by Cindy Dees
One of them piped up drolly. “But we’re bloody well telling everyone in the bunker that an itty bitty thing in a skirt tossed your happy butt on the floor.”
Jeff scowled. Damn. There went his reputation. To the itty bitty thing in a skirt in question, he said, “Let me clean up. And then we can go to my office and talk.”
She was waiting for him when he emerged from the locker room five minutes later. He’d intended to take a long, hot shower and make her wait, but inexplicable curiosity, eagerness even, to learn more about her had turned his shower into a hasty affair lasting barely two minutes.
“May I take your bags for you?” he offered, startled at how bulky and heavy they looked now that he paid attention to them. She didn’t seem fazed by them, though.
“No, thank you. The Medusas make a policy of hauling their own gear.”
They stepped out into the hallway and he turned toward his temporary digs in an underground warehouse space that he’d appropriated a few weeks back.
“What exactly are the Medusas?” he asked as they walked.
“‘Who are they?’ is the appropriate question.”
Not real chatty, this self-contained woman. When she didn’t continue, he said, “Okay, then. Who are they?”
“Special Forces team. All-female.”
“All—what?” Female? No. Freaking. Way. There was no way women could do the job he and his buddies did. None. Not possible.
She didn’t bother to reply. Apparently, she figured he’d heard her correctly the first time.
She might not let him carry her bags for her, but he did open the door for her when they arrived at his office. She nodded her thanks as she stepped inside. The true black of underground shrouded the room, and she paused in the thin shaft of light spilling weakly into the space from behind them. He reached out and flipped the wall switch beside the door. Halogen lights flashed on overhead, illuminating the cavernous space.
His companion studied the elaborate mock-ups of walls, and partial rooms scattered all over the spacious room, looking like stored television show sets. He closed the door behind them. “Welcome to my laboratory.”
“What are you researching?”
“The appropriate question is ‘Who is the Ghost?’”
“Okay. Who is the Ghost?”
“Our mission. Yours and mine.”
“Come again?”
He smiled at the incongruousness of such a quintessentially military phrase issuing from her quintessentially feminine mouth.
“The Ghost. We’ll talk more about him later if it turns out you can actually help me. My desk is over here.” He led her to a glass-enclosed space tucked in one corner of the storage area.
He led her inside and moved behind his desk to sit down. He actually felt safer with the bulky piece between them. She’d taken him by surprise with that throw of hers. Next time, though, he’d be ready for the move. “I’m afraid I need you to tell me a little more about yourself before I can bring you on board this project.”
“Captain Steiger, I am an experienced and decorated Special Forces operative, and General Wittenauer thinks I’m the right person to help you with whatever you’re doing. This isn’t a job interview. It’s a done deal; I have been assigned to this mission.”
He studied her, frustrated. What the hell was he supposed to do with a girl? What on God’s green Earth was the Old Man up to?
He must’ve muttered that last question aloud, because Captain Kim replied dryly, “I don’t speak for General Wittenauer. Why don’t you call him and ask?”
His eyes narrowed. He could smell a bluff at a hundred paces. Fine. He picked up the phone. “Hey, Carter, get me JSOC headquarters, will ya?” He’d show her a thing or two about playing poker with a good ol’ boy.
The familiar voice of Mary Norton, General Wittenauer’s personal secretary, came on the line. Jeff drawled, “Well, hey there, Ms. Mary. How’s my favorite lady in the whole world doing today?”
The secretary’s formal tone thawed considerably. “I’m fine, Captain Steiger. And what can I do for you?”
“Is the Old—is General Wittenauer available?”
The secretary laughed. “Yes. The Old Man’s here. He’s only in his early fifties, you know. One moment.”
A brusque voice said, “Go.”
“Sir. This is Captain Steiger down at H.O.T. Watch. I’m calling about the operative I asked for to help me catch the Ghost.”
“Hasn’t she arrived yet? Her plane must’ve gotten held up.”
