Mackenzie′s Pleasure
Mackenzie's Pleasure
Linda Howard
HER HEROBarrie Lovejoy needed a savior. The terrorist group holding her hostage surely wouldn't tolerate her silence much longer. Instead they would silence her-forever. Then out of the darkness he arrived. Grizzled and dangerous, he led Barrie from her captors straight into his sheltering arms…HER HUSBANDNavy Seal Zane Mackenzie was the best. No mission had ever gotten the better of him-until now. Saving Barrie Lovejoy had been textbook-except for their desperate night of passion. And though his job as a soldier had ended with her freedom, his duties as a husband had only begun. For he would sooner die than let the enemy harm the mother of his child.
A fan-favorite tale of romance and suspense from New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard
Navy SEAL Zane Mackenzie was a pro. No mission had ever gotten the better of him—until now. Saving the ambassador's gorgeous daughter, Barrie Lovejoy, had been textbook—except for their desperate night of passion. And though his job as a soldier had ended with her freedom, his duties as a husband had only just begun. For he would sooner die than let the enemy harm the mother of his child.
Previously published.
Praise for New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard (#ulink_c44dfa82-3632-5adf-a652-1abacd66cd6d)
“Linda Howard is an extraordinary talent whose unforgettable novels are richly flavored with scintillating sensuality and high-voltage suspense.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Linda Howard knows what readers want.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“Already a legend in her own time, Linda Howard exemplifies the very best of the romance genre. Her strong characterizations and powerful insight into the human heart have made her an author cherished by readers everywhere.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Linda Howard writes with power, stunning sensuality and a storytelling ability unmatched in romance drama. Every book is a treasure for the reader to savor again and again.”
—New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen
“Ms. Howard can wring so much emotion and tension out of her characters that no matter how satisfied you are when you finish a book, you still want more.”
—Rendezvous
“You can’t read just one Linda Howard!”
—New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter
MacKenzie’s Pleasure
Linda Howard
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
COVER (#uf357362d-dd07-5a92-a8c2-82144a5a9957)
BACK COVER TEXT (#ube7d0474-d5ea-5bed-92f6-c979ad9a096e)
Praise (#u03491e2d-8de3-5af0-9c24-73701d0fe496)
TITLE PAGE (#ua9e7ab92-b321-5f19-8e85-5ddfa18b1aff)
PROLOGUE (#u20a84974-59f4-5d92-89bc-fa9f837bff98)
CHAPTER ONE (#u0ffbfc81-60f6-5cb3-b520-c96b321969ec)
CHAPTER TWO (#uc1c46b09-8281-5963-8848-9354a5424d34)
CHAPTER THREE (#u159d1106-39d4-5b5f-8a46-c45f1112635f)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_faa80b5a-dc26-5f07-8b36-3cd9c4d49fb4)
WOLF MACKENZIE SLIPPED out of bed and restlessly paced over to the window, where he stood looking out at the stark, moonlit expanse of his land. A quick glance over his bare shoulder reassured him that Mary slept on, undisturbed, though he knew it wouldn’t be long before she sensed his absence and stirred, reaching out for him. When her hand didn’t encounter his warmth, she would wake, sitting up in bed and drowsily pushing her silky hair out of her face. When she saw him by the window she would slide out of bed and come to him, nestling against his naked body, sleepily resting her head on his chest.
A slight smile touched his hard mouth. Like as not, if he stayed out of bed long enough for her to awaken, when they returned to the bed it wouldn’t be to sleep but to make love. As he remembered, Maris had been conceived on just such an occasion, when he had been restless because Joe’s fighter wing had just been deployed overseas during some flare-up. It had been Joe’s first action, and Wolf had been as tense as he’d been during his own days in Vietnam.
Luckily, he and Mary were past the days when spontaneous passion could result in a new baby. Nowadays they had grandkids, not kids of their own. Ten at the last count, as a matter of fact.
But he was restless tonight, and he knew why.
The wolf always slept better when all of his cubs were accounted for.
Never mind that the cubs were adults, some of them with children of their own. Never mind that they were, one and all, supremely capable of taking care of themselves. They were his, and he was there if they needed him. He also liked to know, within reason, where they were bedding down for the night. It wasn’t necessary for him to be able to pinpoint their location—some things a parent was better off not knowing—but if he knew what state they were in, that was usually enough. Hell, sometimes he would have been glad just to know which country they were roaming.
His concern wasn’t for Joe, this time. He knew where Joe was—the Pentagon. Joe wore four stars now, and sat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Joe would still rather strap on a metal bird and fly at twice the speed of sound, but those days were behind him. If he had to fly a desk, then he would damn sure fly it the best it could be flown. Besides, as he’d once said, being married to Caroline was more challenging than being in a dogfight and outnumbered four to one.
Wolf grinned when he thought of his daughter-in-law. Genius IQ, doctorates in both physics and computer sciences, a bit arrogant, a bit quirky. She’d gotten her pilot’s license just after the birth of their first son, on the basis that the wife of a fighter pilot should know something about flying. She had received her certification on small jet aircraft around the time the third son had made his appearance. After the birth of her fifth son, she had grumpily told Joe that she was calling it quits with that one, because she’d given him five chances and obviously he wasn’t up to the job of fathering a daughter.
It had once been gently suggested to Joe that Caroline should quit her job. The company that employed her was heavily engaged in government contract work, and the appearance of any favoritism could hurt his career. Joe had turned his cool, blue laser gaze on his superiors and said, “Gentlemen, if I have to choose between my wife and my career, I’ll give you my resignation immediately.” That was not the answer that had been expected, and nothing else was said about Caroline’s work in research and development.
Wolf wasn’t worried about Michael, either. Mike was the most settled of all his children, though just as focused. He had decided at an early age that he wanted to be a rancher, and that’s exactly what he was. He owned a sizable spread down toward Laramie, and he and his wife were happily raising cattle and two sons.
The only uproar Mike had ever caused was when he decided to marry Shea Colvin. Wolf and Mary had given him their blessing, but the problem was that Shea’s mother was Pam Hearst Colvin, one of Joe’s old girlfriends—and Pam’s father, Ralph Hearst, was as adamantly opposed to his beloved granddaughter marrying Michael Mackenzie as he had been to his daughter dating Joe Mackenzie.
Michael, with his typical tunnel vision, had ignored the whole tempest. His only concern was marrying Shea, and to hell with the storm erupting in the Hearst family. Quiet, gentle Shea had been torn, but she wanted Michael and refused to call off the wedding as her grandfather demanded. Pam herself had finally put an end to it, standing nose to nose with her father in the middle of his store.
“Shea will marry Michael,” she’d stormed, when Ralph had threatened to take Shea out of his will if she married one of those damn breeds. “You didn’t want me to date Joe, when he was one of the most decent men I’ve ever met. Now Shea wants Michael, and she’s going to have him. Change your will, if you like. Hug your hate real close, because you won’t be hugging your granddaughter—or your great-granchildren. Think about that!”
So Michael had married Shea, and despite his growling and grumping, old Hearst was nuts about his two great-grandsons. Shea’s second pregnancy had been difficult, and both she and the baby had nearly died. The doctor had advised them not to have any more children, but they had already decided to have only two, anyway. The two boys were growing up immersed in cattle ranching and horses. Wolf was amused that Ralph Hearst’s great-grandchildren bore the Mackenzie name. Who in hell ever would have thought?
Josh, his third son, lived in Seattle with his wife, Loren, and their three sons. Josh was as jet-mad as Joe, but he had opted for the Navy rather than the Air Force, perhaps because he wanted to succeed on his own, not because his older brother was a general.
Josh was cheerful and openhearted, the most outgoing of the bunch, but he, too, had that streak of iron determination. He’d barely survived the crash that left him with a stiffened right knee and ended his naval career, but in typical Josh fashion, he had put that behind him and concentrated on what was before him. At the time, that had been his doctor—Dr. Loren Page. Never one to dither around, Josh had taken one look at tall, lovely Loren and begun his courtship from his hospital bed. He’d still been on crutches when they married. Now, three sons later, he worked for an aeronautics firm, developing new fighter aircraft, and Loren practiced her orthopedic specialty at a Seattle hospital.
Wolf knew where Maris was, too. His only daughter was currently in Montana, working as a trainer for a horse rancher. She was considering taking a job in Kentucky, working with Thoroughbreds. From the time she’d been old enough to sit unaided on a horse, her ambitions had all centered around the big, elegant animals. She had his touch with horses, able to gentle even the most contrary or vicious beast. Privately Wolf thought that she probably surpassed his skill. What she could do with a horse was pure magic.
Wolf’s hard mouth softened as he thought of Maris. She had wrapped his heart around her tiny finger the moment she had been placed in his arms, when she was mere minutes old, and had looked up at him with sleepy dark eyes. Of all his children, she was the only one who had his dark eyes. His sons all looked like him, except for their blue eyes, but Maris, who resembled Mary in every other way, had her father’s eyes. His daughter had light, silvery brown hair, skin so fine it was almost translucent, and her mother’s determination. She was all of five foot three and weighed about a hundred pounds, but Maris never paid any attention to her slightness; when she made up her mind to do something, she persisted with bulldog stubbornness until she succeeded. She could more than hold her own with her older, much larger and domineering brothers.
Her chosen career hadn’t been easy for her. People tended to think two things. One was that she was merely trading on the Mackenzie name, and the other was that she was too delicate for the job. They soon found out how wrong they were on both counts, but it was a battle Maris had fought over and over. She kept at it, though, slowly winning respect for her individual talents.
The mental rundown of his kids next brought him to Chance. Hell, he even knew where Chance was, and that was saying something. Chance roamed the world, though he always came back to Wyoming, to the mountain that was his only home. He had happened to call earlier that day, from Belize. He’d told Mary that he was going to rest for a few days before moving on. When Wolf had taken his turn on the phone, he had moved out of Mary’s hearing and quietly asked Chance how bad he was hurt.
“Not too bad,” Chance had laconically replied. “A few stitches and a couple of cracked ribs. This last job went a little sour on me.”
Wolf didn’t ask what the last job had entailed. His soldier-of-fortune son occasionally did some delicate work for the government, so Chance seldom volunteered details. The two men had an unspoken agreement to keep Mary in the dark about the danger Chance faced on a regular basis. Not only did they not want her to worry, but if she knew he was wounded, she was likely to hop on a plane and fetch him home.
When Wolf hung up the phone and turned, it was to find Mary’s slate blue gaze pinned on him. “How bad is he hurt?” she demanded fiercely, hands planted on her hips.
Wolf knew better than to try lying to her. Instead he crossed the room to her and pulled her into his arms, stroking her silky hair and cradling her slight body against the solid muscularity of his. Sometimes the force of his love for this woman almost drove him to his knees. He couldn’t protect her from worry, though, so he gave her the respect of honesty. “Not too bad, to use his own words.”
Her response was instant. “I want him here.”
“I know, sweetheart. But he’s okay. He doesn’t lie to us. Besides, you know Chance.”
She nodded, sighing, and turned her lips against his chest. Chance was like a sleek panther, wild and intolerant of fetters. They had brought him into their home and made him one of the family, binding him to them with love when no other restraint would have held him. And like a wild creature that had been only half tamed, he accepted the boundaries of civilization, but lightly. He roamed far and wide, and yet he always came back to them.
From the first, though, he had been helpless against Mary. She had instantly surrounded him with so much love and care that he hadn’t been able to resist her, even though his light hazel eyes had reflected his consternation, even embarrassment, at her attention. If Mary went down to fetch Chance, he would come home without protest, but he would walk into the house wearing a helpless, slightly panicked “Oh, God, get me out of this” expression. And then he would meekly let her tend his wounds, pamper him and generally smother him with motherly concern.
Watching Mary fuss over Chance was one of Wolf’s greatest amusements. She fussed over all of her kids, but the others had grown up with it and took it as a matter of course. Chance, though...he had been fourteen and half wild when Mary had found him. If he’d ever had a home, he didn’t remember it. If he had a name, he didn’t know it. He’d evaded well-meaning social authorities by staying on the move, stealing whatever he needed, food, clothes, money. He was highly intelligent and had taught himself to read from newspapers and magazines that had been thrown away. Libraries had become a favorite place for him to hang out, maybe even spend the night if he could manage it, but never two nights in a row. From what he read and what little television he saw, he understood the concept of a family, but that was all it was to him—a concept. He trusted no one but himself.
He might have grown to adulthood that way if he hadn’t contracted a monster case of influenza. While driving home from work, Mary had found him lying on the side of a road, incoherent and burning up with fever. Though he was half a foot taller than she and some fifty pounds heavier, somehow she had wrestled and bullied the boy into her truck and taken him to the local clinic, where Doc Nowacki discovered that the flu had progressed into pneumonia and quickly transferred Chance to the nearest hospital, eighty miles away.
Mary had driven home and insisted that Wolf take her to the hospital—immediately.
Chance was in intensive care when they arrived. At first the nursing staff hadn’t wanted to let them see him, since they weren’t family and in fact didn’t know anything about him. Child services had been notified, and someone was on the way to take care of the paperwork. They had been reasonable, even kind, but they hadn’t reckoned with Mary. She was relentless. She wanted to see the boy, and a bulldozer couldn’t have budged her until she saw him. Eventually the nurses, overworked and outclassed by a will far stronger than their own, gave in and let Wolf and Mary into the small cubicle.
As soon as he saw the boy, Wolf knew why Mary was so taken with him. It wasn’t just that he was deathly ill; he was obviously part American Indian. He would have reminded Mary so forcibly of her own children that she could no more have forgotten about him than she could one of them.
Wolf’s expert eye swept over the boy as he lay there so still and silent, his eyes closed, his breathing labored. The hectic color of fever stained his high cheekbones. Four different bags dripped an IV solution into his muscular right arm, which was taped to the bed. Another bag hung at the side of the bed, measuring the output of his kidneys.
Not a half breed, Wolf had thought. A quarter, maybe. No more than that. But still, there was no doubting his heritage. His fingernails were light against the tanned skin of his fingers, where an Anglo’s nails would have been pinker. His thick, dark brown hair, so long it brushed his shoulders, was straight. There were those high cheekbones, the clear-cut lips, the high-bridged nose. He was the most handsome boy Wolf had ever seen.
Mary went up to the bed, all her attention focused on the boy who lay so ill and helpless on the snowy sheets. She laid her cool hand lightly against his forehead, then stroked it over his hair. “You’ll be all right,” she murmured. “I’ll make sure you are.”
He had lifted his heavy lids, struggling with the effort. For the first time Wolf saw the light hazel eyes, almost golden, and circled with a brown rim so dark it was almost black. Confused, the boy had focused first on Mary; then his gaze had wandered to Wolf, and belated alarm flared in his eyes. He tried to heave himself up, but he was too weak even to tug his taped arm free.
Wolf moved to the boy’s other side. “Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly. “You have pneumonia, and you’re in a hospital.” Then, guessing what lay at the bottom of the boy’s panic, he added, “We won’t let them take you.”
Those light eyes had rested on his face, and perhaps Wolf’s appearance had calmed him. Like a wild animal on guard, he slowly relaxed and drifted back to sleep.
Over the next week, the boy’s condition improved, and Mary swung into action. She was determined that the boy, who still had not given them a name, not be taken into state custody for even one day. She pulled strings, harangued people, even called on Joe to use his influence, and her tenacity worked. When the boy was released from the hospital, he went home with Wolf and Mary.
He had gradually become accustomed to them, though by no stretch of the imagination had he been friendly, or even trustful. He would answer their questions, in one word if possible, but he never actually talked with them. Mary hadn’t been discouraged. From the first, she simply treated the boy as if he was hers—and soon he was.
The boy who had always been alone was suddenly plunged into the middle of a large, volatile family. For the first time he had a roof over his head every night, a room all to himself, ample food in his belly. He had clothing hanging in the closet and new boots on his feet. He was still too weak to share in the chores everyone did, but Mary immediately began tutoring him to bring him up to Zane’s level academically, since the two boys were the same age, as near as they could tell. Chance took to the books like a starving pup to its mother’s teat, but in every other way he determinedly remained at arm’s length. Those shrewd, guarded eyes took note of every nuance of their family relationships, weighing what he saw now against what he had known before.
Finally he unbent enough to tell them that he was called Sooner. He didn’t have a real name.
Maris had looked at him blankly. “Sooner?”
His mouth had twisted, and he’d looked far too old for his fourteen years. “Yeah, like a mongrel dog.”
“No,” Wolf had said, because the name was a clue. “You know you’re part Indian. More than likely you were called Sooner because you were originally from Oklahoma—and that means you’re probably Cherokee.”
The boy merely looked at him, his expression guarded, but still something about him had lightened at the possibility that he hadn’t been likened to a dog of unknown heritage.
His relationships with everyone in the family were complicated. With Mary, he wanted to hold himself away, but he simply couldn’t. She mothered him the way she did the rest of her brood, and it terrified him even though he delighted in it, soaking up her loving concern. He was wary of Wolf, as if he expected the big man to turn on him with fists and boots. Wise in the ways of wild things, Wolf gradually gentled the boy the same way he did horses, letting him get accustomed, letting him realize he had nothing to fear, then offering respect and friendship and, finally, love.
Michael had already been away at college, but when he did come home he simply made room in his family circle for the newcomer. Sooner was relaxed with Mike from the start, sensing that quiet acceptance.
He got along with Josh, too, but Josh was so cheerful it was impossible not to get along with him. Josh took it on himself to be the one who taught Sooner how to handle the multitude of chores on a horse ranch. Josh was the one who taught him how to ride, though Josh was unarguably the worst horseman in the family. That wasn’t to say he wasn’t good, but the others were better, especially Maris. Josh didn’t care, because his heart was wrapped up in planes just the way Joe’s had been, so perhaps he had been more patient with Sooner’s mistakes than anyone else would have been.
Maris was like Mary. She had taken one look at the boy and immediately taken him under her fiercely protective wing, never mind that Sooner was easily twice her size. At twelve, Maris had been not quite five feet tall and weighed all of seventy-four pounds. It didn’t matter to her; Sooner became hers the same way her older brothers were hers. She chattered to him, teased him, played jokes on him—in short, drove him crazy, the way little sisters were supposed to do. Sooner hadn’t had any idea how to handle the way she treated him, any more than he had with Mary. Sometimes he had watched Maris as if she were a ticking time bomb, but it was Maris who won his first smile with her teasing. It was Maris who actually got him to enter the family conversations: slowly, at first, as he learned how families worked, how the give-and-take of talking melded them together, then with more ease. Maris could still tease him into a rage, or coax a laugh out of him, faster than anyone else. For a while Wolf had wondered if the two might become romantically interested in each other as they grew older, but it hadn’t happened. It was a testament to how fully Sooner had become a part of their family; to both of them, they were simply brother and sister.
Things with Zane had been complicated, though.
Zane was, in his own way, as guarded as Sooner. Wolf knew warriors, having been one himself, and what he saw in his youngest son was almost frightening. Zane was quiet, intense, watchful. He moved like a cat, gracefully, soundlessly. Wolf had trained all his children, including Maris, in self-defense, but with Zane it was something more. The boy took to it with the ease of someone putting on a well-worn shoe; it was as if it had been made for him. When it came to marksmanship, he had the eye of a sniper, and the deadly patience.
