by Dee Tenorio
“If not him, than who? Who else knew anything?”
“I don’t know,” he grit out. “But it seems to me you might give him the benefit of the doubt, since he’s kept your secret for almost two years. That ought to buy him one night of trust from you.”
He could see her stubbornness digging roots. “I’m not taking any more chances with your life.”
It was his turn to cross his arms. “I trusted you, when every one of my instincts told me not to.”
Her chin jutted out at him.
“I trusted you and you were using me the whole time.”
Chapter Fifteen
Fuck, fuck, fuuuuuck!
“Cade—”
“Weren’t you?” He had no right asking that while looking so clean and comfortable in a pair of worn jeans and a green T-shirt that molded its faded fabric over his chest like paint. She could just make out the dark gray letters that had once spelled “USMC Pendleton” over his heart. His dark hair gleamed, still wet from whatever shower she’d slept through.
What she wouldn’t give to creep into one of her own.
No right at all, she decided firmly. Not when she was barely covered in his rumpled shirt, her legs tangled in his still-warm sheets. She didn’t want to imagine what her face looked like, not with the bruises she knew had to be much darker than last night. And her hair. Ugh, her hair… She felt more than naked this way, at a distinct disadvantage. But no one ever said life was fair. He was asking the questions directly and he deserved the answers. All of them.
“Yes,” she answered, hating how her playful lover had gone back to the blank stoicism that felt as if he were hiding from her.
“That’s it? Yes? No explanations, no protestations of innocence?”
Trina shrugged. “I think I gave up innocent when I deep throated you.”
The muscle under his eye ticked, but that was it. He was braced in front of his little dining room table like a stone sentinel. Damn it, he was going to make her tell him.
“Carter needed someone to exploit me.”
If she could just see some kind of emotion in his eyes, she’d feel better about it. But she couldn’t. Miserably, she nodded.
“I volunteered, after that first day in the park.” She swallowed, wishing her mouth wasn’t so dry. “I’ve been reporting your every coming and going to Frank almost since the beginning. Giving him an idea of your mental state at any given time.” Never sure if what she said might put Cade in the wrong place at the wrong time. Editing as carefully as possible to keep them all safe while she scrambled to find the evidence she needed. Using Cade to buy herself time, to shape her case, to maneuver Frank. Worse, she knew she’d do it again. In a heartbeat.
“Because you wanted to make your case.”
Yes. And no. She’d wanted to protect him. Have a reason to be with him. She’d needed him, to help her hold on to her soul, and she’d lost it anyway. To him. After a few silent moments she nodded again, looking down at her fingers and swimming in a shame she hated herself with.
“Woman, you are so full of shit.”
Trina lifted her head to protest, but he was already crossing the planked floor to reach the side of the bed, all but diving on top of her to meld their mouths together. He kissed her almost ravenously, his hands in her hair and holding her in place until he was satisfied she had no bones and no will to speak of.
He finally broke the kiss, levering up on his elbows over her. “If you want to tell yourself you used me to protect your cover, fine, but don’t expect me to let you feel guilty about it. You wanted me, the same way I wanted you. Right from the beginning. It might not have been the best timing in the world, but we’re here now and we’ll work the rest out.” He kissed her again, slower, softer. “Don’t think for one second that you’re getting away from me now.”
His kisses drew out longer, as if he were drinking from her. His fingers caressed her cheek with softly drawn designs that traveled into her hairline.
“What I will insist on is getting this idea out of your head that I need you to protect me.”
She could only blink at the nearly feral tension on his face. How could he be so careful, so gentle with her, and still be that obviously pissed off?
“You may be a federal agent but last I checked, I was still a Marine under my cop uniform. You’ve been trying to remind me of that for as long as I’ve known you.”
“And now you’ve suddenly remembered?”
“No.” The frown pulling at his lips only slightly creased his cheeks. “No, it’s more that I had to accept it again. I’ve been working on that for a while now.”
“You’re still retired,” she pointed out, however unwisely.
“Sweetheart, I’ll be a Marine ‘til they bury my cold, dead, decrepit ass in the ground a good fifty or sixty years from now. I just had to know who I was fighting for.” The heat in his gaze left her no doubts on that score.
She laughed, she couldn’t help it. “Ooh-rah?”
“Semper Fi, baby.” Always Faithful. She knew, though, he wasn’t talking about the Corps. “I know you can take care of yourself, but you don’t have to take care of me. Even at my worst, I can still do what needs to be done, you got that? I won’t discount your abilities, you don’t ignore mine. Deal?”
“Semper Fi,” she whispered, brushing her fingers over his cheek as he’d done to hers. An agreement. One that was easier to give than it should have been. “I’m still scared, Cade.” He deserved that truth as well.
“Of what?”
“How about the fact that I’ve never had a healthy relationship in my life?” The closest she’d ever come was her time with her father. Those years had been loving, but heart-breaking. To love him and know her love wasn’t enough. It had broken something in her. “I’ve spent the last ten years moving from assignment to assignment, avoiding anything that could have turned real.”
“Then maybe I owe Frank for forcing you to keep coming my way.”
