Capturing the Commando
Colleen Thompson
Shannon Brandt's mission had failed–spectacularly. Instead of arresting AWOL Ranger Rafe Lyons, the merciless commando had kidnapped her–a tough, experienced FBI agent. Worse, she'd agreed to a deal with the devil and promised to help Rafe recover his abducted niece.Before long, her promise becomes a wrenching ethical dilemma. If she breaks the law to reunite a family, she'll ruin her career and dishonor her family. But if she plays it by the book, an innocent life may be lost. To further complicate her decision, Shannon finds herself falling for the arrogant, abrasive–but undeniably attractive–commando…even though this dangerous mission might lead to both their deaths.
“You going to be okay?”
She shrugged, her manner flippant. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m just about to go into a situation that could get me fired—if it doesn’t get me killed.”
She might think she had him fooled, but Rafe had to wonder, was she really up for this?
“Wish me luck.” One corner of her mouth quirked, forming a perfect dimple in her cheek. A dimple he pictured himself softly kissing.
He scowled, worry making it crucial to wipe the look from her face, to make her understand how critical this moment was. Looking across the front seat at her, he said, “This is it, Shannon. This means…everything.”
Her eyes softening, she nodded. “I know, Rafe,” she said. Laying her hand atop his, she gave him a reassuring squeeze.
He felt her lean over the console an instant before her unexpected kiss lit the powder keg of his confusion. As he turned to wrap an arm around her, to drag her even closer, moist heat exploded, mouth to mouth and man to woman.
But as much as Rafe would have liked to taste, to touch, to break the unbearable tension for a short time, he pushed her away, his brain reminding him of the business at hand and his heart’s blood going ice-cold with suspicion.
Is Special Agent Shannon Brandt trying to get me so worked up I won’t notice that she’s kissing me goodbye?
Capturing the Commando
Colleen Thompson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To old friends, lost friends, and fond memories.
Thanks for being part of the journey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After beginning her career writing historical romance novels, Colleen Thompson turned to writing the contemporary romantic suspense she loves in 2004. Since then, her work has been honored with the Texas Gold Award, along with nominations for RITA
, Daphne du Maurier and multiple reviewers’ choice honors, along with starred reviews from RT Book Reviews and Publishers Weekly. A former teacher living with her family in the Houston area, Colleen has a passion for reading, hiking and dog rescue. Visit her online at www.colleen-thompson.com (http://www.colleen-thompson.com).
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Shannon Brandt—A rookie FBI field agent with everything to prove, for Shannon, failure’s not an option—any more than falling for the man she’s sworn to stop at any price.
Rafe Lyons—This decorated Army Ranger will stop at nothing to avenge his little sister’s death and find his missing niece—even if that means kidnapping one gorgeous federal agent.
Lissa Lyons Smith—Murdered in her eighth month of pregnancy, Lissa had finally moved beyond her troubled youth to find happiness in the months before her death. Or had she?
Garrett Smith—The computer geek is helping Rafe track his wife’s killer. But is his grief for Lissa real or carefully contrived?
Steve Brandt—Though he thinks his sister is better suited for teaching preschoolers than hunting felons, sibling rivalry won’t stop this special agent from rescuing Shannon at any cost.
Dominic Powers—This shady lawyer will do anything to keep his luxurious South Florida lifestyle intact—no matter how many must suffer and die to ensure it.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter One
Tampa, Florida
August 21, 7:20 a.m.
He had her dead to rights.
Maybe dead, in fact, too, Shannon Brandt realized as a deep voice warned, “Don’t move,” and something hard jammed into her back. The barrel of a handgun? All from a passerby she’d barely noticed as she hurried to the corner breakfast joint where the rest of her team was already positioned, ready to make the grab. The tall white male, face mostly hidden by the brim of a goofy tourist ball cap, had been looking down, apparently engrossed in a brochure for the kitschy mermaid park nearby. He’d seemed harmlessly distracted, with a diaper bag tucked guy-style, like a football, beneath one arm. Waiting for his wife, she thought, and paying no heed to anyone else.
Or so it had seemed until the moment she’d passed and he was out of sight.
Her stomach plummeted when he ground out, “Into the car. Now. We’ll have our little talk there, Special Agent.”
Giving her a slight push, he propelled her not toward the nondescript stolen vehicle she might have expected but to a cherry-red Cadillac the size of the Queen Mary. The gas-sucking seventies engine rumbled, and she saw a sweaty-looking pale man with dark, reflective glasses slouched low behind the wheel.
Though shaded by a floppy beach hat, the driver’s weak chin gave him away as one Garrett Smith, she realized, her heart constricting with the knowledge that that meant the man behind her, the fake dad with the weapon, was well prepared to use it—that he was the very fugitive she’d been so certain she had fooled into walking into their trap.
She blanched, wondering how long it had taken him to figure out she was FBI. And whether he meant to retaliate for her online masquerade and efforts to entrap him.
She sucked in a lungful of humid air, thinking of the slim-frame Glock in her inside waistband holster. But thinking, too, of the half-dozen civilians gathered at the nearby bus stop, the men and women on the sidewalk with their greasy sacks of sugary doughnuts and newspapers, or their lunches packed for a new workday.
For a split second her mind lost its purchase, allowing the memory of another nightmare to crash its way through to reality. The concussive blast, exactly where she’d ordered the tactical team to place its charges. The hot crimson slick spreading from beneath the collapsed wall.
The cigar store hostages in Iowa, whose lives she had been charged with saving. The hostages whose lives she’d blown away just two months ago…
The faint drawl of a West Texas accent yanked her ruthlessly back to the present.
“Make a move for that gun and this goes real bad in a hurry, Special Agent. I promise you, we’re only talking. I swear it as an officer of the U.S. Army Rangers.”
“An AWOL officer,” she corrected, “on a mission your superiors never authorized and—”
“Let’s go catch up with your mother, honey,” Captain Rafe Lyons interrupted, his deep voice turning cheerful. “The little guy probably needs changing by now.”
Adrenaline detonating in hot waves all through her, she couldn’t wrap her brain around the shock of this game changer. Around the fact that rather than playing a crucial role in capturing the commando, she was the one being taken to his waiting car instead. Taken captive, possibly—or maybe to be killed before her thirtieth birthday, regardless of what he had just promised.
She could already hear the voices, the old guard bureau veterans at her funeral scoffing, If that girl was half the agent her old man was, she’d have fought her way free and dragged Lyons back in handcuffs. Could picture her older brother, Steve, a special agent working out of Oklahoma, wondering aloud why she couldn’t quit competing with him and find herself a nice safe job teaching preschool.
Like hell, Steve. Fury ramping past her fear, Shannon pivoted, one hand reaching for her waistband, while the other rose to shove aside her assailant’s weapon and allow her enough space to go on the attack.
But though she’d practiced such defense tactics in scores of training sessions, Lyons was no ordinary sparring partner. Dropping his arm beneath her grasp, he closed in and brought his hand—the hand holding what she took to be a pistol—up against her neck. Before she could cry “Rape!” or free her own gun, she felt herself tumbling, glittering blue bursts crackling through her brain and muscles. Independent of her will, her head and limbs flailed wildly with the voltage surging through her.
Not a gun—a stun gun, her mind registered as her body crumpled, her forehead smacking the sidewalk and heat streaking past her eyes. As the jolt ended, she heard the Ranger, with his maddening Texas accent, telling the gathering bystanders, “Stand clear. Police business.” She could picture him flashing a wallet with a badge and an official-looking ID.
Though there were a few murmurs, the onlookers scurried away, eager to look elsewhere as he deftly removed her Glock.
A minute later, as Lyons flipped the front seat forward and shoved her into the white leather backseat cavern, Shannon struggled to fight, but her abused muscles would only twitch uselessly in response. He climbed in beside her, and his big hands frisked her briskly and efficiently, plucking the cell phone from the pocket of her khaki skirt and dropping that lifeline—with its built-in GPS—beside the curb.
He reached to close the door and urged the driver, “Let’s go.”
The man Shannon had ID’d as Lyons’s brother-in-law pulled out into traffic. Sped up to take her somewhere that her team, only a block distant, couldn’t follow.
