by Sherrilyn Kenyon; Dianna Love; Cindy Gerard; Laura Griffin
As he neared the aerobic room he heard a noise and went on alert.
Jeremy approached the room cautiously, wondering why the lights around the base of the room were still on. One of his yoga instructors liked to use them instead of overhead lights for a softer mood.
When he stepped through the door, he was sure his heart skipped a beat.
CeCe lay on a blue foam mat in front of the wall of mirrors, stretching her amazing body with liquid movements. She hummed quietly along with the music playing.
The fiberglass base Blade had repaired sat in the corner.
She looked into the mirror and met his gaze, then stopped moving. “Hi.”
Her shy greeting kicked his heart into beating again.
“Hi.” Jeremy moved slowly toward her, not wanting her to vanish if she was only a figment of his imagination.
She sat up, still staring into the mirror, their reflected gazes locked in a timeless moment.
When he stood behind her, looking down, Jeremy waited for a painful breath to flow out of his lungs so he could speak. “Good to see you.”
“You too. How’s your shoulder?” Her words came out fragile, as if they might break if she spoke too loud.
“Healing. Why are you here?”
“I got a call from Blade about the base and…”
“Oh.” He would have said more but the words backed up in his tight throat.
“That’s not what I meant.” Her eyes shied away from his. She took a breath and raised her beautiful gaze to meet his in the mirror. “When Blade called, I talked to him for a while. He wouldn’t really share anything about you and didn’t know where you were, but he said you’d come back eventually. I’ve been visiting my family in Ontario so I asked him to let me know when he knew you were back. That I wanted to come see you.”
“Why?”
“To tell you I’m sorry.” The words rushed out in a strained whisper.
That threw him. He really looked at her. She’d lost weight. It showed in her face, which was turned up staring at his reflection.
“For what?” he asked. Why was she apologizing?
“For judging you by one set of standards and others, like my family, by another set.”
His pulse jumped at the hope her words offered. “What do you mean?”
She shifted up on her knees, never breaking eye contact. “Took me a while to sort things out, but I think I finally got my head straight. I was willing to accept that the men in my family were decent men, in spite of their heritage. Their grandfather and father—my stepdad—ran illegal gambling operations, but when their grandfather was killed in a bust, my three stepbrothers made a pact before they graduated high school to change the family business. They started legitimate businesses over four years ago and have slowly moved the family enterprise away from illegal numbers games.”
Jeremy knew she waited for some comment, but he wanted to see where this was going.
Hope had been an evil mistress over the past month.
CeCe drew a deep breath. “I went home to see my dad and brothers after… everything happened. I told them about you and that I couldn’t hold you to a double set of standards. If I could accept them with the DeMitri past then they had to accept that I cared for you.”
His heart was beating so fast he could feel his chest move. “What exactly are you saying?”
She stood up and turned around, facing him with her heart in her eyes. “That I should have been willing to let you explain whenever you were ready, to give you a chance to tell your side of what happened in your past. That if you tell me you’re not involved in criminal activity I believe you. I know how you found the photo card in my statue base and that you gave the real one to Vinny to use in a deal for my freedom. Then you walked into that…”
Her lip trembled and a tear streaked down her face. “You walked into that death trap knowing you had no way out. I thought you’d died when all those shots were fired. Then they took you away and wouldn’t let me go with you and you were bleeding and no one would tell me where you were and…” Tears poured down her face.
Jeremy took her into his arms and hugged her. Holding her was a gift he never expected to experience again. Her arms went around him and she sobbed against his chest.
“It’s okay.” He shushed her, rubbing his hand up and down her back. “I made it.”
“No it’s not okay.” She lifted red eyes full of regret to his. “I’m sorry you didn’t know how much I loved you before you walked into that building prepared to die for me.”
She loved him? Jeremy couldn’t move as hope flooded him from head to toe.
CeCe had come back and she loved him.
He laid his palm along her cheek. “I’m sorry too, that I couldn’t tell you about so many things. I don’t have a criminal record anymore…”
Her forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What do you mean?”
“My entire record has been expunged. With the exception of boosting cars when I was a teenager, everything else on my rap sheet was created as a cover for my… job.”
She sniffled. “You don’t own a gym?” Her lips puckered in concern. Then her tongue slipped along her bottom lip.
All he’d thought about for the past sixteen days was CeCe.
Jeremy gave up waiting to kiss her. When he dipped his head, she cupped her hands on his face and opened her lips to his invasion. His world tilted back into place and started spinning forward again.
He kissed her over and over again, wanting to hold her like this forever. But to do that he’d have to tell her everything.
Slowly ending the kiss, he said, “Time for all the truth.”
She looked as though she prepared herself for the worst, then nodded. “I’m ready to listen.”
Using his thumbs, he wiped away the last of her tears. “In addition to owning this gym, I do contract work for an agency that protects national security.”
“Oh, crud. I had the thought that you might be law enforcement, then I blew it off when everything happened. I can’t believe what I put you through and…” She paused, blinking. “What kind of law enforcement?”
