SEAL of Honor (23 page)

She waited.

And waited.

Heard nothing and her heart kicked into high gear, drumming a cumbia beat out on her ribcage until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She peeked out into the hall and saw Gabe standing at the screened front door, scowling at a dark shadow on the other side.

“Audrey?” the shadow called. “Is that you? Who is this guy?”

At the familiar voice, she let out a breath of relief and walked to Gabe’s side. He gave a slight nod, conceding to the false alarm, and holstered his weapon.

Jesus, she was going to kill him for scaring her like that.

She hit the porch light, illuminating her sister-in-law’s face. “What are you doing here, Chloe?”

Chapter Twenty-four

SAN DIEGO, CA

Goddamn Gabe Bristow. And Quinn. And their team-fucking-building.

Marcus dropped his bag inside the door of his condominium and shuffled on legs that felt like Twizzlers as far as the oversized leather couch before collapsing face down into the cushions.

Bruised. Blistered. Sunburned. Parched. Dirty.

His aches had aches.

And he was pretty sure his aches’ aches were reproducing like rabbits. But, hey, at least he got to come home and sleep in his own bed tonight, unlike the rest of the guys, who were stuck in a hotel near the naval base.

SERE training. Ha.

They might as well call it break-you-till-you-cry-for-your-mommy training. Welcome-to-the-ninth-circle-of-hell training. Expose-and-exploit-your-every-weakness training.

But he hadn’t cracked. None of them had, not even scrawny little Harvard. They all bent to their limits and past, but they hadn’t cracked. As soon as his body stopped throbbing, Marcus thought he might find some pride in that.

Take that, Navy SEALs.

Marcus jolted awake to the sound of his cell phone vibrating near his head. He hadn’t been aware of falling asleep, but he’d rolled off the couch and now lay with his head partly under the coffee table. When he pried his eyes open, he saw the cell doing a jig across the glass top. He could even see the caller ID.

Giancarelli.

If it was anyone else, he’d ignore it, drag himself into the shower and then pass the fuck out in his king size, sleeping-on-a-cloud memory foam bed for three days. Or four. Hell, a whole week.

But it was Giancarelli. His best friend. The guy he’d ditched for nearly two years without so much as a see-ya-later because he’d been feeling sorry for himself.

Marcus groped around the edge of the table until he got hold of the phone. He didn’t have the energy to sit up. “Yo.”

“Shit, don’t tell me you’re drunk,” Danny said.

Drunk? Yeah, probably sounded that way, Marcus realized. “No. Overtired. What’s up?”

“I need to get a hold of Gabe, but I don’t have his number.”

“Can’t. He’s in Costa Rica with Audrey.” The fucker. Living it up with his woman in a tropical paradise while his men were all but tortured by his SEAL friends.

’Course, Marcus had to admit, the man did deserve some down time after being taken hostage, beaten to hell, and shot.

“What about the other guy? Quinn?” Danny asked.

The urgency in Giancarelli’s voice penetrated the fog in his brain. He finally scooted out from under the coffee table and propped his back against the couch. “What’s going on?”

“I know who was pulling Jacinto Rivera’s strings. I know who was behind the abduction plot. The FBI won’t give me the time of day until I have the proof, but Bryson Van Amee needs protection ASAP.”

Marcus snorted and tried stretching out his legs. Christ, even his bone marrow ached. “Protection? From who, his airhead wife?”

Giancarelli’s silence spoke louder than anything he could have said and Marcus sat up straighter. “That was supposed to be a joke.”

“Do I sound like I’m kidding?” Giancarelli said. “It’s Chloe. Which my extremely beautiful and intelligent wife realized is a nickname for Claudia. As in, Claudia Rivera, who disappeared from Bogotá in August, six years ago. And guess who popped up in the States in September, six years ago. Chloe Smith, who became Chloe Van Amee about three months after that.”

Jesus Christ. If Giancarelli was right….

Marcus hauled himself to his feet and powered up his laptop. When the internet came up, he wasn’t surprised to find Harvard online and tucked the phone into his shoulder to type out an instant message:
H, GOT A ? 4U.

As he typed, he asked, “How sure are you about this, Dan?”

“Pretty damn. I know it in my gut.”

And Danny had a good track record with gut feelings. “Okay. Hang on.” He set aside the cell and typed another message.

CAN U DO A BCKGRND CHK 4 ME?

Harvard was quick to respond:
NAME?

CLAUDIA RIVERA SALAZAR.

ALREADY HAVE IT. DO YOU WANT ME TO SEND IT TO YOU?

