Down to the Wire

by Lyn Stone

  Five minutes of bumping over the washed-out ruts and they were home free for the moment. When they reached the highway, he floored the sedan, hoping to attract any law enforcement personnel who might be conducting speed traps. Nothing.

  Finally, some ten miles down the road, they approached a crossroads community with only one gas station/convenience store, closed. But the phone booth out front was a welcome sight. He didn’t want to use her unsecure cell phone for his call to D.C. Joe whipped into the parking lot. “Get on the phone and dial 911,” he told her. “I want everybody in the state on this. Tell them that the three guys who shot up that hotel parking lot are on a spree, targeting civilians. I’ll give you the location coordinates to repeat. Then you give a description of your Jeep complete with tag number, just in case they get it in running shape before they’re surrounded.”

  She did as he said, injecting just the right amount of hysteria sure to bring out the cavalry. Hopefully it would result in a convergence of forces like the 2002 shootings here in Virginia. At any rate, Humberto and his playboys would be entirely too busy to stick to their original mission. “Well, it’s over,” he said.

  “We hope,” Martine added. She stared at the receiver in her hand as she replaced it in its hook.

  Joe placed his hand over hers and stood there looking at her for a full minute. “You okay?”

  “Peachy,” she answered. “Shouldn’t you make some calls?”

  She slid her hand from beneath his and moved away to give him better access to the phone. He dialed the D.C. office and related the pertinent information to Drewbridge, the duty agent for the night. Agent Drewbridge promised to send a chopper to Roanoke first thing in the morning to pick him up.

  “What will you do now?” Joe asked Martine as he hung up.

  She shrugged, eyes closed, hands clutching her arms as she hugged herself. “I don’t know. Fly home, I guess.”

  “Come with me to D.C,” Joe insisted. “DEA could use your input since you were there, too.” He smiled at her. “You were in charge of cutting Humberto’s purse strings. I expect you’ll get a commendation.”

  She smiled back and sighed wearily. “Maybe. But before I do anything, I want a bath.”

  He took her arm and led her back to the car, opening her door for her and settling her inside. How could he expect her to make up her mind about anything when she was totally exhausted? “Tell you what. Let’s go in to Roanoke, get a room and catch a few hours’ sleep. I don’t know about you, but I’m beat.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said. Though she was nearly dead on her feet, her words didn’t slur and she exhibited no signs of the weeping fit he would have expected after her harrowing ordeal. Martine was a highly unusual woman. She had shown him nothing but sheer courage, even when dealing with the claustrophobia. He was almost glad she had an Achilles’ heel. Perfection would be hard to live with.

  Not that he would be the one living with it, he thought with a half laugh. What had made him even think of it? Martine seemed to thrive on danger—at least as long as she could avoid closed-in spaces—and he was definitely not in the market for a girl with her proclivities. Nope. He needed a soft, willing homebody, one whose idea of a bad day was missing her favorite soap opera on TV or choosing the wrong hairdresser.

  But dammit, in light of all they’d been through together, one night together would be okay, wouldn’t it? One night to last him a lifetime.

  Martine woke up when the car stopped. She brushed her hands over her eyes, feeling actual grit in the creases of her eyelids. Her hands stung from the prickles of those thistles they had crawled through and her ankle throbbed from the knife cut. She was such a mess, she didn’t even want to face a mirror. And she didn’t much want to face Joe, either, after disgracing herself in that cave. Elevators made her a little nervous, but she hadn’t realized just how serious her claustrophobia was until she had to face it like that. She really owed him a profound apology for cracking up, if he would just let her say it.

  “Here we are,” he said. “I thought maybe we shouldn’t go for really swanky, given our current condition. I could sure stand a Jacuzzi, though.”

  He had such a great smile, Martine thought. Those straight white teeth and sensuous lips were enough to drive any woman right to the edge of caution. His deep brown eyes with their long lashes and teasing glint pushed her right over. “You’re my hero.”

