Chapter 7

Yeah, Gabe wanted to use her all right, but it had nothing to do with her Spanish fluency. Not unless she cried out in Spanish during an orgasm.

Whoa.

Jesus.

Fuck.

What was that?

He put the brakes on those thoughts as his cock twitched in expectation. It’d been way too long for him if Miss Mouth, here, was this big of a turn-on.

And why the hell did he find her name-calling such an aphrodisiac, anyway?

“No,” he said between his teeth at the same time Quinn said, “That might not be a bad idea.”

“What?”

Quinn shrugged. “Tactically, she’s an advantage.”

And the Machiavellian motherfucker never passed up an advantage. Gabe scrubbed his face hard with his palms. “She’s. Not. Trained.”

“Are you expecting opposition?”

Dammit. Quinn already knew the answer to that was a solid no. It was the only reason he’d risk going by himself to talk to the limo driver. Really, Armando Castillo should answer his fucking phone. If he did, this all would be a moot point. “I’m not taking a civilian?—”

“News flash, Gabe. We’re all civilians now.”

Civilian.

His mouth froze on a comeback as the realization struck with the same force as a sucker punch to the solar plexus. Fuck, that hurt. Way more than it should have, and he had a moment of pure panic as his diaphragm refused to expand and let air into his lungs.

He was a civilian now. Damn.

“So it’s settled.” Audrey turned to face Quinn. “I’ll go with him and act as a translator.”

Settled? Far from it. He couldn’t take her anywhere with him unless it was to bed. Definitely not on an op, even one where he expected no resistance. She’d be a distraction of epic proportions, something that could get both of them killed in the wrong situation. Even now, he couldn’t stay on task and found his gaze wandering to her pert little rear end, so close in front of him he wouldn’t have to reach far to get a handful.

But how could he admit that in front of his men? Between Jean-Luc disobeying orders and Ian’s bad attitude, the natives were already restless, and if he admitted to a weakness—a woman, for shit’s sake—there would be anarchy.

He forced his mind back on task before the pulse in his cock became a full-on boner. Audrey wasn’t trained, true, but she spoke the language and knew the mores of Hispanic culture better than any of his men. She was better equipped to tell whether the limo driver was evading, hiding something, or downright lying to them.

He turned to her. “Could you shoot a firearm and not hit me if the situation came down to that?”

“I was born and raised in the South, honey, but I’m no southern belle. I shoot what I aim at,” she said in a tone so coated with sugar he was surprised her teeth didn’t rot. Then she flashed a smile as bright as that sinful yellow tank top she wore. “But it’s still up in the air whether I’ll aim at you or not.”

Marcus let go an appreciative whistle and Jesse muttered, “Dayam.”

Gabe rubbed his jaw. Last thing he needed was for this Southern spitfire to go all Annie Oakley on his ass, but he pulled his SIG Sauer P226 from the holster at the small of his back and handed it over. When he saw the way she tested its weight and checked the chamber in smooth, efficient movements, some of his trepidation vanished. The woman really did know how to handle a firearm. Thank God.

“All right, you’re with me. Marcus,” he called across the room, “do you have contacts within the FBI that can keep their mouths shut?”

“Nah, boss,” Marcus said, and something that looked a lot like guilt darkened his features. Then he moved his shoulders as if shrugging off a weight. “You know, with the way I left… nobody talks to me now.”

Figures. Gabe didn’t know the nitty-gritty of Marcus DeAngelo’s retirement from the FBI, except that he’d left with a less-than-sterling reputation. “Then find someone who will and get us a sitrep without causing a stir.”

“Sitrep?” Audrey asked.

“Situation report,” Gabe said through his teeth.

“Sure thing, boss,” Marcus said with his usual smile back in place and a cheeky two-finger salute.

Patience is a virtue.

Patience is a virtue.

Patience. Is. A. Goddamn. Virtue.

Gabe repeated it to himself like a mantra. Didn’t work. It may be a virtue, but he’d never been all that virtuous and still wanted to throttle Marcus.

He put a hand on Audrey’s back and guided her toward the door. “The rest of you, gear up and move out, but stay in touch with each other. We’ll be out of radio contact, but I have my phone. We’ll be back in a couple hours, tops.”

With time dwindling steadily away, he couldn’t waste any more than that.

Jesse trailed them outside. “Gabe, can I talk to you for a sec?”

Now what?

He stopped, waved Audrey on ahead. “Make it fast.”

“It’s about Quinn.” Jesse took off his hat and swiped a hand through his long, dark brown hair before replacing the Stetson and adjusting the brim. “He hasn’t had a physical yet. Every time I approach him about it, he makes up an excuse. He hasn’t given me access to his medical records, either.” His dark eyes went to the front door as it opened, and the man in question stepped out into the breezeway. “Granted, I don’t know him all that well, but it seems like odd behavior, so I thought I should mention it.”

