Thrill Ride Page 3

  Non. Now all he had was a lonely tree house deep in the jungle and, honestly, he didn’t even have that anymore. Now that the Knights had found him, he was going to have to relocate. For their safety and his…

  “I’m not gonna say it again.” He grabbed her shoulders and gave her a little shake, just so she’d know he meant business. “You have to go back.”

  He couldn’t ignore the softness of her flesh beneath his fingers or the way she smelled like mint bubble gum and dryer sheets, so clean and fresh despite the sweat slicking the dusky skin of her chest and neck. He released her shoulders and took a hasty step back.

  Everything about her was heart-shaped, from her face to her mouth to that high, tight ass of hers that was enough to make an atheist believe in God. She was small and exotic and, even dressed like a man and sporting that patchy beard, she was still the most desirable woman he’d ever seen.

  For all the good that did either of them.

  Because if there’d been no chance of a future for them before this fiasco, there certainly wasn’t a chance for one now. And, oui, he knew it was a future she was after. It was there in her big, dark eyes every time she looked at him. He could almost see the visions of white dresses and orange blossoms dancing around in her pretty head.

  And if things had been different…

  But, no. There was no use what-iffing. A man could make himself crazy doing that.

  “I’m not going without you,” she declared through clenched teeth. “Don’t you want our help?”

  Mon dieu, just the thought of the Knights getting themselves involved in this mess turned his stomach and had the sweat on his skin going cold and clammy.

  “Y’all can’t help me, chere.” He was beginning to think no one could. “The best thing is to just forget you ever knew me.”

  The expression on her face was more determined than that of most four-star generals he’d known. “Impossible,” she declared with an angry shake of her head. It caused her long, black ponytail to slip across her shoulder. A few strands stuck to the dampness on her neck, and it took everything he had not to reach forward and brush them away.

  Touching her only reminded him of all the things he’d lost in his life, all the things he’d given up when those losses galvanized him into agreeing to become The Interrogator for The Project and—

  “There has to be something we can do for you,” she insisted.

  “There isn’t,” he growled, giving her the look he’d perfected over the years when questioning bad men about bad doings, the one guaranteed to shrivel a guy’s balls.

  “There has to be,” she snapped right back, apparently immune to his expression.

  Well, there you go. That’s what you get for thinkin’ it’d work on someone who doesn’t have any dangly bits…

  For long seconds they stood and glared at each other, a kind of old-fashioned staring contest. But unlike that childhood game, the stakes here were as high as they came. Because death was stalking him as surely as the jaguars living in this jungle stalked their prey. There was a pretty good chance he wasn’t coming out on the other side of this thing alive. So, the most he could hope for was to keep his friends safe while he hunted for the answer to the question of why he’d been betrayed, and while he made whoever was behind that betrayal pay for their duplicity.

  “I’m givin’ you one more chance, chere. Turn around now and go back the way you came.”

  “Or what?” She dared him with every fiber of her being, looking like a very angry…a very angry…? How to describe her? A very angry sex kitten, that’s how. Oui. That’s about all the mean and menacing she could muster—which wasn’t nearly enough for what he was involved in. But she didn’t know that. And even her hip shot stance seemed to call his bluff.

  So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?

  “Fine.” He spun on his heel and marched back up the path to his pack. Pulling it from beneath the fern, he shook it roughly to make sure all the creepy-crawlies were vamoosed, then he shouldered it and stepped off the trail into the jungle, immediately picking up the pace.

  He’d simply outrun her. She’d left him no other choice.

  Hopping over bushes, skirting roots, and slipping through curtains of wet vines, he moved through the forest like a ghost—quickly and silently. But much to his amazement and dismay, thirty minutes later he could still hear her crashing through the undergrowth fifty yards behind him, scaring the animals she passed into screams of warning.

  The woman had the tenacity of a bulldog combined with the hearing of a bat. Just his damned luck.

