by Tara Janzen
Like Anthony F. Royce.
The weapon’s only disadvantage was its break-open, single-shot action—only one round could be loaded and fired at a time. But Gillian could fire, load, and fire again in less than six seconds, and she could do it with dead-on accuracy, hitting a silhouette’s center chest ring ten out of ten times at 150 meters with her .223 barrel and a 69-grain match bullet loaded to 2,820 feet per second.
Kid had trained her well, and so had Superman. With the Contender for offense, and her Trijicon .40 caliber long-slide Glock for defense, she had the lightest, most compact package possible for the night ahead.
All she needed was for her enemy to come to Denver, for Royce to finally come after her.
CHAPTER
10
FROM THE DEPTHS of a cast-iron tub that had seen better days, Honey searched through her tote bag. She needed a smoke. Honest to God, and if she couldn’t find one of those little cigarillos she’d dropped in there this afternoon, she just might—
Oh, hell, she didn’t know what she’d do. Do without, that was for damn sure, but other than that, her options were damn slim.
Dress casual, Julia had said. Bring the money to the church, St. Mary’s. Father Bartolo will be there at eight o’clock.
Honey checked her watch and swore under her breath. She was going to be late, as usual. But my God, a bomb had just gone off in the street.
Her hands were still shaking. She wasn’t sure, but she thought her heart was shaking, too, inside her chest. Her ears hurt. Her shin hurt where she’d hit it diving into the bathtub, and her butt hurt for no reason other than she was sitting in a bathtub with no water, no bubbles, no scented oils, no—
Oh, thank God. She’d found a cigarillo.
More rummaging produced a book of matches. That had been good thinking, she told herself, to grab the matches off the reception desk this afternoon before she’d left the Royal Suites Hotel to begin her big awful adventure. Much more good thinking like that and she’d probably end up dead.
She stuck the cigarillo between her lips, struck a match, then held the trembling flame to the small cigar. A couple of puffs later, she was in business: smoking, in a rusty bathtub, with plaster falling off the walls and landing on her dress.
Gripping the cigarillo between her teeth, she brushed at the bits and flakes of gold-painted plaster. The whole situation was tawdry in the extreme, and to think she could have been on St. Bart’s with maid service and a live-in cook—and no bombs.
Julia Ann-Marie needed her bottom paddled, but Honey didn’t think the church allowed anyone to paddle a nun’s bottom.
A nun. Good God, the York family was still reeling: a papist in their midst, and even more amazing, a woman sworn to virginity.
Honey inhaled, choked a bit, got it all back under control, and started looking for one of those little bottles of booze she’d snagged off the plane this morning.
She needed her gun back, and Mr. You Don’t Need to Know My Name could either give it to her or give her two hundred dollars—but she wanted the gun. It wasn’t safe to be in San Luis without a gun, certainly not where she was going. Anything could happen on her way to the bakery, and she needed to be prepared with something besides a book of matches, a small cigar, and a shot of bourbon under her belt.
Though, truth be told, things could be worse. Things could always be worse, but they weren’t, so she wasn’t going to think about it.
Her next breath was a little ragged on the end, and she started searching harder for the bourbon. She remembered “worse.” She would never forget “worse,” no matter how long she lived, so what in the hell was she doing in Central America again? Anywhere in Central America?
Saving Sister Julia’s orphans, was the answer. Good little WASP that she was, she’d taken on a painfully compelling mission of mercy for the Catholic Church, and all she needed was a smoke and a bottle of bourbon, or vodka, or gin, or whatever came up first, to steady her nerves.
Oh, hell, yes, Honey York knew exactly what she was doing, which was not freaking out in a bathtub.
Maybe a Xanax was in order.
Sure it was, and the bottle of tiny white pills had to be in her damn tote bag somewhere, probably rolling around with the booze, which she finally found. Her hand had barely closed around a bottle, though, when the lights went out.
“Fuck.” That came straight out of Mr. You Don’t Need to Know My Name’s mouth, and she couldn’t have agreed more.
