Her Mission With A Seal
Her Mission With A Seal
Cindy Dees
Their mission: deliver a ruthless spy to justice.But can they outlast a storm as dangerous as their target?Tracking an elusive Russian operative, CIA agent Nissa Beck has no choice but to ask for help as a hurricane descends on New Orleans. She turns to alpha navy SEAL Cole Perriman. Used to conquering impossible odds, now he must protect beautiful Nissa. But as unstoppable storms and passions rage, there’s more at stake for them than survival.
Their mission: deliver a ruthless spy to justice
But can they outlast a storm as dangerous as their target?
Tracking an elusive Russian operative, CIA agent Nissa Beck has no choice but to ask for help as a hurricane descends on New Orleans. She turns to alpha navy SEAL Cole Perriman. Used to conquering impossible odds, now he must protect beautiful Nissa. But as unstoppable storms and passions rage, there’s more at stake for them than survival.
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author CINDY DEES is the author of more than fifty novels. She draws upon her experience as a US Air Force pilot to write romantic suspense. She’s a two-time winner of the prestigious RITA® Award for romance fiction, a two-time winner of the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Book Award for Romantic Suspense and an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Best Author Award nominee. She loves to hear from readers at www.cindydees.com (http://www.cindydees.com).
Her Mission with a SEAL
Cindy Dees
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07862-7
HER MISSION WITH A SEAL
© 2018 Cynthia Dees
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
“Grab the ladder!” someone shouted faintly.
Nissa grabbed it with both hands and wrapped her legs around the rope, hanging on with superhuman strength she didn’t know she possessed. God bless adrenaline.
A big green shape came up the ladder. It didn’t stop at her feet, though. It moved up behind her until the SEAL’s head was at her waist.
“Keep going!” Cole shouted.
Not. A. Chance.
No way was she letting go of the rope to keep climbing.
He climbed until his head was level with hers, his body spooning hers, his longer arms grasping the rope ladder around her slender frame. Warmth from his body penetrated the back of her wet suit as he plastered his entire body against hers.
“One foot. Just put your right foot up one rung for me,” he shouted into her ear as another huge gust of wind buffeted them. “It’ll be calmer on the deck of the ship.” His breath was warm against her exposed cheek. He felt alive. Vital. Real in the midst of this unreal nightmare.
* * *
Code: Warrior SEALs: Meet these fierce warriors who take on the most dangerous secret missions around the world!
* * *
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Dear Reader (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708),
I’m super excited to finally give you Commander Cole “Frosty” Perriman’s story! You’ve waited through a bunch of books for him to get his very own happily-ever-after, and you’ve totally earned this one.
Nissa Beck is a CIA psychological operations officer, and the only woman I can imagine giving Cole a run for his money. But can she break through his icy reserve to find the passion lurking beneath? I don’t envy her the task...
And may I take this moment to apologize for the opening scene? It positively gave me the shivers to write. You might want to get a few bland crackers and nibble on them as you start this book. I recommend a hot beverage of your choice, too. And maybe a cozy chair next to a warm fire. Oh, and a blanket. There. Now we’re all ready to settle in and enjoy the wild ride as Cole and Nissa chase down one of the most dangerous men in the world and dare to love each other.
Happy reading!
Cindy
Contents
Cover (#u668f4863-a6a6-5690-8050-f2519df12a69)
Back Cover Text (#u31ea9f99-0b5c-59d4-8924-e289a6f5c2a2)
Author Bio (#ua2ffa77a-5816-5764-8bdd-0c4c765de77a)
Title Page (#u654ed41c-6688-56f5-97a9-9fa86bfc7ae2)
Copyright (#uf065946f-4ff8-5738-9a45-397cff3d22fe)
Introduction (#uc8167f67-f4aa-5a19-9c11-7d0d9b6b6000)
Dear Reader (#udb6a63ee-b679-5f72-bce1-20b8eb6dd0bf)
Chapter 1 (#uc29ae9f1-d859-5348-91b8-bd528282d28a)
Chapter 2 (#u5c258a7f-4c4d-5ee6-a616-f1cb306ec093)
Chapter 3 (#uac43980a-02b2-5911-914f-bcfcd2ee2da1)
Chapter 4 (#u78e4bfaa-1b5e-507e-b9d2-b51582c177e4)
Chapter 5 (#ua28ba685-049e-547c-8bd3-63b58198e9c2)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Nissa Beck had done some crazy things in her life, but sailing into the teeth of a rapidly intensifying hurricane in a tiny dinghy—in the dark—with a trio of Navy SEALs was right up there on the stupid scale. They’d actually strapped her into the boat so she wouldn’t get tossed out as their craft went nearly vertical climbing the wave faces towering overhead and then plunged nearly vertically down the waves crashing into black troughs of icy seawater.
Throat-paralyzing terror was the only reason she hadn’t screamed herself hoarse already. The horror of being out here at the mercy of the wildly tossing ocean was indescribable. As was the sheer size of the waves. They were small mountains. Literally. Except for the ones that periodically collapsed on top of them, burying them in frigid seawater for endless seconds until they popped back up to the surface and could breathe again. In short, it was a living nightmare.
She’d swallowed more seawater than she could fathom and thrown most of it back up along with the last meal she’d consumed three hours ago. A lifetime away in a safe place. On land. Not in the path of Hurricane Jessamine.
But her target had fled the United States and was out here somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico making his getaway on a container ship call the Anna Belle. The ship wasn’t one of the super giants, just a relatively small cargo ship. The manifest said she sailed with a crew of twenty, was loaded with wheat below decks and carried 120 containers stacked above decks.
What the manifest didn’t say was that she also carried a passenger. A man named Markus Petrov. One of the most elusive spies ever to operate on American soil. A colleague of Nissa’s, an American spy named Max Kuznetsov whose mother had been killed by Petrov, had spent nearly a decade tracking the guy and had spent most of the past three years undercover in Petrov’s criminal organization learning his true identity.
It was a brilliant setup, actually. Petrov ran a Russian crime gang and used its proceeds to finance his extracurricular espionage activities. In the meantime, he hid behind the Russian mafia, who fiercely protected his identity.
Max and a team of Navy SEALs had destroyed most of Petrov’s criminal organization last week in a spectacular shoot-out deep in the bayous of south Louisiana. But Petrov had disappeared.
Unfortunately, Max also needed to go to ground, along with his fiancée, a psychic who had helped him identify Markus Petrov at long last. Until Petrov was apprehended, the two of them were in extreme danger and had been whisked into federal protective custody. This left no subject matter experts on Petrov except Nissa to help with the manhunt.
She’d been tracking Max’s progress in the Petrov case for years and was the CIA’s second most knowledgeable analyst when it came to the Russian spy. Which was why she was out here tonight doing her darnedest to drown. The SEALs needed someone who could make a positive ID on Petrov when they captured him on the Anna Belle.
The cargo ship had gone silent the moment it crossed into international waters, and the only reason they knew where it was now was compliments of a hurricane hunter aircraft that’d made a visual sighting of the ship on its last pass through Hurricane Jessamine that afternoon.
Were it not for that chance sighting, nobody would have any idea where Petrov and the ship he’d fled on had disappeared to.
The ship’s manifest said it was bound for the Dominican Republic with food and humanitarian supplies. Perhaps that part was true, at any rate.
One of the SEALs had a radio headset plastered to his ears. He shouted a course correction back to the muscular man wrestling the tiller, the team leader, Commander Cole Perriman.
He was easily six foot three and built like a god. The high-tech wet suit currently clinging to his torso was an exercise in truth in advertising. Every beautiful, perfect muscle was clearly outlined for her viewing pleasure. Thank you, God.
At the moment his hood was pushed back, and his short dark hair was plastered to his skull. Still, his face was handsome and rugged. She knew from earlier that his eyes were pale, icy blue and practically glowed against his darkly tanned skin.
The members of his team called him Frosty. Although the nickname initially made her think of cheerful snowmen, after two minutes in his presence, she understood the moniker. The guy’s nerves were made of pure ice.
Their pitifully small craft topped a massive swell, and she thought she caught sight of a black shape looming ahead. But then the rain squall around them intensified, and they slid down the back side of the swell into a black trough bordered by massive walls of water on all sides. Lord, the ocean was big. She felt tiny and insignificant in the face of these gigantic waves. She was not a particularly religious person, but a prayer entered her head now to whatever deity might hear her plea to please save them all from this insanity.
The only good part about being down in the troughs was they got a momentary break from the screaming winds trying to tear their faces off. The rain, blowing at a hundred miles per hour or more, felt like a power washer trying to scrub the flesh off her bones.
She would be more inclined to whimper in fear were it not for how unconcerned these guys seemed about the storm. They were self-possessed and untalkative, exuding a certain cool self-confidence.
“There’s the Anna Belle!” the one called Bass shouted as they topped another huge, heaving swell.
“Where are its lights?” she shouted back.
Commander Perriman answered from behind her, “Good question. They may have lost power. If they’ve taken on enough water, they could have flooded their engines and backup electric generators.”
“That sounds bad” Nissa ventured to reply.
The SEAL called Ashe responded, managing to infuse his voice with dry irony, even while shouting over the storm, “It would suck to be them in a storm like this without power.”
The big twin motors on their rigid inflatable boat powered them up a half dozen more mountain-steep swells before they finally drew close to the darkened container ship. It was actually the scariest moment of the journey so far when a swell tilted the Anna Belle way over on its side toward them, a huge pile of containers looming overhead, threatening to topple the ship and kill them all.
“Suit up!” Perriman ordered the team. All the hoods came up. Nissa already had hers up, and it held in place the earbuds and throat microphones the team would use to communicate once they boarded the Anna Belle. She covered her eyes with the night-vision goggles that had been stowed around her neck. The three men beside her leaped into lime-green relief against the heaving black sea.
“Ship’s listing pretty bad,” Perriman commented over their discrete radio frequency.
“Fifteen to eighteen degrees to the port side,” Ashe replied. He sounded like an expert sailor. “She’s looking top-heavy, too. With those containers stacked high like that, they act as a wall to catch the wind. Hurricane could blow the ship over if they get crossways of a big enough gust.”
Okay, that sounded really bad.
“Let’s get on and off her as fast as we can,” Perriman ordered. “I don’t like the looks of her seaworthiness.”
Great. The ship they were about to board was on the verge of capsizing and sinking. Just how every girl wanted to spend her Saturday night.
They tied off their craft to a cleat low on the hull of the Anna Belle, and then Bass, using welded rungs on the hull, climbed the side of the ship like a freaking monkey. He lowered a rope ladder from the deck down to them.
“Up you go, Nissa,” Cole ordered. He clipped a rope that Bass threw down onto the body harness they’d made her wear and which they’d used to lash her into their boat.
She looked up at the rope ladder swinging around over her head and gulped. He must have seen her hesitation because he moved up behind her and leaned forward to shout in her ear, off microphone, “I’ll be right behind you.”
Right. As if that was reassuring. At least she knew to grab the rope ladder from the side and not to try to go up it facing the rungs head-on. With one rope of the ladder against her cheek, she turned her feet pigeon-toed to climb the ladder.
It was okay for the first ten feet or so. But then the ship got sideways of a swell, and it tilted toward her sickeningly. The rope swung out into space. She wasn’t even over the SEALs’ boat anymore. Black water yawned below her. I’m going to die. Frozen in terror, she squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the ladder for dear life.
The ship tilted back the other way, and the ladder swung back toward the ship, slamming her into the cold steel hull. She lost her grip on the wet ladder and swung out to the side on the safety rope, smashing into the ship’s hull hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She screamed, but the sound was ripped away from her by a huge gust of wind and rain that hit her with the force of a fire hose.
“Grab the ladder!” someone shouted.
She opened her eyes and swung sickeningly out in space as the ship rolled again, black water reaching up to her and the listing ship looming above, as if it was about to come down on her head and drag her to the bottom of the sea.
Panic paralyzed her so completely that she couldn’t even form thoughts, let alone take action. She bumped along the hull of the ship as it tilted away from her, and by some miracle, she banged into something hard and rough. The rope ladder. She grabbed it with both hands and wrapped her legs around the rope, hanging on with superhuman strength she didn’t know she possessed. God bless adrenaline.
A big green shape came up the ladder. It didn’t stop at her feet, though. It moved up behind her until the figure’s head was at her waist.
“Keep going!” It was Cole.
Not. A. Chance.
No way was she letting go of the rope to keep climbing.
He climbed until his head was level with hers, his body spooning hers, his longer arms grasping the rope ladder around her slender frame. Warmth from his body penetrated the back of her wet suit as he plastered his entire body against hers.
“One foot. Just put your right foot up one rung for me,” he shouted into her ear as another huge gust of wind buffeted them. “It’ll be calmer on the deck of the ship.” His breath was warm against her exposed cheek. He felt alive. Vital. Real in the midst of this unreal nightmare.
He patiently talked her through the rest of the climb, one hand and one foot at a time. Bass kept tension on her safety rope from above, helping her make the climb, and Cole steadied her with his big body and strong arms, protecting her from the worst of the storm.
It took a lifetime, but eventually Bass hauled her onto the deck beside him. She lay on her belly and although there was nothing left in her stomach, she dry heaved anyway, so terrified she didn’t think she was ever going to be the same again.
Of course, Ashe jogged up the ladder as if it was a walk in the damned park. The party all aboard, they knelt together in the shadow of a pile of containers, shadows among the shadows in their black sea-land suits and black facial camo grease. Of course, she looked the same, her blond hair tucked under her neoprene hood, her skin blackened like theirs.
“Any sign of movement out here?” Perriman asked.
Bass replied, “Negative.”
The deck tilted steeply beneath her, and she looked down at water as the ship listed worse than ever.
“Man, she feels top-heavy,” Cole remarked.
Ashe replied, “She looks violently misloaded. Death trap. This storm gets much worse, and she’s going down.”
“Then let’s get our guy and get the heck off her,” Perriman ordered. “You have your orders.” He glanced at Nissa huddling miserably against a container and said off mike, “You’re with me.”
The team split up and ran off in different directions to search the ship. She and Cole were supposed to make their way to the bridge. He was going to have a word with the captain and obtain the guy’s cooperation—at gunpoint if necessary. The other team members would go below decks, searching the ship and making their way to the bridge by other means.
Hanging on to the deck rail with both hands, she followed Perriman aft toward the conning tower. In a storm this bad, they didn’t expect to see any crew above deck, and indeed, the open area between the tall stacks of shipping containers and the ship’s superstructure aft was deserted and dark.
Perriman stopped in front of a hatch, and she endured a nauseating roll by the Anna Belle way over to one side, the sickening pause while the ship teetered on the brink of capsizing, and then the roll back the other way.
How Cole unlocked the steel door, she had no idea. But she was relieved when he threw it open. She dived inside and helped him haul the heavy door shut against gravity as the ship rolled again. He threw the handle and latched the door behind them.
The relative quiet and the relief from the hammering pain of hurricane-driven rain was intense. The ship still rolled like a big dog beneath her feet, but in here, she couldn’t see the ocean and had less of a sense of being ready to capsize.
Perriman hand-signaled her to follow him. She nodded and fell in behind him as he raced silently up a set of metal stairs. He paused at the doorway to the next deck, peering through a tiny window before opening the door. Bracing herself against the wall as the ship rocked, she followed him into what looked like a small dining room.
“Stay here,” Cole breathed.
Gladly. She nodded and he disappeared behind a swinging door into the kitchen, according to the ship’s diagrams that they’d studied on the helicopter ride out here. Perriman swung back into view, staggering a little as the ship heaved.
“Clear,” he announced.
Deck by deck, the two of them cleared their way up the superstructure toward the bridge. Oddly, they didn’t run into a single crew member. Maybe the captain had sent everyone to strap themselves in the sleeping quarters below decks to ride out the storm. Cole had mentioned that such a thing was possible, so she wasn’t completely freaked out by how deserted the command portion of the ship was.
They turned the corner to the last flight of steps leading to the bridge. Unlike the living areas below, this space was guaranteed to have crew members in it. Cole paused, checked over his shoulder that she was ready with her pistol drawn and then he charged the bridge.
She went in on his heels, awkwardly spinning left as the deck tilted underfoot to cover Cole’s back as he spun to cover the right half of the space.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed.
The bridge was deserted.
From up here, she could see outside again, and the ship rolled dangerously far over onto its side as she glanced out. From this high up in the air, the list was even more pronounced, and she all but froze again in panic.
Perriman jabbed at his throat mike. “Bridge is abandoned. I repeat. Abandoned. Report if able.”
Bass and Ashe both reported immediately that they’d been unable to find any crew members aboard the vessel.
“Complete your search and join us on the bridge,” he ordered.
She looked over the panel of controls. Every needle was at zero. The ship was completely shut down. This could not be good. “Can we start the engines or something?” she asked.
“Diesel engines are not as simple to start as flipping a switch. But maybe I could get a generator online.” Perriman fiddled with a set of controls to one side of the ship’s wheel, and then swore quietly. She gathered that meant they weren’t going to get any lights on.
“Batteries are dead, too.”
“Has the crew abandoned ship?” Nissa asked.
Perriman frowned. “They sent no distress signals.”
“Maybe there was no time to send one?”
“The ship’s still afloat. Granted not for long the way she’s listing, but still. We could send a signal right now if we had even an inch of battery power. I can’t believe they ran the batteries all the way down before they got out a call for help.”
The door opened behind them and Nissa spun fast, jumpy as heck, weapon drawn. It was Bass and Ashe.
“Funny thing, boss,” Bass said. “The generators looked like someone took a sledgehammer to them. The batteries were pulled free of their moorings and smashed up, too.”
“The engines?”
“I couldn’t see any damage at a glance,” Ashe replied. “But I got nothing when I tried to start up the diagnostic panel at the engineer’s panel. I looked under the console and found a bunch of ripped out wires beneath it.”
Curious, Nissa dropped to her knees to take a peek under the dashboard in front of her. “Uh, guys. All the wires and conduits I’m seeing down here are trashed, too.”
“So the ship’s been sabotaged,” Cole responded. “Why?”
The ship leaned particularly far onto its port side just then and everyone grabbed on to something to stay upright. She stared in dread at the tall stacks of containers tilting perilously.
“I’ve being doing weight and balance calculations on ships my whole naval career, and I’ve never seen a ship this badly loaded. The manifest showed the cargo spread out in three layers over the entire deck, not stacked six high all afore midships like this,” Ashe complained. “She feels too light in the water for the weight listed on the manifest, too.”
Cole looked at him keenly. “What are you saying?”
Ashe shrugged asking instead, “Hey, Bass. Are the holds full to the brim with wheat like the manifest said?”
“Negative. All the holds are empty.”
“Holy hell,” Ashe breathed. “Sir, we have to get off this ship immediately. She’s in imminent danger of capsizing.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, the storm’s getting worse. Fast. The idea was to turn this ship around and sail it back to New Orleans with the prisoner in custody.”
Ashe replied urgently, “Even if we could get the engines running, this ship is top-heavy as hell and has no ballast below decks. I can’t believe she hasn’t gone over already. I’m telling you, sir, we have to get off the Anna Belle now.”
“And you’re sure no one but us is still aboard?” Cole asked.
Bass and Ashe both nodded and murmured in the affirmative.
Perriman ordered tersely, “Let’s get out of here, ASAP.”
After that, it was all elbows and assholes as they raced downstairs, Ashe’s warning ringing in Nissa’s ears.
The trip back down the rope ladder of doom wasn’t nearly as bad for Nissa because she was so bloody relieved to be getting off the Anna Belle. She’d had enough of those rolls and those endless, breathless pauses while the ship debated capsizing.
She landed in the SEALs’ tiny boat with relief. They might be a cork in this vessel, but it was better than being aboard the doomed Anna Belle.
