by Cindy Gerard
When he finished, along with the relief of unloading, he also felt a landslide of shame.
“About time you got that off your chest.”
He blinked at Gabe. “You knew? Jesus. The guys? Do they all know?”
Gabe lifted a shoulder. “We knew something had gone sideways for you. You were career Navy all the way, back in the Task Force Mercy days. And then after Afghanistan, suddenly you weren’t. The next thing we heard, you were hiding out in South America, playing fast and loose with your little cargo business and supporting the local pisco trade.”
Mike stared at the top of his soda can. That pretty much summed up his first couple of years post-Afghanistan. “Couple of years of that hard drinking was all I could take. So I sobered up.” Except for one day each year. And except for wanting a drink every single other day of every year.
“We knew that, too, or we’d never have tagged you for the Sierra Leone mission. You should have come to us,” Gabe added. “We could have helped.”
“No,” he said. “You couldn’t. I was too…” He thought of all the things he was, none of them good.
“Stupid?” Gabe suggested.
In spite of himself, Mike grinned. “Yeah, that, too.”
Gabe lifted a dismissive shoulder. “We all have ghosts. Nut up and get over it.”
This prompted a laugh. “How touchy-feely of you. I’m tingling all over.” He held out an arm. “See? Goose bumps.”
Gabe gave him a rare smile. “What can I say? I’m a giver.”
Mike looked up at his friend, who clearly didn’t think less of him, who absolutely had ghosts of his own.
Gabe hitched his chin toward the apartment again. “Want me to run a check on the mystery woman?”
Mike’s phone pinged. He held up a finger and fished it out of his pocket. It was a text from Joe with a document attached. “Funny you should mention her,” he said, “because it looks like Joe came through on that front.”
“Good to know you’re thinking ahead. I’ll go check and see if she needs me to move any furniture so she can look behind it.”
Mike was barely aware that Gabe walked back inside the apartment. He was already engrossed in the background on his mystery woman.
“And we have a winner,” he said under his breath and quickly read the file on Eva Salinas. Good to know she was actually capable of some truth.
Holy crap. Her sheet read like the overachievers handbook. A little reading between the lines and it became clear that little Eva Montoya had been born on a mission. Her parents had set the bar high. From the time she could crawl up on her attorney mother’s lap or charm her JAG attorney father, whose service in the Navy had apparently prompted her to pursue her own career in service to her country, she’d been setting wrongs right.
Girl Scout, student council president, captain of the debating team at University of Virginia and graduated summa cum laude, top of her class at U of V law school. Impressive.
And while she did not follow her father’s hellishly big footsteps into the military, she’d had instructor-level credentials in Muay Thai—no wonder she’d made such quick work of him in the alley—and was an expert marksman rank in both long gun and pistol. In short—she was kick-ass.
Right out of law school, she’d joined the CIA as an attorney in support services out of Langley, where she’d met Ramon Salinas, fallen in love, and after a whirlwind courtship, married him.
Should have been a happily ever after, Mike thought. A woman like her sure as hell deserved one. Ramon would have ripped her heart out and stomped all over it, but Mike wasn’t about to tell her that she wouldn’t have gotten that Cinderella ending. He would not talk trash about a dead man to anyone. Sure as hell not to his widow.
He only looked up when he heard the terrace door slide open again and Gabe stepped back outside.
“Everything okay in there?”
Gabe nodded. “I offered her a shower and she jumped at the chance. You look like you could use one, too.”
“For a fact. Might wake me up. We’ve been on the move for longer than I care to remember.”
“That would explain the need for the ugly shirt. Sucker’s so loud it would keep a narcoleptic awake.”
“Listen to you. Another joke from the Archangel. Jenna really has mellowed your ass out.”
“I suspect she’d say that she straightened my ass out. Come on. You can use the shower in our bedroom. Give you a chance to change into something that doesn’t shout South Pacific.”
“I’ll let that pass.”
“As if you could do anything about it.”
Gabe headed back inside, his limp reminding Mike what he’d given up in service to his country and for Jenna. He had saved her from a bomb blast, taking shrapnel in his leg that eventually resulted in amputation below the knee.
“That way.” Gabe pointed down the hall.
Mike hesitated and for a second considered hunting up Eva’s purse and digging around for the flash drive. He’d been itching to plug it into Gabe’s computer and read the information that had driven her to Lima to find him.
But that might break this fragile trust they’d developed and frankly, right now, he wanted a shower more. And he wanted to think about the information Joe had turned up on Eva Salinas, who was not Pamela Diaz or Emily Bradshaw.
The woman was nothing if not inventive.
“Here.” He handed Gabe his phone. “For your reading pleasure. It’s the lowdown on your other houseguest—aka CIA legal eagle.”
16
It wasn’t often Eva was given license to snoop. While she wasn’t a pro, she’d searched as much of the apartment as she could manage under the ruse of using the restroom before Gabe had stepped back inside and offered her the use of the guest shower.
