Cutting Loose

by Tara Janzen

  “He needs to get over it and get back in here.”

  Gabriel Shore was the expert in residence on Spencer Bayonne, the guy who’d killed Jason Schroder and the one who was after Zach. Dylan would like for him to concentrate on the job at hand, which was helping SDF know its enemy.

  As far as what had brought Gabriel Shore to Steele Street, the bounty on his sister, well, that wasn’t quite the crisis the boy thought. Dylan understood the kid’s guilt, and his sense of responsibility, but if anyone could take care of herself, it was Red Dog, no matter what kind of money was on the table. That said, Dylan wasn’t going to take any chances. He’d learned enough about Kendryk to be very wary of the guy. Two million dollars was nothing to Lord Weymouth, but it was more than enough to complicate Gillian’s life. More than enough reason for Dylan to want to take him down—and for that, he could use a little help from Gabriel Shore.

  “Dr. Shore,” he called out. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go over Kendryk’s intelligence network files again.”

  “Yes…uh, sir,” the guy said, and with a last look at Cherie’s desk, he turned around and headed back to Dylan’s office.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Saturday, 6:00 P.M.—northern New Mexico

  Zach had been wrong.

  Paysen had not been the middle of nowhere.

  This was the middle of nowhere, wherever this was.

  An hour and a half of driving along dry, rutted tracks and washed-out roads had brought them to someplace he’d never been before: lost. Twice, he and Lily had found themselves creeping down the side of a canyon on a road so narrow, he’d been afraid Charlotte was going to completely balk.

  Before, he’d always been of the mind that as long as there was a road, a person was not lost.

  Well, he’d been wrong about that, too. He and Lily were on a road, they’d been on half a dozen in the last hour, and he was clueless, although he did have a growing suspicion that they were going around in circles.

  He couldn’t confirm the circle theory, because he’d lost SB303, and that was a hardship. He’d gotten attached to the girl and spoiled rotten by her intel. The road, and he used the term loosely, kept bottoming out in dry creekbeds and arroyos and killing their reception.

  Where in the hell were they, he wondered, and why couldn’t they get the hell out of here?

  “You must have something to say,” he said, throwing Lily a glance. She was yawning, just waking up.

  No woman could possibly have nothing to say in this situation.

  “We’re lost,” she said after finishing her yawn. “I’m hot, and I’m tired, and I’m hungry for something besides crackers, and this place kind of reminds me of home, all the wide open space. And you never have told me why we’re running our asses off and why people keep shooting at us. You haven’t told me what’s on or in the bracelet that’s worth dying for, or who in the hell you really work for.”

  Well, that was more than she’d been saying. She’d actually drifted off after the first half hour of driving, just slipped into sleep over on her side of the car, and he’d let her.

  “I’m not sure we’re heading north anymore,” he said, making the only appropriate comment.

  “We’re not,” she confirmed, and pointed straight out the windshield. “That’s west.”

  Smart-aleck Montana ranch girl, he thought.

  “Uh…thanks,” he said.

  “So why are we getting shot at all over the place?” she asked.

  “I think the better question is how do we get out of here and back to a paved road?”

  To her credit, she didn’t harp on the shooting, and she accepted his question at face value. She evaluated it, taking another look around at the road, and the scrub, and the dirt, and the low rolling hills that just seemed to keep rolling no matter how long he drove.

  “Well, for starters,” she said, “we could stop going around in circles. We have definitely been in this exact spot before. I think just before I fell asleep.”

  Finally, he’d gotten something right. Dammit. He should have been a Ranger. U.S. Army Rangers never got lost. Well, almost never.

  “Got any ideas on how to get out of this spot?”

  “Higher ground. We need to get the big picture,” she said, and pointed to the left, yawning again. “Pull over up ahead, about a hundred yards on the left, at the top of that rise.”

  “I tried the higher-ground theory while you were snoring.”

  “I don’t snore.”

