Cole suddenly reached out and pulled Madalina into a tight embrace.
She buried her nose into the crook of his neck, inhaling the distinct scent of his skin. A tickle of cologne only enhanced his masculinity. How she wished they could explore her grandfather’s house—her house now—without stress and anxiety. She wanted to see what there was to see, then drag Cole to some upstairs bedroom and sink herself into his arms. Let him erase the tension, the doubts. The fears. She ran her palms over his back, making languid circles around his shoulder blades, enjoying the sensation of solid muscle beneath her fingertips.
He kissed her forehead and, after a tight squeeze, released her. Madalina reluctantly let her arms fall away.
There wasn’t time for luxury and intimacy.
The dragon—or dragons—needed to be found.
Taking Cole’s outstretched hand, she followed him toward the stairs to begin their search.
Cole decided that the master bedroom spanned enough space to encompass three master bedrooms in any other house, with its separate seating area, private balcony, master bath, and spacious layout. Furniture ranged from a king-size bed to decadent nightstands to an enormous entertainment center that doubled as bookshelves.
A hiding place could be anywhere.
“Why don’t you start in the bathroom, and I’ll start in here,” Cole suggested to Madalina. With the lights on, they could see much more detail now than when they’d first crept through looking for intruders. Her face expressed shock at the grandeur.
“Okay,” she said, clearly distracted.
Cole left her to it. He started in the sitting area, searching every inch of the floor, walls, and furniture. Which meant upending chairs and unzipping cushion covers. A hidden safe wasn’t the only place to secure a person’s belongings. He’d learned through experience that people would hide valuables in the most unlikely places.
He heard Madalina opening drawers and doors, probably to a closet, while he looked at the bed and nightstands. Every so often he paused to listen to the house, to the sounds of the night, before beginning the search again.
“This closet is ridiculously huge.” Madalina’s voice sounded as if it came from a great distance.
“I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t, after all this,” Cole retorted. After checking the seam of the carpet, he made his way to the entertainment center. By the time he finished rifling through a hundred books and movies and checking for compartments, Madalina was done with the bathroom. She brushed her hands on her thighs as she walked into the bedroom.
“I don’t think I missed anything. There are shoe spinners and drawers and shelves. It’s hardwood in there, and I even crawled around the floor, looking for a loose board or something else to indicate a trapdoor. Nothing like that, as far as I can tell,” she said.
“No safe, hmm?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Cole paused and glanced over his shoulder, surprised she hadn’t mentioned it before now. “Combination or regular lock?”
“It’s a combination, but that doesn’t matter. The door was left open, and the safe itself was empty.”
He wanted to have a look for himself. Abandoning the entertainment center, he brushed past her into the bathroom, which was as luxurious as any other part of the house, and went into the closet. A twenty-by-twenty space, the closet was divided into separate his-and-hers sections. He estimated he could fit two hundred suits on “his” side of the closet alone, with shelves for folded sweaters, and drawers for underclothes and socks.
The safe itself, thirty inches by thirty inches square, was set into the wall on “his” side with the door standing open. Heavy and solid, this was an upscale model. The kind that withstood all but the most intense fires and break-in attempts. The kind where people stored their gold and their cash and diamonds the size of doorknobs. Had there been suits and shirts and pants hanging from the higher rod, they would have hidden the safe from view. Not that the safe needed more protection.
Inspecting the interior he focused on the back panel especially, but couldn’t detect any special catch or pressure point that might pop open the door to expose a hidden space behind. The safe was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what it appeared to be.
“Nothing?” Madalina said from the doorway of the closet.
“No. I was hoping another hidden compartment might be behind this, but I can’t find an opening or anything. It’s just a regular safe.” Cole checked the “hers” side and found nothing. The only safe seemed to be the one he’d already inspected.
“Well, there are other rooms. We might find something there,” she said.
He glanced over when she exhaled and pushed a lock of hair away from her forehead. He could see the exhaustion on her features. “You want to lie down? I’ll keep looking for another hour or two, then wake you.”
She met his eyes, clearly undecided.
Cole swerved her way and set his hands on her shoulders. “Rest awhile. I’ll wake you in two hours.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes.” Cole kissed her forehead, then caught her hand in his own. “Why don’t you sleep here? I won’t be far, just a room or two down the hall.”
“Don’t go downstairs, though. Not without waking me up first,” she said.
“I won’t. Promise.” He led her to the bed, which had covers that looked fresh and clean despite probably not being used for several months, and let her decide whether she wanted to pull back the sheets or not.
Madalina rolled onto the top of the bed and moved a decorative pillow to rest her head on a regular one.