She fought to sit up, but her body was having none of it. She struggled to protest, but her words spilled out in an incoherent jumble. Instead, she coughed, choking on the acrid taste of her own terror. Or maybe there was blood, too. Judging from the pain, she’d bitten her tongue, and something was dripping down her forehead, which felt as if she’d cracked it open like an egg.
“Don’t try to talk.” Bent over her, Lyons briefly came into focus, with his chiseled features, short hair black and shiny as a panther’s, and intense green eyes set in a worried face.
He started to cuff Shannon’s hands behind her, then appeared to change his mind, binding them in front instead and pressing a towel he pulled out of the diaper bag into them. “Hold this against your forehead.” As he spoke, he winced, regret flashing across his handsome features.
She reached up, wiping at the bloody mess and struggling to reorder her scrambled thoughts. When she touched the rising lump with the towel, she groaned and struggled not to be sick, pain slicing like a cleaver through her skull.
“Wish that hadn’t had to happen,” he said, perspiration rolling down the side of his face. “It shouldn’t have been necessary. I told you, I just wanted to talk.”
“W-would you have bought that and…and gone quietly?” The words sounded thick and clumsy in her ringing ears. “Well, no,” he allowed. “But that’s me, and—anyway, I’m not the one sitting here bleeding.”
“And I’m not the one heading to Leavenworth for assaulting and abducting a federal officer,” she told the man she had already pegged as just another macho cowboy. Having been raised, alongside her chauvinistic brother, in Wyoming by a testosterone-breathing uncle, she was well-acquainted with the breed—and couldn’t wait to slap cuffs on this Texas-born example.
As the vintage Cadillac picked up speed and cornered sharply, Shannon would have fallen to the floorboards if Lyons’s strong hands hadn’t grabbed her.
“Damn it. Careful, Garrett,” he barked. “We don’t need to draw any more attention.”
“You’re calling me by name?” the driver complained, sounding as nervous as he had every right to be.
Lyons laughed. “You’re kidding, right? The agent here knows exactly who we are. As much as she knows anything, in the shape she’s in right now.”
“You promised me nobody’d get hurt. Nobody but those murderers…” Grief choked Garrett’s voice to a whimper. “God. Lissa…”
With the heel of his hand, Rafe popped the corner of the driver’s seat. “Don’t say her name. All right? Not now. Not until we find them. Then we can ram it down their throats.”
Lissa Lyons Smith, they meant. Garrett’s wife of two years and Rafe Lyons’s little sister. The sister he had raised after their parents’ deaths in a head-on collision, when Lissa had been fourteen to her brother’s twenty-two.
The same sister who had been brutally murdered almost exactly ten years later. Only three weeks ago in Abilene, she’d been found, her eight-months-pregnant body an empty husk. The medical examiner had determined she’d already been dead, or at least deeply unconscious, from the shattering blow to her skull before the killers started cutting.
Shannon prayed that part was true. But whether or not it was, the young woman’s death and her child’s disappearance had been more than enough to bring the Ranger captain known by his men as “the Lion” back early from his combat mission in Afghanistan.
It had been more than enough, too, to send the decorated Ranger—by all accounts, a hero—AWOL following the funeral. Out of reach and out of control as he pursued a mission—a personal vendetta—of his own…
One he had begun by punching out the lead Amarillo detective in frustration before returning to his home base in Georgia, closing out his bank accounts and emptying his gun case.
“You don’t—you don’t need to do this. We want… We’re working to find them, too,” Shannon explained, though waves of pain like black tar were rolling across her vision. Whatever you do, she told herself, you can’t pass out.
Would they dump her somewhere if she did? Maybe even kill her? Or did Lyons mean to kill her anyway, as a warning to back off, directed at the team assembled to rein in one maverick the government deemed too valuable—or too dangerous—to allow to run amok?
“Those animals are strictly secondary targets.” Lyons’s anger only intensified the pounding inside her head. “I’m working to find her.”
“Her…?” Who did he mean?
On that fateful evening, neighborhood witnesses had spotted a white plumbing van leaving the Smiths’ home—a vehicle found abandoned only hours later, not far from where a Ford SUV had been taken from the garage of a vacationing neighbor. When the theft was finally reported three days later, the vehicle’s antitheft tracking system located it abandoned in Northern Florida—less than a mile off of I-10, the main east-west corridor that ran across the Southern U.S.
There were a host of theories, each more horrifying than the last, regarding the crime itself, but state and federal investigators alike agreed on one fact. The two assailants had been male, with both sporting facial hair and a compact, muscular build.
It seemed likely the men were working for someone else, a monster who had set all this in motion. Could a creature cruel enough to order an unborn infant sliced from the womb of an expectant mother possibly be a woman?
The light in Rafe’s green eyes went almost feral. “My niece. I only want my niece back.”
“Of course.” She cursed her spinning head and the confusion that came with it. “Then you’ve found evidence the baby survived?”
“We were going to have a girl.” Smith’s voice broke as he interrupted. “A little girl, and we were going to name her Amber Lee.”
“But do you know the baby lived?” Gritting her teeth against the pain, Shannon focused on the question, on keeping her eyes open.
“We don’t have hard proof,” Smith admitted. “But we think… She has to—”
“She’s alive,” Rafe promised, his voice a rumble of barely suppressed emotion. “She’s alive, and I’ll kill anyone who stands between me and getting that little girl back to her family.”
Dabbing once more at the dripping blood, Shannon pushed herself into a sitting position, then stared up at him and challenged, “Does that include a federal agent, Lyons? Because I mean to stop you. I plan to bring you in. Today.”
RAFE STARED, dumbfounded, into the brunette’s ice-blue eyes. Eyes that stood out starkly from a face that he thought might be attractive despite the blood dripping from the rising purple lump below her hairline.
She was serious, he realized, recognizing the same raw determination that marked the soldiers of his unit. The men who earned the Ranger tab, who earned respect through leadership and combat.
She might have frozen on that crowded street, hesitated for the single instant it took him to predict what she would do. But he knew damned well she would have shot any man who was a fraction of a second slower—or any less desperate than he was to find his niece.
Yet it was neither the coldness of her gaze nor the memory of her training that reminded him to tread carefully around her. It was the starkness of her statement, a statement another man might have laughed off but he instead took as a warning.
She would not go quietly. Would not concede defeat even as she slumped back against the plush white leather, her blue eyes fluttering closed.
As Garrett slowed for a red light, a jacked-up black pickup pulled beside them, its bass thumping out a salsa rhythm. Ignoring it, Lyons pushed the towel she’d dropped into her hands, and in that single moment she erupted into action.
She drew back her legs, then screamed and kicked at the driver’s-side window, clearly hoping to draw attention, maybe even smash the glass. Still too weak to be effectual, she did no better than a couple of hard thumps.
In less time than it took for Garrett to let out a startled oath, Rafe hauled her around and pushed the fist-size black stun gun against the curve of her waist.
When she went still, he laid on the Texas drawl. “You don’t want another friendly zap, now do you? Come on, sugar. Calm down.”
Pressing her back against the door, she glared up at him, her look pure poison. But the effort must have cost her, for the face behind the bloody mask paled, and her eyelids fluttered even harder.
Blinking hard, she grimaced and then slurred, “I’m not your ‘sugar,’ cowboy.”
“And I’m not your ‘cowboy,’ Special Agent,” Rafe said with a shake of his head. As the car once more began moving, he said quietly, “But I’d like to be… Well, I sincerely hope to be your partner for a while.”
First confusion and then mutiny flashed across her face. Her lips moved—he thought he might have read Hell, no—but no sound followed.
And wouldn’t, as her last measure of determination winked out and those striking blue eyes rolled back into her head.
Chapter Two
Rafe had been wrong, he realized, as he washed her face with the towel Garrett had dampened in the restroom of a gas station. The woman they had taken was nothing like attractive beneath the drying blood. She was gorgeous, plain and simple. Maybe not a conventional beauty, with her mouth a little too wide, her brows a bit too dark and her nose tipped upward a bit too much at the end, but taken together with those probing light blue eyes he’d seen, the effect was…damned uncomfortable.
