by Alison Kent
She pulled him closer instead, holding on while she whimpered, tipping her lower body upward, asking for the more that he so wanted to give her with body parts other than his fingers or thumb.
Time and place, man. Time and place.
He continued to kiss her, continued to play her, eating up her cries and whimpers the way he wanted to eat up the rest of her. He could taste the change in her, the salty electric tingle along her tongue, and knew she was close to coming.
He wanted to take her there, to give her this pleasure. She was so damn candy sweet, so vibrant, so open. It was a wonder he’d been able to keep his distance at all. He doubted he’d ever keep it again.
And here he’d been so good for so long, swearing off dessert, knowing how bad it was for him. But when Glory tore her mouth from his and whispered his name, when she closed her eyes and gave herself up to his touch, it was a surrender that knocked him breathless.
Her entire body shuddered; he felt her tremors where his limbs were tangled in and out of hers, where his torso held hers pinned to the wall, where his fingers eased her down from the high.
He watched her lashes flutter as she opened her eyes and slowly turned her head to look at him, watched her press her lips together, then bathe them with her tongue.
He pulled his hand from her panties, wishing he could linger and give her even more. But his pants were too tight and he had to get back to work and, ah, hell, a storeroom was no place to make serious love to this woman. Not in all the ways he wanted to.
She moved her hands up and pushed her thick mop of black curls from her face. She smiled then, as she looked at him and said, “Wow.”
He grinned right back. “Good stuff, huh?”
She pulled in a deep, steadying, satisfied breath. “Lemon tortes have nothing on you, Shaughnessey.”
He tossed back his head and laughed. This one was going to be a hell of a lot of fun to get to know better.
A hell of a lot of fun.
Danh ordered his men out of the van with no more than a wave of his hand. Footsteps fell soundlessly in the alley. The vehicle’s doors closed without a creak. He waited for the five to fall in behind him, pressed to the building’s wall, before he eased open the sandwich shop’s back door.
He knew from earlier surveillance that they would be stepping into a small hallway that serviced the shop’s restrooms and storeroom. The goal was to make it into the main shop undetected. Once there, phase two of the plan would be set into motion.
Right now, however, it was time to complete phase one.
He slipped through the door behind his number one man, Quan, standing guard while the other man checked both restrooms—empty—and the storeroom—locked—before blacking out the shop’s security camera with spray paint.
Danh then signaled for the rest of his men to enter, left Quan at his post in the back hallway. He knew there were no scheduled deliveries the rest of the afternoon. Unscheduled, he had to cover for.
At his command, his four men spread out through the sandwich shop on catlike feet. Gasps and screams were cut off rapidly with a single wave of a weapon as Danh motioned the sole employee and five customers to gather at the rear of the shop.
Behind him, his men went to work lowering the blinds on the front windows, the ones covering the main door, the set hanging over the rear exit into the garage. The signs on both doors were turned to “Closed.” The locks were secured as well.
Good. Done. Now to get what he had come for.
“Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. We will take no more than a few minutes of your time, then be on our way. If you will each stand and place your hands behind you, my men will secure both your safety and ours.”
“Just take the money from the till and get the hell out of here.”
Danh turned his attention to the young man wearing the name tag and the brown apron with Brighton’s green-and-yellow logo. “If we were here for the money, Neal, we would be gone by now. Face the wall. Hands at your back. Everyone but you, sir, in the tweed sport coat.”
Two of Danh’s men quickly circled the hostages’ wrists with zip ties. A third spaced out chairs against the side wall and settled their captives as comfortably as possible. The fourth of his men, along with Danh himself, ushered the Spectra agent into the shop’s hallway.
Danh circled him slowly, taking in the costume of wool, cashmere and tweed, the ink-stained fingertips, the brown leather journal he still held tucked beneath his arm. The tiny gold-framed spectacles completed the picture, giving the agent the look of a scholar, a writer, the perfect cliché.
“Professor Shore, correct?” Danh queried, appreciating the brief flash of anger before the other man’s features settled into an expression of fearful concern more appropriate to the situation.
The agent cleared his throat. “If you’ll return the use of my hands, I’ll gladly give you my money clip, my watch, anything you want.”
Danh admired the man’s absorption in his role. Spectra IT trained their agents well. “I am not interested in your money or your possessions, Professor. What I want is something that interests only you and I. Once you turn it over to me, I will release all of you and be on my way.”
“You ain’t going nowhere, dickhead.”
Danh turned at the rudely shouted challenge and stepped back to view the customers lined up like a shooting gallery’s ducks. “You, sir. You plan to stop me?”
“You bet your sweet bippy. Me and my brothers in blue. You’ve heard of New York’s finest? I’m off duty.” He indicated the phone hooked to his belt at his waist. “This baby’s been transmitting to 9-1-1 since you and your Halloween parade started marching around.”
Danh nodded to his nearest associate who removed the cell from the officer’s belt and nodded. A sharp stirring of unease had Danh clamping down on saying more. After all, silence intimidated far greater than swagger. His temples throbbing, he simply inclined his head.