He smiled, then turned serious when he told her, “I work undercover for a group that has no public identity. I used to insert into prisons for intel, but the powers that be have decided not to use me that way anymore. I can’t share details about my work with you, so there will be times when I’m technically lying by omission, but I’ll never lie to you about anything between us. I love you too, and never want to lose you again.”
Tears started fresh again. She kissed him hard and passionately for what seemed like forever and not long enough, then pulled back with a worried look. “What about my family? Every one of my brothers is an honest businessman, but you of all people know how the past can cause problems. Will they be on your agency’s radar, because I don’t want to put my brothers or dad at risk… by me being with you.”
Trust was a bridge between them that could go crashing down or bind them together depending on if they could build it.
Jeremy trusted her so it came down to whether she could trust him. “I’m glad you have brothers who watch over you for when I’m not at home to protect you myself. As long as your family doesn’t threaten U.S. national security they won’t be on our radar. And I swear I won’t be watching them like an agent when I’m around your family, which is bound to happen. That is, if you stay with me.”
She didn’t hesitate this time. “I’m not going anywhere, because I trust you and love you. And I don’t want to ever lose you again either. You belong with me.”
She wanted to keep him.
Relief whipped across his skin, freeing the tension in his body. Jeremy lifted her off the floor, swinging her around and around in his arms, ignoring the pain throbbing in his shoulder. He could endure anything with her at his side.
CeCe’s laugh was music to his soul. He intended to hear that song played over and over. When he stopped spinning and settled her to her feet,
CeCe’s eyes twinkled with a mischievous smile.
He kissed her forehead. “What?”
“Holidays with you and my family are going to be interesting.”
Leave No Trace
CINDY GERARD
It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
—Aung San Suu Kyi, 1990
One
It had become too much about the scotch, Cav admitted with brutal honesty. Too much about relying on it to make it through the nights. Too much about craving it to help him deal with a life where the shots called him, instead of him calling the shots.
With a heavy breath, he leaned back in the mahogany and leather desk chair in the Jakarta mansion that had been his base of operations for the past six years. He slowly swiveled until he faced his office window, then rocked back and held the heavy-bottomed glass aloft, watching the sunlight play over the amber oblivion before indulging in another sip.
Yeah. Way too much about the scotch.
That was all about to change.
Everything was about to change.
Tomorrow morning he was going to give notice via his handler. After a decade and a half of being a good little spook, David Cavanaugh and the CIA were finally going to part ways.
It was past time.
He watched the ebb and flow of traffic shooting by the window and wondered why he didn’t feel relief. Instead, ever since he’d made his decision, he’d been overrun with recurrent flashes of guilt. And, yeah, panic. What now? What next? Where did he go from here? What did he have left to give?
The sound of light footsteps on the polished teak floor brought his head around. He’d dismissed the two bodyguards that were a part of his cover earlier, but Dira, his aman, stood in the towering office doorway, the wide strap of her woven straw purse slung over her shoulder. The twelve-foot ceilings dwarfed the quiet Indonesian woman’s five-foot stature.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Windle?”
Frank Windle had been Cav’s CIA cover for the past six years. Windle’s expat, unprincipled venture capitalist persona came with this fully staffed luxury mansion, the personal bodyguards, a force of jangas—armed guards with dogs who patrolled the high cement wall surrounding the compound—and an expense account that would make the Prince of Wales weep with envy.
He’d come a long way since his initial CIA assignment in Ouagadougou, Africa, working undercover as a lowly U.S. embassy staffer and sharing a three-room tenement flat with fellow rookies Wyatt Savage and Joe Green. He lived in luxury in Jakarta now, and he regularly rubbed elbows with the scum of the earth.
“I’m good, Dira, thanks.” He dismissed his longtime housekeeper with a soft smile. “Enjoy your evening.”
He planned to enjoy his. Alone. With a farewell toast to both the Company and his love affair with Glenlivet.
With grim determination, he looked around the polished opulence of the wood-paneled room. He wouldn’t miss the subterfuge, but he’d sure as hell miss this place. The spacious office was one of twenty luxurious rooms in a mansion that personified the historical Dutch East Indies architecture with its steeply pitched gables, large airy rooms, and soaring finials. The house was a jewel. Cool, airy, and regal… and living here had choked the life out of him.
He downed the last of the fine single malt and wondered how the Company would explain it when Windle, who’d made a name for himself as an unscrupulous player in not only the Indonesian but the international black market by being open to any number of illicit business transactions, made a sudden departure from Jakarta and cut off its intel pipeline.
The Company’s problem, not mine.
Right. So why did a knot of anxiety tighten inside his chest like a fist? And, Jesus, why the guilt? He’d been a good Company man. He’d had plenty of incentives to flip and go over to the dark side. Lucrative incentives. And while he wasn’t as naive about the international spy game as he had been when he’d first signed on to play, he was still a patriot. He didn’t need to feel guilty about anything—not about his work, not about leaving. And yet…
“Screw it,” he muttered. Screw the guilt. It was someone else’s turn to run the gauntlet. He’d be thirty-five next month, and some days he felt as old as fucking Methuselah. It was the weight of those dead bodies and repeat adrenaline burns. He’d carried both as long as both his body and his soul could bear.
