Full Throttle Read online

  Oh, for the love of Peter Piper’s peppers, Abby!

  Carlos toed out of his boots, and then—quick as a whistle—shucked his drawers…er…cargo pants. He stepped out of his boxer shorts a half second later. Buck-naked except for his tank top and green tube socks, he started vigorously shaking both garments as he joined her atop the big root.

  Jaw. Slung. Open.

  Eyes. Bulging. From. Head.

  That was Abby. A caricature of herself. If a blaring sound effect, something like ah-ooo-gah, were to blast through the air, she wouldn’t be surprised. She tried to close her mouth, and couldn’t. She tried to swallow, and couldn’t. Blinking worked slightly better. She managed to get her eyelids to cooperate once. But then they stuck wide open again like her eyeballs were coated in the syrup she sometimes extracted from the maple trees as a demonstration to tourists who visited the DC Botanic Garden.

  One corner of Carlos’s mouth quirked as he continued to shake his cargo pants and boxer shorts. “Please tell me you’ve seen a penis before.”

  “Y-yes,” she rasped. “But I’ve never see one so…pretty.” Yep, and maybe she should consider not saying the first thing to pop into her head.

  His eyebrows pinched together, his grin disappearing. “My penis is not pretty,” he grumbled, glancing down at the organ in question.

  She begged to differ. Because he was thick, long, deeply tan, and still partially erect. And with a plump head and two identical veins running up his length, she’d go so far as to say that, in the world of phallus beauty contests, his could make a run for the money as Mr. Universe.

  “If anything,” he said, still staring at it, “it’s a handsome penis, a manly penis.”

  “Whatever you want to call it”—her voice was a husky parody of its usual timber—“I’m just saying I visually enjoy it.” Gah? Really, Abby? What the frickin’ sticks happened to not saying the first thing to pop into your head?

  He glanced up then, and there was no use trying to hide the hunger in her expression. It was plastered so clearly across her face that a man with two glass eyes could see it. To her amazement, she watched his manly, handsome, pretty cock swell and rise.

  “You keep staring at me like that, bonita,” his said, his voice all low and rumbling, his accent thick, “and I’ll be forced to go against my better judgment and push you back against this tree in order to—”

  Her senses came back to her in a rush. There was a very important reason why she couldn’t walk over to him, whip off her skirt/shorts, and climb aboard the Latin love train. Choo-choo!

  “Sorry!” she barked, shaking her head. Holy ass! She was dizzy. She lifted a hand to her temple. “I shouldn’t be—” She blew out a breath. “I shouldn’t have gawked. That was insanely rude of me.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She glanced up to find his eyes half-lidded and sparkling. Then movement in her peripheral vision had her gaze once again darting down to his penis. Now the thing was fully engorged, standing almost vertical, and bouncing with every beat of his heart.

  Her breath left her lungs in a whooshing rush and for a moment she thought she was going to have to physically reach up and, with thumbs and forefingers, force her eyeballs away from the sheer masculine beauty that was Carlos Soto in his gloriously aroused birthday suit. But after a bit of a struggle, she was able to direct her attention to the root beneath her feet.

  “Come on now,” he teased as he stepped back into his boxer shorts. For the love of St. Christopher’s cane! Hurry up and get ’em on, already! She was about two seconds away from taking him up on that offer of pushing her back against the tree. And that would be so, so bad. For many reasons. “Surely you’re not shy after what we just did together.”

  “I’m not shy.” She decided to play the logic card. It was the only thing she had in her deck that was worth anything. “I just think we shouldn’t press our luck. Let’s cross the Thai border, catch a ride with that extraction team, and then we can talk about…” what happened “…whatever.”

  “Probably for the best.” His tone was amused. Although she didn’t lift her gaze from the pattern of brown bark winding beneath her black flats, she could hear him slipping on his pants and then hopping from the root to retrieve his jungle boots and holster. The subtle clanking sound of a jostled handgun told her he’d re-strapped the latter to his thigh. And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, she was able to draw a full breath.

