On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  He’d done all right for himself, sure, especially since coming on board with Special Defense Force, but Honey still didn’t have any business being in this Land Cruiser with him. Under normal circumstances, their paths would not have come within a hundred miles of each other, let alone crossed.

  “I can guarantee you that redneck Arkansas fathers don’t hand out too many of their edicts from a distance,” he said, reaching over and taking the small bottle out of her hand.

  Honey was a quick girl, and she didn’t miss his implication.

  “He hurt her?” Her voice was even softer than before.

  Smith finished the bourbon, all five drops of it, and thought that someday he should take her out for a real drink, something with a mixer in it, or at least ice—and maybe dinner, something that didn’t come out of her purse.

  He handed the bottle back. There wasn’t much of his life he could talk about, nothing he’d done professionally. Most of his missions were going to the grave with him, shared only with the men and women who’d been there.

  But in the dark, in the rain, with a woman he liked far more than he should, he could talk about sweet Melinda Jo.

  “My father remarried years ago, but he keeps a picture of my mother on a bookshelf in the family room. I remember she always wore jeans or slacks of some sort, but the day the picture was taken, she was wearing a dress. I was fifteen when my cousin pointed something out to me I’d never noticed. It was strange—I’d looked at the photograph hundreds of times, and yet I’d never seen the scar on her leg. I thought it was a shadow, a trick of the light or something, but my cousin had the story, and in the way of every family’s dirty laundry, he’d decided it was time to air it out and put me in the know.”

  She was very still, waiting, her mouth set, her gaze unwavering. With such a buildup, she had to know what was coming, and Smith wished like hell he could disappoint her. But the only disappointment in the story was its truth.

  “It was a burn scar, almost a brand. My grandpa laid into her with a hot poker one night and deliberately held it on her leg to mark her. She was only thirteen at the time.”

  Honey’s hand came to the base of her throat, the concern on her face turning to unmistakable shock.

  “I’m—I’m so sorry.”

  “I’d never really liked the old bastard,” he said. “But after I found out what he’d done, I hated him. That he had scarred her. That he’d hurt my mom.”

  He stopped and shifted his attention out the windshield, waiting for a moment.

  Okay. Maybe he had a little more emotion in him than he’d thought. He still hated the old bastard, and Walter Hill had been dead for twenty years—and it had probably been six years since he’d given the son of a bitch a thought.

  Well, hell. “It was a long time ago.”

  He dragged his hand back through his hair, then draped his arm over the steering wheel.

  “Her life, and the old shack where they lived, it was way below the poverty line. Nothing but squalor, abuse, too much liquor, and never enough education.”

  “Until you.”

  “I got the education,” he agreed. “And thanks to my dad, I managed to skip the squalor and abuse, but make no mistake, I’m still a good fifty percent redneck, no apologies and no regrets. Some of the people I’ve worked for, I think they test for it in the blood.”

  “Because it makes you tough.”

  A small grin curved his mouth. Yeah, that was it, but he was surprised a blue-blooded socialite knew it.

  “Damn near indestructible. It really does take a bullet to kill us, and sometimes even that won’t do the trick.”

  “Us,” she said, saying the word with a surprising thoughtfulness. “You mean guys like you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think there were any other guys like you.”

  His grin broadened.

  Maybe he was in love.

  He hated to think so, really he did. Love had not been his strong suit in life, and the truth was, black patent leather hair bows and gold jewelry aside, he liked Honey too much to want to ruin it with another screwed-up relationship. There were thousands of guys like him in the world. He’d worked with them, bled with them, killed a few—okay, more than a few—and gone up against them, but he honestly didn’t think there were too many Park Avenue princesses knocking around the backwaters of the borderlands in any other Third World country, looking for a sister who should have been the responsibility of the Catholic Church.

  “There’s a couple of other guys out there like me,” he admitted. “But you wouldn’t like either one of them.”

  “Bull,” she said, letting out a short laugh. “I’d probably adore both of them.” Her mouth curved into an easy smile, and another emotion went through him, hot and sweet.

  God, she was gorgeous.

  He remembered what it had been like to kiss her.

  He remembered what it had been like to be inside her, and how she’d felt, naked in his arms—so freaking soft, and so incredibly hot. The whole night in San Luis was permanently hardwired into his memory banks—and there she was, not three feet away, smelling like Paradise perfume in a lingering cloud of cherry whiskey cigar smoke, with her hair coming undone.

  She was so unexpected. Her eyes clear and guileless and such a pure ocean green, her skin so satiny, her hair those hundred subtle shades of blond, everything about her so polished and just so, and then there were the cigarillos and the bourbon, and those hot, soft words she’d spoken in his ear: Do me, Smith.

  Geezus. Those words and the sound of them had truly been seared into his brain.

  What would it take, he wondered, to “do her” again tonight? Complete abandonment of common sense? Total disregard for mission protocol? Or simply giving in to what he wanted—her.

  Dammit. He knew better, but he didn’t think knowing better was going to be much of a deterrent. Not when they were trapped in the middle of nowhere, alone in the dark, with nothing but time on their hands.

