Wild Justice (Delta Force Book 3)

by M. L. Buchman

For the first time since lunch he looked right at her. His eyes were a honey-gold and she couldn’t look away from them. “You are direct, aren’t you?”

  “I am not a woman who likes unsolved puzzles.”

  “And I’m your current puzzle.”

  His statement surprised her—because it was true. He was. Duane was very attractive. And he’d proved a deep kindness in how he’d helped her along. But there was something about him that she still didn’t understand.

  He slouched lower in his chair, the aged wicker complaining bitterly. The sun had set beyond the mountains and the fast tropical night was slamming into place. It felt as if Duane was fading into the dark.

  “Why did you laugh?”

  “What? When?”

  “At lunch, with the colonel. You laughed while we were talking about human trafficking.” Sofia recalled the whole team flinching as if they’d been slapped.

  “Well, shit. That doesn’t sound very good, does it?”

  “Then what were you laughing at?”

  “You,” he grunted it out as if it pained him.

  “Excuse me?” There was still enough light to see Duane’s smile at her arch tone.

  “And that would be at and not with. Just so we’re clear on that point.”

  “You were laughing at me?” Her tone of justifiable outrage just cracked him up.

  Duane could do this all night. Teasing Sofia Forteza was the best thing. Well, second best, after fighting beside her. Third best after holding her. Fourth after kissing her…

  And he’d wager good money that bedding her would be a whole new level of wonderful. So, the teasing was sliding down the scale fast, but it was still undeniably worthwhile.

  “I got to see inside your brain for a moment.”

  “You what?”

  “Your thoughts are very busy, Sofia Forteza. Do you always think so hard?”

  “It’s my brain that sets me apart.”

  “That combined with your million-dollar looks.”

  Even the fading light he could see her jolt as if he’d slapped her.

  He managed to catch her wrist before she could bolt from the chair. She made it to her feet, but stopped. With her back turned to him, only his hold on her wrist kept her anchored in place. “You’ve got to know that you’re incredibly beautiful.”

  She remained. Frozen like a statue. But she didn’t pull to free herself, leaving him to feel her pulse racing beneath where his thumb had landed.

  “Sofia?” What had some bastard done to her? If he ever found out who, Duane would fry him, mash him, and fry him again just like a goddamn patacone.

  “You were only talking about my looks?” Her voice was small, too small to belong to Sofia Forteza and that bothered him a lot.

  “That and your brain. There’s a whip-smart lady in there. To this Southern boy that’s at least as charming as anything else you have going on. Ma’am.”

  He could feel her pulse slowing, could feel the tension sliding out of her wrist muscles. Some lights had come on in the town, but not enough to cast more than a soft glow up to their balcony. Against the darkest blue of the sky, he could see her tilting her head just enough to call bullshit. Her defenses were coming back online.

  “Okay, it’s your killer body that has me completely charmed. Nothing else. I swear,” he raised his free hand as if taking the Officer’s Oath. “Well, maybe your smile. It’s a hell of a smile, ma’am. Lights you up right purdy,” he went for a slide into good-old-boy and was pleased with the tone he hit. It also seemed to halt her hardening defenses in surprise.

  “Give me one good reason to keep listening to this baloney you spew out so simply.”

  “Easy,” Duane decided what the hell and went for the truth. It wasn’t like he had anything to lose. “I can’t stop thinking about you. I keep expecting you to be gone and I’ll never see you again. After Venezuela and again the debriefing. After the cruise ship. After today’s meeting at lunch. My brain doesn’t seem to care. It just keeps thinking about you.”

  Sofia remained very still in the darkness. He could no longer see her features. No longer see if she mocked him with an eyebrow raise. All he could feel was the soft heartbeat in her wrist.

  He pulled her toward him with a slight tug. She stumbled forward as badly as if he’d yanked on her arm hard instead of barely holding her wrist between his fingertips.

  She recovered her balance and finished the step forward until they were toe to toe, her standing, him sitting and sliding his thumb on the soft flesh inside her wrist.