  “Dream on, babe.”

  He drove the hundred yards or so and pulled over anyway, parking them on the rise in the same place he’d parked earlier, and then the two of them got out of the car and moved to the front. They both leaned back on the hood and took in the view. If it wasn’t for the bracelet hidden in the heel of his shoe, a real tradecraft touch, Zach might have been able to relax and enjoy the view a lot more, because there was something familiar about it. Maybe it was just that so much of this part of northern New Mexico looked the same—exactly the same. Quiet, and still, with not much moving besides the wind and the mirage. Heat shimmered off everything, blurring the distinction between land and sky. A lizard darted from one rock to the next, the only sign of life.

  And he meant only. There was nothing else out there moving, not in the heat of the day. The road they were on snaked across the landscape below, intersecting with two other dirt tracks before they all meandered over the horizon or disappeared behind a bluff. He’d turned right at the first intersection the last time they’d been down there, and they’d ended up here again, after five long, hot, dusty miles. He mentally checked it off the list of choices.

  “This is nice,” she said, leaning into him and taking his hand.

  Nice because of her, he thought, and he was crazy—leaning back against Charlotte, looking at New Mexico, and feeling fairly content. What the hell was up with that? And what in the hell was he doing slipping his fingers between hers? Sleeping with her? There were no tactical advantages in the acts. They were personal, and he wasn’t in any place to be getting personal.

  He usually had better sense.

  Correction: He always had better sense.

  And yet he didn’t let go of her hand.

  “We’re running because people are shooting at us,” he said, watching the wind kick up dust devils on the scrubby terrain. “But you already knew that.”

  She turned her head and looked up at him, and he continued.

  “They’re shooting for one of two reasons: either to stop us, like the manager at the Road Runner, or to kill us, like the men in your house, which is just another way of stopping us.” He looked down and caught her gaze. “You already knew that, too.”

  “Go on.” A small smirk of a smile touched the corner of her lips, and he was tempted to just kiss it off her.

  “You know they want to stop us so they can get the bracelet, and you know why the bracelet is worth dying for.”

  “I do?” A slight breeze ruffled her hair, and she reached up to tuck it back behind her ear.

  He held up two fingers. “Power and money. They’re what makes the world go round, and the bracelet is loaded with both.”

  “And that’s it? The answers to my questions?”

  He nodded. “That’s it.”

  “What about love?” she said, her gaze holding his. “I thought love was what made the world go round.”

  Yeah, love.

  Love was a good question. Confusing as hell, but a good question. Love didn’t make sense. He hardly knew her, but he had this damned compelling urge to find out everything he could about her. Not the dossier stuff Alex had given him, all the facts of her life. No, he wanted the good stuff. He wanted the inside stuff.

  “Your mom died when you were eight,” he said. “That must have been tough.”

  She gave a small shrug. “Sure it was. I still miss her sometimes. But I have an older sister who filled in pretty well, taking care of me, and I’ve got three older brothers,
and my dad, and a place where I always belong.”

  “The Cross Double R,” he said.

  “Yes, and that’s a lot more than some people have. Maybe even more than most people.”

  She was right.

  “So you’re the baby of the family?”

  She let out a soft laugh. “So to speak. I do have seven nieces and nephews now. But overall, I think I still own the ‘most likely to get into trouble when you least expect it’ spot in the family.”

  “Like running off to El Salvador?”

  She shook her head. “I planned that trip. There was no running off.”

  “There was plenty of getting into trouble.”

  She couldn’t deny it, and she didn’t.

  “Bad timing on my part,” she admitted. “I picked the week St. Joseph’s self-destructed. Believe me, if I’d seen Diego Garcia coming, I would definitely have gone the other way.”

  “What about Tom Bersani? You must have seen him coming.” It had been part of her file—the divorce, the marriage. It had only lasted six years, not very long in the scheme of things.

