Thrill Ride

by Julie Ann Walker

  Oh, it was terrible. She couldn’t watch. But she couldn’t tear her eyes away either. Because Vanessa, tears running down her face in a terrible mess, grabbed Rock’s head from the puddle of blood and lifted it, hugging it against her chest before bending to place a gentle kiss on the man’s lips…

  And what happened next didn’t make a bit of sense.

  Because Billy settled his hard, callused palm over her mouth, and from the corner of her eye she watched Boss do the same thing to Becky. Then, before Eve could begin to struggle, Boss asked, “We clear?”

  And that’s when she noticed Ozzie over in the corner tapping away like crazy on a laptop keyboard. “As far as I can tell,” the wild-haired man answered, frowning at the screen and then shooting a pointed look toward the windows of the adjacent living room. “But let’s stay vigilant.”

  “Affirmative,” Boss said, then, “Okay, let’s get the body cleaned up and ready for transport.”

  And that’s when Rock’s shoulder moved, and Eve saw his wide hand emerge from behind the partition to settle on the back of Vanessa’s head.

  Eve understood then why Billy had placed his palm over her mouth, because before she could call it back, a shriek of surprised terror rippled up from the depths of her shaking chest.

  “Shh,” Billy whispered into her ear again. “It was all a hoax.”

  ***

  “Vanessa, chere, just breathe,” Rock crooned, and the sound of that slow drawl and silken baritone kissed her ears and had another hard sob ripping up the back of her ravaged throat. It felt like she’d swallowed industrial-strength bleach. But she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  Rock was alive! He was alive!

  But how…?

  She’d seen those bullets hit him. She’d seen him go down. Yet, here he was. Sitting at Eve’s dining room table after having grabbed a quick shower and change of clothes, reaching over to run a reassuring hand through her messy hair even as he held a tea towel against his ear.

  And in the ten minutes since he’d been lying in that pool of blood, in the ten minutes since he’d pulled her to him and kissed her back with everything he had—probably to keep her from screaming her fool head off at the first sign he wasn’t dead—she hadn’t been able to stop crying.

  It was like something inside her had broken and couldn’t be fixed…

  Oh, she’d think she had herself under control, the tears would dry up, the shaking would stop and then, suddenly, off she’d go again, proving what an incredibly unhardass she really was.

  Jesus.

  “Done.” Becky walked into the living room, dusting off her hands like she’d been chopping logs instead of putting batteries into an amazing assortment of vibrators before taping them to all the windows in the house—along with Eve’s help. Which was another thing Vanessa had yet to fully process, the sight of Eve Edens, Chicago’s reigning socialite, with huge, ridiculously colored plastic cocks in her hand. “No more optical bugs up in this joint. Bam!” Becky acted like she was spiking a football before she broke into a little victory dance.

  “Let me get a look at that ear,” Steady said, grinning and shaking his head at Becky as he sauntered over to Rock, his camouflage Army-issued medical kit held loosely in one tan fist.

  “Nothing to be done for it,” Rock said, pulling the tea towel away. There was a shallow, half-inch wide chunk of flesh missing from the outer edge of his ear.

  “At least we can stop the bleeding,” Steady muttered, setting his kit on the table and unzipping a pocket. He reached inside and came out with a package of QuikClot.

  “Merde,” Rock groused, his goatee drooping at the corners. “That stuff burns like the fires of hell.”

  “Quit being a baby,” Steady teased, ripping open the pack to shake some of the powder onto Rock’s torn ear. Rock hissed and grimaced and Steady rolled his eyes. “It’s better than losing any more blood and—”

  Blood.

  There’d been so much blood…

  Vanessa couldn’t help it; another loud sob shuddered out of her.

  “What’s up with her?” Steady asked, one black brow arched in question.

  “I think the dam’s developed a major structural crack,” Rock replied, frowning over at her even as he held still so Steady could tape a makeshift bandage around the wound on his ear. “Chere,” he murmured again, grinning and giving her a reassuring wink. “It’s okay. Je suis bon.”