  She’d done it. She’d resisted him. And it was as if she’d run a marathon. She was completely and thoroughly depleted.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  No. Not in the slightest. “Of course.” She forced a smile.

  “Good girl.”

  God, why did he have to keep saying that?

  * * *

  “Tell me why you planted those bombs!” Dan thundered, slamming his hands down on the little circular table and glaring at the blubbering hotel maid with so much fire in his eyes Penni thought it was a wonder the woman’s hair didn’t ignite. Just whoosh! “Tell me how you knew which rooms to put ’em in!”

  Penni curled her fingers under the seat of her chair as Dan’s voice echoed around the cramped storage space the hotel manager had allowed them to turn into an interrogation chamber. The hotel’s security director had called in sick to work, and the only surveillance footage the manager had known how to access was that from the elevators. But it had been enough. Because after spending a couple of hours combing through the previous day’s archived digital recordings, they happened to come across footage of a maid, the very maid seated across from them now, as she exited the elevators onto the twenty-third floor, their floor.

  Under normal circumstances, this would not have been strange. But the Secret Service eschewed housekeeping services because number one, it was a breach in security, and number two, by their very nature they were a private, reclusive lot. And given both of those factors, upon arrival they’d made it abundantly clear to the hotel that there was to be no staff allowed on floor twenty-three.

  And, okay, was it conceivable the maid had not been informed of that particular protocol? Hello? Of course, it was. Mistakes were always a possibility when the human factor was involved. But what were the odds she just happened to stumble onto their floor the one time all of them had been on duty while Abby gave her speech?

  Most definitely slim to none, Penni figured. And Dan had wholeheartedly agreed. When they showed the footage to the hotel manager, and after yet another call from the U.S. State Department, the blubbering maid had been handed over to them, apron, wheeled cart, and all.

  So here she was. The culprit. The fiend. The monster. This small, slightly pudgy, middle-aged woman with her hair twisted up in a bun was the whole reason Penni could barely breathe for the crush of sorrow and guilt. This weeping, wailing, dark-skinned stranger had taken the lives of Penni’s friends and colleagues with nothing more than a universal room key, a set of cheap timers, a few pounds of accelerant and shrapnel, and some duct tape. Uh-huh, Penni had taken a peek at what remained of the incendiary devices, and though she was no expert, she could tell they’d been rudimentary.

  And effective…just as Dan had said. Mad, mad effective. Christ on the cross!

  “Tell me!” Dan demanded again.

  The woman just sat there bawling her eyes out and shaking her head.

  “Check her cart,” Dan grumbled, tipping his chin toward the wheeled contraption. “Maybe there’s something in there that’ll help loosen her tongue.”

  Penni figured that fell under the heading of Yeah, right. “Dollars to doughnuts she was smart enough to clean out any evidence before she started today’s shift,” she said. Then, “But what the hey, it’s worth a try.”

  Standing, she walked to the cart. Ignoring the weighty lethargy of her tired limbs, she dug through various cleaning apparatuses and dirty room service breakfast trays until she came to a half-used roll of duct tape. “Well, would you look at that? I guess I gave her too
much credit, huh?”

  And, oh! How she wanted to turn and hurl that roll of tape at the maid’s head. But by gritting her teeth so hard she was pretty sure she heard enamel crack, she managed to simply lift it and brandish it in front of the woman’s nose.

  She took no joy in the rounding of the maid’s eyes, no pleasure in the look of dawning realization on her face. Because all Penni felt in that moment was pure, undiluted rage. And since there weren’t enough vile words in the English language to accurately convey the ferocity of her feelings, she let her expression do the talking for her. Yes, you are totally busted, you crazy, vicious, murdering bitch!

  Babbling in Malay, the maid plunged her hands below the table, reaching for something.

  Penni dropped the tape in a flash. It fell onto the tabletop with a thunk just as she pulled her weapon and aimed it at the woman’s head. For the first time in her life, she knew what the phrase killing rage truly meant. It took everything she had not to squeeze that trigger. Dragging in a deep breath of the tear- and sweat-soaked air inside the tiny room, she saw that Dan had beat her to the mark. The barrel of his Ruger P90 was pressed securely to the woman’s left temple.

