Agent I1: Tristan [01] The D.I.R.E. Agency
Page 17
The door slammed opened behind her. Shit, shit. Strong footsteps followed, gaining more ground than she could ever cover with her size eight feet. He jumped over the handrail and landed behind her.
Cassandra’s heart leapt to her throat. She couldn’t afford to get caught. She had to save her family.
“Stop. I just want to talk to you.”
Sure, you do. With a little water and a towel over my face.
The first floor door came into sight. If she could make it to the ground floor, she could lose him in the bustle of emergency room activity.
He grabbed Cassandra’s arm from behind. A shock of electricity shot through her. She convulsed violently, her body shaking and quivering with abandon.
He dropped her arm. Cassandra collapsed on the landing, her head bouncing off the plaster wall. Pain exploded at the back of her skull, as dizziness shrouded her head. Her body hummed, every nerve-ending charged and sizzling.
He dropped down beside her. She gazed up at him through lazy eyes. Her heart stopped, any hope for breath lodging in her lungs.
She must’ve died and gone to the hot angel floor of heaven.
Bright, emerald green eyes stared down at her beneath furrowed brows, a lock of dark copper hair falling over his forehead.
“Are you okay?” He bent over her.
Yep. He was an angel all right, with a soft, deep voice that made her body sizzle and her head spin all the more.
His full, gorgeous lips were by far his most appealing feature, although his chiseled, smooth jaw came in a strong second. He even wore intricately carved copper and gold armbands like archangels in paintings of old.
The stories of heaven she’d always heard were way underrated.
“You’re beautiful.”
He grinned with a dimpled smile that would render an auctioneer speechless.
“I think you hit your head. Can you stand?”
Cassandra frowned. As a matter of fact, her head did hurt. Reaching behind her, she felt around in her hair and found a knot the size of a Ping-Pong ball.
She wasn’t dead?
Damn. That meant this guy worked for D.I.R.E.
That just wouldn’t do.
Shutting her eyes, Cass took a mental inventory of her body. Other than limbs like noodles and a nagging headache, she felt okay.
She had to lose him.
What a pity.
Mustering strength she would surely beg for later, Cass backed away from him when he tried to help her up. “Don’t touch me.”
Holding up his hands, he unfolded to stand above her. “Sorry about that.”
Glaring up at him, Cass got to her knees. Bracing a hand on the wall, she slowly climbed to her feet - with a swift uppercut to his crotch.
Sonovabitch echoed in the cavernous stairwell as he doubled over.
Cass flung open the first floor door. Running into the busy corridor, she lost her footing.
Shit, shit, shit.
Grabbing a handrail on the wall, she righted herself and took off. Thank God she wore stretch jeans. She had a little crawling to do.
Growling through the pain, Aidan Monroe shot out of the stairwell in pursuit of the hellion on wheels that had royally racked him.
Holy buckets he hurt.
“In pursuit of a blonde female.” He spoke into his armband, as he ran with a limp past a nurse pushing an empty gurney. “First floor of the hospital, heading toward the main corridor. Runs like a freaking gazelle.”
Tristan Jacobs, his former SEAL BUD/S teammate and fellow D.I.R.E. agent showed on his screen. “Cassandra Naylor?”
“I think so.”
Aidan had been trained to ignore pain and most of the time he could manage. However, his new system had every nerve ending on high alert and dammit, this woman had knocked his nuts into his throat.
Rounding a corner, he ran into two D.I.R.E. agents in the hallway.
“Which way?” one of them said.
“You mean she didn’t run past here?”
They shook their heads.
Dammit.
Several minutes later, Aidan walked, no limped, into the front door of Creekmore General Hospital. He and some of the other D.I.R.E. agents had scoured the building and grounds looking for the blonde spitfire.
She’d lost them.
Aidan winced as he stopped beside Tristan in front of the elevators. His balls hurt like hell. He may never get a hard-on again. He could kick himself for allowing his out-of-control powers and her striking beauty to play on his sympathies.
“It had to be Naylor’s daughter.”
He preceded Tristan into the elevator. Tristan hit the fourth floor button. “What did she look like?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Blonde, built, glasses... good taste.”
“Good taste?” Tristan leaned against the opposite wall.
“She said I was beautiful.” He gave Tristan an arrogant grin.
“Well, you did say she wore glasses.”
Asshole.
Aidan glowered at him. “She’s not the first.”
