“That makes me sound stupid…and petty. And I guess I was.” A grimace twisted her lips and her head dipped. “I did take his warning into consideration. It’s not like I headed straight to Columbia or deep into Mexico. This island seemed safe enough. Off the beaten path.”
“Which means someone kept tabs on you since before you left Virginia. If this is what I think it is.” He crossed his arms over his chest to keep from reaching for her and hauling her close. “Or they could simply have put your picture out to all their contacts and asked them to find you. This guy could be working alone.”
“What do you think this is?”
The knot that had tightened his stomach the second Manuel said someone had asked after Nicky grew heavier, clenched tighter. “An abduction.”
“For ransom?”
“Or to influence your father.”
Her mouth formed a bitter smile. “All that bother, and you know he won’t negotiate with them.”
“He might not negotiate…”
“But he would send someone after me, wouldn’t he?” She closed her eyes for a brief moment.
“Yeah, they likely know he’d never deal with them in any official way, but maybe they’re just flexing muscle. Showing us they’re not afraid to take on US SEALs.”
She made a little scoffing sound. “Could they be more stupid?”
No argument there. He gave her a one-sided smile. “You seem to think highly of us.”
“You’re the best in the world at what you do,” she said, her eyes sad. “My issue was never with the SEALs.”
“Your issue was just with your father?” At last, Deke strode toward her and opened his arms.
She snuggled against his chest. “My mother said she never signed up for a career military man.” Her voice was muffled against his shirt. “She thought he’d give it up once they started a family. Long deployments killed their relationship.”
Deke nodded. “The life’s not for everyone, but for every guy I know whose marriage failed, I can show you another that’s solid. Wives don’t have to go it alone. There’s a whole community of people who step in to help. I’ve done my part.”
She drew back, her brown eyes glittering. “I saw it from her side. She was afraid every time he left that it would be the last time she saw him.”
“And that’s a risk we take,” he said, lifting her chin with his thumb. “I’ll admit it’s tough. On both ends.”
Her gaze fell away. “Time away didn’t seem to weigh on him the same way it did her.”
“Give him a break, Nicky,” he said, lowering his voice. “He had men under his command he had to keep safe.”
“I know. Being the last priority, after the mission and after the team, well, I’m not sure I could handle that, either.”
Her words left a bitter taste in his mouth, but Deke shrugged. “Since I’ve never been married with a wife waiting for me to come home, guess I’m not entitled to an opinion.”
She stared at the buttons of his shirt, then slowly lifted her face. “I’d still like to hear it.”
Deke felt as though whatever he said next would be judged and weighed. That a misstep here might be a deal breaker. But he couldn’t sugarcoat what he felt. “I think the woman who takes on a SEAL has to know what she can expect, and then she has to accept what she can’t change.”
Her lips twisted. “Whining not allowed?”
“Baby, I can’t imagine you ever whining.”
She sniffed and raised her chin. “Since I’ll likely never marry a SEAL, I guess we’ll never know.”
Deke swallowed hard, another weight settling in his gut. He gave her a bleak smile and turned toward the door. “I have to pack my things. Close the door behind me. Butt the back of the desk chair against it, too. Do not open the door to anyone but me.” Then because there wasn’t anything more to say, he left.
After she jammed the chair beneath the door handle, Nicky sat on the edge of the bed, feeling hollow. What the hell had just happened? All her bitterness over her parents’ divorce had come spilling out, like a tidal wave right over Deke. He hadn’t deserved that. Hell, she wasn’t even sure her father would have deserved it—except perhaps for choosing her mother as a wife, knowing full well she hadn’t been made to be a SEAL’s wife. Her mother had been enamored of a handsome man in uniform, someone tall and brave, but she had thought he’d quickly come to heel, join her father’s business and pull out his old uniform on Veterans Day to reminisce. She’d never really understood his deep devotion to the SEALs.
