“Montana.”
“Wade, this is Gina again.”
There was a short silence. “Twice in two days. Don’t know if I can stand the excitement,” he drawled. “Is this your cleverly disguised way of telling me you’ve changed your mind and can’t live without me?” His tone said he knew very well changing her mind was the last thing she’d ever do, but he just couldn’t help twisting the knife a little.
Nice guy.
“No,” she said crisply, striving for cheerful indifference to the nasty undercurrent. “That Forsythe guy I called you about this morning? The one for Rainie? I need you to give me his phone number.”
Another pause. “You know I can’t do that, Gina.”
“It’s important, Wade. It’s been over a day and Rainie still hasn’t come home. Or called. Or answered her cell.”
“File a missing persons report.”
“I have, but—”
“Then try letting NYPD do their job, babe.”
She ignored the dripping sarcasm. “They called me a few minutes ago asking about her. Stupid me thought they’d taken my report seriously. But instead they started implying she could be responsible for a break-in at the hospital last night. A lot of drugs were taken.”
“If they’ve got evidence, maybe she—”
“There’s no
way
Rainie had anything to do with that break-in. Please, Wade, I’m really scared. I’m afraid the CIA is trying to—”
Wade made a rude noise. “A
conspiracy
theory? Jesus, Gina, I thought you were supposed to be a fucking genius or something. Or has your obvious distaste for me colored your entire perception of federal law enf—”
“Oh, stop it and grow up!” she snapped. Then reined in her temper. “I’m sorry. I’m just so worried about Rainie. Why would she have disappeared like this?”
“Maybe she likes sex with a real man. Someone over the age of, oh, say, twenty-one. She’s probably spent the last two nights with that guy you disapprove of so much, fucking his brains out.”
Gina felt like she’d been slugged in the stomach. Tears stung her eyes. “Don’t you
dare
give me that shit, Wade Montana. I liked
fucking
you fine. It was all your goddamn male chauvinist baggage I couldn’t live with,” she said between clenched teeth.
“Oh. Yeah. Because
you
have no baggage at all,” he shot back. “Especially none of that goddamn
feminist
garbage.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and counted to ten. Twenty. Thirty. Then she opened them again and said, very, very calmly, “Give me the phone number, Wade. Give me the damn phone number
now
or I swear I’ll e-mail all your FBI buddies and tell them how much you like being tied up and spanked. And you
know
I’ll do it.”
There was another long silence. “You are such a fucking bitch,” he finally said.
“Yeah, well, you used to like that about me. The number?”
“Hold on.” A moment later he read it off to her. “And just for the record,” he said, quiet fury ringing in his voice, “
you
liked it way more than I did.” Then he slammed down the phone.
Slowly she let out the breath she’d been holding.
Okay, then.
Wasn’t
that
a barrel of laughs.
But at least she’d gotten the damn phone number.
KICK
woke up feeling like shit on a stick. If the stick had been made from glowing hot metal and shoved the long way through his bad leg and was lodged there like a spear. A glowing-hot, poison-tipped spear.
But all things considered, it could be a hell of a lot worse. A day of his life was gone. But then, so was his addiction. Well. Sort of. The cravings would still be there for a while. Okay, probably for the rest of his fucking life. But cravings Kick could handle. As long as the crippling physical need was gone. Which it was. Mostly.
A noise attracted his attention. He cracked his moist eyelids. And saw Rainie. Standing over him fussing with the sheet.
Hell. What was she still doing here? That worried him. He’d really hoped they’d let her go once they had him in their clutches. No good would come of her being anywhere close to him. He’d been down this road before and it hadn’t been pretty.
But
she
sure was. Pretty, that was.
“Hey,” he said, unreasonably glad to see her at his bedside. God, he was a selfish bastard.
“Welcome back,” she said, and gave him a genuine, if tired, smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than I have a right to be. You okay?”
She nodded. She was holding his hand. He smiled back and passed out again.
But this time he remembered his dreams. Pretty Rainie was in every one. Smiling sweetly as he shot her in the head.
