“At the risk of asking an obvious question—what the fuck is going on, Sammy?” he replied, not releasing her. “You tell Evan we just went to goddamn college together? That’s it? Did you forget we were together for more than three years? Did you forget you were the love of my life?” Wes shook her gently, his expression intense. “And now you’re going to offer yourself to some crazy person in exchange for your little brother’s friend?”
She steeled herself against the onslaught of emotions—fear, anger, panic—locking them down. Now was not the time. Not even close. Sam jerked back, pressing the alarm button on the car’s key chain, locating the SUV nearby.
“Where’s your vest?” she asked again, striding toward the vehicle.
Wes paced after her. She swore she could feel him working up another offense as he opened the back of the truck. He pulled out the lightweight vest that Rush insisted he wear every time he was out on the streets photographing or conducting interviews.
“Do you have tape?” she asked.
Wes’s brow furrowed in confusion. “This is so goddamn strange,” he muttered as he reached into his camera case for a spool of electrical tape. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this is how a reunion between you and me would go down.”
Sam bit back a retort just as Rush burst through the hospital doors, jogging toward them and holding a small cooler.
“I got eight bags of O negative,” Rush called out.
“Drive to Santos Dumont like your ass is on fire,” Sam told him, grabbing the cooler from him as he rounded to the driver’s side of the car.
She slid into the back, Wes following her. Rush gunned the engine and peeled out of the hospital parking lot.
“Now what in hell is going on?” Rush asked, mirroring Wes’s earlier question as Sam’s mobile rang again. She pulled it out, putting it on speaker.
“Boss—” Talon started.
“Are Simon and Henri with you?” she interrupted.
“We’re here. Apparently, Lightner is with us too?” Simon asked, his British accent thick with sarcasm. “Didn’t think he’d take the breakup so hard.”
“He’s with us alright, but not to put the band back together,” Sam answered. “Carey was supposed to meet me at the hospital. He never made it. Lightner got to him and now he wants a trade.”
“Is Carey alright?” Rush asked.
Sam met Rush’s eyes in the mirror. “I don’t know,” she answered in a low voice. “Lightner wouldn’t let me speak to him.”
“So much for bloody bygones,” Simon commented, though the flippant remark sounded strained.
“Rush and I are headed to the airport now,” she continued explaining. “This time of night, it should take under fifteen minutes, but we need to drop Wes off at the hotel.”
“Like hell you are—” Wes rebutted.
Sam swung around to look at him. “Wes, I’m not jeopardizing your safety.”
“I’ve been in worse situations, Sammy,” he answered, his jaw tightening. “Besides, I could be of help. Been around enough war zones to know how to maneuver. And you know I’m a crack shot.”
Sam thought about it for a moment. She was loathe to give up the time required to get him to the hotel when she could be using that time to develop a game plan with her team. And Wes had a fair point.
“How far away are you guys?” she asked into the phone.
“Less than six minutes,” Talon replied. “We’ve got four more guys less than a minute behind us.”
“I need you guys to split up and conduct a perimeter security check. Simon and Henri: you’ve both worked with Lightner. You know how he thinks. I need you two to take point on the approach; secure two additional men. Figure out where Lightner is holding Carey. You’ll be responsible for taking out his guards. Rush: you take the others and cut off all routes of escape—land, air, and sea. I want everything rigged with explosives,” she told him, meeting Rush’s eyes in the rear view mirror.
“I’ve got goodie bags already set up,” Rush replied. “I’ll light them up like it was the Fourth of July.”
Sam nodded, knowing she could count on her men implicitly.
“Talon,” Sam resumed. “Set up shop no more than two hundred yards out from where you figure the exchange is going down. We’ll have a lot of moving pieces, so Wes will be your spotter.”
“Boss—I could nail this guy a mile away!” Talon argued.
Sam opened the cooler, pulling out blood bags.
“I know, Talon, but I need you closer,” she replied.
