by Cindy Gerard
“Eggplant.”
A vegetable—good, he needed to think about vegetables. Not ripe, luscious fruit, which was what she made him think of. Beans, legumes, squash. That’s what he needed to think about, because she’d also pulled her hair out of the utilitarian ponytail and wound it into a loose, thick braid that looked sophisticated and exotic.
The woman was a chameleon. She was also a woman of extremes. He’d known her for less than twenty-four hours, and during that time she’d effortlessly changed from sex kitten to commando to metropolitan sophisticate.
The only constant was the sexy part and, Lord love a duck, did she ever have that nailed.
“Two bags?” he asked, relieving her of one of the full shopping bags she carried in each hand.
“As long as I was there, I picked up a few extra changes of clothes. For you, too,” she added with a small but pleased-with-herself smile.
“Oh, goodie. A man can never have enough flowered shirts.”
She actually laughed. A first. And the sound did something to his nerve endings that he didn’t want to dissect. All of his nerve endings, and holy God, he needed to get a grip.
It had been way too long since he’d gotten laid. And he’d gone far beyond having a need-to-know curiosity about this woman.
“Give me five more minutes,” she said. “There’s a drugstore two doors down. I need to pick up a few personal things.”
Since he needed the space, he didn’t argue. Good to her word, five minutes later she was back with another bag full of stuff. A woman who could speedshop. Impressive.
As they left the mall and hurried across the blistering hot parking lot toward the SUV, he wondered if he would ever know the real Eva Salinas. More disturbing was the realization that he might want to know. Intimately.
Now who’s crazy, Brown?
Back in the SUV, he dug his phone out of his pocket, dialed a secure number, let it ring three times, then hung up. He could feel her curious gaze as he pulled out into traffic, and gave her credit for not asking what the call was about. He’d have an answer for both of them soon.
She dug into the bag from the drugstore—lipstick, a compact, lotion, deodorant, and such—and was sorting through them when his phone rang less than a minute later.
He grabbed it on the first ring. “That was quick.”
“Figured it was important.” The familiar voice of Joe Green sounded reassuringly close although Mike knew he could be anywhere from here to Singapore. “After all, it’s been a year.”
Green was a member of Black Ops, Inc. And yes, it had been a little over a year since the team had enlisted Mike’s services to help Joe and the woman who was now his wife escape Sierra Leone after Joe had been falsely imprisoned. Of course, nothing was ever that simple, and Mike and his brother Ty had ended up helping Green uncover a corrupt government official, dodge a few bullets, and save a couple of lives along the way.
Mike and the team went way back. He’d been their pilot during their military days, providing air transpo for their Task Force Mercy missions in South Africa and the Middle East. After TFM had been disbanded Mike had redeployed to Afghanistan, was drafted into the One-Eyed Jacks unit, and the rest, as they say, read like a bad B-grade movie.
“I’m in D.C.,” he told Green, peripherally aware that Eva had pulled down the passenger-seat visor and was using the mirror to apply makeup. “Need a place to crash. A safe place. There’ll be two of us.”
Green didn’t hesitate. “That all you need?”
He’d just offered his services—most likely the support of the entire BOI team—and for that Mike was grateful.
He also felt a resurgence of guilt. As far as he knew, none of the BOI team knew about what had happened in Afghanistan. The shame and disillusionment he felt over rolling over and playing dead when he’d copped that plea and taken the less than honorable discharge wasn’t exactly something he wanted to broadcast to men he respected and admired.
“For the time being,” he said, pushing past it, “but how ’bout I give you an IOU for a six-pack and you can consider yourself on retainer?”
“That’ll work.”
“Appreciate this, man.”
“Tit for tat and all that.”
It was good to know that a team as skilled and connected as BOI felt they were indebted to him. Joe, after all, was married to the daughter of the new Secretary of State, and Black Ops, Inc. was now a sanctioned entity of the Department of Defense. He didn’t intend to call in that marker unless it was absolutely necessary, but he had a feeling that before this was all over, it would come to that. Shooters wielding MP5Ks tended to make him a tad paranoid.