HE
woke up several more times, until finally he was able to stay awake for over an hour. After changing his IV, Rainie gave him a cup of water with a straw in it, and fed him apple-sauce with a plastic spoon, and he was even able to keep it down.
“I feel like a baby,” he said. It was kind of embarrassing. Big, macho commando man.
“Your second infancy,” she teased. “Enjoy it.”
“
Hmm
. I’m fairly certain I was breastfed,” he said.
She gave him a sardonic grin. “You
are
feeling better.”
“Yeah.” He eased back on his pillow and looked up at her gratefully. And nervously. “Why are you still here?”
A shadow of unease flitted across her face. “They,
um
, persuaded me to stay.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. So goddamned predictable. “What did they threaten you with?”
She handed him a folded-up newspaper. He read the headline and cursed under his breath. “Bastards.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. They might be bastards, but Al was right. He was the bigger one for getting her involved in the first place. And he knew better. He
knew
better. “God, I’m so damned sorry I dragged you into this.”
“Me, too.” And yet, as he gazed into her tired green eyes, they softened. Her cheeks grew pink. “But the sex was really nice.”
He couldn’t believe she’d brought that up. A tingling spilled through him, his body suddenly remembering what pleasure was, rather than merely painful torture.
Nice?
“More like amazing,” he said. Was it possible she’d forgiven him for using her? “Look. Maybe . . . if I survive this thing and get back to New York, I could maybe look you up sometime?”
For a second, she looked surprised. Hell, he’d surprised himself. Since when did he make dates? Even when the sex was amazing . . .
But her deep, hesitant intake of breath as she looked deliberately down at the floor was more eloquent than words.
He held up a hand, actually shocked at the letdown he felt at her rejection. Not that he blamed her one damn bit. It wasn’t like he’d shown her a real good time. Besides, that crazy emotional disappointment he was feeling? Probably just a residual influence of the drugs. “Never mind,” he agreed. “You’re right, not a good idea.”
She gave him a bleak smile. “Different worlds” was all she said.
But that pretty much summed it up in a nutshell. She was a nurse, for crying out loud. He was . . . what he was. They came from diametrically opposed worlds, and wish as he might to dwell in hers, no sane, normal woman would ever knowingly accept the things he’d done, the person he’d become, in his. Not even for amazing sex.
In the end, it all came down to one thing.
She saved lives.
He took them.
LATE
that night, they were driven to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, and escorted out to where a huge, lumbering C-17 was being loaded with cargo bound for Cairo, Egypt. From there they’d transfer to a private transport south and over the border to the Sudan. Kick’s ticket to hell.
He was still weak and shaky, but he’d completed the whole course of the detox treatment itself. Feeling better. Almost human. Okay, maybe not
that
good, but getting there.
At the sight of the plane, he stifled a groan. So much for feeling human. He wished he had a dollar for every time he’d had to strap himself onto one of those hard-as-rock, spine-cracking cargo seats that lined the walls of the giant flying warehouses, while headed out on a mission too covert to risk flying commercial. He’d be a rich man.
Even richer than he was now. Hazardous-duty pay wasn’t bad, and he’d earned plenty of it. The numbers added up quickly when you were never home to dip into your portfolio.
Too bad he probably wouldn’t be around to enjoy his nest egg now that he’d finally found something . . . someone . . . worth spending it on.
But despite the fragile hope he’d momentarily let slip to Rainie, this Sudan mission would be a bitch to survive. Realistically, he probably wouldn’t.
Afghanistan had been bad enough, but at least that theater had been full of regular US military support. When his spec ops ZU team had been ambushed trying to take out the fanatical al Sayika leader Jallil abu Bakr, help was just a walkie-talkie hail away. That wasn’t going to be the case in the Sudan. The closest thing to friendlies he’d find there would be the wandering Bedouin, and a few refugee camps scattered around the Sahara Desert, such as the Doctors for Peace camp that his buddy Nathan Daneby had started a hundred clicks or so south of the Egyptian border.
