Just sex?
“I don’t think so, Baby Blue,” she said aloud as she tossed back the covers and headed for the shower in the master bath.
Time, she told herself, would tell. He wasn’t much for words, this man who was determined to keep his distance but just couldn’t seem to make that happen. He cared about her. Had reached out to her when she’d been hurting—over Neal’s death. Over the disaster that was suddenly her life.
In the meantime, she could wait him out. Wait for him to figure out what she already knew. He loved her. He couldn’t make love to her like that if he didn’t. Yeah, she could wait. And think about all the things he made her feel.
It beat thinking about Grimm, she thought as the hot water stung the cuts on her ankle.
But think about him she did as she dressed and headed downstairs, tensing up again over the prospect of what disaster this day had in store for them.
He bellied down on the rise overlooking the log lodge and focused the binocs.
First-class digs, he thought, ignoring the biting pain in his shoulder. Ignoring the blood that had started seeping from the dressing.
He still couldn’t believe that the bitch had shot him. Couldn’t fucking believe it. She wasn’t what he’d thought she was. He’d thought she was as soft as her name. Sweet Baby Jane.
But she wasn’t. Wasn’t anything like what he’d thought. And she shouldn’t have shot him. It was a humiliation.
And it was going to be the end of her.
Yeah, the game had changed that night in the cave. And what he’d wanted from her before was a far cry from what he wanted now.
Now, he just wanted her dead.
By midnight, she would be. Her and her guard dog.
A fly buzzed around his head. He ignored it, concentrated on committing the lay of the land to memory. He did his best work at night. And when he got done with them tonight, there wouldn’t be a body part big enough to identify.
He was saving his best work for last. He rubbed absently at his shoulder where the round from his own weapon had ripped open his flesh. Yeah. He had something special in mind for Janey Perkins. Something that had been a long time coming.
On elbows and knees, he backed away from the ridge. He needed to get somewhere and stop the bleeding. Needed something to stall the infection he felt building inside him and ripping through his body like shards of glass.
Then he’d be back. After dark. After he’d rested. After he’d worked out his plan of action.
There were a number of ways he could take both of them out. He just had to figure out the most satisfying. By nightfall he would. And then it would be all over but the headlines after the remains of their lifeless bodies were found.
Jase stood by the wall of glass windows making up the front of the lodge, looking through a pair of binocs. He scanned the rock-and-aspen-lined ridge about 150 yards from the lodge, searching for a flash of light. The one he’d seen moments ago—like sun glinting off glass.
Nothing. There was nothing there now. Maybe it had been a play of light and shadows. And maybe someone was up there.
“Hey,” Janey said behind him.
He lowered the binocs, turned at the sound of her voice—totally unprepared for the emotions that slammed through him at the look of her standing at the foot of a staircase crafted of mountain pine.
She looked as bright and clean as a shiny penny. Her hair was damp from a shower; she’d pulled it back into a long tail at her nape. Her face glowed all pink and pretty against an emerald-green top that she’d tucked into snug jeans. Her feet were bare. Everything about her shouted vitality and verve and unembellished confidence.
Everything but her eyes. Her eyes gave away what she was feeling. A shy hesitance. A reluctant uncertainty.
And he felt a stab of guilt. He’d put that look in her eyes. He’d turned away from her after the first time they’d made love. Had told her they had no future after the second.
He still didn’t know if they had a future but no way could he keep his distance this morning.
“Come here,” he said gruffly. When she lingered on the bottom step, he went to her instead.
And held her. Just held her, wallowing in the mountain-stream scent of her hair, in the warmth of her incredible, responsive body, reveling in the way she clung to him.
And for the moment, it was enough. Enough that she understood she was more to him than hot sex and an assignment. Enough that when he pulled away and looked into her eyes, she understood he was in far deeper than he wanted to be. Enough that she knew they were closer to a beginning than they were to an end—but that he had a lot of sorting to do. A lot of thinking—once he got her out of this alive.
“How are you?” He touched the back of his knuckles to the delicate rise of her cheekbone.
“Good. I’m good.”
Her mother was dead. A friend was dead. Max Cogan was in debt up to his eyeballs with the mob—Jase hadn’t broken that news yet—and there was a trail of bodies that he suspected would eventually lead to her.
But she was good. Sure she was.
He let it pass. No good would come from pointing out the obvious.
Arm around her shoulders, he walked her toward the kitchen. Sat her down at the table and fed her again. He really liked feeding her.
“Other than in the cave,” he began, swinging a chair around so the back faced the table, then straddling it, “have you ever shot a gun?”
“That would be a no,” she admitted after swallowing a bite of strawberry. The cross hanging just above her cleavage caught the sunlight shining through the window. “Are we going to need to change that?”
“Grimm hasn’t shown up anywhere,” he said, passing on information No had given him in an early-morning phone call. “That means one of three things. He’s dead, holed up somewhere licking his wounds, or on the move.”
Her face drained to pale. “Dead?”
He knew what she was thinking. The same thing he’d thought the first time he’d pulled a trigger and a heart had stopped beating.
