by Tara Janzen
“And it’s not about masturbation. I got a lot of that, because of the title.”
O-kay. They were headed into serious fantasyland now.
He looked at the empty bottle in his hand, wondered if she had another, and decided he’d probably had enough. No matter what she ended up talking about, he had a job to do, which was to get the two of them through to sunrise, which, as long as they stayed put in the Palacio, shouldn’t be too damned difficult, especially since she was no longer the focus of anyone’s attention. Everyone had moved on to explosions and street action, and moved away from slightly notorious, but not very famous, tawny-haired blondes.
“The publisher picked the title, not me. If you look at the chapter headings, you’ll see what the book is really about.”
He’d get right on that, sure, as soon as he figured out what all those young men were up to over at the cantina. They were starting to mill around and band together, to form up.
Trouble, he decided a moment later, when he saw an AK-47 snugged up against one guy’s body.
He started across the room, heading for the large chest of drawers pushed against one of the walls.
“Slip your shoes back on and get over here,” he said, getting her out of his bed, which was just plain stupid. But he needed her. “Help me with this.”
He didn’t care how cute she was; when men started showing up with AKs, everyone had to pull their weight.
Or not, he realized a moment later, after he’d directed her to one side of the chest he wanted to move in front of the broken windows. The chiffonier was pure jungle hardwood, and big, which made it perfect, and perfectly heavy.
Too heavy for Honey to even give it a budge.
“Are you back there?” he asked, dragging the damn thing across the floor, but not feeling much push with his pull.
“Yes,” she gasped, and he looked around the edge of the chest to see if she was okay, and immediately felt foolish.
Hell. He’d been spending too much time with Red Dog. That girl could have moved a jungle hardwood chiffonier with her will and one damn cold look from those spooky golden eyes.
Honey couldn’t have moved it with a crane. But it was cute to see the way she’d put her shoulder into it, and how the position curved her back and made her butt stick out, and how it made her dress ride up, and how she planted her platformed feet to give herself some leverage.
“You don’t work out much, do you.” It wasn’t a question.
“Not . . . much,” she admitted, gritting her teeth and still pushing for all she was worth.
Halfway across the room, she changed positions, putting her back into it, not that it made a damn bit of difference. She wasn’t complaining, though, and he appreciated it, and she didn’t give up, which impressed him. Trying that hard and being totally ineffective would have depressed the hell out of him. He expected results from everything he did, whatever it was, and he got them, every time.
So he pulled, and the damn thing moved, inch by inch, until he got it situated in front of the windows. The instant he stopped pulling, he realized his mistake.
He heard the plop of her butt hitting the floor just half a second before he heard her cry out.
“Oh, ow.”
“Sorry.” He should have warned her.
“Oh, ow. Oh, I . . . oh, ow. I—”
Then it hit him like a train wreck. Shit.
“Don’t move,” he said, stepping around the chiffonier and kneeling down next to her. Sure enough, she was sitting in broken glass.
“Owww.” The word came out real soft and real slow, like it really, really hurt. Then she looked up at him, and he could tell it hurt. Her face was sort of scrunched up, and she was holding herself really still. “Oh, Mr. Smith, I-I . . . ow.”
“No Mr., remember, just Smith, and don’t move. Just let me pick you straight up.”
“M-my shoes slipped.”
Of course, they had.
He slid one arm under her knees and the other around her back.
Her bare back.
Without hesitation, her arms went around his neck, and as carefully as possible, he shifted his weight and scooped her up—and she melted into him.
It was amazing.
It was the softest lamination of his life. Every curve she had found a place on his body and molded itself to him.
“Ow,” she said again, real soft again, her voice little more than a sigh against the side of his neck, her breath blowing along the edge of his ear.
Sex.
It was the only thought he had for a couple of eternal seconds, during which he didn’t move, just stood there like a pole-axed idiot and thought sex. Nothing specific, just sex, the whole thing.
“I-I think I’ve got glass in my butt.”
Yeah, he was pretty sure she did, too.
And he had nothing for brains. He was running on empty, which was just about the stupidest damn thing that had ever happened to him—getting pole-axed by a woman named Honey in a polka-dot dress with glass in her butt.
CHAPTER
17
GET A ROPE ON HER,” General Richard “Buck” Grant growled over the phone, and Dylan couldn’t help but agree. It was a damn good idea.
“We’re on it, sir.” Or as “on it” as he could get at the moment. Steele Street was a little shorthanded. Hawkins had left for the airport. Skeeter was manning the communications, and he was taking orders and gearing up to ask a favor. This shit with Royce had gone on long enough.
Too long, actually. Dylan didn’t give a damn whose career was hanging in the balance over at the CIA. He didn’t give a damn how much dirt Royce had on some of those higher-echelon types, or who needed the asshole alive. He hadn’t cared in two years, not since Royce had revealed himself as a traitor. He wanted the man dead.
