Target of Mine: The Night Stalkers 5E (Titan World Book 2)

by M. L. Buchman

  This time they were all armed. For the sake of the security cameras, they made a show of going out as couples, two couples acting like they were just going for a walk to stretch their legs. Down one long deck to the grand staircase near the end—all red carpeted and brass hand railed.

  On Deck 8 they turned away from their quarry and made a point of window shopping along the corridor past the closed boutiques where they’d spent so much of Titan’s money.

  On Deck 7 they explored the selections in the library. Drake took a Connelly thriller he’d been wanting to read. He couldn’t imagine that Nikita had actually been paying attention when she’d a selected diet plan title that promised to burn away fat without exercise.

  “It looks like the kind of book my empty-headed self might select,” she explained. Then, as if embarrassed by herself, she dropped it on a chair as they left. He set the Connelly with it, liking the juxtaposition—the two sides of Nikita Hayward.

  On Deck 6 they meandered most of the way back to the bow.

  At side-by-side suites, 612 and 614, they traded nods with Altman and Zoe that would look as if they were wishing each other good night. Both doors had “Do Not Disturb” signs dangling from their door handles.

  Zoe slipped the keycard into 614, which had belonged to two of the three henchmen. Nikita did the same on 612.

  The electronic locks released at the same moment and flashed green.

  In unison they jammed down on the handles, swung open the doors, and pulled their weapons as they moved inside.

  Drake was first in.

  “Daylin?” A sleepy woman’s voice.

  A step behind him, Nikita hit the lights.

  A lean woman stared at him wide-eyed for the length of two heartbeats, then drove a hand under her pillow.

  There was a sharp click and spit close by Drake’s ear. The woman yelped as the round punched into the pillow and there was a loud clank as her bullet hit metal.

  The woman flinched and jerked her hand back to her chest. As she did, she knocked aside the pillow, revealing a twin to the gun that Sugar had taken in the bar and delivered to Jared.

  The prone woman was smart enough to not go for this gun again.

  Altman came in through the connecting door with Zoe close behind and picked up the weapon while Nikita kept her covered. He dropped the magazine and nodded, “Two rounds shy of full.”

  Drake didn’t remember moving until his face was inches from the woman’s. “Why did you shoot her?” he pointed back at Nikita.

  “I did not! I missed,” her accent was thickly Spanish.

  “Same accent as our three hombres,” Nikita confirmed where she still had the woman centered in her sights. “And you didn’t miss. My arm still hurts like hell.”

  The woman looked aghast. “I was ordered to shoot you. A final test it might be…have been. They never said I would be shooting American woman. I was not ready for such things. So I aim away.”

  Drake glanced back at Nikita and earned an I-told-you-so look for his troubles.

  “Daylin know I am crack shot. Now they no longer trust me. That is why they leave me on ship today.”

  “Sure,” Zoe chimed in. “They trust you so little, they gave you gun Number Two.”

  “They also give this,” she went to raise her other arm.

  Drake saw a flash of metal and was all set to dive away when there was a sharp clank and her arm stopped abruptly. She was handcuffed to the bed.

  “With just the handcuff, I could scream for help. With a pistola on a cruise ship, I would be in very much trouble if I was found.” Then her dark eyes went wider as she looked at the four of them grouped around her bed. “Or am I now in more troubles? Did you kill Daylin and the others? Now me, too? Are you kill squad like Daylin say?” Her voice kept rising.

  Drake did his best to shush her. He would have to admit it was an odd setting. A cruise ship suite at two in the morning, softly aglow with indirect light. A slender woman with dark skin, black hair that spilled in a soft wave to well-curved breasts that were barely hidden by the thin blue nightgown—handcuffed to the bed while four fully dressed Special Operations soldiers looked down at her.

  “We are not a murder squad,” Nikita said with disgust.

  “What about when Daylin comes back? He will be very angry. Where is he?”

  “I expect he will be in a Belizean jail for quite some time. We’re arranging for the three of them to be extradited to the US on the charge of attempted kidnapping of Americans.”

