Armored Attraction

by Janie Crouch

  “Karine. The policeman out there... Is he looking for you?”

  Karine clutched at Vanessa. “Man. Man on boat.”

  “That man was on the boat?” A sheriff’s deputy?

  “No.” Karine shook her head. “That clothes.”

  Not that particular guy, but someone wearing the same uniform. Dear God. Was Karine telling her that someone from the sheriff’s office was part of a trafficking ring?

  Vanessa stared at her for a few more moments. She had no idea exactly what was going on, but she was willing to give Karine the benefit of the doubt. If Vanessa was wrong, she’d deal with the consequences later.

  “Okay, let’s get you out of here.”

  They slipped under the curtain and were out of the hospital in a matter of minutes. Karine was still shuddering, glancing from side to side frantically, obviously searching for anyone who might be following. Vanessa put an arm around her, tentatively, to guide her through the parking lot to her car. Karine stiffened briefly before leaning into her.

  Vanessa started the car and pulled to the edge of the parking lot. She didn’t know which way to turn. If someone from the sheriff’s office really was in on this, it wouldn’t take long for them to figure out Karine was with her. She couldn’t take Karine to her house. She needed to get her out of the area.

  “Karine.” Vanessa turned to the girl, who was sitting low in her seat so no one could see her. “I’m going to drive you to Norfolk, okay? It’s a city about an hour and a half from here. There are police, FBI, who can help us.”

  “No!” Karine sat straighter in the seat. “I cannot leave. I must stay here to help the other girls. Must find them.”

  “Yes, we’ll get help and then come back here.”

  “No!” Karine repeated, grabbing for the door handle. “I stay here.”

  “No, wait. Don’t get out,” Vanessa said.

  Karine was exhausted, traumatized and injured. Vanessa prayed she had been mistaken about the police uniform. Many of the men in the sheriff’s department Vanessa had known most of her life. She couldn’t imagine they would be involved with the victimization of girls.

  But she wasn’t about to put Karine out on her own, no matter how unlikely the scenario may be.

  “Okay, we’ll stay here in Nags Head,” Vanessa told her, watching her visually relax. “We’ll go to a hotel.”

  Karine nodded and eased lower into her seat.

  If Karine was going to refuse to leave the area, Vanessa was going to need to see about someone coming here to help them. Contacting the local police was out of the question. She needed someone outside that circle, someone in federal law enforcement.

  Liam Goetz.

  He was DEA, which maybe didn’t deal with trafficking directly, but at least she knew he wasn’t local. He’d know how to help or tell her who to contact.

  Of course, she hadn’t talked to Liam in eight years. Didn’t even know if he would be willing to talk to her now. But he was her best chance in this situation. She had to try.

  Vanessa sped to her apartment to get his phone number, which was written on the back of a picture of the two of them. She should’ve thrown it away years ago but hadn’t been able to make herself do it. Now she was glad she hadn’t.

  She grabbed a couple changes of clothes from her room, but nothing to make it look as though she wasn’t there, then ran back out to the car. She had no doubt one of the first places the police would start looking for Karine was at Vanessa’s apartment.

  As she pulled away, she Bluetoothed the number on the back of the picture. She forced herself not to look at the much younger, more innocent version of herself in the photo. That girl was gone forever.

  The phone rang twice before someone answered.

  “DEA call center.”

  “Um, yes, I’m trying to reach an agent. At least he used to be an agent.” Vanessa wasn’t sure exactly what she should say. Maybe Liam didn’t even work for the DEA anymore. “He gave me this number.”

  “Please provide the name of the person you are trying to reach and I’ll direct your call.” The operator was briskly efficient.

  “Liam Goetz.” Vanessa had no idea what department he worked for or even what city.

  “Please hold.”

  Vanessa drove toward some older hotels closer to Nags Head. They weren’t very expensive, which was pretty much all Vanessa could offer Karine right now. Plus, the police were probably less likely to look for her there.

  The longer Vanessa was on hold, the more convinced she became that this whole call to Liam was probably useless.

  “Hello? You’re trying to reach Liam Goetz?” A briskly efficient female voice this time.

  “Yes. But I don’t know which division he’s in—”

  “I’m going to connect you to his voice mailbox. Please leave a detailed message. We will make sure he gets it.”

  Okay, so evidently he did still work for the DEA. That was good.

  “Okay.”

  “Please hold. Leave a message when you hear the beep.”

  Vanessa was startled, caught off guard, a moment later when she heard the beep. There had been no outgoing message.

  “Um, Liam, it’s Vanessa. Vanessa Epperson.”

  How much should she tell him?

  “I’m still living on the Outer Banks, but I’m actually staying at a hotel at the moment.” She gave him the name and address of the hotel they’d just pulled up to. “I need your help. I have a situation here and believe local police might be involved, so I need federal law enforcement. If you could just point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it. I wasn’t sure who else I could trust. Just call if you can.”

