Heatseeker (Atrati)

by Lucy Monroe

  “That’s not possible.” Whit was silent, and she could picture him rubbing his eyes as he did sometimes. “Your cover has been compromised at the very least. Chuma and Massri cannot see you.”

  “I can’t leave her, sir.”

  “I can’t sanction protective surveillance, Rachel.”

  “I’ll take my vacation,” she insisted again.

  “All vacation requests are currently on hold.”

  So he’d said, but that didn’t make any sense. “You’re saying you can’t give me vacation leave? But why, sir?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say. These things happen sometimes.”

  But not at TGP. It wasn’t the usual government agency.

  “I’m not com—”

  “The best I can offer you right now,” Whit said, cutting across her insubordination before she could get a direct refusal of orders completely out, “is indefinite unpaid medical leave due to the traumatic nature of your assignment’s end, and transport home when you decide to return from Africa.”

  Rachel didn’t worry about the financial consequences or what this might mean for her career; she just said, “Thank you, sir.”

  “Wrap this up, quickly, Rachel. The medical leave isn’t just an excuse. You need psychological debriefing and support.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  “I’ll be sending in another agent to continue the work you started. Will you be available to brief her?”

  “Yes, of course.” She was surprised Whit was going to send in another female agent, but the man had been doing this for a long time.

  He knew what he was doing, even if Rachel didn’t understand it.

  “Rachel?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Watch out for yourself. I don’t want to lose a good agent to her need to protect someone else.”

  Rachel didn’t have an answer that Whit would want to hear, so she simply told him good-bye.

  “What’s going on?” Kadin asked.

  “He’s not going to try to flip Jamila, but I’m off the case.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m on unpaid medical leave.” She repeated the rest of what Whit had said.

  Kadin nodded, his expression giving nothing away of what he was thinking.

  “Roman tells me he needs a medic on a team he’s got in the Congo,” he announced to the group.

  The cold wind of abandonment blew over Rachel, making her shiver. “Okay.”

  She needed to get out of his arms, stand on her own two feet … like she’d been doing the last ten years. But she couldn’t make those self-same independent, strong-willed feet move.

  Chapter Twelve

  Kadin shifted, though not away. If anything, she ended up plastered more securely to his side.

  He addressed the others in the room. “Roman wants Eva in the Congo tomorrow.”

  The female medic nodded her understanding. “What are my travel plans?”

  “Helicopter transport. You’ll be meeting your helo at a small airfield two hours south of here.”

  Rachel wondered why they weren’t using the main airport but then realized it was probably a matter of security. And secrecy.

  “What about us, Trigger?” Cowboy asked.

  “Peace is going with Eva. Roman wants her to have an escort… .” He stopped talking, as if he was waiting.

  Eva, who had been on her way out of the room, stopped and turned slowly. “He said what?”

  Kadin’s grin was pure evil. “He wanted you to have an escort.”

  “And you recommended me? Thanks a lot, brudda.” Peace didn’t look even slightly like he was looking forward to the assignment.

  “I don’t need an escort, asshole,” Eva said to Peace in a vicious tone.

  “See what I mean?” Peace asked with a wink at Rachel.

  And Rachel got it. Eva was pissed that her chief thought she needed protection. She clearly had no trouble taking that anger out on the closest target at hand.

  “Roman said he wanted your skill set on the team in the Congo, too, Peace,” Kadin said, his amusement at his own pot-stirring ringing in his voice.

  “Right,” Eva spat. “As if Roman Chernichenko would send a team to that region without a weapons specialist.”

  “He sent Colt. Who’s now in Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, on the critical list.”

  That took the wind out of Eva’s sails. “I’m sorry to hear that. Colt’s a good guy.”

  “I’m a good guy, too,” Peace claimed, sounding hurt but looking like he had a bit of Kadin’s devilment in his eyes, as well.

  “You’re an idiot. You’d better watch your ass, is what you’d better do, asno. No one on my team is ending up in some French hospital. You hear me?” Eva demanded before leaving the room, muttering to herself in Spanish.

  “They don’t need a computer expert?” Spazz asked.

  Cowboy’s body jerked, as though he didn’t like the question.

  “They’ve got that new guy on their team.”

  “Hansen?” Spazz asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s good, but I’m better.”

  Kadin shrugged. “You’re the best. That’s why you’re on my team.”

  “You hear that, Cowboy? I’m the best.”

  “I would have told you that. If you’d let me.” The cowboy soldier’s tone implied he meant more than his words said on the surface.

  Neil ignored him, his attention fixed on Kadin. “What are our orders?”

  “I didn’t get them.”

  “What?” Cowboy asked, his eyebrows raised.

  “I hung up on Chief.”

  “He’s not going to like that.”

  Kadin shrugged. “He’s used to it.”

  Neil laughed. “Are you kidding? There’s only one guy who is normally more laid-back than you, and that’s Peace.”

  “Normally,” Cowboy drawled. “When your filly doesn’t have you tied in more knots than a new roper’s lariat.”

  Rachel was expecting Kadin to deny that she was his, but he just shook his head. “He’ll get over it.”