“Even an extra hundred yards out would make it easier to pick off more of Lightner’s men,” Talon continued to argue.
Sam spread the bulletproof vest open, examining it. “I want you to be able to count the holes on a button, Talon.”
“Wait—why?” Rush asked this time, his eyes on her again as he navigated down Avenida Infante Dom Henrique.
“Because Talon’s going to shoot me after the exchange goes down,” Sam replied calmly. “Nazar’s not going to want my dead body when he so badly wants to kill me himself. They’ll only take me alive.”
*
End of November—Same Night in Chicago
The Whitney, Chicago
J A C K
“I suspect this won’t end well for you, Jack…”
Jack Roman stood at the window of his study, scotch in hand, replaying the conversation he’d had with her in his kitchen after the boxing match, an endless loop from which he got no satisfaction, no relief. His thoughts were a mess as he stared out over the snow falling gently over Grant Park. He bounced between feeling alienated, angry, helpless and perhaps most acutely, sick with love—a controlling, obsessive, complicated emotion that felt more like a weapon of mass destruction than the strong, positive regard and affection he knew it to be.
“You don’t want a lover, Samantha. You want an opponent…”
Underneath the detritus of his anger and deep-seated frustration with Samantha, Jack was wracked with worry for Jaime, his mind filled with images of his brother lying prone and debilitated in some hospital in Brazil. He was a mess, burning with fury and aching with dread, praying for his brother even as he wished for Samantha’s comfort, his head pounding at the thought of her slipping out of his grasp.
“I’m not the girl you wait for, Jack…”
Jack knocked back the scotch, wincing slightly as the mouthful seared its way down his esophagus.
“No one’s a safe bet. But I’m the kind of bet that should come with hazard pay.”
She’d been right. About everything. But he hadn’t wanted to listen—still didn’t. He’d been too caught up in his infatuation with her to be persuaded.
“You need to eat,” Mitch announced as he walked into Jack’s office, carrying a tray. “I know you don’t have an appetite, but you need to choke this down. I’ve got a jet chartered for you at 6 a.m. to Rio, but the flight’s nearly twelve hours long, and I don’t want you tearing the heads off the flight attendants and the pilots just because you haven’t eaten.”
Jack shook his head, turning to look at his best friend and business partner. “Not hungry.”
“Jack—” Mitch began on a sigh. “You need to have your shit together when you get to Brazil, so sit your ass down and shovel it down. I’m not asking nicely.”
Jack squeezed his eyes shut momentarily, knowing Mitch was right. He needed to be strong for Jaime, for his family. He turned away from the window, sitting down at his desk. Mitch had whipped together some simple pesto pasta and an Italian tomato bread soup that he’d learned how to make from Jack’s mother. He inhaled the fragrant aromas, and his appetite immediately roared to life. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten since everything happened.
“Thank you,” Jack murmured as Mitch settled across from him. He watched Jack bite into spools of pasta. “You’re a good friend,” Jack thanked him after a few silent moments.
“It’s nothing.” Mitch shrugged. “You’d do the same
thing for me if I was in your position. Anything new with Jaime?”
Jack shook his head. “She said she’d call with another update as soon as she heard. She thought it would be at least a couple hours before she got more info from ICU.”
Mitch sat back, his expression contemplative. “I’ll handle everything while you’re gone. The big things on the docket are: closing up that land deal in Cicero and tying up loose ends with the commercial buildings over in Humboldt Park. Nothing that requires you to be here.”
Jack nodded distractedly as he sipped the soup.
Mitch watched him down a few mouthfuls before continuing. “Anything else need covered?”
Jack shook his head.
Mitch’s brow arched quizzically. “So you don’t want to explain how everything with Sam was amazing and wonderful, and then in the space of half a day, you can’t even say her name out loud.”
Jack’s hand tightened around his fork. He glared at his desk, trying to think of how little he could get away with saying about the situation.
“You blame her for what happened to Jaime,” Mitch surmised, ever observant. “What I’m curious about is why.”
