by Dale Mayer
“Well, like I said, it’s been a long time.”
She was too tired to even giggle. She just held him close, her body completely filled with emotions and energy and humming with music she hadn’t heard ever before. “Is it okay if I nod off to sleep again?”
“Sleep,” he whispered. “We must catch it while we can.”
“Still think it’s a waste,” she murmured.
His hand slipped between her legs as he teased the soft folds, and she groaned. “We can keep going if you want,” he murmured, his voice warm against her ear. He stroked her once, twice, and she could feel faint tremors roaming through her again.
“How is that possible?” she asked with a sigh.
“Sometimes it happens that way.” And he pulled her closer. “To be continued later. Sleep now.”
She sighed, her body completely sated. Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.
Jax lay here, cuddling Abby. His body completely depleted, yet still wanting more. When one tasted heaven, there would never be anything quite like it ever again. And, boy, was she the sweetest thing. But this wasn’t just a physical attraction, and that’s the part that worried him. He really liked her and wanted to get to know her more, spend time with her—hell, spend every damn night possible with her. But how would he do that? He thought back to his arrangement as the Mavericks team lead on this op. He had said one job, and this was his one job. But then what? It seemed like, once with the Mavericks, they were all on call.
Which wasn’t bad. Especially since they could accept or reject each op as it came. Or at least Jax hoped so.
He couldn’t believe that Griffin had found a woman, and now Jax had too. He hadn’t believed it at the time, but now he needed to figure out just what he would do for a job and a career—to make something of his life—so that Abby wouldn’t mind being with him. He didn’t think she’d like him doing these jobs, but maybe she’d understand after seeing just how important her rescue had been. He shelved all thoughts of the future for the moment, closed his eyes, and tried to let his body rest.
When a text came through, he reached for his phone and checked it. A text from Griffin.
They got him.
Jax smiled, dropped the phone beside him, and whispered, “They got him.” He felt her stir.
“They caught Benjamin?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. “Does that mean we get to stay here?”
Just then his phone rang. “I highly doubt it,” he said with a shake of his head. But he leaned over, his body already awakening at the sight of her slumberous eyes. And he slid gently inside her, even as he answered the phone. With one hand, he held her tethered close, and, with his other, he held the phone and asked, “What’s up?”
“We need you back at the hospital,” Beau said. “Security found him.”
“Where was he?”
“Hiding in the laundry room in the hospital basement,” he said. “And he’s telling a very different tale.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Beau said. “Both of you get over here fast.”
“On the way,” he said. He dropped the phone, leaned over, kissed her hard, and pressed his hips against her several times before his own orgasm ripped through him and helped her to climb over the edge once again. And then, as he lay here, trying to breathe, he murmured, “Now we must go.”
She groaned and said, “That’s a hell of a way to wake up.”
“It is, isn’t it?” he said with a chuckle. He leaned over, kissed her hard, and smacked her gently on the bum. “Now.” He got up and headed to the bathroom.
Chapter 18
Back at the hospital, Abby looked at Jax and asked, “They’ll know, won’t they?”
He laughed. “Well, we do look a little too alert to have slept the whole time.”
She smiled and linked her fingers with his. As they walked into the front entrance to the hospital, security met up with them. “Was security behind us the whole way?”
He laughed. “I guess you didn’t see them this time since it’s dark now.”
Beau met them at the doorway and told Jax, “I need you to come with me.” Then he turned to Abby and said, “You have the choice of looking in on Abdul, being with Danny and the boy’s family, or coming with us.”
She hesitated, but Jax made the decision for her. “Let’s get you somewhere you can stay comfortably.” And they quickly diverted her to the sitting room where the rest of the family was. Two of the family’s security guards were here as well. “I’ll send over a couple MI6 agents as well.”
As soon as she was settled, Jax headed off with Beau. She frowned as they disappeared. She didn’t like being separated from him at all and, even worse, it sounded like they had had Benjamin, but they’d lost him. She sat down, and the father looked at her.
“They found him. But they won’t let me speak with him.”
“Understood,” she said. She pulled out her phone and quickly sent a message to Jax. Something’s going on, she texted. What?
Benjamin’s possibly dead.
She gasped as she stared down at the message. Call me.
Can’t. We’ll talk in a few minutes.
She put away her phone and sat, studying the father’s angry face. He kept staring out the window and then back at his wife and then out the window. While Nahim was obviously upset, the wife appeared to be at peace and had curled up on the corner of a couch with her eyes closed. Her belly was cradled in her hands. She had already given birth to five daughters, one son, and now was on her seventh child. The marvel of a woman’s body continuously amazed Abby. As she sat here, she heard a commotion outside. One of the guards stepped out, and the other one stood at attention, waiting for something to happen.
She frowned, got up, walked over to him, and asked, “Do you know what’s going on?”
He shook his head but turned as the door opened. The second guard stepped in, stood at the doorway, looked at her, and said, “You’re needed outside.” Then he stepped backward.