Her. He’d said her. The woman sitting before him wasn’t a mistake. Sonofa—
“She’s a hell of an operator, Jeff. Just the ticket for what you need.”
“But I need a combat operator. Someone to catch a thief—”
The general cut him off. “And that’s why I sent you Cobra. If anyone can get the job done, it’s her. Trust me, Steiger. She’s a pro.”
Cobra? She had a field handle? Great. Some chick with delusions of being one of the boys.
“Let me know how your experiment goes, son. We’ve got some very high-powered folks breathing down the necks of their congressmen, and that sort of crap rolls downhill fast. It’s landing on me deep and still steaming over here at the Pentagon.”
“Yes, sir. I will, sir.” He hung up the phone, staring at it stonily.
A melodic voice interrupted his dark musings. “We’re going to catch a thief, are we? What’s he stealing?”
“Art.”
“What kind of art?”
“Paintings. The cheapest one so far has a price tag in the two million dollar range.”
“Where are these paintings being stolen from?”
He looked up at her grimly. Wittenauer wanted him to give the girl a try? Then that’s just what he’d do. “Come with me.”
He led her out into the larger room and over to one of the full-room mock-ups. He stopped in the doorway of the two-story-high structure. He flipped a switch, and a labyrinth of red laser beams cut across the space. He pointed to a window on his left.
“Come in through that. Don’t touch the floor. Cross the room to that painting over there.” He pointed at a poster-size print of a buxom blonde in a skimpy, wet bikini, hanging on the far wall.
Kat commented dryly, “The little known follow-up portrait to the Mona Lisa? The Moaning Lay-me?”
He grinned reluctantly. “That Da Vinci dude was sure ’nuff a fellow of fine taste.”
Kat eyed the mock-up assessingly. “What equipment may I use?”
“Whatever you want. I’ve got climbing cups, rope, grappling hooks, crampons, you name it.” He gestured at a pile of gear on a table just outside the door.
“I’ll need to change my clothes.”
“Fine.”
“Where?”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “My office. I won’t look.”
She shrugged. “My lingerie covers more than that girl’s bikini.”
“Too bad,” he quipped. A twinge in his shoulder from his earlier fall kept him from saying more. She might not catch him by surprise again, but he didn’t relish a straight-up fight with her. After all, he had a rule against hitting girls. Yup, that was why he didn’t want to tangle with her, he told himself firmly.
She emerged from his office in a one-piece gray bodysuit that made him about swallow his tongue. Whoa. She was perfect. She had curves in all the right places, was slender in all the right places. She was a tiny little thing. No more than five foot three. Though slim, definite muscles flexed beneath her sea-land suit.
The high-tech gray fabric was waterproof when submerged, but when dry, it breathed like cloth and allowed the wearer to sweat normally, unlike the neoprene suits divers traditionally wore.
While he struggled not to stare, she moved to the pile of equipment and confidently sorted through it, slinging climbing ropes over her shoulders and strapping on a climbing harness. She clipped carabiners and belaying devices on to her waist belt and quickly strapped a k
nife to her thigh. She certainly handled the gear like she knew what to do with it.
She asked, “Have you got three or four handheld, signaling mirrors?”
“Coming up.” He went over to an equipment locker and pulled them out.
She held out her hand without even looking over at him. The mirrors disappeared into one of her waist pouches. She walked over to the “outside” of the window.
“Does noise matter?”
“Not for today’s purposes.”
“Time limit?”
“Not this time.”
She leaped up onto the window ledge as lightly as her feline namesake and balanced there easily. He watched with interest as she threaded a spare radio antenna through the sighting hole in the middle of one of the mirrors. She broke off the end of the antenna and poked its now sharp end into the drywall above her head. A slight adjustment, and the mirror caught one of the laser signals and reflected it away from the space above the window. She repeated the process until she’d created a gap in the net of lasers. Clever.
