Untamed (13 page)

Tara let her head drop. “If I could use it during a fight to save you or anyone else, I would….but I can’t. I’d probably end up killing someone.”

Brody moved over to Tara’s chair, took the bottle from her hand, and set it on the table. “Do you remember what I told you when we were training?”

She lowered her head. “Yes.”

He crooked his finger and lifted her chin. “Your safety comes first. Everything else is replaceable.”

She opened her eyes to find him staring at her. His eyes
seemed to be pleading with her to understand when he didn’t seem to be understanding why she felt like she did.

“You aren’t.”

He tilted his head. “I’m not what?”

“Replaceable and I don’t want to fail you. I didn’t tell you because
I can’t rely on it. Not in a jam, not when you need me.”

Chapter 13

Brody was amazed that Tara
didn’t understand why he was upset. It wasn’t because she had the extra gift; it was that she’d kept it from him. Hell, he was elated to know that, if push came to shove, she could save herself. After all of this time working with her, that was what had scared him most.

“You know what scares me?”

Tara shook her head.

“Not being able to save you during a fight.” Brody couldn’t stop his lips from turning up. “Now, I won’t have to worry.”

He pressed a kiss to her lips. “I wasn’t upset about your gift; I was upset that you didn’t trust me enough to share it…even if you weren’t going to use it.”

Tara’s face softened. “I’m sorry.”

He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into his chest. “If anything happened to you, I couldn’t live with myself.” Brody chuckled. “Not that Gracie would let me live.”

He leaned back and looked down at her. “Tara, I have to know that I can trust you one hundred percent
, that you have my back…and you need to know that I have yours. That’s the only way we’re going to beat who and whatever Black throws at us. Honesty, trust, and belief in each other are all we have.”

It was then
, in that moment, that she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was one hundred percent head over heels in love with the playboy. That thought scared the hell out of her, and they had other things to deal with than her feelings; but damn, she acknowledged them just the same. It was a big step for her… one she thought she’d never take again, not after Peter.

Brody’s phone
beeped, and he glanced down at the caller ID before he answered it. “Connors.”

He nodded. “Yes
, sir, we’ll be on the tarmac in twenty minutes.”

Brody flipped his phone closed and stood, holding out his hand to Tara.
“As much as I want to carry you upstairs and hear you call out my name over and over again until your voice goes hoarse...we have to go. The General sent the plane; they need us back immediately. All of the men we arrested and were holding have escaped, and now Veronica is missing too.”

Tara nodded and placed her hand in Brody’s.
They made quick work packing and getting to the tarmac. It wasn’t until they were in the air that she started asking questions. “Do you think those men took Veronica?”

Brody rubbed his hand over his face and through his hair. “I don’t know.”

Brody’s phone rang, and he placed the call on speaker. “Speak to me.”

“
Hey, Brody, this is Jonah. We have a bigger problem than we thought.”

Tara glanced down at the phone before meeting Brody’s questioning gaze. “Jonah….where is the General?”

“I don’t know. I can’t find him. Shit…” They heard Jonah say. “Our systems are compromised. Someone is in the main frame. When you get back, meet me in the catacombs.”

The lights and alarms
in the plane started going off, and oxygen masks dropped from the overhead as they were thrown forward against the seats in front of them. “Crap.”

They could hear Jonah breathing heav
ily as though he was running before the line went dead.

Brody shoved the phone in his pocket and jostle
d down the aisle toward the cockpit, trying to defy gravity. He beat on the door. There was no answer. He tried to open it...and it wouldn’t budge.

“Tara, teleport out of here
,” Brody demanded in his don’t-screw-with-me voice over the alarms.

Clinging to the back of the seats
, she made her way to the door. “I’m not leaving you. Just use your gift and unlock the damn door.”

N
o way was she failing her partner. She dug her nails into the seat holding her in place when the door popped open. The pilot and copilots were slumped forward over the controls, sending the small plane into an angled nosedive. They were losing altitude, hurtling toward earth. She moved to the copilot as Brody went to the pilot, and they pulled each of their bodies back in their seats and away from the controls. Brody pulled on the controls as if he knew what he was doing. She watched as he tried to level off their descent and bring the plane back under control.

Brody scowled. The fine lines of his face deepened as he concentrated on the bodies
, using his gift to lift the captain and co-captain out of their chairs and gently laying them down in the aisle. He climbed into the captain’s chair and motioned for her to get in the other chair. She hurried and did what he said, strapping herself in.

He started flicking switches and messing with a bunch of stuff she’d never seen. Her heart raced in her chest. Her
fight-or-flight instinct was overwhelming, so she pinched herself and made herself stay right where she was. She wasn’t leaving him. No, that wasn’t an option.

“I told you to get out of here. Why didn’t you
listen to me?” Brody growled as he continued to work the controls.

“You’re my partner
. I’m not leaving you.”

T
he beeping noises disappeared, and the plane leveled out. “Thank God you know how to fly.”

He turned t
o her. “And what if I didn’t? Were you just going to die in the plane with me?”

Tara shrugged. “We would have figured something else out.”

Brody pulled on the headset and started talking into it. Tara took the minute’s reprieve and tried to slow her breathing. She moved out of the seat and felt the pilots’ necks. They were still breathing, just unconscious. She moved back into the chair and refastened her seatbelt. “They’re still alive, just unconscious.”

“What the hell is that smell?”
Brody scrunched his nose before turning back to the window. He scanned the area around him, sniffing as he moved. He lifted the coffee cup closest too him, flipped the top off and sniffed. His arm went up to his nose, covering it as he recapped the lid. “Something is wrong with the coffee.”

