Thrill Ride Read online

  Not that he hadn’t tried. Especially in the six months since she’d crashed back into his life…

  Oh, yeah. It was official. He was quickly outpacing both Ozzie and Steady when it came bagging babes, which was really saying something since, between the two of those bastards, there wasn’t a barmaid or hostess left in Chicago who hadn’t taken a…ride, if you will…on one or both of the Black Knights. And yet for Bill…?

  Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

  Not one of the women who’d shared his bed in the last six months, not to mention the scores—okay, maybe not scores, but certainly more than his fair share—who’d shared his bed in the last ten or so years had inspired the kind of passion that Eve managed to inspire just by walking into the room.

  “Billy can’t help himself where I’m concerned,” she finished, smiling down at him sadly and, yeah, so maybe he was king of the assholes. Because it wasn’t her fault he’d been young and dumb and unable to see that she’d only been tiptoeing on the wild side, taking a little spin around the block with the bad boy from the wrong side of town before settling on someone more appropriate.

  Goddamnit!

  “But just so we’re clear,” she continued, holding his gaze, and that was something new. The Eve he’d known years ago was as shy as a church mouse on a Sunday morning. But this new Eve? Well, she was showing a backbone made of pure, forged steel. And, sonofabitch, that just made him want her more. “I cook because it soothes me. I’m not yelling at you for reading that book and telling you this isn’t a…a gosh darned”—now that was the Eve he knew; the one who blushed anytime she tried to curse—“library visit.”

  “You’re right,” he told her, meeting her wide eyes unhesitatingly. Eve had always reminded him of a china doll. Milky-white skin, jet-black hair, eyes as clear and deep as sapphires, and a fragility that brought out the Neanderthal in him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take out my frustration on you.”

  She blinked like he’d just sprouted a second head from his ear. And, yeah, so he was probably overdue on quite a few of the apologies he owed her.

  “Well…I…well…okay, then,” she sputtered and turned to make her way back toward the kitchen. He watched her walk away and gave himself over to the sheer joy of examining the graceful movement of her long, tan legs. That is, until his sister interrupted his pursuit.

  “I don’t understand why you have to do that,” she said. When he turned to glance at her, Becky was wearing “the look.” The one that informed him a lecture was coming.

  He hoped to head it off. “You heard me apologize, right?”

  “I heard you. I’m just not sure I believe you. Why can’t you just forget about it? It was a lifetime ago.”

  “Maybe I’m just no good at letting go of grudges,” he admitted. But he knew that was only partially true. Because no matter how hard he’d tried, the fact remained that what he wasn’t good at was letting go of Eve.

  “Yeah. And maybe you’re just an asshole.”

  He shrugged then fought a smile because he knew just how to derail his sister from this current line of badgering. Clearing his throat, he said in his best orator’s voice, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

  Becky rolled her eyes. “And that would be from…?”

  He picked up the book from his lap and turned it so she could see the cover. “Atticus Finch, baby. A man of inordinately wise words.”

  “That’s a really annoying habit you have.”

  “Which one? Being an asshole or quoting classic literature?”

  “Both.”

  He winked and was rewarded when one corner of her sullen mouth twitched. She could never stay mad at him for very long. That was the thing about Becky. She could blow up quicker than a stick of dynamite, but her anger always burned out just as quickly.

  She reached for one of the sandwiches Eve had delivered, just as Boss strolled into the room. Bill went on instant alert. Boss’s face looked like a thundercloud on a good day—thanks, in part, to a bevy of scars—but today? Well, today it looked like an F5 tornado.

  A stone of dread settled at the bottom of his stomach, and he figured it wouldn’t be long before his ulcer started acting up again.

  “General Fuller confirmed a CIA operation over Monteverde Cloud Forest,” Boss announced. “Says there’s nothing he can do about it. His recommendation is for us to convince Rock to turn himself in.”

  Yeah, right.

  “Not likely,” Bill snorted. “Even if there was a way to contact him, Rock would rather die in the jungle with a bullet in his brain than rot away in an eight-by-ten.”

