Breaking Loose

by Tara Janzen

  Yeah, that was probably it.

  It probably didn’t have anything to do with getting his hands halfway up her skirt.

  Nah, he wasn’t that kind of a guy.

  He turned to tell her cooperation was really in her best interest, and maybe do a little placating of his own if the sheer common sense of his plan hadn’t yet sunk in-but the look on her face told him anything he had to say was completely beside the point.

  Shock. Disbelief. Confusion. And recognition with a capital “R.” She had it all, and it was all in the stunned gaze locked onto his face.

  Sure, he got it. He was feeling a little stunned himself-okay, a lot stunned.

  Damn, he’d forgotten how beautiful she was. He truly had, but with the light coming in from the window, and him being real up close and personal with her, the cosmic freight train that had run over his heart the first time he’d seen her had instantly powered up and was taking him for another ride, at light speed. She was fucking luminous, her skin like satin, the curve of her nose so exquisitely elegant, her cheeks flushed with the heat, her mascara melting a bit, giving her a sultry, woman-coming-undone look. She’d lost her hat in the struggle at the door, and taken her sunglasses off somewhere between the entrance and the second floor, which left him face-to-face with the world’s most gee-fucking-gorgeous, whiskey-colored eyes-exotic, dark-lashed, a deep warm brown shot through with lighter streaks of amber, like sunlight streaming through a glass of single malt.

  He was taken.

  He was smitten.

  Yeah, she knew who he was. It was written all over her face. And he sure as hell knew who she was-it was carved in his goddamn heart.

  This was crazy. He was a man on a mission, not some callow nineteen-year-old boy-and she was the woman who had haunted his dreams for six long months.

  He lifted his hand away from her mouth and loosened his hold, easing up on her a bit.

  “You” she breathed.

  Yeah, him.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Great question, the obvious question, but the answer was totally unacceptable, something he’d be damned if he admitted to anyone, because suddenly, for just a brief moment in time, with her in his arms and his brain out to lunch, the answer sounded a lot more like “falling in love” than “stealing a sphinx.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dax Killian. Oh… my…God.

  The shock sent Suzi’s thoughts reeling. Suddenly, she was unmoored.

  Daniel Axel Killian. Good God. Scruffier than when she’d met him in Denver, his hair short and tousled. Beard stubble darkened his jaw, and he was dressed on the sloppy side of casual, but it was him. She would recognize him anywhere, the angles of his face damn near perfect, the little bit of slope on a nose that bordered on cute, a firm, sensuous mouth with the imperfect scar marking his chin-and those eyes, pale gray under dark lashes, absolutely clear, absolutely unwavering… absolutely locked onto hers.

  Soulful, that’s what she’d thought of his eyes six months ago, when he’d been pouring on the charm and hitting on her at the Toussi Gallery, but the description didn’t fit here, not now, not in the Galeria Viejo. Far from soulful, his gaze was piercing, fierce, and unnerving the hell out of her.

  Geezus. Her heart thudded in her chest. Killian. What in the ever-loving world was he doing here?

  And, oh, God-there was an answer to that question, only one, and it had to be the Memphis Sphinx, but why? She knew who he was and what he’d been, and she knew the U.S. government hadn’t sent him. The U.S. government had sent her, which only left the nongovernmental routes open for him, and all of those routes were illegal as hell, absolutely gridlocked with black-market players like Esteban Ponce, Levi Asher, Jimmy Ruiz, and Remy Beranger.

  Ruiz sure as hell hadn’t mentioned an American buyer, a norteamericano, let alone dropped a name like Dax Killian.

  Cripes, she was in so much trouble here, and geezus, was it hard to breathe in this dusty, cramped, sweltering dungeon of a room. Her head should have been reeling just from that-but no, it had taken Dax Killian to throw her off her stride.

  And, oh, God, he’d thrown her.

  She needed to get her bearings back, take a breath, get a frickin’ grip, think things through. Dax Killian, good God, no way in hell should he be here, not for any good reason, which only left the bad reasons, and the bad reasons were very bad.