She ran a stud finder across the wall above the window until it flashed green and beeped. Quickly, she reached up and hammered in a crampon. She slapped on a carabiner and ran the end of her nylon webbing rope through it. With surprising upper-body strength for a woman, she pulled herself up a couple of feet and tied off her harness.
She repeated the whole process until she’d reached the ceiling. The laser beams stopped about four feet shy of the ceiling. Bemused, he watched her pull out some sort of climbing cleats that hadn’t come from his pile of gear and buckle them to her feet and hands.
His jaw dropped as she struck the ceiling hard to sink her cleats into it, and commenced crawling, spiderlike, across the surface. How she clung upside down like that and didn’t fall, he had no idea. He’d never seen anything like it. In three minutes or so, she’d reached the far wall. She planted a crampon, tied off a rope and shimmied down it quickly, using her mirrors to deflect the lasers.
“You want me to take the picture, or just draw a mustache and horns on it?” she asked casually, spinning gently in her harness next to the poster.
Damn. She didn’t even sound out of breath!
“Whatever you do, don’t defile Bambi. She’s an icon around here.”
“Do you need me to retrace my route, or have you seen enough?”
“That’s enough.” He tried to sound unaffected, but he’d never seen anything like what she’d just done. The strength it took to cling to a ceiling like that boggled his mind. She must have a crazy strength-to-weight ratio.
Well, why not? He’d predicted that the Ghost had a similar strength-to-weight ratio. It was the only way to explain some of the climbing the guy had to have done to successfully steal the paintings he had. Jeff just hadn’t expected to encounter the same sort of strength in a woman.
Kat efficiently retrieved her climbing gear and lowered herself to the floor. She walked toward him, winding her climbing rope around her left arm as she came. “Any more hoops you want me to jump through before you believe who I am?” she asked, looking him dead in the eye.
Without ever taking his eyes off hers, he reached for the holster at his right hip lightning fast and quick drew his pistol, whipping it out to point it at her.
Chapter 2
Kat had a split second to react to the weapon. She had two choices: aggression or evasion. He was a Special Forces operator—the gun would be loaded and the safety off. She opted for both responses. She dodged low and across his body from the gun, and then launched herself upward. Like most shooters, he’d turned his gun shoulder forward slightly, which threw him slightly off balance. She slammed her body into him to accentuate his balance problem. A quick hook with her ankle, a karate thrust with the heel of her hand to his shoulder, and he spun to the ground, his gun arm trapped underneath him.
He made a credible grab for her in the jiujitsu style, but she ducked and slipped the grappling hold. This time she rolled him swiftly to his back and straddled his chest. She wanted to look him in the eye when she told him to cut out the martial arts crap. To that end, she maintained a simple thumb hold on him. It was enough to control him if he got any crazy ideas, but it wasn’t as psychologically overwhelming as the armlock she’d put on him earlier.
He relaxed beneath her legs. She glared down at him and…and her thoughts derailed completely. Wow. Now those were blue eyes. A bright cobalt color lifted straight from the Caribbean Sea.
His mouth curved up into a disarming smile. “I can’t believe it took pulling a gun to get you to show your true feelings for me, darlin’.”
She leaned back on her heels, which put most of her weight on his stomach. His abdominal muscles contracted into a hard washboard beneath her rear end, supporting her body weight easily. Yowza. It was a struggle to maintain her usual even expression.
“Are you done pulling stupid stunts on me, Captain Steiger, or am I out of here?”
His grinned widened. “Depends on how you define stupid.”
She arched an eyebrow and replied dryly, “Are you sure you want me to respond to that remark? I’m not sure your ego could take it.”
“Ouch. No wonder they call you Cobra. The lady has fangs.”
She shrugged. “I thought it was because I spit so well.”
Startled laughter escaped him. “How ’bout I put down the cap gun and you let me up off the playground before the other kids start calling me a sissy? As a show of good faith, I’ll go first.”
She watched impassively as he laid the pistol down by her left knee and slowly lifted his hand away from it. She released his other thumb, her senses on high alert.
