by Julie Miller
Her body was still tingly and replete from making love with Bryce, her mind on a euphoric high. The parts of her that were slightly tender from the newly discovered intimacy had nothing to complain about. He’d given her everything she wanted and more.
And it hadn’t been a fluke, a one-time gift that would nurture and sustain her if her life turned dark again. Bryce’s frenzied need and gentle touch had set a bar by which all men would be forever judged in her life. He’d awakened her later in the night and, without a word, he’d rolled her onto her back and made love to her all over again, communicating all she needed to know with every loving touch of his hands, mouth and body.
Bryce had been patient when she’d needed him to be; he’d been eager when she’d needed that, too. He’d been tender and thorough and demanding enough to make her heart sing with the worth and power of the woman she’d become in Bryce’s arms.
That confidence gave her strength now as she slowed her pace and picked her way closer to the rocky drop-off where she’d discovered the dead soldier’s body. Gruesome as it was, it was the only landmark she was sure she could find in the middle of the night that would be far enough away from the docks to avoid detection.
Trevor Blackhaw found her first, shushing her startled gasp with a finger to his lips before pulling her down to a crouch beside him in the sand. “Tasiya Belov?”
She nodded. Bryce’s description of his bounty hunter friend had left out the intense blue color of his eyes. But she recognized the straight black hair and angular features that clearly reflected his Cherokee heritage.
“You are Bryce Martin’s friend?”
“Trevor Blackhaw.”
She should have breathed easier at the two rafts and twenty or so soldiers and bounty hunters hiding on the beach. But the weapons they carried and the funny, green-lensed telescopes they wore on their heads—night-vision goggles, Trevor explained—made Tasiya feel as if she was caught up in the middle of an invasion.
An army of prisoners inside, an army of rescuers outside. A frantic militia caught in the middle, dashing about the compound like ants scattering from a crushed ant hill. One lone woman, caught in the middle of it all didn’t seem to stand a chance of surviving.
Oh, how she longed to be back at Bryce’s side, in Bryce’s arms. A single word in his gruff, loving voice would have bolstered her flagging courage.
But the clock was ticking. Once Bryce took out the generators that powered the perimeter alarm and security lights, he’d told her she’d have about twenty minutes, tops, to retrieve the gas masks and get them to the prisoners before returning to her room and drinking the herb mixture that would fake her death.
Trevor Blackhaw’s instructions were as clear and concise as Bryce’s had been. He looped the duffel bag with the masks over her shoulder and pushed a small vial into her hands. “We shoot the flare in fifteen. You’ll have about a minute more after that before the gas hits. Give it another ten minutes for the wind to disperse it before you drink that.”
“Fifteen. One. Ten,” she repeated.
“You’ll be out for several hours. But from what I hear, the sarge plans to take good care of you.” Trevor smiled. “Is Sergeant Martin hangin’ tough?”
Tasiya frowned at the question. Didn’t he know? “Bryce Martin is very tough, though he is very gentle with me. He will get us all safely home.”
Trevor’s grin widened as he sensed something amusing that she didn’t get. “Yes, ma’am. That sounds like the sarge to me.”
Several minutes later Tasiya was panting for breath as she handed Bryce his gas mask through the bars of his cell. It was impossible to keep her gaze from drifting over to the cot where they’d made love, or to keep the blush of heat from staining her cheeks.
Bryce reached through the bars and touched her cheek. Those wintry gray eyes looked deeply into hers. “I know. Tonight will always be special to me, too.”
On impulse, Tasiya pulled herself up on tiptoe and kissed him, square on the mouth, telling him in a few short heartbeats how much he meant to her. “Thank you for everything, Bryce Martin. Be safe.”
And then she had to go.
“I’ll be there when you wake up, Tasiya,” he promised. “I will always be there for you.”
“WE ARE UNDER ATTACK,” Tasiya shouted into the phone, playing her part just the way Bryce had told her. She’d already said goodbye to her father, promised him that she would be all right. No matter what he heard, she asked him to have faith in her American friend. She paced back and forth in her tiny room off the kitchen. She only had a minute or so until midnight, a minute or so to convince Dimitri Mostek that she was about to be killed. “There are many soldiers on the island. Americans. There was an explosion. Everyone is running. There are guns.”