  Then her shadow leaned down to him.

  “You’d better be worth it, Mr. Duane the Rock.” Her breath a warm brush on his cheek. Her scent sweet and heady. And rich with a depth that promised wonders. When her lips brushed his he learned that, indeed, honesty was the best policy.

  Sofia was questioning every single moment.

  Duane’s nailing her with his “million-dollar looks” comment. His number was far too low, but she’d certainly heard the phrase before in much less inviting ways. Had the fact that he came from money caused him even half as much trouble as it had caused her? She hoped not.

  But she actually believed him about the innocence of his remark, which was a first.

  Innocence? Ha! He was turning her knees into jelly, making her forget how to stand or think coherently. His gentle hold on her wrist—that she knew he would release at her slightest tug—sent shivers up her arm. Good shivers. As if he was waking up the dormant nerves one by one that had felt nothing for too long and now were in shock from his simple touch.

  It was like that brief kiss on the cruise ship. It had wiped her brain and left her standing there, helpless to stop something so good. Is that what a kiss was supposed to feel like? Warm, tender, questioning? She was far more used to demanding, manipulative, and coldly calculating.

  She gave in to his gentle tug on her wrist, but held onto at least a shred of her common sense. Without breaking the kiss, she managed to sit back in her chair rather than in his lap. It was a good choice. One, these chairs were questionable for one person—if she sat in Duane’s lap, twice the weight was sure to dump them to the decking. Two, if this small contact with Duane was affecting her so much, curling up in his lap into a melting girl puddle generated an unacceptable risk factor.

  The low chair arms were little enough barrier as it was. One hand drifted up to cradle her cheek—a big, hard hand, rough with calluses. He slipped his fingers around her neck. But rather than dragging them closer, he used his fingertips to trace the line of neck and shoulders.

  His other hand never released her pulse. She didn’t need to feel it, she could hear it roaring to life, far louder that the music drifting along from the taberna coming to life next door.

  Sofia had long ago stopped telling men about her family and her wealth, yet still it was the first time she felt as if a man was kissing her and not her fortune.

  He rose slowly to his feet and, helpless to do otherwise, she followed him. If he swept her into his arms and dragged her into one of the bedrooms would she complain? In her current mood, she didn’t think she’d mind if he slammed her up against the wall, tore off her clothes, and went at her hard and fast in the darkness of the night.

  “Duane?” she managed. Though she didn’t know what she was asking. Men only ever saw two things about her: her money, before she stopped telling anyone, and her body. Duane had seen her fight, offered her comfort to face her first field kill, and had complimented her mind. It even sounded as if he somehow understood her—which put him in a minority of one, because she most certainly didn’t.

  She wound her arms up and around his neck, ready to hang on for whatever came next.

  Where had her willpower gone?

  When had her absolute conviction that she wasn’t the sort of woman for a short term fling fallen by the wayside?

  When was Duane going to make the next move?

  Then strangely, impossibly, with their arms wrapped around each other
in the Panamanian night, Duane “The Rock” Jenkins began to dance with her. The balcony was too narrow. The wicker chairs too close.

  Yet he whirled her about in a dance that started slow, but soon had them apart.

  He was…masterful. She followed his lead, feeling as confident in it as she had racing along the upper deck of the cruise ship with him—too wrapped up in the moment to think.

  He twirled her out, guided her back with a tug on her arm, spun her in a quick pirouette with his arm still holding her hand, but raised just enough for her to slide under it with each turn.

  “I don’t know how to dance,” she managed on something closely related to a giggle of delight.

  “Me either.”

  She snorted out a laugh in response.

  “I’m just making it up as I go along, genius lady.” He twirled her out again.

  Let her hang at the end of the spin for a moment.

  She was tipped out over the balcony rail, held from falling in for a swim only by his lightest hold on her fingertips.

  Then he guided her back with a hard enough tug that their bodies slammed together and his arms were suddenly tight about her. So tight she could barely breathe.