She heard him crunching across the broken glass on the far side of the room. When the beam of his flashlight hit her full in the face, it darn near blinded her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No.” She instinctively lifted her hand in front of her eyes.
“You’re drinking.” It was a flat statement, not a question, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought she detected just the slightest amount of censure in his voice. “And smoking.”
“Yes.” She was having a drink, and a smoke, or at least trying to have a drink, and if he didn’t like it, he could suck eggs.
Then the lights came back on—thank God.
She checked the bottle in her hand. She’d gotten one of the gin bottles, which really wasn’t a good idea. She always got a little excitable on gin. It was a family trait. She dropped it back in her tote and rustled around some more.
“Great. Lights,” he said. “That’s better.”
It would be, if she could find the bourbon.
“Come on out of there, Ms. York,” he continued, putting his flashlight back in one of the cargo pockets on his pants, “and I’ll get you back to your hotel.”
“No.”
“No?”
Aha—bourbon. She lifted the small bottle out of her tote and twisted off the lid, but before she could get it to her mouth, another explosion rocked the room, a big one, from farther up the street, and all the lights went out again.
“Fuck.”
Exactly, and then some. She was frozen in the tub, every cell in her body trembling. All the air in the room had just pushed in on her, hard, like a shove, then released. Big chunks of plaster were falling off the walls. She could feel them landing on her, and she’d actually bounced. Just a little, but enough to scare her spitless. She could die here, for the love of God.
One lousy day in San Luis, one lousy plane hop from her beach cabana in Puerto Vallarta, and she could die.
She’d have to skip the Xanax, goddammit. Dying calmly was completely out of the question.
He flipped his flashlight back on and beamed it in her face, the jerk. “What hotel are you staying at, Ms. York? I’m not going to ask again.”
Good.
“I—I want my g-gun back, and my bullet.”
That got her a dose of stone-cold silence.
“I’ll return them to you when you’re back at your hotel,” he finally said.
“I-I’m not going back to my hotel.” She pressed the bottle to her lips and tilted it back.
Oh, God, that felt good, a warm stream of bourbon running down her throat.
“Why not?”
She choked once, then caught her breath and let out a little cough. “I’m—I’m on a mission of mercy.” Not that it was any of his business.
Whatever he said to that, and he said quite a bit, he said it in Spanish, which was just as well. She didn’t need his opinion, or his approval, and she did not need a translation. His tone had said it all, and quite frankly, she was offended.
He turned and headed back into the bedroom. She heard him crunching around on the broken glass, prowling while he went through his sotto voce tirade. When a small flame flared up in the bedroom, she realized he’d been looking for a candle.
Then he was back, looming over her and anchoring the candle on an iron shelf bolted into the wall behind the bathtub.
“Mission of mercy,” he said, straightening up, his voice so cold, he could have owned the patent. “Explain what you mean by a mission of mercy.”
Scr
ew him.
“I owe you five hundred dollars, not an explanation,” she said in a voice that, despite the tremor in it, she thought was cool enough to put him in his place.
She was wrong.
“THE price for my services just went up, then. You want to stay in my bathtub? Great. It’s going to cost you two grand to get out.”
Mission of mercy, his ass. Smith wasn’t buying it for a split second. In that dress, the only mercy she was dishing out was to that rich old guy who’d lost her, and that guy was going to be looking for her, looking hard, him and whoever else he could pull in on the search, beginning with the police. Smith bet a dozen people had seen her run into the Palacio, and he’d be damned if he let her be found in his room.
Like it or not, she was going back where she’d come from.
“B-but that’s—that’s . . .” She looked up at him, words failing her.
Just as well. He wasn’t in the mood to hear any dissent.
“And every minute you stay in my bathtub is going to cost you another thousand dollars.” This could be his best “get rich quick” scheme yet. Not that he’d had many.
“I am not paying to stay in your bathtub.”
Perfect.
