Play It Safe (The Safe House Series Book 2) (3 page)

She glanced up at the tree canopy. What of reception out here?

“The signal is strong on this mountain.”

Again with the mind reading. She had never felt more exposed. Not even alone, in her bedroom, sans clothes. God, did he ever break eye contact once he had it? She wanted him to go back to cleaning his rifle so she could draw a normal, healthy breath.

“We’ll be ready, Angela. I have a script in my pocket.”

Script. That was good, right? He would think her compliant. After he fell asleep, she would go.

“I have to know what’s going on.”

“It’s best if you don’t.”

“I function better with plans and logical next steps.”

“Rockwell has men all over this.”

“With all due respect, Rockwell’s loved one isn’t the hostage.”

Samson stood. In a mesmerizing display of brushing grass and leaves from the red-tab jeans that hugged his backside, he set the weapon down with the precision of someone who held great respect for human life. “Rockwell has
been
a hostage. Budyonnorsk, Russia. 1995. There’s no one better, with more real-world connections, diplomatic and otherwise.”

A strong breeze ripped leaves from the white alders surrounding the grassy knoll, a foretelling of winter. She fastened a persistent lock of hair behind her ear. “I need more.”

“You won’t get it from me. Your safety is inversely proportional to how much intelligence I give you.”

“My father told me of a…diversion…in which he used to partake with his fellow Marines. Boredom, I suppose, during all those hours of waiting. A shooting match of sorts. One of confessions. Whoever shoots the best can ask anything of the others, be it a favor or a truth.”

In the light of day, Samson’s bearded stubble and the chestnut hue of his skin popped out in full-relief against his immaculate white teeth. His smile disarmed her, and she wasn’t yet equipped. She had to equalize the playing field before his charms turned her into one of his helium-brained conquests.

“You want to challenge me to a shooting competition?”

She shrugged, afraid words might give her away.

“If I make the better shot, you confess any truth I ask?” said Samson.

“And if I make the better shot, you tell me what I want to know about the plan to save Mike.”

This time his smile was already that of a champion, first-round knockout. No contest.

A strange vibration circulated her stomach and journeyed south. From the game, she told herself. From besting his ego. Nothing more.

“Ladies first. Choose your weapon.” He gestured wide to a small collection of rifles propped against a log bench in the house’s shade. “The featherweight on the far right might be best for your…arms.”

A Remington 700. Sacrificing weight for accuracy would never get her answers. Only the most precision piece would do.

“I like the black one with the long thingy on top.”

“The sight?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure about this?” Samson retrieved the bolt-action Mark V and placed it in her outstretched hands.

For show, she lifted the wrong end up. “Positive.”

“Whoa.” His wide, callused palm was on the barrel, angling it to the ground before she had time to blink. “First rule of gun safety—always assume it’s loaded.”

“Loaded. Got it,” she echoed.

He selected a .300 WSM. The recoil on that gun, alone, would give her everything she wanted to know inside of ten minutes.

“Rules?” he asked, placing one headset over her ears, another over his.

“Clean shot. Nothing left on the log. Opponent chooses the target.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I choose the rubber duck.”

Angela squinted. Even with 20-15 lenses, she couldn’t tell the bright yellow object was a toy duck. Didn’t matter much. She had no intention of hitting this one.

She nestled the butt of the rifle against the wrong hollow of her arm and pressed her cheek to the wood. The crosshairs locked onto a grayish, widow-maker branch. She squeezed the trigger.

The Mark V felt clumsy, unresponsive to her taste. The rush of firing, however, was still there.

One old branch crashed to the forest floor.

“Aww.” Angela clicked her tongue for good measure and lowered her weapon.

“Close,” he lied.

She wondered if patronizing women had become part of his flirty, foreplay repertoire. He lifted his rifle and fired. The yellow blob at five hundred yards disappeared.

“What is the true nature of your biochemical weapon?” He went for the jugular then added, “Truth.”

Angela’s chest grew heavy from truths she didn’t want to surrender. “It was never meant to be a weapon. It started out as a geoengineering project to control the atmospheric humidity in certain climates whose patterns locked them into cycles that did nothing but breed famine. We determined a chemical solution that allowed us to dial that moisture the way we turn a knob on a thermostat. Not much different than seeding clouds. Like playing god with the environment. It was only when we tested the outer parameters of what was possible that we realized what we had. A formula capable of one hundred percent dehydration of the land within forty miles of its intended target.”

“And life in that zone?”

“In places of high heat, like equatorial zones? Days, maybe.”

“You said ‘we’. Who else knows the formula?”

“Beer bottle. Far left.”

He blinked away her affront and took aim. His torso stilled; his breathing regulated.

A round went off.

He missed.

“Oooh, sorry. Can’t answer that one.”

