by Cindy Dees
“Done,” she breathed.
Avi let her slide down his body, which would have been unbearably sexy were they not in imminent danger of being discovered. As it was though, her breath still hitched in the back of her throat momentarily.
He eased the storeroom door open and peeked out into the hall for a moment. He slipped outside and darted to his right. She followed suit, running lightly on the balls of her feet, racing for the rear exit right on Avi’s heels. He opened the door carefully, slipped outside, and she followed suit. Just as she silently eased the exterior door latched behind herself, she heard two men’s voices talking inside. Sounded like they were headed this way.
Avi had already moved around the corner of the building, and she bolted from the back steps, joining him quickly. Whew. Outside. If they got caught now, they’d be told to stay away, but they wouldn’t have created an international incident—or been caught committing an actual crime.
She released the breath she realized she’d been holding. A wave of adrenaline slammed into her, crashing over her and making her whole body shake. Good grief, that had been a close call.
Avi turned to face the wall, reaching for the electrical panel once more. Crud. He was right. If they left all of the security-related circuit breakers thrown off, when the Iranians found them, they would be suspicious as hell. She and Avi needed to turn them all back on.
He went to work picking the lock again. Frowning, she pushed his hands aside, taking over the job. Thankfully, he didn’t fight her. Using the picks she lifted out of his fingers, she popped open the padlock in a fraction of the time it would have taken him. Avi quickly threw open the metal door and they flipped on all of the circuit breakers they’d disabled before.
It took just a second to close up the panel, and then they turned to eye the security cameras. It was an agonizing ninety seconds or so until the cameras finally lined up, both pivoting away from them at the exact same moment.
“Now,” Avi muttered.
She took off running for all she was worth beside him, sprinting for the cover of the nearest tree. He dived behind its trunk and she glanced over her shoulder. The two cameras were slowly turning back, coming to bear on the lawn they’d just crossed.
Safe. They’d made it.
Another surge of adrenaline startled her. Whether it was the letdown from the first adrenaline surge of fear or an actual sense of thrill pulsing through her, she couldn’t tell. But her body tingled all the way to her fingertips, and she felt light and fast and more alive than she ever had.
Man, that had been fun.
Well, fun, now that they were safe and hadn’t gotten caught.
Still. An urge to jump and shout and run nearly overcame her.
They stuck to the shadows as they moved farther away from the Iranian building, not ceasing their stealth tactics until they reached a main sidewalk well out of sight of the Iranian facility. Rebel stepped out of the shadows and began to walk normally beside Avi, who did the same.
“Good times,” she commented.
He grinned down at her. “See anything interesting?”
“I swabbed a bunch of empty suitcases with explosive detection patches. And there was a stack of oxygen bottles that surprised me. What do athletes need with supplemental oxygen?”
“No idea. Maybe the team’s planning on doing some scuba diving?”
“Tanks weren’t the right kind for that. They looked like medical containers.”
“Huh. Weird. Let’s run those swabs right now.”
It ended up being her running the swabs through the box-shaped detection machine while Avi looked up the make and model of safe the Iranians were using to store their weapons.
“The swabs are negative,” she announced.
“I’m not surprised,” Avi replied. “It would be nigh impossible to fly in anything nasty and get it past airport security in the international airports the Iranians had to transit to get here.”
“If they’re planning something, they would have to get some sort of supplies into the country, though,” she said thoughtfully.
“Not necessarily,” Avi responded.
“What do you mean?”
“They could’ve bought what they need on the black market here in Australia.”
“Maybe. But it’s not like illegal arms dealers hang out shingles and advertise Guns “R” Us.”
Avi chuckled. “Agreed. Typically, it would take an established contact to make a fast arms sale. Which means either the Iranians planned whatever they’ve got up their sleeve well in advance, or else they used an Iranian government contact to make the arms buy.”
She frowned at Avi. “In either case, you’re suggesting that the Iranian government is involved in whatever Mahmoud has planned.”
“Yes. I am.”
“Wouldn’t the Aussies pick up some sort of chatter about an arms sale to a bunch like the Iranians? The way I hear it, the Australian people take it as a point of pride that nothing bad will happen on their Olympic watch. Even criminals might inform on the Iranians if they tried to buy black market weapons and gear to hit the Olympics.”
“Good point.” He shrugged. “Maybe the Iranians brought in their gear by ship.”
“You’re assuming that the Iranians are, in fact, planning a terrorist attack in the next two weeks.”
“That’s because they are planning one. I can feel it in my gut.”
She nodded, her gut also ringing with the rightness of his assumption. “Can we get manifests on all ships that have come into Australia for the past few months?”
“That would be a gigantic list. This is an island nation, after all. Do you have any idea how many ports of entry there are into this country?”
She shrugged. Major T. often lectured about the value of doing the hard legwork that normal people blew off as being too tedious. “We could search for ships that passed through the Middle East, maybe ones carrying Iranian cargo. That might narrow down the search. If nothing else, the Iranians won’t expect us to go to all the trouble of sifting through hundreds or thousands of ship manifests to find their inbound gear.”