  “Dying in the jungle with a bullet in his brain is looking more and more likely,” Boss scowled. “Those teams have orders to shoot on sight.”

  “Sonofabitch.” Bill shook his head, wondering, again, how it had come to this. Surely Rock wouldn’t—

  “Still no word from Vanessa?” Boss asked, breaking into Bill’s thoughts.

  “Nope,” he glanced over at the end table and the blank screen of his cell phone. “It appears she still has her phone turned off.”

  Boss nodded and ran a big hand back through his hair. Then he turned to survey the room as if it had the answer to the question he asked next. “Any idea how they, the CIA, I mean, found them?”

  “If I had to guess,” Bill mused, running a finger under his chin, “I’d say that despite her disguise, and despite all her precautions, somehow Vanessa was followed. And then maybe she got herself tagged while she was in Santa Elena.”

  “That was my thinking, too,” Boss nodded. “I guess we didn’t give those spooks enough credit, huh?”

  “Guess not,” Bill agreed. “Which is why we need Zoelner”—the Black Knights’ resident ex-CIA operative—“down here to fill us in on their operating procedures. Any luck getting in touch with him?”

  Besides the General, Boss had put out a war cry to all the Knights. Telling those who weren’t currently on a mission to get their asses to Costa Rica ASAP.

  “Nope. He’s incommunicado in Syria. And even if he could manage to cross the border to Turkey, it’d take him nearly forty hours to get here. And I don’t mean to go all Han Solo on your ass, but I got a bad feeling this is all gonna be over long before that. Goddamnit!” His jaw hardened until the scar cutting up from the corner of his lip went stark white. “I knew we never should’ve let Vanessa go in there alone. She isn’t trained for this shit.”

  At this point Becky piped up with, “Now, come on, Frank. You know that was the best option we had at the time. We couldn’t all go traipsing over to Santa Elena after she jumped the gun. And she was right, you know. She was the only one of us capable of speaking the native languages, of blending in with the locals and asking the right questions.”

  Boss had nearly shit a brick when Vanessa decided to pull a Lone Ranger—minus Tonto—on them. Taking it into her fool head to track Rock on her own before they’d agreed on the specifics of an exfiltration strategy. But to follow her would’ve raised more than a few eyebrows, so they’d been left with no other option but to let her do her thing. And, miracle of miracles, she’d actually found the guy.

  Unfortunately, it appeared the CIA had found her.

  Boss was right. She wasn’t trained for this shit. But there was nothing to be done for that now.

  Boss blew out a hard breath, “Yeah? And now I not only have one, but two operators out there with their heads on the chopping block.”

  “Rock won’t let anything happen to Vanessa,” Bill assured him, as certain of that fact as he was that Eve was in the kitchen cursing him to hell. Because no matter what Rock had done…scratch that, no matter what the government was saying he’d done, he would never let harm come to a woman under his protection. “He’ll die before he allows her to get hurt.”

  “Yeah,” Boss grimaced. “And that’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  ***


  Snap. Crack. The sound of footfalls in the undergrowth drew closer.

  And it was back to being a brick wall for Rock. He stilled beneath Vanessa, his chest, which moments before had been heaving with passion, barely moved. She followed suit, raking in a shallow, silent breath as her heart clenched into a tight ball of fear.

  Had Rock been wrong? Had the hit teams already made it down this far? Or was that just an animal out there…?

  The air inside the hollow tree felt too dense to breathe, like she was sucking molasses into her lungs.

  Schick. Tick.

  Oh, shitballs, whatever it was, it was big. And, as if on cue, a snuffling sound reached her ears, followed closely by a barking grunt.

  Jaguar.

  Vanessa’s stomach flipped as every hair on her head stood on end.

  Just an animal? Just? Had she really been foolish enough to have that thought? Because there was no just when it came to a friggin’ two-hundred-pound jungle cat with razor sharp teeth and two inch claws.

  “Don’t. Move.” Rock whispered.

