Omega Force 01- Storm Force (8 page)

The Co-Op offices had never been hotter, and it had nothing to do with the hundred-plus temperature outside. Mori got to the office at 9:00, and Kell was already there. She stood at the door, watching him curse at the computer. He looked tired, and when he leaned over to pick up a receipt that had dropped to the floor, his movements were stiff.

Heat rushed across Mori’s face at the thought of why his back might be sore. She’d been stupid and selfish. She could have put Kell at greater risk by being with him last night. She hated that she was not the woman he thought — nothing like it. But, oh, she wished she could be.

He looked up and smiled when she opened the door and went inside. The chill of the AC was so delicious she had to stop for a minute, close her eyes, and enjoy the feel of cold air on her skin. When she opened her eyes again, Kell was in front of her.

“Taylor’s not here yet. Are we still on for lunch?”

She nodded. Her chance to grasp one last selfish slice of time for herself. “What do you want to do?”

Blue and green were normally cool colors, but his eyes filled with heat. “I have some ideas, but they’re probably not appropriate for the office.”

The thought made her heart speed up. She reached up to touch his cheek, run her thumb along the strong cheekbone, move toward him for a kiss.

“Well, isn’t this an interesting way to start the morning?”

Damn Taylor, and damn her for being careless. She stepped back, not sure how to respond.

Kell took charge. “Don’t be jealous, man.” He smiled at Taylor, and Mori had to bite her lip to keep from laughing at his cocky, insincere expression. “Guess we’ll have to keep it out of the office. At least until lunchtime.”

Kell winked at her and went back to the receptionist’s desk, ignoring Taylor’s wide-eyed gawk.

Right. Work.

“Tay, do you have the last quarterly donor report finished? I wanted to go over it this morning.” Mori went into her office and threw her bag on the floor next to her chair.

“Sure, I’ll e-mail it to you.” Tay stuck his head in her office door. “Also, a reporter called yesterday looking for you and asking questions about our new volunteer. I told him all about our war hero.”

Yeah, she knew exactly what he’d told Michael and what had come of it. She’d already decided before Kell showed up last night that she had to give Michael what he wanted in order to keep him from following through on his threats. But being with Kell had erased any lingering doubts. She had no choice. Tonight, she’d tell Michael she was his. At least her body would be his. Her heart would never belong to him, but she doubted he’d care.

About 11:30 a.m., a call from one of the Co-Op’s biggest donors kept her on the phone for more than an hour, trying to reassure the man that the million he’d pledged over the next twelve months was not tied up with anything illegal, much less an act of terrorism.

By the time she finally got off the phone, the pledge intact, it was a quarter till one. She grabbed her bag and was relieved to see Kell still at the desk, although he’d shut it down and had gotten engrossed in one of the books from the Co-Op’s small library. Ironically, the one on extinct and endangered species in the American South and Southwest.

She cleared her throat, and he finally looked up. “Sorry that took so long. Are you starving?”

“No, I’ve been reading about these species that used to be abundant around here but are extinct, or at least they’re thought to be extinct. I guess with a wild animal, it depends on how long it’s been since there’s been a confirmed sighting?”

She nodded, propping a hip on the edge of the desk. “Like the Louisiana black bear we were talking about. Since they live in the wild, chances are good that somebody’s going to report seeing at least one in any given year. But it has been a while. Scientists will go in and confirm as best they can by looking for signs — bear scat or claw marks. If there are no sightings and no signs, eventually they’re considered extinct.”

Kell turned to a page he’d marked with a sticky note and flipped the book around to face her. “The jaguarundi are interesting. They’re thought to be gone from Texas now — mostly, they live in South America. Are you familiar with them? Kind of ugly, I think.”

Mori stared at the book, her pulse accelerating. What did Kell know? What was the likelihood that, out of every animal in the book, he’d zeroed in on the jaguarundi? All she could do was play dumb and stay cool.