“Maybe,” he said doubtfully.
“It’s worth a try. It’s not like we have anything else to go on.”
“Other than watching Mahmoud and Yousef directly,” Avi replied.
“That would involve knowing where both men are, so we can set up surveillance on them.”
Avi replied, “We’ll find them, eventually. My guys are running facial recognition software on all the Olympic feeds, and will have it running on all the Sydney CCTV feeds by tomorrow.”
“Facial recognition isn’t flawless. What if our targets are wearing disguises?” she asked.
“You’re giving them a lot of credit for being smart.”
“Since when do Israelis underestimate their foes?” she shot back.
His stare was sharp as he looked up at her quickly, and she stared back unwaveringly. He’d gone full Special Forces on her, but she was no stranger to men exactly like him. Gunnar Torsten was every bit as hard a man.
“Point taken,” he bit out. “I’ll have my people pull up all the ship’s manifests they can get their hands on, tonight. We should have a nice big stack of paper to wade through in no time.”
“Thank you.”
His gaze softened. The soldier had retreated behind the man once more. “You’re welcome.”
She smiled to take the edge off her criticism. They were both strong-willed people, and bound to disagree from time to time. It came with the territory of working with other special operators. The trick was to resolve the disagreement and then move on. No grudges, no after-the-fact snark. Just let it go. Apparently, Avi understood that lesson as well, for he said pleasantly, “Hungry?”
“It’s nearly 2:00 a.m.!”
“The dining hall is open
all night. And we can have ice-cream cones for dessert again.”
She laughed ruefully. “I don’t know if I could take another ice-cream eating session with you.”
His eyes sparkled with humor. “No problem. Wait till I introduce you to the banana-chocolate-hazelnut crepes the French cooks in the athlete’s dining tent are making.”
“Oh no. I’m doomed.”
“Consider it a warm-up for better treats to come,” Avi murmured under his breath as he ushered her out of the American building.
Gulp. And now she was definitely going to think about sex with him over every bite of whatever luscious treat he decided to serve her tonight. Who knew food could be full-on foreplay?
Chapter 10
Rebel took a break to stretch her neck and gazed around Avi’s hotel room. Stacks of printed ship customs documents were everywhere. The two of them had eaten and blatantly flirted their way through the luscious dessert crepes while they attacked the foot-high pile the Israeli security office had printed for them.
They sorted the documents first by which port of entry they’d come from. Now she and Avi were working their way through each pile individually, searching for any ship that had transited the Middle East in the past few months and which was carrying any cargo originating in Iran.
It was four in the morning, and they’d identified eight ships so far that were possible candidates for Mahmoud and company to have used for smuggling illegal military equipment into Australia.
The next order of business would be to track down more detailed ship’s manifests from each of the eight vessels and compare the listed contents against the weight and balance documents for the ship, and then to look more closely at the ship’s crew.
Not that she expected Mahmoud or his team to show up on any ship’s manifest. Mahmoud was too canny to make an amateur mistake like that. But he would have needed a way to get any smuggled equipment on and off the ship—which meant at least one crewmember was in on the hypothetical smuggling.
“I’m beat,” Avi announced. “How about you?”
“I’m getting there. My eyes are burning and starting to water.”
“Let’s call it a night. We can pick this up in the morning.”
She helped him lift the stacks of papers off his bed and set them on the floor around the edges of the room. All of a sudden, the bed loomed between the two of them while she stared at Avi and he stared back. Sexual tension was abruptly thick in the air, and potent attraction rolled off him.
Dang, he was a handsome man. He was an adult in every sense of the word, self-possessed, confident, and very sure of his ability to pleasure her. His words were right there between them, a challenge and a barrier. She would demand sex from him, huh? Temptation to do that very thing hovered on the tip of her tongue.
“What time do you go on duty tomorrow?” Avi asked.
“Noon.”
“Perfect.”
“I beg your pardon?” she asked quickly.
Avi threw back the covers and said casually, “Crawl in. It’s too late for you to be walking back to your room alone, and it’s too late for me to walk you there and back. I’ve already cost you too much sleep. Let’s catch a few hours’ rest and then we’ll dig through the rest of this paper.”
“Where will you sleep?” she asked cautiously.
“The floor will be fine for me.”
“No way. I’m not kicking you out of your bed.”
He paused in the act of reaching for the hem of his turtleneck. “Are you asking me to join you, Lieutenant McQueen?”
“I’m asking you to sleep in your own bed, Commander Bronson. I’ll take the floor.”
“Not a chance. Who do you take me for? A heathen?”
“You do know I’ve slept on the ground a lot. As in bugs and dirt and wet leaves, right?”
“I’m fully aware of that. But you’re still not sleeping on my floor.”
“We’re at an impasse, then,” she declared.
