by Lucy Monroe
He shouldn’t have been loud enough earlier for his voice to carry. It just went to show that this rescue had him seriously rattled. And no matter how much he’d known that was going to happen, he’d still insisted on taking the assignment.
He had refused to trust Rachel’s rescue to anyone else.
Eva scooted around him and pushed up the tent flap. “My advice, as team medic, is for you to settle your ass down beside Miss Gannon and give her a sense of safety. I don’t think she’s had much of that lately.”
“Shit.”
“Not inside the tent, please.”
“Smart-ass.”
“I am smart.”
Kadin ignored the last, knowing, with Eva, chances were good he wasn’t going to get the final word. He went to lie down beside Rachel, doing his best not to jostle her.
Her eyes fluttered open as he settled beside her. He doubted she could see him well in the shadows cast by the low tent light, but she smiled as if she recognized him. As if she was glad he was there.
Go figure. She was probably still disoriented.
Though weak, the smile remained. “Hey, Marks,” she whispered.
Amazing, resilient, incredible woman.
“Hey.” He wanted to reach out and touch her so badly, his hands literally ached with the need.
“Didn’t think I was ever going to see you again.”
“Me, neither.”
“Glad I was wrong,” she slurred in a barely-there whisper.
For a moment, he was too stunned to reply. Finally, he forced out a gruff, “Me, too.”
But she’d slipped back into sleep as fast as she’d come out of it, and he didn’t think she’d heard his last reply. That was okay. She had to know he was glad to have gotten her out of that hellhole.
Even with their past, that had to be a given.
Giving in to his need, he wrapped his fingers gently around her badly abused wrist so he could feel her pulse. Only when he’d detected the steady thrum of her heartbeat did he let himself doze, listening for trouble even as he sort of slept.
Cowboy and Spazz were silent as they hotfooted it through the forest back toward the enemy’s compound. Neil took care of checking in with the double click that indicated all was well every quarter hour.
The former squid might be a technology geek, but he moved with the stealth of a well-trained soldier. Just as he had when they’d been on the same team together right after they’d both been recruited into the Atrati.
Neil Kennedy had requested and received a transfer from that team after the first year.
Cowboy had missed the other man every day since, until Wyatt had been assigned by his request to Kadin Marks’s team after Roman Chernichenko’s promotion. Not that Wyatt had said as much to Neil. The other man wasn’t about to listen.
Not after the way their relationship had ended, hacked to death by Wyatt’s pride and need to stay in the closet completely. So damn completely that he’d dated women as a smokescreen and let his daddy talk him into getting engaged to one before he finally came to his senses.
But it had been too late to save what he had with Neil.
And the sexy computer geek wasn’t giving Wyatt any signs he might be open to offering him a second chance. In fact, he’d made it damn clear he wanted nothing to do with a closeted gay man from Texas.
Breaking into the enemy compound proved as easy the second time around as the first. Cowboy located and drugged Rachel Gannon’s captors with hypodermics, pretty damn pleased to discover a whiskey bottle that had clearly been shared before the men had taken to their racks. That promised excellent possibilities.
Meanwhile, Neil planted his listening devices, clicking over their comm-links as each one was successfully deployed.
This enemy organization might be a big ol’ nest of vipers, but a bite could only be as poisonous as its successful strike rate. And even the fastest snake among them wasn’t likely to win against a man with a gun.
Or a Texan with a needle, in this case.
Neil wasn’t there to meet him outside the building when Cowboy was done, though, and he felt dread make the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up. Where the hell was his squid?
It took twelve more minutes, two extra clicks, and a double-click checkin that only marginally comforted Wyatt before Neil showed up.
“Where the hell were you?” Cowboy demanded in a whisper.
Spazz shook his head, refusing to answer aloud. While Cowboy understood the man’s caution, he was fit to burst by the time they’d gotten enough distance between them and the compound to converse safely if quietly.