They untied their mooring lines and motored away from the big ship. Nissa had never breathed so big a sigh of relief to be away from the Anna Belle.
“Nearest land?” Cole asked from his position at the tiller.
“Louisiana coast. Nearly a hundred nautical miles,” Bass answered.
Yikes. Even traveling at twenty knots, it would take them hours to make shore. Hours for the storm to intensify around them.
They’d been lucky to catch a ride outbound on a big Coast Guard cutter heading into the gulf to take measurements of the approaching storm, but they’d made no arrangements for a lift back to New Orleans. The plan had been to sail the Anna Belle back.
“Do we have enough fuel to make it?” Ashe asked practically.
Oh, hell. Now she had running out of gas to worry about.
“Close, but enough,” Cole replied casually.
Jeez. What else could go wrong?
“Give me a course heading for the nearest land,” Cole ordered Bass.
While Cole steered, the other two men put up a framework of curved poles and stretched a tarp over them, lashing it down tight. It created a low clamshell covering over the vessel. It didn’t keep out all the rain, but it knocked down the worst of the water and wind. They still had to use a motorized pump to empty water out of the hull, and the ride was rough as all get-out. But after the rolling of the Anna Belle, this freezing-cold misery was a boon. And their boat wasn’t trying to capsize.
Until Bass, on the radio again, shouted something directly into Cole’s ear off headset that put a grim look on the man’s face.
Cole ordered over the radio, “Everyone don a life vest and let’s go ahead and put Nissa into an exposure kit.”
An exposure kit turned out to be a body-sized pouch of some slick neoprene-like material that encompassed her entire body and attached to the donut-shaped life vest the guys inflated around her neck.
“What’s this for?” she asked as Cole checked the connections around her neck.
He paused at his task to gaze at her from a range of about one foot. Lord, he was gorgeous with those lean cheeks and firm jaw. His voice rumbled comfortingly. “If you end up in the water, the kit provides a layer of insulation to extend how long you can survive hypothermia by hours or days. It also protects you from sharks. They can’t smell you through the material. In pockets attached to the interior of the bag are water, rations, a small desalinization kit, a GPS locator beacon, a mirror and an emergency radio. My team and I know how to climb into one in the water and bail out any seawater. But since you haven’t had the training, we’re popping you into yours now, to be safe. Try to think of it as a sleeping bag, and it won’t freak you out so bad.”
“Thanks.”
How did he know that being wrapped up in this giant condom was scaring her half to death? She’d always struggled with claustrophobia, and this situation wasn’t helping matters one little bit. She fought like crazy not to hyperventilate and hung on by a bare thread to the ability to breathe.
She muttered under her breath, “Please, God, don’t let me need this stupid contraption.”
Cole cracked the first smile she’d seen from him. Even in the dark, it was dazzling. “It’s purely a precaution.”
But when he had all four of them lash their safety harnesses together with rope and bungee cord, she had to wonder just how unnecessary a precaution it really was.
They finished the Boy Scout knot project before she asked on radio, “Does someone want to tell me why we’re suddenly preparing for disaster, here?”
Bass answered, “Jessamine has gone from a Category 1 to a Category 3 hurricane in the past few hours. Weather service is now forecasting that she’ll spin up into a high Cat 4 or Cat 5.”
“Isn’t that just special?” she responded sarcastically.
Everyone laughed.
Seriously? They could laugh while sailing around in the middle of a hurricane in a rowboat with motors?
The SEALs took turns at the tiller, wrestling the ocean until they became exhausted and had to switch out. The interminable journey settled into a steady-state nightmare, and the team chatted on headset to pass the time. The good news was the hurricane wind at their backs was blowing them landward at an impressive clip, shaving hours off their journey.
Ashe took the radio from Bass and had an earnest conversation with someone at the other end that culminated in him saying, “Let me know when you’ve run the numbers.”
Ashe piped up after a few minutes, “The Coast Guard has pulled the Anna Belle’s manifest and compared it against what we saw on the ship. She definitely left New Orleans with a belly full of wheat. But sometime in the past twenty-four hours, the ship’s crew must have dumped all of it overboard.”
That made everyone frown. The weight of the wheat low in the ship’s belly would have been critical to making the ship safe and stable.
“And,” Ashe continued, “the Coast Guard checked with the harbormaster. She left the port of New Orleans loaded three deep in containers across her entire deck, not six deep, all fore of the beam, like we found her. The crew of the ship moved the containers after they sailed. They intentionally built a high-profile stack that would catch the most wind.”
“Were they trying to sink the ship?” Nissa blurted.
Cole answered grimly. “Seems so.”
“And then there’s the missing crew and sabotaged engines,” Bass piped up.
“And no distress calls,” Cole added. “The crew definitely intended to scuttle the ship.”
“Oh, they’ll succeed,” Ashe responded. “Once Jessamine cranks up another ten feet of seas and another twenty knots of wind, that huge wall of containers is going to catch a gust and take the Anna Belle right over.”
“Assuming she doesn’t drift crossways of a couple big waves and break her beam first,” Bass commented. “Either way, that ship’s going down in the next few hours if she’s not already sunk.”
“But why?” Cole asked.
Nissa had an idea why. The others speculated, but discarded every idea they came up with. When they all fell silent, she spoke up reluctantly, “What if this was all an elaborate scheme to fake Markus Petrov’s death?”
The team turned as one to stare at her. “It’s a hell of an expensive ruse,” Cole replied. “Twenty million dollars plus or minus for the ship, several million dollars’ worth of wheat, and who knows what other cargo in the containers. Then there’s the cost of paying off the crew, and of making them all disappear. Something like a fifty-million-dollar escape route? That seems pretty improbable.”
“But that’s the point,” Nissa replied. “Markus Petrov is obsessive about secrecy. And goodness knows, he has fifty million bucks lying around to burn. The man has been a mobster for thirty years. My CIA colleague who got inside his outfit said the man was clearing a million dollars a week.”
Bass swore, then drawled, “I’m in the wrong business.”
“I thought all you cops are on the take,” Ashe teased the Cajun. Apparently, Bass had been called off military reserve status and reactivated as a SEAL recently. When he wasn’t on active duty, he was a civilian police officer.
“New Orleans Police Department has cleaned up its act in the past couple of decades, thank you very much,” Bass retorted.
“Indeed. They kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cole quipped.
The guys laughed, apparently oblivious of the monster storm spinning up around them. She envied them their ability to find humor in this nightmare.
Cole looked over at her in her exposure pouch. “The only problem with your theory that Petrov engineered the sinking of the Anna Belle is that no one knew he was aboard her. We were lucky to get a tip from one of Petrov’s guys we captured in the gun battle last week.”
“Or maybe that tidbit was intentionally leaked to us so we would believe he died when the Anna Belle turns up missing or is found sunk.”
“The ship will be tough to find,” Ashe offered. “We’re in close to eight thousand feet of water right now.”
Aww, jeez. She did not need to know that.
“What’s the next move Petrov will make, Nissa?” Cole asked.
All of a sudden, everyone was staring expectantly at her.
“I have no idea. I was only sent out here with you to make the ID on Petrov.”
She was one of the few people on earth who’d seen even a photograph of Markus Petrov, and it had been taken twenty years ago. The tech gang at Langley had run an aging simulator on the image, though, so she had a rough idea of what he would look like now. More important, she knew every detail of his life that the CIA had uncovered and could ask the right questions—and furthermore know if she was getting the right answers—to make the identification. And, of course, she was a trained psychological operations officer. She could probably manipulate the guy into talking when most other people could not.
Cole gave up his position at the tiller to Ashe and flopped down beside her, breathing hard. It took a minute or so for his respiration to return to normal, but then he said to her, “My orders are to capture Markus Petrov with extreme prejudice.” Meaning he had authorization to do whatever it took to catch the guy, no holds barred. He continued, “I’m going to need you to stay with my team until we catch up with him.”
But this was supposed to be a quick out-and-back mission for her. Fly to New Orleans. Make the ID. Fly back to Langley, Virginia, and resume her regularly scheduled life. She didn’t do field operations. At least, not this kind. As it was, the trip into the Gulf of Mexico to catch Petrov had been well beyond the scope of her orders. She definitely didn’t run around with Navy SEALs trying to get herself killed.
“I’m an analyst, not a field operative!” she protested. She didn’t even like being outdoors, let alone playing soldier.
“You’re a field operator now. Welcome to the big leagues, kid.”
Chapter 2 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Even Cole had to admit he was glad to see land as the coast of Louisiana came into sight, a low black line on the horizon. The hurricane was stalled offshore at the moment, and the last hour of motoring north had taken them out of the heart of the storm. For now. As long as Jessamine parked over the warm, shallow waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico, she would only grow in strength.
The breathtakingly huge swells had diminished to merely god-awful seas, and the first faint light of dawn was barely visible in the east.
What a hell of a night. Cole had never seen a ship so close to capsizing before. Climbing aboard the Anna Belle had wigged him out worse than he would ever admit. Every time she’d rolled onto her side, he’d been sure that was the one where she would keep on going and drag them all down to a watery death.
“So. Anyone got reward points at a decent resort along the coast we can cash in?” Bass asked drolly as they approached a line of cypress trees and grassy wetlands.
The guy was the team’s clown and great for morale. Cole had missed working with the Cajun. But then Cole had missed working in the field, period. This was his first op back as a team commander in four long years.
It figured that the mission had not gone to plan. At all. The target wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Cole had had to put his team in extreme peril to search the Anna Belle, the civilian with them had completely panicked and their egress plan had been shot to hell by the sabotage to the ship.
They’d caught a minor break when the hurricane stalled offshore, but he didn’t have any illusions that riding out a major hurricane in whatever improvised shelter they could find was going to be anything but ridiculously hazardous. They were far from clear of life-threatening danger. It was Cole’s job to adapt to whatever came their way, but he had to wonder if he was too rusty to be out here in the field anymore. Should he have anticipated these contingencies and planned better for them?
Right now, he had to get them as far inland and on as high ground as possible before Jessamine came calling. He put Bass at the prow to guide the Rigid Inflatable Boat ashore. Bastien “Bass” LeBlanc was native to this area and more familiar with these coastal waters than anyone else on the team.
To his surprise, Bass called back to Ashe to turn the RIB and parallel the coast. “What are you looking for?” Cole asked.
“Inlet. The storm surge is already flooding the edges of the bayou. If we motor ashore now, we’ll hit a submerged cypress stump and rip the bottom out of the boat.”
Nissa piped up. “What will an inlet look like? Can we help you spot one?”
“Two roughly parallel rows of trees leading inland,” Bass answered absently, staring shoreward through a big pair of binoculars.
“Weather report, Ashe?” Cole asked over the radios.
“Cat 3 and growing. Expected to start moving due north in the next few hours. Winds should hit before noon, and the eye wall should make landfall by evening.”
Damn. They could not catch a break on this mission! He checked the fuel gauges, which were perilously low, flirting with the red empty line.
“Is that an inlet?” Nissa called, pointing from inside her survival bag.
Cole squinted through a rain squall that had just sprung up, obscuring his vision. “What do you think, Bass? We’re getting way low on fuel and we need to make land before we become a cork out here.”
“Let’s give it a try, sir.”
The RIB slowed to a crawl, and they all kept their gazes on the water before them, looking for submerged hazards. The storm surge was already a good ten feet above normal and all sorts of stumps and small trees that would normally be above water were now covered—treacherous traps waiting to destroy their vessel.
Dawn arrived in a thin strip of color beneath the ominous overhang of clouds forming one of the storm bands of the hurricane. The rain abated just long enough for them to see the line of sky streaked with every hue from palest pink to fiery red. The CIA asset, Nissa, turned to stare at the sunrise as the brilliant ball of liquid red crept over the edge of the gulf and then nearly as quickly disappeared behind the roiling cloud line.
“Wow,” she breathed.
One corner of Cole’s mouth turned down cynically at her innocence. It had been a long time since a sunrise had been enough to cause him wonder. Almost twenty years in the SEALs in one capacity or another had made him a hard man who didn’t look for beauty in the world anymore.
“We’ve got an inlet!” Bass called. “Come right five degrees.”
In another minute, two rows of cypress trees rose on either side of them. They looked more like truncated bushes in the early morning light, much of their height below the floodwaters.
They proceeded cautiously up the inlet for perhaps twenty minutes, buffeted by the choppy water almost worse than when they’d bobbed on the open ocean’s big swells. Cole went back to spell Ashe, who shook out his noodled arms as he moved up front to pull stump watch.
The right engine sputtered then caught again. Its fuel needle lay on the peg to the far left side of the gauge and didn’t budge. At least the left needle was still bouncing off the peg with each wave.
“Find us a spot to land, Bastien. This is about as far inland as the RIB’s going to take us.”
“Roger that, Frosty.” Bass scanned the lines of trees on either side of the canal they were following. In about a minute he hooted in excitement and yelled, “Bring her hard right!”
Cole complied, following Bass’s instructions for the next minute or so, aiming for a particularly tall cypress looming over the edge of the flooded canal. They made it past the big tree when the right motor cut out entirely and the left engine started to sputter.
“Just a few more yards,” Bass called.
That was probably about all they had before they turned into drifters.
“Cut the motor!” Bass called.
Cole complied with alacrity, just before the bottom of the boat scraped hard on something that sounded like gravel. A rain squall was rolling in on them, and Cole barely saw Bass and Ashe jump out of the boat into what turned out to be knee-deep water. They’d run aground.
Ashe fought to steady the RIB as a huge wind gust tried to shove it sideways off the spit of land, while Bass ran ahead with a line and tied off the prow to a tree.
Cole moved over to Nissa in her waterproof bag. “We’ve got to get you out of that thing so you can walk.”
She was already flailing around inside the sack to no avail. He realized with a start that she was panicking. Poor girl had been through a lot in the past fifteen hours.
“Easy, Nissa,” he murmured. “Sit still so I can get you out.”
His words had no effect on her. And now that he was within arm’s length of her, he realized her eyes were glazed over and unseeing. She was lost in a full-blown panic attack. Only one fix for that. He wrapped her up in a bear hug, survival bag and all. She thrashed wildly in his arms, but her small frame was no match for his iron strength. He hung on grimly and let the panic attack run its course...and tried hard not to notice how great her body felt writhing against his. He was a total jerk for even registering it, given how panicked she was. He did his best to project calm and comfort to her through his silent touch.
As quickly as she’d freaked out, she went still in his arms.
“You done?” he asked.
“Get me out of this thing,” she mumbled in chagrin. “I can’t stand being confined.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” he replied drily. Using the tip of his Ka-Bar knife, he pried loose the water-soaked knot at her neck. Finally, the cord gave way and the top of the survival bag popped open. Nissa shoved it down her body and jumped clear of the thing, giving it a dirty look. She gave the piled bag a swift kick with her combat boot for good measure.
“It’s dead. You killed it,” Cole commented.
“Good riddance,” she declared.
“It would have saved your life if we’d gone down at sea.”
A shudder passed over her. “I’d have gone crazy if I had ended up floating around in that thing.”
He shrugged. “You would have done what you had to in order to survive. It would have sucked, but you’d have pulled through.” In his experience most people were a lot stronger than they realized. It was just that most people were never put into actual life-and-death situations.
“I dunno. I have pretty bad claustrophobia,” she disagreed.
“Then last night sucked worse for you than I realized.”
She threw him a bleary glare that said he didn’t know the half of it. His respect for her notched up a bit more. She had been brave as hell to go out with his team into the storm and then to crawl around the Anna Belle in the dark with the big ship trying hard to capsize.
“C’mon. Let’s get you onto dry land,” he said, offering her a hand to steady her as she crawled forward around the saddle seats to the prow.
“It may be land but it won’t be dry,” she snapped.
She’d earned the right to be a little testy after the past night. He helped her over the edge of the boat into Bass’s arms. The big Cajun set her down into the water and helped her wade ashore to join Ashe, who was depositing a bag of gear on the soggy ground.
Cole passed the remaining gear bags out of the RIB and Bass retied the boat using a loose hurricane tie that would allow it to stay afloat as the storm surge rose.
“Now what?” Nissa asked Cole as he joined the others.
“Now we find shelter.”
“Any chance we can find a phone for me to report in to my boss?”
“Don’t hold your breath on that. Where there’s no electricity, there’s usually no phone service.”
“Can’t the Coast Guard or whomever you guys have been talking to relay messages to my people?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Your call. Personally, I wouldn’t be broadcasting that Markus Petrov got away on an open frequency. No telling who’s listening in. The way you talk about him, I gather Petrov has spies and informants all over the place.”
“Good point. I’ll need a secure phone line to make a full report.”
“You may have to wait awhile for one of those. Right now, the priority is shelter from the storm.”
“Isn’t the Coast Guard going to come pick us up?”
He snorted. “Not with that monster storm bearing down on us. Besides, they’ll have their hands full with rescues already. We’re on our own to ride this thing out.”
Nissa was already pretty pale, but he thought she went a shade or two whiter with that revelation. He said bracingly, “It’s just a storm. At least no one’s shooting at us. We’ll be fine.”
“Promise?” she asked in a wobbly voice.
“Yeah. Sure.” It was a lie, but he needed the civilian female not to freak out. If they didn’t find solid shelter and soon, they were in serious trouble.
“And then we can get some sleep, yes?” she asked hopefully.
“All the sleep you want.”
He and his guys could go five days without much more than a nap now and then. But he realized that most normal mortals were not aware that they, too, could match the feat. It was all about motivation. Find the right one, and anyone, man or woman, would die rather than give in to mere exhaustion.
Cole continued, “Once the worst of the storm passes, we’ll make our way back to New Orleans and figure out how we’re going to acquire our target and take him into custody.”
“I have some ideas—”
“Later,” he said, cutting her off. “The core of the storm will be here in a few hours, and we need to be under cover before then. How do you feel about running?”
Nissa stared up at him, her blue eyes even bigger and wider than usual. She was a looker, all right. The sea-land suit the Navy had lent her clung to her slender legs and girly curves, showing off a slight body any Hollywood starlet would be proud to have. Her blond hair was French-braided back from her face, but it only accentuated her elfin features.
“As a rule, I’m not fond of running as a form of exercise.”
“That’s too bad,” Cole replied.
“I don’t have any choice about the running thing, do I?” Nissa asked mournfully.
“Nope. Let’s move out.” He grabbed the extra pack of gear meant for her and shouldered it on top of his own pack. It meant he was carrying close to sixty pounds of gear, but no way could Nissa keep up with his team if she were carrying any weight at all. As it was, he suspected she was going to slow them down badly.
It turned out that Nissa could go for about fifteen minutes at a time at a steady, but slow, jog if she got a three-or four-minute break to catch her breath in between. A SEAL team was only as fast as its slowest member, and right now, that was she. But as egressing with a totally untrained civilian went, she wasn’t doing half bad. He’d had missions where they’d had to carry out the principal.
The trek was miserable. What solid ground they could find was saturated and spongy, giving way without warning beneath their feet, sinking them knee-deep in black muck and pitching them on their faces. Everybody took at least a few such spills.
Even when they remained upright, the going wasn’t great. They caught blowing tree limbs in the face, thorny brambles clutched at their bodies and backpacks, and bouts of driving rain pecked at them like angry crows. The only good news was that the gusty wind was mostly at their backs.
They jogged and rested, jogged and rested, for almost two hours. How Bastien was finding his way through the swampy bayou country, Cole had no idea. The rain was whipping around them now on fifty-mile-per-hour gusts, and the brief hint of dawn had faded into twilight gloom as the hurricane roared ashore. They had to find high ground and some sort of shelter before long, or they were going to be in deadly peril.
They jogged maybe another ten minutes before Bass veered suddenly to his right. They had to hack their way through a veritable wall of kudzu vines and brambles, but when they popped out the far side, Cole spotted what had made Bastien change course. A house. Or more accurately, a dilapidated-looking shack.
