by Leslie Jones
“That’s what I figured. And you’ll have a bodyguard.”
Uh-oh.
“Trevor?” She and Trevor shared a history. She trusted him. He had saved her life.
“No. But you know him. He was one of the Delta Force soldiers you worked with in Azakistan.”
And just like that, Christina knew. Of all the people she never wanted to see again, he topped the list. Therefore, it had to be him. She barely kept herself from sticking her fingers into her ears and singing, “Lalalalala.”
“Gabriel Morgan.”
GABE MORGAN GAPED at Jace, his commanding officer. “You want me to do what?”
His gaze glanced off the multipaned windows on two sides of the main troop area; past the American and North Carolina flags; the mess of desks, chairs and sofas; to his own overflowing inbox and the dead fern on the edge of the desk. He flipped the throwing knife in his hand and flicked it toward the human silhouette tacked to a wooden target hanging thirty feet away, on the other side of the room. Thomas ‘Mace’ Beckett, his nose buried in the latest John Grisham book, barely glanced up as the blade passed within inches of his head.
He hefted the second throwing knife, pointed its tip toward Jace Reed, then carefully, gently, set it on his scarred and pitted desk. He placed his palms flat against its surface, elbows locked, spine stiff as he leaned forward. He glared into Jace’s eyes.
“You can say no.” Unintimidated, Jace tapped a manila folder against the gray metal desk, standard Army issue, functional and ugly. “You know. If you think you can’t handle it, I can assign you something easier, like walking General McCutcheon’s wife’s Pomeranian.”
Gabe blanched. It wasn’t an idle threat. He’d long ago filed both the Pomeranian and the wife under To Be Avoided At All Costs. He didn’t know which was the bigger yappy terror. “Good God. Shoot me now.”
Jace snickered.
“I don’t understand why we’re being tapped instead of the SAS,” Gabe said. “If Trevor Carswell is heading the investigation, why isn’t his team protecting her?”
Jace glanced around. Gabe followed his gaze. Sandman and Tag were pushing ’em out, egging each other on. The pushup contest had been going on for a while. Ken Acolatse cleaned his Sig Sauer. Gavin had his earbuds in, head and feet tapping in time to God-knows-what kind of music. Alex tacked yet another Call of Duty poster to the wall. Kid was obsessed.
“They’ll be guarding the real target,” Jace said. “He’s only got the one team, though, and he can’t get authorization for another. He asked for my help, and, lucky you, I’m assigning you the job. It’ll be a cakewalk.”
Gabe felt a shudder work its way down his spine. “Assign someone else. Jace, Jesus. Nothing’s ever a cakewalk when those people are involved.” His fists clenched. He wouldn’t resort to begging.
Sympathy flickered in Jace’s eyes. “I could do that,” he said quietly, all humor gone. “We work with other agencies regularly, though. I need you to be able to handle it. Or I need to know you can’t.”
“You realize that if I do this, I’ll be useless for undercover work,” he said, even knowing the excuse wouldn’t hold water. It wasn’t the assignment. He’d done executive protection work before. An executive protector—bodyguard—could do any number of other jobs. There would be nothing to connect him with Delta Force, which relied on strict anonymity in its work. That’s not what set his teeth on edge.
It was the who.
Christina Freaking Madison.
“You know better. Even if you’re undercover and recognized, that won’t ID you as one of the good guys. Maybe the opposite, if you can convince our assassin you’re a douchebag.” He grinned. “Not a huge stretch.”
Gabe ignored him. It had been, what? Six months? Yeah, about that long ago. His team had been in Azakistan, helping foil a plot by a twisted bastard who tried to release a deadly cocktail of poisonous gases into crowds of families on a US airbase. Christina Madison had gotten photographs of the terrorists for them, but she was also an annoying, brash, inexperienced junior officer of the CIA, an organization he loathed. Sure, she was attractive, with a tight little body that revved his motor, but she would also no doubt be a pain in his ass. And certainly not someone he could trust to watch his six.