“Not the prettiest of the wild cats, for sure.” She took the book and studied the photo, which looked a hell of a lot like Travis. “I don’t know a lot about them. They’re in the puma family, a little bigger than a large house cat, I think.” And aggressive, territorial, and continuing to exist in Texas only within a shifter population, apparently. She handed the book back to him and gave him what she hoped was a carefree smile. “So, you ready to go? Have any place special in mind for lunch?”

He closed the book and studied it a second before nodding. “You like Tex-Mex? There’s a new place over on Kirby I’ve heard good things about. I thought about Niko Niko’s again, but it’s noisy and we need to talk.”

Talk. Mori didn’t want to talk, because what she had to say was one more lie on top of a stack of lies. She had to tell him she couldn’t see him anymore. That it would be better if he didn’t volunteer at the Co-Op. That she was planning to marry another man.

“Sure, that sounds great. Which car?”

Kell stopped at the door and gave her little hybrid a doubtful look. “I know I’m only a couple of inches taller than you, but I can’t see me squishing in that matchbox on wheels.”

Mori laughed. “Then the Blue Bombshell it is.”

“The Terminator. The car’s name is the Terminator.”

They were both laughing when he pulled the Terminator into traffic, but silence settled over them within a block. Mori hated this awkwardness. They should have been in the throes of new relationship bliss, but Kell seemed as preoccupied and unsettled as she was.

What an irony it would be if the thing he wanted to tell her was he didn’t want to see her again. She’d been thinking all along this was her decision, as if he didn’t have his own life and friends — and, who knew, even a wife somewhere. He didn’t wear a ring, but that meant nothing these days, and she’d never thought to ask him.

What a dolt she was, mentally constructing this grand, tragic romance when, really, what they’d had was a one-night stand between two virtual strangers with great chemistry.

“Here we go.” Kell wedged the behemoth of a car into a parking spot, and they got out without speaking further. The restaurant was one of those almost-too-cute adobe buildings, landscaped with cactus and palms. Most of the lunch crowd appeared to have cleared out, judging by the sparsely populated parking lot.

Once they were seated and had ordered, Kell reached out and took her hand. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and Mori held her breath to see what he’d wanted to tell her since last night. She figured this talk could go one of two ways. He could dump her, or she’d be forced to dump him. Either way, it was going to hurt.

“I have to tell you, first, that I don’t regret last night. Not for a second.” He kept his gaze trained on their twined fingers. “I haven’t been with anyone since... I hadn’t expected to meet…” He clenched his jaw and looked down, as if searching for the right words. “You were a surprise.
We
were a surprise. So there are some things you need to know about me that…Oh hell.”

He sat back in his chair and took a sip of his beer.

Kell had secrets he wanted to tell her? Mori sipped her own beer, watching him. It had never occurred to her that Jack Kelly was anything more or less than what he said.

“You were a surprise to me, too.” She thought about their first meeting — only four days ago but so much raw emotion had been crammed into those days, it seemed like weeks since he’d walked into the Co-Op. What she remembered most about her first encounter with Kell was the way he’d reacted to the Homeland Security guys, his posture rigid and his back to the wall so they couldn’t get behind him. It had looked like the kind of move a well-trained soldier might make on reflex. She realized she’d decided at that moment to trust him.

“I don’t think there’s anything you could tell me that would change things. I don’t regret last night, either, and when you knew something was wrong and bullied your way in” — she looked up at him — “you took care of me. I saw who you were inside. That’s what matters.”

“Right. But still—”

A commotion at the restaurant’s bar, which lay a few feet to their right, drew their attention. “What’s going on?” Kell asked their waiter, who’d brought their plates but, like everyone else, was staring at the clump of bar patrons, all talking at once.

“The governor has been found, and he’s alive.” The waiter set down the plates and poured more water in Mori’s glass. “Someone kidnapped him, I think.”

Mori had a bad feeling about this and prayed that, whatever Michael had done to Carl Felderman, the governor would come back intact and with his mouth shut.

