Into the Crossfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Or Spanish into Russian. Or Italian into German. Or Norwegian into Portuguese.

  She covered them all, an amazing configuration of languages, as her sharply designed website told him. He’d looked at her list of collaborators and it was 120 strong, each one with an impressive resumé, scattered all over the world. If there’d been translation work available on the space station, she’d probably have a collaborator there, too.

  He’d nearly laughed at Nicole Pearce’s expression when he’d named his price for picking that ridiculous lock of hers—dinner out with him.

  Granted, he thought, as he looked at his big, battered shit-kickers now comfortably settled on his shiny, expensive desktop, he did look like a scumbag. Well, you wouldn’t want to be his enemy. But Nicole Pearce wasn’t his enemy. Shit, no.

  He’d been aching to touch that creamy white skin ever since he’d first seen her, and when he finally got his chance, he’d make sure his hands were clean. And gentle. He had strong hands, but he knew when to curb his strength. The idea of hurting any woman made him physically ill, but the idea of somehow hurting Nicole…no, hurting her was not in the cards.

  Fucking her…now that was another matter.

  The lock on Nicole Pearce’s office door had been so easy to pick, it was embarrassing. It had taken two seconds, tops, while she’d been checking the time on that fancy wristwatch.

  The memory of her slack-jawed surprise when she looked up to see him opening her door had him grinning as he bent forward to check his e-mail. This afternoon he’d get a haircut and a shave and then a half-hour shower before his date, but right now, he wanted to get some work out of the way.

  He scanned the subject lines of his e-mails, giving a quick fist pump in the air when he saw NIGHTINGALE LANDED.

  He scanned the e-mail, nodding with satisfaction. Twenty-four-year-old Amanda Rogers was now settled in her new life, under a new name and with a new job in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

  The last time Sam had seen Amanda she’d been perched, trembling and terrified, on the edge of the client chair. A pretty girl, or at least he imagined she was pretty under all the bruising, and if you could ignore the puffy black eye and swollen jaw. One arm had been in a cast. The hand on the other arm clutched the arm of the chair with white-knuckled intensity. The uninjured arm was slender, with a delicate wrist. An enraged man would find it really easy to snap that arm, and an enraged man had. Her boyfriend, who terrified her.

  Soon, it wouldn’t be snapping a slender, delicate wrist. It would be a slender, delicate neck. Sam knew that. His two brothers, Harry and Mike, knew that. All three of them had grown up with men who loved nothing more than to beat the shit out of those weaker than themselves. Women and children top of the list.

  As always, with Amanda, Sam had hidden his feelings under a business-like mask but inside he was seething with rage at the idea of her fuckhead boyfriend beating her to a pulp. The boyfriend was six one, two ten, gym strong, and now in jail. He’d screamed threats to Amanda every step of the way from arrest through booking to the moment when the barred door clicked shut behind him.

  Mike had observed him carefully, then had contacted Sam.

  Mike had then had a quiet talk with a terrified Amanda at the downtown station and given her a heads-up. The boyfriend had money and was going to make bail. She wasn’t going to survive another round of Boyfriend TLC, so Mike quietly sent her to him.

  This was what Sam loved doing. It was what he lived for. His brothers, Harry and Mike, too. The runaway success of Reston Security was gratifying. He couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. He was his own boss and he was making money hand over fist.

  But by God, what he and Harry and Mike got their rocks off on was this. His very own underground railroad. Having the money and the power and the knowledge to subtract women, often with their kids, from the brutal equation of violence.

  Simply whisk them away to somewhere else where they could have a shot at living a life undarkened by terror. Man, it was a good feeling. The best.

  The women came to him in trickles. Some brought by Mike, who was in Violence Central there at the SDPD headquarters. Most by word of mouth. The women were tall, short, blonde, brunette, pretty and plain. But they all had the exact same terrified expression and underlying hopelessness. As if they’d already been beaten to death and were just waiting for life to catch up.

