Code Name: Blondie

by Christina Skye

  Max stripped off his heavy waterproof vest. He had to get answers from her. She was implicated now beyond any possible doubt.

  Sand had blown over the lower deck during past storms and broken seashells were mounded against one wall, but Miki didn’t seem to notice. Her gaze was locked on Max’s face. “What is so important that you can’t leave this deserted speck of land and you won’t let us leave, either?”

  Max cut her off. “I’ll ask the questions. Let’s start with how you got up that ridge.”

  She studied him in stony silence.

  “How did you find that tunnel so easily?” The most logical answer was that Cruz had told her it was there.

  She shook her head, not answering.

  “Tell me about Cruz.” He moved in, pinning her flat against the wall, with no place to go and no place to look but his eyes.

  Color filled her face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Cruz who?”

  She was damned good, he thought. There was just the right touch of wariness and innocent confusion in her voice. Cruz must have trained her well. The two were probably lovers.

  For some reason the image hit him hard and left him angry.

  “You want to leave this island? It won’t happen until you start talking.”

  “I’m here because of engine failure. We crashed. You saw the plane.”

  “Crashes can be arranged.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  She sounded entirely believable in her outrage, but that was no surprise to Max.

  “Where did you meet Cruz?”

  “I don’t know anyone named Crux.”

  “Cruz,” Max repeated slowly, drawing out the word. He pulled off one glove, his eyes never leaving her face. “You’re very good, Blondie. And you’re lying.” He looked down at Truman, who was still motionless, his head pointed toward Miki’s right arm. “My good friend here doesn’t ever lie.”

  “You mean that position is some kind of signal?” She chewed her lip, and the more she chewed, the more worried she looked. “What is it supposed to mean?”

  Her face was turning pale, her breathing irregular. No doubt she was worried that he’d seen through her cover story.

  “I know you’re involved, Miki. It will be far less painful for you if you give me the whole story now.”

  “You—you scum. I’m not afraid of you or your—”

  Max caught her in mid-sentence. His bare fingers tightened, covering the pulse that throbbed at her neck. He opened his mind and dove down through the static the way he’d been trained, matching molecule names with chemical fragments registered by his sensitive fingers.

  Surfactants.

  Female sweat.

  He touched her ear. Sea salt. High octane engine fuel.

  And there—something else?

  He ignored her flailing hands, moving lower, exploring the warm skin beneath her collarbone.

  Her face filled with sudden color. “Stop. I’m not—”

  His hand covered her mouth, cutting off her angry protest. The shock of skin-to-skin contact burned, stirring all of his finely honed senses. She was softer than he’d expected, warmer than was safe, a hint of perfume still lingering on her skin. She was throwing off all kinds of hormones, spiking cortisol and cytokines as her immune and stress responses piled up.

  Max kept his focus tight but completely impersonal. Ruthlessly focused, he moved his fingers lower, settling at the warm hollow between her breasts. If Cruz had kissed her here, if he had left even a trace of saliva on her skin, Max would know it. Cruz hadn’t been given details about his final surgery at Foxfire’s lab. Ryker had ordered two chips implanted, chips that released a unique chemical formula into Cruz’s bloodstream. The lab-engineered mix did not exist in nature as a precaution against false positives.

  So the answer was clear. If Max found even a hint of that genetically engineered alkaloid on this woman’s skin, he had full authority to treat her as a hostile and interrogate her by whatever means he deemed necessary.

  He ignored her wriggling, her fear, the heat of her skin and the soft pressure of her hips cradling his thighs. Her softness and fear meant nothing to him. He had to find the marker formula.

  He pressed her hard against the wall and pushed up the edge of her bra, his hand across her mouth. She was soft and full, her nipple pressing his callused palm. Despite his control, the slide of her breast against his bare skin tangled his senses, making his blood thick and hot with need.