Marcus smirked at Harvard’s need to use proper English, even in instant messages.
PLZ & THX
. He picked up the phone again, but set it down and typed,
HAVE CHLOE VAN AMEE 2?

NO
, Harvard answered.
NEVER SAW THE NEED TO LOOK AT HER.

PLZ CHK HER 2 PDQ & SEND INFO 2 ME.

The computer beeped with an incoming email. He brought up Firefox to access his inbox and raised the phone to his ear again. “Danny, you still there?”

“What did you find out?” he asked.

“Harvard sent me an email. Just a sec.” He read it over, swore loud and long, and opened the picture attachment just as his IM dinged with another message from Harvard:
HOLY SHIT.

The pic opened and Marcus stared into the face of a teenage Claudia Rivera. IM dinged with another picture, one of Chloe standing next to her husband.

IS THIS CHLOE VAN AMEE?
Harvard asked.

YEP,
he typed and said to Danny, “Just got a picture of Claudia and one of Chloe and I’m looking at them side-by-side. I think you’re on to something. Chloe’s about fifteen pounds lighter, has bigger boobs, fuller lips, a straighter nose, and blonde hair, but there’s still a strong resemblance. Too strong to be a coincidence.”

Danny cursed. “It’s
always
the spouse, man. It’s so obvious and yet we overlooked it because she acted her part to a T. Academy Award-winning stuff. She doesn’t even have an accent. Except…” He paused. “I did hear it once or twice when she said certain words. Couldn’t place it at the time, but I remember wondering about it.”

“All right, listen,” Marcus said. “I’m going to have Harvard send everything he finds your way. Try to get the Bureau involved. I’ll contact Quinn and see if we can set up a protective detail on Van Amee. Keep in touch.”

He hung up and was in the process of changing his clothes when his phone rang again. He expected Giancarelli, but it was Harvard.

Switching the phone to speaker mode, he tugged off his dirty shirt and picked a clean one out of his dresser. “Nice timing, man. I was just about to call—”

“I checked Chloe Van Amee’s financial records,” Harvard said without preamble. “Her personal accounts are nearly dry, but she scraped together enough to buy a first class ticket to Costa Rica. For
tonight
. Her plane arrived in San Jose two hours ago.”

…

Chloe blinked when Gabe slid a protective arm around Audrey’s waist. If she had less Botox injected into her face, that pinched expression might have been a frown.

“Who’s he?” she asked again in a voice full of suspicion and a hint of gossipy speculation.

Audrey ignored the question, instead answering with a couple of her own. “Where’s Bryson? Is he okay?”

Chloe wasn’t the type of sister-in-law to drop in unannounced. She wasn’t even the type to drop in announced. Five minutes ago, Audrey would have bet her life savings that Chloe would never see the inside of her home, yet here she stood on the porch, staring warily at Gabe.

Jeez, was today the day for unexpected visits or what?

“I wanted to talk to you,” Chloe said.

“You couldn’t do it over the phone?” Gabe asked.

Her too-plump lips pressed together. “No. I couldn’t.” Then she looked him over with a critical eye. “You’re one of the men that rescued my husband.”

He inclined his head. “I am.”

“What are
you
doing here?”

Audrey opened her mouth to say it was none of Chloe’s business, but Gabe spoke over her. “I live here.”

It gave her a little thrill to hear him say it. So what if he technically didn’t have any of his belongings here yet. Just the fact that he said it with that note of finality in his voice made her go all warm and gooey inside. He lived here. With her.

Chloe harrumphed. “Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”

“We’re busy,” Gabe said and Audrey’s face heated.

Oh God. The last thing she needed was for Chloe to report to her brother that she was shacked up with some man, doing the sorts of things that keep healthy men and women busy in the middle of the night. Chloe would make the situation into the apocalypse and Gabe into Lucifer, and Bryson would go on one of his brotherly rampages before she had a chance to ease him into the idea of her having a live-in lover.

She nudged Gabe in the side with a soft, reprimanding, “Gabriel,” but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Unless this is an emergency,” he said, “I suggest you try back in the morning.”

Something flashed in Chloe’s dark eyes, but she dipped her head before Audrey was able to identify the emotion. Anger, maybe. Chloe did tend to have a short fuse, and having someone so succinctly tell her off wasn’t something that happened often to the overindulged woman. Certainly wasn’t fear. A person had to be intelligent to be afraid of the likes of Gabe, and her sister-in-law wasn’t known for her brains.

“Chloe, it
is
late and I’m tired. I’m sure you are, too, if you just arrived.” Audrey tried to keep her voice soft, soothing them both. “As long as Bryson is okay, there’s no need for this right now. Come back in the morning and we can talk or whatever over breakfast, okay?”

