by Heather Long
“Yeah, we can, but we’re not getting on it all bloodied.” Then she had a wet wipe and ran it over his face. “We should also exit out the back. Too many cameras up front.”
She pulled away from him again, and wiped down something on the floor before catching his fingers with hers. It was easier to agree than fight, especially when the sparks danced around his vision and the kaleidoscope effect had his stomach cramping.
He had fifteen, maybe twenty minutes at best.
Once out of the shop, Coco headed down the cobbled alleyway leading them back to the street. The dark helped his head tremendously. She kept an arm around him, and guided him as though they were a pair of drunken lovers. Thankfully, they encountered no more intercepts on the way to the station. Their scheduled train to Paris allowed them to board, and less than thirty minutes after the incident, they were in a sleeper compartment.
Bolting the door, he set the backpack down and collapsed onto the seat.
“You look like shit,” she hissed, tossing her bag next to him. “Did you get hit somewhere else?”
Cupping her face as gently as he could, he forced himself to focus on her face even as the area around it began to spiral. “Stay in the car. Don’t disappear on me. I’ll be out—for about four hours.”
“What the hell?” Worry coated every syllable, or maybe it was wishful thinking on his part. He didn’t have time to debate, he got his backpack opened and pulled out the prescription bottle. When it tumbled from his fingers, she caught it. Her expression tightened as she read the front, then she had it open and he pulled two pills out and dry swallowed them.
His stomach heaved, but he fought it. “Promise me.” He needed her to say it. He’d trust her word.
He had to.
“I’ll be here,” she told him, and then blackness struck like a mallet to the back of his skull.
Chapter 5
Coco kept her word, and maintained her vigil. The paleness of his face worried her almost as much as the haunted fix of his dilated pupils. Checking his pulse regularly, she kept watch on the door to their car. Their sleeper faced away from the station and out over the tracks. Many people were boarding early, as they had done, and settling down for a night of rest. The prescription was for migraines. She tucked it back into the same pocket he’d taken it out of and there was a second bottle of pills in there—she recognized that label as another one for migraines and neural issues.
Settling on the floor next to where Jacko slept, she practiced steadying her own breathing. As long as he was in a helpless state, she wouldn’t let herself rest—not fully. They couldn’t run the risk. Five men came at them in the shop. Five she hadn’t recognized, but she had their fighting style. There were a lot of former GRU—Russian intelligence operatives—running freelance in Western Europe. She’d made note of them.
A few she’d met used similar fighting styles, something she’d only managed to make note of when she’d witnessed Yuri thwart an assassination takedown. Yuri Rochenko did business with Eric Percival. A former agent and an arms dealer who negotiated in the frosty cold.
Bad business, and another thread in the tapestry she’d sought to unravel. One of her contacts, an information carrier and broker for the CIA had left Europe several months earlier. Coco had made contact with her more than once, handing over information to be carried back to the right people. Her cover in the circus made her ideal for transporting the information—who looked at the entertainers too closely?
Had her cover been blown? If someone tracked her down, they’d know several of the key agents the U.S. had in place overseas. Coco knew them, too. She’d made it her business to know because Eric Percival worked with a double embedded within U.S. intelligence services.
CIA. NSA. FBI. Homeland…there were more shadowy ops, and some that weren’t even whispered about much less given an acronym. A part of her wanted to dig out Jacko’s phone and go through it. He’d contacted someone.
“We can handle this. Trust me to have your back.”
The words he’d whispered to her. The code word phrase he’d known. The plan to escort her out. They weren’t rushing. He hadn’t pumped her for information. Hadn’t tried to debrief her… Then again, maybe he planned on waiting until we were aboard the train. They couldn’t have anticipated the ambush.
Which brought her full circle to the men at the shop. If she went with her instincts and labeled them GRU, or at least disenfranchised GRU, and couple the attempt at the resort and Jacko’s arrival in the first place. Wagner sent an unknown onto the chessboard to extract her.
So why the hell had he left her to dangle for so long?
Twice, Jacko’s phone vibrated in the pocket of his backpack. Despite having the access to it, she let it go. She didn’t remove his laptop, either. When one of the attendants knocked, she declined assistance in turning down the bed. They couldn’t with Jacko out cold on the sofa.
“We can handle this. Trust me to have your back.”
Trusting him to have her back meant she had to have his. More, she had to be patient. Months spent in between contacts, and weeks spent in the cold honed her for this purpose. When she checked his pulse again, it had calmed and some of the tense lines in his forehead relaxed. Easing his glasses off, she took a moment to inspect the slice across his arm, and the bruise around the other side of his throat. After removing his hat, she stroked her fingers through his hair and carefully inspected his scalp and skull. Measuring every movement for care, she searched for any sign of a fresh head trauma. If he was on meds as strong as he was, and collapsed as he had—better to be safer than sorry. Finding nothing and labeling the bruises and cuts as superficial for the most part, she returned to her spot against the train wall and let her eyes drift half closed.
She cycled through the information she had, and the identity of their attackers when the train jerked into motion. The aggravatingly slow launch had her holding her breath until they picked up speed. Now, she had to hope no other GRU linked agents boarded the train with an agenda.
