Her face darkened, and she stared into his hazel eyes. It wasn’t just that reality kept slapping her in the face every chance it got. She wanted to scream out to the universe that she got it; he loved living here, and they could never be more than what they were right in this moment. It was more than that, though. He was so passionate and so willing to do anything and everything to take care of the people of his species and their mates—including risking his own life. Luis was a true leader, and the people of these islands deserved his leadership and his presence. She couldn’t ask him to leave for her, even if he was falling for her the way she was falling for him. Luis belonged here, and taking him from this place would do this world a huge disservice.
“What?” he asked, brushing her hair out of her face.
“Nothing. I just hadn’t thought of it. You’re right; this is everything to everyone on these islands, and that makes it the most important mission I’ve ever been on. Thank you for reminding me what is at stake.”
He stared at her for a minute, but she didn’t elaborate, and something in him must have sensed that she wasn’t in a place where she could talk about it. He didn’t press the issue, but instead held her for a few minutes longer before gentle setting her down on the limb once more.
She was silent as she watched him shift, her mind in another place and time. She wanted to live in the moment, but all she could think about was the future and this beautiful place that she was going to leave behind with Luis in it. Her heart was heavy, and she suddenly wanted nothing more than to sleep and forget about tomorrow for a few hours.
A panther once more, Luis found the widest part of the tangled limbs and laid with his back out, feet facing inward. He moved his front and hind leg back, making room for Tara to crawl up against him. She did just that, placing her bag between herself and the tree trunk to provide a barrier and snuggling against him.
She was grateful that he had thought to lay so that she was between the tree and his body, rather than with his own back to the trunk, panther limbs wrapped around her and holding her precariously close to the edge. Even as exhausted as she was, she wasn’t sure that she would have been able to sleep in that position, being able to see out into the jungle and down to the floor.
He had her pulled tightly against him, his head pressed softly against hers. She half expected him to purr in his sleep like a cat, but he was silent, falling to sleep long before she did. His heavy, even breathing calmed her nerves, and as she drifted closer and closer to sleep, she went over the plan in her head. She had memorized the satellite picture of the facility and what little she could glean from Andrew’s description of the layout of the building and the parts that he had been allowed to access.
So new to the company, Ian had gone the cautious route. He’d allowed the man he called Arnold to share secrets with his own scientists and even had an office in the building for Arnold to use for his own research. But that’s where Ian’s trust had stopped. Arnold was allowed access to certain places in the research building, and Arnold was allowed unrestricted access to all the shifters roaming freely on both islands. But there were rooms and floors in the four-story building that Arnold was barred from accessing while he was still in his “probationary” phase, which he was told could last up to a year because of the nature of GRE’s research.
Andrew, to his credit, hadn’t let the ridiculous precautions hinder his progress in the weeks-long investigation; he had used his time wisely, getting closer to Ian Cross than any man had ever gotten and forming a kind of friendship with the elusive man. That was how he had managed to talk Ian into bringing Tara Storm onboard to write a thinly veiled publicity piece to bring in new investors after so many had walked away. Andrew had capitalized on Ian’s panic at losing not one, but two shifters, two guests, and more investors than GRE could afford to lose in the space of a week. Desperate to bring in fresh money, Ian had been all too eager to grant the ditzy, adorable, and easily manipulated Tara Storm full and complete access to the island, and had even praised Arnold for his foresight at assigning her a specific shifter to accompany her everywhere. It had all fallen into place perfectly, and Tara had to wonder at the ease with which things were just lining up. She wasn’t one to believe in Fate, or other invisible forces at work, shaping her life, but this was all too perfect. The connections between the people that had brought her to this moment just too-
Stop it, she admonished herself. There’s nothing Fated about this. You’re here to do a job, and when that job is over, Luis will go back to his life, and you’ll go back to yours. It really is that simple. Don’t make it into something it’s not.
Angry with herself and wishing she had never let her guard down, she burrowed deeper into his dark fur and closed her eyes. It was time to put her big girl panties on and move on.
Once she closed her eyes, she fell asleep almost instantly, willingly giving herself over to the blissful darkness and letting her thoughts float away into the abyss.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tara sat crouched in the brush at the top of the hill overlooking the research center, which was built into the side of another hill. The backside of the building had one access door, which opened up to the second floor. Because of the way the building was built into the terrain, the main entrance was accessed via a small people bridge, and the scientists entered on the third floor with two floors below and only one above.
It was still dark, and she could see that several of the scientists who worked the six-to-two shift were already arriving, almost thirty minutes early for work. Dragging and tired as she expected they would be, many stood or sat in their boats on the dock a short distance away, coffee mugs in hand, staring out onto the water.
Tara and Luis were dressed head to toe in black, her backpack nearly empty on her back and carrying only essentials. Luis had put the bulk of their things in his bag and hung the bag high in a nearby tree. The only thing of his she carried was a change of clothes.