Chloe hesitated. “Alone.”

“Hell no—”

Audrey cut off Gabe’s protest with a finger against his lips. “Yes, alone. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Even after the door shut, Audrey kept her finger pressed to his lips. The expression in his gold eyes faded from pissed off to mulish, then flared with heat as he opened his mouth and sucked her finger inside.

She laughed even as sensation sparked from the tip of her finger and zinged through her blood to her belly. “Didn’t you get enough earlier?”

“I’ll never get enough of you, woman.” After one last swirling lick, he released her finger and moved to the window, still in warrior mode, full of that deadly catlike grace. He parted the curtains. Chloe’s headlights splashed over the hard angles of his face as she backed out of the driveway.

“I don’t like her.”

Audrey let out a huff of laughter. “C’mon, hon. She’s a pain-in-the-ass, but she’s harmless.”

“I don’t know about harmless. There’s something about her…” He backed away from the window and moved his shoulders as if trying to shake off a cold chill. “It’s out of the ordinary for her to visit, right?”

“I’ll say. I honestly didn’t think she even knew where I lived.”

“Yeah, about that. I don’t like out of the ordinary.” After picking up the gun he’d set on the foyer table, he gave her a quick kiss. “Go on to bed. I’ll check out the grounds, make sure we’re secure, then be in.”

She caught his face in her hands. “Careful, Gabriel, your paranoia is showing.”

“Probably.” His faint smile never touched his eyes. “But humor me. Lock yourself in the bedroom until I come back, okay?”

Audrey watched him slip out the front door and fade into the night. She sighed and moved toward the bedroom to follow her SEAL’s orders. She supposed this was something she’d have to get used to, though she planned to ease away his constant fear of attack. That was no way for anyone, even a former SEAL, to live. Everyone needed a refuge, some place untouched by the outside world, where he can let down his guard. This was going to be Gabe Bristow’s haven. She’d make sure of it.

She heard him come in the back door just as she was straightening the sex-rumpled quilt on the bed. He paused in the kitchen for so long she finally gave up waiting and opened the bedroom door.

“Gabe?”

Footsteps.

Except, no, those couldn’t belong to Gabe. It sounded like a Clydesdale stomping through the kitchen and as big as he was, he never walked with heavy boots, always ghosted about even in the comfort of his own home. He’d more than once frightened her today, sneaking up behind her with his barely-there footfalls.

A shadow appeared at the end of the short hallway, backlit by the lamp she always left burning in the living room. Definitely not Gabe. Too short. Too scrawny.

Oh God.

As silently as she could, she closed and locked the bedroom door. She had no way of knowing if the intruder had seen her—the interior hallway was always dark, and the way the door was set into the wall with a slight indentation provided a little protection—but from the sounds of his footsteps, it didn’t matter. He knew the layout of her house and bypassed the laundry room, the guest bath, and the extra bedroom, moving with unerring accuracy toward the master bedroom.

Toward her.

…

Something was not right.

Everything looked normal. The nearly full moon floating over the ocean in the inky sky provided a good view of the house and yard, and Gabe saw nothing out of place. No odd shadows that shouldn’t be there, no movement except for the sway of the palms, no sound but the soft lapping of the ocean against the dock.

Still. He couldn’t shake the gut feeling that something was way off, and he knew better than to argue with his gut—it had saved his ass in more near-fatal situations than any one man should survive. So he walked the grounds again, still found nothing, and his instincts still told him it didn’t matter. He strode to the end of the drive and looked both ways on the narrow, empty road.

Maybe he should take Audrey to a hotel for the night. She had next-to-nil for security—something he planned to fix if he was going to live here—and the crappy system she did have had so many holes it would work better as a colander than a security system.

Actually, that sounded like a damn good idea. He’d sleep better tonight knowing they were secure. Tomorrow, he’d make some calls and pull some strings to have a security specialist out here by noon. Maybe Jean-Luc’s brother-in-law would want the job.

He turned to go back to the house, and out of the corner of his eye, caught a glint of moonlight off something down the street. A car, a blue sedan, parked in the foliage alongside the road. Given that Audrey had no immediate neighbors and lived on a twisty, rarely used road that fought a constant losing battle with the encroaching jungle, it was not normal to have a car just sitting in the street. That was probably the cause of his unease. He’d bet his good foot it was Chloe’s car, and he was not a betting man. People don’t just pop up for random personal visits in the middle of the night unless there was a problem. Especially not wealthy, pampered people like Chloe Van Amee. He could only come up with a couple reasons why she’d leave the car here in this specific spot, hidden from view, and none of them were good.