by Cindy Gerard
Yeah. More like that. His family had been violently killed. He was in a strange country. On top of it all, he’d had to live with the fact that the man he’d looked up to and wanted to be like had likely been a criminal who made moral and business decisions that were responsible not only for his own death but the deaths of everyone in the world Rafe loved.
“I fell in with a pretty rough crowd,” he went on, still not exactly sure why he was telling her this. “Lotta scrapes with the law.”
“So what changed?”
“I got tired of living on the streets. And I finally wised up. On my eighteenth birthday, I did the best thing a young Latino male without U.S. citizenship could do. I joined the army. They turned me into something more than a punk kid with a chip on my shoulder and a death wish.”
“Where was your base?”
“Fort Benning.”
“Bragg.”
He cocked a brow. “You? Army?”
She nodded. “I was an army brat. Following in the old man’s footsteps seemed like the thing to do.”
It all kind of made sense now. Her no-nonsense delivery. Her in-your-face attitude. Her discipline.
“Let me guess. You were an officer.”
“Non-comm. College came later.”
“And then DIA. Impressive.”
She looked at him sideways. “Right. You were a Ranger, then moved on to an even more elite spec ops unit when you were recruited for Task Force Mercy, and you’re impressed with me?”
Several things occurred to Rafe at once. One, he’d told her the worst about his past and in the process it felt like the weight he’d carried for years had eased a little instead of gotten heavier. Two, they were conversing. Like adults. Like normal people, instead of engaging in verbal skirmishes.
Three, someone had done their homework—most likely her boss, Sherwood—if they’d uncovered his affiliation with a highly guarded unit like Task Force Mercy. And finally, yes, he was impressed with her.
“Wait,” he said as a file from his memory bank shuffled forward. “Chase. I ran into a Chase in Somalia several years ago.” He dug deep, willing the rest of the information to break loose. “He … he was a master sergeant. Delta. Frank.” It finally came to him. “Frank Chase.”
Her face softened. “My dad.”
“I’ll be damned. We ran a few joint ops with his squad. He was a helluva soldier. Helluva man. I was sorry when I heard that we lost him.”
“Yeah.” She pinched her lips together, slowly nodded. “Me, too.”
They both grew silent then. Rafe suspected that like him, she was a little lost in her thoughts and in her memories.
“I don’t know why I told you all of that,” he said, suddenly feeling very much the fool.
“I… I’m glad you did.”
He stared at her long and hard, looking for some emotion to go with her words. Such a hard one to figure.
“You’d better go back inside.”
She slowly nodded. Then she left without another word. Probably wishing she’d never come out here, he figured.
Well, that made two of them.
Or it would have if he had an answer for the coil of longing that had tightened in his chest when he watched her walk away.
They spent what was left of the night and the next morning planning and prepping for all contingencies. Sherwood and his staff would check out the Russian connection and continue to try to covertly ferret out the person or persons who had misappropriated the E-bomb technology in the first place.
Green would remain Stateside on protection detail for Stephanie. Reed, Lang, Savage, Colter, and Black booked flights to Bogotá tomorrow, where BOI had contacts that could hook them up with the weaponry and commo they’d need to back up the op. From there they would travel to Medellín and start searching the perimeters of the Garcia network in a secondary attempt to locate the facility that housed an assembly plant for the E-bomb and the Black Ruby cloaking device.
By six p.m. that night, Raphael Mendoza was on a jet bound for Colombia, where he would attempt to reintroduce himself to his family.
And that distance thing B.J. had banked on? It wasn’t happening. She was on the same flight with Rafe, sitting right beside him in first class, embarking on what would most likely be the most dangerous ride of her life.
16
“You have to start thinking of yourself as Brittany. And you have to stop flinching every time I touch you.”
“I know what I have to do,” B.J. informed Mendoza stiffly from the window seat as the second leg of their flight lifted off from Miami heading for Medellín.
It would take a little time to get used to her new persona, mostly because she looked like a hooker. And not the grand-per-night call girl kind who wore Vera Wang and messed up the sheets in upscale apartments with Wall Street types.
Thanks to Johnny Reed, who had volunteered to drive her into the city to oversee her shopping and transformation from bland DIA officer to her new role as gold digger, B.J. now sported long acrylic nails that matched her siren-red toenail polish. She wore rings on at least four fingers; huge, dangly gold hoops in her ears; bracelets and bangles on her wrists. The only essential element of her new wardrobe was a Linea Pelle Dylan Croco handbag that cost more than her monthly apartment rent.
“Gotta look the part to play the part, darlin’,” Reed had drawled with that lazy grin of his. “Besides, we can hide a transmitter in the bottom between the insert and the leather in the purse.” The transmitter would be their only source of contact once Reed, Lang, Jones, Colter, Savage, and Black arrived in Medellín tomorrow morning.
“Because it’s a radio transmitter, the bad guys can detect it if they check you for bugs when you first get into the estate,” Reed had gone on.