  “What I saw was tall, dark, handsome, and exotic, someone from someplace besides Trace, Montana. Somebody who didn’t talk about horses and cattle, and who didn’t wear slant-heeled boots.”

  “He’s Italian.”

  “Very Italian, complete with an Italian mama who thinks he can do no wrong—but how do you know about Tom? And where in the world did you find out about my mom dying when I was eight? Or do I already know the answer to those questions, too?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  She let out a heavy sigh. “I bet one of the first things they teach you is how to answer questions without telling anybody anything they don’t already know.”

  He almost smiled, then leaned down and kissed her instead.

  “So why the divorce?” he asked after a moment of sweet, brief contact with her mouth.

  “Donna,” she said, and he gave her a quizzical glance. “Donna, and Debra, and Karen, and Tina. To my credit, I didn’t know about Debra and Karen and Tina until after we’d already filed for divorce. I thought I was leaving him because of Donna, one of the secretaries at the law firm where he was an up-and-coming star. It was only after we filed that I realized it wasn’t just one secretary, but the whole damn secretarial pool he was fooling around with.”

  How awful.

  “I’ve been cheated on—twice, as far as I know. It made me crazy both times.” Somehow, he’d never really blamed Jewel for leaving him. But he’d never had any confirmation that she’d been sleeping with the poet she’d ended up marrying within weeks of walking out on him. Consequently, there’d never been any confrontation.

  And he’d been bad for her. In his heart, he’d been almost glad she’d gotten away. Not so with Sonja, a Swedish aid worker he’d lived with in Laos. He’d been hard in love with the blond beauty and could have killed her for screwing around on him. He’d left Laos instead.

  “Have you ever been married?” Lily asked.

  Finally, a question he could answer straight out.

  “No.”

  “Girlfriends? Besides the two who cheated?”

  “A few.” He grinned. “How about you? How many hearts did you break before you married Bersani?”

  “A few.”

  His grin broadened. “You’re a quick learner.”

  “I have lots of other things I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Like?”

  “Like Shelby Cobra Mustangs are my favorite car. I could keep that to myself.”

  “Do you want to drive again?”

  “Without the handcuffs?”

  He at least had the decency to look sheepish. “I didn’t have time to talk you into anything this morning.”

  “The cell-phone bomb thing really sucked.”

  “But it worked,” he said. “It got you out of the line of fire and kept you exactly where I needed you to be.”

  She didn’t say anything, only rolled in closer to him, bringing her body up against his, her head resting in the curve of his neck and shoulder. He felt a sigh leave her, felt her relax against him.

  “I don’t even know you,” she said after another long moment of silence. “And I don’t really understand what we’re up against, no matter how much I can figure out or guess at.”

  And he’d probably already said too much.

  “There are lots of things I can tell you, Lily, just not about the job. When we’re out of this, maybe we can—”

  “Hola, pendejo.” The Bazo came to life inside the Shelby. “If you’re there, come in.”

  That was not SB303, he thought. He kissed Lily on the top of the head, then quickly walked back to the driver’s door and leaned down through the window. SB303 had way too much class to be calling him an asshole.

  “Jefe,” he said. Boss.

  “Where have you been?” Dylan asked.

  “You tell me,” he said, hoping to hell Dylan actually could tell him where he’d been.

  “We found a place for you to wait out the day, not too far from where you’re at,” Dylan said, looking ridiculously pleased with himself. “It’s on a route we’re mapping to bring you in the back door to Denver, keep you off the interstate as much as possible. It’ll take longer, but it will be safer. As long as the cops know where you are, Bayonne knows where you are, and anybody else out there.”

  “Sounds good,” Zach said. “But we haven’t seen anything out here, and we’ve been looking.” For almost two hours, he could have told him.

  “This place is hard to find, which has always been the point of it, but you won’t have any trouble.”

  Okay, he was hooked.

  “What have you got in mind?” he asked.