Something about the awkward stiffness to his movements made her worry.
She was called again. “Please come.”
Hesitatingly and with an odd look at the guard now frowning at the door, she said, “I don’t like the sound of this.”
“Neither do I.” He stepped in front of her and went through the double doors. There was a hard spit, and the guard ahead of her collapsed to his knees and fell onto the floor. She was already half out. Her hand was grabbed, and she was dragged all the way out.
“What’s going on?” she cried out. The other guard, his face pale, stood off to the side. Behind him was Benjamin. She stared at him in shock. “They said you were dead.”
“No,” he said. “But I did find a reasonably good facsimile of someone who looks like me. And he’s wearing my ID.”
“That makes sense,” she muttered. “You’re too mean to die.”
He smiled at her warmly. “Nonsense,” he said. “I was never mean to you. At least not when you were nice to me. You’re the one who insists on causing me trouble.” Then he looked at the other soldier and said, “Go help your friend.”
Immediately the soldier walked over and bent to check on his friend’s condition. When a second hard spit came, he keeled over on top of the first body.
She held her hands to her lips. “You didn’t have to kill him,” she cried out.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t. But it’s a very freeing experience. You should try it sometime.”
“Killing people?” she asked in shock.
“Yes. You don’t always have to be such a Pollyanna and save people, you know?”
“Well, I much prefer that,” she snapped. “We’re not all sociopaths like you.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better,” he said, grinning, “that’s a good way to do it. I went to a lot of effort to get you back in my grasp again. It’s not like I’ll let you get away with anything no
w.” He dragged her down the hallway toward the other set of double doors.
“And does Nahim know what you did?”
“I don’t give a shit if he does or not,” Benjamin said. “My time was up there anyway. I raked in as much money as I could off all the family members, and then I planned to leave. You were my ticket out of there at the same time.”
“And you would just kill that little boy?”
“Little boy, little girl, man, woman, why would I care?”
She took a deep breath, realizing just how unfeeling and unconcerned he was about causing such deaths. She glanced back at the double doors to see Nahim’s head poking out, and the look on his face.
“Benjamin,” he yelled.
Benjamin lifted his handgun and fired in the direction of the father. And then he shoved her out the door roughly. “Damn it. I didn’t want him to see us.” He pushed her through to a set of stairs. “Let’s go. Fast, fast, fast.”
“You know Nahim will come after you,” she said. “You tried to kill his son.”
“But did I?” he asked. “He doesn’t have a clue who his enemies truly are.”
“Meaning that his brother was in on it too?”
“Do you really think his brother would have mounted a big attack like that on the cruise ship just for me?”
“So why did he then?”
“Money,” Benjamin said, laughing. “I made a huge haul from Nahim. Even the mother paid me to look after Abdul so well. The uncles paid me too. Everybody paid me, for various reasons. I took all that money and more. And I paid off the brother to help me get you under the guise that I needed you for the boy, but I made sure I gave Abdul an extra shot of arsenic so that there would be maximum pain on my way out the door.”
“That makes no sense,” she whispered. “How can you be such a monster?”
“Easy,” he said, laughing. “You must pick and choose what’s important in life.”
“I’m not important,” she cried out.
“I know that,” he said. “Once I determined that you weren’t worthy, I realized that I had the power to do something that I wanted to do for a long time.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, hating to even hear the answer because she knew it would make her sick to her stomach. He wasn’t just a monster but he was a sick individual, one of those who cared nothing about the pain he caused and probably enjoyed it all too much.
“I will make you pay,” he said. “I have a place all picked out for us.”
“And what if I don’t want to go?”
“Who said I would ask you? You’ll do what I say because otherwise I’ll come back and kill everybody else in here. For all you know, I’ve left bombs everywhere. You know how I operate. I really don’t give a shit about anyone.”
She thought about the cruise liner and his lack of care for anyone’s life. “What about Bahan?”
“That’s who I planned to leave on the floor in the hospital laundry room. But you guys had already met him, so that didn’t go to plan. He was supposed to keep himself away from detection.”
“It doesn’t always work though, does it?” she asked. “Plans are meant to be changed.”
“Well, if I change mine, that means killing you. Now hurry up,” he snapped, and he pushed her forward down the stairs. She held on to the railing to stop herself from falling all the way down the stairs. She ran down ahead to the landing, hoping that Nahim was at least contacting somebody and letting them know what had happened. But then maybe Nahim hated her so much, enough to let her go with Benjamin. She didn’t know.
“And what about Nahim’s brother, Bahan? Did you kill him yet?”
“Well, he’s on the run himself.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because the two of us were most likely the ones who had administered the arsenic to the little boy.”
“It was you,” she said. “So what did Bahan do?”
“He administered most of it. I just finished it.”
“You were both feeding the little boy poison?”
“Sure. Not enough to do any harm though. But you know what it’s like. Cumulative.”