Kell was leaning so far back in his chair she thought he might tip over. “There’s a TV behind the bar. Let’s go hear what they’re saying.”

He was halfway to the commotion before she’d reluctantly risen from her chair. She eased between two of the waitstaff at the end of the bar, and sure enough, there was the old camera hog on-screen with a microphone stuck in front of him, having a press conference.

“Turn it louder!” yelled someone from a table farther back in the restaurant, and the bartender reached up and pushed the button until the familiar drawl of Carl Felderman could probably be heard in Dallas.

Felderman, always a thin stick of a man, looked horrible. Emaciated and pale, he spoke in a voice that sounded strong, but the hand he held up to adjust the microphone shook. Mori had never liked the man, but a deep stab of pity shot through her. Michael had caused this, at least partly because of her.

Mori looked down the length of the bar and finally spotted Kell, staring intently at the screen with his hands on his hips. He’d never mentioned Felderman — had never talked about the bombing at all except in general terms — but she guessed everyone was amazed that he was alive. Except her.

“I’m thankful to God that I’ve come through this ordeal, and I look forward to getting back to Austin and resuming my duties as governor,” he was saying. He pushed away from the table where he was seated, waved feebly at the crowd of reporters, and hobbled away, leaning on the arm of an aide. What had he said earlier?

The camera switched to the news anchor, and people filtered back to their tables or their jobs. Mori looked at Kell, who was still staring at the screen with wide eyes, and she turned to see what he was looking at.

Oh God.
“The governor has identified a local environmental activist as being behind his abduction and possibly the bombing of the Zermurray Building,” the news anchor was saying. The picture behind him was of the Co-Op offices, with swarms of police cars outside, officers moving in and out the door, goddamned Taylor standing on the stoop running his mouth and pointing at her car in the lot.

And then the background picture changed to one of her. A publicity photo taken a year ago filled up the space behind the newsman’s head. “A manhunt is underway, and a reward has been offered for information—”

Kell grabbed her arm and steered her toward the door. His voice was low and tight. “Walk out of here now.” He tossed a few bills on their table as they passed it. “When we get to the car, I need you on the floorboard, out of sight. I’m right behind you.”

“Kell, I didn’t do this.” The light as they pushed through the door blinded her, and she stumbled on the sidewalk. Kell grabbed her arm and propelled her forward as fast as they could go without running. “I swear, I had nothing to do with any of this.”

He had to believe her. She needed him to believe her. What game was Michael playing this time? One more attempt to force her to come to him for help? Well, it was probably going to work.

Kell opened the passenger door and waited for her to climb in and slither onto the floorboard, then walked around the car and slid into the driver’s seat.

“Kell, where are we going?” Was he taking her to the police? They couldn’t go back to the Co-Op or to her apartment. She couldn’t think of anyplace to go except to Michael, damn it. The Co-Op was ruined; she was ruined. But she’d be damned if she let Kell ruin his life, too.

She sat up and struggled to get back into the seat. “Let me out. You can’t get involved in this.”

Before she could twist and open the door, he’d cranked the engine and pulled out of the lot. “Get on the fucking floorboard. Now.”

His harsh tone startled her so that she swallowed hard and curled as tightly onto the floorboard as her height would allow. Sometimes, long legs were not an asset.

“Kell, you have to understand, I didn’t—”

“Not now.” Once he’d navigated the Terminator onto Kirby, he sped up and blended with traffic. “We’ll talk later. Right now, you’re on the run. And I’m aiding and abetting.”

Somehow, when Kell had
slogged through the Ranger School refresher and counterterrorism training with
his new Omega Force team, he’d imagined using his skill set to work in tandem
with law enforcement, or at least support it from behind the scenes.

Using his know-how to run from
the law while aiding a suspected terrorist — and now kidnapper? Not on the
agenda.

Yet here he was,
driving his parents’ ancient behemoth of a car with a silent, panicking woman
crouched on his floorboard, his mind ticking through escape routes and
assessing options.

