Striking Distance (25 page)

He chuckled, withdrew his fingers, nudged the vibrator inside her inch by slow, unbearable inch—and turned it on high.

* * *

JAVIER WATCHED, SO
turned on by Laura’s erotic responses that he thought his balls might burst. He slid the shaft in to the hilt, felt the friction of her inner muscles, then slowly withdrew it, those same muscles gripping it tight. He thrust it inside her again, imagining that the vibrator was his cock as he slowly built a rhythm, his gaze fixed on the most private part of her body as he gave her what she craved.

God, how he wished
he
were inside her now. He was a hell of a lot harder than this made-in-China plastic dick—that much was a fact. But he wouldn’t push her.

It was enough to know that he was pleasing her. And he
was
pleasing her. She was lost now, her legs wide apart, her eyes squeezed shut, an expression of sensual abandon on her face.

But he wasn’t done—not by a long shot.

On the next thrust, he slid the toy into its intended position, the little bunny ears resting on either side of her swollen clit. Her hips jerked off the bed, a stream of breathy “ohgods” spilling from her lips, her hands clenched into fists.

Oh, yeah, his balls were going to blow.

She was slippery wet now, the musky scent of her arousal driving him loco. He needed another taste. He lowered his head and began to flick the tip of her clit with his tongue, keeping up the in-and-out rhythm of the shaft.

She was close to orgasm now, all whimpers and moans, her head tossing from side to side, her muscles drawing tighter around the vibrator. Then her breath caught, bliss on her sweet face as she came, her inner muscles clenching so hard around the vibrator’s shaft that it jerked in his hand.

¡Coño!
Hell!

Lucky damned toy.

He kept up the rhythm until her climax had passed, then turned the gadget off and set it aside, teasing her with light strokes of his tongue, savoring the moment, giving her time to recover. “That was eight.”

Eyes closed, she lay still, lost in the aftermath of what had clearly been an intense orgasm. Slowly she stirred to life. Her eyes opened, and she smiled at him, speaking in a soft, sexy voice. “Your turn.”

“I’m not sure how you think this is going to work. This is a toy for
las chicas
. It looks like a dick, for God’s sake.”

But he’d been raised to keep his word. He duly shucked his clothes, then climbed onto the bed, ready for the silliest sexual experience of his life.

She picked up the vibrator, its jelly shaft still slick with her juices and drenched with her scent. “Lie on your back.”

“¡Oye!”
He did as she asked, his cock standing at attention, clearly eager for whatever she had in mind.

Rather than teasing him as he’d done to her, she went straight for the sweet spot, rubbing the wet shaft against the sensitive underside of his erection.

Javier gasped, his hips jerking reflexively at the strange and intense feeling.

She smiled and continued to caress him root to tip, letting the rotating steel balls rub against the ultrasensitive underside of the head.

It was unlike anything Javier had felt before, enough to keep him hard and make him horny as hell, but probably not enough to get him off. Still, she didn’t relent, running the buzzing toy up and down his cock. Then she wrapped both hands around his cock and the vibrator, holding them together, shaft to shaft, using pressure to enhance the sensation. And in the blink of an eye, Javier was on the edge.

Still naked, she bent over him and began to circle her tongue around the engorged head of his cock, still holding the vibrator and his erection tightly together.

“Jesus.”
Javier thought he would go out of his mind, one sensation spilling into the next, making him jerk and buck, until climax hit him, pleasure making him groan, hot semen blasting onto his belly.

It was a while before he could speak again.

Laura sat beside him running her fingertips over his chest, a smile on her face. “A toy for
las chicas
?”

* * *

IT WAS A
little after midnight when Laura’s cell phone rang. She’d just fallen asleep but the sound brought her immediately awake. She recognized the ring.

It was Erik.

She hurried into the living room, hoping not to wake Javier. “This is Laura.”

“They’ve agreed to a welfare check,” Erik said. “I thought you wouldn’t mind me waking you up to tell you good news.”

Laura was so stunned she had to sit. “That’s wonderful!”

She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up at Javier, smiling, only to realize he couldn’t understand a word she was saying because she was speaking Swedish.

“A consular official and the embassy doctor will visit the family tomorrow to examine Klara, bring her up to date on her vaccinations and address any health problems she may have. They also hope to collect a DNA sample from her—and to take photographs.”

Photographs?

“Would . . . Would I be able to see the photos?”

Erik chuckled. “My dear, that’s the reason we’re taking them.”

“Thank you!” Laura hadn’t even dared to hope for this.

