Killing Time (One-Eyed Jacks) (13 page)

Mother of God.

Heat. Lush softness. Need.

The sensations all registered at once, shooting electricity straight to his groin.

He set her aside as if she was a hot potato.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, not looking at her as she buckled up beside him.

And said nothing.

Holy hell
.

He could
not
be attracted to this woman. A hot enchilada in a seedy cantina, yes. That was allowed. Because he’d been drunk. Because she’d been—hell—she’d
really
been something in that red bustier, skin-tight pants, and fuck-me stilettos.

But he could not be attracted to
this
woman. To Ramon Salinas’s widow.

“It’s not like you to be so late calling in.”

Eyes closed against the ripping pain in her side and arm, Jane forced herself to concentrate and clear the cobwebs the anesthesia had created in her brain.

She couldn’t allow herself to be so vulnerable again. The nurse hadn’t been happy when she’d refused pain medication after awakening from surgery, but she’d needed to regain lucidity for this conversation. She’d already lost several hours.

“I ran into a problem,” she said, struggling for a breath that didn’t make her sound as though she were dying. Weakness was the last thing she wanted to show him. Just like the last thing she wanted to do was disappoint him. “The targets detected me before I could take them out.”

The silence on the other end of the line was as loud as a jet engine. “Explain.”

As concisely and accurately as she could, she told him what had happened when she’d attempted to
eliminate the woman and the man. She was out of breath and weak with pain when she finished.

“Oh, God. You’re injured.” The concern that suddenly darkened his voice almost made her weep.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Jane—”

“It’s okay. I . . . I’ll be okay.” The hot tear of frustration that trickled down her cheek felt like a double dose of defeat. “But I’m not going to be able to fulfill the contract.”

Another silence. “How bad?”

The surgeon had briefed her moments ago, telling her it would be six to eight weeks before she could consider any physical activity other than therapy on her arm. He’d also pleaded with her to accept pain medication to assist with her healing. “Not fatal. Just feels like it.”

“Where are you?”

She told him.

“I’m sending someone for you.”

She couldn’t stop the tears this time. No one had ever cared about her before. They cared about what she could do for them, but never about her.

“Thank you.”

But the line had already gone dead.

She closed her eyes and made herself focus on something other than the pain and this inexplicable flood of gratitude and relief that mixed with a blinding sense of failure.

She had failed him. She had failed herself.

And a man named Brown and a woman whose true name she did not yet know were responsible.

Which meant this was not over.

•   •   •

Halfway across the world the man she knew as Stingray stared morosely at his file on Jane Smith. With a regretful sigh, he closed it, then tossed it aside, rocking back in his desk chair.

He was disappointed in Jane. Very disappointed and, interestingly enough, extremely worried about her.

In the beginning, it was her total lack of conscience that had intrigued him. He’d often wondered what had been done to her as a child that had produced such a twisted, ruthless killer. The term
cold-blooded
was overused and therefore diminished in its significance, but not when it applied to Jane. She had no remorse. Felt no regret—except in failure.

The humiliation in her voice when she’d called and confessed the unthinkable had been heartbreaking. She’d been in agony, but she was a soldier. She had done her duty and made the difficult call.

He had few rules, and high expectations that those rules would be followed to the letter.

Jane had broken the cardinal rule. She’d compromised herself and therefore compromised his enterprises. Had she been any other contract for hire, he would have had her eliminated.

Instead, he’d dispatched a man to Lima to bring her back to him. He’d broken one of his own rules
for her. And he wondered what that said about him. What it said about his feelings for her.

That would sort itself out eventually, he supposed. Right now, he had more pressing matters. He still had to deal with Eva Salinas and Mike Brown.

But first he had to find them.

He picked up the phone, hesitated, then made a call. He had contacts in the CIA. People who owed him. Hackers who could follow up on their leads. If Eva Salinas attempted to access any of her files, he’d soon find out which ones and where she was operating from. Soon after that she’d be dead. Her and Brown.

Their Avianca flight had left Peru at 12:30 a.m. and right on schedule, almost fourteen hours later, it touched down at Dulles at 3:28 p.m. Mike was happy as hell not to have to deal with jet lag, since the time in D.C. was only an hour later than in Lima. He was equally happy to finally be out of that cramped seat where touching Eva Salinas, either accidentally or on purpose, had been unavoidable—even with Ramon’s ghost hovering between them.

“You realize we can’t go to your apartment,” he said. They’d cleared the customs gate and she was stuffing her Emily Bradshaw passport back in her purse as they headed through the terminal at a brisk walk. “Our friend with the MP5K may or may not be alive, and may or may not have reported in to his handler. Either way, whoever ordered the hit either knows by now that it was a bust or is wondering why his man hasn’t surfaced.”

“What do you think the chances are they don’t know we’re back in the States?”

Mike had been doing the math on that one himself. “I think we’re good, for a while. I’d make book that there was no one on that flight interested in either one of us. He’s not going to fly charter—too many records. And I checked—the next commercial flight out of Lima to D.C. lands at least four hours after ours. So, even if the shooter somehow managed to recover enough to follow us and figures out we headed north, we’ve at least got that much time.”

