by Kaylea Cross
“Lie down,” he whispered against her lips, feathering across their edges. She allowed him to turn her fully onto her side, facing him. “Keep your eyes closed.”
More heavenly kisses feathered over her jaw, teasing her lips, then finally centered there. She opened instantly, sighed in satisfaction at the feel of his tongue sliding inside to tease and caress hers. During the previous kiss she’d felt the urgent lust raging through him, but this one was slow and seductive. Need drove her closer to his body and she felt the thick ridge of his erection press against her pelvis. One rock of her hips and she was rewarded by a low groan, a hard hand sliding from her hair to the small of her back and lower to grip the curve of her hip. He squeezed, his long fingers kneading her flesh in a rhythm that made her want to purr.
Khalia stroked his tongue with hers and ran her hands over him, luxuriating in all that male power at her fingertips. When his palm slid up from her hip to cradle her breast she gasped into his mouth, the puckered nipple gathering even tighter against his palm. Tingles radiated out from his touch, heat pooling low in her belly. The thin cotton of her sleep shirt prevented her from feeling his hand on her bare skin. She wanted it gone.
Twisting up, she reached down to drag the shirt off. He stopped her, catching her hands in one of his and again brushed his thumb across her throbbing nipple. Shards of fire swept through her, centering in her core, making her wet and ready for him. A shiver rippled through her. Hunter kissed her deeper, letting her feel more of his need before he took the hard point between his thumb and forefinger and squeezed gently. Her back arched of its own volition and a high-pitched gasp escaped from her tight throat. She was melting, drowning in pleasure and she never wanted it to end.
Before she could plead for more than he was giving her, he pulled the hem of her shirt up just far enough to expose her breasts. Cool air caressed her naked skin as he leaned in. The scrape of stubble against her tender skin was erotic as hell and when he cupped the weight of her in his hand and dragged his tongue across the sensitive center, she couldn’t hold back a soft cry. Grabbing his head, Khalia arched her back and pulled him closer. He obliged with a low sound of satisfaction and took her into his mouth. Her eyes fell closed under the lash of pleasure.
Hot. Wet. Unbelievably sexy. He sucked at her with slow pulls of his mouth, letting his tongue flick over the sensitive tip. In the space of a few heartbeats the pulse between her legs morphed into an all consuming pressure, demanding release. She writhed against his mouth and fought the restraining hold he had on her hip, scissoring her legs in a useless effort to press her mound against him and find some sort of relief.
A loud chiming made her jerk and her eyes fly open. Hunter stilled against her, her nipple still in his mouth. It took a second for her to realize it was her phone ringing. As much as she loved her family, she didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. “Probably just my brother,” she panted, muscles tight with strain, feeling like she’d die if he stopped what he was doing. “Just ignore it.”
Hunter obliged her and did something devastating with his tongue. Her delighted sigh was just melting into silence when another phone in the room began to ring. His.
This time Hunter cursed and released her so fast she landed on her back. By the time she sat up and pulled the shirt down over her breasts, he was across the room and answering his phone.
“What? Are you sure?” she heard him ask, and a ripple of unease went through her at the tension in his voice. With a feeling of dread she picked up her phone to check the call display. Tom. When he hadn’t reached her he’d obviously called Hunter right away. And that had to mean more bad news.
With her arousal extinguished under a bucket of ice water, she hurriedly straightened her clothes and watched Hunter. He was pacing beside the bed, ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus. Yeah, hang on.” He raised his head to look at her. “Pull up your e-mail.”
Grabbing her phone, she did, fighting back the fear slithering inside her.
Someone pounded on the door. She scrambled to her knees, wondering what the hell was happening. Hunter flipped on the light, checked the peephole and pulled it open to let Gage in.
He strode in, his gaze connecting with hers. The worry she saw there made her gut shrivel. “Did you get it?” he gestured to the phone in her hand while Hunter continued to speak to Tom.
“No, I’m just checking my e-mail now,” she said shakily. What the hell was going on now? It seemed to take hours for the program to load. By the time her messages came through, Hunter and Gage were flanking her, looking over her shoulder at the illuminated screen.
“Click on the one from Titanium and open the attachment,” Hunter told her.
“Okay.” Her heart thudded against her sternum. She enlarged the image and stared at it, realizing it was some sort of map. Everyone seemed worried as hell about it. “What is it?”
Face grim, Hunter set his phone down between them and put Tom on speaker. “Tom?”
“It’s addressed to you, Khalia,” Tom answered, “and we need you to figure out what it means, fast.”
“Why, what’s going on?” It scared her even more when Hunter reached out to take her hand and squeezed it.
“It’s part of a ransom note,” Tom said. “A Taliban spokesperson is claiming they’ve taken a family from the school hostage.”
No! As horror swamped her she could barely feel the pressure of Hunter’s fingers around hers. And Tom kept talking.
“Whatever this diagram means will lead us to their location, and they want only you and one person from your security team to go there. They’ve threatened to kill the hostages if you don’t show up there in the next three hours.”
Chapter Twelve
Oh, fuck him, this was the last thing they needed.