  Impossibly bad. She couldn’t have been that wrong about him.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked again, confused as hell. She’d spent the last six months checking the guy out from one end to the other. With a little help from the chop-shop boys at Steele Street, she’d compiled a big fat file on his escapades, and Daniel Axel Killian was a private investigator, an ex-Special Forces operator of damn near legendary proportions, and a former juvenile delinquent of damn near equal infamy-one of Lieutenant Loretta’s wild boys. He was not a black-market criminal.

  Or was he?

  He wouldn’t be the first highly trained military operative to skirt the edges of the underworld in order to stay in the game.

  Cripes.

  “Getting out of here,” he said, sounding damned sure of himself. “And so are you.”

  “No, I’m not,” she said, shaking her head. “Oh, no… no, no. I’m not leaving, not yet.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes, you are,” he growled. “Come on.” He started moving her toward the window, but she dug in her heels, the only part of her he didn’t have in lockdown.

  Dammit. She had a plan, a mission to execute, and it didn’t include “cut and run,” not until she’d had a chance to verify the location of the Sphinx. Two malfunctioning blinks and a beep didn’t quite do the trick. Wait it out-that’s what she was going to do. Wait for the police to leave, and then take another shot at the gallery with the scanner in her hand.

  Another loud crash shook the walls, bigger than the others, as if the cops had turned over a whole bank of shelves, a real rumbling that made the floor tremble and sent a veil of dust drifting out of the woodwork. Dax tightened his hold on her-good Lord, as if they weren’t already close enough. Now they were practically laminated, with her trying to get her feet under her and regain her balance and him holding her in a way that made damn sure she couldn’t.

  “You… you…”

  “Bastard?” he offered.

  “Bastard” worked for her, and she was just about to tell him so, when the pop-pop-pop of gunfire downstairs changed her whole attitude.

  From one instant to the next, they transformed from adversaries with completely opposite agendas into a single, well-oiled machine with two moving parts and one goal-get the hell out of the Galeria Viejo. They reached the window, and he was boosting her up and through even as she was pushing it open. The drop on the other side was about five feet, just enough to give her a second’s pause.

  “Uh…” Geez, it looked like a long way down, the distance made exponentially more difficult by high heels, a tight dress, and a large purse.

  “Do it,” came his gruff command.

  He was right.

  She dropped her purse and threw her shoes after it, one after the other, pulling them off and tossing them onto the roof, doing some sort of squirming rumba while he was holding her, his hands simply all over her, cupping her ass, one hand gripping her thigh, pressing her up against the wall.

  She swore under her breath and, as best she could, shimmied her dress up and over her hips, hitched her knee over the sill, and scrambled the rest of the way out of the window. Her feet barely touched the roof before he landed beside her.

  Geezus. What was he? she wondered. Spring-loaded?

  “Rocket boy,” she muttered, jerking her dress back down.

  Damn. This had not been her plan.

  “White cotton?” was his only reply, his tone slightly disparaging… or maybe that was disappointment she was hearing.

  Tough, she thought, leaning over and quickly slipping back into her shoes. Her underwea
r wasn’t any of his business.

  When she wobbled a little, his hands were there, one on her arm, one on her waist, steadying her, hurrying her up.

  Besides, everyone knew white cotton was best next to the skin.

  “They’re organic.” It wasn’t any of his business, but there wasn’t anything plain about her underwear. Quite the contrary, they cost a small fortune, the cotton grown on a farm in Alabama, the panties delicately stitched by hand in Tuscaloosa and shipped to a specialty shop in San Francisco.

  He muttered something she didn’t quite hear, which was probably just as well, so she ignored him, and by the time another loud crash sounded from inside the building, they were on the far side of the rooftop, with him helping her drop into the safety of the alley-a steaming, reeking, disgustingly garbage-strewn alley.

  “Oh.” The little gust of sound escaped her on a gasp. The stench was overwhelming, and she’d landed on something soft, and rotten, and squishy something that oozed up over the sides of her peep-toe pumps.

