Crazy Sweet (9 page)

Right.

He let out his breath. Whoever had lost her should be shot. She was pure hothouse, and tonight, San Luis was jungle all the way.

Lucky for her, he was a jungle boy—and he was going to get her back to her hotel. All he needed was her key or a receipt with the hotel’s name.

With that in mind, he headed into the bedroom, planning on upending the tote onto the bed and finding what he needed.

She was right on his heels.

“I mean it, Mr…. Mr.—”

“Smith.”

“Mr. Smith? Oh, right.” She didn’t sound like she believed him for a minute. “I want my bag, now.”

She tried to flank him and make a grab for it, to no avail, of course. He just held it higher.

“Smith is my first name,” he corrected her, then stopped for a second as another explosion rocked the night.
Dammit.
It wasn’t as close as the first two, sounding like it was coming from over by the marina, but it was still another goddamn explosion. “Actually, it’s my middle name, so there’s no Mr. anything here. Just Smith.”

Fuck.
He couldn’t do it. He could dump her bag, was planning on it, but he couldn’t dump her. Not with the whole goddamn town coming apart from the beach to the barrio. No matter where she was staying on tourist row, the building would be cheap, hollow cinder-block construction. Not damn much protection. A 7.62 round would go right through the walls—a fact he knew from personal, tactical experience, and yes, he’d gotten his guy. A car bomb on the street would take the walls clean out.

But the Palacio, the damned decrepit Palacio was solid. Hardwood doors, hardwood floors, and those eight-inch-thick masonry walls.

So hell, no. He wouldn’t be taking her back tonight. He was stuck with her. Stuck with her dumb polka-dot bows, stuck with her damn dress—he turned the tote bag upside down and let everything fall out on the bed—stuck with a couple hundred thousand dollars in U.S. currency rubber-banded in two-inch-thick bundles of fifty-dollar bills.

Fuck.
And he really meant it this time.

CHAPTER

11

W
OMEN AND GUNS were a deadly sexy combination, Travis thought, especially when the woman was Gillian and she was putting together her custom TC Contender—naked.

With anyone else the question would have been why was she putting it together at all? Not so with Red Dog. Stay ready, be prepared, those were her watchwords, the mantra that kept her head in the right place.

He stretched in the bed, then propped himself up with a few of her zillion pillows, settling in to watch her work. He didn’t put too much effort into getting comfortable, but it didn’t take much to catch Red Dog’s attention. She had a raptor’s instincts to respond to even the slightest movement.

She slanted him a long look from where she was working at her loading bench.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you rested?”

“Almost.” He grinned. There was no way to get enough rest on their first night together in a month. Or on their second. Or on their third. By the end of the week, when they were finally getting used to being back together, without fail, one of them or both of them would get called back out.

He honestly didn’t think about her too much when he was on a mission, except when the mission concerned her, like his and Kid’s trip to
Thailand
, where they’d been tracking Tony Royce. For the kind of work he usually did for
Steele Street
, the work he did with Creed Rivera, thinking about anything except the job at hand was not an option.

Running through South American jungles with Creed had taken everything he’d had in the beginning, and sometimes more than he’d had. He’d been in the best shape of his life and a good nine years younger than Rivera, and he’d still had to bust his ass to keep up.

“Superior genetics,
pendejo,
” Creed had told him with a shit-eating grin one time when Travis had been doubled over, puking his guts out on some jungle trail, and Creed had barely been breathing hard.

Travis didn’t think two years on the team had changed his genetics much, but it had changed everything else. When someone’s life depended on how fast they could move with all the gear they might need to do a job better than anybody else in the world, or at least better than anybody who might be looking for them, the words “being in shape” took on a whole new meaning.

His gaze went over Gillian where she’d turned back to her workbench and the Contender. She was drop-dead gorgeous, and there wasn’t a man who saw her who didn’t respond to that beauty, to her wild-girl looks. She was strong and sleek, her body perfectly formed, her hair a deep, rich shade of auburn that for seventy-five bucks every six weeks, a stylist over on
Larimer Street
kept looking like she’d just stepped out of a wind tunnel.

