Taken by Surprise (14 page)

* * * *

Cambodian forest

Yes.

The short, simple answer Michael wanted to hear, the only answer he wanted to hear, didn't pass her slightly parted lips.

Yes, there is room for you in my new life.

Hell, he would've settled for that offer of a friendly drink and freaking research! At least he would know he stood a miniscule chance at picking up where they'd left off, moving forward. Instead he heard a twig snap followed by the sound of a bullet being cocked into the chamber of a gun.

Fuck!

Rhonda obviously hadn't heard it. Her lips parted further, maybe to say those words he longed to hear. Michael acted fast, whipping her around in his arms. He fit his front to her back even as he muted her startled gasp by covering her mouth with his hand. He curled his free hand around the handle of his SIG, fingering off the safety as he yanked her with him to the relative protection of a boulder beneath an outcropping of vines. Something moved at his back, snaking along his waist. He realized it was Rhonda's arm, reaching around them both for the second gun still in the waistband of his BDUs.

Michael buried his face against her ear. "Leave it."

God, putting that gun back in her hand was the last thing he needed. Forget that even that smallest bit of movement could rustle the vines providing cover right now and draw attention to their presence. She faced enough trauma already, would have to live with the knowledge that she had shot a man even if Michael had delivered the fatal plug. He would take the blame for all of it, and damn if he would allow anything else to happen to her.

He felt her hand hesitate and then ease to her side. Grateful she listened, that she didn't attempt to jerk away, he slowly lowered the hand covering her mouth, rested it lightly on the base of her throat. The artery in the side of her neck pulsed wildly beneath his fingers. He sensed her attempting to steady her breathing, obviously realizing how loud, how telling a breath could be in the silence of the forest.

A slit in the outcropping afforded him a glimpse of an AK-47 secured in the hands of a badly dressed behemoth with features resembling a grizzly. Michael didn't see the others, but he heard them. He quickly translated the Khmer words, dread creating an icy pool in his gut.

Michael held on to Rhonda for a long time after the less than stealthy footfalls of the men vanished into the forest. He pulled up a mental image of the map he'd studied with the rest of the OLT team back on the chopper before going into Phay's compound. He saw the marked course, traced it to the
X
representing the extraction point, the
W
pinning the crate of weapons the SEALs had been sent in to retrieve. The E & E plan of hooking up with SEAL Team Six, should it become necessary, was solid, requiring only the knowledge of where to be at the given time. Only Michael now knew that the coordinates were a setup.

"Let's get moving." He untangled himself from around Rhonda, immediately feeling the loss of the contact like a shock to his soul. He pushed it away, needing the clarity of his thoughts to override the powerful pull she executed over him. The SEALs operation had been compromised. Hell, the OLT team's op obviously had been, too. How and by whom were the questions that remained unanswered.

"Was that Phay's men?" Rhonda eased out of their hiding spot with him, keeping both her voice and her head low.

Michael glanced at her, noted the watchful scrutiny in her eyes as they shifted slowly from left to right, scanning as he did the area around them. He didn't recognize the man with the AK-47, hadn't gotten a look at either of the other men he heard. It meant very little. Phay had an entire platoon of men at his disposal and, yes, considered most to be exactly that: disposable.

"That would be my guess, unless there's another drug lord sending heavily armed men to this part of the forest to guard a crate of weapons." Not that the idea didn't hold a world of possibility. Veng Kim Phay was likely not the only kingpin conducting some sort of terrorist activity in these parts. Given recent events and knowledge of the area, however, Michael figured his guess stood the chance of being 99 percent correct.

"Did you say
guarding
a crate of weapons?" Rhonda caught his bicep and double-stepped it until she walked beside him. "Didn't they go the same way we're headed?"

"Not exactly." The tangos went further east, in the direction of the weapons. The extraction point was a good fifteen clicks to the northeast. In an effort to ensure the mission went off as covertly as possible, SEAL Team Six's orders were to parachute in at a point near the landing zone to secure its location for later extraction. A three-man recovery team would then double-time it to the location of the crate, retrieve the weapons, and join with the rest of the team at the LZ for extraction. "But we have to move."

Michael cursed the loss of his interteam radio. He needed to warn Ziegler and his men. With his avenues of communication down, his only hope lay in getting himself and Rhonda to the LZ before the SEALs landed to carry out their mission.