Hunter gauged Khalia’s reaction to the news. With everything that had happened he kept waiting for her to crack under the strain, and so far she’d hung in there better than he ever could have expected. Even so, he couldn’t help but feel like this was the tipping point and he couldn’t stand the thought of watching her break. And with this new strain he was very afraid she might.
Her mouth was pinched, her forehead creased with an anxious frown as she stared at her phone. She squeezed his hand so tight her fingers were white. The room was deathly silent in the wake of Tom’s announcement.
“Is it Aisha?” she demanded, a quaver in her voice.
“We don’t know yet,” Tom answered.
A muscle jumped in her jaw, her gaze still on the phone’s screen, then she gave a sharp shake of her head. “I can’t tell anything from that picture, it’s too small. Give me my laptop.” She reached an arm toward where it lay beside the sofa Hunter had tried to sleep on earlier. Gage lunged over to grab it and set it on the bed before her. Both he and Hunter gathered closer while she booted up the computer and pulled up Tom’s e-mail.
The image on screen was definitely a map of some kind, drawn with what looked like pencil. Even on the laptop’s larger screen it was still too small for them to make out the writing or symbols all over it. She enlarged it again. “Now it’s blurry. But if I shrink it any more than this I can’t see much of anything.”
“Kind of looks like Pakistan,” Hunter commented, pulling back to angle his head. Although other than the basic shape of it, the remaining marks and blurry symbols didn’t make any sense to him. “Tom, you said they sent this through the company’s website contact form?”
“Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. They included a number for you to call them at when you arrive at the location.”
The one marked with a big star. He glanced at Khalia, who was chewing her bottom lip as she studied the screen. “Any ideas?”
She shook her head, still staring, and he turned his attention to Gage, who gave him a hell if I know look. “Any Urdu or Pashto in there?” Hunter asked him, referring to what might be writing or symbols on the map.
“Not that I can tell,” Gage answered, bending even closer. “N
umbers maybe? The writing’s fucking awful.”
“I think it’s a triangle,” Khalia suddenly murmured. All three of them bent their heads closer to squint at the map and the lines set amid the other symbols.
“I see it,” Hunter said at last, mentally connecting the three biggest dots. “What are those down at the bottom, numbers?”
Khalia enlarged the image again to read them better despite the blur, and gasped a moment later. “It’s trig.”
“Huh?” he asked, squinting at the numbers. As in, trigonometry?
“And algebra,” she confirmed, sounding convinced. “They’ve given me the distance between two points on the map and the degrees of this angle…” She muttered something else to herself then nodded. “It’s a math problem to calculate the length of this line.” Her finger traced a route from a dot in the middle of the map to the star on the left.
Holy shit, it really was trig.
She pointed to another line running west/northwest from a dot on the right, her lips moving as she took in all the info. “Give me a sec.”
Rummaging through her laptop case she came up with a scientific calculator and began plugging in numbers, mumbling about sines and tangents. Hunter was no slouch with math but she was too quick for him to follow as she punched various figures into the calculator. “It’s one hundred forty-four from this point to this one,” she announced, tapping the screen and looking up at him expectantly.
“A hundred and forty-four what? What kind of measurement?” Gage asked, scooting closer to get a better look.
“Klicks,” Hunter answered, heart suddenly beating faster as everything clicked into place.
The others looked up at him expectantly, hoping he’d cracked it.
“If this is Pakistan, where would this point be?” he asked Gage, pointing to the dot on the right.
Gage studied it for a second, frowning as though he wasn’t convinced the image even was a map of Pakistan. “Islamabad, most likely.”
Hunter nodded. “So what’s a hundred and forty four klicks almost due west of here?”
“Peshawar,” Gage said, sounding surprised and a little impressed.
“Yeah, and that means we’re running short on time.” Hunter sat back, mind whirling. Whoever had sent this knew Khalia was a math teacher. And they were smart enough to include exactly enough information for her to figure out the puzzle. “This is way too advanced for a Taliban spokesperson,” he said to no one in particular.
Tom’s sigh came through the speaker phone. “It’s from someone working for them. I’d guess someone with a college degree.”
Khalia glanced up at Hunter. “The go-between for the Taliban and the Pakistani official the State Department told me about?”
He took her hand again and stroked his thumb across her cold knuckles, trying to ease the anxiety he sensed in her. “Not sure, but they were specifically targeting you with this. And we’ll have barely enough time to get there even if we leave right now.” Each passing second wound him tighter inside. These assholes were part of the cell responsible for Khalia’s father’s death and the subsequent riots that had led to Scottie’s death. Hunter wanted them taken out. If that meant having to take Khalia along to draw them out of hiding, he’d do it as long as he could be there to guarantee her safety and make sure she didn’t get too close.
“Can we bring backup to this meeting?” he asked Tom.
“Negative, they were very clear that it has to be just Khalia and one other person to the final destination. I’m designating you, and the others will go as backup. When you hit the outskirts of Pesh, call the contact number. They’ve threatened to kill the hostages if local authorities get involved. All we need is their location. The Paks will handle the rest. I’ve already been in contact with them. SWAT team is on standby, waiting for word from us.”
