by Lucy Monroe
Not because he was gay, as Wyatt had expected, but because his daddy had raised him to man up, and, well, he hadn’t. He had now, but he’d never be able to erase the look of disappointment in his daddy’s eyes from his memory. He wished he could.
“He still loves you,” Neil said with certainty, a lot closer than he had been a moment before. Wyatt turned, and Neil was there, his hand reaching out to squeeze Wyatt’s arm. “You’re still his son.”
Wyatt nodded. His daddy would never deny him, but things weren’t the same as they had been, either. “I’m not one of his heirs, though. Not anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s leaving the ranch to Jericho and Travis.” Exactly what he’d expected his daddy to do when he heard the news his middle son was gay.
“I’m sorry. Maybe he’ll change his mind after he’s had time to think.”
“He’s had six months, and I don’t see him changing even if I gave him six years.” Wyatt shrugged. It didn’t much matter, anyhow. “I knew I couldn’t go back there and live like I’d always planned, not and have a male partner.”
“It’s a pretty conservative place.”
“It ain’t Houston, that’s for sure. Or even Austin, for that matter.”
Neil sighed. “I never wanted you to give up your heritage.”
Wyatt knew that. Just like he knew that, as a man, he had to make choices about how he was going to live his life. He could spend a lifetime lying and pretending to be something that he wasn’t, or he could be honest about himself and live with the consequences.
It had hurt like hell to do the latter, but he didn’t regret it. Couldn’t. “Mama says she’ll pray for my soul, but I’m not welcome for Christmas this year.”
Neil paled, hurt covering his handsome face. “That’s not right. What did your dad say?”
“Daddy rules the ranch, but Mama rules the house. He won’t go against her.”
“I’m sorry.” Suddenly, shockingly, Neil pulled Wyatt into a hard hug. “I know how much that hurts.”
Wyatt wasn’t about to turn down the contact. “True. Your mother is an idiot.” He’d always thought so. How any woman could write off a son as honorable and loving as Neil was beyond Wyatt’s ability to understand. “At least my mama still sends me my care packages.”
She’d told him she loved him but couldn’t agree with his choices. Since he hadn’t chosen to be gay, he figured she meant his decision to stop hiding it.
“There is that,” Neil said with a suspicious-sounding laugh.
“Yeah, sugar, there is that. I saved you some pecan cookies from the last one. They were always your favorite. I put them up in the freezer.”
Neil laughed again, and this time the sound was even more strangled. “I’m not sure your mama would approve.”
“She’ll love you once she meets you, and maybe she’ll learn to accept me this way, too.”
“You really want to try again?” Neil stepped back, and Wyatt made himself let the other man go.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Think on it.” To Wyatt’s way of thinking, neither of them had much of a choice.
They were each other’s one true thing. It was time they celebrated that truth instead of fighting it.
After forty-eight hours of forced inactivity, Rachel was ready to go AWOL. And with the help of Kadin’s boss, Roman Chernichenko, she just might get away with it.
Kadin had refused to give her a situation report except to say that Abasi Chuma and his muscle were still on the mountain looking for her, convinced a woman could not truly have gotten away from them. Especially a woman who had spent the day before her disappearance hooked up to a car battery.
Rachel wanted more information than that. She wanted to know if Jamila Massri was safe. She wanted to know what the man’s plans for his innocent fiancée were.
Rachel needed to get Jamila out of Egypt before Chuma went home and started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. She couldn’t rely on his remaining ignorant of Jamila’s newly developed friendship with a woman from the West.
The man was a sadistic monster, but he wasn’t a stupid one, and Jamila herself might well give the game away with her own innocent comments. And if Chuma questioned her, that would be even worse. The young Egyptian wouldn’t know any better than to answer him with complete honesty.
She still thought the man her father had chosen for her to marry was charming and sophisticated. She had no idea where the man’s tastes ran and what life married to him might be like.
Just like Linny.
