Chapter One

by Judith Rochelle

  “But you can make it your call. You can convince them. Think about it. I didn’t even have her mention it to you until I was sure she wasn’t in jeopardy from your office. So, yes or no?”

  “Fine.” He shook his head. “If I get fired you’ll have to make room for me out here.”

  Quinn turned to Kate. “Tell him.”

  Kate took another sip of wine and set her glass down carefully in front of her. “I left one little thing out of my story. The night I fled, I took a flash drive Peter had left in his computer. According to what I overheard, it has all kind of records on it. Transfers and things like that.”

  Jake looked as if he was about to strangle on his own tongue. He took a careful sip of his wine, his eyes shifting from Kate to Quinn and back again. “Let me get this straight. You’ve been running around the country with a little gizmo that has all the records for the Osuna cartel on it? And you have it in your possession now?”

  Kate nodded and moved closer to Quinn.

  Jake glared at Quinn. “You knew this when you came to me? And didn’t think it was important enough to mention? To ask for my help then?”

  “He gave me his word,” Kate interrupted. “He knew how afraid I was. Especially about prosecutors being bribed.”

  Jake looked as if he wanted to throttle her. “Kate, you have to give it to me. This could be the very thing we need to break the case open. The information we’ve been killing ourselves to get. And you have to come to our offices to be interviewed. Face it. You can’t hide in Quinn’s house forever. I promise you, if this is what you say it is we’ll give Quinn all the backup he needs to keep you safe. You have my word on that.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “The cartel reaches out everywhere. There’s no one but Quinn I can trust. But I’ll make a deal with you, because I want this over, too.”

  “What kind of deal?” Jake’s voice was skeptical.

  “Like Quinn said, we want to do this on our own terms. You have to guarantee a situation where I’ll be safe and assure me your boss is not on the cartel payroll. Agree to what we want and I’ll hand it over to him.”

  “Listen, we’ll have armed guards if that’s what you want,” Jake told her, his face tight with anger. “And they won’t be cartel employees.”

  “Oh! Wait.” Kate looked at both men again. “Before I get the flash drive, there’s something else I almost forgot.”

  “Jesus, Kate,” Jake said. “Now what?”

  She looked at Quinn. “My trip to the library.”

  “Library?” Jake asked.

  “I,um, wanted to do a little research on the law firm. Apparently everything I knew was a lie so I wanted to see what I could find out. You know, get some background.” She shrugged. “But it was a useless attempt.”

  “Kate.” Jake’s voice was very quiet. “Are you telling me you actually Googled these people on the Internet?”

  “Yes, but it was a waste of time.”

  “You didn’t get anything?” Jake asked.

  She wrinkled her forehead. “Nothing on the law firm, which I thought was very strange.” She looked at Quinn. “And I’m so sorry, but I got so frustrated I did something you told me not to do.”

  To his credit, she thought, he didn’t jump up and strangle her. “You did a search on Peter. After I specifically told you that was a bad idea. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Her heart did a swan dive. “I’m sorry. I know how to cover my tracks, and I just thought...”

  “Never mind. We’ll discuss this later,” Quinn told her in a flat voice. “Just tell us what you found.”

  “Nothing there either. There were several sites but I couldn’t pull up the information.”

  “What happened when you hit the sites?” Jake asked.

  “Not much.” She shrugged. “Most of them came up with the message Server Offline or Error, Page not found.”

  The silence in the room became so thick Kate thought she could touch it. Both men stared at her.

  “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  Quinn looked at his friend, and they said with one voice, “Traps.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Traps? What traps?” Kate stared at both men. “What are you talking about?”

  A muscle twitched in Jake’s cheek. “Peter would certainly want to know if anyone’s trying to dig for information on him. We know he’s a computer genius, so it’s a given he had electronic traps on the links you accessed. They alert him when anyone taps into them and sends the IPS address of the computer doing the search.”

  Her heart was pounding in her chest, but she did her best to conceal it, digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands.

  “I don’t think I tripped anything,” she assured them, praying it was so. “I know how to build layers of anonymous servers to hide the original source before actually doing a search. I’ve done this before. I was very careful. So even if he got an alert, I’m pretty sure he couldn’t back trace to me. Anyway, I used a library computer. I could be anyone.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jake shook his head. “Exactly how many people do you think would be going to a library to look up Peter Fleming? Or that law firm, which has only one client? Think, Kate. It gives them a geographic location on you.”

  “Jake’s right,” Quinn put in. “Damn it, I should have thought of that, but I just let myself get rusty. Out of the blue, in the midst of all this craziness, someone decides to do an Internet search on Peter and Holt, Fleming. You don’t think that would set off alarms somewhere?”

  “And remember,” Jake added, “this is Esai’s town. Knowing this, no one would be foolhardy enough to do a search on any computer, let alone a public one.”

  “Maybe they’d think it was your office,” she said almost desperately. Hopefully.

  Jake shook his head. “They’d know better than that. For one thing, we wouldn’t use public computers. And it wouldn’t be anyone trying to cut into their business. They’d have other sources.” Tension cut deep grooves in his face.

