by Misty Evans
Removing it from his waistband where it had dug into his back on the ride, he set it on the kitchen island. “All yours.”
She held out a hand. “Bullets?”
He grinned, then rooted them out of his front pocket and handed them to her.
“Privy?” she asked.
“Guest bath is around the corner, under the stairs.” He opened the fridge, surveyed the contents. “Master bath is upstairs where you’ll find the clothes. Wanna a drink?”
“I’d love whiskey, but I’d better stay sober.”
Because of Bourean or because of him? “Water, soda, sports drink?”
“How about coffee?” She headed for the guest bath. “It’s going to be a long night.”
Was it? Was she going to tell him all her secrets? Entertain him with a new round of fake stories?
Fuck his brains out?
He could only hope.
The coffee in the walk-in pantry was imported and came in a fancy bag with a picture of rainforest birds. It was labeled fair trade, organic, and bird friendly, whatever the hell that meant.
The coffee maker was a fancy Italian espresso machine that he never used. He wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but Charlotte was and she liked hers strong. He poured in water. dumped in a few scoops of the ground beans, then hit the button.
The machine made noise, chugging as it started brewing. Charlotte returned, wrapped in a robe with her clothes in hand. “Here you go.”
“Coffee’s on.” He sorted through the pile of clothes and found no trackers, but he left her at the breakfast bar and headed outside. A few yards from the house lay a large fire ring and a pile of charred wood. He burned her clothes.
Once he was back inside, he found her sitting on the couch, coffee cup in hand, staring blankly at the cold, lifeless fireplace. Her gun was on the cushion next to her leg.
The coffee smelled good and he needed a shot of caffeine, so he got himself a cup as well and came back, hitting the gas switch on the fireplace. The fake log sprang to life.
Taking a seat beside Charlotte, he switched on the nearby table lamp. He both hated to be the bearer of bad news, and liked the idea of getting her out of the robe for any viable reason. “I need to check you now.”
“Check me? For what?”
“Bugs, tracers, GPS.”
“Where exactly do you think I’d have any of that hidden?”
He sipped his coffee—gad, the stuff was strong enough to wake the dead. The flavor was decent though. “Under your skin.”
She stiffened, thought about it a minute. “You think Nico injected me with a tracker?”
Miles shrugged. “Are you sure it’s him chasing you?”
“MI6 wouldn’t kill innocents and burn down my room.”
“Then how do you think he’s following you if you’re not bugged? Your clothes were clean like you said.”
“I already checked myself over. If I had a chip or tracer under my skin, I would have found it.”
“Not if he hid it in your blind spot.”
“Shit.” She sat forward and put her cup down on the glass coffee table. “I’ve definitely lost my edge.”
Untying the robe, she slipped the thick collar down over her shoulders and swept her long, blond hair off her neck, baring her back to him. “Go ahead. Do your worst.”
He started high, kneading his fingers into the back of her head. Her shoulders dropped an inch. He massaged his way along her cranium, down the back of her neck, feeling the tight muscles there.
A soft, sexy sigh escaped her lips and Miles’ fingers stalled.
Charlotte shivered and glanced at him over her shoulder from under half-lidded eyes. “Did you find something?”
“Uh, no.” He stood and moved away before he ended up sliding the robe the rest of the way off of her and touched her in places that would make her moan. “I need my scanner.”
The thickness between his legs made taking the stairs to the second floor uncomfortable, but he did it anyway. Fuck. Seeing her porcelain skin—skin he had kissed, licked, and sucked on—and hearing her sigh had nearly done him in. He had to keep his head.
Both of them.
Inside the master bedroom’s closet, he opened a hidden panel, flipped a switch, and entered a room of security equipment. Tracker chips inserted under the skin were often embedded too deep to be seen or felt. Examining Charlotte’s entire body by touch would be more of a challenge than he could handle. If she was carrying a tracker, they didn’t have much time before Bourean’s goons showed up.
Grabbing the handheld wand from a peg on the wall, Miles started out of the hidden room, only to be brought up short by Charlotte filling the doorway.
Her gaze scanned the room’s contents. “Sweet equipment. MI6 would be jealous. I don’t even know what half of this stuff is.”
He closed the space between them and flipped the switch on the wand. “Hold still.”
The wand was soundless as he scanned the front of her body. When he turned her around, however, the first swipe down her backside set off a beeping alert. He hovered the wand over her neck and three bars on the display lit up. Moving lower, the fourth and final bar pegged the readout between her shoulder blades and the beeping sped up.
“Found it,” Miles said. “In a spot that’s difficult to see or reach on your own.”
“That wanker.” Her British roots broke through. “He drugged me when I went back to him, believing I was an undercover agent. I eventually convinced him I wasn’t, but he must have inserted the tracker when I was unconscious.”
“We need to get it out. Pronto.”
“Can you do that? Extract it?”
“I can.”
She nodded, resigned compliance. “I’ll need that whiskey after all.”
THE MAN STOLE through the backyards of the neighborhood, assessing each as he went. Although it was dark, plenty of folks in the gated community had their curtains open, lights on. Modern day families putting the kids to bed, cleaning up the kitchen from dinner, the murmur of news shows and late-night television filling their zombified heads.