“Yo. Sleeping beauty.” Jace snapped his fingers in front of Gabe’s face. “Where’d you go?”
Gabe straightened abruptly, scooping up the knife and flicking it toward the target with barely a glance. It penetrated deep into the wood. “Nowhere. So you want me to pretend to guard a pretend princess? But in fact, she’s going to be bait, to draw out the person or persons who tried to kill the real princess? That about it?”
“In a nutshell. You got a problem, Morgan? Let’s hear it.”
“You know what my problem is.” Gabe pushed a hand through his shaggy hair. “You know who she is, boss. She’s unreliable. Her team almost got killed in Iraq.”
Jace nodded. “And she’s CIA, which means you’re already prejudiced against her. I get it. Between your mother and the Peru fiasco, you’ve got some heavy baggage.”
Baggage? Hell, yeah, he had baggage. All it took was one CIA motherfucker to ruin a mission. Or a family.
“If it makes you feel any better, her job really is just to be bait. You’ll be in charge of security and laying the trap. She’s the cheese. You reel in the rats.”
Gabe grimaced. “She’s a hothead. I don’t need to be trying to corral her while I’m laying the trap.”
“Her boss assured me of her complete cooperation,” Jace said dryly. “Apparently, her ass is on the line. If she messes this up, she’s done. And she knows it.”
Gabe stalked to the human-shaped target and yanked both knives out of the silhouette’s throat. He rammed them back into the special sheaths in his boots.
“Fuck.”
CHRISTINA DROVE UP the Capital Beltway toward Silver Spring, cataloguing the things she would need to do before flying to Concordia’s capital city of Parvenière the next day: put a hold on her mail, ask her neighbor to water her plants, clean out the refrigerator. She needed to get her leather jacket back from Frank the Fink, but that wasn’t going to happen before she flew. The jerk. He’d been anything but frank with her. As soon as he’d heard the rumors about her within the Company, he’d treated her like a plague victim.
Unbidden, her mind slid from unremarkable Frank to six feet one inch of hard muscle and overlong, dirty blond hair. To sculpted cheekbones and a strong jaw that he usually kept covered with two days’ worth of stubble. To cynical eyes and lips that tipped up at one corner, as though the world around him both amused and bored him.
The Friday afternoon rush hour and her preoccupation with Gabe Morgan almost caused her to miss the gray panel van. By the time she noticed it, it had followed her from the Beltway onto Georgia Avenue. When she reached Woodside Park on Spring Street, she felt certain she was being followed.
The question was, by whom? Truthfully, Christina couldn’t generate much inward alarm. The CIA trained constantly in surveillance and countersurveillance. It wouldn’t be the first time a class of newbies in the Surveillance Detection Training Program had been assigned to track the movements of CIA field officers. It provided good practice for both groups. And she could be off the mark entirely; this could be merely a delivery truck.
She turned left onto Ballard Street, past the Methodist church with the blooming cherry tree. Sure enough, the van, which had been lagging five car lengths behind her, appeared moments later. She flicked a glance in the rearview mirror. Amateurs. A tiny smile tugged at her mouth. The trainees were obvious and anxious.
Small houses and mature trees lined the streets. She eased left around a Volkswagen Rabbit and immediately swerved to avoid an elderly couple coming through the gate of a yard enclosed by a brown picket fence. As she passed the No Outlet sign, she chuckled aloud. She could
navigate these streets blindfolded. The trainees couldn’t.
Third Avenue dead-ended at a yellow house. Without hesitation, she left the pavement for the dirt track, winding her way past the huge logs and tangled undergrowth. In moments, she pulled out onto Second Street. Easing past another elderly couple strolling on the street instead of the sidewalk, she made it to the end of the road and turned left before the van caught sight of her.