“And if he contacted whoever sent him?”

He touched a hand to the small of her back and steered her around a gaggle of teens who were walking five abreast through the terminal. “Whoever sent him is going to be looking for travel records for Mike Brown and Eva Salinas—not John Mason and Emily Bradshaw. But they’ll find us eventually, so time is also our enemy. We need to get the flash drive and figure this out. Please tell me it’s not at your apartment.”

She shook her head and kept on walking. “Lockbox.”

“Your regular bank?” Whoever was after her had no doubt already tossed her apartment, so they’d be looking for her to have stashed the file someplace safe. A bank made sense.

“No. I opened up an account and a lockbox at Independence Federal on Ninth. Under Emily Bradshaw.”

“And the key to the box?”

“Was in the lockbox with my passports. Now it’s in my purse.”

The longer he was around her, the more she proved how smart she was.

Man. He’d come a long way from thinking of her as a lying, conniving, wack-job.

“I don’t know about you,” she said as they shouldered through the crowd in the busy airport, “but I could use a change of clothes. And a shower.”

Mike looked down at himself. She was right. He didn’t exactly blend in with city dwellers. In his combat boots, camo pants, sweat-stained T-shirt, and five-day whisker grow-out, he looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of
Mercenaries R-Us
. He needed to lower his profile. And yeah. He needed to clean up, too.

She stopped short beside a women’s restroom, then dug into her purse and came up with a half-full packet of Wet Wipes. “My emergency rations. Never leave home without them.” She peeled off half of the stack of moist towelettes and handed them to him. “Meet you back here in five.”

“Make it three,” he said and headed across the wide walkway to the men’s room.

“Much better,” she said when they met up again and made a beeline for the rental car desk.

After completing the paperwork for a black SUV, which Eva paid for with a credit card that couldn’t be linked back to her real name—the lady had covered her bases—Mike maneuvered the car through the maze of airport parking.

“Next stop—a change of clothes.”

“Fine,” he agreed, knowing it was necessary but anxious to get to the bank.

They’d only traveled a few miles on the freeway before she had him take an exit, then gave him directions to the great American hunting and gathering spot: the mall.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of a Tommy Bahama store, more than a little intimidated.

“What size shirt?” she asked, quickly rummaging through a spinning rack. “Pants, too.”

“Large or maybe extra large for the shirt?” He shot off what he thought was his pants size, trying to remember the American size charts.

It had been a damn long time since he’d bought anything but T-shirts and camo cargo pants, so he was fine deferring to her advice on casual wear for D.C. in July—until she grabbed a shirt and shoved it into his hands. A shirt that felt like silk and looked like a city slicker’s version of a rain forest in shades of moss and gray and white.

“No,” he said and shoved it back at her.

She gave him a look. “Seriously? You want to waste time arguing about clothes?” She thrust the shirt back at him. “Don’t be such a diva. Go try it on. These, too.” She handed him a pair of tan chinos that at least had a few pockets, but still made him think of white sand, hammocks, and fruity rum punch.

Jaw tight, he took both pieces and headed for the
dressing room. She added a pair of brown sandals to the stack of clothes as he went by. And a package of boxer shorts.

“What are you, my mother?”

“What are you, five?”

Because she was right—he was acting like a spoiled adolescent—and because they didn’t have time to argue, he bit the bullet and tried them all on. Unfortunately, everything fit, so he kept the clothes on, then paid for them and a pair of aviator-style shades he snagged off a rack on the counter. The clerk—a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen—gave him a blatantly flirtatious smile when he asked for a shopping bag and stuffed his old clothes inside. Biting back the urge to ask her if her mother knew she acted like that, he slipped on the dark glasses and walked to the front of the store to wait for Eva.

He’d never admit it to her, but he was surprised how comfortable the clothes were—and how much he liked what he saw when she walked toward him looking fine. Glad he was wearing the shades, he took his time checking her out. Her dress was formfitting, V-necked and sleeveless, and gathered like a fan beneath her left breast. The skirt hit her above the knee. Her bronze sandals had fancy straps covered with beading and bling.

Chic, understated, and so damn sexy he almost swallowed his tongue. Superimposed over all that cosmopolitan cool was the memory of her breasts
spilling out of that red bustier and her hips swaying on the dance floor at
El Tocón Sangriento
.

“What color do you call that?” he asked to diffuse the image, the memory of the taste of the pisco, and to keep from thinking about the way her breasts bounced beneath the soft, stretchy fabric.

“Eggplant.”

A vegetable—good, he needed to think about vegetables. Not ripe, luscious fruit, which was what she made him think of.
Beans, legumes, squash
. That’s what he needed to think about, because she’d also pulled her hair out of the utilitarian ponytail and wound it into a loose, thick braid that looked sophisticated and exotic.

The woman was a chameleon. She was also a woman of extremes. He’d known her for less than twenty-four hours, and during that time she’d effortlessly changed from sex kitten to commando to metropolitan sophisticate.

The only constant was the sexy part and, Lord love a duck, did she ever have that nailed.