Hotter Than Wildfire (9 page)

 
“
Is
she safe? Really?”

Nicole stepped out of the bathroom in one of Sam’s favorite nightgowns. Of course, all of them were his favorites. He loved them all, though he loved stripping her out of them even better.

Billows of fragrant steam boiled out from the open bathroom door. Sam closed his eyes and inhaled. The steam wafted the smell of her fancy shampoo and conditioner and moisturizer and hand cream and foot cream and cuticle cream…He’d become an expert on how many creams and lotions a woman needed in the ten months of their marriage. Each smell was fabulous, but swirled together, and with Nicole’s unique fragrance underlying it…Jesus.

“Hmm?” Sam enjoyed watching his wife walking around their bedroom. His bedroom had changed beyond recognition since their marriage. It was full of girly things now. The bed had
flounces
around the bottom, the sheets were floral prints, there were watercolors on the wall, scented candles everywhere and crystal bowls full of flower petals. Silk drapes. Feminine overkill.

But Sam was a tough guy. He could take it.

Shit, to be married to Nicole he’d walk over red-hot coals barefoot. Putting up with some froufrou nonsense was nothing.

He walked to her, to his miracle of a wife, put his arms around her, pulled her to him. The baby was just starting to show and he could feel the little bump against his own belly. He loved that bump.

Up until it started to show, the little girl Nicole was expecting was more an idea than a reality. They knew she was expecting and in the meantime everything was exactly the same.

And then the baby bump and the morning sickness brought it home to him every day. They could feel her moving around in Nicole’s belly. He could feel
his child
in her.

Sam loved his wife, he loved his brothers, he would die for her and for them without question—but they weren’t his blood. This child growing inside Nicole would be the only human being on the face of the earth who was his blood relative.

It gave him goose bumps every time he thought about it.

Sam bent down and kissed his wife, moving one hand up to cup the back of her head. He was lost, just like that, at the touch of his lips to hers. He took a deep, shaky breath, every hormone in his body pinging to painful life, and held her more closely, right hand moving over her back.

The satiny material felt real good but her naked flesh, he knew from experience, would feel even better.

He knew this nightgown. There was a zipper…oh, yeah. And when the two back panels separated, he slid his hand over her satiny skin, pulling her even more tightly against him.

Making love to a pregnant Nicole was mind-blowingly erotic. He was heavy, so missionary would soon be out. Still, there were plenty of other positions, and Sam knew every one.

Sam picked her up and lay her on the bed gently and stood there for just a moment, looking at her. He had an almost painful hard-on, but just looking at her, knowing she was his, was his wife, carried his baby…shit, that was the best.

“Sam,” she said softly. “Is she?”

Oh man. He could smell her excitement, a smell that was imprinted on the most primitive part of his brain. Granted, Nicole would probably say that all of his brain was primitive, but in the most basic, reptilian part of his brain, that smell,
her
smell, would remain with him till the end of time. Nicole’s arousal.

How excited was she?

“Sam?”

Only one way to find out. Eyes fixed on the dark cloud of soft hair between her thighs, Sam cupped her, right there where he wanted to be. Waggling his hand made her open her thighs to him and his hand slid in to cover her completely. The lips of her sex felt puffy, slick…

“Sam!”

He inserted a long finger and yes—thank you God—she was wet. Excited. Not as excited as he was, but then that was impossible.

He shifted forward, inserting his thigh between hers, opening her up.

“Oh, for—” Nicole slapped his hand away and clamped her thighs shut. “Will you
listen
to me?”

Startled, Sam’s head lifted and he saw with consternation that she was looking exasperated. At him. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that look on her gorgeous face. What had he done now?

“Yeah, honey?” He smiled down at his wife. “What is it?”

“For the third time,
are
we safe here? Is Eve safe?”

Sex was instantly booted out of Sam’s mind. He smoothed back a lock of blue-black hair, tucking it behind her ear. He looked his wife straight in the eyes and spoke soberly.

“Oh, yeah. Mike cleared her room. He said that he left absolutely nothing of hers behind that could in any way identify her. You trust Mike, right?”

“Yes,” Nicole said softly. “Absolutely.”

His heart gave one of those hard little pumps it sometimes did when he realized all over again how lucky he was. He’d have married Nicole even if she didn’t get on with his brothers, but the fact was, they loved her almost as much as he did. Lucky, lucky man.

“We’ve gone over this, Harry and Mike and I, and we can’t find a way that Montez can connect her to us. So she can recover here and we can set her up in a new life when she’s ready.”

Nicole gave one of her mysterious smiles.

Sam frowned. “What?”

She shook her head, the scent of her shampoo whooshing out from her and messing with his head.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So—it’s okay, then?”

“Absolutely.” Sam picked up her hand and brought it to his mouth, utterly sober and serious. “I would never—and trust me when I say never—let you be near any possible danger to you and our child. You have to believe me.”

“Oh!” Nicole looked startled. “I believe you, of course I do.”

“Good.” Blood was rushing out of his head, down, down…Sam bent and ran his mouth along her neck, and gave her a little nip. She loved that. It turned her on. He knew that through long practice. Nicole shivered and at that moment he lifted her leg and gently slid his cock into her. “Now.” He pulled slowly out, then pressed back in. “Where were we?”

Prineville, Georgia
Bearclaw Headquarters

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the snooty political aide said on the phone. “But Senator Manson is unavailable at the moment.”

Montez gritted his teeth, pulled the handset away so the bitch wouldn’t hear him blowing his breath out in one controlled flow. Control. He needed to keep control.

“All right,” he said, when his voice was steady. “When will the senator be available for an appointment?”