Rhonda obviously picked up on the urgency in his tone because she widened her steps, quickened her pace. "That's the classified mission, isn't it? The SEALs are going in to get that crate."

Michael thrust an arm out, reflexively catching her when she stumbled. "I should carry you." He knew she must be in serious pain. He had forced her to walk for hours, barely taking a break, and now he needed to push her to move faster.

"No, you shouldn't," she argued. He gritted his teeth when she pried herself from his steadying embrace. "I can walk fine. I'll keep up."

"Then get behind me again," he told her, ignoring the flash of anger he had come to expect when he issued that particular order.

"And if Phay's men double back?" she asked hotly.

"Then we're both screwed," Michael muttered, realizing they were lucky to have made it this far. "It's a setup. The whole op has been a setup."

And it wasn't over yet.

* * * *

Silver Springs, Mississippi

Jackson pulled the towel from the rack, used it to dry his hair, and then secured it around his waist as he stepped from the shower. Still dripping from everywhere else, he moved to the steam-fogged mirror and swiped a hand across the glass to clear a patch. He gritted his teeth at the reflection staring back at him.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the dumbest agent of all?" He laughed incredulously, leaning closer for a better look. "She expects me to go out in public like this. The woman's got to be off her flipping rocker."

He spotted a timed light fading in and out in his peripheral vision and glanced down. His cell phone lay on the edge of the sink, the light illuminating the words "Missed Call" on the ID screen. It must have rung while he'd been submersed under the showerhead impatiently waiting for the water streaming down to change from color-me-Smurf to clear.

He straightened, picking up the phone. It rang in his hand. The screen ID'ed the caller as a Silver Springs number he didn't recognize. He thumbed off the keyguard and slid his thumb over the green phone icon on the touch screen as he brought the phone to his ear. "Graham."

"I've got good news and bad news." Adrien Bingham didn't bother with niceties. "Which do you want first?"

Jackson reached for another towel and used it to dry the remaining fog from the bathroom mirror. When the act rewarded him with a better look at his head, he immediately wished he hadn't. "The bad stuff seems to be adding dramatic color to my life right about now. Let me have it."

"Still no trace of Alec McIntyre." Bingham sighed and waited a beat. "It's like the guy vanished into thin air. A body hasn't surfaced, but neither has any sign he might still be alive. The doo-doo hit pretty hard over there. Bullets flying, agents down, soldiers down, but they managed to infiltrate a good portion of Phay's compound before they had to pull out. If McIntyre was there, he's well hidden."

"It's not hard for a man like Phay to make a man disappear without a trace." Jackson rubbed his temples with the thumb and middle finger of one hand.

"Sad but true, my friend."

"Should I take the fact that you know this as a sign that the good news is you talked to Stone?"

"You should. I did. I hung up with him and immediately called you. He said he tried you first, but you didn't pick up."

"I was in the shower." The pause in conversation lasted almost long enough to make Jackson uncomfortable. Adrien Bingham made no secret about his sexual preference. Jackson wasn't homophobic by any stretch, but he didn't want to think the agent might be pulling up a mental picture of Jackson the way he looked right now. With water beading on every muscle and nothing except a towel around his waist to prevent him from being totally naked, he reminded himself of a gay boy's stiff dream.

"How does it look?"

Jackson didn't need to see the other man's face to know the question came with a great big smirk. "Like a Smurf took a dump on my head."

Bingham barked a laugh, then made an obvious attempt to disguise his amusement. "I'm sure you look gorgeous, sweetie."

Jackson let the comment and the endearment roll off him, deciding to take them as a self-confidence booster rather than a come-on. He had guessed, even before meeting the DEA agent, that Bingham's heart belonged somewhere else. Conjuring up mental pictures or not, he didn't see Bingham as any sort of threat.

"You could've warned me about her eccentric tastes," Jackson grumbled, thinking about the other items awaiting him strewn on the hotel bed. On second thought, he would rather not think about them just now.

"And ruin all the fun? Besides, I didn't expect you to need your FBI decoder ring to figure it out. Didn't one look at her do the job?"

"The whole goth sexual goddess dominatrix getup really isn't all that eccentric." Not when he was used to handling a woman so damned much like Christa that the two could be sisters. Mallory had pranced around him over the years in getups far sexier and revealing than the one Christa Hutchens wore at the meeting. He wondered his pulse didn't race at permanent NASCAR speed.