  Sometimes they were on their own, sometimes—tragically—with a kid or two in tow. Often the kid would be in a cast, or have blue-purple bruises or burns. And Sam would put on his expressionless mask and talk schedules and places and plans. While inside he was a beserker just dying to deal with whoever had broken the thin childish arm or put out a cigarette on tender flesh or swung a fist at a child.

  You want to beat up on someone, fuckhead? Why don’t you try me instead of a forty-pound child? Except I have spent a lifetime studying martial arts and I will rip your fucking heart out of your fucking body and feed it to you without breaking a sweat. Not so brave now, eh?

  Sam never, ever allowed what he was feeling to show on his face. These women and kids had seen enough violence to last them a lifetime. So he quietly helped them disappear and reappear with a new life.

  For Sam, it was as if the world had huge holes punched into it by monsters. He spent a lot of time and effort trying to close those holes.

  Sam had set Amanda up with a new identity and carefully wiped her trail clean. If she kept her nose clean, she was home safe and free.

  Setting her up in her new life with new ID had cost $10,000 and Sam had given her $5,000 in cash as start-up money.

  Nightingale, in her new home and new life, had joined dove, falcon, finch, flamingo, gull, heron, hummingbird, ibis, macaw and mockingbird in theirs so far this year. Eleven women and seven kids, safe, because Sam had been able to provide that safety.

  His clients funded it. They could all afford it.

  Sam opened the file on his ship-owner client and added $15,000 in expenses with a great deal of satisfaction. He’d saved the ship owner more than $10 million; the ship owner could fucking well give something back.

  Corporate America, via the US government, had spent millions of dollars training him, including SERE school. The US government had made him an expert at escape and evasion.

  It gave him enormous pleasure to make corporate America pay for the lost ones, the weak ones, the ones who slipped through the cracks, the ones no one cared about.

  Oh yeah, that felt good.

  Man, Nightingale had landed, scumbags were going to prison forever and he had a date with Nicole Pearce. All was right with the world.

  “Wow. Sam Reston, smiling. Jesus, break out the beer. What happened? You get word that Colonel Stewart got his balls caught in a thresher?” Colonel Roland Stewart, the sadistic son of a bitch who had been Sam’s commanding officer for one and a half years of hell, had left a trail of hatred behind him as he slimed his way up the promotion ladder. Stewart getting his balls caught in a thresher would definitely qualify for a smile.

  “I wish. Son of a bitch’s in the Pentagon now, balls secure.”

  His other brother, Harry Bolt, placed two crutches against the wall and leaned his trembling right shoulder against the door of Sam’s office. Sam watched and said nothing. It had all been said before, over and over, loudly, by both Sam and Mike.

  Harry had no business trying to stand without crutches. He had no business standing at all, since the last orthopaedic surgeon had said he had to stay in the wheelchair for at least another month while his bones knitted.

  Harry was his own worst enemy. Sam had found him a small apartment in his own building in Coronado Shores so he could make sure Harry didn’t do something terminally stupid.

  Harry had come back from Afghanistan with a broken body and demons in his head only whiskey and, lately, some jazz singer he listened to endlessly in the dark could keep at bay. He couldn’t be trusted with his own health. The more the doctors told him to take it easy, the m
ore he rebelled. He’d already fallen badly twice, setting his recovery back by months.

  Finally, in exasperation, Sam had asked him to come in to the office, simply so he could keep an eye on him. If Harry fell, at least Sam would be there to catch him.

  Reston Security was expanding fast and it sounded natural for Sam to say he needed a hand. But then Harry turned out to be more than just an extra pair of hands—he was an enormous asset to the company. He was better with computers than Sam, a goddamned genius actually, and he had more patience with dumb clients than Sam did, so he was seconded to the array of latest-generation computers in a quiet room off Sam’s office and to the Asshole Client Detail.

  Harry tried looking nonchalant, bony shoulder pressed hard against the doorjamb for balance, but his legs were trembling.

  Sam knew better than to protest. His brother had a head as hard as the steel that held his hip, right thigh and left shoulder together.

  Harry ragging on him was brand new, though. Maybe it meant he was healing some. He’d come back from Afghanistan with barely a pulse, and had completely lost his sense of humor.

