Damian (The Caine Brothers #3) (9 page)

“I’ll head to Cartagena myself. I can’t leave the country without knowing.”

If Elena took off after her father, he’d follow. He’d never let her face Ramos alone, spy or not. That meant the rest of the team would end up shifting mission parameters anyway. “Fine.” He clicked the radio again. “West. I’ve got a hiccup. Over.”

“What is it, Caine? Over.”

“Elena’s concerned Ramos has gone to Cartagena to kill her father as revenge for our rescue. She wants the rest of the team to go after him. Over.”

Damian recognized a grasp at patience in the long pause before West’s response. “Elena is the mission. Over.”

“That’s what I told her, but she’ll go after him if we don’t. Over.”

Damian imagined West’s expletives as he slammed a fist into something, but he sounded composed when he came back. “I’ll have to clear the change in mission with command. I imagine saving a senator’s life will make it easier to swallow. Over.”

“We’ll head to the secondary extraction site and radio for additional instructions. Over.”

“Roger. Out.”

Damian turned to Elena and asked, “Satisfied?”

“Thank you,” she said.

He’d expected sarcasm. Her sincerity took him by surprise, requiring him to turn on a dime. He cleared his throat and asked, “So what’s the other reason we should go with plan C?”

“Do you want to open this door to find out if there’s a guerilla army in the front yard?”

“There might not be. They might all be out in the back.”

Elena scooted backward and gestured for him to open the door. “Be my guest, hotshot.”

Elena watched as Damian sat on his haunches rubbing his chin, trying to magic up a plan C. Even in the midst of a drug lord’s compound in the middle of a Colombian jungle she could appreciate the man. The fact that Damian’s team had been the one called in to rescue her—and that she had him with her now—bolstered her confidence. Having him by her side made her feel like she could do anything. That said a lot.

But as much as she loved a good rush, they didn’t really have the time to vet a plan. It was time to fly by the seat of their pants.

When it came down to it, she really had no idea where Ramos had gone, but it made sense that he’d connect her father to an attempted rescue and rage would send him to Cartagena to take his anger out on the senator. She’d learned to depend on her instincts in the field, and they told her she was right about Ramos.

She took a deep breath and compartmentalized. She couldn’t worry about her father. Damian’s team would go after him. They’d save him. Right now, she and Damian needed to save themselves.

“Garage, maybe?” she asked.

“And go where? It’s not like there’s a super highway nearby we can hop on. The secondary extraction site is downriver a ways, so we have to head that way.”

“We’ll need a distraction for that, otherwise they’ll just follow us. Plus, how are we going to get down to the river? We can’t just run. They’ll mow us down.”

Her nerves were strung too tight to sit there and debate with him. Who knew when the guerillas would burst through the kitchen or the front door, and there could still be men in the house. Not to mention that the cover of night offered them some advantage, but dawn approached quickly. It wouldn’t be long before the sun laid everything bare.

She stood and headed through the empty living room and paused at the doorway into the dining room, peeking in but finding nobody there.

“Hey,” Damian said, catching up. “You can’t just take off without me.”

Elena put a finger to her lips, urging him to shush, which only earned her a pissed off SEAL. She tried not to laugh, but she really liked poking this particular bear. It got her all kinds of worked up.

Granted, it really wasn’t the best time to be thinking about how stupid sexy Damian was, and how much she enjoyed yanking his chain, or wishing she could get in his pants again. If she had half a brain she’d knuckle down and take the situation seriously. It could very well mean her life.

But she’d never experienced a more surreal mission. The whole thing had her skimming the edge of unhinged. The only thing missing was maniacal laughter.

“This way,” she said, leading him down a hall past the library and Ramos’ office.

“This is a bad idea, Elena,” Damian whispered from behind her. “You can’t just go off half-cocked and assume you know what you’re doing.”

“Excuse me?” She asked, spinning to face him. “You didn’t offer any better ideas.”

“Look, between the two of us, I’m more experienced at rescue and extraction. Why don’t you just let me do my job?”

“I’m stepping on your delicate toes, am I?”