  She was rambling, so she left him her number and then disconnected the call. She’d done all she could do there. She knew she needed to have a backup plan in case Liam didn’t call her back. After all, the last thing she’d heard him say about her eight years ago was that she was a selfish, spoiled brat who didn’t have it in her to care about another person.

  Yeah, she definitely better have a backup plan in place.

  Chapter Two

  Liam listened to the voice-mail message for the umpteenth time.

  Vanessa Epperson.

  He could honestly say he’d never expected to hear her voice ever again. After all, she hadn’t even cared enough to leave him a voice mail eight years ago when she’d decided he wasn’t good enough to marry.

  Or a letter. Or an email. Or a face-to-face explanation.

  But evidently she’d gotten over her phone aversion. Good for her.

  Liam played the message again.

  She needed help and was contacting him because she thought he was still DEA. He hadn’t been DEA for more than five years, since Omega Sector’s Critical Response Division had recruited him to lead their hostage rescue team.

  Fortunately for Vanessa, since Omega Sector was made up of agents from multiple different law-enforcement agencies—FBI, Interpol, DEA... Hell, Liam had worked a mission with a damn Texas Ranger last month—her message had been recorded and immediately forwarded to him.

  She didn’t mention what sort of trouble she was in, just wanted Liam to drop everything and help her. Like how she’d always wanted everyone to drop everything to do what she wanted. Some things didn’t change.

  He listened to the message one more time.

  Liam should call one of his many friends from the head DEA office in Atlanta and have them send someone to Nags Head. Or he might even know someone at the FBI field office in Norfolk he could call.

  It was the logical thing to do; probably the most professional answer to this situation. He could have someone there handling Vanessa’s problem in three or four hours.

  But who was Liam kidding? He wasn’t going to
make those calls. He was already walking down the hall of the Critical Response Division’s headquarters to his boss’s office.

  He wasn’t sure what he was going to tell Steve Drackett. Just that he needed some time off to help an old friend. God knew Liam had enough time off saved up.

  He knocked on Steve’s office door, his back office door that led directly to Steve himself, rather than pass through the main office entrance guarded by Steve’s four assistants.

  Four young, attractive, quite competent and intelligent female assistants.

  Liam knew them all, flirted shamelessly with them all. He’d spent so much time in the office with those women that Steve had threatened to fire him several times.

  Not that Liam dated any of them—he knew better than to date anyone who might have his life in her hands—but at any given moment he’d be leaning on their desks chatting, and keeping them from their work.

  Liam smiled. Steve’s main office was one of his favorite places in the world to be.

  But not today. Not right now. He could not go in there and flirt with those beautiful women with Vanessa’s voice still filling his head.

  Steve’s door opened.

  “Hey, Liam. Come on in.” Steve said, still reading from a file in his hand as he returned to his desk. “I didn’t even think you knew this door existed. Hell, I wasn’t really sure you knew any offices existed outside those belonging to my assistants.”

  Derek Waterman and Joe Matarazzo—both Liam’s colleagues and good friends—were sitting in chairs across from Steve’s desk. They held similar files.

  “Hey, Goetz,” Derek murmured. Joe muttered something unintelligible without looking up from the file in his hand.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt, Steve,” Liam said.

  “It’s no problem. What’s on your mind?”

  “I’m going to need a few personal days.”

  Now the guys looked up from their files. Liam was pretty sure he’d never taken personal days except to go on actual vacations planned well ahead of time.

  “Everything okay?” Steve’s concern was also evident.

  “Yeah.” Liam shrugged. “Everything’s fine. I just have a friend who called needing some help back in the Outer Banks. My friend said this might be a little sticky with the locals so wanted some outside help.”

  “You grew up there, right? You haven’t been home in a long time.”

  “Yeah, not since my grandmother died. Not much there for me.”

  Steve nodded. “Is your friend’s trouble serious? Do we need to send in a team?”

  “Nah. I’m sure I can handle it.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  Liam sighed. “To be honest, I’m not exactly sure. My friend called my old DEA contact number. They forwarded it to me.”

  “Has anybody else noticed Goetz’s complete lack of pronoun usage?” Joe said, leaning back in his chair.

  Damn it. This was about to become a thing.

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” Derek responded, grinning. “So are we to assume this friend is of the female variety?”

  Liam realized he should’ve just mentioned that from the beginning. “Yes, she is.”

  “Um, Joe, do you ever recall Liam being shy about mentioning a female friend to us before?” Derek quipped.

  Liam knew his reputation. He’d worked pretty hard at making sure everyone knew he was a ladies’ man. Girl in every port. Shameless flirt.

  At times he almost believed his own press. Because it was a hell of a lot easier to believe that he was some sort of modern-day Casanova than that he still pined over a woman who’d left him cold eight years ago.

  “A female from his hometown, no less,” Joe responded. “I’ve never heard him mention any such creature before.”

  “Very curious, indeed.” Derek waggled his eyebrows.

  “All right, enough, you two,” Steve cut in. He turned to Liam. “Like I said, is there anything we need to know about your friend or her situation?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Liam said. “She didn’t provide much detail. If it looks like something I can’t handle, I’ll let you know.”

