Maybe Jana was right and he did have a problem with overkill.
Rather than moving in too fast, Connor went for smart. “Not yet.”
“You want more evidence?”
They needed something other than a few inventory slips. Marcel would pass the blame to a young staffer or overzealous employee overseas, just like he did before. “I want him to lead us straight into whatever mess he’s made. Catch him in the act.”
“I’m thinking we won’t have to wait long.”
Connor hoped that was true because he had much better things to do with his nights. “Be ready.”
Chapter Thirteen
Hidden next to a ridge behind Marcel’s property, they waited. Luc shook his head as the newest kidnaping plan blew up around him. Not that he minded since he thought the whole thing suffered from too much ego and too little thought. Still, getting outmaneuvered by Connor ticked him off.
Rich jumped off the hood of the truck and grabbed the binoculars out of Luc’s hands. “Who is that?”
Rich looked, even leaned in. Bruce didn’t say a word.
Thanks to the poor lighting and bad angle, Luc couldn’t make out the face of the newcomer down there on the porch. He saw the cocky walk and the comfortable conversation with Connor. Since the guy didn’t get shot, Luc had to assume the Corcoran folks considered him safe.
That was not good news. Down so many men, Luc didn’t need more targets. “Another player.”
Keys jangled as Bruce shoved them back in his pocket. “We need to hang back. Come at this from a different angle. Maybe wait until daylight so we can see who’s moving around down there.”
Rich’s hand dropped and he slammed the expensive equipment against the truck’s hood. “That wasn’t the plan. I want the rest of my money and to get out of here, and that means finishing this.”
Since he never sanctioned this idea, Luc wasn’t married to completing it now. He refrained from pointing out he never thought this was a good idea. “We need a new plan.”
Grabbing the woman got harder the more men Connor had on his side. And now everyone appeared to be awake and walking around. That stole their advantage. Made getting in and out and catching Connor literally with his pants down impossible.
“Do you recognize the newest guy?” Bruce asked Luc.
“Not from here, but his presence changes things.”
Bruce nodded but Rich looked back and forth between the other men, his face reddening as he watched the byplay. “Why?”
Luc didn’t think Rich could get more clueless. Turned out he was wrong. “We could be dealing with more of Connor’s men or outside law enforcement. There are too many variables we don’t know.”
“New plan.” Bruce headed for the driver’s door. “We get closer then head off on foot. We’ll sneak into Marcel’s house and do a little recon.”
Rich frowned. “I thought there was someone on guard in there and we had to pull back or whatever else you two have been saying. What happened to all the warnings from two seconds ago?”
“Connor is with his wife. The big one is walking the property and the other one went into the bunkhouse.” Rich ran through the list and mentally double-checked it to make sure he hadn’t missed anything obvious. “We have a lot of awake people but one who might not be.”
The confusion hadn’t cleared from Rich’s face. “And the new guy?”
Luc reached around Rich and picked up his binoculars. Adjusting the lenses, he scanned the area and stopped when he spied a lone figure walking in the darkness and ducking into a car. “Looks like he’s leaving for now.”
“Okay then, let’s grab the woman.”
“No.” Luc grew tired of giving that answer.
Rich clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “So what’s in the house you two think is so important?”
Luc didn’t need Bruce’s help. That one was easy. “Answers.”
* * *
J
ana
woke
up
when Connor crawled back into bed. Technically, she’d been asleep since he closed the door behind him and went outside.
It had always been that way. He moved or shifted and she came awake with a start. Something about not having him at her side made her jumpy.
The months apart had been sleepless and frustrating. Holding him, making love with him tonight, made her realize she’d given up way more than the simple joys of marriage. Talking to him across a table, discussing something one of the men had said...touching him.
He snuggled in behind her and wrapped an arm around her stomach. His fingers went searching a second later.
She stopped the wandering by putting a hand over his. “What time is it?”
“Late, or maybe I should say early.” His mouth found her throat and he kissed a line down her neck.
The words vibrated against her sensitive skin. “What were you doing?”
His tongue trailed along her shoulder. “Talking to Drake.”
Leave it to Connor to name drop while his hands made a move on her breasts. Nice try.