“What for?” she had asked.
“In case I have to shift on the fly. I’m not going to stop and strip down so that I don’t rip my clothes to shreds.”
She had laughed at the picture in her head, there in that tree as they shared an early breakfast and enjoyed the last moments of peace before they had to go after the heart of GRE. His logic was infallible, but imagining him stopping mid-fight to carefully undress and shift had tickled her funny bone immensely.
“Let’s go,” Luis said when the lone guard who was stationed outside the building walked around the corner. “We have ten minutes to get down the hill before he completes the circle all the way around again.”
She nodded, following him down the gentle slope, crouching when they could to avoid detection.
The full moon had already made its way over the water and was almost set, no longer casting its bright light over everything, but they were still cautious. Sunrise was at seven this time of year, but the world started getting light almost an hour before that. If there was too much movement, even the human eye would be drawn to them, alerting someone to their presence and blowing their chances of getting in undetected.
They reached the back of the building, and Tara was delighted to see that the door had a simple keycard access, much like a hotel or a college dorm.
“Can you get us in here?” Luis whispered.
“Piece of cake,” she said, pulling out the ERH and plugging the USB cord into a port hidden away underneath the scanning unit.
She held the small laptop in one hand, fingers of her free hand flying over the keys. There was a soft click, and the light turned green. Luis opened the door and peeked into the dark corridor.
“It’s clear,” he said, and the two of them slipped inside.
Luis went right, but Tara quickly tapped him and motioned for him to follow her, turning and going to the left, walking along the wall and beneath a video camera pointed at a stairwell. Tara was on her laptop again, clicking on a program and typing wildly until a video feed of the sta
irwell in front of them popped up on her screen.
“Whoa,” he whispered, watching her work her way into the network with little more than a few keystrokes.
“Nice, right?”
“I need one of those.”
“Don’t we all? There, the feed is looped, replaying every five minutes until we leave.”
“On this camera?”
“On the entire building.” She walked to the stairwell door, watching the camera feed for a moment to make sure that they didn’t appear. “Well, every camera but the lobby floor. I didn’t want them to notice that no one was leaving and coming in, so we’ll have to avoid that part of the building.”
She took the stairs down; her footfalls quiet on the cement steps in spite of her speed. Careful not to make a sound, she opened the door to the basement a crack and looked around to see if anyone was there.
“Clear,” she said, moving through the partially opened door and turning hard left.
“This floor is wider than the rest,” Luis said, noting that the basement extended on all sides of the stairwell, which was located on the outer wall on all the other floors.
“I know. It’s almost twice again as wide. We’re looking for the computer’s server housing. I can get what I need from there, and we’ll be out of here in a few minutes.”
“Sounds too easy.”
“Hopefully it stays that way.”
They followed the dark hallway, which was illuminated by small bulbs set several yards apart so that there was never a dark area, but the light wasn’t more than the faintest of lights, and barely lit the dark corridor.
“Why is it so dark here?” Luis wondered.
“A lot of basements house only computer servers, supplies, and places to hunker down should there be a hurricane. It’s a waste of light bulbs to have this lit up like the rest of the building is.”
“At least GRE is protecting our environment,” Luis said sarcastically.
“It works in our favor,” she whispered, stopping in front of a set of double doors with the standard warning on the door. “This is it,” she said.
“High voltage?”
She shrugged.
“Don’t shove metal into any of the hardware and you should be fine.”
She used the keycard hacker to open the lock on the door, and they slipped inside. The light automatically turned on when they came through the door, washing the entire room in an eerie fluorescent glow.
“There it is,” she said, rushing forward and setting the laptop on a table beside the mainframe computer.
She pulled the USB out again, plugging it into a port and opening a program on the desktop. Her fingers were fast, flying over the keyboard and then stopping abruptly before a dialogue box popped up and a progress bar started slowly filling.
“How long will this take?” Luis wondered, his eyes locked on the door.
“It takes a few minutes. I’m downloading it to the computer. I can’t upload it to Andrew from here. The walls are thick concrete, and there’s no way to get a satellite signal in here.”
“Got it.”
“I don’t think anyone will come down this way. There really isn’t any reason for someone to come down here unless the computer is having issues.”
He nodded, but he still kept his eyes on the door, just in case. Tara turned back to the laptop, relieved to see that the download had less than two minutes to go. She kept her eyes on the dialogue box and watched as the computer went through the motions of gathering every file on every computer hooked up to this server, confident that she was safe as long as Luis was there to watch her back.
When the program finally finished, she waited until it gave the okay to unplug the USB, and she quickly packed her laptop away into her bag.
“I’ll carry that,” he said, taking the bag from her. “That hill is a steep run up.”
She shrugged. She wasn’t going to argue with him over who should hold a bag.
They quietly exited the server room, making their way back toward the stairwell. She looked down the hallway both ways, then at the small bulbs that had so dimly lit the way minutes before.