  Her shoulders sagged in relief. “He cannot kill me from there. Then maybe you could unlock these cuff. Daylin make it too tight and my hand it…zumbar…tingle? Yes? All day.”

  “Do you have a key?”

  “Daylin put it in the safe, but he does not give me the combination.”

  When Drake looked at him, Altman shrugged. “I could pick the handcuff lock. But since we need to see what’s in the safe anyway, you should just cozy up to our friendly neighborhood hotel manager.”

  “Shouldn’t we search first?”

  “You cozy, we’ll search. Not a lot of hiding places in a standard suite.” It was a much simpler arrangement than their own. There were only five spaces: bathroom, walk-in closet, bedroom with big-screen TV, small sitting area with big-screen TV, and a verandah barely large enough for two loungers.

  Drake picked up the phone, punched for the operator, and began convincing her that he in truth did want to talk to the hotel manager despite the hour. Stating his name turned out to be the key in the lock—he was on some sort of preferred passenger list. If they only knew.

  “Hi Norma. Drake Roman here. Sorry to wake you, but could you join us in Suite 614…Yes, 614.” He should have called from Room 614’s phone. He didn’t want to greet her with the handcuffed woman wearing only a skimpy negligee in 612.

  “Don’t forget to tell her to bring a master key for the room safe,” Nikita said as she came out of the closet and headed for the bath.

  He passed on the message, making it clear that she should come alone.

  Norma made it in record time, every inch of her ship officer’s uniform in its proper place.

  The safe turned up nothing except more ammunition, the woman’s passport, which matched the fake ID they’d found in her purse, and the crucial handcuff key. Zoe pointed out a charger, but there was no cellphone. It must still be in Daylin’s pocket.

  “Sugar spiked it with a boot heel. Very dead,” Nikita explained as she searched under the mattress.

  When they showed Norma the gun, she nearly wilted under the burden. “In a decade of cruising, I have never had a gun on a ship before.”

  Her suspicions began turning on them until Drake suggested that she deliver the weapon—along with the contents of the safe, except the woman’s passport—to the Captain to keep under lock and key, preferably until they were again in Miami in four days’ time. Nikita also handed over the three men’s cruise ship passes.

  “What about her?” Norma nodded to the woman. She now had one of the ship’s complimentary white terrycloth robes over her shoulders and was massaging her wrist. “We have a lockup, but the crew would see her and there would be many questions.”

  “For the moment,” Drake took the handcuffs and the key, “she will be staying with us.”

  “My name is Esly Escarra and yes, I know my passport says Joan Smith. I was DNIC sergeant in San Pedro Sula. As policia sergeant in crime and drugs division, I tried to be honest.”

  Not what Nikita was expecting. A gang member, a hired thug, but not a cop.

  The five of them were seated in the lounge area of their big suite. She and Drake on one sofa, Altman, Zoe, and Esly in the three armchairs across a low coffee table. Esly was now dressed in simple clothes that made her barely passable by cruising standards—wouldn’t have without her good figure and nice, though still tentative, smile.

  “Daylin, he was my captain and my lover before he change sides. Now he is…how do you say?”

&nb
sp; “On the take?” Nikita decided that just maybe there was someone worse than mercenaries: those pretending to do one job while actually doing another.

  “On the take? English idiom is very strange. The take was very nice and we live very well. Eventually I must arrest him or join him. The decision is not hard in Honduras, especially not in San Pedro where much of Venezuela’s cocaine leave for Mexico and America. Honest police have very short lives there. But I never shoot one. Daylin? Maybe he did. I do not know. I am more Daylin’s protection, his…he is with woman so he look like a good man? Yes? The other two were his lieutenants.” Then her eyes gazed into the distance for a few moments. “He was always nice to me, but the money changed him very much. If he is truly gone, I will miss him only little amount.”

  “Why shoot at Nikita?” Drake still sounded pissed as hell about that.

  Esly shook her head. “I do not know very much. There is a big project—‘more money than drugs’ Daylin tells me and very much less dangerous. But we must scare away American contractor. GSI, he told me, were no longer needed for this big project. First we attack their women—he say they always travel with many women. Then, if that does not make them to go away, we attack them. That is all I know.”

