Chapter 14

It had been a long, long time since Gabe woke up with the warm sweetness of a woman curled beside him. In fact, had he ever? Most of his past lovers, those that he’d stayed with longer than a weekend fling, had always elected not to spend the night, either because of their own busy schedules or his. But this…

This felt good. This felt right. He could learn to love this.

Still half asleep, marveling at the sensation of Audrey’s small breasts flattened against his arm, he slid his free hand over her curves. She wasn’t voluptuous, not like the women Quinn liked and therefore usually found for the both of them. Actually, now that he thought of it, he liked the full-figured ladies okay, but slim women with just a handful of breasts were what really cranked his engine. Almost every woman he’d ever had over the last twelve years was one Quinn hooked him up with. Well past time for him to start thinking with his own dick—and his dick wanted willowy Audrey Van Amee so badly it ached.

But it was wrong.

She was vulnerable, scared, and under his protection. His duty was to take her out of this hell hole, not jeopardize her safety by succumbing to his wants. As much as he ached to claim her, he couldn’t allow himself to get carried away.

The moonlight seeping through the cracks in their shelter bathed her in ethereal light as she nestled deeper into his side, her breathing steady and rhythmic. She was beautiful, but the beauty didn’t just lie on her surface; it ran deep within her. The strength and courage she’d shown since they’d been thrown together impressed him more than he’d like to admit.

She sighed softly, and he instinctively tightened his hold around her slender body. She tugged at his heart in a way no woman had ever done before. Emotions he didn’t understand swirled through him, making him uncomfortable. It was safer, easier even, to compartmentalize his feelings around lust.

Lust was easy.

Lust he could control.

These other tender, protective feelings flooding him now? They were like grappling in the dark with an unknown entity. He was a SEAL. Sentimentality wasn’t something that he embraced. Yet, there it was, wrapping around him, and he felt a sudden pang of vulnerability.

He’d never been trained to fight this kind of enemy.

He clenched his jaw against the surge of desire, his hand freezing on the curve of her hip. Frustration gnawed at him, twisting his insides into knots. This wasn’t the time for his body to betray him. Not when every second spent here was a tick towards potential disaster.

A flicker of movement outside the makeshift shelter caught his eye, jolting him back to reality.

It was time to put his plan into motion.

Gently, he extricated himself from her and took stock of his condition. All things considered, he felt pretty good. Had a bit of a crick in his side from sleeping on the feed bags, and he needed a shower before he gagged himself. But, otherwise, he felt ready, primed to tackle whatever came their way next. He liked that feeling, thrived on it. He was a man of action, of purpose. And now he had one—protect Audrey at all costs so she could be reunited with her brother.

Jesus, he hoped Quinn and the team hadn’t let his disappearance distract them and were still looking for Bryson.

Amazed that Audrey let him anywhere near her when he smelled like a three-week-old gym bag, he climbed off the feedbags and tested his foot. Still hurt, but not like it had last night, and the swelling had gone down. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

He set a hand on Audrey’s shoulder and gave her a little shake.

Audrey bolted upright, her hair loose and swinging around her shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

He pressed a finger to his lips. “We gotta move, Audrey. Now.”

He saw the confusion in her eyes turn into understanding and his heart twinged with guilt; he’d stolen what could be her last peaceful sleep for a while.

“Are you okay?” She watched him closely as he strode toward the door. “How’s your foot?”

“Not too bad.” He tried the knob, surprised to find it unlocked.

No doubt there was a guard stationed?—

A body tumbled inside as the door opened.

“Aw, fuck.” He gazed down at a young face staring with sightless, glazed eyes at the pre-dawn sky. The guard’s neck gaped open in a morbid grin, sliced from ear to ear.

“Gabe?” Audrey’s voice shook. “What?—”

“Shh.” He waved her back and dropped into a defensive crouch, scanning the campsite.

Another body lay crumpled by the still smoldering fire pit, and a third at the edge of the poppy field. No sign of Cocodrilo, but he thought he saw movement near one of the buildings at his nine.

Had his team found him already?

Gabe cupped his hands around his mouth and whistled, mimicking a bird call, then listened for five long seconds.

No answer.

Not Quinn.

Shit.

