Dammit. Focus.
It was getting harder and harder to do that the more she realized how handsome they both were. Blue Eyes’ short blond hair was a little longer than a military buzz, but not by much. Brown Eyes’ black hair was nearly long enough to be a civilian cut, the front just falling over his eyebrows.
While he kept his fingers clamped around her bicep, he still wasn’t digging in, although she knew if she tried to pull against him he would reel her back in before she could even get free. No, they hadn’t technically hurt her yet, other than the stick test. Which, honestly, she couldn’t blame them for.
Military. They had to be. There wasn’t another adequate explanation for them otherwise.
Since she obviously wasn’t getting away until they were ready to let her go, she decided she might as well see what she could learn from them. “You guys have me at a disadvantage. You know who I am, but I have no clue who you are.”
Brown Eyes shook his head in a good grief kind of way. “Lady, you talk too much.”
“Told you we should have duct-taped her mouth,” Blue Eyes snarked.
Brown Eyes glared at him again. “I’m Doc, he’s Tango.”
“Tango the Texan, huh? Seriously?”
“Bet you never rode a cowboy like me in Chi-town, city girl,” Tango shot back. “They build everything bigger in Texas, sugar, including the Texans.” He grabbed his crotch, his meaning crystal clear.
Before she could stifle the thought, the mental image of her doing just that filled her mind, of straddling the man’s body and—
Holy crap.
She swallowed, hoping her face didn’t look too red.
Doc rolled his eyes. “Excuse him. He’s—”
“Texan?” she shot back.
He snorted in apparent amusement. “Exactly.”
She had to admit, she’d never seen any men in her hometown even remotely approaching the lickability factor of these two hunks.
Both men turned at the sound of brush rustling nearby. She was forced to turn as well due to the grip Doc still had on her arm.
Another man emerged from the trees and walked toward them. From his similar build and from the way he moved, she could tell he was one of them, whoever they were. That the men didn’t seem alarmed reinforced the idea.
Maybe I’m not such an idiot after all.
Hazel eyes, brown hair, he was an inch or so taller than Tango. While he looked the same age, he had deeper, weathered creases at the corners of his eyes she suspected were an indication he was their leader.
“Well,” the man said. “Don’t know if I should thank you or be pissed off at you.”
Her eyes widened, incredulous. “Why should you be pissed off at me? I’m the one you monkeys freaking kidnapped!”
All three men started laughing, although she didn’t understand what the hell they found so funny.
Maybe they’re crazy.
That theory was starting to filter to the top of her list, quite honestly.
When the man quit laughing, he extended his right hand to shake with her. “Name’s Papa. Unit leader and commanding officer of the Drunk Monkeys.”
She blinked, faltering midreach to shake with him. “Say what?”
He bridged the gap and gave her a quick handshake. “That’s the nickname of our unit. The Drunk Monkeys.”
“Um…oookaaay.” Maybe she could get free and run, get lost in the brush and wait until they went away.
“Long story,” Papa said. “Here’s the short version, which I understand you’ve already been told. Our orders are to find Dr. Quong. Then we go after others on The List. We’ve already been working on that, but he’s the first one we’ve successfully located.”
Her stomach churned. “You mean who I successfully located, don’t you?” Well, her and Mike, but she didn’t want to implicate him if this was going to go really bad and get really ugly.
He tipped his head. “Good point. Yes, you located him. We located you, and by extrapolation, him. Good work, by the way.”
Now she didn’t know whether to be pissed off or pleased at the recognition. “Um, thanks?”
His friendly expression fled, leaving stern command in its place. “Rule number one. We’re not bringing you back to our base of operations just yet. We need to tie up some loose ends first. That’s why you’re here with these two. Rule number two. You will not do anything to interfere with or jeopardize our mission, or we will stop you. Try us if you think we won’t. Harming you isn’t our plan, but don’t make us, either.”
She swallowed hard, nodding. From his tone, she knew he was serious.
“Rule number three. Don’t bother trying to get away. You’ll be safely released, unharmed, if you work with us.” He glanced at Tango before looking at her again. “You bite any of us again, you’ll spend the rest of your time with us tied up and gagged and forced to piss and shit in your pants. Got it?”
Another hard swallow. She nodded.
He definitely meant that. It wasn’t a threat just to scare her, the cold expression in his eyes telegraphing that quite clearly, thank you very much.
“You stay here with her,” he said to Doc. “I’ll let you know when to bring her in. Tango, come with me.”
They turned and headed the way Papa had come.
Doc reached over and opened the driver’s side door of her rental, making it clear he wanted her to get in and keep going into the passenger seat on the left as he settled behind the wheel. Once there, he reached across her and slapped the lock button down on her door, then rested his left hand on her right shoulder.
“Settle in. It might be a while.”
After a couple of minutes of silence, she had to break the tension. “So what are you guys, US military?”
He nodded. “Special ops. SOTIF team.”
That rang a bell from her wading through the morass of research she and Mike had compiled, but she couldn’t place it.
She shook her head.