“Then you better start setting up house, sweetheart, because you ain’t getting out.”
“The hell I’m not.” She clamped her cigarillo between her teeth and started to struggle to her feet, a pretty good trick in platform heels inside a cast-iron tub. “You . . . you can’t make me—”
“Oh, yes, I can.” He reached for her, his hand closing on her waist, the other grabbing for her tote before the whole kit and caboodle of her toppled back into the tub.
What in the hell, he thought, hefting the tote in his hand. It weighed a ton.
Still holding her around the waist, he lifted the bag away from her, and wondered why he hadn’t just thought of that in the first place.
“You . . . you—” She made a grab for it, but it was no contest. He just held it higher.
“Yeah, yeah, me.” Her hotel key was bound to be in the bag, along with all her identification and anything else he might like to know, and he should have figured all that out about two minutes ago. The only possible excuse he’d accept was the car bomb and whatever else had been blown to smithereens out on the street. Explosives had a way of riveting a guy’s attention.
“You can’t.” She made another small lunge for the tote, and rather than let her fall on her face, he used her forward momentum to help swing her over the side of the tub—and he checked his watch.
“You owe me three thousand dollars.” He knew women, and this one was small, a hundred and ten, a hundred and fifteen pounds max—and just about ready to come out of that dress. The whole polka-dotted wonder of it had gotten a bit twisted around in the tub, and her jacket had slipped off one shoulder.
Geezus.
“You can go to hell.” She pulled the jacket back up, for all the damn good that did. It was teeny, and covered up exactly nothing.
“Been there, done that.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” she said, taking the cigarillo out from between her teeth and exhaling a cloud of smoke. “You can’t try to rescue me one second and steal my bag the next. It doesn’t make sense.”
“The only thing that doesn’t make sense is you, in San Luis, on the wrong side of town, in that dress.”
“There is nothing wrong with my dress,” she said, using both her hands to pull the dress down and smooth it into place—adjusting the halter top, kind of shaking herself back into it, a move that all but froze him to the floor. “It’s off the rack, that’s all. I was told to dress casual.”
Finishing up, she slid her palms over her hips and tugged at the hem.
Off the rack. Right. Casual.
“Who told you to dress casual?”
“None of your business.” She finished her adjustments, looked up at him, and took a long drag off the cigarillo. “Give me back my bag.”
Her hands were trembling, the cigar was trembling, and she was standing there in a pair of bow-tied platform heels, not even close to reaching his shoulder height, trying to hold her own against him.
She couldn’t do it. Not on a bet. Not on any day of the week.
“No.” Hell, she couldn’t even hold her own against her hairdo. The curls had won, big time, a riot of them. They were all topsy-turvy, going every which way, with the polka-dot bows stuck here and there, looking ridiculous.
But she didn’t look ridiculous. No way. She looked tumbled.
Right.
He let out his breath. Whoever had lost her should be shot. She was pure hothouse, and tonight, San Luis was jungle all the way.
Lucky for her, he was a jungle boy—and he was going to get her back to her hotel. All he needed was her key or a receipt with the hotel’s name.
With that in mind, he headed into the bedroom, planning on upending the tote onto the bed and finding what he needed.
She was right on his heels.
“I mean it, Mr . . . . Mr.—”
“Smith.”
“Mr. Smith? Oh, right.” She didn’t sound like she believed him for a minute. “I want my bag, now.”
She tried to flank him and make a grab for it, to no avail, of course. He just held it higher.
“Smith is my first name,” he corrected her, then stopped for a second as another explosion rocked the night. Dammit. It wasn’t as close as the first two, sounding like it was coming from over by the marina, but it was still another goddamn explosion. “Actually, it’s my middle name, so there’s no Mr. anything here. Just Smith.”
Fuck. He couldn’t do it. He could dump her bag, was planning on it, but he couldn’t dump her. Not with the whole goddamn town coming apart from the beach to the barrio. No matter where she was staying on tourist row, the building would be cheap, hollow cinder-block construction. Not damn much protection. A 7.62 round would go right through the walls—a fact he knew from personal, tactical experience, and yes, he’d gotten his guy. A car bomb on the street would take the walls clean out.
