by Dawn Ryder
Kitten used the moment of inattention to make a break for it. Dare had released her so she might climb the steep stairs up to the passenger section of the plane. She turned, lifted her knees, and kicked him right in the chest. The agent went sailing backward as Kitten took off with amazing speed. Saxon turned and shouted at her.
Dare flipped over almost in the same moment as he hit the ground. It was impressive on a scale she’d never seen, declaring a level of physical fitness she’d rarely witnessed. Dare was after Kitten in a flash.
As Kitten ran, a black SUV pulled around the hangar, its doors opening before the tires were finished squealing. The driver turned to intercept Kitten, making her skid to a halt as the vehicle came at her. She was panting and looking around wildly as the men came toward her. Ginger felt her heart stop as Kitten smiled, a genuine expression of relief. She went toward one of the men, her expression telling Ginger that she trusted him.
It was a fatal error.
The man reached out and cupped the sides of her jaw. He gave a hard wrenching motion, and Ginger cried out as she watched Kitten’s head twist at a grotesque angle. Her face was frozen in that welcoming expression but her eyes widened with the knowledge of betrayal. It was her last thought before her life was snuffed out and she went limp like a bag full of potatoes, slumping to the ground under her own weight as the man stepped over her, reaching beneath his jacket.
A gun went off next to her. Ginger recoiled in horror as the insides of her nose were singed by the gunpowder, and she actually tasted it while the sound rang in her ears and deafened her.
There was instant reaction to the gunshot. The men scrambled for cover as Saxon pulled the trigger again. Ginger turned to look at him. If she’d held any illusions, they fell to the ground in tiny shards as she gained a glimpse of him. His jaw was set, his expression one of determination, but that wasn’t what sent the shiver down her spine.
He was a dammed fine sight under the circumstances. The confidence in his expression like water in the dessert.
Kitten was lying on the ground, a twisted reminder of just how dead she was. Saxon shoved Ginger toward the plane, stepping between her and the men as gunfire started coming at them. Ginger started to run toward the plane. It wasn’t a choice; it was the only instinct in her brain. The need to flee toward the promise of those engines to lift her out of the current storm of bullets.
Dare was at the top of the stairs with a gun in his hand, and she ducked as he fired over her head. She heard someone scream before realizing it was actually her. Her brain was stuck in some weird mode where nothing made sense. But Saxon was behind her, shoving her brutally through the doorway, Ginger tunneled right between Dare’s wide braced feet as he fired off another couple of rounds.
“I’m out,” Dare barked as Ginger rolled over and landed on her butt in the aisle.
Saxon surged to his feet and took a position in the doorway, firing off more shots. “Let’s go, Captain!”
“Secure the hatch!” Bram answered from the cockpit. “Fucking civilian aircraft won’t roll while it’s open!”
Saxon flinched but reached out to grab the door of the aircraft. There was a whistling sound as a bullet tore through the air. A thin red line appeared along his temple as the door sealed out the sunlight. Ginger cringed as she heard a thump and another one as bullets hit the newly closed door.
“Get us off the ground,” Saxon ordered.
The plane jerked and started moving. Ginger grabbed the side of a chair because she was still sprawled on the floor. Honestly, she didn’t think she could move if her life depended on it. Bram was clearly intent on getting away, his focus on speed. Comfort came second because the little plane was bouncing all over the place. Saxon had his face in one of the small oval windows, looking back at the men who had tried to kill them.
Ginger suddenly gained the strength to move. She climbed off the floor and landed in the chair as she looked out of the window. She needed to see but felt her belly heave when she gained a glimpse of the men standing where they had left them. Two of them were hoisting Kitten’s limp, lifeless body off the pavement. They carried her to the back of the SUV and dumped her inside.
They wanted her in there too, cold and just as dead as Kitten.
Hard, sharp-edged truth.
The plane turned, cutting off her view. It left her sitting in the seat, looking at the mess her toes had become. Her nails were broken and she had blood oozing from more than one cut. The scent of fresh blood teased her senses, making her need to throw up. But her stomach was empty so she sat there, letting the chair hold her up since every muscle she had felt drained. The plane surged, the engines whining as they propelled the aircraft forward. She felt pinned to her seat as they sped down the runway and pulled away from the earth, leaving her completely in the hands of Saxon and his team.
Relief surged through her, making her throbbing feet seem like a badge of victory.
Saxon was looking at her. She felt his gaze on her and couldn’t seem to help flashing him a smile. He took a quick swipe at the graze on his head, looked at his fingers and dismissed the amount of blood as insignificant.
“My own gun,” she said over the sound of the plane engines. “That is the last time I am going to be shot at without a way to fire back.”
She likely looked like a hot mess right about then but she didn’t care because she sounded like she was a fresh-from-battle Valkyrie. Saxon Hale tried to maintain his professional demeanor but his lips twitched, curving into that grin that made him look devastating.
He lifted his foot, braced it on a seat and ripped open a holster that was secured with Velcro. He tossed it to her, gun and all, with a look that told her he could relate to her need to take care of herself.