Brody replaced the coffee cup and
flipped off the autopilot switch and was again talking into his headset. Tara closed her eyes and tried to calm down. She could feel the shimmy under her skin, so she dug her nails deep into her palms and opened her eyes.

Brody was looking at her. “
Are you okay?”

She gave him two
thumbs up and a fake grin. “Just peachy. Are we going to be able to land or do we need to be thinking about other ways to get out of this mess? Because let me tell you…I’m not jumping from this plane, even if I have a parachute strapped to my back. It’s
not
happening.”

Brody chuckled. “I’ve got us cleared to land in
Monroe, the next town over, in case whoever did this to the pilots is tracking us.

“Do you think it was Veronica?”

Brody shrugged. “Not sure, but until we find answers, I’m not taking any chances.”

The rest of the ride
passed in silence; well, as silent as it could be over the loud hum of the engines. Tara struggled, pulling the pilots up into seats and strapping them in before they descended. Her stomach dropped as he maneuvered the throttle and aimed the nose at the runway. She could just make out the fire engines and ambulances off in the distance, waiting for their little jet to land. She bit her lip and thanked God she wasn’t on one of those big-ass commercial airline jets, the kind that looked heavy enough just to drop out of the sky. At least theirs was smaller. It might even be able to glide down to the runway if the engines were to fail…. Yeah, that’s what she was telling herself. Regardless as to whether any of it was true.

The plane landed without incident
if you didn’t count the bouncing motion when they touched down. It was a good thing that she didn’t have a full stomach or she wouldn’t have been able to keep her food down. Firefighters and paramedics bombarded the little plane, each doing whatever it was they did to ensure that the pilots and the plane were safe enough. Brody was talking to an officer as he glanced her way while she was trying to shoo away the paramedics. His lips were pulled in a thin line as he approached her. “The officer is going to give us a lift to rent a car so we won’t have to hike.”

Well
, if that little bit of information didn’t perk her up… She wouldn’t have hiked. Unlike her friends, who could withstand the humidity and actual exercise, she would have just shimmied to Gracie’s house and left him to hike by himself. Now that he wasn’t in life-or-death danger, leaving him to fend for himself wasn’t such a bad option.

He threw his arm around her shoulder and started pulling her to the car. “Brody, what do you think happened to the pilot
s?”

He glanced behind them
. His worried gaze taking in the scene as he bit his lip. “I’m not sure, sugar. But I think it would be wise if we hurried back to town to see what kind of information Jonah has for us. I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this.”

Tara slid into the back seat of the squad car while Brody walked around to the front passenger side. Tara laid her head back on the seat and closed her
eyes. Worry for her friends continued eating away at her gut.

A pretty blonde officer walked over to the car and got behind the wheel. She let her gaze rove up and down Brody
as though he were a piece of meat before she winked. Tara clenched her fist. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that their sex had been meaningless fun, a way to relieve some stress and possibly even come to terms with trusting each other, but that didn’t mean she had to like it when other people flirted with Brody in front of her, and the bitch was blatantly flirting.

Tara leaned forward. “He isn’
t a steak, sweetheart, and I’m afraid we’re needed elsewhere. Do you think you can ignore the fantasies you’re having of him and just drive?”

The woman’s mouth parted,
and she didn’t say a word. But the eat-shit-and-die look she gave Tara in the rearview mirror was priceless. At some point Tara would need to come to terms with what it had meant to sleep with Brody, but that point wasn’t today, not by a long shot.

Brody cleared his throat and turned around in his seat. He winked. “What my partner is trying to say is that we’re kind of in a hurry and there are lives at stake, but we appreciate your help.
”

As if that was what she meant
. If it were, she would have said it like that. Tara crossed her arms over her chest and for a brief moment thought about contradicting him. She snapped her mouth shut and turned to look out the window, ignoring both Brody and the blonde in the front seat.

Her mind turned back to
the sexcapades she’d had with the player.
Crap.
She cursed her newfound feelings. She hadn’t thought this far ahead, about what it would be like for him to flirt with another woman in front of her after they’d done the deed. She glanced up at the back of his head. Smart man. He wasn’t flirting back. Brody hadn’t even glanced back at the woman. No, his gaze was on the passing trees, just as hers had been too.

A rental car and an hour and half later
, they were back in town and had parked the car off the beaten path. She followed Brody, climbing over boulders, rocks, and fallen trees toward the base of the mountain that the compound butted up against. Had they originally picked this place because of just that fact? Had they thought that the mountain would give them some type of coverage from attacks, or was it because of the web of weaving underground tunnels they had made into a secondary base below their feet?

B
rody moved behind a big boulder, and that was when she saw it. There was a security device on the side of the mountain, seemingly identical to the one outside the compound door that used the biometrics of palm and fingerprints to allow entry. Brody held up his hand and, seconds later, a part of the mountain was sliding away, allowing them to enter. If she wouldn’t have known to look for it, she’d bet she wouldn’t have found it on her own.  

She spun around and shivered as the door slid closed behind her. Thank goodness she wasn’t claustrophobic, or this place might have creeped her out. Brody steered her down the winding tunnels and into a nice open room equipped with, not only lighting but, a computer screen on the wall and cubicles in place. Jonah was furiously pecking away at a keyboard while other guards and techs milled around, talking in hushed tones.

“Jonah,
what the hell happened?” Brody asked as he walked farther into the room. His gaze scanned the area, just as hers had.