He repeated his question, this time grabbing Neil’s arm to stop the other man from moving until he answered.
Neil glared up through the gloom under the trees that the moonlight barely penetrated. “I was doing my job.”
“What the hell? You only had a couple of listening devices to install.”
“I wanted to put up a couple of spy-cams, too. They’re so tiny, unless they’ve got way better counterintelligence than security, they’re never going to find them. But I ran into the other guard and had to wait for him to move on before I could get out of there.”
“You were only supposed to go in and get out, not host a damn tea party.”
“I wasn’t serving tea, you redneck idiot.”
“You tryin’ to insult me, darlin’? I remember a time when you used to call me redneck as a term of endearment.” Wyatt moved closer to Neil, letting the other man’s nearness just wash on over him.
“I wasn’t using it as an endearment just now, asshole.” Neil’s breathless tone belied the insult.
“You scared me, sailor-boy. You owe me something for causing me such distress.”
“What are you, a six-year-old girl, getting all worried when your friend doesn’t meet you on the playground right when you expect?”
“So, we’re friends again?” Wyatt asked, tugging Neil just that much closer.
“Stop. No … damn it, Cowboy.”
“Shit, baby, call me Wyatt like you used to do.”
“No way in hell.” Neil wrenched his arm from Cowboy’s grasp and moved back. “Those days are long over.”
He fast-marched several feet away and then swung back and faced Cowboy. “And don’t call me baby, asshole.”
He was going to start hearing the insult as an endearment if his man kept saying it like that. Oh, the anger was there in Neil’s voice, but so was something else, something Wyatt knew the blond computer geek would be pissed as hell to know Wyatt had heard.
“Don’t scare me like that again, and I’ll consider it.” Like hell.
“How I handle my assignments is none of your damn business.”
“You go on believin’ that, darlin’, if it makes you feel better.”
With an expletive, Neil turned and started through the forest in the direction of the spot they’d agreed to set up surveillance of the road leading to the compound. Cowboy followed, his senses on alert for any danger, since his man seemed a little too upset to be paying the attention he should.
Chapter Three
Rachel woke to intense pain at odds with the sense of safety that told her the gentle hold on her sore wrist was friendly.
Not willing to trust that sense, she focused on remembering where she was and how she’d gotten there. Memories of being tortured for information in a small dank room flooded her mind as her body tensed in irrational preparation for flight. The exhaustion in her limbs said she wasn’t going anywhere.
More memories came back: the impossible rescue by a phantom from her past. Had she dreamed it? Kadin Marks wasn’t really here. He couldn’t be.
Letting her eyes open slowly, she squinted into the low lighting in the small tent she was in and had no trouble making out a man-shaped shadow beside her.
Kadin?
Her mind rejected what her eyes told her was true, but his big body was so close, she could smell a long-forgotten if all-too-familiar scent.
&n
bsp; Once she’d accepted years ago that Kadin Marks was never coming back, she’d done her best to forget everything about him. The speed with which sensory memories flooded her now was proof of how difficult—and fruitless—her efforts had been.
But it was also further proof that last night had happened as she remembered it.
“Rachel’s captors won’t wake before midmorning. They’ll feel and act like they’re hungover. I found a bottle of their whiskey—seems they like a drink before bed—so they shouldn’t question their condition too much. At least not immediately.” The voice with a Texas twang came over a communications unit beside Kadin’s head.
Rachel realized that was probably what had wakened her.
“What bad Muslims, partaking of harsh spirits,” Kadin replied quietly but with sarcasm.
“It worked to our advantage, anyway. The three glasses next to the bottle indicated they’d all imbibed before bed.”
“Lucky.”
“Yeah. And so was Spazz, getting out of there. He decided he wanted to put in a couple of webcams and nearly got caught by the guard getting ready to go on duty.”
“Webcams?” Rachel croaked. “We’re going to get visual?”