  “How long do we have, Sofia?” His voice was low, dangerous, and she didn’t need any light to know Duane Two—perilous, dangerous—was now holding her.

  She could only shake her head. “A night? A week? No one is telling me.”

  He stroked a hand down her: hair, back, hip, and behind.

  What was she willing to do? Right now she couldn’t think straight. Her senses as well as her arms were filled with him. He smelled like the tropical night, redolent with spice and promise and hot with a passion that could consume her, and a taste like a 2009 Napa Merlot—a solid structure with a lively edge to grab her undivided attention.

  He kissed her hard, so hard that one of her legs wrapped around him of its own free will to draw them closer together.

  His hand slid along her leg, caressing the length of it, until he reached behind him and slowly unwound it. Only when she was solidly back on her own two feet did he start to disengage.

  “Sofia?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t believe I’m going to say this.”

  “Uh-huh,” she’d rediscover speech soon. Maybe after she discovered fire and invented the wheel.

  “I don’t want you like this.”

  “Uh—what?”

  “You’re not a one-night stand kind of woman.”

  She wasn’t. “Is that what this is?” She leaned in to taste his lips again for a moment. Maybe for Duane she could learn to be.

  “I don’t know,” he leaned his forehead against hers. “But as much as I want you, I don’t want to have that between us.”

  I do! Her body practically screamed it aloud without passing through her vocal cords. The fog that he cast on the turbulent waters churned alive inside her was making it very hard to see what was happening. She dropped her head down onto his shoulder and hung on for a moment.

  This is not like me. This is not like me.

  And it wasn’t.

  How could a kiss…unwoman her? She’d spent a lifetime learning to stand up and be strong. Since birth, her grandmother had indoctrinated in her a woman’s strength. And all she wanted was…

  “Try that again? Why don’t you want to make love to me?”

  “Welcome to the conversation.” It took her a moment to recognize that Duane was using her own words from their first meeting in the sniper position above Aguado’s camp.

  “Throwing a woman’s words back at her is not a way to win points.”

  “The way you’re holding me, I’m not too worried about the score.”

  So she let go of him. It was harder than peeling away a double-wide band of military-grade Velcro. She could feel the tearing of it as she did: lifting her head, shuffling back until their bodies were no longer layered together like sniff, sip, and savor at a wine tasting, and finally unwrapping her arms from about his neck where they’d entwined like a centuries-old grape arbor.

  When the cooling sea breeze finally had space to slip between them, her sanity wended its way back to her.

  She couldn’t believe it was happening, not until their positions from last night were reversed—his two strong hands on her shoulders, stepping her back, even as he leaned in to tease out a last kiss.

  Her knees slowly gave way. If Duane hadn’t guided her landing, she’d have been on the deck rather than one of the creaky wicker chairs.

  “What was that?”

  “I know what I’d call it.” How could he sound so calm and rational? She’d had sex that didn’t measure up to that kiss. Actually, maybe she’d never had sex that measured up to that kiss.

  “And?” she prompted him when he didn’t answer.

  He creaked into the chair beside her and took her hand. “A taste of heaven.”

  Pure and utter hogwash. But she couldn’t think of a better word for it.

  Duane lay in bed but had no idea how he’d gotten here or why he was in it alone.

  The Unit typically fought at night and slept during the day. But the short sleep on the cruise ship and nothing else for forty-eight hours wasn’t his problem. Sleep deprivation and Unit operators were old friends.

  Intelligence Support Activity Agent Sofia Forteza absolutely was the problem.

  “Since when do I resist a woman who throws herself at me?” He whispered it into the darkness.

  “Bro!” Chad hissed from the next bed over. “You didn’t?”

  Shit! He’d forgotten about Chad. They’d landed in the same room.

  “You turned down Forteza? She’s a hot chick, bro. You’re telling me she opened the goddamn door and you didn’t walk through it? Didn’t I teach you shit!”

  Duane sighed. Apparently not.