  “Yeah, but will you when he assigns you to the next team dropping into Afghanistan?”

  “But you aren’t with the military anymore,” Rachel protested, forgetting the rest of their conversation for the moment.

  “I’m not.”

  “Then why go to Afghanistan?”

  “We go where we’re needed.”

  “Well, they don’t need you there,” she said before she had a chance to censor her words.

  Kadin didn’t laugh or tell her it wasn’t up to her. He simply squeezed her tighter, and she let him. “Not right now, they don’t.”

  “So?” Neil prompted.

  “I’m staying in Africa with Rachel.”

  For the second time in less than half an hour, the relief coursing through Rachel would have taken her to the floor if her former lover hadn’t been holding her up.

  He looked down at her, his beautiful sherry brown gaze narrowed with determination. “You need someone at your back, angel. That someone is going to be me.” The promise sounded so sure, so long-term.

  She wouldn’t let herself be tricked into believing she had someone to rely on for life, but he was here now. And she’d learned with Linny’s death that sometimes the only way to keep going was to live in the present and let the future take care of itself.

  “Okay, then, we’ve got our orders,” Neil said, as if Kadin’s words had made up his mind about something.

  Cowboy nodded. “The Atrati don’t leave their team leaders hanging. It’s not the way we roll.”

  Neil smiled at Rachel. “Besides, I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress.”

  Rachel didn’t ask if he meant Jamila or her; she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to that. She didn’t consider herself one of the people needing rescue—and hadn’t, until recently, for a very long time. But there was no denying that Kadin’s team had done exactly that. And that brought her
back to a place she didn’t want to be.

  Feeling less than invincible and maybe not as expendable as she’d believed since Linny’s suicide.

  “And Spazz needs someone riding herd on his crazy ass,” Cowboy added with a smirk. “I’m just the man for the job.”

  Neil glared at the other man but didn’t make a vehement denial, and Rachel wondered if his attitude toward his teammate was softening.

  Kadin just shook his head as if the other two men were idiots, but the grateful expression on his warrior’s face told the real story. He lifted the satphone again. “I need to talk to Roman.”

  The little black box beeped with an incoming call right then, as if it had been timed.

  Kadin finished his call with Roman, acutely aware of the fact that Rachel had not tried to move out of his arms the entire time he had been talking to his superior.

  She was just devious enough to have stayed close in order to be able to hear Roman’s side of their conversation, but Kadin preferred to believe she was willing to accept his comfort. If only for the present.

  “We’re cleared to stay in Morocco for the time being,” he said as he set the satphone down.

  “How?” Rachel demanded, her tone wary, the tension in her frame increasing instead of lessening as he would have expected.

  He looked down at her, trying to read the expression in her blue gaze. “Our mission is to extract you from Africa. You refuse to be extracted. Roman has approved additional time to help you see reason.”

  “You don’t have to respect my wishes,” Rachel said, as if she couldn’t keep herself from pointing that fact out.

  “I do.” Whatever his team or Roman or even Rachel believed, there was no way in hell’s half acre that Kadin was going to drug Rachel and dump her unwilling ass onto a plane.

  “Thank you.”

  He knew the words had cost her.

  It was there in the pinched lines of her pretty face.

  He brushed his thumb over her brow, smoothing the worry lines, needing her to relax a little. “You’re not alone.”

  “For now.” But she didn’t fight when he pulled her just that much closer.

  “Now is all that matters.”

  In his line of business, agents didn’t know if they’d be alive the next day, much less the next year. Oh, the Atrati were the best at what they did, but there was no way to ignore the fact that it was a damn dangerous job.

  They all learned to live in the moment. It was one of the reasons he’d been able to stay away from this woman for a decade. Living in the now left the past and the future off-limits.

  “I’ve learned that lesson, too. It’s the only way to get through the day sometimes.” Her words reflected his thoughts so closely, it was uncanny.

  The last thing he’d wanted for Rachel was for her to become too comfortable in his world. That was one of the reasons he’d left hers.

  But for some reason the sweet young woman he’d left behind had rejected that gift and gone looking for the harsher side of life herself.

  Damn it all to hell.

  All he could say now was, “Then we’re in agreement.”

  “We watch Chuma, Massri, and Jamila.”

  “You think like a government agent, even when you’re on unpaid medical leave,” he teased her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not your case any longer, but you want to keep your eyes on the players anyway.”

  Telltale pink seeped into Rachel’s cheeks, but she said, “Keeping Jamila safe requires knowing what those men are up to.”

  “Maybe. We could just throw her ass onto a plane, your director’s orders be damned.”

  “Chuma and Massri are going down soon. She can’t disappear right before the authorities move in. Not if she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder for one of her father’s friends bent on revenge.”

  Kadin nodded. The suggestion had been worth a try, but he’d known what Rachel’s response would be before she made it.

  “When does your other TGP agent arrive?” he asked her.

  “As soon as she can get here.”

  “She?” Spazz prompted, sounding as unimpressed by the idea as Kadin felt. “Your director thinks sending another woman in is a good idea?”