  Okay, so outrunning her wasn’t going to work. Because if he led her too much farther into the jungle, she’d never find her way back out to the trail.

  So, the trees it is…

  If he scaled one of the monster trees, all he’d have to do was wait. Wait for her to pass beneath. Wait for her to search for him. Wait for her to eventually give up and turn back. And she would eventually give up and turn back. Because even though she was proving to have giant brass balls hidden beneath that sweet Latina exterior, nobody, not even hardcore operator and world-class comm specialist Vanessa Cordero, wanted to spend the night alone in the middle of the jungle.

  Oui, that was the plan all right. Of course, that plan got shot straight to hell when he went to grab a handhold on the nearest jungle giant just as darkness enveloped him.

  That’s how it was here in the Cloud Forest. Night fell like an axe blade.

  “Zut!” he cursed, glancing around, wondering if she’d be able to find her way back to the trail and out to Santa Elena in the dark.

  Doubtful, considering he could barely see ten feet in front of him and he hadn’t noticed her carrying any gear. No food or water. No flashlight…

  All of that was confirmed a second later when her tentative voice echoed through the thick foliage. “Rock?” She sounded scared and that hit him like an iron-fisted punch in the gut. “I…I can’t see where I’m going.”

  Cursing her, cursing himself, cursing that shadowy bastard code named Rwanda Don who’d gotten him into this mess, he pulled a penlight from one of the pockets on his cargo pants and traipsed back the way he’d come. No sooner had he gone two feet when she called to him again, the fear in her voice now tinged with panic. “Rock? I hear s-something moving behind me, but I…can’t really see what it is.”

  “Just be still!” he yelled. There was no end to the number of four-legged, six-legged, eight-legged, and no-legged nasties that could do her serious harm. He dropped his pack in order to turn on the afterburners. The verdant growth of the jungle floor appeared more gray than green in the yellow glow of his flashlight as he raced toward the sound of her voice.

  It seemed to take forever and a day, but he finally managed to cover the distance. Shining the penlight around, he called, “Vanessa? Chere, where are you?”

  Then his light landed on her frightened face, framed by the ropy brown roots of the strangler vines clinging to the tree behind her and the coiled length of a brilliant flash of yellow that could be only one thing.

  Eyelash viper.

  An arctic blast of fear turned his blood icy, because while the snake wasn’t kill-you-on-the-spot venomous, a bite to a hand could certainly result in a lost finger and a bite to a major vein, like, oh, say the one pulsing rapidly in Vanessa’s pretty neck where the snake was poised to strike, could definitely cause some major organ damage.

  He slowly walked toward her, careful to keep his movements non-threatening. “Don’t move,” he hissed when she started to take a relieved step in his direction. “Just be very, very still.”

  She stopped dead in her tracks—good girl.

  “Wh-why do I need to be still?” she asked, her eyes wide and glowing in the beam of his flashlight, her soft voice tremulous.

  “Just…” he inched closer, pulling one of his SIGs from his waistband, “…don’t move.”

  “Rock, I—”

  She didn’t get any further than that because t
he viper reared up and Rock was suddenly out of time. He raised his weapon.

  ***

  He was going to shoot her!

  She could see his pistol silhouetted against the thin beam of light and for a heartbeat of time, before fear had a chance to kick in, she felt one and only one emotion…

  Indignity. She could not believe he was actually going to—

  Boom!

  His 9mm sounded like a cannon explosion, so loud it rattled Vanessa’s teeth. She waited for the punch of mind-numbing pain, for the specter of death to follow quickly on its heels, but all she felt was something fall into the leaves beside her feet.

  Instinctively she jumped away, glancing down as Rock pointed his flashlight at the forest floor, spotlighting the writhing, yellow body of the fatally wounded snake. He was at her side in two steps, grabbing the snake by one of its bloody coils and neatly severing its head with the 10-inch bowie knife he’d had hidden somewhere on his person.