  “No! No English!” The maid wailed, choking as she raised her hands and began waving around something that was the approximate size and shape of a postcard.

  “What is it?” Penni asked, her voice breathless and thready. Her throat was scoured raw as New Jersey Turnpike road rash from the tears she continued to gulp down. Stay tough, kiddo. Her father’s familiar advice whispered through her head and bolstered her resolve. Putting some steel in her spine and her tone, she demanded again, “What does she have?”

  Never lowering his weapon, Dan wrenched the object away from the maid, glancing at it. Instantly, his blond eyebrows formed a deep vee and Penni’s stomach turned one quick flip like the time she’d ridden the Coney Island Cyclone. She could tell by his expression that she wasn’t going to like whatever it was he thrust in her direction.

  Holstering her weapon—Dan seemed to have everything well in hand, and her faith that her itchy trigger finger would continue to obey her was running out—she took the card and slowly, still scowling at the woman, allowed her gaze to drop.

  Well…flippin’ hell…

  It wasn’t a postcard. It was a photograph. A photograph of a black-eyed boy, probably no more than eight or nine, who was obviously suffering the effects of some sort of degenerative disease. His arms and legs were heartbreakingly skinny, his naked chest a xylophone of ribs, and his sunken eyes were nothing but dark pits inside his tragically angelic face.

  “Jaya!” the woman wailed, pointing to the photo. “Jaya!” she moaned again, followed by a string of words in Malay that Penni didn’t begin to understand.

  “We need a translator,” she told Dan, grabbing her chair and carefully lowering herself into it. She’d never in her life experienced this kind of exhaustion. Oh, wait. Yes, she had. In the days following her father’s death. Once again, she was forced to swallow the spiky lump of tears that tried to strangle her. Most definitely New Jersey road rash… “We could call the embassy and ask them to—”

  “No.” He shook his head. Shoving his weapon into the waistband of his jeans, he held out his hands, palms down, and patted the air: the universal signal for the woman to calm down. It didn’t work. The maid continued to cry and wring her hands so hard Penni wondered how she didn’t snap off a finger.

  “What do you mean no?” she demanded, scowling. Her ability to control her emotions was slipping, and slipping fast. It was bad enough that her colleagues’ deaths had already taken a baseball bat to her professional composure and left it bleeding out in the street. But ever since Dan informed her that Steady had made a play at rescuing Abby—all on his own!—and was even now headed north to Thailand, she’d been teetering on the edge of full-on panic attack.

  When he didn’t immediately answer her, she snapped, “Okay, lookie here, Danny Boy. I don’t know what it is about me that makes you think I’m a wilting lily, ready and willing to sit by while you and Mr. Fly-By-the-Seat-of-His-Pants run this show. But I’m telling you right now that I want…” She frantically shook her head. “No. I don’t want. I demand a plan. So what is it? If we’re not calling the embassy for an interpreter, what the hell are we doing?”

  And by the look on Dan’s face, she realized some of her panic had come across in that little diatribe. Blowing out a blustery breath, she squared her shoulders and deliberately wrapped her fingers around the Styrofoam cup of coffee Dan had placed on the table in front of her when they first entered the little room. But she didn’t raise the cup to her lips. The coffee inside was black, which she loathed. But that was her fault. She’d forgotten when she told Dan to make it a “regular” that most of the country equated “regular” with “black” as opposed to the liberal amounts of cream and sugar that made up an NYC “regular.” Still, just the ceremony of holding the warm cup between her hands managed to calm her. A little.

  “The president doesn’t wanna involve the embassy if he doesn’t have to,” Dan said after having patiently watched her get her sorry self back under some semblance of control. “He’s trying to keep this as quiet as possible. In fact, he’d prefer it if Abby was already back in our custody before the press gets word of her abduction. And keeping a lid on this will be nearly impossible if we start hauling in a bunch of outside help.”

  “And speaking of,” she said. “Is he aware Steady is currently, right at this very minute, in the middle of a solo rescue attempt?” She couldn’t stress the word solo in solo rescue attempt enough. For Christ’s sake!

