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Dead Man's Curve
Paula Graves


“You’re supposed to be dead.”
Her voice had a raw, uneven tone, the shaking in her hand growing to an alarming wobble as Sin stared down the muzzle of her Glock.
“You didn’t blow yourself up,” she muttered.
“Says who?” he asked.
“You’re wanted by the FBI.”
“I’m not on the list anymore,” he disagreed. “Dead, you see.”
Her mouth twisted with frustration. “You’re not dead. And you’re under arrest.”
He couldn’t hold back a grin at her serious expression.
“This isn’t funny.” Moving more quickly than he thought she could, she grabbed the Glock he’d taken from her and swung it back in front of her. This time, her hands didn’t shake nearly as hard.
Fear battled with grudging admiration. She was tougher than she looked. “What are you going to do, shoot me?”
“If I have to.”

Dead Man’s Curve
Paula Graves

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Alabama native PAULA GRAVES wrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America.
Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com (http://www.paulagraves.com).
For Gayle Cochrane, who knows just how many ways I owe her my gratitude.
Thanks for all you do!
Contents
Cover (#u1530f441-5eaa-53a2-b310-928349dbef07)
Introduction (#ud6bc34c9-1305-5eae-a7dc-e3f9f33d0e64)
Title Page (#ue13deb46-9679-5249-afb7-0961cb7f455c)
About the Author (#ufe07107f-cf54-5ac9-94c0-beed75228546)
Dedication (#u9f6250b8-6bce-5562-a64d-427a02d32bdf)
Chapter One (#u836dacd3-7e59-5e90-a7a4-0a6029ce087f)
Chapter Two (#u3019ae7d-884b-508f-8e05-7718b57added)
Chapter Three (#u1e8fb764-30d8-5d9c-91c1-34204d909898)
Chapter Four (#u6da9b818-ec0c-51f9-8860-165a1cf1dce2)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_fd5b71d2-e2eb-503a-972e-2dc977d95949)
Special Agent Ava Trent took a slow turn around Room 125 of the Mountain View Motor Lodge, studying everything, even though the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had already given the place a thorough once-over that morning before the locals had called in the FBI. She doubted there was much they’d missed, but she liked to walk through a crime scene while it was still relatively fresh.
She wasn’t going to pretend she could put herself in the head of either the victims or the perpetrator—she’d leave the hocus-pocus to the Investigative Services Unit. She just wanted to get a good look at the setup. Get a picture of it in her head. Most people in law enforcement had their own rituals. Taking a good, long look around a crime scene was hers.
Unmade queen-size bed. Suitcases open, partially unpacked, on the luggage stand helpfully supplied by the Mountain View Motor Lodge. Two toothbrushes in the bathroom.
Blotches of blood on the torn green comforter hanging off the bed.
“Married couple. Gabe and Alicia Cooper.” Cade Landry, the agent assigned to investigate the possible kidnapping with her, strode up to her, all broad shoulders, square chin and no nonsense. He was new to the Johnson City, Tennessee, resident agency and, if his gruff demeanor was anything to go by, he wasn’t going to turn out to be a favorite among the other agents.
She didn’t care herself. She wasn’t looking to have her hand held, and if she wanted conversation, she could call up her mother or her sister and get all she could handle. And unlike the female support staff at the resident agency, who all found Landry’s rock-hewn features and sweet molasses drawl irresistible, she certainly wasn’t in the market for a romantic entanglement, especially not with a fellow agent.
“Plenty of signs of a struggle, but not serious injury,” Landry continued. “Blood on the bedspread looks incidental. Bloody nose, maybe. Busted lip in a fight. If the Coopers are deceased, it didn’t happen here.”
“Why were they here in Poe Creek?” she asked.
“Three-year wedding anniversary, according to the motel staff,” Landry answered.
“An anniversary trip to Poe Creek?” She took another look around the motel room and shook her head.
“The husband’s a pro fisherman. Seems his idea of an anniversary trip included fishing on Douglas Lake,” Landry explained, referring to a lake northeast of Knoxville, Tennessee. It was a fifteen-minute drive from Poe Creek, depending on where they’d planned to put their boat in the water.
“Where can I get me a romantic man like that?” she murmured.
It might have been her imagination, but she thought she spotted a hint of a smile flicker over Landry’s stony features. Just a hint, then it was gone. “Not an angler?” he asked as he followed her on her circuit of the room.
“Actually, I’m a very good angler,” she answered. “But I don’t reckon scaling fish ranks high on my list of things to do on an anniversary trip.” Not that she’d ever had an anniversary to celebrate. Unless you counted six years with the FBI.
“Maybe he does all the fish-cleaning. A woman might find that romantic.” Pulling out a pen, Landry nudged a piece of paper lying on the bedside table. It was a note, written in a lazy scrawl. “‘225 Mulberry Road.’”
“Locals already checked it out. It’s a bait-and-tackle shop on the way to Douglas Lake. They’re getting the security video for us, in case the Coopers made it there.”
“May have nothing to do with their disappearance.” Landry’s tone of voice was one big shrug. She was beginning to wonder if anything interested him at all.
But not enough to ask him about it. Taciturn and antisocial was just fine with her. She wasn’t exactly Susie Sunshine herself.
“We don’t have a lot of time before the family shows up,” Landry warned a few minutes later when they emerged from the small motel room into the late afternoon gloom. An early fall storm was rolling in from the west, advancing twilight despite the early hour. Rain would be on them soon, making the drive back to Johnson City a gloomy prospect.
“The family?” she asked.
“The Coopers. As in Cooper Security. Ever heard of it?”
“Oh. Of course.” Anyone in law enforcement around these parts had heard of Cooper Security, the private agency that had brought down a major-league global conspiracy involving some of the previous administration’s top people. “I thought you said this Cooper was a fisherman, though.”
“He was. But Mrs. Cooper works for Cooper Security. They’d have been informed by now, and they have access to helicopters, hell, maybe even private jets, which means they can be up in these mountains before you can say ‘civilian interference in an official investigation.’ No way will they stay out of this, not with both an employee and one of their own cousins gone missing.”
She tried to gauge whether Landry found the thought disturbing or not. For her part, she didn’t like the idea of civilians, however skilled and resourceful they might be, getting up in her business on a case. It cramped her style, if nothing else.
“Why don’t we see if we can get a couple of rooms and stay here for the night?” Landry suggested, surprising her. She slanted a sharp look his way. “Territorial rights,” he added with another ghost of a smile.
She smiled back. “Stake our claim?”
“Somebody’s gotta do it. Might as well be us.”
First sign of life she’d seen in Landry since they’d arrived. She wasn’t sure if she liked it or not, but at least it suited her own intentions.
She called the resident agency and talked to Pete Chang, the Special Agent in Charge. “Do you think the case will benefit from your staying in town instead of commuting?” he asked.
“I do,” she answered with more confidence than she felt.
“Approved. Just do the paperwork.”
She hung up and nodded to Landry. “Go take care of getting the rooms.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly. “Where are you going?”
“Just want a look around.” She wandered across the parking lot, where a crowd had gathered in the deepening gloom. Onlookers were ubiquitous at any crime scene, though in a town this small, the crowd wasn’t as large as it might have been in a bigger place.
She let her gaze run across the crowd, just out of habit. It had surely taken more than one person to overpower and abduct two able-bodied people, especially if one of those people was a Cooper and the other one worked for Cooper Security. Not likely they could spare someone to see what was going on at the crime scene.
But it wouldn’t hurt to give the onlookers a little extra scrutiny.
Most of the people in the crowd came across as tourists rather than locals, though Ava couldn’t put her finger on what, exactly, gave her that impression. She wasn’t a local herself, though she was close. Her hometown was Bridal Falls, Kentucky, not far across the state line up near Jellico, Tennessee. She knew her way around the mountains.
Some of the people in this crowd weren’t dressed for the mountain climate—too many clothes or not enough, depending on where they came from, she supposed. Some wore socks with sandals, which every self-respecting Southerner knew to be a big, flashing sign of an outsider. As she wandered closer to the gathered crowd, she heard a few northeastern and Midwestern accents as well, mingling with the Southern drawls.
