Hot on the Hunt
Melissa Cutler
This ex-agent has one last chance to mend a broken relationship–if he can protect her long enoughBurned black-ops agent Alicia Troy spent years plotting the perfect revenge on the man who left her for dead…until her plan is foiled by her ex-teammate–and ex-lover–who taught her the meaning of betrayal. She can't trust John Witter…so why can't she stop wanting him?For John, it's a race to keep Alicia's intended victim safe long enough for the man to prove John's innocence, and it's a struggle to steer clear of the woman who believes he deceived her. But when their former agency turns on them, labeling them "armed and dangerous," John has a new mission: keep his woman alive.
This ex-agent has one last chance to mend a broken relationship—if he can protect her long enough
Burned black ops agent Alicia Troy spent years plotting the perfect revenge on the man who left her for dead…until her plan is foiled by her ex-teammate—and ex-lover—who taught her the meaning of betrayal. She can’t trust John Witter…so why can’t she stop wanting him?
For John, it’s a race to keep Alicia’s intended victim safe long enough for the man to prove John’s innocence, and it’s a struggle to steer clear of the woman who believes he deceived her. But when their former agency turns on them, labeling them “armed and dangerous,” John has a new mission: keep his woman alive.
“Don’t touch me.”
Her eyes were pure ice.
John pressed her against the wall. “There was a time you couldn’t get enough of me touching you.”
“Right up until you helped an agent try to kill me.”
It took every ounce of his self-control not to force her to look at him. “You believe him over me. After everything we were together.”
Alicia drew a ragged breath. Then he saw it—the passion in her eyes. It was the same torment that was tearing him up. She was no longer the refined femme fatale, but a real woman. His woman.
He touched her cheek with his hand, expecting her to demand he remove it. Instead, her eyes closed on another tremulous breath. “I hate you.”
“I know.”
He cradled her cheek in his palm. Pulse pounding, he ignored all the reasons he shouldn’t be doing what he was about to, then leaned down and pressed a kiss to her closed mouth.
Dear Reader (#uce8582cc-9668-53fd-977e-05e0fcf732b4),
I must confess: every time I write a book, I fall in love with the hero. And sometimes, when the hero and heroine are perfect soul mates, I feel a little guilty about crushing on him, as though that feeling betrays my friendship with the heroine. Isn’t that silly? Maybe not, because if you, as a reader, crush on the hero and think about the heroine as a friend, that means I’m doing my job as a storyteller. Trust me—you are definitely in danger of falling hard for John Witter in Hot on the Hunt.
When I started writing this story, I affectionately nicknamed John “Underdog Alpha.” He first appeared in Tempted into Danger as the funny friend, a wisecracking sniper with an affinity for Michael Jackson songs. But, typically, the funny friend never gets the girl, does he? In Hot on the Hunt, I tackled the question: How does a man like that reboot his life after he’s lost everything, including his homeland and the woman he loves?
John is an underdog in every way—underestimated, living under the radar and written off as a has-been. But from the ash of his former life emerges an alpha warrior…and I guarantee you’ll approve of John’s transformation. You might even feel a tad bit guilty for crushing on Alicia’s man, just as I did. Happy reading!
Melissa
Hot on the Hunt
Melissa Cutler
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
MELISSA CUTLER
is a flip-flop-wearing Southern California native living with her husband, two rambunctious kids and two suspicious cats in beautiful San Diego. She divides her time between her dual passions for writing sexy, small-town contemporary romances and edge-of-your-seat romantic suspense. Find out more about Melissa and her books at www.melissacutler.net (http://www.melissacutler.net), or drop her a line at cutlermail@yahoo.com.
To Eric—you are my everything
Contents
Dear Reader (#ube9cfa97-a525-536c-8883-b5dea8969dbb)
Chapter 1 (#u525580ac-6a80-5636-a58b-bdf9e44d18f5)
Chapter 2 (#u750283d9-b5ec-55d5-b11c-da3baf736e3b)
Chapter 3 (#u05ae0ffa-2672-5524-a2e0-4b5c388b63db)
Chapter 4 (#u8700a420-a178-5def-a464-daeec0a45eb5)
Chapter 5 (#u04a3d157-dad8-5345-8f57-ab8a2adddf77)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1
There was no one on this island of partying rich kids and vagabonds who cared about the washed-up sniper taking practice shots at the buoy eleven hundred meters offshore. Most mornings, John hit his target without fail. Not today. The wind was all wrong, which should have been John’s first clue that his exile in the Virgin Islands had gotten too comfortable. One shift of the wind and he didn’t instinctually adjust.
It was about time. He’d been waiting to exercise this particular mental muscle. The one that guarded against complacency—the false sense of confidence in himself, in his environment and in the people surrounding him—which had been the root cause of the implosion of his former life.
The problem with confidence was that it led to trust. And trust led to assumptions like there’s no way a blood brother who he went to war with would betray him. Or that loving a woman with every cell of his being would earn her loyalty, if nothing else. Dangerously naive assumptions like those were why John Witter—former Green Beret sniper, former ICE black ops agent, former somebody—had spent the past twenty months waiting for complacency to set in so he could kick his own ass back into fighting shape.
It was a far cry from a do-over, but earning the status of persona non grata with the U.S. government and its world allies didn’t leave him a whole lot of viable options.
He lifted away from the rifle and peered through his scope at the buoy swaying in the waves and wind. He should have this shot. He’d adjusted for elevation given the tide, he’d lain in the exact same position he always did, with only a plain cotton T-shirt between his shoulder and the rifle butt, with a wad of gum sandwiched between his left-side molars. All the lame superstitions and habits he’d long ago forgiven himself for. Every sniper he’d trained with seemed to have them, or even nuttier ones than John, as symbols of control and consistency.
Ah. That was the problem, right there. All the things he always did. Control and consistency—the most dangerous illusions of a complacent mind.
He spit the gum into the sand, then shifted from his belly into an awkward hunching seated position. Then he did the most uncomfortable, distracting thing possible—he thought about Alicia. He thought about her the second to last time they were together, about her lying on her stomach and the path of water left by the ice cube he’d trailed along her spine—one of the many memories of her that hurt in a physical, permanent way.
He could still hear the hiss of protest she’d given when the ice cube had first touched her skin, followed by a giggle that had quickly turned into a purr. He’d loved the sounds she’d made in bed. Sweet, vulnerable, girlie sounds that were totally incongruous to the Alicia the rest of the world knew—the soldier, the computer genius, the femme fatale. His secret Alicia. His Phoenix.
At the next knife of pain to his heart, he steadied his gaze through the mounted scope. He thought about the wind and the rate of the incoming tide. He studied the buoy’s pattern of movement, then set his finger on the trigger. Breathe in—Alicia’s hair fanning over her smiling cheek. Breathe out—her hand finding his and holding tight. A squeeze of the trigger. The buoy bell gonged with the hit.
He loaded another round and repeated the process, twice as fast this time. Gong. Maybe that was why he wasn’t entirely sure, at first, that he’d heard the chirp of the alarm from his computer alert system. He stood and shook out his legs, then dusted the sand from his shirt.
The computer chimed again. Sometimes it was easy to forget that life in the real world had gone on without him. He went weeks now without tuning in to world news or checking his email accounts. A long time ago, he stopped caring about war or what his old friends were up to. But guarding himself, resisting complacency, meant keeping tabs on the two people who’d destroyed him. The email alert meant that Logan McCaffrey, his one friend left in the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement—better known as ICE—was contacting him with news about either Alicia or Rory.
Maybe Rory had been moved to a new wing of the prison. Or Alicia had decided to rejoin ICE. Most likely, the news was something benign, but still beneficial for John to be aware of. Someday, he planned to reenter the world and it’d be good to know exactly where his enemies were and what they were up to.
He propped his rifle against the wall just inside the cabin door, then unloaded the spare ammo from his pocket to the shelf next to it. From the fridge, he grabbed a bottle of cola, then crossed the wooden floorboards to the communication console he’d set up on the far side of the room. An email window had popped up.
John dipped his head to read it without sitting.
Rory escaped at 0700 hours. Alicia is missing.
He paused with his hand around the cola’s twist-off bottle cap and read the message again. Stunned into numbness, he drew a slow, lung-filling breath through his nose, set the unopened bottle down and braced his hands on the table. Then he read the message one more time.
On this last reading, two thoughts burst through his shock. One, Alicia wasn’t missing. People with her particular skill set never went missing; rather, they chose not to be visible anymore. And two, Rory was a dead man—unless John got to him first.
Not that John cared if Rory died, but he was the only man who knew the truth about John’s innocence. John had made peace with the reality that he’d never have the chance to press Rory into coming clean about the lies he’d gone on record with about John, locked away as he was in the ultramax prison—the one that didn’t officially exist—inside Fort Buchanan, the U.S. airbase on Puerto Rico.
Seven hundred hours was only thirty minutes ago and Puerto Rico was only one hundred and twenty miles northwest. How far could Rory have gotten? Fort Buchanan was solid, security-wise. A man imprisoned there didn’t simply hide in a laundry cart and steal away under everyone’s noses. With the full press of the U.S. military, ICE and whatever other federal agencies the government sent looking for him, it wasn’t likely that Rory had gotten very far at all.
What if John got to him first, before the government or Alicia did? The idea sent a thrill coursing through him. This might be John’s one chance to clear his name. It was the opportunity he never knew he’d been waiting for. Talk about a shock out of complacency.
He looked northwest across the Caribbean, the vibrant blue sea that had acted as his buffer against reality since Rory, John’s closest friend and sniper partner for a decade, self-destructed and tried to take John down with him.
Like being startled awake after a long, deep sleep, John’s heart beat loud and fast, pumping adrenaline-laced blood through his body. He pivoted and grabbed a hammer from his tool chest. Normally, he pried off the boards from the wall behind his sitting area, but the clock was ticking, so he wound back and smashed the planks to get at the metal locker.
Into a black canvas bag, he stuffed all the gear, cash and weaponry he could fit, reserving a brick of C4 explosives for his immediate use. He set the C4 on the table next to his computer. Whatever happened with Rory, whatever came next, John wouldn’t be back to this place. Not that he had anything to hide, necessarily, but it was bad form in the black ops world to leave a trail.
He unwound the cable from the C4 to the door, then grabbed the key to his boat and the plastic package of a new, untraceable cell phone, slung the bag and his rifle over his shoulder and stuffed the extra ammo in his jeans pocket. He took one last look around, then stepped into the morning sunshine. Trailing the C4 cable behind him, he followed the path downhill toward the water until he was far enough away to be safe from the blast. He’d wait to call Logan for more details once he was on the water.