  “He is.” Dan nodded. “He’s being kept apprised of Steady and Abby’s position and northward trajectory by my HQ.”

  She’d learned that when he and Steady were talking about “geeking up,” they were really referring to the tracking chips they’d both implanted in their wristwatches. Talk about state-of-the-art accessories. Not that she should be all that surprised. Because, if she’d guessed correctly, they were the commander in chief’s very own gang of merry current and/or former military men.

  “Since you brought it up,” she said, her first order of business being Abby, always Abby, “are they still en route to the border?”

  “At last check,” Dan assured her. “And as soon as the SEAL team gets here, they’ll fly over and pick ’em up.”

  “Which means another unit couldn’t be mustered on such short notice.” She wished this suckass day would just end already. Wished Abby was back with her safe and sound so she could hide herself away somewhere and give in to the grief clawing inside her chest. “The president has to be beside himself with worry.”

  Dan shrugged. “He trusts Steady to get the job done. As for…”

  She stopped listening after his first sentence because she wanted to yell, Oh, for the love of—it’s not like you guys are superheroes or anything!

  Or maybe they were. Because that’s obviously how POTUS was treating them. She tilted her head, trying to see if Dan was sporting an invisible cape.

  “…but I know someone who can translate for us. Someone I can trust to get it right and not paraphrase or lose something in the translation. And someone who won’t breathe a word to the press.”

  “Who is he?” She lifted a brow. “And how do we get him here?”

  “It’s a her. And she’s not coming here. We’re gonna call her.”

  Not waiting for her acquiescence to the plan—so what else is new?—he reached into his pocket and extracted his cell phone.

  Turning his back on her and the still-blubbering maid, he punched in a number before lifting the device to his ear. When Bertha Bomber continued to sob and wail, he frowned over his shoulder and plugged a finger in his opposite ear. “Hey, Rock,” she heard him say after a moment. “I need Vanessa. She around?” A couple more seconds passed, then, “Hey, beautiful. How’s your Malay?”

  Beautiful? Beautiful? Uh-huh, Penni was pretty sure if she squinte
d, she’d catch a glimpse of a green-eyed monster sitting atop her left shoulder. Which proved how far off her rocker she’d fallen. She had no claim over Dan. She wanted no claim over Dan. But try explaining that to her new emerald-eyed friend.

  “Excellent,” Dan said into his receiver, turning to smile and wink at her.

  When she smiled back, he cocked his head, his expression faltering. Obviously she’d flashed too many teeth. More snarl than smile.

  “Penni”—he took the phone away from his ear to switch it over to speaker—“I’d like you to meet Vanessa Cordero. Vanessa is a comm specialist extraordinaire.”

  A low, husky voice, like what Penni imagined phone-sex operators might use, sounded from the device. “Hello, Penni.”

  The monster on her shoulder doubled in size.

  “Hiya, Vanessa,” she ground out, feeling terrible because the name sort of stuck in the back of her throat. One almost sexual encounter with the guy and suddenly you’re all Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Could you be any more of a penis-wrinkle, Penni?

  “Rock,” Dan said, “you still on the line, too?”

  “Oui, mon frere,” a deep, melodic baritone slid through the phone’s speaker. “I’m here.”

  “Good.” Dan nodded, glancing at her. “So you’re also talking with Rock Babineaux. He’s a bony-assed Cajun who happens to be a leading expert in interrogation techniques. I’m hoping these two, working together, can pry some information out of our…uh…far-from-friendly friend here.” He jerked his chin toward the maid.

  “I take exception to the bony-assed comment.” That smooth voice echoed through the little room, sounding like a late-night radio host.

  One corner of Dan’s mouth twitched, a light entering his eyes that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than the gleam of camaraderie. Dan and this Rock guy were obviously friends. Friends and coworkers and—Zoink! Penni’s green-eyed pal blipped out of existence. Gone so fast she wondered if he’d ever really been there at all or if she’d simply imagined him, her mind struggling for anything with which to occupy itself, since every time it turned toward thoughts of her colleagues, she damn near hyperventilated.