His man sent the hostage to the floor with a blow from the butt of his gun. The two female customers screamed, whimpered, sobbed. Danh’s man acted automatically, quieting them both with duct tape before taking up his position again.
Ignoring the tic at the corner of his eye, Danh returned to his interrogation. Seconds later, a bullhorn outside sounded with a loud, “This is the police!”
The tic grew impossible to ignore. Now Danh was facing the only contingency he’d never planned for.
A standoff.
“What the hell was that?” Tripp jerked his head away from Glory’s and toward the storeroom’s locked door. He stepped back while she smoothed down her shirt, adjusted her skirt and her panties.
Frowning, she followed the direction of his gaze. “It sounded like”—he pressed a silencing finger to his lips; she lowered her voice—“a police bullhorn.”
“Yeah. That’s what I was thinking.” He held out a halting hand. “Stay where you are.”
“Uh, okay,” she said, agreeing like the good little girl who followed orders he obviously thought she was when what she really wanted to do was move the hell away from the one and only entrance into the room. “How long do you want me to stay?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he backed his way across the concrete floor, his gaze trained on the door until he reached the corner and the built-in, fireproof safety cabinet holding her safe, her files, and her security system’s equipment.
She watched, mouth agape, as he twirled the dial on the cabinet’s combination lock and opened the door. She was done standing still. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Shit. Your camera’s down.”
“What?” What the hell was going on here? “Look, Shaughnessey. You don’t tell me how the hell you know my combination, not to mention where my monitor is...” She peered around his shoulder at the small television on top of the VCR recording the store camera’s data.
He was wrong. The camera wasn’t down. She could see movement in one corner. The rest of the lens had been blacked out by s
pray paint judging by the speckles peppering the missed spot. “I’m calling the cops.”
“No,” Tripp barked, but she’d already backed away and lifted the handset from the phone on the wall.
“It’s dead.” She held it out, away from her ear, wondering if the second line in the shop was still working.
Tripp nodded but kept his attention on the coaxial cable running into the back of the TV.
She hung up the useless phone, told herself she was in good hands, that she could trust him, even while a tiny voice reminded her that she didn’t know him well enough to jump to that conclusion.
The things he was doing, the knife he’d pulled from his pocket, the fact that he was cutting into the cable...
She crossed the room, grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the knife, the hand he’d used to make her come, and stared him in the eye. “You tell me what’s going on and tell me now or so help me—”
“What? So help you what? You’ll run out the door into who knows what?” He pulled back the cable’s black covering, shredded what looked like a coating of woven fabric around the core copper wire. “Stay put. That’s all I’m asking.”
She didn’t want to do anything he said, not when he’d suddenly clammed up. Not when everything he was doing was as underhanded and sneaky—if not downright illegal—as anything that would bring out cops with bullhorns.
But staying put was what she ended up doing because she had no better idea. She looked on as Tripp twisted a short strip of the shredded fabric and tapped it against the copper. Three short taps, three long, three short.
An obvious SOS.
“Are you trying to signal the security company?” And why, with the police already outside? “I don’t pay for twenty-four/seven monitoring. No one is going to hear that.”
“They’re not supposed to hear it.”
Glory rubbed a hand to her tense forehead. This was getting worse by the second. “What, then? See it? How can they see it?”
“It’s not your security service I’m trying to reach.” He glanced sharply from the static on the blacked-out feed to the door, his brows drawn down into a deep vee. “Can you take over? Three short, three long—”
“Three short. My degree might be in business, but I did learn your basic SOS.”
“Good girl,” he said.
She wanted to snap and growl at his use of “girl” but, quite frankly, she was too damned worried. Flat-out scared, if the truth be known, taking the cable from his hands.
Scared and suddenly longing for one of the safe-and-so-what-if-he’s-boring dates of her parents’ choosing. She wanted to be anywhere but here with this obviously dangerous man who turned her on, burned her up, then betrayed her by breaking into her not-so-secure security system.
She tapped the twisted fabric to the wire, felt a strange metallic tang in her teeth, wondered who the hell it was she was signaling. And, at the same time, sending out vibes to her mother’s First Presbyterian prayer circle that she wasn’t shorting out her only route of escape.
Sweat ran between Tripp’s shoulder blades and pooled at the base of his spine. He’d been in such a hurry to get to Glory that he’d left his cell on his desk charging. Meaning, having it with him wouldn’t have done him a fat lot of good anyway seeing as how it was dead.
He needed to reach the ops center, let Christian or Kelly John know something was going down. One of them ought to get hungry enough soon to realize he hadn’t returned. Logic told him they’d check his monitor showing the Brighton feed, see the SOS static, and realize he had a situation here on his hands.
He trusted his partners to get him and Glory out. He trusted the cops out front to bungle whatever it was they were doing. Nothing particular against New York City’s finest. His beef was with authority figures in general, letting power go to their heads, twisting the law to suit their purpose, lifting themselves above.
Sorta the way things had gone down in Colombia, leaving him facing the short stick of a court-martial for desertion—a way-the-hell-better scenario than sticking around to face certain death after blowing the whistle on the drug deals his superiors had been making in the name of the law.