The one-story dwelling was raised on stilts that, as they approached the structure, turned out to be two dozen massive cypress pilings. The exterior badly needed a coat of paint, and rust from the metal roof stained the gray wood siding orange. But as they climbed the stairs to the wraparound porch, the building looked sturdier than his first impression. They might just survive the storm, yet.
Bass pounded on the front door loudly and long enough for them to be sure no one was inside. Ashe picked the door lock and dead bolt with quick efficiency, and in under a minute, they had all piled inside the cabin.
The dwelling was as rough inside as out with a log-framed couch sagging in front of a small wood-burning stove. What looked like handmade chairs and a crude table were tucked in one corner of the main room. A huge alligator skull hung on the wall above the stove. Cole would have hated to see the live beast it had come from. That gator had to have been twenty feet long or better.
A dilapidated stove and refrigerator flanked a rust-stained sink, and a few cabinets rounded out the kitchen corner.
Ashe called from down the short hall to their right, “All clear. One bedroom, one bathroom.”
“How hurricane-proof is this place?” Cole asked Bass.
“Windows could use some plywood or at least some boards over them. There’s no time to check out the roof. We’ll just have to hope it’s nailed down tight. The pilings look sturdy and they’ll take a fifteen-foot storm surge easy.”
“Is Jessamine forecast to surge that high?” Cole asked no one in particular.
Ashe, just returning to the main room, replied, “That’s right about what the forecast calls for. Fourteen to seventeen feet.”
Cole glanced back at Bass, who said grimly, “Lemme go out and take an exact measurement from the canal behind this place to the bottom of the porch.”
The door opened, and wind and rain howled inside until Bass wrestled the door shut once more. Meanwhile, Ashe moved over to the kitchen cabinets to poke around. “There’s some canned food in here. Should hold us for a few days.”
Nissa surprised Cole by speaking up. “Drinking water’s going to be the problem. The storm surge will bring in filthy, polluted salt water that no amount of purification will make drinkable.”
She had a point. Give the intelligence analyst credit for common sense on top of her book smarts.
She asked, “Is there a tub in the bathroom, Ashe?”
“Yes. A small one.”
“Let’s see if there’s running water,” she suggested. “If so, we need to sterilize the tub and fill it while we still can.”
Cole set Ashe to scrubbing the tub with a jug of bleach they found under the kitchen sink, while he went outside to check for a water well and possibly a pump for it.
He met Bass coming up the steps. “Seventeen feet, sir. That’s what this place can take before the house floods. Even with a lower surge than that, we may see wave action pushing some water inside.”
“Good to know. Any sign of a well and a water pump down there?”
“There’s a well. But the electricity’s already out. Pump won’t work.”
“Generator?” Cole asked.
“Maybe. Whoever owns this place has it decently stocked. There’s a shed, and that’s where I’d look for a generator. It’s locked, but we can break in and have a look around.”
They ended up using an axe they found sitting on a ledge over the shed door to break the rusty hasp and get inside. They didn’t find a generator, but they did spot a small lawn mower whose gasoline motor Bass thought he could jerry-rig to run the water pump. And they found a toolbox. Armed with a hammer and pocket full of nails, Cole scrounged under the house for pieces of scrap lumber that he hauled up to the porch and nailed across the windows. They weren’t as good as sheets of thick plywood, but they were better than nothing. The boards would break the worst of the wind pummeling the glass and should catch large pieces of flying debris.
He and Bass stumbled inside an hour later, wet, cold and exhausted. Construction in hurricane-force winds turned out to be strenuous stuff.
Ashe and Nissa had been busy inside, as well. They’d hauled in a big pile of firewood from the porch and stacked it beside the wood-burning stove, in which they had started a fire. Baked beans were heating in a pot atop it, and the sound of running water came from the bathroom, where Ashe poked his head out to announce that they should have enough water for several days. He’d also filled a dozen empty moonshine jugs he’d found with water for flushing the toilet.
As they pulled chairs around the wood-burning stove to warm and dry themselves, Nissa asked in a small voice, “Are we going to be safe here?”
She looked fearfully at Cole for an answer, and he replied, “This old place is sturdier than it looks. Jessamine won’t be its first hurricane.” He forced himself to give Nissa a smile in hopes that it would encourage her. “We’ll be fine. And even if something unexpected does happen, we’re SEALs. We take problems as they come and deal with them.”
They’d battened down the hatches in the nick of time, for within the next half hour, the winds outside rose from a roar to a howl and then to an ominous scream. The entire structure shook alarmingly, but it held.
For now.
Chapter 3 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Nissa crawled into the only bed in the cabin at the unanimous insistence of the guys. They assured her they were perfectly comfortable sleeping on the floor. Cole set up a watch rotation for himself and his men, and then he urged her to get some sleep before the storm got bad.
This wasn’t bad? The walls shivered every time a big gust hit, and she shivered right along with the tiny cabin. The glass in the windows rattled, and she flinched every time something hit the boards nailed over them, sure that this was the time the window was going to shatter and let in the full fury of the storm.
What had she gotten herself into, volunteering for this insane mission? It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all! She was supposed to hang out with some super hot Navy SEALS and catch a notorious bad guy, thereby advancing her career, which was rapidly threatening to die of boredom in a beige cubicle. Although, she had gotten the super hot SEAL part of the deal. All of the men with her were extremely easy on the eye. But the one she couldn’t look away from was their leader.
Cole Perriman was totally hunkalicious. She’d tried really hard not to fantasize about crawling all over that spectacular physique and keep her mind on business, but it had been rough listening to the inbriefing he’d given her and his two guys. She kept getting distracted by how big and rugged he was, but how he had movie-star looks, too. He was a perfect blend of raw masculinity and sheer beauty.
Her friends back at Langley wouldn’t believe she got to work with him. She vowed before she headed back to Virginia to get a few pictures of him to show to the girls around the watercooler...and maybe to fantasize over when she returned to her bland, dull, colorless life.
The wind got so loud it hurt her ears, and it was relentless, moaning and roaring like nothing she’d ever heard before. She finally resorted to pulling the covers up over her head in a futile effort to block out the noise. And maybe she was also hiding like she had as a little girl, when monsters had come calling in the dark of her bedroom at night. She always had been a giant thunder-chicken.
As exhaustion overtook her body, her thoughts drifted, replaying the horror of the past twelve hours: sailing into the teeth of a hurricane, the nightmare climb aboard the Anna Belle, the frantic search for shelter as Jessamine roared ashore. She’d been so certain she was going to die a watery death, drowned at best and bashed to pieces by the stormy sea at worst.
When she finally fell asleep, it was no surprise she dreamed of water. Except in her dream, the ocean was not black and angry...
The sea was brilliant turquoise, light and warm and lazy, and she swam below the surface easily, breathing water. She swayed gently as surf rolled past overhead, untouched by the cheerfully churning surface of the sea.
Her hair drifted in pale wisps around her, and she was startled to realize she was naked. The sea caressed her body lovingly, and she felt safe. At home down here.
She became aware of a large shape moving toward her, knifing forward with strong strokes of humanoid arms. She started to backpedal in alarm, but as the man drew near, she recognized his beautiful, chiseled face and stilled. Cole.
He stopped before her, righting himself until he floated vertical, as naked as she in this underwater dream world. He smiled at her and the temperature of the water around her rocketed up. She looked down and was captivated by his body, more spectacular than she’d imagined in her waking state. His skin was smooth and supple, the musculature rippling beneath it nothing short of spectacular. The man was sculpted like a god. Poseidon would be the correct one, she supposed, given that they were underwater.
His long legs kicked lazily, the deeply-cut muscles of his thighs powerful even underwater. And those abs. Washboard stomachs like that should not be legal. They were certified lethal weapons. Fascinated, she stared at his torso, her underwater breathing coming fast and shallow as her gaze followed the V-line of his obliques downward to the dark curls and his manly parts, which were impressive even at rest.
If possible, her breathing accelerated even more, sounding loud inside her head. The current nudged her toward underwater deity Cole and she let it carry her close enough to feel the heat of him radiating to touch her skin. Everywhere his warmth caressed her, she burned for him.
His silvery blue gaze captured hers, igniting with desire as he stared at her. Suddenly, the water around them was boiling hot, and he willed her even closer to him. Their feet and knees tangled together as they treaded water, only inches separating them now. Each accidental bump sent her pulse a notch higher until her heartbeat pounded like a drum in her ears.
Her belly tied in knots by the intensity of his stare, she looked away, her gaze drifting to his mile-wide shoulders and the bulging wreaths of muscle tapering to powerful arms. His right hand moved forward slowly toward her free-floating breast, giving her plenty of time to splash away from it. But she only watched with breathless anticipation as his big, tanned hand approached her pale flesh, visibly quivering with desire. She needed him to touch her like she needed to draw her next watery breath.
His fingers were strong, his palms heavily calloused. A warrior’s hands. Capable hands. Hands that knew how to kill and—oh, my—hands that knew how to give pleasure. His thumb rubbed across her taut nipple as he cupped her weightless breast, kneading it gently. Her back arched as she strained toward him, desperate for more of his drugging touch. Every inch of her body ached to be his. To be taken by him. Claimed and possessed by him.
He must have read her thoughts for, all of a sudden, he surged against her, his legs entwining with hers, his erection pressing into her belly as hot and hard as a branding iron. His left arm captured her waist, his other hand still making magic on her breast.
Her left hand traced the lean indent of his waist, and slid around to his back, tracing the deep ridge of muscle running along his spine. Down, down, she followed the path of it until her palm filled with the stone-hard bulge of his behind.
Hers. He was all hers, to hold, to touch, to take. Her right leg snaked up around his hips, and using her right foot and left hand, she urged the hot steel pressing into her belly lower, closer to her core. Yes. Right...there...
His mouth closed upon hers, and the kiss was as hot and carnal as the rest of him, as commanding and untamed as a proper sea god should be. Her entire body molded to his and she gave all of herself to him, opening her mouth and feminine core to receive him.
She projected the thought into his mind, “Take me. Take me now—”
“Holy crap, Nissa. Wake up.” The voice was distant and desperate, barely touching her dream, hardly scratching the surface of her raging desire for her underwater god.
Just like that, her turquoise paradise was replaced by the cold blackness of an ocean at night, thick and suffocating. She thrashed in the darkness, weighed down by something confining and heavy.
Must be that damned survival bag. She’d fallen overboard and gotten separated from the others and was going to die out here in the vast abyss of the ocean, cold, scared and alone—
“Wake up. For the love of God,” someone ground out. The man sounded like he was in pain.
Wait. She wasn’t in the ocean. She wasn’t wet at all, in fact. Groggily, she climbed a little closer toward consciousness.
Something powerful grabbed her in a viselike grip.
No! They said a shark wouldn’t attack through the bag! But she was going to die torn in two by one. She fought then, kicking as best she could through the heavy material.
A spate of swearing erupted in her ear, low and irritated. Gods shouldn’t take themselves in vain, should they? Confused, she registered that no saw-sharp teeth penetrated her flesh. Not a shark, then.
The grip turned into mostly a heavy weight immobilizing her, still suffocating her, though. Death by drowning or death by asphyxiation? What a choice. Something primitive within her refused to give up or give in, and she flailed her arms and legs, stubbornly fighting not to be shark bait without at least giving the damned fish a bloody nose before it ate her.
“Oww! Jeez, that’s some right hook you’ve got,” the male voice complained.
Had they found her? Had the SEAL team and its smoking-hot leader, the same team she’d insanely agreed to help, come back for her, after all? She started to shout for help, but bright light broke over her, and her scream went unuttered. She squinted up, blinded by the piercing light shining directly in her eyes from a range of about twelve inches.
She shoved at the light, trying to get it out of her eyes, and her hand encountered cold metal and very warm, very human flesh and bone.
Wait. Was this real? Was she actually awake?
“You can stop trying to kill me, already.”
She recognized the voice. Cole. In the flesh.
“Huh? Where am I? Am I alive?”
“Yes, you’re alive. And you will stay that way if you’ll quit trying to bludgeon me.”
Talk about disoriented. She looked around and made out a tiny bedroom in some sort of rough shack.
The cabin on stilts. The hurricane. The Anna Belle. That god-awful run through the bayou to find shelter. It all came back to her in a rush. The danger, the terror, the certainty that she was going to die. No wonder she was breathing hard already.
“Are we safe from the storm?” she rasped, her voice hoarse as if she’d been shouting forever. Oh, wait. She had been. To be heard over the storm, they’d pretty much had to shout all of last night.
“So far, so good,” Cole murmured cautiously.
“What time is it?”
“A little after eight o’clock.”
“At night?”
Behind his flashlight’s glare, she thought she caught a hint of a grin. “Yes. At night. You’ve been asleep about seven hours.”
“Wow. I don’t feel as if I got that much sleep.”
“You did get more of a workout in the past day than I imagine you’re accustomed to.”
Now there was an understatement. She checked in on her body and was not surprised to feel ominously sore muscles and pain setting in. She was shocked, however, to register that Cole Perriman was sprawled on top of her, and that her right leg was wrapped around his hips and her left hand was clutching his, umm, rather delectable tush.
She let go of his behind with alacrity, but then had the problem of where to put her hand. She ended up settling for resting her hand lightly on his waist, which was every bit as hard and lean through his close-fitting turtleneck as she’d dreamed it. Her pulse lurched alarmingly. She was in bed with the hot SEAL!
Details of her lurid dream flooded into her mind, and she inhaled sharply. The reality of this man’s big, muscular, rock-hard body mashing hers deeply into the worn mattress was all too close to her dream for comfort.
Cole stared down at Nissa, and unfortunately, her eyes were adjusting enough to the low-light conditions to stare back at him.
Oh, no. Awareness was every bit as intense in his gaze as it no doubt was in hers. The crackling attraction from her dream wasn’t a dream anymore. He was right here, real and hot and alive, his thighs tangled with hers, his hard erection pressing against the yielding softness of her belly, his massive arms forming a cage around her upper body.
He moved restlessly against her and her breath hitched. So. This was lust, huh? Everything she’d experienced in her inexperienced life to date was a pale shadow in comparison to this heat and desire raging through her. She wanted this man in every way she could have him, preferably starting with the naked, hot and sweaty ways.
He stared down at her for a moment more, reciprocal desire lighting his eyes from within until they blazed like stars above her.
With a curse, he rolled off her abruptly. But given the narrowness of the bed, his arm was still plastered against hers from shoulder to wrist. “I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“For what? It takes two to tango,” she replied practically.
He laughed, but the sound was more about pain than humor. Of more interest to her was the fact that he didn’t answer the question. Didn’t want to put his attraction to her into words, huh? A ribbon of hurt wound its way through her heart, leaching away the intense pleasure of her dream, stealing her confidence, reminding her mercilessly that she was a mousy desk jockey who worked in a cubicle jungle, not a sexy, adventurous temptress who could capture and hold on to a man like Cole Perriman.
“I’m cold,” she mumbled.
“Yeah, this place was light on blankets. There’s only the one quilt on this bed. Can’t fault the owner, though. He had everything else we needed. Here. Let me warm you up.” He rolled against her, his legs tangled with hers, belly to belly, groin to—ohmigosh—groin.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked.
“Hypothermia care 101. Body-to-body contact is the fastest and safest way to bring a person’s body temperature up to a safe level.”
“I said I was cold, not freezing to death.”
“One leads to the other,” he murmured disconcertingly close to her ear. His breath was warm on her earlobe and a shiver passed through her entire body. And it was emphatically not a shiver of cold.
His arm fell across her stomach and curled up her side, his hand tucked under her armpit mere inches from her breast. She about leaped out of bed in her shock. If not for the easy strength of his arm pinning her down, she might actually have bolted. But as it was, she merely lurched hard enough against his forearm to register that she wasn’t going anywhere if he didn’t want her to.
His leg slid across hers, his thigh resting intimately across both of hers. Under the wet suit the Navy had given her to wear yesterday, they’d also given her a skimpy pair of stretchy running trunks and an equally skimpy tank top. Those were all she was wearing now. And apparently, he was wearing pretty much the same thing.
She registered the general muscularity and hairiness of his leg against her smoothly waxed legs, and something shifted in her gut, a sharp awareness of Cole Perriman not as her mission commander and temporary boss, but as a Man. Capital M. With a side of hubba-hubba thrown in.
Other details registered. The hardness of his stomach against her right arm, trapped at her side. The width of his shoulders towering over her as he lay on his side facing her. The sheer mass of the man. He was all muscle. There was nothing soft about him. No flab to ease the hard contours of his muscles, not even a thin layer of fat beneath his skin to cushion the bulging veins and corded sinews in his arms or legs.
And good grief, he was as hot as a furnace. She was going to break out in a full-blown sweat if he stayed like this for much longer.
He muttered, “How does your hair smell good? You just spent all night swimming around in the ocean and wading through a swamp. You should smell like seawater.”
Bemused, she replied, “I got hot during our minimarathon to run here. I pushed back my hood and the rain rinsed out my hair. And, while you guys were getting the well’s pump running, I used the first water that came out of the pipes to take a quick sponge bath. Salt’s bad for your skin. You shouldn’t leave it sitting on your flesh for any longer than necessary.”
“Thanks for the beauty tip.”
“I’m serious. It can cause rashes and even burns.”
“I know. It’s not an uncommon form of torture to rub salt into a person’s skin.”
Eew. She might be a collector of seemingly useless trivia as part of her work as an intelligence analyst, but torture was not one of her fields of expertise.
“Warming up?” Cole murmured against her temple.
“Umm, yes. I’m toasty warm now.” He didn’t move, so she added, “Thanks for sharing some of your heat with me.”
It was a blatant invitation to leave her bed, but he didn’t accept it. Instead he remained spooned around her.
His hand, the one thrown across her body, slid up her arm toward her shoulder, dragging the quilt higher to tuck it in around her neck. At least his hand hadn’t headed toward her chest...which was throbbing disconcertingly at the moment.
She would love to pull her right arm out from between them, but she was vividly aware of how close her hand was resting to parts of his anatomy that could easily be encouraged to throb, also.
Cole didn’t move, and goodness knew, she wasn’t about to move. But they might as well have been crawling all over each other the way the electricity built between them. She was excruciatingly aware of every inch of his body against hers, and it didn’t help that she could picture his body encased in that insanely sexy sea-land suit of his.
She’d tried really hard yesterday to keep her mind solidly on business, but there’d been no missing the fact that he’d looked like a statue of a Greek god wearing a wet suit.
A particularly violent gust of wind slammed into the wall beside her, and even the light fixture overhead rattled. Terrified, she rolled against Cole and buried her face against his chest.
His arms swept around her, drawing her closer, creating a living bulwark of protection around her. “I’ve got you. Hang on to me,” he muttered.
The shaking around them diminished, but her insides still quaked like mad. “You must think I’m the biggest scaredy cat you’ve ever met.”
She felt the smile against her scalp. “I’ve met worse.”
“How much longer is this storm going to last?” she asked.
“The rest of the night, I should think.”
She groaned into his pectoral, which flexed in an impressive display of bulging muscle.
“Hungry?” he asked her.
“No. You?”
“I ate a little while ago.”
They lay together in silence for a moment, listening to the storm. Then he said quietly, “Try to get some sleep.”
She almost confessed that she didn’t want to go back to sleep because she was afraid of a repeat of her dream from before, but she bit it back.
“Do you need me to stay with you?”
“I’m a CIA analyst on a mission with a Navy SEAL team. I can survive my nightmares.”
He chuckled. “You don’t have to prove how tough you are to me.”
Another gust struck the cabin and she stared worriedly at the rafters overhead. “Is the roof going to stay on?”
