Weakness swamped her, causing her to sprawl atop her captor, spread-eagle. Her head slumped to his shoulder where she inhaled his distinctly male but not unpleasant scent. I've been beat, she acknowledged. Her father wanted her out of Mexico. She had known all along that it would happen, didn't she?
Out of the corner of her still-open eyes, she saw the SEAL named Bronco tab a button on a cord strung across his chest. "Target recovered." He sounded subdued. "We're coming out."
So now she'd been reduced to a target instead of a human being taking a stand against corruption. Terrific. Thanks, Dad.
If she didn't understand why her father was so damn protective, she might actually never forgive him. Maybe one of these days he'd let her do what she'd been called to do and stop playing God, just because he could.
* * *
Haiku and Bullfrog had cleared the area around the school and called for their DEA contact to come and collect them. Sam knew via their ongoing communication that they'd 'tagged and gagged' two drunken civilians wandering up the alley behind the school dormitory. Don't worry, Haiku had assured him. They'll never remember what happened to them.
Scanning the street for any other potential witnesses, Sam squeezed out of the gated schoolyard with the recovery target lying limply in his arms. Bronco locked the gate from the inside, keeping the sleeping occupants secure for now. The girls inside might resist capture for a few more days, anyway.
Not my problem, Sam reminded himself.
Hefting his burden higher, he waited for Bronco to scale the wall and join him. His throbbing nose reminded him of Madison Scott's ferocious struggle. As feisty as she was, she had to know that she was no match for the scum who ruled the streets here. Or was she so foolishly naïve that she thought her reckless behavior wouldn't result in ugly consequences? Like an innocent kid going to jail?
Hearing Bronco drop from the wall beside him, he focused on their exfil, keying his mike. "Do you have a visual?"
"Roger that," Haiku replied. "All clear."
"Moving now. Keep us covered," he requested.
"Copy. Proceed."
With Bullfrog and Haiku poised to fire at anything that threatened them, Sam and Bronco dashed through puddles to the waiting taxi and jumped in. The other two joined them within seconds, and the taxi squealed away. Operation Dumb Broad had gone off with just one hitch.
Sam suspected his nose was broken.
As they sped through a maze of streets, headed for the exfil site several miles out of town, the DEA officer at the wheel looked at the woman in Sam's arms and nearly plowed into an oncoming vehicle.
"Keep your eyes on the road," Sam growled, though he was having difficulty leading by example.
Miss Scott's white blouse had gone transparent in the rain, making it obvious that she wasn't wearing a bra. With every lurch of the taxi, her breasts, so vivid in his memory, swayed enticingly. Sam could just make out the shadow of her naval at the center of her lean waist, the flare of her hips beneath the flimsy skirt she wore. Wasn't she just asking for trouble sleeping in the nude?
Feeling his body respond, he jerked his attention back to the maze of streets through which they raced, spraying water left and right, careening around corners. Focus on the op, damn it.
Gathering up her long damp hair, he drew it over her chest like a sash. Out of sight, out of mind.
Except the scent of her shampoo, feminine and flowery, only increased his awareness of her softly curving bottom nestled right between his thighs. It rubbed his package every time the car hit a bump in the road, which was pretty much constantly. The pleasant friction sure took his mind off his throbbing nose. Chagrined and praying she wouldn't wake up, he tried to adjust the way he held her. This was goddamn unprofessional of him.
Not my fault, he insisted. She was the one who'd lacked the sense to leave while the leaving was good. Waking up to a boner jabbing at her sweet ass was nothing compared to what might have happened to her if she'd stuck around.
He had to give her credit, though, for fighting like a tiger. This woman had guts and maybe a screw or two loose. When she woke up and realized she was long gone from Mexico, he had a hunch she'd be stomping mad, too.
Well, too damn bad. At least she was alive and in good hands, which she wouldn't be for very long if she stayed in this hell hole.
The sweeping light of a passing truck illumined her face briefly, and a shaft of alarm pierced Sam at the sight of a golf-ball sized lump swelling on her forehead.
