Secret Assignment (20 page)

“Maybe they did,” Gideon said, “but the one guy still alive who knows for sure isn’t talking.”

Shannon frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Your brother tried contacting General Marsh. He refused to take Jesse’s call.”

“Jesse’s not his favorite person. Maybe someone else should try to reach him.”

“Someone else did.” Gideon gave her hand a light squeeze. She looked at him and found him gazing out toward the churning Gulf, his profile stony. “I called this morning. He wouldn’t take my call, either.”

“But if he doesn’t know you—”

“He does. I worked under his command for over a year in Kaziristan. And I even met him again earlier this year, at General Ross’s funeral.” Gideon’s gaze met hers. “We have to assume he realizes his fellow generals have met bad ends because of what they knew. In the case of General Marlowe, his family as well. General Marsh has his own hostages to think about.”

His daughters, Shannon thought. His wife.

“Your brother says one of Marsh’s daughters works for your company.”

She nodded. “Evie, General Marsh’s younger daughter. I guess she’s in danger now, isn’t she?”

“We have to assume so.”

“I wonder if anyone’s warned her.”

“If not her father, I’m sure your brother has. He knows the danger.”

She shook her head, feeling as if the world had turned entirely upside down in the past three days. “They’re so bold—the SSU or whatever they call themselves now. They started an actual company, for heaven’s sake.”

“And maybe that’ll help us bring them down. As far as your brother can tell, AfterAssets has never shown up in any investigations before. Now we’ve got the ball rolling.”

“They’ll just dump the company and start something new with some other SSU agent who hasn’t yet shown up on anyone’s radar.”

“Maybe. But like cockroaches, they’ll be a lot easier to stamp out scurrying around in the light than holed up somewhere in the dark.” Gideon looked at his watch. “We need to leave in thirty minutes.”

She nodded, pushing up from the rocker.

Inside, Lydia had returned from the garden and sat at the kitchen table, weeping softly. Shannon hurried to her side, taking the older woman’s hands between her own. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know why I bothered staking up the vegetables against the storm,” she said, sniffing back her tears. “When I leave today, I may not ever be back.”

“Of course you will.”

Lydia shook her head. “I’ll have to go somewhere safe, where I can’t be found. You know that’s what will have to happen, especially if you can’t find a way to decode Edward’s journal.”

Shannon didn’t try to argue against her point. Lydia’s life wasn’t going to be the same, no matter what happened over the next few days. Her husband was dead. She’d already agreed to sell the island to the state. Maybe grieving a little for the life she was leaving in the past was the best thing for her right now.

“Gideon and I are leaving in about thirty minutes. Damon’s at the lighthouse if you need him before go-time—just hit the horn.” She squeezed Lydia’s hands. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

Shannon headed upstairs to get ready for the trip to Terrebonne, wondering if any of them was ever going to be okay again.

* * *

G
IDEON WAS GOING
to miss piloting the
Lorelei.
He’d run a boat in his earlier days as a teenager growing up on the South Carolina coast, a fishing boat his uncle had owned before the economy turned sour and he’d lost the vessel to the bank. Uncle Phil had taken him in after the murder, the only family member willing to take in the angry, hostile teenager Gideon had been at the time.

After so many years away from the sea when he’d come to recuperate on Nightshade Island, he’d been a rusty sailor, but General Ross had been a patient teacher, using trips on the
Lorelei
as an incentive for Gideon to work hard to overcome the weakening effects of his shrapnel injuries and get back on his feet.

“You look at home behind the wheel.”

He looked at Shannon, who sat next to him in the pilothouse. She was looking at him with curious brown eyes. “I used to pilot my uncle’s fishing boat when I was a teenager. Some of my favorite memories.”

“Where was that?”

“Fort Fremont in South Carolina. North of Hilton Head.”

She smiled. “Went to Hilton Head with some girlfriends when I was nineteen. My dad worried the whole time I was away—first big trip without chaperones.”

“Did you get in trouble?”