Dammit, now there were tears spilling over her cheeks, but before she could swipe them off, his rough thumb was there, sliding them away as gently as possible. She grabbed his hand. “Not Frank. You. I couldn’t stay away, not even when I was terrified. Even when I knew I was hurting you. And I’m sorry for that. I’m so sorry, Cade—”
“Hey, I can take a few hits. I’m still here, aren’t I?”
After everything she’d done, every way she’d torn him up… “Why?”
He smiled, almost indulgently. “Because you are.”
She couldn’t hold back anymore, flinging her arms around his shoulders and burying her face in his neck. Breathing him in, the weight in her heart lightening.
“Neither one of us is what anyone would call perfect. I still have some broken parts of me, parts I’m not sure will ever be right. And you do have some rage issues—”
“Excuse me?” She laughed though. How could she not?
“Point is,” he continued, rubbing her back with those warm circles she was quickly getting addicted to. “I love you. All I’m asking is if you love me, too.”
She held tight to him. God, she was probably actually hurting him, she held on so hard, but she couldn’t let go. The last hurdle—or was it the first? She didn’t know—was to give in and trust him completely. The way he’d just trusted her.
She blew out a breath and relaxed her hold so she could lean back and look him in the eyes. “I do love you. So much—” Her throat tightened and she had to swallow the vicious lump down. “So much I thought I’d die last night, watching them pull that body out of your house.”
The nightmare of that moment would never leave her, but it had given her a truth she could never refute again. “If you hadn’t been here—”
“But I was.”
“But if you hadn’t.”
He pressed a hard kiss to the undamaged side of her lips, brooking no argument when he finally let go. “I was.”
She nodded, struggling with that lump again.
&nbs
p; He shook his head at her, rolling onto his back, bringing her with him like his favorite toy. Which was fine, really.
Because the glass above their heads shattered in a hail of bullets and automatic weaponry.
Cade kept rolling, spinning them both to the floor. They hit hard, but Trina barely felt it. She glanced at him, not even able to register shock as he yanked two guns from beneath the bed and handed one to her without hesitation.
She simply took it and grimly stated the obvious. “They found us.”
…
Keeping low to the floor, Cade crawled quickly to the other side of the bed, heading for the corner of the cabin. Once there, he popped a panel near the floor with the side of his fist. The panel flipped, revealing a small screen and a directional toggle with four buttons beneath it. The screen came on instantly, showing a view from the tall trees above the cabin.
“What the fuck is that?”
“I told you this place was safe. I made it that way.” Rotating the tip on the toggle, he zoomed in on one of the three trucks just a few yards from his front door. Two were empty, but one was definitely occupied. Two men stood at different ends, each with rifles too big to be anything but fully automatic, one driver, and something under a tarp in the middle of the truck bed. Something big.
He used the buttons beneath the toggle to check all four sides of the cabin. The east and south sides had three armed men each, while the western wall of the cabin was tucked close to the granite mountainside. Close, but not flush. The escape route there was still open.
He went back to the north view, where the trucks waited, his gaze locking on the shape under a tarp. Tightening the focus as far as it could go, he saw definite movement and clear bloodstains. Fresh stains.
“How did you say my place burned?” he asked, dread pooling in his gut because he knew the answer already.
“Fire,” she whispered, peering over his shoulder at the view screen.
“Let me guess, none of the buildings around mine were touched, right?” He turned to look at her, but like earlier, he knew before the words were out of her mouth.
“No, actually.” She frowned. “It was dark, but I don’t think anything was wrong with the other houses. Their lights were on.”
“Fuck.” No question what was under that tarp now. He checked the safety on the handgun before shoving it in his back waistband. “You ever wonder how someone as young as Rick ended up in my unit?”
Trina shook her head.
“My team was designed for deep recon, direct action ops. Mostly, we went into hot zones, gathered intel, placed necessary equipment, and got the fuck back out. We’re trained for everything, but that little shit is a goddamned genius with C-4. That’s how he caught the attention of ForceRecon’s recruiters. He can demolish a mountain or blow the seal on an envelope if he wants.
“I knew there was something you told me that I wasn’t registering. You said it was blind luck that I left town yesterday. It wasn’t. Rick made me go, gave me some bullshit about the feds coming through. He had me holed up here, waiting for the all-clear.”
“You mean—”
“Rick is no traitor. He set it up to make it look like I was dead only after he got me out of the way.” Though, who the body inside was, someone else would have to guess. “He must have figured out Frank was on to you. Last I saw him, he was pissed because he couldn’t reach someone on text.” He looked at her. “Was that how you two communicated?”
She nodded. “I didn’t get anything from him today…” He could see her mind working frantically backward. “No one called me to tell me Red Dog was attacked, either. They have to call me. And my phone’s never that quiet for that long. You don’t think—”
“Frank could have blocked signals in and out of the bar? Hell yeah, he could, if he thought someone might be bugging him.” Paranoid fuck that Frank was, it was practically a given.
They both looked back to the screen, to the bloody form beneath the tarp.