And just as Arthur Prescott had done with Linny, if Chuma had his way, he’d chew Jamila up in his twisted pleasures and then spit her out a broken woman.
Rachel swung her legs over the side of the bed. It was time to find out exactly what was going on. With both her case and Jamila.
Kadin’s commander had called in for a sit-rep, and if she was quick about it, she might get a chance to listen in.
Moving a lot faster than she had been able to two days ago, Rachel crept from the room on silent, bare feet.
The hall was unsurprisingly empty, but she could hear faint voices from one of the rooms on that landing as well as Kadin’s rumbling tones from somewhere below.
She snuck down the narrow stairway, Kadin’s voice growing more discernible as she did so. He was in a room right off the bottom of the stairs, talking on his satphone.
“No, she hasn’t talked to Whitney yet. She’s still recovering.”
Silence while the other man spoke.
“Well, he’ll just have to wait. She’s not talking on the phone until Eva gives the go-ahead. Rachel’s voice box was strained from screaming while she was tortured, damn it.”
Another silence, this one longer.
“No. I take full responsibility for not returning Stateside yet. It’s my call, and I made it.”
Rachel could just imagine how well that was going to go over with the Old Man, much less Kadin’s boss.
“That’s not going to happen, Chief.”
This time the other man’s response wasn’t so quiet, because Rachel could hear the raised, angry tones if not the actual words coming across the satphone.
“That’s not going to happen,” Kadin repeated in a tone Rachel knew too well.
It was the one that said he wouldn’t be moved. Full stop. Period.
So, he wasn’t going to force her to return to the States without Jamila. Today, anyway. She’d take that and let tomorrow worry about itself.
Realizing that Kadin and his chief’s focus was going to be on his orders—to get her safe and out of Africa—she stepped back from the door. She’d heard what she needed to on that count. Now she wanted answers about Chuma and Jamila.
And she didn’t want to get caught disobeying Kadin’s order to rest. He wasn’t her boss, but he hadn’t figured that one out yet, and right now she was reliant on his good will. So, she wasn’t going to spend a lot of time disabusing him of his faulty notions of authority.
When the appropriate time came, he’d learn the truth.
She snuck down the hallway toward another doorway.
“We need to let Kadin know,” a thin blond man was saying to someone not in her line of sight through the partially open door.
Chapter Eight
Even though it was a safe house, Rachel wasn’t sure she would have been as quick to talk with doors open, but then, she’d learned the hard way to be overly cautious.
“He knew the ruse wouldn’t keep them on the mountain forever. Even a West Texas tumbleweed-humper would have cottoned on eventually,” the unseen man said with a pronounced Texas twang.
The thin blond turned slightly so he faced the other speaker. “It worked for two days, and that’s twenty-four hours longer than I thought it would.”
Rachel moved a silent step to her right to keep herself out of the man’s line of sight.
“Only because that Chuma guy ser
iously underestimates what a woman is capable of doing. My granny woulda had his guts for garters afore he knew what hit him.”
The blond shrugged, his face cracking into a smile. “No doubt, if she was anything like you. But I don’t mind that Chuma’s sexism worked in our favor.”
“That it did.” The other man, a big guy with shoulder-length brown hair, moved into her view, his hand reaching out as if he was going to touch the blond.
The blond tensed and shifted so the hand did not connect with his face, his smile slipping. But there was warmth in his indigo eyes she had a feeling he didn’t know was there.
The over-muscled body of the other man jerked, and a look of pain tightened his features before the corner of his lips tilted slightly. “You’ve got an amazing smile, sugar.”
“And you are so full of Texas bullshit, you could fertilize your daddy’s hay fields.” The words were harsh, but the tone wasn’t, and those indigo depths were still warm with emotion.
If his wince was anything to go by, the big man with gray eyes didn’t notice the tone or the emotion in the other man’s gaze.
There was some history here, and if Rachel wasn’t so worried about Jamila, her curiosity would have her working to figure it out.