Odd? And the grand prize for understatement of the year goes to Jesse Warrick. No, that was beyond odd. That was so completely unlike Quinn that at first, Gabe’s mind couldn’t assimilate what Jesse was telling him with the man he knew. He turned toward his best friend, who was leaning against the front door with his arms crossed over his chest.

“That true?”

Quinn’s jaw cracked from the force of his back teeth grinding together. “I don’t appreciate you going over my head, Warrick. You have a problem with me, you talk to me.”

“I tried,” Jesse shot back. “You brushed me off. Several times.”

“I’ve been busy. In case you haven’t noticed, we have a very limited window to find Bryson Van Amee.”

“What I’ve noticed is you’re defyin’ a direct order from our boss.”

“This coming from the guy kicked out of Delta for punching a ranking officer. Since when are you so hell-bent on rules?”

“All right, gentlemen. Enough.” Gabe stepped between them before the heated argument escalated out of hand and, for one brief moment, wished for his former SEAL teammates. With them, there had never been scuffles like this during an op. Before and after, sure. But during, it just didn’t happen. You followed orders to a T, or someone got killed.

In fact, Quinn used to be by the book, strict as they come. Did a shoulder injury and discharge papers really make that big of a difference in him?

“Q, man, why are you fighting this? It’s nothing. Let Jesse do the damn physical and give him access to your medical records so we can move on to more important things.” He motioned toward the Jeep in the driveway where Audrey sat, watching them through the window. “That woman is counting on us to bring her brother home, and you’re wasting time we don’t have.”

“Exactly,” Quinn said. “Time we don’t have. I’ve been busy and haven’t?—”

Jesse grunted. “I’ve shoveled some mighty big piles of bullshit in my day, but yours is the biggest.”

Quinn stepped forward. So did Jesse.

All right, this was getting ridiculous, and Gabe was sick of listening to these two snipe at each other like ten-year-olds.

“Knock it off, or you’ll both have a meet-and-greet with the ground.” He shoved Jesse back with one hand and jabbed the business end of his cane at Quinn’s stomach. “You. Inside. You’re getting that fucking physical now.”

“Gabe—”

“Goddammit, I mean it. You wanted me to lead this team, so I’m leading it. And right now, you’re being an epic jackass. If you were anyone else, you’d be done. Don’t make me pull you off this op, Q. I’ll hate it, but I’ll do it.”

The two men stared at each other over Gabe’s shoulder for a long, heated moment. Quinn finally relented. He turned and walked, stiff-backed, inside. A second later, Jesse sighed and followed, but Gabe caught his arm.

“Call me if you have any more trouble with him.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

In the car, Audrey gave him a sympathetic look as he leaned his head against the seat and shut his eyes. After witnessing that spectacle, her faith in them as saviors had to be next-to-nil, and yet she laid a comforting hand on his arm.

“This is new to you, isn’t it?” When he cracked an eyelid and shot her a sideways glance, she added, “Not the hostage rescue stuff. Seeing you work, I have no doubt that you know what you’re doing there. But this team is new.”

That was one way to describe a six-hour-old, never-trained-together team. New. He called it a goatfuck. Man, he should’ve passed on this mission. He’d been so eager to get back into the field. Too eager—and his team was suffering for it.

With a sigh, he sat up and started the Jeep. “That obvious?”

She nodded. “Everyone’s testing boundaries. Not exactly jockeying for power since they all seem to get you’re in charge, but they’re trying to figure out what they can get away with and what they can’t. It’s a natural progression for any newly formed group.”

Yeah, but Quinn? He always liked to know where the boundaries lay and never, ever crossed a toe over them. What the hell was the matter with him?

“The same thing happened when Phil joined my dolphins,” Audrey said, drawing his attention back to her. She sat buckled into the passenger seat, staring out the window at the passing Bogotá streets as he wound the Jeep through gathering traffic toward the edge of the city. He wondered if she was looking for her brother in the faces of everyone they passed. Probably.

“You have dolphins?” he asked, partly out of genuine curiosity but mostly to take her mind off Bryson for a little while.

She flashed him a brilliant smile before returning her gaze to the window. “Guess they’re not really mine, but I think of them that way. They hang out around my dock and visit me throughout the day. Rata, Matahina, Hika, and Phil.”

“Phil?”

“He’s the newcomer. Just showed up one day. Rata didn’t like having another male around his pod, but they’re buddies now. Took some time and quite a few fights, though.” She patted his arm. “Your pod has a lot more alpha males in it than Rata’s. You’ll get the kinks worked out.”