  Call them sexists, but having just rescued one woman from being tortured, he and his men weren’t eager to hear about another in the same predicament. Eva would hand them their asses for even thinking like that, but then, the medic thought she was titanium plated.

  “Whit knows what he’s doing.” Rachel rubbed between her eyes, showing by her gesture if not her words that she was worried, too. “My guess is, she’ll be a very different type of agent from me.”

  “Ah … someone to appeal to Chuma or Massri’s baser natures.” Spazz didn’t look too happy at that option.

  Kadin wasn’t, either. Chuma’s baser nature was pretty sick, and even a supremely trained agent could find herself in a world of hurt with a man like that.

  Kadin was just really glad that wasn’t the type of undercover Rachel specialized in.

  “We need to catch sleep while we can. Our principles are tucked up in their beds; it’s time we found ours,” Kadin said in his command tone.

  Spazz opened his mouth to argue, but Cowboy put his hand right over the other man’s lips and promised Kadin, “We’ll go up.”

  Spazz said something that was too muffled by Cowboy’s hand to be understood.

  Kadin’s fellow former MARSOC soldier looked down at the glaring man sitting at the computer. “Whatever you want to look into will wait for morning. That big brain of yours needs rest. Your body needs sleep. Now, get your ass up those stairs and into your rack before I decide you need a bed buddy to make sure you stay there.”

  Kadin wanted to laugh, but he kept it in. Rachel looked so out of it, she wasn’t even taking in the interplay.

  Spazz knocked the other man’s hand away. “If you get into my bed, it won’t be to sleep.”

  “Well, now, sugar, that’s up to you, isn’t it?”

  The two men left the room, bickering, the sexual tension so thick between them, Kadin wouldn’t give odds for more than one rack being used.

  “That just leaves us,” Rachel said quietly, making no effort to move.

  “That it does, angel. That it does.” He picked her up high against his chest and headed out of the room.

  Kadin didn’t even try to hide his smile of triumph when Rachel tucked her arms around his neck and rested her head on his shoulder. She couldn’t see his lips from that angle, anyway.

  She sighed, her breath brushing over his neck and sending sexual sparks exploding through him. “You’ve got to stop carrying me around like this.”

  Yeah, that was a sincere complaint.

  “Why?”

  “You’ve spent the last sixteen hours on surveillance. You must be tired, too.”

  Maybe he should be, but the energy of sexual desire was zinging through him. Despite learning to sleep anytime, anywhere in the Marines, Kadin sincerely doubted he was going to get a whole lot of rest tonight.

  Not with Rachel’s delectable body in the same house, much less the same bed.

  “I’m not too tired to carry you.” He started up the narrow stairway. “You should have been in bed hours ago.”

  “I sleep better with you in the room.”

  Her admission shocked him, and he stopped halfway up the stairs, meeting her gaze. Her eyes remained a mystery in the muted glow cast by the night-light in the wall that served as the only illumination between the lower and upper halls.

  But her expression was tinged with an unmistakable vulnerability he was sure she’d rather he couldn’t see.

  “You need to debrief.” He hadn’t meant to say that, but it was true all the same.

  This woman needed to unload at least the most recent demons riding her.

  “I will, when I get Stateside.” But her promise rang hollow.

  He c
ouldn’t help thinking of the number of times she’d checked out of a hospital AMA. Every single time she’d been in one. That didn’t bode well for her taking her mental health seriously.

  “You’ll debrief with me here.”

  “Or what?”

  Smart girl. She knew he wouldn’t make a demand without backing it up.

  “Or my team is going to do what it does best.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We do extractions, Rachel, and we do them without prejudice.” She didn’t need to know he was bluffing.

  “I’ll just be on the next flight back.”

  “We’ll take Jamila with us.”

  “Kadin, that’s not an option, and you damn well know it.”

  “Neither is you refusing to debrief.”

  She looked away, as if meeting his gaze even in this dim light was too much. “It’s not necessary.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Kadin …”

  “Rachel, I’m here for you. If not me, who? Who are you going to tell what they did to you in that house in the mountains?”

  “And if I said anyone but you?”

  “I wouldn’t believe you.” He would have, even yesterday.

  But not today.

  “Why?”

  “Because you may hate my guts for walking away from you ten years ago, but you still trust me. And even though it has been ten years, I know you better than anyone else alive. Who better to hear the words that need saying?”

  Her face contorted with a flash of grief, but she didn’t deny his words as she would have even twenty-four hours ago.

  “Maybe they don’t need saying. Maybe I don’t need to talk about it. You got me out. That’s all that matters.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

  Maybe she was doing a better job with that than convincing him, because he didn’t buy it for a second.

  “No.”

  She gave him a naked look of such pained helplessness, he wanted to kiss her, to promise her that everything was going to be okay.

  But that wasn’t what she really needed right now. “You want to keep Jamila safe? You need my help. You debrief.”

  She didn’t say anything, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew this discussion wasn’t over.

  He continued up to their room, pushing the door shut behind them with his hip once they were inside.