Rubbing the wedding ring on her finger, she glanced at the one on his, then looked at his face. He’d said four hours…and they still had at least two to go.
At four hours, nearly to the second, Jacko sat up. He went from lying flat, and completely motionless to sitting abruptly. His gaze was a tad wild, and his askew hair gave him an almost rumpled appearance despite the fact he hadn’t been moved once since he collapsed.
His gaze pinned her, and she leaned her head back to study him. Letting him acclimate. A frown pulled his eyebrows together and he squinted.
“Glasses?” The rough thickness of his voice sent a shiver up her spine. Damn, the man had a sexy voice when he first woke up. Of course, the fact he’d woken up from a migraine brutal enough to knock him out doused the burgeoning desire with a hard dose of reality.
“Here,” she said, reaching over to pluck them off to the top of his backpack. He said nothing as he slid them on, and blinked a couple of times.
Gradually the stress around the corners of his eyes erased and he focused on her. “Thank you.”
“Feel better?”
“Debatable,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck before grimacing at his awkwardly wrapped arm. Stripping away the makeshift bandage, he stared at the already clotted and beginning to scab cut. “But I’ve been worse. Situation?”
“We’re on a midnight train heading to Paris. You’ve been out for about four hours. We departed the station about two hours ago, if we don’t have any slowdowns or stops, we’ll be in Paris by first light.” As these things went, it had been a very uneventful four hours.
“Have you rested?” Then he scowled. “Of course you haven’t. I just passed out and you’re sitting on the floor.” The man was suddenly a rush of energy, despite what she imagined had to be staggering fatigue accompanying such a brutal headache. He stood, and reached a hand down to her.
She clasped his hand and let him pull her to her feet. “I’ve rested in worse place
s.”
“Not while I’m around you’re not.” He added a definitive period to the end of the sentiment as though any discussion on the subject was over. It took them a couple of minutes to pull out the sofa, and set it up as the bed.
The way they set up the sleeper cars was very comfortable. The limited space kept them pressing together and leaning into each other to move. Twice, he steadied her with a hand on her hip. And once she had to catch herself with a hand to his chest. Crawling onto the bed, she settled into the corner and leaned back. The cushion wasn’t great, but it was definitely softer on her ass than the floor.
“Do you want to get more comfortable?” He glanced at her shoes, and then skirt.
“If you want to get me naked, you might need more than three hours.” The off the cuff remark was meant to tease, but the way his gaze sharpened and his pupils constricted she considered rethinking her plan.
“Three hours to get you naked?” Damn, had his husky voice dropped another half-octave or what? Her nipples tightened at the invitation. “Or more than three to enjoy it?”
“We’re not having sex yet,” she said, easing the sandals off her feet. She’d meant to grab boots at the shop, but their attackers had left them with little time to finish gearing up.
“Yet.” The corner of his mouth kicked up and he dropped to sit on the bed next to her.
“Yet…and maybe ever. It depends on a lot of factors. Not to mention the fact that I’m in my last pair of panties and a guy like you—you’re a panty ripper.” All the training in the world couldn’t have prepared her for his sudden laugh, or the way he held out a hand to her.
When she settled her palm against his, he closed his grip and held her hand on the bed between them. The gentle rock of the train was lulling, but she couldn’t afford sleep. Not yet. Just like they couldn’t afford sex, no matter how appealing he was giving her shit or looking all rumpled and barely recovered. Strength and vulnerability in a man were incredibly sexy.
And enough of that.
“What was funny?” Just because she couldn’t indulge, didn’t mean she wasn’t curious.
“You qualified when we may or may not be having sex by the fact you’re wearing panties…which answered a question I had earlier.”
Really? “You questioned if I was wearing panties? When? While we were fighting? Running? Or you were passing out?”
“What can I say, I’m a multi-tasker.” The sardonic grin had her laughing in spite of herself. “That’s better.”
“What?” She stretched her legs, then propped one knee upward. It was warm in the car, but she doubted it had much to do with the actual temperature controls.
“You’ve got a gorgeous laugh.” He punctuated the sentiment with a stroke of his thumb over the back of her hand before he slowly drifted it over her knuckles. Her hand ached, but she’d also punched guys earlier. The cloth she’d wrapped over them reduced the bruising and the chance for broken skin, but not the impact. “So far I haven’t gotten to hear it much.”
Sweet, but they were getting off topic. “How are you?”
“I’ll live.” Nice evasion. “Thanks for having my back.”
The latter statement silenced her knee jerk response.
“And I’m sorry about what happened at the shop.” He sighed, the sound equal parts frustration and recrimination. “I should have anticipated they’d make a play at the first available moment, but I didn’t think they’d go for something so public.”
In his defense, they’d not moved at the restaurant. “I’m just sorry about the shopkeeper and whatever happened to you.”
His lips flattened into a thin line. “That was my fault.”
“Own a bad call, but you didn’t slit her throat.” It was how they’d slipped in so quietly. “And I’m just as guilty. I was paying more attention to you than our surroundings.”