"You think?" Astonishment replaced the laughter in Bingham's tone. "And here I took you for the conservative, straitlaced type who would scowl at such a thing. My sincerest apologies."

"Accepted." Jackson hiked a thigh on the countertop surrounding the sink, causing the towel around his waist to loosen precariously. "Did Stone give you anything more on Cosmos or the women?"

"No." Bingham sighed again. "I wish like hell he did. I'm headed to see Lucas right now, Rhonda Ramsey's nine-year-old son. What I wouldn't give to be able to tell the kid something positive about his mother."

"You can. By all accounts your boss got her out, right? So tell the kid she's in good hands. Cosmos will keep her safe. He won't let anything else bad happen to her."

"You're right about that," Bingham agreed, sounding marginally cheered. "Michael would walk to the ends of the earth to protect that woman."

Interesting, Jackson hadn't known there was a love interest between the DEA team leader and one of the hostages. It explained a lot, of course. Like why a high-level agent such as Michael Cosmos insisted on putting his career on the line to be part of an op on foreign soil. As procedures went, the various agents comprising the OLT task force had all pulled some serious strings to get Operation Liquid Tab rolling. Had they followed SOP, they would likely still be sitting in their respective offices, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the go-ahead call.

"I'm not expecting anything more until the SEALs return from their mission," Bingham continued. "As it stands, Stone and the rest of your agents and ours are snuggled inside the safe house in wait mode for the same thing."

"Then we keep our focus on American soil and see if this plan of yours goes through tonight."

"Oh, it will," Bingham said with a confidence Jackson wished he felt. "It has to. Hutchens said to tell you to park a block from the club at a quarter to eleven. She'll meet you there."

"Why didn't she call to tell me that herself?"

She had left him quite literally holding the bag after their impromptu late-night shopping spree with a pat on the ass, of all things, and a graceful wave of the same hand. Who knew BDSM clothing shops stayed open until the wee hours of morning? Christa answered few questions and revealed even less of exactly what to expect out of tonight. He'd returned to his hotel room with his purchases shortly after midnight, pumped on too much adrenaline to sleep. Apparently he wasn't the only one pulling an all-nighter.

"I feel like I'm going in blind, Bingham. It's not a feeling I cherish."

"I don't expect you would." The agent gave another of those badly stifled chuckles. "I wouldn't let Hutchens know that, though. She just might make sure you really do go in there blind."

Been there, done that one
. Jackson thought of Angelina, of the blindfold she'd secured over his eyes, the first step that ultimately led to his threesome with her and his brother.

"What's she doing all day? We should meet somewhere, work out the details before tomorrow night. Make that tonight," he amended, seeing as yesterday had rolled into today about four hours ago.

"The details were left to her," Bingham told him. "Call her if you want, but the message I got from her was to tell you to get some rest. You're going to need it."

Jackson didn't miss the continued amusement in the agent's tone as he rang off. Sleep, yeah, like that would happen. He started to put down his phone when it rang again. This time his ID screen illuminated a name rather than a number. M Stone. Mallory.

Great
.
Just great
. He tipped his head back, pushed a hard breath through pursed lips, and answered.

"You better not be calling to tell me you're hopping on a chopper to Silver Springs at sunrise," he said in lieu of a greeting.

"Promise not to turn me over your knee if I do, and I'll grab the next one out," Mallory countered sweetly. She made a
hmm
sound and said, "On second thought, promise me you will, and I'll hail a cab right now. Forget waiting for sunrise."

"Funny," Jackson grumbled. There wasn't anything funny about the way her voice, half playful and half guarantee, drifted through the cellular waves to fall over him like a lust blanket.
Forget reach out and touch someone
.
Reach out and
fuck
someone is more like it
.

Jackson got to his feet. He didn't spare his reflection another glance as he walked out of the hotel room bath and into the bedroom of his apartment. Not really. Physically, he crossed over the nondescript beige carpet to the ordinary double bed in the center of the equally dull hotel room. In his mind, however, his toes sank into the plush carpeting on his way to his anything but ordinary king-sized bed. In his mind, he snatched a sinfully dressed Mallory by the waist and flung her over his lap as he sat on the bedside, his palm flattening on her delectable ass, preparing to strike.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What had gotten into him?