  Yeah, he might be good, but she was definitely not. Because she could have killed him. And she could not get the image of him taking those shots to the chest out of her head. The gruesome sight of blood spraying in a terrible shower, of watching as he—

  Just then, the back door inched open, and Ghost slid into the house, fluid like a shadow, quiet as a whisper.

  “We good?” He posed the question to Ozzie, who was at the other end of the dining room table, alternately typing on the keyboards of two humming laptops.

  “Seem to be,” Ozzie nodded, never taking his eyes from the screens. “Looks like the satellites have been repositioned, and I’m not picking up any other signs of surveillance.”

  “Yeah,” Ghost nodded, approaching the group in order to carefully place his sniper rifle—he called it Sierra, of all things—on the table before lowering himself into a seat opposite Vanessa. “I didn’t see any sign of continued surveillance, and I made two passes ’round the property before enterin’. Maybe we’re good t’go.”

  And that’s when Rock leveled Ghost with a hard look. “What the hell, man? Why’d you shoot my ear off?”

  “First of all, it’s not off, it’s just missin’ a chunk,” Ghost said.

  “Oh, goody. I love it when we argue over semantics,” Ozzie snorted, grinning even as he continued to type and watch his computer screens.

  Ghost shot the guy an exasperated look before turning back to Rock, finishing with, “And secondly, I didn’t do it.”

  The room fell silent as Ozzie quit typing, his fingers hovering over the keyboards.

  “Then who did?” Boss asked from his position in the doorway. The concerned expression he wore made his scars stand out white against his tan skin. Of course, when Becky strolled over to hook an arm around his waist, his face softened slightly before he bent to place a kiss in her hair, next to her temple.

  The exchange was so natural it was almost instinctual, and Vanessa, watching with envious eyes, was dismayed when another hard sob threatened. Try as she might, she couldn’t hold it in. But because of her clenched jaw and tightened lips, it came out sounding less like a sob and more like a hysterical little eep.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Boss demanded, glowering. “Are you sick? Did you catch something in the jungle while you—”

  Desperately, she shook her head, hoping he’d leave well enough alone.

  Geez, Van, you’re really impressing the hell out of your boss and your coworkers today, aren’t you?

  “The dam’s sprung a leak,” Steady offered, and Boss’s brows slid down his forehead, his expression all but screaming ah, women’s theatrics; I get it.

  But he didn’t get it at all. Nobody did.

  “So who tried to smoke Rock?” Ozzie asked, oblivious to the fact that she was sitting there suffocating under the guilt of knowing her actions could have very well gotten Rock really killed instead of only pretend killed.

  “Dunno,” Ghost shrugged. “I heard the shot directly to my left after I’d fired off the blanks, and I tried to track him. But by the time I’d eluded those CIA boys, the sonofabitch was long gone.”

  All eyes, including Vanessa’s—red-rimmed and still brimming with tears, no doubt—turned to Rock. And, oh, he was so beautifully alive. Looking much worse for wear, but alive. She couldn’t help herself, she reached over and squeezed the hand that was closest to her, needing to assure herself that he was real and warm and vital, half-expecting him to pull away because he was so rightfully pissed at what she’d done.

  But he didn’t.

  Jus
t the opposite. He turned his palm and laced their fingers together, and her heart pounded against her ribs until she fancied everyone seated around the table could see it fluttering the fabric of her safari shirt.

  “Non,” he shook his head. “You all stop makin’ eyes at me. I haven’t the first clue who that might’ve been. Unless Rwanda Don didn’t want me talkin’ to the CIA and decided to hire someone to take me out. Which I wouldn’t doubt, come to think of it.”

  “Rwanda Don?” Boss asked as he toed out a chair and settled his bulk into it, pulling Becky down onto his lap.

  Bill walked into the room right at that moment with Eve directly on his heel, and it was obvious from the man’s stony expression and Eve’s red cheeks that they’d had yet another disagreement about something. Vanessa wasn’t sure what the story was with those two, but it was obviously long, convoluted, and painful. And speaking of…

  Rock must’ve decided the whole hand-holding/reassuring thing had gone on long enough, because he returned her hand to her lap and gave it a judicious pat before planting his tattooed forearms on the table. And so much for her momentary, desperate hope that maybe he’d forgiven her for bringing him here, for nearly getting him killed.

