Thrill Ride (16 page)

“What do we do now?” Vanessa asked anxiously, blowing like a racehorse and glancing around Eve’s plush living room at the harried faces of the Knights.

Harried…except for Ozzie. He didn’t look the least bit harried. Quite the opposite, in fact. The big goofball was grinning like a loon, chomping on his gum to beat the band, and squeezing Rock with one arm while clutching a mean-looking machine gun with the other.

“First things first,” Boss said, running a hand through his hair. “We need to call Becky and Eve and tell them to hold back. We don’t want them blowing in here and giving those CIA pricks a reason to open fire.”

“I’m on it,” Ozzie said, releasing Rock in order to dig his cell phone from his hip pocket.

“Please, don’t do this, Boss,” Rock pleaded, briefly closing his eyes. “Just let me go. Let me—”

“I’ll let you go if you tell me you’re responsible for what happened to those men,” Boss said.

And, oh, no. Oh,
crap.

Quite unintentionally, Boss had posed the question in such a way that Rock could answer in the affirmative. If what Rock had told her, about being the reason those men were dead, was true. And, yep, right on cue…

“
Oui
,” Rock said, opening his eyes and nodding, his hard expression even more stony than usual—which probably had a lot to do with the fact that his face was covered in dust and blood. “I’m the reason they’re dead.”

Everything in the room came to a standstill.

No one moved, no one blinked, no one so much as dared to breathe. The Knights just stared at Rock, their expressions varying from absolute shock to wary disbelief. And Vanessa was about to open her mouth to refute Rock’s claim when, suddenly, in the resounding, pin-drop silence, she picked up on a gentle whirring she hadn’t realized had been nibbling on her subconscious since they’d barged into the living room.

Now, it burrowed under her skin like a chigger, driving her batty.

What
is
that?

It wasn’t the air conditioner or the clothes dryer. It wasn’t the subtle hum of the refrigerator. No…this sounded familiar. It sounded like…

She glanced around, and that’s when she saw a big blue dick taped to one picture window. She blinked, but there was no mistaking what she was seeing.

Big. Blue. Dick.

And not only that, but the other two windows in the room were equipped with a tube of lipstick. Except each tube of lipstick appeared to be vibrating.

What
in
the—

“So
now
will you let me go,
mon
ami
?” Rock asked, his tone tinged with desperation as he stared at Boss’s ravaged expression, which dragged Vanessa’s attention away from the plastic cock and oscillating lipsticks and back to the crisis at hand.

“Bullshit, Rock!” she spat, clenching her hands into fists in order to keep from grabbing him so she could shake some sense into him. “You told me yourself you weren’t the one to pull the trigger.”

And boy, oh boy! If she’d thought the look he shot her when he’d been in the back of that pickup truck was enough to boil her blood, it was nothing compared to this one. Because she’d take the fire of hatred any day—after all, Rock had once told her that love and hate were two horns on the same steer—over this ice cold derision.

Was it just her? Or did the temperature in the room drop twenty degrees?

“It doesn’t matter!” he hissed through clenched teeth, frosty daggers shooting from his eyes, his tone glacial.

“Of course it does,” Boss asserted at the same time Ozzie said, “Uh, yeah, dude. It kinda does.”

“
We
have
you
surrounded!
” That deep voice sounded over the loudspeaker once again, and Vanessa was astonished to see Ghost—the man whose face was usually fixed in unreadable lines—actually roll his eyes.

“Are they kiddin’?” he asked, shaking his head. “There are, what? Six guys in that van at the most, and they think they’ve got us surrounded?”

“They’re CIA,” Steady replied completely deadpan. “Full of their own pomp and circumstance. If there were only two of them, they’d think that was enough to do us in.”

“But that won’t be the case for long,” Boss added. “They’ve got to be calling in backup, so what’s our plan? Any ideas?”