A few of the homes were dark, security lights and cameras here and there giving their absent owners peace of mind.
He hadn’t been able to follow the pickup past the gate, but didn’t need to. By process of elimination, it wasn’t difficult to figure out which house Agent Charlotte Carstons was now hiding in.
In the years before 9/11, CB Norris had been obsessed with hunting down Osama bin Laden. Stationed in Khartoum, he’d spent months trying to locate the man living in exile in Sudan and gaining a reputation as a brash, egocentric operative inside the walls of the CIA.
His boss had been dull, unimaginative. Plodding along and refusing to chase the one man guaranteed to bring America to its knees.
Look what his ignorance had got them.
After the towers fell, CB had revived his career inside the CIA, moving up the ranks with his intimate knowledge of bin Laden using some well-placed informants in London and the Middle East. The president and his cabinet weren’t ready for the real world of terrorism, though. While he’d laid out a very specific plan on how to take down the terrorist leader everyone suddenly wanted, his plan was watered down by his boss, the Pentagon, and eventually the president. They all thought they knew how to find and annihilate bin Laden without his insight.
Ten years later, they’d finally succeeded.
Ten years. What a fucking waste of time and resources. If they’d listened to him, let him run the op, he could have had bin Laden inside of a few months.
Norris’ specialty was hunting people. Once his plan to find bin Laden had been stripped apart and diluted to the point there was no saving it, he’d told the CIA to fuck off and ventured across the pond to London, planning on living on his pension in seclusion.
The Queen had other ideas.
Soon, he was seduced back into espionage. Effective intelligence work depended on a mix of things. Some soft, such as recruiting ass
ets. Others hard, such as hunting down and eliminating terrorists. He’d sucked at the soft stuff; excelled at the hard. When they’d given him Charlotte Carstons to handle, he’d done a bit of both.
She’d been the ideal operative, the fastest at learning what he’d had to teach. She’d soaked up his wisdom and begged for more. Her brain was lightening quick, her hunches on the money every time.
She’d reminded him of himself back in the day when he’d had righteous fire shooting out of his ass, and was determined to save America. Determined to prove to the CIA that they could stick him in any hellhole they wanted and he would still be the greatest operative who ever lived.
But Charlotte Carstons had been more than his operative. He’d fallen for her wit and her beauty. For that mind of hers that could, at times, outthink his. She kept him on his toes, made him hungry for the hunt again.
The irony was that he’d handled her mother back in the day. No one knew that, outside of a certain assassin, but that man couldn’t talk. His tongue had been split and partially removed by a Romanian crime lord who made Nicolae Bourean look like a puppy. Even if Orlo could talk, he wouldn’t share his secrets. He didn’t care about pain or torture, unless he was inflicting it. The bastard was a freak, but a useful tool.
CB’s mission for MI6 had been to eliminate Nicolae Bourean, but when Agent Carstons slipped into Bourean’s mafia and began funneling intel back, he’d realized he was sitting on a gold mine. Romania had remained unaffected by terrorism for years. Bourean, in all his scavenging, criminal glory, had seen to change that.
Somehow, some way, Bourean had made contact with one of the last of bin Laden’s lieutenants, an Afghan known only as Blackwater that the U.S. had never caught. A terrorist now recruiting throughout Europe and doing a fine job of spreading Islamic bile.
Just when he was ready to hunt down Blackwater and take Bourean out with him, Carstons had unknowingly interfered. She wasn’t supposed to follow Bourean’s men into those mountains. Wasn’t supposed to be near that exchange of weapons, video taping it.
And she most certainly wasn’t supposed to save that damn Navy SEAL.
A dog two blocks over barked, sensing his presence, or perhaps smelling him on the salty night air. He found the house he was looking for, one that met the criteria for a safe house.
The house kitty-corner of the two-story was empty. CB jacked the security alarm and made his way upstairs. A lovely view from the master bedroom gave him unfettered access to the safe house. He unpacked his backpack and laid out his tools.
His scope picked up two heat signatures, adults.
Between his night-vision binoculars and the scope on his rifle, he picked up cameras and infrared trip wires all around the property. The back led to a beach, a long boardwalk, and a docked boat that rocked on the waves.
Once Carstons had escaped Bourean, she’d headed to America. He assumed, rightly so, that she was going after the SEAL. Duncan no longer worked for the Navy, but wasn’t far from the same type of duties with his current job. Officially, he worked for Rock Star Security. Unofficially, he was out of the country a lot, messing with black arms dealers, kidnappers, and hackers of all varieties.
Bourean’s minions had gotten close to Carstons a couple of times and he’d had to step in and throw them off her track. He needed to know what she’d given Duncan, how much she’d told him.
What damage they could do now that they were back together.
No one was going to stop him from taking Blackwater. Not like they had with bin Laden.
All he had to do was watch and wait.
Chapter Five
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CHARLOTTE’S ANCESTORS INCLUDED a rowdy bunch of Irish fishermen as well as the bastard son of a French king mixed in with her British roots, and that was just on her father’s side. She knew how to put away good liquor and could hold her own with the best of them.
