by Kat Martin
Jase glared. “Yeah? Well, in Houston, I almost got her killed. It was a near thing, and I sure as hell don’t want it to happen again. I’m not good for her. Surely you can see that. Now let it alone, okay?”
“Fine, whatever you want.” Chase started walking away.
“How is she?” Jase couldn’t resist asking. “Is she all right?”
Chase looked back. “Harper thinks she misses you. I have no idea why.” Turning, he walked back to his office and closed the door.
Jase sat back down at his desk. He was doing the right thing. Kate was his to protect. He didn’t have any other choice.
His cell rang. It was Paulo Diaz.
“Hey, Hawk, I got something to tell you, and it is not good.”
“What is it, Paulo?”
“You remember Hector Moran?”
“Same Hector I met at El Lagarto?”
“That is the one. Hector is dead, amigo. Shot in the back last night.”
Jase’s trouble-instinct crawled up his spine. “Who did it?”
“I am not sure. Surenos, maybe. Or MS-13. It gets worse.”
“Tell me.”
“Word on the street is whoever went after Hector knows someone paid him for information. He died before he had time to talk, but they know someone was asking questions and they are determined to find out who. You and your woman are not safe. You are in very great danger, amigo.”
His pulse was hammering. Kate was in danger. He had to get to her. Find a way to keep her safe.
“What about you? Will you and Rosa be okay?”
“No one knows I spoke to Hector. He can’t tell anyone now, so we are safe.”
“Thanks, Paulo, I owe you.”
“Take care, amigo.”
“You, too.” As he packed up his laptop, Jase phoned Kate. When the call went to voice mail, he phoned her office.
“Kate had a meeting with a client,” her assistant said. “But she planned to be back in the office before five.”
“If she gets there before I do, tell her not to leave. Tell her it’s important. Tell her I’m on my way.” He ended the call and grabbed his laptop, spoke to Mindy and told her he was headed out but he’d be checking in. He rapped on the door to Chase’s office and went in.
“What is it?” At the look on Jason’s face, Chase came to his feet.
“Someone ordered a hit on an informant of mine in Houston. Word is, they know Hector was being paid for intel. Now they’re gunning for whoever was asking questions. People saw us talking to him that night. They know what we look like. I’m a bounty hunter. I’m not hard to find. Add to that, we’ve been asking questions all over Texas. Sooner or later, someone’s going to put things together, figure the connection and come after us. I’ve got to talk to Kate, find a way out of this. I’m heading over to her office now.”
“You need help, you know where I am.”
He nodded. “I’ll keep you posted.”
In minutes he was on his way down Blackburn Street. He couldn’t stop a thread of eagerness mixed with the fear trying to cloud his brain. By the time he reached her office, his Kimber was in his holster covered by his T-shirt.
Kate was standing at the reception desk. She looked good. Beautiful. Better even than he remembered. He wanted to touch her so badly his mouth went dry.
He glanced around. Almost closing time. The receptionist was already gone. “We need to talk.”
Kate gave him a phony smile. “Hi, Jason. It’s nice to see you, too.”
“No time.” He grabbed her arm, ushered her into her office and closed the door.
“What is it?” she asked, picking up his anxious vibes. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t want to tell her. He had done his best to keep her out of danger, but he had failed. “We didn’t quit soon enough, Kate. They killed Hector Moran last night and word is, they’re looking for whoever paid him for info. I need to get you somewhere safe. We’ll go by your condo, pick up whatever you need, then find a place to lay low till we can figure this out.”
“Slow down. You’re telling me the people who killed Chrissy are looking for us?”
“They killed Hector, so yeah. It won’t take them long to figure out we were the ones talking to him at El Lagarto. Once they do, they’ll come for us. Get what you need and let’s go.”
She looked as if she might argue, but in the end, she closed her laptop, grabbed it and her purse and they left the building.
Jase drove straight to her apartment. He felt a little better after talking to the guard behind the desk in the lobby, warning him to be on the lookout for trouble. But they needed to keep a low profile. Zepeda had warned them about the cops. Hector had warned them. The fewer people who knew, the better.
“No one comes up,” Jase said. “No one. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. You can count on me.”
“Thank you, Gordy,” Kate said.
“Keep a sharp eye. These men mean business.” They rode the elevator upstairs in silence. Kate didn’t say anything until they were inside her apartment and Jase had checked to be sure the place was secure.
“All right,” she said, propping a hand on her hip in a gesture he recognized. “Let’s hear it. Start from the beginning.”
Resigned, he started talking, beginning with the phone call from Paulo Diaz, Hector’s murder and ending with Paulo’s warning that they were now the ones being hunted.
Jase tried not to flinch as the color slowly drained from Kate’s pretty face.
* * *
Kate refused to leave. At least not without a plan. It had taken her a while to get over the shock of being told men were coming after them, but now that she had accepted the news, there was no way was she going into hiding.
