And then another thought occurred to him, like a sledgehammer upside the head. If he could have kicked himself in the ass, he would have.
She’d been hungry. She’d asked for food and a shower. It was altogether possible she hadn’t eaten today. She’d told him how rattled she’d been last night. Some women stopped eating when they were rattled.
Not soldiers. Soldiers never lost their appetite, because who knew where the next meal was coming from? And who knew whether this meal might be the one to keep you alive in the field those extra hours waiting for help to come?
Nicole had been hungry.
Sam felt a chill rush over his skin at the thought of Nicole going hungry. In his home. It made him sick with shame. No one knew better than him what it was like to go hungry. He’d spent half his childhood scrounging for enough food to keep up with his growth spurts. Keeping Nicole hungry, just because he wanted to fuck her, was shocking to him.
He’d fallen for her from the first moment he’d set eyes on her, blown away by her beauty. Well, that had been lust. But now that he knew her, had seen firsthand what a fine woman she was, had felt her warmth, it seemed impossible to him that he could ever desire another woman.
This was it. Nicole was it.
And how did he treat her? Well, last night he’d nearly fucked her to death and tonight he ignored the fact that she was hungry.
He was going to get one shot at this, so he’d better start shaping up. No more jumping her like a rabid wolverine. Or at least not until all her other needs were taken care of.
He’d have to keep his lust in check. Some. When necessary. When he could.
Sam had never had a woman of his own. He’d fucked a lot, but even when they lasted weeks, they’d been essentially one-night stands for several nights. He’d grown up around hugely dysfunctional people and he’d seen couples nearly kill each other with rage. What could he know about being part of a couple?
But he’d lifted himself out of all that, made himself into a fine soldier and now a good businessman. He’d taught himself how to do that and he could teach himself how to be the partner of a woman like Nicole. He could do it. He could learn.
And step number one was to take care of her needs. She was tired, so he had to let her sleep. She’d been hungry, so he’d fix her a hot meal. And hope it wouldn’t poison her.
He was halfway to the kitchen when his cell phone buzzed from his jacket pocket.
“Yeah?”
What the hell did he have in his kitchen cabinets? Anything warm he could cook for her? What would you feed a traumatized woman? Soup. That was it. Soup was what they fed the sick. Only how the hell did you make soup?
“Sam, it’s Harry.”
“Uh-huh.”
So maybe soup was out. Presumably it took ingredients and time and some skill. Would a grilled-cheese sandwich do?
“Sam, we’ve got a Fed in the office.”
“A Fed?” Soup and sandwiches fled from his mind. There could only be one reason a Fed would be in his office. “They got a read off the vidcam.”
“Roger that. And the news isn’t good.”
“It never is. Shoot.” Holding his cell between his ear and shoulder, Sam shrugged his shirt back on, his shoulder holster and jacket. The jeans were still wet but what the hell. Things were moving fast and so would he.
“The guy’s ex-Special Forces. Ranger, for ten years. Dishonorable discharge five years ago, accused of stealing and selling base weapons, fell off the grid. But the Feds have linked him to one murder for hire and have been on the lookout ever since. He was red flagged, that’s why the FBI got here so fast.”
This was bad news. Special Forces soldiers had an extra gear. About a million dollars of training went into each soldier and they were worth it. To a man, they were smart, relentless and capable of devastating violence delivered with surgical precision. An SF soldier gone bad was tragic news. An SF soldier gone bad and after Nicole was terrifying.
“Coming in,” Sam said and flipped his cell closed. He went to his gun locker and chose a Glock 19, slotted in a full magazine and picked up another two magazines he put in his jacket pocket. He slid the Glock into the shoulder holster. There was more firepower in the office, but it just felt good to be loaded for bear right now.
He took the time to stare for a full minute at Nicole, stretched out on his bed, in a deep sleep. What would waking her up achieve? Nothing. There was nothing she could do right now and learning that a highly trained bad guy was after her would only make her more anxious. The best thing she could do for herself right now was to rest. Her father was safe and by God, if there was one place in all of San Diego where Sam trusted the security, it was his house.
