by Cindy Dees
Was he that worried about Carrie’s safety? Had all his years of training gone right out the window when danger threatened a woman he—
He what? Had the hots for? Was developing actual feelings for? Liked...a lot?
Swearing under his breath, he forced himself to do his own breathing exercises until his pulse came down out of the stratosphere. He finally was able to slow it to a normal speed.
He glanced over at Carrie, who was hugging her knees to her chest and looked nearly catatonic with terror. “We’re good,” he bit out. “You’re safe.”
“What the hell was that?” she demanded.
“The more pertinent question would be, who the hell was that?” he replied dryly.
“The power went out. How could you be so sure that meant there was an intruder?”
“I have an emergency generator that kicks in so fast we shouldn’t have seen more than a flicker of the lights. The fact that it was disconnected or sabotaged clued me in.”
“How do you know the generator didn’t just fail?”
“Because through my night vision gear I saw two men hiding in the back corner of the garage.”
She did hyperventilate then. When trying to talk her through controlling her breathing utterly failed, he finally suggested, “Lean over and put your head between your knees. At least you won’t faint that way.”
He probably ought to pull over and stop so he could help her, but he urgently wanted to get her to safety. There would be time later to talk her down off the bridge of panic.
She surprised him a few minutes later by asking, “Why do you have so much security installed on your property? Are you that big a target?”
“Not me. My cars and my guns.”
“What?”
“In addition to the girls, I own a substantial collection of weapons. Don’t want any of them stolen. So, I make it hard to get to them.”
“Wouldn’t thieves leave your place alone because you’re a cop?”
He snorted. “They leave it alone because I’m a SEAL. I’ve got the local gangbangers convinced I’m a tiny bit crazier than they want to tangle with.”
“Are you?”
He glanced over at her. “Am I what?”
“Crazy?”
“Hell if I know. Sometimes I think so.”
She asked thoughtfully, “So if the intruders weren’t local thieves, who are they?”
“That’s an outstanding question.” He added grimly, “One I need to answer.”
* * *
Carrie was so rattled she could barely string thoughts together. First Gary and now her? Surely, she was who those men back at Bass’s place had come for. A person would have to be completely suicidal to go after Bastien LeBlanc given his training and skills. What on earth was this all about?
Even if Lonnie Grange had seen her impromptu television appearance this morning, surely he hadn’t been able to send a pair of his thugs all the way to New Orleans to come after her this fast. Right?
This had to be Gary’s mess spilling over onto her. She was sure of it. The diary she’d snatched up as they ran past her backpack on the way out of Bass’s house practically burned a hole in her shirt. She’d stuffed it down her sports bra as they’d run across the garage. It stuck up under her neck and was awkward as heck now that she thought about it.
She pulled it out and caught Bastien’s shocked expression as the book emerged from the neck of her shirt.
“Do I want to know?” he asked.
“I found it today. I’m not sure what it is, but I called a professor at Tulane University not long before you found me in the van. He’s going to translate it for me.”
“Translate it?”
She responded, “It’s a diary of some kind. It’s really old—dated 1802. I think it’s written in French. It was in Gary’s duffel bag.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it before now?” he demanded.
“Because I didn’t find it until this afternoon. It was hidden in a secret compartment sewn into the bottom of his bag.”
“I speak some French. I’d like to look at it when we get where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Safest place in Louisiana.” He didn’t elaborate, and she was too freaked out to ask.
They drove in silence for perhaps ten more minutes, and then approached a brightly lit gate with a brick guardhouse beside it. A big sign proclaimed it to be Naval Air Station New Orleans.
She’d never been on a military base before and looked around curiously at the manicured lawns, boring but painfully neat buildings, and general air of order and discipline. Well, didn’t this explain a lot about Bass? No wonder he was Mr. Hard-core Law-and-Order.
He parked beside an unmarked building, then came around and opened the passenger door for her, took her by the waist, and lifted her down from the high vehicle. She glared up at him and he shot her a crooked grin. “It seemed faster to just pick you up rather than teach you how to climb down out of Bessie.”
“Bessie?” She looked over her shoulder at the big, beefy Hummer. “I’d have called that beast Godzilla.”
“Godzilla was a boy. My cars are all girls.”
“You seriously need to get a life,” she retorted.
“Yeah, I get told that a lot.”
Her gaze shot to him. He sounded more serious than joking. Her tummy fluttered at the idea of being the woman who finally lured Bastien LeBlanc away from his monastic soldier’s life.
Aww, who was she kidding? It would never happen.
He stepped in front of her to use a biometric scanner for the building’s entrance. The security system buzzed and he held an inner door open for her. He led her to a large room with perhaps twenty desks clustered in the space. A half-dozen men looked up, and then, to the last man, did a hard double take at her.
“Hey, Bass,” one of them said cautiously.
“How’s the world tonight, Skip? Safe for democracy?” Bass replied to the guy.
“Working on it.”
“Any major ops running?”
