Hot Pursuit (2 page)

A methodical sweep of the rooms proved
futile.

“He’s not here,” Marco spat. “There’s no one
else.”

“Goddamn.” The skin-crawling sensation Matt
had had from the beginning of this op was now a full-blown assault
on his senses. Kev looked at him, his face bleak behind the
greasepaint, his eyes saying everything Matt was thinking.

Jassar ibn-Rashad was supposed to be here.
He’d been reported here as of this afternoon, in fact. There was a
price on the man’s head and no reason to move from this location…
unless he’d been tipped off they were coming.

Sonofabitch
. Matt suddenly felt like
he was standing in a lightning storm, holding a steel rod in the
air. He wasn’t necessarily going to be struck down, but the
possibility was damn good.

“Do another sweep for intel. West side. Three
minutes, and we’re out,” Matt ordered.

“Copy,” Marco said. He and Jim headed for the
west side of the house while Matt and Kev split up to cover the
rooms at the east end. Matt swept into each room, weapon drawn,
helmet light blazing. There was nothing. No papers, no computers,
no media of any kind. Nothing they could use to determine what
ibn-Rashad was planning next.

He hit the hall again and met up with Kev,
who shook his head.

Jim and Marco arrived next, empty-handed. The
four of them pounded down the stairs. Another quick sweep of the
rooms on the ground floor, and they were back into the night with
the rest of the team, running for the extraction point five miles
away.

They hadn’t gone a mile when bullets blasted
into the air beside them. A hot, stinging sensation bloomed in
Matt’s side. He kept running anyway. Until they crested the dune
they’d been traveling up and came face-to-face with a series of
rocket-propelled grenade launchers pointed right at them.

Rochambeau, Louisiana

Present day

“MM-MM, LOOK AT THAT GIRARD BOY, all grown up
and better looking than a man ought to be,” said one of the ladies
under the row of hairdryers.

Evie Baker’s heart did a somersault.
Matt
Girard. Dear God
. “Careful,” Stella Dupre yelped as warm water
sprayed against the side of the sink and hit her in the face.

“Sorry.” Evie shifted the hose.

She was a chef, not a shampoo girl, but she
didn’t suppose that distinction mattered anymore since the bank now
owned her restaurant. Shampoo girl in her mama’s beauty salon was
just about the only job she could get at the moment, in spite of
the resumes she’d blasted to every culinary school contact she
could think of. The economy was bad and no one was hiring—and she
didn’t have the luxury of waiting for something else to come
along.

She didn’t think her skills would rust
anytime soon, but it hurt not to be cooking right now. She should
be playing with recipes, tweaking the flavors, and experimenting
with new combinations. Instead, she was rinsing hair for a host of
Stella Dupres—and doing it badly, apparently.

Mama glanced over at her, frowning even as
the snip-snip of scissors continued unabated. The ladies in the
salon swung to look out the picture window as Matt strode along,
and the chatter ratcheted up a notch. The odor of perming solution
and floral shampoo surrounded Evie like a wet blanket, squeezing
her lungs. Her breath stuttered in her chest.

Matt Girard
. She hadn’t seen him in
ten years. Not since that night when he’d taken her virginity and
broken her heart all at once. She’d known he was back in town—hell,
the whole town had talked of nothing else since his arrival
yesterday. She’d even known this moment was inevitable, except that
she’d been doing her best to avoid all the places he might be for
as long as possible.

They’d had an easy relationship, once. The
kind where he could tug her ponytail, drop a frog in her shirt, or
tease her endlessly about her buckteeth—which, thank God, she no
longer had. But that had been when they were kids. Then she’d
gotten breasts and started blushing whenever he looked her way, and
things had changed. Or at least they had for her.

Matt, however, had been determined not to see
her as anything other than little Evie Baker, the tomboy he used to
play with when her mama went out to Reynier’s Retreat every week to
fix his sick mother’s hair. He’d apparently persisted in that
belief until the night she’d asked him, after a single shot of
whiskey to give her courage, to be her first.

She’d had so many stupid dreams, and he’d
crushed them all. But not before he gave her what she’d asked him
for.

