Spy Hard (5 page)

Her shoulders straightened under his scrutiny, and a smile came onto her face that looked more forced than real.

“Why don’t you sit?” She motioned to the spot on the couch next to her.

Suspicion pricked his instincts. Until now, he stood in line with the open door, visible from the outside for propriety’s sake. He’d assumed she would want that.

Maybe he was mistaken. He sat next to her, still leaving a respectable amount of space between them, curious where this all might lead. He was almost sure now that she was plotting something and calling him up to move the couch had only been a ploy. She clearly wanted something from him, but wasn’t sure how to go about it.

She bit her full bottom lip. And put her hand on his knee.

He nearly jumped right off the couch as heat shot up his leg.

Okay, he hadn’t expected
that.

If he were a gentleman, he would have stopped her right there, would have told her to come right out with it and tell him what she wanted from him. But he’d been too long without female companionship, so he stayed where he was and put an expectant smile on his face.

He waited to see her next move. At the very least, it should prove to be interesting.

She pulled her hand back and cleared her throat. He could almost see the wheels turning in her head. She was trying to figure out how to go about getting him to do whatever it was that she wanted from him.

A seductress she was not, which made the situation even more intriguing. And turned him on completely. He leaned back, watching and waiting. Leaving his knee within easy reach.

A man could hope.

She gave him another tremulous smile as the air between them filled with tension. Her gaze dropped to his mouth, and she licked her lips in a nervous gesture.

Which brought his X-rated dreams about her to mind. Was she thinking about kissing him?

The temperature in the room shot up a couple of degrees. She had the most kissable mouth he’d ever seen, with a slight crease in the middle of the bottom lip. And all of a sudden he couldn’t take his eyes off her full lips.

She leaned a little closer.

He couldn’t believe it.

She looked so nervous it was a toss-up whether she’d kiss him or run away first.

Every cell in his body voted for the first option. He held very still, careful not to scare her away.

She leaned another inch closer. And looked pitifully miserable about it, while trying to keep a come-hither smile on her face. Not very convincing. He had half a mind to close the distance between them just to put her out of her misery.

The more she fidgeted, the better the idea seemed. For some reason, he was desperate all of a sudden to feel those full lips pressed against his. She smelled like flowers, which made him wonder what she would taste like. He was betting on honey.

In the end, he wasn’t sure who made the last small move that brought them together.

Her soft lips tasted like sweet papaya. Okay, that was more logical and likely than honey. They had papaya on the menu pretty much every single day. Good thing he really liked it.

An odd, exhilarating feeling hit him like a lightning bolt out of nowhere and sent his head spinning. He wanted to sink into her sweetness, to take her up—here and now—on everything she was reluctantly offering.

Dozens of erotic images filled his mind, ridiculously hot compared to how chaste the kiss was. He wanted to lay her down on that couch, wanted to bare her breasts to his gaze and mouth. He wanted to see her eyes clouding with pleasure.

He pressed closer and licked the corner of her lips. She gave a soft, startled sigh, but didn’t move back. If anything, she leaned toward him. Hot need plowed through him like a freight train.

He wanted her naked.

He put his hands over her rib cage, his fingers spread out, his thumbs massaging the spot under her breasts. Considering her earlier display of nerves, he expected her to protest.

She didn’t.

In the back of his mind, he was aware of the open door. He knew if someone walked by, it would mean instant execution. They’d drag him outside and shoot him like a dog. He
was
a dog, for taking advantage of her like this.

Yet with Melanie’s lips on his, the guilt and the risk didn’t seem so grave, and was certainly worth it.

He knew he was in trouble when he realized he was thinking like a hormone-crazed teenage boy and not like a trained operative. Still, everything he was pushed him to proceed with the seduction.

Only the sure knowledge that she was playing him could make him pull away.

She looked shocked and disconcerted, her eyes wide with disbelief. Not because he’d pulled back, he suspected, but because she’d done what she had. She was probably surprised that she’d actually gone through with it.