“Hi to Steph, okay? Give her a kiss for me, a big wet one. And just because you need the occasional reminder, that woman is way too good for the likes of you.”
Green grunted. “No argument from me on that front. Keep the line clear. I’ll be back asap with an address for you.”
“Hey, man, there is a little something you could do for me. Hold on for a text, okay?”
“You got it.”
As soon as Green disconnected, Mike pulled into a liquor store parking lot and fired off the photo he’d snapped of Eva at the Bogota airport. He followed up with a text message asking Green for a detailed search on Pamela Diaz, Emily Bradshaw, and Eva Salinas. Insurance was king in this game.
Mike felt Eva’s gaze on him as he eased back into the stream of traffic. For the first time, he noticed the scent of flowers and musk as she lavished lotion on her bare arms. “One of your friends in high places?”
He turned onto Ninth Street, heading for the bank. “Yup.”
She toed off a shoe, propped her bare foot on the dash, and started smoothing lotion onto her leg. Her very bare leg, left that way when her skirt slid up her thigh. “You asked him to run a background check on me.”
He dragged his gaze back to the street, tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “On all three of you.”
“I thought we’d started to trust each other.”
He laughed—it was either that or swallow his tongue as she shifted legs and started the lotion motion all over again. “You wouldn’t do the same if you were in my shoes?”
She let out a big sigh. “They won’t find anything.”
He laughed again, this time in relief, when she smoothed her skirt back down her thighs and slipped into her shoes. “Oh, yes. They will. Anything you want to spill before they dig up the dirt?”
She shook her head—more a gesture of disgust than a response.
“There’s parking over there.” She pointed toward the lot when they reached the bank.
“Wait here.” He held his hand out for the lockbox key. “Let’s play it safe, on the off chance someone followed you here when you rented the box and still has eyes on the place.”
“That’s not going to work. The bank will want photo ID.”
Right. “Then we go in together. They won’t be looking for a couple.”
His words stopped him short as it occurred to him for the first time that she may have hooked up with someone in the eight years since Ramon’s death. She was an outrageously attractive woman. Intelligent. Driven. Wore the hell out of a red bustier. And right now, she smelled like hot sex on a summer night.
“Or would they?” He looked across the seat at her. “Is there a Mr. Right Now in your life?” If there was, Mike disliked him already. Call him a chauvinist, but in his book a man who would let his woman traipse off by herself to hunt down a no-good like him wasn’t a man at all. Unless she hadn’t told him where she was going or what she was doing, which was totally her MO.
She hesitated, then shook her head. “No. No one would be looking for a couple.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her if Ramon had spoiled her for any other man, but that would have been just plain tacky and maybe even a little mean.
He’d stopped feeling mean toward Eva Salinas somewhere over a half-eaten sandwich at the Bogota airport, when she�
��d told him Ramon was her dead husband.
15
Mike had checked the time on his phone when they’d walked through the bank’s front doors and he checked it again as they walked back out. In and out in eighteen minutes. No hitches. Not even a close look. In fact, he was fairly certain that if anyone had bothered to look at them, they’d have been as fixated as he tried not to be on the blatant sexuality Eva exuded with every move she made.
Well, hello. He grinned when he finally realized what she was doing. Eva Salinas knew exactly what effect she had on people. Knew it and used it. If questioned, no one in that bank would remember a woman doing business and accessing a safety deposit box. They’d remember a pair of amazing breasts, a blatantly suggestive walk, and off-the-charts sexuality. A trophy every man would go home and secretly fantasize about and every woman would want to forget because she felt inferior.
Once again, he appreciated her intelligence as they walked out into the sunlight and got into the SUV, the flash drive with the data on OSD tucked safely away in her bag.