She hadn’t just gone into the DEA to prove something; she’d realized her curious nature could work for more than figuring out the latest news even before the most accomplished gossips in her hometown did.
“Find out anything interesting?” A large hand landed on her shoulder, while Kadin’s other pushed the door all the way open in front of her.
Rachel maintained her composure, but just barely.
Ignoring the sounds of surprise at her presence coming from inside the room, she looked up at Kadin. “I didn’t hear you coming down the hall.”
It bothered her. She was definitely not operating her A-game yet.
“You were too interested in what was going on in this room. I have to wonder, though … were they talking about Abasi Chuma or fighting with each other again?”
She didn’t bother to answer but was unsurprised that Kadin realized there was something going on between the other two mercenaries, as well. The man had always been too observant to be fooled by anything but his own self-delusions.
Kadin ushered her into the room. “In case you don’t remember meeting them before, this is Neil Kennedy.” Kadin pointed to the blond. “Our resident computer and technology geek. We call him Spazz.”
“Spazz?” she asked, thinking the name didn’t match the man, who could have fit in at any corporate computer lab with his Van Halen T-shirt (from the David Lee Roth era) and loose-fitting jeans.
“I get a little wired when I drink too much coffee.”
“Yeah. Anything over half a cup,” the Texan interjected.
She smiled and dipped her head, wishing she could pretend she hadn’t seen the hand extended toward her. “Nice to meet you.” She forced herself to reach out and brush his fingers with her own before jerking her hand back to her side. “Rachel Gannon. But I’m sure you knew that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Neil let his hand drop without any evidence of offense at the marginal handshake. “This behemoth is Cowboy, name self-explanatory as soon as the man opens his mouth. Though his parents still insist on calling him Wyatt.”
Cowboy tipped his hat, not offering his hand, and she had to stifle the urge to thank him.
“There’s no call for name-callin’,” Cowboy grumbled at Neil.
A wicked gleam came into the dark blue eyes. “Hey, I can’t help that you and Kadin are the brawn and I’m the brains of this outfit.”
“What does that make Peace?” Kadin dryly asked.
The computer geek grinned and winked at Rachel before answering. “In a class all his own, man.”
Cowboy’s laughter was rich and warm, reminding Rachel that not all men were evil. Even if they let you down when you needed them most. Her gaze slid to Kadin and got caught there.
He was looking at her as if he was reading her mind again.
“So, I was just telling Cowboy that Chuma and his men are coming into Marrakech,” Neil said, bringing Kadin up to date on her aborted attempt at eavesdropping. “They’re hypothesizing that Rachel must have made it to the road and hitched a ride with someone.”
“It took them two full days to come to that conclusion?” Kadin asked, his tone tinged with disbelief.
Cowboy moved to lean against the table Neil had his computer set up on, his hips resting inches from the other man. “Chuma doesn’t think much of a woman’s fortitude, Trigger.”
“He finally decided his men had lied about how much torture they’d subjected her to.” Neil looked like he wanted to move but wouldn’t let himself.
Rachel understood that need to show no weakness. “That’s not a bad thing, Mr. Kennedy.”
She wasn’t going to call him Spazz. This man might get wired on coffee, and his lethal edge showed in glimpses here and there, but Spazz? It just didn’t fit. The technology specialist was too controlled.
“No Mr. Anything here, ma’am. Just call me Spazz. Everyone else does.”
“I don’t,” Cowboy said with a defiant glint in his gray eyes.
Neil acted as if he hadn’t heard, but the way his nostrils flared told a different story. He looked almost panicked as the other man shifted just a tiny bit closer.
Wanting to take the attention off the man she was feeling an unexpected kinship with, she said, “Call me Rachel, please.”
“We’ll work on it, ma’am, but you know how the old saying goes,” Cowboy replied. “You can take the man out of the military, but it’s not so easy to take the military training out of the man.”
