Fatal Courage: Shadow Force International, Book 3 (Shadow Force International Romantic Suspense Series) (19 page)

A soft, high melody came from inside when Ruby pushed the doorbell. A moment later, an elderly lady with wire-rimmed glasses and a sunflower apron opened the door. “Yes?”

They must have looked a sight, soaking wet, dirty, with ripped clothes, because the lady’s eyes widened behind her glasses.

Ruby put on her best smile. “We need a room. Do you have any vacancies? We only need one for a few hours.”

The woman’s eagle eyes sized up Ruby, three tiny lines developing between her eyebrows when her gaze landed on Ruby’s ring finger. Her soft, doughy cheeks slid down into a frown as she glanced at Jax’s ring finger as well. It didn’t take a genius to realize she was checking to see if they were married.

The eagle eyes narrowed as her nose went up in the air. “I’m sorry, but I don’t cater to that sort of thing here, young lady.”

Jax chuckled beside her. “What Ruby meant is, we got caught in the tornado and our car is damaged. Your police chief recommended we rent a room so we can clean up here while we wait for our friends to come from Chicago to pick us up.”

“Oh.” The woman gave him a longer look and the lines between her brows softened. “In that case, I suppose I can rent the two rooms upstairs. You’ll have to share a bathroom.”

“That’ll be fine,” Jax said. “We’d appreciate it.”

Stepping back, she let them in, introducing herself as Paula and directing Jax to take off his wet, muddy boots before they both followed her upstairs.

The place was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting with hardwood floors, a steep staircase, and floral wallpaper. The lady chatted about the crazy storm as they followed her, Ruby trying to make appropriate noises where necessary. She was too wrung out to make small talk.

Paula gathered fresh towels, shampoo, and soap and deposited them in front of their respective rooms. “You get the Pink Kitty room,” she said to Ruby, opening the door.

A pink and white comforter covered the canopy bed. Next to it was a white wicker nightstand. More wicker in the form of a dresser and desk rounded out the furniture. Everywhere Ruby’s gaze landed, she saw cats. Stuffed toy cats, pictures on the walls, porcelain cat figurines on all the shelves, a cat quilt folded on top of the comforter.

She tried to find something positive about stepping into the explosion of cats. She liked cats just fine, but there had to be two hundred versions of them in that small room.

At least there aren’t two hundred of the real thing running around
, she consoled herself. While Paula seemed like a good candidate as a cat lady, Ruby had yet to see any signs of living specimens.

Although, at this point, she’d take a few real cats over all the fake ones.

“My daughter loved cats when she was young, but was allergic to them,” Paula said, a sadness in her voice. “We improvised.”

Ruby pressed her lips together so tight, she thought she might hurt herself. She didn’t say a word, accepting the towels and shampoo before nodding to Paula and backing into the room.

As their hostess turned to lead Jax to his room, Jax winked at her.

Ruby raised her pointer finger to her temple and pretended to shoot herself.

J
AX
G
RINNED
A
T
Ruby, then proceeded down the hall where Paula was already waiting.

“You get the duck room,” she said with a look of pride on her face. “My husband was a big duck hunter.”

She pointed to the interior and Jax leaned around the frame to peer in.

Fuckin’ A. More wallpaper, this time in dark greens and reds. The bed was a monstrous wood thing and above the headboard was a shelf with stuffed ducks on it. A bookshelf across from it was filled with more of the taxidermy birds. Rows and rows of dead ducks, all of their beady eyes watching him.

“Great,” he said, wondering which was worse, fake cats or duck zombies. “Again, we really appreciate this.”

Paula nodded and wiped her hands on her apron. “I’ll round up some food and drink for you.”

“We don’t want to put you out.”

“Nonsense. I haven’t had guests in a couple of months. It’ll be good to talk to someone.”

Good God. He had some talking to do, but it wasn’t to ol’ Paula here. “That would be great,” he lied.

Shoot me now
. Never in his life had he used the term “great” so many times in a row.

Paula left and Jax shut the door, leaning against it for a moment as the dead ducks watched him. “Fuck a duck.” Could this day get any weirder?

He heard the soft patter of Ruby’s bare feet in the hallway heading for the bathroom. He tossed his towel on the bed, then slid down the door and listened to the sound of the shower coming on.

His dick grew hard. What he wouldn’t give to climb in that shower with her, scrub her clean and dirty her up again.

Forget it. You need to find out about the Moroccan 5, not screw Ruby silly.

Might be fun to do both, though.

His phone buzzed. Amazingly, the thing had made it through the tornado. He’d seen some damn advanced technology, but the SFI stuff still surprised him. How Emit and Beatrice got their hands on such high-tech, field-impervious shit was beyond him.

“Yo, man, what’s up?” he asked Colton, who was on the other end. “You almost here?”

“The car’s on its way, probably be about an hour until they get there, but Emit wants me keeping an eye on things here, so I won’t be with them. I’m calling to let you know there was a report of a man lying in a cornfield not far from you. Eyewitnesses said he was injured and bleeding, but by the time the cops got to the spot he’d been seen at, he was gone.”

“Yeah, so?”

“The description the eyewitnesses gave matches your friend.”

“Hayden?”

“Yep. Neither of the witnesses stopped to offer him help because he was reportedly talking to himself and seemed potentially dangerous.”

“Shit, I need to go look for him, but I’ve got no wheels. Maybe I could hotwire a car.”

“Emit says you and Ruby are to sit tight. Meantime, I did more digging into this Agent Brown douchebag. Homeland’s nearly impossible to breach these days, but between Beatrice, Zeb, and I, we traced that ID badge that Brown used back to its source.”

“Is it legit?”

“While Chicago PD said his credentials checked out, they called the number Brown provided, rather than digging up the number on their own.”