She ducked in and out of several more residential areas, switching streets and doubling back. When she felt she’d lost the van, she turned onto a dead-end street and backed into an open carport, turning off the ignition quickly. Yes, they would see a black Corolla if they made it this far. Black Corollas were ubiquitous in the D.C. area. They would only be able to see her front license plate if they were dumb enough to drive into the dead end. She ducked down, pulling a small telescoping mirror from her glove box. Angling it over the dash, she waited.
Her mind wandered back to Gabe Morgan, and how he would react when he found out he would be forced not only to work with her again, but to protect her. The first time they’d met, he’d done everything but tell her outright that she had no place in Azakistan, where she had been sent to recruit an asset. The rumors about her very first mission had washed through the Delta Force detachment on al-Zadr Air Force Base almost before she’d walked through the doors of their Tactical Operations Center. The stories shouldn’t still hurt a year after the incident, but they did.
Thirty minutes later, she stretched stiff muscles and started the car again, mirth tugging at her lips. She’d lost the gray van. Score one for field officers, zero for recruits. She’d report the incident per standard operating procedure, then pop down to the surveillance center and have a chat and a laugh with her old instructor. Yawning, she drove out of the maze of houses and headed home, keeping a sharp eye out for other suspicious vehicles. Once she turned onto her own street, she relaxed.
The part of her mind not involved in countersurveillance considered the problem of Gabe Morgan. Convincing him that she would be an asset on this mission would be difficult. She didn’t kid herself that she would be in charge. Delta Force teams took orders from JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command—not from the CIA.
The gray van hurtled out of nowhere, sliding sideways across the pavement and rocking to a halt only feet away from the hood of her car. Reacting on instinct, Christina twisted the wheel hard to the left as she slammed on the brake. The rear of her car protested the abrupt change in direction as it skidded. Her defensive driving training coming to the fore, she did not wait to find out what the van’s occupants had in mind. She rammed the accelerator, rocketing sideways and forward, missing being T-boned by millimeters as the van leapt forward to block her path again. It whipped around to follow her as she slipped past, giving her a good look at the driver. Well into his forties, he was too old to be a recruit. He had round, wide features and dark hair. The other remained in shadow. What the hell was going on? This was no surveillance exercise.
Barely a breath ahead of them, she mashed the accelerator into the floor. In moments, both cars shot along the street at breakneck speeds. A sharp turn in the road ahead of her gave Christina a slight edge. She slewed around the corner, trying to take them out of her neighborhood. No way would she endanger civilians.
She dodged around the fast-moving UPS truck in front of her and flashed her brake lights twice before decelerating sharply. As expected, the truck driver stood on his brakes, shouting curses she understood only too clearly through her rearview mirror.
“Sorry, dude,” she muttered. “Not your lucky day.”
The gray van, unable to slow fast enough, tried to swerve around the truck, only to hit a curve. It shot off the road, across a driveway, and hit a brick-encased mailbox. Through a squeal of brakes and mangled metal, the gray van came to a shuddering halt.
Christina pulled over, reversed along the shoulder, and parked in front of the truck, which had also stopped. The UPS driver, a paunchy, sweaty middle-aged man, jumped out of the truck and started toward her. He glowered.
“This accident was your fault,” he said, “and I’m going to make sure the police know it.”
She ignored him, her whole attention on the van, her shaking hand gripping the semiautomatic pistol under her shirt. “Hands where I can see them,” she yelled. “Get out slowly, hands in the air.”
The truck driver gaped at her. “Are you some sort of cop?”
She spared him an irritated glance. “Sir, get back in your truck.”
The van’s engine revved. It jumped backward, crunching over broken brick, and wrestled itself back onto the road. Christina drew her weapon. The van paused a moment, then roared away.
The balding truck driver’s eyes bugged out. “What’s going on? Who were those guys?”
She turned to sprint to her car. The van disappeared around a corner up ahead.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going after them. Wait here for the police.” Who would never come, because Christina wasn’t going to call them. She was too anxious to find out who those men were, and what they wanted. She dashed to her car.
“But who’s going to fill out the police report?” the truck driver wailed as she banged her car door shut.
