, I noticed the wind speed and the wave height and found the perfect spot to set the plane down. It was a little bumpy, but I throttled back, cutting the engines as we drove right into the docking area.

  Sensing our entrance into the area, the lights clicked on. Erica looked over, “Should I close the doors now?”

  I nodded.

  The doors silently closed behind us. When they were shut, my mind instantly switched into operative mode. With no wave movement, I was able to exit the plane easily and jump over to the dock to secure one side before moving around to secure the other side too. I helped her out of the plane, grabbed our luggage, and then saw a tarp covering a familiar shape in the corner, which I assumed was our ATV.

  “Let’s begin.”

  I watched as Jonas surveyed the area where we’d docked the seaplane. I admired how his body moved with efficiency and ease while his muscles stretched tightly against the polo shirt. He’d discarded his jacket, letting me take in the unusual tattoos running up the length of his arm and disappearing underneath his shirt.

  I wondered if his ink told a story or had meaning. The military men I’d worked with during my clinical rotations in counseling had a multitude of tattoos. Several had been in remembrance of fallen friends on the battlefield, while others were triumphs and tragedies in everyday life. In any event, they were significant to the soldier, and I loved listening to the stories these soldiers brought back with them and hoped I could hone in on the area they seemed to be hung up on in their lives. Was Jonas hung up on something? Was he having trouble adapting to civilian life. Is that the reason he’s so cross? He did remind me of a couple of patients I’d worked with.

  Reflected light was coming off of a silver cuff around Jonas’s wrist and bouncing into my face. I tried to get close enough to see what it was, but he quickly barked, “Stay put on the dock until I need your help.”

  Geez. What crawled up his ass? I kind of suspected his nasty attitude would return. Jonas had never been that nice to me, not at his sister’s wedding and certainly not when we first started off tonight; he’d been very curt and to the point. However, when he’d softened during the briefing with Derrick, which had given the impression that he actually had compassion, it had surprised me. Something told me not to buy into the act, but I did, needing reassurance things would be okay. Hell, in the course of twenty-four hours, my life had been turned upside down. I had one friend dead and two in the hospital clinging to life, and I had been stolen out from under the FBI’s noses and moved like a
ghost in the night.

  The memories of waking up in the jet plane with Jonas’s arms surrounding me felt nice and comfortable. His deep woodsy smell and gentle heartbeat didn’t help any. I’d almost allowed myself to believe it was real. But the fantasy of it all was thrown out the window the moment we started getting shot at on the docks in…Where were we again? Was it Miami or somewhere close to it? And for that matter…

  “Where are we?” I asked, hoping he’d pause long enough to get an answer.

  The ass, he kept working, pulling a tarp off of a piece of equipment in the corner and revealing an ATV. I watched as he strapped our luggage to the back while uttering under his breath, “We’re at a safe location. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Duh. I knew that. What I want to know is where? I know we started off someplace close to Miami, and then flew for a couple hours. I don’t think we’ve gone in a straight line, because I could feel the twists and turns in the air. So, Mr. Hyde, where the hell are we? I think I have a right to know.”

  I’d never seen Jonas look so perplexed. One moment he was looking at me like I’d grown a second head, and the next, he burst into laughter. Pointing at me, he said, “Mr. Hyde. That’s a good one, princess. Why that reference, and why do you need to know where you are? Shouldn’t you just be happy you’re alive, and I’m keeping you safe?”

  I crossed my arms underneath my chest, took a stance on the dock with my legs shoulder width apart, and just stared him down. Instead of taking in the scowl on my face, his eyes quickly focused on my breasts. I’d forgotten that I took off my jacket and that my cleavage was more pronounced in this dress. Men! “My eyes are up here, dude.”

  Jonas quickly shook his head and walked to within inches from touching me. His eyes looked down into mine. He expected me to budge, but when I didn’t, he asked, “Why are you being so difficult?”

  His words felt like a slap against my face. Me difficult? Preposterous! I stood on my tiptoes to get into his face and began to point at him. “I’m not the one with a stick up his ass. All I’m asking for is to know where I’m at. What if something happens to you? What if we’re ambushed? I want to know where the hell I’m supposed to go, what I’m to do, and where I can get help should any of that happen.”

  He started laughing in my face. “That’s on a need-to-know basis, and right now, I don’t think you need to know, especially not with that attitude you’re packing. So deal with it, princess.”

  I didn’t care if he looked like a big gorilla ready to blow a gasket and pounce. I wanted answers. “I’ll deal with it all right. The first chance I get, I’ll let Rick and my father know how disrespectful you’ve been and how you won’t even acknowledge where we are. I’m guessing, based on the various directions we flew, we’re either in the Bahamas, off the coast of the Palm Beaches, or somewhere in the Caribbean.”

  His brows furrowed, and the mask of indifference he’d worn since we left the docks in Miami suddenly slipped. “How did you…”

  “You keep calling me princess, but what you fail to realize is that I’m capable of thought. You do remember who my parents are, right? I don’t need a map to know we first traveled east, then south quite a ways, then back to the west, again to the north, and finally east again. You ran a zigzag pattern of confusion for anyone who was attempting to track us or find us after we took off. My speculation is that we mainly went east, so, that would be somewhere in the archipelagos of the Bahamas.”

  He nodded and started to ask, “But…”

  I just smiled, knowing I had him. “I guess you also forgot about the instrumentation panel on the plane. The compass kind of clued me in too. So am I right?”

