by Elle Kennedy
A backward glance was all she allowed herself, but it was long enough to lock eyes with the man on the balcony. Tall and lanky, he had a head of thick black hair, eyes the color of charcoal. He looked . . . familiar.
Adrián Rivera.
Holy shit, it was Adrián fucking Rivera. Cate recognized him from the pictures in the newspapers. The young man had taken over leadership after his father’s death.
Even from several yards away, she saw his frustration. The glint of anger and the feral set of his jaw. He raised an assault rifle and sprayed the cracked sidewalk with bullets, but Cate was out of his range and running again.
Her lungs burned with each desperate stride. This time she didn’t look back. She didn’t stop, didn’t allow herself to think of Riya’s dead body draped on that bed. She pushed forward, running until the soles of her feet were bloody and her body was reeling with exhaustion.
She wasn’t sure how many miles she’d managed to place between her and the hotel. Between her and the men who’d come to murder her. It didn’t matter—she’d never be able to run fast or far enough, not if those men were connected to the Rivera cartel. They would find her. They would find her and kill her and—
Stop it, Morgan’s voice barked. Panic gets you nowhere.
Gasping for air, Cate ducked into a shadow-bathed alley and pressed her tired, aching body against the wall. Despite the late hour, cars continued to speed down the street. A honk broke the air. Voices drifted out of a nearby bar.
She drew a breath. Then another, and another, until the panicky fog cleared and she was able to think clearly again.
A safe house. She needed a safe house, somewhere to hide until she could find a way out of this mess.
She slowly uncurled her fingers, which were gripping her cell phone tight enough to leave an impression of the power button in her palm. It took several seconds for her hand to stop trembling but she still felt weaker than a kitten as she pulled up the familiar number. The phone seemed to weigh a hundred pounds as she raised it to her ear and waited.
“Dad,” she whispered when his gruff voice slid over the line.
“Cate?” he said instantly, concern etched into his tone. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
“I’m in trouble.” She rested her head against the brick wall, the adrenaline in her blood dissolving into fatigue. “I . . . need you.”
Chapter 4
Three years ago
“I need you. Stop laughing!” Cate yelled as she dangled over the side of the climbing wall.
“You’re doing fine. Swing your leg up.” Ash tapped his thigh. “You’ve got this.”
“I hate you, David Ashton.” But she swung her leg and caught the edge of the wall with her foot.
“Double-naming me. That hurts, sugar. Really hurts.”
If Cate was confident enough to let go, she would’ve given him the finger, but she needed all five fingers clinging to the side of the twenty-foot-high wall so she didn’t fall on her ass into the sand below.
After watching Kane and her dad race through this the other day, she’d woken up thinking that if she could beat Morgan’s time, she’d somehow prove herself worthy of making her own decisions. Obviously that was the stupidest conclusion she’d ever come to, but she didn’t realize the idiocy of it until now. After she’d army-crawled under what looked like a thousand spiderwebs, waded armpit high through swamp sludge, scaled a sixty-foot-high wall with a rope, and spun around tires with spikes in them, she’d been struggling with this wall for the last ten minutes.
Her arms felt like jelly. Her legs were scratched to shit. And Ash stood on the other side, hands on his hips, looking like he’d just taken a Sunday stroll in the park. She hated him. She hated his tall, built frame, his chiseled chest and those damn obliques that darn near begged for a girl to lick them from tip to tip. She hated his Southern drawl, which got thick when he was amused, as if his words were caked with syrup. She wondered how he sounded in bed, with a woman. When he said sugar to a girl he was touching, how smooth and slow were his words?
Most of all she hated that he seemed elusive.
There were plenty of boys around here that were hot to get into her panties, but not one of them affected her like Ash did. She’d let a few of those boys kiss her. A couple had even gotten to third base, but she was more turned on by just looking at Ash than by the fumbling advances of those guys.
Which was how she found the small scrap of energy to pull herself upright.
“Ha!” She raised her fists in the air and shook them. “I did it.”
“You sure did.” It sounded like you shoore did. He took a running jump and scaled the wall like he was a monkey.
She cast him a dark look as he settled in next to her. “Couldn’t you have tripped at least once before pulling yourself up?”
“No, ma’am. Muscle memory.” He tapped his biceps and Cate forced her eyes away so she didn’t sigh like a teenage girl at a Bieber concert. “I’ve done this sort of thing too many times. If I screwed up, then I’d need to run this course a hundred more times. Because out there”—he gestured beyond them—“Ethan, Kane, your daddy, they rely on me to carry out my orders without hesitation or question.”
Cate wrinkled her nose. “Is this your way of telling me I need to suck it up and stop arguing with Jim about college?”
He shook his head. “I was explaining why I couldn’t intentionally screw up climbing this wall, but since you brought it up . . . What’s your problem with college?”
“I fell right into that trap, didn’t I?” She twisted around and let herself fall into the sandpit.
Ash followed her down, his silence saying more than any words.