  He covered her breast with his hand and filtered out her muttering, fascinated by the heat of her skin and the way color flared through her face. He didn’t care about her, he told himself. These feelings of his were strictly a reflex. This search was impersonal, no more than a way to gather clues.

  But despite that, his hand tightened in reflex. Blood pounded to his groin as his fingers opened, slow and gentle, claiming her breast with its perfect, dusky nipple.

  He told himself all that mattered was finding Cruz’s marker amid the layers of hormones sheening her skin. Desire was irrelevant and curiosity forbidden. There was no room for any emotion in his touch.

  But his hand was hot where it lay against her skin. His nerves felt too sensitive, too volatile.

  Pain stabbed beneath his left ear. Without warning dizziness struck him, and he swayed beneath a blast of sensory static.

  She struggled ineffectually, her body twisting against his and her words muffled by his hand. Max saw her staring at a line of blood on his wrist.

  Blood. His blood.

  He had a nosebleed, and he never had nosebleeds. Max had no doubt that she had caused it somehow, probably part of Cruz’s new skill set.

  He felt sick at the sight of her, sick at the extent of Cruz’s reach and the stench of his betrayal. “How much did he give you?” Waves of pain dug through his neck, and he felt fresh blood brush on his lip. “What’s the going rate to sell out your country these days?”

  She kicked him, biting down hard on his hand.

  Even then something continued to tease him, shadowlike on her skin, a fragment that he couldn’t identify despite all his training. Yet if Cruz had touched her, Max should have found the marker alkaloids immediately. There was also her concern for Truman, which had seemed entirely sincere.

  She was his enemy, but the pieces simply didn’t add up.

  He released her arm, keeping his hand across her mouth, but the storm of her hormones pulled him in, overwhelming in their complexity. She hadn’t had sex for quite a while, Max noted. Her body was responding to his touch, even amid her fury.

  Fury. Not fear. She wasn’t afraid of him.

  Another piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

  He took a deep breath and straightened her shirt, trying to ignore the heat of her skin and the need that her body had aroused. He wanted to strip all the barriers between them. He wanted his hands free, moving over her like sunlight. He wanted to take her here and now, hard and fast against the wall while she moaned his name and came blindly in his arms.

  The dizziness was worse, pounding behind his eyes. He couldn’t hear.

  Her face bright with color, she fought him, but there was no calculation, no cold cunning there, and for a moment Max wondered if Truman could have made a mistake.

  He felt more blood on his lip. Something had happened when he touched her, bringing waves of dizziness and pain, and he had to find out why.

  She tried to kick him again, biting at his wrist. He saw a line of bruises on her cheek, probably from her fall on the cliff. When he tugged her sideways, trying to get a better look, she fought hard, and her movements slammed her arm against the ship’s metal wall.

  She went rigid, her eyes wide and startled. Breath hissed from her mouth. And then she simply crumpled in his arms.

  A drop of his fresh blood fell on her Hawaiian shirt, mixing into the bright colors. Everything about her was bright and clean, full of restless energy, Max thought. It was so long since he could remember feeling young or cl
ean or innocent.

  Yes, he could understand why she had caught Cruz’s eye.

  Pain stabbed at his ear as he set her on the rusted metal floor. He touched the inside of her wrist, picking up more of her stress hormones. Her face was pale and cool.

  Her faint was no act.

  Anxious, he touched her neck. Only when he felt the steady drum of her pulse did he relax. But his emotions were anything but calm.

  He raised her hand, studying the angry scar above her elbow and trying to reconstruct the accident. Kneeling, he touched one edge of the wound gently.

  Something jumped, racing like a spark up his arm and into his head, knocking him backward. In that blurred moment of pain Max felt completely drained yet in some way connected to her, fused in nerve and muscle.

  He took a deep breath, and then touched the edge of her scar again. Another white jolt of light drilled through him, making his ears ring and his muscles clench.