Kadin’s fingers on her wrist tightened and then loosened immediately when she made a soft sound of distress. “Yes, angel. We’ll find out who the bigwigs are for you.”
Her heart contracted with an old pain she only wished had been dead as long as her hopes. “I’m not an angel, Ka—Trigger. Not anymore.”
She was nobody’s innocent sweetheart these days. She had too much blood on her own hands for that. And he wasn’t her Kadin. He was now called Trigger, a soldier who didn’t know the woman Rachel Gannon had become any better than she knew this hardened warrior.
“You’re a damn fine agent, ma’am,” the Texan who’d been talking to Kadin said.
“They caught me.” She’d been where she wasn’t supposed to be and hadn’t been able to talk her way out of it.
She still wasn’t sure why. The two men who’d discovered her in the back rooms of one of Abasi Chuma’s holdings had seemed to buy her nosy-tourist-in-the-wrong-place ruse—she could tell. At least, she’d thought they had.
But they’d still abducted her. After a heck of a fight, which she’d hoped they’d interpret as a desperate woman fighting out of terror for her life, they’d knocked her out.
She’d woken in that cell with three men standing over her whom she’d never seen before. They weren’t Egyptian, but she hadn’t realized they were Moroccan, either. Though, just because they were in the mountains of Morocco, that didn’t mean her interrogators were local.
“I bet you fought like a tiger,” the Texas twang opined.
Kadin grunted a sound of agreement, and she wanted to touch him, just to see if he was real.
“I did,” she agreed. “I still lost.”
“It happens,” Kadin said.
Kadin. He was really here. Wasn’t he?
The need for reassurance of her sanity overwhelmed her, and she reached out to touch the man lying beside her. But something tethered her hand, and when she tugged against it, it stung.
She must have made a sound, because his hand was there, holding hers in place. “Don’t pull, Rach. You’ve got an IV, and Doc says it stays in until you’ve taken the full bag.”
“Okay.” She remembered the medic, a beautiful woman with Hispanic features and a slight Puerto Rican accent who had handled Rachel as efficiently as any doctor she’d ever been to.
“Yeah. We don’t mess with Doc.” The cowboy stretched the word yeah out as if it had two very long syllables.
Rachel understood that. “Back at the agency, nobody messes with Vannie, either.”
“She’s your tech-wizard, like our Neil, right?” The Texan chuckled. “Our boy has a hard-on for Vannie’s toys, that’s for sure.”
“Yes.” The word came out on a croak, Rachel’s voice failing under the stress of trying to talk with strained vocal cords.
“Hush now, angel.” Kadin’s voice sounded kind of strained itself as he pressed a big finger against her lips. “No more talking.”
“Or Doc’s going to have all our hides,” the cowboy’s disembodied voice added.
“You and Spazz get some shut-eye while you can,” Kadin instructed the other man.
“Roger that.” And then silence.
Kadin’s hand slipped down to cup Rachel’s cheek. “You, too, angel.”
She opened her mouth to remind him she was anything but, but his finger traced her lips in silent command not to speak anymore.
And she found herself drifting off to sleep again, feeling safer than she had any right to in a tent in the mountains of Morocco.
Kadin leaned down and kissed Rachel’s soft lips. And in her sleep she responded, her mouth curling into a smile as his name whispered past her lips. He’d lost the right to call her his when he made his first kill, but damned if he wasn’t going to make sure she was safe from herself as well as the world before he walked away from her again.
“I don’t have a ‘hard-on for Vannie’s toys,’ ” Neil said as Wyatt climbed into their tent.
“Heard that, did you?”
Neil didn’t bother to reply.
Cowboy climbed into his sleeping bag, his body thankful for the chance to rest, no matter how short the break might be. “Don’t worry, baby. I won’t tell anybody else about your toy fetish.”
“I do not have a ‘toy fetish,’ and stop calling me baby.”
“I don’t know. I seem to remember you liking certain toys, sure enough.”