She was tough, as tough as Superman when she had to be, and she never stopped when she had to keep going. She was “good in the woods” whether the woods were tropical, temperate, flat-out desert, or urban, and she could keep up with Creed without breaking a sweat. Travis had seen her do it.

But he never forgot the way she’d been the first night they’d met, the night he’d first made love with her. She’d been sweet, and sweetly scatterbrained that night, not tough. She’d been soft and so incredibly female, so incredibly giving to fall into his arms and lap and everything else and just give herself up to him.

To remember that and to see the way she was now was hard. The changes in her had been wrought by more than training and dedication, by more than her will. The drug she’d been given had had a decisive and undeniable hand in what she had become. XT7 had hardened her body, made her lean. She only kept her weight up by working at it. The parameters impressed upon her mind and psyche and soul by the drug had changed her face. Her features were the same, but her expressions were different, because the muscles now responded differently to emotional stimuli, and a lot of the time, they didn’t respond much. Her eyes were still a warm, amber brown, but he’d seen them glint almost yellow with a cold fierceness that had frozen more than one man in his tracks.

It wasn’t guilt that held him to her side, though he’d never forgiven himself for letting her go up alone to the room in the Hotel Lafayette the night she’d been abducted. He should have been with her. He’d been armed, he’d been trained, and she’d had neither of those advantages.

She’d been helpless.

She’d been tortured.

And nothing had been the same for her since.

So he tied her up sometimes, when she wanted sex that way, and he thought about it a lot, and he worried about it a little. Bondage had never been part of his sex life or his sexual imprinting techniques before, but he’d studied it, studied the psychology of it, and yeah, he figured the two of them were right on track—just a little fucked up.

Hell.

“Tell me about
Panama
.”

She’d said it had been rough.

“Rydell did the recon, and it was good,” she said, lifting the .223 barrel with its attached scope out of the tan case. “So when I got there, he had things pretty well set up, including how we were going to work with the local authorities.” With the frame, forestock, and barrel ready, she began assembling the Contender for its long-range capacity. It took just under a minute, and when she was done, she opened the action and looked through the barrel.

He knew what she’d see: nothing. She never left a speck of fouling in her barrels.

“Hawkins said you were looking for car bombs.” SDF had been called in by special request to neutralize five Colombian cartel terrorists who reportedly had two car bombs hidden somewhere in Panama City and were planning on using those bombs to attack either an American facility or one of the Panamanian government offices.

“The local boys were looking for the bombs,” she said. “Rydell and I were looking for the terrorists.” Closing the action, she opened the lens caps on the scope and turned each of the lenses of the LRS E-Dot to catch the light from the draftsman’s lamp on the end of the bench. Even from the bed, he saw the purple optical coating on the glass.

“And?”

“And we found them. Three were still in
Panama City
. Panamanian Intelligence caught them in the warehouse where they’d stashed the cars. Rydell and I tracked the other two to Colón.” She extended the weapon and sighted the scope through a window, then opened the battery compartment and inserted a fresh cell. After switching the unit on, checking it again, and switching it off, she set the Contender aside and reached for the .44 barrel.

Colón was the whorehouse of Panama, the most dangerous city in the country, and her being there sucked, even with Rydell at her back.

But that was the business, and those were the jobs, and Travis knew that Panamanian Intelligence had specifically requested Gillian because they’d expected the engagement to take place in an urban setting. When there were a lot of people around on busy city streets, the shooter had to be exceptionally skilled.

El cazador espectral,
ghostly hunter. That’s what the Panamanians had called the operator known as Red Dog in the beginning, because Kid Chaos Chronopolous’s newest partner had those exceptional skills. As it had become known that Kid’s partner was a woman, the label had changed to its feminine form,
la cazadora espectral,
which, in the Latin mind, had made her all the more terrifying.

Rightly so.

He knew for a fact, because he’d been there with her and seen her do the deed too many times not to know that when she pressed the trigger on her long rifle, she was an emotional blank. All she felt—truly
all
she felt—was recoil.