She turned to resume her search, not interested in his hurt feelings. If the layout of the mansion had any logic to it, the garage should be somewhere at the end of this corridor.

“I’m trained for this. I know what I’m doing. It’s literally why I’m here.”

“So I’m just supposed to sit back and be the damsel in distress? Let you rescue me?”

“Would that be so hard for you?”

“Yes. It would. Now stop being such a Neanderthal and let’s get out of here.”

He grumbled something under his breath, but she only caught, “…fucking women…” which made her smile.

The hall opened out into some sort of sunroom greenhouse conservatory thing with a glass dome and a forest of houseplants. The sky above them had turned predawn gray.

“What the hell is the point of this room?” Damian asked.

A hail of bullets shattered the glass and the two of them dove for the ground.

“I’m getting really tired of these guys,” Elena said.

“Yeah. Me too.”

From her belly on the floor, she army-crawled across the room and into the adjoining passage. Given the sounds of shuffling and clinking of broken glass, she assumed he followed her. “I see a door out here,” she said.

Once away from the window, she stood and gripped the door handle, readying her weapon. Damian joined her, bringing his up ready to shoot whatever greeted them on the other side. At least he was playing along, despite her exasperatingly independent behavior.

But when she opened it, the only thing inside was a small warehouse full of cars.

“Thank God,” she said.

A pegboard on the wall inside the door held all the keys. Damian swiped one for a Range Rover.

“Let’s go.”

Elena scooped up all the rest of the keys and when she got to the Rover, she dumped them in the back seat. When he gave her a questioning look, she said, “They can’t drive any of the rest of the cars without the keys.”

“Good thinking.”

The car started up with a roar, and he pulled it out of the line while pushing the garage door opener, as if they were just headed out for a casual drive. Except, her heart thundered in her chest and her mouth felt like the Sahara. She strapped on her seat belt and scooched down to avoid being shot in the head.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I have a plan,” he said.

“Oh good.” She didn’t say
finally
even though she thought it. No need to piss him off more.

He revved the engine and when the door had opened enough, he gunned it and they shot out of the garage into the dawn. Gunshots immediately rang out and
pinged
the car, breaking windows.

“Stay down,” Damian yelled, trying to follow his own advice.

Suddenly, a bullet pierced one of the tires and it blew, and steering became squirrely. Damian veered down a steep, dirt side road, heading toward the river, fighting to keep control. At the bottom of the hill a boathouse loomed, crouched at the edge of the river like it would dive in at any moment.

At the rate they were going, they’d be the ones diving in—car and all.

“Uh, Damian? Brakes would be good.”

He shook his head. “Plan, remember?”

“Oh, great,” she said, and latched onto the handhold above the window.

Damian muscled the Rover through the muddy tracks on the dirt road, pointing the vehicle toward the river to the left of the boathouse. “You see anybody behind us?” he asked.

Elena twisted in her seat. The road was eerily empty behind them. “Nope.”

Ramos’s men must have seen them turn down the road, but not having vehicles themselves, they’d have to follow on foot, which meant there would be a lag before they caught up.

In the meantime, Damian barreled toward the river. Elena gripped the handle and screamed as he plowed the front end of the Rover into the raging river.

“Are you crazy?” she squealed.

He grinned like an idiot. “Maybe a little. Come on.”

She tumbled out of the vehicle and hurried around to meet him on the driver’s side. She gave his shoulder a shove-punch. “You could have killed us.”

Clearly high on adrenaline and unwarranted self-confidence, he gave her a condescending snort. “I’m an expert, Elena. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Okay, Mr. Expert. What’s next in this crazy-ass escape?”

“Rescue.”

“Oh, right. I forgot. It feels so much like an escape.”

He glowered at her and grabbed her hand, dragging her to the bank of the river. “Okay, so the plan is to make footprints heading upriver, then veer off uphill into the jungle where it’s more difficult to track.”

“Then what?”

“We get in the river and backtrack to the boathouse and hide underneath it until they either take the bait or lose interest. Then we can head downriver for the secondary extraction site.”