“You aren’t being realistic,” she said. “We can’t just disappear. We both have lives, businesses. We have to find these men and stop them.”
“I’ll find them. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s what I do.”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten. You’re a big, bad, bounty hunter. But in case you’ve forgotten, Hawk Maddox, this is my life we’re talking about. It’s my life that’s in danger, just like yours. I’m sure as hell not going to sit around waiting for these guys—whoever they are—to find me and put a bullet in my head.”
“You need to trust me, Kate—just this one time.”
Kate looked up at him, her heart squeezing with how much she had missed him. She rested a hand on his cheek, felt the familiar roughness of his unshaven jaw.
“I trust that you’re the best at what you do, and that you’d to anything to protect me. Even give up your own life.” The minute the words were out, she knew they were true, had known in some deep part of herself all along.
Jason captured her palm against his cheek and looked into her face, and she could feel the power of those blue, blue eyes. “I don’t want you getting hurt. I couldn’t live with that.”
She forced herself to move away. “I can help you, Jason. Together we can find these men and put them away, put them somewhere they won’t be able to hurt us or anyone else ever again.”
He paced across the room and back, his muscled shoulders rigid with tension. “Getting you more deeply involved in this is the last thing I want.”
“I can’t just go into hiding. It’s not realistic and it isn’t safe. We have to stop them. You know I’m right, Jason.”
He fell silent for several heartbeats. Finally a resigned sigh whispered out. “Unless we can find these guys and put them away, neither of us will ever be safe.”
“We can do it if we work together,” Kate said.
Jase paced away for several heartbeats, then walked back. “Since I’m not willing to leave your protection to someone else, we stay together—on one condition. After we get settled, I take you through some basic self-defense moves. An
d as soon as we get a chance, we practice your shooting.”
“Fine.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “We need to make a plan.”
“Whatever plan we come up with, we’re going to have to go back to Houston.”
“Yeah,” Jase said simply. “I know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Find her! All of you—spread out and keep looking! She can’t have gotten that far. Whatever you do, don’t let her get away!”
The men fanned out, at least five of them, running off in different directions. Two of them charged right past the entrance to the alley where she was hiding.
It was dark, the night so black Callie could only feel the rough brick walls as she crept along in the fetid, humid air. Carefully she picked a path through the rotten garbage strewn all over the pavement, past the overflowing metal dumpster, trying to ignore the disgusting smells, careful not to step on a beer bottle or nudge a tin can with her foot and give herself away.
Icy fear gripped her. Her heart pounded so hard she could feel the sharp thump in her ears. She had to find a place to hide before they caught her and dragged her back, before it was too late.
But her mind was fuzzy from the last drugs they had given her, pills so far, but she knew it was going to get worse. Especially now that she had run. She couldn’t let them find her.
Her eyes burned as she thought about the last girl who had tried to run away. They had caught her in less than an hour, beaten her so badly she couldn’t get out of bed for days.
But Callie had heard them talking about her, saying they were planning to sell her as a virgin. She was young, only thirteen, which made her worth a lot of money. She heard them mention some rich old man who liked young girls.
Tears slipped down her cheeks. She never should have run away from home. But things had gotten really bad, and she was desperate. She had left the day after her thirteenth birthday. She just couldn’t take it anymore, the fighting, her stepfather slapping her mother, threatening Callie if she didn’t do what he said.
Her mother worked as a waitress and didn’t get home until late. After her stepdad lost his job as a dockworker at the port, he’d grown angry, had taken it out on both of them.
Then Steve started looking at her in a bad way, touching her when her mother wasn’t around. She couldn’t tell her mom about Steve. Her mother loved him. Even if Callie told her the truth, her mother wouldn’t believe her. Callie didn’t know what to do, and there was no one she could talk to about it.
Finally, she packed a small suitcase, headed for the nearest bus stop to home, got on a bus and left for Houston. Maybe if she went away for a while, she could figure things out.
The minute the bus doors opened, she was scared. She had known she was in trouble the minute she got off the bus and three men appeared out of nowhere and started following her down the street. Bad trouble. The worst trouble of her life.
A sound interrupted her thoughts. The men were heading back this way. She glanced frantically around, found a spot beneath a chunk of wet cardboard and huddled down in the mud and slime on the alley floor. She held her breath so she wouldn’t make even the slightest sound as two of the men darted inside the entrance to look for her.
“See anything?” the tall skinny one asked. His name was Grady.
“I do not think she is here.” Rico was the other guy’s name, a Mexican with a short fat body and a thick accent. She eased in a slow breath as Rico turned and started back down the alley the opposite way.
Callie closed her eyes and said a silent prayer. As Rico passed the dumpster, she actually believed that God might be listening. Then the sound of a deep voice reached her and her eyes popped open.
“Well, look who I found,” Grady said.
Callie’s throat tightened into a scream.