He maneuvered the Terminator through
the heavy traffic on Kirby and maneuvered onto I-59, headed toward downtown. The
jag-shifters had seen the Olds, so his first order of business would be swapping
it for the car Nik had rented.

Money fell next on the list — cash,
to minimize the trail that would be left by using plastic.

Once those basic needs had been
met, he’d figure out what the hell he was doing trashing his career for a woman
who, if she hadn’t been lying to him outright, had at the very least been lying by omission.

“Can I sit up now?”

He glanced down at a grim-faced Mori,
who had folded her long frame into an accordion pleat, trying to squeeze onto
the floorboard. He wanted to throttle her and hold her so tightly no one could
touch her. And then throttle her again.

Instead, he growled, “Stay.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a
golden retriever.” She popped her head up and looked out the window before
slumping back down. “You need to stop and let me out, Kell.
You can’t get involved in this.”

“It’s a little fucking late for
that.” Damn it, she hadn’t asked him to pull the white knight routine, so he
needed to quit acting like an asshole — at least until he heard her side of
things. First, he had to get them somewhere safe. “Sorry.”

He took a sharp right turn a
little faster than he should have, causing the Olds’s
granny tires to squeal and Mori’s head to thump on the door of the glove
compartment. She rubbed her temple and scowled at him but didn’t speak. Smart woman. He needed to think about where to go that
wouldn’t drag Nik and the rest of his team into the
toilet with him if this all flushed south. It was definitely swirling in that
direction.

 His cell phone vibrated in his jeans pocket,
and he maneuvered to pull it out and look at the incoming number. Nik. Kell considered not answering, but his phone shouldn’t have
been compromised, unless whoever was having him followed had linked Jack Kelly
to Jack Kellison. And he needed to warn Nik and Robin to stay away from his apartment and the Co-Op.
Thank God he’d decided to send Gator home with them last night.

He’d take the risk that the phone
was still safe. “Shit creek, man. No paddle.”

Nik’s words were casual, but his voice
was tense. “Where are you?”

“Going for the rental. Is it still in the same place?”

“Yeah.” Nik’s exasperated huff of
air practically puffed its way through the phone. “She with
you?”

Kell glanced down at Mori, who’d wrapped her arms around
her bent knees and rested her forehead on them. “Affirmative.”

“What
the hell are you thinking? Tell me you’re on your way to turn her in and are getting
the rental car to protect yourself.”

Kell didn’t know what he was going to do beyond getting the
new wheels. He wanted to know what was really going on before he took a step as
drastic as turning Mori in. His gut told him she was in some kind of trouble
the authorities might worsen rather than fix.

One step at a
time. “Just
stay away from the apartment and the Co-Op — and me. It’s complicated.”

“Fuck
that. You need to go and…Wait a minute.”

Robin’s
voice rose and fell in the background a few seconds before Nik
cursed again. When he returned to the phone, he sounded pissed off but calmer.
“OK, go to ground and avoid the colonel. Option B as in beta.
We’ll figure it out from there.”

Kell let out a breath of relief and ended the call. They
were behind him, and he hoped like hell they wouldn’t live to regret it. While
going through their counterterrorism training, the team members had privately
come up with safeguard options in case one or all of them was compromised. They’d
found multiple safe spots that even the Omega Force brass — the colonel and whomever
he worked for — didn’t know about.

First
loyalty was to country. Next, to team. The colonel
came in third. Maybe fourth, behind Gator. Kell didn’t know where the hell Mori Chastaine
fit into that list, except that she shouldn’t be on it at all.

Option
B was a cheap, utilitarian hotel in extreme far-east suburban Baytown,
surrounded by petrochemical plants churning out smoke twenty-four/seven. That
would be the next step after the car exchange.

“Who
was that? Who knows you’re with me?” Mori lifted her head and frowned at him,
then unwound those distractingly long legs and levered herself into the
passenger seat, her right hand on the door handle.

He
watched her out of his peripheral vision. Her eyes scanned the street ahead of
them, then locked onto something, her body tensed, her fingers tightened on the
handle.