  Yeah, she hadn’t planned on it.

  She felt him reach down beneath her thigh, and for a moment she entertained the crazy notion that he was going to try to pick up where they’d left off. And if they were, indeed, seconds away from being devoured by the big cat, she couldn’t say she really blamed him. At least they’d both die happy, doing something pleasurable. But then the hard steel of a gun barrel kissed the inside of her leg.

  Okay so they’d likely survive the cat. A couple of slugs from Rock’s SIG would insure that. Unfortunately the resulting gunfire would undoubtedly bring hell raining down on them in the form of the teams of men currently scouring the jungle.

  It seemed their luck was holding steady. Because this was definitely a lose/lose situation.

  “He smells the blood,” Rock murmured.

  Blood? What blood?

  “What are you talking about?” she breathed into the darkness, her nearly silent words still managing to sound like a shout inside the hollowed-out log.

  “From my neck.”

  Huh?

  She reached up, careful not to make so much as a sound, and felt the neck in question. Her fingers raked across a long, deep gash and came away sticky with blood. “Jesus, Rock,” she hissed, “are you hit? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “No.” She could feel him shaking his head. “Just a sliver of wood from a tree.”

  Like that was so much better. Because bullet or woodchip didn’t make a damned bit of difference when it came to nearly severing your jugular.

  “Slowly,” he instructed, “I need you to slide off me. I hear him comin’ ’round to the base of the log.”

  And that was bad. Because if they could squeeze inside the tree, the jaguar would have no problem doing the same. The thought of that big cat in here with them was just too horrifying to contemplate.

  Vanessa carefully rolled off Rock onto her side, barely completing the maneuver when she felt him scoot down toward the mouth of the log.

  “Be careful,” she whispered, and immediately rolled her eyes as she thought. Well, that’s ridiculous advice. Like what else would he be?

  “Don’t scream,” he retorted, which had her heart—the sucker had just recovered from the initial shock to start beating again—once more screeching to a halt. She actually fancied she could hear a scriiiiitch echo in the darkness.

  When someone warned you not to scream, it was generally followed up by something truly scream-worthy.

  She bit her lip until the pain made her eyes water, but even then, she didn’t unclench her jaw. She figured it was better to chew the sucker right off than take a chance of letting so much as a peep slip out of her mouth.

  The seconds ticked by, and the snuffling around the entrance to their hideout grew louder until Vanessa thought she’d go crazy waiting for whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to scream at to happen. Then she heard a loud thump followed immediately by an earsplitting yowl.

  And that was what Rock had warned her about. Because the unholy, pissed-off roar that echoed outside was enough to raise the hair on the back of her neck and make goose bumps break out on her arms while a reactionary shriek lodged in the middle of her throat.

  “After that boot to the head, he’ll think twice about sticking his nose in here again,” Rock said. She could make out the soft shush of his cargo pants brushing against the tarp as he scooted back to her. “Now, I’m gonna have to go out and erase the big cat’s tracks. If those teams heard that yowl, they’re gonna wonder if it has to do with us.”

  “Y-yeah, okay,” she said, heart beating a mile a minute.

  “You gonna be all right in here by yourself?” She could hear the worry in his voice.

  “Yes,” she was proud to say. Even prouder when she realized it was the truth. For years she’d lived in constant terror of a place and situation exactly like this, but all it’d taken was ten minutes of being subjected to Rock’s astonishing brand of psychoanalysis and she was, maybe not cured, but at the minimum drastically improved.

  Of course, that didn’t do a thing to alleviate her terror for the safety of the man’s hide when he exited the hollow tree to begin silently covering the jaguar’s tracks. The whole time he was out there, exposed, images of the big cat launching itself from the nearest tree to sink razor-sharp fangs into Rock’s jugular played like a horror show inside her head. Over and over again, she saw it happening. Cat. Launch. Claws. Teeth. Blood. And just when she’d had enough, when she was going to have to go out there and see for herself that he was okay, the greenery at the mouth of the log rustled and the air thickened as Rock scooted inside.

