At the corner, Travis held up a hand for them to stay. He popped his head out, took in the situation, glanced back at Eric, and then dashed out toward the SUV parked next to the manager’s office.
Travis got the vehicle started, but that drew the attention of the attackers. They turned their guns on him as he ducked and put the car in gear. As Eric watched, three bullets hit the side of the SUV, but the change of focus left the gunmen vulnerable and four of them went down almost immediately under fire from Mac and Marco.
That left, as far as Eric could see, two. Good odds.
“Let’s go!” Travis shouted, slewing the SUV around so that the side doors faced their little crew of refugees. As the two gunmen jumped into a Jeep driven by a third, Mac, Helene, and Fritz stuffed themselves into the backseat. Marco was already in the process of stealing a second vehicle, into which Eric tossed Jane. After firing off a volley of shots at the Jeep, he swung himself into the car, and Marco took off, following Travis.
“Where are we going?” Jane asked.
“Mexico City. To the embassy. We’ll be ahead of schedule, but nothing to be done for that right now. It’s still our best bet.”
“Split,” Marco said, peeling off from behind Travis. The Jeep stayed on their tail.
“Tell Travis to get his ass to Mexico City. We can handle these guys.”
Marco relayed the message. Eric checked the magazine in his pistol. “What else do we have?”
“Not a lot. But neither do they. You want to try to outrun them, or take them down here?”
“Here. If we damage the car, we’re in worse shape. Find a choice position.”
“Will do.”
A few minutes later, Marco pulled off the road at the top of a hill into a small copse of trees. “This is as good as it’s gonna get.”
“Right. Jane, stay down.”
The Jeep had been on their tail for most of the trip, but it had dropped back slightly after its occupants had failed to shoot out their tires. Eric couldn’t see it, and that made him damned nervous. Where the hell were they? What was taking them so long?
Just as he was about to venture out of their cover, he heard it. He steadied his pistol on the trunk of the car and waited for them to come into view. Marco had already taken his rifle and climbed a tree, settling himself in for a long shot. The Jeep had been in view for less than a second when one of Marco’s bullets took out the engine. A second went through the windshield, and it was dead in the road. Eric signaled for Marco to stay in the tree and approached the Jeep. Inside, he found the driver dead and one man with his arms out the window.
“Open the door using the outside handle and get out,” he ordered. The man obeyed. “Where’s your fucking boss? Where’s Velasquez?”
The man looked past Eric and smiled. “Where’s your girlfriend?”
Eric whipped around to see Velasquez holding a pistol pressed against Jane’s temple. No wonder the Jeep had taken so long—they’d stopped to let him out. And while both Eric and Marco had been focused on the Jeep, he’d snuck up on Jane.
“Say good-bye, asshole,” Velasquez said.
“You know the minute you hurt her, you’re dead.”
“I’m dead anyway after this clusterfuck. So—”
Jane dropped to the ground, pulling him off balance, and Eric and Marco fired in unison. Velasquez’s head exploded, blood and bone and brain matter flying everywhere.
“If I were you,” Marco called from his perch to the surviving gunman, “I’d stay very fucking still.”
Eric was beside Jane in an instant. She was shaking, covered in the muck of death, but alive. Alive and relatively uninjured. He gathered her to him. “My God, Janie. Why didn’t you call out?”
“I didn’t know he was there. By the time I saw him, he had the gun. I just kept hoping he would let me out of the car so I could kick him or headbutt him or something. I figured he would want to show off a little. And I knew if he would do that, you’d be able to kill him.”
“I’m so sorry. So sorry it had to come to this. I wanted to take him back to the States for you and throw him in jail. I know that’s your kind of justice.”
And yet again, she surprised him. “Prison will do for Clive. In fact, I can’t wait to see him put on trial. But Velasquez . . . I’d never have felt truly safe, even if he were locked away. He’d forever be the monster in the closet, waiting to get out.”
He dropped his forehead to hers. “My bloodthirsty little love.”
She grinned and his whole body lightened. “Don’t you forget it.”
Epilogue
JANE LOOKED UP from the papers in her lap when she heard the key in the lock. Quibble, the patchwork cat she and Eric had adopted the month before, leaped from her perch on the back of the sofa and headed for the front door. A moment later, Eric appeared, Quibble riding on his shoulder.
“Working again?” he asked, bending down to kiss her. The cat scrambled away, affronted at the lack of attention, and Eric’s laugh rumbled against Jane’s lips. “You work too hard,” he said. He lifted the papers from her lap and set them down on the coffee table, then settled next to her.
“You’re a fine one to talk.” She ran a hand through his hair, and damp strands clung to her fingers. “You even showered at headquarters.”
“Yeah, I had time before Nash could see me for a debrief anyway.” He took her hand, playing with her fingers. “I ran into Trey.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He says he’s fine.”
“But you don’t believe him.”