But except for one small window of opportunity directly after the night Gillian Pentycote had been abducted, when Royce had been fair game, Dylan’s hands had been tied. Tony Royce was off limits, on orders of someone he didn’t dare cross. The price for disobedience was the existence of SDF. Dylan didn’t know who had put the pressure on White Rook to draw SDF off Royce’s trail, but he knew that if they didn’t obey the command, Rook could and would bury the whole team and shut down 738 Steele Street so tight it would take a presidential order for the place to ever see the light of day again.
The party would be over.
Dylan knew it. Grant knew it. And Red Dog knew it. Dylan had been very clear on the subject.
“‘On it’ isn’t good enough, Dylan. I don’t want to lose her because of goddamn Tony Royce, not when we should have taken him out years ago,” Grant said. “But if she’s lured him to Denver and is out there gunning for him, then we’ve got a rogue operator on our hands, and the shit will hit the fan all the way to the Potomac. If she can’t put the welfare of the team ahead of her personal problems, I can’t protect her, and neither can you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” He did. He understood perfectly. “I won’t know for sure what happened in El Salvador until we make contact with Rydell.”
“Then do it.”
“We’re trying.”
“Do better than try. If she wasn’t within a thousand miles of Royce’s place in San Luis, and it’s just one big, goddamn coincidence that the two of them are ending up in Denver on the same goddamn night after a little sojourn in El Salvador, well, then we’ve got nothing to worry about. What about her? Have you been able to contact her yet?”
“No. Skeeter has tried her cell a number of times, but Red Dog isn’t answering or returning calls,” Dylan said. “Can you contact White Rook? See what he can get us. Authorization to kill Royce and anyone in his employ would cover Red Dog’s ass.”
There was a moment of silence.
“And yours. You know it’s never been that simple, and it’s no simpler now than the last ten times you’ve asked for the same goddamn thing.”
“This is different. He’s here, and he’s a threat to o
ne of our contractors.”
“And as always, you are within your rights to take appropriate exigent measures to neutralize an emergent threat.”
“Screw ‘emergent.’ I want the right to track him down and kill him, Buck.” There was more to it than Gillian, a lot more. Royce had been after him the night she’d been abducted. He’d been behind Dylan’s kidnapping and subsequent torture in Indonesia, and Royce had been SDF’s CIA contact for the mission that had gotten J.T. Chronopolous killed.
They all wanted him dead for that.
“I’ve put two calls in since we started this conversation, Dylan, and if I can get you a finding to sanction his termination, no one will be happier than me. Who’s with you in the Bat Cave tonight?”
“Hawkins is on his way to the airport. He’s going to tail Royce into town, see where the bastard lights, and Skeeter is here.”
“I thought Chronopolous and James were back from Thailand today.”
“Kid stayed in Los Angeles. His wife is having a showing of her work there.”
“She paints naked men, right?”
“Uh . . . right.” Dylan guessed that was one way to sum up a singularly brilliant career in fine art.
“Never did understand that,” Grant said. “Naked women I could understand. But men . . . hell, who wants to look at a bunch of—hell, whatever. What about Travis James?”
“He’s my next call. Chances are, he’s with Gillian.”
“Then we don’t have a problem. Right? Travis can keep her under control.”
“Right.” At least he hoped to hell he was right. Red Dog and the Angel Boy had a connection that—hell, that Dylan wasn’t sure he understood, or that he even wanted to understand. She was a hard woman. She’d push any guy, and any guy besides Travis James would probably get pushed too far.
But Travis was different from all the other hard-ass chop-shop boys. He’d been a silver-spoon Boulder slacker-dude, majoring in feminist studies and conflict resolution, or some such damn thing, before he’d come on board at SDF. He more than carried his weight on the team, or Creed would have lost him in the jungle a long time ago, but the guy couldn’t port a head or bolt ten pounds of boost onto a car—any car. Dylan wasn’t sure Travis knew how to change the oil in a car—any car. He drove a crapped-out Jeep that Quinn wouldn’t even let him park on the second floor where Quinn kept his Camaros.
And he meditated. Full-out. Dylan had seen him do it, in a goddamn Lotus position no less, wrapped up like a freaking pretzel.
And he posed nude for Kid’s wife, Nikki, completely bare-assed nude, sometimes wearing angel wings, sometimes bound and gagged for hours on end, and he did it without an ounce of self-consciousness or panic, and he brought that same level of coolness under pressure to his job at Steele Street.
The guy was fucking imperturbable.
It’s why he had a job at Steele Street, that and the fact that he could shoot, the fact that he would and did shoot. Nothing about the man had surprised Dylan more than his willingness to kill when it was required, without hesitation and with the skills to hit who he aimed at, every time—and it was always a “who” when it counted, never a “what.” Range practice was great. Dylan was all for it, but if a guy couldn’t hit a target that was looking back at him, he was worthless. Less than worthless. He was a danger to his team.
“Get on the horn,” Grant said. “Make sure he’s with her, and when you get ahold of Rydell, let me know what the hell is going on.”
“Yes—” Dylan looked up as the door to the office opened.
Fuck.
They were in trouble. Big trouble.
“—sir,” he finished and hung up the phone, then watched the night head toward hell in a handbasket as Travis walked in and gave Skeeter a big hug.