Zane had the instinct of a warrior: to protect. He was immediately on guard against this intruder into the sanctity of his family’s home turf.
He hadn’t been nasty to Sooner. He hadn’t made fun of him or been overtly unfriendly, which wasn’t in his nature. Rather, he had held himself away from the newcomer, not rejecting, but certainly not welcoming, either. But because they were the same age, Zane’s acceptance was the most crucial, and Sooner had reacted to Zane’s coolness by adopting the same tactics. They had ignored each other.
While the kids were working out their relationships, Wolf and Mary had been pushing hard to legally adopt Sooner. They had asked him if that was what he wanted and, typically, he had responded with a shrug and an expressionless, “Sure.” Taking that for the impassioned plea it was, Mary redoubled her efforts to get the adoption pushed through.
As things worked out, they got the word that the adoption could go forward on the same day Zane and Sooner settled things between them.
The dust was what had caught Wolf’s attention.
At first he hadn’t thought anything of it, because when he glanced over he saw Maris sitting on the top rail of the fence, calmly watching the commotion. Figuring one of the horses was rolling in the dirt, Wolf went back to work. Two seconds later, however, his sharp ears caught the sound of grunts and what sounded suspiciously like blows.
He walked across the yard to the other corral. Zane and Sooner had gotten into the corner, where they couldn’t be seen from the house, and were ferociously battering each other. Wolf saw at once that both boys, despite the force of their blows, were restraining themselves to the more conventional fisticuffs rather than the faster, nastier ways he’d also taught them. He leaned his arms on the top rail beside Maris. “What’s this about?”
“They’re fighting it out,” she said matter-of-factly, without taking her eyes from the action.
Josh soon joined them at the fence, and they watched the battle. Zane and Sooner were both tall, muscular boys, very strong for their ages. They stood toe to toe, taking turns driving their fists into each other’s faces. When one of them got knocked down, he got to his feet and waded back into the fray. They were almost eerily silent, except for the involuntary grunts and the sounds of hard fists hitting flesh.
Mary saw them standing at the fence and came out to investigate. She stood beside Wolf and slipped her small hand into his. He felt her flinch every time a blow landed, but when he looked at her, he saw that she was wearing her prim schoolteacher’s expression, and he knew that Mary Elizabeth Mackenzie was about to call the class to order.
She gave it five minutes. Evidently deciding this could go on for hours, and that both boys were too stubborn to give in, she settled the matter herself. In her crisp, clear teaching voice she called out, “All right, boys, let’s get this wrapped up. Supper will be on the table in ten minutes.” Then she calmly walked back to the house, fully confident that she had brought detente to the corral.
She had, too. She had reduced the fight to the level of a chore or a project, given them a time limit and a reason for ending it.
Both boys’ eyes had flickered to that slight retreating figure with the ramrod spine. Then Zane had turned to Sooner, the coolness of his blue gaze somewhat marred by the swelling of his eyes. “One more,” he said grimly, and slammed his fist into Sooner’s face.
Sooner picked himself up off the dirt, squared up again and returned the favor.
Zane got up, slapped the dirt from his clothes and held out his hand. Sooner gripped it, though they had both winced at the pain in their knuckles. They shook hands, eyed each other as equals, then returned to the house to clean up. After all, supper was almost on the table.
At supper, Mary told Sooner that the adoption had been given the green light. His pale hazel eyes had glittered in his battered face, but he hadn’t said anything.
“You’re a Mackenzie now,” Maris had pronounced with great satisfaction. “You’ll have to have a real name, so choose one.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that choosing a name might require some thought, but as it happened, Sooner had looked around the table at the family that pure blind luck had sent him, and a wry little smile twisted up one side of his bruised, swollen mouth. “Chance,” he said, and the unknown, unnamed boy became Chance Mackenzie.
Zane and Chance hadn’t become immediate best friends after the fight. What they had found, instead, was mutual respect, but friendship grew out of it. Over the years, they became so close that they could well have been born twins. There were other fights between them, but it was well known around Ruth, Wyoming, that if anyone decided to take on either of the boys, he would find himself facing both of them. They could batter each other into the ground, but by God, no one else was going to.
They had entered the Navy together, Zane becoming a SEAL, while Chance had gone into Naval Intelligence. Chance had since left the Navy, though, and gone out on his own, while Zane was a SEAL team leader.
And that brought Wolf to the reason for his restlessness.
Zane.
There had been a lot of times in Zane’s career when he had been out of touch, when they hadn’t known where he was or what he was doing. Wolf hadn’t slept well then, either. He knew too much about the SEALs, having seen them in action in Vietnam during his tours of duty. They were the most highly trained and skilled of the special forces, their stamina and teamwork proven by grueling tests that broke lesser men. Zane was particularly well suited for the work, but in the final analysis, the SEALs were still human. They could be killed. And because of the nature of their work, they were often in dangerous situations.
The SEAL training had merely accentuated the already existing facets of Zane’s nature. He had been honed to a perfect fighting machine, a warrior who was in top condition, but who used his brain more than his brawn. He was even more lethal and intense now, but he had learned to temper that deadliness with an easier manner, so that most people were unaware they were dealing with a man who could kill them in a dozen different ways with his bare hands. With that kind of knowledge and skill at his disposal, Zane had learned a calm control that kept him in command of himself. Of all Wolf’s offspring, Zane was the most capable of taking care of himself, but he was also the one in the most danger.
Where in hell was he?
There was a whisper of movement from the bed, and Wolf looked around as Mary slipped from between the sheets and joined him at the window, looping her arms around his hard, trim waist and nestling her head on his bare chest.
“Zane?” she asked quietly, in the darkness.
“Yeah.” No more explanation was needed.
“He’s all right,” she said with a mother’s confidence. “I’d know if he wasn’t.”
Wolf tipped her head up and kissed her, lightly at first, then with growing intensity. He turned her slight body more fully into his embrace and felt her quiver as she pressed to him, pushing her hips against his, cradling the rise of his male flesh against her softness. There had been passion between them from their first meeting, all those years ago, and time hadn’t taken it from them.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her back to bed, losing himself in the welcome and warmth of her soft body. Afterward, though, lying in the drowsy aftermath, he turned his face toward the window. Before sleep claimed him, the thought came again. Where was Zane?
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_2ad2dce8-6e30-5a61-a2e2-b849225024df)
ZANE MACKENZIE WASN’T HAPPY.
No one aboard the aircraft carrier USS Montgomery was happy; well, maybe the cooks were, but even that was iffy, because the men they were serving were sullen and defensive. The seamen weren’t happy, the radar men weren’t happy, the gunners weren’t happy, the Marines weren’t happy, the wing commander wasn’t happy, the pilots weren’t happy, the air boss wasn’t happy, the executive officer wasn’t happy and Captain Udaka sure as hell wasn’t happy.
The combined unhappiness of the five thousand sailors on board the carrier didn’t begin to approach Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie’s level of unhappiness.
The captain outranked him. The executive officer outranked him. Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie addressed them with all the respect due their rank, but both men were uncomfortably aware that their asses were in a sling and their careers on the line. Actually, their careers were probably in the toilet. There wouldn’t be any court-martials, but neither would there be any more promotions, and they would be given the unpopular commands from now until they either retired or resigned, their choice depending on how clearly they could read the writing on the wall.
Captain Udaka’s broad, pleasant face was one that wore responsibility easily, but now his expression was set in lines of unhappy acceptance as he met the icy gaze of the lieutenant-commander. SEALs in general made the captain nervous; he didn’t quite trust them or the way they operated outside normal regulations. This one in particular made him seriously want to be somewhere—anywhere—else.
He had met Mackenzie before, when both he and Boyd, the XO, had been briefed on the security exercise. The SEAL team under Mackenzie’s command would try to breach the carrier’s security, probing for weaknesses that could be exploited by any of the myriad terrorist groups so common these days. It was a version of the exercises once conducted by the SEAL Team Six Red Cell, which had been so notorious and so far outside the regulations that it had been disbanded after seven years of operation. The concept, however, had lived on, in a more controlled manner. SEAL Team Six was a covert, counterterrorism unit, and one of the best ways to counter terrorism was to prevent it from happening in the first place, rather than reacting to it after people were dead. To this end, the security of naval installations and carrier battle groups was tested by the SEALs, who then recommended changes to correct the weaknesses they had discovered. There were always weaknesses, soft spots—the SEALs had never yet been completely thwarted, even though the base commanders and ships’ captains were always notified in advance.
At the briefing, Mackenzie had been remote but pleasant. Controlled. Most SEALs had a wild, hard edge to them, but Mackenzie had seemed more regular Navy, recruiting-poster perfect in his crisp whites and with his coolly courteous manner. Captain Udaka had felt comfortable with him, certain that Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie was the administrational type rather than a true part of those wild-ass SEALs.
He’d been wrong.
The courtesy remained, and the control. The white uniform looked as perfect as it had before. But there was nothing at all pleasant in the deep voice, or in the cold fury that lit the pale blue-gray eyes so they glittered like moonlight on a knife blade. The aura of danger surrounding him was so strong it was almost palpable, and Captain Udaka knew that he had been drastically wrong in his assessment of Mackenzie. This was no desk jockey; this was a man around whom others should walk very lightly indeed. The captain felt as if his skin was being flayed from his body, strip by strip, by that icy gaze. He had also never felt closer to death than he had the moment Mackenzie had entered his quarters after learning what had happened.
“Captain, you were briefed on the exercise,” Zane said coldly. “Everyone on this ship was advised, as well as notified that my men wouldn’t be carrying weapons of any sort. Explain, then, why in hell two of my men were shot!”
The XO, Mr. Boyd, looked at his hands. Captain Udaka’s collar felt too tight, except that it was already unbuttoned, and the only thing choking him was the look in Mackenzie’s eyes.
“There’s no excuse,” he said rawly. “Maybe the guards were startled and fired without thinking. Maybe it was a stupid, macho turf thing, wanting to show the big, bad SEALs that they couldn’t penetrate our security, after all. It doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse.” Everything that happened on board his ship was, ultimately, his responsibility. The trigger-happy guards would pay for their mistake—and so would he.
“My men had already penetrated your security,” Zane said softly, his tone making the hairs stand up on the back of the captain’s neck.
“I’m aware of that.” The breach of his ship’s security was salt in the captain’s wounds, but nothing at all compared to the enormous mistake that had been made when men under his command had opened fire on the unarmed SEALs. His men, his responsibility. Nor did it help his feelings that, when two of their team had gone down, the remainder of the SEAL team, unarmed, had swiftly taken control and secured the area. Translated, that meant the guards who had done the shooting had been roughly handled and were now in sick bay with the two men they had shot. In reality, the phrase “roughly handled” was a euphemism for the fact that the SEALs had beaten the hell out of his men.
The most seriously wounded SEAL was Lieutenant Higgins, who had taken a bullet in the chest and would be evacuated by air to Germany as soon as he was stabilized. The other SEAL, Warrant Officer Odessa, had been shot in the thigh; the bullet had broken his femur. He, too, would be taken to Germany, but his condition was stable, even if his temper was not. The ship’s doctor had been forced to sedate him to keep him from wreaking vengeance on the battered guards, two of whom were still unconscious.
The five remaining members of the SEAL team were in Mission Planning, prowling around like angry tigers looking for someone to maul just to make themselves feel better. They were restricted to the area by Mackenzie’s order, and the ship’s crew was giving them a wide berth. Captain Udaka wished he could do the same with Mackenzie. He had the impression of cold savagery lurking just beneath the surface of the man’s control. There would be hell to pay for this night’s fiasco.
The phone on his desk emitted a harsh brr. Though he was relieved by the interruption, Captain Udaka snatched up the receiver and barked, “I gave orders I wasn’t to be—” He stopped, listening, and his expression changed. His gaze shifted to Mackenzie. “We’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up.
“There’s a scrambled transmission coming in for you,” he said to Mackenzie, rising to his feet. “Urgent.” Whatever message the transmission contained, Captain Udaka looked on it as a much-welcomed reprieve.
* * *
ZANE LISTENED INTENTLY to the secure satellite transmission, his mind racing as he began planning the logistics of the mission. “My team is two men short, sir,” he said. “Higgins and Odessa were injured in the security exercise.” He didn’t say how they’d been injured; that would be handled through other channels.
“Damn it,” Admiral Lindley muttered. He was in an office in the US Embassy in Athens. He looked up at the others in the office: Ambassador Lovejoy, tall and spare, with the smoothness bequeathed by a lifetime of privilege and wealth, though now there was a stark, panicked expression in his hazel eyes; the CIA station chief, Art Sandefer, a nondescript man with short gray hair and tired, intelligent eyes; and, finally, Mack Prewett, second only to Sandefer in the local CIA hierarchy. Mack was known in some circles as Mack the Knife; Admiral Lindley knew Mack was generally considered a man who got things done, a man whom it was dangerous to cross. For all his decisiveness, though, he wasn’t a cowboy who was likely to endanger people by going off half-cocked. He was as thorough as he was decisive, and it was through his contacts that they had obtained such good, prompt information in this case.
The admiral had put Zane on the speakerphone, so the other three in the room had heard the bad news about the SEAL team on which they had all been pinning their hopes. Ambassador Lovejoy looked even more haggard.
“We’ll have to use another team,” Art Sandefer said.
“That’ll take too much time!” the ambassador said with stifled violence. “My God, already she could be—” He stopped, anguish twisting his face. He wasn’t able to complete the sentence.
“I’ll take the team in,” Zane said. His amplified voice was clear in the soundproofed room. “We’re the closest, and we can be ready to go in an hour.”
“You?” the admiral asked, startled. “Zane, you haven’t seen live action since—”
“My last promotion,” Zane finished dryly. He hadn’t liked trading action for administration, and he was seriously considering resigning his commission. He was thirty-one, and it was beginning to look as if his success in his chosen field was going to prevent him from practicing it; the higher-ranking the officer, the less likely that officer was to be in the thick of the action. He’d been thinking about something in law enforcement, or maybe even throwing in with Chance. There was nonstop action there, for sure.
For now, though, a mission had been dumped in his lap, and he was going to take it.
“I train with my men, Admiral,” he said. “I’m not rusty, or out of shape.”
“I didn’t think you were,” Admiral Lindley replied, and sighed. He met the ambassador’s anguished gaze, read the silent plea for help. “Can six men handle the mission?” he asked Zane.
“Sir, I wouldn’t risk my men if I didn’t think we could do the job.”
This time the admiral looked at both Art Sandefer and Mack Prewett. Art’s expression was noncommittal, the Company man refusing to stick his neck out, but Mack gave the admiral a tiny nod. Admiral Lindley swiftly weighed all the factors. Granted, the SEAL team would be two members short, and the leader would be an officer who hadn’t been on an active mission in over a year, but that officer happened to be Zane Mackenzie. All things considered, the admiral couldn’t think of any other man he would rather have on this mission. He’d known Zane for several years now, and there was no better warrior, no one he trusted more. If Zane said he was ready, then he was ready. “All right. Go in and get her out.”
As the admiral hung up, Ambassador Lovejoy blurted, “Shouldn’t you send in someone else? My daughter’s life is at stake! This man hasn’t been in the field, he’s out of shape, out of practice—”
“Waiting until we could get another team into position would drastically lower our chances of finding her,” the admiral pointed out as kindly as possible. Ambassador Lovejoy wasn’t one of his favorite people. For the most part, he was a horse’s ass and a snob, but there was no doubt he doted on his daughter. “And as far as Zane Mackenzie is concerned, there’s no better man for the job.”
“The admiral’s right,” Mack Prewett said quietly, with the authority that came so naturally to him. “Mackenzie is so good at what he does it’s almost eerie. I would feel comfortable sending him in alone. If you want your daughter back, don’t throw obstacles in his way.”
Ambassador Lovejoy shoved his hand through his hair, an uncharacteristic gesture for so fastidious a man; it was a measure of his agitation. “If anything goes wrong...”
It wasn’t clear whether he was about to voice a threat or was simply worrying aloud, but he couldn’t complete the sentence. Mack Prewett gave a thin smile. “Something always goes wrong. If anyone can handle it, Mackenzie can.”
* * *
AFTER ZANE TERMINATED the secure transmission, he made his way through the network of corridors to Mission Planning. Already he could feel the rush of adrenaline pumping through his muscles as he began preparing, mentally and physically, for the job before him. When he entered the room with its maps and charts and communication systems, and the comfortable chairs grouped around a large table, five hostile faces turned immediately toward him, and he felt the surge of renewed energy and anger from his men.
Only one of them, Santos, was seated at the table, but Santos was the team medic, and he was usually the calmest of the bunch. Ensign Peter “Rocky” Greenberg, second in command of the team and a controlled, detail-oriented kind of guy, leaned against the bulkhead with his arms crossed and murder in his narrowed brown eyes. Antonio Withrock, nicknamed Bunny because he never ran out of energy, was prowling the confines of the room like a mean, hungry cat, his dark skin pulled tight across his high cheekbones. Paul Drexler, the team sniper, sat cross-legged on top of the table while he wiped an oiled cloth lovingly over the disassembled parts of his beloved Remington bolt-action 7.62 rifle. Zane didn’t even lift his eyebrows at the sight. His men were supposed to be unarmed, and they had been during the security exercise that had gone so damn sour, but keeping Drexler unarmed was another story.
“Planning on taking over the ship?” Zane inquired mildly of the sniper.
His blue eyes cold, Drexler cocked his head as if considering the idea. “I might.”
Winstead “Spooky” Jones had been sitting on the deck, his back resting against the bulkhead, but at Zane’s entrance he rose effortlessly to his feet. He didn’t say anything, but his gaze fastened on Zane’s face, and a spark of interest replaced some of the anger in his eyes.
Spook never missed much, and the other team members had gotten in the habit of watching him, picking up cues from his body language. No more than three seconds passed before all five men were watching Zane with complete concentration.
Greenberg was the one who finally spoke. “How’s Bobcat doing, boss?”
They had read Spooky’s tension, but misread the cause, Zane realized. They thought Higgins had died from his wounds. Drexler began assembling his rifle with sharp, economical motions. “He’s stabilized,” Zane reassured them. He knew his men, knew how tight they were. A SEAL team had to be tight. Their trust in each other had to be absolute, and if something happened to one of them, they all felt it. “They’re transferring him now. It’s touchy, but I’ll put my money on Bobcat. Odie’s gonna be okay, too.” He hitched one hip on the edge of the table, his pale eyes glittering with the intensity that had caught Spooky’s attention. “Listen up, children. An ambassador’s daughter was snatched a few hours ago, and we’re going into Libya to get her.”
* * *
SIX BLACK-CLAD FIGURES slipped silently along the narrow, deserted street in Benghazi, Libya. They communicated by hand signals, or by whispers into the Motorola headsets they all wore under their black knit balaclava hoods. Zane was in his battle mode; he was utterly calm as they worked their way toward the four-story stone building where Barrie Lovejoy was being held on the top floor, if their intelligence was good, and if she hadn’t been moved within the past few hours.
Action always affected him this way, as if every cell in his body had settled into its true purpose of existence. He had missed this, missed it to the point that he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay in the Navy without it. On a mission, all his senses became more acute, even as a deep center of calm radiated outward. The more intense the action, the calmer he became, as time stretched out into slow motion. At those times he could see and hear every detail, analyze and predict the outcome, then make his decision and act—all within a split second that felt like minutes. Adrenaline would flood his body—he would feel the blood racing through his veins—but his mind would remain detached and calm. He had been told that the look on his face during those times was frighteningly remote, jarring in its total lack of expression.
