Taken by Surprise (19 page)

Chapter Ten

Michael carried Rhonda's scent with him into the main room of the safe house. He stayed with her long after she drifted to sleep. He stood by the bed, mesmerized by her, longing to lie with her, knowing he couldn't. A bright sliver of sunlight cut through the tattered window covering and finally got him moving. He hadn't heard his text message indicator go off, nor did he feel the phone vibrate in his front pocket where Rhonda had stowed it before she sank to her knees and…

That's not something you need to think about now, Cosmos
.

He forced the remembered feel of her wicked lips on his cock from his thoughts. He wrestled back the memory of the sweet suckling sounds she made as she sucked his length as far down her throat as she could manage. His dick refused to forget the life-altering moment. If he'd allowed her to finish the knee-weakening blowjob, they would be carrying him out of here in a straightjacket headed on an express chopper ride for the funny farm.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, glanced at the blank screen, and met Stone's all-too-freaking-knowing gaze. The agent hadn't sent a text message, because he knew good and damned well what had transpired in that room. If not exactly, then the gleam in the agent's eyes told Michael his extended delay had given the agent, hell, likely the room at large, a good idea.

"I was just about to call you in here," Stone told him from his continued perch on the upturned crate at the rickety table.

Michael wondered if the agent had bothered to move at all since he'd left the room. Had he heard the soft gasps of pleasure Rhonda made before Michael could cover them with kisses?

"Is Rhonda okay?" Ace asked from his place in the folding chair on the far side of the room. "Do I need to put some more ointment on her feet, replace the bandages?"

Christ. Michael hadn't even thought of that. He'd made her stand the whole time on feet that he knew suffered scrapes and bruises and never once considered they might need doctoring. He never once thought to even let her sit down!

"She's sleeping." Anger at himself made him snap at the SEAL. He made sure to temper his next words as he moved to a place along the wall where he could see everyone. Adrenaline and a rock-hard cock prevented him from sitting down right now. If the men filling the room noticed his perilous state, he couldn't do much about it. "I'll check on her feet when she wakes. If she needs more of the ointment and bandages, I'll get them from you."

Michael saw his statement hit its intended mark with the medic SEAL. He didn't want anyone else's hands on Rhonda. He'd already watched Ace touch her enough to lure his green envy monster out of its cave. When in the hell had he become such a jealous bastard?

"Veng Kim Phay is still at large, gentlemen." Lieutenant Commander Korbin Ziegler's declaration fell over the room like a heavy blanket, putting an end to anything except the problem they gathered to discuss. "I don't know about all of you, but I'm getting tired of trying to take this bastard out only to have him get away again. Now, I say we put our heads, various skills, and training together and come up with a plan to neutralize this fucker so we can all go on with our lives."

"It should've been done two nights ago," DEA agent Trace Braxton muttered from where he stood, leaning against the chipped Formica countertop in the kitchen area of the room. His gaze met Michael's. "We lost a good man in that fight, nearly lost the best leader our agency has seen in decades, and ain't got shit to show for it."

"We weren't the only ones to lose someone the other night, Braxton," Michael reminded his field agent. "I agree the operation turned out to be a clusterfuck."

"We all got left behind. We let it all slip away." The softly sung Slipknot lyrics drew the room's attention.

"You got something to say, Cabelly?" Stone asked the SEAL with a lifted brow and a hard expression.

Cabelly, the SEAL with a song for everything, put his hands flat on the back of the folding chair he straddled and didn't hesitate. "I'm just saying the op might not have been such a goat fuck if you guys hadn't left us behind. Phay slipped away again. We might have got him this time if you guys had waited for us to go in with you."

"If you guys had taken the bastard out four years ago when you were supposed to, there wouldn't be a need for any of us to be here now," FBI Agent Marcus Kell said hotly.

"We'd easily have taken him out four years ago if somebody hadn't tipped him off first." Navy SEAL Chase Spazetty fired his two cents into the heated conversation.

"Sure seemed like he knew we were coming the other night," Braxton said, sounding more thoughtful than angry.

"Probably because he got tipped off again," Spaz insisted. "Out of all of us, the feds are the ones with a man on the inside. Who is to stay he hasn't gone rogue, set us all up?"