  “Yeah,” he said laughing. “And you’ll be mine if you swing your little hiney in there and get us registered.”

  Her breath stuck in her throat. His, if she did that? She clicked off her seat belt and reached for the ID she’d tucked in her pocket. If that’s all it took…

  He followed her inside the motel office, ignoring the stares the sleepy desk clerk offered. Martine almost laughed out loud. She certainly wouldn’t take any customers who looked the way they did.

  “We would like a double,” she said in her haughtiest voice, presenting her charge card with a flourish.

  The clerk nodded as he took her information and scribbled it on the form in front of him. “How long?” he asked as if he expected her to answer in hours.

  “One night,” she confirmed, retrieving her card and tucking it away.

  “Could we possibly get room service at this hour?” Joe asked him.

  “Yes, sir,” he said hesitantly. “Sandwiches or something like that. Breakfast isn’t for…another three hours,” he added after glancing at the clock. Then he leaned forward over the desk, looking concerned, first at Joe, then back at her. “Are you all okay? Were you in an accident or something?”

  “Yes. Something like that,” she agreed with a nod. “But we’re fine now. Just need a little rest.”

  He handed her the key card. “Do you have any luggage?”

  “Lost,” she told him with a shake of her head.

  “We have laundry facilities,” he offered, “but I’m afraid the maids are not on duty yet.”

  “Not to worry,” Martine told him with a smile. “We’ll manage.”

  He gave directions to the room.

  “Well, that went well,” Joe said laughing as they got back in the car to drive it around to the room. “Think he’ll call the cops on us?”

  She sighed. “If he does, they’ll have a devil of a time waking me up when they get here.”

  “Not me. I’m starved.” He parked, took the key card from her and went to open the door. Martine trailed in behind him. “You take a bath. I’ll order some food,” he told her.

  She luxuriated in the shower for a good quarter hour, using well over half the shampoo provided and scrubbing her skin until it grew bright pink. Then, wrapped in a huge white towel, she left the bathroom without even glancing in the mirror. “All yours,” she said to Joe.

  “God, I wish,” he muttered, appraising her with his eyelids at half mast. He gave new meaning to the description bedroom eyes. That look jacked up her temperature several notches and made her glance at the nearest bed with anticipation.

  But he obviously had his priorities a little straighter than hers at the moment. He got up and passed her, offering only a little hum of appreciation while staring at her legs, disappeared into the steamy bathroom and closed the door.

  Martine sat down on the edge of the bed, ruffling her wet hair with the small hand towel she’d brought out for that purpose. Her imagination ran wild thinking about Joe.

  He was in there right now, shucking that shirt, those pants, those shoes. The tap was turned on as she listened. Streaming jets of water massaging all those well-defined muscles, easing, soothing, touching what she wished to touch. His eyes would be closed, his head leaning back. Before she knew it, Martine had her hand on the doorknob, about to invade that place of dreams.

  A sharp rapping sounded. Damn. Room service. She groaned, backing away from the forbidden door to go and answer the other one. But just before she unlocked it, she paused, her fingers resting on the dead bolt that remained fastened. What if it was not their
early-morning snack?

  What if Humberto had managed to get that distributor cap back in place and had somehow followed them without their knowing? She didn’t think it was possible, but who knew? It could be that she also had one of those damned transmitters and she and Joe simply hadn’t found it.

  She moved toward the nightstand where Joe had left her gun. She checked to make sure her Glock was loaded, clicked off the safety and went back to the door. Looking through the peephole might get her a bullet in the eye. Instead she crouched to one side, careful to stay away from the drapery-covered window.

  “Yes? Who is it?” she called, her heart racing, her body braced for whatever came next, a couple of overpriced sandwiches or an immediate hail of gunfire.

  Martine swallowed hard, then called out again, louder, “Who is it?”

  “Room service, ma’am,” came the reply, muffled by the door. Sounded like a southern accent, she thought. Couldn’t be Humberto or one of his men. She lowered the gun, shook her head sharply and tried to relax her tensed muscles, wondering if she had gone around the bend to be jumping at shadows this way. She was supposed to be proving herself in this business, not stacking up reasons to go back to what she had been.

