by Unknown
And she’d clearly scared the shit out of herself by kissing him like that, under the dock.
Scared him a little, too, truth be told.
Here and now, Ian knew that the right thing to do would be to reassure her. Promise that he would be a gentleman, even though he was nothing of the sort.
Instead he found himself continuing to tease her. “From this point on, then,” he told her, “any jumping will be advertent.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re friends. I get it. But even friends have the right to change their minds. I’m just promising you that we’ll have a forty-five- or fifty-minute conversation before we engage in any incredibly hot, passionate, deliciously creative, triple-orgasm-inducing monkey sex. Which is absolutely what would happen if we ever hooked up. Judging not only from that kiss, but from other circumstantial evidence as well.”
Interestingly, Phoebe didn’t have anything to say in response to that, although she did look away from him, instead gazing pointedly down at the water moving past the side of the skiff.
Ian cleared his throat. He may have pushed it too far. “I just wanted to be honest.”
She looked up, her expression unreadable. “No, you didn’t. You wanted exactly what you got, which was to get me all …” She stopped.
Please say hot and bothered …
She didn’t. “Flustered. And embarrassed. Why do you do that? I’m making a genuine attempt to be an adult about what happened and—” She threw up her hands. “You know what? Forget it. I made a mistake, and I apologized. It’s over and done. If you want to keep teasing me about it, be my guest. You just keep living in your macho, misogynistic, pathetic little world where you can’t take an attempt at friendship from a woman at face value. Because if that’s who you are, I guess we have no chance of being friends anyway. So there it is.”
It was then, as they approached the lights, that Phoebe finally realized that the T-shirt she wore was transparent. She tried to wring it out and pull it away from her body, but that didn’t help and she soon gave up with a muttered curse. Instead she attempted to arrange her arms so as to keep her breasts covered. But that wasn’t going to work very well, either. Especially since it was nearly time to adios the skiff and climb out onto shore. She’d need to use her hands to steady herself.
Ian pulled them in close to the dock and cut the motor. He quickly tied the painter to a post—even though the dock’s owners would immediately realize that that was not their skiff, it was better to tie it than to let it drift free.
Nothing drew attention like a drifting, empty boat.
Except maybe a large naked guy carrying a handgun, and a pissed-off woman who looked like the grand-prize winner from a wet T-shirt contest, sneaking through a potentially busy parking lot and attempting to hotwire a car.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Ian started to say as he attempted to give her a hand out of the skiff. But she both cut him off, and refused his help, scrambling onto the dock all by herself.
“Nope. Done talking about this,” she said briskly. “So. Where are we going and how are we getting there?”
“On the other side of those shrubs is a fence, on the other side of that is a parking lot,” Ian told Phoebe. “We’re going to move, quickly, up the ramp, and head straight for that shrubbery. Stay in the shadows, and be aware that your shirt is white.”
“I’m very aware of that, thanks,” she said dryly. “Are you sure you don’t want to check the house—maybe someone left towels or even a bathing suit on the deck.”
“We don’t know that they’re not home,” he said.
“If they are, even better,” she countered. “I can play mortified damsel in distress. I was skinny-dipping with my bullshit ass-hat of a now-ex-boyfriend, and he stole both my clothes and my car. Might I borrow some towels? Please. I’ll pay you back. I promise.”
God, she was good, standing there gazing up at him, wide-eyed behind those endearing glasses. Ian was suddenly intensely aware that he was naked. And that he’d just succeeded at making her not like him very much.
“I’m just disappointed,” he admitted. “That you’re so horrified by that kiss. I liked it. I think I’ve been pretty clear about that. And about the fact that I like you. A lot. More than what’s good for you.”
He’d surprised her again, that much was clear. “Shouldn’t that be my choice?” she asked. “As a grown woman? Deciding what is or isn’t good for me?”