“Do these lights look brighter to you?” she asked in a whisper.
“They do.”
“I think they’re UV lights,” she said. “You know, the ones you use on snake cages.”
Luis stopped walking around one lamp until he could see the writing on the end of the bulb.
“It says ‘UV daylight adj’.”
“That’s an adjustable daylight. I’ve used one before. You can hook it to a photocell so that it mimics the daylight outside.”
“Why would they need that down here?” Luis wondered.
Tara’s skin crawled, and she had a sudden thought.
“People.”
“What?”
“You said that people were disappearing, right? What if they’re keeping them down here? They would need to simulate day and night so that they didn’t get sick and die or go mad. Prolonged exposure to artificial light with no UV messes with our systems down to the cellular level and can cause depression and eventually hallucinations, especially when coupled with captivity.”
Tara didn’t wait for him to respond. She was already heading back down the hall, walking past the stairwell and continuing.
“Tara, what are you doing?”
“What if there are shifters down here? And humans? We can’t just leave them here.”
“Okay, but how are we going to get them out? Just file out the door and hope for the best?”
“I don’t know. We have to find out if there are people here. Andrew needs to know if there are lives to be saved.”
Luis stood for a moment, watching her walk away, then followed with a low curse under his breath. As much as he wanted to get her out of there so she could contact Andrew and he could keep her safe while GRE went down, they had to know if there were innocents who needed to be saved.
Tara turned the corner cautiously, taking in a quick breath in shock when she did.
“This isn’t good,” she said, staring at the long corridor with doors spaced out every eight feet. “There are twenty or more rooms in this hallway.”
Tara was walking quickly now, looking through the small glass windows at the people trapped inside, every one of them curled up asleep or pretending to sleep, backs to the door. Tara went down the row and then skidded to a stop about halfway down, her eyes wide and her mouth agape.
“No,” she whispered, tapping softly on the glass window.
“Who is it?” Luis called out.
She looked at him, her face stricken.
“Martin,” she whispered.
Luis rushed to her side, looking through the window and groaning softly. Martin was stirring when he looked over his shoulder, saw Luis’s face, and sat up suddenly.
Tara was running her hands over the knobless door, trying to figure out how to access the room and get Martin out. Martin rose from the bed slowly, walking to the window and looking at Luis in disbelief, as if he didn’t believe his own eyes.
“Luis?” he croaked.
“I’m here. Hang tight; we’re going to get you out of here.”
“No. You have to leave. They’ll be here any minute with our breakfast.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Luis said.
“And the others? You can’t break us all out before they come down here. The doors are alarmed.”
Luis looked to Tara, who had yanked her hands away from the door at the mention of an alarm. Luis’ expression was frantic. Tara put a hand on his arm and looked into his eyes.
“He’s right. We can’t afford to get caught or everyone suffers. I’ll let Andrew know that they’re here, and they’ll save them. It’s only a few hours more, one day tops.”
“We can handle that,” Martin said, reacting to her words though she couldn’t see him from where she stood, which meant that he hadn’t seen her.
“We’ll come back for you,” Luis said, already
moving away from the door. “We’ll come back.”
“I know,” Martin said.
Tara grabbed his hand, pulling him along the corridor toward the stairwell. They were almost there when they heard the elevator ding behind them as the car settled onto the floor and the doors prepared to open.
Luis grabbed Tara off her feet with one arm, rushing to the stairwell door and slipping through it an instant before the elevator doors whooshed open. Luis held the door to the stairwell, closing it slowly so that it didn’t make a noise and alert the people coming off the elevator to their presence.
An instant before the door eased shut, they could hear the men talking affably, as if they weren’t bringing carts filled with breakfast trays to humans and shifters being held against their will in the basement of a secret facility in the Pacific.
Luis’s face was pinched in anger, but he managed to regain control while Tara looked on with concern.
“We’ll save them,” she assured them. “We need to get out of here so I can upload these for Andrew.”
They went up the stairs, and from their side of the door, Tara hacked into the security feed again. She took the videos off loop, watching the guard on the balcony of the fourth floor go by and around the corner again. She disabled the camera pointed at the stairwell door, setting it on a timed loop that wouldn’t affect the other cameras.
They rushed out of the stairwell, then through the door, running for the hill in the gray light that heralded the impending sunlight. Tara half crawled, half ran up the hill, expecting the sound of gunfire and a bullet in the back at any moment. They reached the tree line without any of that happening, both breathing hard as they sat down just inside the jungle, still watching the building below.
“He’s alive,” Tara said, relief evident in her voice.
“But he’s still in there.”
“We’ll get him. And the others.”
“I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to him before we do.”
“We’re going to get him. We need to head north and circle around this place so we can get to the northern beach and I can send this to Andrew.”
Her Undercover Panther : A Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance Page 10