He couldn’t blame her for taking caution. For not wanting to tangle her legs up in the bedding. After a final glance, he turned and headed out of the room.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Brandon stared balefully at the night beyond the windows, impatiently surveying the parking lot for something to keep him preoccupied. His good humor over being kept locked up was beginning to fade, replaced by an inner unease related to his abhorrence of being caged. He loathed containment. It was why he liked being on the move, free-ranging from place to place, country to country. He rarely got tired of his surroundings when they were ever changing. His permanent home in Rhode Island saw maybe eight weeks of use per year, and never all at one time. Now he was going on a whole day in captivity, and with every passing minute, his edginess increased. Should he continue to be imprisoned much longer, what remained of his fortitude would erode into downright churlishness, a state of being he liked to avoid at all costs.
The agents hadn’t returned to coax and cajole him into making a recording, as he’d thought they would. He wondered if they’d changed their minds. Either that or they were letting him stew, attempting to wear his resolve and stubborn determination down to nothing.
In the interim he’d triple-checked the office for weaknesses. The doors were sealed tight, and the windows were solid panes, lacking the ability to open. Other than kicking in the door to the hall, there didn’t seem to be any avenue of escape. If too many more hours went by with no contact, no information, he might take the risk of confrontation and kick down the door anyway. Some action was better than no action. Brandon would bet his next year’s paycheck that the agents wouldn’t expect him to do that. Wouldn’t see war coming in place of resignation.
What bothered him more than anything was a lack of information about Cole. He couldn’t be sure exactly how far the agents would go to get what they wanted from his brother, and the idea that Cole might be out there somewhere fighting for his life made his restlessness worse.
The doorknob rattled and the door swung open. Even if Brandon had wanted to rush the agent, he couldn’t. Not from all the way across the room. It was a reminder that the agents probably timed their entrance to his location near the window, knowing he didn’t have time to get within striking distance. He promised himself
that he would look for the security camera later and take it out of commission, rendering the agents blind to his movements.
Should have thought about that sooner, old boy. You’re losing your touch.
A man entered, one he hadn’t seen before, with a tray of food and two bottles of water. Slim and fit, the man—an agent, Brandon thought—wore plain gray slacks and a long-sleeved white shirt.
Brandon acknowledged the food in periphery, never taking his eyes off the agent, who, in turn, never took his eyes off him.
Smart man. Nevertheless, Brandon sought a way to distract the agent enough to overwhelm him and make a try for escape.
“I wouldn’t,” the agent warned, as if he could read Brandon’s mind. Setting the tray on the floor in the middle of the room, the agent straightened and backstepped toward the hall.
“This is going to come to a head sooner than later,” Brandon said, making it sound like a promise. He didn’t have enough time to reach the agent before the man slipped into the hall and closed the door. The lock turned.
Brandon stopped before the tray, tempted to kick the contents across the room. The deli sandwich, pickle, and apple mocked him with its simplicity. As if this were a lunch for a student, rather than a grown man.
He spent an unknown amount of time circling the room, not eating the food, stubbornly resisting the lure of filling his stomach. The only reason he drank the water was because it came bottled with a lid that didn’t look tampered with.
Stepping over the tray, he approached the door at a brisk pace, listening for sounds on the other side. Listening for the scuffle of shoes on thin carpet or linoleum, indicating agents were preparing for action. He was sure the men on the other end of the security feed were talking straight into the ear of his guards, marking his every movement.
So far, he heard nothing.
In the beginning, when he’d taken the first step, he hadn’t intended to do more than perform a test check on the guards, attempt to bait them into giving their presence away. But an idea took shape at the last moment, an idea that altered his course of action.
When he got to the door, he reared a foot back and kicked hard at a specific spot near the latch. The door exploded outward, splinters flying. Prepared for battle, Brandon rushed into the hall.
True to his word, Cole didn’t stray far from the master bedroom. He turned off all the lights in the house—except for the particular rooms he searched—and opened blinds to the windows, preferring natural illumination to guide him through the hallways. It took him longer than he thought to search each spare bedroom, thanks to the attached baths. The rooms themselves weren’t small. Neither were the closets. The number of cabinets and drawers in the bathrooms alone was staggering. All the while he listened for sounds of intrusion elsewhere in the home.
After an hour he retraced his steps to the master bedroom to check on Madalina. At first he only peered around the corner of the doorway, afraid his presence would disturb her just as she was going to sleep.
The even sound of her breathing reassured him that she’d succumbed to the stress of the day.
On quiet feet, drawn forward by the elegant picture she made laid out on the bed, he drew up beside her and stared down at her slack features. Bathed in a cameo of moonlight, she looked angelic, younger than her already young years. The black crescents of her eyelashes rested just above the swell of her cheeks, supple lips relaxed instead of tight with tension. He never tired of seeing her like this, vulnerable and sweet. For all her sass and fiery nature, she could be genteel when she wanted to be.
In the course of a few short months, he’d fallen head over heels for her. He wasn’t quite sure Madalina understood the depth of his affection—which wasn’t her fault, but his. Because he hadn’t planned to get involved, because he never got deeply involved with anyone, he’d contained his outward displays of emotion to occasional three-word sentences and a lot of physical affirmation between the sheets. He hadn’t gone above and beyond to show her just how much she’d come to mean to him. There weren’t long, soul-searching discussions about life and eternity and togetherness.