Sometimes, it was the little things that mattered, right?
Ginger closed her hands around the gun, letting the feeling of it build up her confidence.
Bram started to level out, which meant the noise in the cabin settled into something conversation could flow through unimpeded.
“Who was that?”
Saxon had hit what she was beginning to accept as his home position. Feet braced shoulder-width apart, jaw tight, eyes slightly narrowed as if he was trying to shield his thoughts from her, while he had his arms crossed over his chest, his hands resting on his lower biceps.
In short, the very picture of confidence.
“Back there. Who was that?” Ginger repeated.
“The people who will kill you to protect the identity of the man you saw,” he answered in a dry tone. “You might have noticed how fast they were to eliminate Kitten, and she was one of their own.”
“So, you’re not going to tell me,” she concluded.
Saxon offered her a twitch of his lips, obviously enjoying the fact that she wasn’t going to let him skirt the issue. That fit. The guy thrived on head-on contact. “Can’t taint your testimony.”
It was an “ah” moment. Ginger nodded as Saxon offered her a wink.
“I did give you a gun.”
He passed by her on his way to the small bathroom at the rear of the aircraft.
He’d winked?
She caught her reflection in the window and looked at the silly smile on her lips. So the guy had a playful side. One she’d touched. It took her back to the moment when she’d first seen him and decided that he really needed a good laugh.
Weren’t you finished fantasizing about him? Repentant?
Well, maybe she was just a glutton for punishment, because when it came to Saxon Hale, she couldn’t seem to unnotice all the things about him that gave her a buzz. Of course, reality would deal with that. Her smile faded.
“We’re a ground team…”
Yup, good old reality could always be counted on to bring down her house of cards.
* * *
He should be focused on the fact that he’d seen Tyler Martin clearly.
Instead, he was quelling the urge to go back and talk with his witness. Impulses
were something he’d learned the danger of a long time ago. Acting on them was a good way to get killed.
He ended up scoffing at himself.
Okay, fine, looking in on Ginger Boyce wasn’t exactly a life-or-death sort of decision.
She was a fighter.
He liked that and ground his teeth together when he realized what he was thinking. Now he’d crossed into dangerous territory. He couldn’t get personal with her. She was his witness and not for much longer either.
She smelled good …
His cock gave a twitch, now that the rumble of the engines was making sure he knew he had her out of immediate danger.
Crap.
He didn’t need it, this response from his body. He should have taken a chance to blow his load between cases. It had been the idea of catching Tyler Martin that had seen Saxon deviating from his normal down time between cases. Now he was stuck with his hormones running high while saddled with a witness who was a goddamned librarian. Maybe she read on the wild side but that would be as far as she’d ventured into the real world.
And she’d seen the Raven murder someone.
That was Fate for you. She gave you what you were pining for but with a twist that made it darn near impossible to utilize. His little witness was going to need to be protected from herself and the harder realities of being in custody.
Namely the way healthy adults reacted to one another under stressful conditions. He’d watched sex be used as an advantage, even as a tactic, when the case called for gaining trust faster than most people gave it under normal circumstances.
Fate was giving him some payback for sure. Saxon had ordered men under his command into the beds of suspected traitors and now, well, it looked like the cosmos was jabbing him with a sharpened stick. Or to be blunt, one spunky librarian, who just happened to have an hourglass figure, which was his personal weakness.
Yeah, personal. That’s what it was and he needed to dig down and dredge up some professionalism. As well as a prayer that Kagan would come through with a team to take Ginger off his hands before he did something regrettable.
Saxon turned and made his way to the cockpit. Dare looked up from the co-pilot’s seat.
“I gave her a gun,” Saxon supplied. “Maybe I can’t tell her who she’s up against, but I can even the playing field a bit.”
Both his men nodded.
“Seems fair enough,” Bram spoke up. His hands were firmly on the controls, his attention on flying. They’d settled into a flight path and leveled off. “Maybe fate will be kind enough to let her be the one who puts a slug in that bastard’s skull. I think I’d enjoy knowing a librarian did Tyler Martin in.”
Saxon scoffed at him. “Tyler won’t go down that easy.”
“Any idea how Tyler found us?” Dare said what they were all thinking. “You can bet he’s pulling our flight plan right now by the look of how much support he had.”
Saxon reached for the onboard phone and dialed a number. His section leader answered.
“Tyler Martin just tried to kill our witness at the airport,” he reported. “We need to cover our tracks or he’ll just be waiting for us when we land.”
Dare snorted. “We can count ourselves lucky Carl Davis isn’t president yet or we might just get shot down.”
All three of them didn’t care for just how correct Dare was or how close to achieving the Oval Office Carl Davis was.
Kagan came back on the other end of the line. “I’m working on swapping out your transponder with another plane. Tell Magnus to stay sharp, he’s going to have to do some fancy flying to make it look convincing.” There was a reason Kagan was the section leader. He was sharper than a surgical needle.