And he let up on himself a little bit in the hitting-himself-over-the-head department. Sober, he might have had a fighting chance. But stone cold drunk in that cantina? Hell. She’d had him at spandex.
Green called again as Mike settled behind the wheel.
“Are you serious?” he asked after Joe told him where they’d be staying tonight and given him the address. This was the last thing he’d expected.
“As a heart attack.” The line went dead.
Mike grinned, picturing the former CIA, former Task Force Mercy, current Black Ops, Inc. operative. Green stood roughly six foot five, was tough as nails, and the word joke was not in his vocabulary. The man had seen and done things—for his country, for his team, for his woman—that would spawn nightmares for the rest of his life. But Mike had seen Green with his wife and knew that, like the wives of the other BOI team members, Stephanie would help keep those nightmares at bay. Never thought he’d see the day when those guys would all end up married. Very happily married.
Just like he never thought he would quietly envy them for the lapse in judgment that had prompted them to give up their freedom for the ball and chain of monogamy.
He squashed back an unexpected rush of melancholy. Fought the way he felt like a kid with his nose pressed against a candy-store window when he saw them all together, witnessed the love, the devotion.
Cripes. What was up with that? Domestic bliss was not the path for him.
Then why so blue, buddy boy? Damned if he knew.
File it under fatigue. File it under the anticipation of reading the contents of the OSD file. And yeah, okay, fine. Maybe point a finger at the woman sitting beside him in the SUV.
For whatever reason, she tripped triggers and rang bells he’d never heard before. Sure, he loved women. Lots of them. Just never singularly and never for more than a night or two. And never with any promises. Easy in, easy out, no hard feelings, it’s been good to know you. It worked for him. At least it always had.
“So… were you planning to sit here all day or do you have an address?”
Eva’s slightly bemused question snapped him out of his thoughts, made him realize how far he’d let himself wander down justification lane. He didn’t have to justify his relationships—or lack of—with women. Not to himself. Not to anyone.
And he sure as hell didn’t need validation for staying away from her. She was Ramon Salinas’s widow. Enough said.
He spit out the address Green had given him and shifted into gear. “You know how to get there from here?” he asked gruffly.
The startled and wary look on her face told him how cranky he’d come across. Not fair to take out his bad mood on her. Or hell, maybe it was. Twenty-four hours ago, life had been simple. Fucked up, but simple.
“Not precisely but we’ll find it.” She entered the address into the onboard GPS.
Feeling guilty but not really knowing why, he tried to make amends with a less abrasive tone. “Used to know my way around. Things have changed since I spent any time here.” When he’d been in D.C. a year ago helping Joe and Steph, all he’d seen was the airport and a nearby hotel before they’d gone wheels up again.
Forty-five minutes later, they pulled off the street and into the underground parking garage of a high-security apartment complex. He was about to tell her to wipe the GPS history clean—he didn’t want to take any chances on someone finding out where they’d been—when she leaned forward and took care of it. He wasn’t finished being silently impressed with her when she grabbed her shopping bags and opened the door. Not long after, Mike punched in a series of security code numbers that Joe had given him to get them into the building, then into the elevator and finally to the tenth floor.
They were walking down the wide, well-appointed hallway, peripherally aware of a zillion security cameras monitoring them, when the door at the end of the corridor opened up.
A big man with an imposing build and eyes that could drill holes through steel limped into the hallway to meet them. “Nice to know you can still follow simple directions.”
Mike broke into a broad grin. “Hello, Angel Boy. Long time no see.”
“Call me that again, smart-ass, and you won’t be seeing anything but stars.”
Mike laughed and shook his old friend’s hand. “Missed you too, buddy. Eva—meet Gabe Jones. Word to the wise: Don’t try to drug him. He’s not as forgiving or good-natured as I am.”
• • •
Mike leaned against the terrace wall, nursing a soda while Gabe stretched out on a chaise longue amid potted plants and a playpen.