  “I…” she tried to swallow her heart, which had leapt into her throat the instant she’d seen that big, black pistol pointed at her head. “I thought you were going to…” She couldn’t continue. The darkness around her was spinning and if she didn’t do something fast she knew she was going to be sucked down into its vortex.

  Head between your knees. Put your head between your knees…

  She bent at the waist and grabbed the backs of her legs, pulling herself down in a long stretch that impeded the rapid contractions of her diaphragm and kept her from hyperventilating and passing out.

  And wouldn’t that impress him? If I keeled over in a dead faint?

  Um, no. The answer to that was a definite N.O.

  She remained like that, doing her best impression of a human taco, for a couple of seconds, pressing her cheek to her kneecaps until the stars stopped spinning in front of her eyes, and then she straightened. In the dim circle of illumination cast by the flashlight, she could just make out Rock’s concerned frown.

  “Y’okay?” he asked.

  “Yes, I—” She raked in a calming breath, appalled to discover her entire body was shaking. So much for the whole hard-ass operator persona she’d been working on since starting at BKI. “I’m all right,” she finally managed.

  “What did you think I was gonna do?”

  “Oh, uh…” She bit her lip and squinted when he shined the light in her face.

  “You actually thought I was gonna shoot you, didn’t you?”

  “Stop shining that thing in my eyes,” she barked, holding a hand up in front of her face. It was a good excuse to one, hide her expression from him because she was so totally busted, and two, change the subject.

  “Sonofabitch! You did!” His tone was incredulous. He spun around, stomping a few feet away. She blinked against the darkness—which was made even worse by the fact that she’d just had a flashlight directed in her eyes—and tracked his movements only by following the thin, bouncing beam of illumination. Then, suddenly, he had the thing aimed at her face, and she was blinded again. “So you believe all that stuff you’re hearing about me? You think I—”

  “No,” she cut him off. Taking a step toward him, imploring him with outstretched hands. “I don’t believe it.”

  He was silent for a long, pregnant moment. The chorus of frogs and the drone of nighttime insects struggled to fill the void, then, “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “Rock, I—”

  “Save it.”

  She snapped her mouth shut. What more could she say? For a split second there, she had thought he was going to shoot her.

  “You think you can keep up?” The question, so sudden and so far off topic, momentarily befuddled her.

  “I—I’ve done okay so far, haven’t I?”

  A resonant grunt was his only response. And then there wasn’t any time for words, because she was too busy trying to stay close to him and the light in his hand.

  The darkness, that stygian, black abyss…It brought back too many memories.

  She shivered and tripped over a large root. Flailing, she tried to keep her balance and failed. But before she oh-so-gracefully face-planted into the ground, he was there, grabbing her under her arms, hoisting her up against his solid chest.

  And time came to a screeching halt.

  It was like someone tipped the hourglass on its side and the grains of sand stopped falling. The sounds of the forest faded away. The oppressive humidity faded away. The unbearable darkness faded away. There was nothing but the two of them, locked in an embrace, faces inches apart, ragged breath mingling.

  Kiss me.

  The thought slid through her mind, unwelcome and startling. She knew it wasn’t right. Knew he wasn’t going to change his mind about what he could offer her. Knew she was only wasting her time hoping that he would. But right now, in this moment, that wasn’t really a moment at all since it was a brief instant out of time, she wanted to know what it was to hold him in her arms. To feel his passion, taste his essence, and share with him those same things in herself.

  He bent just slightly, his full lips so close, his sweet breath so warm…

  And then he set her away from him, pressing the penlight into her palm.

  “You take the light,” he instructed. “Just make sure to shine it at my feet.”

  With that, he turned away, and she was left with no recourse but to follow him on knees that’d turned to jelly.

  ***

  “We think we’ve found him.”

  Rwanda Don—that code name always elicited a smile—sat forward, hand tightening around the prepaid cell phone. “Where? How?”