“I think it is. This place may look like a dump, but it’s solid.”
“We’re going to have to find out who owns it and send a thank-you note.”
Cole grunted as if thank-you notes weren’t part of his job description. He shifted his weight, turning fully onto his back, and Nissa found herself rolling toward him as the mattress sagged beneath his greater weight. She braced herself to stop the roll and froze in dismay as she realized she’d planted her hand on his stomach. Ridges of carved marble formed beneath her palm before she managed to jerk it away from him. Good grief. Touching him was like sticking her hand into a volcano.
Sharp awareness of how much bigger than she he was, in every dimension, made lust shoot through her nether regions, hot and liquid, and nearly as disorienting as her dream.
Had they actually kissed, or had that been part of her dream, too? Nissa could swear she still felt him on her mouth, still tasted him on her tongue. And her face around her mouth definitely felt razor burned. Or maybe that was just chapped skin from the wind and salt water. Confused, she stared at the silhouette of his lips barely visible beside her.
He clicked his flashlight on and shined it up at the underside of the roof, exposed beyond the rafters. Methodically, he ran the light over every inch of the ceiling.
“How does it look?” she asked.
He turned toward her, turning the flashlight with him, abruptly blinding her in its brilliant LED beam. “So far, so good.”
“Could you get that light out of my eyes, please?” She threw her hand up to shield her face.
It clicked off and total blackness descended over them, making her lurch in alarm. Even as a kid, she’d been scared of the dark. She’d mostly grown out of it as an adult. Mostly.
“Easy, Nissa. I’ve got you.” He rolled toward her, and she was swept up against his delicious body, his arms firm and protective around her.
Oh. My. God. He felt every bit as amazing in real life as he did in her dream.
Out of the darkness, Cole murmured against Nissa’s temple, “I promise I’ll keep you safe. No harm will come to you on my watch. You don’t have to be afraid.” His low voice was raw silk, caressing her skin and sending cascades of shivers down her spine.
They lay like that for several minutes, neither one moving, Nissa barely daring to breathe. The sexual tension between them stretched tighter and tighter until she thought it had to snap. Terrified of what that would mean, she cast about in her mind for something to say. Something to distract both of them from this endless, insane moment of raging mutual lust.
“I had the strangest dream,” she blurted.
“How strange?”
“You and I were swimming underwater. And we could breathe the water. You were some sort of sea-god. Poseidon, maybe.”
“I like this dream. And I do have a trident. Although mine is only on my SEAL pin and not real.”
He’d been all real in the dream, that was for sure. Just remembering the way she’d burned for him made her forehead break into a sweat now.
“Tell me more about this dream.”
Hah. As if she would confess in a million years about them being naked and crawling all over each other.
“That’s all there was. We were underwater, but we weren’t drowning. The water was clear and warm and bright turquoise. It looked as if we were near a tropical shore, not the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of a hurricane.”
“Good choice. Yesterday, those were the roughest seas I’ve ever seen.”
“So I’m not crazy to have been scared out of my mind?”
“Not at all. That was a daunting ride, and climbing aboard the Anna Belle with her so close to capsizing would have scared the bravest soul.”
“Were you afraid?”
His features twitched into a frown. “We’re trained during a mission to set feelings like fear aside. They get in the way of the work. But I did register that it was a dangerous situation in which we all could easily have died.”
She turned his words over in her mind, applying the filters her years as a CIA analyst had honed to a fine edge. It was probably as close as she would ever come to hearing a SEAL admit to being scared. And she had heard that SEALs were taught techniques for fear and pain control.
Cole murmured, startling her out of her analysis, “There had to be more to your dream.”
“How do you know? It was my dream.”
His low voice was soft like suede caressing her skin. “I know because you all but tore my clothes off and had your wicked way with me.”
Hot shame flooded her face. He knew. Cole knew exactly what she’d dreamed. Every sordid, sexy detail of her unconscious fantasy. She was never going to be able to look him in the eye again. Ever. Humiliation tasted sour in the back of her mouth, and an urge roared through her to curl up in a little ball, pull the quilt over her head and never come out from under it.
Without warning he rolled off the bed and the quilt lifted off of her abruptly, letting in a rush of cold air. She squeaked, but just as suddenly, the quilt was tossed back over her. She yanked it up around her neck, not that it would shield her from what he knew about her now.
“Where are you going?” she choked out.
“Back to the main room to check the water level outside. It’s my turn on the watch. I only came in here because I heard you making...sounds.” He added in a rush, “I wanted to make sure you were all right. That’s all.”
What kind of sounds had she been making? The way his voice had hitched over the word had suspicions leaping to mind that heaped embarrassment on top of her humiliation. Horror poured over her, her own personal ice bucket over the head. Some of that smoking-hot embrace had been real? Oh, God. How much of it? “What did I...what did we...”
“Do?” Cole murmured down at her. “Enough to seriously consider doing it again someday but not so much that you need to go looking for a shotgun just yet.”
She pulled the quilt up over her head then. But it didn’t stop her from hearing Cole’s quiet laughter as the bedroom door opened and he slipped out of the room, leaving her alone with her new best friends Shame and Self-recrimination.
Chapter 4 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Cole made it out to the living room before he let go of the breath he’d been holding. Damn, that had been a near miss with total disaster. When he’d tried to wake up Nissa and she’d grabbed him, pulled him down on top of her and then all but crawled down his throat, he’d been in grave danger of succumbing to his attraction to her.
He abruptly understood the saying about a person’s world tilting on its axis. He felt off-balance, physically and emotionally, but also on some deeper, more fundamental level. As if his world would never be quite the same again. Which was doubly strange given that he considered himself to be the most thoroughly grounded of men, stable, unshakable and sure of who and what he was.
But that woman...throwing herself at him like that...the way she’d felt in his arms...the things she’d made him feel... This was uncharted territory for him.
Hell, any living, breathing man couldn’t fail to notice how fantastic she’d looked in that curve-hugging wet suit. Even with the hood up, she’d still been beautiful, and not many people could claim that. It wasn’t just the delicacy of her facial bones, either. It was those eyes. Huge and sapphire blue, they were impossible to look away from.
And when she’d wrapped her entire, slender body around him, drawing him into her, opening all of herself to him—
Stop it, he commanded himself. She was a job. Correction, a colleague. He would tear a new one in any of his guys who messed with her on the job. He had to hold himself to the same standard. He prowled around Bass, sprawled out on a bedroll in front of the stove, and went over to the window beside the front door to peer out a crack between the boards.
The water was coming up far too close for comfort. Hour by hour, the floodwaters had been swallowing the steps up to the raised platform. Only two steps were left. Jessamine had better pass on by soon, or they were going to be swimming in here.
He’d thought Bass’s suggestion to put a bunch of long planks up in the rafters had been overkill, but now he saw the logic. If the cabin flooded, they could climb up on the makeshift perch and pick up another six feet of protection from the storm surge.
Bass had also insisted they stow the ax up there, too. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for people to drown in their attics when they didn’t have the tools to break through their roofs. Lord, he would hate to have to go out in the storm, though. The wind had howled like a banshee for most of the day.
Cole glanced at his watch. Almost time for another update from the weather service on the storm. He went to the kitchen table where Ashe had set up the field radio and put on the headphones. He powered up the unit and listened in relief as the hourly report indicated that the eye of the storm had passed just west of New Orleans and Jessamine was beginning to weaken as it moved inland. They should get heavy rain and wind through the night, but sometime tomorrow, the worst of the hurricane should spin itself out and move on.
Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes. It had been no joke to get caught out in a major storm like this. Had they not found this sturdy cabin, they would likely have died, if not from drowning or exposure, then from flying debris.
The report went on to say that the eye wall had spared the city the worst of the wind damage, but unleashed a deluge of rain upon the hapless city. The new and improved levees, post-Katrina, were holding, and the city’s pumping system was dealing with the worst of the floodwater so far, but the city was without power and expected to be that way for days. Civilians and evacuees would not be allowed to return to their homes for at least another seventy-two hours.
He moved back to his post peering out the window. His flashlight beam turned the rain into a sheet of crystal particles flying past him horizontally. Everything beyond the porch was swirling, angry water. In the past hour or two, he’d started imagining that he felt the cypress pilings swaying slightly in the killer currents.
The foundation of the home only had to hold a little while longer. High tide was due in another hour, and then hopefully the water would start back down. Hopefully.
His lonely vigil gave him way too much time to think about his sexy encounter with the hot CIA analyst. He couldn’t shake the feel of her lithe body beneath his, her arms wrapped round him like she never wanted to let go, her mouth moving restlessly against his as if she couldn’t get enough of the taste of him.
He was by no means a monk. But he never had found a woman who was intelligent enough to hold his interest for the long term and who also was mellow enough to deal with his more autocratic tendencies. It was hard to break old habits, and he’d been a team leader for a long time. He was used to giving orders and having them followed. Even he knew that made him rotten husband material.
So over the years he’d settled for occasional friends with benefits, women he saw between missions and who wouldn’t question him about when he might leave or might return. He’d closed off the part of himself that would have enjoyed a family and a home, and he had become the job.
Which was all well and good as long as he had the job. But he was coming up on twenty years of active duty service and eligibility for retirement. In the current environment of budget cuts and force restructuring, he had no reason to believe he would be allowed to serve more than twenty years. This was his last year, and he’d decided to spend it in the field with his brothers and the missions he loved so much.
Midnight came and went, and he let Bass and Ashe sleep through their shifts on watch. They were both excellent operators and fine men. Asher Konig had found the woman for him and was deliriously happy with her, and Bass loved the cars he restored as much as any woman. Neither of them seemed to feel a hole in their lives.
And neither had he until Nissa Beck wrapped herself around him and all but begged him to take her in every sexy, dirty way he could think of. All of a sudden, he was vividly aware of the sacrifices he’d made for his work over the years, the loneliness, the coldness of the life he’d chosen. Sure, he had all the camaraderie he wanted with his fellow SEALs. But they didn’t comfort a guy in the dark when the nightmares came calling, and they didn’t make a home.
More disturbed than he cared to admit to himself, he watched the storm pass by. It was just outside, inches away, on the other side of a thin pane of glass and a few boards, but it didn’t touch him. It raged all round him, but he stayed safe inside this shell of a cabin, isolated and alone.
The rest of his life yawned before him, as lonely and isolated as this, and for once, he couldn’t push his fear of it away with an admonition to himself that he had years left before the end of life as a SEAL.
Now the end was only a few months away, looming bigger and more terrifying than the hurricane outside.
* * *
It was nearly morning before Bass woke with a start, looked at his watch, and swore. “Why didn’t you wake me up, boss? I missed my watch.”
Cole turned to him. “I was wide-awake, so I decided to let you guys sleep.”
The quiet conversation roused Ashe, which was no surprise. SEALs were notoriously light sleepers. He asked, “How’s the storm doing?”
“The worst of it has passed.”
“Did it hit New Orleans?” Ashe asked quickly.
His wife, Sam, was a native and had refused to evacuate. But Ashe had convinced her to go to the naval station to ride out the storm in a hardened building close to the base hospital. Sam was seven months pregnant, and Ashe was having no part of anything bad happening to her or their baby.
“Jessamine slid west of the city. New Orleans is still taking a lot of rain and some wind damage, but the levees are holding.”
“Thank God,” Ashe breathed.
“She’s fine,” Cole replied. “Sam’s tucked into SEAL Ops, and none of the guys will let anything happen to her.”
Bass chimed in, “A bunch of them know how to deliver babies, too.”
Ashe scowled. “Sam’s under strict orders not to have this kid until I’m there to deliver it.”
Cole grinned. “And did you have a conversation with your son about that? Did you explain to him that he’s not supposed to come until you get home?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I did.”
Bass and Cole both laughed and ribbed Ashe about what a pushover of a father he was going to be as dawn broke outside. They ate tuna fish straight from the can—it wasn’t the most appetizing breakfast Cole’d ever had, but it was a whole lot better than some of the swill that had passed for food in his career.
Nissa wandered out of the bedroom around the same time the rain stopped, around nine in the morning. “Is it over?” she asked, her voice husky with sleep and sexy as hell.
Dear God, she was irresistible with her hair—which turned out to be wildly curly when released from its braid—tangled around her face, the formfitting leggings and turtleneck she’d been given to wear under her wet suit leaving nothing to his vivid imagination. His gaze slid up her body hungrily, taking in every detail of her figure, before lifting to her face and—oh, sh—
She was watching him examine every inch of her. Her eyes were wide and startled, but as he gazed into them they went dark and sultry.
Dammit. She was thinking about her dream and that smoking-hot embrace they’d shared. And she knew darned good and well that he was thinking about the exact same thing. He tore his gaze away from hers, but that wasn’t much better. He looked down and couldn’t help but notice her chest rising and falling in short little gasps. Did she have to get so turned on every time she looked at him? It was really starting to mess with his head. And he wasn’t going to be able to stand up without embarrassing himself for too much longer.
In fact, he moved over to the couch and sat down just in case.
“Hungry?” Ashe asked her from behind Cole.
“Yes. What’ve you got?”
Ashe put on a cheesy fake French accent. “I have for zee mademoiselle a delicious tuna fish on zee half can. Or I can offer to her zee beans of later making music.”
Nissa’s laugh was as musical and appealing as the rest of her. “I’ll take the tuna, thanks.”
“Good choice,” Bass commented, opening the stove door to add more wood to the fire.
Nissa settled on a chair that put her knee about six inches from Cole’s. Was she trying to torment him? He was supposed to be the ice man. Nothing rattled him, and nothing ever shook his vaunted cool. He shifted uncomfortably, putting a few more inches between them, hoping he was subtle enough about it not to draw his guys’ attention. He stared fixedly into the fire, determined not to give them any fodder to harass him or, more important, to harass Nissa.
The iron stove door clanged shut, startling him into looking up at Bass. The guy was smirking knowingly. Dammit. At least he’d had the decency to keep his amusement to himself and not embarrass Nissa. Cole made a mental note to have a private word with Ashe and Bass later to keep their remarks to themselves and be respectful of her.
“How much longer until we can get out of here?” she asked no one in particular.
He glanced at Bastien, who was the local and more accustomed to hurricanes than the rest of them.
Bass shrugged. “Depends on how long it takes the water to go down. Could be a day, could be a week. When we can move out will depend on where we plan to move to.”
“Meaning what?” Cole asked.
“Are we heading back to the boat, or are we going to hike inland until we hit civilization?” Bass responded.
“What are the odds of stumbling across a marina out here where we can refuel?”
“Low,” Bass admitted. “Even if we had a water navigation chart, when a big storm comes through the bayou, the scouring action of the tides and the storm surge cut new waterways and clog others till they’re impassable.”
“So our best bet is to abandon the RIB and make our way overland toward New Orleans?” Cole asked.
Ashe chimed in. “The boat was out of gas. If we use it, we’ll have to row all the way back to town. My best guess is we’re a hundred miles west of New Orleans.”
“So far?” Nissa exclaimed.
Ashe nodded. “Weather reports said Jessamine passed west of New Orleans, and her eye wall was about sixty miles across. I figure we didn’t catch the eye wall, because as sturdy as this place is, even it wouldn’t have withstood a direct hit. So we’re at least fifteen to twenty miles west of the path of the storm center. That puts us a good hundred miles or more west of New Orleans.”
The others launched into a brainstorming session of possible ways to get back to New Orleans, but all Cole could think about was Nissa’s knee so close to his. Who obsessed about knees, anyway? And yet, here he was, taking note of how slender hers was and how perfectly proportioned to her legs.
Eventually, Bass distracted him by saying, “What do you think, boss? Do we radio for help or try to make it back on our own?”
He answered, “The folks back in New Orleans are going to have their hands full with rescue operations. No matter how hard the government tries to convince everyone to leave, you know a bunch of the locals were too stubborn to go.” The others nodded in commiseration. “We’re able bodied, uninjured and capable of taking care of ourselves. We don’t need to divert resources to help us when civilians are dying. What’s out here by way of roads or towns?”
Bastien pulled out the laminated maps that had been provided for this mission, and Cole was relieved to move over to the kitchen table to pore over the maps with his men. Close proximity to Nissa was doing weird stuff to his blood pressure.
Cole pulled out their GPS locator. “We’ve only got the one battery that’s in the GPS to work with. The spare batteries got wet somewhere along the way. Let’s get a solid position fix and then figure out where the closest place is that might have vehicles and gasoline.”
As Ashe had guessed, they were, indeed, about a hundred miles west of New Orleans along the Gulf Coast. But what shocked Cole was that they were nearly fifteen miles inland north of the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area. “How did we get so far north?” he asked.
Bass answered, “Storm surge. All this coastal area, here, was underwater by the time we came ashore, and we motored right over it.”
“We’re only about three miles southwest of this town, Gueydan. Can we hike to it overland, or will the area between us and it be flooded?” Cole asked him.
Bass shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Ashe looked over at Nissa, seated on the couch. “What about her? Do we leave her behind and come back for her once we’ve got transportation?”
Cole was stunned by the visceral negative reaction in his gut at the notion of leaving her behind. Aloud, he answered, “SEALs don’t leave anyone behind, and for now, she’s one of us. Besides, she’s had a hell of a scare—several of them, in fact. Let’s not traumatize her any further by abandoning her out here in the middle of the bayou.”
Nissa flashed him a brilliant smile that all but had him striding across the room to wrap her in his arms and capture all that joyous relief for himself.
They ended up having to wait a full twenty-four hours for the floodwaters to go down and for the sodden land to reemerge. They passed the time making repairs to the cabin, inside and out, by way of thanks to the owner for the shelter. Bright and early the next morning, however, they packed their gear and headed out.
Cole was plenty glad to get out of the small confines of the cabin. Its four walls hadn’t been anywhere near big enough to contain the towering attraction between him and Nissa, and he was on the verge of losing his mind before they finally got outside and on the move, away from the momentary insanity that had been their impromptu hurricane party.
For the first time he could remember, he was antsy as all heck to get back to civilization and be done with this mission. And it had everything to do with a petite blonde CIA analyst and her big blue eyes.
Chapter 5 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
The three-mile hike to Gueydan turned into a six-hour nightmare of dead ends, doubling back and wading through waist-deep water. Nissa didn’t think the trek from hell was ever going to end. She was still dreadfully sore from the last hike with these guys, but she was embarrassed to complain about being too uncomfortable to go on. They were toodling along like this was a stroll in the park. Which she supposed it was for them. Bass was actually whistling—cheerfully, no less—as he led the way forward. Instead, she suffered in silence and resolved to work out for about a month solid before she volunteered to come out into the field with a bunch of Navy SEALs again.
The only thing that kept the day from being completely miserable was that every time she stumbled, Cole’s hand was there to steady her. Every time she thought she couldn’t go another step, he called a rest break. Every time her throat was parched, he held out a canteen to her. His attentiveness was so constant and kind that it nearly made her weep more than once.
She knew intellectually that she was holding back the team and that Cole was only making sure she kept moving. But to have a man like him even aware of her, let alone concerned about her, was a fantasy come true. She tried to enjoy the attention, but before long it was hard to focus on anything except the burning agony in her leg muscles and the way they instantly stiffened up whenever the group stopped to rest.
Cole’s touch was never anything but respectful and proper, but it didn’t stop her heart from racing every time his strong fingers grasped her elbow or his palm came to rest lightly in the small of her back. His presence beside her was nothing short of devastating. He filled her senses and her mind, as raw and elemental as the stormy skies and wrecked landscape around them. Trees were snapped in half like twigs, tree branches lay everywhere and every man-made structure they came across had suffered major damage of some kind or another.