  Kate paled. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” She looked at Quinn. “You didn’t want me to do it, and I should have listened. It was a stupid thing for me to do. I just never thought about traps or anything like that. I thought I could cover myself.”

  “No, I’m the stupid one,” Quinn growled. “I never should have let you do it. But I’ve been out of this for so long, I didn’t think about electronic traps.”

  The ringing of his cell phone interrupted the tension in the air. He spoke briefly and when he hung up his face was grim.

  “Time to stop fooling around, Kate. That was Mike at the garage.”

  “I don’t understand. We already junked the car.”

  “Some guy came in today looking for a vehicle with your license plate number. Said he was looking for his sister, checking any place she might have had her car fixed. His family was worried about her.”

  “The fucking traps,” Quinn spat. “That’s the only way they could have found you. Between this and the car they could be breathing down your neck before long.”

  “Oh, my God.” Kate thought she would faint. She was shaking so hard Quinn had to hold onto her. “What a stupid idiot I am, so confident I could hide in cyberspace. I’m a baby compared to them. But...but...how did they get those plates? I bought...I just...” She had to clench her teeth together to keep them from chattering.

  “I’d say when they lost the trail they went back to square one in L.A. and started from there. Then someone probably had the bright idea they might have scared her enough at the bus terminal that she decided to buy another car. They know she has to hoard her money, they don’t know if she has proper identification and she needs to find some place close. So they start looking for junk car places around the terminal, doing a block to block. And Bingo! Up pops wherever you bought the car.”

  “Highway Harry,” she whispered.

  “Who may be riding the highway in the sky by now,” Jake pointed out. “After some
physical exercise I’m sure he was more than happy to tell his new friends anything they want.”

  “Including the make of car he sold Kate and the license tag,” Quinn put in. “They get the cops they bought to search for it in their computers and keep an eye on the roads.”

  Jake nodded. “Put that together with your trip to the library and the alerts that dinged back to Peter and there you go. They have an area to focus on.”

  “But how did they get to Mike’s specifically?” She was hanging onto her control by a very thin thread. “This is a huge area to search.”

  “I’m sure good old Peter called the Osuna brothers, told them he had a hot locate on their target and everyone should get their asses out and start canvassing the San Antonio area. My guess again is by sheer dumb luck they found someone who saw your car being picked up by the tow truck. Maybe asked around in a diner, or a coffee shop. Whatever. Who the hell knows? The crooks catch all the breaks.”

  “W-What did Mike tell them?” she asked Quinn.

  “That he found it on the highway and claimed it for salvage. But you can bet they’ll start pinpointing this area, getting everyone on their payroll to track you down. And that means we’ve got a huge problem.” He pulled Kate tight against him.

  “A no-brainer,” Jake agreed. “They want Kate and they want that flash drive. So now, boys and girls, we’re done playing games. And Kate? If you’re frightened you’ve got a right to be.”

  She gripped Quinn’s fingers until hers almost lost their feeling, her body trying to push itself inside his, her trembling still visible. Her body language shrieked panic.

  “What do you think?” Her voice was barely audible.

  Killing her will be easy. I’ll call you when it’s done.

  “I think we have to do what Jake says,” he told her, his voice low and soothing. “But we aren’t going to run around like idiots. We’ll make preparations so we can keep you safe.” He looked over at Jake. “Right?”

  “Right.” He raked his fingers through his hair, a good sign of his frustration at the turn things had taken. “Listen, Kate. You say you’re willing to give that drive to Lane Barton? Now is the time to do it. We’ve got to get these guys and put them away before they really do kill you. Stopping them is the only chance you’ve got.”

  He got up and went to the cupboards, took down a glass and filled it from the tap. Stood at the sink chugging it, then refilled it before he sat down again.

  “Tell me what you want. Then let me talk to Dean and Lane in the morning and see what we can set up. Dean may want to call you and talk to you again himself.”

  “To make sure we’re still here?” Quinn’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  “No. Listen, Ace. I know you. You’re smart enough now that we’ve got this information to know this is one thing you can’t outrun. Right?”

  Quinn gave him a grudging acknowledgment. “All right. And I do have a suggestion about how to do this. We obviously can’t just march her down there in broad daylight with the entire work force present and watching.”

  “So what’s your idea?”

  “Try this. What if we do it at night when almost everyone’s gone?” Quinn suggested. “You can sneak us in through the underground garage, like we’ve done with other people before. That way we have a contained situation and it all but eliminates the risk.”

  “But there is still some risk involved, isn’t there?” Kate asked. “Nothing is one hundred percent.”

  Jake leaned across the table toward Kate, his face grim. “I can tell you one thing that’s a hundred percent. If you don’t help us tie a knot around the Osunas these assholes will kill you deader than yesterday’s news. Kate, look how close they are to you already.”

  She felt the blood drain from her face. Even the warmth from Quinn’s body couldn’t shake the cold invading her.

  “Okay.” Her voice was small and tremulous. “I’ll trust you two to take care of me. But I’m not handing over the flash drive until we get there. That’s my insurance that you’ll take care of things properly.”