Oh, crap. No one would look at that lump and believe that it was self-inflicted. He gulped against a suddenly dry mouth—least of all Maddy's father who'd promised to collect her on the aircraft carrier to which they were headed.
"Demonio," he swore in his grandmother's tongue. It was happening all over again.
* * *
Maddy awoke to a throbbing head and the thunder of helicopter rotors chopping the air with a deafening whuppa, whuppa, whuppa.
She lay flat on her back, strapped to some kind of a gurney. Too lethargic to open her eyes, she felt herself being lifted, jostled, then lowered into a gale-force wind that whipped her hair into her face. Light flickered beyond her weighty eyelids.
Then the wind and thunder faded abruptly, replaced by the cadence of heavy footsteps resonating with a metallic clang. The air felt still and close, now. The walls that she sensed on either side of her emitted a low, throbbing hum.
What's going on? Where am I?
The gurney made a sharp, right turn, delivering her into a chilly space redolent with the odor of rubbing alcohol. Several pairs of hands went to work unstrapping her, then lifting and lowering her onto a mattress. Someone tossed a blanket over her shivering frame and stuffed a pillow under her head.
"Why is she comatose?" clipped a female in accents of authority. "And why is your nose bleeding, Lieutenant?"
"She, uh, resisted us, ma'am. We had to tranquilize her."
The deep male voice raised the downy hairs on Maddy's body, but for the life of her, she couldn't identify the speaker any more than she could recall what had happened to bring her here. The last thing she remembered was falling asleep in her bed at El Santuario.
"Just how much tranquilizer and what kind did you administer?"
"Two milligrams of Lorazepam," said another male voice.
"Then she ought to wake soon," said the woman, "only I expect she'll have trouble remembering."
Remember what? Maddy's nerves jangled. What had happened to her? How had she come to be like this? And where in heaven's name was she? Cool, deft fingers lifted her eyelids, one then the other. Blinding light pierced each pupil.
"You hit her on the head?" the woman demanded.
"Oh, no ma'am. That was self-inflicted."
A tense silence filled the humming space.
"Her father's helicopter is fifteen minutes out," the woman announced. "If you're lucky, the swelling will go down before he sees her. She's coming out of it now," she added. "Stay with her while I fetch two icepacks." The tramp of her footsteps receded.
Maddy tried to swallow. Her throat felt raw, her mouth as if it had been swabbed with cotton. She ran her tongue over her dry lips.
"She's waking up," noticed one of the men.
"I'll get her some water," rasped the other. For some reason, that gruff baritone voice made Maddy shiver. The sound of running water preceded the feel of a large hand sliding under the back of her head, cradling it as he helped her to lift her shoulders. A paper cup touched her lips. "Here, take a sip, ma'am. It'll help."
The respectful term made her think of the military. As she swallowed a soothing draught, Maddy cracked her eyes and assessed her Good Samaritan through her lashes.
Definitely military, she confirmed. He was darkly handsome, thirtyish. Dried blood crusted the underside of his swollen nose. Dark green eyes regarded her with brooding intensity.
"Who are you?" she croaked, as he lowered her head and untangled his fingers from her hair.
; "Lieutenant Sam Sasseville," he introduced himself. "This is Bronco, my chief," he added gesturing to the second man who wore a baseball cap over his burnished locks. Blue eyes shone out of an unnaturally bronzed face.
"Pleasure," said Bronco with a familiar chuckle.
Those blue eyes. That laugh. She'd met these men before. A wave of alarm rolled belatedly through her. "Where am I?" she demanded, coming up on her elbows to assess the small, sterile space. Even that small movement made her want to lie back down and close her eyes, but she didn't. "How did I get here?"
"You're aboard the Harry S. Truman, currently in the Gulf of Mexico," the lieutenant said, in a tentative manner. "We're SEALs. We were tasked to recover you from Matamoros. Your father must have friends in high places," he tacked on unnecessarily.
A muted roar filled Maddy's ears. She started to sit up all the way, kicking off her blanket in order to stand, but the lieutenant laid a heavy hand on her shoulder, pushing her shoulder toward the pillow.
Another memory stirred. Something violent and frightening.