  The effect was definitely connected with her scar, he thought grimly. She had done something that day—or something had been done to her. Now it was affecting both of them.

  She tossed restlessly beside him. Her eyelids fluttered and she murmured something that sounded like race, which made no sense.

  Her beauty was unavoidable, but it was her energy that stirred his senses, making Max’s hand curve gently over her cheek. Hunger made his blood pound. He wanted her fire and stubbornness, here and now. He needed to—

  Stop.

  He pulled his hand away. Slowly he stood up.

  Everything was wrong, he thought. His feelings never drove him like this. He never lost control.

  He looked down at his bare hand. She had been solicitous about Dutch, hotly protective about Truman. She had even worried about his embarrassment over his scars.

  Nothing about it added up.

  Except that she stirred his senses and made his body come alive in a way he had never experienced. For long seconds something hot and reckless had shimmered between them. Already Max knew that neither of them would emerge unchanged from that contact.

  If it didn’t short circuit him completely.

  More blood trickled onto his lip, and he brushed it away in grim silence.

  Anything that affected him this deeply was a matter of national security. Ryker would need an update immediately.

  Max stared at her white face, at the angry scar on her arm, turning the pieces over and over in his head. After making certain that she was stable and breathing normally, he left Truman on guard and climbed up to the deck. By the time he reached the water his dizziness was gone and the whine in his ears had faded.

  Who was she? he thought angrily. What was she?

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER MAX stood on a lower deck of the rusting derelict gunboat beyond the reef. “I’m sure,” he said tersely to Izzy. “There was no question. Touching her triggered some kind of…weakness. We should be checking her medical records to research that scar.”

  “No records for anyone named Miki or Michelle. Not on any flights to or from Bora Bora in the last week.” Keys clicked quietly at a keyboard. “How’s that dizziness you experienced?”

  “Completely gone now.”

  “Any other effects?”

  Max didn’t mention the inexplicable sense of bonding he’d felt. He needed to understand that better before he tried to describe it to Izzy or Ryker. “There was pain below my right ear. A small nosebleed, too.”

  The computer keys stopped clicking. “Small? You ever get nosebleeds?”

  “Never,” Max said curtly. “Not until today.”

  Papers rustled. “Describe the scar on her arm again.”

  Max repeated the details for the second time, watching a line of gray clouds race across the horizon. “She kept saying something that sounded like race, but it makes no sense.”

  “Let me play with it,” Izzy said tightly. “What else can you give me?”

  “She told me that a man spilled hot coffee on her arm. The shop was called the Java Express.”

  “Give me that again.”

  “Java Express.”

  “With luck, it won’t be a chain,” Izzy said. Computer keys tapped as fast as a weapon burst. “What else?”

  “She was able to give an excellent description of the man who bumped her. Heavy tan. Red hair going gray, a small mole above his left eyebrow. But we still don’t have any names.”

  Izzy’s voice took on an edge of excitement. “I can crosscheck the store name with local E.R. reports for burns in the last sixty days, which would be the usual time frame for second-degree wound healing. We may find a record for the man’s treatment. I’ll get right on it.”

  Max rubbed his neck. “I’d better get back. Truman is guarding the upper deck, but I don’t like taking risks in case she decides to run again.”

  “I’ll report to the big man. Meanwhile, get me a picture of her scar.”

  “Will do.”

  “Any idea how she spells her name?”

  Max shoved supplies into his waterproof tactical vest. “The usual way, I guess, with an i-e.” He stared at the darkening line of the horizon. “What’s the radar showing for that storm?”

  “Winds at twenty knots. We’re calculating landfall around 2100 hours.”

  “Understood. Latest location of our friend’s tracking chip?” Max was careful not to mention Cruz by name.

  “Sporadic. The last coordinates we picked up were in Thailand, assuming it wasn’t another malfunction.” A chair creaked. “Hold on.”

  Max heard muffled voices and the sound of papers rustling.

