The Protector (3 page)

Why was it that whenever he left, she felt suddenly like prey?

A wet nose bumped her hand, and she looked down to see her Golden Shepherd gazing mournfully up at her.
 

“I know, Winston.” She stroked the dark ears inherited from his German
Shepherd
sire. His mother, a Golden Retriever, had contributed to Winston’s blond undercoat, as well as to his docile personality.
 
Turning to the nondescript kitchen, she went to feed her loyal dog.

**

“Why the hell is UPS at our door?” demanded Jackson’s boss, Supervisory Special Agent Brad
Caine
.

The two men sat three feet apart, watching live video feed of the safe house on split-screen monitors that occupied most of the back wall of their Mobile Command Center. The giant silver RV stood at the far end of a shopping center one mile from the safe house.

Jackson barely heard his supervisor’s muttered question. He was busy studying the feed from cameras three and four at the back of the safe house. Camera three showed an empty, fenced-in yard, where nothing of interest was happening. Camera four showed the yards of the condos backing up to theirs. In one such yard sat a man Jackson had tentatively identified as National Guardsman Hal Houston, only he wore no markings on his military-issue jacket to confirm it. More curious still, he was sporting gloves on a fine, spring day with temperatures already in the fifties.

“Maddox,”
Caine
called again, and Jackson dragged his attention to his supervisor’s monitor, where the split screen showed two different angles of a man in a UPS uniform standing at the front door of the safe house.

Jackson sprang from his seat for a closer look. “Is that a terrorist?” he exclaimed. The man looked more Indian than Afghani, though it was hard to tell for certain.
  

“Nah, it’s the UPS guy. I’ve seen him before. But why’s he bringing us a package?”
 

“How do you know it’s not a bomb?” Jackson asked. After so many tours in Iraq, every mysterious object tended to look like a bomb.

Caine
snatched up the phone to contact the agent watching the safe house from across the street. “
Ringo
, what’s up with UPS?” he said.
  

“Don’t know.” Jackson could hear Ringo’s tinny voice through the speaker. “I’ve seen him around before. Did we ask for a package?”

“Hell, no.”
  

“So, what do we do?”
 

“Go tell him no one’s home and you’ll hold the package for them,”
Caine
suggested.
  

“What if it’s a bomb?” Jackson repeated.
 

Caine
sent him a scowl. “We’re not in Iraq, Rookie.”

Jackson glanced back at his own monitor. Nothing had changed. The back yard still stood empty. The neighbor was still sitting in his own yard, wearing gloves. Something didn’t feel right. “One of us should stay with
Eryn
,” he asserted, and not for the first time.

As usual, Brad
Caine
just ignored him.

Chapter Two

Eryn
snatched her head up, startled. Winston pushed to all fours, his ears twitching. Who on earth would be ringing the doorbell?
she
wondered as the chime faded.

Her imagination supplied an immediate answer. The taxi driver! He had tracked her down, and now he would finish what he’d started.
 

That can’t be. How would he know where to find me?

There was only one way to know for sure, and that was to go to the door and take a look.

Rising on jittery knees,
Eryn
traversed the short hallway from the kitchen. Her breath rasped in the silence as she tiptoed toward the solid panel door and put an eye to the peep hole.

She drew back uncertainly. The familiar-looking uniform was reassuring, but the man wearing it was as foreign as all of her students. And why would UPS bring a package to a safe house? It had to be a trick, a way to get her to open the door.

Retreating to the kitchen, she snatched up the phone and pushed one for Jackson. “There’s a man at the door with a box,” she whispered when he answered.
 

“It’s just UPS.” While his words were encouraging, the thread of tension underlying them was not. “Don’t answer,
Eryn
. Stay right where you are.”
 

How did Jackson know who was at the door? “What’s in the box?” she asked, even as her mind supplied an answer: a pipe bomb, of course. Wasn’t that what terrorists always put in boxes?

Suddenly, the caller gave a forceful knock. Panic flooded
Eryn’s
arteries. He had overheard her whispering! He knew she was in here!

“I have to go!”
 

“
Eryn
, wait! Stay on the phone with me—”

She hung up on him abruptly. Her father had promised her that the FBI would keep her safe. But she didn’t feel safe here, not at all.

Snatching her purse from off the kitchen counter, she whirled toward the basement stairs. “Winston, come!”
 

He shot past her on the narrow steps, knocking her off her feet so that she skidded down the last six treads on her bottom. Leaping up, she raced him to the door. “Quiet!” she hissed when he barked with excitement.
 

The rear exit was as heavily bolted as the front. No doubt there were cameras guarding it, as well. Ignoring the frantic voice that whispered that it wasn’t safe to leave,
Eryn
twisted the locks and yanked the stubborn door open.