"Did Cameron reach you?" She sounded relaxed. He pictured her on a bed—his bed, her bed, hell, it didn't matter—lying flat on her back, autumn hair splayed over the pillow beneath her head, one delicate hand curled around the phone at her ear. His cock danced beneath the towel at the idea of feeling that hand curled around his shaft, stroking and pumping until the pressure exploded from his cock head.

He gritted his teeth over the growl rumbling in his chest and pulled a pair of briefs from the dresser drawer. His nature of being unable to function out of a suitcase led to his unpacking first thing upon entering the hotel room. Suits hung in proper fashion in the narrow closet behind the door, socks and underwear folded neatly in the dresser drawers. Tonight's awful costume lay on the bed, eliciting a scowl as he shouldered his cell. He dropped the towel around his waist, stepped into his briefs.

"In a manner of speaking. I missed his call, but got the relayed message through Adrien Bingham."

"He's the DEA agent my brother's gotten so chummy with lately, isn't he?"

Chummy? Jackson's personal jury was still out on exactly what he believed to be happening between his best friend and Adrien Bingham. "He's good, dedicated, quick." Rather than answer Mallory's question directly, he gave her his opinion of the agent.

"Isn't he, um, gay?"

"You wouldn't know it by looking at the guy. Confident, calculating, solid handshake, honest stare. When he's not calling me sweetie, he's all business."

Mallory barked a laugh. "He calls you sweetie?"

Jackson's lips twitched. "He slipped a couple of times."

"Maybe he's got a crush, sweetie."

In Jackson's Mallory-consumed vision, he saw the teasing grin unfold on her wicked lips. He watched her roll onto her stomach, upper body propped up by her elbows, knees bent and feet swinging in the air.

"God, I hope not." He wasn't worried. If his suspicions hit the mark, Adrien Bingham did have a crush, but not on him.

"So what were you doing that you missed Cameron's call?"

"Taking a shower."

The
mmm
sound she made traveled through the cellular airwaves like a heat-seeking missile, finding its target in his aching sac.

She didn't take the interest any further—
thank you, Jesus
—moving on instead with another question. "Where are you staying while you're there?"

"I got a room at a locally owned hotel across from the beach." He even got a view of the beach, he mused with a glance toward the window. A part in the curtains showed him the neon-lit predawn Billings skyline

"You aren't staying with your brother and his wife, then." The statement came laced with a heavy thread of relief, too much for her not to know the truth. He never told her the woman he had the fling with in Silver Springs had been Angelina. Apparently she figured it out on her own.

"The club we're infiltrating is in Billings. For this to work, I've got to keep my connection to my brother and his wife's family secret. I'm even altering my appearance so I'm not recognized or mistaken for Jason."

"Oh?" The single word sang with intrigue. "Sounds like the tie
is
coming off and the suit is being sacrificed to the patron saint of club clothes."

Jackson raked his gaze over the club clothes in question seeming to glare back at him in impatience from where he'd sprawled them on the bed. He couldn't bring himself to pick them up again, much less put them on.

"You're having way too much fun with this," he grumbled, frowning harder when Mallory burst into another stanza of musical laughter. "Allow me to add to your party by giving you the full picture. Let's not forget the hair dye and colored contacts."

"What color?" The intrigue now came with a thick dollop of eagerness.

Jackson couldn't hold back the smile. An excited Mallory was damned near better than sex. Although, Mallory excited
because
of sex…well, now, that wiped the smile from his face as his testosterone shot through the roof. "Blue."

"Seriously?"

"Would I joke about having blue hair?"

She giggled girlishly. "Not you."

"Then why ask?"

"Eyes, too?"

"Eyes, too." The mirror over the dresser beckoned his attention. He had ignored it until now, knowing his reflection would surprise him as much out here as it had in the bathroom mirror. He scarcely recognized the man who looked back at him.

He needed a haircut, had been in desperate need of one before turning it the color of a Smurf. His usual close-to-buzz-cut brown strands fell in small waves of blue, teasing both his forehead and nape. He hadn't yet put in the contacts, but they matched the hair, blue to disguise their normal gray. He'd argued with Agent Hutchens over the need for the contacts. The blue hair coupled with the clothing he still couldn't bring himself to try on would provide enough change in his appearance. She vehemently disagreed, reminding him once again of Mallory when she insisted that his stormy gray eyes were far too sexy and controlled to not draw attention.