So he shoved the thought out of his brain, ignoring the subtle curves of her toned body and the fact that he’d been without a woman for so long he couldn’t—
Guilt burned as if he’d swallowed one of his sergeant’s lit cigars. What the hell was his problem, that he could forget Lissa—murdered, mutilated—and lose his focus on her stolen child for even an instant? As a battle-hardened Ranger, he was well trained, experienced at ignoring his body’s demands. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion—wasn’t he always telling his men these were nothing compared to a warrior’s force of will?
As beautiful, as vulnerable, as Special Agent Shannon Brandt might be, he needed to see her only as an asset to be recruited, assuming he could find some way to convince her to cooperate with his plan.
And if the concussion she had clearly sustained wasn’t serious enough to drop her into a coma, or maybe even kill her.
As they continued driving south, he pointed out an exit. “That’s the one. You need to take that one.”
“I’ve got it—got it.” Garrett darted a nervous scowl over his shoulder. “You know, Rafe, you’re even more annoying when you’re a backseat driver.”
“You don’t have to like me, buddy.” Rafe smiled without a trace of humor, thinking that his computer geek brother-in-law wouldn’t last a day in infantry. “Just keep in mind that I’m in charge here—and you’re my prisoner in all this—every bit as much as she is. You be sure and tell the cops and feds that.”
SHANNON PEERED through slitted eyes, then started at the unexpected dimness. Though she felt the movement of a vehicle, it was different, no longer the vintage Caddy with its white-leather backseat.
Sometime during the day she had been moved, strapped into the dark gray cloth rear seat of a completely different vehicle. She sat up and then hissed through clenched teeth as her headache reignited.
“Feeling any better, Special Agent?” Rafe Lyons turned in the front passenger seat to look her over. “You look better. Color’s improved.”
“Thanks, Nurse Ratched,” she said, and raised her cuffed hands to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Nice to know you care.”
“Good to see your sense of humor’s intact.” A wry grin tipped his mouth—a mouth that under different circumstances she might think of as sensual.
“You’re mistaken. I’m not laughing, cowboy. What time is it? Where are we?”
“You’ve been in and out of it all day,” he said. “You remember anything?”
Vague snippets crossed her bruised synapses. The droning hum of a highway. Wisps of quiet conversation. A stop someplace—a small house?—where an older woman’s sympathetic face floated into view as she helped Shannon change her bloody top. She saw Rafe’s face, too, hard-set with concentration as he placed a bandage on her forehead and fed her what he had claimed was a mild painkiller, then helped her to wash it down with bottled water.
Had there been a sleeping pill, too, despite the risks of mixing one with her head injury? Probably not, Shannon decided, recalling the sleepless nights she’d spent in anticipation of the meeting she had set up with Lyons online—a meeting where she’d planned to continue her bureau-sanctioned role as a disaffected girlfriend offering information on his sister’s killers. The biggest operation she had taken part in since the hostage debacle in Iowa, Rafe Lyons’s capture was perhaps her final chance to prove she was fit for duty.
Suppressing a groan at the thought of how she’d blown it, she forced herself to say, “I remember stopping someplace. There was an older couple, I think. Someone helping you…”
“I forced them,” Rafe was quick to claim. “Just like I’m forcing you and Garrett. I’m the only one here in violation of the law.”
Instantly she understood that he was protecting his accomplices from the consequences of their actions. Shielding his brother-in-law, especially, so Garrett Smith would keep his freedom. Would be around to raise his child.
Considering the questions his wife’s murder investigation had brought up, Shannon wasn’t sure the man deserved the Ranger’s sacrifice. Nonetheless, she promised, “You let me go right now and that’s what I’ll tell everyone.”
She didn’t really care about punishing the older couple—whom she suspected were retired military—for helping the Ranger. And if her suspicions about Garrett Smith proved true and Rafe learned of them, Lyons would probably kill his brother-in-law with his bare hands.
Ignoring her offer, Rafe said, “It’s just about eight-thirty. We should make the motel anytime now. Then we’d better grab some dinner. You must be hun—”
Eight-thirty? Her head spun as she considered the sheer number of lost hours, underscored by the fading summer sky and the dim silhouettes of trees along the roadside. Heart rate ratcheting skyward, she demanded once more, “Where have you taken me?”
In the more than twelve hours since her capture, they could have crossed state lines twice or even three times. Though she knew they’d made at least one stop, she had no idea how long they had stayed off the roads—or how they could have possibly avoided what must have been a massive law enforcement effort to locate and rescue her.
In the distance she saw lights, the dark towers of buildings stacked before a gray-blue blur. The ocean? Gulf? Could this mean they were still somewhere in Florida?
“Little beach community, not too far from Palm Beach,” he said, confirming her suspicion. “Think of this as a vacation.”
“Real funny,” she shot back. “And here I’d pegged you for a cowboy, not a clown.”
“I’m neither,” Rafe said roughly. “Just a man looking to find out what happened to the only blood family he has left on this planet—and why someone would butcher my little sister like she was nothing. No one.”
Empathy stirred Shannon’s heart as she heard the desperate grief behind his anger. Enough grief and desperation to throw away his career, his very freedom, to save his sister’s child.
“You could drop this right now,” Shannon said. “Before somebody really gets hurt. People—even your superiors—aren’t without compassion for your situation, and you can bet the FBI and more local agencies than you can shake a stick at are all committed to the search for your niece and your sister’s killers. If you’ll let me, Lyons—Rafe— I could get you a good deal, maybe even keep you out of prison so you can see that baby when we find her. Be the kind of uncle she can count on to help raise her.”
If we find her alive. Though the pair believed to have murdered Lissa Smith was suspected in other similar crimes, none of the missing babies had ever been recovered, and the purpose of their abduction remained a mystery. Black-market trafficking? Blood rituals? The possibilities were endless, each one more sickening than the last.
“Listen to her, Rafe,” Garrett urged, a note of pleading in his voice. “It can’t hurt to listen to what she says.”
The vehicle, which she’d decided was a midsize SUV of some sort, slowed to make a left turn beside a faded sign that read The Seashell Motel—Your Home Away from Home Since 1957. Behind it lay a long one-story structure, a single bar of back-to-back rooms squatting on the far side of a tiny, ill-lit pool. A very few vehicles, all of them older models, offered evidence that this mom-and-pop enterprise was barely clinging to life—a far cry from the luxury hotels she would have expected in this area.
“I have no intention of listening to a word of Agent Brandt’s deal,” Rafe said firmly, clearly used to pulling rank on others. “I brought her here for one reason and one reason only. To talk her into mine.”
“What about your career?” According to Shannon’s research, the thirty-two-year-old had little else. No steady girlfriend, no other family, and few friends beyond the members of his tight-knit Ranger unit, which had its home base in Georgia. Other than the accent, he’d left behind his West Texas past, including the rodeo bull riding circuit, where he’d competed in his youth.
He was one cowboy who’d traded in his hat—along with his heart and soul and loyalty—for a U.S. Army Ranger beret and the unique camaraderie of Special Operations.
Desperate to leverage that bond, she added, “Those Rangers—they’re your family, too, right? You’re just going to bail on them in wartime?”
His green eyes glared back at her. “You’d better think about your own career, sugar. Because from what I’ve learned about that hostage standoff back in Iowa, you’re about one screwup short of being booted from the only job that’s ever mattered to you…Daddy’s girl.”
She blinked back angry tears that she would never dare shed. They blurred Lyons’s outline, smudging his dark navy T-shirt and the hard planes of his face.
“Go straight to hell,” she murmured, her sympathy for his motives vaporizing in the white heat of her reaction to his cruelty.
SHANNON WAS STILL SEETHING when Rafe finally ordered her into the room. Garrett had checked them into an end unit, a room decorated with cheesy paintings of the beach and a peeling seashell wallpaper border, though any view of the Atlantic had long since been obstructed by the newer oceanfront hotels.
“I’m headed out to pick up dinner,” Garrett told them. “Anything you two want?”
Shannon thrust her shackled wrists toward his face. “How ’bout something with a file baked inside it? Or better yet, a working cell phone?”
