Hot Pursuit

by Julie Ann Walker

  “Another delightful American phrase.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He blew out a ragged breath and gifted her with one of his sexy, sexy glares.

  “I would have thought it was obvious by now that your death-ray gaze doesn’t work on me,” she informed him. Which was sort of a lie. It did work on her. Just not in the way he might think.

  Nothing was ever as fun as matching wits with Christian. It warmed her blood, lit her up from the inside out. Both were dangerous sensations, but she couldn’t stop herself. When it came to him, she had discovered she liked playing with fire.

  “Okay. Fine. Yes,” he grumbled. “That’s why I came to work for BKI. I tried working for a security firm after the SAS. I tried donating my time to teach little old ladies self-defense. I tried to be a civilian, but I was bloody awful at it. I’ve been bloody awful at it since the day I turned seventeen and got caught nicking a loaf of bread and a bottle of HP Sauce from the corner store and the local magistrate told me it was either a detention center or the army.”

  “That’s why you joined?” Ace looked bemused. “Because it was either military service or jail time?”

  Christian shrugged. “It was a common-enough tale back then. And I must admit, it was the best thing to happen to me. One month into training and I was totally army barmy. The military provided the security and consistency I never had as a child. It would have taken plastic explosives to get me out of the service in the beginning, and it nearly took plastic explosives to keep me out after Kirkuk. Then I heard about Boss.”

  He’d stolen a loaf of bread and a bottle of HP Sauce? The military had provided the security and consistency he hadn’t had as a kid? Holy crap! Had Christian grown up poor?

  Emily tried to imagine him scrawny and scruffy, with holey jeans and worn tube socks, and couldn’t quite form the picture in her mind. Grown-up Christian was always so composed, so unruffled, so completely, expensively put together. She’d always assumed he shot out of the birth canal in a pair of Gucci chukkas.

  Then again, his explanation made it startlingly clear why he’d been right there with her in demanding that Angel make sure whichever car he decided to blow up had an insured owner.

  She thought she heard a rumbling noise. Shit. Surely it wasn’t the foundations of those walls she’d built against him. Right? Right?

  Afraid to answer her own question, she posed one for Christian instead. “Boss? What about him?”

  Frank “Boss” Knight was their esteemed leader back at Black Knights Inc.

  “Our paths crossed when Boss was a SEAL,” Christian said. “After I was decommissioned, I heard he’d quit the Navy to start a chopper shop.” Right. Because BKI’s cover was that of a custom motorcycle shop. Only the CIA and those on the very top rungs of government knew the truth of the matter. “I gave him a ring to ask him how the bloody hell he was doing the transition to being a civilian.”

  “Which was when he invited you across the pond to share a beer with him,” Ace said.

  “How’d you know that?” Christian narrowly eyed Ace.

  “Because that’s how he invited me.”

  After a beat, Christian nodded. “Yeah. He invited me. But I didn’t go straightaway.”

  Emily couldn’t help herself. Crumbling walls or not, she was hooked. She had to know the rest of the story. “Why not?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Christian shook his head.

  Au contraire, she thought. From the look on his face, whatever had stopped him from going right away mattered quite a bit.

  “What matters,” he continued, “is that I eventually made my way to Chicago. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “But now what?” she asked. “Can the press track you back to BKI? Will they—”

  “Indeed not.”

  “How do you know? How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’ve fallen off the grid.” His was the Olympic gold of smiles. His straight white teeth upped his sexy ante by about a hundred bucks. Not to mention his mouth… Sweet heavens! He had a full lower lip that spoke of carnal appetites and a harshly defined upper lip that spoke of rigid self-control.

  Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to kiss those diametrically opposed lips. Despite her self-imposed edict, estrogen responded to testosterone. There was nothing she could do to stop that.

  “It’s six years on from that flight I took across the Atlantic,” he said, “and since then I’ve had no known address. No work history, bank accounts, assets, or debts. Boss pays me in cash. I carry fake passports and have a fake motorist’s license. As far as anyone knows, I have ceased to exist. The only thing that remains of the old me is my name. And I only use that with you lot.”

