Another nod.
“My suggestion is that you start making calls, whatever you need to get the ransom money ready. Your husband’s best chance, our best chance, is to pay what they ask.”
“Now I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” the suit from the insurance company said. Always protecting that bottom line. Danny couldn’t remember his name and frankly didn’t care to know it, but in this instance, he had to agree with the man.
They had the resources to send someone to Colombia and get Bryson out. A team of SEALs stationed in Coronado trained with Danny’s office, as well as several other Special Forces units—any of them could go in after Bryson.
Problem was money. And politics. Always came down to those two gems. Even as wealthy as the Van Amees were, a rescue operation cost serious bucks, and Bryson wasn’t important enough to waste that kind of time or manpower. It was easier to pay the ransom.
Not important enough.
Danny thought of Van Amee’s two little boys, Grayson and Ashton, who reminded him so much of his twin sons. So young and frightened, with a mother who didn’t seem to give two figs about them.
Okay, he knew he had to cut Chloe some slack for the dismissive way she treated them. Stressed way beyond what most normal people experience in their lifetime, she was cracking, and everyone handled that differently. For all he knew, she was Mother of the Year under normal circumstances.
Not important enough.
Goddammit, but Bryson Van Amee was important. Those two little boys deserved to grow up with a father. Who was he to take that away by not doing everything in his power to bring Bryson home?
But that was the problem. It wasn’t in his power to make the call. It was Perry the Prick’s.
Frustrated, feeling the constraint of bureaucratic red tape, Danny ground his teeth but kept his mouth shut.
CHAPTER SEVEN
COLOMBIA
Gabe stepped out of Armando Castillo’s shabby but well-kept house and slid his sunglasses on against the glare of morning sunshine. Chickens clucked and strutted around the house and a worn shed he assumed was a barn. A scruffy mule grazed behind a fence that had seen better days and wouldn’t hold back a more ambitious animal. Skinny stray dogs sniffed the pitted dirt streets of a barely there jungle village for scraps.
The air already sweltered, promising a day as thick as pudding with humidity, and Gabe’s shirt clung to his spine. Compared to the persistent coolness of Bogotá, it was as if they’d entered a different country.
He checked his cell phone to call Harvard and found no signal. Not a surprise, but being out of contact with his team in the middle of guerilla country with an untrained civilian woman in tow made him twitchy. Since leaving the city, the hair on the back of his neck prickled in a near preternatural sixth sense—if you believed in that sort of thing—that usually warned him someone was watching.
Laughter erupted from the house behind him and Gabe shook his head in complete awe. How Audrey went from giving Armando Castillo the third degree to becoming the limo driver’s new best friend was beyond him. He’d watched it happen and still couldn’t understand how it had happened. One minute, grief and guilt devastated Armando’s lived-in features as he explained someone had called in and changed Bryson’s pick-up time the morning of the abduction. The next, Audrey had him grinning and joking with her like they’d known each other forever. Maybe if Gabe knew Spanish, he’d understand how she managed that. Then again, maybe she just possessed a certain…magnetism or something.
God knew she drew him like the proverbial doomed moth to a flame.
Which ticked him off in a big way. Never before had a woman fascinated him to distraction like this. He liked to keep his love life—if he could even call it that; sex had been completely off his radar since the car accident last year—as orderly and precise as everything else he did. But she had the potential to destroy his meticulous life like a wrecking ball through concrete.
So he shouldn’t even consider Audrey Van Amee in that way. Idiot.
Warning prickled along the back of his neck again and he straightened, scanning the area. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but that didn’t mean much. He excelled at spotting tails, but he wasn’t dumb enough to think that nobody in the world was better at tailing than he was at spotting them. He checked his watch then rubbed a hand over his jaw, which was in desperate need of a date with a razor.
What the hell was that woman doing in there, anyhow? They had just about overstayed their welcome and needed to get gone.