She leaned forward, preparatory to climbing off him, when he murmured, “Where are you going? I kinda like you like this.”
It wasn’t his words that froze her in place. It was the low purr of his voice, sliding roughly over her skin, no longer boyish but suddenly all man. Or perhaps it was the explosion of…something…low in her belly in response to that black velvet tone of voice.
Her gaze lifted to his in shock. Blue met brown. And to his credit, he didn’t smirk at her. In fact, he looked nearly as stunned as she did. They stared deeply at one another for an eternity. Instinctive recognition flared between them. If she didn’t know better, she’d say they’d met before. Been passionate lovers in some previous place and time.
“Little Kitty Kat,” he crooned.
Shock exploded in her. How did he know that was what Hidoshi called her in his rare affectionate moments? He couldn’t possibly…It was just coincidence…but a superstitious chill shivered through her, nonetheless.
His big hands moved slowly—smart man—and came to rest on the tops of her thighs, by her hips. Through the thin fabric of her bodysuit, his palms scalded her.
“Don’t go,” he murmured, half order, half plea.
“What’s happening?” she breathed.
“Don’t you know?”
She shook her head, wide-eyed.
“Grandmère called it Cupid’s Bolt.”
She frowned. Sometimes she felt at a real disadvantage with American slang. Having spent her childhood abroad, she often missed pop-culture references. “I’m sorry—what?”
The last thing she expected entered his brilliant gaze. Unmistakable tenderness. He replied softly, “Cupid’s Bolt. It’s when you meet someone and it feels like you’ve been gob-smacked by a big ol’ bolt of lighting. Grandmère says it doesn’t happen to many folks. But to a lucky few…”
“What happens?” Kat prompted when he didn’t continue.
He shrugged. “Game over. True love. Soul mates. Till death do us part.”
She was so stunned her jaw actually sagged open.
“We’ve been struck by Cupid’s Bolt, darlin’. It’s inevitable. You and me. Get used to it.”
“You’re telling me we shared a look, and you’ve declared me your future…what?…sex kitten?”
He laughed. “That doesn’t begin to cover it.
”
Panic threatened to creep into her voice. She managed to force it down, but it was a close call. “What then? Wife? Mother of your children? Soul mate? That’s absurd. I’m not even in the market for a relationship, let alone that other stuff.”
“Glad to hear it because you’re plumb off the market, effective now. You’re mine.”
“Oh, puh-lease.”
He grinned up at her. “I get dibs on telling you I told you so.”
He was positively out of his mind. Sure, a tiny part of her twittered like some green girl at how romantic the whole notion was. And he certainly was easy on the eye. But soul mates? Happily ever after? So not in the cards for her.
Long ago she’d dedicated her life to a principle, junjo-do, the way of the pure heart. She hadn’t dedicated part of her life to that way. She’d dedicated her entire self to the pursuit.
He shrugged philosophically, causing movement between her thighs that drew her attention sharply and completely. His voice was dead serious. “You wait and see. That was Cupid’s Bolt, or my name’s not Jefferson Delacroix Steiger.”
Desperate to lighten the mood and distract him, she quipped, “Delacroix? Did your parents hate you?”
He grinned. Better. Although, man, that thousand-watt smile went right through her. She became aware of his thumbs rubbing absent circles on her legs, straying disturbingly near the sensitive flesh of her inner thighs. She was torn as to whether to ignore it or call attention to it by asking him to stop.
“Delacroix is my mother’s maiden name. Our firstborn can have your maiden name, if you like. Although with a name like Kim, I sure hope it’s a girl. I’d hate to stick our son with Kim for a middle name.”
“Our—” She was speechless. He was already naming their children? He was certifiable!
He continued blithely, “I suppose growing up with a name like that would help a boy develop character, though.”
“Or a hell of a right hook,” she added wryly.
Jeff nodded gravely. “If you teach him to fight, he’ll have nothing to worry about on that score.”