  “Just a second,” she answered, looking down at what she was wearing. Or wasn’t wearing. In her mad scramble to grab the weapon, her towel had come untucked and was now lying across the room on the floor by the nightstand. A low chuckle caused her head to snap up.

  Joe stood in the doorway to the bathroom, his towel securely draped around his body just below his waist.

  He walked over, scooped up her towel and tossed it to her, picked up some of the bills she had left on the nightstand, then went to answer the door. She noticed he did risk a look through the peephole before he unlocked it.

  That reassured her a little that she was just being paranoid. Paranoia wasn’t a bad thing. Joe once said it was his friend and had kept him alive. She laid the gun on the floor and hurriedly covered herself.

  By that time he was positioning the tray on the round table in front of the window. “I ordered decaf,” he explained as he turned the cups right side up to pour. He cast her a look that spent a little too long on her bare legs, then went back to what he was doing with the coffee.

  Martine felt a concentrated heat wave. That was the only way to describe the sensation that began around her shaky knees and undulated right up her body, playing havoc with the torso, stopped the breath right about the region of her neck. And probably fried her brain completely because she totally forgot about the sleep she needed, the food her stomach was growling for and the fact that when this was over she probably would never see this man again.

  He looked too damned good in that towel. How shallow was that? she asked herself sharply. How many times had she castigated Matt for mentioning how hot some girl or other looked? Now here she was doing the same thing. Guilty as she felt about it, she didn’t even want to deny the excitement Joe generated.

  “Rye or white? I got one of each,” he said. She didn’t miss the smile in his voice that told her he was not really thinking about bread. The body-flaunting rat knew exactly what she was feeling. He had already turned her down once. Damned if she was going to give him another chance. If he wanted her, he was going to have to make the first move. Nothing, however, said she couldn’t egg him on a little.

  She adopted a bold, wide-legged stance as if she were about to fire the weapon she held, then shifted her weight to one leg, causing the slit in the towel to open and grant a pretty good view of her left thigh, hipbone and the area just above it. Good, she had his attention.

  Then she tilted her head a bit as she examined the nine millimeter she held out in front of her. Her two-handed grip on the pistol squeezed her breasts together enough to provide a decent line of cleavage. There, ignore that, hotshot.

  When she raised her gaze from the gun to meet his, he had abandoned any pretense of pouring coffee. Motion arrested, mouth open, he stared.

  She raised a brow in question.

  He closed his mouth, swallowed hard, then set down the coffeepot. “You planning to shoot me?” he asked, his words laconic. Infuriating.

  Martine stiffened. “Just maybe,” she answered, then stalked over to the nightstand and plunked down the pistol. “Damn you, Joe! You make me so mad!”

  “Yeah,” he said, exhaling audibly. “And you scare the hell out of me.”

  Well, that was unexpected. “Scare you?” she repeated with a bitter laugh.

  “Absolutely,” he admitted. “And if you don’t get away from that bed and get over here and eat, I’m about to face up to my fear. In a very large way.”

  “Bragging, are we?” As warnings went, Martine thought this might be the best one she’d ever had. But obviously Joe was fighting his need for her at least as hard as she was trying to stoke it. There had to be a reason for that, one even more meaningful than the one he’d given her back in Atlanta. Until she discovered what it was, she decided not to try anymore to seduce him. A girl could only take so much rejection, reluctant or not.

  She huffed once, flounced over and plopped down in the straight chair next to the table. She knew her movements were not provocative. They weren’t even the least bit graceful.

  Bite me, Joe Corda! She thought as she grabbed up the sandwich closest to her and sank her teeth into it. She chewed furiously, hardly tasting the food.

  “I guess you think we need to talk about this some more,” he said, fiddling with his own food, not wolfing his down the way she was doing. “This…whatever it is between us.”

