by Alexis Grant
“Like I said, much respect,” he replied in a low, easy rumble. “But that decision has had to be hard on your grandmother and the rest of your family.”
“My grandmother was the rest of my family,” she said quietly. “My father died in a bottle long before my mother was murdered. But thank God I buried my grandmother before I went in deep.”
She shook the memories and forced herself to return to the present. “So, do you have family who could be threatened, compromised, held hostage? If so, you may want to really decide how deep you want in or not—and there’s no shame in that game. Screw that whole death before dishonor pledge, if you’ve got a five-year-old kid somewhere or a pretty wife that they’ll hack up into pieces and ship to you. No disrespect, but it’s different working stateside than being an armed combatant in a war overseas, Captain.”
“First of all,” he said in an easy, nonconfrontational manner. “Start practicing my alias—Juan.”
“Right,” she said, now looking at him. “Camille.”
“Okay, Camille. Understand that I think that what you’re doing is ten times riskier than what I’ve had to do in a unit.”
She gave him a nod and kept her gaze on him now. His comment went a long way in easing her ire about her professional territory being breached. “Thanks. Means a lot coming from a guy from DELTA Force.”
“De nada. And for the record, I’m sorry that we met the way we did and that I accidentally trampled your setup. Won’t happen again.”
“I appreciate that,” she said, losing the agitation from her voice.
“We really are on the same side, Camille. We both want the bad guys.”
She nodded and kept her eyes on his profile, beginning to see past her anger and slowly beginning to notice how handsome he really was.
“Typically, we go in hard,” he admitted, “do an extraction, blow a bridge, hit a target with dead-aim sniper fire, or track moving targets … but we don’t live with the enemy. We do surveillance, but nothing as mentally and emotionally intense as what you’re dealing with. We’re in and out. Intelligence deals with going undercover.”
“That’s why I asked if you had people here you cared about,” she said, leaning forward again and causing him to take another look over his shoulder. “I don’t think I could handle being responsible for anything that might happen. Man … if you’re half a world away in Iraq or Afghanistan, the chances of some highly intelligent nut-job finding your people is low. But if you’ve got family in Broward County or something, even a coupla states away…”
“I appreciate the concern, Camille, and hear you loud and clear. No. I’m solo, too.” He seemed to sit up straighter in his seat, if that were somehow possible, and she watched him grip the steering wheel tighter. “Haven’t had the lifestyle that would really allow for a wife and kids, yet. Been on the move. Lost my dad when I was two. He was a Marine—tour of duty in ’Nam. They told me he got out in 1970, but not before getting hit with Agent Orange. His health was always bad from then on, my mom said. He didn’t last long past my second birthday. Died in seventy-nine. Had an older brother. The streets finally took him. Drug gang wars too.”
“Must have been hard on you and your mom,” she said quietly. “My grandmother always would say there was nothing worse than burying a child or her grandchildren.”
“Yeah … My brother used to keep the neighborhood gangs off me. I looked up to him and he pushed me in school—said I was the one that would piece Mom’s heart back together after he’d broken it. That’s how I wound up in the military and, unfortunately, he wound up in a body bag on the streets of Chicago. But me being in the Service didn’t glue my mother’s heart back together—just made her scared to death that she’d lose me, too.”
“Well, she can be proud of you … got to see you make it.” Sage heard her voice soften as she said the words. The drug war in the streets at home had also struck Captain Davis in a profound way, making them fellow veterans of sorts. She hadn’t wanted to know that, hadn’t wanted to care about this new, forced partner.
“Cancer took my mother a few years back,” he said in a quiet but matter-of-fact tone—the one that people use to disguise deep hurt. “But at least she didn’t have to see me come home with a flag draped over my coffin. That’s all she ever talked about not wanting to see. So I’m good.”
“I’m real sorry to hear that,” Sage murmured. She felt his statement at the pit of her stomach.
He simply nodded and allowed silence to linger between them for a while.
“No cousins and extended family?” She waited, understanding how saying it out loud and admitting that you were basically orphaned in the world was very different than just knowing it.
“I have some people in Arkansas … lotta folks I never got to know real well on my father’s side. My mother’s family was small and tight out of Chicago, but most of them are gone now. Nobody the enemy can make a direct link to.” He lifted his chin and spread his massive hands around the steering wheel again as though resettling himself. “My unit is my family.”
“Then we have that in common,” she said, fully appreciating where he was coming from. Her team members would be the only ones to attend her funeral, would be the only ones to lift a beer in her honor and maybe shed a tear or two when they ultimately lowered her casket into the ground.
Silence became a third passenger in the van as they exited the highway and entered South Beach’s main thoroughfare. Yet, Captain Davis kept glancing up to his rearview mirror, his intense gaze seeming haunted.
“It’s not my place to say this, but … are you sure this is a good idea, ma’am?”
“Camille, remember? Ma’am makes me sound old, by the way.” She offered him a smile, sat forward, and placed a supportive hand on his shoulder as he turned into a covered parking garage.