“Well, Smooth Dog, you’ve been through enough women. At some point, one or two are bound to say something nice.”
Reaching the fourth floor, Aidan followed Tristan into the makeshift D.I.R.E. office. He’d seen his share of women, no doubt. However, long ago he’d discovered that caring for someone brought nothing but heartache and trouble. Variety kept things new and light.
Of course, most women had the opposite viewpoint. Aidan knew he’d left a trail of irate females in his wake. Tristan had warned him that one day he’d meet his match.
Aidan didn’t think so. Besides, he had no time to mess with women now that he’d joined D.I.R.E.
“Monroe, I thought you had a reputation for chasing, and catching, women.”
Mitchell Jacobs sat on the corner of a worktable inside the empty operating room. Any medical activity that had taken place on the floor had been transferred to other areas of the building. Mitchell didn’t want to move back to D.I.R.E. HQ until they were sure Robert Naylor would survive.
“What happened?” Mitchell said.
Tristan straddled a chair at the table. “She racked him.”
Wincing, Aidan pulled his shirt over his head. Besides his injury, he also had a new D.I.R.E. tattoo stinging the nerve-endings in his back.
Twisting around in front of the mirror, he admired his artwork.
Tattooed between his shoulder blades was a vivid, three-D image of two intertwined atoms. Stamped in the nucleus of one was the atomic number one, the second, the atomic number twenty-two. Streaks of lightning shot from each nucleus like sunrays.
Because his electrical system fused directly into his central nervous system, Aidan’s nerve-endings remained hypersensitive for now. Thus, the reason Cassandra’s rack job hit the jackpot.
Dr. Clint Robinson, the D.I.R.E. scientist that had flown in to check his system and fix Tristan, motioned for Aidan to sit on a hospital bed. “Do I need to get you some ice?”
Aidan shook his head as he watched the doctor look over the copper and gold armbands on each of his forearms. “I’ll live.”
Tristan stood by Aidan and compared his single armband to the armbands covering both of Aidan’s forearms. “So, his system is based on the same idea but is tied into his central nervous system?”
Robinson nodded his blond head as he studied the display screen on Aidan’s left arm. “The gold in his blood helps the conductivity. The copper disburses the charge evenly.”
“So, what can he do what exactly – besides shock people?” Tristan snickered.
Aidan glared at him. “Asshole. I’m beginning to re-think saving your life all those years ago.”
“It was only because you saved my life that I agreed to help with Rachel in the first place.”
“And aren’t you glad I did?”
A contented grin appeared on his face. “Yep. She’s everything to me.”
“She’d better be.”
At first, Aidan had had a hard time adjusting to Tristan and his sister. He’d thought no man good enough for Rachel. She had a heart of gold and a giving nature like no one he knew.
However, he’d seen a change in her over the last few days. Finding out her father wasn’t her father at all, and their mother had set her up to marry the biggest asshole on the planet, had changed her.
Thank God Tristan had been there for her through it all. Aidan knew he could never choose a better man for her.
“Tristan,” Robinson said, “Aidan can power up anything that takes an electrical charge, big or small. He can also fry it.” He looked up at Aidan with a knowing grin. “One day, he’ll figure out he can shoot lightning bolts from his gloves, but don’t tell him I said that.”
Aidan gave Tristan a fist bump. “Hell yeah...”
Aidan held up his hands, each finger wrapped in thin, metal rings, the tips covered with titanium diodes. The black aluminum-titanium covering his hands contained veins that fed energy from his solid hydrogen cell through the high-voltage coil, to his fingertips. While his body could perform any of the functions Robinson mentioned, his gloves increased his powers a hundredfold.
“Monroe.” Mitchell turned around a laptop to face Aidan. “Here’s a photo of Cassandra Naylor. Is that her?”
Aidan stared at a photo of the blonde beauty. Why couldn’t his enemy’s daughter look like Quasimodo? No, Robert Naylor’s daughter had to be a fresh-faced beauty with eyes a vivid shade of violet-blue, and a mole below the corner of her left eye.
Aidan had a thing for women with a beauty mark on their face.
She had long legs like Rachel, her skin pale rather than tanned.
Too bad she was a Naylor. Her name alone destroyed any beauty she possessed.
“That’s her.”
Glancing back at the computer, Robinson turned to shut a compartment on Aidan’s armband. “Nice.”
Mitchell turned around the laptop. “She’ll be back, but I want her when and where we choose, not at her leisure.”
