Under Fire

At the next stoplight, Rachel reached for the door anyhow and yanked. No luck. He’d locked the doors. Of course he had.

“Damn it, Liam. This is crazy.” She pounded the door with a fist in frustration. “You can’t actually be kidnapping me.”

“I could. But I won’t need to.” He glanced over at her, his eyes intense. He slid a hand under her hair and caressed the back of her neck. “You’re a reasonable woman. You brought me into this because you were out of options. Now either you really trust me or you don’t. Which is it?”

She stared into his eyes long after the red light had gone green. But there wasn’t anyone on the road to honk or protest as they idled in the middle of the road. The strength in his gaze and gentleness of his touch worked together to remind her why she’d gone this route in the first place. As much as she hated to bring him into this mess, her mess, they were in it together now.

“I’m with you.”

He smiled. God, how he smiled in a way that creased the corners of his eyes and made her ache to kiss those crinkles. “Good. Because I would hate to have to knock you out, too.”

His words sunk in, icing the warmth in her belly.

“Too?”

He looked away and accelerated through the intersection. “You don’t need to know.”

Frustration stirred. She’d lived independently for all her adult life, and this kind of full-scale control did not sit well, even if he was trying to protect her. “If we’re in this together, how about we talk, rather than me asking questions that go unanswered. Tell me what I can know of your plan in progress.”

Steering off the highway, he drove over a narrow bridge. The moon reflected off the marshy water along the barrier island. “We’re going to see one of my team members before anyone sounds an alarm. We should have about an hour’s lead.”

Okay, that was something. Which team member would Liam choose to ask for help? She thought back to the other pararescuemen she’d met during their time in the Bahamas. The team member named Franco had been injured in the Bahamas and transferred out of the unit. So she moved on to… Cuervo, a charmer who wore marathon shirts and a smile. The guy they called Brick, because he was hardheaded but steady. Then there was Data, who’d managed to scrounge up electricity and an Internet connection before most of the specialists sent in. And an eerily quiet guy they’d simply called Bubbles…

They all seemed to have different strengths and she didn’t know any of them well enough to guess. She didn’t know any of them as well as she did Liam… a man she trusted more than anyone. She needed to keep that in mind.

“What can your team member do for us that you and the OSI couldn’t?”

“We have good toys. Sometimes we keep an extra stash of each other’s toys for cases like now when it’s more… expedient that I not return to my own house.”

“Toys?”

“Guns. IDs.”

“IDs? Plural?” She knew he was military, but different forms of identification? A little spooky.

“The kind of search and rescue extractions we’re called to do aren’t always straight-up, in-and-out kinds of deals,” he explained as if detailing an uneventful, everyday kind of career. “Sometimes we need to go deep into hostile country. It can be… well, let’s just say helpful to have a different identity.”

There it was again, in her face, how badass elite his training was and how that placed him in dangerous positions beyond what even she could imagine—and she had a pretty good idea of the risks out there, given her prior work. He could die in a mission next week and she would never know.

Stop. She forced herself to take it down a notch. Breathe. Focus on the crisis at hand.

“Okay, this may sound like a nitnoid concern, but I’m just me. So if we’re sticking together, your new identity plan has a flaw.” Could he be planning to leave her with his friends while he went off Rambo-style to find Brandon?

“I feel confident I can rustle up something that will get us by until we locate your buddy and find some answers.” He turned onto a sand and gravel roadway leading into a tropical thicket. “We won’t have to fly under the radar for long.”

“Thank goodness. I’d like to pick up my dogs by tomorrow.”

“Um, I’m thinking more like a week.” Tires crunched along the rocky road.

“A week? I work. I have a job. I have… well, I don’t have plants or a house anymore.” She slumped in her seat. “My job doesn’t mean jack if I’m dead.”

“Smart woman.”

“What about Brandon?” Did he have any clue what kind of nightmare had been unleashed from their attempts to find help? Had she made things even more dangerous for him? “The same authorities you say we have to run from are already looking for Brandon. How are we going to get to him first?”

The headlights swept across a clearing in the palm trees, revealing a tiny, secluded beach bungalow. The one-story green stucco structure was raised up on stilts and had white hurricane shutters over the windows, shielding it from the elements as well as from prying eyes.

Liam killed the headlights. “Do you seriously expect me to believe you told them the truth on where to find him?”

Goose bumps prickled up her arms. “You think I lied to the authorities?”

“I know you did.”

She didn’t bother denying the truth. She had deliberately misled the OSI regarding Brandon’s whereabouts. “Are you angry with me?”

“I will be if you lie to me from here on out.”

“Fair enough.” She owed him the truth, given all he’d done for her. “After his therapy sessions, he works out for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes he disappears for a day or two. So he leaves Harley at the same doggy day care I use.”

“Harley is his therapy dog?”

“An Australian shepherd–beagle mix.” Memories rolled over her of the day Brandon had been paired with Harley, the hope she’d felt then, how she’d allowed herself to buy into some rosy future where she fixed everyone’s problems. Where there would be no more risk. No more pain of loss.