He gave her a half smile. “He’s wrapped almost as tight as you used to be. Bringing the kid’s body back was good, but I don’t know that he’ll ever forgive himself for the shooting.” It had taken nearly a month to straighten out all the jurisdictional and logistical issues with the Mexican government. When Alvaro’s body had at last been released, Trey had insisted on being the one to go get him. He’d accompanied the body back to the United States and had helped the Peraltas make arrangements to take their son home to Argentina for burial. He would also, no doubt, have confessed his role in the boy’s death had not the terms of HSE’s agreement with Homeland Security forbidden it.
Everyone involved in Jane’s rescue, the destruction of the lab in Mexico, or the attempted recovery of the data from Bryan’s experiments was expressly forbidden from revealing any of the details of their mission. As for the data itself, Bryan’s thumb drive had been accidentally crushed in transit when Nash’s men had brought him back from Texas, and the cloud servers were mysteriously erased, leaving no way for anyone to replicate the work. A number of officials were less than happy about that, but Jane had thanked Nash profusely enough that he became visibly uncomfortable and claimed no knowledge of how either of those events had occurred.
Although Nash’s agreement with Homeland Security held no power over Jane, she had no desire to talk about that period of her life. And Dani could not. Even now, three months out of the hospital, she still suffered the effects of her injury. She had chosen to stay in New York rather than returning to Argentina with her parents, but she had no recollection of her life as a scientist, and even before her scar had healed she had gone back to modeling. She had trouble speaking, and the doctors were fiddling with the cocktail of drugs she took to control her anxiety and occasional seizures.
It had taken some time, but Jane had slowly become friends with the new Dani, as had Eric. Trey, on the other hand, had never even visited her. He claimed not to want to traumatize her, but Jane was pretty sure it was guilt.
“He feels responsible for Dani, too, don’t you think?”
“I do. He won’t visit her, but LeRon says she’s flagged and anything that shows up about her goes straight to Trey.”
Of course, Jane shared that responsibility. The job she had taken paid significantly less than others in her field,
but she was working with a lab trying to develop drugs and practices for PTSD. In her spare time, she spent hours researching traumatic brain injuries, how they happened, their effects, and therapies.
To the people in her new lab, she was just another scientist. They knew—everyone knew, after Clive and Bryan had been sent to prison at ADX Florence in Colorado for kidnapping and providing aid to a terrorist organization—that she had been through some tough events. They assumed, however, that her life before the kidnapping was very similar to her current one.
It was not. As she rested her head on Eric’s shoulder and his strong fingers massaged her neck, she thought about how fundamentally she had changed. No, she hadn’t gotten pregnant in Mexico, but Eric had moved in with her the day they returned, and shortly afterward they had adopted Quibble. Jane was pretty sure he was working his way up to a proposal, though she couldn’t figure out why he was waiting. It wasn’t as if she was going to say no. But Eric liked to do things at his own pace, so she was content to wait as long as he came home to her after every mission.
Here, finally, were all the pieces she had never even known the puzzle of her life was missing. With Eric’s arms around her and Quibble mewing for dinner—the cat had come by her name honestly, since there was not a single thing she did not opine on loudly—Jane was happy. She tilted her head and pressed a kiss into Eric’s neck.
“Thank you for loving me.”
A laugh rumbled under her ear. “Easiest mission ever.”
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WAS written at an especially difficult time in my life, so first I’d like to say thank you to everyone I know for putting up with me while it was going on. But in particular, I owe both my editor, Leis Pederson, for fixing all the things I messed up, and to my agent, Jessica Faust, for riding herd on everything I couldn’t.
When you’re writing a book about drugs and their development, it’s handy to have a friend in the business. Mine asked not to be named, so I’ll just say she’s awesome and leave it at that. Any mistakes or liberties taken with how labs work and how drugs are developed are mine. When you’re writing about Mexican drugs, it’s also handy to have a copy editor who has a friend in Mexico City to check on the language for you. All copy editors deserve awards, but this was above and beyond!
And of course, many, many thanks to those of you who have read my books, liked my books, reviewed my books, and stuck around to find out more about the people who live in my head. Without you, there would be no books at all.
And last (but never least), my deepest thanks go to my husband. He knows why.
About the Author
LAURA K. CURTIS gave up a life writing dry academic papers for writing decidedly less dry short crime stories and novel-length romantic suspense and contemporary romance. A member of RWA, MWA, ITW, and Sisters in Crime, she has trouble settling into one genre. She has published four romantic suspense novels (Twisted, 2013; Lost, 2014; Echoes, 2015; and Mind Games, 2015), two contemporary romance novels (Toying With His Affections, 2014; Gaming the System, 2015), and a host of short stories, many with a supernatural bent.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons living or dead, business establishments, or events is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Laura Kramarsky
Cover Copyright © 2017 Carrie Devine/Seductive Musings
Cover Image Copyright © annebaek / istock.com
Interior: Typeflow
All rights reserved. The scanning, uploading, or electronic sharing of any part of this book (other than for review purposes) without the permission of the author constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.
This book was originally published by InterMix in November, 2015
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