Pursuit (33 page)

“I was thinking,” she said softly, walking her fingers back up his chest, “that now that I’ve slept with you, you have to cut me some slack with the swimming lessons and target practice. I get special treatment. Because, well . . . having surrendered my virtue and all, I deserve it.”

There was a funny noise deep in his chest. It took her a moment to realize it was Matt laughing. “Sorry, honey,” he said cheerfully. “Doesn’t work like that. At
all
. God, none of us thought to sleep with the senior chief to get him to take it easy on us.” He was silent a moment, then shook his head. “Wouldn’t have worked, anyway. Gotta give you points for trying, though. Today you’re going to start the crawl, and you’re going to practice an hour and a half on the video game.”

“But I’ve already killed El Gordo a thousand times!” Charlotte found it hard to believe that adolescent males could spend hours and hours shooting people in a video game. It was fun at first but got very old very fast. “So . . . what
are
the advantages to sleeping with you if you’re not going to cut me some slack?”

The words were barely out of her mouth when he pulled her up on his chest, big hand clamped around her head, kissing her wildly. It was like lighting a torch to a bundle of dry grass. In an instant, Charlotte felt heat sparkle through her system, as if she’d walked naked in front of a blast furnace. Her skin prickled and burned everywhere she touched him. He’d somehow positioned her so that her legs opened to straddle him, knees wide open against his broad chest. While he ate at her mouth, he reached down and opened her sex over him, and the heat notched up even higher.

All thoughts flew straight out of her head. Robert gunning for her, a murder charge, her totally nonexistent future—gone. Gone under the assault of his mouth and hands. And when he lifted her up so she could see the heat in his eyes, the red along his cheekbones, his lips swollen—the very picture of an aroused male—the breath caught in her throat. She was upright only because his hands held her—one long arm bracing her back, one large hand spanning her lower belly. The hand emitted heat like a radiator, and she found it hard to distinguish between the heat of his hand and the heat her own body was generating lower down. She was one long flush, reaching from her face down to her loins. Matt was an incredible turn-on. That long, strong, scarred body. Those dark, intense eyes filled with incandescent heat. The powerful hands, holding her so gently. The way he let her know he was hers—without any tricks or games.

Charlotte thought she knew enough about sex, but she hadn’t a clue. It felt like her whole body was taken over by him. When he kissed her, and his tongue touched hers, her vagina fluttered. When he touched her breasts, the heat spread everywhere, even down to her curling toes.

He was watching her so intently she knew he could read her arousal in a thousand ways. Her heart beating so hard her left breast quivered. Her nipples, like little rocks, flushed dark red. The sheen of sweat covering her body. The slickness between her thighs. They were both slick, the large head of his penis was weeping semen. Watching her eyes carefully, Matt started moving his hips, rubbing the length of his penis along the open mouth of her sheath. He understood she didn’t want penetration right now, but God! this was just as exciting. He touched her breast, and she gasped. Immediately, she could feel a ripple run through the thick hard column between her legs. His hips picked up the rhythm as he searched her eyes deeply, seeming to walk inside her head to figure out what excited her.

It all did—the intense stimulation of her sex, the feeling of sitting astride something immensely powerful, his bellowing breaths, which opened her legs at each intake. The strokes increased in intensity, in speed, as great waves of heat rolled through her. His strokes became shorter, harder, less regular as he fell prey to the demands of his own body. With a soft cry, she convulsed just as Matt gave a loud groan and exploded. She could feel his climax coming between her legs as his penis swelled against her sensitive skin.

Charlotte fell, boneless, on top of him, breathing hard. He only had one arm around her, the other had fallen to his side as if he hadn’t even the strength to hold her. He groaned again, as if he were dying, and she gave a half laugh.

They were plastered together by sweat and the amazing amount of semen that had come jetting out of him. The sharp distinct odor of sex rose, mingling with the unmistakable smell of Matt—musk and sea and clean sweat. It was all so
physical
. Raw and real and exciting as hell.

She turned her head slightly and kissed his neck. It was all she had the strength for.

“I think after that I deserve to have my El Gordo-killing time cut in half,” she murmured. Matt laughed.

San Luis

April 29

Charlotte waited until they were almost at the cantina, then touched Matt’s arm. “I’ll come in just a minute,” she said, stopping. “I need to check something at the Internet café.”

Matt frowned, his jaw muscles jumping wildly. When he frowned, it was something epic. Clouds gathered on the horizon, lightning flashed.

“Wait, I—”

She pushed at him gently. “Go on, now. You’ll be late for your appointment, and your friend is waiting inside. I’ll be by in just a few moments.”

Charlotte smiled at him sunnily, blew him a kiss, and shot forward towards Café Flora before he could say anything. She’d waited until the last possible minute before his meeting with his old friend, knowing that Matt hated being late.

Sleeping with Matt had been a mistake, she knew that intellectually, though it didn’t
feel
that way. It felt wonderful. But there are consequences to everything, and the fallout from going to bed with him was that he was even more proprietary toward her. She was going to have to guard her secrets much more closely now.

The young student who manned the desk smiled as she entered and pushed across a piece of paper with a code on it with a murmured
“Buenas dias, señorita,”
when he saw her walk in.

After typing in the code, Charlotte immediately Googled the
Warrenton Courier,
in the start of her little daily routine. She’d carefully read the
Courier,
check the headlines of the Web sites of the three local news stations, and Google Charlotte Court and Robert Haine. It made her feel so much better when nothing popped up. In five minutes she’d be out and slipping into the cantina before Matt had finished greeting his friend. That was the plan, but when she accessed the Web site of the
Warrenton Courier
she froze.

dead tortured body of court family maid found the headline blared. Heart thumping painfully, Charlotte read the article through, read it again, then clicked onto the TV news sites. Her heart turned over in her chest as she saw a photograph, taken with a telephoto lens, of a naked body spread-eagled out under a huge tree, a pale blob of vulnerable flesh barely discernible as a human being behind yellow police tape. All the news sources had the same information to impart. Early-morning joggers had literally stumbled across the dead body of Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald, housekeeper of the Court family. Moira Fitzgerald had been tortured, then killed.