No time for ceremony, he flipped the switch to initiate the reaction, then set the detonator box on the ground and broke into a jog to his boat as an explosion ripped through the air behind him.
It was a good sound—loud and angry and full of force. Like John. It was a sound that said, “Goodbye, exile. Hello, last chance.”
* * *
Ninety percent of murders were committed by men. The Department of Justice statistic made sense to Alicia. Most men she knew weren’t exactly creative thinkers. Of the 10 percent of murders committed by women, Alicia bet the vast majority of them were crimes of passion against boyfriends or husbands. Again, not a surprise.
Alicia, for one, had debated long and hard about whether she’d kill her ex-lover. She still wasn’t sure she’d made the right call to focus her revenge solely on Rory and leave John unharmed. After all, what kind of world was it when a man conspired to kill one of the most lethal women on the planet and lived to tell about it? Even now, twenty months later, his betrayal burned like acid in her heart.
Swallowing back the hurt, she adjusted the gun hidden in the concealed holder between her breasts and fixed her eyes on the nasty trail of water and sewage trickling from the drainage pipe through the sand and into the surf. Disgusting. This was one section of beach St. Thomas wasn’t going to put on its tourism brochures.
She’d been here for two days, putting the final pieces of her plan in place. Everything was going according to script, except that she hadn’t anticipated that every step closer she took toward executing her plan evoked a fresh surge of memory—about the ICE black ops team she’d been part of and about the day her teammate Rory tried to kill her. About John.
Annoyed that her thoughts had slipped so easily to him again, she stared past the sewage to the pristine water of St. Thomas Harbor and counted the cruise liners. Three had pulled into the harbor so far today, unleashing thousands of tourists onto the four-by-thirteen-mile island. The ferry from Puerto Rico had landed on this less-scenic end of the harbor an hour earlier, along with an attempted murderer stowaway in a crate of cheap Puerto Rican rum bound for one of the waterfront hotels that fed into this drain pipe. Unless he did something stupid and impetuous, Rory would be emerging from the pipe any minute.
Alicia was ready for him. Even if she weren’t a virtual ghost, the Department of Justice didn’t keep homicide statistics about women like her, who’d devoted more than a year to plotting cold-blooded revenge, not against a lover, but the man who’d shot her and left her for dead.
The idea of coming face-to-face with Rory for the first time since that fateful day made her anxious. Not scared or intimidated, per se, but filled with disquiet over the memory of what it had felt like to be weak. To hand her power over to a man.
Never again. Killing Rory was the first step in rebuilding her reputation, but it was about so much more than an encore. It was the start of a new career. A fresh beginning. A plan not undertaken to help her make a debut splash as a black ops mercenary, but to blow the water out of the pond. Or out of the Caribbean Sea, as it were.
Any minute now, a dangerous criminal would be released into the world. Lucky for the masses, Alicia would be there waiting with the kill shot.
Laughter and a child’s squeal forced her attention away from her duty. Three children were frolicking in the water nearby, amid the concrete storm wall and shallow beach. Her heart sank. This was not the place for them, nor the time. If Rory showed up now...
The children were a motley bunch, with rags for clothes and dirty faces, wild hair. Every one of them thin and undernourished. Perhaps their parents worked in the hotels’ kitchens or factories pushing so-called “island handicrafts” on tourists. Alicia’s least favorite part of living in the shadows was that the poor lived there, too. Not because she was a snob, but because nothing made her heart ache like children in the kind of desperate poverty she’d seen the world over. It never got easier to accept.
She hated even needing to shoo these children away. Adults probably shooed them away all the time, treating them no better than stray dogs. She’d watched it happen too many times to count. And who was she to interrupt their fun? She was the intruder in their happy day, the morally corrupt American about to commit an act of violence in their community—in public, in broad daylight.
Fishing money out of her pocket, quarters and dollars, she walked their way, waving it to show them she meant no harm. They skipped to her, hands out, smiling eagerly. She filled their hands with the money and they thanked her in Spanish. She pointed up the road toward the cruise terminals where the food vendors were, telling them in their language to go buy sweets and food for their family. One of them hugged her.
With a glance at the drain pipe, she hugged back, trying not to be impatient. Finally, they hurried off, chattering about what they’d buy and how to divide the money. Alicia was free to turn her attention back to the pipe. The only thing worse than children witnessing what she was about to do was her being caught off guard or Rory slipping by while she was distracted.
She heard a splash before she saw a swish of movement in the shadows. She gripped her gun and pulled it from between her breasts. It was about time, too—the silencer was digging into her middle. She flattened against the storm surge wall adjacent to the pipe, her finger on the trigger.
Rory’s arm appeared first, then his face and body. He high-stepped through the water in relative silence, dressed in tourist clothes—a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and sandals. That was a surprise. She hoped whoever he stole the clothes from was still alive, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
She had a clear shot and could’ve pulled the trigger already, but the cruel streak in her wanted to make sure he knew who was ending his life.
She pivoted away from the wall, gun first. “Hello, Rory.”
He froze in midstride, then turned in her direction. “So it was you. I thought that might be the case, but I had to give it my best try, anyway.” His expression was stoic, like a man resigned to his fate.
She walked closer, until she stood at the entrance to the pipe. “I was counting on that. Though I would’ve preferred it if you’d been a bit more surprised, perhaps begged me to live.”
He sneered. “And I’d really like a steak dinner before I die, but we don’t always get what we want, do we?”
She aimed at his heart, her own heart pounding madly. It was supposed to feel better than this. She’d counted on it being a relief to her broken spirit to have achieved revenge, but it was harder than she’d expected. Conjuring the way she’d felt when their positions had been reversed, when he’d stood before her—her teammate, her lover’s best friend—and looked her in the eye as he pulled the trigger of his Kimber 45.
Yeah, Rory Alderman deserved this. He knew it; she knew it. Karma knew it.
At the slight movement of her finger on the trigger, a shot broke the stillness from somewhere to her left. It ricocheted off the lip of the pipe. Alicia ducked back and flattened against the pipe’s interior wall. Rory took off along the beach.
Another shot rang out, but whoever was shooting at her had terrible aim not to be able to hit her or Rory while she’d been stationary, so she decided it was safe enough to keep moving.
With a fortifying breath, she shot out of the pipe at a sprint. She wasn’t about to let her reputation and her one chance at revenge slip from her grasp while she cowered in a sewer pipe. She’d unleashed a vicious murderer into the world, and, so help her, she wasn’t going to stop until she’d snuffed him out.
Chapter 2
Rory had only a small lead on Alicia, but he was moving fast. Alicia’s boots churned up the sand in hot pursuit, leaping like Rory had over the boulders that marked the beginning of a jetty, then up and over the concrete partition and onto the street. Rory disappeared into a wholesale hammock warehouse.
Alicia shoved her gun back in her shirt for easy access without causing a panic among civilians and looked over her shoulder, hoping to catch sight of the shooter who’d ruined her one good chance at vengeance. She was still going to catch up with Rory, still going to kill him, but now it wasn’t so pretty and clean.
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she flung herself through the door and sprinted after her quarry, ignoring the shouting workers and dodging hammock displays as she followed Rory back to the work area. Rory flailed as he ran, knocking weaving looms and empty wood spools behind him, barring her path.
A year and a half ago, right after she was shot, she’d gotten winded climbing stairs and had needed to reteach her body how to move like a black market operative needed to. Her need for revenge against Rory and the pain of John’s betrayal kept the fire of her determination lit until she wasn’t merely as physically capable as she had been before, but better. She kept up handily, bursting out of a rear exit into a narrow alley.
The same pack of children she’d thrown money at stood near the entrance of the alley, nibbling sweet buns. Rory pushed past them, knocking one over. Alicia didn’t have time to console them or explain. She jumped over the fallen child and into the street, running as hard and fast as her legs could go.
Another shot rang out from somewhere to Alicia’s right. The mystery shooter. She’d go after him next, but first, Rory. She kept her focus trained on the back of Rory’s head, at the buzz cut that made his bald spot look like a bull’s-eye. All she needed was a straightaway free of pedestrians and cars and she could take the shot. But it was rush-hour traffic on Veterans Drive, the road that ran along the harbor, and traffic was crawling. As long as he kept weaving a path among the cars and bicycles, she was helpless to do anything but follow.
The mystery shooter wasn’t as concerned with collateral damage to bystanders as she was, as evidenced by the crack of another gunshot. This time, the bullet grazed Rory’s thigh. He stumbled right, bullied past a line of wooden barrels and half fell into a seafood processing plant.
Alicia gave chase. Stunned workers whined their protest and waved fillet knifes and rubber gloves at her. One speared a massive butcher knife in her direction, scolding rather than threatening. She followed the trail of blood drops out the other side of the warehouse. Something flew through the air at her. She ducked back into the warehouse, slamming the door as something knocked against it. She opened it again. A fillet knife was stuck in the other side. With a growl of frustration, she continued following the blood trail out of the alley. Rory must not have been wounded too badly because he was on a bicycle and had taken off across Veterans Drive again.
He jumped the curb onto the pedestrian and bicycle path that curved around the harbor toward the cruise ship terminals. The path immediately around him was empty. This was her chance. She ground to a halt and drew her gun. Before she could pull the trigger, a bang sounded from behind her. Rory’s bike collapsed. He fell out of sight, off the edge of the path and into the harbor.
Cursing at the stranger who was really becoming a thorn in her side, she set her hand on the partition, preparing to jump. The whine of a motorcycle’s engine caught her attention. She turned to see a man on a motorcycle, his face obscured by the visor of his helmet, his bike picking up speed as it wove through traffic in approach of the partition between the street and the foot path.
“Oh, hell, no,” was all she could mutter.
The mystery shooter. He was young, judging by his fit, muscled body barely concealed by a snug blue T-shirt and worn jeans. He held an HK45 pistol against the right grip of the bike and didn’t seem to be paying Alicia and her Glock any mind.
Why he was interfering with her operation remained to be seen. Was he helping Rory escape or trying to kill him? Until now, Alicia hadn’t considered the possibility that she wasn’t the only person in the world hell-bent on extracting lethal justice from Rory, but now it seemed a naive way of thinking.