Nicky had hated leaving Little Creek. Hated leaving her father. But she’d spent too many years hearing only her mother’s complaints. Her father had never talked about the demise of his marriage. Had never talked badly about her mother except to say they ended up not being compatible.
Now Deke thought she hated what he was, which just wasn’t true. But it was probably too late to take back everything she’d said. And Lord, how she wished she could because she wanted a chance to know him better, to see if this feeling growing inside her—an instant resonance of another person’s heart and yearnings—was the real thing.
Something had clicked inside her when she’d seen his shutter come down, seen the light in his eyes grow dim. In a flash of intuition, she’d known that loving a man like Deke wouldn’t be easy, but since when had doing things the easy way made her happy? Loving him, period, would make the long absences worth it. Any time spent in his arms would be savored. She wasn’t her mother, but had a life of her own, a job that would keep her busy. If children came along, he was right—support could be found within the community, other wives who shouldered the burden of child-rearing, but who pitched in to help out. She didn’t have to go it alone.
A sharp laugh gusted from somewhere deep inside her. Ragged. Thick. She’d only known him a day, and she was already imagining being married and having his kids?
A knock sounded at the door. Too soon to be Deke. Her heart skipped a beat and she pushed off the bed, heading to the door. Peeking through the peephole, she saw a short, stout woman in a white housekeeping staff uniform, a cart laden with towels behind her. While Nicky watched, the woman knocked again.
Nicky bit her bottom lip. They’d need more towels since Deke would be staying in her room tonight. Still, better to be safe than sorry. “Yes?” she called out through the door.
“Señora, I come to clean your room,” she said in heavily accented Spanish.
“We won’t need you to clean today, but could you leave extra towels beside the door?”
“Sí, señora.”
She watched as the woman frowned, but turned quickly to the cart and counted out several towels, before turning back and holding up the stack. “Will this be enough?”
“Está bueno,” Nicky said in her rusty, middle-grade Spanish. “Gracias.”
The woman disappeared for a second as she bent down. Then she straightened and wheeled the cart down the hallway.
When the woman moved down the hallway past the second and third doors, only then did Nicky unlock the door and bend to quickly retrieve the towels. The moment she straightened, she felt the hairs on her arm rise. Something cold and metal pressed against her neck.
“Come quietly,” came a low-pitched voice from right beside her, “unless you want your boyfriend dead. I am here for you, Señorita Martir.”
Damn. Nicky glanced toward Deke’s door. If he walked out this minute, she had no doubt the man would shoot him. She could hear the cold resolution in his voice. From deep inside, she began to tremble. Without looking behind her, she gave a nod. Words were impossible because her jaw was clenched so tight with fear.
A hand closed around her upper arm in a vice-like grip and propelled her down the corridor toward an exit stairway. They passed the woman with her cart, but she didn’t glance their way, her stony face set as she opened another patron’s door.
So, she’d been part of this man’s plan.
God, how could she have been so stupid? Deke had
only asked one thing of her and she’d ignored that simple request. Was always bucking authority a habit? Had she thought he’d been so specific simply because he liked giving her orders? She prayed he’d figure out what happened, and quickly, but didn’t know what he could do, one man alone, to help her out of this mess now. Then she added another prayer for his safety. Unsure what her future held, she couldn’t bear the thought of him being hurt because of her.
At the exit, her captor shot out a hand and twisted the door handle to open it. Then he gave a shove against her shoulder, propelling her into the darkened stairwell. Farther from Deke.
She wanted to dig in her heels, stall for as long as she could, but cold hard steel was pressed against her ribs. So holding tightly to the rail, she descended. Despite the terror making her skin clammy, she stiffened her spine. The farther from Deke she went, the less likely he would be able to pick up the trail. He might never know what had happened to cause her disappearance. She couldn’t rely on Deke rescuing her. She might have to figure this out on her own.