“Boss,” Rock said, then implored, “
Frank
.” And, oh, hell no. Nobody called the big man by his Christian name save for Becky and his sister. Vanessa turned to the Black Knights’ leader and, yep, sure enough. The muscle in Boss’s square jaw ticked out a hard rhythm, and there was actual fear in his eyes. Fear that Rock might say something to change his mind. “You have to let me go,
mon
frere
. It’s the only way to keep everyone alive.”

And
that
would be the something…

She held her breath as she watched Boss consider Rock’s statement, then the big man shook his head “I…I refuse to believe that.”

That’s what he
said
, but Vanessa wondered if Rock could hear the uncertainty in Boss’s tone. To her, it was as clear as a struck bell.

“It’s true,” Rock whispered, stepping forward to lay a hand on Boss’s big shoulder, nodding in that way a person does when they’re trying to convince someone to agree with them and,
yes,
obviously he
had
picked up on Boss’s kernel of doubt.

“Rock—” Boss began, but he was cut off by Ozzie swearing loudly.

“What the hell is the fucking matter with you?” Steady asked the question they were all thinking.

“Cell phone jammer,” Ozzie said, looking ready to throw his phone on the ground and stomp it to smithereens. Of course, with his love of technology, he only glared at the offending piece of equipment like it had personally betrayed him, before shoving it back in his pocket. “So what now? How do we keep Eve and Becky hell and gone from here?”

And, suddenly, all eyes turned to Vanessa.

A deep foreboding throbbed in her chest before deciding to make like a Canadian goose and migrate south to the pit of her stomach.

“What? What am I supposed to—”

“You need to go out there and keep them away from the house,” Boss said, and she was shaking her head even before he finished. “Those spooks wouldn’t dare shoot an unarmed woman.”

“No way. I’m not tucking tail and running.” At this, she turned to Rock, stuck out her chin, and glared. He might hate her guts, but she loved him and she damned sure wasn’t going to leave him right when the CIA was poised to blow him and everyone with him to Kingdom Come—wherever
that
was.

“Go, Vanessa,” Rock nodded, and…was she imagining it? Or did something in his eyes soften, just for an instant.

She decided to pretend that was the case even if it wasn’t, and she stepped forward, placing a tentative hand on his arm. His lean muscles bunched beneath her fingers, reminding her of how hard he’d been against her, how knowledgeable he’d been when giving her pleasure. Reminding her of…too much. “No,” she whispered. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” he hissed. His jaw was clenching so hard, she marveled he could speak at all. And, yessir, she obviously
had
been imagining that softening of his eyes. “You’ve doomed us, so the least you can do now is go save Becky and Eve.”

She flinched like he’d hit her, but, in truth, his words—and specifically his hard, cutting tone—felt more like a knife, slicing her to the bone.

Ozzie frowned at Rock, “Hey, that’s not fair. She only—”

“Save it, Ozzie,” she interrupted, stepping back and shaking her head, a deep sadness pervading her body and weighing down her limbs. “He might be right.”

In Black Knights vernacular, she might’ve fucked them all. Her love for Rock, her desire to have him back with her, back with the Knights, might’ve blinded her. Kept her from seeing what was really the right move. Which was probably leaving him the hell alone to try to figure out and clean up this mess by himself.

Rock was nothing if not capable of dealing with his own problems. But despite what he’d told her time and again out in that jungle and on the long ride to San Jose, she thought she’d known better. She thought she’d known what was best.

What an asshole she’d turned out to be…

“But—” Ozzie tried again.

“No buts. If I need to go out in order to keep Becky and Eve from barging in here and making the situation worse…” If it was possible to make this situation worse, considering her decision to betray Rock had backfired so fantastically that he was now cornered by the same group of people he’d managed to elude for the last six months. And, oh yeah. She’d simultaneously managed to put all the Knights in the middle of the CIA’s crosshairs, too. “…Then that’s what I’ll do.”

And even though it took everything she had to turn away from Rock, even though her instinct was to throw her arms around his neck and tell him exactly what she was feeling, she knew he wouldn’t welcome the gesture, nor would he want to hear her words. So, with a deep, fortifying breath, she started to march out of the living room only to be stopped by a callused palm on her forearm.

For one brief moment, her heart sprouted feathers and soared. Did Rock…?