It had top-of-the-line features, triple backups and a small separate generator to keep the alarm system going even if the electricity was cut. He would swear in court that he and Harry and Mike were the only ones who could get in.
He scribbled a note—Honey, I had to go into the office, call me on my cell when you wake up. Be back as soon as I can—and left it on the dresser.
Sam was in a rush to get back to the office, but still he stood for a moment on the threshold of his bedroom, just looking at her, naked, stretched out on his bed. He could see every single detail of her slender, curvy body. Could see the delicate collarbones, the sharp points of her hip bones, the long lines of her legs.
A stunningly beautiful woman. A head turner. The kind of woman who’d have made a fortune modeling.
But more than just a beautiful woman. She was smart and strong and kind and funny and fiercely loyal in a way he appreciated down to his bones. A woman in a million, and she was his.
He was going to keep her safe.
The fuckhead after her might have been a Ranger, but Sam was a SEAL, which trumped that to hell and gone. As long as he was alive, no one would ever hurt her.
And he was a hard man to kill.
Chapter 12
The man who came, Wilson, was fast and good. He’d given his bank account number, and by the time he drove up in a non-descript-looking off-white Transit van with the logo of an electrical-supplies shop on the sides, Outlaw had had the money transferred. Outlaw believed in paying well. You got what you paid for. And anyway, it was the client who was paying. He’d just add that amount to the bill.
It was the wonderful thing about working for the money men. They could fucking well afford anything. All they wanted was for their problem to go away and they were willing to throw money at it to insure that it did.
Outlaw did his briefing inside the van as Wilson drove them to the warehouse. The old man was trussed up in the back. Getting him out of the house had been a snap, he’d weighed as much as a girl and he’d been sedated. The nurse’s body was in the back, too, and would be weighted with heavy chains, abdomen slashed open. It was improbable given the weight of chains attached to her, but the gases that formed in the stomach could possibly carry her to the top. Slashing her open took care of that. Outlaw never took chances.
“We’ll get the geezer set up and then get his daughter here. I’ll have her meet up with you. As soon as I get what I need from her, we’ll just drop them over the side of the wharf. Where is it exactly that we’re going?”
“South side of town,” Wilson said. “The docks around Fleetridge. This warehouse was impounded because the owners were using it as a drug clearinghouse and now it’s slated for demolition. Next month, in fact. There won’t be anyone there. There won’t be anyone in a three-mile radius this time of night.”
“Perfect,” Outlaw said. His instinct had proven correct. Nothing beat local knowledge. And Wilson was proving real efficient. Outlaw liked men who did what they were told without unnecessary talk.
He’d made it a habit to hook up with former soldiers and so far it had worked out fine. He’d refined his search parameters even further, sticking to men who’d tried out for Special Forces and hadn’t made the grade. They were perfect. Depending on where in the long, grueling p
rocess they dropped out, they’d had the best training on the planet without that fuck-you, my-way-or-the-highway attitude all Special Forces soldiers developed. To a man, SF soldiers only followed orders when they made sense to them, which made them useless to Outlaw.
Outlaw didn’t need for his men to understand, just to obey.
There was also the fact that a man who had been an SF soldier had his pick of civilian security jobs, low-hanging fruit for all of them. There didn’t need to be anything else on the resumè. If you’d been a SEAL, a Ranger, Force Recon, that’s all anyone needed to know.
There were plenty of guys who’d nearly made it, but when they mustered out of the military, no one would give them the time of day. If they were lucky they became rent-a-cops, low-level security, cheap bodyguards for minor punks. Not a one who didn’t need money.
They’d trained and trained hard, and yet, since they couldn’t make that final cut, their lives were over. But they were manna from heaven for Outlaw, who didn’t need that razor edge the elite soldiers had. All he needed was good, solid muscle with some brains behind it.