Apparently, Landry had followed her, for his deep drawl hummed near her ear. “Is this some sort of FBI magic trick? You listening for the voice of J. Edgar or something?”
“Go get us some rooms,” she repeated.
She couldn’t see him, but she pictured his shrug. After his one brief moment of liveliness, he was back to the guy who didn’t quite give enough of a damn about anything to put up much of an argument. He would have bugged the hell out of her last case partner, an uptight blue flamer from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Didn’t bother her a bit, though. A little objectiveness about a case was usually a good thing. Better than sweating every detail until you started seeing things that weren’t there.
She turned away from the crowd and looked back at the motel. It was picturesque, she supposed, in the way small mountain motels were. The facade was pure sixties kitsch, complete with a space-age neon sign starting to glow bright aqua in the waning daylight. To a certain type of traveler, she supposed, the Mountain View Motor Lodge might prove too much of a temptation to resist.
Which one chose the place? she wondered. Probably the wife. This was a wife kind of place.
She noticed a truck and a high-end bass boat parked near the end of the lot. The husband was a fisherman. The boat was probably his. She pulled out her cell phone and made a note to check whether forensics had taken a look at the vehicle and the water craft.
Slipping the phone back in her pocket, she turned toward the crowd, letting her gaze slide across the faces again as she pondered the obvious question nobody had yet asked.
Why would someone kidnap a fisherman and his wife? Was it the Cooper name? Was it the wife’s job at Cooper Security?
As she reached for her phone again to make a note to check into the wife’s open cases, her gaze snagged on a face in the crowd.
He stood near the back, a golden-skinned face in the middle of a sea of various skin colors. Dark hair worn longer than the fashion these days lay thick and wavy around his angular features. He had a full lower lip and deep brown eyes that, back in her foolish, romantic youth, she’d thought soulful.
Someone in front of him shifted, blocking him from her view. She edged sideways, impatient, but when the space opened again, he was gone.
The electric shock coursing through her body kept zinging, however, shooting quivers along her nerve endings and sprinkling chill bumps down her arms and legs. A tidal wave of images and memories swept through her brain, washing out all good sense and replacing it with a tumble of sensations and wishes and the time-worn detritus of shattered dreams.
It’s him, she thought, her heart racing like a startled deer.
Except it couldn’t be him. How could it be?
Sinclair Solano was very, very dead.
* * *
UNTIL THAT BRIEF, electric clash of gazes with the woman across the motel parking lot, Sinclair Solano had almost lost touch with what it meant to be alive. He’d forgotten that something other than caution or dread could animate his pulse or spark a flood of adrenaline into his system. That his skin could tingle with pleasurable anticipation and not just the fear of discovery.
But as soon as the sensation bloomed, he crushed it with ruthless intent. He had no time for anticipation. No room for pleasure. His sister, Alicia, had disappeared from her motel room earlier that day, and while Sinclair could offer no evidence to support his theory, he knew deep in his gut—where the worst of his regrets festered—that she’d been taken because of him.
Someone in Sanselmo had discovered the truth. He hadn’t died in Tesoro Harbor, as the world supposed.
And if he had not, then his former comrades would assume only one thing: he had been their enemy, not their friend.
And enemies were not allowed to live.
The crowd shifted, and he darted back toward the woods across the sheltered road, grateful that summer’s thick foliage hadn’t yet surrendered to the death throes of autumn. He’d dressed today, as he had since coming to these mountains, in olive drab and camouflage, an old habit from his days with the rebels in Sanselmo. Blending into his surroundings had become second nature to him long before his “death,” and nothing he’d experienced since that time had given him a reason to change.
Home these days was a lightweight weatherproof tent in the woods. He was able to pitch the tent in minutes and disassemble it as quickly as the need arose.
The only question now was: Had the need arisen again?
She’d seen him. But had she understood who she was seeing? When he’d known her, he hadn’t yet crossed the line. He’d been a young man adrift, not long out of college and on a mission to find himself. Twenty-five years old, possessing a law degree but no career, a steady supply of his parents’ money and a restless yearning to change the world, he’d bummed around the Caribbean for a while. Haiti for relief work. The Dominican Republic to teach English to eager young students.
The trip to Mariposa had been an oddity. A real vacation, downtime from the poverty and sadness he’d faced every day. And the pretty corn-fed college girl with her Kentucky drawl and pragmatic view of the world had seemed damned near as exotic as the Mariposan beauties.
They’d clicked, in the way opposites sometimes do, and though the smart, practical girl from Kentucky had at first been wary about being alone with a stranger on an island, they’d connected soon enough. It had been the best week of his life, a fact which had confounded him, since neither of them had done a damned thing high-minded or selfless.
Confounded him and made him feel guilty. Especially after talking to his parents one night and realizing, with dismay, that some of the things he’d found most charming about Ava had left his parents appalled and speechless.
It had been his father who’d told him about Luis Grijalva. Luis was doing amazing things in the Caribbean and South America, politically. Organizing workers, fighting for social justice, all the things that mattered to the Solano family.
The things that had mattered to Sinclair.
What was one last day with a college girl compared to meeting the great man himself and learning from his experiences?
He reached the tent, his heart still pounding, and zipped himself inside, wrapping his arms around himself to hold back the shivers. The day was mild, not cool, despite the coming storm, but he felt chilled from the inside out. He dug into the pockets of his trousers and pulled out his latest burner phone. There was a little juice left, but not much. If he didn’t run in to town in the next few days, he’d be completely cut off from even the hope of communication.
He stared at the dimmed display, wondering if it was time to make contact with Quinn again. Just a call. A couple of carefully memorized code words. He hadn’t tried it yet, but things had changed. Alicia was missing.
He hadn’t checked in with Alexander Quinn in almost eight months. He couldn’t trust that Adam Brand, the FBI agent who’d recognized him, would keep quiet. There were limits to even Quinn’s influence, and enemies more powerful and ruthless than the government who’d once listed him as one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives.
But Sinclair hadn’t left the mountains, either. He supposed, in a way, they were as close to a place to call home as he’d found in years of running from his past. He’d always lived in hilly places, from the rolling streets of San Francisco to the volcanic peaks of Sanselmo, the home of his heart. Even on the tiny Caribbean island of Mariposa, where he’d spent a couple of years before the call from Quinn, he’d gravitated to the mountain that filled the center of the island.
The Smoky Mountains were an alpine rainforest rather than a tropical one. But they’d felt like a place of refuge ever since he’d arrived.
Until now.
* * *
THOUGH SHE’D GROWN UP in the mountains, it had been a while since Ava had spent much time in the middle of unfettered nature. She’d been living in cities for several years now, where hiking meant leaving the Ford Focus at home instead of driving it downhill to the grocery store when she had a few things to pick up.
But she’d stayed fit, thanks to the demands of her job, and she found some of her old childhood skills coming back to her as she picked her way through the thickening forest.
The land sloped gently upward, making her calves burn as she hiked, but she shrugged the twinges away, concentrating instead on trying to follow the trail through the gloom. Rain had started to fall by the time she reached a fork in the forest trail, turning her hair to damp, frizzled curls beneath the hood of her jacket.
She should have been shocked that Landry hadn’t asked more questions about why she was heading into the woods, but based on her hours in his unadulterated presence, she wasn’t surprised at all. He was phoning it in these days, for whatever reason. She doubted he’d last at the agency much longer with that attitude. But she didn’t have the time or the inclination to dig deeper into what drove him to such epic levels of ennui.
She had an abduction to solve, and based on what she’d learned from her supervisory agent just a few minutes earlier, chasing a ghost into the woods just might be the best use of her time.
“Don’t know if it means anything,” SAC Chang had told her when he’d called, “but her name pinged in our records because of her familial connection to a terrorist.”
At that point, she’d known who the terrorist would be. Hadn’t she?
She certainly hadn’t been surprised to hear him add, “Her maiden name is Solano.”
Sinclair Solano’s sister had gone missing the same day Ava had looked up into the crowd at the crime scene and seen the ghost of her brother. And since she didn’t believe in ghosts, there was only one explanation.
