by Tara Janzen
A smile curved Royce’s mouth. He wasn’t really a psychotic, score-keeping bastard, but it would be his second triumph of the night, when he had the cocky little bitch sniveling at his feet and begging for mercy.
TRAVIS had never ridden in a Honda Civic before, and given half a chance, he would never ride in another one, especially one driven by a slightly deranged, homicidal maniac who couldn’t keep more than one hand on the wheel because she needed the other to shift and to keep from getting crushed, overwhelmed, and/or buried by the ungodly amount of crap stacked, packed, piled, and/or sliding around inside the car.
“Skeeter had me get you a pistol,” Red Dog said. “You’ll find a Springfield 1911 and four mags in the case behind your seat.”
Count on Skeeter to take care of all the right details, not that a semiautomatic pistol was going to help him survive his current death-defying crisis.
“W-watch—” Out.
Geezus. That had been close. They were on the freeway headed into the city, moving at light speed with no fear.
Against his better judgment, he shifted in his seat, turning his back on the road, and reached around to search through a few dozen piles of crap for the gun case. Amazingly, he found it pretty damn quickly. She’d set it on top of a box.
“Did you…uh, recently move?” he asked, sitting back in his seat and facing forward into the thrill-a-minute zone. There was too much variety of stuff in her car for this to have been an accidental pileup. There were kitchen supplies in a small box at his feet, and he was sitting on a sock.
“Yes, about a month ago.” She flipped on her blinker to change lanes at God-knows-how-many-miles-per-hour, and he braced himself. She hadn’t killed them yet, and he was praying their luck held all the way to the hotel.
“New to the D.C. area?” he asked, gripping the door handle.
Yeah, right, like that was going to save him.
“I grew up here,” she said, giving the steering wheel a little spin and jacking up his pulse in the process, “but was gone for about ten years.”
When she straightened out and settled into the new lane, with everything and everyone still in one piece, he let out the breath he’d accidentally been holding and hazarded another quick glance around the inside of the car. Yes, this had “major move” written all over it, not a cross-town hop. The U.S. map stuck in the passenger’s visor with the big red line drawn across it was another pretty good clue. From the part he could see, it looked like she’d started in Arizona.
“It’s changed a lot since I was a kid,” she continued, then flipped her blinker back on to go for the fast lane.
Oh, crap.
“Divorce?” In his experience, and he had quite a bit of it listening to women pour out their hearts, divorce was a prime mover of the fairer sex, especially if they went back to the nest.
“Yes,” she said, sounding completely taken by surprise and whipping her head around to look at him—right in the middle of her freaking lane change.
Shit!
He made some ridiculous flapping motion, momentarily struck dumb by fear, trying to direct her attention back to the freeway they were screaming down.
“How did you know?” she asked.
Because my life is flashing before my eyes, and in it, my obituary says I was killed in a freaking Honda Civic driven by a divorced woman.
“The road.” He gritted the words out, and she went back to watching it, still cruising along at the speed of light, whipping here and there.
“No, really, how did you know?” She gave him a quick glance, but thankfully went right back to watching where she was going. “I mean, it’s not like written on my face or anything, is it?”
Rough divorce, he decided.
“No. I have a counseling business in Boulder. I see a lot of divorced women.”
“You’re a therapist?” Another turn of her head had his heart in his throat again.
“The road.”
“I thought, well, I didn’t think SDF operators had other jobs.”
“They don’t. I’m the new guy, and I’m still in the process of—ho-lee…” Words failed him, even his usually reliable four-letter words. Nothing could adequately express the sheer terror of streaking back across four lanes of traffic, to the right this time, trying to make an exit she should have been preparing for three miles back.
They hit the damn thing at hyperspeed, and she immediately went for the brakes.
It was chaos—utter, freaking chaos.
Everything inside the car shifted position—eight fucking times—during her slow-down for the traffic light waiting for them at the end of the exit.
Just his luck, the thing turned green just before they got to it, so she kept right on going, effectively destroying any opportunity he might have had to catch his breath.
Skeeter would never believe this. She would never believe anyone would drive a Honda Civic like it was Angelina, or Roxanne, or Babycakes, or, God forbid, Mercy—muscle cars all, the heaviest, the toughest, the baddest badass cars in Denver.
Now there was Red Dog’s stick-shift Civic in Washington, D.C.
And God save him, they were still miles from the hotel.
CHAPTER
14
INSIDE THE vault room at Whitfield’s, things were moving along at a good clip. Skeeter had her DRSB303 connected to the guts of the biometric reader, and her own biometric compact connected to the DRSB303. It took her all of another thirty seconds to lay Vice President Hallaway’s fingerprints on the reader and encode them into Whitfield’s system, and voilà, she was in.
She swung the vault door open—and stood there for a full five seconds, just staring at the contents.
Holy cripes. The vault was deep, like a walk-in closet, and it was absolutely stuffed with filing cabinets and boxes of documents; a few trays of jewelry, the really good stuff; a few bundles of cash; a couple of small sculptures; and even a few paintings.
Including one Picasso—holy freaking cripes.