So was he.

He watched as that hesitant smile returned to her lips. He had to give her credit for pulling herself together in short order.

“Perhaps we could go someplace more private,” she suggested, and swallowed hard.

His body sang with pleasure at the suggestion, even if he couldn’t follow through with it under any circumstances. “Such as?” he asked anyway.

“Down by the river?”

Again, images from his dream came back to him. But so did her whispered prayer from the night before, a clear image as she had stood up there on the balcony. And it put things into perspective.

He was to be her ticket out of the compound.

She glanced away, and he followed her gaze. A backpack peeked from under the bed, no doubt holding her escape kit. Did she have a weapon? Guns were all around the place, always handy. Getting her hands on one shouldn’t have been too difficult.

Did she plan on shooting him once he got her far enough from this place? She looked all soft on the outside, but a glint in her eyes told him that she had found a steel core somewhere deep down, a core he’d do better not to trifle with.

But how he wanted to. Trifle with her. Preferably while they were both naked.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” There. He still had some common sense left, and his response to her proved it.

He took another look at her lips. Then he stood and walked away from her before he could do something colossally stupid, like kiss her again.

Jase strode to the stairs without looking back. Who knew that with all the cold-blooded killers inside the hacienda, Melanie’s room would be the most dangerous part of the house? He wasn’t scared of the men. He’d been well trained to take care of thugs like Don Pedro’s. With Melanie, on the other hand, for the first time in his life, he felt out of his depth.

He didn’t like the feeling.

She’d somehow managed to turn him on while, at the same time, massively confusing him.

The only thing weirder than her hitting on him was his instant attraction to her. That’d come out of nowhere. He didn’t have a pregnant woman fetish or anything. Never had a pregnant girlfriend. Wasn’t even sure if pregnant women were into men or were awash with some mommy hormones that preoccupied them, making things like sex irrelevant. Those labor and delivery scenes he’d seen in movies flashed into his mind, scenes where the woman screamed at the father and did her best to break the man’s fingers.

He flexed his hands.

He hadn’t planned on doing that. Ever.

Yet he found Melanie sexy as hell. And enigmatic. With a touch of vulnerability. But with enough guts to go after what she wanted.

Okay. Boyish obsession ends now.

He shuffled down the stairs, his neck tucked in, doing his best not to draw attention to himself, noting the two men who’d come in since he’d gone upstairs. If nobody paid attention to him, maybe he could hang around a few more minutes.

He glanced around, looking for one of the Don’s satellite phones, but he didn’t see any of them out in plain sight. Bugging that would be just as effective as bugging the man’s office, and possibly easier to accomplish.

A faint taste of Melanie still lingered on his lips, reminding him that months had passed since he’d last touched a woman. Melanie had reawakened his body and then some, but only danger awaited him in that direction, so he refocused his thoughts on the men by the table. They were eating, holding bowls of steaming food the women must have brought up while Jase had been upstairs.

His stomach growled. He ignored it.

Roberto, who wasn’t eating, spotted him and called out as he wrestled with a sizable roll of paper. “Come give me a hand. Here. Hold this.”

Okay. Good. Excellent, in fact.

A command to stay instead of a lecture on all the reasons he shouldn’t be in here.

The man struggled to spread out a large jungle map on a table, a taped-together puzzle of what looked like Google Maps printouts.

Jase moved to hold down two corners, spotted the satellite phone under the edge of the paper. Roberto grabbed a hand grenade to weigh down another corner, then pulled his knife and speared the last corner to the wood with the blade. He gave a swarthy grin, apparently satisfied with his own ingenuity.

“Let’s see if we can figure this out, amigos.” He bent to carefully examine the expanse of trees, interrupted here and there by the river or a clearing. He pointed to the middle of the map and followed the line of the river to the point where it looped back on itself a little. “We’re here.”