Sinclair Solano was alive after all.
“Come on, Sin,” she muttered, blinking away a film of rain blurring her vision even as it darkened the day. “Where the hell did you go?”
The man she’d met years earlier, before his descent into murder and mayhem, had been a real charmer. Handsome, beautifully tanned, in love with beauty and music and passionate about the world of people around him, he’d been as exotic to her as a Mariposan native, even though he was an American, born and raised in San Francisco. His parents were college professors, he’d told her. His sister was a brainiac who’d skipped grades and was already on the verge of graduating from college at the age of twenty.
He’d liked her accent, argued passionately with some of her politics without making her feel evil or stupid and when he’d kissed her, she would have sworn she heard music.
How he’d gone from that man to the scourge of Sanselmo was a mystery that had nagged her for a long time, until word of his death had reached the news shortly after the terrorist bomb blast he’d set, one intended to take out the new president and his family, went terribly wrong for him and some of his comrades instead.
She was glad, she’d told herself. Poetic justice and all that.
But there was a part of her that had always felt cheated. That curious part of her, the one that had driven her into her current job, that wanted to know why.
Why had he blown her off that last day in Mariposa, knowing her flight would leave the next morning? Why had he grown so cold and distant after talking to his father on the phone?
Why had he left Mariposa for Sanselmo, armed himself on the side of brutal, ruthless rebels and channeled his passion for justice into a murderous assault on a nascent democratic republic?
After word of his death, she’d resigned herself to never knowing the answers to those nagging questions.
Now maybe she’d get a chance to ask them after all.
The rain fell harder around her, seeping under the collar of her jacket. Her trousers were soaked through and beginning to chafe. Worst of all, she had no damned idea where she was anymore. And if the ghost she was chasing had left any sort of trail from here forward, she saw no sign of it.
Trudging to a stop, she just stood still a moment, listening to the woods, taking in the ambient sounds—the susurration of rainfall, the distant hum of engines from the highway north of her position, the slightly ragged whoosh of her own breathing.
Another sound seeped into her consciousness. Footsteps. Careful. Furtive.
Turning a slow circle, she let her gaze go unfocused. Let the wall of green become a blur against which movement might become more evident. She slowed her breathing deliberately, remembering lessons from the shooting classes she’d taken in pursuit of her career, determined to be the best at any task she took on. Her own weapon, a Glock G30S, sat heavily in the small of her back. She reached behind her slowly and eased it from the holster.
She wasn’t dressed for stealth on purpose, but her brown jacket, olive-green blouse and dark trousers didn’t make her an easy target. She had ordinary brown hair, not a bright shock of red curls that might draw attention her way. Plain olive-toned skin, unlikely to stand out in the gloom. She was in many ways a nondescript woman, which had served her well on the job.
But right now, she felt utterly exposed as the crackle of underbrush filtered through the patter of rainfall.
Someone was watching her. She felt it.
Edging back in the direction she came, she tried not to panic. Coming out here alone had been reckless, especially when she probably could have convinced Landry to come along with her if she’d made the effort.
She hadn’t wanted to tell him what she’d seen. That was the truth of the matter. She hadn’t wanted to see his skepticism or, worse, his ridicule. Didn’t want to hear that she was imagining things.
She knew what she’d seen. She’d looked at Sinclair’s photograph for years, even after his death, wondering how the sweet-natured, passionate man she’d met in the Caribbean could have become a terrorist.
The wind picked up, swirling leaves from the trees to slap her rain-stung cheeks. Blinking away a film of moisture, she quickened her steps.
A dark mass rose out of the gloom to her right, slamming into her with a jarring blow before she could react. She staggered against the impact, trying to keep her feet, but shoes slipped on the rain-slick leaves carpeting the forest floor and she hit the ground. Her pistol went flying in the underbrush, out of reach. Breath whooshed from her lungs, and her vision darkened to a narrow tunnel of blurry light.
Rough hands grabbed at her as she gasped for air. Twisting, she tried to see her captor, certain she would see Sinclair Solano’s face staring back at her. But the dark-eyed man who held her in his painful grasp was someone she’d never seen before.
He shoved his pistol into the soft flesh beneath her chin, the front sight digging painfully into her skin. “¡Silencio!”
Her pulse rattling in her throat, she had no choice but to comply.
Chapter Two (#ulink_be95b13f-c2a2-5892-94b1-43a2f8a82e21)
It had happened in the span of a couple of seconds. One second, Ava Trent been turning back toward the path that had brought her within sight. The next, a man in the familiar jungle camouflage pattern of an El Cambio rebel had risen from behind a thick mountain laurel bush and slammed into her like a linebacker. They’d both gone down, but Ava had taken the brunt of the impact, struggling to breathe as the man grabbed her up and jammed a pistol under her chin.
Sin’s heart hammered in terror as he scanned the area for an accomplice. There. Emerging from the trees, a second man glided into view, grabbing Ava by the arm.
Two against one, with Ava as the wild card. She’d been carrying a weapon, and back at the crime scene she’d been moving about like a woman with a purpose. Law enforcement, maybe? She’d been circumspect about what she’d be doing when she returned home from vacation, but some things she’d said had hinted at a police job.
Had she recognized him across the parking lot and come out here to find him?
He was armed because Quinn had told him he’d be stupid to walk around unprotected. But despite his reputation, he wasn’t a man comfortable with violence. He never had been.
But he could be, under the right circumstances. He’d learned that much about himself in Sanselmo.
Pulling the pistol from the hidden holster inside his jacket, he wished he had a rifle instead. Better accuracy from a distance. But the Taurus 1911 would do.
Across the woods, the man holding the pistol to Ava’s chin drew his hand back, bringing the pistol muzzle away from her face. But as he did so, the second man grabbed her from behind in a bear hug, eliciting a grunt of surprise from her as she started to struggle against his hold.
The man with the gun pressed it to her forehead, and Sin aimed the Taurus in his direction, his finger sliding onto the trigger.
Ava slumped suddenly, her arms sliding up and her body dropping, catching the man holding her by surprise. She slipped from his grasp, down to the forest floor.
Sinclair would never get a better chance.
Aiming down the barrel of the Taurus, he fired. Simultaneously, another shot rang out, the crack echoing in the trees, almost drowning out the report of his own weapon. The man reaching for Ava fell backward into the underbrush. The man in front of her pitched forward, firing off a shot of his own as he fell.
Ava’s body jerked, even as she rolled away from the falling man, scrambled to her feet and started running. She made it about ten yards before she started to stagger, her legs wobbling beneath her as if they’d gone boneless. She fell forward into the thickening underbrush, disappearing from his view.
Keeping an eye on the two fallen men, Sinclair dashed after her, his heart racing faster than his churning legs. She lay crumpled, facedown, but he could see by the rise and fall of her body that she was still breathing. He stopped next to the two fallen men. The one who’d grabbed Ava first lay facedown, unmoving. The back of his camouflage jacket had a bloody hole in it, somewhere in the vicinity of his left shoulder blade. He didn’t appear to be breathing. Nudging with his foot, Sin rolled the man over and took a long look at his face.
Emilio Fuentes, he thought, staring into the glassy brown eyes of a man he’d once called friend. His heart contracted.
He picked up the pistol Fuentes had dropped and shoved it into his pocket. He checked the second man, the one at whom he’d aimed his own pistol. Carlito Escalante. A bloody hole in the side of the man’s neck was the only obvious injury. Sin checked for a pulse and found none.
A queasy sensation filled his gut, and he swallowed the urge to be sick.
He searched Carlito’s body, found a hunting knife besides the pistol the man had dropped, and added both to his pocket, trying not to let his rapid respirations escalate to hyperventilation. He needed his wits about him. His life had just gotten a thousand times more dangerous.
By the time he found the pistol Ava had dropped when she was attacked and turned back to her, she was on her hands and knees, trying to crawl away. He hurried to her side, crouching beside her.
She whirled at his touch, swinging her arm up in a shaky arc before he could react. Suddenly, he was staring down the muzzle of a Glock aimed right between his eyes. Now he knew where the second shot had come from.