“Special Operations and Tactical Infiltration Force,” he clarified.
“This isn’t one of those ‘you told me now you’ll have to kill me’ kinds of things, is it?”
He turned the force of his brown gaze on her. “If we were going to kill you, you’d be dead already. You wouldn’t have seen it, or us, coming. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
That chill swept through her again.
Why did I think this whole thing was going to be so easy?
If it hadn’t been for Mike, she never would have discovered the information anyway. He did the heavy lifting in terms of data acquisition. She’d simply helped him comb through it all.
“What did you do before everything else happened?” she asked. “With Kite, I mean.”
“Before TMFU?”
She frowned. “Timfoo? What’s that?”
He smiled. “T-M-F-U. The Massive Fuckup. That’s what brass dubbed the creation of Kite, and China making North Korea go boom.”
“Oh. Military jargon.”
“We do what we’re told. Before this, our missions were mostly going after terror organizations, killing people our government wanted dead, or rescuing people our government wanted rescued.”
“So is your real name Doc?”
He smiled. “Need-to-know basis. Sorry.”
“And I don’t need to know?”
“You’re a reporter. We all have code names. That’s all you need to know right now.”
“Why are you called Doc?”
“Need—”
“To know. Yeah, I get it. Reporter is the enemy.”
“No, not the enemy, but you’re not part of our team, either.”
“Same thing, right?”
He shrugged.
Yes, she was a reporter, and here she was, sitting and talking instead of trying to figure out a way to get out of there and locate Dr. Quong and his family.
And the US Embassy.
They had to have one of those around here, somewhere, didn’t the
y? If not here, then in Sydney, maybe? She had to let people know what was going on.
She also didn’t like the idea of getting herself killed doing it.
What will it hurt to play along for now?
In fact, the more she weighed her options she didn’t have a choice. This wasn’t some cheesy Hollywood action flick where the beautiful heroine was clever and talked or fought her way out of the sticky situation.
She was neither beautiful nor a fighter. And she was damn sure driving home the point to herself that she wasn’t a fraction as clever as she previously thought herself to be.
“So where are you from?” she asked.
“How about we just sit here and wait? No offense, but unless you want to talk about movies or books or something, there’s nothing else I can or will tell you until Papa clears it.”
Chapter Eleven
Celia lasted an hour before her racing thoughts, indignation, anger, fear, and a whole host of other emotions finally swelled and broke free. She also chafed against Doc’s hand gripping her shoulder, no matter how hunky he was.
“You realize you guys don’t have any jurisdiction here, right?” she asked. “This is Australia. You’re US forces, if you are a little fuzzy about international law. You’re not in charge.”
He leaned in, voice low, steady, and even, forcing her to draw back or be nose-to-nose with him. “Get it through your head, lady. We are in charge here. We are in charge wherever the fark we’re told we’re in charge. And we’ve been told our orders are to get Dr. Quong back to US soil double-time.”
Her mouth gaped. “You can’t do that!”
He snorted. “Watch us.”
“I…” She stared at him. “At least let me talk to him first. I put in a lot of time on this, dammit. I want to be the one to break the story.”
“Break a leg, break a neck, break a story—fuck, break the goddamned sound barrier, if you want. I don’t give a crap. But you aren’t going to make us break our standing orders, I don’t care how cute you are.”
She didn’t know if she wanted to kick or kiss him. Part of her was incensed he’d called her cute.
The other part of her was touched, and wished he’d do some touching other than his hand on her shoulder.
She caught herself thinking that.
Wait, what?
Dammit, why do the obnoxious ones always have to be cute? So much easier when they aren’t.
“Listen, you don’t understand,” she said. “This is the story of a damn lifetime. My lifetime. I want it.”
He shrugged. “Fine. Report it. I’m not a reporter. I’m a grunt who’s going to get this guy safely delivered. No one’s stopping you.”
That took her aback. “What? I thought you said—”
“Papa told you we wouldn’t let you interfere with our operation, lady. Nobody said you couldn’t report about it to your heart’s content once we’re clear.”
* * * *
Goddammit, why do the pain-in-the-asses always have to be cute?
She was a cutie, all right. Long red hair pulled back in a braid, and green eyes visible over the top of her surgical mask, with a fiery temper to boot. She couldn’t have been more than five four, if that. He also wouldn’t deny her curves above and below her waistline were more than enough to pump some blood into his cock and get its interest.
No, they wouldn’t let her do anything to jeopardize their operation. That might run cross-purposes to her reporting, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.
Yet.
At least she’d calmed down again, and that was the important part. He had grabbed a bolus of Ketamine from his field kit and slipped it and a hypo into his pocket when they first headed out, just in case. He didn’t want to knock her out, especially with that, but he would if he had to to keep her and them and Dr. Quong safe. He’d never had to use it in the field for emergency surgery, but when putting together his kit, he’d made sure to include it at the suggestion of the commanding officer who’d recommended him for this post, a surgeon who’d seen plenty of combat in Brazil and Colombia during the Quarter War.