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Cindy Dees
Their mission: deliver a ruthless spy to justice.But can they outlast a storm as dangerous as their target?Tracking an elusive Russian operative, CIA agent Nissa Beck has no choice but to ask for help as a hurricane descends on New Orleans. She turns to alpha navy SEAL Cole Perriman. Used to conquering impossible odds, now he must protect beautiful Nissa. But as unstoppable storms and passions rage, there’s more at stake for them than survival.
Their mission: deliver a ruthless spy to justice
But can they outlast a storm as dangerous as their target?
Tracking an elusive Russian operative, CIA agent Nissa Beck has no choice but to ask for help as a hurricane descends on New Orleans. She turns to alpha navy SEAL Cole Perriman. Used to conquering impossible odds, now he must protect beautiful Nissa. But as unstoppable storms and passions rage, there’s more at stake for them than survival.
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author CINDY DEES is the author of more than fifty novels. She draws upon her experience as a US Air Force pilot to write romantic suspense. She’s a two-time winner of the prestigious RITA® Award for romance fiction, a two-time winner of the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Book Award for Romantic Suspense and an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Best Author Award nominee. She loves to hear from readers at www.cindydees.com (http://www.cindydees.com).
Her Mission with a SEAL
Cindy Dees
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07862-7
HER MISSION WITH A SEAL
© 2018 Cynthia Dees
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
“Grab the ladder!” someone shouted faintly.
Nissa grabbed it with both hands and wrapped her legs around the rope, hanging on with superhuman strength she didn’t know she possessed. God bless adrenaline.
A big green shape came up the ladder. It didn’t stop at her feet, though. It moved up behind her until the SEAL’s head was at her waist.
“Keep going!” Cole shouted.
Not. A. Chance.
No way was she letting go of the rope to keep climbing.
He climbed until his head was level with hers, his body spooning hers, his longer arms grasping the rope ladder around her slender frame. Warmth from his body penetrated the back of her wet suit as he plastered his entire body against hers.
“One foot. Just put your right foot up one rung for me,” he shouted into her ear as another huge gust of wind buffeted them. “It’ll be calmer on the deck of the ship.” His breath was warm against her exposed cheek. He felt alive. Vital. Real in the midst of this unreal nightmare.
* * *
Code: Warrior SEALs: Meet these fierce warriors who take on the most dangerous secret missions around the world!
* * *
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Dear Reader (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708),
I’m super excited to finally give you Commander Cole “Frosty” Perriman’s story! You’ve waited through a bunch of books for him to get his very own happily-ever-after, and you’ve totally earned this one.
Nissa Beck is a CIA psychological operations officer, and the only woman I can imagine giving Cole a run for his money. But can she break through his icy reserve to find the passion lurking beneath? I don’t envy her the task...
And may I take this moment to apologize for the opening scene? It positively gave me the shivers to write. You might want to get a few bland crackers and nibble on them as you start this book. I recommend a hot beverage of your choice, too. And maybe a cozy chair next to a warm fire. Oh, and a blanket. There. Now we’re all ready to settle in and enjoy the wild ride as Cole and Nissa chase down one of the most dangerous men in the world and dare to love each other.
Happy reading!
Cindy
Contents
Cover (#u668f4863-a6a6-5690-8050-f2519df12a69)
Back Cover Text (#u31ea9f99-0b5c-59d4-8924-e289a6f5c2a2)
Author Bio (#ua2ffa77a-5816-5764-8bdd-0c4c765de77a)
Title Page (#u654ed41c-6688-56f5-97a9-9fa86bfc7ae2)
Copyright (#uf065946f-4ff8-5738-9a45-397cff3d22fe)
Introduction (#uc8167f67-f4aa-5a19-9c11-7d0d9b6b6000)
Dear Reader (#udb6a63ee-b679-5f72-bce1-20b8eb6dd0bf)
Chapter 1 (#uc29ae9f1-d859-5348-91b8-bd528282d28a)
Chapter 2 (#u5c258a7f-4c4d-5ee6-a616-f1cb306ec093)
Chapter 3 (#uac43980a-02b2-5911-914f-bcfcd2ee2da1)
Chapter 4 (#u78e4bfaa-1b5e-507e-b9d2-b51582c177e4)
Chapter 5 (#ua28ba685-049e-547c-8bd3-63b58198e9c2)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Nissa Beck had done some crazy things in her life, but sailing into the teeth of a rapidly intensifying hurricane in a tiny dinghy—in the dark—with a trio of Navy SEALs was right up there on the stupid scale. They’d actually strapped her into the boat so she wouldn’t get tossed out as their craft went nearly vertical climbing the wave faces towering overhead and then plunged nearly vertically down the waves crashing into black troughs of icy seawater.
Throat-paralyzing terror was the only reason she hadn’t screamed herself hoarse already. The horror of being out here at the mercy of the wildly tossing ocean was indescribable. As was the sheer size of the waves. They were small mountains. Literally. Except for the ones that periodically collapsed on top of them, burying them in frigid seawater for endless seconds until they popped back up to the surface and could breathe again. In short, it was a living nightmare.
She’d swallowed more seawater than she could fathom and thrown most of it back up along with the last meal she’d consumed three hours ago. A lifetime away in a safe place. On land. Not in the path of Hurricane Jessamine.
But her target had fled the United States and was out here somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico making his getaway on a container ship call the Anna Belle. The ship wasn’t one of the super giants, just a relatively small cargo ship. The manifest said she sailed with a crew of twenty, was loaded with wheat below decks and carried 120 containers stacked above decks.
What the manifest didn’t say was that she also carried a passenger. A man named Markus Petrov. One of the most elusive spies ever to operate on American soil. A colleague of Nissa’s, an American spy named Max Kuznetsov whose mother had been killed by Petrov, had spent nearly a decade tracking the guy and had spent most of the past three years undercover in Petrov’s criminal organization learning his true identity.
It was a brilliant setup, actually. Petrov ran a Russian crime gang and used its proceeds to finance his extracurricular espionage activities. In the meantime, he hid behind the Russian mafia, who fiercely protected his identity.
Max and a team of Navy SEALs had destroyed most of Petrov’s criminal organization last week in a spectacular shoot-out deep in the bayous of south Louisiana. But Petrov had disappeared.
Unfortunately, Max also needed to go to ground, along with his fiancée, a psychic who had helped him identify Markus Petrov at long last. Until Petrov was apprehended, the two of them were in extreme danger and had been whisked into federal protective custody. This left no subject matter experts on Petrov except Nissa to help with the manhunt.
She’d been tracking Max’s progress in the Petrov case for years and was the CIA’s second most knowledgeable analyst when it came to the Russian spy. Which was why she was out here tonight doing her darnedest to drown. The SEALs needed someone who could make a positive ID on Petrov when they captured him on the Anna Belle.
The cargo ship had gone silent the moment it crossed into international waters, and the only reason they knew where it was now was compliments of a hurricane hunter aircraft that’d made a visual sighting of the ship on its last pass through Hurricane Jessamine that afternoon.
Were it not for that chance sighting, nobody would have any idea where Petrov and the ship he’d fled on had disappeared to.
The ship’s manifest said it was bound for the Dominican Republic with food and humanitarian supplies. Perhaps that part was true, at any rate.
One of the SEALs had a radio headset plastered to his ears. He shouted a course correction back to the muscular man wrestling the tiller, the team leader, Commander Cole Perriman.
He was easily six foot three and built like a god. The high-tech wet suit currently clinging to his torso was an exercise in truth in advertising. Every beautiful, perfect muscle was clearly outlined for her viewing pleasure. Thank you, God.
At the moment his hood was pushed back, and his short dark hair was plastered to his skull. Still, his face was handsome and rugged. She knew from earlier that his eyes were pale, icy blue and practically glowed against his darkly tanned skin.
The members of his team called him Frosty. Although the nickname initially made her think of cheerful snowmen, after two minutes in his presence, she understood the moniker. The guy’s nerves were made of pure ice.
Their pitifully small craft topped a massive swell, and she thought she caught sight of a black shape looming ahead. But then the rain squall around them intensified, and they slid down the back side of the swell into a black trough bordered by massive walls of water on all sides. Lord, the ocean was big. She felt tiny and insignificant in the face of these gigantic waves. She was not a particularly religious person, but a prayer entered her head now to whatever deity might hear her plea to please save them all from this insanity.
The only good part about being down in the troughs was they got a momentary break from the screaming winds trying to tear their faces off. The rain, blowing at a hundred miles per hour or more, felt like a power washer trying to scrub the flesh off her bones.
She would be more inclined to whimper in fear were it not for how unconcerned these guys seemed about the storm. They were self-possessed and untalkative, exuding a certain cool self-confidence.
“There’s the Anna Belle!” the one called Bass shouted as they topped another huge, heaving swell.
“Where are its lights?” she shouted back.
Commander Perriman answered from behind her, “Good question. They may have lost power. If they’ve taken on enough water, they could have flooded their engines and backup electric generators.”
“That sounds bad” Nissa ventured to reply.
The SEAL called Ashe responded, managing to infuse his voice with dry irony, even while shouting over the storm, “It would suck to be them in a storm like this without power.”
The big twin motors on their rigid inflatable boat powered them up a half dozen more mountain-steep swells before they finally drew close to the darkened container ship. It was actually the scariest moment of the journey so far when a swell tilted the Anna Belle way over on its side toward them, a huge pile of containers looming overhead, threatening to topple the ship and kill them all.
“Suit up!” Perriman ordered the team. All the hoods came up. Nissa already had hers up, and it held in place the earbuds and throat microphones the team would use to communicate once they boarded the Anna Belle. She covered her eyes with the night-vision goggles that had been stowed around her neck. The three men beside her leaped into lime-green relief against the heaving black sea.
“Ship’s listing pretty bad,” Perriman commented over their discrete radio frequency.
“Fifteen to eighteen degrees to the port side,” Ashe replied. He sounded like an expert sailor. “She’s looking top-heavy, too. With those containers stacked high like that, they act as a wall to catch the wind. Hurricane could blow the ship over if they get crossways of a big enough gust.”
Okay, that sounded really bad.
“Let’s get on and off her as fast as we can,” Perriman ordered. “I don’t like the looks of her seaworthiness.”
Great. The ship they were about to board was on the verge of capsizing and sinking. Just how every girl wanted to spend her Saturday night.
They tied off their craft to a cleat low on the hull of the Anna Belle, and then Bass, using welded rungs on the hull, climbed the side of the ship like a freaking monkey. He lowered a rope ladder from the deck down to them.
“Up you go, Nissa,” Cole ordered. He clipped a rope that Bass threw down onto the body harness they’d made her wear and which they’d used to lash her into their boat.
She looked up at the rope ladder swinging around over her head and gulped. He must have seen her hesitation because he moved up behind her and leaned forward to shout in her ear, off microphone, “I’ll be right behind you.”
Right. As if that was reassuring. At least she knew to grab the rope ladder from the side and not to try to go up it facing the rungs head-on. With one rope of the ladder against her cheek, she turned her feet pigeon-toed to climb the ladder.
It was okay for the first ten feet or so. But then the ship got sideways of a swell, and it tilted toward her sickeningly. The rope swung out into space. She wasn’t even over the SEALs’ boat anymore. Black water yawned below her. I’m going to die. Frozen in terror, she squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the ladder for dear life.
The ship tilted back the other way, and the ladder swung back toward the ship, slamming her into the cold steel hull. She lost her grip on the wet ladder and swung out to the side on the safety rope, smashing into the ship’s hull hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She screamed, but the sound was ripped away from her by a huge gust of wind and rain that hit her with the force of a fire hose.
“Grab the ladder!” someone shouted.
She opened her eyes and swung sickeningly out in space as the ship rolled again, black water reaching up to her and the listing ship looming above, as if it was about to come down on her head and drag her to the bottom of the sea.
Panic paralyzed her so completely that she couldn’t even form thoughts, let alone take action. She bumped along the hull of the ship as it tilted away from her, and by some miracle, she banged into something hard and rough. The rope ladder. She grabbed it with both hands and wrapped her legs around the rope, hanging on with superhuman strength she didn’t know she possessed. God bless adrenaline.
A big green shape came up the ladder. It didn’t stop at her feet, though. It moved up behind her until the figure’s head was at her waist.
“Keep going!” It was Cole.
Not. A. Chance.
No way was she letting go of the rope to keep climbing.
He climbed until his head was level with hers, his body spooning hers, his longer arms grasping the rope ladder around her slender frame. Warmth from his body penetrated the back of her wet suit as he plastered his entire body against hers.
“One foot. Just put your right foot up one rung for me,” he shouted into her ear as another huge gust of wind buffeted them. “It’ll be calmer on the deck of the ship.” His breath was warm against her exposed cheek. He felt alive. Vital. Real in the midst of this unreal nightmare.
He patiently talked her through the rest of the climb, one hand and one foot at a time. Bass kept tension on her safety rope from above, helping her make the climb, and Cole steadied her with his big body and strong arms, protecting her from the worst of the storm.
It took a lifetime, but eventually Bass hauled her onto the deck beside him. She lay on her belly and although there was nothing left in her stomach, she dry heaved anyway, so terrified she didn’t think she was ever going to be the same again.
Of course, Ashe jogged up the ladder as if it was a walk in the damned park. The party all aboard, they knelt together in the shadow of a pile of containers, shadows among the shadows in their black sea-land suits and black facial camo grease. Of course, she looked the same, her blond hair tucked under her neoprene hood, her skin blackened like theirs.
“Any sign of movement out here?” Perriman asked.
Bass replied, “Negative.”
The deck tilted steeply beneath her, and she looked down at water as the ship listed worse than ever.
“Man, she feels top-heavy,” Cole remarked.
Ashe replied, “She looks violently misloaded. Death trap. This storm gets much worse, and she’s going down.”
“Then let’s get our guy and get the heck off her,” Perriman ordered. “You have your orders.” He glanced at Nissa huddling miserably against a container and said off mike, “You’re with me.”
The team split up and ran off in different directions to search the ship. She and Cole were supposed to make their way to the bridge. He was going to have a word with the captain and obtain the guy’s cooperation—at gunpoint if necessary. The other team members would go below decks, searching the ship and making their way to the bridge by other means.
Hanging on to the deck rail with both hands, she followed Perriman aft toward the conning tower. In a storm this bad, they didn’t expect to see any crew above deck, and indeed, the open area between the tall stacks of shipping containers and the ship’s superstructure aft was deserted and dark.
Perriman stopped in front of a hatch, and she endured a nauseating roll by the Anna Belle way over to one side, the sickening pause while the ship teetered on the brink of capsizing, and then the roll back the other way.
How Cole unlocked the steel door, she had no idea. But she was relieved when he threw it open. She dived inside and helped him haul the heavy door shut against gravity as the ship rolled again. He threw the handle and latched the door behind them.
The relative quiet and the relief from the hammering pain of hurricane-driven rain was intense. The ship still rolled like a big dog beneath her feet, but in here, she couldn’t see the ocean and had less of a sense of being ready to capsize.
Perriman hand-signaled her to follow him. She nodded and fell in behind him as he raced silently up a set of metal stairs. He paused at the doorway to the next deck, peering through a tiny window before opening the door. Bracing herself against the wall as the ship rocked, she followed him into what looked like a small dining room.
“Stay here,” Cole breathed.
Gladly. She nodded and he disappeared behind a swinging door into the kitchen, according to the ship’s diagrams that they’d studied on the helicopter ride out here. Perriman swung back into view, staggering a little as the ship heaved.
“Clear,” he announced.
Deck by deck, the two of them cleared their way up the superstructure toward the bridge. Oddly, they didn’t run into a single crew member. Maybe the captain had sent everyone to strap themselves in the sleeping quarters below decks to ride out the storm. Cole had mentioned that such a thing was possible, so she wasn’t completely freaked out by how deserted the command portion of the ship was.
They turned the corner to the last flight of steps leading to the bridge. Unlike the living areas below, this space was guaranteed to have crew members in it. Cole paused, checked over his shoulder that she was ready with her pistol drawn and then he charged the bridge.
She went in on his heels, awkwardly spinning left as the deck tilted underfoot to cover Cole’s back as he spun to cover the right half of the space.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed.
The bridge was deserted.
From up here, she could see outside again, and the ship rolled dangerously far over onto its side as she glanced out. From this high up in the air, the list was even more pronounced, and she all but froze again in panic.
Perriman jabbed at his throat mike. “Bridge is abandoned. I repeat. Abandoned. Report if able.”
Bass and Ashe both reported immediately that they’d been unable to find any crew members aboard the vessel.
“Complete your search and join us on the bridge,” he ordered.
She looked over the panel of controls. Every needle was at zero. The ship was completely shut down. This could not be good. “Can we start the engines or something?” she asked.
“Diesel engines are not as simple to start as flipping a switch. But maybe I could get a generator online.” Perriman fiddled with a set of controls to one side of the ship’s wheel, and then swore quietly. She gathered that meant they weren’t going to get any lights on.
“Batteries are dead, too.”
“Has the crew abandoned ship?” Nissa asked.
Perriman frowned. “They sent no distress signals.”
“Maybe there was no time to send one?”
“The ship’s still afloat. Granted not for long the way she’s listing, but still. We could send a signal right now if we had even an inch of battery power. I can’t believe they ran the batteries all the way down before they got out a call for help.”
The door opened behind them and Nissa spun fast, jumpy as heck, weapon drawn. It was Bass and Ashe.
“Funny thing, boss,” Bass said. “The generators looked like someone took a sledgehammer to them. The batteries were pulled free of their moorings and smashed up, too.”
“The engines?”
“I couldn’t see any damage at a glance,” Ashe replied. “But I got nothing when I tried to start up the diagnostic panel at the engineer’s panel. I looked under the console and found a bunch of ripped out wires beneath it.”
Curious, Nissa dropped to her knees to take a peek under the dashboard in front of her. “Uh, guys. All the wires and conduits I’m seeing down here are trashed, too.”
“So the ship’s been sabotaged,” Cole responded. “Why?”
The ship leaned particularly far onto its port side just then and everyone grabbed on to something to stay upright. She stared in dread at the tall stacks of containers tilting perilously.
“I’ve being doing weight and balance calculations on ships my whole naval career, and I’ve never seen a ship this badly loaded. The manifest showed the cargo spread out in three layers over the entire deck, not stacked six high all afore midships like this,” Ashe complained. “She feels too light in the water for the weight listed on the manifest, too.”
Cole looked at him keenly. “What are you saying?”
Ashe shrugged asking instead, “Hey, Bass. Are the holds full to the brim with wheat like the manifest said?”
“Negative. All the holds are empty.”
“Holy hell,” Ashe breathed. “Sir, we have to get off this ship immediately. She’s in imminent danger of capsizing.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, the storm’s getting worse. Fast. The idea was to turn this ship around and sail it back to New Orleans with the prisoner in custody.”
Ashe replied urgently, “Even if we could get the engines running, this ship is top-heavy as hell and has no ballast below decks. I can’t believe she hasn’t gone over already. I’m telling you, sir, we have to get off the Anna Belle now.”
“And you’re sure no one but us is still aboard?” Cole asked.
Bass and Ashe both nodded and murmured in the affirmative.
Perriman ordered tersely, “Let’s get out of here, ASAP.”
After that, it was all elbows and assholes as they raced downstairs, Ashe’s warning ringing in Nissa’s ears.
The trip back down the rope ladder of doom wasn’t nearly as bad for Nissa because she was so bloody relieved to be getting off the Anna Belle. She’d had enough of those rolls and those endless, breathless pauses while the ship debated capsizing.
She landed in the SEALs’ tiny boat with relief. They might be a cork in this vessel, but it was better than being aboard the doomed Anna Belle.
They untied their mooring lines and motored away from the big ship. Nissa had never breathed so big a sigh of relief to be away from the Anna Belle.
“Nearest land?” Cole asked from his position at the tiller.
“Louisiana coast. Nearly a hundred nautical miles,” Bass answered.