Never, you moron.

The unsaid words hung there, quivering.

Montez remembered this assistant to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a tall, bony creature with two PhDs, one in political science and one in physics. Ferociously ambitious, biding her time on a senator’s staff before she joined some hotshot think tank for ten times the salary.

She’d disliked Montez on sight, and it had been mutual.

“I think I can safely speak for the senator here,” she said finally. “There has been some…adverse publicity lately with regard to your personnel. This is not a good time for the senator to be linking his name to yours. At least until all the ambiguities have been cleared up. Good day.”

A click.

She’d hung up on him. Montez stared at the dead handset. The bitch had hung up on
him
.

He knew exactly what she was referring to. The media storm surrounding the shooting deaths of three of his employees in San Diego had shaken the company to its foundations.

He had sent three of his best operatives to pick up one woman. One small woman. It hadn’t even occurred to him that they should go in without ID because it hadn’t occurred to him that they could fail.

But they had. Spectacularly. Three men shot dead on the streets of San Diego. Three men with Bearclaw ID on them. There had been nothing Montez could do about it because the police got there before he could wipe the identities clean.

Three good men, former soldiers, crack shots all of them—and a lone woman had defeated them. Which was insane, of course. Especially when that woman was Ellen.

Montez had offered countless times to teach her to shoot. Lots of women got off on guns and, even better, got off on men who were good with guns. Not Ellen. She’d rejected his offer to give her lessons with barely masked horror, as if he were offering to teach her to kiss cobras. And she wasn’t turned on by gunmen, either. Otherwise she’d have been in his bed long ago and this whole fucking mess would never have happened.

So it sure wasn’t Ellen who’d gotten the drop on his men. Men who’d been mission-ready, primed to grab her. No one could ever get the drop on his men, Montez would swear to that.

But the fact was, someone had. One person. Though the San Diego PD had been incredibly tight-lipped with him—you’d have thought
he
was the suspect, they doled out so little intel—Montez had hacked into their system and discovered that the bullets that had killed his men had come from one untraceable gun and one gun registered to Bearclaw.

One gun. One man.

One man had taken down three of his men, men who’d been ready for trouble. And he’d done it so fast and neat he hadn’t left any trace behind. It was almost unthinkable.

Bearclaw had had a lot of really bad publicity from that. It was dying down only because the police had zip—no leads, no gun, no shooter. The bodies had been autopsied—and yes, big surprise, cause of death was massive trauma from bullet wounds in all three cases—and handed back to Montez.

None of the men had families, so Montez had made a very big deal of giving them a hero’s funeral on company grounds, and had given all his employees the day off to attend. And all the while inside he’d been seething, furious that they’d botched a job that should have been
easy
, a fucking cakewalk, and had instead become a huge albatross around Bearclaw’s neck.

It might, in fact, cost him the company, if he wasn’t careful, because he needed that Pentagon contract, real bad, and right now.

Ellen Palmer was now in the hands of a very slick operator who could take three of his men out in minutes and get away laughing.

She was now ten times more dangerous than before.

Montez needed outside help. He hated to admit it, but it was true. He needed someone outside his company, someone who was
better
than the men in his company. Someone who would never be connected back to the company.

He knew one man who would fit the bill.

He dialed a number he’d committed to memory.

Piet van der Boeke. Originally South African, now a stateless person. The last sighting of Piet had been way up the Congo River tracking down a rebel warlord.

He’d done it, too. Piet was legendary. He didn’t have a company or a stable team of men. He recruited men for each job based on the job specs. He was plugged into the world and he found the best man or men for the job each time. But he worked best alone.

Montez didn’t want an army. He wanted one man, Piet. He’d done Piet a favor in ’02, a big enough one that Piet had given him his private number and told him to call if he needed help.

Piet was a fine soldier, one of the best. But there were fine soldiers everywhere. Montez employed more than three hundred of them himself. Men who knew how to handle themselves in a firefight, how to shoot, how to survive an op. They weren’t a dime a dozen, but there were plenty of good soldiers around.

What Piet did, better than anyone in the world, was track.

His mother had died giving him birth. Piet’s father ran a hardscrabble farm three hundred miles from Johannesburg and, more important, at least two hundred miles from another white woman. Piet had been wet-nursed by the wife of the chief of the local Nguni tribe. The chief had basically brought him up with his own son, who had been like a brother to Piet. While year after year Piet’s father sat morosely over his unpaid bills, drinking bottle after bottle of whiskey, Piet was out in the wild, learning to follow sign. He enrolled in the South African Army the day he turned seventeen and proved to be a natural soldier.

But what was extraordinary was that Piet could track in all kinds of wilds. The savannah, the uplands of the Hindu Kush, Grozny, Peshawar, Belgrade…you name the place, country or city where a man had gone to ground and Piet would find him.

When he went private, he had clients coming out of his ears.

He’d been a natural at following sign for big game and he was a natural at modern technology. It was said that the U.S. military didn’t want Bin Laden to be found, otherwise they’d have contracted Piet van der Boeke—then Bin Laden would be either in the dock or six feet underground.

The cell rang. He had strong encryption and knew Piet did, too.

“Yeah?” A bass tone in a strong Afrikaans accent, so strong even the voice distortion program couldn’t quite mask it. The
yeah
sounded like
yiah
. But the voiceprint would be completely altered. Even if NSA could pluck this conversation out of the air—and the odds of that were a billion to one—there would be no voiceprint match.

It occurred to Montez that since he had no idea where Piet was, he could be waking him up. If he was in West Africa, where he heard Piet had set up headquarters, it’d be midnight where he was. But the voice sounded strong and completely alert.