“I suppose the number Brown gave them is bogus.”

“It’s not Homeland, that’s for sure. Whoever was on the other end of that phone that verified Brown as an employee was lying.”

“So who’d you trace the ID badge back to?”

“You’ll never guess.”

“Come on, man, pony up.”

“Rory’s skills were put to the test with this one, but he traced the call to a small, off-the-grid, international CIA station.”

Jax felt a spurt of adrenaline down his spine. “Where?”

“Morocco.”

He nearly dropped the phone. “All of this circles back to Marrakech and Al-Safari.”

“Hayden and Brown are the same person, aren’t they? Hayden took Nelson to that old feed mill to interrogate him, then killed him and tried to escape before the storm caught him.”

“It does look that way, but things aren’t adding up,” Jax said, hearing the shower in the bathroom shut off. “You think someone’s setting up Hayden?”

He got up and walked over to the bed, where he plopped down and rubbed his eyes. “I think it’s more than one.”

“More than one person? Like a conspiracy?”

“I think it’s the whole fucking CIA.”

A pause as Colton digested this news. “Hell, if that’s the case…”

Jax stopped hearing the rest of the words as the door to his room opened and Ruby, hair wet but shiny and smooth now, glided in, wrapped in nothing but a pink towel.

“I’ve got to let you go,” Jax said, disconnecting Colton in mid-sentence.

“My clothes are all wet and dirty,” Ruby said, leaning back against the door. “I didn’t want to put them back on until I have to.”

His mouth was dry. The towel barely came down below her ass and her full breasts bubbled up at the top where she clenched the towel in one hand.

“Great,” he said, and mentally kicked himself, because he literally couldn’t form any other coherent word. “I mean, um… Okay.”

He scooted over a foot and motioned to the spot he’d vacated. “You want to sit?”

She eyed the duck zombies over his head, glanced over at the shelves of them. “Yikes. I think I like cats better.”

But she strolled over to the bed and sat next to him.

Which was a good thing since it saved him from standing up and revealing the growing bulge in his jeans.

She smelled like flowers and soap. Her face was scrubbed clean for the second time that day, a mild cut along her hairline on the left side that he hadn’t noticed before, probably due to the dirt. Her lips were their natural peachy-pink color, her eyes clear and somewhat wary as she met his gaze.

It was all he could do not to let his focus dip down to the luscious mounds topping the towel or the expanse of creamy skin where the towel split along her right leg.

“So, uh…,” he started, fumbling to put his phone away. When he couldn’t hit the pocket, he gave up and tossed it onto the bed. “Tell me what you know about the Moroccan 5.”

“Don’t you want to get your shower first?”

Had she really come in here to talk while her clothes dried out? The look in her eyes said no. She wanted something else. Something she’d had earlier in the day.

And goddammit, he wanted to give it to her.

But not until he had the information he needed. “What I want at this moment is for you to be honest with me.”

He saw the flare of rebellion light her up. Just as quickly, she shut it down. She gnawed on her lower lip for a moment and stared at the floor. With a heavy sigh, she closed her eyes, then opened them and picked at the hem of the towel. “The Israelis didn’t catch them. We did.”

“We?”

“Yeah, we. As in…”

She bit that lip again and his groin went crazy.

“Come on, Ruby. Spit it out. Who’s we?”

Her attention went to the mirror over the dresser. She stared at her own reflection for a moment, then met his eyes there. “As in, me and Elliot.”

What the fuck? “Are you kidding me?”

She shook her head, dropped it to stare at the damn floor again. “Because of some deal Homeland had with Mossad, they were given credit for the capture and deaths of all five men, but El and I found them in Paris, lured them into a CIA safe house there and trapped them. We sent them on to the US for incarceration. All but one, apparently.”

“Which one?”

“Abdel Al-Safari.”

Jax ground his teeth. “Al-Safari was part of M5?

“I only just learned that Elliot turned him into an asset to get close to Izala, I swear. As far as I know the rest of the members of M5 were sent to Guantanamo. Eighteen months ago, orders came down to release them. The CIA kept eyes on them; they all went back to their native stomping grounds in Morocco and hooked up with Izala there.”

“You’re fucking kidding me right now.”

“I wish I was. Whoever got to the president and convinced him to let them loose wanted a bigger fish. M5 was the way to get to that fish.”

“Mohammed Izala.”

“That’s my guess.”

“Fuckin A.”

“He’s been on my personal radar from my first mission for the Agency. He’s the big catch every agent in the field wants to haul in.”

“Did the other M5 members know Al-Safari had been turned into a CIA asset?”

She shrugged. “They were separated in transport to the US and, as I understand, kept separate at Guantanamo. They probably never realized Al-Safari wasn’t incarcerated with them. Obviously, I didn’t.”

His head spun with all the connections. “Was it possible they figured it out and were going to expose Al-Safari to Izala?”

“It’s possible, but there’s also the fact that Al-Safari had been loyal to Izala’s cause before we nabbed him and his M5 brothers. I’ve been thinking about it since Elliot told me the truth. It’s possible Al-Safari only went along with being an asset to save his own skin. When the Moroccans captured him, he sent up a white flag to Elliot, no doubt so we’d bail him out. I’m still not sure why he would kill himself after we rescued him, though.”

“If he was in deep with Hayden and James, Hayden killed him to keep his own illicit activities under wraps.”

She nodded slowly. “That, unfortunately, is also a possibility.”

Jax rubbed his beard. “I fucking hate all this spy shit.”

“Right now,”—Ruby leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees and plunking her chin into her hands—“I do too.”

Her hair fell over the front of her shoulders, exposing her back and shoulder blades. Jax felt the urge to plant a kiss on her spine.

Nope.
Not going there.
No touching allowed.