Rafe shot her an annoyed look from where he was unplugging the second of two grimy-looking rotary phones. “Lock these in the Jeep, will you, Garrett? No need to tempt the agent. And as far as food, it’s just fuel, that’s all. So pick whatever you like.”
Garrett pulled off his beach hat and raked his fingers through limp, sandy-blond hair. About five-ten and still a little on the pale side, he was nonetheless a decent-looking specimen. Squeamish, though, in contrast to the Ranger. Regardless of her suspicions, Shannon tried to appeal to his softer nature.
“I could really use some aspirin or something, anything extra-strength to help knock back this headache.” Though that was true enough, she feigned exhaustion as she dropped into one of the old oak chairs and put her feet up on one of two sagging full-sized beds. “And maybe…if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, a box of tampons—super plus?”
That part was pure fiction, but she had never met the man who would dare to call a woman on the bluff.
“Um…” Garrett’s gray-eyed gaze slid toward Rafe, as if for help. When none was forthcoming, he finally shrugged and murmured, “Sure, I guess so,” before slinking out to escape while he could.
“You’re good. I’ll give you that,” Rafe allowed as he stepped up to the door and hooked the security chain. “But don’t count on playing on his sympathies and turning him against me.”
Stalking back to where she sat, he looked like a mountain of pure, male muscle—six feet three inches, and two-hundred-ten pounds’ worth, according to his records.
Refusing to be intimidated, Shannon fixed him with a fierce look, daring him to come one step nearer. “And don’t count on getting my help by throwing my past up in my face. You don’t win friends with bludgeons—or is brute force all they taught you back in Ranger school?”
He grimaced, and a long sigh followed. “Sorry, Agent. I know better. But that shot about me abandoning my men in wartime—that was way over the line. They’re family, too, to me.”
“Then let’s agree. Family’s off-limits. Especially mine.” And most especially the father she had lost at age eight, the father she and her brother had both been raised to revere, with his every artifact an idol in their rancher uncle’s house. Her stomach shrank down to a red-hot coal as Rafe’s Daddy’s girl crack echoed through her memory.
“Got it.” He stuck out his right hand, offering to shake.
Ignoring it, she added, “And if you ever dare to bring up Iowa again, I swear to you that one way or another, I will find a way to burn you. You can count on it.”
To his credit, he didn’t smile or remind her that she was the one in handcuffs but simply nodded. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Brandt.”
“Good. Then right now, you have my undivided attention. Tell me about this plan of yours.”
“All right, then.” He moved his bulky duffel bag to the closet alcove next to the small bathroom, then sat in the chair beside hers.
“Okay,” he said. “The way I figure it, you can come out of this one of two ways. The inept, helpless victim—”
“Enough with the flattery,” she said with a scowl.
“Or the hero,” he finished. “The agent who managed to solve a crime and save a child your colleagues couldn’t, all on your own.”
“I’m liking that part,” she admitted, imaging herself turning the tables in the process and marching the handsome fugitive in at gunpoint. As her fantasy unfolded, her big brother—who would almost certainly have come to Florida by this time—would stand up and lead the round of applause. “How ’bout we dispense with the cuffs and get right to it?”
His forehead creased in either surprise or amusement. “I’m sure you’d enjoy that. But first, I need your agreement that you mean to help…with the best cause that there is.”
“Let me guess,” she ventured. “It’s finding Lissa’s baby.”
As he shook his head, a fierce light gleamed behind his deep green eyes. “Not just finding her daughter. Finding and returning all the stolen babies. All the infants a man named Dominic Powers has ordered torn from their dying mothers and then sold to the highest bidder to fund his personal empire.”
Chapter Three
He saw on her face that she didn’t know the name. That in spite of the dozens of investigators working in the five states where women had been murdered, Garrett’s hacker sources, with their willingness to use extralegal means, had uncovered a connection that law enforcement hadn’t found—if the feds even knew they were looking at a serial case. Rafe still wasn’t sure exactly how they’d pinpointed Powers, but his sources had come up with enough corroborating evidence to convince him that the unscrupulous attorney was their man.
“How many do you think you’re looking at?” she asked, her eyes giving away nothing.
“There have been five that we know of,” he said. “Five similar murders of last-trimester pregnant women.”
“We’ve come up with eight,” she said. “Most of them in the Gulf Coastal states, though your sister’s death was the only one as far west as Texas. My partner calls them the Madonna Murders—though we’ve managed to keep that away from the press so far, to avoid mass hysteria.”
“People have the right to know.” Anger speared through him. Lissa might not have had to die if the feds had been willing to alert the public. “They have the right to protect themselves and their loved ones.”
“It’s a delicate balance,” Shannon admitted, “but that decision came from way above my pay grade.”
“That’s no excuse,” he murmured.
“We’ve learned that men driving stolen white vans marked with the names of fictitious plumbing companies were seen leaving at least three of the scenes. But Dominic Powers—that’s a new name to me. What can you tell me about him?”
“Forty-six years old, Caucasian. Currently renting a thirteen-point-six-million-dollar villa right down the road in Palm Beach after twenty years in Houston.”
Her lips parted as her brows rose. “Thirteen-point-six?”
He nodded to confirm what he and Garrett had discovered from the tax rolls. “Married three times,” Rafe continued. “The most recent spouse filed for divorce and pressed charges for domestic battery. Wife number two vanished a few years prior. Powers claims she ran off with a boyfriend, while her family swears she’d never leave, much less stay away, without a word to them.”
“How’d number one get off so easy?”
Rafe shook his head, then shrugged. “We weren’t able to find any trace, so for all we know, she’s stuffed in a barrel somewhere offshore.”
Shaking her head, Shannon blew out a long breath. “So how’d this charmer end up in the black-market baby business? I don’t suppose it was his compassion for childless families.”
“His passion for the good life is more like it. He tended to pick wives with money and made sure a good chunk of it stayed with him, even when they didn’t.”
“Tends to happen that way when the spouse takes off for parts unknown. Or conveniently drops dead.”
Rafe nodded. “He seems to like the trappings. Flashy women, flashy lifestyle. Speedboats, sports cars, prestige ZIP codes—a hell of a lot more than he could afford on what he made as a family law attorney back in Texas. Maybe it turned out to be even more than he could fund with the occasional disappearing rich wife.”
“Family law…” In spite of what she’d been through and how she must be feeling, Shannon’s gaze was focused, her expression razor-sharp. “So he would have dealt with adoption cases back in Houston, right?”
“He had an office on the edge of River Oaks,” Rafe confirmed. “So I imagine he saw plenty of wealthy families desperate for a shortcut to claiming a healthy, white newborn they could call their own. And very, very grateful when he could make their dreams come true, no matter how he did it.”
“Then at some point a lightbulb comes on…”
Shannon’s handcuffs jingled as she snapped her fingers “…and Powers decides he’s looking at an unmet, extremely strong consumer demand. And who is he to deny the market?”
“He’s a dead man, that’s who he is,” Rafe vowed as he thought of Lissa, the pounding of his own pulse a war drum in his ears. The need for vengeance roared past the grief that had ripped him open. His heart had gone missing, along with his capacity for mercy.
“I thought you were only out to save your niece,” Shannon countered, but the words had no heat in them. And her slight smile said she understood, hinted that she wouldn’t argue with any outcome that left Powers and his men dead—or at least she wouldn’t protest too stringently. “Your niece and those other babies.”
“If I have to choose between revenge and getting them out,” he said, “I won’t have to think about my decision for a second. But if I get my shot at Powers or those butchers he sent for my sister…”
“A man could be forgiven for taking whatever measures necessary to free a captive family member, or even other innocents,” Shannon advised him, “but when it comes to a cold-blooded revenge killing, all bets are off, Captain. You know that as well as I do.”
Rafe drew a deep breath to clear his head, then answered, “I’m not a man looking for forgiveness. I’ve come way too far to give a damn about that. All I care about is making this work. After that, the Army, the FBI, the cops—they can all pick at my bones or whatever else is left of me.”
She had no answer except to look at him, her gaze as reproachful as it was somber. Could she—the same woman he’d shocked and abducted—be feeling some measure of compassion for him, along with the victims of Powers’s crimes?