“Heard he got shot out there in Iraq,” Mrs.
Martin said as Evie’s mama rolled a lock of gray hair around a fat
pink curler.

“Yes indeed, got a Purple Heart,” Mama said.
“The senator was right proud, according to Lucy Greene.”

“That’s not what I heard!” Joely Hinch
crowed. “Miss Mildred told me he’s being kicked out of the Army
because he didn’t obey orders.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Mrs. Martin said. “That boy
bleeds red, white, and blue. Same as his daddy and every last
Girard that ever was born up in that big house.”

Joely crossed her arms, looking slightly
irritated to be contradicted. “You just wait and see,” she said
smugly.

“Shush up, y’all,” Mama said. “I think he’s
coming in.”

Evie’s heart sank to her toes. She wasn’t
ready for this. Not on top of everything else. She was feeling so
bruised and battered after her failure with the restaurant. She did
not need Matt Girard swaggering back into her life and making her
feel all the chaotic emotions she’d once felt for him.

She finished Stella’s shampoo and wrapped her
hair in a towel. “I’m not tipping you, Evangeline.” Stella sniffed.
“You have to be more careful than that.”

“I know. And I don’t blame you at all.”
Except, of course, she desperately needed every penny she could get
if she hoped to escape this town again. It wasn’t that Rochambeau
was bad—it’s that it was bad for
her
. Always had been.

Here, she always felt like the awkward kid
who lived in a tiny cottage with her mama and wore secondhand
clothes because that’s all they could afford. Didn’t matter that
the clothes were no longer secondhand, or that she wasn’t a kid
anymore. Or that she didn’t care if the girls who lived in the nice
big houses with the manicured lawns didn’t like her; she still felt
like that girl who wanted so desperately to fit in.

And the biggest part of fitting in had, at
one time, relied on the man striding toward her mama’s salon like
he didn’t have a care in the world. Evie’s heart did a somersault
as he reached the door.

Magazines snapped open in a flurry as the
ladies tried to appear casually disinterested in the six-foot-two
hunk of muscle about to open the glass door. More than one pair of
eyes peeked over the tops of glossy pages as he stepped up to the
sidewalk from the street.

No way in hell was she sticking around for
this. It wouldn’t take these ladies more than a few moments to
remember the scandalous rumors about her and Matt, and she didn’t
want to be here when they did.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to get some
things out of the back.” Without waiting for a reply, she strode
toward the stockroom. Rachel Mayhew, Mama’s regular shampoo girl,
looked up and smiled as she passed. Rachel was only twenty, so she
probably didn’t know about Evie’s disastrous night with Matt. Or
maybe she did, considering the way this town talked.

What should have been Evie’s own private
shame had all too quickly become common knowledge back then. Part
of that was her own fault, and part was Matt’s—but she still wasn’t
sticking around to endure the sidelong glances and whispered
conversations.

Life had beaten her up enough recently and
she wasn’t in the mood to feel like a wounded teenager today.

A month ago, she’d said goodbye to her dream.
It still hurt. Her lovely little bistro in Florida was now in the
bank’s hands, and all because she’d trusted a man. Or mostly
because she’d trusted a man.

Her restaurant, Evangeline’s, hadn’t exactly
been doing a booming business, but things had been getting better
and growth had been steady. It had, for a time, flourished under
David’s management, which was how she’d grown to trust his
insistence that he knew what he was doing and that she should spend
her time perfecting her recipes instead of worrying over the
mundane details.

David was cocky, charming, and utterly
confident. She’d found that intriguing. One thing had led to
another, and they’d ended up sharing a bed from time to time. She’d
liked David, thought they were on the same page. He was an
accountant who loved to cook, who knew a lot about social media and
advertising, and who increased her profits by a few simple—or so
he’d said—marketing tricks.

All of it lies. He’d increased her profits,
yes. But then he’d robbed her blind. She’d seen the books on a
regular basis and never known anything was out of whack. He hadn’t
meant her to know, of course, but it still bugged her that she
hadn’t seen through David’s schemes.