Then again, it didn’t matter how many people wanted Rory Alderman dead. Alicia was going to be the one who pulled the trigger, and the only sure way to guarantee that was to neutralize the mystery operative before he mucked up her operation any more.
She vaulted over the partition and dropped onto the pathway, affording the felled bike a nominal glance. Rory was nowhere to be seen. Using the partition as cover, she steadied her Glock. The motorcycle was coming at her on her right. She took aim at the front tire, and that’s when he finally took notice of her. Swerving left, he brought his gun up and squeezed off a round in her direction. She ducked and felt the force of the bullet hitting the partition.
Ready to give it a second try, she peered over the lip of the partition at the same time she registered that the bike motor’s whine had risen an octave, the sound of it gaining speed. She watched it jump the partition and land on the walkway in front of her. Whoever he was, this man was a professional. A damn good one. Probably, the shots he was taking didn’t hit Rory or Alicia by design, for reasons she had yet to figure out. He could be any one of dozens of black market operatives she knew of, or perhaps someone new to the scene. He afforded her a passing glance over his shoulder, then took off on the pathway.
She stood, ready to shoot him in the back, but he was too skilled to give her an adequate target, moving the bike in unpredictable dips and swerves. A solid hundred meters in front of them, Rory had reappeared, slogging along in soaked clothes and barefoot toward the nearest dock—the one advertising parasailing adventures in which a tourist is harnessed to a parachute that’s then pulled along in the air behind a speedboat.
Alicia cursed and took off running, pushing herself beyond the pain of her now burning quads, knowing he was going for that speedboat. It was the only one on the dock that looked remotely functional, much less built to go fast.
A sunburned, schlubby tourist was presently being strapped into a parachute harness by a local man who was giving a safety talk judging by his gestures. When he saw Rory, he directed his gestures to him, protesting Rory’s presence, most likely. Rory shoved him in the water. The tourist screamed and frantically tried to unstrap himself as Rory leaped onto the boat his harness was tethered to.
The mystery shooter sped around the turn onto the dock, but not fast enough. With a rev of the engine, Rory took off in the boat, the parasailer floating into the sky behind him, screaming his fool head off. Not that Alicia blamed him. She would’ve been screaming for help, too.
Alicia ran for the dock. There were other boats nearby. Not as fast, but what choice did she have other than to give chase? Rory angled the boat toward the mouth of the harbor, then left the throttle up and moved to the back of the boat with what looked like a fillet knife in his hand. He worked to untie the rope and before the boat had gotten too far, the tourist went floating back, up into the sky in his parachute a solid ten meters before the chute buckled and he free-fell into the water.
Alicia turned onto the dock as the motorcyclist swung off the bike and ran to the edge of the dock. He dropped the bag that had been slung over his back and withdrew a Remington XM2010 sniper rifle. The prototype model. The same limited-edition prototype Alicia and the rest of her black ops team had been gifted with three years earlier.
Her breath caught in her throat. Of its own volition, her body went still. She should be making a break for one of the other boats in the harbor, stealing it and racing after Rory, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t think beyond the one thought repeating in her head. No. It couldn’t be him.
He lay flat on his belly against the dock, the rifle butt against his shoulder, its stabilizing legs extended to the floor. He ripped off his helmet, revealing tousled, dark blond hair. No.
Her gaze roved over his body. That strong, broad back, narrow waist, perfect backside. Just as she remembered it. His eye was glued to the scope. He pulled the trigger. The rifle quivered as the boom ripped through the harbor. Rory ducked. The speedboat faltered, its glass windshield shattering.
“Damn it,” he muttered, dropping his head.
His voice sent shivers over her skin. How could it be, after so many months, that he still had that effect on her?
He’d appeared out of nowhere and, whether he meant to or not, he’d helped Rory escape. And yet, she couldn’t get her mouth to close. She couldn’t catch her breath or convince her body to move. She couldn’t even find the will to tell him off for ruining everything. Again.
Bringing the rifle with him, he pushed into a squat then stood. The jeans hung low on his hips but snug around his quads. She’d forgotten this part—the perfection of him—and she hadn’t even gathered the courage to look at his face yet.
Rory’s boat was a blip on the horizon now, headed south in a direct path to St. Croix. She afforded the boat only a glance because she couldn’t, for the life of her, stop staring at the man before her, absorbing his nearness and heat, the raw power radiating from his every cell.
She could feel him watching her and forced her gaze to meet his smoky-blue eyes.
They were angry, colder than she’d ever seen them. He might have the body of the man she’d once called her lover, but she could see it in his face that he was a changed person. Harder, humorless. She wanted to slap him for what he’d done to her, slap him because she’d almost shot him in the back just now and she would’ve never forgiven herself for it. Most of all, though, she wanted to throw her arms around him and hang on forever. Like a fool in love.
“John,” she croaked.
“In the flesh.”
A tingle swept over her body. In the flesh was right. But it didn’t matter how powerful her unexpected shock of awareness of him was, because Alicia refused to yield her power to a man, especially one who’d betrayed her. It didn’t matter how he made her feel in the innermost, darkest places of her heart; she knew better now. His sudden appearance might’ve stripped her bare, but so what? The only defense against the pervading sense of vulnerability she always felt in his presence was to get mad.
She stomped over the dock toward him, not that he seemed to notice while he ran a check of the Remington for unspent ammo, so she got right up in his face. “You helped him escape.”
He huffed and shook his head as though she’d told a joke that was in poor taste. “Is that it, huh? You think that’s what this Remington’s for—to help him escape?” He turned away and shoved the rifle in his bag, then took his HK45 out of the back of his pants.
The ache of longing in hearing that growl of a voice that had haunted her dreams for twenty long months was so powerful that she hardly knew what to think anymore. She forced her anger back up to the surface. “Of course you helped him escape. You’re the Robin to his Batman. Always the sidekick, never the alpha. You’re not capable of being the alpha dog. Never were.”
As far as insults went, she knew that one had to hurt, especially to an elite soldier like John. It was an old nerve of his, one she’d learned when they were lovers. She felt like a sore loser exploiting the intimate details of their time together—God knew she had as many secret flaws and faults as he did—but she was desperate to regain the power she’d lost in his presence.
And maybe, if she were being honest with herself, she was a bit desperate to see if she could spark a fire in his eyes again. Anything but the ice-cold steel that they were now.
Rather than show fire, though, his eyes got colder. He ran his tongue over his lower lip, then gave her body a dispassionate once-over. Jaw tight and eyes frosty, he swaggered the few steps to her and leaned his face in. She held her breath, held perfectly still, as his lips brushed her temple, then grazed her hair. “You won’t believe what I’m capable of, Phoenix.”
She wanted to touch him so badly the need ached inside her like a hollow, brittle thing. She balled her hands into fists. Show me, she almost said. “I’m not Phoenix anymore. At least not to you.”
He backed his face up. Rubbing his jaw, he nodded. “I’m going to get to him first, you know.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“I can’t let you stop me,” he countered.
With any other person, if she wanted to stop him, she’d shoot him in the leg or wrestle him to the ground, then bind his hands and legs. With John, she could get away with neither. He had his gun in hand already and, besides, he was a faster shot than she. To top that off, he knew all her close-combat moves, which eliminated the element of surprise—her only advantage when trying to physically dominate a man nearly twice her size.
Back to basics. The police were going to descend on the harbor at any moment, the U.S. military, too, as they searched for Rory. She swiveled, gun extended, and shot out the tires of the motorcycle. At least now he couldn’t speed past her to steal the next fastest boat in the harbor.
He raised his brows, bemused but unimpressed. Then he lifted his gun and aimed past her, to the street beyond the boardwalk. With a casual squeeze of the trigger that belied the complicated nature of the shot, he took out the front windshield of her rental car at least a hundred meters away. Guess he’d seen her drive up earlier. That meant he’d seen her interaction with those kids, too. The realization brought a sudden flush of heat to her cheeks. Not cool.
He flicked a lock of her hair off her shoulder. “Are you going to shoot me next? Because I’m not really keen on reciprocating that one.”
She flipped the rest of her hair behind her and gave him her best scowl. “I’ve been shot enough to last a lifetime, thank you very much.”
The allusion to her injury at Rory’s hand hung in the air between them. John’s jaw went stiff and the ice in his eyes seemed to spread to the rest of his body. The peal of police sirens cut through the tension.
John stared out over the water. Alicia followed his gaze. Rory had shot straight out of the bay and was heading south toward St. Croix. John hitched his canvas bag higher on his shoulder and walked past her. “Those sirens are my cue to beat it. See ya around, Phoenix.”
“He’s mine to kill, John.”
He didn’t even bother turning around to answer. “Maybe so, but I have other plans for him.” He gave her a little salute before breaking into a run to the right, moving southwest along the boardwalk.
Alicia shook some clarity into herself, shoved away the overwhelming flood of emotions John had evoked and concealed her gun. Then she took off left in search of something—anything—that would get her to St. Croix faster than either of the two men who’d wrecked her life for the second time in as many years.
* * *
Well. That was something else. This day certainly wasn’t turning out like John had thought it would when he’d woken up that morning. True, he’d been looking to shake himself out of complacency, and being in Alicia’s orbit certainly rocked him off his axis.
He roared through the Caribbean on the boat he’d docked not too far away from the one Rory had stolen, the speedboat that was now visible through his binoculars, as he fought to recover from the confrontation with Alicia.
He hadn’t been prepared for the toxic cocktail of relief that she looked to be thriving, at least physically, after her injury mixed with a fresh shock of fury at how she’d dismissed him as a corrupt agent without ever hearing him out about what had happened that day. Beyond the fury from his memories, she’d known exactly how to hurt him.
Always the sidekick. How dare she slap him in the face with one of the deep, secret parts of himself he’d shared with her after they’d made love. It wasn’t even a valid argument. Green Beret snipers always worked in pairs, with each able to perform both jobs of spotter and shooter with deadly, world-class accuracy. Just because John had been the spotter more times than not didn’t mean he was any less skilled than Rory. And she couldn’t be talking about their stint on ICE’s black ops team. A team could only have one leader, and that hadn’t been Alicia, either, so he wasn’t sure how she got off separating her experience in black ops with his.
And there he went, arguing the point as if he was trying to convince himself. He smacked his forehead, royally pissed at his stupid, middle-child insecurities rearing their ugly heads. While the lingering, unjustified sensation of being less than compared to the rest of the team had taken a turn for the justified after the entire crew assumed the worst of him on the turn of a dime, exile had forced him to rely only on himself. He was stronger, faster and more lethal than he ever had been in the group or as Rory’s sniper partner.
