Short Fuse: Elite Operators, Book 2 (8 page)

“So why work for the company that digs the gold everyone is fighting over?” It was a question, not an accusation.

“Because the system won’t change, at least not in my lifetime. That means the only chance to make an impact is to work with it, not against it. The powers that be are much more inclined to listen if you know how to speak their language, and I’ve made a lot of progress in a short time.” She shrugged. “It can be hard to remember that when I think about how much further there is to go.”

He chuckled, low and warm. “I love Americans. You’re all so sincere.” He curled his finger under her chin, tilting her face toward his. “Don’t despair for Africa too much. We have our pain, but we also have so much joy.”

He was about to kiss her. His intent was in his eyes, in the determined set of his jaw, and a dizzying burst of adrenaline surged through her body.

Did he know how much she wanted him? Had she been that obvious? Then again, what if he didn’t know? What if he changed his mind? What if he was waiting for her to give him the okay? Maybe she should say something, or nod, or try to pull off a seductive smile, because she needed this desperately, wanted it more than anything, was sure that if he hesitated one more second she would—

His mouth was on hers.

Until that moment she thought she’d been doing just fine when it came to romance. Over the years she’d had a few boyfriends, a couple of one-night stands and had recently settled into a comfortable roster of casual dating punctuated by the occasional call to a longtime friend-with-benefits who never disappointed or expected anything more. The men she chose were universally intelligent, ambitious and respectful. They could hold forth on everything from pop culture to coal prices, were as comfortable in chic art galleries as they were on chaotic trading floors, and had the confidence—and pragmatism—to let her call the shots between the sheets. She was emotionally fulfilled, physically satisfied, and certain that segment of her life was completely squared away.

She was wrong.

In the instant Warren’s lips found hers she realized that none of those men—no matter how gorgeous or sexy or seemingly psychic in bed—had given her what she needed. They were good men, but they were safe. And now that she’d tasted the breath-stealing wildness of Warren’s mouth, nothing would ever be the same.

It wasn’t a particularly urgent kiss—it didn’t need to be. On the contrary, she enjoyed his unhurried restraint, savoring the exploratory pressure of his mouth, the slow slide of his hands around her waist. He kissed like he had all the time in the world, like he wanted to learn every detail of her lower lip before moving beyond it. She crossed lazy wrists behind his neck, relaxing into his grip, letting every last thought drain from her mind until there was only this moment, this man. She was in no rush. She could stay like this all night, locked in his arms, lost in his mouth.

Then he pushed his tongue between her teeth and she had a flash of certainty that if he didn’t make love to her there and then, didn’t throw her onto the thin, scratchy carpet and shove himself inside her in the next thirty seconds, she would die. She wouldn’t be able to take another breath, lust would overwhelm her faculties and she would simply expire, forlorn and unfulfilled in a dirty boiler suit in a modular office unit.

It was the taste of him that convinced her she could survive, the mix of ruthless black coffee and fresh green apple tethering her to sanity, hauling her back to a world where she was kissing the security consultant and people didn’t die from sexual frustration.

A world where her cell phone was ringing, buzzing on the desk where she’d left it.

She wasn’t quite sure who broke the kiss—suddenly they were apart, watching the intrusive hunk of plastic. She lunged to retrieve it, then straightened when her boss’s voice echoed down the line.

“Sorry,” she mouthed to Warren, pointing at the phone and trying to ignore the slight flush coloring his cheekbones, the glassy sheen to his eyes.

He waved off her comment and whispered, “We’ll talk later.” Then he was gone, quietly shutting the door behind him.

Nicola stared unseeingly at the place he’d just been, trying to extrapolate the significance of his statement. Talk about the mine? Talk about the kiss? Talk about why they shouldn’t have gone there? Or figure out how soon they could go there again?

“So? What’s the deal with Roger Nel?”

Her boss’s words snapped her to attention, and she willed herself into the present. “How much time do you have?”

“As much as you need.”