  He spread his big hands wide. “So you see, if we can make that plane and hop back to the colonies, no one will find me. BKI will be safe. All will be well.”

  Would it? Emily wasn’t so sure. “Except someone found out you were here. Someone found out you were part of that Kirkuk thingy, and someone ratted you out to the press.”

  Ace said the one word they were all thinking. “Spider?”

  The name seemed to reverberate around the room like a tuning fork recently struck. Emily couldn’t help it; she shivered.

  Spider was evil incarnate. If it was awful and currently happening in the world—say, piracy, for instance, or human trafficking or illegal weapons sales—it seemed to have Spider’s fingerprints all over it. Which you would think would make the man easy to find. But you would be dead wrong.

  The Black Knights had been hunting Spider for months. That hunt was why the four of them were in England. Unfortunately, the closest they’d come to figuring out who Spider really was had been to find the man who laundered his money, a billionaire media mogul named Roper Morrison. Too bad finding Spider’s money launderer hadn’t gotten them Spider. Morrison had died before they’d had a chance to interrogate him, and the media coverage surrounding Morrison’s untimely demise was one of the reasons they’d had to lie low and hole up in Christian’s uncle’s empty summer cottage, awaiting secret transport out of England.

  “Could Spider have seen you on some CCTV footage?” Ace posited. The UK was lousy with surveillance cameras. And even though they had done their best to avoid the suckers during their time on the island, it was always possible they’d inadvertently been spied by one.

  “And then what?” Christian asked. “He would have had to use facial-recognition software to identify me. Then he would have had to have someone working for him inside the bloody SAS who could get into my classified”—he emphasized the word—“military records. Even if all of that were possible, how could he have sorted out I was here? My uncle and I haven’t spoken in years.”

  “Maybe it’s simpler than that,” Rusty said. He was perched on the arm of a delicate wingback chair. Since he was a red-haired, freckle-faced Hulk, it was like watching a rhino balance on a telephone wire.

  “How do you mean?” Emily asked.

  “That guy who was working security for Spider’s money launderer… What was his name?”

  “Steven Surry,” Emily and Christian answered in unison. Hearing Christian’s deep voice merge with hers made something strange happen to her stomach.

  “Right.” Rusty nodded. “Wasn’t he former SAS? Could he have seen Christian at some point and recognized him? Could he have passed that information on to Spider?”

  “And then what?” Emily frowned. “Spider gave Christian’s identity to the press? Why would he do that? And it doesn’t explain how he would know about Kirkuk.”

  Rusty shrugged his massive shoulders. “Maybe Spider didn’t know about Kirkuk. Maybe he knew from Surry that Christian was former SAS. If this Spider guy is as well-connected as you all say he is, it wouldn’t take him long to figure out that Christian had fallen off the map. And who better to dig up
information on a dude who has fallen off the map than the press? Maybe Spider tipped off the newshounds hoping they would do his dirty work for him. Namely, find Christian. Total can of corn.”

  Rusty had been born and raised in Pittsburgh, and Emily knew from their acquaintance that can of corn was the way people from the Steel City said easy as you pleasy.

  She exchanged a look with Ace and Christian. All three of them said “shit” at the same time.

  Well, technically Christian said, “buggering shit.” But to coin an overused American phrase, Emily thought, silently donning Christian’s hoity-toity English accent, same difference.

  “We need to get the hell out of Dodge,” she muttered.

  Christian snorted, the muscle beneath his eye going to town. “That’s stating the obvi—”

  BOOM!

  He was cut off mid-sentence by the explosion outside.

  Chapter 3

  Christian watched Emily nearly jump out of her skin when Angel set off the explosion. He was sorely tempted to put a hand of comfort on her arm. But touching her was torture—not to mention strictly off-limits—and he definitely didn’t fancy dealing with another round of flag-at-full-staff, so instead he lifted a hand to his ear, waggled his eyebrows, and said, “Sounds like Angel is playing our song.”

