The Edge of Courage (Red Team) (32 page)

When she saw his reaction, Mandy drew a ragged breath. “I can’t stop.” She shook her head. “He said I had two hours to get back to my house.” She kept moving, but backward.

Rocco looked up at her as the distance between them slowly increased. “Who said?”

“One of the men. I don’t know his name. Asan, Asand, I don’t remember.”

“How many men were there?”

“Two.”

“Hold still.”

“I can’t. He said he’s watching the progress the belt is making. If it stops, he will detonate it. And if anyone tries to disarm it, he will detonate it.”

Rocco pushed to his feet as he glanced around them, shoving his hands into his hair. Highway 130 looked like a war zone. Cops were everywhere. Several black SUVs had parked in haphazard places across the road. The woods were crawling with soldiers and search dogs. He could hear various radio conversations. A helicopter was parked on the upward rise of one of the hills. He couldn’t tell if the bomb disposal team had arrived, but he wasn’t waiting another minute to get Mandy safe.

“Ehsan Asir is what his name is.” He walked toward Mandy. “I can disarm it.”

“No!” She turned around. “No. Don’t come near me.”

Rocco jogged to get in front of her, walking backward as she continued her relentless stride forward. He opened the edges of the man’s shirt that she wore.

She shoved him away. “Please, Rocco. Please, go. You don’t have to die, too.”

“No one’s going to die.”

A sob caught on one of Mandy’s exhalations. A tear splashed on his hand. He looked up at her.

“I love you,” she whispered, lifting her hands to cup his face. “I want you to live. I want you to find the joy that’s been denied you so far.”

Rocco clamped his mouth shut as he tried to stem the tidal wave of hatred that filled him for Ehsan Asir—the man Kadisha had been expected to marry before Rocco came into her life—the man he now knew had killed Kadisha and turned Rocco’s life into a living hell. He’d had Rocco in his sights ever since Halim had favored Rocco. The bastard needed to die a bad death.

“Look at me, Mandy.” She did, then dropped her gaze again to the belt of explosives. “Don’t look down. Look at me. Only me.” She did as he ordered. Tears were pooling in her eyes, drowning her gaze. He clamped his jaw shut, calming the rage that simmered so close to the surface.

He pulled the detonation wires from the blocks of C-4 and twisted them away from anything they might touch, then he pulled the cell phone free and pocketed it. Finally, he unbuckled the belt and set it on the wayside.

Mandy wavered on her feet. Her face had gone pale. Rocco pulled her into a tight hold as he radioed Kit. “I got her. She’s safe. They’d strapped a bomb to her. It’s Ehsan Asir. I’m going to kill the motherfucker and it will be self-defense. The belt is here on the wayside. Have someone come get it.”

He wrapped both arms around Mandy. His woman. She
loved
him. She loved
him
. She’d told him this morning, but he’d still been in a daze then. Her declaration sunk in now. He could feel her trembling in his arms. He tore the shirt Ehsan had made her wear off her, leaving her in just her tank top. He didn’t want another man’s clothing on her—especially not that bastard’s. She pressed her face against his chest. He knew he probably stunk—he’d been running in full on panic mode for hours—but he didn’t care and she didn’t seem to mind.

“I can’t believe how easy that was for you to disarm. I could have done it.” She pulled back and glared at him. “I’m an idiot. I don’t know anything! Leaving it on as I did, I could have gotten us killed.” She looked up at him. “I thought I was dying, Rocco.”

He felt her anger grow, swallowing her love, filling her with hate. He’d done this to her. Brought darkness to her world. He had to get her out of there, had to get her back home where things could appear normal again before she lost herself to the realities of his life.

A black SUV pulled up. He opened the door and shoved her inside, then climbed in after her. Shock had made her movements sluggish. He leaned over her and fastened her seat belt, then slapped the driver’s seat. “Let’s get out of here.”

The driver turned and faced him. “As you wish,” he said in a heavily accented Middle Eastern voice. Mandy gasped.

“Yes, do take us out of here,” another man said from the third row of seats. Ehsan Asir. “But do go slowly. There is no need to call attention to ourselves.”

“What do you want, Asir?”

The terrorist smiled. “I want what you took from me. Kadisha was the light of my life. We’d planned for years to be married. Did you know that? Did she never mention me?”