“It’s not a choice,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a fact, Pheebs. And instinctively you know it. It’s a very good plan for us to be friends—to just leave it at that. Because, to be honest, keeping this weird thing between us to friendship is better for me, too. The complications and entanglements …” He shook his head again.
She nodded as she held out her hand. “Then it’s a deal. We’re friends.”
Ian made himself nod, too. And he took her hand. Shook. Should’ve let it go right away. But didn’t. Couldn’t. Damn it.
He also couldn’t stop himself from speaking, even though he had to clear his throat before he could get the words out. “Can we just make one conditional rule here? That if we get into a situation where we know—absolutely—that we’re going to die, we can have—”
She pulled her hand away. “Don’t say it!”
He did. “Sex.”
She glared her disbelief. “You are such an asshole!”
“I am,” Ian agreed. “I’m afraid that accepting me for who I am comes with the territory when talking friendship.”
“Stay in the shadows, asshole,” she said, then turned to stalk up the lawn toward the deck.
“Thank you,” he said as he headed for the shrubs. “I appreciate your open-minded acceptance of my asshole-ishness.”
And he wasn’t sure, but he could’ve sworn that he heard Phoebe laugh.
* * *
“The stupid thing,” Francine said as they all waited for the software to upload on the computer she’d pulled out of a heavy-duty lockup in this crazy, secluded Batcave-type place that she called Zebra, “is that Sheldon could get this to work in about four seconds, blindfolded, with his hands tied behind his back.” She glanced up at her brother-in-law, who’d changed Rory’s diaper of doom and now stood, bouncing and rocking the baby who’d finally decided that it was time to cry. Noisily. “That’s not helping.”
It truly wasn’t.
Martell straightened up, intending to throw himself on the grenade and offer to take the shrieking kid into the other room so that Aaron could stay here and help. But Deb shot him a look that screamed don’t from beneath her black-dyed bangs.
That’s right. She wanted him to grill Blondie. How silly of him to forget.
“I’d offer to, you know,” Martell said to Aaron instead, making a loser-appropriate gesture that might have meant take the baby on some distant planet where babies were shaped like basketballs, “but I’m not very good with kids that little, and I don’t want to scare him—or you, by, I don’t know, dropping him or something, so …” He shrugged expansively. “Sorry, man.”
“Just tell me when the program’s up and running,” Aaron said tersely, then took the kid into the larger of the two bedrooms and shut the door.
Deb, too, faded back toward the kitchen area, phone to her ear as she took another call from her man, Yashi, who was still in Tampa.
Turned out they hadn’t had to wait for ol’ Yash to bring back a computer in order to monitor the surveillance at the safe house—because Zebra here was stocked with a variety of equipment.
If you could call a hefty amount of C4 explosives and the contents of a rather large, holy-shit-worthy gun locker equipment.
Yes, there was a shortwave radio among the gear, as well as a generator to power the place in the event of blackout.
Or zombie apocalypse.
There was also this slightly outdated computer, and yes, the hardware needed to create a wireless hotspot.
Which a
llowed them to upload the software that allegedly would let them sneak a peek at Sheldon and his half-bro captor, Berto. That allegedly was because so far they hadn’t been able to get the damn thing to work.
Several phone calls to Deb ago, Yashi—whose excitement level was permanently set to comatose—had instructed them to uninstall the software and then reinstall it. And yeah, listening to him do his slow-talk thing over the speaker on Deb’s phone nearly made Martell go blind with frustration. Or maybe it was envy that was causing that icepick of pain above his left eye.
Dude got to get some from Deb, as often as he wanted it, and he probably saved all of his whooping and hollering for the nights that she got out her handcuffs and whips and—
Sweet baby Jesus, what was wrong with him?
Thinking about the potentially molten hot, kinky sex life of two people Martell barely knew was not helping in any way.
Not when he had a job to do.
