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Authors: Maya Banks,Karin Tabke,Sylvia Day

Men Out of Uniform: Three Novellas of Erotic Surrender (21 page)

BOOK: Men Out of Uniform: Three Novellas of Erotic Surrender
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“Drive home the fact that we can protect her, and once it’s over she’ll be buried deep in the witness protection program.”
“And you want me to do this in twenty-four hours or less?”
“There’s a reason you’re a sergeant,” Moriarty taunted. He stood up and added, “Use whatever means necessary to convince her to talk with the DA. Gilletti is a mad dog and out of control. He’s responsible for dozens of deaths in Brooklyn alone, two of which were police officers. The wife is our only hope. Get her back here.”
Colin stood and looked at the address on the piece of paper, then folded it up. “Who else has this address?”
“No one but the two people in this room and the retired fed. I thanked him for the info but blew it off as no big deal.”
Colin took out his lighter and burned the piece of paper, watching the ashes fall to the desk.
“Keep me posted on your movement, Daniels. I want to know where you are at all times.”
That was another first. While progress reports were part of the paper trail, each one of them in the unit had full discretion on how and when progress reports in the field would be issued. Colin had never been told to give a step-by-step play-by-play. He’d never been asked to surrender his weapon or his badge either.
“I’ll check in when I can,” he said, then grabbed the duffel bag, hoisted it over his shoulder, and walked out of the office, then out of the building.
He stood on the curb, soaking up the warm morning sun. Despite his uneasy feeling regarding Moriarty, excitement racked through him. The feds had been after Gilletti Jr. for years. He was a nasty gangster who thought he was a rock star. They nabbed the old man a few years ago, but he died in Rikers before his trial had begun. Getting the goods on junior would be huge.
Colin grinned when he thought of the wife’s big green eyes and pouty lips. Getting the goods on Sophia Gilletti was going to be his pleasure.
Colin stepped off the curb and into a careening black Lincoln gunning straight for him.
Chapter 2
 
C
olin leaped onto the hood in a Hollywood-stuntman move then rolled over the top of the car and off the back onto the street. He hit the ground running. Tires squealed and screeched behind him as bullets whizzed past. When he made a hard left down an alley, the car roared after him, getting so close that he leaped up to a fire escape ladder, swung his legs up, and crashed feet first through the second-floor window of an office.
A secretarial pool screamed as he dashed through their morning coffee break. He broke into a hallway, down a stairway, and hit the adjacent alley in minutes. Soon he reached the street opposite the building that housed the task force. It was oddly quiet for a midweek workday, which made him hang back. A flash of metal caught his eye. He looked up to the three-story parking garage across the street and saw someone on the top floor duck behind the concrete railing.
His heart beat like a drum in his chest. To all appearances, the offices looked like your everyday run-of-the-mill private security agency. Had his cover been blown? Had the task force headquarters been compromised?
It would not be the first time FIST HQ had been compromised. The Bronx location was the third in as many years. Even though they acted like, looked like, and spoke like a security firm, there were times when the criminals they hunted, hunted them. Both sides played an artful game of cat and mouse.
With the explosion of high-tech toys on both sides, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep one step ahead of the bad guys. It was why Colin always had a cache of necessities nearby, one he would access as soon as he took care of the problem in front of him.
He backed into the alley and worked his way around the block and up to the top floor of the parking garage where he’d spotted the gunman. The man was now wedged between two blacked-out Suburbans. Looked government issue, but could be Mafia. Colin slid his piece from the holster and dug in the duffel for the silencer. Quietly he screwed it on and, stealthily as a tiger, he stalked the gunman.
He worked his way around the vehicles one by one, crouched, quiet, and alert. Just two cars away the Suburban closest to him moved, just enough to tell him someone was inside.
Fuck.
They were waiting for him. He backed up. Just as he got to the duffel, the back doors of the Suburban flew open and men poured out. Colin took off toward the stairwell. Screeching tires and the pounding of feet followed, hot on his heels. As he rounded the second level, a convertible was pulling out of a space. Colin yanked open the door, grabbed the stunned driver, and pulled him out.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I need to borrow your car.” He shoved the man out onto the concrete and hopped in. He downshifted, hit the gas, and took off.
The Suburban was right behind him. Colin drove through the exit-gate stop arm and made a sharp right onto the street. He shifted, blew through a red light, made a hard left and blew through another red light. The little Fiat handled beautifully, but the Suburban was still in his rearview. He needed to shake the bastards.
Colin turned right at the next street, moving against traffic, and then made another hard right into a tight alley. He lay on the gas and blasted through the chained gates at the end. He slammed the car into park, grabbed the duffel, and ran into the back of a building. He was familiar with the old trading building and knew there were numerous tunnels connecting it to several other surrounding buildings. He hurried into the bowels of the structure and headed north. As he came up two blocks away, he snatched a messenger’s bike and pedaled to the Greyhound station several blocks away. Minutes later, he walked into the station, straight back to a wall of lockers. Quickly he opened the combination lock on one of them, took out one of his alias IDs, exchanged the three grand Moriarty gave him with three Gs of his own. He then retrieved an iPad, two throwaway cells, and a small leather duffel that he stuffed with his cache, turned off his personal cell phone and set it on the cash, then locked the locker. He hurried into the men’s room, where he took the Sig from his holster and shoved it into the duffel Moriarty had given him, then tossed the entire bag into the trash can.
Colin had survived for so long on instinct. And right now, his instinct was screaming at him to trust no one.
 