  “An oasis,” Dylan said, a grin spreading across his face. “Sanctuary. Alazne’s.”

  Alazne’s?

  “You’re kidding.” No wonder everything looked so damn familiar.

  “Not at all.” Dylan let out a short laugh. “Two miles north, on the road you’re on. We’ll put the map up on your Bazo. You can’t miss it, and Zach?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stay out of trouble.”

  “Sure, jefe.” He could stay out of trouble at Alazne’s. It’s what they’d all done.

  Half an hour later, Lily was no longer anywhere close to being tired. She was enchanted, delighted, and wide awake. Rose-colored adobe walls, robin’s egg blue shutters and doors, a stone courtyard with a bubbling fountain and flowers everywhere—she’d never seen a prettier place than where the people in Denver had directed them.

  “You know the woman who lives here?” she asked, even though he’d already said as much. It was just that the little house and the perfect gardens were so…so female, everything so lush and delicate. Even the barn where he’d hidden the car had been sweet-smelling, full of drying flowers and herbs. It was hard to imagine a man being here, being invited in…except in one way.

  “Yes.” He opened a wooden gate, and they entered the courtyard.

  “How well do you know her?” She slid him a curious glance, and he laughed.

  “Very well, and then some, and then even better than that.” He grinned.

  “You jerk.” He didn’t have to say it like that, even though she’d figured as much.

  “I was seventeen. She was twenty-eight, and she kept me for a month,” he said, closing the gate behind them, still grinning.

  “Oh.”

  Oh, my.

  “That must have been…uh, educational,” she said, at a bit of a loss. She’d never heard of anybody who’d, well, who’d done anything quite like that.

  “Very,” he said, “and at the end of a month, she shooed me back home.”

  Walking over to a small table in the shade, she stretched up on her tiptoes to smell the flowers on the trees. They were irresistible, the branches heavy with blooms, filling the courtyard with scent.

  He came up behind her and slid his arm around her waist, then be
nt his head and kissed the side of her neck. “But we keep in touch. We all keep in touch with Alazne.”

  “We?”

  “The guys I grew up with.”

  “And did they come and spend a month with her, too?”

  “Some did. The ones she chose.” He kissed her cheek.

  “Sounds like a racket to me.” Honestly, what kind of woman did that?

  “It was.” He let out a soft laugh and kissed her again. “A lovely racket.”

  “Did she teach you this?” His mouth was warm on her skin, his body a hard wall of muscle at her back.

  “She taught me everything.” He kissed her one more time and took her by the hand, leading her toward the blue door. “Come on.”

  “And I have to meet this woman?” God, she’d barely met him.

  “No,” he said. “She’s not home. If she was home, the door would be open.”

  Lily looked around at the goats in the pen, and the fountain bubbling, at the open windows and the curtains fluttering in the soft breeze. “The place seems pretty open to me, like somebody could steal everything without breaking a sweat.”

  “Nobody is going to steal from Alazne. She’s a bruja, a sorceress.”

  Oh, great.

  “Don’t worry. She won’t mind us being here, and when the sun goes down, we’ll leave.”

  “For Denver,” she said.

  “Yeah. This will all be over in Denver, Lily. I promise.”

  She believed him, but somehow, instead of being a relief, the idea of it all being over depressed the hell out of her. She wanted the danger to be over, the damn bracelet, the getting shot at, the violence, but not him. She didn’t want him to ever be over, and that hardly made any more sense now than it had last night, when she’d thought she’d never see him again.

  Damn. She hoped this wasn’t love. She wasn’t ready for love.

  But she was ready for Alazne’s, for preparing a meal with him and finding out he could cook, for taking a shower with him and finding out how easily making love three times in one day could turn into four, and for sitting in the shade of the trees and listening to the fountain splash.

  “So about those things you can tell me,” she prompted, scooping up a bit of their freshly made pico de gallo on a small tortilla chip. “Does that include where you grew up?”