She’d had another weapon.
“Ava,” he said.
“You’re supposed to be dead.” Her voice had a raw, uneven tone, the shaking in her hand growing to an alarming wobble.
He reached out and moved her hand away from his face. She struggled but didn’t pull the trigger before he took the gun away and wrapped his arm around her as she started to fall backward. “Whoa, there.” Dropping the Glock to one side, he gave her a quick appraisal, looking for her injury.
There. Under the hem of her jacket. Blood spread across the right side of her charcoal trousers and seeped upward onto her olive-green blouse. As she tried to slap his hands away, he tugged the blouse up and away, revealing a ripped furrow in the waistband of her pants. Beneath it, the bullet’s path had carved a bloody gouge in the soft flesh just above her hip bone.
“Ow,” she groaned as he plucked a piece of scorched fabric from the wound.
He needed to get her back to the motel. And he needed not to get caught. Irreconcilable goals.
“You didn’t blow yourself up,” she muttered. He looked up from the bullet wound to find her hazel eyes focused on his face.
“Says who?” he asked, reaching in his back pocket for his multibladed knife. There was a set of tweezers tucked into the handle, if he wasn’t mistaken. Given the messy condition of her wound, he was probably going to need them.
“You’re wanted by the FBI.”
“I’m not on the list anymore,” he disagreed, sliding the tweezers out. “Dead, you see.”
Her mouth twisted with frustration. “You’re not dead. And you’re under arrest.”
He couldn’t hold back a grin at her serious expression. “Can I finish cleaning this wound before you take me in?”
“This isn’t funny.” Moving more quickly than he thought she could, she grabbed the Glock he’d taken from her and swung it back in front of her. This time, her hands didn’t shake nearly as hard.
Fear battled with grudging admiration. She was tougher than she looked. “What are you going to do, shoot me?”
“If I have to.”
“Getting back to the motel on your own isn’t going to be pleasant,” he warned, sitting back on his heels.
“I’ll deal.” Keeping her pistol aimed at his chest, she pushed to her feet, struggling not to sway. “Sinclair Solano, you’re under arrest for the murder of three American oil company employees. For starters.”
“I didn’t kill those men.”
“We’ll let the courts sort that out.” She twitched the Glock’s muzzle at him. “Move.”
He wasn’t going to let her take him in. He’d had his chance to face justice years ago and had traded it for a chance to make things right. But Alexander Quinn had warned him there were no easy outs. Once he went back to El Cambio and pretended nothing had changed, he might never be able to clear his name.
He’d taken the chance. Now, it seemed he might have to pay.
“Do you know who those men were?” He nodded toward the two bodies lying several yards away.
Her gaze slanted toward them briefly before locking with Sin’s again. “No. Do you?”
“The one who grabbed you was Emilio Fuentes. Major player in El Cambio’s military wing. He was Alberto Cabrera’s top commander.” He watched her expression for any signs of recognition. Her eyes narrowed; she knew something about El Cambio, he thought. “The other was Carlito Escalante.”
“The Spider,” she murmured, recognition dawning.
She wasn’t just playing at whatever job she was working, clearly, if she knew Escalante’s nom de guerre. He tried not to stare into the muzzle of her Glock. “Why do you suppose two of El Cambio’s top enforcers were wandering around the Smoky Mountains?”
“They’re looking for you.”
He gave a brief nod. “They’re looking for me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not one of them. Because I betrayed them a long time ago, and somehow, they figured out I’m not dead.”
Her eyes narrowed in her pain-creased face. “Betrayed them how?”
“Long story, carida. Remind me to tell you about it sometime.”
“Are there others out here?”
He suspected there were. If Cabrera had sent two enforcers, he’d probably sent a dozen. The arrogant son of a bitch had never economized on anything. “The motel is about a mile in that direction,” he said, nodding toward the northwest. “But I can’t promise you won’t run into more like those two.”
Her nostrils flared, the only sign of reaction to his words. “Or maybe you’re just telling me that so I’ll let you go.”
He shrugged. “Your call.”
She pushed painfully to her feet, keeping the pistol barrel pointed at his chest. “Walk.”
“I’m not going back to the motel with you, so you might as well shoot me now.”
A muscle in her jaw twitched dangerously. “Why did you even come back here? You had to know you’d be arrested if anyone ever found you.”
“There’s a man named Alexander Quinn.” Her forehead creased slightly with recognition, so he proceeded without further explanation. “He recruited me years ago. Not long after I joined up with El Cambio.”
“Recruited you for what?”
A flash in the gloom behind her distracted him. It was quick, but his instincts were honed for action after all these years living on the edge of the razor. He threw himself at her, praying she wouldn’t shoot before he knocked her to the ground.
A sharp report shattered the air around them. It took a moment for him to realize it had come from the woods, not from her pistol.
He held her down, lifting his head just enough to peer through the underbrush for more signs of movement. Beneath his body, she wriggled, her breath coming in short, pained gasps.
“Shh,” he whispered, dropping his head back below the underbrush.
“Was that—?” Her words came out in a raspy wheeze.
“Someone shooting at us?” he whispered, shifting to give her room to breathe. “Yes. Yes, it was.”
* * *
RAIN NEEDLED HER FACE, soft prickles she could barely feel. All of her senses seemed gathered on the burning ache of her torn flesh and the dizzying sensation of Sinclair Solano’s very warm, very alive body covering hers. She expected more gunfire, but it didn’t come.
“They didn’t just leave,” she whispered, hating that she was on her back, blind to the angle of attack. But moving more than an inch or two might make them easier targets. Sometimes, waiting for a more advantageous situation was the only reasonable option.
Not that she had to like it.
“I know.” Sin edged slowly to one side. As the weight of his body eased from hers, she sucked in a deeper breath. Almost immediately, she wished she hadn’t, as the rise and fall of her diaphragm tugged the skin around her wound.
Biting her lip, she carefully rolled to her side. The movement brought her close to Sin again, but she had a better view of the woods in front of them. “There could be people coming from all directions.”
“I know.”
She had held on to the spare Glock, she realized with a twinge of surprise. For a few moments there, when he’d slammed her to the ground, all she’d been aware of was gutting pain. She eased the pistol forward, trying not to rustle the tangle of undergrowth that hid their position.
“If we can get back to the motel, we’ll have backup,” she added, slanting a look at him. “Want to rethink the whole resisting arrest thing?”
“I’m not guilty of murder.”
She couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. It sounded like the truth, but his gaze slanted away from hers as he said it.
“And you’re willing to die to avoid defending yourself?”
“Where’s your cell phone?” he asked.
She almost banged her head on the ground in frustration. What the hell? Why hadn’t she already pulled out her phone and called in the cavalry?
As she dropped her hand to her right pocket, her palm grazed the wound over her hip, and she sucked in a hiss of breath. Biting her lip, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the phone.
It was in pieces. The bullet had apparently hit the metal phone case and deflected into her hip. But not before it smashed into the phone itself, cracking it in two.
She looked at Sin. “Don’t suppose you’d lend me yours?”
He shook his head. “I’m not letting you take me in.”
“Then I guess we both die out here.” Grinding her teeth in anger, she lifted her head briefly, long enough to see above the underbrush. Movement to the south caught her attention, and she ducked again. “They’re circling around to the south.”
“Maybe checking on Fuentes and Escalante.”
She turned her head toward him, her heart freezing for a long, dizzying moment as she realized he gripped a large Taurus 1911, a shiny silver monster of a pistol with a walnut grip.
His gaze met hers. “I’m not going to shoot you.” He nodded toward the south. “Might shoot him, though.”
She followed his gaze and saw a man dressed in dark green camouflage moving quietly through the underbrush. The same man who’d already shot at them? Or someone new? She wasn’t sure.
“How do we get out of here?” she whispered, trying to ignore the burning pain in her hip. If she crouched here much longer in one position, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to move when the time came.
“We need a distraction,” he murmured.
“Got any ideas?”
“Yeah, one, but I should have pulled the trigger on that option about thirty minutes ago,” he answered, his gaze still on the man creeping through the gloom in front of them. “Too late now.”