“The Americans have attacked the island? That is not supposed to happen. Where is Boone Fowler? When did it begin?”
“I do not know. I only know I am afraid.” She picked up her gas mask off her bed and glanced at the clock—11:59 p.m. A minute away from starting a whole new life. “Tell Papa that my friend sends him a hug and his highest regards, as well.” She paused for a bit of dramatic emphasis. “If I do not see you again, give Papa my love.”
“What friend are you talking about? I said you were not to be touched! You must come home. You belong to me. To me!”
Stick it to yourself, Dimitri, she wanted to say.
“Tell Papa I love him. Give him my message.” Hopefully, Anton would remember their secret code. He might not understand the details, but it should clue him in enough to know she was up to something, and not to believe everything he heard—like the news that his daughter had been killed in a raid against the militia compound on Devil’s Fork Island. “I must go.”
“Anastasiya!” Dimitri shouted. “Anastasiya!”
The sky turned red outside her window and Tasiya hung up the phone.
Tasiya’s lungs filled with a breath of air that felt free and unfettered. The chaos outside her window was merely background noise to the song of hope dancing in her heart. Soon it would all be over and she would be free. Then she could find out if Bryce Martin had been telling her the truth—that he could rescue her father from Lukinburg—and that she could choose any man she wanted in America.
She hoped she could find the right way to tell him that she’d chosen him.
As the clock flipped over to midnight, Tasiya pulled the gas mask on over her face. She patted the jeans pocket where she’d slipped the vial of the knock-out draught Trevor Blackhaw had given her and sat on the edge of her bed to wait.
But her satisfaction over finally beating Dimitri at the intimidation game and her enervating hopes for the future had distracted her a moment too long to warn her of the voice in the kitchen.
“Smith! Smith! Where the hell are you?” She shot to her feet at the bellow of Boone Fowler’s voice. She ran to the window, but the bars blocked any escape. She spun around, but her sparse room offered her no place to hide. It was hot inside the mask, hard to see and hear, but there was no mistaking the approach of footsteps or the angry, hateful, damning voice of retribution. “I swear to God, Smith, if you are with that foreigner…”
A fisted hand ripped the blanket off her door frame. Tasiya backed into a corner. Found. Trapped. Denied her chance at freedom.
Boone Fowler’s calculating black eyes drilled her across the tiny room. He held a gun in his hand, but it was the fanatical gleam in those eyes that scared her more. His absolute hatred for all things foreign seeped into her skin and turned her blood to ice. He made her want to shrivel up. Automatically she bowed her head.
“What the hell is going on here?”
She made a futile lunge for the door, but Fowler ignored the no-touch rule. With a surprisingly agile move for a man his size, he shoved her onto the bed and ripped the mask off her head, plucking several strands of hair with it.
He shook the mask in her face. “What have you done to me? You turned Marcus against me, and no
w this?”
A vinegary scent stung Tasiya’s nose. She felt light-headed. “Marcus Smith is dead.” She tried to protest, tried to hurt Fowler in any way she could. But she was powerless. Just like she’d always been. Before Devil’s Fork Island. Before Bryce Martin. “Smith attacked me. We killed him.”
“We? Who’s in this with you? Who’s helping you?” Her lungs felt heavy; she couldn’t catch her breath. Boone Fowler’s pock-marked face swirled in front of her. “What’s this?” He picked up something on the bed beside her. The phone. The chain that bound her to Dimitri. He grabbed her by the collar of her sweater and shook her, but it only spun her vision out of focus. “Who have you been calling? What have you done to me, you damn foreigner?”
Tasiya sagged. Fowler’s grip was the only thing holding her upright.
“What’s wrong with you?” Fowler coughed.
He tossed her onto the bed and ran to the window to look outside. “They’re all dying. That’s what I smelled. Some kind of gas.” Fowler pounded on the bars at the window. “No. No!” He slipped her mask on over his head and took a deep breath. “You won’t take me out like this, Murphy. Nobody does this to me!”