Staying low, he edged far enough out into the open to snag the dead guard’s AK-47 and an extra clip of ammo, then ducked back inside the hut. As far as shelters went, it was pretty pathetic, and they had to get out in case a firefight erupted. The thin wood walls wouldn’t stop even a low-caliber round from a pistol. Something more heavy-duty from an assault rifle would tear the hut—and anyone inside—to shreds.

They’d have to make a run for it. Only problem with that was he was down to one boot. And wouldn’t you know, the dead guard had tiny feet. He bent over and began unlacing his other boot.

“Gabe?” Audrey climbed to her feet, staring at him with fear widened eyes. “Oh my God, is that blood?”

“Not mine.” Absently, he wiped his bloody hands on his pants and then kicked off his boot. He’d move faster barefoot. He checked the AK over and ejected the magazine, disappointed to see it half empty. “Goddammit.”

What the hell had the kid been shooting at? Certainly hadn’t been his attacker, or else Gabe would have heard. Fuck, the idiot deserved to die if he didn’t know any better than to walk around on guard duty with a half loaded weapon. Gabe pocketed that clip, hoping he wouldn’t need it, and loaded the fresh one, jacked the charging handle.

“Where’s my knife?” he whispered.

“Uh…” Audrey scrambled to their makeshift bed, running her hands over the bags that still held imprints of their bodies.

She pulled the folded knife from a crack between the wall and the feedbags and handed it to him. “Here. What’s happening?”

“Someone’s killing off our guards.”

She gasped and looked at the closed door. “Your men?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Oh God.” Her knees wobbled, and she sank to the feed bags, shaky hands covering her face. “When will this nightmare end?”

“Hey.” Gabe slung the AK-47 over his shoulder and gathered her in his arms, securing her against his chest with his chin on the top of her head. “I promised nothing’s going to happen to you, and I keep my promises. Stay steady and do what I tell you, and we’ll be fine. Okay? Audrey?” he said when she didn’t answer and lifted her chin with the crook of his finger. “Can you stay steady for me?”

Her eyes shimmered with tears, but she nodded. So strong. A lesser woman would be an unstable mess right now. Hell, most Average Joe civilians would be, too. That she kept it together with no training to rely on was amazing to him.

“I won’t fall apart now.” With a watery smile, she added, “Can’t make any guarantees for later, though.”

“Now’s all I need.” He pressed a quick kiss to her forehead before releasing her. “When I open the door, be as quiet as you can and run straight to the poppy field. Don’t wait for me. Run until you reach the other side, then hide. I’ll whistle twice when it’s safe.” He whistled softly in one short burst followed by a longer one. “If you don’t hear that, stay put.”

Biting down hard on her lower lip, she nodded again.

Gabe turned toward the door, rifle aimed, heart thundering behind his ribs. It should have been steady—this was a cakewalk compared to other situations he’d been in as a SEAL—but Audrey changed the stakes. All that mattered was that she got out alive.

A quick glance at her showed him she was ready. Or as ready as she was going to be.

He sucked in a breath, held it until his heart slowed, let it go in a slow exhale, and pushed open the door. “Go.”

* * *

Jacinto Rivera’s current flop was three blocks down from the warehouse Ian and Jesse planned to make a crater, which really wasn’t a big surprise. The fact that it was less than a half step up from a shithole, however, was. Knowing what Quinn knew about Angel Rivera’s love of luxury, he’d assumed Jacinto rode on his brother’s coattails, living the good life for nothing. This was not the good life.

After clearing the apartment’s second floor—not that anyone cared who they were or what they were doing; in this kind of neighborhood, people kept out of their neighbor’s business—Quinn had stood lookout while Marcus made short work of the flimsy lock on Jacinto Rivera’s door. The nearly empty apartment smelled like spoiled milk, food gone over, and rotting flesh.

“Ugh.” Marcus raised his brows at the stench and lifted the edge of his shirt to cover his nose as they slipped inside. “Something’s dead.”

Well, wasn’t DeAngelo a regular Sherlock Holmes. Quinn scanned the tiny apartment. “Let’s hope it’s not Jacinto Rivera.”

If so, they were back to square one in their search for Bryson Van Amee, and time, that persistent fucker, kept ticking away. Everything that could go wrong so far already had. Harvard was having trouble digging up enough intel on the EPC, which was slowing down their search. The warehouse job was eating up time and manpower, but no way in hell was Quinn leaving all those explosives in the hands of the enemy. Oh, and let’s not forget Gabe was MIA.