“So Shelly’s the computer specialist, Ian’s the brains, Aaron’s the brawn,” Martell said to Francine who was glaring at the computer message that announced the program’s uploading. “That makes you in charge of … B&E?” he guessed. Although a beautiful woman like Francine wouldn’t have to break anything to enter, at least not in most instances. There was a wide variety of ways to enter a locked building, and picking a lock, crawling through an air vent, or even breaking a window were usually last on the long list of options that usually started with conning or seducing a guard.
Francine shot him a deadeye look, similar to the ones she’d given him back in the coffee shop, where they’d first met. Other than that, she didn’t respond.
“Must be nice to have the trust of a man like Ian Dunn,” he tried.
“I’d prefer not to talk while I’m doing this.”
“It’s still only forty percent uploaded,” Martell pointed out. “Not a lot of doing right this sec. And I thought as long as we’re going to be working together—”
“Fine,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me more about this bullshit no-win mission you and Little Debbie Cupcake are forcing Ian to pull off?”
“It’s not a no-win—”
“Breaking into the K-stani consulate?” she interrupted with a scornful exhale. “With the kind of paranoid security they probably have?”
“That’s funny,” Martell said, “because I was just thinking about the B of B&E, and how Ian won’t have to actually break—”
“How do you even know these kids are there?” Francine demanded. “Every hour that passes, it’s more and more likely they’ve been moved to—”
He interrupted her this time. “They haven’t been moved. We know this. We know where they are, we’re watching the consulate, and we’ve put safeguards in place to make sure they can’t be moved until we’re ready to send Ian in after them.”
“Safeguards,” she repeated, heavy on the disbelief.
“You really want to get into weeds on how—”
“Damn right I do, and Ian will, too, so if you don’t know—”
He cut her off again. “U.S. intelligence has warned the Kazbekistani government that there’s an assassination plot brewing against their prime minister.”
Francine snorted. “Prime minister? He’s the fucking dictator.”
This woman had a problem with almost every word Martell spoke. He stopped trying to hide his impatience, giving some of it back to her. “Yeah, well, this dictator wants to be called prime minister,” he pointed out. “So that’s what we’ll call him. Obviously the plot is fabricated, and includes a laundry list of reasons for the K-stani Imperial Guard to search, extensively, all diplomatic pouches and packages going from the U.S. to K-stan. Since only a few people in the K-stani embassy are involved in the kidnapping of these children, blah, blah, blah. You get it? The kidnappers can’t move ’em until the searches stop, aight? And TSA and the Coast Guard have bumped their threat level up, so the bad guys won’t try to take ’em out via other means, for fear of getting caught. Plus, we’ve got a BOLO, with a sketch of the perp—unidentified—we don’t want him to know that we know his name. It’s just enough to make him cautious about boarding a plane. Ergo, the kids are still in the Miami consulate. We know this for a fact.”
“You’ve implied that Ian’s not going to break in to get them out,” she surmised. “That means he’s going to walk right in. And since you’ve just said you’ve IDed the perp—the kidnapper …”
“And now I see why Ian trusts you,” Martell said. “You pay attention.”
She brushed aside his attempt at a compliment, her eyes intense as she gazed at him. “So who is it?”
“You ever hear of a guy, goes by the nickname the Dutchman?”
“The Dutchman?” She repeated it with a touch too much disbelief in her tone. Hells yeah, she’d heard of him, but she was playing it like her answer was a great big no. “Seriously? Does he wear, what? Wooden shoes? And live in a windmill?”
Her skills were gold-medal-worthy, but Martell knew she was lying.
“Georg Vanderzee.” He gave her the man’s real name. “Rumor has it he’s a sociopath. So if you have any information that you can share that will allow me to provide more effective support for Ian while on this mission …” He let his voice trail off.
Francine had returned her attention to the computer screen, where the download was closing in on 95 percent complete. She was managing to keep her face devoid of the oh shit that Martell knew she was feeling. But then she surprised him by looking up. Meeting his gaze.