The team moved forward in well-orchestrated silence. They each knew what to do, and what the others would do. That was the purpose of the trust and teamwork that had been drilled into them through the twenty-six weeks of hell that was formally known as BUD/S training. The bond between them enabled them to do more together than could be accomplished if each worked on his own. Teamwork wasn’t just a word to the SEALs, it was their center.
Spooky Jones was point man. Zane preferred using the wiry Southerner for that job because he had unfrayable nerves and could ghost around like a lynx. Bunny Withrock, who almost reverberated with nervous energy, was bringing up the rear. No one sneaked up on Bunny—except the Spook. Zane was right behind Jones, with Drexler, Greenberg and Santos ranging between him and Bunny. Greenberg was quiet, steady, totally dependable. Drexler was uncanny with that rifle, and Santos, besides being a damn good SEAL, also had the skill to patch them up and keep them going, if they were patchable. Overall, Zane had never worked with a better group of men.
Their presence in Benghazi was pure luck, and Zane knew it. Good luck for them and, he hoped, for Miss Lovejoy, but bad luck for the terrorists who had snatched her off the street in Athens fifteen hours ago. If the Montgomery hadn’t been just south of Crete and in perfect position for launching a rescue, if the SEALs hadn’t been on the carrier to practice special insertions, as well as the security exercise, then there would have been a delay of precious hours, perhaps even as long as a day, while another team got supplied and into position. As it was, the special insertion into hostile territory they had just accomplished had been the real thing instead of just a practice.
Miss Lovejoy was not only the ambassador’s daughter, she was an employee at the embassy, as well. The ambassador was apparently very strict and obsessive about his daughter, having lost his wife and son in a terrorist attack in Rome fifteen years before, when Miss Lovejoy had been a child of ten. After that, he had kept her secluded in private schools, and since she had finished college, she had been acting as his hostess, as well as performing her “work” at the embassy. Zane suspected her job was more window dressing than anything else, something to keep her busy. She had never really worked a day in her life, never been out from under her father’s protection—until today.
She and a friend had left the embassy to do some shopping. Three men had grabbed her, shoved her into a car and driven off. The friend had immediately reported the abduction. Despite efforts to secure the airport and ports—cynically, Zane suspected deliberate foot-dragging by the Greek authorities—a private plane had taken off from Athens and flown straight to Benghazi.
Thanks to the friend’s prompt action, sources on the ground in Benghazi had been alerted. It had been verified that a young woman of Miss Lovejoy’s description had been taken off the plane and hustled into the city, into the very building Zane and his team were about to enter.
It had to be her; there weren’t that many red-haired Western women in Benghazi. In fact, he would bet there was only one—Barrie Lovejoy.
They were betting her life on it.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e6e78cf2-09db-5788-b220-e948d2dbfee4)
BARRIE LAY IN almost total darkness, heavy curtains at the single window blocking out most of whatever light would have entered. She could tell that it was night; the level of street noise outside had slowly diminished, until now there was mostly silence. The men who had kidnapped her had finally gone away, probably to sleep. They had no worries about her being able to escape; she was naked, and tied tightly to the cot on which she lay. Her wrists were bound together, her arms drawn over her head and tied to the frame of the cot. Her ankles were also tied together, then secured to the frame. She could barely move; every muscle in her body ached, but those in her shoulders burned with agony. She would have screamed, she would have begged for someone to come and release the ropes that held her arms over her head, but she knew that the only people who would come would be the very ones who had tied her in this position, and she would do anything, give anything, to keep from ever seeing them again.
She was cold. They hadn’t even bothered to throw a blanket over her naked body, and long, convulsive shivers kept shaking her, though she couldn’t tell if she was chilled from the night air or from shock. She didn’t suppose it mattered. Cold was cold.
She tried to think, tried to ignore the pain, tried not to give in to shock and terror. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t know how she could escape, but if the slightest opportunity presented itself, she would have to be ready to take it. She wouldn’t be able to escape tonight; her bonds were too tight, her movements too restricted. But tomorrow— Oh, God, tomorrow.
Terror tightened her throat, almost choking off her breath. Tomorrow they would be back, and there would be another one with them, the one for whom they waited. A violent shiver racked her as she thought of their rough hands on her bare body, the pinches and slaps and crude probings, and her stomach heaved. She would have vomited, if there had been anything to vomit, but they hadn’t bothered to feed her.
She couldn’t go through that again.
Somehow, she had to get away.
Desperately she fought down her panic. Her thoughts darted around like crazed squirrels as she tried to plan, to think of something, anything, that she could do to protect herself. But what could she do, lying there like a turkey all trussed up for Thanksgiving dinner?
Humiliation burned through her. They hadn’t raped her, but they had done other things to her, things to shame and terrorize her and break her spirit. Tomorrow, when the leader arrived, she was sure her reprieve would be over. The threat of rape, and then the act of it, would shatter her and leave her malleable in their hands, desperate to do anything to avoid being violated again. At least that was what they planned, she thought. But she would be damned if she would go along with their plan.
She had been in a fog of terror and shock since they had grabbed her and thrown her into a car, but as she lay there in the darkness, cold and miserable and achingly vulnerable in her nakedness, she felt as if the fog was lifting, or maybe it was being burned away. No one who knew Barrie would ever have described her as hot-tempered, but then, what she felt building in her now wasn’t as volatile and fleeting as mere temper. It was rage, as pure and forceful as lava forcing its way upward from the bowels of the earth until it exploded outward and swept away everything in its path.
Nothing in her life had prepared her for these past hours. After her mother and brother had died, she had been pampered and protected as few children ever were. She had seen some—most, actually—of her schoolmates as they struggled with the misery of broken parental promises, of rare, stressful visits, of being ignored and shunted out of the way, but she hadn’t been like them. Her father adored her, and she knew it. He was intensely interested in her safety, her friends, her schoolwork. If he said he would call, then the call came exactly when he’d said it would. Every week had brought some small gift in the mail, inexpensive but thoughtful. She’d understood why he worried so much about her safety, why he wanted her to attend the exclusive girls’ school in Switzerland, with its cloistered security, rather than a public school, with its attendant hurly-burly.
She was all he had left.
He was all she had left, too. When she’d been a child, after the incident that had halved the family, she had clung fearfully to her father for months, dogging his footsteps when she could, weeping inconsolably when his work took him away from her. Eventually the dread that he, too, would disappear from her life had faded, but the pattern of overprotectiveness had been set.
She was twenty-five now, a grown woman, and though in the past few years his protectiveness had begun to chafe, she had enjoyed the even tenor of her life too much to really protest. She liked her job at the embassy, so much that she was considering a full-time career in the foreign service. She enjoyed being her father’s hostess. She had the duties and protocol down cold, and there were more and more female ambassadors on the international scene. It was a moneyed and insular community, but by both temperament and pedigree she was suited to the task. She was calm, even serene, and blessed with a considerate and tactful nature.
But now, lying naked and helpless on a cot, with bruises mottling her pale skin, the rage that consumed her was so deep and primal she felt as if it had altered something basic inside her, a sea change of her very nature. She would not endure what they—nameless, malevolent “they”—had planned for her. If they killed her, so be it. She was prepared for death; no matter what, she would not submit.
The heavy curtains fluttered.
The movement caught her eye, and she glanced at the window, but the action was automatic, without curiosity. She was already so cold that even a wind strong enough to move those heavy curtains couldn’t chill her more.
The wind was black, and had a shape.
Her breath stopped in her chest.
Mutely, she watched the big black shape, as silent as a shadow, slip through the window. It couldn’t be human; people made some sound when they moved. Surely, in the total silence of the room, she would have been able to hear the whisper of the curtains as the fabric moved, or the faint, rhythmic sigh of breathing. A shoe scraping on the floor, the rustle of clothing, anything—if it was human.
After the black shape had passed between them, the curtains didn’t fall back into the perfect alignment that had blocked the light; there was a small opening in them, a slit that allowed a shaft of moonlight, starlight, street light—whatever it was—to relieve the thick darkness. Barrie strained to focus on the dark shape, her eyes burning as she watched it move silently across the floor. She didn’t scream; whoever or whatever approached her, it couldn’t be worse than the only men likely to come to her rescue.
Perhaps she was really asleep and this was only a dream. It certainly didn’t feel real. But nothing in the long, horrible hours since she had been kidnapped had felt real, and she was too cold to be asleep. No, this was real, all right.
Noiselessly, the black shape glided to a halt beside the cot. It towered over her, tall and powerful, and it seemed to be examining the naked feast she presented.
Then it moved once again, lifting its hand to its head, and it peeled off its face, pulling the dark skin up as if it was no more than the skin of a banana.
It was a mask. As exhausted as she was, it was a moment before she could find a logical explanation for the nightmarish image. She blinked up at him. A man wearing a mask. Neither an animal, nor a phantom, but a flesh-and-blood man. She could see the gleam of his eyes, make out the shape of his head and the relative paleness of his face, though there was an odd bulkiness to him that in no way affected the eerily silent grace of his movements.
Just another man.
She didn’t panic. She had gone beyond fear, beyond everything but rage. She simply waited—waited to fight, waited to die. Her teeth were the only weapon she had, so she would use them, if she could. She would tear at her attacker’s flesh, try to damage him as much as possible before she died. If she was lucky, she would be able to get him by the throat with her teeth and take at least one of these bastards with her into death.
He was taking his time, staring at her. Her bound hands clenched into fists. Damn him. Damn them all.
Then he squatted beside the cot and leaned forward, his head very close to hers. Startled, Barrie wondered if he meant to kiss her—odd that the notion struck her as so unbearable—and she braced herself, preparing to lunge upward when he got close enough that she had a good chance for his throat.
“Mackenzie, United States Navy,” he said in a toneless whisper that barely reached her ear, only a few inches away.
He’d spoken in English, with a definitely American accent. She jerked, so stunned that it was a moment before the words made sense. Navy. United States Navy. She had been silent for hours, refusing to speak to her captors or respond in any way, but now a small, helpless sound spilled from her throat.
“Shh, don’t make any noise,” he cautioned, still in that toneless whisper. Even as he spoke, he was reaching over her head, and the tension on her arms suddenly relaxed. The small movement sent agony screaming through her shoulder joints, and she sucked in her breath with a sharp, gasping cry.
She quickly choked off the sound, holding it inside as she ground her teeth against the pain. “Sorry,” she whispered, when she was able to speak.
She hadn’t seen the knife in his hand, but she felt the chill of the blade against her skin as he deftly inserted the blade under the cords and sliced upward, felt the slight tug that freed her hands. She tried to move her arms and found that she couldn’t; they remained stretched above her head, unresponsive to her commands.
He knew, without being told. He slipped the knife into its scabbard and placed his gloved hands on her shoulders, firmly kneading for a moment before he clasped her forearms and gently drew her arms down. Fire burned in her joints; it felt as if her arms were being torn from her shoulders, even though he carefully drew them straight down, keeping them aligned with her body to lessen the pain. Barrie set her teeth again, refusing to let another sound break past the barrier. Cold sweat beaded her forehead, and nausea burned in her throat once more, but she rode the swell of pain in silence.
He dug his thumbs into the balls of her shoulders, massaging the sore, swollen ligaments and tendons, intensifying the agony. Her bare body drew into a taut, pale arch of suffering, lifting from the cot. He held her down, ruthlessly pushing her traumatized joints and muscles through the recovery process. She was so cold that the heat emanating from his hands, from the closeness of his body as he bent over her, was searingly hot on her bare skin. The pain rolled through her in great shudders, blurring her sight and thought, and through the haze she realized that now, when she definitely needed to stay conscious, she was finally going to faint.
She couldn’t pass out. She refused to. Grimly, she hung on, and in only a few moments, moments that felt much longer, the pain began to ebb. He continued the strong kneading, taking her through the agony and into relief. She went limp, relaxing on the cot as she breathed through her mouth in the long, deep drafts of someone who has just run a race.
“Good girl,” he whispered as he released her. The brief praise felt like balm to her lacerated emotions. He straightened and drew the knife again, then bent over the foot of the cot. Again there was the chill of the blade, this time against her ankles, and another small tug, then her feet were free, and involuntarily, she curled into a protective ball, her body moving without direction from her brain in a belated, useless effort at modesty and self-protection. Her thighs squeezed tightly together, her arms crossed over and hid her breasts, and she buried her face against the musty ticking of the bare mattress. She couldn’t look up at him, she couldn’t. Tears burned her eyes, clogged her throat.
“Have you been injured?” he asked, the ghostly whisper rasping over her bare skin like an actual touch. “Can you walk?”
Now wasn’t the time to let her raw nerves take over. They still had to get out undetected, and a fit of hysteria would ruin everything. She gulped twice, fighting for control of her emotions as grimly as she had fought to control the pain. The tears spilled over, but she forced herself to straighten from the defensive curl, to swing her legs over the edge of the cot. Shakily, she sat up and forced herself to look at him. She hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of; she would get through this. “I’m okay,” she replied, and was grateful that the obligatory whisper disguised the weakness of her voice.
He crouched in front of her and silently began removing the web gear that held and secured all his equipment. The room was too dark for her to make out exactly what each item was, but she recognized the shape of an automatic weapon as he placed it on the floor between them. She watched him, uncomprehending, until he began shrugging out of his shirt. Sick terror hit her then, slamming into her like a sledgehammer. My God, surely he wasn’t—
Gently, he put the shirt around her, tucking her arms into the sleeves as if she were a child, then buttoning each button, taking care to hold the fabric away from her body so his fingers wouldn’t brush against her breasts. The cloth still held his body heat; it wrapped around her like a blanket, warming her, covering her. The sudden feeling of security unnerved her almost as much as being stripped naked. Her heart lurched inside her chest, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Hesitantly, she reached out her hand in an apology, and a plea. Tears dripped slowly down her face, leaving salty tracks in their wake. She had been the recipient of so much male brutality in the past day that his gentleness almost destroyed her control, where their blows and crudeness had only made her more determined to resist them. She had expected the same from him and instead had received a tender care that shattered her with its simplicity.
A second ticked past, two: then, with great care, he folded his gloved fingers around her hand.
His hand was much bigger than hers. She felt the size and heat of it engulf her cold fingers and sensed the control of a man who exactly knew his own strength. He squeezed gently, then released her.
She stared at him, trying to pierce the veil of darkness and see his features, but his face was barely distinguishable and blurred even more by her tears. She could make out some details, though, and discern his movements. He wore a black T-shirt, and as silently as he had removed his gear, he now put it on again. He peeled back a flap on his wrist, and she caught the faint gleam of a luminous watch. “We have exactly two and a half minutes to get out of here,” he murmured. “Do what I say, when I say it.”
Before, she couldn’t have done it, but that brief moment of understanding, of connection, had buoyed her. Barrie nodded and got to her feet. Her knees wobbled. She stiffened them and shoved her hair out of her face. “I’m ready.”
She had taken exactly two steps when, below them, a staccato burst of gunfire shattered the night.
He spun instantly, silently, slipping away from her so fast that she blinked, unable to follow him. Behind her, the door opened. A harsh, piercing flood of light blinded her, and an ominous form loomed in the doorway. The guard—of course there was a guard. Then there was a blur of movement, a grunt, and the guard sagged into supporting arms. As silently as her rescuer seemed to do everything else, he dragged the guard inside and lowered him to the floor. Her rescuer stepped over the body, snagged her wrist in an unbreakable grip and towed her from the room.
The hallway was narrow, dirty and cluttered. The light that had seemed so bright came from a single naked bulb. More gunfire was erupting downstairs and out in the street. From the left came the sound of pounding feet. To the right was a closed door, and past it she could see the first step of an unlit stairway.
He closed the door of the room they had just left and lifted her off her feet, slinging her under his left arm as if she were no more than a sack of flour. Barrie clutched dizzily at his leg as he strode swiftly to the next room and slipped into the sheltering darkness. He had barely shut the door when a barrage of shouts and curses in the hallway made her bury her face against the black material of his pants leg.
He righted her and set her on her feet, pushing her behind him as he unslung the weapon from his shoulder. They stood at the door, unmoving, listening to the commotion just on the other side of the wooden panel. She could discern three different voices and recognized them all. There were more shouts and curses, in the language she had heard off and on all day long but couldn’t understand. The curses turned vicious as the guard’s body, and her absence, were discovered. Something thudded against the wall as one of her kidnappers gave vent to his temper.
“This is One. Go to B.”
That toneless whisper startled her. Confused, she stared at him, trying to make sense of the words. She was so tired that it took her a moment to realize he must be speaking a coded message into a radio. Of course he wasn’t alone; there would be an entire team of rescuers. All they had to do was get out of the building, and there would be a helicopter waiting somewhere, or a truck or a ship. She didn’t care if they’d infiltrated on bicycles; she would gladly walk out—barefoot, if necessary.
But first they had to get out of the building. Obviously the plan had been to spirit her out the window without her kidnappers being any the wiser until morning, but something had gone wrong, and the others had been spotted. Now they were trapped in this room, with no way of rejoining the rest of his team.
Her body began to revolt against the stress it had endured for so many long hours, the terror and pain, the hunger, the effort. With a sort of distant interest she felt each muscle begin quivering, the shudders working their way up her legs, her torso, until she was shaking uncontrollably.
She wanted to lean against him but was afraid she would hinder his movements. Her life—and his—depended completely on his expertise. She couldn’t help him, so the least she could do was stay out of his way. But she was desperately in need of support, so she fumbled her way a couple of steps to the wall. She was careful not to make any noise, but he sensed her movement and half turned, reaching behind himself with his left hand and catching her. Without speaking, he pulled her up against his back, keeping her within reach should he have to change locations in a hurry.
His closeness was oddly, fundamentally reassuring. Her captors had filled her with such fear and disgust that every feminine instinct had been outraged, and after they had finally left her alone in the cold and the dark, she had wondered with a sort of grief if she would ever again be able to trust a man. The answer, at least with this man, was yes.
She leaned gratefully against his back, so tired and weak that, just for a moment, she had to rest her head on him. The heat of his body penetrated the rough fabric of the web vest, warming her cheek. He even smelled hot, she noticed through a sort of haze; his scent was a mixture of clean, fresh sweat and musky maleness, exertion and tension heating it to an aroma as heady as that of the finest whiskey. Mackenzie. He’d said his name was Mackenzie, whispered it to her when he crouched to identify himself.
Oh, God, he was so warm, and she was still cold. The gritty stone floor beneath her bare feet seemed to be wafting cold waves of air up her legs. His shirt was so big it dwarfed her, hanging almost to her knees, but still she was naked beneath it. Her entire body was shaking.
They stood motionless in the silent darkness of the empty room for an eternity, listening to the gunfire as it tapered off in the distance, listening to the shouts and curses as they, too, diminished, listened for so long that Barrie drifted into a light doze, leaning against him with her head resting on his back. He was like a rock, unmoving, his patience beyond anything she had ever imagined. There were no nervous little adjustments of position, no hint that his muscles got tired. The slow, even rhythm of his breathing was the only movement she could discern, and resting against him as she was, the sensation was like being on a raft in a pool, gently rising, falling....
She woke when he reached back and lightly shook her. “They think we got away,” he whispered. “Don’t move or make any sound while I check things out.”