Deke shoved the last of his clothes into his go-bag then slid his Beretta into his ankle holster. He’d taken a minute to place a call to Nicky’s father to apprise him he suspected the cartel had found them. That single call had taken too long. Too many minutes had ticked away. He exited his room, glanced up and down the hallway, but all he saw was a short, heavy-set Hispanic woman from house-keeping, His glance slid past her, but the way she’d averted her gaze—too quickly—set his senses tingling.
He raced across the hall, slid the key in the lock, and opened the door. Towels lay on the floor just inside. “Nicky!” When he didn’t hear an immediate answer, he ran to the woman with the cart. She tried to ignore him, but he grabbed her shoulder, forcing her to face him. “Where is she?”
The woman’s face was cold as granite, but her gaze darted to a stairwell at the end of the hall. Hoping she’d given away their direction, he loped to the stairwell. Below him, he heard a door open and close. Taking steps three at a time, he raced down the stairs and out a door that led outside to the hotel’s parking lot. A glance right, and he spotted a dark sedan next to the sidewalk, a slender woman clutching the top of the open door, until the man behind her shoved something against her back. Her head turned toward the side.
Nicky!
She spotted him, and the man standing behind her with a gun looked back, as well.
Because Deke didn’t want to risk Nicky being shot if the man’s Plan B was to kill the congressman’s daughter, he ducked backward, hiding behind a palm tree.
A moment later, Nicky sank into the car, the man sliding into the back seat beside her. The car sped away with a screech of tires as they burned rubber.
Deke dug for the keys to his rental and ran hard for his car, hoping they’d take the main highway. If they took a side street, he might miss them altogether. Seconds later, he peeled out of the parking lot, leaving off his lights, letting the streetlamps on the main road provide all the illumination he needed so less chance existed he’d be spotted in any rear-view mirror.
Luckily, the sedan was just ahead. Deke let loose his hard grip of the steering wheel and grabbed his cell. “They have her,” he said to his handler.
“There’s only two ways off the island. Boat or air. Do you have eyes on her?”
“Dark sedan, heading south on the main drag.”
“South’s toward the marina. If they get her on a boat, we’ll lose her. It’s four hours to the mainland, and we don’t have anything in the area to intercept.”
So her rescue was all up to Deke. Cold sweat dotted his forehead. His stomach roiled. The last time someone had depended on him, he’d failed to keep them safe. Not that anyone blamed him for what happened to Mark. However, Deke still laid the man’s death all on himself. Mark had been new to the unit—his responsibility because he’d landed on his squad. He’d trained him hard, up until the night they’d fast-roped onto a rocky hill in southern Pakistan. The extraction of a mid-level terrorist with knowledge of the group’s financing was supposed to be easy.
“We’ll follow the money,” the CIA analyst had said. “That will get us the targets we really want.”
Only their intel had been woefully inadequate. Rather than the half-dozen insurgents they’d expected, they’d walked into an ambush. Right behind Deke, Mark had been second through the door. Deke had seen the long cylindrical profile of a weapon lifted atop a shoulder, but hadn’t had time to signal a warning. Instead, he’d reached for Mark’s arm and pulled him as he threw himself to the side. But he hadn’t been fast enough. The RPG blasted out the doorway and took Marcus’s lower body with it. Although the team had regrouped and managed to sweep the site clean—they hadn’t achieved their mission. The financier hadn’t been there, and the few laptops they’d managed to grab on their way out the door hadn’t given them any new actionable information. Mark and Sting, who’d caught a bullet to the neck, had died for nothing.
Deke could still feel the weight of Mark’s demolished body on his shoulder.
His stomach boiled with acid. Every muscle in his body was tense, clenched. He’d be damned if it happened again. Damned if he lost Nicky.
He gunned the engine, keeping the sedan in his sights as it careened recklessly out of the town and into the hills winding toward the bay. With only his compact Beretta and a couple eight-round magazines of ammo, he’d need more than luck on his side.
He’d need a fucking miracle.
Chapter Six
‡
They drove to the same marina where Deke had rented their boat earlier. How ironic. The starting place for one of the most enjoyable experiences of her life had become part of an unending nightmare.