“Total sociopath,” she admitted. “I’ve never met him myself, and I’m pretty sure I only heard part of the story from back when Ian had to deal with the son of a bitch. I’m certain there were parts that Ian thought were too terrible for me to hear.” She shook her head. “And that’s not him being sexist. He told me more than he ever told Shelly or Aaron. I know that for a fact.”
“Can you tell me what Ian said?” Martell asked.
“It’s been a while,” Francine said, and she wasn’t bullshitting him. Her face was somber. “Years. I think it would be better—more accurate—if you got the information directly from Ian.”
“Fair enough.” He paused. “Thanks for being honest with me.”
She looked at him again. “This has nothing to do with you. In fact, fuck you.”
Martell had to smile. “Wow, Deb was right. You really do like me.”
Francine actually laughed as the computer beeped. But then her face changed—it hardened and her eyes flattened, almost as if she were shutting herself down.
And Martell saw that the surveillance program was running. A variety of boxes were up on the screen, each showing a different viewpoint of the former safe house. Some of the rooms were dark, but lights were on in the kitchen and the living room—which had a TV blaring. A bathroom was lit up, too.
A slender, dark-haired man with scrapes and bruises on his face stood in that little pink room, in front of a sink, while another significantly stockier man with a receding hairline loaded beer into the fridge in the kitchen.
Francine sharply drew in her breath. “Get Aaron,” she said, her eyes glued to the screen. “Now.”
“There’re no towels out,” Phoebe reported to Ian in a whisper, as she handed him what looked like a cushion from a deck chair. “I figured this was better than nothing.”
She held one, too, hugging it against herself like a shield. It was striped—white and red—and made of waterproof material that gave it a plastic shine that caught and reflected the light from the neighbor’s dock.
“What, there were no giant flags to wave to make sure people notice us as we attempt to borrow someone’s car?” Ian asked.
She got defensive. “Hey, it was the best I could do. And if anyone sees us, they’ll think it’s some kind of beach chair. If you hold it right, they’ll think you’re wearing a Speedo, and that we’re walking back from the beach—”
“It freaking glows in the dark.”
“
Your ass glows in the dark,” she retorted sharply, her frustration getting the better of her. “Speaking of giant flags.”
He wanted to kiss her. Now more than ever. “Magnificent,” he reminded her. “Giant and magnificent.”
She sighed heavily. She was not amused. “Look, I’ll just go next door, where they are home, and do the woman-with-the-ass-hat-for-a-boyfriend act—”
Ian caught her arm, keeping her from walking away. “No, you’re right. This’ll do. We’ve already been out of contact with Aaron and the feds for too long. We have to connect with them. ASAP.”
She leaned in slightly, squinting a bit as she looked at him in the shadows. “Finally. You’re serious. Thank you. About damn time. FYI, the house is empty. No one’s home. There’s an alarm system, but it looks rudimentary. Piece of cake for an international jewel thief.”
Ian shook his head, avoiding dangerous territory by simply saying, “We need to get out of this area. Davio Dellarosa is a persistent SOB. We’ve already been here too long.”
Phoebe solemnly nodded her understanding. “Well, maybe this’ll help. There’s a car parked in the driveway. The very secluded driveway.”
“There we go,” Ian said. “I knew our luck was changing.”
He let her lead the way across the lawn and toward the house, where indeed there was an older-model car in the shadow of the house, hidden from the waterfront, the street, and the next-door neighbors. It was, perhaps, the perfect car in the perfect location. He dropped his deck chair cushion and got to work unlocking the driver’s side door, while Phoebe stood guard.
She carefully kept her gaze everywhere and anywhere but on him. Although, considering her earlier reference, she apparently had looked, at least long enough to make note of the fact that it had been impossible for him to maintain his all-over tan while in prison.
As Ian popped the lock and opened the car door, he turned to Phoebe. “Can you do me a huge favor?”
She immediately stepped toward him, fully embracing their new mature relationship. “Of course.”