Yikes. Even traveling at twenty knots, it would take them hours to make shore. Hours for the storm to intensify around them.
They’d been lucky to catch a ride outbound on a big Coast Guard cutter heading into the gulf to take measurements of the approaching storm, but they’d made no arrangements for a lift back to New Orleans. The plan had been to sail the Anna Belle back.
“Do we have enough fuel to make it?” Ashe asked practically.
Oh, hell. Now she had running out of gas to worry about.
“Close, but enough,” Cole replied casually.
Jeez. What else could go wrong?
“Give me a course heading for the nearest land,” Cole ordered Bass.
While Cole steered, the other two men put up a framework of curved poles and stretched a tarp over them, lashing it down tight. It created a low clamshell covering over the vessel. It didn’t keep out all the rain, but it knocked down the worst of the water and wind. They still had to use a motorized pump to empty water out of the hull, and the ride was rough as all get-out. But after the rolling of the Anna Belle, this freezing-cold misery was a boon. And their boat wasn’t trying to capsize.
Until Bass, on the radio again, shouted something directly into Cole’s ear off headset that put a grim look on the man’s face.
Cole ordered over the radio, “Everyone don a life vest and let’s go ahead and put Nissa into an exposure kit.”
An exposure kit turned out to be a body-sized pouch of some slick neoprene-like material that encompassed her entire body and attached to the donut-shaped life vest the guys inflated around her neck.
“What’s this for?” she asked as Cole checked the connections around her neck.
He paused at his task to gaze at her from a range of about one foot. Lord, he was gorgeous with those lean cheeks and firm jaw. His voice rumbled comfortingly. “If you end up in the water, the kit provides a layer of insulation to extend how long you can survive hypothermia by hours or days. It also protects you from sharks. They can’t smell you through the material. In pockets attached to the interior of the bag are water, rations, a small desalinization kit, a GPS locator beacon, a mirror and an emergency radio. My team and I know how to climb into one in the water and bail out any seawater. But since you haven’t had the training, we’re popping you into yours now, to be safe. Try to think of it as a sleeping bag, and it won’t freak you out so bad.”
“Thanks.”
How did he know that being wrapped up in this giant condom was scaring her half to death? She’d always struggled with claustrophobia, and this situation wasn’t helping matters one little bit. She fought like crazy not to hyperventilate and hung on by a bare thread to the ability to breathe.
She muttered under her breath, “Please, God, don’t let me need this stupid contraption.”
Cole cracked the first smile she’d seen from him. Even in the dark, it was dazzling. “It’s purely a precaution.”
But when he had all four of them lash their safety harnesses together with rope and bungee cord, she had to wonder just how unnecessary a precaution it really was.
They finished the Boy Scout knot project before she asked on radio, “Does someone want to tell me why we’re suddenly preparing for disaster, here?”
Bass answered, “Jessamine has gone from a Category 1 to a Category 3 hurricane in the past few hours. Weather service is now forecasting that she’ll spin up into a high Cat 4 or Cat 5.”
“Isn’t that just special?” she responded sarcastically.
Everyone laughed.
Seriously? They could laugh while sailing around in the middle of a hurricane in a rowboat with motors?
The SEALs took turns at the tiller, wrestling the ocean until they became exhausted and had to switch out. The interminable journey settled into a steady-state nightmare, and the team chatted on headset to pass the time. The good news was the hurricane wind at their backs was blowing them landward at an impressive clip, shaving hours off their journey.
Ashe took the radio from Bass and had an earnest conversation with someone at the other end that culminated in him saying, “Let me know when you’ve run the numbers.”
Ashe piped up after a few minutes, “The Coast Guard has pulled the Anna Belle’s manifest and compared it against what we saw on the ship. She definitely left New Orleans with a belly full of wheat. But sometime in the past twenty-four hours, the ship’s crew must have dumped all of it overboard.”
That made everyone frown. The weight of the wheat low in the ship’s belly would have been critical to making the ship safe and stable.
“And,” Ashe continued, “the Coast Guard checked with the harbormaster. She left the port of New Orleans loaded three deep in containers across her entire deck, not six deep, all fore of the beam, like we found her. The crew of the ship moved the containers after they sailed. They intentionally built a high-profile stack that would catch the most wind.”
“Were they trying to sink the ship?” Nissa blurted.
Cole answered grimly. “Seems so.”
“And then there’s the missing crew and sabotaged engines,” Bass piped up.
“And no distress calls,” Cole added. “The crew definitely intended to scuttle the ship.”
“Oh, they’ll succeed,” Ashe responded. “Once Jessamine cranks up another ten feet of seas and another twenty knots of wind, that huge wall of containers is going to catch a gust and take the Anna Belle right over.”
“Assuming she doesn’t drift crossways of a couple big waves and break her beam first,” Bass commented. “Either way, that ship’s going down in the next few hours if she’s not already sunk.”
“But why?” Cole asked.
Nissa had an idea why. The others speculated, but discarded every idea they came up with. When they all fell silent, she spoke up reluctantly, “What if this was all an elaborate scheme to fake Markus Petrov’s death?”
The team turned as one to stare at her. “It’s a hell of an expensive ruse,” Cole replied. “Twenty million dollars plus or minus for the ship, several million dollars’ worth of wheat, and who knows what other cargo in the containers. Then there’s the cost of paying off the crew, and of making them all disappear. Something like a fifty-million-dollar escape route? That seems pretty improbable.”
“But that’s the point,” Nissa replied. “Markus Petrov is obsessive about secrecy. And goodness knows, he has fifty million bucks lying around to burn. The man has been a mobster for thirty years. My CIA colleague who got inside his outfit said the man was clearing a million dollars a week.”
Bass swore, then drawled, “I’m in the wrong business.”
“I thought all you cops are on the take,” Ashe teased the Cajun. Apparently, Bass had been called off military reserve status and reactivated as a SEAL recently. When he wasn’t on active duty, he was a civilian police officer.
“New Orleans Police Department has cleaned up its act in the past couple of decades, thank you very much,” Bass retorted.
“Indeed. They kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cole quipped.
The guys laughed, apparently oblivious of the monster storm spinning up around them. She envied them their ability to find humor in this nightmare.
Cole looked over at her in her exposure pouch. “The only problem with your theory that Petrov engineered the sinking of the Anna Belle is that no one knew he was aboard her. We were lucky to get a tip from one of Petrov’s guys we captured in the gun battle last week.”
“Or maybe that tidbit was intentionally leaked to us so we would believe he died when the Anna Belle turns up missing or is found sunk.”
“The ship will be tough to find,” Ashe offered. “We’re in close to eight thousand feet of water right now.”
Aww, jeez. She did not need to know that.
“What’s the next move Petrov will make, Nissa?” Cole asked.
All of a sudden, everyone was staring expectantly at her.
“I have no idea. I was only sent out here with you to make the ID on Petrov.”
She was one of the few people on earth who’d seen even a photograph of Markus Petrov, and it had been taken twenty years ago. The tech gang at Langley had run an aging simulator on the image, though, so she had a rough idea of what he would look like now. More important, she knew every detail of his life that the CIA had uncovered and could ask the right questions—and furthermore know if she was getting the right answers—to make the identification. And, of course, she was a trained psychological operations officer. She could probably manipulate the guy into talking when most other people could not.
Cole gave up his position at the tiller to Ashe and flopped down beside her, breathing hard. It took a minute or so for his respiration to return to normal, but then he said to her, “My orders are to capture Markus Petrov with extreme prejudice.” Meaning he had authorization to do whatever it took to catch the guy, no holds barred. He continued, “I’m going to need you to stay with my team until we catch up with him.”
But this was supposed to be a quick out-and-back mission for her. Fly to New Orleans. Make the ID. Fly back to Langley, Virginia, and resume her regularly scheduled life. She didn’t do field operations. At least, not this kind. As it was, the trip into the Gulf of Mexico to catch Petrov had been well beyond the scope of her orders. She definitely didn’t run around with Navy SEALs trying to get herself killed.
“I’m an analyst, not a field operative!” she protested. She didn’t even like being outdoors, let alone playing soldier.
“You’re a field operator now. Welcome to the big leagues, kid.”
Chapter 2 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Even Cole had to admit he was glad to see land as the coast of Louisiana came into sight, a low black line on the horizon. The hurricane was stalled offshore at the moment, and the last hour of motoring north had taken them out of the heart of the storm. For now. As long as Jessamine parked over the warm, shallow waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico, she would only grow in strength.
The breathtakingly huge swells had diminished to merely god-awful seas, and the first faint light of dawn was barely visible in the east.
What a hell of a night. Cole had never seen a ship so close to capsizing before. Climbing aboard the Anna Belle had wigged him out worse than he would ever admit. Every time she’d rolled onto her side, he’d been sure that was the one where she would keep on going and drag them all down to a watery death.
“So. Anyone got reward points at a decent resort along the coast we can cash in?” Bass asked drolly as they approached a line of cypress trees and grassy wetlands.
The guy was the team’s clown and great for morale. Cole had missed working with the Cajun. But then Cole had missed working in the field, period. This was his first op back as a team commander in four long years.
It figured that the mission had not gone to plan. At all. The target wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Cole had had to put his team in extreme peril to search the Anna Belle, the civilian with them had completely panicked and their egress plan had been shot to hell by the sabotage to the ship.
They’d caught a minor break when the hurricane stalled offshore, but he didn’t have any illusions that riding out a major hurricane in whatever improvised shelter they could find was going to be anything but ridiculously hazardous. They were far from clear of life-threatening danger. It was Cole’s job to adapt to whatever came their way, but he had to wonder if he was too rusty to be out here in the field anymore. Should he have anticipated these contingencies and planned better for them?
Right now, he had to get them as far inland and on as high ground as possible before Jessamine came calling. He put Bass at the prow to guide the Rigid Inflatable Boat ashore. Bastien “Bass” LeBlanc was native to this area and more familiar with these coastal waters than anyone else on the team.
To his surprise, Bass called back to Ashe to turn the RIB and parallel the coast. “What are you looking for?” Cole asked.
“Inlet. The storm surge is already flooding the edges of the bayou. If we motor ashore now, we’ll hit a submerged cypress stump and rip the bottom out of the boat.”
Nissa piped up. “What will an inlet look like? Can we help you spot one?”
“Two roughly parallel rows of trees leading inland,” Bass answered absently, staring shoreward through a big pair of binoculars.
“Weather report, Ashe?” Cole asked over the radios.
“Cat 3 and growing. Expected to start moving due north in the next few hours. Winds should hit before noon, and the eye wall should make landfall by evening.”
Damn. They could not catch a break on this mission! He checked the fuel gauges, which were perilously low, flirting with the red empty line.
“Is that an inlet?” Nissa called, pointing from inside her survival bag.
Cole squinted through a rain squall that had just sprung up, obscuring his vision. “What do you think, Bass? We’re getting way low on fuel and we need to make land before we become a cork out here.”
“Let’s give it a try, sir.”
The RIB slowed to a crawl, and they all kept their gazes on the water before them, looking for submerged hazards. The storm surge was already a good ten feet above normal and all sorts of stumps and small trees that would normally be above water were now covered—treacherous traps waiting to destroy their vessel.
Dawn arrived in a thin strip of color beneath the ominous overhang of clouds forming one of the storm bands of the hurricane. The rain abated just long enough for them to see the line of sky streaked with every hue from palest pink to fiery red. The CIA asset, Nissa, turned to stare at the sunrise as the brilliant ball of liquid red crept over the edge of the gulf and then nearly as quickly disappeared behind the roiling cloud line.
“Wow,” she breathed.
One corner of Cole’s mouth turned down cynically at her innocence. It had been a long time since a sunrise had been enough to cause him wonder. Almost twenty years in the SEALs in one capacity or another had made him a hard man who didn’t look for beauty in the world anymore.
“We’ve got an inlet!” Bass called. “Come right five degrees.”
In another minute, two rows of cypress trees rose on either side of them. They looked more like truncated bushes in the early morning light, much of their height below the floodwaters.
They proceeded cautiously up the inlet for perhaps twenty minutes, buffeted by the choppy water almost worse than when they’d bobbed on the open ocean’s big swells. Cole went back to spell Ashe, who shook out his noodled arms as he moved up front to pull stump watch.
The right engine sputtered then caught again. Its fuel needle lay on the peg to the far left side of the gauge and didn’t budge. At least the left needle was still bouncing off the peg with each wave.
“Find us a spot to land, Bastien. This is about as far inland as the RIB’s going to take us.”
“Roger that, Frosty.” Bass scanned the lines of trees on either side of the canal they were following. In about a minute he hooted in excitement and yelled, “Bring her hard right!”
Cole complied, following Bass’s instructions for the next minute or so, aiming for a particularly tall cypress looming over the edge of the flooded canal. They made it past the big tree when the right motor cut out entirely and the left engine started to sputter.
“Just a few more yards,” Bass called.
That was probably about all they had before they turned into drifters.
“Cut the motor!” Bass called.
Cole complied with alacrity, just before the bottom of the boat scraped hard on something that sounded like gravel. A rain squall was rolling in on them, and Cole barely saw Bass and Ashe jump out of the boat into what turned out to be knee-deep water. They’d run aground.
Ashe fought to steady the RIB as a huge wind gust tried to shove it sideways off the spit of land, while Bass ran ahead with a line and tied off the prow to a tree.
Cole moved over to Nissa in her waterproof bag. “We’ve got to get you out of that thing so you can walk.”
She was already flailing around inside the sack to no avail. He realized with a start that she was panicking. Poor girl had been through a lot in the past fifteen hours.
“Easy, Nissa,” he murmured. “Sit still so I can get you out.”
His words had no effect on her. And now that he was within arm’s length of her, he realized her eyes were glazed over and unseeing. She was lost in a full-blown panic attack. Only one fix for that. He wrapped her up in a bear hug, survival bag and all. She thrashed wildly in his arms, but her small frame was no match for his iron strength. He hung on grimly and let the panic attack run its course...and tried hard not to notice how great her body felt writhing against his. He was a total jerk for even registering it, given how panicked she was. He did his best to project calm and comfort to her through his silent touch.
As quickly as she’d freaked out, she went still in his arms.
“You done?” he asked.
“Get me out of this thing,” she mumbled in chagrin. “I can’t stand being confined.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” he replied drily. Using the tip of his Ka-Bar knife, he pried loose the water-soaked knot at her neck. Finally, the cord gave way and the top of the survival bag popped open. Nissa shoved it down her body and jumped clear of the thing, giving it a dirty look. She gave the piled bag a swift kick with her combat boot for good measure.
“It’s dead. You killed it,” Cole commented.
“Good riddance,” she declared.
“It would have saved your life if we’d gone down at sea.”
A shudder passed over her. “I’d have gone crazy if I had ended up floating around in that thing.”
He shrugged. “You would have done what you had to in order to survive. It would have sucked, but you’d have pulled through.” In his experience most people were a lot stronger than they realized. It was just that most people were never put into actual life-and-death situations.
“I dunno. I have pretty bad claustrophobia,” she disagreed.
“Then last night sucked worse for you than I realized.”
She threw him a bleary glare that said he didn’t know the half of it. His respect for her notched up a bit more. She had been brave as hell to go out with his team into the storm and then to crawl around the Anna Belle in the dark with the big ship trying hard to capsize.
“C’mon. Let’s get you onto dry land,” he said, offering her a hand to steady her as she crawled forward around the saddle seats to the prow.
“It may be land but it won’t be dry,” she snapped.
She’d earned the right to be a little testy after the past night. He helped her over the edge of the boat into Bass’s arms. The big Cajun set her down into the water and helped her wade ashore to join Ashe, who was depositing a bag of gear on the soggy ground.
Cole passed the remaining gear bags out of the RIB and Bass retied the boat using a loose hurricane tie that would allow it to stay afloat as the storm surge rose.
“Now what?” Nissa asked Cole as he joined the others.
“Now we find shelter.”
“Any chance we can find a phone for me to report in to my boss?”
“Don’t hold your breath on that. Where there’s no electricity, there’s usually no phone service.”
“Can’t the Coast Guard or whomever you guys have been talking to relay messages to my people?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Your call. Personally, I wouldn’t be broadcasting that Markus Petrov got away on an open frequency. No telling who’s listening in. The way you talk about him, I gather Petrov has spies and informants all over the place.”
“Good point. I’ll need a secure phone line to make a full report.”
“You may have to wait awhile for one of those. Right now, the priority is shelter from the storm.”
“Isn’t the Coast Guard going to come pick us up?”
He snorted. “Not with that monster storm bearing down on us. Besides, they’ll have their hands full with rescues already. We’re on our own to ride this thing out.”
Nissa was already pretty pale, but he thought she went a shade or two whiter with that revelation. He said bracingly, “It’s just a storm. At least no one’s shooting at us. We’ll be fine.”
“Promise?” she asked in a wobbly voice.
“Yeah. Sure.” It was a lie, but he needed the civilian female not to freak out. If they didn’t find solid shelter and soon, they were in serious trouble.
“And then we can get some sleep, yes?” she asked hopefully.
“All the sleep you want.”
He and his guys could go five days without much more than a nap now and then. But he realized that most normal mortals were not aware that they, too, could match the feat. It was all about motivation. Find the right one, and anyone, man or woman, would die rather than give in to mere exhaustion.
Cole continued, “Once the worst of the storm passes, we’ll make our way back to New Orleans and figure out how we’re going to acquire our target and take him into custody.”
“I have some ideas—”
“Later,” he said, cutting her off. “The core of the storm will be here in a few hours, and we need to be under cover before then. How do you feel about running?”
Nissa stared up at him, her blue eyes even bigger and wider than usual. She was a looker, all right. The sea-land suit the Navy had lent her clung to her slender legs and girly curves, showing off a slight body any Hollywood starlet would be proud to have. Her blond hair was French-braided back from her face, but it only accentuated her elfin features.
“As a rule, I’m not fond of running as a form of exercise.”
“That’s too bad,” Cole replied.
“I don’t have any choice about the running thing, do I?” Nissa asked mournfully.
“Nope. Let’s move out.” He grabbed the extra pack of gear meant for her and shouldered it on top of his own pack. It meant he was carrying close to sixty pounds of gear, but no way could Nissa keep up with his team if she were carrying any weight at all. As it was, he suspected she was going to slow them down badly.
It turned out that Nissa could go for about fifteen minutes at a time at a steady, but slow, jog if she got a three-or four-minute break to catch her breath in between. A SEAL team was only as fast as its slowest member, and right now, that was she. But as egressing with a totally untrained civilian went, she wasn’t doing half bad. He’d had missions where they’d had to carry out the principal.
The trek was miserable. What solid ground they could find was saturated and spongy, giving way without warning beneath their feet, sinking them knee-deep in black muck and pitching them on their faces. Everybody took at least a few such spills.
Even when they remained upright, the going wasn’t great. They caught blowing tree limbs in the face, thorny brambles clutched at their bodies and backpacks, and bouts of driving rain pecked at them like angry crows. The only good news was that the gusty wind was mostly at their backs.
They jogged and rested, jogged and rested, for almost two hours. How Bastien was finding his way through the swampy bayou country, Cole had no idea. The rain was whipping around them now on fifty-mile-per-hour gusts, and the brief hint of dawn had faded into twilight gloom as the hurricane roared ashore. They had to find high ground and some sort of shelter before long, or they were going to be in deadly peril.
They jogged maybe another ten minutes before Bass veered suddenly to his right. They had to hack their way through a veritable wall of kudzu vines and brambles, but when they popped out the far side, Cole spotted what had made Bastien change course. A house. Or more accurately, a dilapidated-looking shack.