Nine hours later, he was driving along Emerald Bay Road in South Lake Tahoe in a rented SUV, less than a mile from Sophia Gilletti. The flight west gave him a lot of time to think about what had to happen next. His weapons were untraceable. The iPad was registered under a dummy name, connected to a dummy e-mail he’d created on a pay-for-use public computer in Maryland. He’d paid for access to it with a prepaid Visa card. While his activity was traceable, his identity was not. He had nothing to hide from his employer, but everything to lose if the bad guys got a lock on him.
It was only early evening in the California Sierras. The clean mountain air felt good in his lungs. For the first time in a long while, Colin felt virtually alone—like he didn’t have five sets of eyes watching his every move. But then he turned right on Fifteenth Street into the Keys and it happened. His antenna went up. A black SUV slowly drove by as if it were looking for a specific address.
Shit.
He glanced down at the GPS map. The place was a freaking maze of canals and waterways and houses. She was just ahead off Venice. In order not to look conspicuous, he kept a regular speed. As the address came into view, the hair on the back of Colin’s neck stood straight up. The houses on the street were quiet, no cars in the driveways, no occupants in the yards, the interior windows covered. The only exception was the car parked across from the house that backed up to the water—the house that Sophia Gilletti was supposed to be in. Colin slowed and turned into the driveway of a house four lots down and out of view of the car. He wished he’d had time to buy a gun, but his gut told him to get to Sophia ASAP. He slipped around the back of the houses, which were connected by a long floating dock. He hurried down the dock to the back of Sophia’s house.
It was hooked up to an alarm system. He opened the fuse box to shut off the electricity, but it looked like someone had beat him to it.
Shit.
Colin tried the back door. Unlocked.
Fuck.
He entered the dark ground floor and listened. Silence. But the alluring scent of a woman caught his attention. She was here. He moved up the wooden stairway and was almost to the top when he heard a sound, not from behind him but in front of him.
 
Sophia slammed the lamp over the intruder’s head. Not waiting to see if she knocked him out, she ran for her life. Straight into a hard chest. Terrified this was it, that her husband’s goon had found her, she screamed. A big hand clamped across her face. He yanked her hard against him, pulling her down the stairway.
“I won’t hurt you,” a deep masculine voice whispered against her ear. She scratched his hand and bit it at the same time.
“Jesus Christ!” he hissed. “I said, I won’t hurt you.”
She twisted and kicked him in the balls. He grunted in pain, loosening his hold. She only caught sight of shocking blue eyes before she pushed past him and ran down the stairs to the back door. There was a Jet Ski at the end of the dock ... If she could just get there ...
As she ran out the door, a hard body tackled her from behind. They went rolling down the slope onto the deck and into the shallow water.
Sophia sputtered as she tried to get away from the blue-eyed monster. Bullets pinged in the water around them.
He grabbed her by her hair and pulled her under the dock. “Get the hell out of his line of fire,” he cursed, dragging her farther down the dock.
Footsteps thudded on the planks above them. Terrified, Sophia looked at the man who held her against his chest. She almost fainted from shock. It ... couldn’t be . . . His eyes warned her to keep quiet. Her teeth chattered so loudly she was sure the entire lake community could hear.
Ever so slowly, he moved them down the dock away from the footsteps thudding in the opposite direction. After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the end. “Stay put,” he commanded. Too terrified to move, Sophia nodded. He slipped from the water. Her instinct told her to stay, but she trusted no one. He might be there to save her for the moment, but like everyone else, he wanted something from her, something that would get her killed. Sophia moved back down the dock to the next house. The sun was beginning to set, so if she could just slip away . . .
“I told you to stay put, damn it.”
She turned around, her teeth still chattering and her body shivering so badly in the cold lake water she couldn’t even tell him to go to hell. He grabbed her arms and pulled her back to the end of the dock. Carefully, he helped her from the frigid water and into a small SUV.
Moments later, they were on Emerald Bay Boulevard, heading south.
Even in the freezing cold, and with the passing of sixteen years, Sophia recognized the man driving the SUV. Looking at him now, hearing the deep timbre of his voice, she knew without a doubt it was the same man she had fantasized about each time Angelo had touched her. Colin Daniels. Her body began to shake again, but not from the cold this time. She had been a naïve sophomore; he an experienced senior, the ultimate bad boy and the fantasy of every girl, and she was sure most of the nuns, at St. John’s Prep.
BOOK: Men Out of Uniform: Three Novellas of Erotic Surrender
6.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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