With Glory looking on, not looking happy about what he’d asked her to do but at least looking like she wouldn’t give up, he twisted the lock on the door as quietly as he could. Next, he turned the handle, cracked the door open and braced the bulk of his body for an inward attack.
Nothing.
His knife at the ready, he moved his head far enough to peer with one eye through the sliver of an opening, seeing nothing but the brown-and-yellow textured wallpaper and the edge of one of the shop’s signature black-framed prints.
A centimeter wider, and this time the glimpse of black he caught belonged to what looked like the sleeve of a jacket. He shifted to his other eye, got nothing but the same perspective, and so cracked the door open farther.
This time it was enough. He heard snuffling and whimpering and then an indistinctive voice—no accent, no inflection—calmly say, “Our friends outside are not going to deter me, Professor. I plan to be gone before they begin their textbook driven negotiation process to secure the safe release of our hostages.”
Hostages! Shit!
“I would be more than happy to oblige”—this from a second, distinctly cultured voice—“if I had an inkling as to what you were talking about.”
Tripp couldn’t identify the players. The voices were unfamiliar. He had no clue as to what was happening. He only knew that he had to stop whatever it was.
The black sleeve shifted enough for him to see a slice of a head in a black ski mask. Again, no way to identify who or what he was up against without getting closer. He pushed the door closed without a sound, backed his way across the room to where Glory stood.
She stared at him, eyes wide and liquid though she hadn’t shed a tear. She still held the cable he’d handed her, though at some point she’d stopped tapping out the SOS. It was good enough. One of his partners would eventually notice the problem with the Brighton feed.
Once they rewound the tape to find out when what had gone down, they’d devise a rescue plan in a hurry. But he couldn’t wait around for any of that to happen. He wanted Glory safely out of here now. Even if he had to rely solely on himself.
He took the cable from her hands, moved her to the same spot she’d stood in before, before when he’d kissed her, when he’d made her come with his hand. “I want you out of sight in case anyone comes charging through the door.”
“You want me to stay put, you mean.”
“If something happens to you, I’ll never forgive myself for not gorging on dessert when I had the chance.”
She blinked hard to keep away the tears. “You are so not funny, Shaughnessey.”
“No, but you’re crazy about me anyway.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“I’ve been counting on it for weeks already,” he said with a wink. And then he sobered. “I need to find out what’s happening. I don’t want to put you in more danger than you already are, but I have to do this.”
“Do what?” she pleaded in a whisper. “Why don’t you just let the police handle it? I think we’re safe. No one knows we’re here.”
“It won’t take them five seconds to find out. I’d like to know who we’re dealing with here should that happen.”
“We’re not dealing with anyone, Tripp. Please let the police handle it. This is what they’re trained to do.”
What was he going to tell her? That he didn’t trust the police? That he was better trained than the good guys on the bullhorn but he wouldn’t know about the bad guys until he took a closer look?
He finally asked her to simply, “Trust me? I’m not going to do anything stupid.”
She gave him a look in return that said she wouldn’t trust him half as far as she could throw him. So he held her fingers in his, brought them to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. Then he gave her a grin meant to tell her to leave all
the worry to him.
He took his time cracking the door open again. The sleeve and ski mask obviously belonged to a lookout. The shop’s back hallway was only accessible by those already in the shop or those using the alley’s door. Meaning, whoever was making demands inside wanted new arrivals kept out and everyone else kept in place.
He took a deep breath, not sure if he was tamping down or revving up the adrenaline, nodded at Glory, and that was it. He pulled open the door. One long step into the hallway. A hand clamped over the guard’s mouth. Pressure applied to a point just below his carotid.
The man was dead to the world from the choke hold before he even knew what hit him. And deader than deadweight as Tripp dragged him into the storeroom. Glory eased the door closed behind them. No more than a few seconds had passed. No real noise made. Tripp planted a knee in the small of the man’s back.
He didn’t bother with the ski mask yet but emptied all the pockets, finding the two things he’d most wanted to find. A 9mm Beretta and a cell phone.
He tucked the gun into his waistband, punched a number into the phone that no government agency would ever be able to trace, and once connected said, “Shaughnessey.”
Several minutes later, a computerized voice replied, “Thank you,” signaling that his location had been made.
Once the biometric sensor read the scan of Julian Samms’s thumbprint, the ops center’s door slid open. He stepped out of the safety vestibule and into the cavernous room, the hub of SG-5’s activities.
Christian and Kelly John both looked up. One nodded. One lifted a hand in greeting. Tripp wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Eli McKenzie, the fifth member of the original team, had recently returned to the field in Mexico, having recovered from a nasty—and suspicious—poisoning.
“Where’s Shaughnessey?” Julian asked, heading for his own desk to download the files he’d need in Miami where he was headed later today. Ostensibly to save a woman’s life.
What he’d learned about her made him more ambivalent than was wise when prepping for a mission. But this one had tied herself to Spectra IT willingly, and he didn’t have a lot of sympathy for anyone that dumb.
