by Lucy Monroe
Despite not understanding his motives, she did as he said and peeled out of the sweatshirt to don the scrubs.
He made her wear a green shower cap-looking thing over her hair and a surgical mask that covered her face.
“This is all very cloak and dagger, but I don’t see the point,” she grumbled on the way to the elevator.
“Don’t talk until we get outside.”
She sighed heavily and frowned at him, but complied. Though how much of her frown he could see behind the dumb mask, she didn’t know. He wasn’t even looking at her, anyway. His attention was on everything and everyone around them.
Which should make her feel safe at the moment, but annoyed her instead. Good night! She was really in a cranky mood. Was it the aftereffects of the CO poisoning?
He took her out behind the hospital, tucked her into another nondescript-looking rental car, and left.
“Can I take the mask off now?”
He looked in the rearview mirror and executed a couple of swift turns before saying, “Yes.”
She yanked it off. “After wearing an oxygen mask all night, having something against my face right now is about the last thing I want,” she said, trying to explain her impatience.
He pulled his off, too, and tossed it in the back seat. “I imagine so, but the oxygen was necessary.”
“Thank you for insisting I stay. I wasn’t really with it enough to make good decisions last night. I hate being confined, but staying over in the hospital was the best thing for me.”
“You’re right, it was.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever told you that saying I told you so is tacky?”
“My sisters may have mentioned it once or twice.”
She found herself grinning in spite of her bad mood. “I bet they did.”
She rubbed her temples, trying to dispel the lingering headache. “So, what is going on?”
“Nitro and a female operative named Josie McCall, decoying as you, left the hospital in my original rental car to drive to Vermont.”
Maybe her brain wasn’t working properly yet, but that didn’t clarify one tiny thing. “Why?”
“Because we want Nemesis to follow them.”
“Why do we want him to follow the decoys?”
“It will give us a chance to get there ahead of them and set a trap.”
“Why Vermont?” Wouldn’t Texas make more sense if they wanted to set a trap for Nemesis to fall into?
“My home is there.”
“You’re taking me to your house?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you told Jake you were moving in with me, not vice versa.”
“Things changed.”
Yes, they had. “Is that where Jake and Bella are?”
“No, they’re staying at Nitro’s place.”
“Fewer people to keep track of when you spring your trap.”
“Exactly.”
It made sense.
“I thought about sending you to stay with Jake, but I figured you had a right to see this thing through.”
She was glad he’d worked that out on his own. “How would you catch Nemesis if you sent me away? I’m the bait.”
“Not anymore. The decoy is now the bait.”
“How do we know Nemesis will follow them?”
“He put a transmitter on my car last night.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, and if I’d thought of it, I could have been having my car watched and we’d have the bastard nailed already.”
“You can’t think of everything.”
His expression said, Want to bet?
“Well, you didn’t this time and it’s no use getting all excited about it. What’s done is done.”
“I don’t get excited.”
“Sure you do.” He liked to pretend he was all dead inside, the standard hardened mercenary, but Joshua cared too much about other people, even if he didn’t realize it.
The look he gave her was one-hundred-percent masculine sensuality. “Yeah, I do, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.”
She swallowed. “So, how does having a transmitter on your car guarantee Nemesis will follow?”
“You’ve got to try to think like he does.”
“I’m not the stalking type,” she said with acerbity, cursing the headache that made every tonal change feel like a pounding hammer in her head.
He didn’t take her to task for her crankiness, but said, “If he doesn’t follow, he risks the possibility of losing track of you. I don’t think he’ll do that.”
“But he’s following a decoy. Don’t you think he’ll figure that out?”
“He’s not going to risk getting close enough for visual because it goes both ways. If he can see you, then you can see him and he risks becoming a familiar face to you. Remember, he can follow his transmitter from enough distance that he’d never be spotted as a tail.”
“But…”
“If he does get close enough for a visual, he’s nailed anyway because we know who he is now and Nitro will be on him like a nitrate burn on your trigger finger.”
“What?” she practically screamed.
They knew who Nemesis was? “Who is it? When did you find out? Why can’t we find him without leading him into a trap?” She glared at Joshua, wanting to brain him but not willing to risk it while he was driving. She’d had her limit of near death experiences in the car for the week already. “I can’t believe you didn’t bother to tell me until now!”
“Hotwire made the I.D. at four this morning. I told you as soon as it was safe to do so.”
“In the hospital—”
“It wasn’t a secure environment.”
“It was secure enough for you to tell the duty nurse about Nemesis and leave Ms. McCall waiting in the hall as my decoy.”
“Do you want to harangue me some more or hear what I know?” He sounded willing to go either way and it was all she could do not to growl like a rabid dog.
Arrogant men and cranky women were not a good combination.
“Tell me how Hotwire traced him. I thought none of his e-mails were written from his home computer.”