Obediently, she straightened away from him, though she almost cried at the loss of his body heat. He switched on a flashlight that gave off only a slender beam; black tape had been placed across most of the lens. He flicked the light around the room, revealing that it was empty except for some old boxes piled along one wall. Cobwebs festooned all of the corners, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of dust. She could make out a single window in the far wall, but he was careful not to let the thin beam of light get close to it and possibly betray their presence. The room seemed to have been unused for a very long time.
He leaned close and put his mouth against her ear. His warm breath washed across her flesh with every word. “We have to get out of this building. My men have made it look as if we escaped, but we probably won’t be able to hook up with them again until tomorrow night. We need someplace safe to wait. What do you know about the interior layout?”
She shook her head and followed his example, lifting herself on tiptoe to put her lips to his ear. “Nothing,” she whispered. “I was blindfolded when they brought me here.”
He gave a brief nod and straightened away from her. Once again Barrie felt bereft, abandoned, without his physical nearness. She knew it was just a temporary weakness, this urge to cling to him and the security he represented, but she needed him now with an urgency that was close to pain in its intensity. She wanted nothing more than to press close to him again, to feel the animal heat that told her she wasn’t alone; she wanted to be in touch with the steely strength that stood between her and those bastards who had kidnapped her.
Temporary or not, Barrie hated this neediness on her part; it reminded her too sharply of the way she had clung to her father when her mother and brother had died. Granted, she had been just a child then, and the closeness that had developed between her and her father had, for the most part, been good. But she had seen how stifling it could be, too, and quietly, as was her way, she had begun placing increments of distance between them. Now this had happened, and her first instinct was to cling. Was she going to turn into a vine every time there was some trauma in her life? She didn’t want to be like that, didn’t want to be a weakling. This nightmare had shown her too vividly that all security, no matter how solid it seemed, had its weak points. Instead of depending on others, she would do better to develop her own strengths, strengths she knew were there but that had lain dormant for most of her life. From now on, though, things were going to change.
Perhaps they already had. The incandescent anger that had taken hold of her when she’d lain naked and trussed on that bare cot still burned within her, a small, white-hot core that even her mind-numbing fatigue couldn’t extinguish. Because of it, she refused to give in to her weakness, refused to do anything that might hinder Mackenzie in any way. Instead she braced herself, forcing her knees to lock and her shoulders to square. “What are we going to do?” she whispered. “What can I do to help?”
Because there were no heavy blackout curtains on this grimy window, she was able to see part of his features as he looked at her. Half his face was in shadow, but the scant light gleamed on the slant of one high, chiseled cheekbone, revealed the strong cut of his jaw, played along a mouth that was as clearly defined as that of an ancient Greek statue.
“I’ll have to leave you here alone for a little while,” he said. “Will you be all right?”
Panic exploded in her stomach, her chest. She barely choked back the scream of protest that would have betrayed them. Grinding her teeth together and electing not to speak, because the scream would escape if she did, she nodded her head.
He hesitated, and Barrie could feel his attention focusing on her, as if he sensed her distress and was trying to decide whether or not it was safe to leave her. After a few moments, he gave a curt nod that acknowledged her determination, or at least gave her the benefit of the doubt. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” he said. “I promise.”
He pulled something from a pocket on his vest. He unfolded it, revealing a thin blanket of sorts. Barrie stood still as he snugly wrapped it around her. Though it was very thin, the blanket immediately began reflecting her meager body heat. When he let go of the edges they fell open, and Barrie clutched frantically at them in an effort to retain that fragile warmth. By the time she had managed to pull the blanket around her, he was gone, opening the door a narrow crack and slipping through as silently as he had come through the window in the room where she had been held. Then the door closed, and once again she was alone in the darkness.
Her nerves shrieked in protest, but she ignored them. Instead she concentrated on being as quiet as she could, listening for any sounds in the building that could tell her what was going on. There was still some noise from the street, the result of the gunfire that had alarmed the nearby citizenry, but that, too, was fading. The thick stone walls of the building dulled any sound, anyway. From within the building, there was only silence. Had her captors abandoned the site after her supposed escape? Were they in pursuit of Mackenzie’s team, thinking she was with them?
She swayed on her feet, and only then did she realize that she could sit down on the floor and wrap the blanket around her, conserving even more warmth. Her feet and legs were almost numb with cold. Carefully, she eased down onto the floor, terrified she would inadvertently make some noise. She sat on the thin blanket and pulled it around herself as best she could. Whatever fabric it was made from, the blanket blocked the chill of the stone floor. Drawing up her legs, Barrie hugged her knees and rested her head on them. She was more comfortable now than she had been in many long hours of terror and, inevitably, her eyelids began to droop heavily. Sitting there alone in the dark, dirty, empty room, she went to sleep.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_2b902c9b-a697-5bfd-ba12-91b693d3d948)
PISTOL IN HAND, Zane moved silently through the decrepit old building, avoiding the piles of debris and crumbled stone. They were already on the top floor, so, except for the roof, the only way he could go was down. He already knew where the exits were, but what he didn’t know was the location of the bad guys. Had they chosen this building as only a temporary hiding place and abandoned it when their victim seemingly escaped? Or was this their regular meeting place? If so, how many were there, and where were they? He had to know all that before he risked moving Miss Lovejoy. There was only another hour or so until dawn; he had to get her to a secure location before then.
He stopped at a turn in the corridor, flattening himself against the wall and easing his head around the corner just enough that he could see. Empty. Noiselessly, he moved down the hallway, just as cautiously checking the few rooms that opened off it.
He had pulled the black balaclava into place and smeared dust over his bare arms to dull the sheen of his skin and decrease his visibility. Giving his shirt to Miss Lovejoy and leaving his arms bare had increased his visibility somewhat, but he judged that his darkly tanned arms weren’t nearly as likely to be spotted as her naked body. Even in the darkness of the room where they had been keeping her, he had been able to clearly make out the pale shimmer of her skin. Since none of her clothes had been in evidence, giving her his shirt was the only thing he could have done. She’d been shaking with cold—evidence of shock because the night was warm—and she likely would have gone into hysterics if he’d tried to take her out of there while she was stark naked. He had been prepared, if necessary, to knock her out. But she’d been a little trouper so far, not even screaming when he had suddenly loomed over her in the darkness. With his senses so acute, though, Zane could feel how fragile her control was, how tightly she was strung.
It was understandable. She had likely been raped, not once but many times, since she had been kidnapped. She might fall apart when the crisis was over and she was safe, but for now she was holding together. Her gutsiness made his heart clench with a mixture of tenderness and a lethal determination to protect her. His first priority was to get her out of Libya, not wreak vengeance on her kidnappers—but if any of the bastards happened to get in his way, so be it.
The dark maw of a stairwell yawned before him. The darkness was reassuring; it not only signaled the absence of a guard, it would shield him. Humans still clung to the primitive instincts of cave dwellers. If they were awake, they wanted the comfort of light around them, so they could see the approach of any enemies. Darkness was a weapon that torturers used to break the spirit of their captives, because it emphasized their helplessness, grated on their nerves. But he was a SEAL, and darkness was merely a circumstance he could use. He stepped carefully into the stairwell, keeping his back to the wall to avoid any crumbling edges of the stone. He was fairly certain the stairs were safe, otherwise the kidnappers wouldn’t have been using them, but he didn’t take chances. Like idiots, people stacked things on stair steps, blocking their own escape routes.
A faint lessening of the darkness just ahead told him that he was nearing the bottom of the steps. He paused while he was still within the protective shadow, listening for the slightest sound. There. He heard what he’d been searching for, the distant sound of voices, angry voices tripping over each other with curses and excuses. Though Zane spoke Arabic, he was too far away to make out what they were saying. It didn’t matter; he’d wanted to know their location, and now he did. Grimly, he stifled the urge to exact revenge on Miss Lovejoy’s behalf. His mission was to rescue her, not endanger her further.
There was a stairwell at each end of the building. Knowing now that the kidnappers were on the ground floor at the east end, Zane began making his way to the west staircase. He didn’t meet up with any guards; as he had hoped, they thought the rescue had been effected, so they didn’t see any point now in posting guards.
In his experience, perfect missions were few and far between, so rare that he could count on one hand the number of missions he’d been on where everything had gone like clockwork. He tried to be prepared for mechanical breakdowns, accidents, forces of nature, but there was no way to plan for the human factor. He didn’t know how the kidnappers had been alerted to the SEALs’ presence, but he had considered that possibility from the beginning and made an alternate plan in case something went wrong. Something had—exactly what, he would find out later; except for that brief communication with his men, telling them to withdraw and switch to the alternate plan, they had maintained radio silence.
Probably it was pure bad luck, some late-night citizen unexpectedly stumbling over one of his men. Things happened. So he had formulated plan B, his just-in-case plan, because as they had worked their way toward the building, he’d had an uneasy feeling. When his gut told him something, Zane listened. Bunny Withrock had once given him a narrow-eyed look and said, “Boss, you’re even spookier than the Spook.” But they trusted his instincts, to the point that mentally they had probably switched to plan B as soon as he’d voiced it, before he had even gone into the building.
With Miss Lovejoy to consider, he’d opted for safety. That was why he had gone in alone, through the window, after Spook’s reconnaissance had reported that the kidnappers had set guards at intervals throughout the first floor. There were no lights in any of the rooms on the fourth floor, where Miss Lovejoy was reportedly being held, so it was likely there was no guard actually in the room with her; a guard wouldn’t want to sit in the darkness.
The kidnappers had inadvertently pinpointed the room for him: only one window had been covered with curtains. When Zane had reached that room, he had carefully parted the heavy curtains to make certain they hadn’t shielded an interior light, but the room beyond had been totally dark. And Miss Lovejoy had been there, just as he had expected.
Now, ostensibly with nothing left to guard, the kidnappers all seemed to be grouped together. Zane cat-footed through the lower rooms until he reached the other staircase, then climbed silently upward. Thanks to Spooky, he knew of a fairly secure place to take Miss Lovejoy while they waited for another opportunity for extraction; all he had to do was get her there undetected. That meant he had to do it before dawn, because a half-naked, red-haired Western woman would definitely be noticeable in this Islamic country. He wouldn’t exactly blend in himself, despite his black hair and tanned skin, because of his dark cammies, web gear and weaponry. Most people noticed a man with camouflage paint on his face and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
He reached the room where he’d left Miss Lovejoy and entered as quietly as he’d left. The room was empty. Alarm roared through him, every muscle tightening, and then he saw the small, dark hump on the floor and realized that she had curled up with the thin survival blanket over her. She wasn’t moving. Zane listened to the light, almost inaudible evenness of her breathing and realized she had gone to sleep. Again he felt that subtle inner clenching. She had been on edge and terrified for hours, obviously worn out but unable to sleep; the slight measure of security he’d been able to give her, consisting of his shirt, a blanket and a temporary, precarious hiding place, had been enough for her to rest. He hated to disturb her, but they had to move.
Gently he put his hand on her back, lightly rubbing, not shaking her awake but easing her into consciousness so she wouldn’t be alarmed. After a moment she began stirring under his touch, and he felt the moment when she woke, felt her instant of panic, then her quietly determined reach for control.
“We’re moving to someplace safer,” he whispered, removing his hand as soon as he saw she was alert. After what she had been through, she wouldn’t want to endure a man’s touch any more than necessary. The thought infuriated him, because his instinct was to comfort her; the women in his family, mother, sister and sisters-in-law, were adored and treasured by the men. He wanted to cradle Barrie Lovejoy against him, whisper promises to her that he would personally dismember every bastard who had hurt her, but he didn’t want to do anything that would undermine her fragile control. They didn’t have time for any comforting, anyway.
She clambered to her feet, still clutching the blanket around her. Zane reached for it, and her fingers tightened on the fabric, then slowly loosened. She didn’t have to explain her reluctance to release the protective cloth. Zane knew she was still both extrasensitive to cold and painfully embarrassed by her near nudity.
“Wear it this way,” he whispered, wrapping the blanket around her waist sarong-style so that it draped to her feet. He tied the ends securely over her left hipbone, then bent down to check that the fabric wasn’t too tight around her feet, so she would have sufficient freedom of movement if they had to run.
When he straightened, she touched his arm, then swiftly lifted her hand away, as if even that brief touch had been too much. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Watch me closely,” he instructed. “Obey my hand signals.” He explained the most basic signals to her, the raised clenched fist that meant “Stop!” and the open hand that meant merely “halt,” the signal to proceed and the signal to hide. Considering her state of mind, plus her obvious fatigue, he doubted she would be able to absorb more than those four simple commands. They didn’t have far to go, anyway; if he needed more commands than that, they were in deep caca.
She followed him out of the room and down the west staircase, though he felt her reluctance to step into the Stygian depths. He showed her how to keep her back to the wall, how to feel with her foot for the edge of the step. He felt her stumble once, heard her sharply indrawn breath. He whirled to steady her; his pistol was in his right hand, but his left arm snaked out, wrapping around her hips to steady her as she teetered two steps above him. The action lifted her off her feet, hauling her against his left side. She felt soft in his grip, her hips narrow but nicely curved, and his nostrils flared as he scented the warm sweetness of her skin.
She was all but sitting on his encircling arm, her hands braced on his shoulders. Reluctantly, he bent and set her on her feet, and she immediately straightened away from him. “Sorry,” she whispered in the darkness.
Zane’s admiration for her grew. She hadn’t squealed in alarm, despite nearly falling, despite the way he’d grabbed her. She was holding herself together, narrowing her focus to the achievement of one goal: freedom.
She was even more cautious in her movements after that one misstep, letting more distance grow between them than he liked. On the last flight of steps he stopped, waiting for her to catch up with him. Knowing that she couldn’t see him, he said, “Here,” when she was near, so she wouldn’t bump into him.
He eased his way down the last couple of steps into the faint light. There was no one in sight. With a brief wave of his hand, he signaled her forward, and she slipped out of the darkness of the stairwell to stand beside him.
There was a set of huge wooden double doors that opened onto the street, but Zane was aware of increased noise outside as dawn neared, and it was too risky to use that exit. From their left came a raised voice, shouting in Arabic, and he felt her tense. Quickly, before the sound of one of her kidnappers unnerved her, he shepherded her into a cluttered storage room, where a small, single window shone high on the wall. “We’ll go out this window,” he murmured. “There’ll be a drop of about four feet to the ground, nothing drastic. I’ll boost you up. When you hit the ground, move away from the street but stay against the side of the building. Crouch down so you’ll present the smallest possible silhouette. Okay?”
She nodded her understanding, and they picked their way over the jumbled boxes and debris until they were standing under the window. Zane stretched to reach the sill, hooked his fingers on the plaster and boosted himself up until he was balanced with one knee on the sill and one booted foot braced against a rickety stack of boxes. The window evidently hadn’t been used in a long time; the glass was opaque with dust, the hinges rusty and stiff. He wrestled it open, wincing at the scraping noise, even though he knew it wouldn’t carry to where the kidnappers were. Fresh air poured into the musty room. Like a cat he dropped to the floor, then turned to her.
“You can put your foot in my hand, or you can climb on my shoulders. Which do you prefer?”
With the window open, more light was coming through. He could see her doubtful expression as she stared at the window, and for the first time he appreciated the evenness of her features. He already knew how sweetly her body was shaped, but now he knew that Miss Lovejoy didn’t hurt his eyes at all.
“Can you get through there?” she whispered, ignoring his question as she eyed first the expanse of his shoulders and then the narrowness of the window.
Zane had already made those mental measurements. “It’ll be a tight fit, but I’ve been through tighter ones.”
She gazed at his darkened face, then gave one of her sturdy nods, the one that said she was ready to go on. Now he could see her calculating the difficulty of maneuvering through the window with the blanket tied around her waist, and he saw the exact moment when she made her decision. Her shoulders squared and her chin came up as she untied the blanket and draped it around her like a long scarf, winding it around her neck and tossing the ends over her shoulders to dangle rakishly down her back.
“I think I’d better climb on your shoulders,” she said. “I’ll have more leverage that way.”
He knelt on the floor and held his hands up for her to catch and brace herself. She went around behind him and daintily placed her right foot on his right shoulder, then lifted herself into a half crouch. As soon as her left foot had settled into place and her hands were securely in his, he rose steadily until he was standing erect. Her weight was negligible compared to what he handled during training. He moved closer to the wall, and she released his right hand to brace her hand against the sill. “Here I go,” she whispered, and boosted herself through the window.
She went through it headfirst. It was the fastest way, but not the easiest, because she had no way of breaking her fall on the other side. He looked up and saw the gleam of pale, bare legs and the naked curves of her buttocks; then she vanished from sight, and there was a thump as she hit the ground.
Quickly, Zane boosted himself up again. “Are you all right?” he whispered harshly.
There was silence for a moment, then a shaky, whispered answer. “I think so.”
“Take the rifle.” He handed the weapon to her, then dropped to the floor while he removed his web gear. That, too, went through the window. Then he followed, feetfirst, twisting his shoulders at an angle to fit through the narrow opening and landing in a crouch. Obediently, she had moved to the side and was sitting against the wall with the blanket once more clutched around her and his rifle cradled in her arms.
Dawn was coming fast, the remnants of darkness no more than a deep twilight. “Hurry,” he said as he shrugged into the web vest and took the rifle from her. He slid it into position, then drew the pistol again. The heavy butt felt reassuring and infinitely familiar in his palm. With the weapon in his right hand and her hand clasped in his left, he pulled her into the nearest alley.
Benghazi was a modern city, fairly Westernized, and Libya’s chief port. They were near the docks, and the smell of the sea was strong in his nostrils. Like the vast majority of waterfronts, it was one of the rougher areas of the city. From what he’d been able to tell, no authorities had shown up to investigate the gunfire, even supposing it had been reported. The Libyan government wasn’t friendly—there were no diplomatic relations between the United States and Libya—but that didn’t mean the government would necessarily turn a blind eye to the kidnapping of an ambassador’s daughter. Of course, it was just as likely that it would, which was why diplomatic channels hadn’t been considered. The best option had seemed to go in and get Miss Lovejoy out as quickly as possible.
There were plenty of ramshackle, abandoned buildings in the waterfront area. The rest of the team had withdrawn to one, drawing any pursuers away from Zane and Miss Lovejoy, while they holed up in another. They would rendezvous at oh-one-hundred hours the next morning.
Spooky had chosen the sites, so Zane trusted their relative safety. Now he and Miss Lovejoy wended their way through a rats’ nest of alleyways. She made a stifled sound of disgust once, and he knew she’d stepped on something objectionable, but other than that she soldiered on in silence.
It took only a few minutes to reach the designated safe area. The building looked more down than up, but Spooky had investigated and reported an intact inner room. One outer wall was crumbled to little more than rubble. Zane straddled it, then caught Miss Lovejoy around the waist and effortlessly lifted her over the heap, twisting his torso to set her on the other side. Then he joined her, leading her under half-fallen timbers and around spiderwebs that he wanted left undisturbed. The fact that he could see those webs meant they had to get under cover, fast.
