Hot Pursuit

by Julie Ann Walker

  In fact, she’d been so irritated with him that she’d decided to let him make his own damn sandwich. But then Angel had finished eating and gone to bed. Rusty had followed his example two minutes later, and she’d been left with nothing to do. Which meant her mind had immediately turned to Angel’s wallet and what Christian must have found inside since he hadn’t attempted to pickpocket Ace or Rusty.

  The thought of Christian stalking up that staircase, determination in his eyes and a condom in his pocket, had obliterated all the not-so-nice feelings she’d had toward him and instead filled her with anticipation. Not to mention a gazillion ideas of ways they could do deliciously dirty things together.

  Since she figured it was in her best interest to get him fed as quickly as possible—the man was going to need his stamina for what she had planned for him—she’d tossed her hands in the air and muttered, “Fine. I’ll make the damn sandwich.”

  After she’d finished, she’d waited. And waited.

  In the dark. And the quiet. Her mind wandering back to Christian and that lovely condom. The thought of ripping open the package and sliding the latex over him had her insides melting into sticky caramel goo. That goo began to heat and bubble when her imagination went a step further—to her on her back, legs wide, and him angling his cock down, taking her slowly, his thick length stretching her as it disappeared inside—

  At that point, she hadn’t been able to stand it a second longer. She’d trudged downstairs, sandwich in hand, to find him.

  But it was even darker down here. And quieter.

  Her anticipation waned as a chill stole up her spine and the hairs on her arms lifted. She curled her bare toes against the cold marble tile and whispered again, “Christian? Did you find the washer and—”

  She cut herself off when footsteps sounded behind her.

  “Well, it’s about damn time.” She blew out a sigh of relief. “I was beginning to think you’d—” That’s all she managed before a hand clamped over her mouth and cold metal kissed her temple. The sandwich fell from her nerveless fingers, hitting the tile floor with a soft-sounding plop.

  “Don’t move,” a deep voice rumbled close to her ear.

  Neanderthal. She’d recognize that accent anywhere. Not to mention the smell of him, all cheap cologne and old sweat.

  His meaty hand left her mouth to snake around her throat, thick fingers pinching into skin already bruised by his first assault. With her heart trying to burst through her chest and her lungs refusing to do what they’d been made to do, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to scream loud enough for anyone to hear. But damned if she wouldn’t give it her best shot.

  She opened her mouth. Before any sound emerged, Neanderthal whispered, “If you scream, I’ll shoot the first person who comes running.”

  If his tone were a color, she imagined it would be bloodred. He wasn’t kidding. He would kill the first person he saw. She clamped her mouth shut and turned her head slightly, very conscious of the pistol pressed to her temple. Seriously? Twice in one day? Can’t a gal catch a break?

  “What do you want?” she whispered.

  “Right now?” He chuckled. The dry, slithering sound reminded her of worms crawling through the unseeing eye sockets of a dried-out skull. “All I want is you. Thought I was gonna hafta search the whole sodding house, but here you are. Right by the front door. Making my life easy.”

  Her eyes darted around the dark entryway, looking for Neanderthal Numero Dos, a.k.a. Ben. He was nowhere to be found. At least nowhere her straining eyes could see and—

  A terrible thought suddenly occurred.

  Did Ben have Christian? Is that why Christian hadn’t come back upstairs? Had Ben…done something to Christian?

  She didn’t allow herself to contemplate the possibility that Ben might have killed Christian, because if she did that, her psyche would shatter into a million sharp, cutting pieces. She needed her wits about her if she had any hopes of getting out of this mess.

  Christian’s fine, she assured herself as Neanderthal dragged her toward the front door. He’s smarter than both Neanderthal brothers put together. Tougher too. He’s fine. He is. He has to be!

  “Open the door,” Neanderthal commanded, his hot, wet breath swirling around her ear, making her shudder with revulsion. “Slowly. Quietly.”