The last words she heard were Fowler’s. “That’s right, foreigner. You die. It’ll be the most useful thing you’ve ever done for me.”
The last thoughts she had were of Bryce. He would come for her. He’d promised. She would be safe.
Chapter Thirteen
“Tasiya!”
Where the hell was she?
Bryce flipped over the mattress in her room in an impossible attempt to find her underneath. He stormed back into the kitchen and tossed open drawers. He smashed his foot through the locked pantry door and searched for her there. The refrigerator, the mess hall, Fowler’s office. He’d covered every inch of this compound from prison cell to latrine. She was gone.
How the hell could Tasiya be gone?
“Damn it!” Bryce rammed his fist through a cabinet door, heedless of the pain.
“We just have to get the bad guys, Sarge. We don’t have to kill their furniture.” Jacob Powell had stopped by the kitchen door, leading a handcuffed Steve Bristoe toward the courtyard where Big Sky and the Special Forces unit were rounding up the militiamen once they’d regained consciousness. They all had a one-way ticket to prison in Montana.
“Not funny, Powell. She’s missing.”
“Well, have you looked—”
“I’ve looked everywhere. She’s supposed to be unconscious in her room, waiting for me to pick her up. She’s gone.”
“Let me get rid of this scumbag and I’ll help you look. Have you checked the docks?”
“Just once.”
Powell nodded. “I’ll check again.”
Trevor Blackhaw walked in as Powell and Bristoe left. “We’ve got another problem, Sarge.”
His Native American friend wore the responsibility of leadership well, and Bryce had to admire how Blackhaw and the rest of the Big Sky team had homed in on Bryce’s clues. They tracked them down, put together a flawless plan and recaptured the militia.
But as far as Bryce was concerned, there was no other problem besides the fact that the woman he loved and had sworn to protect was missing. “Can’t somebody else deal with it?”
“You’re our man on the inside, Sarge. You know this place better than anybody.” Apparently, not well enough if he could lose track of a willowy brunette hell-bent on obtaining her freedom. Blackhaw thumbed over his shoulder toward the breezeway. “We’ve rounded up enough supplies and weaponry to man a small invasion. I’ve accounted for the thirty militia members you reported, including the body of Marcus Smith.”
Bryce couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. “So you came for thirty men, you got thirty men.”
“Thirty men plus their leader.” Every muscle in Bryce’s body clenched with dread. “I’ve got no sign of Boone Fowler anywhere. And one of the speedboats is missing.”
No Tasiya. No Fowler.
“That son of a bitch.” A desperate sort of helpless anger squeezed his heart. “He took her.”
“That’s what I figured. Fowler’s got the girl and he’s using her as a hostage to escape.”
Bryce’s heart was bleedin’ out. “We have to find her. And fast.”
Because from everything Tasiya had said, according to Boone Fowler, the only good foreigner was a dead one.
“I CAN’T. I CAN’T DO THIS.” Tasiya refused to cry in front of Boone Fowler, but she was sobbing inside.
After recovering from the nontoxic sleeping gas, she’d awakened into a real nightmare. Those weren’t Bryce’s loving arms that had held her when she came to, but the vicious bond of Boone Fowler’s controlling grip.
He’d spirited her away on a boat to a hidden cove in the middle of the night. He’d taken her phone line to Dimitri Mostek and called him, telling him the traitorous Trojan Horse he’d sent to his camp had been discovered. In the crudest of terms, he told Dimitri that his foreign tramp had seduced his chief of security and several prisoners, as well. Enraged, Dimitri had threatened to kill her father—he had no use for a defiled woman. But Tasiya had pleaded with Fowler to take her life instead.
And that’s when she’d seen the true depth of Boone Fowler’s madness. He’d caressed her bruised cheek with the barrel of his gun and answered, “Done.”
But she was denied the quick execution she’d prayed for.
She became a tool again. Dehumanized. Expendable.
He’d driven her all the way to Montana. She’d finally gotten to see the mountains. But there was no beauty for her in their snow-capped granite peaks—only the visual reminder, everywhere, of Bryce Martin’s beautiful gray eyes; his craggy, eloquent, wonderful face; his unflinching, immeasurate strength.
