Tall, Dark and Lethal. Dana Marton
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didn’t need to know that he’d been staging his very last—private—op for weeks. He didn’t want to drag anyone into that with him.
“How could anyone find you? I don’t even know where you are.”
An exaggeration. The Colonel knew everything. Or could find out in a hurry. “No idea yet, sir, but I’ll figure it out.”
When his cover had been blown in Southeast Asia a little over four months ago, and his life further complicated by shrapnel in his lungs, he’d been retired from undercover commando work at the age of forty. A retirement his enemies seemed unwilling to honor. He couldn’t blame them. He’d done some damage in his day.
But he hadn’t thought he would be found, not this fast. He had counted on having enough time to take care of his unfinished business with that bastard Smith before he would have to disappear again.
He hadn’t even known about the uncle who had left him half of a duplex in Pennsylvania. His grandmother had had an older son out of wedlock that she had never told her husband and daughter about. A son who, apparently, had died not long ago with no children of his own, so Cade ended up with the house. And he’d received his payoff from the SDDU in cash. He hadn’t been to a bank since he’d been shipped back stateside from the military hospital in Germany. Hadn’t used credit cards, hadn’t returned to his old home or any of his properties to retrieve as much as a coffee cup, hadn’t gotten his car out of storage. He might as well have died on that last mission and never returned to the U.S. No one knew where he was.
Except the tangos who had just blown up his house.
“Where can I go, sir? What’s open?” The sooner he got off the road, the sooner he could start investigating, the sooner he could take care of the men in the van and get back to the op he’d been planning. Which would now be delayed, dammit. Didn’t look like he would be catching up with Smith today after all.
Bailey pulled her legs up to hug her knees. She needed to put some decent clothes on. He tried not to look at her toned legs. She was barefoot, her toenails done in pink.
He wasn’t sure he could take any more pink this morning. Fortunately, she quickly released her knees and set her feet down.
“Do not come in.” The Colonel enunciated each word.
That snapped him back to business. “Sir?”
“The FBI is looking for you. There was an Agent Rubliczky here at the crack of dawn. He’s not happy. That’s why I called earlier.”
“What do they want now?” He had left the FBI for the SDDU under less than amicable circumstances that included an inside, undercover job to find a leak. His work had ruffled a lot of feathers at the Bureau. He knew Rubliczky by reputation. The man worked domestic terrorism. His blood ran cold at the implications. Son of a bitch.
“I’m being set up?” It seemed impossible for someone there to carry a grudge this long. He’d left the Bureau nearly a decade ago.
“They think you’re involved in something. It’s pretty bad, Cade. They are out for blood. They are also talking about a Bailey Preston. Who is she to you?”
A distraction the magnitude of which could barely be expressed. “We shared the same duplex. She has nothing to do with this.” He stole a glance at her from the corner of his eye and couldn’t help noticing her nipples nearly pushing through the thin silk top. He liked to think he was a pretty disciplined guy, but still, he was only a man.
“You’re sure? She could be into…whatever. Could even be a foreign asset.”
Against his better judgment, he looked at Bailey full on. He’d been in this business long enough to be a fair judge of character. “Not possible.”
“She is on their list, too. Could be dangerous.”
He watched as she twisted an arm around, looking straight ahead and trying to keep him from noticing that she was working on pulling up the door lock, yanking it hard enough to nearly break it off. Her jerky movements were giving her full breasts a soft bounce. And he knew exactly what they would feel like moving against his palms.
“It would be better if you stayed put for a while until I figure out what’s going on,” the Colonel was saying.
Stay put where? All he had was the Escalade, which could be reported stolen any minute. He couldn’t go back to the duplex—or to any of his other properties. He couldn’t go to the law, and he couldn’t stay on the road. There were some badass terrorists looking for him, along with the FBI. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, he had his ill-tempered neighbor in the silk pajamas to worry about.
He’d run for his life many times before, but never with a half-naked woman in tow. Most guys he knew would say the addition of a half-naked woman would improve just about any situation a man could get into.
She flashed him a look sharp enough to peel skin, her blue-violet eyes throwing thunderbolts once again. Her normally generous lips tightened to a thin line as she forced her words through them. “I’m going to sue you for this.”
Those guys had never met Bailey Preston, that’s for sure.
Chapter Two
“Take me home or take me to the nearest police station. Your pick,” Bailey said for the umpteenth time, raising her voice a smidgen, which made no difference whatsoever. Talking to Cade Palmer was like talking to her garden statuettes, or to her sixteen-year-old nephew, Zak, who was going through yet another difficult phase. Poor kid.
She was willing to cut Zak some slack. But not Cade. Cade was a grown man who should be held responsible for his actions.
“Who are you, anyway?” Even sitting down, she had to look up at him. He was a head taller, built but lean, and irritating as anything.
She was starting to suspect that he wasn’t the computer programmer he’d claimed to be. People didn’t come after computer programmers with grenade launchers. Then there was all that “yes, sir; no, sir” business on the phone, and him wanting to “come in.”
He was looking in the rearview mirror and ignoring her. Straight nose, strong jawline and shortcropped dark brown hair. He had a singular focus and an easy grace to his lean body.
“Are you in the witness protection program?”
He took forever to respond. “Kind of.”
Oh, God. Anger flooded her circuits. He had no right to drag her into his dirty business. “Could you be any vaguer?”
“You bet.” He looked at her with his caramel brown eyes, which were fringed with thick, dark lashes. “There’s a confidentiality issue.”
What on earth had she ever done to deserve this from the universe?
She had to be honest—she didn’t much care for the man. He was insufferable for the most part, the kind of neighbor people prayed wouldn’t move in next door. She did her best not to let him get a rise out of her with every outrageous act or comment—and failed often. And she had trained herself not to ogle or respond to his magnificent body, not even if he purposely taunted her by mowing the lawn in nothing but a pair of tattered blue jeans. But his eyes got to her every time. And there was no avoiding them, because if she dropped her gaze, she was confronted with his mile-wide chest.
“It’s for your own protection,” he added.
“I don’t want your kind of protection.” She was lucky he hadn’t killed her when they’d jumped from the balcony. Her heart raced all over again just thinking about it. Or maybe she just hadn’t had a chance to calm down fully yet.
He had stepped up on her railing—which she should have replaced when she’d installed the French doors, but had run out of money—and then he had stepped out into nothing. Air. His arms had been like steel brackets around her. For a surreal moment, he had morphed into some kind of action hero.