Rafe didn’t need and certainly didn’t want her pity, so he hurried to fill the space with an explanation of the operation he had come up with, a raid that would stand only a ghost of a chance—and then only if she would agree to help him.
Shannon leaned forward, listening intently, her blue eyes lasering straight through his bravado to focus on the risks inherent in the plan.
When he had finished, she shook her head. “That’s crazy. You know that, don’t you? Why not just let the feds conduct the raid? We have the people and the training. We can assemble…” A shadow passed over her beautiful features, troubling her expression. “We can… I can order the tactical teams and SWAT departments to breach those walls and get—inside.”
When she paled, he suspected she was thinking of the Iowa cigar store standoff he’d researched online after Garrett had determined his “informant’s” true identity. He saw in her eyes that she was haunted by the two women and the new father who had died in the wake of her miscalculation. An error based on the best intelligence she’d had at the time.
From his own experience in combat, he knew civilians sometimes became casualties despite every effort to minimize that risk. He recognized, too, the look of PTSD, the post-traumatic stress disorder he saw written in her blue eyes.
But he pretended not to see it, respecting his promise not to bring up the incident. Instead he zeroed in on his real concern. “What do you think the odds are of the feds taking my information—data illegally obtained by Garrett’s hacker buddies—as gospel and running with it before another woman dies?”
“We’d make it top priority, but you’re right, there would have to be independent, legally obtained confirmation. For the search warrant, among other things—”
“And,” he added, “you’d also have a hell of a lot of interdepartmental chest-thumping as all the various bureaucracies fought for jurisdiction and wrangled over who got to take the credit.”
She opened her mouth as if to argue, then very slowly let it close before nodding. “Even if I were crazy enough to agree to take part in this lunacy,” she began, “do you honestly think a force of three has a prayer of pulling this off without getting a bunch of people killed? Starting with us, I mean.”
“I’ve come back from riskier missions,” he told her. “And run more than a few of ’em myself.”
“With men you trusted?”
“With my life.”
“Yeah, well, this time,” she said, “you’d have exactly two on your team. A woman whose career is toast if she doesn’t betray you, and a techno-nerd brother-in-law who—no offense—looks like he couldn’t fight his way out of buying siding from a determined telemarketer. Do you really imagine you can rely on us?”
“It’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
“For what, Rafe? Because I can’t begin to imagine that a guy like Dominic Powers is keeping a bunch of infants stockpiled at his swanky Palm Beach hacienda. Can you?”
“There’ll be records of where they’ve gone. Who’s adopted those kids. Somewhere. I have a source that mentioned some kind of ledger he keeps close at hand. He takes it out of his wall safe every morning.”
“And you think it’s his client list, maybe even records related to the babies’ mothers?”
“That’s exactly what we’re hoping.”
“Is that another risk you’re willing to take? There sure seem to be a lot of them.”
“I’ll find some way to do this,” he swore through gritted teeth. “With or without your help.”
She shook her head. “You’re not the only one who knows a bluff when she hears one. You wouldn’t have risked snatching me off a crowded street if you thought you had a shot without me. But before you risk both our lives on some half-baked raid against what you and I both know will be a well-fortified, heavily guarded compound, there’s something you should know. Some information I have that your amateur-hour investigation didn’t turn up.”
Though he bristled at being called an amateur—especially considering how he’d caught her off-guard earlier that day—Rafe clamped his jaw shut to hear out what she had to say.
Would it be another lie, like those she’d spun online in her bid to snare him, or was it possible she might be seriously considering helping him?
TIME TO TREAD CAREFULLY, Shannon warned herself as apprehension knotted in the hollow of her stomach.
Nothing she did, nothing she said, during this crisis could be more dangerous than the news she had to give him. Unwelcome news that might easily spark the ugliest of reactions in a man who had already crossed so many lines.
But however many laws he had shattered, however many oaths and regulations he had sacrificed, she still sensed a core of honor in him. A set of rigid values he placed above all bureaucratic rules.
Here’s hoping that not punching a woman is part of that code. After reinforcing her courage with a deep breath, she lobbed her opening volley. “It’s about your sister’s husband, Garrett.”
Rafe snorted in disgust, contempt written in his green eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try that divide-and-conquer bullshit on me, too.”
She leaned slightly forward, determined to cut through his distrust. “Listen to me, Lyons. Your brother-in-law… We think he’s had a girlfriend, a lover, these past six months. A woman he met online and—”
When Rafe jumped to his feet, she jerked back, then cursed herself for reacting. For showing she’d been physically intimidated, when all he was doing was getting up to pace the room.
Yet she couldn’t force herself to relax, for there was nothing safe about the wild energy crackling through his muscles, or the warning, low as a growl, in his voice when he spoke.
“Don’t you dare sit there and try to play me,” he said. “Don’t imagine for a minute I’m that stupid.”
She sat back, scarcely breathing, waiting for his anger to wind down. But he was only getting started, his temper revving to the red zone.
“Do you know Garrett was the one who found her?” Rafe demanded. “Can you imagine what it did to him, a guy like that, who’s worked in nice clean offices his whole life and doesn’t even like to think about where his chicken dinners come from, walking into that hell he saw? I’ve seen some horrible things in war zones, but the idea of what he found that night—Lissa left—left like some animal had torn into her…”
He swallowed audibly, his voice choking down to silence, the silence that so often marked the helpless rage of the survivor of a loved one’s murder. Seeing it, Shannon was haunted by the echo of her own pain, her impotent eight-year-old fury, after her father was gunned down.
If she had been a grown woman when it happened, a woman qualified to fire automatic weapons and trained to deliver a crushing blow to a man’s most vulnerable targets, would she have taken the law into her own hands as Rafe was doing now? If she had had a chance to save some part of her father, would she have been willing to sacrifice anything she had, even her own life, as Rafe would to reclaim Lissa’s daughter?
“Listen, Special Agent,” Rafe said grimly, “you haven’t lived with Garrett these past two weeks, haven’t heard the way he wakes up screaming about the blood. You haven’t watched the guy break down and sob her name, listened to him retching in the bathroom. It’s killing him, killing both of us to think of—”
“People feel remorse.” Shannon’s voice floated to earth as cautiously as the feathery pink seed of a mimosa. “People can feel regret when they’re faced with the consequences of what they’ve set in motion.”
He spun around and crossed the room in two steps before grabbing her by the arms with hands as hard as vises. “Not Garrett. I know him, know him well enough to trust him to take care of the most important person in my life. And now you have the freaking nerve to accuse him, and you think I’m going to stand here and listen to you do it?”
Heart leaping in her chest, Shannon could do no more than stiffen, frozen by the knowledge that she might have pushed too hard. Might have assumed too much about who this desperate man was, and what he would or wouldn’t do to her, despite his need for her cooperation.
He could kill her with his bare hands for the insult she had offered. Almost worse in her mind, he could try to break her will. Considering both his training and the places where his missions had taken him, he would be well acquainted with dozens of methods of coercion, from beatings that wouldn’t show to the kind of torture that would scar her soul forever.
Not him. He could never…
Yet despite her efforts to convince herself, she could feel her body recoiling, could hear the trembling of her own exhalation. Her head throbbed with the effort of containing boundless terror.
My father didn’t show fear, not even when that drug lord shoved the muzzle underneath his jaw. And my brother wouldn’t, either, so I’ll be damned if I will, no matter what he does.
The Ranger let go of her and looked away, then resumed his pacing.
To prove she wouldn’t be cowed, she forced herself to speak again, to swallow past the hard lump in her throat. “There’s more, Rafe. More we found during our investigation.”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” he asked. “I damned well don’t want to hear this.”
“If you don’t want to hear it, then you’d better gag me.” She shrugged, struggling to look as though she couldn’t care less. To look like a strong woman in a tough spot, rather than the quivering mass of nerves she felt like behind the mask. “Though you’ll have to admit, that would probably put a damper on the team-building aspect of this operation. Even more, I think, than leaving a goose egg on my forehead or these bruises on my arms.”