The moment he navigated into a space, he turned around in his seat to fully face her. “Does your team have a GPS locator on you? Do you have enough artillery? If this guy gets pissed off—”
“I’m going to have to let him slap me around a bit for going off without his consent,” she said as calmly as possible. “And, no … I’ve never allowed the government to put a chip in me. I’ll be fine.”
“Unacceptable. You already have a concussion and don’t need to be reinjured.”
“I know, Captain … but rest assured, as soon as we get the word, I will kick his ass for the trouble.”
She smiled, Captain Davis didn’t.
“Juan, remember.”
His surly reminder made her smile wider. “It’s going to be all right, Juan,” she said.
“I don’t want you to have to do anything in there that you don’t want to.” His statement was blunt and delivered with crisp military diction, but his intense dark gaze was definitely haunted. “You’ve given enough. We have all the intel we need. Whatever we don’t know yet, we can gain through other methods. You shouldn’t have to deal with that shit, no matter how badly we all want to bring these bastards down.”
They sat in the dim parking lot staring at each other. It was a standoff where no one would mention the unmentionable, and yet this man whom she’d just met was trying his best to ask her to not go back in and put her body on the line.
Men had come and gone in both her personal and professional space; she’d had suitors, lovers, crushes, mentors, but had never truly allowed herself to become vested in the hopes and dreams of having anything that resembled a normal relationship. She could tell that this undercover scenario had to be unfathomable for a man like Captain Anthony Davis, someone who seemed to have a very straight-arrow, black-and-white view of the world. This was a man, she guessed, who had probably experienced normal relationships all his life. Her assignment undoubtedly contradicted everything he believed to be right with the world. She could only imagine that to him, she might as well have been an alien … and as she stared at his handsome face and deeply troubled eyes, for some reason now that made her very sad.
“
I only have to be there for maybe another forty-eight to seventy-two hours.… That’s when the delivery will probably go down, if they solidify the deal. My goal is to find out exactly when and where, then I’m out.”
She slowly removed her sunglasses and captured Captain Davis’s troubled gaze within her own. “I’ll allow him to slap me around and then take off my makeup, so he’ll think he’s responsible for the bruises from the fight that you and I had. I’ll weep and cower and make the man feel as badly as I can … and claim an inability to function. But with a stressful deal going down, his lack of time and patience, and my little tantrum for attention—which is how I’m sure he’ll view my running away in a speedboat—I may be able to avoid being with him again. Understood?”
“And if not?”
Again, silence slipped into the spaces between them.
“I’ll handle it.”
Sage grabbed her large, gold-tone designer purse and slung it over her shoulder. She had no other answer for Captain Davis, beyond the one he didn’t want to hear for some odd reason, and the one she didn’t feel like saying out loud. His eyes seemed to beg for answers to questions she couldn’t let herself think about right now.
There was pain and outrage in his gaze, but oddly no judgment as she placed her hand on the door and he popped the lock for her. He wore the expression of someone trapped within a reality he hated, unable to change what was, wishing with all his might that he could. The reality of her undercover assignment clearly violated everything the man before her believed in, yet for the sake of the mission, there was nothing either of them could do about it. The fact that he cared while not even knowing her was troubling on a level that was hard to sort out.
Sage lifted her chin and took in a deep, steadying breath. Captain Anthony Davis’s gaze never wavered. She understood feeling powerless and knew that look in a person’s eyes all too well. It was the same one that had once haunted hers. But until now, she’d never had a champion. Although he hadn’t said that he was or wanted to be that for her, there was something unmistakable in the depth of the captain’s angry eyes that let her know that he’d kill Salazar twice if he could.
She had to get away from that look before it crumbled her resolve. No man had ever seen through every layer and barrier she owned to peer directly at her soul and then ask it questions without uttering a word. And it had been so long since anything deep within her had stirred that the strange sensation of being secretly alive was unnerving.
Quickly opening the van door, she refused to theorize about the hundred things that could possibly go wrong. Captain Davis didn’t need to know that; it would only add to his obvious worry. All he had to do was get the information he needed and then help her hunt the bastards they were after. That was all.
“Just don’t die on me, Captain. You seem like a pretty decent guy, even if you did try to kill me.”
Before he could respond, she was out of the vehicle and had slammed the van door behind her.
CHAPTER 4
He watched her walk away and not look back, the globes of her lovely rump a mesmerizing vision undulating beneath the tight white fabric. Her head held high and shoulders back, she strode forward like a Nubian queen. Each loud click of her gold stilettos against the concrete sent a stab into his nervous system. That jarring female-created sound then sent his gaze down the length of her long, shapely legs. His reaction was one born of pure male reflex, something he couldn’t have stopped if his life had depended on it.
Everything professional within him said that he shouldn’t have noticed these things about her. But everything male within him was on the verge of insubordination to his own direct order to stand down.
Sage Wagner was a problem. She wasn’t just talented, capable, sexy, and smart—the woman had integrity. That was a rare quality these days. Plus, wrapped inside all that professional armor was a woman with an injured heart and a deeply wounded soul.