It wasn’t safe to stay, either. Another day of this uncertainty and she’d lose her mind. Besides, she’d been assured she was a guest here, not a prisoner. She could call it quits whenever she felt like it.

And today she desperately wanted to call it quits.

Winston bounded past her as she stepped into the fenced yard and drew up short.

Now what? There was no gate or exit out of the enclosure, only a section of the fence that looked like it was propped in place.

Crossing over to it, she gave a push and, to her astonishment, a six-foot partition keeled right over. Grabbing her dog’s collar, she waded cautiously into the grassy alley that divided the rows of condominiums.

She sensed the stranger before she actually saw him; he blended with the shrubbery so well that she would have looked right through him if his green stare hadn’t drawn her gaze.
 

He stood up slowly, never breaking eye contact.
Too tall.
Too broad.
Eryn
stepped back, her heart jumping.
 

She wheeled and ran the other way. The muscles in her legs, weak from inactivity, strained to carry her as fast and as far away as possible. She should have listened to her
spidy-sense
days ago.

Well, I’ll be damned, thought Ike. He’d been studying the back of the safe-house waiting for Cougar to show up when the part of the fence he’d compromised keeled over and out stepped the woman he was supposed to recover, all blue eyes and wild hair.
 

Up till then he’d had no idea how Cougar had planned to retrieve her without the FBI agents’ knowledge. He stood up, relieved. She’d saved them a hell of a lot of trouble.

Or not.

To his incredulity, she took one look at him, clutched her handbag to her chest, and sprinted the other way, up the grassy alley with the dog at her side, heading in the opposite direction from his getaway vehicle.

Sonofabitch.

The other camera, tucked under the rear eaves was filming her exodus. It would film him, too, if he went after her, but the odds of snagging her were better now than they’d ever be, especially if the FBI caught her first.

So Ike took off after her.
  

The girl was surprisingly fleet-footed. She had almost made it to the tree line before he curled a gloved hand around her elbow and swung her around. Lunging for the dog’s collar at the same time, he pulled them both to a jarring halt. “Wrong way,” he grated.
 

“Let go of me!” Her voice came out high and thin. “I’m not going back.” She struggled against his grasp, proving more difficult than the dog, who eyed him warily.
 

The odds of a successful nab and grab depended significantly on the amount of time it took to seize the recovery target and disappear. Ike had two minutes, tops, to make them disappear.
 

Ignoring
Eryn’s
shriek, he banded an arm around her waist and plucked her off her feet. “Come,” he said, relying on the dog to follow his mistress. He carried the squirming woman into a fenceless back yard where he hid them all behind a utility shed.
 

She was a wriggling bundle of resistance. “Let me go!”
 

He had to pin her to the shed’s wall. “Quiet,” he ordered, covering her mouth with a gloved hand. Her face went waxen; her pupils dilated. Christ, she was terrified of him, and he had mere seconds in which to reassure her.
  

“Look, I’m not with the FBI and I’m not a terrorist,” he said, peering around the corner of the shed for any sign of pursuit. “Your father sent me.”

She sucked a startled breath through her nose.

That’s right, princess.
“The safe word is Lancaster. He said you’d understand that.” Not that he did.

Looking back into her eyes, he was relieved to see her fear fade. Suddenly, she looked more like the teenager in the photo on Stanley’s desk at HQ, all freckles and periwinkle eyes.
Except the lithe body crushed under his most definitely belonged to a woman.
   

Easing his hand off her mouth, he saw that her jaw now bore the imprint of his glove.
 

“Lancaster,” she whispered, touching the tip of her tongue to her full upper lip.
  

She was too beautiful. Aware that his right thigh was wedged between hers, Ike eased his weight off of her. They needed to get moving. “I’m here to take you somewhere safe,” he added, measuring the distance to his car as she took stock of him.
 

“Do I know you?” she asked.
 

“Isaac Calhoun.” He glanced at his watch. No more time to chat.
 

But then she gave a cry of relief and threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly. “Thank you!” she cried, leaving an impression of soft breasts and fragrant hair.
   

Ike disguised his sudden befuddlement by tying a short rope to the dog’s collar in a makeshift leash. “We need to go. Can you run?”
 

“Of course.”
She seemed more than eager, looping the strap of her purse over her head.

He swept the area one more time.
“Now.”
Seizing her hand, he tugged her back into the grassy alley toward the condo he’d been using.
 

Sliding open the rear entrance, he pulled her and the dog inside and locked it behind them. In seconds, they were stepping out the front door. The man who owned the place happened to be in the service, making him compliant to the Commander’s strange request for a house key.