  “You’re not going to call her first? Get more details?”

  “No, I’m just going to go.”

  Thankfully none of the three men in the room pointed out what Liam already knew: dropping everything and traveling from Omega headquarters in Colorado Springs to the Outer Banks of North Carolina because of a vague phone call from someone he hadn’t talked to in nearly a decade was overkill.

  But from the first moment he had heard Vanessa’s voice, figured out she was asking for help, Liam knew he would be doing just that.

  “Okay, I think one of the Omega jets is heading out to DC in the next few hours if you want to catch a ride there,” Steve responded. “Be safe and keep me posted as to when you’ll be back.”

  Joe and Derek didn’t say anything, although they were both staring at Liam with mouths slightly agape. Liam ignored them.

  “Okay. Thanks, Steve.”

  Liam just left. He didn’t want to explain himself to his friends, especially when he could hardly understand what he was doing himself. All he knew was that he had to see Vanessa.

  He wasn’t really surprised that she was still living in the Outer Banks. The two-hundred-mile stretch of land, a string of barrier islands running along the northeast coast of North Carolina, held a great deal of prime property and the Eppersons owned a good chunk of it.

  And Vanessa was princess of it all. She had been her whole life.

  Liam had found out the hard way that her love for her pampered way of life outweighed any promises she might make to any poor sap fool enough to fall in love with her. Fool enough to believe her when she said she loved him, too.

  Did she think of him when she felt the sand of the Roanoke Sound on her feet? On her back? Think of all the many hours they’d spent there together?

  Did she ever think about him asking her to run away and marry him right there in that sand? About saying yes?

  About not showing up where they were supposed to meet? About refusing to talk to him at all when he’d come by to see why she had changed her mind?

  Probably not.

  The address she had given him in the message was not her family mansion in Duck, which was slightly north of Nags Head and the preferred location for million-dollar mansions. It was some hotel he didn’t recognize at Mile Marker 13, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

  Liam drove to his apartment and packed his things. He’d try to catch a ride with the team going to DC as Steve suggested. If not, he’d drive to Fort Carson, the army base in Colorado Springs. Omega worked pretty closely with the military when needed, and Liam had lots of contacts there from his days in Special Forces.

  The commanding officers might lock their daughters away when Liam was in sight, but they would gladly welcome him on board an aircraft to give him a lift wherever he was going.

  The thought brought a quick smile to Liam’s face. His playboy reputation was well deserved. He’d certainly earned it since he’d been in Colorado.

  Except for the past couple of years when he seemed to have lost his taste for fun, fast hookups. Yeah, he still flirted with all the gals—young or old—and kissed just about every woman he came across. But he wasn’t particularly interested in more than that.

  The thought of pseudo intimacy with another woman whose face he’d fondly remember but name he’d probably forget? Not as interesting anymore.

  Maybe it had something to do with watching two of his best friends—and fellow Omega agents—fall in love with strong, beautiful women over the past few months. Jon Hatton and Derek Waterman’s love for the women in their lives was downright palpable. Liam wanted something authentic like that for himself.
<
br />   Then it struck him. That was why he was going to Nags Head. Because until he could put what had happened there behind him, he was never going to be able to have something real with any woman.

  It was time. He was going to lay the ghost of Vanessa Epperson to rest once and for all. Her call was finally the excuse he needed.

  * * *

  LIAM WASN’T GOING to call.

  Vanessa had accepted that reality when she woke up this morning, sleeping in a pretty dingy hotel, a traumatized teenager curled into the tightest of balls in the bed next to her. He’d had all evening, all night and some of this morning to respond, but hadn’t.

  Maybe he hadn’t gotten the message. Maybe he was off on some important mission with the DEA or something.

  Maybe he still hated her.

  The reasons why he wasn’t contacting her didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that Vanessa was on her own in helping Karine.

  That was okay. Vanessa had learned in the hardest way possible that she was capable of handling on her own almost anything that came her way. This situation was no different.

  But Liam’s lack of contact still stung a little bit.

  She dragged herself out of bed, careful not to wake Karine. She knew from the girl’s whimpers and cries throughout the night that she couldn’t have gotten very good rest.

  Karine needed help. Probably medical and definitely psychological—both more than Vanessa could provide. If the hospital and police weren’t safe around here, then Vanessa was going to have to talk her into leaving the Outer Banks, at least for the day.

  Vanessa poured water into the cheap four-cup coffeemaker on the bathroom vanity. Once she had coffee, no matter how bad it was, she’d be able to figure out a plan.

  While she waited she turned on the local morning news. Although she doubted it, she was curious to see if there was any mention of Karine.

  At first nothing, just weather and tides—an important part of life on a string of islands. But then the breaking news...

  The sheriff’s office had set up roadblocks at the bridges on both sides of Nags Head. They were looking for a federal fugitive—considered armed and very dangerous—and were stopping all cars leaving the island to search them.