Ten minutes later, just as he was about to go drag her out of the house in a fireman’s carry if need be, Audrey emerged carrying a basket. Armando and his tiny wife, who had a voice that rivaled a foghorn, trailed behind. Gabe pushed away from the car, only to have to wait another five minutes as they chatted.
C’mon, woman.
He caught Audrey’s gaze and hitched his chin toward the Jeep. She crinkled her nose—and, dammit, he shouldn’t have found that expression as endearing as he did—then pointedly turned her back on him. He got the feeling she would have stuck out her tongue if they weren’t in mixed company.
Frustrated, he yanked open the Jeep’s door with enough force to rock the vehicle. He was tapping his fingers in succession on the steering wheel when she finally decided to bless him with her presence, and slammed the Jeep into gear almost before she had the door shut.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She caught herself on the dashboard with one hand while protecting her basket with the other. “Impatient much?”
“In case you’ve forgotten, we’re working on a limited watch.” He shot her a narrow-eyed glare. “We don’t have time to sit around and chitchat with the friendly locals, especially when there are a lot of unfriendly locals in the vicinity.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Audrey straightened and buckled herself into the seat. “And I wasn’t wasting time.” She reached into her basket and brought out a printed sheet of paper that she fluttered in front of his nose.
“Holy shit. You actually got something out of him?” He grabbed it from her. Spanish. Of course. He really needed to learn the language. “What’s it say?”
“Yes, I did.” She scowled and snatched the paper back. “But we’re lucky Armando even let us inside, not to mention told us anything. It’s extremely rude to come calling without bringing a gift, you know.”
“What’s it say?” Gabe repeated though his teeth.
Audrey sighed. “It’s the itinerary Bryson filed with the limo company so they’d know when he needed their services. And…” Again, she dipped a hand into the basket, brought out a smaller handwritten piece of notebook paper. “Even though they didn’t have a name for the man that called in and changed Bryson’s pick-up time, they have the phone number he used.”
Okay, that was slightly impressive. When he left the house to try and contact his team, he’d figured that well of information was tapped out. “We’ll give that to Harvard to trace as soon as we’re back in contact.”
“You didn’t get a hold of them?”
“No signal.”
“Y’all really should have satellite phones,” she said, as if it was common sense.
“Why didn’t we think of that?” He infused the words with as much fake incredulity as he could muster. “I’ll get right on that as soon as I get us out of guerilla country, rescue your brother, and keep this haphazard team of mine from killing each other. Top of my list. Promise.”
“You’re such a grumpy butt.”
Gabe sputtered. He’d been called a lot of things in his life, mostly names incorporating creative variations of four-letter words in many different languages. But this took the cake. “A what?”
She flashed that smile, the one that lit up her eyes and crinkled her nose, and his irritation instantly faded. That probably should have annoyed him, but it didn’t.
“It’s something my brother…” Just as quickly as it appeared, her smile vanished and she turned away t
o stare out the window.
Gabe let a whole five seconds of silence pass before he couldn’t stand the sadness he felt weighing down on her. “Something your brother…what?”
“Just something he used to say when I had a mood on as a child,” Audrey said, still staring out the window. “I always thought it was so ridiculous I forgot whatever I was mad about.” She finally looked at him again and a hint of her previous smile ghosted over her lips. “Did it work for you?”
“Yeah. And, wow, I never pegged you for the manipulative type.”
Now her smile returned full-force, and for a moment, Gabe found himself so dazzled he almost forgot to watch the winding road in front of them.
“I’m a woman, duh,” she said. “And a Southern woman, to boot. Manipulation is what we do best.”
Gabe forced his attention back to the road. “What else is in there?” He hitched his chin toward the basket on her lap.
“Food for the guys from Armando’s wife.”
At the mention of food, his stomach growled mightily, reminding him he hadn’t eaten since his retirement party, and then only a couple hors d’oeuvres. “What kind of food?”
“Empanadas, buñuelos, some fruit, coffee.”
He held out a hand, wiggled his fingers. “Hand over one of those empanadas.”