His gaze flicked to the reddened fingerprints on her forearms, and a troubled look passed over his face. Raking his hand through his black hair, he shook his head and said, “Fine, then. Say whatever it is you think you have to tell me. I won’t promise to listen—but you don’t have to worry that I’ll hurt you for it.”
Shannon wouldn’t bet her life on that, then realized that in a way, she did with her next words. “The weekend before Lissa’s murder, Garrett played golf with his neighbor. The same neighbor who mentioned he was about to fly to California with his family, leaving his Ford Explorer locked up in the garage.”
Rafe stared at her, the color draining from his face. “The same SUV the killers stole and drove to Florida? You’re telling me that this guy told him about it?”
Relieved beyond measure that something she had said had sunk in, Shannon nodded. “Garrett knew,” she said. “Knew it would take days for the theft to be discovered. And more than that, his neighbor gave him a spare house key and asked Garrett to bring in a package he was expecting.”
“Which would’ve given him access to the garage.”
“I have the man’s sworn statement. When the family came home, they discovered the SUV keys missing from the kitchen counter where he’d left them. But nothing else was taken, nothing but that Ford Explorer.”
Speculation narrowed Rafe’s eyes before he turned his suspicious gaze on her. “So that’s it? That’s all you have? A little online flirtation and some neighbor dumb enough to leave his keys in plain sight of a window? And if he told Garrett he was going, who else might have known? Or mentioned it to their friends?”
She nodded, deciding to hold off for now on telling him about the hotel receipts that put Garrett Smith’s affair well beyond the level of flirtation and try a new tack. “We were also concerned about his ties to online hackers.”
Rafe shrugged it off. “Sometimes he recruits them to test their skills against a database or a network he’s securing. Bomb-proofing his security work with a little friendly fire makes a lot of sense to me. Besides, those hackers are the ones who’ve helped us put everything together. They might also be the key to finding those babies and the people who paid big bucks to adopt them.”
Shannon wondered how many of the parents knew the true facts behind the adoptions they were paying for in the form of exorbitant fees. And how many hearts would shatter when the hideous truth unfolded. Yet she couldn’t let that be her worry, not with so many families desperate to find their stolen children, children who were the last, most sacred legacies of the women who’d been lost.
“You haven’t given me a shred of proof that Garrett’s involved,” said Rafe. “You’re only tossing pebbles at a window—distracting me enough to get me worrying about him. Of course, that’s the way I would’ve played it, too. More subtle like that, don’t you think? Better to work the wedge of doubt in slowly, instead of pounding it so hard it shatters.”
Shannon blew an impatient breath through pursed lips. Of course it couldn’t be easy. Not with Rafe so aware of her desperation to derail him, to bring him in to save her career. And maybe their lives, too, because she had seen enough to know that in an operation, almost anything could happen. Including outcomes no one involved intended. “Just think about it. That’s all I ask. Pay attention to how he acts, to anything that doesn’t feel right.”
This time, when Rafe narrowed his eyes, there was nothing fleeting about his suspicion. “You are good, Special Agent Brandt. You’re damned good. But you’ve got one huge shortcoming in this situation.”
“You mean other than the handcuffs, stun gun, weapons, and huge height and weight advantages you’ve got on me?” she asked sarcastically, her headache flaring as she rolled her eyes.
This time, when he reached toward her, his touch was gentle, almost playful, as he flicked his callused fingertips beneath her chin. “Your main problem is, I’m better. And I’ve been two steps ahead of you from the very start.”
Chapter Four
Shannon’s unruffled demeanor impressed the hell out of Rafe. She was either almost unbelievably cool under pressure or the finest actress he had ever met.
“How ’bout unlocking these cuffs now?” she asked him. “It’s darned awkward, using the restroom, and besides, I’d really like to catch a shower if I could.”
“A shower,” he echoed flatly. “With everything that’s going on, you’re thinking about soap and water and fluffy towels?”
Her smile hinted that, as with everything else she’d said and done since awakening, this new ploy had its purpose. “Fluffy towels? In this place? If that happened, it would be the second-biggest surprise of my day so far.”
“If you’re thinking of escaping, you should know that the bathroom has no windows,” he warned. “And if you’re thinking about potential weapons, I’ll be searching you before I let you out. Thoroughly.”
She stood and approached him, her shackled hands raised and her palms turned up as if in supplication. But there was nothing pleading in her eyes, only the glint of mild amusement. Maddening amusement, just short of mockery.
Or was it something else? Was she coming on to him now? Thinking to seduce her way out of this? Trying to get him worked up with the thought of her tight curves beneath the sluicing water—lathered, naked and hotter than the tropical late-summer night?
He nearly groaned aloud at his body’s immediate reaction. Damn her anyway, for trotting out this tactic. Why couldn’t she stick with something simple, like attempting to claw his eyes out or kick every woman’s favorite target up through the roof of his mouth? Those threats, he was equipped to deal with, just as he had been with her attempt to poison his mind against Garrett.
“I promise, I’m not thinking of anything but rinsing the dried blood out of my hair and the grit off of my skin,” she said innocently.
As if he bought that act for a second.
Confirming his suspicions, she added, “I’m also thinking we could have a long wait for your friend Garrett to come back. A very long wait…if he ever comes back at all.”
“He’ll be back, all right, though I’m thinking it might take him a while to work up the nerve to make your little purchase.” Rafe emphasized the word to show her that he didn’t buy that tampon story for a second.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a handcuff key. Unable to resist the temptation to see how far she was willing to take this latest attempt to distract him, he lifted the key toward her face and leaned in to whisper, “If I unlock those cuffs, how do I know you’ll be good?”
She didn’t step back—didn’t yield an inch—only looked up into his face through beautiful, long lashes, a knowing smile playing on her full lips. But to his surprise, her voice gave away a nervous tremor as she whispered, “Are you sure you really want me…to be good?”
It zinged through his awareness—how close they were standing and how very few steps it would take to sweep her to the bed beneath him. As a distraction, Rafe tried mentally running through the alphabet in reverse. To his infinite annoyance, his thoughts couldn’t make it past the letter x.
As in X-rated. Damn it. How was he supposed to stay two steps ahead of her when he was thinking with his…
“Yes,” he managed to say, sliding his key into the tiny lock, turning it slowly and feeling the click of a steel cuff disengaging. His gaze lingered on her pale wrist, on the reddened indentation, the slight bruising, and the way her skin had chafed beneath the metal.
Yet another injury his actions had inflicted on her.
Before he could stop himself, he stroked his thumb across the subtle damage gently, an attempt to rub the sting from her impossibly soft flesh.
“No,” she said sharply, her gaze dropping as she turned away and shook her head. “I’m sorry… I can’t—I just can’t do this.”
Rafe felt the perspiration beading on his forehead, felt the burn of shame that made him want to crank the room’s noisy AC down to glacial. Laying a palm atop her shoulder, he gave her what he hoped would pass for a sympathetic squeeze. “I’d be disappointed in you if you could. And more disappointed in myself if I weren’t Ranger enough to control my…”
Control what? His attraction? Because it was definitely more than simple lust that he was feeling. It was the perfect storm of his awareness of her body, his appreciation of the intelligence sparkling in her blue eyes, and his growing admiration for the way she was handling herself in one hell of a tough situation. “Control myself,” he finished. Nodding toward the bathroom, he added, “Go on now, sugar, and get that shower, will you? Before I change my mind.” Or stand here like some idiot, fantasizing about joining you.
Stress—that was all this was. Worry and grief, nothing more. Furious at his failure to maintain discipline, he swore beneath his breath, while Shannon wasted no time hurrying into the bathroom. The door clicked closed behind her, and he cursed again to hear it lock. But he couldn’t say he blamed her, and besides that, he had more important worries at the moment.
Such as where the hell was Garrett? He should’ve checked in by now, at least. Though Rafe hated himself for it, he couldn’t help but wonder if there had been any truth to Shannon’s accusations.