A streak of lightning lit the sky overhead, and the man in camouflage jerked in reaction, especially when a booming crash of thunder followed only a second later.
“Just great,” Ava muttered. As if the rain wasn’t enough.
“Just might be,” Sin said quietly.
She glanced at him. He was still watching the other man, his eyes narrowed in thought.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, uneasy at how quickly they’d gone from opponents to allies with the addition of the new intruder. She’d do well to remember that, no matter what help Sinclair Solano might be offering at the moment, he was still a wanted man. He was suspected in over a dozen terrorist bombings in Sanselmo, many of which had killed innocent civilians—men, women and even children.
But Sin wasn’t the one hunting her now, so she had to be pragmatic about the situation. He seemed to know where he was and what he was doing. And she was bleeding and growing stiffer by the minute.
Another flash of lightning cracked open the sky. This time, the thunder sounded right on its heels, stopping the man hunting them in his tracks. Ava took the opportunity for a quick look around for more men in camouflage. She didn’t see anyone else out there, but Sin was probably right. If Cabrera had bothered to send two of his top lieutenants to look for Sin, he’d have sent more than just three people. There might be a whole squad of killers roaming these woods.
Getting out of here wasn’t going to be easy.
“Next flash of lightning, I want you to run east, as fast as you can. Due east. About two hundred yards in that direction, you’ll find a tent covered with a Ghillie net. Get inside and be ready to shoot anyone who sticks his head inside.”
She shot him a look. “Even you?”
“I’ll say, ‘Alicia is missing,’ and you’ll know it’s me.”
“Alicia is missing?” she repeated, not sure if it was smart to admit she knew the connection between her kidnapping victim and the man beside her.
“She is, isn’t she?” His throat bobbed as he turned his gaze toward the man still creeping through the trees. “Cabrera’s people almost certainly have her. They took her as a way to put pressure on me.”
“Why would they think it would?” she asked, wondering if he’d tell her the truth.
“Because Alicia Cooper’s maiden name is Solano.”
“Your sister?”
He looked at her oddly. “You already knew that.”
She didn’t deny it.
He sighed. “I have to find her before they do something that can’t be reversed.”
“She’s with her husband. He’ll help protect her.”
Sinclair nodded. “If they don’t kill him first.”
Lightning streaked across the sky, one jagged crack after another. Thunder rolled in a continuous roar, and Sin gave her a nudge. “Now!”
She reversed position, clamping her teeth together as pain raced through her side to settle in a raw burn at the point of her hip. Staying low, she raced east. Or, at least, what she hoped was east. She heard a commotion behind her, gunshots stuttering through the drumbeat of rain.
Head down, she ran faster, deeper into the woods. Pain squeezed tears from her eyes, but she couldn’t slow down. Footsteps crashed through the underbrush behind her, but she didn’t look back.
The Ghillie shelter rose up in the gloom so quickly, she almost ran headfirst into the tent. Spotting the opening, she wriggled into the small tent and turned until she sat facing front, her knees pulled up to her chest despite the howl of pain from her torn hip. She held her Glock steady by using her knees as a shooting rest, willing her heartbeat to slow and her ragged respiration to even out.
Alicia is missing, she thought, trying to piece together the disparate shards of information she’d gleaned over the past half hour. Alicia Cooper was originally Alicia Solano. Sinclair’s sister. Chang had told her that much. But did Alicia know her brother was alive? Did she know why Cabrera’s men had taken her and her husband?
Was Gabe Cooper even alive?
“Alicia is missing.” Even without the code words, she recognized Sinclair Solano’s voice. “I’m coming in.”
The flap of the tent opened. She tightened her grip on the Glock, her trigger finger sliding down from where she’d held it flattened against the side of the pistol. She tried not to hold her breath, but air wouldn’t seem to move in or out of her lungs while she waited for him to appear.
Then, in the space of a blink, he was there, crawling inside the tent, little more than a dark shadow within the darker confines of the shelter.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“I think so.”
“I shot a third man when he shot at me. He’s dead. But there are others out there. I heard them calling to one another.”
She pressed one hand to her mouth, feeling sick. “And we’re sitting ducks in this tent.”
“We’re under shelter. There are alarms outside to let us know if intruders are getting close.” He reached for a blanket that lay beside her on the tent floor. She hadn’t even noticed it, hadn’t realized how hard she was shivering until he draped it over her shoulders. Warmth rolled over her like a wave, driving out some of the chills.
“Better?” he asked.
She nodded. “I didn’t notice any alarms outside.”
“You wouldn’t have,” he said with a quirk of a smile. He hunkered down next to her, sticking close enough that the searing heat of his body was as good as a blazing fire. The only thing missing was the comfort of light. The tent remained dark and would only get darker as night continued to fall.
“So what now?” she whispered.
He blew out a long, slow breath. “We wait out the storm and hope those fellows don’t find us.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_f9d946a5-5f7f-5919-9b7d-561747e9bd00)
As plans went, waiting and hoping weren’t high on Sinclair’s list of great ones. But his burner phone had no juice left. He’d have to get to civilization to charge the phone, and even then, he wasn’t sure what, if anything, Alexander Quinn could do to help him find Alicia and her husband.
“I need to go back to the motel,” Ava said after a few moments of tense silence. “I have work to do.”
“You’re a cop?”
She gave him a strange look, then released a soft huff of breath that was almost a laugh. “Oh, right. I left the other jacket in the car.”
“What other jacket?”
He could barely make out the curve of her pained smile. “The blue jacket with the big yellow FBI on the back.”
“FBI.” Great. Of all the old acquaintances he could have run into in the middle of the woods, he had to run into the one who worked for the federal agency that had once had his face tacked prominently to every wall of every field office and resident agency in the country.
“We think you’re dead, you know. Well, everyone else does.”
“I’d love for it to stay that way.”
“Too bad. I’m not your friend, Solano. I can’t look the other way. So if you’re going to kill me to stop me from ratting on you, go for it now so one or the other of us can get on with trying to stay alive.”
“I’m not what you think I am.” He sighed as she gave him a look so skeptical he couldn’t miss it even in the near darkness. “I know you’ve probably heard that before.”
“You reckon?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Let me guess. You were really a double agent working for the CIA to bring down El Cambio from the inside.” Her sarcasm had a sharp bite.
Well, he thought. There goes the truth as a viable explanation.
Awkward silence descended between them again. Strange, Sin thought, how hard it was to talk to her now, when back in Mariposa, all those years ago, talking to Ava Trent had seemed as easy as breathing.
She’d been nothing like any girl he’d ever known, growing up in San Francisco, and he supposed maybe the sheer novelty of her had been the initial attraction. That and her curvy little figure, displayed not in a skin-baring bikini, but a trim racer-back one-piece, standing out on the Mariposan beach amid all those skimpy thongs and barely-there tops. She’d swum the ocean as if it were a sport, tackling waves with ferocity of purpose, all flexing muscles and determination.
Somehow, her lack of self-consciousness about her appearance had only made her more attractive in Sinclair’s eyes. And when she’d opened her mouth and that Kentucky drawl had meandered out, he’d been leveled completely. There had been no other word for the way she’d made him feel, as if the earth beneath his feet had liquefied and he couldn’t hold a solid thought in his head.
She’d declared he’d like Kentucky, if he was looking for somewhere new to visit. And he’d almost talked himself into going back there with her.
“How sure are you that it’s Cabrera who has your sister?” Ava’s whisper broke the tense silence filling the tent.
“Pretty sure,” he answered. “Do you have evidence to the contrary?”
She was silent for a moment. “I just got here this afternoon. I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate before I went on a ghost hunt.”
Feeling her gaze on him in the gloom, he turned his head to find her watching him, eyes glittering. “I didn’t think anyone would see me.”
“How’d you find out about the kidnapping?”
“I heard the sirens.” Reliving that heart-sinking moment when he’d realized all those lights and sirens had been headed for the motel where his sister was staying, he struggled to breathe. “I’d seen a write-up in the local paper about a visit from a previous bass tournament champion. Her husband, Gabe. There was a picture of the two of them, right on the front page of the sports section.”