She launched into an explanation of the situation at Hambani, working to keep her thoughts organized and concise. She’d always excelled at narrowing down complex problems into clear-cut solutions, but not today. Not when her heart still pounded and her face still burned and every sweep of her tongue over her lips revived the taste of the hottest man she’d ever met.

Chapter Seven

“You’re sure you want to do this?” But even before he finished the question, he knew the answer.

“I always do this. Usually on my own.” Nicola accepted the hand he offered, swung down from the Land Cruiser and slammed the door shut. She gathered her hair into a ponytail, then turned toward the entrance to the informal settlement, vaguely demarcated by a gap between two stacks of old tires.

“Ready?”

“After you.”

Warren indulged in a brief glance at the snug rear of Nicola’s jeans as she preceded him, as though he needed another look. In the twenty-four hours since he’d given in to his hammering impulse and kissed her in Roger’s office, he seemed to have committed her entire body to memory, so that glimpses of it flared in his mind like vivid snapshots at the most inconvenient moments.

Midway through Roger’s slurred tale of boyhood antics over dinner the night before, he thought of her mouth, how it yielded so readily beneath his own.

That morning, swerving to avoid a hole in the ground on his run and nearly twisting his ankle in the process, all he could think about was the curve of her hips, that tantalizing slope inward toward her waist.

And in the car on the drive to the settlement, as at his request she obligingly repeated back to him the exit strategy he’d devised should things become hostile, all he could hear was her gentle, satisfied moan as she’d softened in his arms.

An empty aluminum can clattered against the hard ground, and he jerked up his gaze, shoving Nicola’s outstanding figure to the back of his mind and forcing himself to pay attention to their surroundings. There could be danger here—he had to be alert.

They had attracted attention even before they left the car, as shoeless children froze mid-game to watch their approach. Now that they were out and walking around, two white people clearly on some kind of errand, not hapless tourists whose GPS had sent them down the wrong road, the community’s cautious interest was palpable. Women leaned in shack doorways holding half-peeled potatoes, a handful of brave children trailed them at a safe distance, and slowly but steadily, a disproportionate number of men emerged from under makeshift lean-tos and rose from overturned plastic buckets to line the packed-dirt walkway bisecting the settlement.

The smell pervading the area was almost overwhelming. It was a combination of rotting food and raw sewage, punctuated with the cloying stink of burning tires and intensified by the blazing midday sun. Flies hummed and hovered, made fat and lazy by the abundance of putrid waste, not even bothering with the patchy-furred dog sleeping at the base of a trash-filled metal drum.

They hadn’t made it more than a few steps down the walkway before the group of onlookers thickened to block their path. Instinctively Warren tensed, conscious of the Glock holstered under his shirt as he scanned the crowd, but Nicola’s posture was relaxed as she greeted everyone in French. She launched into what sounded like a well-practiced spiel, and from the few words he was able to catch—Garraway, Hambani,
l’assistance
—he suspected this was her way of inviting comments from the community as to how Garraway’s social responsibility budget would be best deployed.

When she finished speaking there was an astonished silence. Mouths hung open and eyes widened, expressions ranging from hopefulness to blatant disbelief. A pregnant woman with a shaved head gawped so incredulously that Warren had to look away. If only they knew how insignificant this money was to Garraway—that the company would make more from the Hambani mine in a month than most of these people could earn in a lifetime.

He thought of his father’s gleaming oak desk at the top of a towering skyscraper in downtown Johannesburg. He recalled the constant flash of diamonds at his mother’s ears, the anniversary-gift stones she never took off. He remembered visiting the zoo with his primary school and reddening with the angry, inarticulate embarrassment of childhood when the classroom bully found a plaque thanking the Copley family for funding the hippo enclosure and taunted him for the rest of the day, asking which one of the hippos was his mom, blocking Warren from getting on the bus and braying that he should go back to the lagoon with the rest of his kin.

Two weeks later that same bully pulled his chair out from under him in the cafeteria. Fueled by a wave of blind rage that was now deeply familiar, Warren had punched him until his nose bled, then pushed one of the huge trash bins onto its side, forcibly shoved the much larger boy inside and threw himself against the bin to turn it upright, trapping the bully in a damp, slippery, spaghetti-sauce-coated prison.