For another couple of seconds, she was stymied, not sure where to begin. The Godwin file was here, right in front of her somewhere—but where?
If Whitfield was planning on taking it to a meeting Monday morning, it was probably close to the front of the safe, she decided, going for the first filing cabinet.
She was less than halfway through the top drawer, and coming up empty-handed, when she suddenly knew she wasn’t alone. Someone had entered the closet behind the bookcase.
In one move, she melted back into the shadow of the vault door, swinging around to face the opening, her Para .45 drawn and cocked—and pointing right at Dylan’s chest.
Body shot, that had been her plan, and her finger was on the trigger, taking up slack, ready to execute in a heartbeat or less.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
Geezus holy freaking kee-rist. A tremor went up the length of her arm as she backed off the trigger. How’s it going? Was he freaking nuts? Sneaking up on her like that?
“Good. How about for you?” Geezus. And oh, crap, it’s Dylan, and I’ve been caught, and how much trouble am I in?
He shrugged.
For another full three seconds, she was completely stymied again.
Dylan Hart? Shrugging?
She’d never seen the boss do anything other than make well-thought-out and deliberate moves. So what was with the shrug, when he should be carving her up into little pieces and threatening her with total annihilation?
“Here, I’ll get that,” he said, stepping forward and brushing his hand across her shoulder.
All-righty then.
She glanced at her shoulder, wondering what in the world he’d just done.
“Oh. Just a sec.” He did it again, taking another step forward and brushing his hand across her other shoulder, but this time, he didn’t step back, not an inch, not a millimeter. “We’ve got a problem,” he said, breathing down on her.
Uh, no kidding. Mr. Don’t-Go-There was acting strange, had her backed
up against the filing cabinets, and was practically plastered against her—chest, thighs, geezus. There was no way to get some distance between them, not without pushing him away, which—no big surprise—she wasn’t inclined to do. But man, oh, man, she could feel the heat coming off his body. He was that friggin’ close—and that friggin’ hot.
Hot. Oh, shit.
Understanding dawned on her in one blinding flash.
“Dylan, do we need—”
“Mints,” he interrupted, leaning in even closer and sliding his hands up under her uniform jacket, until they rested on her bare waist. “Cinnamon. Don’t. Ever again. I knew you were in the office be fore your foot hit the first stair.”
Point taken, and under any other circumstances, she would have been appropriately chagrined, probably even mortified to have made such a stupid mistake—but she was slightly electrified by the whole hands-on-the-waist thing, and she had a feeling they had a bigger problem than her smelling like cinnamon, like possibly a red Syrette situation.
“Are you hallucinating?” That’s what she needed to know.
“Maybe.” He grinned. “Do you have a butterfly on your nose?”
Cripes.
“Dylan, listen to me. I need the silver case with the Syrettes.”
“Sure.” He nodded.
But he didn’t give her the case.
“Dylan. I think you’re having a relapse, a reaction to the drugs Negara gave you during your capture.” She flipped the safety on the Para and holstered the gun.
“Yeah, the NG4,” he said, still nodding. “It’s a bitch. Sorry about the leeches. I may have—”
He stopped abruptly, swore under his breath, then reached in his front pants pocket and pulled out a silver case.
Leeches? That’s what he was seeing? Holy crap. She happened to know the man hated leeches. It was in his phobia file, which admittedly was pretty damn short. Leeches and his mother pretty much covered it. She took the case, popped it open, and refused to panic.
“I need the other case, Dylan.” The one with the Syrettes, not the one with Whitfield’s fingerprints.
They’d never actually talked about his mother, but she’d picked up a few bits and pieces here and there, mostly from Superman, about Dylan’s supposed childhood, which hadn’t had much “child” in it. And then, of course, she’d gone digging on her own, and yeah, she thought she knew his real name, where he’d gone to prep school, why he’d left home, and how old he’d been when he’d done it. She did not know what had happened to the five million dollars that had disappeared out of his father’s company the day before his dad had died.
Nobody did, and a whole helluva lot of people had spent the last seventeen years looking for it. A whole helluva lot of people had spent the last seventeen years looking for him, including his mother and the man she’d married less than a month after his father’s death. As far as Skeeter could tell, though, only one person had found him—White Rook, whoever the hell that was. Not even she had been able to unearth White Rook’s real name or his connection to Dylan, other than the creation of SDF.
“Yeah. Sure.” He patted his pants down again. “The NG4, it’s, uh…bad, something new, a new class of…of…”
He looked up, catching her gaze, his brows furrowed.
“A new class of designer drug used in interrogations,” she quoted from her research, trying to help him out, to help him focus.
“Yeah. That’s it. Bad stuff. I may have fucked up on Sumba.” He still looked confused. “I told the doctors on the Jefferson, but they might not have acted, might not have, well, you know how it is with us.”
Yes, she did. Not even the Department of Defense acknowledged SDF’s existence. They were Grant’s bad boys, not anybody else’s. They were expendable. Dylan was damn lucky the brass on the Jefferson had even let him on their ship. Which made her wonder what kind of care he’d really gotten.
“The NG4, the place where they gave it to me, it was white.”
“White?”