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Linda Howard
HER HEROBarrie Lovejoy needed a savior. The terrorist group holding her hostage surely wouldn't tolerate her silence much longer. Instead they would silence her-forever. Then out of the darkness he arrived. Grizzled and dangerous, he led Barrie from her captors straight into his sheltering arms…HER HUSBANDNavy Seal Zane Mackenzie was the best. No mission had ever gotten the better of him-until now. Saving Barrie Lovejoy had been textbook-except for their desperate night of passion. And though his job as a soldier had ended with her freedom, his duties as a husband had only begun. For he would sooner die than let the enemy harm the mother of his child.
A fan-favorite tale of romance and suspense from New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard
Navy SEAL Zane Mackenzie was a pro. No mission had ever gotten the better of him—until now. Saving the ambassador's gorgeous daughter, Barrie Lovejoy, had been textbook—except for their desperate night of passion. And though his job as a soldier had ended with her freedom, his duties as a husband had only just begun. For he would sooner die than let the enemy harm the mother of his child.
Previously published.
Praise for New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard (#ulink_c44dfa82-3632-5adf-a652-1abacd66cd6d)
“Linda Howard is an extraordinary talent whose unforgettable novels are richly flavored with scintillating sensuality and high-voltage suspense.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Linda Howard knows what readers want.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“Already a legend in her own time, Linda Howard exemplifies the very best of the romance genre. Her strong characterizations and powerful insight into the human heart have made her an author cherished by readers everywhere.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Linda Howard writes with power, stunning sensuality and a storytelling ability unmatched in romance drama. Every book is a treasure for the reader to savor again and again.”
—New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen
“Ms. Howard can wring so much emotion and tension out of her characters that no matter how satisfied you are when you finish a book, you still want more.”
—Rendezvous
“You can’t read just one Linda Howard!”
—New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter
MacKenzie’s Pleasure
Linda Howard
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
COVER (#uf357362d-dd07-5a92-a8c2-82144a5a9957)
BACK COVER TEXT (#ube7d0474-d5ea-5bed-92f6-c979ad9a096e)
Praise (#u03491e2d-8de3-5af0-9c24-73701d0fe496)
TITLE PAGE (#ua9e7ab92-b321-5f19-8e85-5ddfa18b1aff)
PROLOGUE (#u20a84974-59f4-5d92-89bc-fa9f837bff98)
CHAPTER ONE (#u0ffbfc81-60f6-5cb3-b520-c96b321969ec)
CHAPTER TWO (#uc1c46b09-8281-5963-8848-9354a5424d34)
CHAPTER THREE (#u159d1106-39d4-5b5f-8a46-c45f1112635f)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_faa80b5a-dc26-5f07-8b36-3cd9c4d49fb4)
WOLF MACKENZIE SLIPPED out of bed and restlessly paced over to the window, where he stood looking out at the stark, moonlit expanse of his land. A quick glance over his bare shoulder reassured him that Mary slept on, undisturbed, though he knew it wouldn’t be long before she sensed his absence and stirred, reaching out for him. When her hand didn’t encounter his warmth, she would wake, sitting up in bed and drowsily pushing her silky hair out of her face. When she saw him by the window she would slide out of bed and come to him, nestling against his naked body, sleepily resting her head on his chest.
A slight smile touched his hard mouth. Like as not, if he stayed out of bed long enough for her to awaken, when they returned to the bed it wouldn’t be to sleep but to make love. As he remembered, Maris had been conceived on just such an occasion, when he had been restless because Joe’s fighter wing had just been deployed overseas during some flare-up. It had been Joe’s first action, and Wolf had been as tense as he’d been during his own days in Vietnam.
Luckily, he and Mary were past the days when spontaneous passion could result in a new baby. Nowadays they had grandkids, not kids of their own. Ten at the last count, as a matter of fact.
But he was restless tonight, and he knew why.
The wolf always slept better when all of his cubs were accounted for.
Never mind that the cubs were adults, some of them with children of their own. Never mind that they were, one and all, supremely capable of taking care of themselves. They were his, and he was there if they needed him. He also liked to know, within reason, where they were bedding down for the night. It wasn’t necessary for him to be able to pinpoint their location—some things a parent was better off not knowing—but if he knew what state they were in, that was usually enough. Hell, sometimes he would have been glad just to know which country they were roaming.
His concern wasn’t for Joe, this time. He knew where Joe was—the Pentagon. Joe wore four stars now, and sat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Joe would still rather strap on a metal bird and fly at twice the speed of sound, but those days were behind him. If he had to fly a desk, then he would damn sure fly it the best it could be flown. Besides, as he’d once said, being married to Caroline was more challenging than being in a dogfight and outnumbered four to one.
Wolf grinned when he thought of his daughter-in-law. Genius IQ, doctorates in both physics and computer sciences, a bit arrogant, a bit quirky. She’d gotten her pilot’s license just after the birth of their first son, on the basis that the wife of a fighter pilot should know something about flying. She had received her certification on small jet aircraft around the time the third son had made his appearance. After the birth of her fifth son, she had grumpily told Joe that she was calling it quits with that one, because she’d given him five chances and obviously he wasn’t up to the job of fathering a daughter.
It had once been gently suggested to Joe that Caroline should quit her job. The company that employed her was heavily engaged in government contract work, and the appearance of any favoritism could hurt his career. Joe had turned his cool, blue laser gaze on his superiors and said, “Gentlemen, if I have to choose between my wife and my career, I’ll give you my resignation immediately.” That was not the answer that had been expected, and nothing else was said about Caroline’s work in research and development.
Wolf wasn’t worried about Michael, either. Mike was the most settled of all his children, though just as focused. He had decided at an early age that he wanted to be a rancher, and that’s exactly what he was. He owned a sizable spread down toward Laramie, and he and his wife were happily raising cattle and two sons.
The only uproar Mike had ever caused was when he decided to marry Shea Colvin. Wolf and Mary had given him their blessing, but the problem was that Shea’s mother was Pam Hearst Colvin, one of Joe’s old girlfriends—and Pam’s father, Ralph Hearst, was as adamantly opposed to his beloved granddaughter marrying Michael Mackenzie as he had been to his daughter dating Joe Mackenzie.
Michael, with his typical tunnel vision, had ignored the whole tempest. His only concern was marrying Shea, and to hell with the storm erupting in the Hearst family. Quiet, gentle Shea had been torn, but she wanted Michael and refused to call off the wedding as her grandfather demanded. Pam herself had finally put an end to it, standing nose to nose with her father in the middle of his store.
“Shea will marry Michael,” she’d stormed, when Ralph had threatened to take Shea out of his will if she married one of those damn breeds. “You didn’t want me to date Joe, when he was one of the most decent men I’ve ever met. Now Shea wants Michael, and she’s going to have him. Change your will, if you like. Hug your hate real close, because you won’t be hugging your granddaughter—or your great-granchildren. Think about that!”
So Michael had married Shea, and despite his growling and grumping, old Hearst was nuts about his two great-grandsons. Shea’s second pregnancy had been difficult, and both she and the baby had nearly died. The doctor had advised them not to have any more children, but they had already decided to have only two, anyway. The two boys were growing up immersed in cattle ranching and horses. Wolf was amused that Ralph Hearst’s great-grandchildren bore the Mackenzie name. Who in hell ever would have thought?
Josh, his third son, lived in Seattle with his wife, Loren, and their three sons. Josh was as jet-mad as Joe, but he had opted for the Navy rather than the Air Force, perhaps because he wanted to succeed on his own, not because his older brother was a general.
Josh was cheerful and openhearted, the most outgoing of the bunch, but he, too, had that streak of iron determination. He’d barely survived the crash that left him with a stiffened right knee and ended his naval career, but in typical Josh fashion, he had put that behind him and concentrated on what was before him. At the time, that had been his doctor—Dr. Loren Page. Never one to dither around, Josh had taken one look at tall, lovely Loren and begun his courtship from his hospital bed. He’d still been on crutches when they married. Now, three sons later, he worked for an aeronautics firm, developing new fighter aircraft, and Loren practiced her orthopedic specialty at a Seattle hospital.
Wolf knew where Maris was, too. His only daughter was currently in Montana, working as a trainer for a horse rancher. She was considering taking a job in Kentucky, working with Thoroughbreds. From the time she’d been old enough to sit unaided on a horse, her ambitions had all centered around the big, elegant animals. She had his touch with horses, able to gentle even the most contrary or vicious beast. Privately Wolf thought that she probably surpassed his skill. What she could do with a horse was pure magic.
Wolf’s hard mouth softened as he thought of Maris. She had wrapped his heart around her tiny finger the moment she had been placed in his arms, when she was mere minutes old, and had looked up at him with sleepy dark eyes. Of all his children, she was the only one who had his dark eyes. His sons all looked like him, except for their blue eyes, but Maris, who resembled Mary in every other way, had her father’s eyes. His daughter had light, silvery brown hair, skin so fine it was almost translucent, and her mother’s determination. She was all of five foot three and weighed about a hundred pounds, but Maris never paid any attention to her slightness; when she made up her mind to do something, she persisted with bulldog stubbornness until she succeeded. She could more than hold her own with her older, much larger and domineering brothers.
Her chosen career hadn’t been easy for her. People tended to think two things. One was that she was merely trading on the Mackenzie name, and the other was that she was too delicate for the job. They soon found out how wrong they were on both counts, but it was a battle Maris had fought over and over. She kept at it, though, slowly winning respect for her individual talents.
The mental rundown of his kids next brought him to Chance. Hell, he even knew where Chance was, and that was saying something. Chance roamed the world, though he always came back to Wyoming, to the mountain that was his only home. He had happened to call earlier that day, from Belize. He’d told Mary that he was going to rest for a few days before moving on. When Wolf had taken his turn on the phone, he had moved out of Mary’s hearing and quietly asked Chance how bad he was hurt.
“Not too bad,” Chance had laconically replied. “A few stitches and a couple of cracked ribs. This last job went a little sour on me.”
Wolf didn’t ask what the last job had entailed. His soldier-of-fortune son occasionally did some delicate work for the government, so Chance seldom volunteered details. The two men had an unspoken agreement to keep Mary in the dark about the danger Chance faced on a regular basis. Not only did they not want her to worry, but if she knew he was wounded, she was likely to hop on a plane and fetch him home.
When Wolf hung up the phone and turned, it was to find Mary’s slate blue gaze pinned on him. “How bad is he hurt?” she demanded fiercely, hands planted on her hips.
Wolf knew better than to try lying to her. Instead he crossed the room to her and pulled her into his arms, stroking her silky hair and cradling her slight body against the solid muscularity of his. Sometimes the force of his love for this woman almost drove him to his knees. He couldn’t protect her from worry, though, so he gave her the respect of honesty. “Not too bad, to use his own words.”
Her response was instant. “I want him here.”
“I know, sweetheart. But he’s okay. He doesn’t lie to us. Besides, you know Chance.”
She nodded, sighing, and turned her lips against his chest. Chance was like a sleek panther, wild and intolerant of fetters. They had brought him into their home and made him one of the family, binding him to them with love when no other restraint would have held him. And like a wild creature that had been only half tamed, he accepted the boundaries of civilization, but lightly. He roamed far and wide, and yet he always came back to them.
From the first, though, he had been helpless against Mary. She had instantly surrounded him with so much love and care that he hadn’t been able to resist her, even though his light hazel eyes had reflected his consternation, even embarrassment, at her attention. If Mary went down to fetch Chance, he would come home without protest, but he would walk into the house wearing a helpless, slightly panicked “Oh, God, get me out of this” expression. And then he would meekly let her tend his wounds, pamper him and generally smother him with motherly concern.
Watching Mary fuss over Chance was one of Wolf’s greatest amusements. She fussed over all of her kids, but the others had grown up with it and took it as a matter of course. Chance, though...he had been fourteen and half wild when Mary had found him. If he’d ever had a home, he didn’t remember it. If he had a name, he didn’t know it. He’d evaded well-meaning social authorities by staying on the move, stealing whatever he needed, food, clothes, money. He was highly intelligent and had taught himself to read from newspapers and magazines that had been thrown away. Libraries had become a favorite place for him to hang out, maybe even spend the night if he could manage it, but never two nights in a row. From what he read and what little television he saw, he understood the concept of a family, but that was all it was to him—a concept. He trusted no one but himself.
He might have grown to adulthood that way if he hadn’t contracted a monster case of influenza. While driving home from work, Mary had found him lying on the side of a road, incoherent and burning up with fever. Though he was half a foot taller than she and some fifty pounds heavier, somehow she had wrestled and bullied the boy into her truck and taken him to the local clinic, where Doc Nowacki discovered that the flu had progressed into pneumonia and quickly transferred Chance to the nearest hospital, eighty miles away.
Mary had driven home and insisted that Wolf take her to the hospital—immediately.
Chance was in intensive care when they arrived. At first the nursing staff hadn’t wanted to let them see him, since they weren’t family and in fact didn’t know anything about him. Child services had been notified, and someone was on the way to take care of the paperwork. They had been reasonable, even kind, but they hadn’t reckoned with Mary. She was relentless. She wanted to see the boy, and a bulldozer couldn’t have budged her until she saw him. Eventually the nurses, overworked and outclassed by a will far stronger than their own, gave in and let Wolf and Mary into the small cubicle.
As soon as he saw the boy, Wolf knew why Mary was so taken with him. It wasn’t just that he was deathly ill; he was obviously part American Indian. He would have reminded Mary so forcibly of her own children that she could no more have forgotten about him than she could one of them.
Wolf’s expert eye swept over the boy as he lay there so still and silent, his eyes closed, his breathing labored. The hectic color of fever stained his high cheekbones. Four different bags dripped an IV solution into his muscular right arm, which was taped to the bed. Another bag hung at the side of the bed, measuring the output of his kidneys.
Not a half breed, Wolf had thought. A quarter, maybe. No more than that. But still, there was no doubting his heritage. His fingernails were light against the tanned skin of his fingers, where an Anglo’s nails would have been pinker. His thick, dark brown hair, so long it brushed his shoulders, was straight. There were those high cheekbones, the clear-cut lips, the high-bridged nose. He was the most handsome boy Wolf had ever seen.
Mary went up to the bed, all her attention focused on the boy who lay so ill and helpless on the snowy sheets. She laid her cool hand lightly against his forehead, then stroked it over his hair. “You’ll be all right,” she murmured. “I’ll make sure you are.”
He had lifted his heavy lids, struggling with the effort. For the first time Wolf saw the light hazel eyes, almost golden, and circled with a brown rim so dark it was almost black. Confused, the boy had focused first on Mary; then his gaze had wandered to Wolf, and belated alarm flared in his eyes. He tried to heave himself up, but he was too weak even to tug his taped arm free.
Wolf moved to the boy’s other side. “Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly. “You have pneumonia, and you’re in a hospital.” Then, guessing what lay at the bottom of the boy’s panic, he added, “We won’t let them take you.”
Those light eyes had rested on his face, and perhaps Wolf’s appearance had calmed him. Like a wild animal on guard, he slowly relaxed and drifted back to sleep.
Over the next week, the boy’s condition improved, and Mary swung into action. She was determined that the boy, who still had not given them a name, not be taken into state custody for even one day. She pulled strings, harangued people, even called on Joe to use his influence, and her tenacity worked. When the boy was released from the hospital, he went home with Wolf and Mary.
He had gradually become accustomed to them, though by no stretch of the imagination had he been friendly, or even trustful. He would answer their questions, in one word if possible, but he never actually talked with them. Mary hadn’t been discouraged. From the first, she simply treated the boy as if he was hers—and soon he was.
The boy who had always been alone was suddenly plunged into the middle of a large, volatile family. For the first time he had a roof over his head every night, a room all to himself, ample food in his belly. He had clothing hanging in the closet and new boots on his feet. He was still too weak to share in the chores everyone did, but Mary immediately began tutoring him to bring him up to Zane’s level academically, since the two boys were the same age, as near as they could tell. Chance took to the books like a starving pup to its mother’s teat, but in every other way he determinedly remained at arm’s length. Those shrewd, guarded eyes took note of every nuance of their family relationships, weighing what he saw now against what he had known before.
Finally he unbent enough to tell them that he was called Sooner. He didn’t have a real name.
Maris had looked at him blankly. “Sooner?”
His mouth had twisted, and he’d looked far too old for his fourteen years. “Yeah, like a mongrel dog.”
“No,” Wolf had said, because the name was a clue. “You know you’re part Indian. More than likely you were called Sooner because you were originally from Oklahoma—and that means you’re probably Cherokee.”
The boy merely looked at him, his expression guarded, but still something about him had lightened at the possibility that he hadn’t been likened to a dog of unknown heritage.
His relationships with everyone in the family were complicated. With Mary, he wanted to hold himself away, but he simply couldn’t. She mothered him the way she did the rest of her brood, and it terrified him even though he delighted in it, soaking up her loving concern. He was wary of Wolf, as if he expected the big man to turn on him with fists and boots. Wise in the ways of wild things, Wolf gradually gentled the boy the same way he did horses, letting him get accustomed, letting him realize he had nothing to fear, then offering respect and friendship and, finally, love.
Michael had already been away at college, but when he did come home he simply made room in his family circle for the newcomer. Sooner was relaxed with Mike from the start, sensing that quiet acceptance.
He got along with Josh, too, but Josh was so cheerful it was impossible not to get along with him. Josh took it on himself to be the one who taught Sooner how to handle the multitude of chores on a horse ranch. Josh was the one who taught him how to ride, though Josh was unarguably the worst horseman in the family. That wasn’t to say he wasn’t good, but the others were better, especially Maris. Josh didn’t care, because his heart was wrapped up in planes just the way Joe’s had been, so perhaps he had been more patient with Sooner’s mistakes than anyone else would have been.
Maris was like Mary. She had taken one look at the boy and immediately taken him under her fiercely protective wing, never mind that Sooner was easily twice her size. At twelve, Maris had been not quite five feet tall and weighed all of seventy-four pounds. It didn’t matter to her; Sooner became hers the same way her older brothers were hers. She chattered to him, teased him, played jokes on him—in short, drove him crazy, the way little sisters were supposed to do. Sooner hadn’t had any idea how to handle the way she treated him, any more than he had with Mary. Sometimes he had watched Maris as if she were a ticking time bomb, but it was Maris who won his first smile with her teasing. It was Maris who actually got him to enter the family conversations: slowly, at first, as he learned how families worked, how the give-and-take of talking melded them together, then with more ease. Maris could still tease him into a rage, or coax a laugh out of him, faster than anyone else. For a while Wolf had wondered if the two might become romantically interested in each other as they grew older, but it hadn’t happened. It was a testament to how fully Sooner had become a part of their family; to both of them, they were simply brother and sister.
Things with Zane had been complicated, though.
Zane was, in his own way, as guarded as Sooner. Wolf knew warriors, having been one himself, and what he saw in his youngest son was almost frightening. Zane was quiet, intense, watchful. He moved like a cat, gracefully, soundlessly. Wolf had trained all his children, including Maris, in self-defense, but with Zane it was something more. The boy took to it with the ease of someone putting on a well-worn shoe; it was as if it had been made for him. When it came to marksmanship, he had the eye of a sniper, and the deadly patience.
Zane had the instinct of a warrior: to protect. He was immediately on guard against this intruder into the sanctity of his family’s home turf.
He hadn’t been nasty to Sooner. He hadn’t made fun of him or been overtly unfriendly, which wasn’t in his nature. Rather, he had held himself away from the newcomer, not rejecting, but certainly not welcoming, either. But because they were the same age, Zane’s acceptance was the most crucial, and Sooner had reacted to Zane’s coolness by adopting the same tactics. They had ignored each other.