He pushed the throttle to the max, careening into the open ocean until St. Thomas was nothing but a shadow behind him. St. Croix was forty miles south, not too much of a stretch on the Caribbean’s relatively calm waters. This was a well-traveled boat route for ferries and locals, and despite it being hurricane season with one such predicted storm a day or two away, he spotted cruise ships, luxury yachts and even the occasional water skiers and kayakers.
After thirty minutes of travel, he no longer needed binoculars to keep tabs on Rory’s location. In another twenty minutes, the nose of John’s boat raced alongside the back of his, and in no time flat, they were careening neck and neck toward the green hills rising on St. Croix in the distance.
Time to step up his efforts. Bracing for impact, he slammed the side of his boat into Rory’s. The blow knocked Rory’s boat off course, but didn’t slow him down. John had to crank the wheel to stay even with him. He couldn’t see how it was possible to damage Rory’s boat enough to stop it without doing the same to his. He needed a new strategy.
When they were neck and neck again, John climbed onto the captain’s chair. With a hand on the windshield for balance, he crouched with one foot on the chair and the other on the rail. He maneuvered the boat so close to Rory’s that the hulls knocked, then he pushed off, throwing himself over the edge.
Chapter 3
While John was airborne, Rory noticed what he was doing and jerked the wheel left. John’s hands closed over the metal bar atop the rail, but he didn’t make it on board. His body slammed against the side of the hull and the pull of the water on his legs nearly sucked him under, the boat was moving so fast.
His hands slipped on the wet metal. With the wake and the water pressure, he slid along the rail to the rear corner of the boat.
The next thing he knew, Rory was over him, stomping on his right hand with his bare foot as the boat sped on. John tried to swing his leg up to catch on the bottom rung of the ladder, but Rory’s assault was too much. John lost his grip with his right hand and swung out, perilously close to the nearest of the two motors.
With a shaky, smarting right hand, John moved his grip to a lower rung on the ladder so Rory couldn’t stomp on him anymore, then reached for his gun. The trouble was, Rory had started prying off the ladder with a metal gaffe. John barely had time to grab the frayed end of the parasailing rope dangling off the back before the ladder separated from the boat and flew backward. Blinking sea spray from his eyes, John wrapped the rope around his wrist and tried to line up a nonfatal shot of Rory with his gun while Rory grabbed the fillet knife and sawed at the rope.
A loud bleat shocked them both. Rory whipped his head around to see a large luxury liner bearing down on them, still far enough away for Rory to change course. He lunged for the wheel and John seized his chance to climb aboard. Replacing his gun in its holster, he rallied his grip and core strength to hoist himself hand over hand until, with a growl of effort, he fell to the floor of the boat. Rory cranked the wheel right, out of the yacht’s trajectory, and set the course toward St. Croix once more.
John wiped the back of his hand across his face, as if it wasn’t as soaked through as the rest of him. “Rory, you bastard. Stop the boat.”
Rory turned and faced him, but he left the boat racing over the water at an impossible speed. “Not a chance. What the hell are you doing in the islands?”
He bore an angry flesh wound on his thigh where John had grazed him with a bullet, but it had clotted and he didn’t seem any worse for wear.
John, on the other hand, felt as if he’d been locked in a washing machine during the spin cycle. He rolled his shoulders and flexed his hand. “I had it on good authority that Alicia was going to kill you.”
Rory let out a wheezy laugh. “And you thought you’d beat her to it? Nah, I bet you two are working together, am I right? You always were her lovesick whipping boy.”
Okay, wow. Rory knew about John and Alicia’s affair. That changed things. Intimate relationships between members of an ops team weren’t exactly endorsed by ICE or their team leader, and he and Alicia had worked hard to be discreet. But somehow Rory had figured it out, which meant that John needed to rethink what Rory’s motives were for shooting Alicia and broadcasting for all the world that John was his accomplice. Was it to twist the proverbial knife he’d stabbed John with? Why else would Rory shoot John’s lover? Even after all this time, it didn’t make any sense.
Looking into the face of the man John had once considered his brother, John felt his blood start to boil. Whatever Rory’s motivation, he’d tried to kill Alicia. Whatever muck he’d made of John’s life, he tried to kill the woman John loved. Another flex of his right hand told him all he needed to know—none of his bones were broken and he was in top shape to brawl.
He flew at Rory and landed a satisfying blow to his gut with a left hook chaser that knocked Rory into the steering wheel. Rory pushed off with a fist meant for John’s cheek, but the boat zigged right.
John gave Rory a shove, sending him stumbling toward the rear of the boat. “You don’t get to talk about Alicia like that. You don’t deserve—” He swallowed back his next words. Rory might know they were lovers, but no way would John give him even an inkling of how very much he’d cared about her.
Rory bounced back swinging, this time catching John with a blow to the chin. He absorbed the pain and grabbed Rory’s neck, yanking his torso down to John’s waiting knee. Damn, it felt cathartic, this fight. Letting Rory experience a fraction of the pain Alicia must have felt at Rory’s hand.
John tried to back up a step, but Rory locked his arms around his middle and pedaled forward, pushing John to the steering console. His midback hit hard against the rim of the console, knocking the wind out of him. Any moment, U.S. authorities were going to descend on them. It was inevitable. Rory was a violent offender and a traitor. They knew he’d escaped, and John, Alicia and Rory had made enough of a commotion on St. Thomas that officials were going to pick up their trail in no time flat.
He needed to get Rory subdued and take control of the boat, stat. But Rory had a whole lot of fight left in him. He let fly with a fast hook, but John blocked with his elbow and sent his fist into Rory’s wounded thigh. The blare of a warning horn sounded from off the bow and John played the sucker by looking. A massive barge snaked by their boat with only feet to spare. While John was distracted, Rory caught him with an uppercut that made contact with John’s jaw. He staggered back and wasn’t sure, for a split second, if only he was pitching sideways or if the whole boat was.
By the time he decided the boat was jumping a wake at a dangerous angle, he was toppling overboard. He flailed his arms as he careened toward the water, but didn’t come in contact with anything but air. He plunged into the water.
He came up spluttering and gasping for breath. The speedboat was moving fast toward St. Croix and overhead, a helicopter hovered. His first thought was that the navy or police had found him, but after blinking water from his eyes he took a closer look. It was a private chopper and Alicia was in the passenger seat. She leaned over the edge of the open passenger doorway, her hair waving wildly in the wind created by the rotors.
“You okay?” she called.
He had to admire her wit, hiring an aerial tour pilot for a private island hopping escort. That was a smart move.
“Yeah.” Sort of. The only damage was to his pride, and that wound stung like an SOB.
Alicia turned her body and looked back toward St. Thomas. In her hand, John glimpsed a flash of metal. Her gun. Which meant she hadn’t exactly hired the pilot to take her to St. Croix. She’d used force, digging herself even deeper into a criminal hole. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that jazz. The question was, why had she put herself in such a desperate position? It’d been a miracle that she’d survived the gunshot wound Rory had inflicted on her, so why was she squandering her second chance at life with vengeance? It didn’t add up.
“The navy’s coming,” she called.
Not unexpected, but he still needed to get away before U.S. authorities found him. They’d already accused him of being Rory’s accomplice after Rory’s initial arrest, but though one criminal’s claims alone hadn’t been enough proof of John’s guilt to charge him with a crime, finding him there and Rory gone might be the corroborating evidence the Feds had been waiting for to put John away for life.
He hated to ask for help, not from her. Anyone but Alicia. She already thought him as less of a man. The sidekick. Never the alpha. Damn it all to hell. “Throw down a rope.”
Her attention swung to Rory’s boat. Even from that distance, he could see it in her eyes, the disdain for John, her desperation to get to Rory. Unbelievable. She was going to leave him there in the middle of the ocean, tens of miles from shore or the nearest boat.
Anger at her and Rory and the entire rotten farce that had become his life made him snap. He smacked the water, shouting, “Don’t do it, Phoenix.”
Ignoring him, she nudged the pilot’s shoulder. He couldn’t hear her for the thunder of the rotors, but he watched her mouth the word go.
Just like that, she was gone.
The Caribbean Sea had never felt so vast. John tipped his chin up and looked at the clouds. His boat was miles away, the U.S. Navy was bound to catch up with him and try to pin him with orchestrating Rory’s escape, and he’d had no choice but to beg Alicia not to abandon him. Triple ouch.
Most of the time, he relished being the perpetual underdog. His whole life he’d been a scrapper, but he’d used it to his advantage. In warfare and black ops combat, it was rarely a bad thing to be underestimated by the enemy. But sometimes, clawing for a seat at the table sucked. Today, it sucked.
His only hope of getting through the next hour without becoming shark bait or getting arrested was to get the attention of one of the yachts or sea kayakers passing by. Treading water, he turned in a slow circle, assessing his options. The navy was maybe only five or ten minutes back. In the distance, a modest luxury yacht cruised his way, coming from St. Croix, blasting reggae music and with sunbathing, barely clothed women adorning its deck.
One thing John loved about his HK45 was that water didn’t jam it up. He raised the gun overhead and squeezed off a round to get their attention, hoping they’d process the sound as an emergency flare gun instead of a lethal weapon, then tucked the gun out of view and waved his arms high, saying a silent prayer that the boaters were feeling charitable.
* * *
“You know how you can guarantee I won’t kill you?”
The pilot’s eyes were wide with terror and bugging out of his beet-red face as he gave a spastic shake of his head.
The real answer was Because I would never kill a civilian—ever. But honesty like that wasn’t exactly an A-1 coercion technique. Alicia burrowed the muzzle of her gun deeper into his neck. Her finger wasn’t anywhere near the trigger, but it didn’t need to be. The metal on his skin was convincing enough that she meant business.
“Because you’re going to hover over that field, no funny business, and I’m going to jump out. And then you don’t ever have to see me again. Sound like a plan?”
He nodded, right on cue. Holding the helicopter pilot by gunpoint hadn’t been her first choice, but money hadn’t worked as a bribe and she couldn’t take the chance of Rory making it to St. Croix—or, worse, disappearing—before she got a read on him.
She hadn’t wanted to abandon John in the water, either, but what choice did she have? She’d unleashed a vicious criminal and now it was her duty to stop him at the sacrifice of everything else. Not only her duty to herself, but to the planet. Wasn’t that a disquieting thought? In the twenty months since she’d been shot, she’d barely thought of anyone but herself. That’s the way rehab and physical therapy worked. If you weren’t thinking about yourself 24/7, thinking about healing and regaining your strength until it was almost an obsession, then you weren’t doing it right.