  Her hand was shaking with fear when she did as instructed. But as soon as she opened the door, her whole body began to quake. And not only with fear. With cold too. The spring night had turned icy. Frost was forming on the grass, glinting like diamonds under the light of a half-moon.

  “Now,” Neanderthal said, keeping one hand around her throat and the other around the pistol kissing her head, “you’re gonna walk with me down the steps and out onto the front lawn. If you try to run, I’ll kill you. If you try to scream, I’ll kill you. If you try to bite me or hit me or take my weapon, I’ll kill you.”

  There it was again. That bloodred tone.

  She swallowed, nodding.

  “There’s a good girl.”

  In any other situation, she would have called him on his misogynist bullshit. A man did not call a woman girl unless he wanted a hard knee to send his junk up into his throat. But considering his hissed warnings and the fact that she quite liked her head with the few holes it already sported, she kept her knee to herself and her mouth shut.

  Neanderthal nudged her forward with his hip. The flagstones on the front porch were freezing beneath her bare feet. The icy bite of the breeze was even worse as it scraped along her cheeks. She tried not to wince when they made it to the gravel path, but the sharp stones stabbed into her soles. In fact, the pain became so much that she stumbled, forcing Neanderthal to release her neck and wrap an arm around her waist.

  Pulling her tight against him, he lifted her off her feet and carried her until they reached the center of the path in the middle of the yard. When he lowered her, there was no mistaking his dick against the seam of her ass.

  He was hard.

  Gag a maggot!

  “It’s all your fault, you know,” he whispered conversationally when he felt her disgusted shudder. “If you hadn’t given me and Ben that little peep show earlier, I wouldn’t be hard now.”

  Oh, dear sweet baby Jesus.

  It hadn’t been Angel she’d seen walking into the woods. It’d been Neanderthal. As he threw back his head and yelled, “All you fucks inside the manor house come out with your hands up! I have the woman, and I won’t hesitate to put a bullet in her brain!” she thought with gut-wrenching anguish, My mistake, my presumption, might have killed us all.

  Chapter 20

  Christian knew fear.

  He’d lived with it most of his life. As a child, he had feared the men his mother had brought home. Feared that, even though Jessica Watson was about as nurturing as a chainsaw, she might die and leave him to fend for himself in a world that wasn’t kind to skinny, funny-eyed orphans. As an adult, he had feared what he would do with his life after the SAS fed him to the wolves. Then, more recently, he’d feared what would become of him after BKI closed its clandestine doors.

  However, none of that had prepared him for the tsunami of terror that crashed over him when he felt a peanut butter and jelly sandwich squish under his foot at the same time a booming voice yelled from the front lawn, “I have the woman, and I won’t hesitate to put a bullet in her brain!”

  His heart stopped.

  His lungs ceased to draw breath.

  His vision tunneled until only darkness remained.

  The sheer weight of the fear threatened to take him to his knees. He might have allowed himself to succumb if the first part of Wankstain’s instructions—oh, yes, he recognized that voice—had not demanded he remain on his feet.

  Beat, beat, pause, he commanded his heart.

  Inhale, exhale, he ordered his lungs.

  Blin
k and focus, he instructed his eyes.

  When it seemed his recalcitrant body parts were back to doing their bloody jobs, he turned toward the front door. Any other time, he might have taken a moment to consider his options, but with Emily in the man’s clutches, he knew his only recourse was to obey.

  “Holy duck fuck!” Ace snarled at the top of the stairs. Even through the darkness, Christian could see Ace was shirtless, his blond hair catching the moonlight streaming in through the windows. “Is that who I think it is?”

  “None other.” Christian knew that if and when the time came, he was going to end the Wankstain Brothers. “Now, do as he says.”

  Rusty joined Ace at the top of the stairs, and Christian didn’t wait around to see if Angel had heard the shouted command. He resumed his journey toward the front door. Ten steps. That’s what it would take to get to there, but it felt like ten miles. Enough time for him to file away a mounting pile of regrets and recriminations.

