Blue Forever (Men in Uniform) (12 page)

“Kip, I . . .”

At her expression of misery, his face fell, along with his hand. The stone wall was back.

“Or not,” he said, his voice rife with irony. After a moment he lifted her chin with his fingers, leaned in, and gave her a hard kiss. The tender lover of last night was gone. “It’s been good, princess. Take care of yourself.”

With that, he turned on his boot heel and strode away. Leaving her with an aching heart and an overwhelming urge to run after him and tell him, “Yes! I’ll be your sometimes lover! If only you promise not to break my heart . . .”

Too late
.

Somehow, she held herself back.

She straightened her spine and forced herself to turn and walk toward the Hilton without a backward glance. She got as far as the hotel pool without breaking down, but once safely there, she collapsed into a deck chair, battling back the overwhelming emotions. Eyes shut, she breathed deeply, collecting herself for several minutes before she could get her legs to carry her into the hotel lobby.

She walked in slowly, and saw her boss right away. Roger Achity was pacing back and forth in front of the concierge desk.

She could do this
. It was what Kip wanted. She’d be safe now.

She straightened her spine and waved to Roger, and he halted, waving back in relief, bee-lining it in her direction.

He’d only taken a few steps when a tall man approached him from one side, grasped his arm, and jerked him to a stop. He held something to his ribs. Something long and black, like a—

What the
—

Her steps faltered.
Oh, God
. That was a
gun
!

She had to get out of there!

She spun, and started to run. And ran smack into an even bigger man. He was older, with a kindly face and long, silver hair. But he had a gun, too, covered by a beach towel draped over his arm. He pointed the pistol at her chest. “Don’t,” he said.

A blond woman appeared at her side, took her arm, and greeted her as though they were old friends, steering her off toward the outside exit.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said softly, “but you’ll need to come with us. And do not even
think
of trying to get away.”

19

God.
Damn.
It.

He should
not
have let her go in alone.

Kip had smelled a rat the whole time they were walking up the beach to the Hilton. Something hadn’t felt right. It was too calm. The drop-off had seemed too easy. He was a wanted man, a foreigner with every law enforcement official in China hunting him; he would have expected some kind of checkpoints set up in the tourist areas. But there’d been no sign of troops.

He’d been so dismayed by DeAnne’s refusal to see him again that he’d not paid enough attention to his instincts.

And now three armed tangos had kidnapped her right from under that idiot Achity’s nose.

Where the hell was that protective security detail he’d asked for?

God
fucking
damn it.

Kip didn’t stop to think about what he was doing. The second he realized what was happening, he launched himself out of his hiding place behind the pool cabana, reaching for the weapon tucked in his shoulder holster.

A half bottle of wine had never taken the edge off his reflexes before. But apparently that, combined with the terror coursing through his heart at seeing the woman he loved being threatened, must have paralyzed every one of his instincts for a few precious seconds.

Before he could take even one step, he felt the iron grip of two hands clamp onto his arms. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice drawled, and the prick of a hypodermic needle touched his neck. It didn’t penetrate, but it had the desired effect. He froze in his tracks. He was instantly relieved of his weapon.

He tried to jerk in the opposite direction and twist free, but it was no use. His reaction came too late. These guys were gorillas, and that needle had him breaking out in a cold sweat. Besides, the last thing he wanted was to start a fight, drawing the Chinese security police.

Frying pan or fire?

He could see Roger Achity standing inside the lobby, watching in horror as DeAnne was led away by an amazon in a slick pantomime of friendliness, powerless to help her because his own captor kept him firmly in place.

So, Achity wasn’t part of this?

“Who the fuck
are
you?” Kip growled, weighing the odds of getting shot full of tranqs if he tried one of his more lethal moves to escape their hold. He could probably do it. The only question was the consequences, and who would suffer them.

“Don’t even think about it,” the other guy said, reading his mind. “We don’t want to hurt her.”

They started weaving him back through the crowded pool area, laughing, talking loud, pretending to be a rowdy trio of drunken tourists.

“Let her go,” Kip bit out. “She’s got nothing to do with any of this.”

“I don’t think so,” came the deceptively lazy answer. Deceptive, because he could hear the steel beneath the words. Not to mention feel it in his arms. The guy was a blond Rambo type, short hair, bulging muscles, military commando written all over him.

Shit
.

“Come along now, nice and easy, and no one gets hurt.”

Was he kidding? “What is this,” Kip asked with a snort, “a bad spaghetti western?”

Nevertheless, he went along with them nice and easy, mainly because he could see DeAnne being ushered his way, her eyes huge and filled with fear. The female kidnapper had an arm around her, best friends, a weapon digging into DeAnne’s side. The old guy trailing them had one, too.

Fury streaked through Kip’s whole body. “If you’ve hurt her, I’ll—”

“Are you that blind?” his second captor said, voice calm and sardonic. “Her fear is for you, bro.”