"You shouldn't move," he said.
"Don't touch me!"
He snatched his hand back as she sorted through the rush of emotions.
Ignoring his cautionary statement, Maggie sat up carefully. The room went into a slow spin and then subsided. "So my father is the reason I'm here," she deduced, putting the pieces together.
"Yes," both men said simultaneously.
Damn it, Daddy. "And you—you what?—you slipped into the school while I slept and you grabbed me?" Surely her father would not have condoned such underhanded measures.
"Affirmative," said the lieutenant, but his inscrutable expression suggested there was more.
"Why can't I remember?"
"We, uh, we had to subdue you," he stiffly confessed.
The blue-eyed chief looked down at the floor, his lips crimped.
He was trying not to laugh, Maddy realized, outraged. The faces of Imelda, Graciela, Mercedes, and the other dozen girls at El Santuario flashed before her eyes. If they hadn't realized she was gone yet, they soon would. Her stomach cramped in anguish as she envisioned their confusion, followed by their terror when they realized how Maddy's desertion would impact them.
"What have you done?" she cried, directing her dismay at her father foremost, then glaring at the two men standing near her. "What have you done?" she repeated. "Those girls aren't safe without me!"
Lt. Sasseville's mouth firmed with what might have been remorse. His companion—what was his name? Bronco?—clapped him on the shoulder.
"It's all you, sir," he stated with confidence. Then he nodded in her direction. "Feel better soon, ma'am." He backed swiftly out of the hatch, leaving Maddy to direct her fury at just one man.
In a matter of days—maybe a week if they were lucky—every girl in the school would be preyed upon by a man, her innocence forcibly taken from her. The knowledge lodged in Maddy's throat like a pill, too big and bitter to swallow.
Dropping her face in her hands, she hid her devastation. A tide of degradation was overtaking Mexico, and she was no longer there to deflect it.
"Go away," she begged wanting desperately to be alone, to sulk, and to reconsider her options.
But the SEAL didn't move, not even when the pain in her chest doubled. "Why are you still here?" she raged, lifting her face from her hands. She couldn't grieve with him here in the room.
At first, his only answer was silence. But then he broke it, speaking in a condescending tone that made her eyes widen. "You realize you would've ended up raped or murdered if you'd stayed around much longer," he pointed out.
She glared at him. "How does that concern you?"
"Concern me?" He gave a purely Hispanic shrug. "It doesn't. I don't give a damn what might have happened to you." Except that his irate, protective tone said otherwise.
Stung by his antagonism, all she could do was gape at him.
He took a step toward her, planting his hands on the edge of the bed and leaning down until his dark green eyes looked straight into her gray-blue ones, and his scent stole over her. "I should be halfway around the world right now, hunting down high-value targets, not wasting my time protecting the daughter of an oil tycoon." His tone made his resentment obvious.
Memories bombarded Maddy, flickering through her mind so quickly she could scarcely get a read on them. Silhouettes emerged out of the darkness.
"You attacked me," she recalled, seeing a vision of him hauling back her mosquito netting.
He straightened like she'd slapped him in the face. "No way." He pointed a long finger at her. "I told you exactly who we were, and you resisted us, remember?"
All she remembered was him grabbing her out of the window and throwing her atop her bed. "You mauled me on my mattress," she added, remembering how she'd fought back.
"No," he exclaimed, shaking his head vehemently.
But a touch to the knot swelling just above her eyebrows confirmed the accuracy of her statement. She sent him an accusing glare. "Yes, you did."
"No. You tried escaping out the window," he insisted, his expression growing sterner by the moment. "And then you went crazy. Look what you did to my nose!"
She eyed his swollen nose ridge with a smidgen of satisfaction. Without the flaw, the man was simply too handsome. "Serves you right for scaring me half to death," she said, dismayed by her behavior. But his was worse.
His chest expanded and his hands clenched. "What the hell were you thinking ignoring a mandatory evacuation?"
Maddy bristled. "I was thinking that I was protecting innocent lives. What was I supposed to do? Just abandon those girls? How dare you lecture me for doing what you do every day, you overbearing hypocrite!"