  The last guy she’d been with had been him, four months ago in San Luis? He didn’t even want to analyze the huge sense of relief those words had given him. Nobody got exclusive rights off a one-night stand, and if he’d been able to in any way, shape, or form put her out of his mind, none of it would have mattered. But every time he’d seen her picture in the paper, it had mattered. A lot. And driven him a little bit closer to an edge he knew better than to go over for a woman, any woman, but especially a woman he was probably never going to see again the rest of his life.

  But life had thrown him a curve, a whole set of them in extra-small BDUs, and they were sitting next to him in the dark, in the middle of a rainstorm.

  “So the point of all this is about that name you’re thinking.”

  “Yes?” She tilted her head to one side, giving him her full attention.

  “My mother didn’t give me that name. I dreamed it up myself at fifteen, and my dad let me make it legal.”

  She stared at him for a second, then asked the inevitable question. “Why?” Which he always considered one step better than “What in the world were you thinking?”

  “Because I thought it was cool, and I refused to be Walter Smith Rydell for even one more minute after I knew what that old man had done to my mom. My dad never called me Walter anyway. I’d always been Smith to him, after his mom’s side of the family.”

  She still looked slightly incredulous. “And out of all the names in the world, you picked—”

  “Cougar.” He gave in to a grin. “Cougar Rydell. It didn’t get any cooler than that at fifteen. My little brother wanted to change his name to Soaring Eagle, but Dad put his foot down and told him we only had room for one idiot in the family.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “It was the last wild thing I ever did. Scout’s honor.” He held up three fingers in the age-old

  salute.

  “Liar.”

  “Well, there was this one night in San Luis,” he admitted, “at
the Hotel Palacio, I did a ‘wild thing’ that night.”

  Even in the low light, he saw a blush race across her cheeks.

  “You...you’re, you are such a jerk to say it like...to bring it up like that.”

  Probably, but it was the truth.

  Honey crossed her arms and gave him a hard look, or as hard as she could get it.

  “I am so not a wild thing,” she said indignantly. “It was just...that night was just...just—”

  While she tried to figure it out, he sat back and enjoyed the view—green eyes holding his own despite the blush, blond hair, soft mouth, and a tactical vest full of her survival gear—perfume, lipstick, granola bars, a credit card, and a little cash.

  Smith supposed he’d seen worse tac rigs.

  On second thought, no, he hadn’t. No commando was ever going to find comfort by spritzing on perfume. Honey did on a regular basis.

  “—just crazy,” she said, finishing the thought by tightening her arms across her chest with her chin tilted up, silently daring him to discount her version of events.

  Not on a bet.

  “Riots. Explosives. Car bombs. A quarter of a million in U.S. cash. Yeah,” he agreed, leaning forward. “It was pretty crazy.”

  Like what he was thinking.

  Oh, hell. He was more than thinking.

  Reaching out, he slid his hand around the back of her neck and rubbed his thumb across her nape.

  “You are not going to get anywhere with this,” she said, her tone quite firm.

  But she didn’t pull away.

  “I know,” he said, and drew her closer.

  “You are such a jerk.” They were really close now, with her eyes all flinty and no-nonsense, and her Audrey Hepburn updo coming undone, and her mouth looking like the first step to salvation.

  “I know.” He’d been told quite a few times, but never by anyone who looked like her. Nobody looked like her, so perfect, and yet not quite. Being with her all day, he’d noticed a few intriguing flaws. “Two of your bottom teeth are crooked.”

  “You are such a jerk,” she said, and he grinned. “I stopped wearing my retainer when I was twenty-one, which of course is none of your business, no matter what my teeth look like, you jerk.”

  They were both sitting sideways in their seats, meeting halfway over the console.

  “And you have really dark eyebrows for a green-eyed blonde.”

  “I never said I was a natural blonde, and you never even called me, not once, Cougar Rydell.”

  Cougar. God, what she must have thought of that when she’d first heard it. He grinned again and lowered his head, brushing his mouth across her ear and down the side of her neck—and he loved it, just because her skin was so soft and she smelled so good, and because she let him.

  Sure, he needed to be thinking about the mission, and what he was doing, and put it all in the big-picture scheme of things. He needed to be thinking about a truck full of LAWs careening around the mountains in a deluge without him riding shotgun on it. He needed to be thinking about what might be in the briefcase, and how he was going to use it.

  Yeah, he needed to think about all those things, and he was going to—in a minute, or two, or thirty, or sixty, depending on how lucky he got.

  “I had you tracked after I put you on the plane that morning out of San Luis,” he said, his lips barely touching her skin. “I knew where you were every step of the way, and I knew the minute you got home. And the next thing I knew, you were dating the underwear model again.” And that had been the end of it, he’d thought. “So I backed off. I figured your life was back to normal, and you wouldn’t want to be reminded of how out of hand things had gotten in El Salvador.”

  “Completely out of hand,” she said, leaning in to him a little, her hand coming to rest on his chest, which he loved. “I’ve never been involved with anything so...so out of hand.”

  He believed it. Shakespeare in the nude didn’t come close to what had been going on in the streets of San Luis that night, or in his bed in the Hotel Palacio.