Shit.
She was going to make a run for it
if that next red light caught them. He obviously didn’t have the good sense God
gave a duck, or he’d arrest her. Since that wasn’t happening, he should let her
go, let her run, let her sink or swim in her own mess. Whatever her troubled
game was, its players traveled in loftier circles than he did. Governors and
millionaire shipping magnates were not the type of terrorist he’d been prepared
to go after.

That
was his brain doing all the tough talk. His gut remembered the vulnerability
she’d shown when he’d touched her, and the open abandon with which she’d given
herself to him. She was in trouble, and he had to do something about it.

Damn
it. This nobility shit was seriously overrated.

With
one eye on the smoke-belching truck in front of him, Kell
reached over and flipped open the glove compartment, pulled out his spare pair
of handcuffs, and snapped one bracelet around Mori’s wrist before she figured
out what he was doing. Be prepared, he always figured.
Rangers lead the way.

“What
the hell?” Mori pulled against him harder than he’d expected. In fact, she
practically jerked his arm off, but he held on to the other cuff, finally
snapping it around the Terminator’s gearshift. If she jerked on it that hard
again, she’d throw them into reverse and they’d both be shit
out of luck.

She
stopped struggling and stared at the cuffs. “Why did you do that?”

Kell gritted his teeth and gave her a solid glare. “Because
you were getting ready to hop out at the next red light and run like a gazelle
on the fucking Serengeti.”

She
laughed. How dare she laugh?

“I
don’t see one damn funny thing about this situation.”

Mori
stopped laughing, but the smile lingered. “I bet you were one absolute asshole
as a Marine.”

The
woman needed an education, and he knew just the man to give it to her. “Ranger.”

“Whatever.”
Mori slumped down in the seat but didn’t try to slip the cuff on the gearshift — good
thing, since a fender bender that put them in a close encounter with Houston’s
finest would be counterproductive to an escape.

“Where
are we going, anyway? Wrong direction for the FBI or Houston
PD.”

He
glanced at her before snapping his gaze back to the traffic. She was staring
out the window, so he couldn’t see her expression. How much did he trust her? Right now, not much. “Somewhere we can talk.”

She
turned to face him. “You aren’t turning me in?”

The
combination of hope and fear in her voice stabbed his conscience like a knife
in the chest. He wanted to protect her, but he couldn’t make that promise — not
until he knew what kind of shit she was in and how deep. “Not yet.”

He
pulled into a self-park lot a half block from the rental’s location, used the
Jack Kelly credit card to pay for a week’s parking, and eased the Terminator
into a space. “Reach in the glove compartment and find the key to the cuffs. Don’t
think about running.”

Mori
huffed. “Or what? You’re going to chase me down? Shoot
me in the middle of downtown Houston? I mean, what part of
I don’t want you involved in this
do you not get?” She dug around in
the compartment, fished out a small pair of silver keys on a plain ring, and
began fumbling with the cuff. “Just let me get out of this car and walk. Drive
away and live your life. It’s safer for both of us if you —”

“Who
sent the two jaguarundi shifters after me?”

Mori
stopped futzing with the cuff but wouldn’t meet his gaze. Just
as he’d thought. A normal reaction would have been
What’s
a shifter, Kell? Jags are extinct, Kell.
Yet Mori was as pale as if she’d seen a fucking
Louisiana black bear walking through downtown Houston in the oppressive August
heat. She knew about shifters, which raised a whole bunch of new questions.

“How
do you know about them? What did they do?” Her voice barely rose above a
whisper, and she finally looked up at him. “Did they hurt you?”

“Not
yet.” He reached over and took the keys from her, quickly unlocking the cuffs.
He’d take them with him; he’d never cuffed a woman to a bed with anything more
than pleasure in mind, but he had a feeling Mori Chastaine
wasn’t going to give up her secrets easily.