  Emily tightened the straps on her rucksack and stood up. “You have a dark sense of humor.”

  “Do I?” He set off toward the back door. The sound of the reporters chattering excitedly among themselves as they rushed to investigate the ruckus was quickly drowned out by the loud, rolling rumble of thunder. The storm outside was nearly upon them. “Perhaps I do. But you live my life and see what color yours turns, yeah?”

  “Doth mine ears deceive me? Or is the mighty Christian Watson feeling sorry for himself today?”

  “Not sorry.” He opened the shutters beside the back door a bare centimeter and scanned the steps outside. The last reporter was disappearing around the corner of the cottage. “Just stating the facts.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, if you’re of a mind to state facts, then how about telling us why you didn’t go to Chicago right away after Boss invited you to join him for a beer?”

  “Certainly.” He shrugged. “Directly after you tell us what made you so keen to quit the CIA.”

  The woman claimed to be an open book, but those particular pages of her story were redacted, paper-clipped, and superglued shut.

  Her perfectly arched eyebrows slammed into a scowl. Usually, he fancied his women smiling and sated. But there was something about Emily in a pique. Her fierce expressions and sharp tongue always heated his blood.

  “Do you realize you have an annoying habit of evading my questions by firing counter-questions?” When she pursed her lips again, he was forced to look away. There was too much temptation there. If he continued to stare at her, he wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that he wanted to smear those lips—and the rest of her, for that matter—with butter and then lick her clean.

  “Holy demented shit,” Ace cursed in his usual colorful way. “I swear, you two should go see a doctor. You’re both suffering from different-day, same-ol’-shititus. And it’s starting to annoy the hell out of the rest of us. Now, how about it?” He looked expectantly at Christian. “We good to go, or what?”

  Right-oh. Although Christian would like nothing better than to argue with Emily for the rest of the day, they were on a clock.

  Tentatively, he opened the back door and poked his head outside. He was hit by the smell of salty sea air tinged with threatening rain. Without turning back, he raised a hand and wiggled two fingers, a wordless gesture for the trio behind him to get cracking.

  Ace was the first to slink past Christian. He did a quick battlefield scan, looking left, right, and center, before quickly and quietly setting off down the gravel path that wound toward the bottom of the hill. The trail intersected with a road that fronted the beach. Parked on that road was an old farm truck: their target.

  Angel had pointed out the vehicle before leaving the cottage. The Israeli was an expert at “appropriating conveyances.” Which was a fancy way of saying he could hot-wire and filch a car quicker than most people could sign their names.

  One of Angel’s many questionable talents.

  Emily and Rusty pushed past Christian and headed for the path. Christian was disconcerted to discover they were holding hands. Disconcerted and…something else. Something that felt alarmingly like that foolish tosspot known as jealousy. Which was ludicrous because (A) Rusty was gayer than a Sunday morning tea cake; (B) Rusty was simply being a gentleman, helping Emily on the steep path; (C) Rusty and Emily were old friends; and last but not least, (D) even if Rusty wasn’t gay and wasn’t simply being a gentleman and wasn’t Emily’s old friend, Christian had absolutely no claim on the woman.

  Still, there it was. All green-eyed and snarling and making him want to chew nails. Jealousy. He was jealous that Rusty got to hold Emily’s hand, that Rusty got to touch her oh-so-casually while Christian spent most of his days keeping his hands curled into fists to stop himself from doing precisely that.

  Gritting his teeth, he locked the cottage. After replacing the key beneath a terra-cotta pot, he turned for the path.

  He was halfway down the hill, determinedly not looking at Rusty and Emily, when he got the distinct urge to glance back at the cottage. Back at the place that was the symbol of his childhood when it had been relatively happy and healthy. Back at the spot he had longed for during those nights after the car accident when his mother came home too pissed to—

  He shoved aside the memories, refused to look back, and quickly caught up to the couple in front of him. The day had darkened to night. Not sweetly, but more like an ugly bruise. The warmth of spring was eclipsed by the clouds, and the wind had turned cold and harsh.