While the kids were working out their relationships, Wolf and Mary had been pushing hard to legally adopt Sooner. They had asked him if that was what he wanted and, typically, he had responded with a shrug and an expressionless, “Sure.” Taking that for the impassioned plea it was, Mary redoubled her efforts to get the adoption pushed through.
As things worked out, they got the word that the adoption could go forward on the same day Zane and Sooner settled things between them.
The dust was what had caught Wolf’s attention.
At first he hadn’t thought anything of it, because when he glanced over he saw Maris sitting on the top rail of the fence, calmly watching the commotion. Figuring one of the horses was rolling in the dirt, Wolf went back to work. Two seconds later, however, his sharp ears caught the sound of grunts and what sounded suspiciously like blows.
He walked across the yard to the other corral. Zane and Sooner had gotten into the corner, where they couldn’t be seen from the house, and were ferociously battering each other. Wolf saw at once that both boys, despite the force of their blows, were restraining themselves to the more conventional fisticuffs rather than the faster, nastier ways he’d also taught them. He leaned his arms on the top rail beside Maris. “What’s this about?”
“They’re fighting it out,” she said matter-of-factly, without taking her eyes from the action.
Josh soon joined them at the fence, and they watched the battle. Zane and Sooner were both tall, muscular boys, very strong for their ages. They stood toe to toe, taking turns driving their fists into each other’s faces. When one of them got knocked down, he got to his feet and waded back into the fray. They were almost eerily silent, except for the involuntary grunts and the sounds of hard fists hitting flesh.
Mary saw them standing at the fence and came out to investigate. She stood beside Wolf and slipped her small hand into his. He felt her flinch every time a blow landed, but when he looked at her, he saw that she was wearing her prim schoolteacher’s expression, and he knew that Mary Elizabeth Mackenzie was about to call the class to order.
She gave it five minutes. Evidently deciding this could go on for hours, and that both boys were too stubborn to give in, she settled the matter herself. In her crisp, clear teaching voice she called out, “All right, boys, let’s get this wrapped up. Supper will be on the table in ten minutes.” Then she calmly walked back to the house, fully confident that she had brought detente to the corral.
She had, too. She had reduced the fight to the level of a chore or a project, given them a time limit and a reason for ending it.
Both boys’ eyes had flickered to that slight retreating figure with the ramrod spine. Then Zane had turned to Sooner, the coolness of his blue gaze somewhat marred by the swelling of his eyes. “One more,” he said grimly, and slammed his fist into Sooner’s face.
Sooner picked himself up off the dirt, squared up again and returned the favor.
Zane got up, slapped the dirt from his clothes and held out his hand. Sooner gripped it, though they had both winced at the pain in their knuckles. They shook hands, eyed each other as equals, then returned to the house to clean up. After all, supper was almost on the table.
At supper, Mary told Sooner that the adoption had been given the green light. His pale hazel eyes had glittered in his battered face, but he hadn’t said anything.
“You’re a Mackenzie now,” Maris had pronounced with great satisfaction. “You’ll have to have a real name, so choose one.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that choosing a name might require some thought, but as it happened, Sooner had looked around the table at the family that pure blind luck had sent him, and a wry little smile twisted up one side of his bruised, swollen mouth. “Chance,” he said, and the unknown, unnamed boy became Chance Mackenzie.
Zane and Chance hadn’t become immediate best friends after the fight. What they had found, instead, was mutual respect, but friendship grew out of it. Over the years, they became so close that they could well have been born twins. There were other fights between them, but it was well known around Ruth, Wyoming, that if anyone decided to take on either of the boys, he would find himself facing both of them. They could batter each other into the ground, but by God, no one else was going to.
They had entered the Navy together, Zane becoming a SEAL, while Chance had gone into Naval Intelligence. Chance had since left the Navy, though, and gone out on his own, while Zane was a SEAL team leader.
And that brought Wolf to the reason for his restlessness.
Zane.
There had been a lot of times in Zane’s career when he had been out of touch, when they hadn’t known where he was or what he was doing. Wolf hadn’t slept well then, either. He knew too much about the SEALs, having seen them in action in Vietnam during his tours of duty. They were the most highly trained and skilled of the special forces, their stamina and teamwork proven by grueling tests that broke lesser men. Zane was particularly well suited for the work, but in the final analysis, the SEALs were still human. They could be killed. And because of the nature of their work, they were often in dangerous situations.
The SEAL training had merely accentuated the already existing facets of Zane’s nature. He had been honed to a perfect fighting machine, a warrior who was in top condition, but who used his brain more than his brawn. He was even more lethal and intense now, but he had learned to temper that deadliness with an easier manner, so that most people were unaware they were dealing with a man who could kill them in a dozen different ways with his bare hands. With that kind of knowledge and skill at his disposal, Zane had learned a calm control that kept him in command of himself. Of all Wolf’s offspring, Zane was the most capable of taking care of himself, but he was also the one in the most danger.
Where in hell was he?
There was a whisper of movement from the bed, and Wolf looked around as Mary slipped from between the sheets and joined him at the window, looping her arms around his hard, trim waist and nestling her head on his bare chest.
“Zane?” she asked quietly, in the darkness.
“Yeah.” No more explanation was needed.
“He’s all right,” she said with a mother’s confidence. “I’d know if he wasn’t.”
Wolf tipped her head up and kissed her, lightly at first, then with growing intensity. He turned her slight body more fully into his embrace and felt her quiver as she pressed to him, pushing her hips against his, cradling the rise of his male flesh against her softness. There had been passion between them from their first meeting, all those years ago, and time hadn’t taken it from them.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her back to bed, losing himself in the welcome and warmth of her soft body. Afterward, though, lying in the drowsy aftermath, he turned his face toward the window. Before sleep claimed him, the thought came again. Where was Zane?
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_2ad2dce8-6e30-5a61-a2e2-b849225024df)
ZANE MACKENZIE WASN’T HAPPY.
No one aboard the aircraft carrier USS Montgomery was happy; well, maybe the cooks were, but even that was iffy, because the men they were serving were sullen and defensive. The seamen weren’t happy, the radar men weren’t happy, the gunners weren’t happy, the Marines weren’t happy, the wing commander wasn’t happy, the pilots weren’t happy, the air boss wasn’t happy, the executive officer wasn’t happy and Captain Udaka sure as hell wasn’t happy.
The combined unhappiness of the five thousand sailors on board the carrier didn’t begin to approach Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie’s level of unhappiness.
The captain outranked him. The executive officer outranked him. Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie addressed them with all the respect due their rank, but both men were uncomfortably aware that their asses were in a sling and their careers on the line. Actually, their careers were probably in the toilet. There wouldn’t be any court-martials, but neither would there be any more promotions, and they would be given the unpopular commands from now until they either retired or resigned, their choice depending on how clearly they could read the writing on the wall.
Captain Udaka’s broad, pleasant face was one that wore responsibility easily, but now his expression was set in lines of unhappy acceptance as he met the icy gaze of the lieutenant-commander. SEALs in general made the captain nervous; he didn’t quite trust them or the way they operated outside normal regulations. This one in particular made him seriously want to be somewhere—anywhere—else.
He had met Mackenzie before, when both he and Boyd, the XO, had been briefed on the security exercise. The SEAL team under Mackenzie’s command would try to breach the carrier’s security, probing for weaknesses that could be exploited by any of the myriad terrorist groups so common these days. It was a version of the exercises once conducted by the SEAL Team Six Red Cell, which had been so notorious and so far outside the regulations that it had been disbanded after seven years of operation. The concept, however, had lived on, in a more controlled manner. SEAL Team Six was a covert, counterterrorism unit, and one of the best ways to counter terrorism was to prevent it from happening in the first place, rather than reacting to it after people were dead. To this end, the security of naval installations and carrier battle groups was tested by the SEALs, who then recommended changes to correct the weaknesses they had discovered. There were always weaknesses, soft spots—the SEALs had never yet been completely thwarted, even though the base commanders and ships’ captains were always notified in advance.
At the briefing, Mackenzie had been remote but pleasant. Controlled. Most SEALs had a wild, hard edge to them, but Mackenzie had seemed more regular Navy, recruiting-poster perfect in his crisp whites and with his coolly courteous manner. Captain Udaka had felt comfortable with him, certain that Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie was the administrational type rather than a true part of those wild-ass SEALs.
He’d been wrong.
The courtesy remained, and the control. The white uniform looked as perfect as it had before. But there was nothing at all pleasant in the deep voice, or in the cold fury that lit the pale blue-gray eyes so they glittered like moonlight on a knife blade. The aura of danger surrounding him was so strong it was almost palpable, and Captain Udaka knew that he had been drastically wrong in his assessment of Mackenzie. This was no desk jockey; this was a man around whom others should walk very lightly indeed. The captain felt as if his skin was being flayed from his body, strip by strip, by that icy gaze. He had also never felt closer to death than he had the moment Mackenzie had entered his quarters after learning what had happened.
“Captain, you were briefed on the exercise,” Zane said coldly. “Everyone on this ship was advised, as well as notified that my men wouldn’t be carrying weapons of any sort. Explain, then, why in hell two of my men were shot!”
The XO, Mr. Boyd, looked at his hands. Captain Udaka’s collar felt too tight, except that it was already unbuttoned, and the only thing choking him was the look in Mackenzie’s eyes.
“There’s no excuse,” he said rawly. “Maybe the guards were startled and fired without thinking. Maybe it was a stupid, macho turf thing, wanting to show the big, bad SEALs that they couldn’t penetrate our security, after all. It doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse.” Everything that happened on board his ship was, ultimately, his responsibility. The trigger-happy guards would pay for their mistake—and so would he.
“My men had already penetrated your security,” Zane said softly, his tone making the hairs stand up on the back of the captain’s neck.
“I’m aware of that.” The breach of his ship’s security was salt in the captain’s wounds, but nothing at all compared to the enormous mistake that had been made when men under his command had opened fire on the unarmed SEALs. His men, his responsibility. Nor did it help his feelings that, when two of their team had gone down, the remainder of the SEAL team, unarmed, had swiftly taken control and secured the area. Translated, that meant the guards who had done the shooting had been roughly handled and were now in sick bay with the two men they had shot. In reality, the phrase “roughly handled” was a euphemism for the fact that the SEALs had beaten the hell out of his men.
The most seriously wounded SEAL was Lieutenant Higgins, who had taken a bullet in the chest and would be evacuated by air to Germany as soon as he was stabilized. The other SEAL, Warrant Officer Odessa, had been shot in the thigh; the bullet had broken his femur. He, too, would be taken to Germany, but his condition was stable, even if his temper was not. The ship’s doctor had been forced to sedate him to keep him from wreaking vengeance on the battered guards, two of whom were still unconscious.
The five remaining members of the SEAL team were in Mission Planning, prowling around like angry tigers looking for someone to maul just to make themselves feel better. They were restricted to the area by Mackenzie’s order, and the ship’s crew was giving them a wide berth. Captain Udaka wished he could do the same with Mackenzie. He had the impression of cold savagery lurking just beneath the surface of the man’s control. There would be hell to pay for this night’s fiasco.
The phone on his desk emitted a harsh brr. Though he was relieved by the interruption, Captain Udaka snatched up the receiver and barked, “I gave orders I wasn’t to be—” He stopped, listening, and his expression changed. His gaze shifted to Mackenzie. “We’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up.
“There’s a scrambled transmission coming in for you,” he said to Mackenzie, rising to his feet. “Urgent.” Whatever message the transmission contained, Captain Udaka looked on it as a much-welcomed reprieve.
* * *
ZANE LISTENED INTENTLY to the secure satellite transmission, his mind racing as he began planning the logistics of the mission. “My team is two men short, sir,” he said. “Higgins and Odessa were injured in the security exercise.” He didn’t say how they’d been injured; that would be handled through other channels.
“Damn it,” Admiral Lindley muttered. He was in an office in the US Embassy in Athens. He looked up at the others in the office: Ambassador Lovejoy, tall and spare, with the smoothness bequeathed by a lifetime of privilege and wealth, though now there was a stark, panicked expression in his hazel eyes; the CIA station chief, Art Sandefer, a nondescript man with short gray hair and tired, intelligent eyes; and, finally, Mack Prewett, second only to Sandefer in the local CIA hierarchy. Mack was known in some circles as Mack the Knife; Admiral Lindley knew Mack was generally considered a man who got things done, a man whom it was dangerous to cross. For all his decisiveness, though, he wasn’t a cowboy who was likely to endanger people by going off half-cocked. He was as thorough as he was decisive, and it was through his contacts that they had obtained such good, prompt information in this case.
The admiral had put Zane on the speakerphone, so the other three in the room had heard the bad news about the SEAL team on which they had all been pinning their hopes. Ambassador Lovejoy looked even more haggard.
“We’ll have to use another team,” Art Sandefer said.
“That’ll take too much time!” the ambassador said with stifled violence. “My God, already she could be—” He stopped, anguish twisting his face. He wasn’t able to complete the sentence.
“I’ll take the team in,” Zane said. His amplified voice was clear in the soundproofed room. “We’re the closest, and we can be ready to go in an hour.”
“You?” the admiral asked, startled. “Zane, you haven’t seen live action since—”
“My last promotion,” Zane finished dryly. He hadn’t liked trading action for administration, and he was seriously considering resigning his commission. He was thirty-one, and it was beginning to look as if his success in his chosen field was going to prevent him from practicing it; the higher-ranking the officer, the less likely that officer was to be in the thick of the action. He’d been thinking about something in law enforcement, or maybe even throwing in with Chance. There was nonstop action there, for sure.
For now, though, a mission had been dumped in his lap, and he was going to take it.
“I train with my men, Admiral,” he said. “I’m not rusty, or out of shape.”
“I didn’t think you were,” Admiral Lindley replied, and sighed. He met the ambassador’s anguished gaze, read the silent plea for help. “Can six men handle the mission?” he asked Zane.
“Sir, I wouldn’t risk my men if I didn’t think we could do the job.”
This time the admiral looked at both Art Sandefer and Mack Prewett. Art’s expression was noncommittal, the Company man refusing to stick his neck out, but Mack gave the admiral a tiny nod. Admiral Lindley swiftly weighed all the factors. Granted, the SEAL team would be two members short, and the leader would be an officer who hadn’t been on an active mission in over a year, but that officer happened to be Zane Mackenzie. All things considered, the admiral couldn’t think of any other man he would rather have on this mission. He’d known Zane for several years now, and there was no better warrior, no one he trusted more. If Zane said he was ready, then he was ready. “All right. Go in and get her out.”
As the admiral hung up, Ambassador Lovejoy blurted, “Shouldn’t you send in someone else? My daughter’s life is at stake! This man hasn’t been in the field, he’s out of shape, out of practice—”
“Waiting until we could get another team into position would drastically lower our chances of finding her,” the admiral pointed out as kindly as possible. Ambassador Lovejoy wasn’t one of his favorite people. For the most part, he was a horse’s ass and a snob, but there was no doubt he doted on his daughter. “And as far as Zane Mackenzie is concerned, there’s no better man for the job.”
“The admiral’s right,” Mack Prewett said quietly, with the authority that came so naturally to him. “Mackenzie is so good at what he does it’s almost eerie. I would feel comfortable sending him in alone. If you want your daughter back, don’t throw obstacles in his way.”
Ambassador Lovejoy shoved his hand through his hair, an uncharacteristic gesture for so fastidious a man; it was a measure of his agitation. “If anything goes wrong...”
It wasn’t clear whether he was about to voice a threat or was simply worrying aloud, but he couldn’t complete the sentence. Mack Prewett gave a thin smile. “Something always goes wrong. If anyone can handle it, Mackenzie can.”
* * *
AFTER ZANE TERMINATED the secure transmission, he made his way through the network of corridors to Mission Planning. Already he could feel the rush of adrenaline pumping through his muscles as he began preparing, mentally and physically, for the job before him. When he entered the room with its maps and charts and communication systems, and the comfortable chairs grouped around a large table, five hostile faces turned immediately toward him, and he felt the surge of renewed energy and anger from his men.
Only one of them, Santos, was seated at the table, but Santos was the team medic, and he was usually the calmest of the bunch. Ensign Peter “Rocky” Greenberg, second in command of the team and a controlled, detail-oriented kind of guy, leaned against the bulkhead with his arms crossed and murder in his narrowed brown eyes. Antonio Withrock, nicknamed Bunny because he never ran out of energy, was prowling the confines of the room like a mean, hungry cat, his dark skin pulled tight across his high cheekbones. Paul Drexler, the team sniper, sat cross-legged on top of the table while he wiped an oiled cloth lovingly over the disassembled parts of his beloved Remington bolt-action 7.62 rifle. Zane didn’t even lift his eyebrows at the sight. His men were supposed to be unarmed, and they had been during the security exercise that had gone so damn sour, but keeping Drexler unarmed was another story.
“Planning on taking over the ship?” Zane inquired mildly of the sniper.
His blue eyes cold, Drexler cocked his head as if considering the idea. “I might.”
Winstead “Spooky” Jones had been sitting on the deck, his back resting against the bulkhead, but at Zane’s entrance he rose effortlessly to his feet. He didn’t say anything, but his gaze fastened on Zane’s face, and a spark of interest replaced some of the anger in his eyes.
Spook never missed much, and the other team members had gotten in the habit of watching him, picking up cues from his body language. No more than three seconds passed before all five men were watching Zane with complete concentration.
Greenberg was the one who finally spoke. “How’s Bobcat doing, boss?”
They had read Spooky’s tension, but misread the cause, Zane realized. They thought Higgins had died from his wounds. Drexler began assembling his rifle with sharp, economical motions. “He’s stabilized,” Zane reassured them. He knew his men, knew how tight they were. A SEAL team had to be tight. Their trust in each other had to be absolute, and if something happened to one of them, they all felt it. “They’re transferring him now. It’s touchy, but I’ll put my money on Bobcat. Odie’s gonna be okay, too.” He hitched one hip on the edge of the table, his pale eyes glittering with the intensity that had caught Spooky’s attention. “Listen up, children. An ambassador’s daughter was snatched a few hours ago, and we’re going into Libya to get her.”
* * *
SIX BLACK-CLAD FIGURES slipped silently along the narrow, deserted street in Benghazi, Libya. They communicated by hand signals, or by whispers into the Motorola headsets they all wore under their black knit balaclava hoods. Zane was in his battle mode; he was utterly calm as they worked their way toward the four-story stone building where Barrie Lovejoy was being held on the top floor, if their intelligence was good, and if she hadn’t been moved within the past few hours.
Action always affected him this way, as if every cell in his body had settled into its true purpose of existence. He had missed this, missed it to the point that he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay in the Navy without it. On a mission, all his senses became more acute, even as a deep center of calm radiated outward. The more intense the action, the calmer he became, as time stretched out into slow motion. At those times he could see and hear every detail, analyze and predict the outcome, then make his decision and act—all within a split second that felt like minutes. Adrenaline would flood his body—he would feel the blood racing through his veins—but his mind would remain detached and calm. He had been told that the look on his face during those times was frighteningly remote, jarring in its total lack of expression.