There were a lot of things Hunter had to say about that, and he couldn’t say any of them in front of Khalia without freaking her out even more. Though she had to realize by now how corrupt things were over here. “So how are you going to keep them out of it?” Anyone from the police to the ISI could be involved in this plot.
“Can’t, because they’re already working on it. I’ll update them again when you make contact with the hostage takers in Pesh. With all the international pressure on them about the wave of riots and now the school attack, the Paks are desperate to break up this cell. Just get us the location, then get out.”
Meaning Tom had already been getting pressure from the ISI for Intel about this cell and if he wanted Titanium Security to keep operating in country, he had to comply no matter what the risks were. “That’s how it is?”
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
Wait, so they were all fine with using Khalia as fucking bait? Taking her to Pesh to make the call and make everything look legit was one thing. Expecting her to go with him and verify the actual address was quite another.
Hunter set his jaw, the protective male in him rejecting the idea outright. She wasn’t just a fucking Principal to him anymore. He cared about her, more than he’d ever thought possible in such a short amount of time, and he wanted to shelter her from any more danger or ugliness. But damn, what if she was their only shot at nailing this cell?
He struggled to let the hardened professional side of him take over, mind racing. “Even if they can’t go in with us, I’ll need the rest of the team close by for Intel and backup.”
“Damn straight. They’ll go along and hang back at a spot you designate until you get a hard location. Once you verify it, you pull Khalia out and get out of town,” Tom said.
Good, because under the circumstances Hunter wouldn’t have allowed anyone but him to take her into Peshawar, and he had no intention of letting her anywhere near the meeting location, no matter what Tom or anyone in the ISI wanted. But could she withstand this?
He searched her face, read the apprehension in her pale green eyes. This was asking more of her than anyone had a right to. He knew she realized that this was so much bigger than her. That this might not only save the lives of the hostages, but take out the cell that had attacked the school and murdered her father.
“Can you do this?” he asked her, feeling torn. Part of him wanted her to say no, refuse outright. But another part wanted these fuckers caught and dispatched to hell where they belonged, and right now she was their best shot at making that happen. She wanted it too. He could see the vengeance burning in her eyes.
“These are the men who killed my father?” she asked, looking for reassurance.
“Yes,” he and Tom said at the same time.
She swallowed, her eyes searching his as if for guidance. “If I don’t go they’ll kill the hostages, right?”
“Most likely,” Tom answered for him. “We don’t have much time for you to make up your mind. Best start heading there before we lose any more leeway. As soon as we get off the phone, Gage and I’ll contact the State Department and anyone else I think is necessary.”
“What about the police?” Khalia asked. “How are we going to keep them from tipping off the kidnappers with their own investigation?”
Tom spoke up again. “Don’t worry about all that. Gage and I’ll handle everything while you’re en route. You going?”
Hunter watched Khalia wrestle silently with her decision. He empathized with her position. Until ten minutes ago she thought she’d be on a flight home in a few hours. Now the responsibility of innocent lives had been dumped straight into her hands, but more than that she now had the chance to personally help bring her father’s murderers to justice. The possibility of the hostages being Aisha and her family, or any other family from the school would eat her alive with guilt. All of that combined was one hell of a motivating force, even for an untrained civilian.
“No one here’s going to judge you for not going if that’s what you decide,” he said quietly, needing her to believe him, his conscience forcing him to give her an out. As much as he dreaded the thought of her leaving him in the
morning, he hated the idea of her being in further danger. Yeah, he was good at his job, but even he couldn’t guarantee her safety if they did this. Going into Pesh blind with no immediate backup was a huge risk. And yet he still wanted the cell enough for her to do this and trust in him to watch her back. What the fuck did that say about him?
“It’s my fault,” she whispered tightly, her face stricken. “They want me and now they’re threatening more innocent people to draw me out.”
“It’s not your fault. And they’re not going to get you,” Hunter said fiercely, gripping her shoulder. “You think I’d let you go near wherever the meeting point is when we’ve got a confirmed threat against your life? No way.” It pissed him off that she’d even think it.
“Then what are we going to do? Call the kidnappers and wander around the city until we find them?”
“Once we get an address, we’ll get close enough for me to verify the location and let the locals do their thing. Tom and Gage will work out the logistics while we drive.”
Pulling free of his grip, she took a shaky breath and stood, resolve stamped all over her expression as she faced him and Gage. “I want this cell destroyed. I want them to pay for what they did to my father and everything else.”
“I know you do.” They all wanted the cell eliminated. The reasons didn’t matter now; they were united in the cause.
She gave a decisive nod. “Let’s go.”
“Roger that. Tom, we’re on our way.” He didn’t ask her if she was sure or give her a chance to hesitate. If he did she might second guess herself and every minute spent here cost them. As it was they’d have to haul ass to get to Pesh by the deadline.
Gage left to get his own gear together. Hunter put on his tactical vest and grabbed his weapons while Khalia changed in the bathroom. Less than a minute later she reappeared in the black robe with a scarf covering her dark curls. Her face was pale but her eyes burned with conviction.
