Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He could have taken a uniform shirt, too, but he suspected that might be missed. He didn’t want to tip these guys off to the fact that he was out here.

  It was then that Beret stopped pacing and gave an order, and the camp came to life. They were moving out.

  Ken got ready to follow, taking the opportunity to chow down on one of the packets labeled “chicken with vegetables.” Not his favorite, but he was hungry enough to love every gooey, body temperature mouthful.

  As he ate, he thought about Savannah, waiting for him back in the blind. He’d already been gone for hours. Even without having to trail the three very slow tangos, even moving at his own top speed, it would take him close to three hours to get back to her. She was probably already worrying about him, probably starting to wonder if he’d decided to take her suggestion and leave her behind.

  Shit.

  It pissed him off that she still kept bringing that up as a possibility. What did he have to do to prove to her that he wasn’t going to ditch her?

  He had to start by coming back. Preferably before the sun went down. And then maybe in a few days—by the time he got her to safety—she’d finally realize he’d meant what he’d said about not leaving.

  But right now he wanted to see where these guys were going. It would be smart if he could at least get a sense of the direction they were heading, smarter yet if he could find out where they came from and what the chances were that there’d be more of ’em creeping around this part of the jungle.

  Still, he kept imagining Savannah, alone in that blind as the sun started to set.

  Worse yet, he imagined her assuming he wasn’t coming back and striking out on her own.

  Jesus, he had to get back there right away before she did that.

  Ken was out of there and halfway down the hillside before he stopped and forced himself to take a deep breath and think this through.

  He was doing the very thing to Savannah that pissed him off so much when she did it to him. Just as he’d promised her he’d come back—it might take a while, but he’d definitely return—Savannah had promised him that she’d stay in the blind. And as long as she was hidden there, she was safe.

  So why was he rushing back?

  Because he didn’t trust that she’d do as she’d promised.

  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If he wanted her to trust him, he had to start by trusting her.

  Ken headed back toward Beret and his camp, and when they finally moved out, he followed.

  Molly went back into her tent after lunch, and Grady—Jones—was still asleep on her bed.

  He’d brought her Double Agent, and it lay beside him. He must’ve been reading it before he fell asleep; his finger was still marking his place.

  She let herself look at him—her lover.

  In a few hours, just before sunset, she would go to his camp, and they would make love again. All evening and into the night. She couldn’t wait—she ached for the day to end.

  Lucky Jones—he was sleeping it away.

  She loved his eyes, she realized, as she gazed down at his face. As he slept, he looked so peaceful, so young and pure with those eyes closed, his eyelashes thick and dark against his cheeks. He was exceptionally handsome, with a mouth that looked decadently good no matter if it were arranged in a grim line, or stretched into a full grin, or relaxed in sleep. His chin was sheer perfection, and he’d shaved it again this morning.

  For her.

  Molly reached out to touch the smoothness of his face, just lightly, and he moved, reaching up to grab her wrist with one hand.

  Just like that, he was awake, eyes open and completely alert, gazing up at her.

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said, losing herself for a moment in the midnight of his eyes. He was gorgeous when asleep, but when he was awake and looking at her with those incredible eyes . . . He had the power to make her heart pound.

  “What time is it?” he asked, his voice rough from sleep.

  “It’s nearly one. I let you sleep,” she explained with a smile that she hoped hid the way her pulse was jumping. “I figured you needed it after I wore you out yesterday.”

  He laughed that little laugh that she’d come to love and tugged her down so that she was sitting beside him on the bed.

  “I couldn’t wait to see you,” he murmured. “I couldn’t wait to . . .”

  Molly wasn’t quite sure how he did it. One second she was sitting above him, the next she was lying beside him, partially beneath him on the bed. He was kissing her—slow, deep, impossibly erotic kisses. He brought her hand down to his male parts and pressed her palm against him—a very grown-up version of the show and tell she’d done with her youngest class just this morning. He was hugely aroused—so much so that despite her rule of what could and could not go on in her tent, she didn’t want to let go of him.

  She did this to him. It was an unbelievable turn-on.

  “I’ve been walking around like this since I got off the boat yesterday,” he whispered as he pulled up her shirt and pushed aside her bra, his mouth hot and wet and desperate as he suckled her hard. Almost too hard.

  Molly clenched her teeth against the sound—that of sheer, mind-blowing pleasure—that threatened to escape from her throat.

  Stop. She had to tell him to stop. They couldn’t do this here.

  But she was still clinging to him through his shorts, and he unfastened them, pushing them down and out of the way so that she was really touching him—hard and smooth and hot and large.

  Her door was unlocked. Even if she did want to break her rule—and, Lord, she didn’t—she would never do this with her door unlocked.