  “I wrote you a letter,” he said.

  “I never got it.”

  “I never sent it.”

  He kissed her cheek, and she tilted her head ever so slightly, granting him a little more access to the soft skin on the side of her neck.

  He lightly grazed her with his teeth, and a small shiver went through her.

  Yeah. He needed to be thinking about rifles, grenade launchers, and crates of ammunition, not sex.

  Right.

  But if this got going, it wasn’t going to stop.

  “I wrote you a letter, too,” she said.

  “I didn’t get it.” But he was damned intrigued, wondering if it had been the same sort of carefully worded, “gee, I really, really like you, and even though we have absolutely nothing in common, the next time I’m in Washington, D.C., I could give you a call, if you’d like” type letter.

  “That’s because when I read it over, I had second thoughts.”

  Damn. The same thing had happened to him.

  “What were your second thoughts?” Not that he couldn’t imagine them. They’d probably run pretty much along the same lines as his—long-distance relationship; his job was hard for a lot of women to understand, let alone accept; she was one of the wealthiest women in America—stuff like that.

  “Well, I knew how much I’d paid for my dress, so that was easy, but I didn’t know how much to charge you for the panties. They were a birthday present.”

  He stopped kissing her neck. She’d almost sent him a bill for the clothes she’d left in his room at the Hotel Palacio?

  “You were going to send me a bill?”

  “Itemized,” she whispered, tunneling her hand up into his hair. “Including my gun and the bullet I bought.”

  Goddamn. He grinned. She’d written him out a damn bill.

  He laughed against her skin and bit her neck, just hard enough to make her giggle.

  “Who gave you the panties?” They were shameless, so sheer they could only be called “see-through,” and if anything, she owed him for taking that damn gun off her hands.

  “My mother.”

  “I thought mothers gave chastity belts to their daughters, not see-through underwear.”

  “They were on sale, in Paris, buy one, get one free, and she couldn’t resist—all that luscious silk for half price.”

  He grinned again. Luscious was right.

  “Go ahead and send me the bill. I’m keeping them.” He wasn’t a trophy kind of guy, but those panties were amazing—and he’d gotten them off her.

  “Smith?” she said, moving against him, lifting herself even closer to him.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m wearing the other pair now.”

  And that set the game. Sex won out over common sense, hands down.

  It was all so simple.

  Opening his mouth over hers, he took her in a drugging kiss, cupping her face in one hand, and sliding his other hand up under her shirt. When he reached her lacy, satiny bra, she made a soft sound in the back of her throat. She was so lush and full, and hearing her groan and feeling her nipple harden was enough to send a flood of heat to his groin.

  He shifted in his seat, trying to get closer to her, wanting more.

  God, she was sweet, such a visceral addiction, all heat, the taste, and feel, and scent of her imprinted on every fantasy he’d had in the last four months, which had done nothing but drive him goddamn crazy. He’d wanted to forget, not remember. But every time sex had crossed his mind, Honey had been hot on its tail.

  Today had been such a tease, to be with her and meet the challenge of keeping his memories and his imagination in check. He’d done a pretty damn poor job of it. Every inch of bare skin had made him want to run his tongue over her to make a connection, to get her wet and mark her as his—the side of her neck, the tender inside of her wrist, the short expanse of bare leg between her rolled-up BDU trousers and her rolled-down socks. He wanted his mo
uth on her everywhere.

  It was a conquest thing, meeting the challenge, and she was such an exquisite challenge. Yeah, he knew the goal. He understood what was happening between them.

  Except for the part about practically wanting to eat her, so gently, so carefully; to somehow bring her inside of himself without leaving a mark or taking a bite. It was like he wanted to meld with her, but he wasn’t a guy who “melded.” He was a guy who conquered.

  Okay, it was a little crazy how much he’d thought about her, how much he wanted her, and there was nothing about the fact that had made him happy. His life was all about control, and wanting something he couldn’t have did not fit the paradigm.

  But here she was—in his arms, and he’d gotten hard by simply touching her breast, holding her in his palm, feeling the weight and softness of her. And he knew she’d gotten wet, because as close as he was trying to get to her, she was trying to get to him—something they were going to have a damn hard time doing in bucket seats.

  He kissed her deeper, and unsnapped her bra, and wished they were in a bed for one simple reason: access.

  That’s what he wanted. That’s what he needed.

  “I don’t think—”

  “I don’t, either.” Geezus. How could he think with one of her hands sliding up his thigh and the other one sliding under his shirt?

  “We need to—”

  “Yes.” They needed to bail out of this impossible front seat into the back cargo area.

  “Oh,” she breathed softly, when the hand she had between his legs finally slid those last few inches home.

  Yeah.

  Oh.

  Suddenly, bailing into the cargo area dropped a few rungs on his priority list.

  Staying put had hit the number-one slot.

  Staying put and getting his pants off.

  “Oh,” she said again, running her hand up the length of him, but it was even more of a breath, less of a word.

  Their mouths were touching, but the only movement between them was her hands unbuttoning his pants.