Tempted Into Danger

by Melissa Cutler

  The noise of the helicopter still roared above her, loud and steady as she scrambled for shore. Every swish of something brushing her legs reminded her of the predators that could be lurking below the surface, hungry for their next meal.

  Finally, she reached the bank and hauled herself onto the exposed roots of a mangrove tree, then to the solid ground beyond it. From there, she watched the helicopter rise to the height of the canopy, Diego’s form growing smaller in the distance. Removing the headpiece, he stood and curved one booted foot over the open pilot door. Despite his impossible height, his gaze found hers. His face was a mark of calm concentration.

  Rising from the ground, she locked eyes with him, so nervous that the pounding of her heart made her ribs hurt. He was so high up, she didn’t see how he’d survive the force of impact of hitting the water. She rocked onto the balls of her feet and bent her knees, ready to spring into the water and help him if need be.

  The helicopter swerved down and left, toward the tree canopy lining the bank, as his arms swung up above his head. In seemingly slow motion, he pushed off the doorway of the plummeting aircraft and arched into a perfect dive.

  Coherent thought evaporated. Sound and time ceased to exist. She was vaguely aware of the helicopter chewing up trees as it crashed into the jungle on the far bank, but her focus remained wholly captivated by Diego.

  He was a wonderment to behold. Stunning, beautiful. Like an arrow of pure power and control slicing through the air.

  A soft sound of admiration and relief escaped her throat when he slid past the surface of the water into its depths. She’d never seen his equal in all her days. Bracing herself against the trunk of a mangrove, she drew a ragged gulp of air, counting the seconds until he emerged.

  He came up swimming toward her, his arms stroking and his broad shoulders undulating with machine-like precision until he reached the bank.

  An explosion sounded behind him and he twisted. Vanessa’s attention shifted along with his in time to watch a belch of flame and smoke erupt from the pocket of trees the helicopter had crashed into. Once it subsided, Diego resumed his swim to shore. Wrapping those large hands around mangrove roots, he hoisted his body out of the water, a move that transformed Vanessa’s breathless admiration into serious, skin-tingling lust.

  Hot damn, Diego Santero looked fine soaking wet. Everything about him radiated potent masculinity, from the slick, dark hair that drew emphasis to the angles of his cheeks and jaw, to the water beading off his forearms and the soaked black shirt and cargo pants that clung to every curve of muscle and flesh below.

  Delicious, wicked awareness sped through her system, rendering her weak-legged and warm all over.

  “What is it? Are you hurt?” he asked, stepping nearer.

  Gripping the tree for support as he touched her arm, she dragged her gaze from his body to his face. And all she could think to say was, “You make velocity look good.”

  Chapter 6

  A tight, white T-shirt—that was the best Alicia could come up with for Vanessa’s change of clothes? A body-hugging shirt and bra that turned translucent when wet. Nice going, Phoenix. Way to boost his objectivity during the mission. Nothing helped him make life-or-death decisions better than the outline of a beautiful woman’s nipples staring him in the face.

  Next time, the asset was getting a bright orange sweatshirt and a granny bra. Then again, the next asset he protected wouldn’t be Vanessa Crosby, so maybe he stood a chance of maintaining his dignity. Because he sure wasn’t dignified now, what with all his blood pooling in inconvenient places.

  “You’re not hurt?” he asked again, bending over her. Her comment on velocity hadn’t made much sense, and she sagged against the nearest tree like it was the only thing keeping her upright.

  She ran her fingertips over his arm, a light touch that probably meant nothing to her but got him wondering how big of an ethical violation it was that he was picturing his asset in her birthday suit.

  Then she gasped. He edged back to figure out why. She was staring at water-diluted blood running down her arm. His blood.

  “You’re bleeding. Oh, my God. I’m so sorry, I... Are you okay?”

  “Never better.” He meant to say it sarcastically but wasn’t sure he achieved that effect. The wound hurt like crazy—glass usually did—but he hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought. Funny how an attempted kidnapping, a firefight, an out-of-fuel helicopter and a woman in a wet T-shirt worked to take his mind off the pain.

  “I’ve got first aid at the cabin. If you’re not hurt, then let’s start walking.”

  At least he was the one leading the way to his cabin. That gave him a little time to get over the desire to peel her wet clothes off and ask her to calculate another velocity equation, this time out loud so he could hear the numbers falling from those sweet lips while he helped himself to the softness of her body.

  You’re such a freak, Santero. Who ever heard of a math fetish?

  “I’m sorry you had to crash your helicopter,” she said.

  He kept his eyes on the jungle, clearing a path through the dense underbrush with his knife as he went, searching for the boulder he’d tossed his gear belt onto. The relentless manual labor helped him resist the urge to turn and look at her every few steps. “Yeah, that kind of sucked.”

  The helicopter had been one of his few possessions that didn’t fit in a duffel bag. He had an ancient jeep garaged in Germany and a second chopper stashed in Kenya, but it was a piece of junk compared to the one he’d just sent into the trees. “The worst part of losing the chopper is that we’re going to have to trek out of this place on foot.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Depends on what direction we head. At least two days, maybe three. Been a while since I’ve hiked it.”