Alicia had looked so beautiful in that photo, he thought. So happy. The guy she’d married seemed solid, too. Quinn had told him a few things about the Coopers, whom Quinn knew through prior dealings with the family. Gabe Cooper had been among the family members who’d done battle with a South American drug lord seeking vengeance against one of the Coopers. Sinclair prayed he’d be just as strong in protecting Alicia.
Of course, Cabrera’s men might have executed him the first chance they got. They were nothing if not ruthless.
“They’re keeping her alive,” Ava murmured. “There’s no point in killing her if they want to use her to smoke you out.”
“I may have done the job for them.”
“Three dead and we’re still at large. That’s not nothing.” Her voice had grown progressively more strained. That wound she’d suffered was probably hurting like hell by now.
“I need to take a look at your wound.”
“It’s okay.”
“It needs to be cleaned out and disinfected. The longer we wait to do that, the more likely infection will set in.” It might not be possible to avoid infection even now, but it wouldn’t hurt to clean her up. “I have first aid supplies.”
“We can’t risk a light.”
“The Ghillie cover will block most of it, and the woods should take care of the rest, unless they stumble right on us. And if that happens, the light will be the least of our worries.”
She released a gusty sigh. “Okay. But be quick.”
He grabbed his bag from the back of the tent and pulled out the compact first-aid kit. Fortunately, he’d stocked up a few days ago when he’d made a run to Bentwood to charge his burner phone. Using a penlight to see what he was doing, he pulled out disinfectant, gauze, tape and a couple of ibuprofen tablets to help her with the pain. The kit also offered a bigger pair of tweezers. One look at the messy furrow ripped into the fleshy part of her hip suggested he was going to have to do some careful work to get all the singed fabric out of the wound.
“I’d offer you a bullet to bite,” he said, keeping his voice light, “but we may need to conserve them.”
“Just get it done.” She pushed down her trousers, wincing as the fabric stuck to the drying blood at the edges of her wound.
He handed her the penlight. “Can you hold this for me?”
She positioned the light over her hip, turning her head away and burying it in the elbow crook of her other arm.
He worked quickly, wincing at her soft grunts of pain. The wound was about five inches long and at least a half-inch deep, grooving a path right through the flesh of her hip. It had missed the bone, fortunately, and she had enough curves for the bullet to have also missed most of the muscle. “Looks like it mostly injured fatty tissue,” he commented as he dabbed antiseptic along the margins of the wound.
“I’m suddenly feeling less guilty about that chocolate-covered doughnut I had for breakfast,” she mumbled.
“We need to get you somewhere cleaner than these woods,” he said as he bandaged up the wound.
“I’m counting on that,” she answered. “You’ll be coming, too.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You don’t get a vote.”
He looked down at her bared hip, the utter vulnerability of her current pose. “You’re in no position to make demands at the moment.”
She moved as quickly as a cat, the grimace on her face as she whipped up to face him betraying the pain the move caused her. Still, she had her Glock in his face before he could put down the first aid kit. “Want to bet?”
He couldn’t stop a smile, even though he knew it would only make her angry. “You’ll have to shoot me, then.”
Her lips pressed to a thin line. “Why aren’t you dead, Solano?”
“Because I never walked into that warehouse in Tesoro with the rest of the crew.” He tamped down the memories—the thunderous bomb blast, the sickening knowledge that people he knew, people he’d lived with and sometimes even liked, were gone, martyrs to a cause he’d once embraced and now despised.
“The authorities in Sanselmo accounted for your body.”
“There were ten bodies. Mine just wasn’t one of them.”
“You killed someone to fake your own death?”
“He was already dead. John Doe from the local morgue.”
“You knew those men would die when they went in there. Why would you betray your own comrades that way? I never thought you were amoral. Wrong? Absolutely. Following a fool’s path? Certainly. But to kill nine men to fake your own death?”
“It wasn’t my doing,” he said, not sure how much he should reveal to her about what he’d done all those years ago. Some of it was probably still classified. He and Quinn had never discussed what he would have to tell the world if he were ever caught.
“Don’t get caught” had been Quinn’s oh-so-helpful advice.
Besides, she had already dismissed the truth as a possible explanation. What good would it do to tell her at this point?
“If it wasn’t your doing, whose was it?”
He took a deep breath. “I can’t say. There are other people involved. Some of them might still be in dangerous situations.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So you’re going with the ‘secret CIA double agent’ story after all? Really?”
He looked away from those sharp eyes, his gaze falling to her midsection, where her unbuttoned trousers were riding down perilously, revealing black panties, the luscious curve of her hips and the sleek plane of her flat belly. His body responded fiercely, a white-hot ache settling low in his groin. It had been a damned long time since he’d been this close to a woman. And this woman, in particular, had gotten under his skin in record time once before.
Clearly, in the eight years since, he hadn’t developed an immunity.
He cleared his throat and waved his hand toward her open fly. “You’re about to lose your britches.”
As she glanced down, he grabbed her wrist, moving the muzzle of her Glock away from his face. Her gaze flew up to meet his, her expression shifting between mortification and anger. But not fear, he noticed. For whatever reason, she didn’t seem to fear him.
Lust flared like fire in his belly.
He let go of her wrist. “I told you, I’m not going to hurt you. But I don’t like having a gun in my face.”
She jerked back from him, but she didn’t aim her gun his way again, he noticed with relief. When she spoke, her voice was soft and raspy. “How did you get out of Sanselmo without being caught? How did you make it back here to the States, for that matter?”
“Same answer to both questions. I had help.”
“From whom?”
“The good guys.”
“Good guys in whose eyes?” Her tone was acerbic.
“Interesting question, that.”
“CIA, I suppose?” She looked disappointed that he wasn’t coming up with a different story.
Too bad, he thought. You may not like it. Hell, I didn’t like it much myself. But the truth is what it is.
“I’m going to take a look outside. I think it’s dark enough to risk it.” He turned in the narrow confines of the tent and started crawling toward the exit. As he neared the flap, he felt the heat of her body scrambling up behind him. She nudged her way to his side, her body soft and sizzling hot against his. Another flare of desire bolted through him, making his arms and legs tremble.
He turned to look at her. Her small, heart-shaped face turned toward his, her eyes large and dark in the faint ambient light coming from outside. “This doesn’t require us both,” he murmured.
“I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
She was going to make his quest to find his sister a little more difficult, he realized. Because if there was one thing he’d learned about Ava Trent during that week they’d spent together in Mariposa, it was the depth of her sheer, dogged determination. She attacked every task she took on with the same pedal-to-the-floorboard pluck.
She wouldn’t be easy to shake. And he wasn’t going to hurt her.
So how did he plan to proceed?
The easy answer would be to somehow make her an ally rather than an enemy. But short of spilling a boatload of long-held state secrets, how was he supposed to do that? And would she believe him even if he told her every little piece of the truth?
He needed to talk to Quinn, which meant heading for the closest town to charge his burner phone. And the closest town was Poe Creek, about a mile through the El Cambio–infested woods. Poe Creek, where cops still swarmed about the motel crime scene. Where Ava probably had fellow agents beginning to wonder where the hell she’d disappeared to and whether it was time to call for reinforcements to go looking for her.
“How many people are with you?” he asked.
She frowned. “I’m not going to tell you that.”
“They’ll be looking for you. Don’t want to shoot the wrong people.”
“You won’t be shooting anyone,” she said firmly.
“We’ve already shot three people trying to kill us. I’m not going to stop trying to defend myself—or you—just because you’ve decided to make your name as an FBI agent on my bounty.”
She made a low, growling sound thick with frustration. “I don’t want to shoot you.”
“Good to know.”
“But you’re a fugitive from justice, and bringing you in is my job.”
“Why don’t we concentrate on getting out of these woods alive first?” he suggested, trying to sound reasonable. The grumble that escaped her throat at his words suggested he hadn’t entirely succeeded.
But she gave a short nod toward the tent flap in response. “Think they’re still out there, then?”
“Somewhere,” he affirmed. “But now that we know they’re looking for me, we can be more careful moving through the woods. I think we can stay a step ahead of them until we get back to civilization.”