Best case, Bryson would resurface unscathed after the ransom, his insurance company sixty-some million dollars poorer. Or, more likely, his captors would kill him and dump his body somewhere it’d never be found and the insurance company would still lose a couple million to his estate. Either way, it’d count as a loss for HumInt Consulting Inc.’s newly minted Hostage Rescue and Negotiation Team, and that was just not acceptable.

“It’s not Rivera,” Marcus called and Quinn turned toward him. He stood in the small kitchenette off the main room, gazing into the open refrigerator. “Not unless he’s small and furry. Stray cat, and it’s been here a while. Looks like it starved to death.”

“In the fridge?”

“Irony at its most cruel.” With his shirt still tucked up over his nose, he lifted his head to study the rest of the apartment. His dark eyes crinkled in disgust. “Nobody lives here. How could they?”

Quinn made a noncommittal sound, not about to admit he’d grown up in an apartment in Baltimore not much better than this, with an alcoholic father that beat him senseless on a daily basis and a mother too stoned to care. It was something he’d never admitted to anyone. Not even Gabe.

His name had been Benjamin Paul Jewett, Jr., or Paulie, back then, and life had been Hell on Earth. The day Big Ben went on a drunken rampage and shot him and his mother was the best of Quinn’s ten-year-old life, and how sad was that? Lying on his narrow bed, pumping blood from a hole in his chest, his stolen Gameboy still clenched in his hands, he’d thought, I’m finally free.

The police had busted down the door, carted Big Ben away, zipped his mother into a body bag, and shipped Paulie to a hospital, where he met Dr. Samuel Quinn and his ICU nurse wife, Bianca. They’d saved his life with so much more than excellent medical care. Then he’d lost them, too.

“Yo, Q. You here with me?” Marcus’s hand passed in front of his face and he blinked back to the present, silently cursing himself. He didn’t stroll down memory lane often, and when he did, he never went that far back. He shook his head. He had to stop zoning out. Jesse was already suspicious about his medical condition and he didn’t need to add more fuel to that fire by blanking on Marcus.

He also had to get out of this fucking apartment—it made his skin crawl with the memories of Big Ben. He cleared his throat. “Find anything?”

Marcus gave him a narrow-eyed once-over but then shrugged. “Nah. Place is cleared out. If Jacinto ever lived here, it wasn’t recently.”

Quinn nodded and started toward the door. “Let’s go over and see how Ian and Jesse are doing at the warehouse. Maybe we’ll get lucky and—” His phone vibrated in his pocket and he held up a finger. “Hang on.” He checked the screen.

Harvard.

Even as his stomach dropped into his pelvic cradle with sickening speed, he tried to keep his voice level. “What did you find?”

The kid’s voice was almost all static. “Nothing good.”

And it wasn’t. Gabe’s Jeep abandoned on the road, windshield shot up, with no sign of him or Audrey.

Quinn rubbed a hand down his face, appalled that tears blurred his vision. There were so few people left in the world he considered friends, and even less he counted as family. Gabe was family. If that fucker went and got killed… Christ, he might just lose his grip on the thin shred of sanity he still had.

“…dead bodies,” Harvard said, and Quinn snapped back, realizing he’d lost the thread of conversation.

Concentrate, asshole, he told himself. He’d never had a problem keeping on task before, but… well, a lot had changed since the car accident. “What bodies?”

Harvard made an exasperated sound. “Four of them on the road. Looks like a shootout?—”

“That Quinn?” Jean-Luc asked in the background. “Let me talk to him.” Then, “Quinn, those bodies are trouble. I can’t begin to explain what happened between them and Gabe, but some of their friends showed up as I was leaving the scene and came after me. I lost ’em. Wasn’t easy.”

And the hits kept coming. “Did you get any intel out of them?”

“Not from the guys chasing me. They had guns and they were pissed. I wasn’t about to stop and have a hi-how-are-ya chat with ’em. But,” he added before Quinn could protest, “I got the plate numbers of both vehicles and photos of the dead men. Already sent to Harvard’s email, and he says he’ll start on the IDs as soon as we get back.”

“All right. You’re sure there was no sign of Gabe or Audrey near the Jeep?”