The epithet sent his eyebrows winging toward his hairline. A disbelieving laugh escaped him and he unclenched his hands. "You couldn't begin to do what I do, Miss Scott," he countered, propping them on his hips and sending her a confident smirk.
Maddy narrowed her eyes. Fury pounded through her. No man had ever put her back up in so short a time. "I never said I can do exactly what you do, Lieutenant. But I will risk my life for a cause that I believe in. In that sense, we're exactly alike."
His smile faded abruptly. "We are nothing alike," he insisted, his gaze sliding over her.
She sat up straighter, angling her chin at him. "Oh, I see. SEALs don't protect the weak and combat corruption?"
She thought she had him bested when he paused for the barest second. "No," he finally countered. "We kill the enemy, Miss Scott. That's the difference between us." He tapped his broad chest. "I'm not a potential victim." He pointed at her. "You are."
She had to admit, her situation had been getting tenuous what with all the teachers running off, even the local ones. She'd prayed night and day for help to come in some form or another. Perhaps her mother's spirit, her guardian angel, had guided Lt. Sasseville to Matamoros just in the nick of time.
Her rancor trickled away, leaving bottomless regret in its wake. "There's no one left to protect them," she reflected, her voice barely above a whisper. Empathy for the girls brought tears to her eyes. Feeling sick to her stomach, she blinked them back.
Sam Sasseville frowned and looked away.
Weariness swamped Maddy without warning. With a sigh of defeat, she fell back against the pillow and wallowed in grief. Why was it taking the female officer so long to find ice packs?
"I'm sorry," the SEAL startled her by apologizing. His gruff tone suggested that he did actually feel sorry for the hapless victims they had left behind. But then his next words ruined his apology. "You can't save the world, you know."
She turned her head in his direction. "Why not?" she demanded.
He rolled his eyes as if the question wasn't worth answering. "Well, for one thing, your father doesn't like it."
She frowned. How could he know that, or was he just assuming? "He's on his way here, isn't he?" she asked, remembering what she'd overheard earlier.
The lieutenant glanced at his watch. "He's about five minutes out. I expect you'll take a helo to Miami from here, and then he'll fly you home on his private jet." His tone dripped with disdain for such decadent jet-setting.
Maddy plucked at a thread sticking out of the blanket. The mansion in McLean wasn't her home. The world was.
Out the corner of her eye she watched Lt. Sasseville open a canister of gauze, wet a couple of squares with water and wipe off the dried blood under his nose.
"Did I break it?" she asked him.
"Probably."
"Sorry."
"Sure you are." He dropped the soiled gauze into a receptacle marked HAZARDOUS WASTE. "You know what I think?"
She heaved an inward sigh as he rounded on her again, his lecture clearly not over. "What?"
"I think you should work within the borders of the United States and leave third-world countries to men equipped to handle the danger."
What little goodwill Maddy harbored toward the SEAL evaporated.
"I read your file, Miss Scott," he volunteered, raking her huddled form with exasperation. "Your mother was Melinda Scott, the famous environmentalist whose plane crashed into the Amazon ten years ago. You're obviously trying to follow in her footsteps."
Maddy flinched. The tragedy, still so fresh in her mind, had shaped her into who she was today.
"You majored in Global and Environmental Studies, and you've participated in every disaster relief effort since the Great Tsunami. You've been to Bosnia, Thailand, Haiti, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Mexico." He ticked the locales off his fingers. "Enough already," he declared. "It's obvious that you're an intelligent woman, but you don't belong in any of those places."
She sucked a breath into her tight chest. "Oh, really?"
"Really. No one wants to hear that you got killed in some shithole country where there's been infighting for four hundred years and where your death makes no difference. Just go back to the life you came from and enjoy the privileges you were born to."
The tears that had started to flow earlier threatened an immediate reappearance. He sounded exactly like her father, though Lyle Scott had never put it that bluntly. And like her father, he was obviously used to telling people what to do. Well, too damn bad. Maddy only ever answered to her conscience and the whispered pleas of her dead mother's spirit.
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