Renegade Alpha (ALPHA 5) (5 page)

The situation in Colombia was the kidnapping of the wife of one of the British officials working at the consulate in Bogota. Grayson Security had been called in to deal with the delivery of the ransom demanded for her safe return.

Lijah would get a report from Seth later, but he could already guess that the wife probably hadn’t been returned, despite Quinn having delivered the ransom demand. Kidnappers in Colombia weren’t too worried about seeing through their part of an agreement. Which meant that Quinn needed help to go in and extract the wife, if she was still alive.

If.

“Go,” he told Seth briskly. “Take the jet. If you aren’t back in a couple of days, Callie and I will take a commercial flight to the States.”

Callie looked at him in alarm. “I’ve agreed to stay in London but I’m not going to America with you!”

Lijah ignored her protest. “Do you have your passport with you?”
 

As it happened she did, had pushed it into her bag before leaving the house this morning. Just in case she needed it, she had told herself at the time. But… “I’m not going to America with you,” she repeated stubbornly.

“Go now, Seth,” Lijah instructed.

“I hope you find Peter soon, Callie,” Seth told her before hurrying from the office, his cell phone already back against his ear as he issued a string of instructions into it.

Lijah waited until the other man left before answering Callie’s outburst. “With your father gone, the safest place for you for the foreseeable future is right beside me. And I have a feeling I’m going to America,” he added challengingly.

He was right. What was more, Callie knew he was right. It was just that for the past week, she had put off thinking too deeply about anything except finding her father.

The father who had sacrificed his career for her and put his own life on hold to help her recover from her ordeal, and who may now have put his own life on the line for her. She owed it to him to put her trust in the men he had trained.

If Lijah Smith said she needed to go to the States with him, then that was what she had to do.

She nodded abrupt acceptance. “So what happens next?”

Lijah took his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, pressed speed dial before raising the phone to his ear. “Everyone in. Now!” He ended the call. “What happens
next,
Callie, is I do what I do best.” He gave her a hard and determined grin.

Callie quickly learned that what Lijah did best was phenomenal.

Within minutes, it seemed all the offices of Grayson Security were occupied with people on telephones and computers, all talking at once, gathering information, checking and double-checking.

And all of them reported directly to a Lijah who was brisk and decisive—and nothing like that laid-back, uninterested cowboy Callie had first spoken to just hours before.

Somewhere amid all that efficiency, he also managed to remember to instruct someone to order a late lunch to be brought in for everyone, and for someone else to go and buy clothes for Callie.

He also spoke to the owner of the company responsible for security that night at the Hammond Gallery. The conversation had started out politely enough, and ended abruptly after Lijah called the other man an incompetent asshole.

Callie sat on the sidelines and watched and listened in awe.

She also learned a healthy respect for a man she already found far too personally disturbing for comfort.

She hadn’t so much as looked at a man since Michael died, and yet she couldn’t
stop
watching and listening to Lijah. Admiring him. For the way he cut through any and all red tape, including those airlines that had been so difficult with Callie this past week. The quickness of his mind as he processed and spat out information before anyone else. The easy way he led his team, and in such a way none of them seemed aware he was even doing it.

Most of all, she couldn’t stop watching the way that he moved.

For such a big man, he was incredibly light on his feet, catlike, even graceful, muscles rippling in his arms and back, jeans fitting snugly over a taut butt.

Partway through the afternoon, he had thrown off the Stetson too, revealing very dark overlong hair brushed back from his face and inclined to curl a little about his ears.

Several busy hours later, Callie realized she had seriously underestimated Lijah Smith, been fooled by his initial appearance and laid-back attitude.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” She stood hesitantly in the doorway to his office, after feeling totally superfluous all afternoon.

He looked up from where her father’s papers were spread all over his desk, so focused his expression was blank for several seconds as he stared at her, as if he was having trouble placing who she was.

Then his brow cleared, and he gave her a rueful smile. “We now know your father flew to Washington via Amsterdam and Atlanta, that he spent one night at a hotel near the airport. We’ve even spoken to the receptionist who remembers booking him in. Did you know your father is a handsome devil that women don’t forget?” he added dryly.

“I did actually, yes,” Callie answered distractedly, stepping farther into the office. It had always puzzled her that her father had never married again, but his reply to that question had always been he had loved her mother too much to ever think of taking another wife. “My father flew to Washington?” she repeated slowly.

“Via Amsterdam and Atlanta.” Lijah nodded. “No doubt in an effort to cover his tracks. Any idea why he chose Washington?”

“I believe several of the guests at the gallery that night were from the Washington area…”

“Twenty of them,” Lijah confirmed. “Twelve of them are men.”

Callie gave a pained wince. “We can hardly knock on the door of each and every one of them and ask if they stole the Felix Griffith’s jewelry collection and killed Michael. Or if they now know where my father is.”

“Obviously not,” Lijah confirmed grimly. “But hopefully if—when we locate Peter, he’ll know who we’re looking for. At the moment, we’re still having a little trouble locating which hotel Peter went to after that first one. Any ideas?”

“He didn’t go to another hotel,” Callie revealed with certainty. “His sister, my Aunt Jane, is married to an American lawyer and owns a house in Georgetown,” she explained at Lijah’s questioning look. “She won’t be there now, though. She and her husband always go to Barbados for the winter.”

“Shit, I wish I’d known that an hour ago. Daisy!” Lijah called to the outer office, a harassed blonde appearing in the doorway seconds later. “Forget phoning round the individual hotels. Get the address and telephone number of Peter’s sister from Callie here. No, forget that too. Thanks, Dayz,” he dismissed the blonde as he turned to Callie. “Do you have a cell phone?”