  “Is he…” she began but stopped when she discovered someone had dumped a bucket of sand down her throat. She swallowed, trying to work up some saliva to battle the dryness, and tried again. “Is he gone?”

  “For now.” She closed her eyes, whispering a silent prayer of thanks into the darkness. “And one good thing about his arrival: now we know the hit squad isn’t anywhere close. That cat wouldn’t come within a hundred yards of a big group of men like that.”

  Okay, as far as silver linings went, she guessed that was a pretty good one. Blowing out a blustery breath, tilting her head from side-to-side to try to work out the kinks in her neck, she reached for him in the darkness. Now that they’d averted one crisis, it was time to deal with another. “So I guess it would be a good time to get a bandage on that cut before you bleed to death.”

  Chapter Seven

  Vanessa’s small hand landed on his forearm, and Rock tried and failed to ignore the fact that her palm was warm and smooth and sending little electrical jolts all through his body.

  He should not have kissed her. And the last thing he should be thinking about right now was kissing her again. But that’s exactly what he was doing.

  Thinking about kissing her. Kissing her and a whole hell of a lot more.

  Mon dieu, but she’d been hot. A burning flame in his arms. Sexy and lusty and…feminine. She was soft in all the right places, firm in all the rest, and it boggled his goddamned mind that she’d even stop to give him the time of day.

  Oh, not because he wasn’t used to getting attention from women, even beautiful women. He may not have Snake’s surfer-boy good looks or Ozzie’s movie-star profile, but he’d gotten more than his fair share of les jolies filles over the years, especially when he’d been with the Teams…

  Oh, mama, had those ever been the days. When there’d been plenty of base bunnies only too happy to overlook his thick Cajun accent and lean, rangy body in order to say they’d bagged themselves an honest-to-goodness Navy SEAL.

  But, unfortunately, since starting Black Knights Inc., his pace in the, uh, bunny department had slowed considerably. And more recently, ever since he’d been on the run—no, that wasn’t true; it was ever since they’d hired Vanessa—that pace had screeched to a full stop. Because every time he tried to take a woman home from the bar or local cantina,
he was stopped by visions of long, inky-black hair, dark, flashing eyes, and an ass that didn’t know the meaning of the word quit.

  And that scared him like a hound pissing peach pits. Because had that jaguar not showed up when it did, he’d likely be buried balls-deep in her sweet feminine warmth right at this very moment. And though the act would’ve undoubtedly been one of the most pleasurable experiences of his entire sorry life, it would’ve also been a mistake on too many levels to count…Because despite the fact that her actions had been screaming, Ride me, cowboy. Hard and fast—which, wouldn’t you know, just happened to be his particular specialty—he was fully aware that, deep down inside, Vanessa was the “forever” type of girl. So if he’d given in to the lust that’d momentarily grabbed hold of them, he’d have given her hope there could be a future for the two of them when there absolutely could not.

  He pulled away from her gentle touch, shaking his head even though she couldn’t see him. “The wound is nothin’,” he told her brusquely. Was that his voice that sounded like a rusty hinge? “The blood’s already drying.”

  “Yes,” she dragged the s out on the end of the word. “But here in the jungle, the smallest cut can lead to massive infection. We need to get that thing cleaned, dried, and bandaged.”

  She had a point. But if she put her hands on him again…Good Lord. He reckoned he’d be toast.

  “All right, fine. But I’ll do it myself.”

  She made a tsk-ing sound, and her hand landed on his forearm again only to start on a slow, agonizing journey up his bare arm. The erection he’d managed to beat back when the jaguar arrived on the scene swelled with new life.

  Merde. This woman’s gonna be the death of me!

  He grabbed her hand and tossed it away, trying to ignore her surprised hiss. “I’m serious.” His harsh tone declared the topic closed for discussion. “I’ll do it myself.”

  The resounding silence following that statement let him know more clearly than words ever could that he’d gone and hurt her feelings.