She turned over onto her back and stared up at Connor. The small light on the other side of the room gave the bedroom area a soft glow. The lighting only highlighted his dark good looks. Staring up at the man she loved so much, she forgot what she was going to say.
His mouth kicked up in a sexy grin. “Yes?”
“What?” But he got it. That knowing look said he understood what he did to her and was happy to use that as a weapon to get his way.
“Yes, Drake is here,” Connor said, filling in her mental blanks. “He’s going over to cover Cam and check out the charity office.”
“Am I ever going to meet this man? I’ve seen emails and photos and heard your side of telephone conversations.” Drake meant something to Connor and therefore to her.
Her husband wasn’t the bring-friends-home type. He hung out with his team. They bonded and supported each other. Worked hard and got together to watch football and do whatever it was that had them laughing downstairs at the house.
But Drake held a piece of Connor’s past. They’d depended on each other through what she gathered were tough days filled with danger and death. That kind of thing had to imprint on both of them.
She often thought Connor limited his contact with Drake in order to limit the reminders of all they’d seen. She understood. Well, as much as she could as someone who fought death through other means. Still, she wanted to meet the man who meant so much to Connor. Thank him for getting her husband through the tough times.
And maybe Drake could give her a hint about how to handle Connor and his demons.
Right now he trailed his fingers over her collarbone, brushing and teasing. “Drake is not exactly a guy who brings a bottle of wine and sits down at dinner to chat.”
Connor had been the same way when they met. She insisted on dates and dinners and some sense of normalcy. For her, he made the adjustments. “I’m sure your friend eats.”
“Let me put it this way—if you considered me feral when we got married...”
“That’s an overstatement, but yes.” Her hand went to his hair. She loved the feel of the strands through her fingers. She’d missed so much about him and about being with him, but that easy pleasure ranked pretty high on the list.
“I am full-on domesticated compared to Drake. He’s been in the field since he graduated from college.” Connor lowered his head and dropped a kiss on the top of her breast. “He stalks and hides and fixes.”
“And kills.” She waited for Connor to freeze.
He kept kissing and caressing, moving lower until his mouth hovered over her breast. “More than you would think and not always for sound reasons. He followed the orders when I no longer could.”
The strangeness of the conversation—the topics so hard and rough—while Connor whipped her body into a frenzy and made her want to crawl all over him summed up their relationship. From the beginning they’d mixed the danger with the pleasure. She guessed that part of their lives counted as pretty abnormal.
A thought struck her. “Do you not want me to meet him?”
“Honestly, I thought you already did. Way back, I mean. We talk about you all the time and he speaks as if he knows you, which I guess he does in a way. The version of you he hears from me.”
She felt him smile against her skin. “That sounds bad.”
“The exact opposite, actually.”
“That’s good to know.”
“But the fact we don’t hang out with him is not about hiding you or protecting you from his rough side.” Connor pushed up on his elbow again and stared down at her. “It’s really about him never standing still long enough to hold him down for anything.”
“We all seem to be trapped here until we figure this out, and that includes him.” It felt right to finally meet the mysterious man behind the cryptic description.
“Yes, it does.”
“He won’t be able to run from me.”
Connor rolled into her until his erection brushed her thigh. Before she could catch his mouth for a kiss, he started moving. Down he went, stopping only to nuzzle her in all the right places.
He rubbed his head back and forth against her stomach until the rough stubble had her body begging for more. One hot kiss against her skin and her stomach dipped. Then he did it again.
“I can’t imagine any man wanting to get away from you.” He traveled even lower.
Her fingers slipped over his head, guiding him to where she wanted him and then holding him in place. “So sweet.”
“Actually, I thought I’d show you how dirty I can be.”
Chapter Fourteen
They snuck in using the same entrance they’d escaped from before. The outside sensor lights didn’t click on. The video monitors had been purchased but not installed. The alarm system took care of the outside gate and the doors. Move a window and a wailing noise would blast through the still house. But they weren’t using a regular entrance.
Crouched down and quiet, they’d moved across the property, heading in from the ridge. It was the one blind spot in the yard. A slim patch of land between the shed and the house. No lights. No warnings.