Not that she’d found anything. Not that she’d expected to, she conceded as she stepped out of the shower and into the bedroom. A good operative—and despite the evidence of a toddler in residence, Jones had operative written all over him—would never leave anything in plain sight. What she needed was access to her CIA database so she could find out who, exactly, he was.
What she got, however, was Jones, alone on the terrace, loading salmon steaks on a grill.
“So… I figure you have questions,” he said, without turning around. “I know I’d have them if I was in your position.”
Then he gave her the last thing she’d ever expected: full disclosure. And she immediately felt ridiculous for not recognizing who he was the moment she’d met him.
Jones wasn’t merely an operative. He was a member of Black Ops, Inc. Everyone in the intelligence community knew about Nate Black’s band of merry men who, until a few months ago, had run covert ops for Uncle off the grid out of Buenos Aires. The team had recently relocated to Virginia, where they were now a sanctioned entity under the direction of the Department of Defense.
Jones was not only a linchpin on the team, he was a legend in the intelligence and black ops community. She should have tuned in when Brown had called him Angel Boy. He was the Archangel.
Holy, holy God.
Jones had gotten his nickname for his deadly skill with an Arc-Angel butterfly knife—solid titanium, razor sharp, ten inches fully open. No one but a master could handle it the way it was reputed that Jones handled it.
The Archangel and his ilk were the ultimate shadow warriors, rogues who played by their own rules and damn the consequences, often skirting around the dark fringes of international law. Until this past year, when the Black Ops, Inc. team was made legitimate.
“Why?” she asked, opting for wine when he offered her a choice.
“Why tell you who I am?” He extended a glass of chardonnay. “Like you weren’t going to figure it out?”
She gave him a narrow-eyed look.
“You’re CIA. It was just a matter of time.”
“It’s that obvious?”
He adjusted the fire under the salmon. “Relax. You didn’t give anything away. Mike had Joe run
your sheet. There are no secrets among spies.”
She joined him by the grill. “I’m not a spy. I’m an attorney.”
One corner of his mouth drew up in a ghost of a smile. “It’s your story. You can tell it any way you want to.” He glanced at her then. “From the sound of things, you’ve been telling a lot of stories.”
Because he hadn’t said it unkindly, she relaxed a little. Apparently Mike had also told him about Lima, which meant he must also know about Afghanistan.
“Where is Brown?”
“Shower.”
“Speaking of showers, thanks. And thanks for letting us crash here.” She lifted a hand toward the grill. “And feeding us.”
“You both look like you need fuel. You’ll work better with some food in you. Then you two can have a sit-down and figure out where you go from here.”
They lapsed into a silence then that didn’t exactly feel comfortable, but was much less tense than before he’d told her who he was.
Eva took the opportunity to size him up. Gabe Jones and Mike Brown could have been cast from the same mold. Jones had a couple inches and maybe twenty pounds on Brown, but both were big men. Both unreasonably attractive. And they both had a look about them. Even though Brown had been out of the game for a few years, his Spec Ops background was evident in the way he walked, the way he constantly scoured the space around them for threats. There was a poised readiness, a situational awareness about him and about this man. When the door opened behind her and Mike stepped out onto the terrace to join them, she had to stop herself from staring.
His hair was still wet. He’d shaved and the effect was stunning. He wore another one of the print shirts she’d bought mostly to tick him off, but partly because he looked so hot in the first one. She could smell him on the light summer breeze wafting across the terrace. Something citrus and spicy and 100 percent male; he must have helped himself to Jones’s aftershave.
He looked refreshed and vital and as gorgeous as the Primetime handle billed him to be.
Their eyes met and held for an explicably long moment before she looked away. Tipping up her wine, she attempted to act as though nothing out of the ordinary happened. But the exchange had rattled her.
The little rush, the undeniable shimmer of attraction was so unwise. If she could have ignored it she would have, but Mike Brown was a difficult man to ignore. So were these unexpected reactions she kept having to him.
Jones made a sound that could have been a laugh when he saw Brown. “For the love of God. Who puked a rain forest all over you?”
Brown walked over to inspect the salmon steaks. “You can thank her. Just my luck I finally get a personal shopper, and she misses the memo about cargo pants and black T-shirts.”
Jones turned back to his grill. “Well, I think you look real cute.”
“See what you’ve done?” When Mike turned to Eva, there was a smile in his eyes that prompted her to smile back before she could check it. “He’s disrespecting me now.”
“I never respected you in the first place,” Jones said with a grin that indicated he lied. “So you can’t hang that on her.”
“Your fault,” Brown insisted with a pointed look at Eva that she made a valiant attempt not to find endearing.
She could not go there.
She walked over to the waist-high wall of the terrace, let the coolness of a soft evening breeze wash over her, and listened without comment as the two friends talked, gave each other grief, and laughed softly—their way of keeping the tension of the current situation under control.
They’d been through the fire together. Their bond ran deep. Men like Jones and Brown didn’t give that kind of trust recklessly.
Reckless wasn’t something she could afford to be, either, but trust was mandatory. Someone wanted her dead and she had no choice but to trust both of these men with her life.