She jiggled her gun against the pilot’s skin. “But if you try to be a hero or do something stupid, the deal’s off and I shoot. Got it?”
Another nod.
“Take it down as far as you can without landing.” She didn’t need marks left from the chopper’s landing skids. Her footprints would be evidence enough of her presence on the island. With any luck, the pilot would return to St. Thomas and shake off his flight under duress. Maybe he wouldn’t even call the police. Yeah, right.
Jumping out of a helicopter into a soggy field in the middle of St. Croix’s wilderness wasn’t ideal, but the airport was on the west side of the island—miles from any one of the harbors Rory was almost certain to have chosen as a landing point on the east side and way too central a location for her to disembark at. After a sweep of the coastline, she’d spotted Rory’s speedboat drifting in the calm waters near a secluded high-end resort, with Rory nowhere to be seen.
If she’d been in his position, she would’ve done the very same thing because the resort’s remote location tucked into the lush green tropics of the northeast shore meant fewer witnesses had noticed him drive up and jump out. Plus, the resort sported a whole parking lot full of cars ripe for the stealing.
Contrary to St. Thomas’s Let’s-help-the-tourists-spend-their-money-fast! vibe, this was a sleepy island of wealthy, older vacationers who liked their tennis games at the club in the morning and their naps in their beach hammocks in the afternoon, thank you very much. An escaped convict couldn’t hide here long—at least, that’s what Alicia was counting on.
Unfortunately, that meant she couldn’t hide out here long, either, so it was a good thing that she didn’t plan to. The idea was to locate Rory, execute him and vanish before the vacationers had woken from their naps. The closest, best place to make a clean break with the helicopter and its frightened pilot was a field two kilometers from the resort.
She poked the pilot in the neck with her gun once more for good measure. “Hold it steady now.” She yanked his radio wire from its socket and tossed it out the door opening, then his earphones. No sense giving him a chance to call the police the moment she jumped, even if she’d never said directly why she needed him to get her to St. Croix or what she planned to do while there.
She tucked two one-hundred-dollar bills in his shirt pocket to cover replacing the equipment she’d destroyed, secured the computer bag she’d retrieved from her rental car across her shoulders, then walked to the edge of the doorway. He’d done a great job getting low. She had maybe a two-meter jump. No problem.
On the ground, she ran out from under the helicopter’s shadow and sought cover beneath the tree canopy. She watched the helicopter rise and head off, not back toward St. Thomas, but in the direction of the St. Croix airport. Just terrific. With the navy on its way to the island, she had ten, maybe fifteen minutes to vanish before the U.S. authorities he was most likely on his way to notify descended on the resort.
Cursing at the messiness of it all and how screwed up her vengeance plan had gotten, she made a break for the hotel. What she really needed was a quiet place to log on to her computer. Maybe that was less glamorous than stealing a car and scouring every inch of the island, but Alicia could cover a lot more ground that way, so to speak.
She could tap into the local police phone line and radio and let the police and civilians do the grunt work. If what she’d seen on St. Thomas as the helicopter lifted off was any indication, St. Croix’s main town of Christiansted would be crawling with police and soldiers, too, so the less visible she was, the better.
In the resort’s parking lot, she scanned for a sign of Rory or any indication that he’d been through. She didn’t expect a top-rate operative like him to leave a trail, and he didn’t surprise her with one. She jimmied open the door of a rusty, early 1990s model American-made sedan—the kind that only took the touch of a screwdriver to the engine’s solenoid starter to jumpstart and so were, statistically, the favorite choice of auto thieves the world over—that probably belonged to one of the resort’s employees.
With another look around, she pulled the driver’s door closed, but it caught on something and bounced back open. Her gaze shot sideways to see a man’s black boot propped on the bottom of the door frame.
Squelching a gasp, she pulled her gun and twisted to aim at him, but the man was faster. Cold metal of a gun muzzle jabbed at her neck. Didn’t karma have an ironic sense of humor?
“Not the best idea, Phoenix.”
There were only a handful of men in the world who called her that, and none of them owned that smug, smooth voice. She followed the boot in the doorway up past a pair of black cargo pants, black leather belt and gray T-shirt concealing a lean, fit build to the smirking face of a man who looked a few years older than her thirty-two. It was going to take some effort and strategy to best him and escape, but she had no doubt that she would.
Her first strategic move was to bide her time and wait for an opening. Blanking her expression, she released her gun into her lap and raised her hands in a show of surrender. “What do you want?”
He cocked his head and looked sideways with mocking amusement. “You and I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet. Do you know who I am?”
A navy SEAL, she’d bet, given his clothes and high and tight haircut—and, if the gleam in his eye was any indication, one with a mean streak. “Should I care?”
His lips twitched into a smile. “I think you’re going to want to remember my name. ICE Special Agent Logan McCaffrey.”
ICE. That was not the agency she expected to catch up with her first. How did they get to the islands so fast? And why target her? She would’ve thought that if she had any remaining allies in the government, they would be the men and women she’d worked with for twelve years. She guessed loyalty and an exemplary service record didn’t count for much after she’d broken their most notorious corrupt agent out of prison.
The name Logan McCaffrey didn’t ring a bell, but then again, she’d been out of the loop for a year and a half. As if she’d ever paid much attention to the loop the first place. Their black ops crew had operated largely as a solitary unit, their identities classified, which had kept them isolated from the politics and flow of employees within the government bureaucracy that paid their salaries.
McCaffrey tightened a hand around her upper arm. “That was quite a show you put on with Rory Alderman.”
To test his strength, she tried to jerk her arm out of his grip, but he clamped his hand harder around her. Okay, then, he was as strong as he looked and with reflexes to match. The faster she separated his gun from his possession, the better her odds of success. She lowered her gaze to her lap, where her gun lay. So close, yet she’d never be able to wield it before he reacted.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a show.” It was supposed to be quiet and fast, elegant even. Not the spectacle it’d turned into, thanks to John.
“Nevertheless, I’ve been waiting for you to make that move for a long time. Alicia Troy, it’s my pleasure to place you under arrest.”
Chapter 4
John didn’t have time to worry about Alicia, especially with his fate hanging in such limbo. He had enough to think about with hunting down Rory and dodging the military and coast guard vessels that swarmed the water surrounding St. Croix as he considered where and how to sneak ashore.
He’d hitched a ride back to his boat from the yacht owner who’d heard his gunshot, and though his clothes were almost dry and his bag of guns and money had been right where he’d left it on the floor of the boat, it had been a pride-swallowing, tough slog of an hour.
With military and federal forces descending on the island and the dark, threatening clouds of Hurricane Hannah forming in the distant horizon, John doubted Rory would linger there long. There were only a few ways one could get on and off St. Croix, and John had no doubt the airport and main port in Christiansted Harbor were already on lockdown.
The next closest island was over a hundred nautical miles away. Since there was no way Rory would chance returning to St. Thomas, he would have to hire a private charter or steal a private helicopter, plane or a boat large enough to handle the choppy open waters. Even then, the coast guard and military would have satellites and radars to keep tabs on the water and airspace surrounding the island.
As far as John was concerned, he was in the best position to find Rory, not only because of his intimate knowledge of both St. Croix and the man who was his former best friend, but because he was in the ironic position of being the forgotten one, the ghost operative. There wasn’t anyone in the world who cared enough about John’s movement to pay attention to where he was or what he was doing.
The only person who even knew John was an interested party in what happened to Rory and Alicia was his ICE buddy Logan, and even if Logan thought he might go after Rory, he had no idea how close John had been living to the unfolding events or how quickly he was capable of responding. With any luck, he would slip onto the island undetected, nab Rory, extract a confession from him, then turn him over to ICE before Hannah’s wind speed hit fifty knots.
John’s plan not to think about Alicia was easier said than done, though. Because the moment the luxury estates and resorts dotting the green hills of St. Croix’s coast got near enough that he could make out balconies and artfully arranged palm trees in courtyards, all he could think was that she was out there, too. The same 134 miles that trapped Rory with scores of federal agents and U.S. troops also trapped her.
Had she already found and killed Rory? He hadn’t forgotten her hesitation back on St. Thomas to do just that, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it. On their black ops team, there was no getting around necessary violence when their duty to defend their country demanded it, which occasionally meant making a kill. Alicia’s conviction to do what was right for her country and her lethal grace were two of the things he loved about her. Perhaps, now that duty to country had been stripped from her job description, her moral compass had changed. Unless...
Unless what if she’d lost her touch? Post-traumatic stress disorder was common in victims of violence. Either that or there was some reason, deep down inside her, why she wanted Rory alive. Regardless of why Alicia had done what she did, it was time to set his musings aside and admit the very real danger that she wouldn’t have the chance to try to kill Rory again because she’d be apprehended by authorities here on St. Croix, if she hadn’t already.
The idea made his chest tight, which pissed him off. She’d abandoned him in middle of the Caribbean Sea, of all the damn things. She hadn’t even seen fit to throw down a floatation device. So what if the authorities got her? He had no business caring what her fate was anymore. If she got caught, then his path to Rory would be clearer. Try as he might, he just couldn’t sell himself on that argument, though. Despite everything, she was the woman he’d once loved. Despite everything, there as a part of him that cared about her still.
He wove a path along the north side of the island, away from busy Christiansted Harbor. With the binoculars he kept in the boat’s console, he scanned the coast, but he couldn’t keep his thoughts from returning to Alicia.
It had always been that way between them—he cared too much and she acted as if she barely afforded him a thought. She’d made him fight for a spot in her bed. Made him demand it. At the time, in the middle of it all, he’d liked being the one calling the shots in their relationship. Fighting for what he wanted was his comfort zone. As with everything else in his life—his career, his family—with her he’d let his stubborn streak act as a battering ram, breaking through her self-protective walls. He’d not only loved Alicia, body and soul, but he’d loved the challenge of her, too.
He saw no sign of Rory’s boat at Salt River Bay, which had been his first hunch. Intimately familiar with almost all the docks, piers, bars and hotels on St. Croix because St. Croix had been the first haven he landed on after his life fell apart, he pressed north, where the shoreline evolved into looming green cliffs untouched by civilization and edged with shallow, yellow sand beaches. It was unlikely that Rory had ditched the boat and swam ashore—which would’ve been hell on his gunshot wound—so he’d either tied off at one of the few docks on this end of the island or he’d gone to the island’s south side.