“What went wrong?”

“A prostitute,” she said, doing the same check on the .44 that she’d done on the .223. “We caught the men coming out of a brothel. We knew they were in there, no surprise in Colón, and Rydell and I set up across the street in a hotel facing the house. I had the SR-25 bagged in on a table, the crosshairs on the door. Rydell was backing me up with his M-4, but when the cartel boys came out, they weren’t alone.”

“They had a woman with them?”

“A girl,” she said, opening the lens caps on the .44’s scope. “She couldn’t have been more than thirteen.”

That wouldn’t have stopped Red Dog, if she’d had a shot.

“I took the second guy out first, then smoked the first guy.”

Which was exactly what he would have expected her to do, girl or no girl.

“Rydell confirmed the hits, and we packed up and split.”

“But?” There had been something.

“The girl”—she shrugged—“the girl was wearing a white dress, a summery white dress, and when I shot the man holding on to her hand, his blood got all over it.
All
over it. And she started screaming. And she kept screaming. And even after Rydell and I left the room, and left the hotel, and left freaking Colón, I could still hear her screaming in her bloody white dress.”

“Can you still hear her?” he asked, keeping his voice calm, despite the sudden demoralizing dread he felt. He hated for her to suffer, and he didn’t know if it would ever end. Dr. Brandt at Walter Reed held out hope, but Dr. Brandt wasn’t the one who held her together in the middle of the night. He wasn’t the one who helped her work through her pain. And Dr. Brandt sure as hell wasn’t the one who tied her up.

Travis had a feeling the good doctor might look a little askance at that particularly intense and intensely intimate form of therapy, and yeah, he knew he was out there somewhere on a limb calling it that—but he was out there with her.

“No,” she said. “It stopped about halfway back to Panama City, but…”

But he knew it scared her, the way her mind worked sometimes. Scared her that someday she might get stuck in some strange place in her head where cleaning her weapons and following orders and physically training wouldn’t save her.

“I still hear you screaming sometimes,” he told her. “It’ll wake me up in a cold sweat, babe.”

“But I’m already awake when it happens to me.” She closed the lens caps on the scope and set the .44 barrel back in the case.

“I know.” He’d seen her get caught in the sudden confusion and pain of a flashback. He’d seen her work to hold on to the reality of the present. If Dylan had known how often it happened, there was no way the boss of SDF would have allowed her to do the work she did. But without the work, Travis was afraid she would be completely lost. “The trauma of those kinds of experiences doesn’t just go away, but no matter what happens, we’ll deal with it.”

Her gaze lifted from the Contender’s case and met his. “You were there when I first woke up in the hospital, waiting for me, ready to hold me, ready to catch me.”

“Always,” he said. “And it won’t change, Gillian, never.” The same mix of guilt, responsibility, love, and lust that had put him by her bedside in the beginning had only grown stronger over the years, tying him to her in ways he didn’t always understand, but always accepted. She was his, and there was no love without taking the responsibility that went with it.

He sure as hell could do without the guilt, though. It ate at him. He should have taken better care of her that night. He should have taken more care with her.

She started to say something, but then stopped when his phone rang.

Leaning over the side of the bed, he rummaged through his clothes until he found his cell. One look at the signal on the screen told him everything he needed to know. He immediately got up and started getting dressed.

“Who is it?”

“SDF, a call in.” There wasn’t a person on the other end of the line. Only the signal had been sent, but it was enough. Something was up, and Travis needed to be front and center at 738 Steele Street ASAP.

“My phone isn’t ringing,” she said, looking toward her fanny pack.

“Good. You need the rest.” He shrugged into his shoulder holster and reached for his shoes. “If I can come back, I will. Otherwise, you know the drill.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Good,” he said, crossing the room and leaning down to give her a kiss. “I’m glad you’re home, babe. I’ll be back.”

It wasn’t until he was halfway down the outside stairs, heading for the street, that it occurred to him that with all the sex, and then more sex, he’d forgotten something very important.

He’d forgotten to ask her about El Salvador.