  The gear belt was an easy find on top of the long, flat boulder he’d aimed it at from the chopper. After a quick inspection to make sure the grenades and ammo hadn’t gotten damaged during the fall, he strapped it around his waist.

  He looked up to find Vanessa watching him and made a halfhearted effort to keep his eyes on her face.

  “I bet you feel better now that you’ve been reunited with your Batman belt.”

  “Definitely.” He lifted his knife out of its sheath on his thigh and gestured north. “Let’s keep walking. It looks like the clouds are about to open up and I’d like to make it to the cabin before it gets too dark.”

  And get you out of those clothes into something dry. But then he visualized her peeling her pants off. In his mind’s eye, her panties were as see-through as the bra—and, just like that, he had to put his back to her so he wouldn’t embarrass himself with the arousal that he apparently had no control over.

  They plunged into the shadows of the forest as the first drops of rain fell.

  He was feeling the glass and shrapnel with every step and every slash of his knife through the underbrush and decided that concentrating on the pain was a better use of his energy than lusting after an asset.

  The pain cleared his head real good, and in no time flat he could think straight again.

  The denseness of the canopy kept the fading daylight out, as well as the larger drops of rain. Diego had a small flashlight on his belt, but it wasn’t going to be all that effective for jungle hiking. The way he figured it, they had about a half hour until the forest was as black as midnight.

  “While we hike, I want to hear more about the algorithm you wrote and what it has to do with that zip drive you gave me to hold.”

  “The algorithm was something I wrote in my spare time at work. I didn’t tell anyone I was attempting it because my boss is a jerk and I didn’t want him finding out I was doing something that wasn’t in my job description—especially if the algorithm failed.”

  He hacked at a particularly thick branch and
hissed through his teeth at the sting of pain in his neck. “How is tracking bulk cash not in your job description? I thought you were a criminal activity analyst.”

  “Yes, but only for possible security breaches in offshore accounts. The million- and billion-dollar corporate clients of the bank. Wire transfers and small cash deposits don’t qualify.”

  “So why’d you do it?”

  “To see if I could. I overheard two of my coworkers talking about how it was impossible to track bulk cash because criminals know all the tricks to flying under the radar. And I like a good challenge.”

  She said it like she’d taken up oil painting, not chosen to single-handedly take on the crime world’s billion-dollar bulk cash smuggling network as a hobby. And he’d thought her jab to the kidnapper’s gut had been ballsy. “So you made the radar bigger in scope, so to speak?”

  “No. I decided the radar the bank used wasn’t working, so I built a new one.”

  The self-assuredness in her tone had him glancing back to see the expression that accompanied it. She grinned at him, proud, those Princeton smarts of hers radiating from her eyes and the set of her shoulders. Helicopters and high dives might be out of her comfort zone, but looking at her now, it was easy to see how she’d rocketed to the top of her field. A person couldn’t fake confidence like that.

  “What I can’t figure out is why the men waiting at your apartment wanted to kidnap you. From what I can tell, it would’ve made more sense for them to kill you, but they clearly wanted you alive. Why do you think that is?”

  “I hadn’t considered that, but I guess you’re right. They must’ve known that there’s only one copy of the algorithm program. It’s stored in an encrypted internet storage cloud and I’m the only one who can access it. Whoever those men were, they can’t destroy it without my codes.”

  She hadn’t complained about the exertion of thrashing through the underbrush at an uphill angle, but she was starting to sound winded, so he slowed his pace. “According to the file ICE gave me, you emailed your boss about the algorithm yesterday. What made you decide to tell him about it?”

  “I ran a preliminary test and got a hit. I thought the bank deserved to know if someone was using it for criminal activity.”

  Good plan, if also a smidge naive about the way the criminal world worked. Then again, part of the reason he did what he did was so innocent people like her didn’t have to live in constant awareness of the evils of the world. “And he told you to hand it over. Why didn’t you?”

  “Call it instinct, but something about the situation didn’t feel right. I put him off, telling him I needed to clean up the program and make it user-friendly. I was going to run a small-scale test this weekend at my apartment, which is why I brought the zip drive full of account information home.”

  “That’s a bold move. You could’ve been arrested for stealing customer information if you were caught.” He high-stepped over a felled tree, then offered her a hand over.

  “I know, but I have a thing about puzzles going unsolved. I was going to destroy the zip drive after I—”

  Despite the hold he had on her hand, she still managed to snag her back foot on the log and trip, falling forward with her arm out to brace herself. No big deal because he caught her right away, but he wished he hadn’t discovered that he liked the way her palm felt splayed on his stomach while she worked to right herself.

  “Thanks.” She gave him a sheepish smile and wiped her hands on her pants. Like they weren’t as soaked through as the rest of her.

  Before his overeager libido embarrassed him, he started hiking again.

  “Did ICE know I was in danger today because they were spying on me?” she asked.

  “Not only you, but the whole bank. The Panama office has been monitoring RioBank communications for a while. I don’t have the whole scoop because my team was only brought in this morning and the feds aren’t big on sharing their intel.