He didn’t mind the hug. Hell, no. But Travis was alone, and he for damn sure minded that.
Gillian was on her own, on the loose, and the only thing that could save her butt now was C. Smith Rydell. They needed a situation report on what had happened in El Salvador and how much trouble she’d really started. Smith had been in San Luis all day, so why in the hell hadn’t he checked in with Superman? Just what in the hell was he doing down there?
CHAPTER
18
HOLDING HIS BREATH.
Smith was holding his goddamn breath.
He never held his breath. Ever.
But he’d never held the hem of a polka-dot dress in his fingers either, not with the intention of lifting it up and over what he knew deep in his heart was going to be a world-class ass.
Geezus.
She was face down on the bed, her junk pushed to one side, her shoes about half falling off her feet, with a truly heart-wrenching combination of silent sobs and not so silent hiccups percolating out of her.
Fuck. He had to be on Candid Camera. This did not happen to him. Ever.
“That last one hurt.”
Yeah, it had hurt him, too, to pull a shard of glass out of her.
“That’s the last of the big ones.”
Big ones, geezus. They hadn’t been that big, just big enough to cut her dress and stick a bit of sharp edge in her skin. There was a little blood, though.
Lucky for her, he had a Medkit. Right. Like they were going to need that.
“I think there’s more in there. It still hurts. Really bad.”
Yes. He ran the beam of his flashlight over her again. Her dress was pretty cut up, and he was sure there was more in there, too, which was why he was going to take a look.
“I’m going to take a look,” he said in the most professional voice he could muster.
He was a professional, a professional soldier, not a medic. But he’d had training for situations like this, medical situations. Remaining calm was paramount.
So he was calm—until he lifted her dress, and then, for a second or two, he was a little less than calm.
She wasn’t wearing underwear—that was his first impression. Then he realized she was. It was just so incredibly sheer as to be almost invisible. If it hadn’t been for the tiny edge of pink lace trim, he might not have seen it at all.
It was so sheer, it didn’t have a color. It was like looking at her ass through a film of water, and he could have been happy looking at it for a long, long time. But he was on a mission. He had a job to do, and in order to do it, he had to remove that sheer nothing whisper of what could only be silk.
“I don’t work for the State Department.” God knew why he felt compelled to tell her that.
“I know,” she said, her voice muffled from where she had her face buried in her hands and in the bed.
“But I am with the U.S. government, working out of the, uh, Department of Defense.”
“That’s . . . that’s very comforting,” she said. “To know it’s an actual representative of the United States government who’s officially going to be taking off my underwear and looking at me naked in bed, while I lie here helplessly without my gun.”
“I’m not giving your gun back.” Or the bullet. It was in his pocket, a keepsake of what was turning out to be one of the craziest nights of his life. He had his limits, and arming a cupcake was beyond them. And whether she wanted to admit it or not, she had to know that the actual taking off of the underwear was completely beside the point. She was naked, right now.
“It is under only the most awful duress that I am allowing you to do this.”
“It’s the wise choice, Ms. York.” Just slightly better than hanging around the rest of the night and letting little shards of glass work their way deeper under her skin.
Which, honestly, is what he would have done. He didn’t know where her threshold of pain was, but it seemed to be set at “not very damn much.” He wouldn’t have stretched himself out naked on a bed for a stranger.
Except for someone like her.
Yeah, someone like her probably could talk him into it without having to talk too damn much.
Geezus. He was such a guy.
�
�Ms. York-Lytton to you,” she said, her face still in her hands, and another small sob escaped her, followed up by a catch in her breath.
“Let’s just take a look,” he said, ready to do the deed and get it over with.
He slipped his fingers under the top edge of her panties, taking hold of that tiny strip of pink lace and stretching it out enough to pull everything off her without rubbing against her skin.
And the instant he bared her bottom, he realized his mistake.
“Okay,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “There is another piece in there, right next to where I took the last one out, but don’t worry. It’ll just take a minute to remove, and then you’ll be fine.”
And she would be, once he got it out—but geezus.
He finished pulling her underwear down, but not off. He stopped at the top of her thighs, which gave him all the access he needed.
Not all he wanted, he silently admitted, and he wasn’t very happy about having to admit anything. But all he needed.
She sobbed again, and yeah, he could imagine it did hurt like hell. A long sliver of glass had embedded itself under her skin, a two-inch sliver with just its tip showing.
No wonder he hadn’t seen it, and no wonder she was crying and letting him take her panties off.
Which, for all the wonder of that, made him feel like shit.
He was going to have to use his knife.
“Would you like some pain meds? I have some in my pack.”
“Oh, right, like I’m . . . like I’m going to take drugs from a stranger. I don’t even know your name.”
“Smith,” he told her again.
She said something to that, something mumbled into her hands, and he thought it was “bullshit.” As a matter of fact, he was pretty damn sure that’s what she’d said. Two minutes ago, it would have made him grin, but not when he was going to have to cut her. The sliver of glass was just under her skin. He could see it very clearly.
“Just do it,” she said, sounding completely resigned and completely miserable. “Just do what you need to do to get it out.”
