Chapter 39

Chloe blinked when Gabe slid a protective arm around Audrey’s waist. If she had less Botox injected into her face, that pinched expression might have been a frown.

“Who’s he?” she asked again in a voice full of suspicion and a hint of gossipy speculation.

Audrey ignored the question, instead answering with a couple of her own. “Where’s Bryson? Is he okay?”

Chloe wasn’t the type of sister-in-law to drop in unannounced. She wasn’t even the type to drop in announced. Five minutes ago, Audrey would have bet her life savings that Chloe didn’t even know where she lived and would never see the inside of her home, yet here the woman stood on the porch, staring warily at Gabe.

Jeez, was today the day for unexpected visits or what?

“I need to talk to you,” Chloe said.

“You couldn’t do it over the phone?” Gabe asked.

Her too-plump lips pressed together. “No. I couldn’t.” Then she looked him over with a critical eye. “You’re one of the men who rescued my husband.”

He inclined his head. “I am.”

“What are you doing here?”

Audrey opened her mouth to say it was none of Chloe’s business, but Gabe spoke over her. “I live here.”

It gave her a little thrill to hear him say it. So what if he technically didn’t have any of his belongings here yet? Just the fact that he said it with that note of finality in his voice made her go all warm and gooey inside. He lived here. With her.

Chloe harrumphed. “Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”

“We’re busy,” Gabe said, and Audrey’s face heated.

Oh, God. The last thing she needed was for Chloe to report to her brother that she was shacked up with a man, doing the sorts of things that keep healthy men and women busy in the middle of the night. Chloe would make the situation into the apocalypse and Gabe into Lucifer, and Bryson would go on one of his overly protective brotherly rampages before she had a chance to ease him into the idea of her having a live-in lover.

She nudged Gabe in the side with a soft, reprimanding, “Gabriel,” but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Unless this is an emergency,” he said, “I suggest you try back in the morning.”

Something flashed in Chloe’s dark eyes, but she dipped her head before Audrey was able to identify the emotion. Anger, maybe. Chloe did tend to have a short fuse, and having someone so succinctly tell her off wasn’t something that often happened to the overindulged woman. It certainly wasn’t fear. A person had to be intelligent to be afraid of the likes of Gabe, and her sister-in-law wasn’t known for her brains.

“Chloe, it is late, and I’m tired. I’m sure you are, too, if you just arrived.” Audrey tried to keep her voice soft, soothing them both. “As long as Bryson is okay, there’s no need for this right now. If you don’t have a place to stay yet, there’s a nice hotel just down the beach. Come back in the morning, and we can talk or whatever over breakfast, okay?”

Chloe hesitated. “Alone.”

“Hell no?—”

Audrey cut off Gabe’s protest with a finger against his lips. “Yes, alone. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Even after the door shut, Audrey kept her finger pressed to his lips. The expression in his gold eyes faded from pissed off to mulish, then flared with heat as he opened his mouth and sucked her finger inside.

She laughed even as sensation sparked from the tip of her finger and zinged through her blood to her belly. “Didn’t you get enough earlier?”

“I’ll never get enough of you, woman.” After one last swirling lick, he released her finger and moved to the window, still in warrior mode, full of that deadly catlike grace. He parted the blinds. Chloe’s headlights splashed over the hard angles of his face as she backed out of the driveway.

“I don’t like her.”

Audrey let out a huff of laughter. “C’mon, hon. She’s a pain-in-the-ass, but she’s harmless.”

“I don’t know about harmless. There’s something about her…” He backed away from the window and moved his shoulders as if trying to shake off a cold chill. “It’s out of the ordinary for her to visit, right?”

“I’ll say. I honestly didn’t think she even knew where I lived.”

“Yeah, about that. I don’t like out of the ordinary.” After picking up the gun he’d set on the foyer table, he gave her a quick kiss. “Go on to bed. I’ll check out the grounds, make sure we’re secure, then be in.”

She caught his face in her hands. “Careful, Gabriel. Your paranoia is showing.”

“Probably.” His faint smile never touched his eyes. “But humor me. Lock yourself in the bedroom until I come back, okay?”

Audrey watched him slip out the front door and fade into the night. She sighed and moved toward the bedroom to follow her SEAL’s orders. She supposed this was something she’d have to get used to, though she planned to ease away his constant fear of attack. That was no way for anyone, even a former SEAL, to live. He needed a refuge, someplace untouched by the outside world, where he could let down his guard. This was going to be Gabe Bristow’s haven. She’d make sure of it.

She heard him come in the back door just as she was straightening the sex-rumpled quilt on the bed. He paused in the kitchen for so long that she finally gave up waiting and opened the bedroom door.

“Gabe?”

Footsteps.

Except, no, those couldn’t belong to Gabe. It sounded like a Clydesdale stomping through the kitchen, and as big as he was, he never walked with heavy boots, always ghosted about even in the comfort of his own home. He’d more than once frightened her today, sneaking up behind her with his barely-there footfalls.

A shadow appeared at the end of the short hallway, backlit by the lamp she always left on in the living room. Definitely not Gabe. Too short. Too scrawny.

Oh, God.

As silently as she could, she closed and locked the bedroom door. She had no way of knowing if the intruder had seen her—the interior hallway was always dark, and the way the door was set into the wall with a slight indentation provided a little protection—but from the sounds of his footsteps, it didn’t matter. He knew the layout of her house and bypassed the laundry room, the guest bath, and the extra bedroom, moving with unerring accuracy toward the main bedroom.