Michael saw the movement out of the corner of his eye in just enough time to react as Kell launched himself from his position against the wall toward the Navy SEAL across the room. Michael caught the FBI agent, locking the larger man's arms behind his back as Michael, with Braxton's help, wrestled him to the corner farthest from the SEAL. Across the room, Ace put Spazetty in a stronghold, proving himself a worthy warrior despite his much smaller stature.

"That's enough." Stone's sharp baritone sliced through the friction in the room. "Kell, stand down."

"That goes for my guys, too," Ziegler ordered in a commander's voice that brooked no argument. "Spazetty, zip it, or you'll find yourself replaced for the remainder of the op and on report. Cabelly, you bust out with any more songs, and I'll disable your vocal cords."

"Yes, sir," the SEALs responded in turn.

"I guess it's true what they say about putting too much testosterone in one place." Rhonda's distinctly female voice hit the room like a cannon.

Michael whipped his head around, finding her standing in the doorway of the hall, and swallowed a curse. She looked sexily rumpled, strands of her blonde hair escaping the band she had used to tie it back, eyes slightly bloodshot from exhaustion, clothes wrinkled from her too-short nap. He leveled a questioning look at Kell. When the agent held up both hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender, Michael slowly let the man go and turned fully toward Rhonda.

"You should be sleeping."

"That's kind of hard to do when a bunch of muscle-bound agents and sailors are about to go head-to-head in the next room." She didn't join them in the room, but leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, folded her arms beneath her breasts.

Her stance drew Michael's gaze down. His mouth watered at the sight of her hardened nipples poking at the material of her T-shirt. His earlier discovery that she'd put on the borrowed clothing sans undergarments didn't help to calm the adrenaline surging through his system. A hotheaded confrontation coupled with the sexual overload still pumping furiously through his veins put him teetering on the edge of a control explosion.

"We didn't mean to wake you, ma'am," Ziegler said apologetically when Michael didn't respond.

Rhonda's gaze scanned the room, pausing on the lieutenant commander briefly before settling on Ace. Apparently, she'd found a friend in the medic SEAL. The green jealousy monster beat his head against the inner walls of Michael's skull.

"Do you happen to have a pair of support hose I can borrow, too?" Before the SEAL could answer her absurd question, she rushed on, no doubt saving him from years of ragging by his team buddies. "Because the next one of you guys to hit me with the 'ma'am' bomb is going to find himself with a support hose noose around his neck. I'm well aware I'm the only female here. Let's not rub it in, gentlemen."

Snickers and a few muttered apologies followed her statement. The men settled, returning to the places they'd occupied before the tempers started to fly.

The meaningful look Michael exchanged with Stone and Ziegler propelled him forward. Rhonda's next words stopped him in his tracks.

"Don't bother showing me the way back to the bedroom unless you intend on staying there with me for the rest of the day."

Christ, did she really just say that in front of his men, the FBI, and a team of freaking SEALs? Michael had to summon every ounce of his training not to show the effect that offer had on him. And it was an offer. The desire swirling with the promise in her eyes made no mistaking that. If he walked with her right now back to that room, she would be back on her knees so fast it would make his head spin. And that would just be the start of the intensely mind-blowing things she would do to him. Before the day ended, they would explore every avenue etched in the map they had uncovered back in the forest and just a couple of hours ago in that very bedroom.

She knew she'd stumped him. The vixen. Her wicked lips even twitched in amusement.

"That's not possible right now." Somehow Michael managed to sound nonplussed.

"Then I'll stay right here, if it's all the same to you," she told him sweetly.

Too sweetly. Michael studied her, taking in her nonchalant stance, the easy, if not thoroughly entertained, gleam in her eyes, and waited for the proverbial shoe to drop. He glanced at both Stone and Ziegler. As the other two leaders in the room, they had as much say in whether she stayed or went as Michael did. Stone shrugged, and Ziegler disguised a chuckle behind cough.