“It’s deadly,” she snapped. “And why did the child’s uncle do it?”
“Because he didn’t know Nahim’s wife was pregnant, and, of course, the father’s got a target on his back. He has for a long time. He’s made a lot of changes within his little fiefdom,” he said caustically. “And nobody’s happy about it. The brother would take over. He’s got four sons and would be much harder to usurp.”
“A bullet would kill him too,” she snapped. “My God. You people are living on a completely different planet.”
“Not really,” he said. “We’re just living life the way we want to, unlike you, who spends your life living for other people. I’m living for myself.” He pushed through another set of double doors and down more stairs. She had no idea where he was taking her. Presumably somewhere alone so that he could secret her away.
“What are your plans now?” she asked.
“You’ll find out. I didn’t spend years planning this to just let you get away from me here now. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Of course not,” she said. “You’ve always been a threat to my life.”
“Damn right,” he snapped. “Make sure you remember it.”
She didn’t understand the mentality, but then she’d seen a lot of broken minds in her lifetime, even just through the courses she’d taken. She tried to remember the psychology of dealing with a sociopath, but basically it was to remember they didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone but their own pleasure. And that didn’t bode well for Abby. “Did you kill anybody else?”
“No, not really. Why?” he answered.
She frowned at that. “Not really?” She paused. “Meaning, that you only participated somewhat in their deaths or that you didn’t quite kill them or that you have no clue?”
He laughed. “What’s the matter? Did you miss me? Want to know all the details of my life since we were together?”
“It’s been over five years, and we were never together,” she said. “I have wondered how much trouble you’ve gotten into in that time.”
“None,” he said. “Surprise, surprise. Only you. You’re the one stopping me from going back home again.”
“Because of the court case?”
“Of course, because of the court case,” he snapped. “You’re not that stupid.”
“No,” she said. “Neither of us are. We made it through med school and that means we have a certain amount of smarts.”
“But you’re a Goody Two-shoes, whereas I look after just me. I’m the only one who counts.”
“Well, I care about other people,” she said.
He nodded. “Maybe, but that has nothing to do with this right now. You’re the one stopping me from returning to the US. I can’t get that case squashed. I’m on this bloody wanted list for having skipped the country, and I had to stay in a country without extradition. I’ve been going from private practice to private practice, but I want my life back,” he said. “So you’ll drop all charges, and then you’ll quietly disappear, so they can’t come after me again.”
“But I can’t drop the charges.” The blow came out of nowhere, smacking her hard enough on the head that she fell to her hands and knees. Gasping desperately and trying to get her brain to stop rattling around inside her skull and seeing only black and white spots in her eyes, she was then grabbed roughly by the upper arm and dragged to her feet again.
“Yes, you can,” he said, his voice dead. “Or else I’ll put a bullet in you right now.”
She took several deep breaths. “Fine. I will.”
“See? It really doesn’t take anything to get what you want in life,” he said. “Everybody is quite happy to do what I want them to do.”
“What I meant to say,” she said, moving carefully, her head still pounding and her vision still not quite back to normal, “is that, even if I do drop
the charges, that doesn’t mean that they will.”
“Sure, they will,” he said. “Particularly if you’re not around for them to worry about anymore. Without a victim, there’s no case.”
“You mean, for those kinds of charges. And you don’t expect to face any charges for killing me. Is that it?”
“That’s it,” he said cheerfully. “And nobody over here gives a shit what happens to you. You’re just a number, another pain in the ass by making it all happen in England. You should have just come to Dubai.”
“And you should have just had me picked up quietly somewhere,” she snapped. “Instead of getting your bloody henchmen to kill those people.”
“We decided that was the way to do it right off the bat. How were we to know so many idiotic people would be there, and nobody would even know who you were?”
“Or that I would hear the commotion and disappear on the ship,” she said.
“Yes. It wasn’t even one of the megacruises. It was a small one, but still just so many people there.”
“Were you on board?” she asked, staring at him in shock.
He laughed. “No, I wish. Life’s kind of boring, but, if you can orchestrate shit like that every once in a while, it makes it more fun. You’ve got to make things lively.”
“By poisoning a child, taking over a cruise ship, and making everybody believe that I’m necessary?”
He nodded. “It all makes sense.”
“You’re insane. None of this makes sense,” she cried out. “Did Nahim know about the cruise ship plan?”
“Nope. We gave him only a brief overview. He didn’t take part in any of it, but now he’ll be blamed. It all makes sense if you realize the bottom line was I wanted you. That’s it. I didn’t care how we did it. But, once I told Bahan that you were on the cruise, it was supposed to be a subtle operation. Go snag you, take you away on a day trip, and bring you back to Dubai. But, no, he wanted more control. He wanted to be the big chief, controlling fire-and-ice stuff. He did hire the wrong men too. So it ended with me hiring the wrong person, him hiring the wrong crew, and I don’t know where the hell that guy helping you out came from, but that just made things worse.”