• • •
For her sake, Mike was glad they’d taken a little break. If a quick shower and quicker meal could be considered a break. All in all, it had been less than forty-five minutes since they’d invaded Gabe Jones’s very private sanctum. Gabe had gone to clean up, making himself scarce, leaving them alone in the home office with the computer.
Mike had pulled a chair up beside Eva, chomping at the bit as he waited for her to boot up Gabe’s PC and open the file on Operation Slam Dunk.
He wasn’t sure why he was so anxious. He already knew what was in it. Maybe it was the thought of seeing the lies in black and white all these years later. Or maybe it was that he’d spent the last eight years trying to forget it, and now he was about to lance open a wound that was still painful. Back when it had happened, he’d gone through it in sort of a fog. He’d been in mourning for his lost team, zoned out on the pain meds for his broken collarbone and the debridement of the burns on his leg—and in a state of shock that he had been fingered as the bad guy.
Gabe was right. He’d planned on being career Navy. He’d lived it, breathed it, loved it. And then suddenly the Navy no longer had any love for him. The entire U.S. military had wanted his head on a platter. It had been too much to absorb, to process, and most of all, to deal with.
So he hadn’t. He’d skated through the days, lying to himself, blindly reassuring himself that Brewster would come through. That everything would be straightened out. He’d be released back to active duty, exonerated. A wronged man.
His head had been buried so deep in the proverbial sand that the court-martial proceedings had caught him completely off guard. And he’d folded in on himself, defeated, manipulated, too shocked to even be angry.
The anger had come later—self-destructive, angry years that he’d spent seeking restitution at the bottom of a bottle.
“Mike?”
Eva. He’d zoned out on her.
“Yeah. Sorry. What?”
“Where’d you go?”
To a very bad place.
He glanced into her concerned eyes, and it hit him how dark those eyes were. So brown they were almost black. And God, she smelled good. Like that rain forest Gabe had accused him of wearing.
And, whoa. She’d called him Mike.
She’d never called him Mike before. Always Brown. He’d understood; it established a line of demarcation. We are not friends, it said clearly. We are merely working together by necessity.
But she’d just changed the game.
Like when he’d joined her and Gabe on the terrace after his shower. He’d thought then that he’d read more into her expression than was warranted. But no, he’d been right. She’d been glad to see him. And then she’d looked away. Probably as surprised by her reaction as he’d been.
“Sorry,” he said. Not the time. Not the place, and sure as hell not the woman to be bonding with. Sure, he wanted to take her to bed. Any man with a pulse would want her.
But he was smart enough to know that an entanglement with Eva Salinas would come to no good end. So, no. Never. No way. This woman had complication, complication, and had he mentioned complication? written all over her.
“Is that it?” he asked with a no-nonsense nod toward the monitor and the document she’d opened up.
“Yeah. That’s the first one of several.”
She scooted her chair to the side so he could move in close and start reading.
It was all there. Spelled out nice and neat and military sharp. I’s dotted. T’s double crossed. Just the facts—and they were all wrong. All lies.
He hadn’t realized he’d started to sweat until he felt a trickle of perspiration inch down his temple.
“Looks like a cut-and-dried case against me,” he said, closing out the first document and opening another. “No wonder you wanted me dead.”
She sighed heavily. “I wasn’t going to kill you.”
“Well, no, not after my boyish charm won you over.”
Crap. He could not flirt with her.
“Yeah. The way you stumbled across the dance floor and gagged me with your pisco breath made my heart go
pitty pat,” she flirted back.
Not good. Not good at all.
He could see in her eyes that she’d realized it a split second after he had. She quickly nipped it in the bud with a sober scowl.
We are totally on the same page here, chica.
He cleared his throat, all business again, and leaned closer to the screen to put a little distance between them and that floral scent that made him crazy. Or maybe he was making himself crazy. He’d had plenty of practice in that area the past several years.
“I figured at the very least you were guilty of collusion with whoever had called the shots,” she said. “But I decided that until I could confront you face-to-face, I wasn’t taking any chances. That’s when I started digging past the file.”
He listened as he scrolled. Closed one document, opened another, not seeing anything he hadn’t known before.
“So who all did you bump about this?” he asked absently.
“It’s more like who didn’t I talk to.” She stared morosely at the screen over his shoulder. “So when doors started slamming shut in my face and I began to get the sense that I was being followed, I turned my focus in another direction. It didn’t make sense at that point that you were behind whoever was stonewalling or following me. You couldn’t have connections that reached that far.
“So the question was,” she continued, “who did that leave? That’s when I started giving serious thought to a cover-up.”
“Maybe that’s what your mysterious benefactor wanted when he gave you the flash drive,” he speculated, opening the next file. “For you to investigate the possibility.”
“I wondered the same thing. But no matter how I spun it, I hated the idea. I’ve spent my entire career in service. To believe that you were innocent was to believe that my own government had conspired against you. But to what end? Why throw a decorated Navy pilot under the bus?”
“Lots of questions,” he agreed absently and clicked on another file. The first thing to open was a photograph.
His heart stopped dead before his mind fully engaged. Then he leaned in close, taking a really long look, making sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