“That why you killed her? Blew her whole fucking village to hell. You call that love?”

Ehsan’s face tightened, his eyes darkened as he sifted through memories. “Ghalib
Halim set me aside when he saw that you had your sights on her. He wanted you. The Gray Ghost. He used Kadisha as bait to draw you in. It worked. Just like he’d said it would. He knew who you were, the whole time. You thought you were so brilliant, fooling all of us.”

“What he knew was that you were playing him, spying on him, and selling information. Of course he wasn’t going to let you marry his daughter.”

He thrust his chin at Rocco. “No it was I who fooled you. I discovered who your contacts were from my friendly askars. They told me about Mr. Bolanger and Mr. Bladen. I knew if we got to them, we’d get to you here in America. We found men here to assist us, used their greed to buy them. Our rage was righteous and our cause was just. Praise Allah.”

Rocco looked around them. They were slowly weaving among the vehicles parked all over the road. As soon as they cleared the police barricade, they’d escalate in speed. He had to act fast if he wanted to get Mandy out of the SUV.

Asir lifted his hand, his thumb depressing a trigger. He smiled calmly as if the SUV weren’t rigged with enough C-4 to blow a huge crater in the state highway. Up ahead, there were only a few hundred feet between the last of the team’s vehicles and the long line of waiting civilian traffic stopped by the roadblock. This was the only opportunity Rocco was going to get, and he knew it.

He released Mandy’s buckle, then lunged toward Asir, grabbing his hand to control the trigger as he punched the man’s face, over and over with lethal blows. Dragging his limp body forward, he kicked the driver in the head. Once. Twice. The SUV began to drift off toward the ditch on the right side of the road.

“Get out. Roll with the fall, run back away from this SUV. Go! Now! Tell the others there’s a bomb in here.”

Mandy shoved the door open and dropped out of sight. The driver’s forehead landed on the horn, but the noise barely registered against the blood pounding in Rocco’s head. He saw Mandy get up and run screaming toward the team. She was waving her arms. Her hair was streaming behind her. It was déjà vu, all over again, thanks to the bastard whose limp hand Rocco still held.

The SUV dipped into the wayside and stopped. Asir wasn’t wearing a suicide belt—the wires led under the seat. Rocco cursed. It was impossible to determine quickly how much C-4 was packed throughout the vehicle. He pulled his comm unit from his ear. There was no way these two bastards were going to survive this day. He noticed a backpack on the floor next to Asir and tore into it with his free hand, searching for something, anything that would let him rig up a way to detonate the bomb from a safe distance. He found what he was looking for—a roll of the black electrical tape that was used to build the bomb that had been strapped to Mandy.

Mandy ran toward Kit, her throat raw from shouting the bomb warning. The response from the emergency crews was immediate. Men were calling out orders, moving vehicles farther away from the SUV, getting the civilian cars to turn around and leave the way they came, clearing the area.

She looked to see if Rocco had left the SUV after her, but she was alone. Perhaps Asir’s bomb was more complex than the one he’d strapped to her, and it was taking Rocco longer to disarm it. A minute passed. Then another. Her stomach was in her throat. Owen and his team congregated around her and Kit.

As she watched, the whole SUV blew, lifting the vehicle high into the air with the force of the explosion. She screamed and lurched forward, but someone caught her around the waist, dragging her against an immovable wall of muscle, pulling her back to the line of men and vehicles in case there was a secondary explosion. She fought against his hold, but could not break free.

“Mandy, it’s me. Kit. I’ve got you.”

She dragged in a breath, slowly letting reality sift into her mind. She stopped clawing at his arm and looked up at him. Kit. She was safe. But Rocco wasn’t. “Rocco was in that SUV. He’s gone, Kit. He’s gone.”

She looked at the SUV sitting like a big fireball on the side of the road. And then men blocked her view. Not just any men—Owen’s team. Val, Angel, Kelan, and Owen stood like a shield in front of her, protecting her from the sight of the burning SUV.

She buried her face in Kit’s chest, giving in to sobs that ripped from her heart. A lifetime passed in the next handful of minutes.

“Hey, Kit,” Kelan called over his shoulder. “Looks like your boy is fireproof.”

“And bomb-proof,” Angel added.

“Some guys are hard to kill,” Owen said, grinning at Mandy.