  Chad shuffled around in the darkness. They were shifting over to daylight operations while they were in Panama, but sleep wasn’t any closer despite the darkness.

  He could feel that Chad had twisted round to face him. “Tell me one good reason why.”

  Duane could think of a dozen reasons, all true and none of them relevant. The only thing that mattered was that a woman like Sofia Forteza actually did throw herself at him. And, oddly, that was what had stopped him cold.

  “C’mon, bro. You try to hide shit from me and you’ll be getting the noogie to beat all noogies,” the bedsprings pinged as Chad began climbing out of the sheets.

  “Okay!” He knew that Chad would deliver. “Remember when you were in college and—”

  “No college, bro. I got my higher education in the Army.”

  “Sorry,” he’d forgotten. “Remember back in high school—”

  “Didn’t have much of that either.”

  “Shut up, Chad!”

  “Yes, sir!” Chad had gotten his GED during Basic Training. Self-educated—mostly living in the library when the Detroit streets got too cold in the winter—he’d sat all the tests back to back and they’d stamped him as way smarter than the average bear.

  “You wanna hear this?” Duane resisted pummeling Chad in the face with his pillow. Chad was close enough, but then he’d keep the pillow for himself.

  “Fire away! Gotta hear why you turned down the hottest babe to ever offer you the whole enchilada.”

  “That’s the problem,” Duane sat up and looked across at Chad in the darkness.

  The ancient concrete floor was rough and pitted against the bottoms of his feet, but pleasantly cool.

  “Before…” He could barely remember the man he used to be.

  “When you were being Mr. Rich Playboy?”

  “Yeah, back then. I’d roll up in my rag-top Corvette—”

  “Always buy American,” Chad chimed in. They knew each other’s stories too well. To Duane’s way of thinking, of course a Coca-Cola heir bought American.

  “Take them out for a ride and they’d give me a whole different kind of ride later.” Har
d to believe he’d ever been so crass. Or maybe not. Rich, mostly left on his own as long as he aced school and a sport—captain of the track team had only enhanced his ability to sweep up the girls.

  “Sure, they’d screw you until your eyeballs fell out. Mr. Rich Happy Boy. All the debs hoping for the golden ticket by going to the one-man ball.”

  Duane shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah, that was about the size of it.”

  “You showed up with your Vette and your bottomless bank card and I might have done you.”

  “Thanks for a mental image that now I’ll never be rid of.”

  “Glad to help, bro.”

  “Why am I telling you any of this?”

  “One of two reasons,” Chad sounded entirely too cheerful. “Either you’re fucked up enough to think I’m gonna help you.”

  “Doesn’t sound like something you’d do, does it?”

  “Nope! Or, you fucked up. Period.”

  But Duane didn’t buy that. It had been the right thing to do. Step back. Slow it down. He just didn’t know why. “Maybe I just don’t want to watch the best time of my life walking away from me at the end of this mission.”

  “Maybe you’ll never know if she woulda been your best time because you, you damned fool, said no to that. She’s the hottest thing since corndogs with ketchup.” It was easy to imagine Chad waving his hand about in the dark toward Sofia’s room. “Don’t even know why I’m speaking to someone that dumb.” He heard Chad thump back down onto his pillow.

  Duane thought about it for a while. “I didn’t want to mess it up.”

  “If you can tell me what ‘it’ is in that sentence, I’ll give you twenty bucks and a kiss. Else you’ll owe me the same.”

  “How much to not get the kiss?”

  “A hundred. But I’m worth it. The ladies definitely tell me I’m worth it.” Implying Duane definitely wasn’t.

  “Shut up.”

  “I would if you’d stop yammering and just go lay the woman.”

  Still, Chad had a point. What was the “it” he didn’t want to mess up? His and Sofia’s “relationship” so far constituted blowing up a jungle prison, taking out a CIA team—twice, and a hellaciously amazing pair of kisses. The “it” was some unimagined, undefined future…something.