“Yeah, white, all white, everywhere, and it hurt to be there. The whole thing hurt.”
Skeeter just bet it had. Tight-jawed, she quickly slid down his body, frisking him. They were running out of time, and she was running out of patience with herself. She should never have let him come here tonight. Screw the Godwin file. She’d known about the pain. She’d read about it on the freaking Internet. She didn’t know what he meant by “white,” but the pain of being injected with the NG and XT classes of drugs had been mentioned numerous times. The U.S. government had banned the use of all NG and XT drugs in their detention facilities for humane reasons and because of the potential danger of their time-delayed side effects, including a whole lot more than what Dylan had told her on the plane. There could be worse in store for him than getting sick or hallucinating, which she knew was one reason the Navy doctors had given him the yellow Syrette. For some of the other possibilities, no Syrette in the world was going to do him a damn bit of good.
She started back up his body, checking every pocket, searching for the other case. She’d made damn sure he’d had it with him before they’d left the Lafayette.
“I’m getting really hot, Skeeter.”
No shit. He was burning up. Standing next to him was like standing next to a radiator, and if they didn’t get out of the vault pretty damn quick, she was afraid one of them was going to faint—probably him.
Definitely him—dammit.
She didn’t faint, ever.
So here they were, in Whitfield’s vault, searching for a Syrette, with him melting down and her trying not to freak out, just the two of them.
Jammed together, up close and personal.
Dylan Hart.
And her.
Hot and scared.
“‘NG’ stands for Next Generation,” he said.
Yes, she knew that.
“Our government banned them. Too dangerous, they said.”
Yes, she knew that, too.
“Not that we ever admitted to having a psychopharmacological arsenal.”
Actually, in one of the articles she’d read, one senator had mentioned what a good trick it had been to ban something the U.S. government had supposedly never used, but nobody had paid him too much mind.
“The NG4,” he said, “it’s next-generation sodium pentobarbital, with some latent admixtures to really get inside a guy’s brain—that’s where I screwed up with Negara and Souk. Uh, hold on a minute, hold still. I’ve got it.” He brushed off her shoulder again.
More leeches. Cripes.
“What screwup? And who is Souk?” That was the second time he’d mentioned a mistake.
She ran her hands up under his jacket and over his chest—and hit pay dirt, a whole lot of pay dirt.
“You’ve already got the Godwin file.” She was flabbergasted, and impressed as hell.
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound nearly as impressed with himself as she was. “Skeeter, you know about sodium pentobarbital, right?”
Yeah, she knew. “Truth serum.”
What she really needed was in his shirt pocket, and she pulled it out, the silver case with the Syrettes. She started to open it, but he stopped her, moving his hands to her arms and holding her.
“Skeeter, I tried, but it’s all such a fucking mess in my head. Sometimes, this last week, I’ve thought I had it all sorted out, but then it all goes to hell again. Like now. I’m just a little fucked up.”
“I know. I’m going to help you.”
He shook his head, like he didn’t quite believe anything was going to help.
“I don’t know, Skeet. I don’t know what I gave them. It could have been everything. I could have answered every question they asked. I warned Hawkins before we left this morning, but what I need you to know is…is…” His voice trailed off.
What? she wondered. He was looking at her so intently, his gaze so confused, like he couldn’t quite get her into focus, but whatever he was trying to say, it was damned important to him, i
mportant enough for her to give him another couple of seconds, even though the sand in their hourglass had run out. They had Godwin. They needed to get the hell out of Whitfield’s.
“What?” she whispered when he didn’t continue.
A frustrated sigh left him, followed by a muttered curse.
“You,” he said. He swore again, tightening his hold on her and lowering his head into the curve of her neck. “I never would have given them you. Never. No one knows what you mean to me. No one. I swear it.”
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, struck completely dumb. He couldn’t possibly mean that no one knew he thought she was a royal pain in the butt.
Everybody knew that.
No, this was something else.
“God, Skeeter Jeanne, I’ve got you buried so deep inside me.” A short laugh escaped him. “So deep, wrapped around my guts. No matter what Souk shot me up with, he couldn’t go that deep. Not as deep as I want to be inside you…” His voice trailed off again, and he let out another sigh, a soft breath she felt all the way down to her toes.
And that did it. The whole freaking insane night had just taken a sharp left into the Twilight Zone. She couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d kissed her.
Then he did—simply opened his mouth on her neck and ran his tongue over her.
Her knees almost buckled from the shock and the heat.
“You are so damn sweet.” He breathed the words on her neck, and began unbuttoning her jacket. Another wave of heat poured down her body.
Oh, geez. Oh, God. Oh, no.
No, no, no.
Not like this. Not because of some freaking hallucinogenic drug racing through his system.
“Dylan,” she said. “Dylan, stop.”
He didn’t, not even close. His mouth was on her. He finished with the buttons and his hands were sliding back under her jacket, sliding over her skin.
“Dylan—” she started again, then pulled her thoughts up short.
Wait a minute.
This was it, the moment she’d been dreaming about for three long years, the moment when Dylan Hart revealed his undying love for her, and good God, he was on truth serum.