At least, he hoped they could. Because one way or another, he needed to get word to Alexander Quinn. The spymaster had warned him something like this might happen.
Every man’s sin sooner or later came back to haunt him.
* * *
HER HIP WAS burning like fire, the pain as effective as a cup of strong coffee to keep her heart pounding and her adrenaline pumping. Without the pain, she might have been tempted to hunker down and wait for daylight, because sneaking through the woods at night was harder than she remembered.
She had grown up in a rural area, traipsed through her share of woods and mountains, but rarely at night, and never with five inches of bullet-grazed flesh playing a symphony of agony with each careful step. But, as she reminded herself in a silent litany as she followed Sinclair Solano through a tangle of underbrush, each step took them closer to civilization. Closer to a clean bandage, prescription antibiotics and painkillers.
Closer to the safety of numbers.
She had come to the conclusion that Sin was being honest about one thing—he didn’t intend to kill her, even if she tried to take him into actual custody instead of this parody of custody they were playing out at the moment. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to stop her.
He’d been at this fugitive thing a long time. Clearly, he was good at it.
So the ball was in her court, she supposed. He might not be willing to kill her to maintain his freedom, but was she willing to kill him if he resisted her attempt to keep him in her custody? Was she willing to let Cade Landry shoot him? Or one of the local cops?
This shouldn’t even be a question, Trent. You’re an FBI agent. Taking criminals into custody is part of what you do.
But Sinclair Solano had saved her life. Put his own life at risk to do it. And when he swore he wasn’t the man she thought he was, he seemed to believe what he was saying.
Her boot tangled with a thick root somewhere beneath the mass of vines, scrub and decaying leaves underfoot, tipping her off balance. She stumbled forward, grabbing for something, anything to break her fall.
She slammed into the hard, solid heat of Sin’s chest as he moved quickly to catch her. His arms roped around her body, holding her close, lifting her back to her feet.
He didn’t let go immediately, his breath hot against her cheek. Despite the pain in her side, despite the adrenaline still flooding her body, she felt an answering rush of heat racing through her veins to settle, heavy and liquid, in the juncture of her thighs.
She wasn’t twenty and carefree, enjoying her last taste of freedom before law school and the FBI career she’d chosen for herself. These woods weren’t the cool, lush rainforest surrounding the soaring peak of Mt. Stanley.
And Sinclair Solano had long since ceased to be just some sexy, brooding fellow tourist who’d made her pulse race and her toes tingle with a few hot kisses under the Mariposa moon.
He let her go slowly, his hands sliding down her arms, his fingers brushing hers lightly as he released her. “You okay?” he whispered.
Her voice felt trapped in her throat. She nodded without attempting to free it.
For a long, electric moment, he continued gazing at her. Apparently, Poe Creek had not yet folded up its streets for the night, for faint light glowed in the west, edging his features with a hint of gold. He had tawny skin and dark, dark eyes, and eight years past their brief entanglement, his compelling magnetism still tugged at her unwilling heart.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, and she realized with a shiver those exact words were echoing in her own troubled mind.
“Tell me the truth.” She couldn’t stop herself from taking a step closer, as if he’d tugged an invisible cord between them. “If you tell the truth, I’ll know it. And I’ll know what to do. Why did you join El Cambio? And why did you leave?”
For a tense moment, he stared at her, his expression unreadable. Then, as he opened his mouth to answer, a loud crack sounded from close by.
She dropped, grabbing his arm and dragging him down with her. Adrenaline spiked, sending her heart into a wild gallop as she tried to find cover in the underbrush, her gaze darting around the darkened woods in search of the intruder.
“That wasn’t a gunshot,” Sin whispered, his face close enough that his breath tickled the tendrils of hair curling on her forehead.
“What was it?”
Before he could answer, a flurry of sound and movement broke the tense quiet of the woods. Thirty yards to the north, two men burst into view out of the underbrush, scrambling and stumbling as they went, throwing fearful looks behind them.
A few yards behind them, a large black bear loped after them, moving with surprising speed.
“I thought black bears didn’t attack unprovoked,” she whispered, watching the animal crash through the forest after the two fleeing men.
“She may have a cub around here somewhere.”
One of the men seemed to finally remember he was armed. He swung his gun hand toward the bear and fired a shot. It missed the bear, the bullet whipping through a thicket only ten yards away from where Ava and Sin crouched.
Sin grabbed her around the waist and hauled her with him behind a nearby tree trunk. The sudden movement pulled at her injury, and she hissed with pain.
“Sorry!” he whispered in her ear, sliding his hand up to her rib cage.
But he didn’t let her go.
Another gunshot rang in the woods. Another bullet missed the bear and whizzed harmlessly past their hiding place by a dozen yards. The next time Ava peeked around the tree trunk, the bear was circling back around, heading away from where they crouched. The men were two diminishing shadows in the woods, still on the run.
Ava released a long breath. “That was close. Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” Sin murmured, catching her arm as she started to move.
She looked up at him, jerking her arm free of his grip. “What?”
He met her gaze, his eyes burning with fierce intent. “We have to follow those men.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_72ab10ce-0fda-5223-9af5-531e9c04268f)
Clearly, she thought he was crazy. Hell, maybe he was—those men were probably better armed and equipped than either of them, and he had no idea how many of them might be roaming the woods at the moment.
“We need to go back to the motel and report those guys,” she said firmly, starting westward.
He caught up with her, taking care not to touch her this time. “The bear scared the hell out of those guys. I’d bet they’re heading back to wherever Cabrera has set up camp in these hills. This could be our best chance to find out where that is.” His voice went raspy as emotion tightened his throat. “They might lead us to my sister.”
Her gaze softened. “They’re already out of sight.”
“I can track them. I’ve had a lot of experience in the past few years.”
Pinching her lower lip between her teeth, she gazed toward the darkness where the two men had disappeared. She released a huff of breath. “Okay, you’re right. We can’t let this trail go cold. But we don’t do anything but observe when we get there, understand? We find the place, then memorize the trail back for when I have reinforcements.”
He wasn’t sure he could agree to her stipulation, not with his sister’s life at risk. But if he didn’t agree, she would dig in her heels and make it next to impossible for him to tail those men. “Understood.”
She looked bone-tired briefly before her spine straightened and her chin came up to jut forward like the point of a spear. “You can track them? Then you lead.”
He suspected she wanted him in front as much to keep an eye on him as to let him lead the way. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to run from her.
Not yet, anyway.
“Let’s pack up the tent. We may need to set up camp later.” He accomplished the task quickly, and they were underway in minutes. The men hadn’t covered their tracks while they were running, but about a mile from where they’d encountered the bear, they stopped blazing an obvious trail through the woods. In the dark, trying to figure out what was evidence of human passage and what was normal woodland wear and tear became a hell of a lot harder, especially with clouds scudding overhead, blocking out most of the moonlight. At least the rain had finally stopped, leaving the ground wet enough for footprints to show up in the softened soil underfoot.
“There.” Three miles out, Ava spotted the faint tracks of their human prey. “Aren’t those footprints?”
He studied the tracks. “Good eye,” he murmured with approval.
“You’re not the only tracker around here,” she answered bluntly. But she sounded pleased. He spared her a quick look, struck by how pretty she was, even rain-drenched and weary. What makeup she’d been wearing back at the motel had washed away completely, leaving her looking more like the dewy-faced girl from Kentucky he’d found so fascinating when they’d met on the beach in Mariposa eight years earlier.
But looks could be deceiving. No matter how much he might wish those intervening eight years had never happened, he couldn’t deny they had. He’d changed. She’d surely changed as well.
And she was right. They weren’t friends. They couldn’t be.
“We need to be careful. Now that they’re covering tracks, we risk running right up on them. We have to watch for an ambush.”
She nodded, her expression grave. “It’s not too late to go back. We can come back in daylight. Track them when the light is better.”
His instincts rebelled against the idea, but he didn’t trust his decision-making skills at the moment. Right now his gut was too full of fear for his sister to provide any objectivity. Tracking two well-armed men in the dark woods was clearly risky.