No, she’d been so thrilled with the way
things were going that she’d spent more time doing what she really
loved—cooking and creating recipes for the Cajun fusion dishes
she’d become known for in their community. A mistake that she still
kicked herself over, even though David had covered his tracks too
well for her to see anything amiss.

She’d trusted him. But how had she not known
he was bad news? How had she let herself be fooled by a handsome
face and charming manners?

She’d learned in the aftermath of the
destruction he’d wrought that the authorities thought he had ties
to organized crime. He’d been skimming money, along with other more
nefarious schemes such as money laundering and extortion. She hated
to think about it. Evangeline’s had been everything she’d ever
wanted when she’d broken out of her hometown and gone to cooking
school a few years ago.

But here she was again, back in Rochambeau
and washing hair in her mama’s salon, just like when she’d been in
high school.
Loser
. All she wanted was to get out again at
the first opportunity. Before that loser feeling wrapped around her
throat and squeezed the rest of her dreams away.

Matt reached for the door, and Evie darted
behind the stockroom curtain. Her heart slammed against her ribs as
the tinkling bell announced his arrival. She turned to lean against
the doorjamb and pushed the rose-print polyester aside with one
finger. She was being silly. He wasn’t here because of her. He was
here because his sister had sent him on some errand or other for
her wedding.

Hell, he probably wouldn’t even blink twice
if he ran smack into her.

Evie frowned. Her eyes slid down his body and
back up again. He was still something to look at. Something easy on
the eyes and hard on the senses.

He’d changed in ten years, but some things
were still the same. That cocky swagger as he’d approached the
shop. He’d always walked like his daddy owned all the oil in the
Gulf of Mexico. Which he damn near did. The Girards had been
Rochambeau’s wealthiest family for as long as anyone could
remember.

Matt’s dark hair was cut very short, and his
shoulders were much broader than when he’d been seventeen. The
fabric of his white cotton T-shirt stretched across a wide chest
packed with muscle. His bare forearms made her throat go dry.

Something quivered deep inside her, the way
it always had from the moment she’d become aware of Matt as more
than a boy she played with. Something hot and dark and secret. Evie
squashed the feeling ruthlessly.

He pushed a hand through his hair, every
muscle of his torso seeming to bunch and flex with the movement.
She would have sworn she heard a collective sigh from the ladies in
the salon. Rachel absently ran water in her sink, cleaning out the
soap bubbles from the last shampoo. When she got too close to the
edge, the water sprayed up into her face.

Evie would have laughed if she too weren’t
caught up in Matt’s every move. She’d adored him ten years ago and
worshipped him until the night she’d given him her virginity.

What a mistake that had been. Not because the
sex had been awful. No, it’d been pretty exciting, all things
considered. It was what had happened afterward that ruined it for
her. The shift in their relationship hadn’t been what she’d
expected. And then he’d been such an ass about it.

“Afternoon, ladies.” Matt tipped his head to
them.

“Afternoon,” they murmured in unison, voices
sugary and lilting, eyes assessing and cataloging him.

“Miz Breaux.” He took her mother’s hand and
kissed it like a courtier.

“Oh, shoot.” She smacked him playfully on the
shoulder. “What do you want? Don’t you know this is a beauty
parlor? Sid’s Barber Shop is on Main Street.”

“Well, ma’am.” He grinned that devil-may-care
grin Evie remembered so well. “I figured Old Sid can’t see so well
anymore and I’m still fond of my ears. I’d much rather have a
lady’s touch, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh my.” Mama giggled.
Giggled
.

Evie rolled her eyes. No wonder she couldn’t
pick a decent man. She came by the defect genetically. Mama had
been divorced three times. She’d gone back to using her maiden name
after the second one in order to avoid confusion. Evie had her
daddy’s last name, her sixteen-year-old sister had a different
name, and Mama had yet another one.

“You don’t even look like you need a
haircut,” Mama was saying.

He scrubbed a hand over the nape of his neck.
“My sister thinks I do. And it’s her wedding.”

Mama giggled again. What was it about that
man that turned even the smartest woman into an airhead? “Well, we
can’t let Christina be disappointed then, can we? But you’ll have
to wait until I finish with Mrs. Martin.”