More Than a Mission (6 page)

S
he had tossed down the gauntlet and should have known better than to think he wouldn't pick it up.

One side of his mouth quirked as he slowly leaned toward her until he was barely an inch away. He surprised her then by saying, “Last chance.”

His breath was warm against her lips. She imagined just how much warmer his mouth would be on hers. The voice of her daring side screamed, “Stop running, girl! Go get him!”

And so she did, closing that last little distance and covering his mouth with hers. Experiencing the warmth over and over again as he answered her kiss. Tasting him when she opened her mouth and he did the same, slipped his tongue in to dance with hers.

Their lips were the only points connecting them and she found herself reaching up, laying her hand on his leather-clad shoulder to ground her since her head was beginning to spin. And then suddenly, he yanked away.

“I'm sorry,” he stammered, although he wasn't quite sure why he was apologizing. After all, this was what he'd been after all week long—a way to get closer.

Even in the dark, the rush of color to her cheeks was painfully obvious. “Sorry? You're sorry?”

Again she was throwing him for a loop. “Yes, I mean, no. I mean, I know you didn't want it to go that far,” he offered as an excuse.

She crossed her arms and cocked her hip. That eyebrow crept upward again as her sherry-colored eyes burned with annoyance. “Already running, Aidan?”

“I think we'll probably both be thankful in the morning that we stopped when we did.”

With a nod, and without waiting for her reply, he hurried away.

He rushed into the suite eager to see what Elizabeth would do once she was within range of the cameras Lucia had set up in her cottage.

A purely professional interest, he reminded himself, but as he caught sight of Elizabeth in her bedroom, he knew it for the lie it was.

Sitting beside Lucia, he watched as Elizabeth reached behind her and undid the zipper on the back of the basic little black dress that hugged her slim curves. The fabric loosened, and then with a dip of her shoulders, the dress slipped off and pooled at her feet on the floor, leaving her standing in nothing but lacy black underwear. Very feminine, highly revealing underwear.

He swallowed hard.

“A woman doesn't wear black unless she wants someone to see it. Especially black like that.” Lucia nudged him with an elbow.

“She didn't know I'd be there.” He continued watching, waiting for the undergarments to drop, as well, but then Elizabeth grabbed something from the edge of the bed.

She headed to a door at the far end of the room and Aidan reached for the monitor controls to switch the view, only Lucia batted away his hand.

“I didn't bug the bathroom. There's no way out of that room besides the window.”

Chagrined, he replied, “You're right.”

Lucia punched a few buttons at that point and a view of the back of the cottage popped into place on one monitor. The light from the bathroom window was visible, a bright beacon against the dark stone of the cottage, but not much else.

“She can't go out that way without us knowing,” Lucia explained, and then yawned.

“Maybe we should take turns the rest of the night?” Aidan suggested. “I'll take the first watch.”

With a knowing grin, Lucia bid him goodnight.

Aidan settled in, anxious to see Elizabeth again while he replayed over and over that enticing kiss and the confusion surrounding it. He was embarrassed that he had lost his objectivity, forgetting why it was that he was kissing her and actually enjoying it.

Maybe he just wasn't as cut out for this part of the spy business as he thought. He could handle the surveillance and fighting after his many years as an army Ranger, but the rest…

That had been Mitch's specialty. He had been the kind who could charm even a snake-oil salesman. Not that his friend's charisma had been enough to save his life. The Sparrow was apparently immune to it, although tonight…

Had it been his imagination that Elizabeth had responded?

Had she fooled Mitch in much the same way before plunging the knife into his gut?

His mood different, he looked at his watch, wondering what she could be doing in the bathroom for so long. And then he caught a glimpse of motion in another of the monitors at the furthest end of the table. He squinted at the picture; it was so dark, he was barely able to discern much beside the general height and body shape of the individual.

Cursing, he grabbed the monitor controls and flipped a switch that turned on the night vision for that camera. The picture improved, not that he would be able to get much information about the suspect. At first glance, the black-clad figure was built much like Elizabeth, but the identity would be impossible to confirm thanks to the ski mask covering the suspect's face.

The Sparrow? he wondered and glanced back to the monitor in the bedroom where there was still no sign of Elizabeth.

How had she gotten from the cottage to the cellar of the restaurant? A tunnel between the two buildings?

His gaze fixed on the black-clad figure, he watched her move to the safe. With a few quick spins of the dial, she opened it and removed a moderate-sized foot locker from the bottom shelf. Placing the foot locker on the floor, she undid yet another lock and flipped open the top of the locker. The angle on the camera made it possible to see what was inside—an assortment of knives and bottles.

Don't touch the knives, he repeated Elizabeth's warning.

Elizabeth—the Sparrow—reached into the bottom of the foot locker and extracted a holster and gun. She took the time to check the clip and firing mechanism on the gun—a Heckler & Koch Mark 23. He recognized the weapon immediately.

The HK Mark 23 had been specially commissioned by the Pentagon for its Special Operations Command. A friend within SOCOM had raved about the gun and insisted both he and Mitch should check it out. Their friend been right. Both he and Mitch had loved the double-action .45-caliber gun that could be fitted with a silencer. His friend's pistol had disappeared on the night he'd been killed.

More and more evidence was piling up against the Sparrow in Mitch's murder. He had to remind himself that his friend's death was not the reason for this assignment. His goal was to find Prince Reginald's murderer. But maybe one of those bottles in the foot locker held a poison similar to the one that had killed the prince.

Aidan observed the Sparrow holster the gun and slip on the holster, quickly get the foot locker back in the safe and close it once again.