“They weren’t, but Hotwire traced the source of an e-mail you had in your archived folders that he had a hunch about. It was written a few months before the stalking started. A woman who thanked you for finally getting through to her mother with your book.”
Lise had forgotten all about the e-mail because it had been so brief and the reader hadn’t even signed her name. “How did Hotwire trace that e-mail to my stalker?”
“He connected the dots and everything in Ed Jones’s life fits our perp.”
Joshua pulled the car onto the freeway, dragging the surgeon’s cap off his head, and Lise followed suit.
“He’s originally from Southern California, but he moved to Texas almost a year ago. He disappeared when you moved to Seattle. We haven’t been able to locate his current address in the city. It could take weeks to do so and in that time he could do something a lot worse than setting you up for CO poisoning. Trapping him is faster and more certain.”
“I don’t recall ever meeting an Ed Jones.”
“You probably haven’t, at least not before he started to stalk you. Your guess that his wife left him and he was unemployed was right on target. She had him arrested for assault about seventeen months ago and pressed charges. He got out pretty damn fast, but he lost his job because of the arrest and his wife filed for divorce.”
“Do we have a picture of him?”
Joshua tilted his head toward the back seat. “The file is back there.”
She scrambled around and grabbed it. She flipped through the information Hotwire had found on Ed Jones. He was a former program manager in computer software and always paid his taxes on time. According to Hotwire, he’d never even had an overdue library book, but he was deranged enough to abuse his wife and stalk Lise. The pictures in the file were not very clear, but they made her shake because she recognized him
.
“He was the handyman at my apartment complex in Canyon Rock. He was soft-spoken and pleasant.” She’d spoken to him almost every day for months—just pleasantries, but still, it had been contact and she never would have guessed.
“That’s a piece of information Hotwire can use. Do you remember seeing him anywhere else?”
“Not since I came to Seattle, but then he wouldn’t have risked that, would he? And the night of the Seahawks game, there was more than one man wearing a ski mask because of the cold.”
“All along he’s been very careful not to take a lot of risks. Which is why I’m sure he won’t risk getting a visual of our decoys.”
One thing was good. “At least now I know he didn’t sit at a restaurant table next to me on my trip from Canyon Rock to Seattle. I would have recognized him. He must have followed at a distance.”
“Exactly.”
For some reason, that consoled her, made her feel like he wasn’t so in control. He had his limits, too.
“I still don’t see how you can be so confident of leading him into a trap. Now that he knows I’m with you, he’s bound to suspect something is up.”
“I don’t think so. He thinks he’s safe in his anonymity. Even knowing about me, he doesn’t know about Nitro and Hotwire and he has no reason to believe I’ve got the necessary skill set to find his bugs. If he knew we’d tampered with his equipment, he would not have risked putting a transmitter on my car.”
“That makes sense, I guess.” But it seemed too easy. “You’re a mercenary with a background in the Special Forces. He’ll assume you’ve got some level of advanced knowledge and he could guess at the rest.”
“If he digs into my identity, and I’m sure he already has, he’ll only find that I live off my investments and like to travel. Even finding a record of my Special Forces tour in the army will take a lot more effort than it did to hack into your system or some medical records he knew he was looking for.”
Joshua still wasn’t making a lot of sense. “But people know you’re a mercenary.”
“It’s not top secret, but it’s also not documented. The company I took over is one that never advertised. All of our business is by word of mouth and very few of my clients know my real name.”
“But your family…”
“Don’t make it a habit of telling other people.”
That was true. Bella had never told her about Joshua’s job. Lise had figured it out on her own.
“If he did private dick work, that would be one thing. But he’s staying too low-key for that and it’s pretty obvious, he relies heavily on the computer. I’m betting he’s doing all his investigation via the Internet. At least now. Most likely he watched you for a long time before he started the recognizable events.”
She’d figured that out, too, and it gave her the creeps. “So, what happens after Nitro and Ms. McCall lead Nemesis to Vermont?”
“His ass is mine.”
“If you use your home as the base for the trap, he’ll know where you live. What if he turns his anger on you?”
Joshua laughed out loud, the sound filled with genuine mirth and no little diabolical self-assurance.
“It’s not funny. You aren’t invincible.”
“As far as he’s concerned, I am. The only thing saving him is his anonymity and that’s been compromised. We’ll find him and when we do, I’ll make sure he’s damn sorry he ever fixated on you, sweetheart.” He gently forced her hand open and laced his fingers with hers. “Stop worrying.”
“I’ll try.” She watched out the front window for several minutes in silence.
He flicked her a glance before doing that thing he did, looking in all the mirrors. Probably checking for a tail. “What’s wrong, honey? That is not an I’m not worrying anymore look.”
She smiled at his belief that she could dismiss her concerns in the blink of an eye because he said so. He really was one very confident man. She was trying, and that was the best she could do, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not dismiss a growing certainty in her heart.
“I think Nemesis means to kill me.”