It would have been easier to deal with her if she was just some ice princess with a gun in her hand. She wasn’t a person scratching and clawing her way to the top of a department for the sheer adrenaline rush that came from success … not that he would have cared one way or another if that was her personal bent. But hearing her story, knowing what she’d been through, and maybe more important, knowing how she’d survived it all by putting her entire being on the line, just messed with him. Profoundly so. From what little he knew about her, his gut told him that this woman was just as exquisite on the inside as she was on the outside; a quality rarer still.
And due to a communications glitch and overlapping missions, he’d not only hurt her physically, but he’d also put her in harm’s way. Now he had to fix that, yet couldn’t do a damned thing while some lowlife slapped her around at best, or severely beat and raped her at worst. To make matters absolutely more insane, she couldn’t even protect herself once back inside Salazar’s hostile camp, not without blowing her cover, all because of the marks he’d left on her.
If he’d only known … damn.
Anthony wiped his palms down his face and banged his forehead against the steering wheel as she disappeared into a brilliant swath of sunlight. From where he sat in the shadowy garage, it was like watching an angel simply vanish into the bright light. Wearing a smudged white dress and no visible means to protect herself, she was fearlessly walking back into a place where other angels feared to tread.
He had to fix this, had to make this right. The Salazars had to go down hard when he took down Assad. More than anything, however, he had to make sure that Special Agent Sage Wagner came home in one piece.
God help him make this right.
* * *
She had to get out of the parking lot, had to get to fresh air. Sage was practically jogging in her heels as she exited the garage and entered the main shopping boulevard.
For a moment the chemistry between her and Captain Davis had been thick enough to cut with a Bowie knife. It was an unexpected jolt to her system, something so off the wall and crazy that she knew it had to be a result of the concussion. Yeah, she’d definitely bumped her head.
She didn’t do men on the job, didn’t lose focus while working a case, and in this circumstance, any deviation from the plan was a great way to get herself killed. Almost happened earlier, underscoring that point, so what the hell was her problem?
Shaking off the attraction, she set her sights on Avant Garde. Hopefully, Jeffrey wouldn’t be in, because if he was, there’d be an inescapable discussion about her bruised arms and slightly puffy cheek. She was more than a fav customer to him; she was a friend. Therefore, he’d undoubtedly stand in front of her fitting room door with his arms folded, giving her all the statistics about domestic violence, and caring about her—and it would break her heart to have to lie to him.
Sage hoisted her shimmering Louis Vuitton shoulder bag up, feeling every body blow that had landed, and squinted against the sun glare, Dolce & Gabbana designer shades be damned. But she had to play this out, finish what she’d started, and she definitely couldn’t afford to lose focus for personal reasons at this juncture.
To even go there mentally was ludicrous. She was living a totally fabricated life, built from the ground up by careful planning and her agency’s stealth. Birth records, phony high school records, false parental death certificates, bogus job records, even a couple of traffic tickets thrown in for good measure to go along with the fake driver’s license she carried in her purse beside the credit cards in her false name. Everything had been established to give her an entirely new history so that when Salazar had her investigated, he’d come up with a vetted mate.
No man with Salazar’s kind of assets and in his line of business was going to risk his empire on casual tail. The woman who got to get inside would have to be thoroughly background-checked after she’d piqued his interest and rebuffed him persistently … until he decided that she was potentially wife material, a trophy with the background of a Dominican nun. And that’s what the DEA had given her,
the background of a saint, down to the second-grade teacher’s qualifications and Catholic school foundation.
Hesitating in front of the boutique, Sage stared at her reflection in the plate glass window. There was no room in this equation for how she felt or what she wanted. There was only the case, only the mission. She hadn’t felt her body stir for a man in years. It had been ever longer since she’d been willing to tell someone what had happened to her family. Everything with Salazar was an act, an illusion just like her bogus ID. She hadn’t ever choked up thinking back on it all because someone asked, “What did they do to you?” Captain Anthony Davis was a problem—one that she didn’t have time for right now.
Sage pushed forward and swallowed hard, forcing the wet emotion that stung her eyes to burn away. Being tired didn’t matter, and she didn’t have time to bleed. After the mission was complete and the case file was closed, then she could think about what next.
She glanced around the small, airy space, glad that only the counter girl was there on her cell phone, and grabbed a few oversized white blouses off the rack. Her image from earlier in the day would be on the cameras at the mansion. A total wardrobe change was out. That might be a dead giveaway that something was awry. But a gauzy white blouse, put on over the tube dress and belted, could work. If asked, she could say she took it out of her purse when she got a little chilly from the water spray.
Sage held her long-sleeved choices against her body. Yeah, that could work. It would hide the smudges and her arm bruises, and if any dirt on the dress was seen she’d tell the truth—the boat was a bit dirty. Then she could complain about that, too. In fact, she could always say she fell into the boat, having tried to get in it with heels on, and then had to take her shoes off. Blah, blah, blah. A new plan was beginning to hatch in her sore brain.