Cate sighed. “You know how the colleges are called the Ivy League?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Well, they feel more like an Ivy tower. A place where Jim thinks he can lock me up inside and I’ll never be hurt by the outside world. I think he forgets where I came from.” She kicked her boot into the dirt. “There were kids protesting at one of the schools. I asked my guide what it was about and apparently they were upset that the cafeteria in one of the dorms was only offering one vegan choice instead of two.”
“That sounds . . .” He was obviously struggling for something good to say and when he couldn’t come up with anything, he threw up his hands and said, “Shit, sugar, there’s got to be someplace you can go. If you don’t go to college, what’re you gonna do?”
“I don’t know, but I want to do something with my life besides just sitting in a room listening to an old guy talk about how he thinks life should work in a perfect textbook world. You and I both know that nothing ever happens like you expect. What kind of muscle memory am I going to be building up? How to sit in a chair? How to pick up a pen?” She stopped ranting when they arrived at the cove.
“I kinda doubt that’s the only learning you can do,” Ash said, then frowned as he took in the grotto.
It was Cate’s favorite place on the compound, where a natural spring fed a small stone pool. Even better? The cameras that Jim had set up around the property had a blind spot.
She slid a mischievous smile toward Ash. She was tired of complaining. She’d argued with Jim for nearly the entire flight from Florida to Costa Rica and now she wanted to relax and enjoy herself with her favorite person. Her hands dropped to the hem of the long-sleeve shirt Ash had made her wear when she told him she wanted to run the course.
“Want to go for a swim?” she suggested.
He flicked his eyes toward a red dot high in a tree and then down to her frame. Oh gosh. Was that . . . heat she saw in them?
Only one way to find out.
“There’s a blind spot here, you know,” she whispered to him, even though there weren’t any mics out here. The cameras were just visuals.
She watched as Ash took in the area and knew
precisely the moment when he figured out where the blind spot was. His gaze fixed on a small depression in the back wall of the grotto. “You tell Morgan about this?” he said warily.
Cate beamed at him. “Now why would I do a silly thing like that?”
* * *
Of course she’d found a flaw in the system. That didn’t surprise Ash in the slightest, though he did have to wonder if Morgan was truly aware of how shrewd and savvy Cate actually was. The boss had the tendency to underestimate his daughter.
“I hate all these cameras,” Cate mumbled. The smile she’d been flashing faded as she slid through the water. “That’s another reason I want to get away from here. I can’t stand being watched all the time.”
His gaze flicked up to the red dot again, then over to Cate, who was climbing the cliff wall like a mountain goat before settling into a niche right below the camera eye. The blind spot.
Well, Ash was going blind looking at the cotton of Cate’s underwear plastered against her skin.
“Better safe than sorry.” He toed off his boots but kept his clothes on, because his briefs wouldn’t disguise his growing erection.
“Now you’re just being a hypocrite. You’ve complained about the all-seeing eyes before,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but I also wasn’t here when Morgan’s previous base was torched, so I probably have a different perspective.”
Before Ash’s time, Morgan had lost a couple of people when his compound was attacked while he was chasing down a lead on Cate. Holden McCall, their tech guy, had lost his wife in the attack. Holden had gotten on a chopper and hadn’t been seen since.
Morgan’s new property housed not only his daughter but also his wife, and the man had no intention of losing either one of them. Thus the ten-foot-high walls, the intrusive cameras, and the sudden need to see Cate installed as a pretty coed in an American college. Ash totally got where his boss was coming from.
“Slowpoke,” Cate called out to him, kicking out a stream of water with her foot.
Out of all the reckless, dangerous things Ash had done in his life, this had to rank up there at the very top. He spared one more look at the camera before tossing his phone beside Cate’s abandoned clothes. Then he slid into the warm water and was at the rock formation with five broad strokes.
She scooted over to make room for him. “Not taking off your shorts?”
“I’m good.” The heavy wet khakis felt uncomfortable enough to dampen his embarrassing response. Ash hoped it continued that way.
“Suit yourself.”
He focused on clear green grotto water.
“I hate fighting with Jim,” she admitted, pulling her knees up to her chest. “But all we seem to do lately is yell at each other. He probably wants me out of the house so there’s finally some peace and quiet. I know everyone else is sick of it.”
Ash tried hard not to notice that her smooth legs were rubbing lightly against his arm. Jesus. He was twenty-five, not fifteen. He did not get turned on by a little arm to leg contact.
“We’ve weathered worse,” he told her.
Cate snorted. “Jim and I aren’t even close to reaching our worst. By the middle of the rainy season, we’ll make a tropical storm look like a walk in the park.”
She tucked her head against his shoulder, filling his nose with the smell of vanilla and spice, and he had to fight to keep his arm from drawing her closer. He couldn’t encourage her crush in any way. Morgan would fillet him from throat to dick if Ash so much as looked at her crossways.
“He loves you and you love him and that’s why you guys argue. You only argue with the folks you love,” Ash said gently.
“Is that right? Where’d you hear that?”
He shrugged. “If you didn’t feel safe here, you wouldn’t feel right about yelling at him. You’d do whatever he asked so he’d keep you close. That’s how it works.”