“Positive.” He mentioned how Gabe’s cane and sunglasses were still in the vehicle, and that they found his gun in the foliage beside the road. “Harvard thinks he ditched it.”

“I agree. If guerrillas ambushed them, he’d have wanted to pose less of a threat.” Luckily, Gabe was a threat with or without a firearm. “What about his phone?”

“Couldn’t find it.”

So he ditched the gun, kept the phone…which had GPS. Thank you, Gabe, you smart son of a bitch.

Relief surged through Quinn, making his hands shake. He hoped like hell Marcus didn’t notice.

“Get back to base ASAP,” he told Jean-Luc, then disconnected the call and speed-dialed Jesse. “Change of plans. Hold off on the warehouse. We’re going after Gabe.”

* * *

“Go,” Gabe whispered when the door opened.

Audrey hesitated only a second.

It was a second too long.

The black silhouette of a man slunk around the corner of the hut, spotted them, and raised his gun without even a shouted warning. He never got a shot off; Gabe dispatched him with a burst of three quick, clean headshots. The man in black’s eyes widened, and, gun dropping from his limp hand, he crumpled where he stood. The AK-47’s retort echoed off the mountainside and set off other gunshots around the camp in a daisy chain reaction of panic. The guerrillas poured from their huts, confused, sleepy, and half-dressed, right into the oncoming bullets of the attackers. Those who didn’t drop dead went for their own weapons, and soon, the clearing sounded like a fireworks show.

Bang, bang, bangbangbang. Boom!

Audrey shrank back. This was it. They were both dead. She’d never see her nephews again, never know if her brother made it home safe or if her paintings sold at the art show. She’d never find out if sex with Gabe was as good as she imagined it might be. Never know if their chemistry was purely an adrenaline-fueled consequence of the circumstances or something more.

God, she didn’t want to die.

To her complete horror, Gabe grabbed her arm in a hard grip and flung her out the door. “Go!”

Go? Go where?

Bullets flew, people fell to the ground moaning in pain or ominously silent, and she couldn’t get her bearings. A young guerrilla charged at her, caught her in the left side, and knocked her off balance. She hit the dirt hard, her breath leaving her lungs in a rush. The guerrilla raised his gun, a wild look in his eyes. He pulled the trigger but instead of the expected explosion, there was only a sharp click. Empty. He cursed loudly and lunged towards her with a knife, but he never landed the hit.

Without hesitation, Gabe stepped up behind the kid and stabbed into his neck with the Swiss army knife. Blood spurted, splattering across her face and chest. She wanted to scream. Opened her mouth, and nothing came out.

“Audrey!” Gabe’s voice was all drill sergeant again. He easily spun and deflected a blow aimed at his kidneys from a knife-wielding man-in-black. “Move! Go, go, go!”

She scuttled backward on her butt, watching Gabe in full hand-to-hand combat. He moved like an assassin. Quick. Silent.

Mesmerizing.

And deadly.

Couldn’t forget deadly.

More guerrillas advanced, and the man-in-black broke away from the fight with Gabe to defend himself from them. Gabe blocked a blow from an axe with his forearm, twisted the weapon from the attacker’s hand, and embedded it in his skull. The guerrilla fell to the dirt, twitching grotesquely before going eerily still. Then the man-in-black was back, lunging at Gabe with a viciousness that was almost inhuman. But Gabe was a force of nature. His knife was a blur as he twisted and turned, dodged and weaved in a finely choreographed dance of death.

“Audrey, goddammit, go!” In the millisecond he took his eyes off his attacker to glance worriedly her way, the knife slashed deep across his bicep. He staggered back, stumbling as his bad foot went out from under him.

“No!” Audrey surged forward—but caught herself. What was she going to do to help, paint an unflattering portrait of his attacker? Right. He knew what he was doing. She didn’t, so she had to gather her wits and follow his orders. She was doing nothing but distracting him, dividing his attention and putting him in further danger.

He’d told her to run through the poppy field, hide in the jungle, and wait. Scrambling to her feet in the slick dew-covered grass, she sent one last look over her shoulder. Gabe had straightened himself and sprung back into the battle with a dark, determined expression on his face.

She hated to leave him.

Sending up a prayer for his protection, she ran toward the poppy field.