CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Okay, it was official: he had a major case of the hots for the woman he had charged himself with protecting. Danny had stopped at the top of the stairs, both because there wasn’t anywhere besides the second floor of this nondescript town house cum safe house that he wanted to be under the circumstances and because negotiating the stairs while on crutches was tricky at best. Watching Groves head down, Danny recognized the fact that he’d made a major mistake. Too late: not a damned thing he could do about it.
He’d kissed the girl.
“Hey, Marco, I’d keep what I just said in mind, if I were you.” Groves threw that, along with an ugly look, up at him as he reached the bottom of the stairs. It was the tail end of the conversation they’d been having. Danny had said something like, we need to give them some space, you can head on back downstairs, to which Groves had replied along the lines of, I’m just doing my job here, whereupon Danny had said, no irony intended, that he appreciated that, which Groves had taken poorly and possibly as sarcasm and in reply growled that if it was up to him he, Groves, wouldn’t be laying his life on the line for a damned traitor who deserved to be spending the rest of his life in jail. Or worse.
Danny had barely stopped himself from saying amen to that. The thing was, though, Marco wouldn’t. So he’d said screw you instead. Thus provoking Groves’s less-than-friendly reply.
What made it difficult, Danny reflected as he headed back down the hall, was that he could actually appreciate where Groves was coming from. Rick Marco had besmirched the honor of all federal agents everywhere, committed crimes as heinous as those of any of the drug kingpins they were chasing, gotten a bunch of agents and civilians killed, and then, when he was caught, cut a deal and started singing like the yellow canary he was.
Marco deserved every bit of Groves’s antipathy.
But that made the relationship tricky for Danny while he was being Marco.
He couldn’t wait for the damned gig to be over. For many reasons. One of which, of course, was that it would be a nice change not to have to worry anymore about being tortured and killed, at least until the next death-defying assignment came along. Which it would. See, he was a troubleshooter. The Bureau had a team of them, under-the-radar players who were sent in on the most dangerous undercover assignments as needed. For security reasons, none of them knew the identities of the others. Crittenden was their boss. Crittenden knew them all. Except for Crittenden’s superiors, who Danny expected but did not know for sure were kept in the loop, and the tight little cadre of agents who were Crittenden’s support staff, Crittenden was also the only one who knew the details of their assignments.
It helped that Danny was armed again; Crittenden had delivered on the gun. When they had arrived at the town house last night, and he had gotten a good look at the crutches that had been provided for him as they were unloaded, Danny had almost been surprised. Almost, because not much Crittenden managed to pull off surprised him anymore. But this, a piece of masking tape stuck to the underside of the shoulder support of the left crutch with the number 342 scrawled on it, had done the trick—342 was Crittenden’s top-secret extension at Quantico. Only his team knew it. Seeing the tape with the number on it had been like seeing Crittenden’s signature. It had told Danny that there was something up with the crutch. After he’d insisted on switching out the wheelchair for the crutches and then hauled his ass up the stairs on them—an exercise in pain, danger, and frustration that he didn’t relish repeating any more than he had to—he had hobbled into his bedroom, locked the door, and proceeded to take them apart.
A 9mm model 26 Glock, known in the business as a pocket Glock because of its small size, was concealed inside the left crutch, cleverly inserted into the triangle that fit beneath his armpit. The long shaft that stretched from the triangle to the floor was hollow, and contained two ten-round magazines. In the same place in the right crutch, he’d found a cell phone. Generic, disposable, untraceable. Just to be on the safe side, he’d taken the battery out.
Hot damn, he’d thought at the time, he was in business again. After careful consideration, Danny had decided to leave both phone and gun concealed in the crutches. Otherwise, Sanders and company might well spot them. And take them: as a fed turned criminal turned protected federal witness, Rick Marco was allowed neither a personal cell phone nor weapons. Then after they took them, they would start asking questions. Like, how the hell had he gotten them?
Since Danny couldn’t tell the truth, the whole thing just got awkward from that point.