Could she really have been that naive?

Liam unlocked the doors. “We’ll check in at the dog-sitter’s once we finish up here.”

Rachel gripped his arm, stopping him. “How would you know that I lied and they didn’t?”

His muscles flexed and bunched under her fingers, his eyes a little sad. “I didn’t know. I only suspected. Now I know.”

Turning away, he stepped out of the SUV. She clambered out to join him around front, Disco leaping out and running to the nearest squat sago palm tree to mark it. At least he opted for a tree instead of the neatly fenced-in vegetable garden.

Satisfied her dog was safe, she tore her eyes off Disco and did a quick scan of the locale, orienting herself. Marsh grass leaned in the wind blowing a briny breeze across the lawn.

Old skills fired to life. They’d driven southeast, maybe fifteen miles from base. The drive had gone quickly in the night but would undoubtedly take much longer during daytime beach traffic.

Snapping for her dog, she caught up with Liam along the slate pathway. “I wasn’t sure if they would toss Brandon in some military jail or lock him up for a psych eval. I just wanted a chance to get to him first.”

“How can you be so certain he doesn’t need to be in a hospital?” He pivoted hard to face her, bringing her up short.

She palmed his chest. Perspiration lightly dampened his T-shirt and dotted above his mouth. Her gaze sketched along the shape of his mouth as she ached to taste away the salty beads. His eyes locked with hers as he loomed a solid eight inches taller than her. Her body hummed with awareness, her pulse pounding in her ears as loudly as the waves beating against the shore.

Disco nosed her knee, reminding her where they were and what Liam had asked. “What I think about Brandon’s mental state is irrelevant right now in light of the fact we need to find him first.” She peeled her hand from his chest before she did something needy, like beg him to make this all go away. She was stronger than that and damned if she would be naive now. “After that, we can figure out the rest.”

“We’re on the same page then.” He backed away, waving toward the front door. “You met my team buddy Wade in the Bahamas, and now you’ll get to meet his wife, too. It’s best if we say as little as possible about what’s going on. I’ll clue Wade in on the pertinent details, enough to make sure there’s follow-through on solving this if something happens to us.”

Preparing for the worst? She rubbed her arms, which didn’t do a thing to ward off the goose bumps. “What should I say to them if they ask me about the situation?”

“They won’t ask.” He climbed the white wood steps leading up to the tiny landing in front of the door. “I just need to pick up my gear and we’ll hit the road before anyone knows we’ve left the base. Once they do, they’ll be looking for who we were. Not who we’re going to become.”

There it was again. That fuzzy area of gray he embraced so easily. Had she known this about him on some level even as she tried to think only of the civilian-rescue aspect, rather than the dangerous military missions? Intellectually, she understood that pararescuemen were trained in more than just saving people. She’d learned the basic history of the teams from meeting him, how they used to be called parajumpers—PJs—and that the name morphed officially to pararescuemen, even if the PJ nickname stayed in the culture.

They did far more than parachute in. They had to be prepared to fight back an assault that threatened their rescue target. She knew he was an elite warrior.

Knew that there were only about three hundred and fifty like him in the world.

Knew she should be grateful for all he was doing for her—and she was.

But oh God, what if they couldn’t pull this off?

Liam cupped her face. “Trust me.”

Trust? There was that word again. That word she hadn’t allowed herself to consider when thinking of a man in so very long. His strong, callused hands felt familiar even after the months they’d spent apart. What a time to realize the tumultuous arousal she’d felt when they kissed and when he’d woken her, well, those feelings were easy.

The other feelings churning inside her, those were tough as hell. Because, God help her, she had learned to trust again after all.

***

Inside the entryway, Liam watched Rachel follow Sunny Rocha into the homey kitchen before he turned his attention to his teammate Wade. He hated to let Rachel out of sight. But she was safe here, and the two women were both already deep in conversation about their dogs. The Rochas’ malamute-husky mix was sniffing Disco. Wade and Sunny Rocha hadn’t even questioned their showing up an hour before sunrise. Sunny had waved them inside and offered to start a pot of coffee.

For now, Liam had a window of time to get his feet steady on the ground again, arm himself properly, and put together a solid plan. Wade angled his head toward the hall and led Liam past walls packed with framed photos of Alaskan landscapes and mountains. He pushed the door open to the spare room that doubled as a man cave in the two-bedroom bungalow. Uniforms showed in the open closet, his helmet and night vision goggles on top of a file cabinet.

Wade grabbed a T-shirt off the back of the desk chair and tugged it over his head to go with the low-slung sweatpants he must have stepped into on his way to the door. “You’re cruising late tonight.”

“I’m going out of town for a couple of days.” He hated putting Rocha in this position, but as long as he guarded his words carefully, there would be nothing said that compromised any of his teammates. He was their leader, their CRO—combat rescue officer. He didn’t want any of this coming off as an order. “If people come asking about me, tell them everything. Don’t hold anything back, thinking that you’re protecting me. I’ll be fine.”