“We need to teach you manners.” She rolled her eyes but slapped one of the wrapped packages into his palm. “You’re lucky they included enough for you. They thought you were very rude. Which, you are.”
“I’m hurt,” he muttered around a bite of flavorful beef and fried dough. “Crying on the inside. Got coffee?”
She sighed, but produced a thermos and poured some coffee into the lid without spilling a drop as they bumped over a road that hadn’t seen construction in a good decade or more. The hot, dark aroma that only came with real Colombian java filled the car. She waited until he inhaled the empanada before handing over the cup, but they hit another bump and his head banged on the roof. The coffee sloshed everywhere. He swore as the car that had been riding his ass for the past mile blared its horn.
“You should buckle up. If Colombians are anything like Costa Rican drivers, it can get vicious.” Calmly, she poured another cup. Then, despite her lecture, unbuckled herself and turned in her seat to hold the coffee to his lips. “Careful, it’s hot.”
Something twisted his gut, a sharp clench of emotion he didn’t dare put a name to, not to mention analyze.
“Uh, thanks, I got it now.” He took the cup, their fingers brushing in an innocent, fleeting touch. That clench in his gut slid below the belt. She had soft hands, small and elegant, flecked with colorful bits of paint, and a visceral image of those pretty fingers tracing over his body, her palm closing around his cock and stroking hard and fast the way he liked, took root in his brain.
The Jeep hit another bump and sent a pinch of pain through his groin. He winced and she drew away, retreating to her side of the car. Her eyes looked a little dazed, her lower lip swelling up under the constant worrying of her teeth. Silence stretched between them, growing more uncomfortable with each passing second.
At last, she looked at him. “You feel it too, don’t you? From that first moment, there’s been something between us. Chemistry.”
Should’ve known she’d not shy away from it. Audrey Van Amee may be quirky, rash, and as capricious as his intel claimed—though he was starting to doubt that last one—but nobody could accuse her of not having spine. Which shamed him for considering, even for a second, denying the…chemistry, or whatever it was. Lying was probably the right thing, the professional thing, to do. But, hell, if she couldn’t see the erection still throbbing against the fly of his cargo pants, she should visit a doctor about that vision problem, because the damn thing was as noticeable as the Washington Monument.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I feel it. Obviously.”
Her gaze dropped to his lap, and lingered just long enough that he had to shift in the seat to relieve some of the growing pressure between his legs. She licked her lips and he wanted to groan.
“Must you do that?”
Big caramel brown eyes snapped to his. “Do what?”
“That thing with your tongue. It’s not helping my situation over here.”
She sent him a wicked grin. “Why? Does it distract you?”
“You know damn well it does.”
“Hmm.” Slowly, ever so slowly, she traced her tongue over her lower lip. “Good.”
“No. Not good. Not if you want to see your brother again.”
Her smile faded and hurt flared in her eyes before she turned away from him. Direct hit. Dammit, he was an asshole, but he refused to take it back.
She rode in silence for several miles, and Gabe got the feeling she’d retreated to somewhere inside herself. Maybe he’d been too abrupt in shutting her down. He wasn’t always the most tactful of men, but he had to make his intentions clear from the go so there were no crossed signals and hurt feelings later on. Yes, she was sexy. Under different circumstances, maybe he’d have even acted on his attraction. But not here. Not now. Probably not ever, if he wanted to remain professional—and he did. If word got out that he’d had a fling with a family member during an op, the team would be ruined before they even had a chance to make a name for themselves.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the glimmer of wetness on her cheek and glanced over. Tears streamed from her eyes in steady rivulets. Okay, now he really felt like an ass.
“Audrey, I’m sorry. That was—”
“No.” She sniffled and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I went too far. I just… I guess I need the distraction, even if you don’t.” She squared her shoulders and turned in the seat to face him. “We’re not going to get to Bryson in time, are we?”
“We’ll find him.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it.”