Jack felt his jaw tick. A second passed. Then another.
“Because it’s her fault he was caught out in that mess to begin with,” he blurted, anger making his face flush.
“Really?” Mitch tilted his head. “How d’you figure?”
Jack set down his fork, pushing away from his desk. “It was her idea to separate him from the group. It was her idea to route transportation through that area,” Jack answered, flinging his hand. “It was her idea to leave my brother in the hands of incompetent assholes under the guise of doing him a favor.”
Jack recognized in some barely-functioning, yet still fair-and-logical part of his mind that he was talking the worst kind of shit about a woman he adored, and whom he knew with absolute certainty cared deeply about his brother’s well-being. But for the life of him, he couldn’t seem to stop spewing bullshit like venom he was squeezing out of a wound.
Mitch shifted his gaze to the large flat screen hanging on the study wall. CNN was broadcasting live coverage of the demonstrations in Rio, reporting on what had become a nationwide disaster and an international debacle.
“So let me make sure I understand what you’re telling me,” Mitch reiterated. “Your contention is that your girlfriend, who specializes in the personal security of high-value individuals, deliberately put your brother in harm’s way today. And that’s why she insisted he have security in the first place, assigning him men who served on the special forces of any variety of nations?”
Jack pushed back from the desk. “You’re being an asshole.”
“No, you’re being an asshole,” Mitch countered, turning back to him calmly. “Jack, there’s no way in hell Sam would risk Jaime’s life. She was trying to protect him, and something awful happened beyond her control. So you’re freaking crazed and upset and you have every right to be, but you’re talking crazy and you’re acting like—”
“What?!” Jack shouted. “I’m acting like what? Like a man who’s about to lose his only brother? Like a man who’s been lied to for the past seventy-two hours? Is that what I’m acting like, Mitch?” Jack picked up a sculpture and hurled it across the room, smashing it to pieces. “Is it?!”
“What do you mean, ‘lied to?’” Mitch asked calmly as Jack paced across the study.
He felt like a caged animal: pent up, livid, ready to explode. Jack took a breath—told himself to calm down.
“She’s been acting strange for the past few days. She was… I don’t know—off,” Jack admitted, wiping a hand down his face. “We were going to go out to dinner Friday, but she was at the office late with Carey, and then she said she felt ill and wanted to be alone. All of a sudden, she’s got a morning flight to Houston for meetings.”
“Okaaay,” Mitch answered, clearly not following.
“I knew something was wrong,” Jack admitted. “I knew it. But I didn’t want to push it. I wanted her to come to me. I wanted her to trust me, so I waited.”
“So she wasn’t in Houston for meetings?”
Jack shook his head. “She told me today she went back to her father’s ranch. Had to sort some things out.”
“Sort what things out?”
Jack rounded on Mitch. “Jesus, Mitch—that’s exactly my point. This woman is opaque! Everything about her is a freaking mystery! I don’t know who she is. I don’t know where she is. It’s become patently clear to me I know fuck all about her—and yet here she holds my brother’s life in her hands!” Jack raked his fingers through his hair. “The worst thing is I’m goddamn in love with her. I’m in love with a woman I don’t know—a woman I can’t know. Because she never lets me in, Mitch. She never fucking lets me in!” he shouted, slamming his hand on the desk.
Mitch sat back, watching him calmly. Jack could hear the steady, gentle tick of the pendulum clock in the corner of the room as he stared back at Mitch, his breathing heavy.
“You going to tell me what you’re hiding in that safe?” Mitch asked after a moment of tense silence.
Abruptly, the gale force anger diminished from his sails, and Jack sat, cradling his head in his hands.
“I can’t.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
Jack pushed his fingers through his hair, looking up at his friend guiltily. “I shouldn’t even know this shit. I shouldn’t even have that file.”
Mitch’s quizzical expression morphed into one of understanding. He steepled his fingers under his chin as he considered Jack. “Your father,” he stated simply.