Outlaw had mostly uncomplicated jobs to do for clients who had to remain anonymous. The SF dropouts were efficient, took orders and were glad for the work, since they were shut out of the top-tier security work Special Forces soldiers gave each other once they were out of the military.
They wouldn’t give the dropouts the time of day. Outlaw had once seen a former SEAL cross the street to avoid a man who’d rung the bell four days into Hell Week.
He treated his men with respect, paid them above market rate, and got excellent service.
He’d learned well from the money men.
She was swimming in the Pacific, way out beyond her comfort zone. The strong tide was slowly carrying her out to sea, however hard she fought against it.
It was getting dark, the last slice of the sun drowned in the vast ocean’s blackness and there were no lights on shore. A wind started up, blowing from land, creating wavelets rippling out that would reach all the way to China. Never a strong swimmer, she was tiring fast, swimming as hard as she could to shore, yet never coming closer.
The wind intensified, grew cold, sapping her strength. A wave crashed over her head unexpectedly and she drank water, icy salt water. She surfaced sputtering and frightened and shivering.
She drew in a deep breath and set out once more for shore. For what she hoped was shore, a big black mass rising out of the dark sea, cold and unforgiving. She tried to speed up her strokes, but it took all her strength merely to resist the increasingly strong tide.
Another wave crashed over her head, driving her under, and she crested the surface just as her breath gave out, gasping and treading water, looking around her in a panic.
It was all black, all dark now. Which way was shore, and safety? It was impossible to tell. She struck out again, hoping it was the right direction, her strokes uneven. She fought down the waves of panic, the deadliest enemy at sea, as she fought the strength of the waves that wanted to carry her out, away, toward the vastness of the open sea.
Exhausted, she gulped in air, only to find it was salt water instead. Her limbs were flailing now, she was so cold it was hard to coordinate her movements. She treaded water, turning in a full circle, fighting panic.
Darkness, everywhere. No lights, no sounds from shore to orient her. No ships on the horizon, nothing.
Staying still like this, she rode the waves as they grew taller, trying to time it so she wouldn’t dissipate her strength. Rising, rising, a faint ripple of light as the wave crested in foam, then the drop to the trough, over and over again. Up, cresting, plunging down…another wave crested fast over her. She hadn’t expected it, she had no air in her lungs.
Oh God! It was pitch-black beneath the waves! The swirling water had tumbled her into a somersault and now she didn’t know which was was up and which was down. She tilted her head back, but there was nothing to see, not even reflected starlight on the surface.
She started kicking, arrowing as fast as she could…up? Please God, let her be kicking upward. In a last spurt of strength, she scissored her legs harder and faster, lungs burning, aching to pull in the breath that would fill her lungs with salt water. She had a second left, maybe two…
She was going to die here, all alone, in the cold, dark ocean, everything so silent except for her beating heart. It thumped against her rib cage, hard, as she kept her hands outstretched, hoping to break the surface, but all her hands encountered was cold water.
She was dying, panic ringing in her mind like a bell, ringing, ringing…
Nicole sat up in bed with a gasp, sweating and shivering, completely disoriented in the dark. With a shaking hand, she groped until she found a lamp and turned it on, blinking blankly at the room.
The ringing continued, on and on. Her cell phone!
Nicole dove for her purse, lying on the floor, scrambling for the phone. Maybe it was Sam. He wasn’t here. The house had an unmistakeable empty feeling. And, she now saw, there was a note on the dresser from him.
She glanced down at the little window. Not Sam, her father. Was something wrong? Had he taken a turn for the worse?
“Dad?” she said breathlessly. “Are you okay?”
“Not your father, bitch.” A low, deep, man’s voice. Slightly raspy, somehow familiar…
“Who is—” And suddenly she knew. That low, raspy voice had spoken vicious things in her ear only hours ago. The intruder.
“Look at your screen.”