The
shifter comment seemed to have deflated Mori, and her shoulders sagged as she
got out of the Olds. She didn’t pull away when he wrapped his fingers around
her wrist and tugged her to walk alongside him to the trunk, and she didn’t
raise an eyebrow when he transferred his rifle and the cuffs to a big duffel that still held the clothes he’d taken to Cote
Blanche. Mori’s slight intake of breath was the only indication she’d seen him
slip the Beretta out of the case and into his waistband under his shirt before
closing the trunk. He’d have put the rifle with it if he thought he could walk
with it stuck down his pants leg.

“Look
inconspicuous,” he said under his breath, like a six-foot blond Amazon and a
guy with a washtub-sized duffel bag could be inconspicuous under any
circumstances. Especially in a city like Houston, where there were underground
air-conditioned tunnels so people wouldn’t have to walk outside. “Walk with a
purpose, but not like you’re in a hurry.”

They
trekked at a steady clip to the lot where the rental was parked. Kell pulled out the card, found the space number, and
detached the key. Escorting Mori to the
passenger side of the generic dark-blue Chevy, he unlocked the door, not
releasing her wrist until she had slid silently inside. To her credit, she
didn’t try to run while he walked around to the driver’s side and got in. The
shifter comment had shaken her big-time. Good.

“I’m
stopping to get cash, and then we’re going to a hotel where we can talk. There
are some things you need to know about me, and there sure as hell are things I
need to know about you — and your friends. Like the shifters and Michael
Benedict.”

Mori’s
demeanor morphed from worried to petrified before
Benedict’s name was out of his mouth.
Bingo.
Now he knew who’d hit her. Maybe even who’d sent the shifters after him.

Who, but not why. That big missing puzzle piece still floated
out of reach. Why would the millionaire head of an international shipping
company be mixed up in something this ugly?

He
pulled the rental into traffic and wound his way east toward Baytown. It would
take longer going along side streets, but the cops would be watching the
freeways and interstates, expecting that to be Mori’s logical escape route.

“You
got a cell phone?” He glanced over at her, glad to see she wasn’t crying.
Tears, he couldn’t handle. But she appeared to be deep in thought. “Mori? You got a cell phone?”

“What?”
She jolted into awareness. “Sure, why?”

“Turn
it off. It might have some kind of GPS signal that can be tracked.” He thought
a moment. “Better yet, leave it on and throw it out the window.”

She
dug in her bag and pressed the off
button on the phone. “I’ll turn it off.”

Great. Now he’d have to make sure she didn’t use the damned
thing while he wasn’t looking, or she’d get them both arrested. Or killed.

He
couldn’t help but pity her, even through his anger. She might not have realized
it yet, but life as she’d known it was over — or maybe she had, from the tilt of
her head as she stared out at urban vistas that grew steadily seedier as they
traveled east. With the governor fingering her as his kidnapper, it wasn’t the
Co-Op under fire now, but Mori herself. Unless they could somehow straighten
things out, she’d never be able to go home again. Assuming she wasn’t in it so
deep that things couldn’t be straightened out. Then Kell
couldn’t protect her, or wouldn’t. There were lines he wouldn’t cross for
anyone.

He
found a branch of his bank with a drive-through ATM and took out the day’s
cash-withdrawal limit of $500 using his personal debit card. He stuck the bills
in his wallet and tossed it on the console before resuming their twisting,
turning route to Baytown. A long, tense, silent hour later, he pulled into the
lot of a Super 8 motel tucked within a cluster of truck stops.

“Welcome
to paradise.” He eased through the lot, dodging potholes, and pulled into a
parking space in the back. The door to Room 123 lay directly in front of
them. 

Thank
God they’d made it this far. With the draining of adrenaline came a bone-deep
weariness. He hadn’t been able to soak his back or apply a heat pack to it for
two or three days, and it was catching up with him. A whole bottle of ibuprofen
wouldn’t faze this kind of ache, and he wondered if
Mori would hate him if he handcuffed her to the nightstand while he took a
long, hot bath.