His teachers were horrified. His classmates were thrilled. And when his grandfather arrived wearing a three-piece suit that probably cost more than the school building, the old man had winked and squeezed his shoulder and told him not to worry, no one got very far in life without a bit of blood on their hands.

Movement in his peripheral vision jerked him back to the here and now. A big-bosomed, determined-looking woman elbowed her way to the path, planted one hand on her hip and began speaking in rapid, pointed French. He inched closer to Nicola, watching her for any sign of intimidation, but she just listened and murmured understanding. When the woman finished she replied in an explanatory tone, her voice calm and level.

The woman stared at Nicola for several seconds, eyes narrow and shrewd. Then, as if making a decision, she straightened and gestured down the walkway.

Nicola glanced at him over her shoulder. “This lady is called Maza. She said she’s a midwife, but I think she’s more like the community nurse. She wants to show us the problem areas in the settlement.”

He nodded. “After you.”

Maza led them through the makeshift village, which grew denser and more squalid the farther they got from the entrance. Warren quickly gave up trying to quantify the population—there were hundreds of dwellings and he was sure each one housed multiple occupants. There was no electricity, no running water. They stepped over streams of sewage bisecting the packed-dirt pathways, and the pervasive smell of paraffin suggested it was the primary fuel source for everything from household lanterns to portable stoves.

“If there’s a fire, this whole place is gone. No one will be able to get out,” he murmured. Nicola inclined her head in agreement, watching Maza point out a jagged scar on a young boy’s leg.

“From the civil conflict,” Nicola translated. “These people flooded into Namaza when the gold was discovered, bankrupting themselves to leave their rural homes and come here to look for work at Hambani. Next thing they knew, they were trapped in the middle of a war.”

The lingering evidence of that violence was everywhere. Bullet holes riddled corrugated metal walls. Angled scars from
panga
blades marred the faces of men and women alike. To Warren’s left a child held part of a dismantled TEC-9, swinging it from his fingertips.

Warren didn’t even bother to shake his head. The damage here was done. And it would take a hell of a lot more than Nicola’s measly social responsibility budget to change that.

Not that her demeanor suggested she had anything less than a complete community overhaul in mind. He fought an affectionate smile as she gamely scrutinized a leaking roof, shook hands with a sour-faced old woman and cooed at an infant thrust at her by a teenage mother.

Whoa, that’s intense.
He pivoted away, suddenly uncomfortable at the sight of Nicola calmly propping the baby on her hip as she continued her tour. If someone passed him their child, his first instinct would be to check it for booby traps, yet she was so compassionate, so relaxed, so easy with these people whose lives and histories couldn’t be more different from her own.

He couldn’t imagine being that free from guilt and suspicion, or that willing to take people at their word, or having that much belief in his ability to help them. He blinked hard as he turned from the happy scene, in which he was sure he had no part.

That was when he saw it.

The shack was carefully positioned between two others, and although an unusual amount of space separated it from its neighbors, its location made it practically invisible from the central path. It was larger than most, the roof bolted in place rather than weighed down with tires, but those weren’t necessarily red flags—those kinds of improvements could be easily afforded by someone who’d managed to get regular shift at Hambani.

The state-of-the-art tablet visible through the glassless window could not.

Though he was immediately on alert, Warren kept his expression carefully neutral, not wanting to alert any spectators that he’d noticed something amiss. He turned toward one of the other shacks, thoughts racing as he recalled what he’d seen.

Not only was that a disproportionately expensive piece of electronic equipment, the fact it was so brazenly displayed suggested its owner had no fear of it being stolen.

Did this house belong to a drug dealer? A loan shark? A gang leader? He snuck another surreptitious glance inside, squinting to make out a carton of imported cigarettes on a table, a bottle of South African wine beside it, a pair of designer-brand athletic shoes beside the mattress on the floor. All incongruously lavish for a community like this one, where people lived so far below the poverty line it wasn’t even a relevant concept.