While she would have loved to drown the pain from Miles’ scalpel with the bottle of gold colored whiskey he gave her, it was neither her preferred brand nor worth dulling her senses over since Nico’s goons could show up at any moment.
Passing on the whiskey, she placed a clean dishrag in her mouth, lay on her belly on the kitchen breakfast bar, and nodded at Miles to go to work.
She told herself she wouldn’t scream. By the third slice of the tiny knife, her eyes started to burn. Not from the fresh pain; from the horrible memories that cascaded through her mind. Her body held too much suffering in its tissues, yet she refused to give into it. A ragged moan escaped her throat, muffled by the dishrag.
“I see it,” Miles said, his finger jabbing into the superficial cut he’d opened. “I just can’t get hold of it.”
The tears broke free, sliding down her cheeks. “Just do it,” she yelled into the dishrag, the muffling making the words sound like uss doo id.
“Hold still,” he commanded and she nearly turned over and clocked him.
The sting of the scalpel bit a bit deeper and Charlotte sucked in her breath, grinding her teeth into the dishrag.
“Got it,” Miles said, holding out bloodied fingers in front of her.
Her vision swam as if she were indeed drunk and she closed her eyes, sweat slicking her forehead. She spit out the rag and cracked one eye to act interested in what he was showing her.
“Tiny bugger,” she murmured.
“T16ZR.” Miles lifted it to the light and rolled it around in his fingers. “I haven’t seen one of these in eons. This is old technology, years out of date.”
The bar was cool against Charlotte’s cheek. She could feel blood running down her back, along her ribs. The horrible memories tugged at her brain, trying to take her back to the torture chamber.
Get up. Don’t let the demons take you back there.
Doing a modified pushup on the bar, she pushed the memories away. “Nico gets top dollar for the modern tech equipment. Deals in everything from iPhones to surveillance cameras, but his clients don’t want old stuff. Any equipment he can’t get enough money for, he uses on his own people.”
Miles gently touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
She waved his apology off. “Had to be done. Now destroy that thing.”
“This model only sends out a pulse once every fifteen to thirty minutes, and it’s easily disrupted by cell towers and magnets. That’s why no one uses these anymore. Not even to chip dogs. This safe house’s security blocks everything from EMF waves to digital scans. Tech this old could never hold up against it.”
Wooziness made her arms tremble. “But that explains how his goons have been one step behind me all this time.” She pushed herself up the rest of the way and closed the robe over her chilly skin. A dull ache now pervaded her upper back. “The pulse is sporadic and getting interrupted frequently.”
“If you were sleeping in cars with On-Star or any type of internal computer, really, it probably messed with the tracker. Hell, a microwave could throw it off.”
“He never expected I would actually escape. He probably just shoved it in there for grins and giggles.”
“Stay put.” Miles wiped off the tiny device and stuck it in his pocket. Then washed his hands. “Let me clean and close that cut.”
“Slap a bandage on it. I’ll be fine.”
“You’re bleeding and I know for a fact you’re in pain. Drop the robe and let me clean you up. It’ll only take a minute.”
Without her permission, he nudged her knees sideways so her back was facing him again. Then he gently loosened the robe from her grasp and lowered it to get to the incision once more.
His fingers were more gentle this time, washing off the blood and coating the wound with a cool cream. She shivered under his touch, not from the cream, but from a new onslaught of memories assaulting her. Memories of his fingers trailing down her spine, his lips following.
“You need a few stitches, darlin’.”
<
br /> The words snapped her out of her revelry. “We don’t have time for that.”
“Yes, we do. I put a numbing cream on the area. It’ll take thirty seconds to kick in and another minute for me to stitch you up.”
She felt the cream already going to work. Lowering her chin to her chest, she breathed through her nose and let her mind wander to the past again. “Stitch carefully. I don’t need another scar.”
It was meant to be a joke. Miles didn’t seem to think it was funny. “I never should have left you.”
“You didn’t. I left you.”
“I could have found you. Kept you out of Bourean’s clutches.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The past was in the past. Charlotte didn’t see a reason to rehash what might have been. “You had no idea who I was or what mission I was working. You couldn’t have stopped what happened.”
He stilled. “Charlotte…”
She waited. He didn’t continue. “What?”
She heard a terse sigh.
“Look, it’s all right. You can help me now, so let’s get to it, shall we?”
Miles went to work sealing up the incision, the numbing cream doing its job. Charlotte only wished that cream could numb the hum under her skin everywhere Miles touched.
“The men following you will have lost the signal from the transmitter—if they were receiving anything—the moment we hit the gate outside,” he said.
“We still need to move. And warn the others in the neighborhood. They’ll go door to door killing people and burning places to find me.”
“I called in reinforcements while I was burning your clothes. They’ll handle neighborhood security, and I’ll send the tracker off on a new course to distract Bourean’s men.”
The tracking device now lay on the counter. “Are you sure that’s the only one?”
He patted the wand on the bar next to her. “This baby could find a tracking device six feet underground. You’re clear.”
She slid off the breakfast bar as he headed for the double doors that led out to the boardwalk and the ocean.