  “I’ll probably get my ass handed to me when I report on that, but I’d say this is the best way to play it.” He pulled out a tired smile. “You’re doing the right thing, Kate. My office could go about this a lot differently but we’d be putting you at greater risk, and I don’t want that. I’ll call you guys first thing in the morning after we’ve got everything set up.”

  He picked up his briefcase, getting ready to leave.

  Quinn kissed the top of Kate’s head as he too, rose from his chair. “I’ll just walk Jake out to his car and be right back, darlin’.”

  Kate watched the two men walk out to the driveway, then began to clear away the glasses from the table. The fear she’d been able to control the past few days had erupted full blown with this latest piece of news. If she could have bolted, she would, but she had to trust Quinn on this. And Jake was right. Where could she run to now?

  ****

  Out in the driveway, the two men spoke in quiet tones.

  “You know I don’t have a choice,” Jake said as they stood by his SUV. “She has to come downtown and bring that gizmo with her.”

  “But her safety comes first. Just keep that in mind. Anything looks suspicious and we’re out of there.”

  “She seems to have a lot of guts. She’ll get through this, especially with you to help her. But you and she had better understand something else. When this goes to trial she’ll probably have to testify.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now let’s get through tomorrow.”

  Jake studied his friend. “I hope you know what you’re doing here. She seems like a special lady but this is a very dicey situation. And you’ve already been through one fucking tragedy.”

  “I’m fine, Jake. Really. But thanks for the concern.”

  “You’ve come a long way with her in a very, very short time. You sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Absolutely. And this time I don’t intend to lose what I’ve got. Once in my life is enough.”

  “Okay, then. I’ve said my piece. I hope this works out.”

  The men shook hands and Quinn went back inside.

  Kate was standing on the back porch, watching the moon. Quinn came up behind her and laid his hands gently on her shoulders.

  She leaned into him, reveling in his strength. “I’m frightened, Quinn. They found my car. They traced back my Internet searches. And I’m about to walk into strange territory with men I know nothing about.”

  “I’m right here with you, darlin,’ and we’re going to keep it under control. I’m going to make sure of that. We’ll take all the precautions we need to. And I’ll be right beside you.” He slid his arms around her, pulling her tight against him.

  She turned and locked her hands behind his back, pressing her cheek to his chest. “Do you realize last week we hadn’t even met? Now I feel as if we’ve known each other forever.”

  “Me, too,” he answered softly. He kissed the top of her head, inhaling her scent. “We’ve lived a lifetime in a few days.” His mouth moved to the side of her neck. “I know it’s late, and we’ve got a big day tomorrow, but God, Kate. I just have to be inside you. I need to feel you around me.”

  “I need that, too,” she told him.

  He swept her up in his arms. “Don’t forget what I promised you for tonight.”

  Oh, yes, she remembered all right. Along with that sinful wink. Her nipples tingled and she felt creamy liquid trickle from her center, wetting her thighs.

  Quinn lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bedroom. He set her on her feet by the bed and began removing her clothing with as much control as he could muster. There was an urgency between them tonight that was different. More intense. More emotional.

  He moved over her, positioning himself between her widespread thighs, bending her knees to give himself greater access. With one swift stroke he plunged inside her.

  “O
kay?” He breathed against her ear.

  She nodded, beyond speech, her body wanting—demanding—the steady strokes that would tip her past the flashpoint. How long would he torture her by holding her on this ledge? She was mindless with need. At last Quinn began to move his hips, setting up the familiar rhythm.

  And then it was there, an orgasm of such gigantic proportions she wasn’t sure she’d live through it. Every muscle convulsed, her inner walls clenched and unclenched, her liquid poured from her, her breasts were on fire. On and on he drove her, his shaft so thick and heated she felt it in every inch of her body.

  She would reach one plane and the spasms would subside. Then with a roll of his hips he would push her to the next level. She was gasping for air, her heart threatening to pound out of her chest. Her blood was like hot liquid boiling and setting her nerves on fire.

  At last, when she had nothing left, when her body had been wrung dry, his own release came and took her with him over the edge one more time. As he poured himself into her, she felt as if he’d pierced her straight to her heart. The completion was as much emotional as physical and she wondered how she’d survive if this all fell apart.

  Hot tears raced unheeded down her face. She clutched at him tightly, afraid to let him go, afraid to be separated lest the moment disappear. She couldn’t catch a full breath, couldn’t steady her pulse, couldn’t do anything except lay there with Quinn’s body draped over her, his arms wrapped around her, sweat gluing their skin together.

  It could have been minutes, an hour, a week. Kate had no idea how much time had passed when Quinn slid carefully from her body and rolled to the side, taking her with him. His fingers stroked her cheek and his rough silk lips pressed kisses to her ear.

  “You’re mine now,” he rasped. “Mine. Do not forget it.”

  “Yours,” she agreed, too weak to say anything else.

  “I will protect you and take care of you. Count on it.” He drew in a lungful of air. “We’ll get past this and then take a look at the rest of our lives. Okay, darlin’?”