“There’s always something going,” one of the other men replied cryptically, throwing her a cautious look.
“This is Carrie Price,” Bass announced. “Someone just broke into my place and tried to abduct or harm her.”
Everyone’s eyebrows shot up at that, and now they all were staring at her unapologetically. Obviously, none of them had missed the implication that she’d been spending the night with Bastien.
Skip commented, “What idiots thought they could get past you?”
Bass frowned. “They made it all the way into my car collection. I had to throw Carrie into my Hummer and bug out.”
That caused exclamations all around. Finally, Skip asked, “What’s up with the girl that she’s got hostiles coming for her?”
Bass threw her a look she didn’t know how to read. Was that apology in his eyes? Regret? Or maybe disappointment? He said, “I was hoping you guys could apply your superior research skills and help me answer that question.”
Oh no. He was going to sic a bunch of SEALs on cracking her past? Not good. Hastily, she spoke up. “I can tell you why I’m of interest to your intruders. It’s because I found Gary Hubbard’s diary. Well, not his diary. A diary he had in his possession. I think it was written by a woman two hundred years ago. My guess is that Gary believes it can lead him to a hidden treasure.”
“Isn’t he that ghost hunter guy on TV? I thought he got kidnapped or something? Some stunt for his show.”
Carrie replied indignantly, “It wasn’t a stunt. He really was kidnapped, and he’s still missing.”
Bass interjected, “I got tagged by the NOPD to investigate Hubbard’s disappearance, and Miss Price is correct. He was legitimately kidnapped.”
“How’s she co
nnected to him?” someone else asked shrewdly. This SEAL was fair in coloring and had light, light blue eyes. He looked way too smart for her good. His gaze had that same predatory alertness Bass’s did when he was asking her questions she didn’t want to answer.
Crud. These SEALs were as sharp as Bastien. How was she ever going to keep them from tearing apart her secrets? She pulled out the diary. “I was going to send this over to a professor at Tulane to translate, but maybe you guys know someone who can get it done faster? This was written around the year 1800, in French.”
Bass took it from her and thumbed through it carefully, pausing and seeming to actually read portions of it. But then, he was a Cajun. The dialect must be fairly close to the early nineteenth-century French it derived from.
“Who wrote it?” one of the men asked.
Carrie answered, “According to Gary’s notes, a woman named M. de Parais. She spends quite a bit of time swooning over someone she refers to as P.C. In his notes, Gary named the last French governor of Louisiana as Pierre-Clément Laussat. Gary thought this M. de Parais was Laussat’s mistress.”
“Gary’s notes?” Bass asked ominously.
“I found a notebook in the same bag the diary was hidden in. Mostly Gary wrote down show ideas. But there are several pages about some treasure he thinks the diary will lead to.” She added reluctantly, “Or, more accurately, it will with the help of a ghost.”
Bass looked up sharply from the diary. “He really believes in ghosts?”
“Absolutely.”
“And yet he’s never found one on his show.”
“He believes that the lighting anomalies and power glitches we film are created by ghosts.”
“Do you?” Bass demanded.
Why was he doing this in front of a room full of avid listeners? It was embarrassing to talk about this under the best of circumstances. But Bass seemed determined to air the show’s—and her—dirty little secrets in front of all his buddies.
She answered reluctantly, “No. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“So you admit you Photoshop in fake stuff that looks like ghosts after the fact? Your show is a fake?”
“First of all, it’s not my show. And second, I don’t add in fake anything. It’s my job in post-production to crop and enhance the footage in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the existence of ghosts.”
“Don’t play coy. Do you or don’t you fake ghosts on the show?”
He was really starting to get on her nerves. “I told you. I enhance anomalies that are already there. I might highlight a light flickering or add contrast to a shadow that’s already present, but I don’t make up anything.”
“And that’s how you know your boss didn’t fabricate his own kidnapping?” Bass asked.
Cripes, he was being a bastard. For the first time, he sounded like a cop who suspected her of being involved in the kidnapping. Was it being in the presence of his fellow SEALs that brought out his nasty side like this?
“Do you always have this much trouble remembering what someone’s already told you more than once?” she snapped.
The men laughed, and it seemed to break Bass’s train of thought. He closed the journal gently. “I speak a fair bit of French, but I can’t read the whole thing. It uses archaic words and spellings I don’t recognize.”
One of the guys across the room spoke up. “We can fire it off to the Defense Intelligence Agency. They ought to be able to roust out some historian who can translate it for us.”
“It’s a police matter, not a national security matter,” Bass objected.
“Your home was invaded. It’s a SEAL matter, now,” the guy with the light eyes declared.
“Thank you, sir,” Bass said formally.
Sir? That scary man outranked Bass? She would never have guessed. All the men in here looked pretty much the same—hard, smart and way too observant for her own good.
“You need a place to crash tonight?” asked the one he’d addressed as sir.
“Now that you mention it, yeah,” Bass replied.