“
I
didn’t,” she said with a grin. “I didn’t want to have to call home for help and risk the lecture. Mostly I just bummed around the beach, played a little volleyball, flirted with hot marines on leave from Parris Island.” She slanted a look at him. “Who knows, maybe we met years ago.”

He smiled. “I was probably already in Afghanistan by then. I’m a bit older than you.”

“Not so much older,” she murmured.

Heat swirled instantly between them, fueled by Shannon’s smoldering gaze and his own vivid imagination, placing her on Coligny Beach in a little green bikini, showing off miles and miles of long, toned legs.

“What will you do when this is over?” she asked, her tone serious, although her eyes continued to suggest all sorts of delicious possibilities.

“When it’s time to leave the island?”

She nodded.

He hadn’t planned for anything in particular. Maybe he’d been as unwilling to think about the end of his life on the island as Lydia had been. The reality of time passing weighed heavily on him suddenly, a ball of lead sitting in the center of his chest.

“I guess I could go back to South Carolina,” he said, thinking about the life he’d left behind there. His uncle was dead now, the last of his close family. He had some cousins on both sides of the family, but he knew few of them and had never been close to any. His uncle had died a bachelor, childless and penniless. “I suppose there’s work to be had on the shrimp boats or fishing boats. Or maybe I’ll look into age limits for joining the local police force.”

“Is that something you’d like to do? Police work, I mean.”

He thought about it. The investigative work would be interesting. He wasn’t sure about the long hours of tedious patrol that would be required of him before he ever reached the level of investigator. Not to mention, it was entirely possible that, at thirty-four, he would be considered too old to be a prospect for any local cop shop.

“I don’t know if I have the patience to be a rookie,” he admitted.

“There’s always security work.”

He glanced at her. She was still looking at him with those sweet, sizzling brown eyes. He wanted her so much at that moment that he wasn’t sure they’d ever make it to shore. Only the thought of Lydia’s safety and their own important mission kept him from grabbing her hand and taking her down to the cabin this very minute.

What had she just said? Something about security work.

It took a second to follow the path her question laid out for him. “Security work as in, working for a security company?”

She blushed a little. “We’re a growing company. Jesse started small and conservative so that he’d have means—and room—to expand. We’ve added several new agents recently and we’re looking to hire more.”

“But do you really need an old leatherneck? I mean, we must be a dime a dozen.” The thought of going home with her when this was all done was too tempting to contemplate. He’d learned a long time ago that something that sounded too good to be true almost always turned out to be a disaster.

He’d been giving a lot of thought to the things they’d talked about the night before. He’d been worrying so long about the monster inside him that he’d lost sight of how many years he’d gone keeping it in check. Maybe that was the real difference between him and his father. His father had let stress and anger and a bone-deep meanness turn him into a killer. Gideon had honed his self-control and self-discipline until he could channel anger into constructive rather than destructive actions.

But even if he never turned out to be the beast he’d feared so many years, he wasn’t much of a good bet for a relationship, either. What did he have to offer Shannon? He didn’t even know what he wanted to do with his life. Maybe they should enjoy what was left of the time they had together for what it was and not try to shape it into something that would ultimately end in hurt feelings and broken hearts.

Hell, they didn’t even know if they were going to survive the next couple of days, did they?

“I’ll think about it,” he said carefully, looking away.

When he dared another quick glance at her, she was no longer looking in his direction. Her delicate profile was pointing toward the mainland, where the shoreline grew closer and closer as the Hatteras cut through the choppy waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The plan required them to go to lunch at Margo’s Diner, where the talk would be about Shannon leaving town, her work complete. As expected, Margo wasn’t shy about expressing her sorrow to see Shannon go. She passed along congratulations to Shannon’s cousin J.D. and his new wife, Natalie, from about half the town as well, although Gideon suspected many of those well-wishers had merely responded to Margo’s passing along of news with a simple “How nice.”

“I can’t believe that in a few weeks, there will no longer be a Stafford on Nightshade Island after all these years.” Margo shook her head.

“Me, either,” Gideon murmured, his heart sinking a little.