He rubbed at a scar on his right thigh, a memento from an AK-47 round in Beirut in ’99. And whenever it rained his collarbone ached like hell from when he’d broken it escaping an op gone wrong in Mogadishu in ’05.
His cell phone rang, Private Number showing on the readout. He’d personally fitted the security screens on his cell—this phone, even the CIA didn’t know about—but just in case he answered with his cover. “Windle.”
“Cav, it’s Wyatt.”
The chair creaked as Cav sank back. It had been months since he’d heard Wyatt Savage’s soft southern drawl, yet his old friend was one of the few constants in Cav’s history. He hoped that would be true in his future as well. In the spook world, where black and white too often bled into shades of gray, there had never been a question that Wyatt was also one of the good guys.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t give his old partner a hard time.
“Why is it that every time the phone rings and I hear your voice, I feel a knee-jerk reaction to say ‘wrong number’ and hang the hell up?”
“I need your help.”
“Ah. That would be the reason.” The last time Wyatt had enlisted Cav’s help it had involved infiltrating a human trafficking ring, the takedown of a rat-bastard Chinese crime boss, and several blown-up buildings near the Jakarta wharfs.
“Look, Cav. I don’t have a lot of time. So here’s the quick and dirty.”
“It’s always quick and dirty with you, Savage.” Just like Cav was always going to say yes to whatever Wyatt asked of him.
Over a decade and several dead bodies had stacked up since he, Wyatt, and Joe Green had guarded one another’s backs in service to Uncle. While Wyatt and Joe had said hasta luego to the CIA several years ago and teamed up with Nate Black’s private security and military contract firm, Black Ops, Inc., Cav had stuck with the Company. Until now.
“Cav… you still there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here,” he said when he realized he’d lapsed into silence. He glanced toward the liquor cabinet. “What’s going on?”
“Two days ago an American woman stepped off a plane in Mandalay, Myanmar, hired a taxi that let her off near her hotel downtown, and she hasn’t been heard from since.”
Cav reached absently for a pen, then flipped it back and forth between his fingers. “One of yours?” Black Ops, Inc. specialized in immobilizing bad guys on the international front.
“No. She’s not with BOI. Carrie’s a friend. And she’s as green as the damn grass.”
“What kind of friend?” Wyatt had gotten married last spring, yet he sounded damn rattled over this friend. Cav had missed the wedding. Like he’d missed many important events over the years, because he’d been embroiled in some covert op to gum up the works in a would-be tyrant’s attempted coup to overthrow a U.S.-sanctioned government, or an op to intercept an arms shipment bound for a terrorist training camp, or a score of other missions that had kept him on the razor’s edge of life or death. A lot of lives. A lot of deaths.
A lot of post-op scotch to blur the memories that hovered like ghosts around a crypt.
“Just a friend,” Wyatt said, snapping Cav back. “I grew up with her. Our families go way back. She’s a small-town hospital administrator. She wasn’t prepared for Myanmar. She’s never even been out of the States. Hell, for all I know, she’s never been out of Georgia.”
Cav could hear the desperation in Wyatt’s voice.
“Her family begged me to talk her out of going, and I tried. Believe me. I tried to
scare her smart. But there was no stopping her.
“Look”—he paused, and Cav could visualize his friend rubbing his brow with his index finger—“she’s important to me, Cav. I’d be there in a heartbeat but Sophie… she’s pregnant and… Christ, Cav.” His voice broke and Cav sensed that what came next wouldn’t be good.
“There are complications. We… we might lose the baby.” His voice was thick with strain. “I can’t leave her right now. The doctors say it’s going to be touch and go for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”
“I’m sorry, man.” Cav knew all about Sophie. One drunk midnight, shortly after the Company had paired them up as partners all those years ago, Wyatt had told him about the one who’d gotten away. Cav had been happy as hell when they’d finally found their way back to each other this past year. Now this tough break. One that was clearly tearing Wyatt apart.
Now he understood the reason for Wyatt’s call. He couldn’t go to Myanmar. Cav could. And he could get there a helluva lot faster from Jakarta than Wyatt could from Georgia.
“What’s the word from our embassy?” he asked.
“They’ve got nothing. It’s like she fell off the face of the earth. They’ve got calls in to both local and government officials, but so far it’s clam city.”
Cav listened intently while Wyatt gave him Carrie Granger’s physical description.
“Let me make some calls. See what I can find out. I’ll be back in touch.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Don’t insult me.” They’d been too much to each other to ever have to say those words.
“Right. Love you, too.”
A quick smile curved Cav’s lips as a glimpse of the Savage he knew finally surfaced. He disconnected, then started looking up old contacts who might have connections in Myanmar.
TWO HOURS AND several calls later, Cav still had nothing. In a city peopled with Asians, a slim, pretty, blue-eyed blonde, five foot seven or eight, should stick out like a square peg in a round hole. But he’d butted up against dozens of brick walls. No one had seen or heard anything about an American woman. This wasn’t good.