Even if he had to disassemble a crutch if the shit started hitting the fan again, it was a lot better than being unarmed, as he had been the last time the cartel had found him. An optimist might believe that there wouldn’t be a second time, but Danny considered himself a realist.
And realistically, the whole point was for the Zetas to be chasing him rather than the real Marco. The exercise got kind of pointless if there was no trail. And if there was a trail, the team the Zetas had in place would sooner or later pick up on it. Because Marco knew where all the bodies were buried, and they were desperate to silence him before he could point them all out.
Dangerous situations were what he excelled at, the latest fiasco notwithstanding, and Danny wouldn’t even have been much more than glumly resigned to the prospect of being found again if he’d just had himself to worry about. But now there were Sam and Tyler.
They added a whole new layer of concern to the situation.
The kid was a kid. By virtue of that fact alone, Danny wasn’t about to let him get hurt or killed. Whether he liked him—which he did—or not didn’t matter.
And Sam—well, he wasn’t about to let her get hurt or killed, either.
For a whole host of reasons, including the fact that she was a girl, and an innocent bystander, and he owed her, and . . .
Face facts, she was getting under his skin.
He should never have kissed her.
Danny would have cursed himself for letting it happen, except that was an absolute exercise in futility. Bottom line: learn from your mistakes, don’t do it again.
Ordinarily he wouldn’t have done it the first time, no matter how hot Sam was or how attracted he was to her. He was on the job, working undercover, and he was professional enough to maintain a certain degree of detachment from an unsuspecting civilian who had accidentally gotten caught up in the investigation and was now, as a result, under his protection.
He blamed the damned painkillers. They made him just loopy enough so that his inner self-control system was shot to hell.
The solution was easy enough, even if he cringed when he thought about it: no more pain pills for him. When the pain came back, as it was going to do, and pretty shortly, too, he was just going to have to hurt till he healed. Dangerous as the situation was, he needed a clear head anyway. Along with no distractions: as in, lay off the girl.
She was beautiful, sexy, just his type with her lovely face, long black hair, and big blue eyes. He liked the attitude she gave him, admired her guts. Add to that, her lips were soft, her mouth hot, her body killer. Plus, she’d been surprising him from the beginning, when he’d looked up from his prison in the car trunk to see her frowning down at him. She’d kept surprising him at every turn since. The biggest surprise of all might have been the way she had caught fire when he’d kissed her. He definitely hadn’t seen that coming. In his experience, beautiful girls—the latest woman he’d been seeing (read sleeping with) in the weeks between assignments being a case in point—tended to be lacking in the passion department. Not Sam. She had caught fire as quickly as he had. Impossible to miss the fact that she had been vibrating with eagerness to get naked and get it on with him.
Hot and horny: when it came to women, it was his favorite combination. How could he resist taking what she was obviously ready, willing, and able to give?
Libido-squashing answer: because he had to.
Her life, her kid’s life, and his own life were on
the line here. For all their sakes, sex couldn’t be allowed to enter into the equation at all.
No matter how much he wished things were otherwise.
Without really even meaning to wind up there, Danny found himself standing at the doorway to Tyler’s bedroom again. Behind him, the bathroom light was still on; it provided enough illumination for him to easily see the pair on the bed.
They were curled up facing each other, both black heads nestled close on the same pillow. Clutching a small teddy bear close to his chest, Tyler looked small and frail under the protection of Sam’s arm, which was draped over him. Sam looked—well, the only word he could come up with was delectable. Her hair fanned out over the white sheets like a banner, and her features, seen in profile, were strong yet delicate and were echoed in miniature by her son’s. She was wrapped in the thick white robe, which precluded him from seeing any real detail of the curves that had made him burn earlier. But the robe parted just below the belt that she had cinched tight around her waist as she’d run away down the hall, high enough so that he could see a silky white triangle of cloth curving between her legs. He realized that what he was seeing was a little bit of the underwear he’d felt sliding against his shorts earlier, and his body responded with an instant surge of heat. He assumed that the panties, like the boxers he was wearing, had come with the town house, and seriously doubted that they were the kind of underwear she would choose if she had been choosing. Whatever their origin, just a glimpse of those thin white panties was enough to turn him on. To add to the problem, below that triangle of white her bare legs were on full display. They were long and lithe, and looked very tan against the white sheets. Her thighs were slender, her calves well shaped. Her feet were long and narrow.