Sure enough, bobbing in the water alongside kayaks and dinghies tied to the small private dock jutting from the Grand Ammaly Bay Resort, he spotted the boat Rory had stolen.
That cleared up where Rory’s touchdown point had been, but John knew better than to take the bait. Even if the boat hadn’t been left in plain sight as a decoy and was a bona fide signal of Rory’s trail, Rory wouldn’t have lingered at the Grand Ammaly for long. Most likely, he’d gone shopping for unattended purses and wallets at the resort’s restaurants and lounges, then stolen a car. John’s best bet was that Rory’s next move involved treating his gunshot wound.
He also bet that Alicia had started her hunt for Rory at the resort. She didn’t have many weaknesses as an operative, but she was a computer genius, first and foremost, and had the accompanying literal, statistical logic to go along with that gift. John had witnessed it enough back when they were teammates. It was the same mind-set that made her an expert at computer technology, but it would only hurt her in the Caribbean, where scarcely anything followed the rules of American-bred literal logic.
The question now was, after Rory ditched the speedboat and gathered funds, where would he go to tend his wound? Compounding the issue was that Rory didn’t need someone else to administer first aid. Green Berets were trained to take care of themselves and each other. It was a critical skill to have when operating behind enemy lines, as they often had on their missions. Once, in Afghanistan, John had sustained a nasty slice to his side while training Afghan soldiers in hand-to-hand combat techniques and Rory had administered ten stitches in the kitchen of an abandoned, bombed-out house.
All Rory would need was first-aid supplies and a secluded, clean place to patch himself up. On the sleepy, vacation paradise of St. Croix, there was definitely no shortage of secluded hideaways. Good thing John knew Eugene Flyer, bar owner and island informant extraordinaire.
He cranked the wheel of his boat in the opposite direction of the resort, toward Eugene’s bar, but something stopped him from taking the throttle out of neutral. Alicia.
What if she’d caught up with Rory before he’d had time to flee the resort? What if she was on the verge of killing him? John was so near, he had to check. The idea of seeing Alicia again made his heart pound. He wished he knew how to sever the grip she had on his heart, but the best he could do for now was try to ignore it.
But as he spun the wheel back toward the resort and pushed the throttle, he couldn’t stop the rush of memories of the woman he’d loved and lost. It was a bitter pill to swallow to realize that even with everything on the line and his future hanging in the balance, Alicia’s face, her voice, remained stubbornly in the forefront of his mind—forever there, yet forever out of reach.
* * *
Alicia followed McCaffrey’s hand as he snatched her gun and tucked it in his pants pocket. Arrest, huh? So he didn’t have the green light to kill her. Good to know. Part of her was spitting nails that her mission had gone so royally FUBAR, but another part of her had to give thanks for that small favor. At least she was alive. She sat still, forcing him to make the next play.
He took hold of her left arm again and repositioned his gun against her neck.
“Right hand on top of your head, right now.”
She complied, biding her time. Next, he’d probably order her out of the car. One could hope he’d do something so stupid, anyway.
“Real slowly now, you’re going to get out of the car. One wrong move and I shoot. Don’t think for a second that I don’t understand how dangerous you are.”
If he’d truly understood how dangerous she was, he would’ve cuffed her hands to the steering wheel, then climbed in the backseat and ordered her to play hostage taxi driver.
She unfolded one booted leg to the ground, then the other. Predictably, he tugged her arm to force her to stand. Harnessing the momentum in his tug, she pushed off the ground with her left leg, kicking out with her right.
Her boot slammed into his gut as she grabbed the wrist of his gun hand. She banged his wrist against the door frame as she kicked his legs out from under him. With an oof, he fell forward into her lap like she’d hoped he would, his grip on her arm loosening. She jerked her arm free of him, and before he had time to gather his wits, she kneed him in the head, then grabbed the wrist of his gun hand.
They grappled for command of the gun. She nearly lost the battle when he grabbed her hair and yanked. The pain of it made her stomach ache, and the lack of air made her light-headed, but she fought through it, banging his gun hand against the door frame over and over until it fell from his hand, either onto the ground or the car floor, she couldn’t tell. Time for part two of her plan.
Her hands shot out, groping the steering column until her fingers closed around what she’d been after. The gear shifter. She wrenched it down but didn’t have enough force behind the movement to snap it off.
She threw herself backward, arching her hips and creating a slight window to get her knees up. Her boots hit his legs, though she couldn’t guess how high up. Gasping and grunting, she kicked against him, but his hold on her was too firm. Before she could stop him, he pulled her from the car. She put all her effort into one last tug on the gear shifter as they moved. She was about to give up and come up with a new plan when it snapped off.
There was no time to waste. As soon as she was out of the car, she got her legs under her and swung the jagged-edged shiv toward his neck. She felt it snag on skin. He hissed through his teeth and grabbed for her arm. No way was she going to let that happen. Instead, she used his power against him and as his arm whooshed past her, she countered with a block, just as she’d learned as a student of Krav Maga, the discipline of Israeli martial arts her father practiced and had taught her, his only daughter, from the time she could walk.
The memory and discipline of her training settled into her bones, eclipsing the need for conscious planning. They merged, becoming one fluid series of spins, kicks, jabs and blocks. McCaffrey gave as good as he defended himself, employing a dangerous combination of lightness and power that spoke of a background in mixed martial arts. For every lock and strike she issued, he countered with a punch or kick, but she was able to finally create a pocket of space to swing the shiv out. She brought it down hard and stabbed him square in the thigh.
Grunting in pain, he stumbled back, gripping his bleeding leg.
She turned her attention to finding her fallen gun. She didn’t see it on the ground, so it had to be somewhere near the driver’s seat. She’d nearly reached the car when Logan grabbed hold of her waist. She was no match for his strength. He twisted her elbow behind her, then body slammed her face-first into the side of the car near the rear wheel. Painfully.
He pulled her back, then slammed her into the car a second time. His gun found her neck again. “Give me a reason to squeeze the trigger.”
Her mouth went dry. There was more than patriotic duty or irritation that she’d temporarily bested him behind those words, which had dripped with hate, anger. But why? She’d never seen him before, so what could he have against her on a personal level?
Besides the shiv she still held in the hand he’d twisted behind her, she had a hell of an arsenal strapped to her body under her clothes, none of which she could use at the moment. So she waited and tried to ignore the piercing pain in her twisted arm. Patience, patience...
“Got her,” he said low, as though speaking into a phone or earpiece. He rattled off their coordinates.
She gazed down the side of her leg, checking out his stance, calculating how much room she’d need to create so she could slip sideways enough to take control of his gun arm. His right knee had her leg pinned against the car. The shiv had been removed from his leg and, though the pants were torn and bloody, the blood wasn’t spreading or dripping. She must not have caught him all that deep.
She was contemplating her options to get him to loosen his hold when she spied an edge of black peeking out from beneath the cuff of her pants.
Her ankle holster.
“Roger that,” Logan said, his tone indicating he was still on the phone. She glanced over her shoulder as he pocketed the phone.
He narrowed his eyes at her, so she made a show of glancing at her ankle, as if she was considering making a play for the gun. He took the bait, following her line of sight.
“Loaded down with firepower, hmm? I’d expect nothing less. I bet you want me to squat down and get it, make it nice and easy for you to kick me in the face from that position, right?”
“A girl can dream.”
His gun scraped over her shoulder, then her back as he repositioned it between her ribs, aimed at her heart. “How about you get it, nice and slow, then drop it on the ground. I’ll stay here with my finger on the trigger.”
This guy was good. Too good. For the first time, a flutter of nerves started inside her. This was going to be harder than she thought, especially with no crew backing her up. John’s image flickered in her mind. Guess it was too much to ask for him to surprise her with a well-timed ambush.
No.
This was what she wanted—to work alone. She didn’t want to be rescued, especially by the man she’d once dreamed of spending the rest of her life with. Even now, the thought of him made her chest ache. It was stupid, pining for a man who’d conspired to kill her. But even as she thought the words, they felt hollow. Did she really believe him capable of that? The same nagging doubt she’d fought for twenty months to ignore came creeping back into her consciousness.
No. She didn’t have time for doubts and heartache, not with Rory on the loose and herself in a battle of wits with a highly trained ICE agent.
She shoved her wayward thoughts aside and gave an exaggerated squirm. “You’ll have to let go of my arm for me to get that gun.”
His hand slid to her wrist, loosening the twist, but he didn’t release her. With his mouth near her ear, he whispered, “If you try anything clever, I have no qualms about hurting you.”
She didn’t doubt it, given the way he’d threatened to pull the trigger of his gun earlier. “You must have some qualms or you wouldn’t have said that. In fact, I think you’re pretty damn offensive. You would have never said that to a man. Don’t be such a sexist pig.”
He let out a sardonic chuckle. “I couldn’t give a damn that you’re a woman. Truth is, you’re a worthy adversary, and I would’ve loved to have you on my team. It breaks my heart a little to have witnessed your fall from grace.”
There were so many questions that sprang to her mind from that comment that she didn’t know where to start. His team? She’d already figured out that he was no run-of-the-mill ICE field agent. He had the sophisticated moves and toughness of a black ops agent, which begged the question, once again, of why she’d never heard of him before today.
At a slow, deliberate pace, she bent and stretched her right hand down toward her gun. “What’s your real job with ICE?”
He tsked. “I’m sure you’ve already guessed the answer to that. You want me to tell you, anyway?”
She tugged her pant leg up, then ever so tediously unbuttoned the strap holding her backup nine millimeter in place. “Why don’t you go ahead and spell it out for me what you’re doing here and why you had a front row seat to my so-called fall from grace?”
“Did you think the need for a black ops crew disintegrated when you and your team did?”
Honestly, she hadn’t given much thought to ICE since they forced her to go on disability leave. Just thinking the term made her temper catch fire and gave her a fresh surge of adrenaline.
Closing her eyes, she visualized the position of his gun-holding arm, his stance and his height and breadth, calculating exactly how she’d need to move and strike to gain the upper hand. Then she dropped the gun between her legs, the barrel propped against the top of her right foot.
“What’s your plan with that move? Are you going to kick it up and grab it from midair?”
“Something like that.”
“It’d almost be worth letting you try that, but how about instead you shuffle it behind you.”
“I would, but I can’t move.”