Kip turned his head to scowl at him. Tall and broad-shouldered like a swimmer, the man was young, still in his twenties. But his eyes were as old as Kip had ever seen. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The kid just smiled, those ancient eyes seeing straight through him. Which made Kip so angry he tried again to jerk away from the two assholes, which just landed him with both arms yanked high up his back and excruciating pain searing through them.

DeAnne gave a small cry of dismay, which razored straight through his heart.

“I
said
nice and easy,” the first guy drawled, casually showing him the hypodermic.

Kip gritted his teeth. He was getting really sick of that obnoxious Southern accent. “Lighten the fuck up,” he ground out. “You’ve got me, okay?”

They were walking past the pool area now, heading with surprising speed toward the parking lot at the side of the hotel.

“Be good,” the young guy said, and at some unseen signal they both let Kip’s arms down a few inches. “We’re on your side, Major. Just gotta put on a good show for the natives.”

With a surprised glance, Kip scanned their surroundings. Sure enough, a pair of uniformed PLA muscle stood just outside the parking lot, watching their progress.
Shit
. He ducked his head and decided it was best to play along for the moment. At least these guys spoke the right language.

God knew what he was getting himself into, but it had to be better than a Chinese prison.

DeAnne’s trio joined them at the perimeter of the parking lot. She looked frantic, her cheeks flushed, her pretty blue eyes rimmed with red. “Oh, Kip, I’m so sorry. I never meant—”

“Hush, princess. I know. It’ll be all right. Please don’t cry.”

To his surprise, the gorillas pushed him to her side. Then they encircled the two of them in a moving formation that to anyone else would just look like a bunch of inebriated friends having a good time.

She clutched his waist, trembling, and Rambo actually let one of his arms go so he could put it around her and hold her close.

“Who are you people?” he demanded quietly. He was starting to think—
hope?
—maybe he’d misjudged the situation. “Where are you taking us?”

“We’re the good guys,” the Southerner returned. “And we’re getting you the hell out of here. So shut the fuck up and let us do our job.”

A white panel van pulled up with a squeal of brakes and the side door slid open with a bang. A tall, rangy man with a black ponytail and the features of a Native American hopped out and held it open for them.

He took one look at DeAnne and his serious expression melted away.

She looked back at the man and let out a loud gasp. “My God.
Clint?
”

A huge grin broke over the guy’s face. “Hello, DeAnne. I thought it might be you.”

20

Wait
.

For a moment, Kip just stood there, dumbfounded.
What was going on?

He wasn’t the only one. The rest of his captors looked equally taken aback. Everyone except DeAnne and the man she’d called Clint.

Before Kip could tighten his arm around her, she threw herself into the other man’s embrace and he swung her around in a big hug, both of them laughing and talking over each other.

Kip folded his arms and glared. “You
know
this guy?” he demanded, confusion battling with a totally irrational desire to pound the man into the pavement.

“Oh, Kip!” she said, her entire face lit up with surprised joy. She stood grinning and hugging the other man, his arm wrapped around her shoulder. “This is Lieutenant Commander Clint Walker. He—”

“Not anymore,” Walker interrupted. “Don’t forget, I’m a civilian now.”

“Whatever.” She waved him off with a smile. “Clint was—I helped him—” Her mouth opened and shut a couple of times, then her eyes clouded with consternation. “Oh, dear. I’m not really supposed to talk about that, am I?”

Kip narrowed his eyes. “Talk about what?”

“But I can,” Clint said, giving her a much-too-affectionate look. “DeAnne helped get me out of a real jam last year. My wife’s ship was hijacked by pirates. Well, a Chinese PLA assassination squad, actually. Needless to say, I was their target. DeAnne negotiated with the Chinese government to call them off. She did a great job, as you can see. I’m still alive.”

By now, everyone’s jaws had dropped almost to the pavement. Including Kip’s. But he’d fastened on to two words that managed to wipe the red haze from his vision.

My wife
.

Relief twisted through him like a tornado. He didn’t know what he would have done if he’d had to watch her with some old—

No. He wasn’t going there.

Besides, she didn’t want Kip. Didn’t want to go on seeing him. She’d as good as said so less than fifteen minutes ago. He
shouldn’t
care.

He eased out the breath he’d been holding and let himself be crammed into the corner of the third-row bench seat in the patiently idling panel van. DeAnne climbed in after him, followed by Clint Walker, joining them in the back row.

“Where are you taking us?” Kip asked no one in particular as the van pulled out of the hotel parking lot.

“The harbor,” Walker said, then DeAnne asked him about his wife, and he said she was pregnant, and DeAnne exclaimed and hugged him again, and that’s when Kip tuned them out.

Weddings and babies. The thought made him shudder.

He did a quick assessment of the others in the van.
Captors or rescuers?
Despite DeAnne’s relationship with one of them, Kip still wasn’t completely convinced.