  Turning away from me, he didn’t bother to respond with words, only grunts, which basically told me I had been correct in my analysis of our location. He started looking for a few things in the garage, dock, or whatever the hell you wanted to call it. Jonas seemed to find what he was looking for, as he grabbed a small envelope. I watched as he opened it and pulled out a couple sets of keys along with a map of the island.

  He held it up toward me. “Let’s begin.”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Let’s begin.” Begin what? Was he going to start treating me with some civility? Was it signaling the beginning of his assignment? You’d think he could learn a few more vocabulary words to provide a better definition for what he meant. If I wanted to be stuck with an ape, they could’ve dropped me off in a zoo. Maybe they would be a little friendlier to be around?

  Before I could move or even acknowledge him, he seemed to remember, “Since you’re by the plane, why don’t you make yourself useful and reach in and grab the GPS.”

  Shaking my head back and forth, I stood my ground. “Do you just bark orders at everyone, or do you know how to ask nicely?” I could already see how this was going to go: him on one side of the island, me on the other, providing he’d allow it.

  Jonas held up his hands. “Fine. You win this match, but don’t push your luck with me, Erica. I tend to win.” He cocked his head to the side, giving me a stare down, and when I didn’t flinch, he finally added, “Would you please grab the GPS from the cockpit?”

  “Sure, why not?” I laid my jacket down on the dock, along with the small purse Titan had provided so that I could carry my new ID with me. I stepped gingerly onto the pontoon of the plane and reached into the cabin for the device. However, when I pulled back, my heal caught—on what I didn’t know—and I began to fall, until strong arms reached around, picked me up, and threw me over a shoulder.

  “What the hell?” I yelled out and slapped at Jonas’s backside. “Put me down.”

  I felt a sharp slap to my backside. “That’s for being a smartass and cussing too much for a lady.” He slapped at my ass again. “And that’s for almost falling into the water and hurting yourself. I can’t have you getting hurt within the first minutes here.”

  He took the device from my hand before putting me down on the dock. I’m actually surprised, with his attitude, that he didn’t drop me on my ass. What the hell was with this guy?

  I waved my hand the full length of him. “At the hanger outside of Tampa, I thought you’d finally gotten a personality and had learned how to treat people. Was that all a ploy to get me to go along with you on this assignment? Which are you: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, or a little of both?”

  He leaned down to grab my things, before grasping my upper arm and almost dragging me over to the ATV. “Climb on.”

  I shook my head refusing to comply, so he ordered me to climb on again. I refused a second time, when he finally asked, “Why not?”

  I waved both of my hands up and down the front of me. “How? Don’t you see the skintight dress I’m wearing? How am I supposed to climb on and straddle that thing?” I argued.

  Jonas handed me my purse, and then proceeded to grab ahold of the hem of my dress and hike it up, almost exposing the delicate lace panties I was wearing. He paused a moment when he reached my upper thighs. I was about to protest, but he took my coat and tied the arms around my waist before pulling the length of the coat through my legs and tucking it in. He shook his head. “I know it’s not fashionable, but it’ll do, at least until we can get somewhere we can change into clothes more suitable to this tropical setting.” He shook his head and mumbled to himself. “What the heck was Titan thinking when they put her in a dress?”

  I’d wanted to fight with him, but seeing his reaction to my legs, to the tattoo that rested on my upper left thigh…he’d won this round. How could I fight with someone who was already fighting an internal battle? How did I know? Easy, he’d swallowed hard, and his hands had been shaking a bit when he’d seen the words “carpe diem” and a date he should have probably recognized—the date my family had gone into witness protection; the day I had suddenly become Erica Jamieson. It seemed to reach him in some way, how I didn’t know, but based on my studies and working with other veterans, I noted his temperament had become slightly agitated, and then
calmed considerably. He was wrestling with something in his mind, but what?

  We didn’t say any further words as he helped me onto the ATV, and then climbed on in front of me. He clicked a button on the wall that opened a door, allowing us to pass through before it closed.

  The humidity was stifling, but the breeze off the ocean helped to keep things tolerable. From the air, the island had looked deserted, but I’d grown up knowing that things weren’t always what they seemed. Plus, Titan would never send us to the middle of nowhere without decent accommodations, so my curiosity was peaked, and I wanted to see what mysteries this island held.

  Turning his head back toward me, Jonas cited, “This might get bumpy, princess. Hold on tight if you don’t want to get left behind.”

  Like hell I will! The thought just passed through my mind, when he propelled the ATV forward, causing me to wrap my arms around him to keep from falling off. The bastard laughed at me. At this moment, I hated him, being here, and the world for that matter. Why the hell had this happened to me? And why, above everything, did it feel so nice to have my chest pressing up against the hardness of his back and my hands gripping the contours of his chest? Why did I love the way my thighs vibrated with the pulse of the engine? Get a grip, girl. You’re here because of a threat. You have to trust this asshole, even if he does push all your buttons. And get your mind of the gutter; he has no interest in you. He’s here for a job only.

  The ATV went along a rough path. I looked up and around me to get a feel for the surroundings. I was surprised to see the palm trees forming a canopy with their fronds, which blocked the path from aerial view. I remember looking down on the island from the plane and seeing only a jungle of trees. There had to be more here, right?

  A few minutes later, my question answered itself. I looked closely at the underbrush and noticed small lines running toward the direction we were headed. A little further down, I noticed small translucent solar cells interspersed amongst the shrubbery collecting sunlight to turn into power. Something did exist on this island. It just wasn’t visible by air.