  Sam and Mike were Harry’s only family, down in Harry’s file as the persons to contact in case of death. When Sam and Mike had flown to Ramstein to take him home, Harry had been more dead than alive.

  Worse than the damage to his body had been the damage to his spirit. Like Sam and like Mike, Harry had come through a brutal childhood intact. Whatever had happened in Afghanistan—and so far he wasn’t talking—had crushed his spirit.

  So Harry taking the piss out of him was new and good.

  Sam sat up, shuffled papers, wiped the smile off his face. “Wasn’t smiling,” he muttered. He rarely smiled. No one knew that better than his brother.

  “Was, too.”

  Sam looked up into his brother’s light brown eyes, as fierce as an eagle’s and just as warm. “Was not.”

  “Was, too.”

  “Was not.” Sam’s jaw clenched at how childish they sounded. “Don’t you have work to do? Weren’t you supposed to prepare the McIntosh report?”

  “Mmm.” A corner of Harry’s mouth lifted. “Did that last night, while you were having fun along the docks.”

  A joking Harry was good, but there were limits. “It wasn’t fun,” Sam snapped.

  Harry’s slight smile faded. He knew how heavily this two-week wait had weighed on Sam and he knew the reason why. Who knew how many girls were being hurt while Sam had to wait? “No,” Harry said soberly. “I know it wasn’t. I was just trying to get a rise out of you, God knows why. You’ve been walking around looking like the Grim Reaper lately.”

  “Not anymore,” Sam said. “Job’s done. I notified the client, who’s already contacted the authorities. I’ll write up the report today. It’s over.”

  “Christ.” Harry straightened. He put his crutches under his arms and hobbled into the room. “Wow, that’s…that’s great news. Did you get the evidence to back you up?”

  “Damn straight,” Sam said with satisfaction. “Photos and digital recordings and even some paperwork. Put those fuckers away for the rest of their natural lives. Which I suspect will be cut tragically short by a shank between the ribs in the prison showers. Nobody likes child rapists.”

  “Hey, man. Congrats. I’ll call Mike and we can go celebrate tonight. On me. Bonus on that sucker’ll keep us in tall corn for the next quarter.”

  “Can’t.” Sam’s eyes slid to the computer monitor, staring into it. There was nothing there he had to see right now, but it kept his face away from Harry’s intelligent, perceptive eyes. “Busy tonight.”

  “So cancel. The three of us need to celebrate.”

  Sam didn’t share blood with Harry, or with Mike, but they were his brothers in every sense of the term. That didn’t mean he’d miss his shot at dinner out with Nicole Pearce for Harry or Mike. Tonight was off-limits.

  “Can’t,” he said, bending his head over a piece of paper, pretending to scrutinize it like it was a peace treaty between warring tribes. “Not tonight.”

  Harry jerked the paper out from under his hands and held it up. “Okay, I get it, you can’t talk because you’re way too busy with”—he glanced at the paper—“orders for paper and photocopy toner. Uh-huh. Okay, what’s going on tonight that’s so special?”

  Sam glared at him. His very special Death Glare, guaranteed to terrify recruits.

  Harry put his crutches to one side and carefully sat on the corner of the desk and looked at him, eyebrows lifted. Sam crossed his arms and set his jaw.

  “Not talking, eh?” A corner of Harry’s mouth lifted, Harry body language for a full-out grin. “That means I’ll have to guess. Okay. I like guessing games. It’s obviously not work-related, or you’d have told me all about it, so we’re talking a date with a dame. And just as obviously that dame’s someone you don’t want to blow off, but if you don’t want to talk about it, that means it’s…” He snapped his fingers. “I know! That looker across the hall! The one you’ve been mooning over. Christ, how’d you swing that one? Who’d you have to kill?”

  Damn! Sam hated it that Harry was so smart. He hunkered down in his chair, knowing he couldn’t take Harry on. Harry’s bones were just now resetting, Sam couldn’t go breaking any new ones.