  He should not have waited by the washing machine while it went through its fifteen-minute fast cycle. But he had fancied being able to head upstairs, take out Angel’s condom, and use it on Emily with no distractions, no niggling thought that at some point he would need to traipse back down to the first floor and transfer the wet quilt into the dryer.

  At the time, his plan had seemed capital. Now? Not so much. It meant he’d left her alone.

  If he’d been by her side, he might have been able to fight off their aggressors. And, yes, he realized there wasn’t much he could offer in the way of defense against a loaded gun, but still… He should have been there with her—

  His thoughts cut off when he reached the door. Wasting no time, he twisted its handle and threw it open. The breeze outside was cold, biting. It matched the ice that encased his heart when he saw Emily in the same position she had been in back at the hangar’s car park. Head Honcho Wankstain was at her back, his big, meaty hand around her throat, a pistol pointed at her head.

  Like a black hole, the matte charcoal of the weapon seem to draw all light toward it. Christian felt his breath get sucked out of him. Felt a gravitational pull to run across the yard and…what?

  It’s not like Wankstain wouldn’t see him coming and either plug him before he made it ten steps or else make good on his threat to put a bullet in Emily’s brain. That last thought was enough to have Christian resisting the urge to fly to her side and instead hold his ground. But it didn’t stop his desire to see Wankstain six feet under.

  A taste for killing was like a taste for hard liquor. Once you developed it, it never went away. The most you could hope to do was control it. Christian thought he had done a brilliant job of controlling it over the years. Except for that time he’d gone in search of John J. Tully and his mouth full of rotten teeth, he had never had the urge to shed blood outside of battle.

  He had that urge now. In fact, a hundred different ways he could end Wankstain’s life flashed through his head in rapid-fire order. All of them were painful and properly gruesome.

  “I’m sorry!” Emily called despite Wankstain growling something, no doubt a threat, in her ear. “I was wrong earlier! It wasn’t Angel I saw in the woods; it was him!”

  There was such anguish in her voice. Such self-condemnation. It stabbed at Christian’s heart like a carving knife, slicing the organ to pieces.

  “Quite a show you put on for us too!” Wankstain shouted, his breath forming a frosty cloud in front of his face. “She’s a tasty little tart, ain’t she?”

  Christian wanted to vomit at the thought of the men having seen Emily naked and vulnerable. And when Wankstain turned his head, pressing a wet, open-mouthed kiss on Emily’s cheek, a film of red fell over Christian’s vision.

  “What do you want?” He didn’t raise his voice. Knew it would be carried out to the front lawn by his fury alone.

  “What do I want?” Wankstain asked. “I want all of you out here! On this lawn! Now! Or the woman gets it!” As if to prove his point, he shoved his pistol so hard against Emily’s already bruised temple that she cried out in pain.

  Before Christian knew what he was doing, he’d taken a step forward. Had Ace not come up behind him and slapped a hand on his shoulder, Vulcan neck-pinch style, he would’ve been off the flagstones, down the stairs, barreling toward Emily and her Cro-Magnon-looking captor, and damn the consequences to himself.

  “Easy,” Ace whispered, keeping hold of him. “Go easy, my man.”

  Christian wasn’t living on the same planet as easy. Maybe not even in the same solar system. But somehow—he hadn’t a buggering clue how—he managed to keep from losing his shit. Still, his heart beat with a terrible rhythm as he shuffled forward, following Wankstain’s orders.

  Thirty seconds later, he, Rusty, and Ace were all out on the lawn, shoulder to shoulder and a mere twenty feet from Emily and her captor.

  I’m so sorry, her eyes pleaded.

  Nothing for you to be sorry about, he wordlessly assured her with a shake of his head. This isn’t your fault.

  Wankstain glanced back and forth between them and snorted. “Aw, the way you two look at each other is so touching it makes me want to puke. Now, where’s the other one?” He craned his head to glance behind Christian and the others.

  Christian peeked over his shoulder at the open and empty front door. Angel was nowhere in sight. A niggle of apprehension squirmed around inside his chest.