“We know you’re in there, Evigan.” Carter’s gravelly voice boomed through the cabin walls. That feedback at the end meant he was on a bullhorn. “You got two minutes to come on out or things are going to get ugly for your old Army buddy here.”
Squelching the urge to tell Carter to go fuck himself if he couldn’t tell the difference between military branches, Cade took a quick mental inventory. He didn’t have any automatic weapons here, but his rifles were nothing to piss at, either. “How good are you with heavier artillery?”
“With my right hand or my left?” Even now, she had to be cheeky.
“We’ll have three seconds to get away from this wall after I push this button. Floorboard in front of the couch, there’s a twin gauge and an ammo belt pre-loaded. Count of two, you get it, I’ll cover the window. One, two!” He hit it and they raced toward the middle of the cabin, Cade using his body to shield hers from the three men he knew were on the other side of the shattered window. Bullets streamed in. Cade dropped practically on top of her. A loud boom stopped the gunfire, shaking the cabin and sending dirt flying in past the broken glass. Trina, God love her, didn’t miss a beat. Her hands found the loose floorboard and yanked it up. Another few seconds scrambling and they were back in the corner, one rifle and ammo belt heavier.
“You have land mines out there?” she snapped.
“Probably should have mentioned that when I told you about the place, huh?”
“Ya think? Who the hell do you think you are? First Blood?”
“Please. That guy was a Green Beret.”
“Oh, of course. Got anything else here I should know about? Spaceship, maybe? Laser beams?”
“There’s an RPG in the attic.” Not really—he could just imagine the bitch getting a grenade launcher through customs would be—but the look on Trina’s face was worth it. Cade cracked open another panel above the surveillance viewer and pulled out a wireless transceiver. “Things go tits up, you use this to call for help. It’ll be open frequency, so Frank will hear it, but use it anyway.” He pointed to the north wall of the cabin. “There’s a hidden door under that rug. You can slip out there if you have to. They get in, you get out and you run, do you hear me? You run and you don’t stop.”
She absorbed the information with a determined nod.
Not the best plan, but it was a start. He flipped the setting on the transceiver to his own frequency. “Still sure you want to be here, Carter? There’s ten more of those buried all over my property. That one looks like it cost you at least two men.” He heard his own voice echo on the loudspeakers outside.
Apparently, so did Trina, because she looked at him incredulously as she checked the rifle.
The bastard had the temerity to chuckle in response. “I had a feeling you were going to make this interesting. Never bought that post-traumatic stress bullshit people said about you. Maybe that means you’re smart enough to figure out what I have here in this tarp. So why don’t you come on out and we’ll talk?”
Trina rolled her eyes, mouthing words he hadn’t heard since he’d left the service. He’d have laughed, but she did have a loaded twin-barrel in her hands. Perverse, maybe, but if their lives weren’t in danger, this would probably rate as his best date ever.
He brought the radio back up. “That’s not happening. But since you’re here, why not tell me how you found me?”
“You’d be amazed what you can get out of a guy when you shatter his leg.”
Cade closed his eyes and counted. It didn’t do much for his growing rage, but it did keep him from storming out the door in a pointless explosion of bullets. “You’d have to do more than that to break Rick.”
Carter hesitated a few telling seconds. “It was worth a try. No, you’re the one who fucked up this time, deputy. Turns out all sheriff’s department vehicles have LoJack. We just had to find the signal. Trelane almost managed to get away with faking your death, I guess we just got lucky when we caught him blowing your house up.”
“Can’t have been too
lucky, since there was a dead man inside.”
“Yeah, well, you win some you lose some, right?” Carter’s joviality could only mean one thing. He was buying time. Cade switched the cameras, finding men creeping carefully around the house. Trying to get toward the last, unchecked wall. “Come on out, Evigan. I got no reason to kill you. Yet.”
But there would be when they got in, Cade would make sure of that. “What happens if I come to the door?”
“Simple trade. You come out and tell me where Shana is, I’ll give you back your sack of shit best friend.”
Yeah, right. “He alive?”
Another rough laugh. “Let’s put it this way. He sure as hell wishes he wasn’t.”
Shit. Trina must have been thinking the same thing because she dropped her head back against the wall.
“You may want to hurry up. Not sure how much longer he’s gonna stay that way.”
Trina put a restraining hold on his arm. “You know he just wants you out there so he can shoot you, right?”
“No, he’s more hands-on than that. He’ll want to gut me.”
She gave him a sideways glare. “He’s not an idiot. You’re almost twice his size. No way he’d get close enough for you to hurt him.”
But Carter was prideful as all hell, and he still bristled at the knowledge that Cade had laid him out when they first met.
“Cade?” Trina turned fully his way, a note of nervousness in her voice.
He lifted the radio to his mouth. She was right to be nervous. “Let’s make a deal.”
“Cade, no.” Her hiss barely registered.
“I’ll come out, but you have to make it worth my while. Bring Trelane to the porch, then get your men back to the truck. I’ll talk to you, just you. Then we can all get out of this safe and sound.”
“What about your little friends underground? I’d hate to drop your man somewhere he won’t come back from.”
“Consider them disarmed. Unless someone breaks the rules. Then I’m blowing the shit out of you and your men.”
