“I checked Chloe Van Amee’s financial records,” Harvard said without preamble. “Her personal accounts are nearly dry, but she scraped together enough to buy a first class ticket to Costa Rica. For tonight. Her plane arrived in San Jose two hours ago.”
…
Chloe blinked when Gabe slid a protective arm around Audrey’s waist. If she had less Botox injected into her face, that pinched expression might have been a frown.
“Who’s he?” she asked again in a voice full of suspicion and a hint of gossipy speculation.
Audrey ignored the question, instead answering with a couple of her own. “Where’s Bryson? Is he okay?”
Chloe wasn’t the type of sister-in-law to drop in unannounced. She wasn’t even the type to drop in announced. Five minutes ago, Audrey would have bet her life savings that Chloe would never see the inside of her home, yet here she stood on the porch, staring warily at Gabe.
Jeez, was today the day for unexpected visits or what?
“I wanted to talk to you,” Chloe said.
“You couldn’t do it over the phone?” Gabe asked.
Her too-plump lips pressed together. “No. I couldn’t.” Then she looked him over with a critical eye. “You’re one of the men that rescued my husband.”
He inclined his head. “I am.”
“What are you doing here?”
Audrey opened her mouth to say it was none of Chloe’s business, but Gabe spoke over her. “I live here.”
It gave her a little thrill to hear him say it. So what if he technically didn’t have any of his belongings here yet. Just the fact that he said it with that note of finality in his voice made her go all warm and gooey inside. He lived here. With her.
Chloe harrumphed. “Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”
“We’re busy,” Gabe said and Audrey’s face heated.
Oh God. The last thing she needed was for Chloe to report to her brother that she was shacked up with some man, doing the sorts of things that keep healthy men and women busy in the middle of the night. Chloe would make the situation into the apocalypse and Gabe into Lucifer, and Bryson would go on one of his brotherly rampages before she had a chance to ease him into the idea of her having a live-in lover.
She nudged Gabe in the side with a soft, reprimanding, “Gabriel,” but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Unless this is an emergency,” he said, “I suggest you try back in the morning.”
Something flashed in Chloe’s dark eyes, but she dipped her head before Audrey was able to identify the emotion. Anger, maybe. Chloe did tend to have a short fuse, and having someone so succinctly tell her off wasn’t something that happened often to the overindulged woman. Certainly wasn’t fear. A person had to be intelligent to be afraid of the likes of Gabe, and her sister-in-law wasn’t known for her brains.
“Chloe, it is late and I’m tired. I’m sure you are, too, if you just arrived.” Audrey tried to keep her voice soft, soothing them both. “As long as Bryson is okay, there’s no need for this right now. Come back in the morning and we can talk or whatever over breakfast, okay?”
Chloe hesitated. “Alone.”
“Hell no—”
Audrey cut off Gabe’s protest with a finger against his lips. “Yes, alone. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Even after the door shut, Audrey kept her finger pressed to his lips. The expression in his gold eyes faded from pissed off to mulish, then flared with heat as he opened his mouth and sucked her finger inside.
She laughed even as sensation sparked from the tip of her finger and zinged through her blood to her belly. “Didn’t you get enough earlier?”
“I’ll never get enough of you, woman.” After one last swirling lick, he released her finger and moved to the window, still in warrior mode, full of that deadly catlike grace. He parted the curtains. Chloe’s headlights splashed over the hard angles of his face as she backed out of the driveway.
“I don’t like her.”
Audrey let out a huff of laughter. “C’mon, hon. She’s a pain-in-the-ass, but she’s harmless.”
“I don’t know about harmless. There’s something about her…” He backed away from the window and moved his shoulders as if trying to shake off a cold chill. “It’s out of the ordinary for her to visit, right?”
“I’ll say. I honestly didn’t think she even knew where I lived.”
“Yeah, about that. I don’t like out of the ordinary.” After picking up the gun he’d set on the foyer table, he gave her a quick kiss. “Go on to bed. I’ll check out the grounds, make sure we’re secure, then be in.”
