Deadly Valentine

by Davis, Justine; Davis, Justine

  But he picked up an electronic stylus and commenced sketching rapidly. It didn’t take long before Colt announced, “You’ll forgive the roughness of the sketch. This is the first time I’ve actually written it down. I believe your scientists will get the idea, however.”

  Gray-hair examined the intricate drawing closely. Layla couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, but then, she was no engineer. A printer across the room spit out a copy of Colt’s drawing. One of the thugs let go of her arm and moved over to retrieve it. He showed it to Gary-hair, who nodded tersely.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Captain McQuade.”

  Colt replied tiredly, “Go to hell.”

  And just like that, Gray-hair and his associates had let her go and swept out of the room. She rushed forward and wrapped her arms around Colt as he swayed on the stool.

  “Are you crazy?” she cried. “How could you have done that?”

  He straightened in her arms all of a sudden, abruptly much stronger and more alert than he’d been when the thugs were in the room. “That was quite some display of mama-bear rage, Layla,” he murmured in amusement. “Very convincing. Couldn’t have fooled them without you.”

  Fooled them? What the heck was he talking about? “I beg your pardon?” she demanded. “You mean you put me through hell like that and it was an act? I thought they were killing you!”

  He grinned. “Oh, they made a good faith effort to mess me up. Succeeded to some degree, too. But I wasn’t about to die with the rest of my life with you in it waiting for me.”

  “The rest—” she started.

  The door burst open and a half-dozen armed men in military uniforms burst into the room. She started violently, flinging herself protectively in front of Colt as best she could. Apparently, she wasn’t quite done playing mama bear, yet.

  “We’re the good guys, ma’am,” one of them announced in alarm.

  Like she could tell the difference from the good guys and the bad guys at this point? She harrumphed, unimpressed.

  Someone called out, “Captain McQuade, tell her.”

  An amused voice came from behind her. “These are my guys, Layla. They work for me. I trust them completely. Did you catch that bastard and his minions?”

  “Yes, sir. We apprehended your captor and his men in the hall before we came in here. They never knew what hit them. A few of the guys are loading them in one of our vans and taking them in for questioning now.”

  Layla’s jaw dropped. “How did this happen? Are you sure you can trust these men, Colt? I thought you said someone sabotaged the mission—”

  He put an arm around her waist and drew her close. “Sabotaged it from the outside, honey. Not from within my unit. These guys nearly died trying to save me and keep me from getting captured.”

  One of them piped up, “He’s telling the truth. We fought like hell to go back and get him. He was the one who ordered us to leave him and save ourselves.”

  Colt spoke up mildly, “Sweetheart, if you wouldn’t mind putting away your claws for a few minutes, I could use a little medical attention. I wouldn’t say no to a spot of morphine right about now.”

  She spun, concerned. Who knew she had all these raging maternal instincts? Maybe she was cut out to have kids after all. And if Colt meant what he’d said about having her in the rest of his life…

  Two soldiers rushed forward and shouldered her aside to examine Colt.

  Before she hardly knew what had hit her, she and Colt had been whisked out of what turned out to be a big brick building and into a large step van. At least twenty more men in military uniforms milled around outside. A big cheer went up when she and Colt emerged from the building. Colt grinned and waved at them.

  “Where are we going?” she murmured to him as the two of them were loaded into a step van.

  “There’s a military hospital not too far from here. I imagine that’s where they’re taking us. They’ll treat my injuries and make sure you’re not dehydrated or in shock.”

  “I may be shocked, but I’m not in shock,” she declared stoutly. Although it took a few minutes bumping down a road in the van for her really accept that they were safe. Alive. Nightmare over.

  It took a few minutes more for her adrenaline level to drop enough for her to begin thinking even close to logically again. And as soon as she did, her first question to McQuade’s men was, “How did you guys find us?”

  One of them laughed. “You, ma’am.”

  “Excuse me?” She blinked at the soldier in surprise.

  “We’ve been, umm, keeping an eye on the captain for the past few weeks. He said someone was trying to kill him and we believed him. When some of our superiors seemed inclined to blow off his claims, it turned out a bunch of the guys in our unit had family emergencies of one kind or another and we all ended up on leave.”

  Colt piped up from the stretcher he was lying on in the middle of the van, “And what? You followed me?”

  “As much as we could. With all due respect, sir, you’re pretty hard to keep tabs on when you don’t want to be found.”

  Grins passed around the van and another soldier took up the tale. “You seemed to get spooked about a week ago and we lost you when you went to ground. But then a Valentine’s card appeared in your mailbox waiting to be mailed. We read the address and staked out the place.” He nodded at Layla. “Your apartment, ma’am. Sure enough, sir, you showed up there a couple of nights ago and we had your trail again.”

  Colt swore softly. “Amateur mistake to use my own mailbox.”

  One of the other men added, “Good thing you did. Only way we found you. That Valentine’s card was a lucky break for us.”

  Layla smiled at Colt. That card was turning out to be lucky in more ways than Colt’s men knew. He smiled back at her, and then said, “Continue. How did you men find us today?”