Nicole turned the phone so she could see the screen and gasped. It showed her father, pale as ice, tied to a chair. He was trembling badly. Not fear, those were muscle spasms unchecked by the medication he’d clearly not had a chance to take. While Nicole watched in horror, a large man’s hand off-screen took a knife and traced a long line down her father’s face, from temple to chin.
At first she thought he’d brought the wrong edge of the blade to her father’s face, as an admonishment. Look what we could do to him if we wanted to.
But then a small red line appeared, growing larger and larger, gaping open, blood starting to drip off her father’s jaw onto his pale gray pyjamas. Looking more closely, Nicole could see that the knife had cut deep into the flesh, possibly to the bone.
“Stop it!” she screamed into the cell phone. “Don’t you dare hurt my father!”
The hand reappeared, this time holding a gun. A big black gun that looked enormous next to her father’s frail figure. Deadly black metal against her father’s pale, wrinkled skin. The gun angled downward until the muzzle pressed into her father’s knee. It was driven so hard into her father’s flesh she could see the material of the pajama pants ruching around the muzzle.
Then the screen went dark.
“Oh, we’ll do more than just hurt him,” the deep, vicious voice came back on. “You saw that gun.”
Nicole listened, heart pounding.
“I said—you saw that gun!” the voice roared.
Nicole tried to get her voice to work but her mouth and throat were too dry. No sound would come out. She coughed, managed to croak, “Yes. Yes, I saw the gun.”
“Good. Remember that gun. Now listen carefully. This is what I want you to do.” The voice was back to cool and calm. Giving instructions as if indicating which way to Balboa Park. “Call a taxi, tell him to take you to Fleetridge, to the Westwood shopping mall parking lot there. Keep this line open so I can hear and see what you’re doing, otherwise your father will pay the consequences. If you don’t come alone, your father’s dead meat. He’s dead meat, anyway, anyone can see that, but I’ll make him suffer before he goes. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I’ll disappear with him and you’ll never see him again, but you’ll know that every second of what’s left of his life I’ll be hurting him. Is that clear?”
The temperature in the room had suddenly dropped. Nicole was shivering with terror and cold. “C-clear,” she whispered.
“If you call anyone, if y
ou signal anyone, if you don’t come alone, your father will pay first, then you. At the parking lot there will be someone to meet you. Is that clear? Deviate one inch from this and your father gets a bullet in the knee, first thing. I don’t have to tell you how excruciatingly painful that would be.”
“No, no!” Panic exploded in her head. “Don’t do that! Oh God, please! Don’t worry, I’ll follow your instructions to the letter.”
“Of course you will.” That horrible voice, now sounding genial and chirpy. “Oh, and pray that you find a taxi right away, because I’m giving you twenty minutes to get to the meeting point, after which I start shooting bits of your father off.”
“N-no.” Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely get the words out. “D-don’t. P-please.”
“Then bring me what I want.”
Oh God. What was it? “I don’t know what you want!”
But she was talking to dead air. He hadn’t hung up, though. He was keeping the connection open.
So terrified her hands wouldn’t work properly, Nicole tried to pick up Sam’s cordless handset, fumbled it badly and watched as it bounced on the floor. It took her trembling hands three tries before she could hold it, and she ripped a page out of the telephone book pawing through it to the Ts. It took her two tries before she could punch in the taxi service’s number. While waiting for the call to go through, she fumbled her shirt on and pulled her jeans up, sliding her feet into loafers, picking up her purse.
The instant she heard the taxi dispatcher tell her that a car would be arriving in four minutes at the front gate, she rushed out to the bank of elevators, punching the button over and over again in her anxiety.
Her skin prickled with panic as she got into the elevator and punched for the ground floor. The damned thing was so slow! When, after a million years, it finally reached the ground floor, she shot out and ran across the lobby and into the landscaped front garden, checking anxiously along the dark road for a car with a taxi sign on top, trembling with anxiety.