“I saw you checking out the mirrors and the shop windows before hand. You were maintaining situational awareness. I didn’t have to go into the changing room.”
Ahh. So that was why he was kicking himself. “You didn’t know you could trust me in there alone.” She could own her own actions.
“No,” he said slowly, elongating the syllable. Then he ground his teeth together. “I could still have kept watch from outside the room.”
“Maybe,” she told him, then shifted to sit sideways. He still had hold of her hand, and she didn’t try to pull away. “I could have gotten out of that changing room a couple of ways. They had boxes in the corner, but the actual walls didn’t go all the way to floor. There was a curtain there. If I nudged them to the side, I could have slid under and out behind the changing room. You didn’t have a way to watch it on a 360 angle, and I would have been in the backroom.” The same backroom they’d escaped via. “Or…I could have sent you to grab something else for me since you were outside the room, not saying you would have fallen for it and the moment you looked away, I could have slipped away—it only takes a minute of looking in the wrong direction. If I wasn’t sure about your language skills—which I wasn’t—I could have told the shopkeeper I needed to escape and gotten her to help me by staging a distraction.”
Jacko stared at her, and his open mouth closed with a snap. Finally, he said, “How long did it take you to come up with that plan?”
“Engaging the shop keeper? About a minute, the dressing room? When I was first looking at clothes.”
“And then I came inside with you.”
One corner of her mouth tilted higher and she gave him a rueful smile. “Then you followed me in there, and it’s harder to sneak away from someone who can’t take their eyes off you.”
“It’s hard to look away from beauty and strength in the same package.” Dammit. Her stomach did a little twist at his admission. She didn’t have the time to fall for someone whose allegiances might conflict with her own. The worst part of the intelligence game—forgetting they were playing to win.
No matter how unavoidable their sensuous collision might be, she avoided it for now. “Why did Wagner send you?”
“I told you, he sent me to get you out.”
“No, I got that part. Why did he send you?” Why the hell had Ned put him in danger? Where was her handler in all of this? “As much pain as you were in—you could have gone down in that fight.”
“Was in pain, and could have, but I didn’t.” He released her hand and reached for his backpack, seemingly retreating behind his technology barricade. The low light in the cabin didn’t reveal much else in his expression.
“And when are you going to collapse again? Don’t tell me that was nothing.”
He waved off the question. “I can do the job, Coco. Don’t worry about me.”
“I wasn’t worried about you.” In the dance, he’d withdrawn so she had to take a step back as well. “I’m worried about me. If you go down, I’m either trapped there getting you out or I have to leave you behind. I’ve done a lot of questionable things in my life, but leaving someone behind isn’t one of them.”
Silent, he paused with laptop half out of the bag as he studied her. What did he see? The way his mouth compressed and his eyes tightened, she didn’t think it was anything good. Finally, he said, “Who are you?”
The shifting sands of the conversation made maintaining her equilibrium a challenge. “What?”
“You kept asking who am I and why did Ned send me…who are you? Why would he need you out and in one piece?”
Ned. So he and Wagner were on a first name basis. But that wasn’t what he was asking her. He wanted to know why was he going to all of this trouble? “I’m nobody.”
“Now you’re being modest and it doesn’t suit you.” Damn if he didn’t verge right on the edge of an insult. “C’mon, Coco. You trusted me this far whether because you didn’t have a choice or you wanted to—so trust me here. Why are you important to him?”
Yeah, she didn’t have to tell him the truth. And despite what she’d said earlier, if she wanted to get away, she
’d had plenty of opportunities. Not the least of which was when he’d been unconscious. Before she could answer, his phone rang again, the buzzing filling the quiet little cabin punctuated by the thump of the train’s passage over the tracks beneath them.
“It’s been doing that a lot.” She informed him as he pulled it out.
“And you didn’t answer it?”
“Not my phone,” she told him, perfectly well aware that she’d just told him even louder that she had trusted him and maybe, just maybe he’d get that he could trust her, too.
The only question was who was she lying to? Him, herself, or both?
“I need to take this,” he said, holding up a finger. “I haven’t forgotten what we were talking about.”
When he lifted the phone to his ear and said, “What?” She flopped back onto the bed and closed her eyes. Training told her to listen to the conversation, parse it, and put the pieces together.
The rest of her said go to sleep. Running would happen soon enough and she needed the rest.
And yeah, she was chickening out of answering that question.
For now, at least.
Chapter 6
If it had been anyone but Tex, Jacko would have ignored the call. He and the other retired SEAL had struck up an unorthodox, if familiar relationship that was equal parts friendly and competitive. “What?”
Coco settled back into the bed, and closed her eyes, effectively ending their discussion rather than putting it on hold for a moment.
“You’re alive,” Tex said, his dry tone echoing across the line. “Wolf’s about ten minutes away on a chopper if you need a bailout.”
“All secure, but he could drop off a cheeseburger if he’s in the neighborhood.” He wasn’t all that ready to tell Coco the identity of their backup, nor share more than he already had. At the moment, he wrestled with whether she was the problem or just caught in the crossfire. It didn’t help that Wagner hadn’t been sure other than if anyone knew the identity of the double agent, it was her.