The latch under the porch gave without trouble. On their stomachs and shuffling in, they moved one by one until they reached the open area about three feet high where they could push up. Lifting the floorboard into the back office proved harder. With his palms flat against the outline of the trap door, Luc shoved but something heavy weighed it down.
Luc motioned to Bruce and Rich to wait. No knowing how or what lurked on the other side required them to be even more careful. He didn’t trust either of the other men to do the job. No, he would take on this task without them. Bruce could pretend to lead another time. Rich could whine on someone else’s dime.
Luc tried again. When Bruce reached over and added his strength, the door gave with a soft click. Luc waited for shots to fire through, for footsteps or something. When the room above stayed quiet, he decided to move. Leaving the other men squatting in the dirt, Luc threw more of his energy into the task and the door lifted about a foot.
He slipped his hand through the opening and felt something soft. A rug of some sort. Figured on this job something mundane and stupid would almost sidetrack him. He made a space wide enough to shimmy through then lowered the door again. The small thud echoed but he knew it would blend into the noise of the desert.
With his gun in his hand, he took careful steps across the room to the hallway. A light burned at the end where the kitchen and family room area stood. Luc heard shuffling and the clinking of glasses. The person out there was either the one Corcoran man assigned to the house or Marcel.
Luc slid along the hall. He got close to the end and saw the flash of an elbow as the man in there moved around. Luc took in the hiking boots and dark pants. Nothing about this guy’s form resembled Marcel’s slim look. This had to be the trained killer.
Knowing that had Luc moving back down the hall to the bedroom. Slow and even steps that kept the wood beneath him from creaking. The bedroom door was closed. Luc turned the knob gradually to eliminate any noise. Since it wasn’t locked, it pushed open in his hand.
Slipping inside he saw the lump in the bed and the kitchen knife on the nightstand. Luc had to give the guy credit for being prepared. Too bad it wasn’t enough. Bullets beat blades every single time.
As Luc got to the side of the bed near the weapon, the lump moved. Marcel flipped to his back and his eyes popped open. Luc had his hand over his mouth before he could yell.
After a second, Marcel shoved the hand away and pushed up on his elbows. “It’s about time you got here.”
* * *
S
unrise
peeked
on
the edges of the horizon. The heat of the day would settle in soon and they would have to move. There were plans to make but Connor stood frozen.
He held the jeans Jana laid out to wear. He ran his hands over them and felt around the pockets. The black square in his hand weighed almost nothing but it was heavy against his palm.
The mental battle waged on. Her protection versus his paranoia.
He finally reached a conclusion. It was the right move but the wrong execution. He swore under his breath. “Women.”
“What are you doing?”
Her voice had him jumping. Man, no one ever snuck up on him. Just showed how off his game he was around her.
Busted.
He dropped the pants on the mattress. “I’m actually not doing it.”
She picked something off the floor and he frowned when he realized it was his old tee. She slipped it over her head and his front-row seat to that amazing body stopped. So did any chance of luring her back between the covers.
Before he could come up with a reasonable explanation, she stood in front of him at the end of the bed. “Are you playing verbal gymnastics in the hope I’ll forget I saw you with your hands in my pants?”
Now that was quite a statement. “I like having my hands in your pants.”
“No jokes.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Talk, and do it now.”
The move plumped her breasts and had him getting hard...until she cleared her throat. His gaze flew back to her angry one. “It’s a tracker.”
“And you were going to sneak it into my clothes.” She plucked it out of his hand and held it up, studying it. “Again.”
He could see the anger wash over her. Her skin reddened and her mouth fell into a flat line. He knew he only had seconds to make this right. “No.”
“Since when do you lie to me?”
That expression, heated and full of fury, had him rushing to explain. “I mean, I was going to then I thought about what you said and how I come on too strong and I stopped.”
He tried to do it her way. He’d lost so much by insisting on handling the marriage and her safety on his terms. If she wanted some freedom he’d give it to her. Not now, with gunmen outside. He couldn’t control them but he could control his actions. This time he’d planned on talking with her first. Explaining why he needed her to carry the device.
“Really?” Hope threaded through her voice.