Robinson extended Aidan’s arms in front of him. “Flex your fingers and your wrists. Everything feel okay? Frequency too high?”
Aidan shook his head. “Other than the fact that I’m shocking everyone I touch, I’m fine. I knocked Cassandra Naylor to the floor.”
“Not to mention your sister.” Tristan glowered at him. “And me.”
Robinson opened the computer screen on Aidan’s right armband. “You’re not shocking me now, Aidan. You have to learn to control your blood flow during intense situations. I don’t want to lower the frequency. You’ll need the power.”
“Remember that during sex.” Tristan gave him a knowing grin.
Aidan stared at Tristan before shaking his head. Anger bubbled in his veins, teasing him to take it on. “Don’t even tell me that. I don’t want to kill you, after all.”
Laughing, Tristan sidestepped Aidan when Robinson motioned for him to take Aidan’s place on the bed. “Hey, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Donning his shirt again, Aidan plopped down in a chair and sat back on two legs. He wouldn’t mind testing out that theory on Cassandra Naylor. With a spitfire like that, things were bound to get intense in bed.
“Speaking of Cassandra Naylor…”
Mitchell gave him a raised brow. “Were we?”
Tristan and Robinson grinned as he replaced the Tesla-derived coil in Tristan’s armband.
Aidan glared at them. “We have Dar’s belongings, right?”
Mitchell said, “We’ve gone through his phone. He doesn’t save his calls or text messages.”
“Why don’t we send her a text from his phone, asking her to meet him somewhere?”
“The trick would be to sound like him,” Tristan said. “If she thought someone else had his phone, all bets would be off.” He looked down at the open compartment on his armband. “I’m sure she’s already suspicious that he hasn’t contacted her.”
Sighing, Aidan let the chair legs hit the floor. “I majored in asshole in high school. Where’s that phone, Mitchell?”
Tristan smiled at him. “I thought that was a natural talent.”
He pressed the power button on the smartphone. “For a quiet man, you sure have been zinging out one-liners since you got engaged.”
Tristan raised his brows. “Intense situations, remember?”
Aidan lowered the phone to glare at Tristan. “I swear, Jacobs…”
“Bring it, man.” Tristan watched Robinson work. “It would take you and every army on earth to keep me away from Rachel.”
He couldn’t find fault in Tristan, knowing how much he loved her. The fact that he worked for D.I.R.E. gnawed at his gut, but considering who her father was, Aidan felt comfortable knowing Tristan would be around to look after her.
Mitchell came to study Robinson’s work. “Tristan, I take it Rachel’s finally resting?”
Tristan nodded. “Yeah, she finally accepted a sleeping pill from one of the doctors. She’s sleeping in the room next door. I offered to take her home for a while, but she knew I needed to stay close.”
Pressing the voice-texting app, Aidan held up Dar’s phone to his mouth. “Meet me at Willie’s Bar at two o’clock. Alone.”
Staring at the phone, he waited for a response. When none came after three minutes, he stared at Mitchell, then Tristan. “She’s suspicious.”
Mitchell crossed his arms over his chest. “If she’s smart, she would be.”
Ding. Call me.
Aidan spoke into the phone. “Can’t. Not safe.”
Mitchell and Tristan stared at him.
Ding. Wear the shirt I bought you for your birthday.
Aidan winced.
Tristan hopped down from the bed. “What did she say?”
“Wear the shirt I bought you for your birthday.”
Mitchell gave a cocked brow. “She’s definitely Bobby’s daughter.”
Aidan held up the phone to his mouth again. “I didn’t bring it.”
“Okay, Tristan,” Robinson said, “I want you to cloak and teleport separately.”
While Tristan tested his powers, Aidan waited for Cassandra to respond. What if the shirt was one of Dar’s favorites? What if she didn’t even buy him a shirt for his birthday?
Dammit. This was a bad idea.
Ding. C u there. Luv u.
He pulled back his head. Luv u? For some reason, he never pictured the Naylor family using the L word. Didn’t they walk around with loaded guns and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, like in the movies?
Her use of those words made him see Cassandra Naylor in a different light. She was a woman that loved her brother, just like Rachel loved him. Hell, she was Rachel’s sister. They had to be alike to some extent.
He shook his head as if to clear it. Hell, what was he saying? She was an experienced agent. Had been sired by the Robert Naylor, for gripes sake.
The Naylors were the enemy.
He needed to keep her on that side of the line.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
About the Author
="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share