Boone Fowler had brought her here to destroy all that.
For her father’s life, she had to walk into Big Sky headquarters and kill them all.
“Get out of the truck.” Fowler pointed the pistol at her head and Tasiya climbed out into the snow. The bite of the wind was less sharp here than it had been on Devil’s Fork Island, but the air itself was colder. Tasiya could barely feel it through the layers of rage and despair and guilt she wore. “The building’s less than a mile over that rise. I can watch the fireworks from here. Start walking.” He caught the door when she would have closed it. “And remember, fail me and your father dies.”
The fireworks. Right. A sick, deadly version of the American Independence Day lights and colors and concussive sounds Bryce had once told her about.
The fireworks that would go off the instant she released her thumb from the arming trigger attached to the bomb Fowler had strapped around her waist.
A BLEARY-EYED BRYCE opened the door to the most beautiful sight in the entire world. “Tasiya!”
Relief and love and a joy so profound it made him giddy shook through him as he ran to pick her up and never let her go again. “I was so worried about you. We’ve been lookin’ all across the country for you. Anybody Fowler knows, anywhere he’s been. Did he hurt you? How’d you get away?”
“No.”
A blip of static tempered his joy at seeing her after nearly three days of constant searching and fearing he’d never see her again. “No, what?”
She braced her hand against his chest and stared at it. Downcast eyes, tightly compressed lips and skin beyond pale stopped him in his tracks. Ah, hell. “Please do not touch me.”
For the briefest of moments, Bryce thought maybe she’d come all this way to tell him they couldn’t be together, that, as he’d predicted, she’d found another man. She’d chosen someone better. Or she was goin’ home. Goin’ back to that place that kept her beautiful spirit under its thumb.
But just as quickly, he nixed those thoughts. Somethin’ wasn’t right. Despite the quivering protest of her lips, he slipped a finger beneath her chin and nudged her gaze up to his. “You promised you were always gonna look me in the eye.”
Crap. Th
e fear was back. And somethin’ more. What was she tryin’ to say?
“I…it is good to see you Bryce Martin.”
Cameron Murphy limped up to the doorway on his cane and introduced himself. “So you’re the pretty lady who’s got Sarge tied up in knots. Invite her in and get her out of the cold.” His voice sounded like an order, but he was smiling. “I appreciate all your help in getting my men home safely. Welcome to Montana.”
Then Trevor Blackhaw was behind him. Jacob Powell and the others all gathered round. But every friendly welcome, every thank-you, every invitation to join them only seemed to make that lip quiver more.
Finally the words burst from her lips. “I cannot do this.” Tears flooded her eyes and spilled down her pale cheeks. “I love you too much, Bryce Martin. My father and I will die, but I cannot kill you.”
I love you too much?
But she gave him no opportunity to question whether he’d understood her right. He would have swept her into his arms and kissed her right there in front of God and the colonel, but Tasiya shook her head, urging him back with a single look.
She unbuttoned the front of her coat and pulled it open.
“That lousy son of a bitch.”
Bricks of C-4, wired to detonate, were strapped around Tasiya’s middle. She wore enough of them to bring down the entire two-story building and collapse the secret rooms underneath.
“Boone Fowler did this to you.”
Tasiya nodded. “He has sent me here to kill you all.”
BRYCE PACED the command center like a caged tiger while Owen Cook read the intelligence report that said UN forces had launched a covert strike into Lukinburg. Political hostages were being freed, corrupt officials were being taken into custody, and an all-points search for King Aleksandr Petrov—the man believed to be behind the American terrorist attacks, the kidnapping attempt of his own daughter and the funding of Fowler’s militia—was underway.
Murphy’s wife, Mia, had taken Tasiya aside to help her freshen up or whatever it was that women did when they went off together for a quiet talk. Mia had been a well-trained bounty hunter long before becoming Cameron Murphy’s wife and partner, so she had a working knowledge of explosives and dealing with hostage victims. Tasiya was in good hands, but she wasn’t safe.