  Damnit, Angel! Where the bloody hell are you?

  “Maybe he didn’t hear you,” he suggested, knowing full well that Angel, who slept with one eye and both ears open, hadn’t missed Wankstain’s initial shout. “Or maybe he means to wait and see if Spider turns up to do his own dirty work.”

  Christian watched Wankstain’s reaction closely, narrowing his eyes when nothing registered on the man’s face but confusion.

  “Who the feck is Spider?” Wankstain asked. “And why do you keep bringing him up?”

  Christian felt Ace shift beside him, knew the man was thinking the same thing he was. Sodding shit. If not Spider, then what in the world is going on here?

  Needing answers and also, you know, stalling so that Angel could either get his daft ass out of the house or else finish doing whatever it was he was doing, Christian asked, “If you’re not working for Spider, then who are you working for? How did you find us?”

  Wankstain scoffed. “Who I work for is neither here nor there. As to how we found you, that’s easy. We saw your face splashed across our telly and decided to drive to Port Isaac to have a bit of a chat with you.”

  One piece of the puzzle fell into place. Christian hoped to snap in another. “Which is when you saw us sneak out of the cottage and decided to follow us to the airport?”

  “Right. And instead of having a bit of a chat with you like we’d planned, you lot”—Wankstain lifted his chin to include all three men—“had to go and try to be heroes, which caused an innocent bloke to get slotted.”

  Christian didn’t correct him about the status of the pilot who had been shot. Instead, he said, “And whose fault was that? If memory serves, you and your brother were the only two who had weapons.”

  He was baiting the bastard, which was risky. But Angel still had yet to make an appearance, and Christian was determined to do everything he could to distract Wankstain from that unfortunate fact.

  Fury contorted the man’s face. The overgrown wonker wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, even on a good day, but the hatred bubbling inside him made him downright ugly.

  Wankstain kept hold of Emily, but he moved the gun from her temple and aimed it at Christian. And not that Christian ever liked looking down the black-throated barrel of a semi-auto, but he was relieved the dangerous end of the weapon was no longer in close proximity to Emily’s brain.

  Ace made a noise in the back of his throat, something close to the warning growl of a rabid animal. It was
Christian’s turn to whisper, “Easy.” He couldn’t have his teammate pulling an Emily and jumping in front of a bullet meant for him.

  “It’s your fault,” Wankstain insisted, a muscle ticking in his slab of a jaw. “You started all this when you opened fire at that roadblock!”

  Spittle flew from his mouth, catching the light of the moon and glistening before it joined the frost on the gravel path. Christian knew he should feel the cold, feel the bite of the icy stones beneath his bare feet. But he was numb to everything but the terrified look on Emily’s face and the words tumbling out of Wankstain’s mouth.

  Roadblock? As in, the one in Iraq? What the actual hell? Christian didn’t know this man from Adam.

  “Who are you?” An icy pit formed in his stomach to match the sheet of permafrost that had grown thick around his heart. “What’s your name?”

  “Lawrence Michelson. Ring a bell?”

  “No.” Christian shook his head, hoping for that second puzzle piece and keenly aware of the two men at his side, of the woman he loved who was so close and yet so far away. “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

  “How ’bout Teddy Michelson? That jog your memory?”

  “Oh sodding hell.”

  Snap. That was the sound of the next puzzle piece falling into place, and Christian thought he was starting to discern the whole picture. His heart broke through its icy casing and plummeted. If he dared take his eye off Lawrence’s gun, he figured he’d see the organ lying on the ground at his feet.

  “That’s right.” Lawrence nodded, his dark eyes overly bright. “You’re the fecking twat that got my brother killed!”

  Christian wanted to howl his frustration, his fury, at the sky. Instead, he held out a placating hand. “Lawrence, I’m sorry about your brother. I knew Teddy well. He was a good man. A ruddy brilliant soldier. But what you’ve been told about the Kirkuk Police Station Incident isn’t the whole truth. Teddy didn’t—”