The team moved forward in well-orchestrated silence. They each knew what to do, and what the others would do. That was the purpose of the trust and teamwork that had been drilled into them through the twenty-six weeks of hell that was formally known as BUD/S training. The bond between them enabled them to do more together than could be accomplished if each worked on his own. Teamwork wasn’t just a word to the SEALs, it was their center.
Spooky Jones was point man. Zane preferred using the wiry Southerner for that job because he had unfrayable nerves and could ghost around like a lynx. Bunny Withrock, who almost reverberated with nervous energy, was bringing up the rear. No one sneaked up on Bunny—except the Spook. Zane was right behind Jones, with Drexler, Greenberg and Santos ranging between him and Bunny. Greenberg was quiet, steady, totally dependable. Drexler was uncanny with that rifle, and Santos, besides being a damn good SEAL, also had the skill to patch them up and keep them going, if they were patchable. Overall, Zane had never worked with a better group of men.
Their presence in Benghazi was pure luck, and Zane knew it. Good luck for them and, he hoped, for Miss Lovejoy, but bad luck for the terrorists who had snatched her off the street in Athens fifteen hours ago. If the Montgomery hadn’t been just south of Crete and in perfect position for launching a rescue, if the SEALs hadn’t been on the carrier to practice special insertions, as well as the security exercise, then there would have been a delay of precious hours, perhaps even as long as a day, while another team got supplied and into position. As it was, the special insertion into hostile territory they had just accomplished had been the real thing instead of just a practice.
Miss Lovejoy was not only the ambassador’s daughter, she was an employee at the embassy, as well. The ambassador was apparently very strict and obsessive about his daughter, having lost his wife and son in a terrorist attack in Rome fifteen years before, when Miss Lovejoy had been a child of ten. After that, he had kept her secluded in private schools, and since she had finished college, she had been acting as his hostess, as well as performing her “work” at the embassy. Zane suspected her job was more window dressing than anything else, something to keep her busy. She had never really worked a day in her life, never been out from under her father’s protection—until today.
She and a friend had left the embassy to do some shopping. Three men had grabbed her, shoved her into a car and driven off. The friend had immediately reported the abduction. Despite efforts to secure the airport and ports—cynically, Zane suspected deliberate foot-dragging by the Greek authorities—a private plane had taken off from Athens and flown straight to Benghazi.
Thanks to the friend’s prompt action, sources on the ground in Benghazi had been alerted. It had been verified that a young woman of Miss Lovejoy’s description had been taken off the plane and hustled into the city, into the very building Zane and his team were about to enter.
It had to be her; there weren’t that many red-haired Western women in Benghazi. In fact, he would bet there was only one—Barrie Lovejoy.
They were betting her life on it.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e6e78cf2-09db-5788-b220-e948d2dbfee4)
BARRIE LAY IN almost total darkness, heavy curtains at the single window blocking out most of whatever light would have entered. She could tell that it was night; the level of street noise outside had slowly diminished, until now there was mostly silence. The men who had kidnapped her had finally gone away, probably to sleep. They had no worries about her being able to escape; she was naked, and tied tightly to the cot on which she lay. Her wrists were bound together, her arms drawn over her head and tied to the frame of the cot. Her ankles were also tied together, then secured to the frame. She could barely move; every muscle in her body ached, but those in her shoulders burned with agony. She would have screamed, she would have begged for someone to come and release the ropes that held her arms over her head, but she knew that the only people who would come would be the very ones who had tied her in this position, and she would do anything, give anything, to keep from ever seeing them again.
She was cold. They hadn’t even bothered to throw a blanket over her naked body, and long, convulsive shivers kept shaking her, though she couldn’t tell if she was chilled from the night air or from shock. She didn’t suppose it mattered. Cold was cold.
She tried to think, tried to ignore the pain, tried not to give in to shock and terror. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t know how she could escape, but if the slightest opportunity presented itself, she would have to be ready to take it. She wouldn’t be able to escape tonight; her bonds were too tight, her movements too restricted. But tomorrow— Oh, God, tomorrow.
Terror tightened her throat, almost choking off her breath. Tomorrow they would be back, and there would be another one with them, the one for whom they waited. A violent shiver racked her as she thought of their rough hands on her bare body, the pinches and slaps and crude probings, and her stomach heaved. She would have vomited, if there had been anything to vomit, but they hadn’t bothered to feed her.
She couldn’t go through that again.
Somehow, she had to get away.
Desperately she fought down her panic. Her thoughts darted around like crazed squirrels as she tried to plan, to think of something, anything, that she could do to protect herself. But what could she do, lying there like a turkey all trussed up for Thanksgiving dinner?
Humiliation burned through her. They hadn’t raped her, but they had done other things to her, things to shame and terrorize her and break her spirit. Tomorrow, when the leader arrived, she was sure her reprieve would be over. The threat of rape, and then the act of it, would shatter her and leave her malleable in their hands, desperate to do anything to avoid being violated again. At least that was what they planned, she thought. But she would be damned if she would go along with their plan.
She had been in a fog of terror and shock since they had grabbed her and thrown her into a car, but as she lay there in the darkness, cold and miserable and achingly vulnerable in her nakedness, she felt as if the fog was lifting, or maybe it was being burned away. No one who knew Barrie would ever have described her as hot-tempered, but then, what she felt building in her now wasn’t as volatile and fleeting as mere temper. It was rage, as pure and forceful as lava forcing its way upward from the bowels of the earth until it exploded outward and swept away everything in its path.
Nothing in her life had prepared her for these past hours. After her mother and brother had died, she had been pampered and protected as few children ever were. She had seen some—most, actually—of her schoolmates as they struggled with the misery of broken parental promises, of rare, stressful visits, of being ignored and shunted out of the way, but she hadn’t been like them. Her father adored her, and she knew it. He was intensely interested in her safety, her friends, her schoolwork. If he said he would call, then the call came exactly when he’d said it would. Every week had brought some small gift in the mail, inexpensive but thoughtful. She’d understood why he worried so much about her safety, why he wanted her to attend the exclusive girls’ school in Switzerland, with its cloistered security, rather than a public school, with its attendant hurly-burly.
She was all he had left.
He was all she had left, too. When she’d been a child, after the incident that had halved the family, she had clung fearfully to her father for months, dogging his footsteps when she could, weeping inconsolably when his work took him away from her. Eventually the dread that he, too, would disappear from her life had faded, but the pattern of overprotectiveness had been set.
She was twenty-five now, a grown woman, and though in the past few years his protectiveness had begun to chafe, she had enjoyed the even tenor of her life too much to really protest. She liked her job at the embassy, so much that she was considering a full-time career in the foreign service. She enjoyed being her father’s hostess. She had the duties and protocol down cold, and there were more and more female ambassadors on the international scene. It was a moneyed and insular community, but by both temperament and pedigree she was suited to the task. She was calm, even serene, and blessed with a considerate and tactful nature.
But now, lying naked and helpless on a cot, with bruises mottling her pale skin, the rage that consumed her was so deep and primal she felt as if it had altered something basic inside her, a sea change of her very nature. She would not endure what they—nameless, malevolent “they”—had planned for her. If they killed her, so be it. She was prepared for death; no matter what, she would not submit.
The heavy curtains fluttered.
The movement caught her eye, and she glanced at the window, but the action was automatic, without curiosity. She was already so cold that even a wind strong enough to move those heavy curtains couldn’t chill her more.
The wind was black, and had a shape.
Her breath stopped in her chest.
Mutely, she watched the big black shape, as silent as a shadow, slip through the window. It couldn’t be human; people made some sound when they moved. Surely, in the total silence of the room, she would have been able to hear the whisper of the curtains as the fabric moved, or the faint, rhythmic sigh of breathing. A shoe scraping on the floor, the rustle of clothing, anything—if it was human.
After the black shape had passed between them, the curtains didn’t fall back into the perfect alignment that had blocked the light; there was a small opening in them, a slit that allowed a shaft of moonlight, starlight, street light—whatever it was—to relieve the thick darkness. Barrie strained to focus on the dark shape, her eyes burning as she watched it move silently across the floor. She didn’t scream; whoever or whatever approached her, it couldn’t be worse than the only men likely to come to her rescue.
Perhaps she was really asleep and this was only a dream. It certainly didn’t feel real. But nothing in the long, horrible hours since she had been kidnapped had felt real, and she was too cold to be asleep. No, this was real, all right.
Noiselessly, the black shape glided to a halt beside the cot. It towered over her, tall and powerful, and it seemed to be examining the naked feast she presented.
Then it moved once again, lifting its hand to its head, and it peeled off its face, pulling the dark skin up as if it was no more than the skin of a banana.
It was a mask. As exhausted as she was, it was a moment before she could find a logical explanation for the nightmarish image. She blinked up at him. A man wearing a mask. Neither an animal, nor a phantom, but a flesh-and-blood man. She could see the gleam of his eyes, make out the shape of his head and the relative paleness of his face, though there was an odd bulkiness to him that in no way affected the eerily silent grace of his movements.
Just another man.
She didn’t panic. She had gone beyond fear, beyond everything but rage. She simply waited—waited to fight, waited to die. Her teeth were the only weapon she had, so she would use them, if she could. She would tear at her attacker’s flesh, try to damage him as much as possible before she died. If she was lucky, she would be able to get him by the throat with her teeth and take at least one of these bastards with her into death.
He was taking his time, staring at her. Her bound hands clenched into fists. Damn him. Damn them all.
Then he squatted beside the cot and leaned forward, his head very close to hers. Startled, Barrie wondered if he meant to kiss her—odd that the notion struck her as so unbearable—and she braced herself, preparing to lunge upward when he got close enough that she had a good chance for his throat.
“Mackenzie, United States Navy,” he said in a toneless whisper that barely reached her ear, only a few inches away.
He’d spoken in English, with a definitely American accent. She jerked, so stunned that it was a moment before the words made sense. Navy. United States Navy. She had been silent for hours, refusing to speak to her captors or respond in any way, but now a small, helpless sound spilled from her throat.
“Shh, don’t make any noise,” he cautioned, still in that toneless whisper. Even as he spoke, he was reaching over her head, and the tension on her arms suddenly relaxed. The small movement sent agony screaming through her shoulder joints, and she sucked in her breath with a sharp, gasping cry.
She quickly choked off the sound, holding it inside as she ground her teeth against the pain. “Sorry,” she whispered, when she was able to speak.
She hadn’t seen the knife in his hand, but she felt the chill of the blade against her skin as he deftly inserted the blade under the cords and sliced upward, felt the slight tug that freed her hands. She tried to move her arms and found that she couldn’t; they remained stretched above her head, unresponsive to her commands.
He knew, without being told. He slipped the knife into its scabbard and placed his gloved hands on her shoulders, firmly kneading for a moment before he clasped her forearms and gently drew her arms down. Fire burned in her joints; it felt as if her arms were being torn from her shoulders, even though he carefully drew them straight down, keeping them aligned with her body to lessen the pain. Barrie set her teeth again, refusing to let another sound break past the barrier. Cold sweat beaded her forehead, and nausea burned in her throat once more, but she rode the swell of pain in silence.
He dug his thumbs into the balls of her shoulders, massaging the sore, swollen ligaments and tendons, intensifying the agony. Her bare body drew into a taut, pale arch of suffering, lifting from the cot. He held her down, ruthlessly pushing her traumatized joints and muscles through the recovery process. She was so cold that the heat emanating from his hands, from the closeness of his body as he bent over her, was searingly hot on her bare skin. The pain rolled through her in great shudders, blurring her sight and thought, and through the haze she realized that now, when she definitely needed to stay conscious, she was finally going to faint.
She couldn’t pass out. She refused to. Grimly, she hung on, and in only a few moments, moments that felt much longer, the pain began to ebb. He continued the strong kneading, taking her through the agony and into relief. She went limp, relaxing on the cot as she breathed through her mouth in the long, deep drafts of someone who has just run a race.
“Good girl,” he whispered as he released her. The brief praise felt like balm to her lacerated emotions. He straightened and drew the knife again, then bent over the foot of the cot. Again there was the chill of the blade, this time against her ankles, and another small tug, then her feet were free, and involuntarily, she curled into a protective ball, her body moving without direction from her brain in a belated, useless effort at modesty and self-protection. Her thighs squeezed tightly together, her arms crossed over and hid her breasts, and she buried her face against the musty ticking of the bare mattress. She couldn’t look up at him, she couldn’t. Tears burned her eyes, clogged her throat.
“Have you been injured?” he asked, the ghostly whisper rasping over her bare skin like an actual touch. “Can you walk?”
Now wasn’t the time to let her raw nerves take over. They still had to get out undetected, and a fit of hysteria would ruin everything. She gulped twice, fighting for control of her emotions as grimly as she had fought to control the pain. The tears spilled over, but she forced herself to straighten from the defensive curl, to swing her legs over the edge of the cot. Shakily, she sat up and forced herself to look at him. She hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of; she would get through this. “I’m okay,” she replied, and was grateful that the obligatory whisper disguised the weakness of her voice.
He crouched in front of her and silently began removing the web gear that held and secured all his equipment. The room was too dark for her to make out exactly what each item was, but she recognized the shape of an automatic weapon as he placed it on the floor between them. She watched him, uncomprehending, until he began shrugging out of his shirt. Sick terror hit her then, slamming into her like a sledgehammer. My God, surely he wasn’t—
Gently, he put the shirt around her, tucking her arms into the sleeves as if she were a child, then buttoning each button, taking care to hold the fabric away from her body so his fingers wouldn’t brush against her breasts. The cloth still held his body heat; it wrapped around her like a blanket, warming her, covering her. The sudden feeling of security unnerved her almost as much as being stripped naked. Her heart lurched inside her chest, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Hesitantly, she reached out her hand in an apology, and a plea. Tears dripped slowly down her face, leaving salty tracks in their wake. She had been the recipient of so much male brutality in the past day that his gentleness almost destroyed her control, where their blows and crudeness had only made her more determined to resist them. She had expected the same from him and instead had received a tender care that shattered her with its simplicity.
A second ticked past, two: then, with great care, he folded his gloved fingers around her hand.
His hand was much bigger than hers. She felt the size and heat of it engulf her cold fingers and sensed the control of a man who exactly knew his own strength. He squeezed gently, then released her.
She stared at him, trying to pierce the veil of darkness and see his features, but his face was barely distinguishable and blurred even more by her tears. She could make out some details, though, and discern his movements. He wore a black T-shirt, and as silently as he had removed his gear, he now put it on again. He peeled back a flap on his wrist, and she caught the faint gleam of a luminous watch. “We have exactly two and a half minutes to get out of here,” he murmured. “Do what I say, when I say it.”
Before, she couldn’t have done it, but that brief moment of understanding, of connection, had buoyed her. Barrie nodded and got to her feet. Her knees wobbled. She stiffened them and shoved her hair out of her face. “I’m ready.”
She had taken exactly two steps when, below them, a staccato burst of gunfire shattered the night.
He spun instantly, silently, slipping away from her so fast that she blinked, unable to follow him. Behind her, the door opened. A harsh, piercing flood of light blinded her, and an ominous form loomed in the doorway. The guard—of course there was a guard. Then there was a blur of movement, a grunt, and the guard sagged into supporting arms. As silently as her rescuer seemed to do everything else, he dragged the guard inside and lowered him to the floor. Her rescuer stepped over the body, snagged her wrist in an unbreakable grip and towed her from the room.
The hallway was narrow, dirty and cluttered. The light that had seemed so bright came from a single naked bulb. More gunfire was erupting downstairs and out in the street. From the left came the sound of pounding feet. To the right was a closed door, and past it she could see the first step of an unlit stairway.
He closed the door of the room they had just left and lifted her off her feet, slinging her under his left arm as if she were no more than a sack of flour. Barrie clutched dizzily at his leg as he strode swiftly to the next room and slipped into the sheltering darkness. He had barely shut the door when a barrage of shouts and curses in the hallway made her bury her face against the black material of his pants leg.
He righted her and set her on her feet, pushing her behind him as he unslung the weapon from his shoulder. They stood at the door, unmoving, listening to the commotion just on the other side of the wooden panel. She could discern three different voices and recognized them all. There were more shouts and curses, in the language she had heard off and on all day long but couldn’t understand. The curses turned vicious as the guard’s body, and her absence, were discovered. Something thudded against the wall as one of her kidnappers gave vent to his temper.
“This is One. Go to B.”
That toneless whisper startled her. Confused, she stared at him, trying to make sense of the words. She was so tired that it took her a moment to realize he must be speaking a coded message into a radio. Of course he wasn’t alone; there would be an entire team of rescuers. All they had to do was get out of the building, and there would be a helicopter waiting somewhere, or a truck or a ship. She didn’t care if they’d infiltrated on bicycles; she would gladly walk out—barefoot, if necessary.
But first they had to get out of the building. Obviously the plan had been to spirit her out the window without her kidnappers being any the wiser until morning, but something had gone wrong, and the others had been spotted. Now they were trapped in this room, with no way of rejoining the rest of his team.
Her body began to revolt against the stress it had endured for so many long hours, the terror and pain, the hunger, the effort. With a sort of distant interest she felt each muscle begin quivering, the shudders working their way up her legs, her torso, until she was shaking uncontrollably.
She wanted to lean against him but was afraid she would hinder his movements. Her life—and his—depended completely on his expertise. She couldn’t help him, so the least she could do was stay out of his way. But she was desperately in need of support, so she fumbled her way a couple of steps to the wall. She was careful not to make any noise, but he sensed her movement and half turned, reaching behind himself with his left hand and catching her. Without speaking, he pulled her up against his back, keeping her within reach should he have to change locations in a hurry.
His closeness was oddly, fundamentally reassuring. Her captors had filled her with such fear and disgust that every feminine instinct had been outraged, and after they had finally left her alone in the cold and the dark, she had wondered with a sort of grief if she would ever again be able to trust a man. The answer, at least with this man, was yes.
She leaned gratefully against his back, so tired and weak that, just for a moment, she had to rest her head on him. The heat of his body penetrated the rough fabric of the web vest, warming her cheek. He even smelled hot, she noticed through a sort of haze; his scent was a mixture of clean, fresh sweat and musky maleness, exertion and tension heating it to an aroma as heady as that of the finest whiskey. Mackenzie. He’d said his name was Mackenzie, whispered it to her when he crouched to identify himself.
Oh, God, he was so warm, and she was still cold. The gritty stone floor beneath her bare feet seemed to be wafting cold waves of air up her legs. His shirt was so big it dwarfed her, hanging almost to her knees, but still she was naked beneath it. Her entire body was shaking.
They stood motionless in the silent darkness of the empty room for an eternity, listening to the gunfire as it tapered off in the distance, listening to the shouts and curses as they, too, diminished, listened for so long that Barrie drifted into a light doze, leaning against him with her head resting on his back. He was like a rock, unmoving, his patience beyond anything she had ever imagined. There were no nervous little adjustments of position, no hint that his muscles got tired. The slow, even rhythm of his breathing was the only movement she could discern, and resting against him as she was, the sensation was like being on a raft in a pool, gently rising, falling....
She woke when he reached back and lightly shook her. “They think we got away,” he whispered. “Don’t move or make any sound while I check things out.”
Obediently, she straightened away from him, though she almost cried at the loss of his body heat. He switched on a flashlight that gave off only a slender beam; black tape had been placed across most of the lens. He flicked the light around the room, revealing that it was empty except for some old boxes piled along one wall. Cobwebs festooned all of the corners, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of dust. She could make out a single window in the far wall, but he was careful not to let the thin beam of light get close to it and possibly betray their presence. The room seemed to have been unused for a very long time.
