Traceless. HelenKay Dimon
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all she wanted was these men home and safe and her in bed with Connor over her. Once she survived this, maybe that could happen.
“I should check.” She eased up on the clench on Connor’s arm. If she let them see the terror still racing through her, they’d go deeper into male protection mode and she needed them to focus on what was happening around them, not on her.
“What?” Holt asked.
She glanced over at one of Connor’s team leaders. She’d liked Holt from the beginning. Raised in Hawaii by his Japanese mother, Holt protected his sister and fought for his country. He was rock solid, like all the team members were, but there was something about the way he usually maintained silence that made her smile. He backed up Connor and she knew her husband’s life was safe in Holt’s hands. Still, Holt wasn’t a “yes man” and Connor described that as Holt’s best quality.
“To see if these two were there when I got trapped at the charity.” Because if they weren’t then there were even more men out there ready to hunt Connor down.
He put a hand on each forearm and turned her to face him again. His intense stare bored into her. “What does that mean?”
“Back at the office two came in the front, waving guns around. I ran to the back and there were four more out there. Waiting.”
Holt shook his head. “Damn.”
He motioned to Shane and each man took an arm of the dead man and dragged him to the porch. They moved fast and kept low. The guy got a quick patdown then she saw a flash. Before any of it registered in her brain they were back inside.
Shane leaned the broken door against the frame and each took a position on the side of the opening and looked into the dark night. He stopped only long enough to hand something off to Cam.
“You’re lucky to be alive.” The chain continued as Cam pivoted and stepped between Jana and Connor, holding something in his palm.
“They clearly wanted me alive to get to Connor here.” She glanced down and noticed Cam held a cell. With a swipe of his thumb, a man’s face appeared on the screen. Eyes closed and face bruised. She leaned in closer to get a better look. “What’s this?”
“I got a photo of the guy Holt took down outside and sent it to Davis for facial identification.” Cam moved the cell around. “This is it.”
A shiver ran through her when she recognized the guy as the one who touched her hair. “That’s one of them. One that chased me, I mean.”
Connor broke his hold on her and tapped a finger against his ear. “Hey, Davis, any luck on the ID check?”
Shane frowned as he touched his ear. “Davis?”
Holt followed suit and did a comm check. When he shook his head, she knew they’d somehow lost contact with the Maryland office. The way Cam and Connor crowded around her only highlighted the potential new danger.
“What happened?” she asked, amazed at how small and quiet her voice sounded.
Connor motioned for Cam to pocket the phone. “Everyone stay on guard. Could be nothing.”
The shaking in her bones suggested otherwise. If she shook any more her teeth would rattle. “Or it could be something, like a blocked signal.”
She knew just enough to be frozen in fear. There were devices, ways to keep people from communicating on an internal system. Ways to cut people off and make them more vulnerable.
“We’re going to assume the signal was momentarily lost.” Holt swore when a stray piece of wood from the broken door crunched under his foot. “Okay, let’s run through this. There was nothing on the guy outside or the one on the porch. No ID or obvious markings.”
She knew he meant tattoos and markings. More than once the team had tangled with some nasty international gang types during kidnap recovery, so the team clearly thought that was a possibility here.
There was no good answer, but trained mob assassins struck her as one of the worst possibilities. She rushed to give the team as full a picture as possible so they could assess. “There were four men here earlier.”
Connor froze in the act of typing something into his black watch. “What?”
The news she was about to deliver would get them all moving. It wouldn’t go over well but evading was never the answer with this group. “Actually, there were seven men altogether. Six back at the charity office, including the leader, when they took me. Then when I woke up—”
“They knocked you out?”
She nodded because the red wash of anger on Connor’s face and mumbled profanity she heard from the others said enough. She didn’t need to add to whatever was happening inside of him—or any of them—with more words about that.
“When I got here, I heard another voice,” she said. “A guy behind me, so I couldn’t see him. He seemed to be calling the shots and the one the leader from the attack on the charity office answered to.”
“We still have four hanging around at the charity. Or we did. They could be mobilizing and on the way here by now,” Shane said.
Holt nodded but his attention never wavered from whatever he watched outside. “We should assume that.”
“There are men over there now?” Panic surged through her all over again. She had protection. She had them.
“Were, but probably still are.”
Shane’s confirmation was enough for her. She turned back to Connor, made him focus on her over the emotions spinning through him. Touching him was like touching stone. Anger vibrated off of him as he held his body stiff.
She worked to keep the worry out of her voice. “We need to warn Marcel and the others to stay away from the office. I don’t want anyone else dragged into this, whatever it is.”
“Marcel is...?” Cam asked.
“Marcel Lampari. He runs the charity she’s working for.” Connor didn’t break eye contact with her. “He’ll be fine. Go back to the part about the other men who attacked you.”
This subject, Marcel, was a sensitive one. She knew Connor blamed Marcel for so much. When she worked overseas years ago and masked gunmen intercepted a vaccine shipment with her on board, Connor and his group got her out. That’s how they met. In a mix of adrenaline, heat and terror, which she should have seen as a sign of how their marriage would run.
But they’d put the kidnapping incident behind them long ago and fallen in love. Only one topic remained and bubbled up every so often to wallop them. Back then Connor unloaded on Marcel for his poor security and vulnerable distribution channels. The charity had fixed all those issues since then but Connor’s distrust of Marcel never faded.
Connor believed Marcel viewed her as more than a fellow worker. That he would leave his wife if Jana showed any interest. She never picked up on whatever Connor saw in Marcel and the man never made a move, but the attraction was very real in Connor’s mind and he didn’t try to hide it.
When she’d had to get away she’d wrestled with the idea of coming to Utah, fearing it would hurt Connor even more to have her leave and go to Marcel. But she had nowhere else to turn. She’d lost her father when she was twenty and her mother a decade before that. Her life with Connor had been so insular and her need to get away so desperate that without really thinking it through she ran right to the one man sure to infuriate Connor.
She never meant to betray him. She loved Connor and would never cheat on him, but in her haze she messed up. Only two weeks before, Connor confronted her about Marcel during one of their weekly telephone calls and Connor’s anger bubbled over. He told her his patience had expired and started a countdown to come get her. She’d hung up on him and now that decision haunted her.
If they had any chance of making their way back to each other they had to work out the Marcel issue, but