Those few seconds had cost her. When she turned the corner, the van was nowhere in sight. She searched the area, crossing and recrossing roads until she finally had to admit defeat. Slamming her palms against the steering wheel, she let loose a stream of expletives that would have even Gabe Morgan’s ears turning red.
Chapter Two
PRINCESS VÉRONIQUE WAS elegant, charming, and refined. All of the things Christina wasn’t. She could be described as dogged. Intuitive. Maybe even gutsy. But elegant?
“I’m not sure how Jay expects me to pull this off,” she muttered. And yet, hadn’t she been blending in most of her life? Flitting from personality to personality as easily as a bird shed feathers? It was part of why she’d been recruited to the CIA.
Concordia was a small country, nestled just to the south of Belgium and west of Luxembourg. The flight to its capital city had been long, but peaceful enough. She’d spent the time studying the materials Jay had given her on Princess Véronique and her household staff, the details of the attempt on her life, and the layout of the castle in which she lived. Fourteen hours later, she’d been met by Trevor and his team and smuggled into the princess’s apartments inside the royal palais.
The palace itself had been designed to impress. Inside, the ceilings soared fifty feet, enough to accommodate the double staircase. The first floor consisted of offices and living space for household staff. The west flight of stairs led to the winter residence of the Comtesse and Comte de Defois-Angonne, Princess Véronique’s aunt and her husband. The apartments for the crown princess were located in the east wing.
“Don’t worry,” the princess said, her musical French accent lilting across the room. She set her wineglass on the sideboard, crossed the length of an enormous reproduction of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Apotheosis of Henri IV, and joined Christina near the windows. “I have every confidence in your abilities.”
“That makes one of us.” Christina blew out a breath. “Being in front of the cameras is not exactly my forte.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means I’m used to operating behind the scenes. In the shadows. Where no one sees me.” Thinking she’d be a natural at it because of her chameleon-like abilities, she’d taken an acting class in high school. It had been a disaster. She couldn’t remember her lines or stay in character while she unconsciously tried to blend. Acting meant pretending to be Lady Macbeth or Juliet. Blending was different. When she blended, she fed off the personalities around her and became just like them.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Trevor said. He stretched, lacing his fingers over his head.
His long torso dwarfed the fragile-looking chair, a gilt frame with white cushions sporting elaborate embroidery. “I know you can do this, Christina.”
Christina frowned unhappily, looking up at the massive crystal chandelier as she watched Princess Véronique stroll closer to the high windows, framed by burgundy draperies and topped by elaborate pelmets. The windows overlooked a man-made lake, complete with black swans. “You’re about the only one. Jay would have kept me at a desk forever if not for you contacting the CIA.”
The princess glided back to the sofa and seated herself, crossing one elegant leg over the other. “People see what they wish to see.” She glanced at the man sitting across from her. “M’sieur Carswell, do you not agree?”
“Call me Trevor, please, Your Royal Highness. And yes, that’s been my experience. Also, we’re going to limit your public appearances, Christina.”
“You,” Christina said, “are going straight to a safe house.”
The princess clicked her tongue. “After our princess lessons, non?”
Trevor made a sound of assent. “You’ll have round-the-clock guards, Your Highness. I’m sorry, but you’ll be all but under house arrest.”
“I understand.” The princess inclined her head in acquiescence.
Christina surveyed the sitting room. It was opulent and formal. Delicate settees, spindly-legged chairs, tapestries, and huge formal portraits on the walls. The sitting room was larger than her entire apartment. She shook her head. It was a different lifestyle, that was for sure. “Your home is beautiful.”
Princess Véronique glanced around, as though seeing it for the first time. “Yes, I suppose so. I find myself wishing for something simpler.”
“Why don’t you redecorate? It’s your home, right?” she asked.
Véronique’s smile was small. “We are not a wealthy country, Christina. The expense cannot be spared merely for my whims.”
“But . . .” She shut her mouth. She wasn’t here for that.