Michael raked a hand through his hair and accepted the defeat. "I don't want to get the shit flying again, but Spazetty might be onto something," he said to the room at large, getting back down to business. "What if someone tipped off Phay? Dregs and I were already inside the compound and headed out with Rhonda when the bullets started to fly. I don't know exactly what happened out there, but according to plans, we should've still had a good fifteen minutes or more to get to safe ground."

"They knew we were there." Kell spoke up, much calmer now than he'd been moments ago. "It seemed like the whole damned cartel opened fire on us at once, knew our precise locations, our next move, every fucking thing."

"Someone with the foreign forces?" Braxton suggested. "The Royal Thai and Royal Cambodian operatives were the ones who refused to wait for the SEALs assistance to go in."

All the men in the room seem to consider the possibility, knowing it would be all too easy for Phay to infiltrate the local military, to secure informants within the midst.

"This is their turf, boys," Stone reminded them. "We can't do anything without their approval. What we can do is watch our backs, especially if we suspect a traitor." He paused, getting to his feet, no doubt to put himself on eye level with the men in the room when he stated in a matter-of-fact tone, "If there is a traitor, I can assure you it is not my man."

"No way," Kell agreed. "McIntyre would die before he'd go rogue."

Michael shot a glance at Rhonda, saw her stiffen at the name. As he watched her, a slide show of horrors moved through her expression in super fast-forward, memories of the things she saw Phay's men do to McIntyre, of the man's screams as he endured the pain. She firmly believed the agent was already dead in his efforts to protect his agency and country. Michael saw her jaw working, knew she was biting her tongue to keep from saying exactly that.

"I hate to be the party pooper here, sirs, but shouldn't our first concern be on finding the bastard again?" Ace asked. "He went underground for years last time."

"Lieutenant McCormick is right," Ziegler said. "Phay's likely to go into hiding again if he hasn't done so already. Hell, it apparently worked for him last time. He kept out of sight, ran his organization under the radar, and expanded not only his drug trade, but started dipping into weapons trafficking."

"When you reap success like that below the surface, why risk coming topside?" Cabelly wondered aloud.

"Arrogance," Rhonda supplied. "Revenge. To make an example of the US government agencies and the Navy. He won't go into hiding again. If Veng Kim Phay is furious with himself about anything, it's going underground the first time instead of putting up a fight. He thinks he's invincible." She shifted her attention to Ziegler, speaking to him directly. "When you guys sent him scrambling the first time, the organization wasn't solely his. He'd been in charge for three years, but he was still battling against the control his father wielded. Phay changed the rules in the cartel, took it back to the old-school ways before his father made so many changes. Old-school kingpins didn't run from threats, at least not in Phay's mind. They conquered them."

"How do you know all of this?" Ziegler asked her slowly.

The smile that unfolded on Rhonda's lips chilled Michael's blood in his veins. "I spent a lot of time with Veng Kim Phay while he held me hostage. We shared," she paused, swallowed visibly, "a lot of conversations."

The silence that fell over the men in the room felt heavy enough to slice with a knife. Michael knew every man there had to be thinking the same thing he did. What else had Veng Kim Phay shared with her?

She'd told him the fucker hadn't raped her. Michael found a zip of comfort in remembering that. He found a miniscule more in recollecting the tightness of her pussy when he thrust his tongue inside her sodden channel, when he probed the inside of her flaming core with his fingers. A woman who had been raped, manhandled the way Phay was known for treating women wouldn't have been so tight. She wouldn't have been so responsive to Michael's touch.

"I think he planned to keep me." Rhonda's gaze skittered away from the lieutenant commander's, falling to the floor rather than meeting another in the room.

Michael couldn't breathe as he waited for her to go on. He hoped no one would interrupt her. She needed to talk about it even if it meant postponing their strategizing for a few precious moments. Thankfully everyone in the room seemed to recognize it, too, because no one said a word.

"He took me around the compound, showed me things that I don't think he would've let a person see if he intended to someday let them go. Of course, maybe he simply knew he would kill me one day so it wouldn't matter anyway." She gave a humorless laugh at that, but then it faded. Her forehead wrinkled as she shook her head. "It didn't feel that way, though. It felt more like he wanted to, gods, to be my boyfriend or something." She lifted her head, and her gaze slammed into Michael's. "I'd rather be a slave to Jabba the Hutt."