“Martin had an impressive team backing him up, looked federal. The stripper is dead,” Saxon continued.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Kagan answered. “Next contact needs to come through a burner phone. You’ll receive it from agents I have meeting you. The Raven has put a death mark on your witness. Ten million. You can bet you’re going to have contract men looking to cash in, and I’m more convinced that she did see Marc Grog. That’s too much cash for someone who doesn’t give a damn about his name surfacing.”
Death mark …
The line cut off, leaving Saxon with those two words echoing inside his head. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard them. The Raven wasn’t known for his tolerance but for his swift retribution. The one thing Saxon had found a lot of evidence to support was just how often the network of underworld people responded to the Raven’s commands. Saxon and his men had been finding bodies for weeks as the man tightened his grip on the underground. The Raven didn’t tolerate failure. His people would go to extreme lengths because failure meant being found dead in a back alley of New Orleans.
Now that he had a name to put to the Raven, it was all making sense. Marc Grog had headed up one of the biggest media production studios on the globe. It had been a cover for the mega underworld operation that laundered billions of dirty money. Exotic locations for films had masked sky rings and drug trafficking. Marc had been clever enough to make it all seem legitimate.
Saxon could see why Carl Davis would be interested in doing business with the man. The reason was simple: reach. People were tuned into the cyber world. Any man who wanted to win the vote needed to be able to reach that world. Marc Grog held the keys to the bridge or at least he had until his death a decade before. If he was still alive, it meant he was guilty of moving classified information; there would have been no reason to fake his death otherwise.
Ginger was the only person who could set a flame to the whole thing.
He went back into the cabin. Ginger had emerged from the bathroom, more together than he’d expected her to be. She had her hair back in that messy knot on the back of her neck that he liked.
Professionalism …
Right. He moved closer to her noticing that her eyes were more than hazel. They were green and orange and brown, like autumn on the east coast.
He wanted to roll around in a pile of leaves with her.
“So tell me what the person on the other end of that phone said.”
She’d caught him off guard again, which was likely a good thing considering the direction of his thoughts. Her gaze shifted to his temple.
“You’re bleeding.” Her voice had become a tattered whisper, betraying her true emotional state.
“Just a graze.”
She seemed to weigh his words, considering his temple. Then locked gazes with him and something went through him, like a shot of awareness. He avoided naming it because without a doubt, acknowledging the emotion would be an act of surrender to the impulses associated with it.
He wasn’t going there.
“So…” she prompted him. “What was said? Since it was about me, it seems I should know.”
Saxon slowly shook his head, but, honestly, he wasn’t really sure if he was warning her or himself. She pressed her lips into a little pout.
“Tainting the witness again?” she asked. “I think I should warn you that my job is digging up dirt on people.” Ginger flashed a smile at him and it was all warning. “I love my job.”
A half sound of amusement got past his control. There was a flicker of victory in her eyes that should have pissed him off but all he ended up with was the feeling that she was entitled to that moment. Her life had certainly taken a turn for the sucky end of the pool.
“You cracked a smile. I win,” Ginger declared.
“Not a smile.”
She held up her hand and peered at him through her forefinger and thumb. “Just a smidge, but it happened. I’m the witness, remember?”
“Yes.” He felt his body tighten with that realization. Ginger noticed, too. Whatever else she was, she had keen senses. She was reading him like a book. It was a situation he wasn’t used to encountering in anyone but his immediate family.
“Fine, I get it. It’s not like it’s the first time the Feds have told me to nose out be
cause the deadbeat father I’m investigating is one of their informants.” She lifted her hands in a motion that told him she was dropping it.
“This is a little more important than street-corner drug dealers.” He shouldn’t have kept the conversation going, but his dammed impulses were overriding his brain.
Her fingernails dug into the leather of the holster as her expression tightened. “Yeah, I’m getting that feeling all right.” Ginger returned to looking out the window, making good on her word to drop the issue.
He made his way down to the bathroom, ignoring the impulse to just lay everything out on the line for her.
She fucking deserved to know what she was up against. Truth was, part of him wanted to level with her, just to see the way she’d rise to the challenge.
But he also didn’t want to be the one to tell her she had a death mark on her with a ten-million-dollar bounty. It would be like crushing a hummingbird that was sitting in his hand, trusting him. For the first time, he just didn’t have the stomach for it. That was a first, too, because a scared witness was a submissive one. Any man on a witness-protection team would tell you that, or at least, off the record they would. Just one of those things men like him didn’t share with the outside world, another fact that allowed most of the population to go on with their lives in peace. There was a cost and someone always had to pay it, and most of the time, fate wasn’t very fair about where she handed the bills.
He didn’t want to see Ginger crushed down to that position, even while he knew it would be safer for her.
But he was left with cold reality turning his insides because the Raven didn’t have any problem stepping on the innocent. Neither did Carl Davis. Their subordinates would carry out those orders because in their minds it was merely business. Keeping her alive was going to be hard.