She caught his face in her hands. “Careful, Gabriel, your paranoia is showing.”
“Probably.” His faint smile never touched his eyes. “But humor me. Lock yourself in the bedroom until I come back, okay?”
Audrey watched him slip out the front door and fade into the night. She sighed and moved toward the bedroom to follow her SEAL’s orders. She supposed this was something she’d have to get used to, though she planned to ease away his constant fear of attack. That was no way for anyone, even a former SEAL, to live. Everyone needed a refuge, some place untouched by the outside world, where he can let down his guard. This was going to be Gabe Bristow’s haven. She’d make sure of it.
She heard him come in the back door just as she was straightening the sex-rumpled quilt on the bed. He paused in the kitchen for so long she finally gave up waiting and opened the bedroom door.
“Gabe?”
Footsteps.
Except, no, those couldn’t belong to Gabe. It sounded like a Clydesdale stomping through the kitchen and as big as he was, he never walked with heavy boots, always ghosted about even in the comfort of his own home. He’d more than once frightened her today, sneaking up behind her with his barely-there footfalls.
A shadow appeared at the end of the short hallway, backlit by the lamp she always left burning in the living room. Definitely not Gabe. Too short. Too scrawny.
Oh God.
As silently as she could, she closed and locked the bedroom door. She had no way of knowing if the intruder had seen her—the interior hallway was always dark, and the way the door was set into the wall with a slight indentation provided a little protection—but from the sounds of his footsteps, it didn’t matter. He knew the layout of her house and bypassed the laundry room, the guest bath, and the extra bedroom, moving with unerring accuracy toward the master bedroom.
Toward her.
…
Something was not right.
Everything looked normal. The nearly full moon floating over the ocean in the inky sky provided a good view of the house and yard, and Gabe saw nothing out of place. No odd shadows that shouldn’t be there, no movement except for the sway of the palms, no sound but the soft lapping of the ocean against the dock.
Still. He couldn’t shake the gut feeling that something was way off, and he knew better than to argue with his gut—it had saved his ass in more near-fatal situations than any one man should survive. So he walked the grounds again, still found nothing, and his instincts still told him it didn’t matter. He strode to the end of the drive and looked both ways on the narrow, empty road.
Maybe he should take Audrey to a hotel for the night. She had next-to-nil for security—something he planned to fix if he was going to live here—and the crappy system she did have had so many holes it would work better as a colander than a security system.
Actually, that sounded like a damn good idea. He’d sleep better tonight knowing they were secure. Tomorrow, he’d make some calls and pull some strings to have a security specialist out here by noon. Maybe Jean-Luc’s brother-in-law would want the job.
He turned to go back to the house, and out of the corner of his eye, caught a glint of moonlight off something down the street. A car, a blue sedan, parked in the foliage alongside the road. Given that Audrey had no immediate neighbors and lived on a twisty, rarely used road that fought a constant losing battle with the encroa
ching jungle, it was not normal to have a car just sitting in the street. That was probably the cause of his unease. He’d bet his good foot it was Chloe’s car, and he was not a betting man. People don’t just pop up for random personal visits in the middle of the night unless there was a problem. Especially not wealthy, pampered people like Chloe Van Amee. He could only come up with a couple reasons why she’d leave the car here in this specific spot, hidden from view, and none of them were good.
Weapon aimed, he melted into the jungle shadows alongside the road and moved toward the car, keeping down and to the right so he’d come up in the driver’s blind spot.
And what do you know, it wasn’t abandoned. Chloe still sat in the driver’s seat. She jumped when he opened the passenger side door and pointed his gun at her forehead.
“Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you? No? Great.”
Her eyes flicked from his gun to his face then skipped away. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Could say the same of you, Mrs. Van Amee.”
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until her manicured nails dug into the braided leather. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
She pressed those grotesque, collagen-injected lips together, refusing to answer.