Toward her.

* * *

Something was not right.

Everything looked normal. The nearly full moon floating over the ocean in the inky sky provided a good view of the house and yard, and Gabe saw nothing out of place. No odd shadows that shouldn’t be there, no movement except for the sway of the palms, no sound but the soft lapping of the ocean against the dock.

Still, he couldn’t shake the gut feeling that something was way off, and he knew better than to argue with his gut—it had saved his ass in more near-fatal situations than any one man should survive. So he walked the grounds again, still found nothing, and his instincts still told him it didn’t matter. He strode to the end of the drive and looked both ways on the narrow, empty road.

Maybe he should take Audrey to a hotel for the night. She had next-to-nil for security—something he planned to fix if he was going to live here—and the crappy system she did have had so many holes it would work better as a colander than a security system.

Actually, that sounded like a damn good idea. He’d sleep better tonight knowing they were secure. Tomorrow, he’d make some calls and pull some strings to have a security specialist out here by noon. Maybe Jean-Luc’s brother-in-law would want the job.

He turned to go back to the house and, out of the corner of his eye, caught a glint of moonlight off something down the street. A car, a blue sedan, parked in the foliage alongside the road. Given that Audrey had no immediate neighbors and lived on a twisty, rarely used road that fought a constant losing battle with the encroaching jungle, it was not normal to have a car just sitting in the street. That was probably the cause of his unease. He’d bet his good foot it was Chloe’s car, and he was not a betting man. People didn’t just pop up for random personal visits in the middle of the night unless there was a problem. Especially not wealthy, pampered people like Chloe Van Amee. He could only come up with a couple of reasons why she’d leave the car here in this specific spot, hidden from view, and none of them were good.

Weapon aimed, he melted into the jungle shadows alongside the road and moved toward the car, keeping down and to the right so he’d come up in the driver’s blind spot.

And what do you know, it wasn’t abandoned. Chloe still sat in the driver’s seat. She jumped when he opened the passenger side door and pointed his gun at her forehead.

“Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you? No? Great.”

Her eyes flicked from his gun to his face, then skipped away. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Could say the same of you, Mrs. Van Amee.”

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until her manicured nails dug into the braided leather. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

She pressed those grotesque, collagen-injected lips together, refusing to answer.

“Chloe.” He made her name into the verbal equivalent of a dagger, all edges, and she flinched.

“I’m sorry.” She turned in the seat, brown eyes wide and wild as tears spilled over. “God, I am so sorry. I-I love my husband, and I didn’t think anyone would get hurt. Rorro—” She said his name with a Spanish inflection, rolling the Rs, and Gabe held up a hand to stop her.

Average American women from Kansas couldn’t roll their Rs like that.

“Your real name isn’t Chloe,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Claudia.” Just like that, she dropped the perfect Midwestern accent, and the lilting sounds of Colombian Spanish weavedthrough her words. “My name is Claudia Rivera.”

“Jesus Christ. Angel and Jacinto’s missing sister.” How the fuck had they all missed that connection? His first instinct was to get back to Audrey as fast as his bum foot could carry him. Second was to shoot Chloe Van Amee on principle because he suddenly knew who set up Bryson’s abduction and caused Audrey so much anguish. Chloe may not have been the mastermind, but she was in this shitstorm up to her liposuctioned rear end.

“I tried to get away from them,” Claudia sobbed. “I didn’t want any part of my family, but they dragged me back. Rorro called me a year ago and said he’d tell Bryson who I was and what I’d done in Colombia if I didn’t go along with his plans. I had no choice. Ididn’t want to lose my husband. My house.”

She said nothing about her sons, and inwardly, Gabe ached for the poor boys. He knew exactly what it was like to grow up with a mother who put on all the right appearances but really didn’t care about anyone but herself. At least Grayson and Ashton still had a loving aunt and father.

Maybe.

“What plans?” Gabe demanded.

“At first, he only wanted money,” Claudia said. “But he bled me dry. The allowance Bryson gave me wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t draw from our joint accounts without making him suspicious. When I explained that to Rorro, he said we had to come up with another way for me to pay. Then he saw a stupid action movie, and it gave him the idea to kidnap Bryson for ransom and blame it on the EPC. He had me call Jacinto with the plan because he doesn’t want anyone to know he isn’t as dumb as he pretends to be. He likes it when people underestimate him.”

Gabe thought back to the raid, and hell, that’s exactly what he’d done, even after Luis Mena warned him that Rorro was vicious and not to be underestimated.

They all thought Rorro had tossed his cousin to the wolves out of fear, but it had been a more calculated move than that. He had deemed Jacinto’s usefulness tapped out and disposed of him like a rancher putting down a lame horse.

A chill shot down Gabe’s spine and nailed him in the ass.

“Where is he now?”

Claudia gazed over at him. In the light of the fat white moon overhead, her plasticized face took on the macabre look of a skull with sunken cheeks and a peculiar hollowness in her eyes. It was the same thousand-yard stare he’d seen in soldiers who had looked death in the face and walked away alive. The same empty, lonely stare Gabe saw every time he looked at Quinn.

“Claudia. Where. Is. He?”

“He thinks it’s Audrey’s fault he didn’t get the ransom money because she called the FBI and ruined everything.” She moistened her lips and looked away. Guilt thickened her voice. “He’s going to kill her.”