  But how could she really expect him to do that? She couldn’t even forgive herself.

  Oh, God. If she started crying or…or eeping again, she was sorely tempted to grab Ghost’s sniper rifle and just put herself out of her misery.

  Fortunately, Rock’s next words interrupted the world-class pity party she was in the midst of throwing for herself. “Rwanda Don is a long story. You sure we have the time for it?”

  Boss frowned as he glanced at his watch. “Hell no. General Fuller arranged transport for us back to the States, and the van should be here any minute.”

  “Well, if we don’t have time for this Don person,” Becky piped in, “then would someone mind telling me what the heck happened out there?” She flung a hand in the general direction of the front door.

  And, yep, that was just the distraction Vanessa needed, because she was way past needing an explanation herself. After all, she had seen Rock get shot. Four. Times.

  Yet here he sat. Not a scratch…er…not a bullet hole in him.

  “Steady,” Rock nodded toward the Knights’ resident medic, “you want to take this one, mon ami. It was your idea, after all.”

  The smile that lit Steady’s face was blinding, and it occurred to Vanessa why everyone—including Steady himself—had tried to pair the two of them together when she first joined the group. After all, they both had that hot Latin blood, and Steady possessed the kind of dark beauty all women found irresistible.

  All women except her, obviously.

  Because the moment she’d walked into BKI head-quarters, she’d only had eyes…er…ears for Rock. All it had taken that first day on the job for her to start salivating and imagining Cajun French–speaking babies was for Rock to open his mouth, and Carlos “Steady” Soto hadn’t stood a chance. From that very first word, she’d been toast. Complete and total toast.

  She was still complete toast.

  And he was never going to love her. Never. Capital N…And why should he? If he hadn’t had a good reason before, he certainly had one now. She’d nearly gotten him killed.

  Another ravaging sob threatened in her chest, but this time she managed to hold it back.

  “I just figured,” Steady began, tugging on his ear as he set out to explain his grand scheme, “that if we had any hope of making this thing work, of helping Rock out, we had to get the friggin’ Company off our backs. And the only way that was gonna happen was if Babineaux kicked the bucket. So we drew some blood, had Wild Bill fit him with explosives, let Ghost go out and simulate sniper shots, and voila!” he snapped his fingers, “Ding, dong, the Cajun’s dead!”

  For a long moment after that rather short monologue, there was nothing but silence, each of the women staring at Steady, trying to determine if what he’d said made a lick of sense. Becky was the first to come to the conclusion that, no. No, it didn’t. Because she shook her head rapidly, like a cartoon character without the resulting eye-ee-eye-ee-eye-ee sound effect, and said, oh-so-eloquently, “Huh?”

  “Yeah,” Vanessa nodded, a million questions spinning through her brain, but the most important one Becky seemed to have nailed. “What she said.”

  Bill rolled his eyes. “I don’t know how the hell you managed a medical degree when you can’t explain yourself for shit.”

  Steady’s face was wallpapered in big dollop of what-the-hell-dude. “I hit the high points.”

  “Yeah,” Bill nodded then quickly shook his head. “Like that time you told me to take the high ground and cover you while you recon-ed that leafy foxhole in Colombia? When you just happened to leave out the part where you planned to toss a grenade in the sonofabitch, blowing it to Kingdom Come and bringing every FARC guerrilla within a quarter-mile radius down on our heads?”

  “Ooh, ooh,” Ozzie raised his hand like a kid in a classroom. “I’ve got one. Like the time you told me to distract that Taliban warlord with my witty repartee so you could scout his compound for the location of his weapons stash. Only instead of marking the location of said stash, you called in an airstrike and watched it go kaboom while I was left to make like Usain Bolt and hightail it on outta there. That was classic.”

  Steady waved an unconcerned hand. “Details are superfluous.”