He had no trouble at all imagining her legs wrapped around his waist.
Do not go there. But it was too late. The instant, involuntary mental picture had already made his heartbeat quicken. His body hardened faster than quick-set cement. With the best will in the world for it not to happen, his mind instantly shot back to those hot kisses. To the soft roundness and hard little nipple that was her breast.
Damn it to hell, anyway.
Cursing himself under his breath, Danny abruptly turned away. Clumping along the hall to his own room, he did his best to replace the image of Sam in that bed with anything and everything else he could call to mind, anything that he thought—hoped—might drive her out of his head. But the image of her lying there sleeping, that silky triangle of white promising all kinds of luscious secrets yet to be revealed, her sexy bare legs just about begging to be wrapped around him, was, he discovered, impossible to override.
When he slept, finally, his dreams were so erotic as to be embarrassing when he woke up and semiremembered them. By then, it was morning. And not early, either. He could tell that by the quality of the light that was filtering in through the curtains that covered the single window. One result of dreaming about rather than actually having an orgy of hot sex with his pretty companion in hiding was that he felt grouchy as all hell. And really, really horny. Plus his head ached. Practically every bone and muscle in his body hurt. And to top it off, as he had expected, his leg felt like a thousand angry wasps were going to town on it with red-hot stingers.
What could he say? Another day in the life.
Moving gingerly, he barely managed to suppress a groan. Even the slight weight of the covers lying across the bandage now felt unbearable. He tossed them aside.
Bring on the Lortab. Quick.
No. Not going there. From here on out, it was cold turkey all the way.
Cursing silently, grimacing, Danny tried to go all Zen and practice mental control and block out the pain.
Didn’t work.
Gritting his teeth, hitching himself into a sitting position, getting ready to carefully swing his legs off the bed preparatory to standing up, Danny glanced around in search of his crutches. In the process of doing so, he discovered that he was the object of what appeared to be fascinated attention by a pair of big blue eyes.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how he looked at it, they didn’t belong to Sam.
It was Tyler who stood in the open doorway watching him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Pancakes,” Sam called out to Tyler in as cheery a tone as she could muster, scooping up the last of the golden brown disks from the skillet where they had been sizzling and sliding them onto a plate with the others. The unmistakable smell of breakfast—pancakes, plus bacon and coffee—filled the air. It made her stomach growl, and she realized that despite the circumstances she was actually very hungry. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was clean, completely furnished and well equipped down to the dish towels, decorated in earth tones, with a big sliding glass door at the far end that was only partially veiled by sand-colored vertical blinds. Having already filled another plate with a dozen crispy strips of bacon, she picked up both plates and turned around to set them on the table. That’s when she discovered Marco. He leaned on his crutches just inside the kitchen doorway watching her. Her stomach instantly tightened, and her heart quickened its beat.
Oh, no. After a lifetime’s worth of making bad choices where men were concerned, was she really still this stupid?
He was clad in loose gray sweatpants and another of the house-favorite ubiquitous white T-shirts, plus his own sneakers. She was wearing one of those white T-shirts herself, along with a pair of too-big black gym shorts that she’d found among other garments folded in the drawers of the dresser in the master bedroom. The shorts hung past her knees, and the only way she was keeping them up was by the drawstring, which she had cinched supertight around her waist; since her boots were the only shoes she had, she wore them as well. With no makeup—whoever had stocked the town house apparently hadn’t thought of that—and her hair twisted into a loose knot on the top of her head, she was not feeling particularly attractive, which didn’t make her any happier to see Marco standing there.