Kit laughed. “I’ll be goddamned.”

Frowning, she pulled back and looked up at her brother. He nodded to something behind her. Rocco! He was walking around pockets of burning debris. His shirt was ripped. He had more cuts on his face and arm. He was searching the crowd that had gathered, his black eyes intense, focused on only one purpose: finding her.

Mandy gasped and pulled free from Kit. The movement caught Rocco’s attention. The men parted, giving him access to her. He grinned, his teeth white in his soot-stained face. She ran toward him, throwing herself into his arms. He grabbed her in a solid hold. She touched his face, his shoulders, reassuring herself he was real and essentially unharmed.

“Hold me,” she ordered him.

“I am.”

“Tighter.”

“I got you, sweetheart. And I’m not ever letting you go.” He bent and pressed his mouth to hers as his hand cupped the back of her head. His jaw pressed against hers, forcing her mouth to open. She gave herself to him without any hesitation, surrendering to the sweep of his tongue.

“Mandy,” he breathed against her lips. “I need you. Now. I want to be in you.”

She nodded, her forehead brushing his. Rocco looked around for another vehicle and was in luck to find the guys were standing next to one. He pulled Mandy along behind him as he made a beeline for that SUV. “This vehicle clear?” he asked Kit.

“It is. Why?”

“Because I need some privacy to talk to Mandy, make sure she’s not injured. I don’t want anyone bothering us. Make it happen, Kit.”

Rocco opened the back passenger door without waiting for Kit’s response. He checked the whole vehicle before helping Mandy inside. He locked the doors, then drew her toward the long back bench, pulling her shirt off as they went.

“Rocco! Someone will see!”

“No one will see. The windows are tinted and we’re too far back for anyone to see from the front.” He sat on the backseat and drew her onto his lap. He ran his hands over her ribs, her chest, her arms, then pulled her down for a kiss. He was breathing heavily, sucking the scent of her into his lungs, filling his body with her essence. She was here. And he was here. They were together.

His dick was as hard as a marble pillar, aching to be inside her. He reached up and opened the front clasp to her bra, letting it slip from her shoulders. He cupped her breasts, checking for bruises or other wounds. He knew what Asir was capable of. In Afghanistan, Rocco had seen what happened to several of the women who’d had the bad fortune to cross the bastard’s path.

“Are you hurt? Did they touch you?” he asked her.

She gave him a look that caused his heart to stop beating, then lurch forward. “I’m not hurt. But they did touch me—not in that way, but they were free with their hands. I couldn’t understand much of what they said, though I knew from the tone they used it didn’t bode well.”

Rocco pulled off his shirt and drew her close, feeling her skin against his, using his body to push away the bad memory of Asir touching her. He would replace it, here and now, with another, healthier one. One of love. He reached down to remove her boots. He wanted her naked, bare to his touch, his eyes. He wanted to see all of her, love all of her. She was barefoot. They hadn’t even let her get her shoes when they’d taken her. She winced when he touched her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, trying to keep the anger he felt for Asir out of his voice, away from her.

She shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s over.”

“Yes. Take your pants off. I want you naked. Now. Hurry.”

She leaned up on her knees, bringing her belly close to his face and unfastened her jeans. He yearned to look down, watch her undress, but her breasts were so close, so warm, he let his mouth latch on to one instead. She gasped and arched into him, clasping his head. He sucked her nipple, feeling it tighten and bud against his tongue. It took every ounce of willpower he owned to take hold of her waist and lift her off his lap so that she could remove her jeans.

He kicked off his boots, pulled off his socks, and shucked his pants. His cock nearly lifted off his belly as he watched her mount his lap. His balls were so swollen—any and every movement hurt. He guided himself into her sweet sheath, then shut his eyes. He was home. She was safe. He drew a deep breath, the first full breath he’d been able to take since he’d discovered she’d been abducted.

She started to move over him, but he held her hips still. This was not a moment he wanted to rush. He never wanted to be apart from her body. He ran his hands up her thighs, over her hips to her soft narrow belly, then dragged his eyes up to hers.

“Mandy, I love you.” She didn’t answer him, other than to brush the hair from his face, and smooth her thumb over the corner of his eye. “Did you mean it when you said you loved me? Or was it just the fear talking?” he asked.