  He didn’t give her much time to worry about her shoes, though, only about a second and a half before he took her arm and started hustling her along, heading down the alley and away from the gallery.

  “Dammit,” she swore under her breath, and it wasn’t because of her damn shoes. Everything going to hell in a handbasket was unacceptable, especially when somebody else was suddenly and unexpectedly doing the driving.

  All she could guarantee was that he wasn’t going to be doing it for very damn long-oh, hell no.

  Yeah, Dax was swearing, too, because he was an idiot-a stone-cold, no-excuses idiot.

  This woman…

  He swore again.

  This woman, the one he had his hand wrapped around like he wasn’t going to let go, the one wearing freakin’ organic panties, she was trouble. He needed to take her to her hotel, pack her and her white cotton undies up, and put her on a plane out of here. Whatever she thought she was doing, and whoever in the hell she was working for, they’d all been wrong.

  Wrong to send her to fucking Ciudad del Este.

  Wrong to hook her up with a loser like Jimmy Ruiz.

  Wrong to put her within a hundred miles of Esteban Ponce, Levi Asher, and fucking Erich Warner.

  And damn wrong to put her up against a guy like him, and in this kind of game, there was always a guy like him.

  He tightened his hold on her, which was ridiculous. She didn’t need him holding on to her. He knew it. She’d been getting around on her own for thirty-two years, most of it in three-inch heels, and as far as he’d been able to tell from his investigation, she’d never even scraped a knee, let alone broken a bone.

  And yet, for reasons that were damned annoying and had nothing to do with anything even remotely resembling logic, he’d suddenly decided it was his damn job to keep her that way.

  From his vantage point in a rented room high up on the seventh floor of the Pioneros Building, the shooter watched the bust go down at the Galeria Viejo.

  Christ. He checked his watch. That hadn’t taken long to go straight to hell, and his target, Erich Warner, hadn’t even shown up. Esteban Ponce had, though, which meant that the rumors, and the intel, and the trail, had run true. Remy Beranger had the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III. The fuckup youngest son of Arturo Ponce wouldn’t have shown up for anything less, not at some dive gallery in Ciudad del Este.

  A four-thousand-year-old statue with the power to grant everlasting life, that was the prize on the block, and with his old man croaking out the last few weeks of terminal cancer, Esteban must have figured he could save the day-and it was that kind of thinking that made him the fuckup son.

  The other players in Beranger’s were unknowns, but he’d taken their pictures and, with a little luck, would have them identified by tonight, the sooner the better. If one of them was acting as a proxy for Warner, he needed to pick them up and shake them down. The bodyguards were unimportant and easy to pick out, but that still left a short fat guy in a pale blue suit; the taller, solidly built guy who’d been watching the gallery from the Mercado for the last couple of hours; and most intriguingly, the woman that guy had just hustled out of the building and down the alley.

  She was stunningly beautiful, but that wasn’t what had caught his interest, at least not initially. He’d been watching her through his rifle scope when she’d lowered her sunglasses to glare at one of the men Ponce had left at the gallery’s front door, and for an instant, when he’d first seen her face, she’d actually stolen his breath, stopped it cold in his chest.

  It was about the only damn thing in the world that unnerved him, having his breath stop cold in his chest-for obvious reasons.

  He checked back through his scope, and for a moment just enjoyed the easy roll and sway of her hips as she walked down the alley.

  She had, by anybody’s measure, a world-class ass.

  But she was headed out of there, and he needed to head in, find out what was going on, and if the situation was as it appeared, take the damn Sphinx and get the hell back out. Rumors of the statue’s appearance on the world stage had been percolating for four months and then spread like wildfire over the last couple of days, when it had supposedly arrived in Ciudad del Este, sporting a price tag of a million dollars cash just to get into the party. The auction would start from there. Anyone who was listening knew it was here.

  Warner was listening, guaranteed, listening hard, getting desperate, and rightly so-the German’s days were numbered.