Kick wondered if Nate was still there at the DFP camp. He doubted it. Last he’d heard, his tireless friend was helping the UN set up another field hospital somewhere down by the equator. The Sudan was a huge country—three and a half times the size of Texas—and it seemed every inch of it was being ravaged by some kind of pestilence, drought, or war. And now the virulent terrorist Jallil abu Bakr had come to add his sick agenda to the country’s burden of problems.
Kick’s mission was to rid the world of the scumbag once and for all. He’d failed last time. This time he wouldn’t fail. So help him God, he wouldn’t.
On the way to the airport, CIA weasel Jason Forsythe told Kick he would rip up his Zero Unit employment contract once and for all, if Kick completed this one last mission for them. Free at last, free at last. He could only pray Forsythe was telling the truth. But in all honesty, Kick really hadn’t needed the extra motivation.
Somewhere in the fog of unconsciousness during the past twenty-four hours, fighting to save himself from the toxic drug that had been slowly ravaging his flesh as a consequence of that last failed mission in A-stan, he had finally realized he would never be truly healed, in body or in soul, until abu Bakr was dead and buried. Like his team and his best friend, whom abu Bakr had brutally murdered. On Kick’s watch.
To get his self-respect back, to get his
life
back, he had to finish that ill-fated mission. Nothing else would help. If that meant going to the Sudan to face conditions that would test a healthy man, let alone one barely able to stand on his own, so be it.
Kick needed the closure.
No. What he really needed was . . . revenge.
THE
SUV came to a halt beside the C-17 and Kick climbed out into the New Jersey night, followed by Rainie and the lone guard that had come along with them. Apparently the ZU trusted him now. Or maybe they knew he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag at the moment.
Forsythe slid out of the front seat and waved the driver to the back of the vehicle, where he pulled out three backpacks and a couple of long duffel bags, depositing them on the tarmac. The burly guard picked up the whole lot and strode through the darkness toward the C-17.
Kick took a deep breath. This was the part he’d been dreading. Saying good-bye to Rainie. He sucked big-time at this stuff, especially when the person meant something to him. Which, maybe not so strangely, Rainie did. A lot. How had that happened so quickly? Him, the bitter war fighter, gone all soft and mushy.
He wished like hell it weren’t such a classic
Casablanca
moment.
But instead of stopping by the car and turning bravely to him with tears in her eyes, spouting on about hills of beans, she just kept walking determinedly next to Forsythe, who was clearly headed for the C-17’s rear cargo ramp.
Hello?
“Hey. Where are you going?” he called, limping after her. For some unknown reason, his pulse quickened. Instinct?
Her feet stuttered to a stop, then her shoulders squared and she started walking again. “Same place you are,” she said without turning, her voice strained.
“
What?
” Disbelief slammed through him.
Oh, no.
No, no, no. He grabbed Forsythe’s shoulder and spun him around. “Goddamn it! What the hell have you done?” he growled. “I swear I’ll—”
There was a thump, and the business end of the guard’s MP-7 appeared in front of his face. Forsythe waved the goon off. Probably not the smartest move.
Kick wrapped his hand around the CIA jerk’s throat. “She is
not
getting on that plane with us,” he ground out, too angry to care when the MP-7 reappeared.
“Calm down, Jackson,” Forsythe wheezed. “She’s only coming along to administer the final meds for your detox. Doc said you need to be monitored for seventy-two. She volunteered.”
“You’re lying.”
“She won’t be in any danger. She’ll never leave the plane.”
Kick took another calming breath, shook off the top layer of fury, and let him go. He turned to Rainie. She was so damn beautiful. But her face looked pale, her skin clammy, her red-rimmed eyes wide and dilated. As in, scared to death but trying her damndest not to show it.
That newspaper article she’d shown him. It
hadn’t
been just about the detox. He should have known.
“They’re blackmailing you into coming along, aren’t they?” he demanded.
Of all the unconscionable things they’d ever done to him, this was by far the worst. He didn’t want her anywhere
near
this mission.
Any
mission. Didn’t want to spoil the little good they’d shared together by having her find out what he really was, what he was about to do.
And they fucking well knew it.