“Chloe.” He made her name into the verbal equivalent of a dagger, all edges, and she flinched.
“I’m sorry.” She turned in the seat, brown eyes wide and wild as tears spilled over. “God, I am so sorry. I-I love my husband, and I didn’t think anyone would get hurt. Rorro—” She said his name with a Spanish inflection, rolling the Rs, and Gabe held up a hand to stop her.
Average American women from Kansas couldn’t roll their Rs like that.
“Your real name isn’t Chloe,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Claudia.” Just like that, she dropped the perfect Midwestern accent, and the lilting sounds of Colombian Spanish weaved through her words. “My name is Claudia Rivera.”
“Jesus Christ. Angel and Jacinto’s missing sister.” How the fuck had they all missed that connection? His first instinct was to get back to Audrey as fast as his bum foot could carry him. Second was to shoot Chloe Van Amee on principle because he suddenly knew who set up Bryson’s abduction and caused Audrey so much anguish. Chloe may not have been the mastermind, but she was in this shitstorm up to her liposuctioned rear end.
“I tried to get away from them,” Claudia sobbed. “I didn’t want any part of my family, but they dragged me back. Rorro called me a year ago and said he’d tell Bryson who I was and what I’d done in Colombia if I didn’t go along with his plans. I had no choice. I didn’t want to lose my husband. My house.”
She said nothing about her sons, and inwardly, Gabe ached for the poor boys. He knew exactly what it was like to grow up with a mother who put on all the right appearances, but really didn’t care about anyone but herself. At least Grayson and Ashton still had a loving aunt and father.
Maybe.
“What plans?” Gabe demanded.
“At first he only wanted money,” Claudia said. “But he bled me dry. The allowance Bryson gave me wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t draw from our joint accounts without making him suspicious. When I explained that to Rorro, he said we had to come up with another way for me to pay. Then he saw a stupid action movie and it gave him an idea to kidnap Bryson for ransom and blame it on the EPC. He had me call Jacinto with the plan because he didn’t want anyone to know he isn’t as dumb as he pretends to be. He likes when people underestimate him.”
Gabe thought back to the raid and hell, that’s exactly what he’d done, even after Luis Mena warned him that Rorro was vicious and not to be underestimated.
They all thought Rorro had tossed his cousin to the wolves out of fear, but it had been a more calculated move than that. He had deemed Jacinto’s usefulness tapped out and disposed of him like a rancher putting down a lame horse.
A chill shot down Gabe’s spine and nailed him in the ass. “Where is he now?”
Claudia gazed over at him. In the light of the fat white moon overhead, her plasticized face took on the macabre look of a skull with sunken cheeks and a peculiar hollowness in her eyes. It was the same thousand-yard stare he’d seen in soldiers who had looked death in the face and walked away alive. The same empty, lonely stare Gabe saw every time he looked at Quinn.
“Claudia. Where. Is. He?”
“He thinks it’s Audrey’s fault he didn’t get the ransom money because she called the FBI and ruined everything.” She moistened her lips and looked away. Guilt thickened her voice. “He’s going to kill her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Weapon. She needed a weapon.
Audrey looked around, spotted the bedside lamp. It had worked when she thought Jean-Luc was attacking her in Bryson’s apartment in Bogotá, but Jean-Luc hadn’t really wanted to harm her. Somehow, she didn’t think the man banging against the door that she’d barricaded with her dresser felt the same way. His sole purpose was to harm.
Where was Gabe? Had this man harmed him?
Oh God.
Okay, think. There had to be something in here she could use as a weapon.
Steadying herself with a fortifying breath, she took another look around. Besides the lamp, she had framed photos of Bryson, her nephews, and her parents on the nightstand. Bottles of perfume and lotion rattled on her dresser, more falling with each heave of the man on the other side of the door. The scent from the broken bottles was cloying, flowers and fruits and spices filling her head, making her dizzy, and she promised she’d never put on another drop of the stuff if she lived through this.