  “Well,” the first one said, “not only did you two show up at her place a few nights ago, but those thugs who were after you did, too.”

  Layla interrupted, “Who are they, anyway?”

  “The ringleader used to work for the Defense Research Agency. He got fired a while back and went into business trying to steal American military research secrets. He used what he knew from before he left the agency to track down various important researchers and bribe or blackmail them into selling him information. The he sold it to the highest bidder on the black market.”

  Layla reached out to hold Colt’s hand. “So why did this guy go after Colt?”

  Colt himself answered that one. “Not me. Peter.”

  The men around them nodded. “Anyway,” one of them continued, “we were just going to follow you two, but then that information broker got onto your trail. So, we tailed him.”

  One of the other men laughed. “Yeah, and he was a hell of a lot easier to follow than you two. He left a trail a mile wide.” The guy shrugged. “He seemed to lose you yesterday. But then all of a sudden yesterday afternoon he went crazy and made a beeline for some mountain in the middle of nowhere. We tagged along, and when he captured you two, we moved in for the kill.”

  “You could’ve busted in a little sooner,” Layla griped.

  Colt squeezed her hand. “It’s not as easy as it looks to barge in and rescue hostages. Particularly if you want those hostages to live. We’re alive and that bastard is in custody. It all worked out okay.”

  The soldiers laughed. “It helped when your girl went crazy. She provided just the distraction we needed to pull the attention of the lookouts away from the approaches to your location. Once they were all watching her go crazy and trying to subdue her, we were able to move in.”

  Layla stared at the fellow in blank disbelief. She’d helped rescue them? Seriously? Warmth started to spread inside her. Well, all right, then.

  She frowned down at Colt lying on the ambulance cot. “Why did you give them Peter’s design?”

  He grinned up at her. “I didn’t. Peter explained to me once how a microwave oven works, so I drew a sch
ematic of that. With as many embellishments as I could think of to make it look complicated.”

  “For real? But what if they’d realized what you’d done? Wouldn’t they have killed you? Wasn’t that a heck of a risk to take?”

  He laughed. “You must be getting back to your usual self. You’re firing forty-two questions at a time at me again.”

  She made a face at him. “What about the real design, then?”

  He tapped his head. “All in here. As soon as I get access to another computer-design system, I should be able to sketch it out for the real Defense Research Agency.”

  “Then it’s truly over?” she asked.

  He looked at her in quick concern. “The mission’s over, yes. But hopefully not us.”

  She smiled brilliantly at him. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d made that comment about the rest of his life with her? Cool.

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her down to him. He scooted over a little in the bed and she stretched out beside him. She felt a little weird cuddling in front of his men, but if he didn’t mind, she didn’t, either. It was a tight fit on the narrow cot, but she didn’t plan on being more than a few inches away from him for some time to come anyway. They lay together in silence for a few minutes while she reflected on the past few days.

  Finally, she said, “Do you remember what today is?”

  “Sunday?”

  “No. Valentine’s Day!”

  He commented casually, “Hmm. Interesting.” A pause. “Did you know that more men propose to their girlfriends on Valentine’s Day than on any other day of the year by a factor of ten?”

  Her heart bumped hard against her ribs. “Is that so? I never knew.”

  “The way I heard it from Pete, you never really got into the spirit of the Valentine’s Day much, though.”

  “I never had anyone to get into the spirit of it with,” she retorted.

  “Ahh. So there might be hope for me convincing you it’s a worthy holiday?” he asked.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  He shifted and slid out from underneath her. She sat up in alarm. A couple of grinning soldiers slid over to make room for him and he knelt on the floor of the van in front of her.

  “Layla, I feel like I’ve known you forever. Meeting you in person confirmed everything I already knew about you from Pete. He always said you and I would make a perfect couple, and I have to agree with him. You have been my anchor and my sanity. You have saved my life and saved my soul. Will you do me the very great honor of considering becoming my wife?”

  Okay, that was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said in the history of the world—at least that anyone had ever said to her. A smile spread through her heart and across her face, so big and wide she could barely contain it.

  “No—” she started.

  A collective indrawn breath echoed sharply against the metal van walls.

  She continued on, “I won’t just consider it, Colt. Of course I’ll marry you!”

  He wrapped her in his arms and kissed her thoroughly while his men cheered around them. Beneath the din, he murmured to her, “I am crazy, you know. Crazy about you.”

  “Do you realize that next year I’m going to have to hex you and me at our annual Valentine’s dinner?”

  He chuckled. “Sounds like a new tradition. Pete would approve.”

  And so he would have. Funny how across time and even the veil of death itself, Peter had managed to bring the two of them together. That had been some Valentine’s card, indeed.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-8501-3

  DEADLY VALENTINE

  Copyright © 2011 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  The publisher acknowledges the copyright holders of the individual works as follows:

  HER UN-VALENTINE

  Copyright © 2011 by Janice Davis Smith

  THE FEBRUARY 14TH SECRET

  Copyright © 2011 by Cynthia Dees

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