Could a weak-chinned geek like Garrett really have had the balls to screw around on Lissa? Beautiful, sweet Lissa, who had finally turned around after her troubled teenage years and pulled her life together after meeting the straight arrow who would become her husband? But she was no fool, either. She would have known if something had been up with him, would have confided in the big brother who had raised her. And Rafe, when he’d returned from his deployment, would have torn the damned fool’s head off, something he’d warned Garrett of when he’d flown in for the bachelor party. Though they had both been half-drunk that night, Rafe’s warnings weren’t the type that any sane man ever forgot. Especially a guy as “risk-averse,” as Rafe’s CO would have put it, as his brother-in-law had always been.
But as the shower hissed behind the closed door, Shannon’s warnings about Garrett continued to prey on Rafe’s mind, making him wonder how much he really knew about his brother-in-law, who had always claimed he had no family, other than an estranged, alcoholic mother who had abused him for years. No friends, either, Lissa had once complained, other than the tech buddies he spent way too much time bonding with over some shoot-’em-up online game.
“He’s so obsessed with his stupid ‘Battle Bloodcraft,’ I can’t get him off the couch to paint the baby’s room—or do a darned thing to help out when he finally drags home from work.”
Rafe hadn’t thought much about what had seemed like a minor domestic squabble, other than to grin at the idea that he and his fellow Rangers were living the adventure those geeks only dreamed of from their nice safe homes and mamas’ basements. Yet now the word obsessed came back to make him wonder, and his anxiety only deepened when he repeatedly failed to reach Garrett on the prepaid cell phone he was using so law enforcement couldn’t track them.
“This isn’t right,” Rafe grumbled before striding to the bathroom door. “Hurry up in there,” he shouted, banging. “We may have to take off in a hurry.”
But with Garrett driving the borrowed SUV, Rafe would need fresh wheels. Though he hated to compound his crimes, he reminded himself that during a combat mission, ordinary rules were made for breaking. Including the rules against grand theft auto, something he would have to resort to whether he decided to go in search of Garrett or relocate. Because one thing was for certain. He and Shannon couldn’t stay here and take a chance on Garrett giving them away if he’d been picked up by either the local cops or their federal pursuers. And on the slim chance that Shannon’s theory was right and Garrett was somehow wrapped up in Lissa’s murder, the consequences of his defection could be even deadlier.
SHANNON NEARLY JUMPED out of her skin when Rafe banged on the door and demanded she come out. She had barely finished rushing through her shower and hadn’t yet toweled off, let alone had the chance to search the cramped space for anything she might use as a weapon should the opportunity arise. A shard from the mirror, a sharp sliver of chrome broken off the towel rack—she had learned from studying prisoner-made shanks and shivs that almost any item could be turned into a weapon, if one only had enough time.
“Let’s go,” Rafe called. “Unless you want this door coming down on your head.”
She quickly dried herself, absurdly worried less about that threat than the idea that the huge Ranger would break in and find her naked. “Give me a minute. I’m just dressing. What’s wrong?”
“Garrett,” Rafe admitted. “He’s still not back, and his cell phone’s going straight to voice mail.”
Reaching for her clothing, she couldn’t resist smiling. “I thought you trusted him? Implicitly?”
“It’s our luck I don’t trust.” Rafe’s words were hard and empty as spent bullet casings. “Especially not with every law enforcement agent in this part of the country looking to bring us in.”
She dressed in a rush, donning the same tan skirt she had been wearing since that morning, along with the T-shirt she had been given by the older woman. Finally slipping into her wedge-heeled sandals, she raked her fingers through her damp hair and spared herself one last look in the mirror.
She winced at what she saw. With neither makeup nor a brush on her, and a purple lump high on her forehead, she looked like some sort of refugee—or like exactly what she was, the victim of an assault—by stun gun and abduction. No wonder Rafe hadn’t jumped to take the bait when she’d trotted out whatever feminine wiles she could muster.
Thank God. She unlocked and opened the door to find him slinging his duffel over one broad shoulder.
He took one look at her and pulled a comb out of his pocket. “Here you go. Try this. Then we’ll need to put the cuffs back on you.”
Shaking her head, she said, “Forget the handcuffs. You won’t need them. I’ve decided I’ll be helping you. Helping find those babies.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s the fastest way, maybe even the only way, to finish this before another family’s shattered.” Though she had only meant it as an excuse to convince him to leave her hands free, Shannon realized that what she was saying—what he’d tried to make her understand before—was true. Working in a small, targeted unit, with the support of hackers who couldn’t care less about privacy laws, warrants or jurisdictions, they could cut weeks, or possibly months, from a cumbersome and complex official investigation.
They could prevent yet another expectant woman’s murder.
All it would cost her was her honor, her career—and the betrayal of the oath she’d sworn to faithfully discharge the duties of her office. A vow she held as sacred as every hard-won lesson she’d gleaned from her father’s storied career.
Even so, Rafe Lyons clearly didn’t buy her supposed change of heart, because the moment she passed him back his comb, he snapped one of the cuffs onto her right wrist. After making an adjustment to the size, he snapped the other bracelet onto his own left hand—shackling them together before pocketing the key.
“It’s not that I don’t want to trust you.” A smile quirked one corner of his mouth. “It’s just that I’m no idiot. And there’s way too much at stake to take any chances.”
There was a rattle at the outer door, the scrape of a key before the door pushed open and was stopped by the security chain that kept it from going any farther than that first half inch. From the back of his waistband, Rafe produced a compact semiautomatic and aimed the handgun at the crack.
“It’s me, Rafe. Let me in, will you? My hands’re full, and—”
“Your head’s empty?” Rafe demanded, dragging Shannon along as he moved to look through the crack before opening the door. “You had me worried, not answering your phone.”
Garrett came in, several plastic shopping bags looped over his wrist and his hands filled with a pizza box that smelled of hot cheese, tomato and oregano. When Rafe had mentioned eating earlier, Shannon hadn’t been interested in anything except finding some way to escape—or turn the tables on her captors. But now that her stomach had reawakened, it was howling urgent demands.
She was suddenly parched, too, and grateful that Garrett had thought of bringing sodas. Not exactly health food, but she found herself straining against Rafe’s wrist in her eagerness to take the can Smith offered.
Turning her annoyance on Rafe, she argued, “Come on, Lyons. Eating chained together is going to be a huge pain. For both of us.”
Her stomach growled noisily, but Rafe ignored her as he stared a hole into Garrett and waited for his explanation. So the Ranger had been listening to what she’d told him after all. Maybe they would finally get some answers to the questions her investigation had raised.
Finally noticing Rafe’s expression, Garrett stopped—the can of soda a frustrating two inches short of her hand. Paling visibly, he stammered, “When you called, I was busy paying for the pizza. I was fumbling for my wallet, worried about getting back, and—”
“So why not call me as soon as you got to the car? Unless you were tied up talking on the phone with someone else?”
“What’re you saying?” Garrett slammed the can down beside the pizza box on the room’s cheap laminate table, his voice turning defensive. “I’ve got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”
Shannon lowered her hand to stare a question at him. Such as talking to your mistress?
“I thought we agreed. Throwaway or not, if anyone figures out we’re using these phones, our location can be pinned down. They’re only for emergencies. Contacting each other. As I tried to contact you three separate times.”
Garret’s pallor gave way to an angry redness. “What is with you tonight?” Flinging a furious gesture in Shannon’s direction, he accused, “She got to you while I was out picking up her damned things, didn’t she? She’s messing with your head, Rafe. Turning you against me.”
Rafe’s stare never wavered as he said, “Why don’t you set my mind at ease, then? Let me see that cell. I want to check your call log.”
“I told you she’d be trouble. I warned you, Rafe. I did,” Garrett shot back, making no move to hand over his phone.
As the silence lengthened, the weight of suspicion crushed the air from Shannon’s lungs. Would Rafe, clearly in charge and all too handy with his weapons, continue to press a man he knew and sympathized with, or would the two of them unite against her?
Or was it possible that Rafe, still shackled to her, would decide Garrett was right about her and opt to leave her somewhere? A shallow grave sprang to mind, or maybe he would just leave her here in this room, dead.
She wanted to say something, to defend her earlier accusations. But instinct warned her that a single word could prove disastrous.
Rafe’s hard gaze moved from Garrett to her, then back to the thin blond man.