He lifted his knee away from where he had her leg pinned, so she slid the gun back just as he’d asked, biding her time. She gave a start as she felt his hands on the bare skin of her waist where her shirt had pulled up from her pants. He must have spotted the belt she’d strapped to her ribs under her shirt. She remained doubled over and let him look.
“I wasn’t going to strip-search you, but you’re not giving me a lot of choice.” He used his gun to push her shirt higher, revealing her concealed carry-gear belt. “You’re like a one-woman army, here. Grenades, ammo, flash bangs, multi-tool. And I’m sure there’s more in here somewhere.”
He felt along her bra, then gave a humph as he reached the hilt of the knife she’d sewn into it. His touch was clinical, free of any sexual undertones, but she still had to ignore the sensation of being violated. “Ingenious. Makes me wish I was more creative with my concealed carry.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t look as good as you do in cargo pants.” She pushed off her left leg and stood, twisting into the hand that still held her wrist to pin it behind her and bringing his face into strike range. She elbowed him in the nose, then ducked under his gun-holding arm and twisted again, locking out and twisting the arm of the hand that held her wrist until he had no choice except to release her.
Before he could spin to face her, she kicked him with all her might, then reached under her shirt and ripped her knife from its sheath in her bra as she dropped to her knees near his head. She held the knife to his throat.
Wearing an expression of respect, he touched the clotting blood on his thigh from where she’d stabbed him. His eyes were watering, his nose bloody. He reached with unsteady hands into his pocket for her gun and she let him get it clear of the fabric before she elbowed him in the gut, then plucked it from his hand and aimed it at him with her left hand.
“Should I shoot you or slice your neck open?”
“Nicely played. There’s just one little problem.”
She registered the sound of a vehicle at the same time he raised his head and looked past her. A van done up like a resort’s airport shuttle, but with darkly tinted windows, screeched to a stop not two meters away. She supposed the shuttle look was as much camouflage on a tropical island as the type of run-down A-Team knockoff van she and her black ops crew had driven in the Third World countries they often found themselves in.
The side door of the van swung open to reveal two ripped, fit men holding automatic rifles, both aimed at her. Driving the van, and with a handgun aimed at Alicia, was an equally fit young woman.
“Alicia Troy, meet your replacements.” The glee in McCaffrey’s voice made her want to punch him in the face all over again.
Damn it all.
“Drop the gun and get your hands in the air,” Logan said, the smug smoothness returning to his voice. “We’re done dancing.”
Out of ideas, she complied, setting the knife and gun on the ground.
While she processed the turn of events, Logan scooted from beneath her, gathered her discarded weapons and stood. He returned to the car she’d planned to steal and retrieved her computer bag from the passenger seat. “We’ll need this as evidence.”
And, boy, would they find it on that computer. Her gut twisted.
“I see you weighing your options, but the only one that’ll keep you alive is to get your hands in the air. We’re the best of the best and I wouldn’t underestimate us if I were you.”
“If you’re the best, it’s only because my team’s out of the picture.”
Logan and his crew all chuckled. Logan shook his head. “Nearly two years ago, you and your merry band of misfits nearly destroyed a billion-dollar, international operation, and Rory Alderman sold national secrets to the highest bidder. If you ask me, it’s a miracle ICE decided to give their black ops experiment another try.”
Given all the guns pointed at her and that she was outnumbered four to one, her best option—her only option, really—was to do as he said, at least for the time being. For the first time in her life, she raised her arms in a show of surrender.
Chapter 5
Through the painted iron bars of the Ammaly Bay Resort’s pool enclosure, John watched resort security take statements from a couple who had apparently been robbed of all their belongings during the water volleyball tournament less than an hour earlier. So John’s hunch had been right. Rory had used the resort as an ATM to fund his disappearance.
The question still was, had Alicia caught up to him before he was able to slip away?
Cutting a wide berth around the pool, he walked the winding path through the hotel grounds, then through the lobby. After Rory gathered funds, the next logical step would be to steal a car. With that in mind, John headed into the parking lot, but what he saw had him cursing and ducking for cover behind the nearest parked car.
Alicia. But she wasn’t alone.
He watched as she climbed into a white hotel shuttle van along with at least four others.
He raised up slightly as the van cruised past him. He didn’t recognize either the woman behind the wheel or the man in the passenger seat, but they both looked calm, yet vigilant. Something was definitely not right about the situation, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Then his eyes widened and his stomach dropped. Something akin to a boiling sensation started in his chest. Sitting right beside Alicia in the middle row of the van was Logan effing McCaffrey—the man John had thought was his only friend left in ICE. Guess they weren’t such great friends, after all.
No wonder Alicia had been so cavalier about breaking the law by hijacking that helicopter. No wonder she hadn’t shot to kill Rory. It wasn’t that she’d lost her touch; it was that she had something going on with ICE that John didn’t understand.
No, check that, he did. There was no two ways about it. He knew exactly what had happened. “Mother of God, Logan and Alicia set me up.”
He watched the van roll out of the parking lot headed north, toward Frederiksted, then jimmied the door of an old hatchback. The once-silver paint had turned gray, and the engine strained before it caught, but it blended in with most of the other vehicles on the island, which was John’s only requirement.
His palms sweating against the steering wheel and his throat tight and sore as though from screaming, John waited until the van was a good distance away before pulling onto the road behind it. It was a slow crawl along the two-lane coastal road to Frederiksted. He hung back as far as he could while still maintaining a visual on the van, biding his time to strike as his anger gathered force.
They’d played him a fool—Logan, Alicia, ICE. Everyone. In his mind, he could see the email from Logan that morning. Alicia is missing.
Oh, they played him good. He huffed out an exhale, fighting to get a grip. The van drove slow and steady over the straight stretch of the highway toward the heart of Frederiksted, with John following at a distance.
John had spent a lot of time in Frederiksted, the second largest town on the island, yet far and away more charming, with its rustic buildings, Dutch history and killer beaches. He used to love the place, but this was the spot where he’d realized, a year or so ago, that his complacency had finally consumed him and he’d lost his taste for life.
It’d happened on a moonlit rooftop deck across the street from the pier, with a beautiful woman in his arms and four shots of rum in his veins. She’d trailed kisses over his chest, her hands exploring lower, and he remembered looking up at the moon and thinking, I feel nothing. Not drunk, not desire, not even anger at Alicia or Rory. Nothing.
It’d been enough to scare rationality back into him. That was the night he left St. Croix and sequestered himself with his weapons and computer on a barely inhabited island east of St. Thomas. That was the night he’d started training again—when he’d started preparing for this, his first and most critical mission back in the game.
And all the while, through his pain and rebirth, Alicia and Logan had been plotting something, preparing to use him.
Instead of stewing on why it seemed to be his lot in life to be a patsy, he should be asking himself what Logan and Alicia were trying to accomplish with Rory’s escape and John’s pursuit of him. It didn’t make sense. Logan was the ICE recruiter who’d brought John and Rory over from Army Special Forces and had facilitated their training. He didn’t work cases, so what was he doing in the field?
Come to think of it, maybe an even better question than that was why would Alicia help ICE in the first place? She’d quit the agency more than a year ago, and as far as John could glean at the time, not on the best of terms after they’d put her on disability.
All John knew was that he was sick and tired of being jerked around and played for a fool. That was going to end right the hell now. Seething inside, he gunned the engine and swerved right, ripping around one corner, then another, onto a side street that ran parallel to the coastal highway on which the van continued to travel. With a whining protest, the hatchback complied. Keeping one eye on the road and his foot pushing the gas pedal to the floor, he reached into his bag and brought out his rifle.
At a corner where the van was set to pass by as it headed in the direction of the airport, he screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, threw the car into Park and ran up an exterior set of stairs to a rooftop deck, rifle in hand. This plan might ruin his getaway car, but John couldn’t worry about that now. There were plenty of other cars on the island to steal.
No more than a minute after he flattened to a shooting position, the van came into view.
His index finger slipped to the trigger. Compared to hitting a buoy, this was going to be a piece of cake. Taking aim, he squeezed the trigger and held it down until the two front tires were shredded.
The van’s brakes smoked as it jerked into a spinout. John then took aim at the windshield and squeezed off a single round that hit right in the corner as the van turned. The windshield beaded into thousands of white balls of glass, but the plastic safety film covering the glass kept the windshield erect, though no one could possibly see through it.
Someone in the van fired a shot out of an open window, then another, but John ignored the danger. It was a little hard to squeeze off an accurate shot from a vehicle spinning out of control. He stood, ready to spring. The van slammed into the side of the building adjacent to the one John stood on, nearly taking out the beams holding the second-story balcony up. The airbags exploded as it shuddered to a stop.
John climbed onto the corner of the ledge and jumped, rifle in one hand and his HK45 in the other. His boots slammed hard onto the hood of the van, but all the fury and adrenaline pounding through him kept pain the furthest from his mind. He kicked the windshield. This time, the glass did shatter, raining down over the airbags.
He fired shots into the bags, deflating them in seconds, then kicked the female driver and the man in the front passenger seat both in the faces as he took a seat in the empty windshield frame and had a look inside at the handful of operatives aiming guns at him, looking ready to act should he give them the slightest opening.
He didn’t recognize anyone except Logan and Alicia, but the other three had the physiques and postures of highly trained special agents. Their firearms were top rate and high-powered. Too bad for them because John had an automatic military-grade M4 rifle and an HK45 semiautomatic aimed right back at them—and every person there knew that in the time it would take to get one good shot in him, he could level them all to the ground.
Boots still on the driver’s and passenger’s necks, he locked his knees, pinning them to their seats. Then he plucked their guns from their hands and threw them over his shoulder. Call it a product of growing up in the South, but he hated using physical force against women—seriously hated it—but it’d been Logan who’d retrained John after the army that in black ops, nothing mattered except getting the job done, including an opponent’s gender.
Alicia had confirmed Logan’s words for him more than once that it was insulting to women in the field to be treated differently. So he did what he had to without flinching, when he had to, but he didn’t have to like using force against the female driver right now.
There were two guns still aimed at him—Logan’s and the one held by the man in the very back of the van. John focused one gun on each man, even though there was no way he’d take a chance of hitting Alicia by firing at Logan.
Alicia’s expression was cold, blank. He let his gaze flicker over her before it landed on Logan. He swallowed, caging the impulse to beat that shadow of a smile off his former friend’s face.