  But he roughly pushed up her skirt, pushed aside her underpants and touched her. She was slick from wanting him, and he filled her with his fingers, making her gasp. God, she wanted him inside of her. But they could not do this here.

  “Grady! I want . . .”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m almost . . .”

  He was covering himself with a condom using only one hand, and she found herself helping.

  “Please,” she breathed, “I can’t do this here!” But she wanted to. She wanted him more than she could ever remember wanting anything or anyone. All she had to do to make him stop was to pull away. Instead of wrapping her legs around his waist she had to get off the bed, rearrange her clothes and tell him that, really, they had to wait for later.

  But she didn’t want to wait.

  “Stop,” she said frantically, even as she pulled him toward her. “Please! You’ve got to stop because I can’t!”

  He did stop—pulling his head up from the hedonistic things he was doing to her nipples with his mouth to look down at her in amazement. “You want me to be the one to stop this? You’re kidding, right?”

  “No!” She could feel him, heavy and hot against her and her hips moved up, seeking more of him. “My rule. It’s the right thing. Don’t make me—”

  “Screw your rule,” he told her, pushing himself just a little bit inside of her, but pulling back out as she opened herself to him, as she lifted her hips toward him again.

  She heard herself make a sound not unlike a whimper and he laughed.

  “Yeah, right, I’m going to stop when you do that. What kind of hero do you think I am, Mol? I only do the right thing when there’s a payoff in my favor. Don’t ever forget that.”

  “Please,” she breathed, but she didn’t really know what she was begging for. He just kept teasing her, pushing himself a fraction of the way into her and then pulling out of reach.

  “It’s your rule,” he told her. “You want to follow it, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Here’s my rule—to come inside you as often as I can before you fucking leave.”

  He slammed himself into her, and she heard herself cry out. Yes. Oh, yes. He muffled the sound she made by kissing her, his tongue hot and thick in her mouth.

  She clung to him, matching the slam-bam urgency of his p
ace, her fingers in his hair, digging into his back. He didn’t slow down and she didn’t want him to.

  She forgot about her rule, forgot about the unlocked door. There was only Grady and his need for her—and her insatiable need for him.

  His hands and mouth were rough as he drove himself harder and faster inside of her, again and again and again.

  “Come now,” he breathed into her ear. “Come with me—oh, Christ, Molly!”

  She exploded, too, waves of pleasure making her shake. Yes. Oh, yes!

  “Shh,” he said, laughing a little, pressing his hand down over her mouth. “Shhh!”

  And then there they were, in her tent, in her bed, breathing hard, having just broken her biggest rule. Lord, it was really her only rule.

  One of them should’ve been able to keep their wits about them. And it just wasn’t fair that it should always have to be her.

  Grady—Jones, damnit, she had to start thinking of him as Jones—sighed. It sounded just a little too satisfied and smug.

  So Molly bit him on the finger. Hard.

  “Ouch! Jesus!” He pulled out and slightly off of her, and she took the opportunity to scramble off the bed and onto her feet. To quickly rearrange her clothing. Damn it, he’d given her a hickey on her breast. She quickly checked her mirror to make sure he hadn’t marked her any place that showed.

  Her hair was a mess, and her face looked . . .

  Like she’d just had outrageously wild sex in the afternoon in her tent in the middle of a missionary’s camp in a village where she and her coworkers had been preaching safe sex and restraint from the moment they first arrived. She closed her eyes, cursing her weakness.

  Jones came up behind her. “You all right?”

  Molly opened her eyes and looked at him in the mirror.

  He was genuinely concerned. “I didn’t hurt you, did I? I didn’t mean for it to get that rough. It just . . . And then you seemed to like it, so . . .”

  “I asked you to stop.” It wasn’t a fair accusation, and she knew it. She’d asked but she hadn’t really wanted him to stop. Not at all. This was her fault, entirely.

  Her eyes filled with tears, and he cursed and pulled her into his arms. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Jesus, I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to apologize for this. Just tell me I didn’t hurt you. I’d rather die than hurt you.”

  “You didn’t,” she whispered. He hadn’t. Not yet anyway. But she was in much further over her head than she’d thought, if she was in a place where she’d so casually throw her rules out the window to share a cheap and easy quickie with this man, in the middle of the afternoon.

  She couldn’t get enough of him. What was going to happen when she left? She was leaving in a few short weeks. Of course, he’d probably leave Parwati Island first.

  How was she going to deal with that if she didn’t even have the power to push him out of her tent?

  “Will you still come tonight?” he asked her.

  Molly managed a smile. “Gee, I hope so.”

  He smiled, too, but it was halfhearted, and it occurred to her that he might be as shaken by this as she was. As much as he would try to deny it, this wasn’t just about sex for him, either. And if the emotions that ran together whenever their eyes so much as met scared the hell out of her, what did it do to him?