“I wouldn’t know how.” He took his eyes off the road long enough to meet her gaze. “My team will rescue him, Audrey. There is no other alternative.”
A smile fluttered over her lips. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Silence again, but this time she didn’t turn away. Her eyes stayed on him, studying him, and he started to feel like an abstract painting that she couldn’t figure out.
Up ahead, traffic had halted on the narrow road. He pulled up behind the last car in line, popped open his door, and stood on the runner. Some sort of accident, maybe, but with the way the road curved to the left, it was too hard to tell. He considered walking up and checking it out, but the idea of leaving Audrey alone in the car sent an icy shiver through him. And no way was he taking her. What if it was a guerilla roadblock?
Fuck.
He ran through a mental list of their options. Couldn’t turn around. Another car—the one with the horn-happy driver—had already rolled to a stop behind them, blocking that escape. He couldn’t run, but Audrey could. Maybe he could distract them long enough for her to disappear into the—
Audrey alone in the jungle. Cold. Wet. Vulnerable to all manner of predators.
No. His mind instantly and violently rejected the image. He was probably getting ahead of himself, anyway. For now, the best course was to wait on high alert. Could be nothing just as easily as something serious, and he didn’t need to draw any undue attention to them either way. He sat back down, shut the door, grabbed his SIG, checked it, and realized her gaze was still on him. She hadn’t even spared the stopped traffic a glance.
“What?” he snapped, his legendary nerves of steel fraying. He felt more exposed with her eyes on him in the close confines of the Jeep than he ever did HALO jumping into the most brutal enemy territory.
She turned her head to one side, golden honey-brown hair cascading over one slim shoulder. Sunlight glinted off her ear. He hadn’t noticed she was wearing earrings before, little turquoise sunbursts that were fanciful and charming and suited her to a T.
“You’re really not my type, Gabe
.”
“Ditto, sweetheart,” he said, keeping one eye on the stopped traffic. Why were those stupid turquoise earrings so freaking sexy, anyway?
“I can’t figure out why I’m so attracted.” Fine lines etched into her brow as she narrowed her eyes at him. “Okay, you’re hot stuff, but you’re also impolite, domineering, abrupt, sarcastic—”
“Stop. My ego can’t take much more flattery.”
She grinned at his deadpan tone. “See? And still, I like you.” She sounded shocked. “Once this is over and my brother’s safe, maybe I’ll walk on the wild side and go against type, just this once. See if I’m missing anything. I’ll have to think about it.”
His cock jerked, offering itself for her experimental walk on the wild side, and he clenched his teeth against the hot and raw surge of lust. No can do, buddy. “Think about it all you want, Audrey, but nothing’s going to happen.”
“Why not? You want it. If I decide I want it, too, there shouldn’t be a problem. We’re both consenting adults.”
“It’s unprofessional.”
She made a very unladylike sound. “I’m starting to think it’s not me that needs a walk on the wild side. Do you ever just…I don’t know…cut loose?”
When he only gave her a bland stare, she added, “You know. Raise hell, let your hair down, kick up your heels, sow your wild oats… Oh, c’mon, Gabe, work with me. I’m running out of euphemisms here. I bet you were a wild child in your day.”
“Yeah, ‘cuz I’ve had so much time to run wild.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound, even to his own ears. “Forget that I’m a little busy trying to save your brother. Never mind that I spent the past year trying to save my foot, then my job. And every year before that, I was too busy trying to be the best damn SEAL I could be. So, no, I don’t ever cut loose.”
“What about when you were a child?”
She asked it so casually, he didn’t think twice about answering. “Same goes. I went to a military academy.”
Audrey gave him a look so full of—Jesus Christ, was that pity? He ground his back teeth and reached into the glove box for an extra ammo clip, then jammed it into the side pocket of his cargos. She had no reason to pity him. He’d had a good life and liked it just fine the way it was. Or at least he did. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the new course he’d taken in the past twelve hours, but that didn’t rate her pity.
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