“You should know that Safiya claims to be Yasmina’s—that is to say Klara’s—biological mother. She says your baby was stillborn and was taken from you to be buried. Al-Nassar’s younger brother, who is now Safiya’s guardian, backs up her story, though we know he was nowhere near the compound when Klara was born.”

Erik was still talking—something about DNA being essential for her case—but Laura barely heard him, his words drowned out by the thrumming of her pulse.

Was it possible Safiya was telling the truth? Could Laura still be so confused about what happened that night that she didn’t realize her baby had died? Could the baby she’d been forced to bring into the world lie buried in the dirt in Afghanistan?

No.
No!

“Safiya is lying. Klara is
my
child. She was born alive. I saw the blanket moving in Safiya’s arms. I heard her cry.”

It was that tiny cry that had cut through Laura’s shock and trauma and had made her realize, at least for a moment, what had just happened.

“That’s why we want DNA. We want to be able to prove in court that she’s your biological daughter. The Pakistani representative who met with the family said she did not resemble Safiya at all, but had lighter hair than Safiya’s other children and blue eyes. But that alone won’t be proof.”

Lighter hair. Blue eyes.

It was the first description Laura had gotten of her daughter.

Somehow, those few words made Klara more real to her, heightening her anxiety, sharpening her regret.

I am so sorry, Klara!

Laura’s stomach knotted. She looked up to find Javier watching her, a worried frown on his face. “I know you’ll do your best. Please give the consular officials and doctor in Pakistan my thanks.”

“I will.” Erik paused. “We’re doing all we can, Laura. I wish I could tell you that we’ll get her back, but I cannot make that promise.”

“We will get her back. We must.”

Laura refused to consider any other possibility.

CHAPTER

23

LAURA WAS QUIET
and subdued at breakfast, and Javier knew she was worried about her daughter. He couldn’t blame her. She’d shared her news with him—some of it good, some of it bad—and he’d realized that the chances of her getting her little girl back through official channels were next to none.

“Why don’t you bring in the U.S. State Department?” he’d asked as they’d gone back to bed. “They’ve got a lot more international muscle.”

“They’ve got more enemies, too. Besides, if I do that, it won’t be long before someone in the media picks it up, and the coverage will make it harder to free her. She’ll be a prized pawn. It’s better to keep it quiet, work behind the scenes. Also, I’m not ready for the whole world to know what I did.”

He’d taken her hand. “Laura, you didn’t
do
anything.”

“Exactly,” she’d said, turning out the lights.

If he hadn’t just sworn to the commander that he’d kept OPSEC intact, he might have told her right then how he, as the man in command of the squad who’d rescued her, saw what had happened that night. Instead, he’d kept his mouth shut.

When she went into her office for the Monday morning I-Team meeting, he went for his morning run, leaving her with Childers again. Outside, the wind was biting cold, snow in the forecast. He ran hard, his leg giving him less grief. On the way back, he stopped at a grocery store to grab some food and other supplies.

He was standing in the vegetable aisle when he got the feeling he was being watched. He glanced to his left and saw a white guy—brown hair, brown eyes, close to six feet, maybe two-fifteen—staring straight at him. The man looked quickly away, smiling, one hand in his pocket.

Was he carrying?

Javier couldn’t be sure. He walked down a few random aisles just to make sure he was truly being followed. The man stuck with him.

What the hell?

He carried his basket to the express checkout lane and picked up a tabloid, pretending to give a shit about celebrity baby bumps. He glanced over the top of the magazine to find the
hijo e puta
standing in the next lane, still watching him. There was something off about him, something odd. Javier set the magazine back, drew out his wallet and his cell, and sent McBride a quick text.

Being followed. @ Grocery on 20th & Chestnut.

He had no idea what this guy wanted or whether he was connected in any way to the attacks on Laura. But he was taking no chances.

He got an immediate reply.

Walk S. on Chestnut to 19th. Turn left. Units en route.

Wanting the bastard to believe that Javier wasn’t on to him, he made conversation with the cashier, a friendly woman with sandy brown hair and brown eyes. He paid, picked up his bags, and headed out the door, using the mountains in the west to orient himself. He turned left, heading south. He didn’t have to look behind him to know the guy had followed.

What the hell did the bastard want with Javier?

Spare change? A date?

Sorry,
cabrón
. Can’t help you either way.

Javier reached 19th Street and turned left, no sign of the cops. They’d be running silent, of course, maybe even riding in unmarked cars. He slowed his pace a little, wanting to give the cops more time, his senses trained on the man walking behind him. The man began to laugh.