  Leaning forward, he snapped the lens covers closed on the scope, and in under a minute, well under, he had his M91 BDR.308 broken down and stowed, each piece of the rifle placed snugly into the foam core of a hard case. Next, he checked the charge on his TacVector, a nonlethal weapon of his own design that he carried in an extra-long holster rig under his right arm. Under his left arm, he was packing a.45, a Springfield 1911-A1, cocked, locked, loaded, and by anybody’s measure, supremely lethal, especially in his hands.

  The Memphis Sphinx.

  Sonuvabitch.

  That bastard in Washington, the spymaster, the shooter’s nemesis par excellence, had actually done it: concocted a trap of near-Machiavellian dimensions and baited it with the one thing guaranteed to draw Erich Warner out into the open, the promise of everlasting life-and that was a real bad deal for old Warner, the cool million aside, because in this game, the German was just another piece of bait.

  CHAPTER SIX

  São Paulo, Brazil

  Erich Warner read the text message on his phone, then settled back into his chair and shifted his attention to the young iguana tethered next to him. With an absentminded grace, he slowly ran his finger down the reptile’s comblike spine. They were on the wide front porch of an exquisitely restored plantation house, overlooking a cerulean ocean. A jeweled leather collar encircled the beast’s thick neck, with a linked chain running from the collar to the railing where the animal basked in the sun. It wasn’t much of a chain, not quite a meter in length, not quite enough to keep the youngster from hanging himself if he fell off the rail.

  Erich liked keeping his possessions on a short leash-like the golden-skinned woman sleeping naked on a low bed at the far end of the porch. Her name was Shoko, and she, too, wore a jeweled collar. Like the iguana’s, her collar had come from Tiffany’s. Unlike the iguana’s, hers was made of platinum and encrusted with diamonds, an inch-wide band of icy clarity resting on sun-warmed skin.

  She’d chosen it herself, the same way she’d chosen the tattoo gracing her left hip, a swastika radiating out of a kanji, a Japanese character for “hero.” Nazi Hero-a personal calling card his beautiful slave girl tended to leave in the most surprising places, usually cut into somebody’s flesh.

  In recent memory, the tattoo and the necklace had been the only choices he’d allowed her, the Blade Queen of Bangkok, for slave she’d been born, and slave she was, forever and always his, a gift… of sorts, a twisted beauty from a twisted place, received in payment for an overdue debt fr
om a very, very twisted little man.

  He ran his finger down the length of the iguana’s spine again.

  Dr. Souk had been so brilliant, except in his choice of associates, but the man hadn’t been the first or the last overindulged, slightly deranged scientist to fall prey to Hamzah Negara, an Indonesian warlord whose base of operations had been on the island of Sumba in the Sabu Sea. Souk had simply been the first and last of Erich’s overindulged, slightly deranged scientists to defect to Negara. They were both dead now, unfortunately not by Erich’s own hand.

  Negara had been such a fool, allowing himself to be used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and for his foolishness, he’d ended up splattered across the living room of his house on Sumba, his brains blown out by a sniper’s bullet. Before all the foolishness, though, before Negara had seduced Souk away, there had been years of research and a burgeoning business in psychopharmaceuticals. There had been the lab Erich had built for the demented Dr. Souk in Bangkok. There had been deals in the millions of dollars. And there had been freaks of nature like Shoko, lab experiments gone awry-like so many of Souk’s experiments had gone awry Some days, the lab had resembled a charnel house of destroyed human and barely human beings. But the drugs had been beautiful, cutting-edge pharmaceuticals with names like XT7, XXG2, NG4, and the notorious BBE5, all of them razor sharp at the molecular level, capable of reshaping the landscape of the human brain with remarkable results-like Shoko, a woman so sleek and strong, so capable, so ruthless, so unfathomably unique. She had no heart, not in the metaphorical sense, no compassion, no empathy. No sense of mercy or justice.

  She was perfect, and perfectly self-sufficient, except in one small area, and therein lay Erich’s short leash. She needed him as much as she needed air, water, and food. Without him, she would simply cease to exist, her potential demise so gruesome, she dared not cross him-ever, not in this world.