“No we’re not. It’s a king-size bed and we’re both adults. We’ll share it. I’ve already promised not to make love to you until you demand it, so you have nothing to fear from me.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “I have nothing to fear from you, anyway. I am capable of defending myself, thank you.”
He might have successfully squished her against a wall the first time they ever met, but she also hadn’t fought him full out. She’d had no desire to actually break his fingers or gouge his eyes out that night. And thank goodness she hadn’t tried to permanently wreck his man parts. She might have need of those one day, as it turned out!
A skeptical look entered his gaze at her assertion that she could defend herself from him. It was there for just a second before it disappeared, but it bothered her, nonetheless. What was she going to have to do to get him to take her seriously as a special operator?
Avi stripped off his black turtleneck, revealing a torso that made Rebel gulp. His skin was tanned, his chest liberally sprinkled with dark hair and his abs—well. Suffice it to say the man had a serious six-pack.
He kicked off his shoes and took off his belt, but left his pants on as he sat down on the edge of the bed and then swung his feet under the comforter. He leaned back on a pile of pillows and linked his hands behind his head. He smiled up at her, a devilish glint in his dark eyes.
“Go ahead, Rebel. Crawl in.”
He didn’t add the phrase, “I dare you,” aloud, but he might as well have.
Oh, she didn’t like being dared to do anything. She had never been able to walk away from a challenge. Her current career being an excellent case in point.
Glaring a little in his general direction, she kicked off her shoes and reached behind herself to unstrap her bra under her turtleneck. Working under her shirt, she pulled her left bra strap down her left sleeve and slipped her hand out of it. Reaching up her right sleeve, she did the same. She finished with a flourish, pulling her bra out from under her shirt.
“How in the hell did you just do that?” Avi asked.
She grinned at him. “Put on a bra and I’ll show you how.”
He just shook his head. But the glint in his eyes was even more pronounced, now. She noticed that his gaze had a tendency to stray downward toward the formfitting spandex clinging to her now-unfettered breasts. She wasn’t huge as women went, but she’d always privately thought she had a nice chest.
Avi seemed to think so, too.
She stretched out beside him, pulled the sheet up over her shoulder and rolled onto her side, facing away from him. Behind her, Avi turned off the light, and the room plunged into darkness.
“Good night, Rebel.”
How could one person’s voice sound both soothing and sexy at the same time like that? Good grief, it was intimate being here with him like this. His quiet voice caressed her skin as if it had been a physical touch, and his body heat warmed the space between the blankets, surrounding her in an embrace that might as well be his arms for real. It was comforting.
Except Avi was not a comfortable man. He was a challenging man. A restlessly energetic man. A frankly sensual man who dared her to let go of her inhibitions and experience more. Feel more.
Which was hard for her. She’d been taught her whole life to suppress emotions and feelings. To operate solely from a place of logic, and to be... Less.
The idea exploded across her mind with the force of a revelation. That was why she’d been such an angry child, a rebellious teen. Because she refused to be less than she was. If anything, her father’s repressive attitude toward women had driven her to reach for higher goals, to push her own limits, to be... More.
In a way, she had her father to thank for where she was today. She doubted she would have gone to college, joined the military or, especially, tried for the Medusas without his disapproval prodding her in the gut for all these y
ears.
“You’ve gone unusually quiet over there,” Avi murmured.
“I was thinking about my father.”
A burst of laughter escaped him. “You never fail to surprise me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Here you are lying in bed with a reasonably attractive man who has stated his intent to make love with you, and you’re thinking about your father? I must admit, that’s a bit demoralizing.”
“Oh. Umm. Sorry. I was thinking about how all his efforts to repress me only made me try harder and reach bigger in life. If I’m lying here beside you today, it’s because of how much I hated him and resented his belief that I was good for nothing but cooking, cleaning and making babies. Thank goodness you’re nothing like him.”
“A complex and somewhat sideways compliment, but I’ll take it. As for your father—” He expressed a curse crude enough to make her laugh out loud.
Still grinning, she said into the dark, “Fair enough. How is it you always know exactly the right thing to say to me?”
She could feel his smile, even though she couldn’t see it. “Lots and lots of practice with women. You women are not really that hard to understand if a man takes the time to pay attention to you.”
“There went my sense of being a special unicorn,” she replied ruefully. “I’m as transparent as the next woman to you.”
“Hardly. You’ve proven to be quite a challenge to analyze.”
“Is that good or bad?” she asked doubtfully.
“Absolutely good. There’s nothing I get bored with faster than a predictable woman.”
“So, the key to keeping your attention is to keep you off balance? Thanks for that insight.”
“Oh no,” he groaned, laughing. “I’ve created a monster.”
She rolled onto her back to stare at him. “Hah. Wait until I start demanding sex from you. You’re never going to get a moment’s rest.”
And just like that, he was looming over her, propped up on one elbow staring down at her. His eyes glowed like the last embers of a fire, banked but still hot enough to burn. His voice was low and dark, charged with promise. “Never fear, Rebel. I’m entirely up to the challenge. I look forward to it.”