Angela raised the rifle, proper stance, sight aligned on the bottle’s yellow and black label. She reduced her breathing to a four-count. Four count inhale. Four count exhale. Her index finger itched. She squeezed, fired, repositioned the lever, squeezed, fired, repeating the cycle until she had cleared the log of every item of junk and spent cartridges littered the grass around her like acorns.

“
Jesus Christ!
”

“I want names of contacts Rockwell has on the ground in South Africa.”

“You hustled me.”

“I want to know what kind of tracking software you put on my phone, the location of the nearest consulate to my brother’s last known location of Mthatha, the identities of politicians Rockwell has in his back pocket and those he avoids, where—exactly—we are in the state, and a number I can call where Rockwell will pick up.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. How many women have there been?”

“What?”

“I found seventeen bras, all of varying sizes and degrees of …transparency…in the dresser drawers of my room. Forget to remove your trophies?”

“Don’t scramble up on your feminist high horse, McAllister. Those women were here because they chose to be, not because of some conquest. Just because no man can stand you long enough to darken your door doesn’t give you the right to judge those of us who enjoy the finer pleasures of life.”

His words were a .30 caliber cartridge to her abdomen. A blow that stole the sting of pleasure she had found at viewing his body moments earlier and twisted it into something shameful and wrong and not meant for her. Her feet retreated two steps, of their own will. Again, her gaze drifted to the clearing—something safe, something devoid of the pity that now distorted Samson’s near-perfect features.

“Angela…” His voice was contrite, as if his verbal shot had just sucked the life out of something, someone.

“I’d like my phone, please.” She continued to stare a hole in the knot of a random tree. Four inhales, four exhales did nothing to dissipate the buckshot comment that had landed square in her chest.

“Angela…”

“Phone.” Her throat closed around the word that came out, hard, biting.

He slid the phone from the back pocket of his jeans, tossed it a short bump a time or two in his palm then handed it to her.

Without words, she took the phone and headed back up to the safe house with as many answers as she had when she descended the grassy hill.

Less than zero.

The call came as Samson laid out an apologetic, late-afternoon meal: pasta, zucchini bread, salted tomatoes. Angela had spent much of the day organizing his ammunition and gun collection. She said organizing something—anything—helped gather her thoughts. Beyond that, she said little else.

He wanted to ask her where she learned to handle guns, why she wanted to know so much about Rockwell, and why she had bothered to count underthings that didn’t belong to her when he, himself, had never counted. Sure, there had been women, lots of them since he vowed himself to Riley and she was ripped from his life, sometimes two women at a time, but they meant nothing. They were simply warm bodies to medicate the pain. His existence was largely solitary, not unlike the narrative he had read in Angela’s file. He would trade all his meaningless encounters for one real moment.

A moment he would never have again.

Angela’s obnoxious ringtone tapped out a hip hop beat across the house. Her phone zagged across the granite countertop. In an instant, she was beside him.

“Ready?”

She nodded.

He placed the script in front of her and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

She pressed the green answer then speaker button. “Hello?”

“Doctor McAllister. I hope I haven’t kept you long.”

Her gaze scanned his handwritten notes. “I can’t help you, and my brother, unless you tell me exactly who you are and what you want.”

Good girl. Samson pressed the scan command on Rockwell’s black market mobile tracking software. Pop up code boxes blanketed red heat islands on a world map, silently crunching data.

“Call me Julian. I believe we have the same goals. I want something you alone can give me. And I’d venture to say you want the same.”

A scuffle sounded in the background, followed by muted, muffled noise and a blast of something before the choked noise died completely.

“I want to speak to him.”

“Not until we occupy the same room, Angie. That cannot happen unless you follow my instructions.”

The digital map reconfigured, the expanding red rings gradually shifting to green between 17 degrees west and fifty-one degrees east. Africa. A minute more until the screen was all green. Samson pointed to three words on his script:
Keep him talking
.

“I’m ready.”

“Third Street Promenade near Los Angeles. Tomorrow. You’ll find art that resembles a striped flag pole in the plaza. Someone will wait for you there with further instructions. Bring your passport and a viable sample.”

“I don’t carry samples, Julian. Surely, even you can see the foolishness in that.”

Samson winced. Generally not a good idea to insinuate captors are idiots. He supposed someone as intelligent as Angela may lack the stay-alive, common-sense gene. Fortunately, a slight chuckle came across the line.

“High-spirited. We’ll do just fine, Angela. Just fine.”

Samson motioned a circular sweep of his hand to remind Angela to keep Julian engaged.

“I want to hear Mike’s voice.”

“Impossible. He’s… indisposed.”