  Martine shook her head and took another bite.

  “No? Well, you’re the first woman I ever met who didn’t talk a thing to death.”

  As if talking could change a thing. As desperately as she wanted to know the real reason he wouldn’t take her up on what she offered, Martine was determined not to play the role he expected her to play here. She gulped down the bite of sandwich and slurped a swig of her coffee.

  “Shut up, Joe,” she ordered, and busied herself picking off the limp lettuce and flinging it down on the side of her plate. “Just shut up and eat.”

  “You think I don’t want you, right?” he asked, sitting back in his chair, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the table where he rested his arm.

  Martine shrugged and took another bite. Damn, she hated this sandwich. The bread was stale, the tomato grainy and the ham barely there. And the mayo was old. Probably tainted. She slapped the remainder of the sandwich down on top of the lettuce, choked down what she had in her mouth and leveled him with a glare. “Get stuffed, Corda. And I mean that in the very worst sense of the word!”

  With that, she pushed out of the chair and slammed into the bathroom to wash her clothes as best she could. She crumpled them into the sink and turned on the hot water.

  Tonight was obviously a total bust, so she would concentrate on tomorrow. If nothing else, she had come through this mission alive and well. Crawling home looking like a dirty ragamuffin would only lower her in Matt and Sebastian’s estimation and God only knew she felt low enough in Joe’s already.

  He had seen her at her very worst. But he had seen her at her very best, too, she reminded herself as she scrubbed at the dirt, watching it muddy the water to a murky gray-brown. Besides, what did looks matter?

  She drained the sink and ran more water using the remainder of the shampoo as detergent, then rinsed it away. Imagining herself wringing the neck of that mule-stubborn man in the next room, Martine twisted the water out of the fabric, rolled the garments in a dry towel, then hung them over the bar that supported the shower curtain.

  That done and still so angry she could spit, she wasn’t about to go back in there and make a bigger fool of herself. Instead, she washed the clothes he had left piled in the corner of the bathroom.

  “God, what am I doing?” she muttered as she flung them on the rod beside hers. “He’ll think I’m Suzy Home-maker!”

  �
�Actually I think you’re Rambo,” he said from the doorway.

  Martine whirled around, grabbing at the towel as it shifted. When had he opened that door?

  He shook his head, pushed away from the door frame and approached her. “Okay, you win. I give up.”

  Chapter 9

  Words just failed her. Martine knew if she could just draw a breath, she would scream invectives that would curl his hair. Instead she just stood there letting his hot gaze incinerate her good sense.

  Then his arms surrounded her and enveloped the rest of her in his heat. Dimly, she was aware of moving backward, felt the coolness of the wall tiles press against her back. But, oh, the glorious warmth that encompassed her front! A wall of muscle created the most delicious friction.

  His mouth devoured hers. Her palms smoothed over his wide shoulders, glided up the sides of his neck. Her fingers threaded through his hair, reveling in the crisp texture of it. His deep, visceral growl of possession reverberated through her body like a powerful current.

  Strong hands gripped her hips and lifted her. Still lost in the kiss, she felt she was flying, swept away from the wall, whirled around and spirited out of the steamy bathroom to the softness of the bed. Her mouth sought his again, desperately, when he broke the kiss.

  “Minute,” he gasped, as she felt his hand between them, a brief break in body contact as he took care of protection. Then he renewed the welcome onslaught, covering her completely, his movements sinuous and inciting. He pressed that ridge of pulsing promise against her belly.

  “Now!” she demanded, her word half lost as she struggled for breath, for surcease. Blood pounded in her ears and stars burst behind her eyes.

  “Not…yet,” he groaned, his weight pinning her as he stopped moving. “Too fast.”

  “No!” What the hell was he waiting for?

  A harsh breath rushed out past her ear. His hand tightened on her hip as he slid lower and entered her in one smooth glide. Pleasure flooded her with such intensity, she felt tears push from beneath her eyelids. Joe was so right, so good, so necessary.