He grabbed on to that. “I can be taught, you know.”
She glanced around the floor. “Everything but how to hang up your clothes, apparently.”
With the simple comment he’d heard so many times before, the tension poured out of him. The battle ended and she believed him. He had to admit that felt pretty damn great. “Picking up clothes is tough for guys.”
“Uh-huh.” She waved the tracker in front of his face. “So you stopped just short of tracking me without my knowledge.”
“Yes. I wanted to tell you first.” He couldn’t bring himself to say “ask your permission”
because if she said no to being tagged he didn’t know what he would have done. He was learning but he still understood how to do his job and that tracker was a necessity. “Do I get any credit for that?”
A smile broke over her face. “I think you do.”
Crisis averted.
The breath rushed out of him in relief. “That wasn’t so hard.”
“Which is what I’ve been saying.”
Since he guessed he was about to lose ground, he reached for the satphone on the table when it buzzed. He’d grab on to any diversion.
She got to it first and held it up. “I thought we couldn’t get calls.”
“The bad guys’ phones work. I gave Shane and Holt the number and they’re passing it around to our side while Joel searches the call logs.” Connor clicked the button and put the line on speakerphone. “I’m here with Jana.”
Shane skipped the welcomes and went right to the news. “Someone made contact.”
Just as Connor thought. Marcel was in this mess up to his eyeballs. “Did he see you?”
“Who?” Jana asked.
Connor ignored the question knowing she would figure it out in a second. Shane must have had the same idea because he answered Connor instead. “I pretended I didn’t know he was here.”
“Is Marcel still breathing?”
Jana grabbed Connor’s arm and tugged. “What did you do?”
He glanced at her, expecting rage and distrust and dreading it. Instead, her eyes narrowed in what looked like confusion. She wasn’t yelling or demanding. She wanted to understand. That reality broke through his worries.
But that didn’t mean he rushed in. Connor doled out the information in pieces he thought she could take. She was strong but she believed in Marcel and his cause and wounding her with the truth was not something Connor enjoyed.
“He had a sneak meeting with someone at the house,” he explained.
Her expression didn’t change but her grip loosened on his arm. “Maybe it’s the attackers. He could be hurt. They could have threatened him.”
All nice theories but none of them fit the facts. And he sure didn’t want her feeling sorry for the guy. “He’s in this with them.”
She threw up her hands. “How do you know?”
“He didn’t call for help and he’s still breathing.”
Shane mumbled something Connor didn’t catch but then Shane’s voice rose again. “Unfortunately.”
Connor thought the same thing. “Guess we know how the attackers got off the porch so quickly yesterday.”
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Marcel helped them get away.”
That made sense. Connor didn’t understand the disappearing act, but now he knew the attackers had a way in and out. Even if Marcel was in danger or being bribed, he let those men in and put them all in danger. That was enough to kill off any sympathy Connor might have had for him.
With her mouth hanging open, she sat down hard on the edge of the bed. “I can’t believe this. He runs a charity.”
Shane laughed. “So?”
“He
helps
people.”
“He’s not what you think he is. He’s dirty.” Connor hoped cutting through the flowery language might help her accept faster. She could mourn later. Be furious tomorrow. Right now he needed her to get on the same page and focus. “And I think it’s time I had a serious talk with the man.”
Jana bounced right back to her feet. “I’m coming with you.”
“No way.” Even in this new world where he tried to be understanding and include her in decisions, this one was nonnegotiable.
“Connor.”
“I’m going to let him live.” He talked over her, not letting her go off on a defense of the man. “For now.”
“Then it shouldn’t be a problem to have me standing there.”
Shane jumped in. “He’ll talk more freely if he’s not busy trying to defend his actions or trying to win you over, Jana.”
She snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”
Connor appreciated the assist from his friend and ran with it. “Men are simple creatures.”
“Speaking of which, let me be there when you punch him.” Shane sounded amused by the idea.
Which was a good idea because Connor thought he might need reinforcements to keep from killing Marcel. “Definitely.”
She closed her fist around the tracking device. “You have ten minutes then I’m coming in. And there had better not be bloodshed.”
No way Connor was agreeing to that.