  Nikita shook her head. “Your Daylin was not a smart man. The best way to make a mercenary like the head of GSI angry is to attack his women.”

  “Works for me, too,” Drake’s growl was so very male.

  Esly sighed, “No, he is not very smart. But he was kind to me and better than many as lover. Are you good lover?” She aimed her sudden tease at Altman. Her self-confidence was amazing for a woman who had faced a “death squad” after being handcuffed throughout the day.

  Nikita couldn’t resist smiling, but Luke Altman’s face didn’t shift in the slightest as he turned to her.

  “So, Esly shoots to miss and loses Daylin’s trust. Daylin goes for staging a kidnapping in Belize City.”

  “Daylin,” Nikita confirmed, “ends up bloody when Sugar rams her spiked boot heel into his crotch.”

  Esly covered a quick burst of laughter with a hand over her mouth.

  “Somebody in Honduras…” Drake took Nikita’s hand and held on to it as if that would protect her from whatever came next.

  It was silly, they were safe in their suite, but still she was charmed.

  “…took every bit of weaponry and tactical advice that GSI would sell them and now wants to cut them out of the profits. Which would have made GSI even angrier and more dangerous.”

  “Wait,” Esly looked from one face to another, “you are not this GSI?”

  “No,” Nikita decided to keep it simple. “No, we’re not.”

  An hour later they were none the wiser.

  Daylin, and through him Esly, had been hired to scare off GSI. They weren’t likely to be scared off, especially not after the amount of capital they’d invested in Honduras. They’d been paid for it, very well, making an outfit as greedy as GSI hungry for more, not less.

  “At least we can all agree on one thing,” Nikita finally summed it up.

  “What’s that?” Zoe finally managed to take the bait. Drake and Altman were beyond speech.

  “This is certainly the single most screwed-up, frustrating, really-pissing-me-off project I’ve worked on since—” she almost said joining ST6, but Esly was still there with them, “—the last time I was on a screwed-up, frustrating, really-pissing-me-off project.”

  That earned her grunts of agreement from the two men.

  They had sent Esly’s fingerprints, taken with the help of Zoe’s mascara, to Parker along with the suggestion to look in the Honduran police files. Esly and the three jailed kidnappers came back with positive IDs almost immediately—exactly matching Esly’s story right down to each one’s rank and matching picture. He also provided home addresses; Esly’s and Daylin’s were the same.

  Daylin had apparently kept the broader scope of the plan to himself, and his destroyed cellphone had probably been swept out with the rest of the trash in the bar.

  They handcuffed Esly to the bed in the back suite—this time less painfully and with her cooperation: “I am the unknown. I understand.”

  Altman pulled a chair close enough to the bed to prop his feet on the mattress. He’d wake up if Esly so much as rolled over.

  Zoe was out cold on the couch in the second bedroom’s sitting area.

  Nikita slouched lower on the couch in the main room and rested her head on Drake’s shoulder. She’d never been so comfortable around a man. She could go to sleep leaning on him, and maybe not even wake if he moved. He felt that safe to be around.

  Drake rose to his feet and looked down at her. He tugged lightly on her hand.

  “What?”

  At Drake’s eye roll, she let him pull her to her feet, though she was unsure what was happening, at least for the first three steps. He was leading her toward the master bedroom.

  “But—”

  “I’m tired…”

  And Nikita was surprised by the rush of disappointment that he was leading her to the bedroom to sleep. It was so strong that it almost took her breath away.

  “…of not having you in my bed.”

  Drake Roman in a bed was the best idea she’d heard all day, “But this is my bed. Yours has a pretty Latina handcuffed to it.”

  “Po-ta-to. Po-tah-to. Besides, I want my Southern belle, not some dangerous Latina.” Drake closed and locked the door.

  “You’re saying I’m not dangerous?”

  “There’s a difference between dangerous and lethal. You slay me, Nikita.”