After being dragged from the back seat of the sedan, she’d fought the urge to glance around and see whether Deke had followed. If he was close by, she shouldn’t alert her two captors. And likely he wasn’t because she heard no other cars in the distance.
The driver said something in rapid-fire Spanish and grinned, putting the strap of a nasty-looking, short-barreled weapon over his head and shoulder before loping down one of the docks toward a boat.
In the dim light from the lamppost at the end of the dock, she got her first good glimpse of the man who’d been stuck like glue to her side throughout her ordeal. She was surprised by how young he was, and by his cruel expression. Her throat grabbed tight and she forced herself to breathe evenly. Dressed in jeans and ragged t-shirt, with his black hair greased back, the kidnapper looked like a thug. His black gaze was steady, narrowed as she stared back. He’d show her no mercy if she resisted. She knew that fact in her bones.
With the end of the weapon, he pushed her down the dock, toward the waiting boat at the end of the pier. Not as clean as the one she’d been on earlier. Not as large, and with only two seats. Likely, she’d be shoved to the floorboard behind their seats. She wondered where they were taking her—whether they’d simply dump her in the ocean, or intended to deliver her to some cartel to be held in a jungle camp or seedy barrio prison.
Her fate seemed grim. So grim, she was tempted to take her chances and jump into the water beside the dock and risk being shot right away. Maybe she could swim deep enough and hold her breath long enough, she could make it beneath another long boardwalk and wait for a chance to escape.
Again, the muzzle of the handgun bit into her ribs. She’d have several bruises. Bruises on top of bruises from where he’d butted her with the damn weapon. She glanced back, past his shoulder, wishing for a glimpse of hope, but saw nothing in the darkness around them. Heard nothing other than the creak of boards, the soft lap of waves against boats and wood. As she neared the boat, she deliberately tripped on an uneven board, going down to her knees with an exaggerated cry.
The thug’s hand gripped her hair hard and pulled back her head. He pressed the gun against her cheek. His teeth were bared in an ugly snarl.
Did he know he was a cliché? Black shirt, black hair, black eyes, feral
smirk? She came up, bumped against him, and jerked away, grimacing because he’d kept hold of her hair. She’d lost some in his fierce grip, but she had only one shot at this. Pushing hard, she jumped over the side of the dock into black, murky water.
Shots made strange pfft sounds around her in the water. But she couldn’t take the time to care. She dove beneath the hull of one boat and skimming a hand against its razor-sharp barnacles, followed its length, before popping up, just beneath the curving bow for a quick breath, then down again she swam.
A loud splash sounded nearby. She curved and dove as deep as she could, her chest skimming slimy seaweed and jagged rocks. Glancing up, her eyes burning in the dirty saltwater, she couldn’t make out much, only darker shadows against the darkness above her.
Her shoulder and her face struck something solid. She pressed her hand against the side, exploring with her stretched fingers. The object was wooden and thick. One of the dock’s pylons. She circled behind it, and with her lungs burning from lack of air, she kicked against the rocky, silty bottom and rose, her head breaking the surface. She fought from gasping too deeply and wrapped her arms around the pylon, pitching her ear toward the wooden slats over her head for sounds of movement.
From above, she heard shouts, from the captor’s partner. Heavy treads pounding on the boards as he neared her, but no answering shouts from the man in the water. Was he nearing her position even now, trying to slip up and surprise her?
Then she heard a sharp report. A single shot, followed by a heavy thud and another loud splash. She held still, trying not to panic, trying to remain quiet. Softer footsteps ran down the dock.
“Nicky,” came in a low-pitched voice.
Deke. She closed her eyes and let out a sob.
“Nicky!” came Deke’s call, louder and nearer this time.
She let loose of the pylon and swam from beneath the dock to peer upward. “Deke, I’m here,” she called out in small voice, still scared and beginning to shake.
Hot Alpha SEALs: Military Romance Megaset Page 48