But will it be in time to save her brother? He knew that was what she was thinking and gave her props for not saying it aloud.

“Why’d you name him Phil?” he asked after a moment of bumping along in comfortable silence. “Why not something more exotic?”

“He’s not an exotic guy. He’s happy and sweet and laid-back. Phil suited him.” She shrugged, and the strap of that slinky yellow tank slipped off her shoulder, showing a whole lot of golden brown skin and freckles.

No tan lines. Jesus.

The image of her stretched out naked on a dock with dolphins dancing in the ocean around her took up residence in his brain right next door to his libido. He tried to shake it by recalling the directions to the limo driver’s house that he’d committed to memory. A forty-five-minute drive southeast to a small town in the Amazon region where jungle tangled around the base of the mountains.

And he was still picturing her naked. It was going to be a long ride.

* * *

“There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Jesse pulled his stethoscope from around his neck, tossed it inside his medical bag, and snapped the clasps closed. “Want a lolly now?”

“Fuck you.” Quinn grabbed his shirt and stuffed an arm in the sleeve, muttering something that sounded like, “I hate doctors,” with expletives thrown between each word for good measure.

Jesse shook his head. Different dance partner, same ol’ tune. He had almost come to miss it since leaving the military. He’d tended to lots of guys like Travis Quinn back then—burned out and perpetually as mean as a caged bull because of it, but in for the long haul because they had nothing else. The type that knew he wasn’t invincible and just didn’t give a rat’s hairy ass. The type that didn’t exactly have a death wish, but neither did he have anything to live for.

It was a sad, lonely place for a man to be, and could have so very easily been Jesse if it weren’t for his little boy. He’d already been on the edge of it when Connor was born, which was why Cheyenne divorced him and threatened to take away his son two months later when he got kicked out of Delta Force. Shit, he couldn’t even blame her for it. He’d been a piece of work back then. Pissed off, depressed. That threat was the boot in the ass he’d needed to pull himself together, and he’d done it right quick. His boy meant everything to him.

Quinn needed something like that, something to mean everything, but he’d never open himself up enough for it. And he’d probably kick Jesse’s ass to Jackson Hole and back for giving that particular medical opinion seeing’s how he hated doctors and all.

“I’m not a doctor yet,” Jesse said good-naturedly instead. He would be, though, then his son wouldn’t need to worry about whether or not he’d come home alive from his next mission. HORNET was just a means to an end, a way to keep his skills sharp and bring in extra cash to cover the expenses of med school.

“Close enough. Are we—” As Quinn turned to grab his boots from the floor, something happened—Jesse saw it, like a flipped light switch blew a fuse inside his head. His face blanked. His eyes, though open, went vacant as the Wyoming plains in the middle of winter.

“Shit!” Jesse shot to Quinn’s side, hat flying off his head from the speed of the movement, and wrapped an arm around his waist in case he toppled.

And, just like that, he snapped back. “What the…? Get the hell off me.”

“Nah, pal, you should have a seat.” And a freakin’ CAT scan. Unfortunately, the latter wasn’t readily available in Bumfuck, Colombia. The former was, and Jesse maneuvered Quinn into a nearby chair, then reopened his bag. “How long have you been blacking out?”

“I haven’t.”

Jesse snorted, looped a blood pressure cuff around Quinn’s upper arm, and clipped a pulse oximeter to his finger. “I already made a point about your bullshit earlier, so I’ll refrain from beatin’ a dead horse by repeatin’ myself. How long?”

“It’s nothing,” he muttered. “I haven’t eaten. I’ll get some food and be fine in a few minutes.”

“Are you diabetic?”

No answer.

“Goddammit, you might as well tell me. I’ll find out.”

Quinn said nothing, just stared mulishly at the opposite wall, his jaw clenched so hard his right eye ticked. His blood pressure and pulse were a little high, his O2 low. Not good, but expected after an episode like that. Whatever that was.

As soon as Jesse ripped the BP cuff from his arm, Quinn was out of the chair, headed toward the door. “Quinn.”

He stopped, still said nothing, but his shoulders tensed.

“I need you to release your records to me.”

“You’ll get them. Right now, we have work to do.”

Yup, Jesse thought as he packed away his supplies and picked his Stetson off the floor. But the million dollar question was, when? He had no doubt Quinn would take his good ol’ time about releasing them.

Well, he’d just see about that. By hook or crook—probably crook, which was just fine by him—he’d get his hands on those medical records ASAP. Then, depending on if he found what he suspected he’d find, he’d have to take the issue to Gabe.