“So keep it off when I first enter the compound,” she’d surmised.
“Right. Before you leave, we’ll set up a time every day for you to turn it on for five minutes so we can get a fix and then you turn it off. Any time you leave the estate, turn it on so we can follow you. Got it?”
She got it—and much more. Her suitcase was packed with a wardrobe straight out of Victoria’s Secret’s Naughty Nights catalog and it had cost a small fortune. The dresses were short, tight, low cut, and slinky. The underwear barely was. The shoes were strappy, stiletto, and painful—fuck-me shoes, Reed had called them, pronouncing her fit to pose as the sexpot fiancée of a man whose priorities were all about money, power, and sex. She didn’t even want to think about the bikini he’d picked out for her.
Rafe’s physical transformation was no less dramatic than hers. The first time she’d seen him he’d been wearing cammo cargo pants and a wife beater. Since they’d met up again, he’d worn a white T-shirt and well-worn jeans. As of today, Raphael Mendoza had shucked his casual attire for pleated, cream-colored linen pants and camel-colored Italian loafers that he wore without socks. His short-sleeved shirt was of the finest silk, a pale sky blue. He let it hang loose over his trousers and it was buttoned only to mid-chest.
His gold crucifix gleamed against skin so smooth and free of chest hair it crossed her mind again that he might wax. Raphael Mendoza in the persona of this slick, fashion-conscious Latino would definitely wax. The Choirboy, however, would sneer at the idea.
It was the Choirboy who looked at her now, all business, his brows pinched together in a scowl, reminding her that he had a right to be concerned about the way she reacted to him. She breathed in deep through her nose, then exhaled slowly through her mouth.
“Okay. Look.” She figured she owed him an apology. “I’m sorry for being so short. It’s just nerves. And this damn dress. I’ll get past it, okay?”
“I never should have agreed to let you come along,” he said, turning away.
That was no news flash. From the moment they’d all gotten their heads together to come up with a plan to infiltrate Garcia’s operation, Mendoza had nixed the idea of the two of them going in as a couple. She’d eventually won the argument
.
“You show up out of the blue,” she’d pointed out, “after an almost fifteen-year absence, you’ve got to have a reason and you’ve got to have a decoy. I can be both. You’ve been running a small but lucrative financial firm that took one shady risk too many. You badly need a financial transfusion. So you go to your uncle, wanting help from his bank. It makes sense. It also makes sense that you’ve got a taste for the finer things. So does your fiancée—”
“Who has you pussy-whipped and panting,” Reed had interrupted, building on the ruse, “and is pressuring you to claim what’s rightfully yours. A piece of the family ‘business.’”
“They’ll watch you like a hawk until you earn their trust,” B.J. had continued. “Me they’ll dismiss as arm candy. I’ll be about as suspect and threatening as a layer cake. I have to go along and you know it.”
They’d all known it. Even Mendoza, who’d finally, grudgingly relented but with several caveats.
“I run the op. You do what I say, when I say, and you take no stupid risks.”
“You run the op,” she’d echoed, and after a long, angry glare, he’d finally agreed.
Which had brought them to this juncture in their Colombian getaway. B.J. drew a steadying breath. Mendoza was right about the flinching. She had to get used to him touching her because the people they were trying to fool would see through their scam in a heartbeat if she didn’t nail the role of his possessive and clingy fiancée.
“Oh, and for what it’s worth,” Rafe said, drawing her attention away from the endless sky outside the window, “from where I’m sitting there is absolutely nothing wrong with that dress.”
She snorted. That’s because from where he was sitting, he could probably see all the way to her navel. It took everything in her not to tug on the scrap of material that passed for a bodice and drag it over her breasts. Not only did she not want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her squirm, he was right. She had to get used to it.
She would have killed for a piece of chocolate. It might have helped her make the transition from B. J. Chase to Brittany Jameson, disinherited wild child of the Pennsylvania Jameson Department Store Jamesons, failed model, failed fashion designer, but winner of a three-karat, emerald-cut diamond engagement ring and Raphael Mendoza’s heart. Brittany was shallow, she was spoiled, she was demanding, and now that she had her hooks into the CEO of a hot new financial brokerage firm based out of Vegas she wasn’t about to let him out of her sight—especially once she’d learned of his wealthy Colombian family and had seen a chance to enhance her lifestyle by having her fiancée join the family business.
At least that was the cover story. In addition to planting Internet articles about Brittany Jameson and her family, Crystal was hard at work even now, creating an identity for Rafe as one of those shady financial gurus who lived on the edge and by their own set of ethics. They’d also called on Ann Tompkins, who was in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation of a prominent but clearly corrupt CFO of a major savings and loan corporation. Ann had promised to cut a deal with the defendant if he would vouch for Rafe’s identity in the event Munoz put out any feelers about Rafe’s dealings.