Jack nodded, glancing away.
“Jack—”
“Don’t,” Jack interrupted, pushing back from the chair. “I know I shouldn’t have it. I know I shouldn’t have opened it. It’s all classified. You don’t need to fucking say it, alright?”
Mitch sighed as he watched Jack. “I’m sure Sandro’s motives were well-intentioned, but that’s a major abuse of his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee,” Mitch reprimanded softly. “It’s one thing to do a background check on somebody—it’s a completely different thing to share classified information on a woman you’re seeing.”
Jack swallowed.
“I thought you’d lead with ‘it’s a breach of the trust I have with Samantha,’” Jack answered quietly, bitterness tinging his tone.
“That too,” Mitch nodded. “But you already don’t trust her. Now you’re just looking for solid reasons not to.”
Jack clenched his teeth together, knowing Mitch was right. Jack had gone looking for trouble. He knew she had a black past, one that had nothing to do with him or their relationship, but he wanted to see all the markers of her character for himself—the things she wouldn’t tell him, the emotional scars that marred her, the secrets she kept locked so tightly, he doubted they’d ever see the light of day. He wanted to know everything about her. The decisions she’d made. The orders she’d followed. He wanted to understand how close his morbid imaginings resembled reality. He wanted everything. All of it.
“I know Rio wasn’t her fault,” Jack admitted roughly. “But how can you trust someone you don’t really know? How can you give control of what’s most precious to someone you intrinsically can’t trust?”
“Are we talking about trusting her with Jaime’s well-being or are we talking about the safety of your heart?” Mitch asked quietly.
Jack tensed.
“Because I think we both know that you can trust her with your brother’s life,” Mitch pointed out. “I think you realize it’s your heart she can’t be entirely trusted to handle with care.”
Jack blinked back emotion as his last conversation with his brother shifted into focus.
“I know you’re new to this, but that’s a big part of what loving someone is about. Loving all of them, even if you don’t understand it all. And trusting them, even when it’s incredibly hard to do.”
He recalled Jaime’s reassuring smile. A sharp pain flayed him at the thought of never seeing his brother alive again, of Maddie growing up an orphan.
“I’m sorry this has happened,” Mitch continued. “I hurt for you and your family. You know I love Jaime too, but I know Sam will take care of him. I trust her to do everything she can to set this right. In that, I don’t think she’ll let you down.”
Jack’s mind shifted back to the file he’d hidden in his safe. He considered the stratum of secrets that had lithified to create the mysterious and inextricable layers to Samantha’s character. He wondered at the complexity of her heart—how she could be so tenderly loving and yet so matter-of-fact in the face of consternation—a Janus with the slightest shift of a dial.
“You’re doing yourself no good stuck inside your head,” Mitch told him. “Go down to Rio. See to Jaime, talk to Sam—give her a chance to level with you.” Mitch stood. “Jack, you have every right to be upset. So be upset. Be angry. Be scared for your brother, but don’t assume you’re in a place to make any sound judgments.”
As Jack stared out at Lake Michigan, the black, fathomless horizon in the distance, he admitted: “I can’t believe I fell for a woman like her.”
Mitch’s answering laugh was soft and humorless. “Really, Jack? Can’t you?”
Chapter 2
End of November—Fifty Minutes Later
Santos Dumont Airport, Rio de Janeiro
S A M A N T H A
I’ll either walk out of here with Carey or I’ll goddamn die trying, Sam thought as she pulled the SUV up to the service entrance of the airport. The guard hut laid still and silent, though the fluorescent lights flickered and a bank of security screens glowed behind the closed windows. She waited a scant second before driving forward under the raised gate. A shadowed form stepped out in the darkness, lowering the gate behind her.
“Rush, I’m inside,” Sam murmured, her phone on speaker in the console beside her. “One visible hostile at the guard gate.”
“Copy,” Rush answered quietly.
Complicated Creatures: Part Two Page 2