The one-story dwelling was raised on stilts that, as they approached the structure, turned out to be two dozen massive cypress pilings. The exterior badly needed a coat of paint, and rust from the metal roof stained the gray wood siding orange. But as they climbed the stairs to the wraparound porch, the building looked sturdier than his first impression. They might just survive the storm, yet.
Bass pounded on the front door loudly and long enough for them to be sure no one was inside. Ashe picked the door lock and dead bolt with quick efficiency, and in under a minute, they had all piled inside the cabin.
The dwelling was as rough inside as out with a log-framed couch sagging in front of a small wood-burning stove. What looked like handmade chairs and a crude table were tucked in one corner of the main room. A huge alligator skull hung on the wall above the stove. Cole would have hated to see the live beast it had come from. That gator had to have been twenty feet long or better.
A dilapidated stove and refrigerator flanked a rust-stained sink, and a few cabinets rounded out the kitchen corner.
Ashe called from down the short hall to their right, “All clear. One bedroom, one bathroom.”
“How hurricane-proof is this place?” Cole asked Bass.
“Windows could use some plywood or at least some boards over them. There’s no time to check out the roof. We’ll just have to hope it’s nailed down tight. The pilings look sturdy and they’ll take a fifteen-foot storm surge easy.”
“Is Jessamine forecast to surge that high?” Cole asked no one in particular.
Ashe, just returning to the main room, replied, “That’s right about what the forecast calls for. Fourteen to seventeen feet.”
Cole glanced back at Bass, who said grimly, “Lemme go out and take an exact measurement from the canal behind this place to the bottom of the porch.”
The door opened, and wind and rain howled inside until Bass wrestled the door shut once more. Meanwhile, Ashe moved over to the kitchen cabinets to poke around. “There’s some canned food in here. Should hold us for a few days.”
Nissa surprised Cole by speaking up. “Drinking water’s going to be the problem. The storm surge will bring in filthy, polluted salt water that no amount of purification will make drinkable.”
She had a point. Give the intelligence analyst credit for common sense on top of her book smarts.
She asked, “Is there a tub in the bathroom, Ashe?”
“Yes. A small one.”
“Let’s see if there’s running water,” she suggested. “If so, we need to sterilize the tub and fill it while we still can.”
Cole set Ashe to scrubbing the tub with a jug of bleach they found under the kitchen sink, while he went outside to check for a water well and possibly a pump for it.
He met Bass coming up the steps. “Seventeen feet, sir. That’s what this place can take before the house floods. Even with a lower surge than that, we may see wave action pushing some water inside.”
“Good to know. Any sign of a well and a water pump down there?”
“There’s a well. But the electricity’s already out. Pump won’t work.”
“Generator?” Cole asked.
“Maybe. Whoever owns this place has it decently stocked. There’s a shed, and that’s where I’d look for a generator. It’s locked, but we can break in and have a look around.”
They ended up using an axe they found sitting on a ledge over the shed door to break the rusty hasp and get inside. They didn’t find a generator, but they did spot a small lawn mower whose gasoline motor Bass thought he could jerry-rig to run the water pump. And they found a toolbox. Armed with a hammer and pocket full of nails, Cole scrounged under the house for pieces of scrap lumber that he hauled up to the porch and nailed across the windows. They weren’t as good as sheets of thick plywood, but they were better than nothing. The boards would break the worst of the wind pummeling the glass and should catch large pieces of flying debris.
He and Bass stumbled inside an hour later, wet, cold and exhausted. Construction in hurricane-force winds turned out to be strenuous stuff.
Ashe and Nissa had been busy inside, as well. They’d hauled in a big pile of firewood from the porch and stacked it beside the wood-burning stove, in which they had started a fire. Baked beans were heating in a pot atop it, and the sound of running water came from the bathroom, where Ashe poked his head out to announce that they should have enough water for several days. He’d also filled a dozen empty moonshine jugs he’d found with water for flushing the toilet.
As they pulled chairs around the wood-burning stove to warm and dry themselves, Nissa asked in a small voice, “Are we going to be safe here?”
She looked fearfully at Cole for an answer, and he replied, “This old place is sturdier than it looks. Jessamine won’t be its first hurricane.” He forced himself to give Nissa a smile in hopes that it would encourage her. “We’ll be fine. And even if something unexpected does happen, we’re SEALs. We take problems as they come and deal with them.”
They’d battened down the hatches in the nick of time, for within the next half hour, the winds outside rose from a roar to a howl and then to an ominous scream. The entire structure shook alarmingly, but it held.
For now.
Chapter 3 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Nissa crawled into the only bed in the cabin at the unanimous insistence of the guys. They assured her they were perfectly comfortable sleeping on the floor. Cole set up a watch rotation for himself and his men, and then he urged her to get some sleep before the storm got bad.
This wasn’t bad? The walls shivered every time a big gust hit, and she shivered right along with the tiny cabin. The glass in the windows rattled, and she flinched every time something hit the boards nailed over them, sure that this was the time the window was going to shatter and let in the full fury of the storm.
What had she gotten herself into, volunteering for this insane mission? It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all! She was supposed to hang out with some super hot Navy SEALS and catch a notorious bad guy, thereby advancing her career, which was rapidly threatening to die of boredom in a beige cubicle. Although, she had gotten the super hot SEAL part of the deal. All of the men with her were extremely easy on the eye. But the one she couldn’t look away from was their leader.
Cole Perriman was totally hunkalicious. She’d tried really hard not to fantasize about crawling all over that spectacular physique and keep her mind on business, but it had been rough listening to the inbriefing he’d given her and his two guys. She kept getting distracted by how big and rugged he was, but how he had movie-star looks, too. He was a perfect blend of raw masculinity and sheer beauty.
Her friends back at Langley wouldn’t believe she got to work with him. She vowed before she headed back to Virginia to get a few pictures of him to show to the girls around the watercooler...and maybe to fantasize over when she returned to her bland, dull, colorless life.
The wind got so loud it hurt her ears, and it was relentless, moaning and roaring like nothing she’d ever heard before. She finally resorted to pulling the covers up over her head in a futile effort to block out the noise. And maybe she was also hiding like she had as a little girl, when monsters had come calling in the dark of her bedroom at night. She always had been a giant thunder-chicken.
As exhaustion overtook her body, her thoughts drifted, replaying the horror of the past twelve hours: sailing into the teeth of a hurricane, the nightmare climb aboard the Anna Belle, the frantic search for shelter as Jessamine roared ashore. She’d been so certain she was going to die a watery death, drowned at best and bashed to pieces by the stormy sea at worst.
When she finally fell asleep, it was no surprise she dreamed of water. Except in her dream, the ocean was not black and angry...
The sea was brilliant turquoise, light and warm and lazy, and she swam below the surface easily, breathing water. She swayed gently as surf rolled past overhead, untouched by the cheerfully churning surface of the sea.
Her hair drifted in pale wisps around her, and she was startled to realize she was naked. The sea caressed her body lovingly, and she felt safe. At home down here.
She became aware of a large shape moving toward her, knifing forward with strong strokes of humanoid arms. She started to backpedal in alarm, but as the man drew near, she recognized his beautiful, chiseled face and stilled. Cole.
He stopped before her, righting himself until he floated vertical, as naked as she in this underwater dream world. He smiled at her and the temperature of the water around her rocketed up. She looked down and was captivated by his body, more spectacular than she’d imagined in her waking state. His skin was smooth and supple, the musculature rippling beneath it nothing short of spectacular. The man was sculpted like a god. Poseidon would be the correct one, she supposed, given that they were underwater.
His long legs kicked lazily, the deeply-cut muscles of his thighs powerful even underwater. And those abs. Washboard stomachs like that should not be legal. They were certified lethal weapons. Fascinated, she stared at his torso, her underwater breathing coming fast and shallow as her gaze followed the V-line of his obliques downward to the dark curls and his manly parts, which were impressive even at rest.
If possible, her breathing accelerated even more, sounding loud inside her head. The current nudged her toward underwater deity Cole and she let it carry her close enough to feel the heat of him radiating to touch her skin. Everywhere his warmth caressed her, she burned for him.
His silvery blue gaze captured hers, igniting with desire as he stared at her. Suddenly, the water around them was boiling hot, and he willed her even closer to him. Their feet and knees tangled together as they treaded water, only inches separating them now. Each accidental bump sent her pulse a notch higher until her heartbeat pounded like a drum in her ears.
Her belly tied in knots by the intensity of his stare, she looked away, her gaze drifting to his mile-wide shoulders and the bulging wreaths of muscle tapering to powerful arms. His right hand moved forward slowly toward her free-floating breast, giving her plenty of time to splash away from it. But she only watched with breathless anticipation as his big, tanned hand approached her pale flesh, visibly quivering with desire. She needed him to touch her like she needed to draw her next watery breath.
His fingers were strong, his palms heavily calloused. A warrior’s hands. Capable hands. Hands that knew how to kill and—oh, my—hands that knew how to give pleasure. His thumb rubbed across her taut nipple as he cupped her weightless breast, kneading it gently. Her back arched as she strained toward him, desperate for more of his drugging touch. Every inch of her body ached to be his. To be taken by him. Claimed and possessed by him.
He must have read her thoughts for, all of a sudden, he surged against her, his legs entwining with hers, his erection pressing into her belly as hot and hard as a branding iron. His left arm captured her waist, his other hand still making magic on her breast.
Her left hand traced the lean indent of his waist, and slid around to his back, tracing the deep ridge of muscle running along his spine. Down, down, she followed the path of it until her palm filled with the stone-hard bulge of his behind.
Hers. He was all hers, to hold, to touch, to take. Her right leg snaked up around his hips, and using her right foot and left hand, she urged the hot steel pressing into her belly lower, closer to her core. Yes. Right...there...
His mouth closed upon hers, and the kiss was as hot and carnal as the rest of him, as commanding and untamed as a proper sea god should be. Her entire body molded to his and she gave all of herself to him, opening her mouth and feminine core to receive him.
She projected the thought into his mind, “Take me. Take me now—”
“Holy crap, Nissa. Wake up.” The voice was distant and desperate, barely touching her dream, hardly scratching the surface of her raging desire for her underwater god.
Just like that, her turquoise paradise was replaced by the cold blackness of an ocean at night, thick and suffocating. She thrashed in the darkness, weighed down by something confining and heavy.
Must be that damned survival bag. She’d fallen overboard and gotten separated from the others and was going to die out here in the vast abyss of the ocean, cold, scared and alone—
“Wake up. For the love of God,” someone ground out. The man sounded like he was in pain.
Wait. She wasn’t in the ocean. She wasn’t wet at all, in fact. Groggily, she climbed a little closer toward consciousness.
Something powerful grabbed her in a viselike grip.
No! They said a shark wouldn’t attack through the bag! But she was going to die torn in two by one. She fought then, kicking as best she could through the heavy material.
A spate of swearing erupted in her ear, low and irritated. Gods shouldn’t take themselves in vain, should they? Confused, she registered that no saw-sharp teeth penetrated her flesh. Not a shark, then.
The grip turned into mostly a heavy weight immobilizing her, still suffocating her, though. Death by drowning or death by asphyxiation? What a choice. Something primitive within her refused to give up or give in, and she flailed her arms and legs, stubbornly fighting not to be shark bait without at least giving the damned fish a bloody nose before it ate her.
“Oww! Jeez, that’s some right hook you’ve got,” the male voice complained.
Had they found her? Had the SEAL team and its smoking-hot leader, the same team she’d insanely agreed to help, come back for her, after all? She started to shout for help, but bright light broke over her, and her scream went unuttered. She squinted up, blinded by the piercing light shining directly in her eyes from a range of about twelve inches.
She shoved at the light, trying to get it out of her eyes, and her hand encountered cold metal and very warm, very human flesh and bone.
Wait. Was this real? Was she actually awake?
“You can stop trying to kill me, already.”
She recognized the voice. Cole. In the flesh.
“Huh? Where am I? Am I alive?”
“Yes, you’re alive. And you will stay that way if you’ll quit trying to bludgeon me.”
Talk about disoriented. She looked around and made out a tiny bedroom in some sort of rough shack.
The cabin on stilts. The hurricane. The Anna Belle. That god-awful run through the bayou to find shelter. It all came back to her in a rush. The danger, the terror, the certainty that she was going to die. No wonder she was breathing hard already.
“Are we safe from the storm?” she rasped, her voice hoarse as if she’d been shouting forever. Oh, wait. She had been. To be heard over the storm, they’d pretty much had to shout all of last night.
“So far, so good,” Cole murmured cautiously.
“What time is it?”
“A little after eight o’clock.”
“At night?”
Behind his flashlight’s glare, she thought she caught a hint of a grin. “Yes. At night. You’ve been asleep about seven hours.”
“Wow. I don’t feel as if I got that much sleep.”
“You did get more of a workout in the past day than I imagine you’re accustomed to.”
Now there was an understatement. She checked in on her body and was not surprised to feel ominously sore muscles and pain setting in. She was shocked, however, to register that Cole Perriman was sprawled on top of her, and that her right leg was wrapped around his hips and her left hand was clutching his, umm, rather delectable tush.
She let go of his behind with alacrity, but then had the problem of where to put her hand. She ended up settling for resting her hand lightly on his waist, which was every bit as hard and lean through his close-fitting turtleneck as she’d dreamed it. Her pulse lurched alarmingly. She was in bed with the hot SEAL!
Details of her lurid dream flooded into her mind, and she inhaled sharply. The reality of this man’s big, muscular, rock-hard body mashing hers deeply into the worn mattress was all too close to her dream for comfort.
Cole stared down at Nissa, and unfortunately, her eyes were adjusting enough to the low-light conditions to stare back at him.
Oh, no. Awareness was every bit as intense in his gaze as it no doubt was in hers. The crackling attraction from her dream wasn’t a dream anymore. He was right here, real and hot and alive, his thighs tangled with hers, his hard erection pressing against the yielding softness of her belly, his massive arms forming a cage around her upper body.
He moved restlessly against her and her breath hitched. So. This was lust, huh? Everything she’d experienced in her inexperienced life to date was a pale shadow in comparison to this heat and desire raging through her. She wanted this man in every way she could have him, preferably starting with the naked, hot and sweaty ways.
He stared down at her for a moment more, reciprocal desire lighting his eyes from within until they blazed like stars above her.
With a curse, he rolled off her abruptly. But given the narrowness of the bed, his arm was still plastered against hers from shoulder to wrist. “I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“For what? It takes two to tango,” she replied practically.
He laughed, but the sound was more about pain than humor. Of more interest to her was the fact that he didn’t answer the question. Didn’t want to put his attraction to her into words, huh? A ribbon of hurt wound its way through her heart, leaching away the intense pleasure of her dream, stealing her confidence, reminding her mercilessly that she was a mousy desk jockey who worked in a cubicle jungle, not a sexy, adventurous temptress who could capture and hold on to a man like Cole Perriman.
“I’m cold,” she mumbled.
“Yeah, this place was light on blankets. There’s only the one quilt on this bed. Can’t fault the owner, though. He had everything else we needed. Here. Let me warm you up.” He rolled against her, his legs tangled with hers, belly to belly, groin to—ohmigosh—groin.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked.
“Hypothermia care 101. Body-to-body contact is the fastest and safest way to bring a person’s body temperature up to a safe level.”
“I said I was cold, not freezing to death.”
“One leads to the other,” he murmured disconcertingly close to her ear. His breath was warm on her earlobe and a shiver passed through her entire body. And it was emphatically not a shiver of cold.
His arm fell across her stomach and curled up her side, his hand tucked under her armpit mere inches from her breast. She about leaped out of bed in her shock. If not for the easy strength of his arm pinning her down, she might actually have bolted. But as it was, she merely lurched hard enough against his forearm to register that she wasn’t going anywhere if he didn’t want her to.
His leg slid across hers, his thigh resting intimately across both of hers. Under the wet suit the Navy had given her to wear yesterday, they’d also given her a skimpy pair of stretchy running trunks and an equally skimpy tank top. Those were all she was wearing now. And apparently, he was wearing pretty much the same thing.
She registered the general muscularity and hairiness of his leg against her smoothly waxed legs, and something shifted in her gut, a sharp awareness of Cole Perriman not as her mission commander and temporary boss, but as a Man. Capital M. With a side of hubba-hubba thrown in.
Other details registered. The hardness of his stomach against her right arm, trapped at her side. The width of his shoulders towering over her as he lay on his side facing her. The sheer mass of the man. He was all muscle. There was nothing soft about him. No flab to ease the hard contours of his muscles, not even a thin layer of fat beneath his skin to cushion the bulging veins and corded sinews in his arms or legs.
And good grief, he was as hot as a furnace. She was going to break out in a full-blown sweat if he stayed like this for much longer.
He muttered, “How does your hair smell good? You just spent all night swimming around in the ocean and wading through a swamp. You should smell like seawater.”
Bemused, she replied, “I got hot during our minimarathon to run here. I pushed back my hood and the rain rinsed out my hair. And, while you guys were getting the well’s pump running, I used the first water that came out of the pipes to take a quick sponge bath. Salt’s bad for your skin. You shouldn’t leave it sitting on your flesh for any longer than necessary.”
“Thanks for the beauty tip.”
“I’m serious. It can cause rashes and even burns.”
“I know. It’s not an uncommon form of torture to rub salt into a person’s skin.”
Eew. She might be a collector of seemingly useless trivia as part of her work as an intelligence analyst, but torture was not one of her fields of expertise.
“Warming up?” Cole murmured against her temple.
“Umm, yes. I’m toasty warm now.” He didn’t move, so she added, “Thanks for sharing some of your heat with me.”
It was a blatant invitation to leave her bed, but he didn’t accept it. Instead he remained spooned around her.
His hand, the one thrown across her body, slid up her arm toward her shoulder, dragging the quilt higher to tuck it in around her neck. At least his hand hadn’t headed toward her chest...which was throbbing disconcertingly at the moment.
She would love to pull her right arm out from between them, but she was vividly aware of how close her hand was resting to parts of his anatomy that could easily be encouraged to throb, also.
Cole didn’t move, and goodness knew, she wasn’t about to move. But they might as well have been crawling all over each other the way the electricity built between them. She was excruciatingly aware of every inch of his body against hers, and it didn’t help that she could picture his body encased in that insanely sexy sea-land suit of his.
She’d tried really hard yesterday to keep her mind solidly on business, but there’d been no missing the fact that he’d looked like a statue of a Greek god wearing a wet suit.
A particularly violent gust of wind slammed into the wall beside her, and even the light fixture overhead rattled. Terrified, she rolled against Cole and buried her face against his chest.
His arms swept around her, drawing her closer, creating a living bulwark of protection around her. “I’ve got you. Hang on to me,” he muttered.
The shaking around them diminished, but her insides still quaked like mad. “You must think I’m the biggest scaredy cat you’ve ever met.”
She felt the smile against her scalp. “I’ve met worse.”
“How much longer is this storm going to last?” she asked.
“The rest of the night, I should think.”
She groaned into his pectoral, which flexed in an impressive display of bulging muscle.
“Hungry?” he asked her.
“No. You?”
“I ate a little while ago.”
They lay together in silence for a moment, listening to the storm. Then he said quietly, “Try to get some sleep.”
She almost confessed that she didn’t want to go back to sleep because she was afraid of a repeat of her dream from before, but she bit it back.
“Do you need me to stay with you?”
“I’m a CIA analyst on a mission with a Navy SEAL team. I can survive my nightmares.”
He chuckled. “You don’t have to prove how tough you are to me.”
Another gust struck the cabin and she stared worriedly at the rafters overhead. “Is the roof going to stay on?”
“I think it is. This place may look like a dump, but it’s solid.”
“We’re going to have to find out who owns it and send a thank-you note.”