“I guess you’re right.” She paused. “You think I should go, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do.” He started mentally running through the obstacle course they’d just left in order to maintain some control over his body. Cate’s snuggling close did little to help with that effort. “Go a year and if you hate it, you can come back to Morgan with some real ammunition. Right now, all you’ve got is your opinion against his. Get some concrete facts to support why your plan is better than his.”
“That seems like such a waste. Almost no one on Jim’s team, or Noelle’s, for that matter, has ever gone to college. Look at Bailey. She can run circles around anyone who has a computer degree.”
“I don’t know Bailey’s story, start to finish, but I bet if she had the opportunity that Morgan’s offering you, she’d have jumped at it. I know I would.”
Cate jerked upright, nearly bashing the top of her head against Ash’s face. “You want to go to college?” she asked in surprise.
“Well, not now. But back when I was in high school, my options were the military or working at the local copper plant. So yeah, if I’d had a free ride to college, I would’ve gone in a heartbeat.”
She studied him, as if looking for signs of insincerity, but she wasn’t going to find any. The military had been the only choice for Ash when he was eighteen, and he’d taken it. He didn’t regret his decision or where it had led him in the years after he’d been discharged, but he completely understood Morgan’s desire to see Cate have something more than racing around the world, rescuing dumb fucks or trying to prevent something tragic from happening—usually because of the actions of dumb fucks.
Beside him, Cate blew out a huge sigh. “Fine, but you have to visit me.”
Something like regret pinched at his heart. Not seeing Cate every day when he was home would suck. He wanted to sigh, too, but figured he shouldn’t show anything to her but approval.
“When I can.”
“That’s a terrible answer.”
“No,” he corrected. “A truthful one. If I’m working, I’m working. I’m still the youngest guy here. I have to keep earning my place.”
“Jim’s not getting rid of you. He likes you too much. So does Noelle.” Cate leaned over and brushed her lips against his cheek. “Everyone likes you.”
Ash gulped hard, fighting the urge to shift his head so that those soft, sweet lips would brush his lips rather than his cheek. He had to quit thinking like that, damn it. Morgan had saved his life by offering him a place on the team. No way would he repay Morgan by encouraging Cate, no matter how badly his body wanted her.
“Come on. We should go back,” he said gruffly. “Your dad will be worrying about you.”
Without waiting for her answer, Ash dove into the cool water and swam toward the bank, away from danger and temptation.
Chapter 5
Present day
It took Ash all of five minutes to get ready, and half of them were spent sprinting to his room. He grabbed the go bag that sat inside his closet and that he checked religiously every week, and then he was back in the war room ready for further instructions. Morgan was still on the phone, while Noelle was leaning over the shoulder of their security man, Bill, reading an e-mail on the screen.
“What’s the holdup?” Ash wanted to be in the air—now. Cate’s frantic phone call to Morgan had come in more than an hour ago. Why the hell were they still in Costa Rica and not on their way to Guatana?
At the interruption, Morgan frowned at him and turned away.
Noelle, however, glided over calmly as if they were planning a tea party. “We’re gathering a team,” she explained.
“For what? We go in, take her out, and we’re done. You and I could do it.” He jiggled his duffel impatiently.
“Jim wants to make sure that all the contingencies are covered. We don’t have a secondary safe house there. He’s been on the phone to see if any of our associates have locals on the ground so we can gather som
e intel and have a place to hide out if the first location is compromised.”
Ash tightened his grip. “We don’t need another safe house. Cate made it to the apartment you’ve got there, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then we fly the bird in, land it at the airport, take some kind of local transport to Cate’s location, and then do it all in reverse. It’s a cakewalk.”
“You saw the news coverage. It’s chaotic there.” Noelle arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “A solid plan is the difference between success and failure. Dead and not dead.”
“There are a dozen mercs living in this place. We could topple a government with them,” Ash snapped.
Her mouth flattened. Clearly she didn’t like Ash’s testiness, but he didn’t give a shit. “Not all of them are coming. Kane and Abby have a son. Someone will have to stay home and it’ll take the two of them twenty minutes of arguing before they come to an agreement about who gets to fight the bad guys and who stays home with J.J.”
Ash ground his teeth together. What would be the likelihood of him being shot down by Morgan’s surface-to-air missile system if he commandeered the chopper and flew to Guatana by himself?
As if she could read his mind, Noelle shook her head in irritation. “Don’t be stupid. Go and check on the med kit in the chopper. Make sure we have enough supplies.”
Alarm spiked in his system. “Why? Is Cate injured?”
Fuck. What if she was? Morgan hadn’t offered any details other than Cate’s in trouble. We need to get her.
“No, but if you don’t stop snapping at me, you will be. Now go.”
Ash went, but only because he had no choice. The chopper’s medical supplies were checked daily, but if that’s what was going to get them off the ground faster, he’d inventory the hell out of the bandages, saline, and morphine syringes.
The task occupied twenty minutes of his time. They were short on syringes so Ash went to the supply room in the compound’s basement and grabbed a new box. Then he had nothing to do but sit on the landing skids and wait for the rest of the team to show up.