The fake background wouldn’t hold up under lengthy scrutiny but it would buy them a few days to get in, find out what they could about Garcia’s operation through the Munoz family connection, and get out. Hopefully they’d be armed with the information they needed to find and destroy the facility manufacturing the E-bomb and the Black Ruby cloaking device.
Long shot? At best. But if and until Stephanie pinpointed the location of the facility as she continued sifting through and decoding hundreds of encrypted messages, it was all they had to run against a fast-ticking clock. They now had six days and counting.
“Cocktail?” The flight attendant intruded on B.J.’s thoughts.
“None for me, thanks.” Rafe turned on a dazzling smile as he reached for B.J.’s hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. “Darling?”
He was testing her.
Fine. It was showtime.
“Brittany” smiled. “You know I can’t resist champagne, baby,” she said, turning toward him in her seat, reaching for him in such a way that her dress gaped open even further, giving him a real eyeful. She lightly stroked his chest, played with the gold cross nestled against his skin in the open neck of his shirt. Then she leaned in close and bussed her nose along the rim of his ear.
She felt a shiver ripple through him. Felt his muscles tense and his heartbeat kick up beneath her palm.
“I’ll be right back with your champagne.” The attendant barely managed to suppress an eye roll.
“You do that,” B.J. told her.
For good measure, she caught his earlobe between her teeth, let it slide between them as she slowly pulled away. Then she settled back in her seat and tried to pretend that the heat and the touch and the taste of him hadn’t affected her.
“Well,” he said, his voice sounding strained. “I’d say you’ve gotten past your problems with the … um … touching thing.”
“Thought you needed a little demo to set your mind at ease.”
Hoping she didn’t sound as breathless as she felt, she gripped the armrests to steady her hands so he wouldn’t see that she did, indeed, still have a huge problem with touching him. And smelling him. And feeling his powerful reaction eddy through his very responsive body.
“Do … ah, do we need to talk about this little chemistry thing that’s going on between us?” he asked.
No, they did not, B.J. thought, fighting panic at his admission that he’d felt it, too. They just had to get through it.
Rafe willed his eyes to focus.
When the woman decided to prove a point, she did it with a very sharp pencil—and a wicked, wanton mouth.
His pulse slammed at about two hundred per; his hands clenched into fists to keep himself from reaching for her and taking her little game several steps further. She’d not only called him out, she’d taken him to task and damn near to the limit of his self-control.
He was glad he’d worn pleated pants and that his loose shirt covered his lap and camouflaged the tenting action going on underneath it.
Madre de Dios.
He should have gone out and gotten himself laid. Several times. Several ways. But a hard-won maturity had crept up on him over the past few years. Once upon a time—when he’d been young and randy and in a constant state of rut—sex without strings had been not only the method of choice but the status quo. He hadn’t been looking for commitment. He hadn’t been looking for romance. Hell, he wasn’t looking for it now, but now a woman had to mean more to him than a quick tumble and a fast good-bye. Trouble was, his line of work didn’t allow for much more than that, which meant it had been a damn long time since he’d spent any quality time with a woman.
The fact was, until he’d tangled with one B. J. Chase, aka Brittany Jameson, there hadn’t been another woman who had interested him enough for him to even consider advancing to the getting-to-know-her-better stage. Stephanie didn’t count, he realized now. While Stephanie had represented what he’d thought was his ideal and he respected and admired her, he now understood that he’d never loved her that way.
Not in the way that made it right. The way Gabe loved Jenna, the way Sam loved Abbie, and God help them, the way that wild man Reed loved Crystal to the exclusion of his own life. He would die for her—almost had. Just like Gabe and Sam would die for their women.
When and if the time ever came, that’s what he wanted. A love to die for with a woman who would do the same. He did not want to love some sharp-eyed shrew who just happened to make him hot. And Chase was a shrew even if he had detected those little glimpses of vulnerability suggesting there was more than met the eye.
The attendant arrived with her champagne.
“Not a minute too soon.” “Brittany” smiled widely in anticipation of the champagne.
Dios santo. She had the sultry blonde act down to a science. He’d neve
r gone for the playgirl types. But that smile. He’d wondered if he’d ever see her smile and now she’d delivered twice in the last few minutes.
So it was manufactured. Didn’t diminish the impact. All those sharp, brittle edges melted away. Ice-chip-blue eyes turned simmering hot. Her skin even warmed and those wide, wicked lips revealed a toothpaste ad smile that could have sold anything from lipstick to liquor to sex and only made him more intrigued. If she could affect him like this with an act, what, he wondered, would happen if he ever got a genuine smile?
Jesus. He was running in circles. He wanted to know more. He didn’t want to know more. He didn’t like the woman. He wanted to like the woman. What was he, sixteen?
Rest. He needed rest. So did she.
“Better try to catch some shut-eye,” he suggested. None of them had gotten much sleep in the last forty-eight.