  “Costa Rica,” announced the CIA agent who’d been working on The Project since the beginning. A tickle of excitement trilled up R.D.’s spine. “And they did it by planting a radio frequency device on Vanessa Cordero. According to reports, she’s been in the Monteverde Cloud Forest for a few hours now, and the general consensus here is she wouldn’t be there unless she’d found him.”

  Could it be? After all these months?

  “Are they going in after him?”

  “That’s the plan.” The agent’s voice sounded smug. And why shouldn’t it? They were very close to their ultimate goal of finally catching and/or killing Richard “Rock” Babineaux, assuring their secret—and illegal—activities over the last few years would forever be kept in the dark.

  Let him get killed. Please, let him get killed.

  Just the thought of the accusations Rock could make upon capture, and the possibility of the ensuing investigation, was enough to have R.D.’s stomach turning somersaults. Of course, even if someone did begin to investigate, it wasn’t as if they’d ever find anything.

  We took enough precautions. We made sure to cover our tracks.

  But only after Billingsworth, that nosy prick, had begun asking too many questions about the origins of certain campaign funds, prompting R.D. and the CIA agent to do some housecleaning. The amount of money lost in process, campaign money that’d been paramount to easily securing R.D.’s future plans, was infuriating.

  Still, there was some satisfaction, unsavory as it was, in knowing the only person who knew the true origins of that money was now dead, thanks to two of the boys from The Project…

  R.D. raked in a steadying breath. “Keep me informed as the situation unfolds.”

  The deep sigh on the other end of the line was annoying. “That’s been our deal all along.”

  “Yes. Indeed it has been.” With that, R.D. hit the end button and sat back, feeling optimistic for the first time in months.

  Of course, it wouldn’t do to get one’s hopes up. Rock was a slippery bastard if ever there was one. And if anyone could slither out from under the wide net the CIA was bound to cast, it was him.

  ***

  She actually thought he’d been about to shoot her…

  Rock pressed a hand to his aching chest as he trudged back to the spot where he’d dropped his pack. In the past six months, he’d suffered under the knowledge th
e Black Knights would be inclined to believe him guilty—why wouldn’t they? They’d seen the evidence against him—but he hadn’t realized how much it would hurt to bear witness to their presumption until this very moment.

  And despite all of that, despite the pain in his heart knowing he’d lost their respect and trust, what had he almost done?

  He’d almost kissed Vanessa Cordero, that’s what.

  Which just goes to show what a goddamned imbécile he really was, lower than a toad in a dry well. Because kissing her would’ve done nothing but make a bad situation worse. It would’ve done nothing but give her hope when there was no hope to be had.

  Chancing a glance over his shoulder, he quickly forgot his own misery when he saw the whites of her wide eyes shining like twin beacons through the darkness. It didn’t take someone with his particular skills at reading people, or his ability to pick up on subtle facial cues, to recognize the poor woman was scared to death. And her fear didn’t have anything to do with the eerie, barking hoot of a nearby mottled owl, because she’d been immune to the creepy, almost ethereal sounds of the jungle before sunset.

  Oui, it was as obvious as the nose on his face; Vanessa Cordero was terrified of the dark.

  Pourquoi? Of course, the reason behind her fear didn’t really matter. The fact that she was this scared at all had him pausing beside his pack, rolling in his lips as he considered his options.

  One: He could lead her back to Santa Elena, which would mean two hours of marching through the dense, dark jungle having to listen to her breath hitch every other heartbeat. Or two: He could take her back to his tree house—which was only a fifteen-minute hike—and then send her on her merry way in the morning.

  That second option meant he’d have to spend the night with her. Alone. In a somewhat confined space. When he hadn’t had a woman in a very, very long time…

  Vanessa made the decision for him when a noisy clatter sounded behind them and she jumped on his back, her thighs squeezing his waist and her arms wrapped around his neck in a choke-hold that immediately had his eyes bulging as he struggled to breathe.