  In the distance, a plume of smoke drifted upward, away from the glow of the burning vehicle below. Sirens sounded, the familiar bee-doo-bee-doo-bee of Christian’s youth. But all around them was quiet. Not a soul in sight. Everyone with a smidge of curiosity had donned their overcoats and headed toward the scene of the explosion, which was in the exact opposite direction of the waiting vehicle.

  Angel certainly knew how to create a distraction. No question.

  Christian could see the Israeli perched in the truck’s driver’s seat, motor running. The rest of them were near the end of the path, headed straight for the vehicle, when the sky opened up. The downpour stung like needles of dry ice and instantly drenched them to the bone.

  Emily let loose with a curse that made Christian smile. Whipping open the passenger-side door, Ace quickly hopped in, scooting close to Angel. Rusty and Emily were next, piling in Keystone Cop–style. Christian realized, rather belatedly, that there was no room left for him.

  While the old truck was brilliant for a quick snatch-and-grab—no alarms and easy to hot-wire—unfortunately it wasn’t built to carry a five-man crew. The bucket-style bench seat was barely big enough for the four people already stuffed into it.

  He looked forlornly through the downpour at the bed of the pickup. Four rucksacks had been tossed haphazardly inside. With no small amount of displeasure, he thought, When escaping and evading, needs must.

  Placing a foot atop the rear tire, ready to hoist himself into the back of the truck and hunker down for one of the most miserable rides of his life, he stopped when Emily poked her head out the door and demanded, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Rain had plastered her hair to her skull. It dripped from her long lashes and off the center of her plump bottom lip.

  Forget the butter. He didn’t need it. Licking the rainwater from her would do in a pinch.

  “I’m getting into the back!” he yelled over the rumble of thunder and the rattle of the raindrops atop the truck’s roof.

  “Don’t be an idiot! You’ll freeze your ass off. Get in
the front. I’ll sit on your lap.”

  The image of her cute ass snuggled tight into his crotch had his silly pecker begging, Oh, abso-bloody-lutely. Luckily, his mind had the right of things and was quick to interrupt with, Oh, no sodding way in hell.

  He shook his head. “I’ll be fine! It’s not that far to—”

  That’s all he managed. She hopped from the truck and stomped toward him through gathering puddles.

  “For the love of Nellie Fox,” she grumbled. She was always calling on the love of some White Sox baseball player or another. Christian wouldn’t know any of them from Adam. He preferred cricket and football—even though he’d lived in the States for years, he refused to call it soccer. “Stop being a damn fool, and come get in the damn truck!”

  Before he could argue, she had him by the sleeve of his drenched coat and was hauling him toward the open door. He barely had time to shrug out of his rucksack and toss it into the truck’s bed before she gave him a shove that was surprisingly strong, considering she probably weighed less than nine stone soaking wet.

  Rusty grunted when Christian piled in beside him. Christian was far from a small man, but Rusty was even larger. They were trying to figure out how to get their shoulders to fit side by side when Emily hopped onto Christian’s lap and slammed the door shut.

  The loud cacophony of falling rain became a low drumming. With four big, burly men occupying the vehicle, the cold air began to heat. The smell of wet clothes and soggy leather boots quickly permeated the entire space.

  “Punch it, Angel,” Emily said.

  The former Mossad agent didn’t hesitate. He laid on the gas, and the truck puttered to life, picking up speed one cranky shift of gears at a time.

  “Well, that went better than expected.” Emily adjusted herself into a more comfortable position that, yeah, you guessed it, had her delightful derriere settling directly over Christian’s crotch.

  God, if you’re up there, now would be a brilliant time to give me a tad bit of help! All this time Christian had spent studiously not touching Emily, and suddenly her ass was balanced atop his cods.