  The room was lit by the bright wash of a nearly full moon shining off the ocean and through the wide-open verandah doors. Plenty enough to see by.

  She moved away from the door quickly because the urge to take him here and now was nearly overwhelming, but she’d had enough of vertical surfaces. She agreed: bed. Definitely. Nikita peeled off her shirt and bra as she followed him across the carpet.

  “Hey, cut that out,” Drake was glaring at her as she shucked shoes, pants, and underwear.

  “I thought the point was to get naked,” she tossed her socks on the pile of clothes.

  “I was looking forward to undressing you myself.”

  “Why?”

  While Drake puzzled over how to answer that one, she grabbed the hem of his own t-shirt and yanked it upward. He mumbled a protest as she peeled it over his head and off his arms.

  She had his pants undone before he grabbed her wrists.

  “Hold on there, little lady! Just slow down for a second.” Drake’s John Wayne was better than his Southern, marginally. His pants hung enticingly loose on his hips but didn’t slide down. She reached, but his strong grip kept her hands inches from his waistband.

  “I thought you wanted sex,” she tried again and failed. Drake was far stronger than he looked—though she already knew that.

  “Did I say that I wanted sex?”

  “Well, we’re not going to just get naked and then sleep.”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “Then what?”

  After another moment, he slowly released her hands.

  “Then what?”

  In answer, he raised a hand to her face, cupping her cheek in his palm. Then he leaned in to kiss her, so softly and gently that she couldn’t tell when it shifted from mere contact to warm kiss. His other hand slid around her waist and pulled her tightly against him.

  His dangling belt buckle dug into her hip, so she moved back enough to bat his pants and underwear off his hips, then let herself be pulled against him once more after he kicked the last of his clothes free. Drake’s chest was just as much a revelation this time as it had been during their first kiss. She pressed against it more and more, every inch of contact a new discovery. The simple sensation of touch had never been so desirable, so necessary. She felt as if she’d go mad if she didn’t get—

  Overbalanced, Drake collapsed backward onto the bed, his tight
grip taking her with him.

  “At least we made it to the bed this time,” she rubbed her face against his chest as his hands dug into her hair. He didn’t guide her, no pressure to aim her attention at his crotch. Instead he seemed to be merely playing with her hair. When she lay her ear on his chest to listen to his racing heart, his hands went quiet and merely cradled her head against him. She listened to it for a long time—seconds, minutes, ten beats, a hundred…she didn’t count, didn’t try to keep track.

  Drake coaxed her the rest of the way onto the bed and onto her back. While he shed his socks, then backtracked to his pants for protection, she lay back, closed her eyes, and prepared herself for the wild ride to come. Sex with Drake was so good. They’d only had the one opportunity, but it had been wonderful, hot, and steamy.

  The hand that brushed down her neck was so unexpectedly gentle that she could only gasp at the contact. She felt a shiver that had nothing to do with temperature.

  Nikita lay there and could only let her awareness follow that single point of contact. Down her neck, tracing back and forth across her collarbone, down between her breasts until her stomach muscles clenched tighter than after doing a hundred crunches when he rested his palm there.

  She managed to open her eyes and look at Drake. The moonlight was bright enough to reveal his face but not his expression. His attention wasn’t following the line of his touch. He wasn’t staring at her breasts. He was watching her face.

  “What are you doing?” Nikita didn’t recognize her own voice it was so breathy with surprise.

  “Enjoying myself. What are you doing?”

  She hissed at the sensation of his fingertips tracing up the side of her breast, then circling around. “Feeling,” she managed. She was feeling the sensations as they rippled over her skin like tiny waves lapping on a tropical beach. For years she’d learned about focused attention down range, on the target. Now her focus was narrowing inward until she was aware of no more than the exact path of Drake’s touch, a point of fiery sensation and a trailing wake of pleasant tingles.

  Then an underwater explosion’s worth of heat lashed through the point where his mouth took her breast. A groan escaped her. The more her body reacted, the slower and gentler Drake became. He delivered no fiery heat, instead he coaxed it out of her until she burned for more.