  “Jesus,” Bill’s expression was filled with disbelief, then he shrugged and turned back to the group at the table. “Steady drew Rock’s blood because we figured the CIA would want DNA evidence. Then I took a portion of that blood, put it into three bottle caps along with a small amount of plastic explosive, and set each with a charge before taping them to Rock’s chest. Ghost,” he pointed a chin at the man in question, “armed with blanks and the remote detonator for the charges, snuck out before The Company sent in backup. When Rock stepped out on the porch, ostensibly to give himself up, Ghost pulled the trigger on his sniper rifle and the remote detonator simultaneously, which resulted in the sound of gunshots and the high-powered bursts of blood you saw shooting out from Rock’s chest. Add a little more blood in a smear down the hall, fake a giant pool of blood with red food coloring, oil, and some thickening agent, and voila!” He snapped his fingers, grinning at Steady, who was now the one to roll his eyes. “Ding, dong, the Cajun’s dead.”

  “Like I said,” Steady sighed, “superfluous details.”

  “But—” Vanessa was trying to wrap her head around the complexity and brilliance of the plan. It wasn’t really working. Her head. Not the plan. Obviously, the plan had worked perfectly.

  “Plus,” Ozzie added, “we figured they’d assume Rock had made enemies, being rogue and all—”

  “I hate that word,” Rock grumbled, and Vanessa, even with her head spinning, once again experienced the overwhelming urge to reach over and grab his hand. But she figured she’d pressed her luck about as far as she could with that little move, so she laced her fingers together in her lap, squeezing them until the her nails bit into her knuckles.

  “—so it’d be easy for them to jump to the conclusion there was an assassin out there looking to put an end to his life, which,” Ozzie frowned, “come to find out, is probably true. Dude,” he turned to Rock, eyes wide, “you’re unbelievably lucky you were already flopping around from those explosives, making yourself a moving target, or you’d probably be sporting a new hole in your head.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Rock grunted, drawing a design on the tabletop with one long finger, frowning concernedly.

  “And since we’re talking about that flopping around…” Ozzie continued, grinning like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. All he was missing was a feather sticking out of his mouth. “You could use some serious acting lessons. Daniel Day-Lewis you are not, my friend.”

  Rock opened his mouth, probably to refute Ozzie’s aspersions upon his acting ability—after all, he had managed to fool the CI
A and all the women present; Vanessa would not think about that—just as Boss’s phone began blasting the opening bars to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

  “Our ride is two minutes out,” the big guy announced after glancing at his iPhone’s screen. “Ghost, grab the body bag.”

  “Body bag?” Eve interjected for the first time since they’d all gathered around the table, a definite hint of horror in her tone. “Why do we need a…a…body bag?”

  “Because Rock’s dead,” Boss shook his head, frowning at the poor, obviously overwhelmed woman like maybe she’d been absent the day they handed out extra IQ points. “We can’t very well let him walk out of here. No one but the people in this room, not even General Fuller or the other Knights, know what we’ve pulled off. And they won’t. Not until we get home. And Fuller won’t know until after we clear Rock’s name. Which begs the question, Ghost. You gonna be all right not telling Ali what’s going on?”

  “She’s at her parents for the next two weeks, and she knows I’m on a mission. She doesn’t expect t’hear from me for days,” Ghost said, bending to pull a thick, black body bag from a duffel bag, laying it out on the floor and unzipping it.

  Eve’s gulp was audible. And seeing that monstrosity there, watching Rock push up from the table, Vanessa felt herself on the precipice of bursting into tears yet again.

  So close. She’d been so close to really losing him. Had that bullet that’d taken a bite out of his ear been two inches to the right…

  This time, it was her gulp that was audible.

  “Chere,” Rock leaned down to whisper in her hear, his hot breath tickling her lobe. “You didn’t do anything wrong today. You gotta stop beatin’ yourself up, okay?”

  No, she couldn’t stop beating herself up for almost getting him killed. No way. No how.

  Then he grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “I’d have done the same thing if I were in your shoes,” he insisted, and Ozzie piped in with, “He’s right. We all would’ve done the same thing.”

  “But how c-can you forgive me after I almost got you—”

  “Vanessa,” he held her gaze until she could see the truth of his words in his eyes. It warmed her heart like nothing else ever could. “I don’t hold anything against you. You did what you thought was right. That’s all any of us can ever do.”