But, no. It was only Boss.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said, his expression solemn, that kernel of doubt still in his eyes.

“Yeah,” she swallowed, amazed to discover she was about to completely blow her cover as a hard-assed operator—
again—
and burst into tears. But she sucked it up. Literally. She made a snorting sound as she raked in another breath. “You have to know he’s not telling us everything, right?” she whispered lowly, keeping the conversation private. “He wouldn’t have played even a tiny part in killing innocent people. He…he just
wouldn’t
have.”

“Hell, I know that,” Boss grumbled quietly. “But as right as you are about that,
he
might be right in that the only way out of this thing now is to give him up.”

Oh, geez. Just the thought of what the CIA would do to him if they got their hands on him…

The walk to the front door was the longest she’d ever taken, especially since each step took her further and further away from the only man she’d ever loved. But when they finally reached their destination, Boss didn’t give her a moment to second-guess herself. He opened the door the barest inch, shouting out, “I’ve got a woman exiting! Don’t shoot!”

“Affirmative!” That loud voice echoed over the speaker and down the side of the mountain in the opposite direction, an effective death knell to the part she was going to play in the rest of this operation.

But just before she squeezed through the door, hands up, palms out, she heard Steady yell to Boss the four most fantastic words ever spoken in the history of the world…

“I’ve got a plan!”

***

Rock stood by the front door to Eve’s vacation home, listening to the eerie sound of those black Chinooks muttering overhead, aware of the fact that the original six CIA agents had now ballooned to over twenty, and trying to guess what the odds of this thing actually working might be.

Because Steady’s big plan?

His death. Pure and simple. Richard “Rock” Babineaux needed to die.

And with his head aching like a rotten tooth and the room spinning ever so slowly due to the fact that he was a pint and a half low on blood, he figured he was pretty close to accomplishing that goal.

“Two to one,” Ozzie said from beside him. Because in all the years they’d worked together, the two of them had made a game of weighing the odds.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a game.

And he was starting to get that feeling…

The one that told him things could go really wrong, really quickly. And he absolutely hated that feeling. Especially since he’d left Vanessa with the impression that this was going to be all her fault.

He hadn’t wanted to be so hard on her, but he’d needed her out of the house. Safe. And the quickest way he’d known to accomplish that feat was to blame her for their current predicament and guilt her into leaving.

Of course if this thing went sideways, those were going to be the last words she ever heard out of him and…

Sweet
Lord
almighty!

When she saw him go down, she was going to flat-out lose her shit—all the women were—and he hated that. He hated knowing she was going to think, just for a little while, that his death was on her. Because, yes, she’d betrayed him, and by God he may feel like holding her down so he could wring her neck, but he in no way wanted her to suffer under the impression that—

“Naw,” Steady scoffed, interrupting his thoughts. “It’s way better than that. I’d say it’s closer to fifty-fifty.”

Way better?

Steady considered it
way
better that he only gave this thing—
his
plan—a fifty-fifty shot of working?

Rock closed his eyes and girded his loins to do…well…what he was about to do. Because the truth of the matter was, they’d run out of options. So when Steady had piped up with, “You need to die, Rock,” before laying out a plan to make that happen, on
their
terms, they’d decided to give it a go.

But now that he was here, about twenty seconds away from opening that door and stepping into the abyss, he was beginning to regret his decision to go along with this harebrained scheme. Of course, that probably had a lot to do with the fact that, besides there being twenty-plus agents stationed outside with direct orders to shoot him dead if he put up any kind of resistance, he had three small capfuls of plastic explosives taped to his chest.

That’s right.

Plastic explosives. Taped. To. His. Chest.

Mon
dieu
, he could only pray Wild Bill was on top of his game with those charges—way the hell at the very pinnacle of his game, in fact. Because when dealing with explosives of any kind, especially C4, you didn’t just check your work once—you checked it three times. And, by God, you better never let your attention wander while handling them or you might wind up missing a few digits at best, a few lifetimes at worst. And if Bill hadn’t calculated those percentages just right…