“In my bag.”

Lijah stood. “Then I think you should be the one to make the call to your aunt’s house. If Peter sees and recognizes your number, maybe he’ll pick up.”

Callie began looking through her bag for her cell. “And if he doesn’t?”

His eyes narrowed. “When you and I get to Washington later tonight, we’ll make your aunt’s house our first port of call.”

Her fingers fumbled slightly on the buttons of her cell phone as she punched in her aunt’s number. It hadn’t even occurred to her before now that her father might be at Aunt Jane’s. Mainly because she hadn’t guessed that her father was in Washington at all.

Her palm felt damp as she tightly gripped and held the cell up to her ear. Maybe in a few seconds, she might actually be speaking to her father. And, if possible, beg him to come home. “It’s ringing.”

It continued to ring.

And ring.

Callie’s heart sank as the call went to voice mail.

She put her hand over the mouthpiece to speak to Lijah. “Do I leave a message?”

“No. Absolutely not,” he instructed grimly. “If Peter isn’t answering, then we have no idea if the location has been compromised.”

“Compromised?” Callie slipped the cell phone back into her bag.

Lijah gave a shrug. “That’s military speak for—”

“I know what it is, Lijah,” she assured him quietly. “I’m a military brat, remember?” She knew compromised meant that her aunt’s house might now be known and infiltrated by the enemy.

The enemy
.

Dear God, was it possible her father really had managed to find
him
?

And if he had—

“Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Callie.” Lijah crossed the room to stand just in front of her. “We have no proof your father even went to your aunt’s house. It may just be locked up for the winter, like you said.”

And her father might be lying inside that empty house with a bullet through his head, just like Michael—

“I said don’t.” Lijah lightly grasped the tops of her arms as he looked down at her intently. “Do you trust me, Callie?”

After what she had witnessed this afternoon? “Oh yes.” With her father’s life. With
her
life.

“Then trust me now when I tell you there is no reason to suppose that any harm has come to your father. Peter may just have gone underground. No phone calls, no contact with anyone he knows. It’s what he’s trained to do, remember?”

She gave a pained wince. “Even me?”

“Especially you. There is no way that Peter would want this bastard to know anything more about you than he possibly already does, and that includes your telephone number.”

She looked up at Lijah, searching those deep blue eyes, noting the skin taut over high cheekbones and the stubble having grown even darker on the strength of his jaw during the course of the afternoon. “Do you have family who worry about you too, Lijah?”

It was as if a shutter had come down over those indigo eyes as he released her and stepped back. “We’ll be leaving in three hours.” He turned away and began gathering up her father’s papers. “I suggest we go back to my place so that I can pick up a few things, maybe eat dinner too, before driving to the airport.”

Callie had no doubt that some of those things Lijah wanted to pick up would be a gun and whatever other weapons he favored. Quite how he was going to get them through airport security, she had no idea, but she now had every faith Lijah knew exactly what he was doing.

“Why were you so tired this morning when I arrived here?” She had realized, as she watched him working today, that the lines etched beside his eyes and bracketing his mouth were caused by fatigue. Not the sort of fatigue from spending a night on the town or in bed with a woman, but a bone-weary fatigue that he ignored so he could concentrate on finding her father.

“Because I only arrived back in England at six o’clock this morning.”

She had thought it might be something like that. “From where?”

“Long story.”

Callie frowned, having realized this was his stock answer when he didn’t intend saying any more on a particular subject. That perhaps he couldn’t say any more than that. “Did it have a happy ending?”

“Yeah.” Some of the tension left his shoulders. “It had a happy ending.”

She gave a pained grimace. “I’m sorry I was so impatient with you when I arrived. I—didn’t realize… I had no idea what you do here.”

“Pretty impressive, hm?”

He
was pretty impressive.

Callie had also noted that the subject of his family was a closed book.

Because Lijah didn’t want to talk about his family, or because he didn’t have any?

Any more than he would tell her why, as an Englishman, he chose to wear a Stetson and cowboy boots?

The more time Callie spent with Lijah Smith, the less she felt she knew about him.

Chapter 4

She felt that even more when she stepped into his home a short time later.

“Not what you were expecting?” Lijah taunted as he watched Callie walk slowly about his house.

Well, house was probably overstating it. Lijah had bought this old abandoned warehouse and turned it into an open-plan living space, except for the bedroom and a bathroom up a dozen stairs onto the floor above. On the ground floor, apart from another bathroom, it was all open; sitting area, dining area, kitchen, games-and-training area. The floors were polished oak, the furniture comfortable rather than fashionable, the bare brick walls covered with an assortment of paintings and photographs.

From the outside, it still looked like an abandoned warehouse. Deliberately so; sometimes Lijah had to lock up for weeks at a time if he was away on a mission. He had a Grayson state-of-the-art security system installed, of course, but the less inclination anyone felt to break in, the better he liked it.

“Judo?” Callie looked at the throw mat in the games area.

“I practice several martial arts.” He shrugged.

“Disarm or attack?”

He gave a hard smile. “I’ve been known to do a little of both.”

“I’ll bet,” Callie acknowledged dryly, doing her best not to think about Lijah wearing only a pair of cotton trousers resting low down on his hips, the bareness of his chest dewed with sweat, dark hair tousled. “Finn Devlin’s?” She deliberately changed the subject as she paused beside six black-and-white photographs.