If he was in the mood for revenge, Abby and Luke were pretty tempting targets.
“I guess the family’s rallying the wagons around Gossamer Ridge?” Rick asked aloud.
“That’s what Alicia says. Speaking of her—did she catch you when you came in?”
“I didn’t see her.” Rick’s cousin-in-law Alicia had started working for Cooper Security about a month after she married his cousin Gabe. She was a brilliant little dynamo whose PhD in criminal psychology looked very good on the Cooper Security list of credentials. She also happened to be an insightful, natural investigator. They were lucky she’d decided to join the company.
“Well, she’ll be looking for you,” Jesse told him.
“What does she want?”
“She didn’t tell me—just said to let you know she wanted to see you.” Jesse’s eyes narrowed. “How much sleep have you had in the last day?”
“A few hours.”
“How many of those hours were on the floor of that cave Wade told me about?
“A few,” he answered with a wry smile.
“Go home. Get some sleep. We can regroup tomorrow.”
Home,
Rick thought as he walked back through the bullpen-style communal office where rows of desks, some occupied, some empty, filled the open area. He supposed he and his brothers and sisters all thought of Chickasaw County as home, no matter how far they’d roamed over the years. After all, here they were, all six of them, back in Chickasaw County, all living within a few miles of the sprawling two-story farmhouse where they’d grown up, where their father, now retired, still lived.
But at the moment, the only place that called to him, on a gut-deep level, was his sister Isabel’s house.
Because Amanda was there.
He’d thought, as time and distance built between him and those few stolen weeks of fire and feeling, he was over what he’d felt for her.
But clearly, he wasn’t.
Maybe it wasn’t love. Maybe it never had been. But it was more than he’d ever felt for another woman. More than he’d felt, period, for a long while now.
Now he just had to decide what he was going to do about it.
AMANDA HAD COME TO THINK of her captor as an incubus, so thoroughly and horribly had he haunted her dreams for the past three years. In real life, he had seemed far less intimidating, at least on sight. Physically, he was only average in size—tall, perhaps, for a Kaziri, but no more than five foot ten in height, trim and fit but not particularly muscular. He would have been considered pleasant-featured in almost any culture, with handsome brown eyes, high cheekbones and a mobile, laughing mouth. His hair was dark but not black, shot through with russet, especially when the light slanting through the single window in the interrogation room hit it.
His cohort called him Raa Baber—The Tiger.
But in her dreams, as in life, he lacked the noble beauty of the big, sleek cat. The man she knew as The Tiger was hard. Suffocating. Cruel.
She forced herself awake, before the games began. She sat up in the soft bed and threw off the blankets, feeling trapped. Only when she’d scrambled over to the window and let the afternoon light bathe her in reflected warmth did the pounding, rapid-fire cadence of her pulse recede into something approaching normal.
The house was quiet around her, only the faint hum of electricity and her own rapid respirations breaking the silence. She willed herself to relax, to let go of her past for just a few minutes. She was clean—finally—and on the mend. The broth and toast Rick had given her earlier had managed to stay down with no ill effects. And she was, for the moment, safe.
Or so she thought.
Until she heard the front door open.
She supposed most people would assume that Isabel or Rick had returned. It was a logical assumption—the house belonged to Isabel, and Rick had the most interest in where she was and what she was doing.
But Amanda had learned long ago to assume nothing.
She looked around the room for her duffel bag, finding it tucked inside the guest room’s small closet. As the sound of footsteps sounded quietly outside her door, she pulled the first spare weapon she could find from within the bag’s interior—her SIG Sauer P238. She checked the clip to make sure it was loaded and swung the weapon toward the door as footsteps stopped just outside.
The doorknob rattled. She steadied her weapon.
The door swung open and the intruder took one step inside. It was a woman in her late twenties, with wavy black hair and coffee-black eyes that widened as she spotted the gun in Amanda’s hand.
The woman released a soft profanity and lifted her hands, dropping her purse to the floor. “I come in peace,” she said quickly. “I’m Alicia Cooper. Rick’s cousin Gabe is my husband.” She had an accent from somewhere on the West Coast—Oregon, maybe, or northern California.
Amanda didn’t drop the weapon. “What do you want?”
“Your help,” Alicia answered.
Chapter Nine
Amanda heard more footsteps moving in the house, behind Alicia. The other woman didn’t seem to notice, her focus centered on the snub, square nose of the SIG.
“My help?” Amanda asked, wondering if the second person approaching was friend or foe.
“I understand you were attacked yesterday morning by a man who once worked with MacLear.”
Amanda’s eyes narrowed. How did she know this? “Do you have any ID?”
The footsteps stopped just outside the bedroom door. Once again, the other woman seemed oblivious. “You want to see my driver’s license? Really?” There was a surprising hint of delight in her voice. “You still think I’m a threat?”
Amanda shook her head. “You’re about as threatening as a three-week-old kitten.”