The growl that came from the other man was pure frustration laced with a sexual need Wyatt was damn sure Neil was hoping the Texan hadn’t noticed.
“Why did you request the transfer to my unit?” Neil asked after several seconds of charged silence.
“You can’t make a guess?”
“No.” Neil sighed. “You can get ass anywhere—you sure as hell don’t need mine. It comes with too many requirements you can’t fulfill”
“You sure about that?”
“I am.”
“That’s why you left our team?”
“I left our team because the man sleeping in my bed got himself engaged to a woman.” And didn’t Neil sound plenty pissed about that still?
“I made a mistake.”
“So did I. I trusted you.”
“You’ll trust me again.”
“ No. ”
“Yeah. You’re my one and only, and I ain’t lettin’ you go again, darlin’.”
“Stop talking like a redneck.”
“You like it when I let my twang show.”
“Not anymore, asshole.”
They’d see about that. They surely would. “Get some sleep, darlin’. We’ve got plenty of time to go at it. I’m not going anywhere.”
And neither was his man. Not this time.
Kadin woke with his arm draped across Rachel’s midsection, his hand curved possessively at her waist. Dawn’s early light filtered through the tent, and he luxuriated in the ability to gaze at this woman once again.
Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. Dark brown eyes blinked up at him, incomprehension giving way to memory in a matter of seconds. Cowboy had been right. The woman was a damn fine agent with an agile brain.
She was also one of those rare brunettes with blue eyes.
“Shit. You’re wearing contacts.” And they had to be pretty damn dry about now.
She nodded with a minuscule movement of her head, as if doing even that hurt.
He grabbed his comm-link and barked, “Doc.”
“Sí?” The woman sounded tired, but then, she’d checked on her patient every couple of hours through the night.
“Rachel’s wearing colored contacts for her cover. I couldn’t tell last night in the dark.” He thought her light brown hair was a few shades darker, too, but hair dye wasn’t about to hurt her.
Contacts left in too long could do som
e damage, though.
“I’ll get a saline wash ready.”
Kadin didn’t bother to reply, figuring the medic was already busy pulling her supplies together.
“Thirsty,” Rachel croaked.
Kadin grabbed his water bottle and brought it to her lips. She drank deeply, and he let her. By the time she was done, Eva had arrived.
She washed Rachel’s eyes with the saline for several long seconds before instructing her to blink rapidly.
Doc repeated the process until there was a wet spot on the small pillow under Rachel’s head and the smell of salt water permeated the air. “Okay, I think it should be okay to take them out.”
Rachel nodded and reached up to do it.
Doc pushed her hand back down. “Let me.”
Rachel did, and a second later, her pretty blue eyes, bloodshot but looking otherwise okay, were staring up at Kadin.
“That’s better,” he said gruffly, glad to see her unhindered pale gaze once again.
“I kind of liked the brown,” she whispered with a wry smile.
He shook his head decisively. “Blue is better.”
“I didn’t know you had that preference, Trig,” Doc said as she packed up her stuff. “No wonder you never made a move on me.”
“I didn’t make a move on you because I knew you could slice my balls off in my sleep, and I like the boys just where they are.”
Doc laughed, but Rachel looked between them as if trying to figure something out.
He brushed his fingers through the damp hair at her temple. “What?”
Rachel just shook her head.
“Did you need the contacts for vision, or were they simply cover?” Doc asked Rachel.
“Cover,” Rachel replied quietly.
“Is there something you can give her for her throat, so she can talk more easily?” Kadin asked.
“If she needed it, I could give her a steroid shot, but she’s better off just letting her vocal cords heal. Try to keep her from talking, and definitely no yelling.” Doc gave him the stink-eye.
Kadin frowned. “You act like I pick fights with everybody.”
“Don’t you?”
“Hell, no.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. You ever hear Peace yell at me?”
“Peace doesn’t yell at anybody.”