Her closet. She must have something in there. She ripped open the door. Hangers. And none of them were even metal. An iron and ironing board. She grabbed the iron and plugged it in. If all else failed, she could hit him with it when it was still hot.
The banging on the bedroom door stopped. She paused for a half second and listened, didn’t hear anything on the other side but didn’t dare hope that he was gone. That’s how people got killed in horror movies. She dived back into the closet and found a broken palette knife missing half of its wooden handle.
Better than nothing.
Up on the shelf: Plastic containers filled with all the miscellaneous junk that she had shoved out of sight, out of mind to sort on some rainy day in the future. Loose screws, plastic thingamajigs, and cords to who knows what. Old birthday cards, tax returns, random junk mail she never threw away. None of this was going to help her.
Oh, why couldn’t she be in the kitchen? She had all sorts of weapons in there. Butcher knives, frying pans. Her X-Acto knives, carving sets, files, and palette knives three times the size of the one in her hand. Shards of sculpture metal and welding supplies. Primers, glues, and—
Paint thinners.
Audrey froze. Despite the overwhelming odor of the perfume, she caught the pungent, piney stench of turpentine, heard the splash of it hitting her door, saw the puddle oozing underneath.
No, no, no, no.
She scrambled backward, away from the growing puddle. Fumes burned her nose and eyes and she curled into a ball in the farthest corner of the room, burying her nose in the edge of her shirt. Something fell behind her and hit her shoulder. Gabe’s cane. She snatched it up, held it to her chest like a child held a teddy bear to fend off the boogeyman.
Gabe.
She remembered the fear and wonder in his eyes as he told her how much loving her scared him. Scared him, her brave SEAL. God, the thought of what he might do when she was gone frightened her more than the thought of dying.
No, she couldn’t die and leave him to his own devices. He needed her.
Audrey gripped the cane like a baseball bat and stood, tiptoeing around the spreading pool of turpentine. The easiest way out was the window, but she didn’t dare, too afraid the intruder was waiting for her out there. He probably didn’t expect her to charge out the door, brandishing a cane like a maniac,
so that’s exactly what she’d do.
She listened, but didn’t hear anything in the hallway. Made sense. If her intruder planned to burn her to death, he’d get out before lighting the match. Which he could be doing right this very second.
Fear threatened to freeze her. The chemical-heavy air threatened to choke her, and the room morphed into a funhouse mirror before her eyes, all stretched and wobbly. The floor surged and pitched under her feet, and the short trip to the door was a feat of equilibrium that would turn any gold medal gymnast green with envy.
Next up on the balance beam: Audrey Van Amee.
She giggled. Stopped. Shook her head. Nothing about this was funny. Stay focused. If she let the chemicals get to her, she was dead.
She shoved the dresser aside, its legs scraping loud across the wood floor. She didn’t let herself think about how that might alert him and flung open the door. He was there in the hallway, tossing aside an empty can of turpentine, grinning at her as he dug in his pocket.
Flash of silver. A lighter.
She charged, brought the cane down hard on his head. He staggered but didn’t collapse. With her forward momentum and the slippery turpentine covering the floor, she couldn’t have stopped even if she wanted to. She slammed into him, taking him to the floor. He was small. So much smaller than an attacker bent on burning her alive should be. A boy, not a man.
He cursed in livid Spanish, jarringly foul words in a voice that was still more child’s than man’s. She reached for his hand, stabbing her fingers into the fleshy part, hoping he’d drop the lighter.
He did.
She snatched it up and scuttled away from him as he rose to his feet. Oh God, he had a gun. Why did she not think that he’d have a gun? He pointed the muzzle at her head.
“Get up.”
She stared at the gun. Something was dripping…
Turpentine.
He was as smeared with the paint thinner as she was.
She opened her hand and stared at the silver lighter with the initials R.S.V. engraved in extravagant letters on the side. One of those fancy kinds that light when the lid flips off.
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