“Lydia’s not going to be that far away from where I live,” Shannon said with a smile. “Less than thirty minutes. I hope we’ll stay in touch.”

Gideon felt Shannon’s gaze but didn’t let himself return it. If she wanted to make the idea of working for her brother’s company more tempting, she was doing a fine job. He had begun to think of Lydia Ross as family, virtually the only family he had anymore. He liked Lydia. Liked listening to her stories and her jokes. Liked their comfortable silences, their moments of quiet communion.

He liked that she somehow managed to look at him as if she were really seeing him for who he was rather than the man whose continued life had come at the price of her son’s.

“I hope that doesn’t mean we’re losing you, too, handsome,” Margo said with a flirtatious smile.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he admitted. “Not sure what jobs there are around here for an old Carolina beach bum like me.”

Shannon cleared her throat.

“You’re about as far from a beach bum as they get around these parts, marine,” Margo said with a laugh.

He managed a grin. “Maybe so, but I don’t have a platoon to lead around here, Margo. And I hear the Coopers ran the last of the terrorists out of town last year.”

Unfortunately, a new set of vermin had taken their place. It might well be up to him and Shannon to run them out this time.

“I’ll be right back,” Shannon said, heading for the restrooms at the back of the restaurant. Gideon told himself not to watch her go, but he couldn’t seem to drag his eyes from her curvy backside as she walked away on those long legs of hers, a relentless, impossible temptation.

Shannon disappeared into the restroom, and Gideon looked away with a sigh of frustration.

“You need to talk that girl into gettin’ her brother to hire you, marine,” Margo said softly.

“Her brother might have something to say about that.”

“Like ‘hell, yeah’?”

He smiled at her irrepressible matchmaking streak. “I’m not sure the Coopers will find me quite as irresistible as you do, gorgeous.”

Margo beamed with pleasure at the compliment. “Maybe they’ll like how sweet you are to that girl. Or how much you obviously think of her.” She bent a little closer. “And I’m bettin’ a big, strappin’ fellow like you is pretty good to have around in a fight.”

Gideon hoped she was right. He’d spent a lot of years training to be damn good in a fight. And he and Shannon might be on the verge of finding out just how good he really was.

Five minutes clicked past on the clock, and Shannon didn’t come back from the restroom. Gideon’s low-level unease began to blossom into full-blown anxiety. He looked at Margo, who had just come back from taking an order and was writing it up for the chef. “Shouldn’t she be back by now?”

Margo looked surprised. “Want me to go check on her?”

“Would you?”

Margo pinned the order to the caddy by the kitchen door on her way to the bathrooms. The look on her face when she came back a few seconds later made Gideon’s gut tighten to a hard knot.

“She’s gone. The window in the bathroom’s open.” Margo held out her hand. “And I found this on the floor beneath the window.”

Gideon looked down at her hand. On her palm lay Shannon’s small silver watch, the stretch band snapped in half. And across the cracked crystal, there was a dark red smear of blood.

Chapter Fifteen

Her head hurt like hell, but at least she was still alive. She couldn’t tell exactly where she was, unfortunately, other than somewhere inside a cramped, dark and stiflingly hot space.

Quelling a sudden rush of panic, Shannon wriggled until she could get her hands on something solid beneath her body. The rough, nubby texture of carpet rasped against her fingertips, and beneath that, the hard outline of a spare tire well. She was in a car trunk.

The panic clawed its way back.

The car didn’t seem to be moving. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. She couldn’t remember much about what had happened between walking into the women’s bathroom at Margo’s and waking up in the trunk. She had no idea how much time had passed. The only thing she knew for sure, deep in her trembling gut, was that whoever had taken her hostage had no intention of letting her go alive.

The ache in her head was easing, reassuring her that she probably didn’t have a closed head injury. She couldn’t even be sure she had been hit on the head—the pain seemed to be internal rather than external. Maybe she’d been chloroformed. Or injected with something. Either would explain her general groggy feeling at the moment.

She fought against the urge to close her eyes and go back to the dreamless darkness from which she’d just emerged. Wherever she was, she was running out of time to get out safely. No time for slumber.