  But, shit, he didn’t want to talk about this. He’d never been one to blab about his sex life, mostly because there’d never been much to talk about. He had sex—lots of it in fact, though lately, work had gotten in the way—but it was never with anyone special. The sex he had was mainly a way to scratch an itch, like eating when hungry. Who wanted to talk about food once you’d eaten your fill? Mostly, one woman was just like another. They satisfied an appetite, and that was about it.

  But…Nicole Pearce was different. He couldn’t really get a handle on why, but there it was. And he wasn’t talking about it.

  They stared at each other mutely, Sam not talking, Harry trying to crack him open but failing. Finally, Harry gave a big martyred sigh.

  “Okay. This is what’s going to happen. Right now, you look like a dockworker who’s been scamming goods and you smell like one, too. No way in hell you’re gonna get lucky with that babe looking and smelling like that. So you’re going to get a shave and a haircut and take a long shower. Two of ’em, because man—” He waved the air in front of him as if someone had just let rip a massive fart. “You read me? And I’m going to go out with Mike for a beer and we’re gonna wait for your report tomorrow morning on your evening out with Ms. Luscious.”

  “Out,” Sam growled, rolling his eyes. “Get out now before I break your bones all over again, and I’ll do a better job of it than some fucking Afghani RPG, trust me.”

  Harry gimped his way out of the office, a half smile on his face. It had been worth it being teased, to see Harry smiling. Sam wasn’t much of a smiler himself, but Harry had been to hell and back. This was the first lighthearted exchange he’d had with Harry since he’d been blown up in the Hindu Kush.

  Maybe it was the Nicole Pearce Effect. God knows, she had an effect on him, a massive one. Harry said he’d been mooning over her, which was crazy. Sam didn’t moon. But he had been…interested. Real interested.

  He’d timed his comings and goings to get a glimpse of her. Christ, just watching her walk down the hallway toward him had been enough to give him a boner he could use to hammer a nail into the wall.

  He knew the basics about her, thanks to her website and Google. Daughter of an ambassador, grew up all over the world, attended the University of Geneva School of Translation, translated from French and Spanish, knew basic Russian and some Arabic.

  That really impressed him. Language training was intense in SpecOps. Sam had aced just about everything in training except languages. He had a tin ear for languages, and it had been a real drawback. Still was, as he was starting to have foreign clients.

  Though she was an ambassador’s daughter, Nicole Pearce didn’t live like a woman of privilege. She lived in a house t
hat was worth about half the value of Sam’s condo on Coronado Shores. Her income was one twentieth of his. She had founded her company only a year earlier, when she had moved to San Diego to live in the house her maternal grandmother had left her, operating the business out of her home until she’d moved into his building a month ago.

  Before opening her own business, she’d worked as a translator for the UN in Geneva.

  When, out of curiosity, Sam had looked up the job description, there’d been the income for her UN civil service pay grade. He’d whistled. In Swiss francs, tax free. It was an enormous amount of money. Why had she quit that to open a small business in San Diego, taking a huge cut in income?

  She was single, which floored him. Never been married, either, which was even harder to believe. Actually, it seemed insane to him. Had she only lived in places where they put saltpeter in the water? Where all the men were gay? What was wrong with the men she came across? Because if he hadn’t first seen her in the middle of an op when he couldn’t break opsec, he’d have been on her tail the instant he caught sight of her moving in across the hallway.

  Grew up abroad, owner of new business, single. Those were the facts he was able to find on her in public records. But what the facts on file didn’t say was how mind-blowingly beautiful she was. She was the kind of woman who should probably come with a warning sign—danger ahead.

  The Googleable facts didn’t hint at just how fucking classy she was, either. The lady packed a double whammy Sam had never seen before. Throw-on-the-bed sexy and ice princess classy. Elegant, graceful, poised. He’d had to make a cage of his neck muscles not to swivel his head every time she walked by and had had to stop himself, through sheer will power, from sniffing after her like a dog, she smelled that good.

  And shit, did she have the princess-to-peon thing down pat. One fulminating look out of those large, uptilted cobalt eyes with the ridiculously long dark lashes, and she could reduce any male to a whimpering mass of protoplasm. On days when he’d looked particularly reprehensible, he got looks that would have killed a lesser man.