“Janey—he was going to kill you. He would have killed me, too. You don’t have to justify. You don’t have to second-guess. If he’s dead, it was his doing, not yours.”
She nodded, but her eyes told the tale. The thought of taking a life horrified her.
“How did you do it?” Huge brown eyes turned on his. “How did you go to war? How do you—”
“Live with myself knowing that people are dead because of me?”
She swallowed. Nodded.
“The world is full of bad guys. Whether they’re terrorists, jihadists, psychopaths . . . doesn’t matter. If we don’t kill them, they won’t think twice about killing us. It’s a job. It has to be done.”
“And you . . . get used to it?”
“Never. But you deal with it. And you move on.”
At least you tried. He knew of guys. Guys who had come back, couldn’t cope, couldn’t compartmentalize. Some of them ended up dead. Some were drunks. Some were twisted.
He’d come close on all counts. And he thanked God every day that he’d pulled out of the abyss.
22
They spent a better part of the day doing target practice. Janey had proven to be a pretty good shot. Then, rifles in hand, they’d hiked up the rise to the spot where Jase thought he’d seen that flash of light.
“What do you think?” Janey asked as he searched the area.
“Someone was definitely here. Could have been a hiker or a hunter.” He squatted down on his heels to touch the scrub grass, study the indentation that could have been made by a man lying on his belly watching them through a pair of binocs—or a rifle scope.
“Or it could have been Grimm,” she finished what Jase hadn’t wanted to say.
He shook his head. “I still can’t figure it. How he keeps finding you.”
She looked up at him, squinting against the sunlight that glinted off her cross.
And that’s when it hit him.
<
br /> Man. Oh man. How the hell did I miss it?
He grabbed her hand. “Come on. We need to get back to the lodge. There’s something I want to check out.”
Fifteen minutes later, they stood under the canned lighting in the well-lit kitchen.
He reached out, lifted the cross away from chest. “You started wearing this . . . when? After your mother died, right?”
She nodded, looking confused.
“Ever take it off?”
“No. Not since I found it.”
His mind flashed back to another sunny day.
“That day in Atlantic City. The day we ran on the beach. You didn’t wear it then.”
She frowned, then followed his gaze downward to the cross. “That’s right. You made me take it off along with the rest of—”
“Of the bling,” he finished. “And when we came back, Grimm had been in your room.
“Take it off,” he said.
Sensing his urgency, she reached behind her and unclasped the chain.
“Fuck,” he muttered after he’d inspected the cross.
“What?”
“See this?” He held the piece of fake gold jewelry on its side. A seam was clearly visible. “I’m guessing if we pop this apart, a transmitter is going to fall out.”
“Transmitter?”
“A receiver for a tracking device,” he clarified. “I need to check it out, Janey.”
“Christ,” he said a few minutes later. He’d carefully pried the two halves of the cross apart and now held a tiny piece of metal on the tip of his finger. “No wonder the bastard shows up everywhere you do. When he broke into your suite that day, he must have planted this in the necklace. He’s been tracking you every step of the way since.”
“Which means he could be watching us right now,” Janey said, her gaze locked on his.
“Yeah. That’s exactly what it means.”
It was too easy. Like catching fish in a barrel, he thought as he lowered the black ski mask over his face and crept through the midnight dark to the log lodge.
There he waited, his back plastered against an exterior wall. And he listened. Silence. Nothing but silence.
He felt strong again. Rested. The bleeding had stopped. The antibiotics had started to kick in. It never ceased to amaze him that local yokels who ran businesses in these Podunk cowboy towns thought a locked door meant protection. The back door to the pharmacy was wood, for God’s sake. He could have busted it down with one kick. A pick kit had been just as effective—and quieter.
The two of them—Janey and her bodyguard, he thought with disdain—were asleep inside. He was 99 percent certain of it. He’d watched from the ridge for several hours as they’d moved through the house—cozy as hell—before darkness fell and they finally walked up the stairs. A light had come on in an upper-story window—in a bedroom where they had probably fucked like rabbits.
There weren’t any lights on now. Hadn’t been for two hours. He hadn’t minded the wait. Not after biding his time this long.
He pulled the Glock out of his belt. He wasn’t messing with a rifle this time. Too cumbersome. The Glock wasn’t his weapon of choice, but it would do. And the knife tucked into the sheath in his boot would provide entertainment after.
Quiet as a cat, he moved to the rear of the lodge and what he’d determined was the kitchen door. It was locked. He’d expected it to be. Just as he’d expected the electronic security system. He took care of that with a quick snip of wire cutters to the electrical box hidden behind a network of vines.
Then he took out the electricity and phone, halfway wishing for more of a challenge. Rich people. They paid thousands for security systems, then relied on the local Barneys to come to their rescue when a system was breached.
He’d be long gone before the Jackson Hole police department responded to the silent alarm. And Janey Perkins and her “bodyguard” would be long dead.
His heart was pumping—a nice adrenaline rush—by the time he slipped inside. Waited. Listened. Then proceeded toward the stairs.
At the top of the landing he stopped again. Waited again. Listened again. Dead quiet. Exactly the way he wanted it.