With no warning at all, the tension exploded in a shattering burst. Before she could cry out or react at all, she was hurtled off her feet, landing hard on her back with Rafe thudding down across her.
With the breath knocked out of her, her rattled brain was slow to react, to piece together the continuing rain of shards behind the drawn curtains, now perforated with round holes.
Bullet holes, she realized as she spotted Garrett where he lay moaning on the floor, clutching at a burst of dark blood that had spread over the lower left sleeve of his white shirt. What she’d heard had been a spray of automatic gunfire coming through the window. What she’d felt was Rafe taking her down, his swift reflexes saving her life—maybe both their lives—in the process.
As he struggled to rise, Garrett clamped a hand over his forearm. “It hurts. God, it hurts. I’ve got to—”
“Stay down.” Sliding off her but staying low, Rafe whispered to her, “Stay down, or I’ll put you down for good—you understand that?”
Sinking back to the floor, Garrett stared around the room with wild eyes. From the parking lot outside, they heard a car alarm’s shriek, but other than that, nothing. Neither voice nor siren made it past the eerie wail.
“Someone followed you, didn’t they?” Rafe demanded. “You were so busy on your damned phone, you didn’t even notice you had a cop on your tail.”
“Not the police,” Shannon whispered. “They wouldn’t fire through that curtain blindly, especially not with me here.”
“Good,” Rafe said, digging the key from his jeans pocket and using it to unlock the cuff from his wrist. “Then we can return fire.”
“Where’d you put my Glock?” she asked, as he crawled toward the duffel he’d been wearing over his shoulder moments earlier.
“You’ve got to be freaking kidding,” he said through clenched teeth. “You just be a good girl and keep quiet—and stay out of my way.”
With that, he unwrapped an AK-47 from his bag, which he dragged behind him as he crawled toward the window.
Riding a wave of pure adrenaline, she glared as fury flooded her veins. Be a good girl and keep quiet? As God alone knew who picked them off one by one?
While Rafe was distracted by an attempt to peer out the window without getting his head blown off, she scooted toward the duffel, reasoning that where he’d stowed one weapon, there could well be others.
What she meant to do with them, she had no idea, other than defending herself as best she could. You could take out Lyons while his back is to you. Garrett might not be armed—or in any condition to offer resistance.
Her heart stopped as a second burst of gunfire erupted, punching into the wall behind them. Instinctively, she dropped to her stomach, hugging the floor while creeping slowly forward. With her hand stretching before her, she drew close as Rafe thrust aside the ragged curtain’s edge and returned fire.
The rattling boom was deafening and the swirling reek of gun smoke choking. Yet Shannon fought her way through it to grasp the duffel’s strap and yank the bag in her direction, then reach inside. It was all she could do when she felt the butt of a familiar pistol under her hand.
“No!” Rafe bellowed, firing only once more before twisting clear of the window frame and turning his head away from the opening.
Startled by his shout, Shannon only gripped the pistol tighter.
Her next move was cut short by the sound of glass splintering against the window frame, followed by the whoosh of the flaming liquid that spattered over the remaining shreds of curtains. The cloth ignited instantly, falling inward as the thin fabric crumbled, feeding the fire with new fuel in the form of the nearby bedspread.
Shannon rolled away, coming up on her feet. Rafe was on her in an instant, his forward motion carrying her away from the open window toward the side of the motel room nearest the door. Garrett was there, too, his face a mask of terror as he cradled his useless right arm and yelled, “We have to get out of here!”
The room was blazing, the cheap, synthetic carpet filling the air with acrid smoke. Their attackers had pitched a Molotov cocktail, Shannon thought, though at this point the delivery system scarcely mattered. All that did—the only thing screaming through her brain—was the hideous decision they were faced with.
Stay there and burn to death in this motel room, or try to shoot their way free through the waiting ambush.
Chapter Five
“Into the bathroom.” Rafe had to shout at Garrett to be heard over the earsplitting scream of the room’s smoke detector. “I need you to fill the tub and wet some towels.”
“We’ll be trapped,” Garrett protested, and Rafe saw raw panic in his white-rimmed eyes.
“Like hell,” he said, turning the gun on his brother-in-law. “Now get in there right now, and don’t come out until I tell you it’s safe.”
Garrett hesitated only a moment before nodding rapidly and doing as he’d been told.
Rafe closed the door, shutting the other man inside. “That’ll keep him out of the way and busy for the moment.” Probably on his knees and praying he would wake up on his own couch, where he could play the night away with his armchair adventures.
Shannon shifted her gaze from the spreading fire to him. “What’s your plan?”
Rafe noticed she kept the sidearm she had recovered pointed in the direction of the window. He chose to interpret it to mean she had her priorities—namely, their immediate survival—in order for the moment. “We’ll be going out the back door,” he said.
She shook her head rapidly, the blue of her eyes overlaid by the reflected dance of flame. “What back door? There’s no back door here.”
“There damn well will be in about five minutes,” he insisted as picked up one of the oak chairs and hauled it toward the closet alcove along the back wall.
“Better make it two.” She coughed on the smoke.
Looking over his shoulder, he nodded and prayed she wouldn’t shoot him in the back the moment he turned away. “Keep covering the front, will you?”
With no choice except to trust her, he slung the assault rifle across his back and began slamming the chair legs against the wall. Fortunately this particular wall had at some point been remodeled using drywall, which crumbled before each punishing blow. But if the unit behind them, the one he meant to break into, still had its original plaster walls, then they could all be in huge trouble.
Even if he did break through, it was possible their attackers might be waiting on the other side. Or that another guest—an armed guest—might be staying in the room, although he would have to be stone-deaf or just plain stupid not to have fled the shooting and the shrieking smoke alarm already.
Chunk by chunk, the room’s interior wall gave way, falling before his relentless onslaught as the sweat poured off his body. But as Rafe kept bashing, first one, then another, of the chair’s legs snapped off.
“Hurry!” Shannon called.
The urgency in her voice had him turning his head to see yellow tendrils of flame licking up the far wall toward the ceiling. Ignoring the fire, he tossed aside the broken chair and lifted out the clothes rod. Positioning it like a lance, he took three steps backward and then slammed his body forward to finally punch through the stubborn wall.
More drywall gave way to his efforts, and he greedily sucked in the spill of sweet air. Kicking out one of the studs to widen the passage, he shouted back at Shannon, “Go get Garrett. Be quick.”
The bark of gunfire was his only answer, and through the billowing smoke he spotted her—his captive federal agent—shooting through the window. Taking aim and firing as if she meant to kill.
WITH THE SWIRLING SMOKE making it nearly impossible to see into the darkness, Shannon squeezed off one last shot in the direction where she’d last spotted a man running, the black barrel of his automatic weapon jutting out in front.
Beyond that detail, she could make out nothing, not even the presence of a second man. But surely there were more. No sane shooter would try to take down an armed and desperate Ranger on his own. Unless Rafe had never been the target. Maybe he had been right. Maybe Garrett had picked up a tail in the form of some whacked-out thief with heavy firepower and a flair for guerrilla tactics.
No way. A garden-variety thief would never make this kind of assault rather than clipping Garrett when he’d headed for the door with his arms full of food and groceries. But what about a greedy family law attorney, desperate to keep his lucrative little empire safely hidden? Could Dominic Powers have somehow learned of Rafe’s pursuit and hired a couple of local thugs or put up a reward to stop him from getting any closer?
Backing toward Rafe, Shannon bent low in an attempt to stay below the level of the smoke. “That’ll keep ’em under cover for a little bit.”
As she reached the bathroom door, she opened it and ordered, “Come on, Garrett. Time to— Rafe, he’s passed out. Going to need your help here.”
Water was pouring into the nearly full tub, and Garrett lay beside it, slumped and bleeding on the worn linoleum floor. Before she could get to him, Rafe was pushing past her, shouting, “Go. Go on ahead. I’ve got him.”
Shannon didn’t waste a moment. Heart punching at her sternum, she rushed through the ash-filled heat to Rafe’s ragged-edged “back door” and looked into a nearly pitch-dark room. An empty room, she prayed, as she pushed her way through the opening…
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