She quirked a skeptical brow at him. “I’ll grant you, these guys aren’t terribly bright, but there are a lot of them and I don’t know if they’re dumb enough to fall for that kind of fake-out. Or lose interest.”

“Never underestimate how dumb people can be,” he said. “If they don’t fall for the ruse, they might assume we headed downriver and start searching in that direction, but without any footprints they’ll probably give up fast. Since Ramos isn’t around to give them orders, they’ll just go back to the house. They’re paid to follow, not think for themselves. Either way, we’ll be underneath the boathouse and we’ll be able to see which way they go.”

“Okay,” she said. Still not sure such a simple trick would work. “You’re the expert.”

“Damn straight.”

With her hand still held tight in his, he dragged her along the river bank making sure they left a trail of footprints. She slipped a couple of times in the mud, but caught herself and trudged on. When he found a spot he liked—where grassy undergrowth would mask footprints and make it more difficult to track—he led them up into the trees.

When he was sure their footprints pointed anyone following them into the jungle, but the prints started to disappear in the foliage, he picked up a fallen branch and led them back down to the river, wiping out their tracks as they went.

He climbed down onto the boulders above the water itself and held out a hand to her. They’d traipsed about fifty yards upriver and away from the boathouse. She joined him on the rocks.

“That water’s moving pretty damn fast,” she said.

He tossed the branch into the water. The river snagged it in its greedy grasp and sucked it away.

Damian shrugged, unconcerned. “I’ve seen worse.”

“You’re trained for this shit. I’m not a great swimmer.”

“I’ve got you, Kim Possible.”

“Ha ha. Very funny.”

He waded into the river, and braced his legs against the current long enough for her to pick her way in with him. Standing on his sturdy SEAL legs, he looked like an immovable object, like he’d planted roots in the river and the damn thing could just go around him.

When she got into the water, she felt like a ping-pong ball, bouncing and careening at the whim of the river.

Damian snatched her around the waist, his firm grip like a comforting steel band anchoring her to him.

“Hold on,” he said.

She clung to his back as he made riding the current look like a graceful dance. He guided them around a couple of boulders and a fallen branch as if he lived in the water and could command it to do his bidding, and the time he spent on land was a grudging necessity. By contrast, despite clinging desperately to him, her legs bounced against rocks and water splashed in her face blinding and choking her.

When they finally made it over to the pilings under the boathouse she was tense, drenched, and freezing. He was cool as the proverbial cucumber.

“Okay, let’s take a look under here,” he said, inching them under the building.

The limited space tended more toward claustrophobia than cozy. The riverbed sloped up to the bank, and the water lapped within a couple of feet of the underside of the building. A ledge in the bank above the water line gave them a somewhat dry area, but it didn’t leave much space to squeeze them both in. It was a great hidey hole, but cramped. She doubted the guerillas would even check under the building, but if they did, the darkness of the space would keep them hidden.

Before she could voice her concerns about the tiny space and if they’d even fit into it, she heard voices filtering through the trees and down the road.

In Spanish, they chattered about the car crashing into the river. They milled around the wreck nattering for a bit about the prints, sounding excited that she and Damian would be so stupid as to leave them. They debated about it being a trap, but the majority opinion was that the prints led upriver, not downriver or into the boathouse. Finally, the voices became more distant as they followed the prints, heading upriver. They didn’t even check the boathouse.

“I can’t believe they fell for that,” Elena said.

“They haven’t fallen yet. They’re just following the lead. They may catch on and come back. In the meantime, we should get comfortable.”

“Is that even possible here?”

He clambered up into the muddy ledge, laying on his side and scooting back to leave space in front of him, then patted the dirt and waggled his brows at her. “We can make it comfortable.”

She laughed despite herself. “You’re incorrigible.”

She climbed up on the ledge with him, stretching out in front of him. When their bodies touched, it was the fireworks from the barbecue all over again, but with an undercurrent of fuzzy warm. He made her feel safe—something she’d never before experienced from another human being. She’d spent her adult life independent. The nature of her career required her to push people away, and for the most part she’d been fine with that.