The time he’d shoved her into traffic, she could have been badly hurt or killed and this thing with her car’s exhaust had been even more dangerous.
Which is what she said to Joshua.
“Most people start vomiting before they pass out when they’re exposed to carbon monoxide.”
“So?” Was that supposed to mean something to her? She swore, sometimes talking to Joshua was like coaxing honey from a turnip.
“If you’d reacted classic textbook, you would have pulled over sooner.”
“Before I got so disoriented I drove over the guardrail?”
“Yes.”
“So, you don’t think he’s trying to kill me?”
Joshua’s hand on the steering wheel tightened until his knuckles were white. “Not yet.”
Chapter 13
Suddenly cold, she reluctantly tugged her hand from his so she could pull off the green cotton top and put her sweatshirt back on. “Not yet?” she prompted.
“He’s too cavalier with your life. There have been two incidents now that could have been fatal. Both times the chance of injury was greater than that of death, but you can’t get around the fact that he was willing to risk it. I think he has plans for the future.”
The need to vomit Joshua had mentioned earlier hit her now. “You think he’s on some sort of timetable, or that he just wants to taunt me sufficiently before killing me?”
“It could be either, but I wondered if yesterday’s incident wasn’t engineered so he could kidnap you.”
“Why kidnap me?”
“Honey, that’s a question I’d rather not answer.”
As one terrifying and soul-sickening scenario after another started flying through her imagination, she realized it was a question she wished she hadn’t asked, either.
Joshua’s takeoff was smoother than any commercial flight she’d been on, but the change in pressure still affected her head. She took some painkillers with a long drink from the water bottle he’d given her after belting her into the co-pilot’s seat.
He sent her a concerned glance. “You okay, Lise? Maybe we should have waited until tomorrow to fly out.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I wanted to get you out of Washington.”
Because he’d been worried about her even though he would never admit it. The knowledge did more to dispel her headache than any pain reliever could.
“Did you fly in the Rangers?”
He nodded. “Choppers. I didn’t learn to fly a jet until the year after I went independent.”
“Why did you leave the army?”
The thing that had fascinated her the most when she’d been interviewing mercenaries for her books had been their varied reasons for becoming what they were. They had ranged all the way from wanting to do what they did already, but with no red tape limiting the success of their missions, to simply wanting to get paid more for risking their lives.
Joshua had a lot of integrity. She’d bet his reasons for going independent were good ones.
But when he didn’t answer at once, she began to wonder if his reasons had been painful as well. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
He turned to look at her, the plane on automatic pilot now that they were flying at altitude. “I got married the second year of my tour in the Rangers.”
“You’ve been married?” The news shouldn’t have come as such a shock. After all, she’d been divorced. But it did.
His eyes reflected faint humor at her surprise. “Most men over the age of thirty have, at least once.”
“I guess you’re right, but I never pictured you as the domestic type.” A warrior, yes. A hearth and home man, no.
“It wasn’t a craving for domesticity that prompted my marriage. I was a nineteen-year-old kid who wanted a little softness when I wasn’t in the field. Melody was soft—at least, her body
was.”
“Did you love her?”
“I thought I did, but I learned that kind of love is more illusion than reality.”
He couldn’t have meant his words the way they sounded, but she had to ask to make sure. “Are you saying you don’t believe in the love between a man and a woman…at all?”
His jaw tightened, his expression hardening. “No.”
She inhaled air into lungs that hurt with the effort it took not to protest the wound his words inflicted. If he did not believe in love, it was a safe bet he did not love her and that news was about as welcome as a snakebite in the desert.
“What about Jake and your sister, what about your parents?” Bella had told her that their parents were happily married and had been for decades.
“Lee is not my real father.”
“So, he’s your stepfather, but that doesn’t negate the love he feels for Myra. He adores her.” Even if Bella hadn’t told her that, it had been obvious at both the wedding and Genevieve’s christening.
“No, it doesn’t.” He adjusted something on the instrument panel. “I should have said that I don’t believe in it for me. What Jake and Bella have is unique.”
“You don’t think you’re capable of experiencing those feelings?”
“No.”
“Because of your marriage?”
“What I thought was love turned out to be nothing more than sexual infatuation.” His dark eyes bored into hers, letting her know he believed everything he was saying. “When our marriage ended, the only thing I missed about Melody was the sex and holding someone at night.”
Was that all he would miss about her when she moved back to Texas and he went on to his next assignment? She’d miss the sexual intimacy, too. The passion between them was beyond anything she could ever have imagined, but for her it was so much more. The pain in her chest grew and she wondered if broken hearts really did shatter.
She could not force herself to say anything, even the inane, but apparently he wasn’t expecting an answer because he went on.
“Melody and I played at marriage. Looking back, I realize our relationship was nothing more than a series of intense sexual encounters. We didn’t talk. We didn’t want to buy a house, or do any of the things married couples interested in becoming a family do.”