  “What I can tell you is that the men believed to be after your algorithm are three brothers, the Chiaras, who are black-market merchants. ICE got an insider tip that the Chiara brothers have a RioBank employee on their payroll and are using the bank to launder and store their money. When ICE intercepted your email this morning, they called my crew in. They think the suspicious number pattern you isolated is related to the Chiaras’ criminal activity.”

  “So ICE wants my algorithm?”

  “They wanted more from you than that. Word came in from a local source that this Monday night the Chiaras are brokering the sale of a submarine between the Russians and some bad-news Colombians. ICE wanted you to act as a bank insider and pinpoint the Chiaras’ account in order to dissolve it and prevent the submarine sale. That’s all off the table now that the mission’s aborted, obviously.”

  She snagged his arm, stopping him. “So that’s it? You’re not going to try to convince me to help ICE catch the Chiaras or the RioBank insider? They don’t want me to try to stop the submarine sale anymore?”

  He lowered his knife and faced her. He wasn’t going to tell her this, but it no longer mattered to him what ICE wanted from her. The mission ICE gave him was to protect Vanessa Crosby—nothing more, nothing less. The safe house ambush brought it home to him that Dreyer was rushing into a situation without a sound plan or an accurate understanding of the Chiaras’ power and volatility.

  He’d never expose an asset to that kind of danger. “This algorithm you created brought you to the attention of a lot of bad people. All that matters now is getting you as far from the threat as possible.”

  “Like where?”

  “Probably somewhere in the States, in WitSec. I’m sure Uncle Sam will still want that program you made along with your testimony against whoever the RioBank rat turns out to be.”

  Huffing, she wiped dirt and rainwater from her forehead with the back of her hand. “So they’ll take what I created with a ‘Sorry about your life’?”

  She looked as irritated with the truth as he felt. He hated that it had turned out like that, too. Chewed up and spit out by a bunch of pale, pencil-pushing suits and criminal degenerates. “At least you still have a life. That’s the silver lining, right?”

  “Who’s to say I would’ve told the kidnappers the access codes so they could destroy the program? That would’ve been my only leverage against them killing me.”

  “Leverage or not, it’s almost eight o’clock. I’m thinking if my crew wasn’t brought in when we were, they would’ve had you in their custody for nearly three hours. If you were still alive, they wouldn’t be making it easy for you.”

  Her face blanched and she got real quiet, probably imagining the torture they would’ve put her through. Diego was visualizing it right alongside her and it made him sick. Whatever divine intervention sent him to her service today, he was grateful. The bitter truth that he’d railed against the assignment, that he’d considered quitting rather than debasing his worth by acting as a chauffeur, struck him like a punch straight to his heart. Vanessa would be dead—or worse.

  This was why he didn’t take days off—times like this when it hit him that the alternative to busting his butt on the job was that innocent people suffered. Vanessa, and civilians like her, was why he trained so damn hard.

  He gestured north with his knife. “Let’s keep walking. It’s getting dark.”

  The jungle had opened up enough that he didn’t need his knife anymore and they could hike side by side.

  “Do you think the Chiara brothers were behind the attack on me at my apartment and the safe house?” she asked.

  “Probably. What bothers me more is how they figured out where we were headed. Safe houses are supposed to be top secret. The only way it makes sense in my mind is if someone in ICE is a double agent, which increases the danger to you exponentially.”

  “What are we going to do?”


  “Not sure yet. That’s the beauty of a Leroy,” he said. “Nobody knows where we are, so you’re safe as long as we’re here. I’ve got a way to communicate with my crew without revealing our location, and once we get to my cabin and regroup, I’ll get on the line. Until we get an answer from ICE that makes sense, we can choose to either stay where we are or meet up with my crew and stay off the grid as a group. Either way we play it, we hold the power.”

  “Did you build the cabin yourself?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not a cabin like you’re picturing. I know I call it that, but it’s more like a glorified shanty. Don’t get your hopes up that I’m taking you to my tricked-out secret lair or something. No sense building some sprawling mansion that’s easy to spot from the air.”

  Despite the worry lines that seemed permanently etched on her face, she smiled. “In other words, no feather pillows?”

  Thank God for that, because he could think of a hundred different ways he and Vanessa could make use of a feather pillow, and not one of them included sleeping. “Try no indoor plumbing. But the room’s safe and waterproof, so at least we can regroup out of the rain.”

  “Do you own the land around the cabin? I thought most of the jungle in Panama is wilderness preserve.”

  “I don’t own a single square foot of land in the entire world. Right now we’re walking through Nobu territory.”

  She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and tugged, grinding them to a halt. “Seriously? I thought they shot trespassers. That’s what the news stations are always saying.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty touchy about outsiders on their land, but I worked out a deal with them for access in exchange for the occasional crate full of firepower and ammo.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that when they shoot at people, it’s with guns you supply them? You’re an arms dealer?”

  “Sort of, I guess. But they’re a peaceful people as long as the world leaves them alone. Everyone deserves the right to protect their land and families with the same caliber of technology their enemy would employ. Spears and knives don’t cut it against poachers and corrupt government militaries.”