But the Palacio, the damned decrepit Palacio was solid. Hardwood doors, hardwood floors, and those eight-inch-thick masonry walls.
So hell, no. He wouldn’t be taking her back tonight. He was stuck with her. Stuck with her dumb polka-dot bows, stuck with her damn dress—he turned the tote bag upside down and let everything fall out on the bed—stuck with a couple hundred thousand dollars in U.S. currency rubber-banded in two-inch-thick bundles of fifty-dollar bills.
Fuck. And he really meant it this time.
CHAPTER
11
WOMEN AND GUNS were a deadly sexy combination, Travis thought, especially when the woman was Gillian and she was putting together her custom TC Contender—naked.
With anyone else the question would have been why was she putting it together at all? Not so with Red Dog. Stay ready, be prepared, those were her watchwords, the mantra that kept her head in the right place.
He stretched in the bed, then propped himself up with a few of her zillion pillows, settling in to watch her work. He didn’t put too much effort into getting comfortable, but it didn’t take much to catch Red Dog’s attention. She had a raptor’s instincts to respond to even the slightest movement.
She slanted him a long look from where she was working at her loading bench.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you rested?”
“Almost.” He grinned. There was no way to get enough rest on their first night together in a month. Or on their second. Or on their third. By the end of the week, when they were finally getting used to being back together, without fail, one of them or both of them would get called back out.
He honestly didn’t think about her too much when he was on a mission, except when the mission concerned her, like his and Kid’s trip to Thailand, where they’d been tracking Tony Royce. For the kind of work he usually did for Steele Street, the work he did with Creed Rivera, thinking about anything excep
t the job at hand was not an option.
Running through South American jungles with Creed had taken everything he’d had in the beginning, and sometimes more than he’d had. He’d been in the best shape of his life and a good nine years younger than Rivera, and he’d still had to bust his ass to keep up.
“Superior genetics, pendejo,” Creed had told him with a shit-eating grin one time when Travis had been doubled over, puking his guts out on some jungle trail, and Creed had barely been breathing hard.
Travis didn’t think two years on the team had changed his genetics much, but it had changed everything else. When someone’s life depended on how fast they could move with all the gear they might need to do a job better than anybody else in the world, or at least better than anybody who might be looking for them, the words “being in shape” took on a whole new meaning.
His gaze went over Gillian where she’d turned back to her workbench and the Contender. She was drop-dead gorgeous, and there wasn’t a man who saw her who didn’t respond to that beauty, to her wild-girl looks. She was strong and sleek, her body perfectly formed, her hair a deep, rich shade of auburn that for seventy-five bucks every six weeks, a stylist over on Larimer Street kept looking like she’d just stepped out of a wind tunnel.
She was tough, as tough as Superman when she had to be, and she never stopped when she had to keep going. She was “good in the woods” whether the woods were tropical, temperate, flat-out desert, or urban, and she could keep up with Creed without breaking a sweat. Travis had seen her do it.
But he never forgot the way she’d been the first night they’d met, the night he’d first made love with her. She’d been sweet, and sweetly scatterbrained that night, not tough. She’d been soft and so incredibly female, so incredibly giving to fall into his arms and lap and everything else and just give herself up to him.
To remember that and to see the way she was now was hard. The changes in her had been wrought by more than training and dedication, by more than her will. The drug she’d been given had had a decisive and undeniable hand in what she had become. XT7 had hardened her body, made her lean. She only kept her weight up by working at it. The parameters impressed upon her mind and psyche and soul by the drug had changed her face. Her features were the same, but her expressions were different, because the muscles now responded differently to emotional stimuli, and a lot of the time, they didn’t respond much. Her eyes were still a warm, amber brown, but he’d seen them glint almost yellow with a cold fierceness that had frozen more than one man in his tracks.