None of the camp showed. The satellite pictures had probably been taken years ago, when the camp had been nothing but a couple of wood huts hidden under the trees. Only after Don Pedro’s headquarters had been destroyed by Cristobal last year had the boss begun serious building here.

The men examined the map as they ate.

“Here is one of the burned villages.” One of them pointed at the edge of the map with his fork.

“And here is another.” Roberto tapped a spot not far from the first. “So we know Cristobal is going to hit us from the southeast.”

Jase scanned the map in every direction. He hadn’t seen a rendering this detailed of the area before. He’d studied aerial photos of the jungle before leaving on this mission, but back then he hadn’t yet known where exactly the Don’s new headquarters were, so he’d had no reason to inspect this exact spot out of the endless jungle specifically.

Some sort of a building showed on the satellite map about thirty miles to the north of them.

“What’s that?” he asked, not sure whether he would get an answer.

But Roberto seemed to be in a talkative mood. “A scientific research station. They monitor one square mile of jungle and record every animal that passes through it. Some kind of biodiversity research. A chopper brings them supplies and switches staff out every month. They don’t move outside their boundaries.”

“They got any good stuff?” Jase played the part of the opportunistic jungle thug, wondering if the scientists knew just how close they were to some serious trouble.

Roberto shrugged. “Not the kind of equipment we could use here. And their perimeter security is too good. That’s how they keep track of the animals. They’re not worth the bother.”

Jase filed that information away in his brain and kept his mouth shut while the others marked the approximate location of the enemy troops on the map and tried to guess the numbers. He paid close attention until a shout from above interrupted the murmur of voices.

“What the hell are you doing? In your room!” Don Pedro growled at Melanie at the top of the stairs, his eyes narrowed with fury, his mouth drawn into a sharp, cruel line of displeasure.

Looked like the Don had stepped out of his office and caught her watching the men from above. No doubt she’d been plotting her escape, picking the next chump to try her tricks on.

If the Don had come out earlier when Jase’d been in her room…

He thanked his lucky stars and watched as she headed toward her door, her neck pulled in. Apparently she didn’t move quickly enough. The Don grabbed her by the arm. Hard enough to leave marks.

Jase’s muscles tightened.

Her hands slid in a protective gesture to her abdomen as she tried to pull away. She winced as the man shoved her toward her room. The door closed behind them with a slam.

Then the Don proceeded to shout at her some more in Spanish, his tirade muted now and unintelligible to the men downstairs. A small pause came, then something crashed.

Jase’s muscles twitched.

She’d tried to use him and he didn’t like that, but he liked this even less. Instinct, and everything he was, pushed him to leap up the stairs and bust into that room. But his training held him back, even as his jaw muscles pulled tighter with every passing second.

Keep it cool. Don’t break cover.

The Don was obviously having a bad day. Having his mortal enemy, Cristobal, who’d nearly brought him down not that long ago, marching on his camp had visibly rattled the big boss. Jase had never seen him look anything less than invincible before.

He’d rather see him dead, all considered.

He noted the position of every man in the room again, each weapon, calculated angles and speed, shifted into a better position without letting go of the map. If she cried out…

But even as he thought that, the Don stormed out of Melanie’s room and yelled down below for everyone to work before disappearing in his office once again. The men shrugged off the display of temper—nothing they hadn’t seen before. None of them seemed to care one whit for the woman upstairs. They were all focused on the upcoming battle.

The bastard had slammed Melanie’s door so hard behind him that it’d bounced open again. Jase kept watching that gap in the door from the corner of his eye while he pretended to pay attention to Roberto and the others.

Then he caught movement. The door closed with a quiet click.

She was all right then—well enough, at least, to get up and move around. He relaxed marginally. Of course, the Don wouldn’t risk hurting the baby.

But after the baby was born… Jase rolled the tension out of his shoulders. Okay, so maybe she had a good reason for wanting to get away from this place, sooner rather than later.