And Javier had had enough.

He turned—and found himself staring at the working end of what looked like a toy replica of an M1911, its tip fluorescent orange to distinguish it from the real thing. “What the—”

A smile on his face, the man fired.

BAM! BAM!

Javier felt searing pain as a very real round creased his rib cage. “What the fuck?”

The weapon was real.

He dropped to the concrete and rolled, drawing his concealed SIG. “Drop it!”

The man laughed, smiling as he aimed at Javier again.

Javier took him out with a double tap—two rounds, center mass.

He stared at Javier, fear in his eyes, a look of shock on his face, then fell to the ground. Javier didn’t have to check his pulse to know he was dead.

Then Javier heard the sound of running feet as the cavalry arrived at last. He tucked the SIG back into its holster and stood, sliding a hand beneath his jacket and pressing it against the pain in his left side. His hand came away bloody.

¡Puñeta!

Four cops approached, weapons drawn.

“On your knees! Hands above your head!” one of them shouted.

And Javier realized they were talking to him. He’d been in this situation—walking up on a shoot-out, unable to tell who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. It was better to comply and explain later than get shot again.

He had just dropped to his knees when an unmarked vehicle tore around the corner and drew to a stop at the curb.

Darcangelo stepped out, called off the officers. “What the hell happened?”

Javier stood. “No clue. This
cabrón
was following me. I heard him laughing and turned to find him pointing that piece at me. The tip is orange. I thought it was a toy, but the bullets were real enough.”

Darcangelo pulled Javier’s jacket open. “You’ve been shot.”

“He fired two rounds before I dropped him. One caught me. It’s just a graze. I’ll take care of it at Laura’s place.”

Darcangelo shook his head. “I hate to say it, but you’re not going anywhere. I need a statement from you, and I’m going to have to confiscate your firearm. In the meantime, you might as well humor me and let the Band-Aid boys check you out.”

An SUV turned the corner behind them, tires squealing, and stopped beside Darcangelo’s car. Hunter stepped out of the vehicle. “You okay, Corbray?”

Javier nodded.

Hunter looked over at Darcangelo. “How’d you get here so fast?”

“I was setting up that solicitation sting down on Colfax when the call came in. What took you so long? Getting your nails buffed?”

“Hey, fuck you. It’s my day off.”

“Your day off? What is that shit? Why don’t you see what you can do to keep Corbray out of the limelight while we clean this mess up? Any minute now the media are going to show up and start taking photos of him again.”

¡Puñeta!

What a clusterfuck!

The commander was going to love this.

* * *

LAURA MADE COFFEE
for Deputy U.S. Marshal Childers, then retreated to her office, turning to her job to keep her mind off Klara. But that was impossible.

Safiya was lying, doing all she could to keep Klara, and there was little Laura could do about it. Once Erik had exhausted diplomatic options, she would have only the courts to turn to. And the courts would rule against her.

Despair welled up inside her, Erik’s words running through her mind. If it hadn’t been for Javier, she wasn’t sure how she’d have gotten any sleep last night. He’d held her, assured her everything would be all right. His confidence had seemed to lift some of the burden—and some of the worry—off her shoulders.

Determined to have a productive day, she slogged through transcribing her most recent interviews. She had worked only four full days over the past two weeks, the newspaper seeming distant, part of another life. If she didn’t produce something soon, Tom would lose patience with her, though his temper didn’t bother her the way it bothered other people.

Done with that, she began to run through her notes on the VA story, only to find that she still couldn’t concentrate. Her gaze fell on Ali Al Zahrani’s FBI file. She set her VA notes aside, reached for the file, and looked through the list of articles she’d written over the past few months to see whether any of them might have provoked Ali. But none of them had touched on any topic remotely related to the Middle East or terrorism. There were, however, a lot of articles
about
her both in the
Denver Independent
and in other papers as the media focused on Al-Nassar’s upcoming trial.

Could that be it? Could that coverage have persuaded him somehow to think of her as an enemy, a threat that needed to be eradicated? Could there be some connection between Al-Nassar and Ali or his family of which the FBI wasn’t aware?

If Laura had read this report without having met Ali’s family and without having spent so much time in the Middle East, she might have bought that story without a second thought. Page after page painted a damning picture—a young man who’d gone from model teenager to terrorist in a matter of months, turning his back on society to carry out one fatal act of violence. But nothing in the report explained how Ali might have become radicalized or who might have influenced him. Could he have spent his afternoons radicalizing himself in his own bedroom?