He leaned close and put his mouth against her ear. His warm breath washed across her flesh with every word. “We have to get out of this building. My men have made it look as if we escaped, but we probably won’t be able to hook up with them again until tomorrow night. We need someplace safe to wait. What do you know about the interior layout?”
She shook her head and followed his example, lifting herself on tiptoe to put her lips to his ear. “Nothing,” she whispered. “I was blindfolded when they brought me here.”
He gave a brief nod and straightened away from her. Once again Barrie felt bereft, abandoned, without his physical nearness. She knew it was just a temporary weakness, this urge to cling to him and the security he represented, but she needed him now with an urgency that was close to pain in its intensity. She wanted nothing more than to press close to him again, to feel the animal heat that told her she wasn’t alone; she wanted to be in touch with the steely strength that stood between her and those bastards who had kidnapped her.
Temporary or not, Barrie hated this neediness on her part; it reminded her too sharply of the way she had clung to her father when her mother and brother had died. Granted, she had been just a child then, and the closeness that had developed between her and her father had, for the most part, been good. But she had seen how stifling it could be, too, and quietly, as was her way, she had begun placing increments of distance between them. Now this had happened, and her first instinct was to cling. Was she going to turn into a vine every time there was some trauma in her life? She didn’t want to be like that, didn’t want to be a weakling. This nightmare had shown her too vividly that all security, no matter how solid it seemed, had its weak points. Instead of depending on others, she would do better to develop her own strengths, strengths she knew were there but that had lain dormant for most of her life. From now on, though, things were going to change.
Perhaps they already had. The incandescent anger that had taken hold of her when she’d lain naked and trussed on that bare cot still burned within her, a small, white-hot core that even her mind-numbing fatigue couldn’t extinguish. Because of it, she refused to give in to her weakness, refused to do anything that might hinder Mackenzie in any way. Instead she braced herself, forcing her knees to lock and her shoulders to square. “What are we going to do?” she whispered. “What can I do to help?”
Because there were no heavy blackout curtains on this grimy window, she was able to see part of his features as he looked at her. Half his face was in shadow, but the scant light gleamed on the slant of one high, chiseled cheekbone, revealed the strong cut of his jaw, played along a mouth that was as clearly defined as that of an ancient Greek statue.
“I’ll have to leave you here alone for a little while,” he said. “Will you be all right?”
Panic exploded in her stomach, her chest. She barely choked back the scream of protest that would have betrayed them. Grinding her teeth together and electing not to speak, because the scream would escape if she did, she nodded her head.
He hesitated, and Barrie could feel his attention focusing on her, as if he sensed her distress and was trying to decide whether or not it was safe to leave her. After a few moments, he gave a curt nod that acknowledged her determination, or at least gave her the benefit of the doubt. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” he said. “I promise.”
He pulled something from a pocket on his vest. He unfolded it, revealing a thin blanket of sorts. Barrie stood still as he snugly wrapped it around her. Though it was very thin, the blanket immediately began reflecting her meager body heat. When he let go of the edges they fell open, and Barrie clutched frantically at them in an effort to retain that fragile warmth. By the time she had managed to pull the blanket around her, he was gone, opening the door a narrow crack and slipping through as silently as he had come through the window in the room where she had been held. Then the door closed, and once again she was alone in the darkness.
Her nerves shrieked in protest, but she ignored them. Instead she concentrated on being as quiet as she could, listening for any sounds in the building that could tell her what was going on. There was still some noise from the street, the result of the gunfire that had alarmed the nearby citizenry, but that, too, was fading. The thick stone walls of the building dulled any sound, anyway. From within the building, there was only silence. Had her captors abandoned the site after her supposed escape? Were they in pursuit of Mackenzie’s team, thinking she was with them?
She swayed on her feet, and only then did she realize that she could sit down on the floor and wrap the blanket around her, conserving even more warmth. Her feet and legs were almost numb with cold. Carefully, she eased down onto the floor, terrified she would inadvertently make some noise. She sat on the thin blanket and pulled it around herself as best she could. Whatever fabric it was made from, the blanket blocked the chill of the stone floor. Drawing up her legs, Barrie hugged her knees and rested her head on them. She was more comfortable now than she had been in many long hours of terror and, inevitably, her eyelids began to droop heavily. Sitting there alone in the dark, dirty, empty room, she went to sleep.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_2b902c9b-a697-5bfd-ba12-91b693d3d948)
PISTOL IN HAND, Zane moved silently through the decrepit old building, avoiding the piles of debris and crumbled stone. They were already on the top floor, so, except for the roof, the only way he could go was down. He already knew where the exits were, but what he didn’t know was the location of the bad guys. Had they chosen this building as only a temporary hiding place and abandoned it when their victim seemingly escaped? Or was this their regular meeting place? If so, how many were there, and where were they? He had to know all that before he risked moving Miss Lovejoy. There was only another hour or so until dawn; he had to get her to a secure location before then.
He stopped at a turn in the corridor, flattening himself against the wall and easing his head around the corner just enough that he could see. Empty. Noiselessly, he moved down the hallway, just as cautiously checking the few rooms that opened off it.
He had pulled the black balaclava into place and smeared dust over his bare arms to dull the sheen of his skin and decrease his visibility. Giving his shirt to Miss Lovejoy and leaving his arms bare had increased his visibility somewhat, but he judged that his darkly tanned arms weren’t nearly as likely to be spotted as her naked body. Even in the darkness of the room where they had been keeping her, he had been able to clearly make out the pale shimmer of her skin. Since none of her clothes had been in evidence, giving her his shirt was the only thing he could have done. She’d been shaking with cold—evidence of shock because the night was warm—and she likely would have gone into hysterics if he’d tried to take her out of there while she was stark naked. He had been prepared, if necessary, to knock her out. But she’d been a little trouper so far, not even screaming when he had suddenly loomed over her in the darkness. With his senses so acute, though, Zane could feel how fragile her control was, how tightly she was strung.
It was understandable. She had likely been raped, not once but many times, since she had been kidnapped. She might fall apart when the crisis was over and she was safe, but for now she was holding together. Her gutsiness made his heart clench with a mixture of tenderness and a lethal determination to protect her. His first priority was to get her out of Libya, not wreak vengeance on her kidnappers—but if any of the bastards happened to get in his way, so be it.
The dark maw of a stairwell yawned before him. The darkness was reassuring; it not only signaled the absence of a guard, it would shield him. Humans still clung to the primitive instincts of cave dwellers. If they were awake, they wanted the comfort of light around them, so they could see the approach of any enemies. Darkness was a weapon that torturers used to break the spirit of their captives, because it emphasized their helplessness, grated on their nerves. But he was a SEAL, and darkness was merely a circumstance he could use. He stepped carefully into the stairwell, keeping his back to the wall to avoid any crumbling edges of the stone. He was fairly certain the stairs were safe, otherwise the kidnappers wouldn’t have been using them, but he didn’t take chances. Like idiots, people stacked things on stair steps, blocking their own escape routes.
A faint lessening of the darkness just ahead told him that he was nearing the bottom of the steps. He paused while he was still within the protective shadow, listening for the slightest sound. There. He heard what he’d been searching for, the distant sound of voices, angry voices tripping over each other with curses and excuses. Though Zane spoke Arabic, he was too far away to make out what they were saying. It didn’t matter; he’d wanted to know their location, and now he did. Grimly, he stifled the urge to exact revenge on Miss Lovejoy’s behalf. His mission was to rescue her, not endanger her further.
There was a stairwell at each end of the building. Knowing now that the kidnappers were on the ground floor at the east end, Zane began making his way to the west staircase. He didn’t meet up with any guards; as he had hoped, they thought the rescue had been effected, so they didn’t see any point now in posting guards.
In his experience, perfect missions were few and far between, so rare that he could count on one hand the number of missions he’d been on where everything had gone like clockwork. He tried to be prepared for mechanical breakdowns, accidents, forces of nature, but there was no way to plan for the human factor. He didn’t know how the kidnappers had been alerted to the SEALs’ presence, but he had considered that possibility from the beginning and made an alternate plan in case something went wrong. Something had—exactly what, he would find out later; except for that brief communication with his men, telling them to withdraw and switch to the alternate plan, they had maintained radio silence.
Probably it was pure bad luck, some late-night citizen unexpectedly stumbling over one of his men. Things happened. So he had formulated plan B, his just-in-case plan, because as they had worked their way toward the building, he’d had an uneasy feeling. When his gut told him something, Zane listened. Bunny Withrock had once given him a narrow-eyed look and said, “Boss, you’re even spookier than the Spook.” But they trusted his instincts, to the point that mentally they had probably switched to plan B as soon as he’d voiced it, before he had even gone into the building.
With Miss Lovejoy to consider, he’d opted for safety. That was why he had gone in alone, through the window, after Spook’s reconnaissance had reported that the kidnappers had set guards at intervals throughout the first floor. There were no lights in any of the rooms on the fourth floor, where Miss Lovejoy was reportedly being held, so it was likely there was no guard actually in the room with her; a guard wouldn’t want to sit in the darkness.
The kidnappers had inadvertently pinpointed the room for him: only one window had been covered with curtains. When Zane had reached that room, he had carefully parted the heavy curtains to make certain they hadn’t shielded an interior light, but the room beyond had been totally dark. And Miss Lovejoy had been there, just as he had expected.
Now, ostensibly with nothing left to guard, the kidnappers all seemed to be grouped together. Zane cat-footed through the lower rooms until he reached the other staircase, then climbed silently upward. Thanks to Spooky, he knew of a fairly secure place to take Miss Lovejoy while they waited for another opportunity for extraction; all he had to do was get her there undetected. That meant he had to do it before dawn, because a half-naked, red-haired Western woman would definitely be noticeable in this Islamic country. He wouldn’t exactly blend in himself, despite his black hair and tanned skin, because of his dark cammies, web gear and weaponry. Most people noticed a man with camouflage paint on his face and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
He reached the room where he’d left Miss Lovejoy and entered as quietly as he’d left. The room was empty. Alarm roared through him, every muscle tightening, and then he saw the small, dark hump on the floor and realized that she had curled up with the thin survival blanket over her. She wasn’t moving. Zane listened to the light, almost inaudible evenness of her breathing and realized she had gone to sleep. Again he felt that subtle inner clenching. She had been on edge and terrified for hours, obviously worn out but unable to sleep; the slight measure of security he’d been able to give her, consisting of his shirt, a blanket and a temporary, precarious hiding place, had been enough for her to rest. He hated to disturb her, but they had to move.
Gently he put his hand on her back, lightly rubbing, not shaking her awake but easing her into consciousness so she wouldn’t be alarmed. After a moment she began stirring under his touch, and he felt the moment when she woke, felt her instant of panic, then her quietly determined reach for control.
“We’re moving to someplace safer,” he whispered, removing his hand as soon as he saw she was alert. After what she had been through, she wouldn’t want to endure a man’s touch any more than necessary. The thought infuriated him, because his instinct was to comfort her; the women in his family, mother, sister and sisters-in-law, were adored and treasured by the men. He wanted to cradle Barrie Lovejoy against him, whisper promises to her that he would personally dismember every bastard who had hurt her, but he didn’t want to do anything that would undermine her fragile control. They didn’t have time for any comforting, anyway.
She clambered to her feet, still clutching the blanket around her. Zane reached for it, and her fingers tightened on the fabric, then slowly loosened. She didn’t have to explain her reluctance to release the protective cloth. Zane knew she was still both extrasensitive to cold and painfully embarrassed by her near nudity.
“Wear it this way,” he whispered, wrapping the blanket around her waist sarong-style so that it draped to her feet. He tied the ends securely over her left hipbone, then bent down to check that the fabric wasn’t too tight around her feet, so she would have sufficient freedom of movement if they had to run.
When he straightened, she touched his arm, then swiftly lifted her hand away, as if even that brief touch had been too much. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Watch me closely,” he instructed. “Obey my hand signals.” He explained the most basic signals to her, the raised clenched fist that meant “Stop!” and the open hand that meant merely “halt,” the signal to proceed and the signal to hide. Considering her state of mind, plus her obvious fatigue, he doubted she would be able to absorb more than those four simple commands. They didn’t have far to go, anyway; if he needed more commands than that, they were in deep caca.
She followed him out of the room and down the west staircase, though he felt her reluctance to step into the Stygian depths. He showed her how to keep her back to the wall, how to feel with her foot for the edge of the step. He felt her stumble once, heard her sharply indrawn breath. He whirled to steady her; his pistol was in his right hand, but his left arm snaked out, wrapping around her hips to steady her as she teetered two steps above him. The action lifted her off her feet, hauling her against his left side. She felt soft in his grip, her hips narrow but nicely curved, and his nostrils flared as he scented the warm sweetness of her skin.
She was all but sitting on his encircling arm, her hands braced on his shoulders. Reluctantly, he bent and set her on her feet, and she immediately straightened away from him. “Sorry,” she whispered in the darkness.
Zane’s admiration for her grew. She hadn’t squealed in alarm, despite nearly falling, despite the way he’d grabbed her. She was holding herself together, narrowing her focus to the achievement of one goal: freedom.
She was even more cautious in her movements after that one misstep, letting more distance grow between them than he liked. On the last flight of steps he stopped, waiting for her to catch up with him. Knowing that she couldn’t see him, he said, “Here,” when she was near, so she wouldn’t bump into him.
He eased his way down the last couple of steps into the faint light. There was no one in sight. With a brief wave of his hand, he signaled her forward, and she slipped out of the darkness of the stairwell to stand beside him.
There was a set of huge wooden double doors that opened onto the street, but Zane was aware of increased noise outside as dawn neared, and it was too risky to use that exit. From their left came a raised voice, shouting in Arabic, and he felt her tense. Quickly, before the sound of one of her kidnappers unnerved her, he shepherded her into a cluttered storage room, where a small, single window shone high on the wall. “We’ll go out this window,” he murmured. “There’ll be a drop of about four feet to the ground, nothing drastic. I’ll boost you up. When you hit the ground, move away from the street but stay against the side of the building. Crouch down so you’ll present the smallest possible silhouette. Okay?”
She nodded her understanding, and they picked their way over the jumbled boxes and debris until they were standing under the window. Zane stretched to reach the sill, hooked his fingers on the plaster and boosted himself up until he was balanced with one knee on the sill and one booted foot braced against a rickety stack of boxes. The window evidently hadn’t been used in a long time; the glass was opaque with dust, the hinges rusty and stiff. He wrestled it open, wincing at the scraping noise, even though he knew it wouldn’t carry to where the kidnappers were. Fresh air poured into the musty room. Like a cat he dropped to the floor, then turned to her.
“You can put your foot in my hand, or you can climb on my shoulders. Which do you prefer?”
With the window open, more light was coming through. He could see her doubtful expression as she stared at the window, and for the first time he appreciated the evenness of her features. He already knew how sweetly her body was shaped, but now he knew that Miss Lovejoy didn’t hurt his eyes at all.
“Can you get through there?” she whispered, ignoring his question as she eyed first the expanse of his shoulders and then the narrowness of the window.
Zane had already made those mental measurements. “It’ll be a tight fit, but I’ve been through tighter ones.”
She gazed at his darkened face, then gave one of her sturdy nods, the one that said she was ready to go on. Now he could see her calculating the difficulty of maneuvering through the window with the blanket tied around her waist, and he saw the exact moment when she made her decision. Her shoulders squared and her chin came up as she untied the blanket and draped it around her like a long scarf, winding it around her neck and tossing the ends over her shoulders to dangle rakishly down her back.
“I think I’d better climb on your shoulders,” she said. “I’ll have more leverage that way.”
He knelt on the floor and held his hands up for her to catch and brace herself. She went around behind him and daintily placed her right foot on his right shoulder, then lifted herself into a half crouch. As soon as her left foot had settled into place and her hands were securely in his, he rose steadily until he was standing erect. Her weight was negligible compared to what he handled during training. He moved closer to the wall, and she released his right hand to brace her hand against the sill. “Here I go,” she whispered, and boosted herself through the window.
She went through it headfirst. It was the fastest way, but not the easiest, because she had no way of breaking her fall on the other side. He looked up and saw the gleam of pale, bare legs and the naked curves of her buttocks; then she vanished from sight, and there was a thump as she hit the ground.
Quickly, Zane boosted himself up again. “Are you all right?” he whispered harshly.
There was silence for a moment, then a shaky, whispered answer. “I think so.”
“Take the rifle.” He handed the weapon to her, then dropped to the floor while he removed his web gear. That, too, went through the window. Then he followed, feetfirst, twisting his shoulders at an angle to fit through the narrow opening and landing in a crouch. Obediently, she had moved to the side and was sitting against the wall with the blanket once more clutched around her and his rifle cradled in her arms.
Dawn was coming fast, the remnants of darkness no more than a deep twilight. “Hurry,” he said as he shrugged into the web vest and took the rifle from her. He slid it into position, then drew the pistol again. The heavy butt felt reassuring and infinitely familiar in his palm. With the weapon in his right hand and her hand clasped in his left, he pulled her into the nearest alley.
Benghazi was a modern city, fairly Westernized, and Libya’s chief port. They were near the docks, and the smell of the sea was strong in his nostrils. Like the vast majority of waterfronts, it was one of the rougher areas of the city. From what he’d been able to tell, no authorities had shown up to investigate the gunfire, even supposing it had been reported. The Libyan government wasn’t friendly—there were no diplomatic relations between the United States and Libya—but that didn’t mean the government would necessarily turn a blind eye to the kidnapping of an ambassador’s daughter. Of course, it was just as likely that it would, which was why diplomatic channels hadn’t been considered. The best option had seemed to go in and get Miss Lovejoy out as quickly as possible.
There were plenty of ramshackle, abandoned buildings in the waterfront area. The rest of the team had withdrawn to one, drawing any pursuers away from Zane and Miss Lovejoy, while they holed up in another. They would rendezvous at oh-one-hundred hours the next morning.
Spooky had chosen the sites, so Zane trusted their relative safety. Now he and Miss Lovejoy wended their way through a rats’ nest of alleyways. She made a stifled sound of disgust once, and he knew she’d stepped on something objectionable, but other than that she soldiered on in silence.
It took only a few minutes to reach the designated safe area. The building looked more down than up, but Spooky had investigated and reported an intact inner room. One outer wall was crumbled to little more than rubble. Zane straddled it, then caught Miss Lovejoy around the waist and effortlessly lifted her over the heap, twisting his torso to set her on the other side. Then he joined her, leading her under half-fallen timbers and around spiderwebs that he wanted left undisturbed. The fact that he could see those webs meant they had to get under cover, fast.
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Линда Ховард
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: HER HEROBarrie Lovejoy needed a savior. The terrorist group holding her hostage surely wouldn′t tolerate her silence much longer. Instead they would silence her-forever. Then out of the darkness he arrived. Grizzled and dangerous, he led Barrie from her captors straight into his sheltering arms…HER HUSBANDNavy Seal Zane Mackenzie was the best. No mission had ever gotten the better of him-until now. Saving Barrie Lovejoy had been textbook-except for their desperate night of passion. And though his job as a soldier had ended with her freedom, his duties as a husband had only begun. For he would sooner die than let the enemy harm the mother of his child.