She turned, glanced over her shoulder as if sensing that she was being watched. Pausing, she examined the room, then moved to the one locker closest to the safe. Again with a few quick turns she opened the combination lock.

He wondered what she was up to and was surprised when she pushed aside some clothes hanging in the locker, stepped inside, and then closed the door behind her, disappearing from sight.

Shit. Standing, he rushed to Lucia's room and pounded on the door. “Lucia! The Sparrow's flown the nest!”

As Lucia opened her door, she grumbled, “This better be good, Aidan.”

He motioned to the monitors. “The Sparrow is armed and dressed to kill. She headed out of the cellar through some kind of hidden passage in one of the lockers.”

“Then you better arm yourself, as well,” she said, but he bent and picked up the hem of his jeans leg to reveal the mini six-shot Glock 36 tucked into an ankle holster.

Lucia let out a disbelieving chuckle. “If it's the Sparrow, you'll need more than that pea shooter.” She reached into the pocket of her robe, extracted her larger Glock 34 and held it out to him.

Aidan snagged the weapon from her grasp and, as he headed for the door, called out, “Keep an eye on the cellar. Call me if there's any activity.”

“Where do you think you're headed?”

“To the beach. It's the most likely place for the tunnel to end. I should be able to see where she's going from there.”

 

He'd raced off the main street and down to the shore, running along what little was left of the beach thanks to the high tide. By the time he got behind the cottage, his shoes and the bottoms of his pants were soaked all the way up to the knee.

The light in her bathroom still spilled into the night.

He pulled out Lucia's Glock, crept up the rocky path from the beach and scoped out the dunes and gardens adjacent to the cottage. No activity besides the movement of the marsh grasses in the dunes from a slight ocean breeze. Crouching down, he kept to the edge of the garden that Elizabeth had crafted behind the restaurant.

Still no sign of anyone.

Moving to the side yard, he examined that area, and then paused, glancing down at the luminous face of his watch. Nearly fifteen minutes had passed since the Sparrow had slipped into the locker. He recollected her pace as she'd run the other day. If she had escaped into an open area and decided to run, she could be a good distance away already.

Cursing beneath his breath that he might have lost her, he pressed toward the opposite side of the yard, but could see nothing in the backyards of the neighboring shops and homes. A dog's bark caught his attention.

He squinted through the night in the direction of the noise.

That was when he thought he saw something moving down at the water's edge, close to the old stone building that was Leonia's fish market. Concentrating, he focused on where he had seen the motion.

Was that something moving in the shadows behind the fish market?

“Come in, Blender Boy. The Sparrow's in her nest,” Lucia advised over his earpiece.

He ignored Lucia and peered down to the market.

Definitely something, he thought. Maybe even two people behind the building. “Red Rover, confirm, Red Rover. I think I've got something here.”

“Sparrow just came out of the bathroom. What do you have?”

Aidan squinted and cursed that he had forgotten to bring his binoculars. But Lucia had a pair up in the suite. “Red Rover. Focus on the back of the fish market. At about two o'clock.”

Some noise came over the wire and in his mind, Aidan counted the seconds of delay as Lucia grabbed the binoculars, headed to the window and monitored the area he had pointed out. Moving nearer, he tried to confirm what he'd seen earlier, but the closer he got, it seemed to him that he might have imagined it. Or maybe it was two fisherman making an early delivery.

“Nothing in sight. Are you sure you saw her there?”

He wasn't certain and he should have been. He had been one of the army's best and here he was, being led around in circles by a slip of a woman. “Not sure, Red Rover. Returning to base,” he advised, then slipped the gun back into his pocket and walked through Elizabeth's gardens to the road.

Once there, he raced back to the hotel and to the suite where Lucia was seated in front of the monitors. In one picture, Elizabeth slept soundly in her bed.

He walked up behind his colleague. “I don't get it. I saw someone preparing for a job. I saw her leave the cellar.”

Lucia looked over her shoulder at him. “I'm not saying you didn't. But if she did all that, she wasn't gone for long. Or maybe it was someone else.”

“Maybe,” was all he could admit. Plopping down into the chair beside her, he returned her weapon and moved his feet, which squished noisily.

Lucia finally examined him and shook her head. “Maybe it's time for you to get clean and get some rest. You need to be back on the job—”

“At ten. The restaurant opens for brunch at eleven.”

“I'll take over your watch. Plus, I'll fill Walker in later this morning.” She tucked her gun back into the pocket of her robe.

Right, fill in Walker, he thought. But there was one thing he needed to tell her before he went to sleep. “The weapon she had—”

“A Sigma SW9F? That's what ballistics said about her two pistol kills,” Lucia interrupted.

Aidan met her gaze squarely and shook his head. “She had an HK Mark 23.”

“Mitch's gun.” She reached out, laid a hand on his arm. “I'm sorry, Aidan.”

“I'm not. Whoever was in that cellar did it. Chances are that it was the Sparrow. I plan on proving that she killed the prince, as well. When you call Walker, make sure and find out if he has any new info.”

“Will do,” she acknowledged and turned her attention back to the monitor, not that there was much going on. Just Elizabeth still in her bed. Peacefully at rest.

Aidan wondered how she could sleep so soundly. Didn't all her kills haunt her the way Mitch's murder haunted him?

But then again, sociopaths didn't have the same kinds of reactions that normal people did, he thought. Walker would be the first to tell him that. Yet her behavior earlier that night and her kiss…

She had been just a normal woman, enjoying a night out with friends. Friends who might be able to give him more information on the real Elizabeth. Although he had to be at the restaurant by ten, that still left him an hour or so in the morning to visit both Kate and Samantha's stores and talk to the women.