“I understand that.” She shot a sidelong glance at Kadin, registering clearly now that the black fatigues weren’t standard military issue.
Close but not exactly, and the gray-on-black insignia of a stalking panther with Semper Paratus, Semper Fatalis under it didn’t resemble any military badges she’d seen.
She hadn’t noticed earlier because she had been so certain Kadin would never leave the Marines. So her mind had supplied her with the information that the fatigues were military, but the truth was, only black-ops agencies clad their people in black, even in a war zone.
“So, what, exactly, are all you guys, you Atrati, if you aren’t military?” She’d originally assumed they were all Marines.
Another oversight she could blame on her prior expectations. It certainly didn’t jive with her current observations. Cowboy’s hair, hat, and boots were hardly the norm for a jarhead.
“We’re Atrati,” Kadin said simply when the other two remained silent and speculative in the face of her question.
“Yes, but what, precisely, does that mean?”
“We’re a private black-ops company the government and others contract for specialized assignments.”
That statement still told her nothing concrete.
“Like TGP?” she probed.
“Not really. Like I said, we’re privately run, and we aren’t a spy agency so much as a black-ops force. The Goddard Project calls us in when they want to control the outcome on an op rather than releasing it to the CIA or FBI.” Kadin’s expression went flat. “But we don’t take our orders from the U.S. Government or its agencies.”
“I don’t imagine either of our bosses is feeling ‘in control’ of this op right now.”
“No, I don’t imagine they are.” Kadin didn’t seem too worried about that prospect.
“Are you in trouble because of me?” she still asked.
“I make my own decisions.”
She nodded, accepting the non-answer for what it was. Kadin took responsibility for his choices, regardless of whether or not his superiors agreed with them.
And she was frankly less worried right now about either her or Kadin’s careers than she was about Jamila Massri. “We need to determine Jamila’s whereabouts and Chuma’s plans for her.”
&
nbsp; “That would be Marrakech,” Neil Kennedy said, succeeding this time in shocking Rachel right into sitting down.
It couldn’t be that easy, could it? “She’s here?”
Why had Chuma seen fit to bring the young woman to Morocco? Were Rachel’s worries founded? Had Abasi Chuma sussed out the connection between Jamila and Rachel?
“Or will be shortly.” Cowboy reached for some papers and shuffled through them, finally pulling one out. He pointed to a highlighted line. “Chuma said something about Miss Massri’s father coming to Morocco and bringing her with him.”
“But why would he bring her here?” Rachel asked, worry tightening her gut even as her analytical mind began working on the reasons for Dr. Massri’s arrival in Marrakech. “Unless he suspects she’s part of an information leak.”
“Or he wants her company,” Neil said in a tone that said he wasn’t sure that was an improvement on the situation.
Rachel agreed wholeheartedly. She shifted on the wooden chair, fidgeting with the hem of her scrubs top.
No matter how Rachel looked at it, this could not be good. Jamila’s wedding wasn’t scheduled to take place for another three months, but that didn’t mean a man like Abasi Chuma would want to wait that long for intimacy. No matter what the cultural norms.
If her father really cared about Jamila and her future, would he have contracted with a monster for her hand in marriage?
“So, she’s on her way here?”
“That’s what the man said,” Cowboy agreed.
“Spazz?” Kadin prompted, as if he expected something more.
“I tracked her and her father on a commercial flight from Cairo. First-class. They flew into Menara,” Neil said, naming the airport on the outskirts of the ancient city. “And have reservations at a privately held hotel here in Marrakech that caters to the rich and famous.”
“Chuma is footing the bill, I bet,” Rachel said with disgust.
“No takers on a sure thing.” Neil typed on the ultrathin laptop in front of him. He made a sound of surprise, his brow furrowing. “An entire block of rooms is being paid for by Massri, not Chuma. They’ve been reserved for use for the past forty-eight hours even though they’ve been empty. Or at least there’s no record of anyone actually checking in.”