  “That is, if you still want me to,” she added quietly. She gave him an easy out. “I understand if you need to make a delivery or something in your plane. You’ve kind of killed the morning and half the afternoon by coming over here.”

  “The Cessna’s down again,” he told her. “I’m waiting on a part. Jaya—a guy I know’s—working on getting it for me. I could probably rig something to get into the air if I really had to, but it would be pretty risky. And these past few days—it’s funny, you know? My death wish hasn’t been quite so strong.”

  Molly felt the tears return to her eyes. She suspected that that was the closest thing to a declaration of love she was going to receive from this man.

  She reached for him and he took her into his arms again.

  Please God, she prayed as Jones kissed her so gently, so sweetly, so tenderly. Please give me the strength to accept this man’s love for what I know it to be—just a temporary gift.

  “What’s in New Jersey?” Heinrich asked in the cab on the way to my apartment.

  It was day five of my self-assigned mission, and I had gotten nowhere. Five whole days, and I still hadn’t learned anything about his network of Nazi spies. I’d set foot in the man’s hotel suite exactly once—for about fifteen seconds before we left for dinner two evenings ago. I was a failure at being a Mata Hari because I couldn’t get up the nerve to seduce the man and he, apparently, had no intention of compromising me.

  I did, however, use some of the money I’d borrowed from Evelyn Fielding to take a room at the Waldorf myself, right across from Heinrich’s room—although he didn’t know it. Every night, he dropped me at my apartment, and I would go inside. But as soon as his taxi pulled away, I’d follow. And every night, he always went straight back to the hotel.

  Taking care that he didn’t see me, I would follow him inside as well, watch as he went into his room and locked the door. Once he was in for the night, I would creep out into the hall, and put a thread across his door. I’d wake up early to check it, before breakfast arrived, and every morning that thread remained unbroken. That was how I knew that Heinrich von Hopf hadn’t gone anywhere nor let anyone into his room.

  It was frustrating. As much as I enjoyed our time together—and Nazi or not, I did enjoy nearly every minute I spent with the man I loved—I’d found out very little.

  He often had meetings during the morning, but try as I might to follow him, I repeatedly lost him in a matter of a few city blocks. He was as good as I was at losing a tail.

  I knew he had a notebook, a small pad, that he kept in his inside left jacket pocket. I’d only gotten a glimpse of it, but was certain it contained a list of names. I’d seen him jotting notes into it while we were out in society, at a club or a party, and I was growing more and more desperate to get a look at it.

  I was going to have to be brazen. There was no way around it. If he wasn’t going to invite me to his room, I would have to invite myself.

  “New Jersey?” I said now, stalling. Light from the streetlamps shining in through the cab windows moved across his face as we headed for my apartment. He was seeing me home. Again. No matter how I kissed him, he never suggested I go back to his hotel with him.

  He held something in his hand. “This fell out of your coat pocket back at the club.”

  I looked more closely. It was my bus ticket to Midland Park, New Jersey. Dated yesterday. I’d gone out to finish up work on a project that I hoped would be the solution to many of my current problems. But I couldn’t tell him that.

  “It is yours, isn’t it?” Heinrich asked.

  Spy rule number one: Stick as close to the truth as possible. “Yes,” I told him. I smiled. But don’t be afraid to lie when you have to. Keep it simple, easy to remember. “Didn’t I tell you? Lorraine, my best friend from college, had a baby a few months ago. You’d said you were busy all day, so I went out to see her.”

  “No, you hadn’t mentioned it,” he said.

  “It’s one of those topics an unmarried woman tends to avoid when with a man. Happily married friends with new babies.” I shook my head in mock disgust. “Even if it’s brought up innocently enough, it’s perceived to be a giant hint. Hurry up and put a ring on my finger. Snap to it and put a baby in my womb. What are you waiting for? I hear it can be fun.”

  The cab driver did an obvious double take in the rearview mirror, and Heinrich leaned forward. “Let us out up ahead, just at the next corner here, will you please?” He looked at me. “You don’t mind if we walk for a bit, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  He paid the driver and we got out of the cab. The night was cold, but not bitterly so.

  “He was a li
ttle too interested in our conversation,” Heinrich said as the cab drove away.

  “Did I embarrass you?”

  “No,” he said, then laughed. “Well, yes, a little. But I wasn’t embarrassed so much by you as by the driver. I’m not used to America where the servants listen and even join a discussion. In Austria, they maintain a distance.”

  “They’re listening in Austria,” I pointed out. “They’re just pretending that they’re not. It’s an illusion.”

  “Maybe so,” he said. My apartment was about two blocks away. He offered me his arm as we began to walk. “But it’s an illusion I prefer.”