Today was a stark reminder that he shouldn’t take her and what they had between them for granted. Either one of them could have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and lost each another.
She shifted and rolled onto her side, away from him, the dark swath of her luxurious hair spread out over the pillow. He resisted dragging his fingers through the silky strands, resisted waking her up with kisses on her neck. A dark shadow eclipsed the soft glow surrounding her, like a monster creeping up from the ether. He glanced at the window, frowning.
The moonlight was gone.
Just as suddenly, thunder boomed through the sky. A sharp crack that shockingly didn’t wake Madalina. The gloom deepened until rain came down in torrents, pounding the roof so hard it sounded like tribal drums.
We will encounter a severe storm on our way back to the village. The Rain Dragon brings forth weather. Cole, remembering the comment from Walcot’s letter, was of the same mind as Madalina’s grandfather. Rain was just rain, and storms were just storms. That this one came up suddenly and unexpectedly meant nothing more than that the weather was unpredictable in Brazil. It certainly didn’t indicate that they were in close proximity to the Rain Dragon.
Turning from the bed, he stalked to the door.
He didn’t have time for whimsy or obscure ancient myths when hard, cold reality could come knocking any second.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He broke his first promise at just after two in the morning. Cole took Madalina’s dead sleep to mean that she needed the rest. Through thunder, lightning, and a biblical downpour, she slept on, undisturbed by the ruckus. Thus, he did not wake her. If she remained asleep, it would make his plans later in the night a lot easier. Easier for him, though how she would handle it remained to be seen.
He might wind up single when all was said and done.
A more thorough search of the living and sitting rooms downstairs turned up nothing. No dragon, no hidden doors, no concealed compartments. He surveyed the night beyond the windows as he worked, looking for shadows that shouldn’t be there. The rain had ceased fifteen minutes before, finally, and the silence in the aftermath of the noise seemed deafening.
Twenty minutes after that, he received a text.
We’re five minutes out. D.
His brothers had arrived.
Moving quickly, making decisions on the run, he entered the upstairs bedroom and repacked the duffel bag, leaving Madalina’s things on the end of the bed. He zipped the bag closed with all his belongings still inside.
This was when he should wake her and tell her his plan. He should include her in the next step of the game. But he knew what he would get in return.
Trouble. That’s what.
She would fight him every step of the way, argue over the danger he was about to put himself in. He imagined that fiery nature of hers reasserting herself and a conversation becoming an argument, until he was forced to leave after the argument turned to silence, as it inevitably would.
Taking her with him was not an option.
He didn’t know what he was getting himself into or what awaited, and he wouldn’t expose her to that kind of danger.
Not telling her and leaving without saying good-bye could be the catalyst for her to end the relationship altogether.
It was a hell of a position to be in.
After a final glance, he departed the bedroom and headed downstairs. He knew his brothers well enough to know they would come to the back door, which was where he wound up a moment later. Two distinct silhouettes darkened the porch just outside, waiting instead of knocking.
Cole opened the door and let his brothers in.
“Had any trouble since you talked to Thaddeus?” Damon asked in a brisk voice.
Of all his brot
hers, Cole was most like Damon. They were similar in height, coloring, and demeanor. Sometimes, when Damon let his hair grow out a little more, Cole had the eerie sense of looking in a mirror when he watched his brother.
“None. Everything’s quiet on this end,” Cole replied, closing the door after Samuel stepped inside. Sam, with light brown hair and blue eyes, was the baby of the bunch. He was the youngest West brother and the quietest.
“You could have opened the gate,” Damon said with a quirk of his lips. He fingered a spot on his dark shirt, to the side near his ribs, where a small hole exposed a glimpse of skin beneath. “Climbing over that thing was a pain in the backside.”
“I didn’t want to leave Madalina in the house alone to go down and open the gate by the keypad. If there’s a remote for the gate, I haven’t found it yet. Besides, climbing keeps you limber. And young,” Cole said. As much as Damon harassed him, Cole knew getting over the gate hadn’t been a problem for either brother. They kept themselves in top shape, ready for situations exactly like this.
“You each drove a rental car here from the airport, yes?” Cole asked abruptly, changing the subject.
“Like you asked,” Damon said. “Though we can’t figure out why we need two cars if we can all fit in one.”
Cole clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder before explaining what came next. He had sent his brothers a text earlier in the evening with instructions about the rental cars. “Here’s the deal. You two are going to stay here with Madalina and search every inch of the house. We’ve been at it awhile, but so far, we’ve found nothing.”
“Wait. Where are you in all this?” Damon asked after a quick survey of the dining area and kitchen beyond.
“I’m taking the jet to pay a visit to Norman Westrich,” Cole said. He didn’t have time to waste beating around the bush or using obscure terms.
Rendezvous in Rio Page 13