Laura’s reporter instincts, instincts she’d learned to trust, told her that something was off here.

His afternoons.

Her heart gave a hard kick.

She grabbed her notes from her interview with Ali’s uncle together with a fistful of pages from Ali’s browser history and began to compare.

According to FBI’s interview notes and her own, Ali went from class to his uncle’s grocery store, where he worked every afternoon until the store closed. He got out of class at roughly two in the afternoon and then reported to work by three, usually getting home at about nine thirty at night. And yet all of the suspect Internet searches he’d made using his desktop computer and home IP address—
every single one of them
—had taken place between one and four in the afternoon.

That made no sense.

Laura double– and triple-checked the documents, page by page, and confirmed it. The condemning Internet searches had all been made from Ali’s home during the hours he was supposed to have been at school or working at his uncle’s grocery store.

That could only mean one of two things. Either his uncle was lying about Ali’s whereabouts in the afternoon—or someone else had been using Ali’s computer.

Had FBI investigators noticed this?

Surely, they had. Then again . . .

Just to be cautious, she read through the browser history for a fourth time, noticing things she hadn’t before. His afternoon searches were strictly related to bomb making and terrorism. There wasn’t a single search for naked women, no clicks on news articles, no visits to chat rooms, no detours to iTunes. Also, he’d never done any Internet searches about her. In fact, there was nothing in his browsing history that involved her at all, not even articles about Al-Nassar’s trial. To make matters stranger, he’d visited some of the sites—many of them, in fact—for only a matter of minutes before clicking on the next link and the next.

“Ms. Nilsson?”

Laura gasped, startled. She looked up to see Childers standing in her office doorway, smartphone in hand.

“Sorry to startle you, but I just got word that Mr. Corbray has been shot.”

* * *

IT WAS LATE
afternoon by the time Javier was discharged from the hospital and free to head back to Laura’s place. He’d been questioned first by Darcangelo and then by two homicide detectives while waiting for the doctor to appear and stitch the graze. He’d been about to stitch the damned thing himself when the doctor had finally walked in and gotten the job done, leaving nine stitches in all.

Now, all he wanted to do was get back to Laura.

She’d put his phone number to use and called him the moment she’d heard he’d been shot, panic in her voice. He’d reassured her he was fine, but he knew she wouldn’t believe that until she saw him.

He walked with Hunter, Darcangelo, and two officers to the hospital’s parking garage. The two men had offered to accompany him back to Laura’s flat even though it wasn’t really their job.

“Why don’t you ride with that loser?” Darcangelo pointed to Hunter with a jerk of his head. “He’s got tinted windows that might give you more privacy if we run into media on the way.”

Hunter grinned. “He’s just jealous.”

Javier recognized close male friendship when he saw it. He climbed into Hunter’s SUV and put on his seat belt. “How long you and Darcangelo been married?”

Hunter grinned. “We met about six years ago. I’d broken out of prison, and Darcangelo was the one who found me.”

“Prison?” Javier listened while Hunter told him how he’d been convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. He’d broken out of prison to save Megan and Emily, and Darcangelo had put the pieces together, first bringing him in and then helping him prove his innocence.

“If it had been anyone else, I’d probably still be in the joint—or dead.”

Javier understood that bond. That was what he had with Nate. Except that he’d been awfully hard on Nate when he’d been up at the Cimarron, keeping him at a distance, keeping things from him.

Maybe you should set that right,
cabrón
.

Maybe he should.

* * *

LAURA WAS ABOUT
to go out of her mind by the time Javier finally got home. She met him at the door, took in the sight of him. He smiled when he saw her, but she could tell he was troubled. Was he in pain? “Thank God you’re okay!”

She wanted to wrap her arms around him but stopped herself. He was carrying two grocery bags, and she wasn’t sure where he’d been hit. She didn’t want to hurt him.

He set the bags down and drew her into his arms. “I told you not to worry,
bella
.”

She hadn’t been able to help it. She’d felt nauseated since she’d gotten the news, afraid in her heart that Javier had become a target because of her. His photo had run in the papers and been on all the news broadcasts, after all. Maybe the same people who wanted to get rid of her had now decided to go after him, too.

“Where were you wounded?”

Javier stepped back and slid out of his jacket to reveal a bloodstained T-shirt, the left side torn a few inches above his waist. He lifted the shirt and pressed his hand against a dressing that was held in place by medical tape. “Nine stitches. No big deal.”

“No big deal?” Fear for him flashed into anger. “You could have been killed!”

Childers stepped forward. “Glad to see you’re in one piece.”