There were no weapons visible, nothing to imply the shack’s owner was anything but a peaceable resident enjoying a windfall. Yet Warren’s gut insisted something was off. Whoever lived here was no good guy. He was sure of it.

He dared another step closer, studying the structure itself. It was definitely bigger than its neighbors, yet its external footprint didn’t seem to match what was visible through the window. Were the walls doubled, to create hollow storage space in between? That would be an easy way to conceal guns or drugs, and even easier to access from inside. After a quick glance over his shoulder assured him Nicola was still within a second’s reach, he leaned in to study the shack’s foundation, looking for irregularities.

He heard the observer before he saw him, the slight crunch of rough dirt beneath calmly planted feet. Warren was deliberate in his movements, not guiltily jerking toward the newcomer, not acknowledging his presence at all until several unhurried seconds passed. When he was ready, he turned.

He recognized the man instantly. Although he stood about ten feet away, those green eyes were as unmistakable now as they had been through the fence around the mine and in the crowd surrounding the blown-out equipment shed. He was slight but muscular, two inches shorter than Warren, his posture poised, promising menace.

If he was armed, his weapon was concealed. Warren thought of the Glock holstered at the small of his back and kept his hands relaxed at his sides, trying to broadcast that he wasn’t in the market for a high-noon duel. He didn’t want conflict of any kind, if he could avoid it—the intermittent giggling of small children was a constant reminder of their proximity.

The man regarded him in steady silence. Unflinching, Warren let him.

For several minutes they sized each other up, aware they were at odds but neither yet willing to make the first move. Warren kept part of his senses attuned to the sound of Nicola’s voice, ensuring there wasn’t a plan to distract him while she was attacked, but the intrigued, almost sympathetic expression on his opponent’s face suggested this was a chance meeting.

Finally the man tilted his head. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The base notes of his accent were pure Latadi, but they’d been smoothed and polished by an overseas education. Warren knew that foreign buffing well—it was audible in his own speech.

“Where?”

“This country.”

“Why not?”

“This is not your quarrel.”

Warren shoved his hands in his pockets, demonstrating his trust. “I’m paid to protect the Hambani mine. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The man opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. He looked over Warren’s shoulder, in the direction of Nicola and the gathered residents.

“She wants to help, but it’s time for us to help ourselves.” His gaze returned to Warren’s. “Take her away. Keep her safe.”

Warren squinted at the man before him, weighing the man’s words. Normally he would chafe at any intimation of unearned authority, at anyone’s attempt to tell him what to do.

But there was something different about the way this man spoke, the gentle urging in his tone, the flash of respect that crossed his face. Almost like he was offering an escape route, the chance to disembark from a doomed ship before it left the harbor.

He thought again of the bullet-scarred shop facades on Namaza’s main street, of Roger’s description of a mine under siege in the middle of a civil war. The ground beneath his feet practically reverberated with recent violence.

Maybe this man was right. Maybe they shouldn’t be here.

A baby’s indignant squeal cut the atmosphere between them, and Warren glanced behind him to see Nicola passing the child back to its mother. When he turned around the man had retreated several steps, into the space between two shacks. They exchanged nods, and he was gone.

It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since he left Nicola’s side, but when he rejoined her it seemed the attentive crowd had turned clamorous, as people shouted over each other, jostled to reach the front, gesticulated insistently as they rambled in indecipherable rural dialects. She seemed unruffled, murmuring and smiling with the same ease she had when they arrived, but he didn’t like the tenor the group was taking. Gone was the wary curiosity and hopeful disbelief, replaced by aggression and demand. The community was becoming a mob.

Evidently dissatisfied with what Nicola was managing to communicate with her limited grasp of French, an older woman with several missing teeth latched onto Nicola’s forearm to tug her off the path.

“Okay, hang on,” Nicola objected smoothly, but her reversion to English betrayed her alarm as she tried to disengage from the woman’s grip. “I’ll be back another day and we can look at all the problem areas you’ve mentioned, but right now—”