As she read the reports, bile rose in her throat, and she had to swallow heavily in order not to throw up.

Each article contained a capsule account of the events two months ago—the murder of Philip Court by his daughter, who then proceeded to murder Imelda Delgado, a nurse in the hospital, and Charlotte Court’s disappearance.

Charlotte sat back in the uncomfortable aluminum chair, trembling. It took her three tries with the mouse to click off, her hand sweaty and shaking. She could see herself reflected in the dark screen, her face a dead white oval, eyes wide.

She couldn’t move, she could barely breathe.

Moira
. Lovely, gentle, good-hearted Moira.
Tortured to death.
The articles had been painfully clear. Moira had died in excruciating pain. The tips of her fingers had been cut off, the bones of her hands had been shattered—
forensic evidence
points to a hammer
was the way one news article had put it—and her elbows and knees had been reduced to pulp. Charlotte found it hard to even imagine the pain Moira had suffered.

Slowly, feeling as if she were a thousand years old, Charlotte stood up. She had to lock her knees to do it. It took her several minutes before she felt she could move. She was somehow responsible for Moira’s death; she could feel it in her bones. No one could possibly want Moira dead. It was her connection to Charlotte that had brought her to the attention of a torturing murderer.

When she felt her legs could withstand her weight, she shuffled out of the Internet café, barely noticing the young student’s frown as he watched her stumble across the room. It took her several tries to open the door. Her hands felt numb.

Something terrible had come for Moira and it was now out for her.

“So,” Tom Reich said as they sat at the table in the cantina. They’d both instinctively chosen the table in the farthest corner from the door, in a dark pocket. They sat at right angles, both facing the room.

“So,” Matt nodded.

“Good to see you again.”

“Likewise.”

Finally, the waitress finished setting two cervezas on the table together with nachos and salsa and the menu and walked away.

Matt understood very well that nothing of any importance could be said while she was hovering around their table. He was cool with that. The waitress happened to be Mama Pilar’s granddaughter and had lived in San Luis all her life, but still. Opsec was opsec. Already the two of them meeting would have raised a little red flag up north. Operators seldom gathered in public in groups of more than two or three since 9/11. Tom was looking at him, expression serious. “You’re looking good. I know you were badly injured. What’s your status now?”

Matt didn’t even try to bullshit him. “I’m okay, came back pretty well, but I’m not as operational as I was. Get a little winded at times. Can’t dive to more than a hundred feet.”

He kept his face totally impassive as he mentioned the career killer. A Navy SEAL who couldn’t dive wasn’t a SEAL.

“Tough break.” Tom’s gaze was direct, his expression understanding but not pitying. Exactly what Matt needed.

Matt shrugged. Life is tough. Suck it up. Their creed.

Tom searched his eyes. “So—you’re out, I hear. They must have offered you a job with nonoperational status. They need boots on the ground now, but they also need brains in the offices.”

Matt snorted. They
had
offered him a job, and he’d contemplated it for a nanosecond. “And be a REMF? No thanks.”

Tom smiled.
Nobody
wanted to become a Rear Echelon Motherfucker.

“So . . . you happy here?” Tom looked around the cantina. “I walked around a little before coming here. It’s a nice place. Might even be a good place to settle down. Lenny’s shop looked full. You going to become a partner there?” The questions were casual, but his expression was anything but.

Matt shrugged again. “Nah. I’d like something a little more challenging than fishing and sports diving. But . . . I’m going to stay here . . . a while. I already told you. I’ve got . . . commitments.”

Matt watched Tom’s eyes widen at each hesitation. Soldiers don’t hesitate, and they’re not ambiguous or unclear when they speak. Matt had spent his adult life communicating facts in as clear a way as he could. His life and his men’s lives depended on it. So Matt’s hemming and hawing was enough to raise eyebrows.

“Okay.” Tom leaned forward a little over the table. “I’ll get right down to it, Matt. I have a proposition for you. A job. Ready for you whenever you want, as soon as your . . . commitment is over, because you’d need to relocate to San Diego.”

This was it. Exactly as Matt had imagined. Tom’s company was fast becoming legendary and would soon be one of the top security companies in the country and perhaps the world. An invitation to join him was something most men would covet. And Tom was one of the good guys. He looked Tom over. Becoming rich hadn’t made him go soft in any way. He wasn’t even dressed like a rich man, with his white cotton short-sleeved shirt and jeans, scuffed boots, and his Navy-issue diver’s watch instead of a Rolex. He was a good guy, and he was offering Matt a job, which he desperately needed. Matt was grateful, this was really good news, but . . .
damn!
Bodyguarding rich guys and wiring McMansions. That wasn’t what he’d trained so long and so hard to do. Still, it was his best option in this new life. There was no going back to the Teams. That dream was gone. Dead.

Suck it up.

Feeling dead inside, Matt nodded. “For the moment I can’t leave San Luis. But when I can—what does the job entail?”

“The best thing you can imagine.” Tom’s expression changed, turned gleeful. He dropped years, and for an instant looked like a kid instead of a thirty-six-year-old former soldier.

“Listen up, Matt, this is big. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and planning for a long time, and finally I’ve got things in place. I needed someone just like you, and now that I’ve got you, we can start.” He shifted his beer aside and placed both big hands on the table, watching Matt’s eyes. “We’re going to re-create Red Cell.”