“Grab a couple of racks upstairs. A few of the ladies are in town. Miss Price can bunk in with them, and she’ll be that much safer.”
“Thanks, Frosty,” Bass murmured.
Carrie followed after Bass as he left the room. “Frosty?” she asked under her breath as they reached the hall.
“That’s Commander Cole Perriman. He’s the leader of all the SEALs in this unit. His field handle is Frosty. He got the nickname because of his pale blue eyes. That, and the guy has nerves of pure ice.”
Bastien ducked into an office across the hall and dug in a filing cabinet for a piece of paper. He shoved it across a desk at her. “Read and sign, please.”
“What is this?”
“A nondisclosure agreement.”
“What on earth for?”
Ignoring her question, he explained implacably, “You will need to read the whole thing, but basically, it says that you agree not to speak about anything you hear or anyone you meet in this building—ever—or else you’ll face serious criminal charges.”
Whoa. She carefully read the document, which spelled out dire consequences for breaking the agreement she was about to sign. Apparently these military people, they took their privacy extremely seriously. Yet another disheartening insight into the heart and mind of Bastien LeBlanc. She signed the paper and shoved it back across the desk at him. He filed it without comment and then led her back out into the hall.
He jogged up a flight of stairs fast enough to leave her a little out of breath at the top. He, of course, seemed to not even notice the exertion. “There are quarters up here for SEALs passing through town or getting ready to go out on missions. You’re going to stay in the women’s bay tonight, and you’re going to meet a few of the people you can’t talk about outside this building.”
“Women?”
“Yup.”
Lord, she hated it when he went all cryptic and silent on her like this. “Who are these women?” she prodded.
“They’re Tier Two support staff to the SEALs.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “They have specialized skills that SEAL teams use. Sometimes they deploy with us, and sometimes they help us from some forward operating base. They speak oddball languages, do photo intelligence analysis, fly drones, that sort of thing.”
How cool was that? And she got to meet some of them! Eagerly, she stepped into a big room with rows of single beds down each wall.
“Hey, Catfish!” one of the four women at the far end of the room called out. “You got a new recruit for us?”
Carrie looked up at him in alarm.
“Nah. This is Carrie Price. Civilian. Never fear. She already signed an NDA about you. Take it easy on her tonight, will ya? She’s had a rough couple of days.”
“She’s in good hands,” one of the other women replied. “Scram, Bass, so we can grill her about you.”
He rolled his eyes and looked down at her. “Come get me if they bug you too much. I’ll be directly across the hall. I’m not averse to kicking some butts in here.”
“You think you could take us, big guy?” one of the other women declared. “Go ahead. I dare you.”
Bastien’s gaze narrowed. “Who trained all of you in hand-to-hand combat? You think I give up all my secrets to recruits?” He shot one last general scowl around the group before retreating.
A pretty brunette said pleasantly, “Hey, I’m Kalli. Pull up a chair.”
Carrie sat in one of the chairs at a round table.
Kalli asked, “So, Carrie Price. How do you know the most eligible SEAL in Louisiana?”
“Who, Bass?”
“Who else? You gotta admit, he’s some serious man candy.”
Carrie grinned. “He is not hard on the eyes, no.”
“So what’s the deal with you two? You dating?”
Carrie jolted. “Good grief, no!”
“Then why was he hovering all protective-like over you? His body language screamed relationship in progress.”
That made her snort. “Not hardly. He’s highly ticked off with me at the moment. I’ve been keeping secrets from him, and it’s driving him crazy.”
One of the other women leaned forward. “I’m Freda. Nice to meet you. We may pick on Bass, but he’s got a good heart. A really good heart. He’s the kind of guy you can trust with your life.”
The other women all nodded, and the last two introduced themselves as Logan and Suzanne.
“Bass was one of the guys who trained us,” Kalli explained. “He was a giant pain in the ass most of the time, but he pushed us because he cares about us. He wants us to survive anything we encounter in the field.”
“You really work with SEALs?” Carrie asked.
The women laughed. Freda answered for all of them, “In the flesh, babe.”
“That is so freaking cool,” Carrie replied.
“You have no idea,” Kalli replied, grinning. “So what brings you to these luxurious accommodations in the company of Bastien LeBlanc?”
“Some guys broke into his property, possibly to kidnap me.”
The women’s eyebrows all shot up. “They still alive?” Freda asked skeptically.
“Well, yeah. Bass threw me in a Hummer and drove away like a bat out of hell.”
Kalli frowned. “He didn’t take out the intruders?”
“No.”
“That’s weird,” Suzanne replied.
Freda leaned forward, also frowning. “He must really have it bad for you if he was so concerned for your safety that he ran rather than confronting a couple of thugs.”
“Me?” Carrie laughed. “He hardly knows I exist.”
All four women guffawed. Kalli spoke for all of them. “Are you kidding? We saw the way he hovered over you, and the way he looked at you. We know him like we know our own brothers, and I’m here to tell you, that man is seriously into you.”