“Hey, Mom.” Tyler stood right in front of Marco, and it didn’t require much imagination to guess where he’d run off to when he had disappeared from the kitchen as she had started pouring the pancake batter into the skillet. What was it they said about hindsight? She would have stopped him if she had realized. The more distance she kept between herself and Tyler and Marco, the better. She couldn’t have felt much warier of a snake—unless, she thought with an inner grimace, she was sexually attracted to the snake, too. “It smells good.”
Tyler wore another of the white T-shirts. Adult size, it was as big on him as a dress and completely hid his short pajama pants, which he had on beneath. As he’d brought no shoes, he was barefoot. Clothing, or rather her and Tyler’s lack of it, was an issue that Sam knew she was going to have to address with somebody, but that was added to the discussion-to-be-had-later list and consigned to after breakfast.
Right at the moment, she had Marco to deal with. Even stooped over the crutches as he was, he was physically imposing, tall and wide shouldered, with muscular arms, big hands curled around the handles, and an athlete’s body complete with long, strong legs, the foot of one of which was barely touching the floor. His black hair was unruly and he badly needed a shave. Her eyes collided with his, and to her dismay instant electricity blazed between them. As the memory of their last, charged encounter sizzled in the air like a heat shimmer—his hand on her breast being the crowning moment—Sam felt a wave of embarrassment. Luckily, she wasn’t prone to blushing, or she probably would have turned the color of a ripe tomato. As it was, biting down on her lower lip was the only outward sign of discomfiture she gave, and as soon as she realized she was doing it she stopped.
“I told Trey breakfast was almost ready.” Tyler glanced over his shoulder at Marco as he spoke. “He’s hungry just like us.”
“Only if there’s enough.” The smile Marco gave her made her heart skip a beat. As a result, her brows snapped together in a quick frown. God, had she really kissed him like that las
t night? What had she been thinking?
Obvious answer: thinking was not what she had been doing.
“He wants to try your pancakes. I told him you make the best pancakes ever.”
“Thank you, sir.” Getting a grip, Sam managed a smile for her son. Tyler’s answering smile as he headed toward the table was so sunny that Sam didn’t have the heart to do or say anything that would dim it. He had been through enough trauma over the last thirty-six hours or so to last several lifetimes. Keeping things as normal and unterrifying as possible had to be a top priority for her now. At least, for as long as she could manage it. But whatever the day, or the coming days, might bring, there was nothing she could do to change any of it at the moment, so she tried to push from her mind the gnawing fear that had been threatening to consume her ever since she had woken up and realized where she and Tyler were.
“There’s plenty,” she told Marco. Okay, so maybe her tone was a little short. Acute anxiety coupled with an attraction to a man she absolutely should not be feeling attracted to tended to make her cross, she was discovering. When Tyler glanced at her, looking faintly curious, she tried to compensate for her tone with a brief and very insincere-feeling smile, manufactured entirely for Tyler’s benefit, which she directed at Marco.
He did not smile back. Instead he stayed where he was, studying her just a little too intently. She had almost no doubt that he was recalling those kisses, too, probably way more graphically than she was, and the knowledge rattled her.
“Come on, Trey.” Tyler pulled out one of the four wooden chairs that were arranged two by two on the long sides of the rectangular, farmhouse-style table, plopped himself down in the chair next to it, and patted the seat of the one he had pulled out invitingly. “It’s getting cold.”
With a wry inner grimace, Sam recognized the words she regularly used on Tyler to get him to leave whatever game had him enthralled and come to the table. Marco’s gaze flicked from Tyler to the dishes Sam was holding. Until that moment she hadn’t realized that she had been frozen in place with a steaming plate of food in each hand. Reluctantly acknowledging that there was no way out of feeding Marco breakfast that wouldn’t involve upsetting Tyler, or making plain to Marco just how unsettling she now found having him around, she moved toward the table and set the pancakes and bacon down on it. Then she forked a couple of pancakes onto Tyler’s plate, and added several strips of bacon. Tyler reached for the syrup with enthusiasm.
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