  “Listen up. We just got a new fix on that GPS chip you mentioned. The signal faded almost immediately, but my team managed to fix the location first. It’s one mile away from your current position. I repeat, the target is in your vicinity, due southwest. Coordinates following.”

  “Roger that,” Max said tensely. With Cruz in the area, he had to backtrack to the island immediately.

  “One last thing. We’ve had reports of maritime hijackers operating in your area. They use speedboats with deck-mounted machine guns, and they are all-around bad news. Watch your six out there.”

  Great, Max thought grimly. Another complication he could do without. “They’ll be on my radar. Thanks for the tip. Signing off now.”

  He didn’t waste energy on questions or curses. After memorizing the coordinates Izzy had given, he flipped off the radio, hid his equipment inside a rusted wall and secured his vest.

  Two minutes later he was in the water.

  LLOYD RYKER WAS STARING at the newest report from Izzy Teague and nursing a stomach-scouring cup of coffee when he heard a knock at his door. He barely had time to slide two papers off to the side of his desk before the door opened.

  Wolfe Houston, the current Foxfire team leader, looked cool and calm, but after months of working together Ryker knew that the more tense the situation, the more cool Houston appeared. It was the mark of a good operative, but it made the man hard as hell to read.

  “Something wrong, Houston?”

  “Permission to speak with you, sir.”

  “Of course. Have a seat. I’d offer you some coffee, but the stuff I make will kill you.” As Houston sat down, Ryker managed to spill his coffee over the open file on his desk. “Shit. Too much coffee in the last twenty-four hours has got me on edge.” Ryker grabbed a handful of napkins and blotted the top-secret report that was now buried, out of Houston’s line of vision. “What did you want to talk about, Lieutenant?”

  “Preston’s op, sir. Izzy Teague tells me things are heating up.”

  “Nothing that we didn’t expect. Is there a problem I’m not seeing?”

  “I just wanted to be sure everything was on target, sir.” Houston’s eyes were cool as they locked on Ryker’s face. “And that there aren’t any new developments you may have forgotten to mention.”

  Was there a warning in that question? If so Ryker would discipline Houston as soon as the mission was completed. H
e wouldn’t tolerate insubordination or questioning of command judgment. “I don’t follow you, Houston.”

  The tall SEAL sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “You updated me about the training Cruz was receiving before his flight from the secure facility. You mentioned a new chip that appeared to malfunction in the field. I wanted to be sure there weren’t any other…modifications that you might have forgotten.” Houston let the words hang. “Sir,” he added calmly.

  Ryker felt the muscles clench at the back of his shoulders. The question wasn’t insubordinate but it was damned close. He’d have to keep Houston on a short leash from now on. “Modifications as in training and chips, Lieutenant. You think I’m keeping secrets from you?”

  “I have no idea, sir. I simply want to be fully briefed to protect my man in the field.”

  “Perfectly understandable. And the answer to your question is no. To my knowledge Cruz had no additional training in process at the time of his escape.”

  Houston’s eyes narrowed slightly. “‘To my knowledge’? Is it a possibility, sir?”

  “You know what I know, Lieutenant.” Ryker decided the conversation had gone on long enough. It was always a bad idea to let subordinates see a crack in your armor. He sat back and casually pushed his PDA over the file he had been reading when Houston entered. “You have the full resources of this project at your disposal to find Cruz. What else do you need?”

  “Nothing, sir. Preston’s a good man. He’ll finish the mission as planned.”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.” Ryker studied a pile of government forms on the corner of his desk. “While you’re here, I should mention that I’m considering your request for personal time…and marriage to Kit O’Halloran. You know my feelings about personal involvements.”

  Houston simply nodded, his face unreadable.

  “Still, some rules are meant to be relaxed. I have the possibility under advisement.” There, the tantalizing offer was now raised openly. Ryker snapped his briefcase shut and stood up. “Anything else, Houston?”