Cole grunted as if thank-you notes weren’t part of his job description. He shifted his weight, turning fully onto his back, and Nissa found herself rolling toward him as the mattress sagged beneath his greater weight. She braced herself to stop the roll and froze in dismay as she realized she’d planted her hand on his stomach. Ridges of carved marble formed beneath her palm before she managed to jerk it away from him. Good grief. Touching him was like sticking her hand into a volcano.
Sharp awareness of how much bigger than she he was, in every dimension, made lust shoot through her nether regions, hot and liquid, and nearly as disorienting as her dream.
Had they actually kissed, or had that been part of her dream, too? Nissa could swear she still felt him on her mouth, still tasted him on her tongue. And her face around her mouth definitely felt razor burned. Or maybe that was just chapped skin from the wind and salt water. Confused, she stared at the silhouette of his lips barely visible beside her.
He clicked his flashlight on and shined it up at the underside of the roof, exposed beyond the rafters. Methodically, he ran the light over every inch of the ceiling.
“How does it look?” she asked.
He turned toward her, turning the flashlight with him, abruptly blinding her in its brilliant LED beam. “So far, so good.”
“Could you get that light out of my eyes, please?” She threw her hand up to shield her face.
It clicked off and total blackness descended over them, making her lurch in alarm. Even as a kid, she’d been scared of the dark. She’d mostly grown out of it as an adult. Mostly.
“Easy, Nissa. I’ve got you.” He rolled toward her, and she was swept up against his delicious body, his arms firm and protective around her.
Oh. My. God. He felt every bit as amazing in real life as he did in her dream.
Out of the darkness, Cole murmured against Nissa’s temple, “I promise I’ll keep you safe. No harm will come to you on my watch. You don’t have to be afraid.” His low voice was raw silk, caressing her skin and sending cascades of shivers down her spine.
They lay like that for several minutes, neither one moving, Nissa barely daring to breathe. The sexual tension between them stretched tighter and tighter until she thought it had to snap. Terrified of what that would mean, she cast about in her mind for something to say. Something to distract both of them from this endless, insane moment of raging mutual lust.
“I had the strangest dream,” she blurted.
“How strange?”
“You and I were swimming underwater. And we could breathe the water. You were some sort of sea-god. Poseidon, maybe.”
“I like this dream. And I do have a trident. Although mine is only on my SEAL pin and not real.”
He’d been all real in the dream, that was for sure. Just remembering the way she’d burned for him made her forehead break into a sweat now.
“Tell me more about this dream.”
Hah. As if she would confess in a million years about them being naked and crawling all over each other.
“That’s all there was. We were underwater, but we weren’t drowning. The water was clear and warm and bright turquoise. It looked as if we were near a tropical shore, not the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of a hurricane.”
“Good choice. Yesterday, those were the roughest seas I’ve ever seen.”
“So I’m not crazy to have been scared out of my mind?”
“Not at all. That was a daunting ride, and climbing aboard the Anna Belle with her so close to capsizing would have scared the bravest soul.”
“Were you afraid?”
His features twitched into a frown. “We’re trained during a mission to set feelings like fear aside. They get in the way of the work. But I did register that it was a dangerous situation in which we all could easily have died.”
She turned his words over in her mind, applying the filters her years as a CIA analyst had honed to a fine edge. It was probably as close as she would ever come to hearing a SEAL admit to being scared. And she had heard that SEALs were taught techniques for fear and pain control.
Cole murmured, startling her out of her analysis, “There had to be more to your dream.”
“How do you know? It was my dream.”
His low voice was soft like suede caressing her skin. “I know because you all but tore my clothes off and had your wicked way with me.”
Hot shame flooded her face. He knew. Cole knew exactly what she’d dreamed. Every sordid, sexy detail of her unconscious fantasy. She was never going to be able to look him in the eye again. Ever. Humiliation tasted sour in the back of her mouth, and an urge roared through her to curl up in a little ball, pull the quilt over her head and never come out from under it.
Without warning he rolled off the bed and the quilt lifted off of her abruptly, letting in a rush of cold air. She squeaked, but just as suddenly, the quilt was tossed back over her. She yanked it up around her neck, not that it would shield her from what he knew about her now.
“Where are you going?” she choked out.
“Back to the main room to check the water level outside. It’s my turn on the watch. I only came in here because I heard you making...sounds.” He added in a rush, “I wanted to make sure you were all right. That’s all.”
What kind of sounds had she been making? The way his voice had hitched over the word had suspicions leaping to mind that heaped embarrassment on top of her humiliation. Horror poured over her, her own personal ice bucket over the head. Some of that smoking-hot embrace had been real? Oh, God. How much of it? “What did I...what did we...”
“Do?” Cole murmured down at her. “Enough to seriously consider doing it again someday but not so much that you need to go looking for a shotgun just yet.”
She pulled the quilt up over her head then. But it didn’t stop her from hearing Cole’s quiet laughter as the bedroom door opened and he slipped out of the room, leaving her alone with her new best friends Shame and Self-recrimination.
Chapter 4 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
Cole made it out to the living room before he let go of the breath he’d been holding. Damn, that had been a near miss with total disaster. When he’d tried to wake up Nissa and she’d grabbed him, pulled him down on top of her and then all but crawled down his throat, he’d been in grave danger of succumbing to his attraction to her.
He abruptly understood the saying about a person’s world tilting on its axis. He felt off-balance, physically and emotionally, but also on some deeper, more fundamental level. As if his world would never be quite the same again. Which was doubly strange given that he considered himself to be the most thoroughly grounded of men, stable, unshakable and sure of who and what he was.
But that woman...throwing herself at him like that...the way she’d felt in his arms...the things she’d made him feel... This was uncharted territory for him.
Hell, any living, breathing man couldn’t fail to notice how fantastic she’d looked in that curve-hugging wet suit. Even with the hood up, she’d still been beautiful, and not many people could claim that. It wasn’t just the delicacy of her facial bones, either. It was those eyes. Huge and sapphire blue, they were impossible to look away from.
And when she’d wrapped her entire, slender body around him, drawing him into her, opening all of herself to him—
Stop it, he commanded himself. She was a job. Correction, a colleague. He would tear a new one in any of his guys who messed with her on the job. He had to hold himself to the same standard. He prowled around Bass, sprawled out on a bedroll in front of the stove, and went over to the window beside the front door to peer out a crack between the boards.
The water was coming up far too close for comfort. Hour by hour, the floodwaters had been swallowing the steps up to the raised platform. Only two steps were left. Jessamine had better pass on by soon, or they were going to be swimming in here.
He’d thought Bass’s suggestion to put a bunch of long planks up in the rafters had been overkill, but now he saw the logic. If the cabin flooded, they could climb up on the makeshift perch and pick up another six feet of protection from the storm surge.
Bass had also insisted they stow the ax up there, too. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for people to drown in their attics when they didn’t have the tools to break through their roofs. Lord, he would hate to have to go out in the storm, though. The wind had howled like a banshee for most of the day.
Cole glanced at his watch. Almost time for another update from the weather service on the storm. He went to the kitchen table where Ashe had set up the field radio and put on the headphones. He powered up the unit and listened in relief as the hourly report indicated that the eye of the storm had passed just west of New Orleans and Jessamine was beginning to weaken as it moved inland. They should get heavy rain and wind through the night, but sometime tomorrow, the worst of the hurricane should spin itself out and move on.
Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes. It had been no joke to get caught out in a major storm like this. Had they not found this sturdy cabin, they would likely have died, if not from drowning or exposure, then from flying debris.
The report went on to say that the eye wall had spared the city the worst of the wind damage, but unleashed a deluge of rain upon the hapless city. The new and improved levees, post-Katrina, were holding, and the city’s pumping system was dealing with the worst of the floodwater so far, but the city was without power and expected to be that way for days. Civilians and evacuees would not be allowed to return to their homes for at least another seventy-two hours.
He moved back to his post peering out the window. His flashlight beam turned the rain into a sheet of crystal particles flying past him horizontally. Everything beyond the porch was swirling, angry water. In the past hour or two, he’d started imagining that he felt the cypress pilings swaying slightly in the killer currents.
The foundation of the home only had to hold a little while longer. High tide was due in another hour, and then hopefully the water would start back down. Hopefully.
His lonely vigil gave him way too much time to think about his sexy encounter with the hot CIA analyst. He couldn’t shake the feel of her lithe body beneath his, her arms wrapped round him like she never wanted to let go, her mouth moving restlessly against his as if she couldn’t get enough of the taste of him.
He was by no means a monk. But he never had found a woman who was intelligent enough to hold his interest for the long term and who also was mellow enough to deal with his more autocratic tendencies. It was hard to break old habits, and he’d been a team leader for a long time. He was used to giving orders and having them followed. Even he knew that made him rotten husband material.
So over the years he’d settled for occasional friends with benefits, women he saw between missions and who wouldn’t question him about when he might leave or might return. He’d closed off the part of himself that would have enjoyed a family and a home, and he had become the job.
Which was all well and good as long as he had the job. But he was coming up on twenty years of active duty service and eligibility for retirement. In the current environment of budget cuts and force restructuring, he had no reason to believe he would be allowed to serve more than twenty years. This was his last year, and he’d decided to spend it in the field with his brothers and the missions he loved so much.
Midnight came and went, and he let Bass and Ashe sleep through their shifts on watch. They were both excellent operators and fine men. Asher Konig had found the woman for him and was deliriously happy with her, and Bass loved the cars he restored as much as any woman. Neither of them seemed to feel a hole in their lives.
And neither had he until Nissa Beck wrapped herself around him and all but begged him to take her in every sexy, dirty way he could think of. All of a sudden, he was vividly aware of the sacrifices he’d made for his work over the years, the loneliness, the coldness of the life he’d chosen. Sure, he had all the camaraderie he wanted with his fellow SEALs. But they didn’t comfort a guy in the dark when the nightmares came calling, and they didn’t make a home.
More disturbed than he cared to admit to himself, he watched the storm pass by. It was just outside, inches away, on the other side of a thin pane of glass and a few boards, but it didn’t touch him. It raged all round him, but he stayed safe inside this shell of a cabin, isolated and alone.
The rest of his life yawned before him, as lonely and isolated as this, and for once, he couldn’t push his fear of it away with an admonition to himself that he had years left before the end of life as a SEAL.
Now the end was only a few months away, looming bigger and more terrifying than the hurricane outside.
* * *
It was nearly morning before Bass woke with a start, looked at his watch, and swore. “Why didn’t you wake me up, boss? I missed my watch.”
Cole turned to him. “I was wide-awake, so I decided to let you guys sleep.”
The quiet conversation roused Ashe, which was no surprise. SEALs were notoriously light sleepers. He asked, “How’s the storm doing?”
“The worst of it has passed.”
“Did it hit New Orleans?” Ashe asked quickly.
His wife, Sam, was a native and had refused to evacuate. But Ashe had convinced her to go to the naval station to ride out the storm in a hardened building close to the base hospital. Sam was seven months pregnant, and Ashe was having no part of anything bad happening to her or their baby.
“Jessamine slid west of the city. New Orleans is still taking a lot of rain and some wind damage, but the levees are holding.”
“Thank God,” Ashe breathed.
“She’s fine,” Cole replied. “Sam’s tucked into SEAL Ops, and none of the guys will let anything happen to her.”
Bass chimed in, “A bunch of them know how to deliver babies, too.”
Ashe scowled. “Sam’s under strict orders not to have this kid until I’m there to deliver it.”
Cole grinned. “And did you have a conversation with your son about that? Did you explain to him that he’s not supposed to come until you get home?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I did.”
Bass and Cole both laughed and ribbed Ashe about what a pushover of a father he was going to be as dawn broke outside. They ate tuna fish straight from the can—it wasn’t the most appetizing breakfast Cole’d ever had, but it was a whole lot better than some of the swill that had passed for food in his career.
Nissa wandered out of the bedroom around the same time the rain stopped, around nine in the morning. “Is it over?” she asked, her voice husky with sleep and sexy as hell.
Dear God, she was irresistible with her hair—which turned out to be wildly curly when released from its braid—tangled around her face, the formfitting leggings and turtleneck she’d been given to wear under her wet suit leaving nothing to his vivid imagination. His gaze slid up her body hungrily, taking in every detail of her figure, before lifting to her face and—oh, sh—
She was watching him examine every inch of her. Her eyes were wide and startled, but as he gazed into them they went dark and sultry.
Dammit. She was thinking about her dream and that smoking-hot embrace they’d shared. And she knew darned good and well that he was thinking about the exact same thing. He tore his gaze away from hers, but that wasn’t much better. He looked down and couldn’t help but notice her chest rising and falling in short little gasps. Did she have to get so turned on every time she looked at him? It was really starting to mess with his head. And he wasn’t going to be able to stand up without embarrassing himself for too much longer.
In fact, he moved over to the couch and sat down just in case.
“Hungry?” Ashe asked her from behind Cole.
“Yes. What’ve you got?”
Ashe put on a cheesy fake French accent. “I have for zee mademoiselle a delicious tuna fish on zee half can. Or I can offer to her zee beans of later making music.”
Nissa’s laugh was as musical and appealing as the rest of her. “I’ll take the tuna, thanks.”
“Good choice,” Bass commented, opening the stove door to add more wood to the fire.
Nissa settled on a chair that put her knee about six inches from Cole’s. Was she trying to torment him? He was supposed to be the ice man. Nothing rattled him, and nothing ever shook his vaunted cool. He shifted uncomfortably, putting a few more inches between them, hoping he was subtle enough about it not to draw his guys’ attention. He stared fixedly into the fire, determined not to give them any fodder to harass him or, more important, to harass Nissa.
The iron stove door clanged shut, startling him into looking up at Bass. The guy was smirking knowingly. Dammit. At least he’d had the decency to keep his amusement to himself and not embarrass Nissa. Cole made a mental note to have a private word with Ashe and Bass later to keep their remarks to themselves and be respectful of her.
“How much longer until we can get out of here?” she asked no one in particular.
He glanced at Bastien, who was the local and more accustomed to hurricanes than the rest of them.
Bass shrugged. “Depends on how long it takes the water to go down. Could be a day, could be a week. When we can move out will depend on where we plan to move to.”
“Meaning what?” Cole asked.
“Are we heading back to the boat, or are we going to hike inland until we hit civilization?” Bass responded.
“What are the odds of stumbling across a marina out here where we can refuel?”
“Low,” Bass admitted. “Even if we had a water navigation chart, when a big storm comes through the bayou, the scouring action of the tides and the storm surge cut new waterways and clog others till they’re impassable.”
“So our best bet is to abandon the RIB and make our way overland toward New Orleans?” Cole asked.
Ashe chimed in. “The boat was out of gas. If we use it, we’ll have to row all the way back to town. My best guess is we’re a hundred miles west of New Orleans.”
“So far?” Nissa exclaimed.
Ashe nodded. “Weather reports said Jessamine passed west of New Orleans, and her eye wall was about sixty miles across. I figure we didn’t catch the eye wall, because as sturdy as this place is, even it wouldn’t have withstood a direct hit. So we’re at least fifteen to twenty miles west of the path of the storm center. That puts us a good hundred miles or more west of New Orleans.”
The others launched into a brainstorming session of possible ways to get back to New Orleans, but all Cole could think about was Nissa’s knee so close to his. Who obsessed about knees, anyway? And yet, here he was, taking note of how slender hers was and how perfectly proportioned to her legs.
Eventually, Bass distracted him by saying, “What do you think, boss? Do we radio for help or try to make it back on our own?”
He answered, “The folks back in New Orleans are going to have their hands full with rescue operations. No matter how hard the government tries to convince everyone to leave, you know a bunch of the locals were too stubborn to go.” The others nodded in commiseration. “We’re able bodied, uninjured and capable of taking care of ourselves. We don’t need to divert resources to help us when civilians are dying. What’s out here by way of roads or towns?”
Bastien pulled out the laminated maps that had been provided for this mission, and Cole was relieved to move over to the kitchen table to pore over the maps with his men. Close proximity to Nissa was doing weird stuff to his blood pressure.
Cole pulled out their GPS locator. “We’ve only got the one battery that’s in the GPS to work with. The spare batteries got wet somewhere along the way. Let’s get a solid position fix and then figure out where the closest place is that might have vehicles and gasoline.”
As Ashe had guessed, they were, indeed, about a hundred miles west of New Orleans along the Gulf Coast. But what shocked Cole was that they were nearly fifteen miles inland north of the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area. “How did we get so far north?” he asked.
Bass answered, “Storm surge. All this coastal area, here, was underwater by the time we came ashore, and we motored right over it.”
“We’re only about three miles southwest of this town, Gueydan. Can we hike to it overland, or will the area between us and it be flooded?” Cole asked him.
Bass shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Ashe looked over at Nissa, seated on the couch. “What about her? Do we leave her behind and come back for her once we’ve got transportation?”
Cole was stunned by the visceral negative reaction in his gut at the notion of leaving her behind. Aloud, he answered, “SEALs don’t leave anyone behind, and for now, she’s one of us. Besides, she’s had a hell of a scare—several of them, in fact. Let’s not traumatize her any further by abandoning her out here in the middle of the bayou.”
Nissa flashed him a brilliant smile that all but had him striding across the room to wrap her in his arms and capture all that joyous relief for himself.
They ended up having to wait a full twenty-four hours for the floodwaters to go down and for the sodden land to reemerge. They passed the time making repairs to the cabin, inside and out, by way of thanks to the owner for the shelter. Bright and early the next morning, however, they packed their gear and headed out.
Cole was plenty glad to get out of the small confines of the cabin. Its four walls hadn’t been anywhere near big enough to contain the towering attraction between him and Nissa, and he was on the verge of losing his mind before they finally got outside and on the move, away from the momentary insanity that had been their impromptu hurricane party.
For the first time he could remember, he was antsy as all heck to get back to civilization and be done with this mission. And it had everything to do with a petite blonde CIA analyst and her big blue eyes.
Chapter 5 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)
The three-mile hike to Gueydan turned into a six-hour nightmare of dead ends, doubling back and wading through waist-deep water. Nissa didn’t think the trek from hell was ever going to end. She was still dreadfully sore from the last hike with these guys, but she was embarrassed to complain about being too uncomfortable to go on. They were toodling along like this was a stroll in the park. Which she supposed it was for them. Bass was actually whistling—cheerfully, no less—as he led the way forward. Instead, she suffered in silence and resolved to work out for about a month solid before she volunteered to come out into the field with a bunch of Navy SEALs again.
The only thing that kept the day from being completely miserable was that every time she stumbled, Cole’s hand was there to steady her. Every time she thought she couldn’t go another step, he called a rest break. Every time her throat was parched, he held out a canteen to her. His attentiveness was so constant and kind that it nearly made her weep more than once.
She knew intellectually that she was holding back the team and that Cole was only making sure she kept moving. But to have a man like him even aware of her, let alone concerned about her, was a fantasy come true. She tried to enjoy the attention, but before long it was hard to focus on anything except the burning agony in her leg muscles and the way they instantly stiffened up whenever the group stopped to rest.
Cole’s touch was never anything but respectful and proper, but it didn’t stop her heart from racing every time his strong fingers grasped her elbow or his palm came to rest lightly in the small of her back. His presence beside her was nothing short of devastating. He filled her senses and her mind, as raw and elemental as the stormy skies and wrecked landscape around them. Trees were snapped in half like twigs, tree branches lay everywhere and every man-made structure they came across had suffered major damage of some kind or another.
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Cindy Dees
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: Their mission: deliver a ruthless spy to justice.But can they outlast a storm as dangerous as their target?Tracking an elusive Russian operative, CIA agent Nissa Beck has no choice but to ask for help as a hurricane descends on New Orleans. She turns to alpha navy SEAL Cole Perriman. Used to conquering impossible odds, now he must protect beautiful Nissa. But as unstoppable storms and passions rage, there’s more at stake for them than survival.