“Don’t depend on that. I hear she’s dangerous with a baseball bat.” Rick’s voice preceded him into the bedroom. He arched one eyebrow at the gun still leveled in Amanda’s grip. “Put it down. She’s one of the good guys.”
Amanda slowly lowered the SIG. “She didn’t knock.”
“I didn’t want to wake you if you were asleep,” Alicia protested. “Isabel lent me her key. Just thought I’d peek in to see if you were awake.”
Her hands shaking a little, Amanda set the SIG on the bedside table and turned back to look at them, pushing her hair away from her perspiration-damp face. “I’m Amanda.”
“Like I said, I’m Alicia Cooper.” Alicia flashed her a smile. “How’re you feeling?”
“Better,” she admitted. She sank onto the end of the bed and gestured toward a nearby chair. “Sit down. Tell me how you want me to help you.”
Alicia pulled up the chair and sat in front of her, folding her hands on her lap. She was dressed in a trim-fitting brown trouser suit with a turquoise sweater beneath the jacket. On the outside, she looked calm and composed, yet she seemed to vibrate visibly with pent-up energy. “I understand one of the people who shot at you yesterday was a former MacLear agent.”
Amanda glanced at Rick, wondering how much he’d told his family about her background. He met her gaze without flinching, so she guessed he hadn’t spilled anything he’d know she wanted to stay a secret.
“Rick’s the one who recognized him. I only knew a few MacLear agents, and Rick’s the only one I knew well.”
“I think it’s likely the men who chased you through the forest outside Chattanooga were also MacLear agents.”
Rick, who had been hanging back near the doorway, moved forward at Alicia’s words, looking at her with interest. He sat next to Amanda on the bed. “Has something happened to make you believe that?”
Alicia nodded. “J.D. put out some calls to old Navy buddies who’d served with Jackson Melville, to see if anyone connected to MacLear had approached them recently about working any new assignments.”
“J.D.’s one of my cousins,” Rick explained to Amanda. She was beginning to wonder how many Coopers there were.
“A few of them seemed to be evasive in their answers,” Alicia continued, “while a couple of others were happy to tell him they’d turned down offers of freelance security work because of the taint of any connection to MacLear or Melville.”
“Melville can’t be involved—he’s under indictment,” Rick pointed out.
“So is Barton Reid,” Alicia countered. “Though that’s looking pretty shaky at the moment.”
“Nobody reputable is likely to work for Melville or any MacLear upper-level officer again,” Rick said firmly.
“Nobody
reputable,
” Amanda agreed quietly. When they both looked at her, she added, “That’s the problem, isn’t it? MacLear’s seedy underbelly has come back out to play.”
“Someone has sent them after you,” Alicia said with a nod. “It can’t be a coincidence that Barton Reid was working at the embassy in Kaziristan while you and Rick were there.”
“How do you know so much about Barton Reid?” Amanda asked.
“Jesse hired her specifically to profile Reid,” Rick answered for Alicia. “We want to help strengthen the case against him if we can.”
“Who’s paying Jesse?” Amanda asked.
“Actually, I am,” Alicia said with a sheepish grin. “Sort of. I invested in Cooper Security, so when I decided to look into Reid, Jesse was good enough to let me use the company’s resources to do it.” Her smile widened, this time with pleasure. “He also made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—he gave me a job.”
“Alicia has a PhD in criminal psychology—”
“And I live here in Chickasaw County,” she added. “My husband is a fishing guide on Gossamer Lake. I didn’t want him to have to leave his family and the job he loves behind, and I wasn’t really looking forward to an hour or more commute to Birmingham, so when Jesse said Cooper Security could use a profiler…” She stopped herself, apparently realizing she was rattling on. Her grin turned sheepish again. “Anyway, I wanted to help Luke and Abby out. They’re family. So I’m doing anything I can to get them out from under this constant threat.”
Amanda couldn’t hold back a slight smile. She might talk a mile a minute, but Alicia Cooper seemed like a decent person with the guts and determination needed to make good things happen for the people around her. Amanda hadn’t known too many people like that—they were rare in her world.
“Nailing Barton Reid to the wall will definitely help Luke and Abby,” Rick said firmly. “You know I’ll help you any way I can, Ali, but the MacLear Special Services Unit was serious about secrecy, especially when it comes to keeping the legitimate end of the company in the dark. I probably know less than you do about what they were up to at this point.”
“You may know more than you think,” Alicia said. “At the very least, you’re familiar with how MacLear worked from the inside out. If we’re right about what’s going on, some of the SSU agents who escaped detection or managed to slip under the radar have banded together to start their own mercenary force. Guns for hire, with no scruples about who hires them or why.”
“And we have to stop them,” Rick said, his voice quiet but fierce with determination.
Amanda felt distanced from their conversation. Nothing they were discussing should have had anything to do with her. Not anymore. She’d gotten out, kept her head down, her eyes forward and her mind firmly shut to everything that smacked of her former life.
And yet, here you are,
a little voice in her head reminded her.
Recovering from a gunshot wound and running for your life.