There were six operators. Walker sat on the far side of DeAnne. Occupying the middle bench seat were Rambo, who seemed to be the team leader, the amazon, and the young guy with the eyes that had seen too much—who also looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. The older guy with the ponytail was the front passenger, and the driver was a somber, silent man who hadn’t been part of the kidnapping.
Getaway driver
. Even with his geeky glasses and pasty complexion, Kip would definitely not want to meet that one in a dark alley.

When they were on the road, the woman reached into a cooler and tossed drinks all around. She looked at him and DeAnne. “We’ve got Coke, Fanta, or water.”

Grateful, he took a bottle of water. He had to admit, this was about as far as it got from what he’d expected when he felt that first prick of a tranq needle against his carotid artery.

He wondered if Jake had somehow sent this crew to rescue them. It was obvious this was some flavor of spec ops team. They might look like misfits, but everything they did was coordinated and on point.

But why the kidnapping ruse?

Or was this friendly hospitality the ruse?

“Thanks,” he said, cracking the cap of his water after surreptitiously inspecting it for tampering. “But will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?”

DeAnne and Walker looked up from their conversation.

There was a long moment of silence in the van, broken only by the crunch of the vehicle’s tires on the uneven pavement.

“Fair enough,” Rambo said, and everyone turned to him. “You’ve already met Walker. I’m Commander Bobby Lee Quinn.” He touched the woman’s shoulder. “This is Darcy Zimmerman, and that’s Alex Zane.” He tossed a thumb over his shoulder at the younger man, then pointed to the front of the van. “Up front we have Master Chief Rufus Edwards, retired”—the old guy saluted him—“and our esteemed driver is Rand Jaeger.”

“Okay,” Kip said. “And?”

Quinn said, “Ever heard of a PMC called STORM Corps?”

Kip nodded. Working intelligence behind the lines, he’d run across most of the private military companies whose specialty was recovering hostages and defending assets in war-torn regions of the world. There weren’t many of them. STORM—Strategic Technical Operations and Rescue Missions Corporation, if he wasn’t mistaken—was one of the best-known, with an excellent reputation for getting the job done right, with minimum fallout.

He opened his mouth to probe further, but DeAnne beat him to it. She sat up, nearly dropping the Coke bottle the woman, Darcy, had handed her. “You’re from STORM? The outfit that rescued those three kids from the terrorist camp in Indonesia?” Her eyes darted to Walker.

He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I was just brought on two days ago.”

Darcy smiled at Quinn as if remembering the op, then nodded at DeAnne. “Yeah. That was us. A good outcome.”

“I’ll say,” DeAnne said, her expression morphing from hesitancy to admiration. “You really are the good guys.”

He shouldn’t be too surprised that a State Department official knew about PMCs. No doubt State often had to deal with private companies hired by families horning into cases involving everything from kidnapped American businessmen to foreign-born parents taking children out of the U.S. without proper custody. The Indonesian incident, for instance, had been all over the news . . . though STORM hadn’t been mentioned by the media, apparently preferring to remain under the radar. The State Department had taken all the public credit for that rescue.

“So you’re all with STORM?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Quinn answered without hesitation. “Except Walker and the master chief. They’re on loan.”

Kip looked around at the six operators, something still niggling at him. What exactly was the agenda here?

“Who sent you to help us?” he asked, cutting to the chase.

Every one of the six shifted slightly in their seat.

Ah, hell
. And just like that, the rescuers turned back into captors. “You weren’t sent to help us.” He should have fucking known.

The master chief cleared his throat. “Truth is, we were sent to neutralize you.”

“Neutralize?” DeAnne squeaked. Fear crept back across her face.

Walker patted her hand. “Don’t worry. That doesn’t mean we’re supposed to shoot you.”

Kip wanted to rip the guy’s hand off. He had to physically restrain himself from putting a proprietary arm around her, pulling her away from the jerk, and telling him to back the hell off his woman.

Except, of course, she wasn’t his woman.

“That would be a waste of a perfectly good Marine,” Quinn drawled, and flashed a smile at DeAnne. “And a pretty lady.”

That earned Quinn an elbow in the ribs from Darcy.
Good
. Kip decided he liked her.

“Sent by whom?” he pressed.

“Sorry. That’s privileged information,” Quinn said.

DeAnne frowned, and Kip muttered, “Give me a fucking break.”

“Goddamn navy, that’s who,” Alex Zane piped up, a large dose of bitterness coloring his tone.

The navy.

Kip was shocked.
Shocked
.

Jake had said Kip had been sent in as a decoy, never intended to complete his mission to photograph the prototype of the new Chinese AUV being tested at Yulin Submarine Base. The whole ridiculous decoy plan had clearly turned into one big political clusterfuck, so it made sense they’d want him off the playing field.

What
didn’t
make sense was this too-obvious, broad-daylight kidnapping charade. Not the navy’s usual style.

“If you’re not going to shoot us,” he asked, leveling a penetrating look at the STORM commander, “what
do
you intend to do with us?”

The cocky Southerner sent him an irreverent grin. “Why, Major, I think that’s fairly obvious. Send you back into the fray, of course. But this time, you’ll be working for us.”