The irony that it looked like Kite the drug was very similar in nature to Ketamine did not escape him.
Tango finally emerged from the brush and silently made his way toward where they waited in the car. Doc didn’t release her shoulder, although he’d relaxed his grip a little. Just enough she’d hopefully ease up as well, but not so much he couldn’t grab her if she tried to run.
“Anything?” Doc asked Tango when the man got into the backseat.
“Papa told me they’re working their way to the house now. He sent me back here to wait with you. He’ll send word.”
“Any problems?”
Tango’s hesitation told him there were, but he didn’t feel he could reveal it in front of her. “Slight complication.”
Doc knew Tango’s words were directed at him, but in the rearview mirror, Doc could see Tango’s gaze didn’t leave the woman.
Celia? Yeah, that was her name.
When Doc’s brain tried to conjure an image of what her body might feel like sandwiched between him and Tango, he cut that line of thought off at the knees when his cock started throbbing again. He surely didn’t need that kind of distraction right now.
That kind of distraction was what got people killed.
“You really think you need that out here when it’s just the three of us in a damn car?” Tango asked her, nodding at her mask.
“They said to wear it.”
“They, who?”
“Give her a break,” Doc warned. “She’s a civvie.”
He saw the doubt already seeding in her eyes, which narrowed over the top of the mask as she looked back at Tango.
Doc finally dove in. “The masks are great if it’s SARS or the flu or something like that. Something airborne. They still don’t know for sure if it can be transmitted through anything other than saliva or blood or direct contact. It might not be airborne at all. The earliest victims the Chinese admitted knowledge of, from North Korea, they seemed to pass it by attacking others, or by direct contact with health care workers. Hell, it might be able to be transmitted via sex. We don’t know. We don’t know if it’s airborne or not yet.”
“You guys were wearing them when you grabbed me.”
“Yeah, so we didn’t stand out like sore thumbs, and to keep our mugs off any surveillance cameras.”
Tango snorted. “It worked, didn’t it? You were clueless. You didn’t even notice us following you from your hotel.”
She appeared to ignore his dig. “What about the warnings about wearing them on airplanes and in crowds on the street and in stores and stuff?”
Doc shrugged. “Better safe than sorry. And it makes it easier to control people. I don’t know, I’m a grunt, not a wonk. That’s all above my pay grade.”
After a moment, she finally tugged it down so it hung around her neck. “So are you a doctor?” she finally asked.
He could throw her that bone, he supposed. “Yep. Mostly. I don’t have the paper with the MD on it, but I’ve got all the training.”
“Then why aren’t you out there with your friends in case one of them gets hurt?”
“They’re more than friends, lady,” Tango said, the familiar tinge of irritation in his tone. “They’re our brothers.”
“Because,” Doc interjected, trying to defuse the tension, “Papa wanted me back here with you in case there was trouble.”
“To keep an eye on me?”
“To protect you.”
“You’re welcome,” Tango added.
Doc shot him a glare but continued. “In a situation like this, with all hands on deck and not expecting to come up against a really heavy resistance, it’s better I hang back.”
“Doesn’t do to have our medic shot,” Tango added. “Plus he’s got the knowledge.”
“I thought you said you were a doctor?” she asked.
“He is,” Tango said. “Damn good one, too. We need
more doctors in this world.”
“We need journalists, too.”
“Telling the story won’t cure this damn disease, will it?” Tango asked.
“Hey, if it wasn’t for me and Mike, you monkeys wouldn’t know where the hell he was!” Her face went red and her jaw snapped shut, as if she realized she’d revealed more than she’d meant to.
Doc found it horribly endearing. “Mike?”
She glared at him but didn’t respond.
“Look, I haven’t seen all the info Papa got from the food chain, but I do know you didn’t come up with all this on your own.”
“Food chain?”
“Military command.”
“Hey, at least we figured it out where no one else did. That counts.”
“There you’re wrong,” Tango said. “Might have taken longer, but eventually, someone else would have figured out the same thing you did.”
“Keep it down,” Doc told them both, glancing around as he did, realizing how loud they were getting. He didn’t want someone sneaking up on them because they were bickering about doctors versus reporters versus grunts.
That would just be damn stupid.
They sat there for another hour before Foxtrot drove up next to them in the car they’d picked up upon their arrival. He rolled the passenger window down as Doc rolled down his window.
“Clear,” Foxtrot said before turning around and heading the way he’d come.
Doc rolled up his window and started the car. “Here we go.”
Tango tapped Celia’s shoulder. “Be nice to Papa if you want a chance to talk to the doctor,” he advised. “Otherwise, you might find yourself locked in a bathroom with a case of MREs and a cup until we’re ready to let you go.”
Her green eyes narrowed as she shot a venomous glare at Tango, but she kept her mouth shut.
That’s progress, at least.
Chapter Twelve
Celia wasn’t sure what to expect when Doc and Tango drove her to the small house surrounded by thickets of trees. They parked her rental car in the yard next to the car they’d followed there. Two trucks were also parked outside.
“What are we doing here?” she asked. “Where are we?”
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