Except for their quick sponge baths at the airport and her brief run to the drugstore, it was the first time Mike and Eva hadn’t been connected at the hip since she’d seduced him. They’d arrived at Gabe Jones’s apartment only a few minutes ago and she’d excused herself to use the restroom. They needed to get to work on the OSD file, but at the moment he couldn’t muster the energy. He’d practically been mainlining caffeine in the form of soda since they’d landed and for the moment he simply needed to chill.
This terrace was the spot to do it. His gaze landed on the playpen again. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would have believed it. Mike grinned at Gabe. He had to hand it to Gabe’s gorgeous redheaded wife, Jenna. She’d tamed the beast.
Gabe “The Archangel” Jones was one of the toughest, meanest, most reclusive operators he’d ever worked with. Dedicated, driven, focused. A warrior to the end.
He’d either led or been part of teams that had pushed through everything from triple-canopy jungles, urban ghettos, mountains, and swamps for months on end, hunting the bad guys. One time when Mike had picked them up, their clothes were ragged to the point of falling off their bodies, everyone had lost at least twenty pounds, and they hadn’t had a square meal or decent rest in months. But Gabe’s force of personality and leadership had made them go way the hell over and beyond to complete the mission.
He’d even lost a leg a few years ago on an op but it had barely slowed him down.
Yet, here he was, all cozied up in a high-security D.C. apartment complex with designer deck furniture, flowering plants, and toddler toys, reeking of domestic tranquility.
“What?” Gabe narrowed his eyes in response to Mike’s grin.
“Never saw you as a baby daddy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s called maturity. You ought to try it sometime.”
Mike laughed and glanced down at the street ten stories below where rush-hour traffic zipped along. “Sorry I missed Jenna.”
He turned back to his friend, propped his elbows on the terrace wall behind him. Gabe’s wife, who his friend had just informed him was five months pregnant with their second child, was having a girls weekend in West Palm Beach. Jenna had taken their eighteen-month-old daughter, Ali, to visit their friends, Amy and Dallas Garrett, who along with Dallas’s brothers and sister ran E.D.E.N., Inc., a high-risk securities firm. Amy and Dal
las had a daughter close to Ali’s age. Jenna and Amy had been close friends ever since they’d bonded during an investigation that had ultimately brought down a secret third-generation neo-Nazi camp in Argentina that practiced mind-control experimentation on unwilling victims. The two women tried to get together whenever time and schedules allowed.
“Might be a good thing Jenna and Ali aren’t here,” Mike added soberly. “And seriously, man, this is a safe house?”
He’d never been in one but had assumed it would be sterile—no personal possessions of any sort, not even art on the wall. Reason: If it was compromised, there’d be no clues for the bad guys as to who was there and possibly why.
“It’s my home. But no one makes it past the front entry that I don’t want inside.”
Judging from all the surveillance cameras and combo locks, Mike didn’t doubt it.
“Anytime you want to tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into,” Gabe added, “I’m all ears. But that’s your call.”
“Appreciate it.” Mike glanced toward the terrace doors, wondering what Eva was up to inside. “In the meantime, I’m still sorting things out.”
Gabe followed his gaze, then tipped up his beer. “So, what are the chances she’s tossing the place?”
Mike grinned and said cheerfully, “I’d say they’re pretty good.”
He’d seen the indecision in Eva’s eyes. She might think she knew everything about him, but she didn’t know Gabe Jones from Adam and that made her nervous. With good reason. Gabe Jones was someone to be wary of even though he was one of the good guys.
“She have anything to do with that?” Gabe lifted his beer, indicating the swelling on Mike’s cheek.
“Yup,” he admitted and carefully pressed the cold soda can against the ripening bruise.
He was going to have to tell him everything—including what he did and didn’t know about Eva Salinas. Which meant telling him about Afghanistan.
So he did. Drew a deep breath and purged. It felt like a bloodletting, and he didn’t stop until he’d spilled every last drop.