They were exactly where he wanted them, too, as he slowly eased open the bedroom door with the barrel of the Glock and slipped inside.
He could just make out the outline of two figures huddled together beneath a snow-white comforter. And if he acted now, he’d be on a flight out of here in forty-five minutes.
He lifted the gun, mouthed a silent, Adios, suckers, and squeezed off six rounds without batting an eye.
His shoulder was still vibrating from the recoil and the acid scent of gunpowder permeated the air when he slipped a penlight out of his breast pocket. He walked to the bed and whipped back the covers.
“What the—”
“Drop the gun.”
He whipped around, aimed the Glock toward the direction of the voice—and heard, more than felt, the report of the rifle that was pointed dead center at his chest.
The pain was a vague, nebulous sensation as he lifted his hand and felt the wet, gaping hole directly over his heart. The cold, however, was dramatic and intense as he felt his legs buckle and he crumpled to the floor.
The darkness, when it came, was cavernous and vast.
He was a dead man. After all he’d been. After all he’d done. He was a dead man.
And the bitch of it was, he hadn’t even seen it coming.
It wasn’t Grimm.
It wasn’t Grimm.
Janey couldn’t believe it. Could hardly believe the man who had been trying to kill her was dead—and that they were alive. If it hadn’t been for Wilson’s intuition and planning, they probably wouldn’t be.
“Got a feelin’,” he’d said shortly after he’d discovered the tracking device in her cross.
And then he’d told her what he planned to do.
“He’s not going to strike in the daylight. If he’d planned to, he’d have done it today. He’s going to come after us after dark—like the night viper he is.”
He’d kept her calm through the rest of the afternoon. Made certain they were just visible enough, just long enough, that if anyone had been watching them, he’d never get a clear shot through the windows. Made sure he was always close beside her, always between her and a possible bullet.
The two hours they’d spent in the dark in the upstairs bedroom behind the door had felt like two decades.
“If you hear anything—anything at all,” Baby Blue had whispered close to her ear, “tell me.”
She’d understood then how concerned he was about his hearing loss. Turned out, he didn’t have to worry. She’d actually dozed off—amazing—and he’d awakened her with a finger to her lips and a nod toward the door.
That was when she’d heard it. Above the frantic beat of her heart, she’d heard the faint sound of footsteps on the floor outside the bedroom door.
She’d heard the shots all right. Flinched and bit her lip to keep from crying out when the gunman had stood just inside the door they were hiding behind and, cold and calculating, killed the hell out of their pillows.
She shivered and snuggled closer to Baby Blue, who was on his cell phone filling Nolan in.
“No,” he told Nolan again. “It wasn’t Grimm. No. She’s never seen this guy before. The detective on scene is going to fax a photo to Boston and Atlantic City and Tupelo. I’ve already called Rodman and told him he’d be hearing from you. He’s agreed to fax you a copy.”
She stared out the window as the last of the police cars and the hearse carrying the county ME and the shooter’s body drove down the lane and out of sight. Nolan said something on the other end that she couldn’t hear.
“Yeah. The receiver was on him. I’ll be overnighting the transmitter to you in the morning so you can check it out. . . . Yeah, well, I thought you could do more with it than the local police. It’ll be a big oops on my part if it comes to an obstruction charge, but since the guy is dead,
I don’t see the problem.”
He hung up shortly after that.
“How you doing?” He cupped her shoulders in his hands and turned her to face him. The electricity was out, but she’d found several candles and busied herself lighting them all over the living area while he’d talked to the police.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I should feel relief. And I do . . . to a degree.”
“But all this time you’ve been expecting Grimm,” he concluded accurately.
“You think . . . you think maybe this guy . . . maybe he was the one who murdered my mother? And those women?”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. Whether the police can ever tie him to any of those deaths . . . that’s a different matter.”
She leaned into him when he pulled her against him, kissed the top of her head. “And where does that leave Grimm in the mix?”
He squeezed her harder. “Got me, babe. But we’ll get there. We’ll get to the bottom of all of this. In the meantime—”
“The worst is over,” she said, and prayed to God she was right.
His cell phone rang. “Wilson,” he said, after fishing it out of his hip pocket.
Lost in thought, she tuned out of the one-sided conversation until she realized he’d hung up. And that he’d become very quiet.
She pulled back. Looked up and into his face. His ashen face.
“Oh, God. What now?”
“It’s Max. He’s in the hospital. He’s had a heart attack.”
Monday evening, July 24th, CCU waiting area, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles
“Janey, you’re not going to do him any good if you drop from exhaustion.”
Jase was worried about her. He sat on a small vinyl sofa on Janey’s left. Lakesha Jones sat on her right.
“He’s right, Janey. You should go home. Or go to a hotel. Get some rest.”
“I’m staying,” she said stubbornly, and Lakesha rolled her eyes over Janey’s head.
Janey hadn’t even had time to process that a man who had tried to kill her was dead, that she could have died, and that Grimm was still alive.
Cindy Gerard - [Bodyguards 04] Page 25