“Alicia and Logan, you make quite a pair.” He swallowed, correcting the emotion in his tone, replacing it with steel. “I want answers. And I want them now.”
“Thriller, that was quite an entrance. I wish I could say it’s a shock to see you here,” Logan said, using John’s old code name and a slick tone that made John want to bare his teeth. “Because I was in the room when your superiors gave you explicit instructions to stay out of ICE business and off U.S. soil. Here you are violating both directives.”
“And yet, you knew exactly what would happen when you contacted me this morning.” And he was downright pissed at himself for being so gullible. Guess he had further to go than he thought toward rebuilding himself as a warrior.
“Predictability always was a weakness of yours.”
“No, not predictability. Loyalty. That’s why I’m here.” The woman in the driver’s seat looked as if she might be making plans to counterattack. He unlocked his knee and kicked the underside of her chin hard enough to serve as a warning. “And I’ll tell you, Logan, Alicia, it’s the damnedest thing because two years ago, I never would have classified my loyalty to my fellow soldiers and teammates—the people in the world I should trust most—as a weakness.”
He met the gaze of the man in the way back of the van, the one with the flat Polynesian nose and the Kimber 9mm trained on him. “That’s ironic, right? Because when I was a soldier, they drilled it into our heads over and over again that loyalty was everything.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. John winked at him, just to be contrary, before returning his focus to Logan. “This is a good-looking crew you’ve compiled. I guess your superiors have you working in the field now?”
“Wait...you two know each other?” Alicia said.
The question gave John pause. If she’d really teamed up with Logan, she would have known that. Unless she was playing dumb.
He didn’t take his eyes off Logan when he answered her. “Logan recruited me for ICE from the army.”
“I trained you, too. Don’t forget that part of the story.”
John shifted the aim of his rifle to Logan’s face. “Then how is it that there are five of you and only one of me, and yet we find ourselves in this position? This must be one of those times where the student surpasses the teacher.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.” At the first movement of Logan’s gun, John engaged the muscles of his trigger finger, but didn’t take the motion any farther. Instead, he schooled his features against the bolt of panic that hit him as the butt of Logan’s gun found Alicia’s throat. “Where are my manners? I owe you my thanks for leading us to Alicia. She was our target all along and I knew you’d be the one to help us neutralize her.”
Steady, man. Loyalty is your weakness, remember?
Odds were that this was just another ploy to manipulate him. Keeping his focus on Logan’s trigger finger, he noted in his periphery that Alicia’s hands were behind her back. A bruise was forming on her cheek and he saw abrasions on her neck. Her shirt was dotted with debris, as if she’d been flung on the ground. In fact, the more he studied her, the more beat up he realized she was.
So much for his theory about her and Logan teaming up against him. Alicia wasn’t here of her own free will and clearly someone, probably Logan, had roughed her up pretty good. And that made John want to do some killing in a bad, bad way.
Steady...
“What about Rory?” he asked. “How does he factor into this grand plan of yours?”
“Don’t you worry about him. There are only two ways off this island—by boat or air. The airports are on lockdown and the island is surrounded by navy, ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service, FBI—you name it, they’re here and all trying to be the ones to take Rory down first. He won’t be leaving this place alive. Bringing Alicia into custody was my crew’s one and only mission.”
“I’ll help you find Rory,” Alicia said. “Think of how it’ll boost your careers if you find him first. I can track him better than anyone.”
“Why would you help us capture him? You’re the one who broke him out of prison.”
“You have no proof.”
“Don’t I?”
Alicia swallowed, which looked as if it took effort given how hard Logan had his gun jammed against her neck. Bastard.
While Logan and Alicia kept up a back-and-forth about proof and being set up, John assessed his options. The van was shot to hell, its tires and windshield destroyed. At some point they were all going to have to get out of the vehicle because this stalemate they were in couldn’t go on indefinitely. John knew they’d try to get out of sight before the authorities showed up. Sure, Logan and his crew were law enforcement officials, but there wasn’t a black ops agent alive who wanted a bunch of uniforms slowing them down or mucking up their operation.
The question John needed to answer in the next thirty seconds or so was how did he get Logan and his crew out of the van, their threat neutralized without killing them, and all while maintaining his position of power? Problems, problems...
“What about me?” he asked, interrupting Logan’s snide response to something Alicia had said.
Logan huffed. “What about you? You’re free to walk away. And I suggest you do so before I change my mind.”
In other words, Logan thought he was harmless. How insulting. Did he not notice John had disabled their van and was holding them all at gunpoint?
“You haven’t left yet.”
“Keen observation.”
“Don’t get ideas about saving your lady love here. Consider this a lesson in who not to give your loyalty to...because it sure isn’t this one. If your positions were reversed, would she save you?”
Not in a million years. She’d already deserted him in the middle of the ocean. He probably could’ve forgiven her for that, except for the minor detail that she still clung to the belief that John was a traitor to his country and helped plot her murder.
The hard truth was that John’s most strategic move would be to walk away, leaving Alicia in Logan’s custody. Since Logan and the rest of the Feds didn’t perceive John as a threat, and with Alicia out of commission, John could hunt down his quarry unencumbered. He had no doubt he could find Rory faster than any of them. The truth was, Alicia being captured and ICE’s underestimation of John’s abilities worked in his favor in every possible way...except for John’s conscience.
Alicia’s life was on the line here. The thought of her languishing in a prison cell for the rest of her life made John’s heart race with panic. No matter what disgraces she thought him guilty of, her opinions didn’t change who John was, with his weakness for loyalty and all.
Rory’s accusations had stripped him of his reputation, his career and the woman he loved, but no one could take away John’s integrity. All he was now was the soldier and man he and his Maker knew him to be. And a soldier didn’t walk away from a teammate in trouble, just like a man didn’t walk away when his woman needed him—even though he wasn’t her man anymore and his days as a soldier were nothing but a fading memory.
Besides, John had never been a big fan of taking the easy way out.
He took his finger off the triggers of his guns and held them up, aimed in the air, like he was surrendering. Really, though, it was a great ruse to get the guns over the top of the van’s roof and out of sight. “All right. Here I go. One question—are you going to shoot me in the back while I walk away?”
“You’re not worth the bullet.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Alicia hadn’t reacted to the news that John was walking away. Not that he’d expected her to—she was too much of a professional. Keeping his expression passive and his eyes on Logan, he squeezed the trigger of his rifle, spraying the teetering balcony post with shots until it gave way and collapsed onto the passenger side of the van with a loud crack.
John dived off the van, out of the way, just before impact.
The force of the falling balcony tipped the van onto its side in a clatter of metal parts and broken glass. It hit the ground hard, dust billowing all around.
John scrambled to his feet and leaped onto the side of the van, to the broken window.
Alicia was grappling with Logan and the woman from the front seat. He’d get to them in a sec, but his first order of business was taking out the man in the back of van. He was partially covered by a fallen beam but still had command of his gun and was shooting wildly. John smashed the butt of his gun into the man’s face.
He stopped shooting and his eyes rolled back before he crumpled, passed out.
John grabbed the man’s gun and tossed it out the window, then transferred his own gun to his left hand, seized Logan by the shirt with his right and hauled him up.
Logan came up swinging and clipped John in the jaw. “What happened to walking away?”
John returned the favor. The impact of his fist on Logan’s cheek felt good. Like when he’d let his fists do the talking with Rory on the speedboat. “Did you really think I could?”
He ducked out of the way of Logan’s next hit, then slammed his shoulder into Logan’s chest and punched him in the gut, knocking him off the side of the van into the ground.
The woman from the front seat had crawled to the back. She and Alicia were going at it in a messy, opportunistic fight, both clearly prevented from making use of their close-combat training given the tight confines of the vehicle.
John jumped up onto the van’s side and got the barrel of his gun right in the woman’s face. “Yeah, you can go ahead and get your hands off Alicia now.”
Shooting daggers at him with her expression, she opened her hands and backed off.
John kept the gun on the operative as he offered Alicia a hand up. “Let’s go. I’m getting you out of here.”
She had the wherewithal to look offended. “I can take care of myself.”
“Really? Is that what was going on here—you taking care of yourself?”
“I was biding my time. I don’t want to owe you.”
John nearly got a cramp in his eyeballs from rolling them so hard. “Phoenix, you already owed me. This doesn’t change anything.”
Ignoring his hand, she pushed past him onto the side, now the top, of the van.
“John, look out!”
He wrenched his gaze up in time to see Logan coming at him. Logan grabbed him and pulled him off the van. With another lunge, Logan sent them careening over the side of the road, down a grassy ridge. John kept a grip on the other man’s shirt as they tumbled.
They landed near the base of a giant metal silo located out back of the rum distillery that was St. Croix’s claim to fame. John shoved him off and scrambled back. Panting, snarling, they faced each other down.
“You’re ready for round two?” John asked.
Logan swiped at a spot of blood in the corner of his lips. “Do you really think you can best me? I trained you.”
He holstered his gun, then withdrew his knife. “You keep saying that like you think I haven’t picked up a single new move since then.”
Logan sprang forward with a roundhouse kick aimed at his knife-holding hand that John easily sidestepped.
“And I guess you forgot that in training me, you taught me all your moves.”
Logan regained his footing, then reached into a pocket on his cargo pants and brought out a massive, steel sawback bowie knife. “You say that like you think I taught you all my moves.”
For the first time, John noticed the dried blood on Logan’s pants and on his neck. Good job, Phoenix. “I thought you were my ally, but you used me.”
“Try not to sound so hurt. It’s unbecoming.”
They circled each other, breathing hard. John had no idea what Alicia was up to or where she’d gone—for all he knew, she’d taken off in the car he’d stolen—but he didn’t have time to worry about that at the moment.
“Why go after her? She was one of ICE’s best operatives.”
“You don’t think ICE keeps track of its highly classified operatives once they’ve left the agency? Spare me your selective ignorance. You know how the system works. Since Alicia was shot, she hasn’t been mentally sound. She’s a loose cannon loaded with national secrets and lethal skills, which was why I was assigned to keep tabs on her. It was only a matter of time before she broke bad. She proved that today with Alderman’s escape.”
“And you thought I was the perfect tool to get to her?”
“I knew you’d lead us right to her. Which you did.”
And here he’d thought he’d gotten beyond complacency and assumptions about the people in his life. How had he been so naive? He let his anger at himself and his anger at Logan fuse inside him. Adrenaline and power pumping through his veins and right into the hand that held his knife, he rushed Logan, growling as he cut through the air with the blade.
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