“I want a live video feed of Mike tomorrow at the meet up location. I talk to him, and he talks to me. Otherwise, I unleash an email blast to every international law enforcement agency and embassy within a thousand miles of the equatorial zone.”

Samson’s laptop map was almost entirely green over the bottom half of Africa.

“Agreed. But Angela, you come alone. If we find out you alerted anyone—especially that Navy SEAL you insist on keeping around you—I’ll be forced to acquaint every single person you care about with my latest neurotoxin.”

Ten seconds.

“Renders a person trapped in the wooden shell of their body until insanity taxes the heart. There is poetic beauty in science, is there not, Doctor McAllister?”

The call ended.

Damn it.

A frigid exhale skated from Angela’s lips. She brought both shaking hands to a steeple over her nose and mouth. “Ohmygod…ohmygod…ohmygod.”

“You did good, Madam Curie.” A few seconds shy of perfect, but good, nevertheless. He pulled her into an embrace because it broke his heart that some fucked-up, psychotic terrorist had the reach to make someone as innocent as Angela believe he could harm her.

Not as long as he still drew breath.

He expected her to turn away, wiggle free. She didn’t. Doctor Angela McAllister, with the wit of a dive-bar comedian and the intelligence to change so much more about the world than he ever could, melted against him like the space was created just for her. Her eyeglasses bumped against the powerful lines of his chest. She backed away long enough to remove them to the counter then burrowed her forehead deeper against him. Slow, soundless sobs wracked her body.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered against her hair. That someone so untainted could get mixed up in something so dark. That he said no man could stand her. That he couldn’t be that one to darken her door, just once, to show her that humans weren’t meant to live exclusively inside their heads and in lab results—that passion and intimacy aren’t meant to be repressed. All he could offer her was his blanket apology and his protection.

He hoped that would be enough.

She pulled away and looked up at him with round, glassy, vulnerable eyes. Without frames cluttering her features, she was cute, the way a sparrow is cute when it lands, unexpectedly, on your windowsill and holds your attention and makes you mourn when it leaves. He knew the instant she leaned in what would happen—she all but scrambled up his body to make it happen. She planted her lips on his in a rigid kiss that spoke of the rushed inexperience he knew her to have. No tongue, no acquiescence. Simply the collision of two fleshy folds of the body. It was like kissing a best friend’s sister at fifteen.

Only not entirely.

A slight awakening shivered through him. The first thought that cleared his awakening libido:
Dear God, has it been that long?
His second:
Why can’t I give her this? Just this?

She broke contact and drifted slowly away as if she believed that was all to the art of a kiss. In that breath, his decision was made. He would give her the breath-stealing, earth-shattering, scaling-a-mountain-peak kind of kiss that blew apart any hidden fantasy those dirty little rap lyrics germinated in her mind.

Samson slid his palm past her neck and threaded her scalp. He pulled her roughly to him, this time a collision of experience, a tutorial on how to let someone know you want them beyond all reason. His mouth angled over hers in a fevered union of hot exhales and this-side-of-insanity gasps for breath. She opened her lips to him and welcomed him inside the searing, probing, devouring place he created for her to explore, sample, test. The hungry thrust of his tongue surpassed altruism. His body responded wholly and completely, as he would have to any woman who unleashed a rare moment when he could put aside worries and preoccupations with others’ safety and focus on that void inside. She let loose an unrestrained moan deep in her throat that drove him to barely-there oblivion where actions clobbered common sense. The moment his hands snaked down her slight frame and hugged her hips against his jean-clad erection, he knew he had to stop the madness.

He pulled away, his mind as slow to recover as if he had swallowed a narcotic. His exhales rushed past her cheeks, fast and hard. Her lips were swollen and ripe and wet, as pretty as any shade of lip gloss. Her hair had fallen in loose tendrils from the invasion of his hand and that flush he had witnessed twice in the bar had made a grand return. He couldn’t think of a fucking thing to say past an appreciative curse that there was, in fact, an untamed spark within her he longed to ignite into a scorching wildfire.

But her eyes clouded dark. Her blinks came more rapid.

His chest ached. He had seen that look before, out on the lawn.
Shit
.

“Angela…”

“No, I get it. No man would want to darken my door. Least of all, you.”

She took a step back. Then two. Then five.

He should tell her that he hadn’t wanted to stop, that he found her contradictions fascinating and he longed to find out what other secret pleasures opposed her puritanical exterior, but her protection was more to him than an eighteenth discarded item. Rockwell would never be right about that. Duty always,
always
, came first. Angela believing the worst of him was best.

She picked up a plate of cold pasta and a fork off the table and padded through the kitchen toward her room. “Thanks for dinner.”

Her voice captured the same, lonely note he had perfected, graveside, for six long years.

He shoved the companion plate aside, a very different kind of hunger much harder to temper.