* * *
It was getting late. Kate hurriedly packed a bag, grabbed her laptop, and they took the elevator down to the lobby. They drove straight to Jason’s to retrieve his gear, then headed south on I-45.
It was close to four hours to Houston, but Jase insisted on driving instead of flying. He needed his own ride, he said. He could count on the Yukon. Kate wondered if it had anything to do with the metal restraints welded into the back of the vehicle.
As they headed out of the city, Jase made several evasive turns and doubled back a couple of times to be sure they weren’t being followed. On the road, they went to work making plans, Kate taking notes on her iPad.
“Let’s start with what we know so far,” Jason suggested.
Kate tried not to think how good it felt being with him again. Jase seemed to fill some part of her that felt empty without him. It wouldn’t last long, she knew. And if she weren’t careful, she could get hurt even worse than before.
“We need a working theory,” he continued. “We can change whatever turns out to be wrong.”
“Okay, we’re pretty sure the group is working mainly out of Houston,” Kate said. “Both murdered women came from there. Or at least we think they did.”
“And Hector’s info corroborates that assumption. He said the group picks women up off the street—they could be runaways, battered women, or girls who come to the city hoping to find a better life.”
“Instead they wind up hooked on drugs,” Kate said. “Feeding their habits by selling themselves.”
“Hector also mentioned women in homeless shelters, and those being smuggled in from out of the country. Pretty typical for a trafficking ring.”
Kate jotted down a few notes. “Hector talked about the women being moved around. That sounds like it could be important.”
“It could be the key to finding them,” Jase said. “I’ve got a call into an HPD detective named Tony Castillo. He hasn’t called back, but sooner or later he will.”
Worry filtered through her. “Hector said not to trust the police.”
“He was warning us to watch out for dirty cops. I’ve worked with Tony before. Always been a straight-up guy. I trust him, but I won’t take chances.”
“So moving the women around. How would that work?”
“Could be they haul them to a specific location,” Jason said. “A motel or a house on the outskirts of town, something like that. The women are waiting when the men arrive to take their pleasure.”
“Pleasure.” It made her stomach burn to think of it. She loved sex with Jason, but it was consensual, a joy they both shared. She couldn’t imagine having a stranger greedily using her body any way he wanted.
“If they move them from place to place, maybe there’s no primary location,” she said. “No single place they actually house and feed them.”
“I’m betting they have a facility somewhere, a hub they work in and out of. Could be more than one. And if they’re using pickups and vans to move the women from place to place, they’ve got to park them somewhere. Sooner or later, we’ll figure out where.”
They lapsed into silence after that. As tired and worried as she was, she slept for a while. When she awoke, they were pulling into the apartment Chase had loaned them before, out by the Energy Corridor near the Garrett Resources office. Since there was no record of their stay, no way to track them to that location, it was the safest place they could be.
Jason parked the car beneath the covered carport in the lot. They grabbed their bags and went up to the apartment.
Riding together for hours had heightened the sexual awareness that always seemed to spark between them. As Kate crossed the living room, she could feel the heat of Jase’s body behind her. When she turned, the hunger in his blue eyes scorched right through her, heating her from the inside out.
Desire flared. She wanted him. She always seemed to want him. She replaced the feeling with a shot of anger.
“Not going to happen, big boy. You’re the one who ended things, remember? I’m not going to be your
booty call whenever you get an itch you need to scratch.”
His jaw hardened. “That isn’t the way it is, and you know it.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It was never like that. Not then, not now. I wanted you. No one else—just you. I still do.” He stormed past her down the hall into the second bedroom and slammed the door.
Kate just stood there. She was the one he wanted? The only one he wanted? She couldn’t believe he had actually said that. It wasn’t true. Couldn’t possibly be true.
As she had a dozen times, she went over the words he had said the day he had ended their affair. I’m not good for you. After what happened, can’t you see that?
She’d thought it was just a line, the kind men used when they wanted to end a relationship they were tired of.
Now she wondered... Surely he didn’t blame himself for what happened at El Lagarto? Perhaps even the brawl at Mean Jack’s?
Even if he did, it didn’t matter. Just like Andrew, he wasn’t willing to take a chance on her, on them, and she was in too deep to settle for an occasional round of sex. The road to heartbreak was paved with sultry days and hot nights in the bedroom. Hawk Maddox wasn’t leading her down that road again.
Kate stripped out of her clothes and headed for the shower. She dried her hair and went straight to bed. She could hear Jason in the other bedroom, then his heavy weight shifting on the mattress. Clearly he was having as much trouble falling asleep as she was.
Kate’s resolve strengthened. Hawk Maddox was simply too much for her to handle. She wasn’t willing to put her heart at risk again.
* * *
The following morning, Jase was up first thing, rousing Kate, who was still half asleep, determined to begin their self-defense lessons.
“Are you sure about this?” she grumbled, yawning. “It’s hard to believe self-defense lessons are going to be much good against a pack of vicious criminals.”
Jase just smiled. “Always better to be prepared.”