But was the risk worth taking?
He looked at her. “What do you think?”
She nibbled her lip again. “We keep going. By now they may realize they’re missing three of their men. When those guys get back to camp, they could decide to bug out to somewhere else. If we wait until morning, we could follow this trail straight to a dead end.”
He loosed a sigh of relief. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
They followed the trail another hour, moving with extreme caution as the trail rose upward into the mist-veiled mountains. The climb became steeper and more treacherous, and as they neared a particularly vertical rise, Sin stopped and offered Ava a drink from a water bottle in his backpack.
She drank the water gratefully. “Don’t suppose there’s any way to go around that hill?”
“Not without losing at least a half hour.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Then up we go.”
“You go in front,” he suggested. “You’ve got the bum hip. I’ll be able to catch you if you lose traction.”
She eyed him with caution, clearly weighing her options. No snap judgments from the Kentucky belle, he thought with a hidden smile. He’d always rather liked that about her, if he was remembering correctly.
“Okay.” Turning, she reached for a handhold in the steep incline, closing her fingers around a rocky outcropping.
Sinclair stayed close behind her, distracting himself from the gnawing anxiety eating a hole in his gut by enjoying the sway of her curvy backside as she climbed the trail in front of him. She’d filled out a bit in the eight years since he’d last seen her, her once lithe, girlish body developing delightful curves in all the right places. She had the kind of hips that made a man want to sink into her and stay there forever. His hands, gripping a rough-edged rock jutting out of the hillside, itched to close around her round, firm breasts instead....
Don’t get too distracted, he warned himself sternly.
The hillside started to level out, the climb less of a strain. Ava stumbled as they reached flatter ground, going down on her hands and knees. She stayed there for a moment, breathing hard.
Sinclair knelt beside her, laying his hand on her back. Her back rose and fell quickly as she caught her breath. “Sorry,” she rasped.
He rubbed her back lightly. “We can take a break. How’s your hip?”
She pushed herself up to a kneeling position and slid down the waistband of her pants to check the bandage. “I think it’s okay.”
“May I look?”
Her eyes met his, wide and wary in a shaft of pale moonlight peeking through the clouds. But she shifted, giving him better access to her injury.
Gently easing the trousers away from the bandage, he checked more thoroughly. There was a little blood seeping through the gauze, but not enough to worry. She wasn’t in danger of bleeding to death.
Infection was still a major risk, however, and the longer she stayed out here in these woods without professional medical treatment, the greater the likelihood of sepsis.
He should have insisted they go back to the motel instead of chasing these men, he realized with a sinking heart. He’d been selfish and, if he was honest with himself, a little bit afraid of facing justice after so long on the run. “We should go back to the motel.”
She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Go back down that hill after we just climbed it? Are you kidding me?”
“The longer you and that bullet wound stay out here in these woods, the more likely you’ll get an infection. That’s nothing to play around with.”
“I think I’m good for a few more hours.” She pushed to her feet. “Let’s go. We’re wasting moonlight.”
His heart still stuck in his throat, he rose and followed her lead.
Ten minutes later, Sin heard voices. He grabbed Ava’s wrist as she continued forward, dragging her back against his chest.
She started to struggle, but he tightened his hold and whispered in her ear, “Voices.”
She froze, her head coming up as if to listen.
The voices seemed to be floating toward them on the wind, coming from somewhere dead ahead. But all Sin could see in front of them were trees, trees and more trees.
Where were the voices coming from?
“Rest a second,” he whispered, letting Ava go. “I’ll scout ahead. If I run into trouble, you can go for help.”
Her lips pressed to a thin line. “I told you I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“Damn it, Ava—”
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she repeated firmly. “Besides, I’m not sure I could make it back to the motel alone at this point,” she added, her voice softening. “So for better or worse, we stick together.”
“Stay as quiet as you can,” he warned, leading the way forward. He took care with each step, moving heel to toe with deliberation, eyeing the ground ahead of them for any potential pitfalls. The voices ahead grew steadily louder, and he could make out the high, excited pitch of the conversation. Spanish, of course, but he was fluent, so he had no trouble making out the words flying about in agitation.
“How’s your Spanish?” he whispered to Ava, who crept up beside him when he paused to listen.
“A little rusty,” she admitted. “Haven’t had a lot of chances to use it working in the Johnson City resident agency.”
“It’ll come back to you,” he assured her. But he interpreted anyway. “Someone’s taking hell for running from a bear.”
“Do you recognize who’s speaking?”
“Might be Cabrera,” he said, uncertain. “There’s a little echo. Can’t be sure yet.”
Suddenly, a woman’s voice rang in the night, her Spanish rapid-fire but American-accented. Sin’s heart clenched into a hot, hard fist.
Alicia.
“¿Dónde está mi esposo?” Fear battled with rage in her voice.
“She wants to know where her husband is,” he translated for Ava.
“Yeah, I got that,” she whispered grimly. “They probably killed him right off. Got rid of the extra baggage. One less captive to worry about.”
Sin had never met his brother-in-law, but he hoped like hell Ava was wrong. He’d found a lot of comfort in the idea of Alicia happily married to a man she loved, a man who was good to her, who loved her and protected her when Sin couldn’t.
He’d broken his sister’s heart when he’d gone to Sanselmo and joined the rebels. Knowing he was a wanted man, doing things she didn’t approve of for reasons she’d never understood—that kind of notoriety must have been hard for her to live with.
The last time he’d talked to her, he’d tried to explain himself, but even if he’d been able to find words to justify his actions, he couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not over the phone. Maintaining his cover with El Cambio had been crucial to staying alive.
She’d stopped listening anyway. “I hope the next time you set a bomb, you blow yourself up,” she’d told him, her voice raw with anger and pain.
Funny, he supposed, that he’d gone out and done exactly that, as far as she and the rest of the world were concerned.
As he strained to discern more of the verbal exchange between his sister and her captors, the cracking sound of a hand hitting flesh jolted through him, and Alicia’s angry questions ended in a sharp cry. An answering growl rose in Sin’s throat, and he rushed toward the sound of his sister’s cry without thinking, stealth forgotten.
Ava’s hands circled his arm and she dug her heels in, pulling him backward as he rushed forward. He tried to shake off her grip, but her fingers dug in harder, preventing him from dashing through the underbrush.
“Don’t be an idiot!” she growled. “Do you want to get her killed?”
He struggled to control himself, to ease his ragged breathing and hurl cold water on his sudden rage. Ava was right. He knew she was right.
But even as he regained control of his emotions, a white-hot ball of fury festered in the center of his chest, biding its time.
Sinclair would make Cabrera and his men pay for what they’d done to his sister. He was going to find great pleasure in making sure of it.
“They’re not going to do permanent damage to her, not while she’s leverage,” Ava whispered. He wished she sounded more confident.
“She’s right there! We can get her away from them.”
“Not without knowing how many people we have to take out to do it.” Her voice was firmer now, her quiet competence taking some of the edge off his desperation. He grounded himself in her calm gaze, taking a few slow, deep breaths.
“Okay. Okay.” He scanned the dark woods, listening to the sound of murmured conversation, trying to figure out from which direction it came. He pointed north, finally. “I think they’re ahead that way. We need to get close enough to see what’s what, but stay hidden.”
“You were El Cambio. You know more about how they work than I do. How many men would Cabrera bring with him on a mission like this?”
He could only guess. Cabrera had been ruthless, unwilling to risk any sort of mutiny among his underlings. He’d trusted few people. Sin had worked damned hard at being one of those people, and if Cabrera was here, looking for him, it was because he knew just how completely Sin had betrayed that trust.
Cabrera might be keeping Alicia alive now as leverage to get to Sin. But he didn’t kid himself. Cabrera’s only policy was scorched earth. There’d be no witnesses left when he was done.
“It doesn’t matter how many. We have to get her away from him.” The urgency of his fear forced the words from his tight throat.
“We need to get our eyes on that camp first. Know what we’re up against. We need to be smart about it.”
He caught her arm, tugging her around to look at him. Her eyes widened, her lips trembling apart.
The urge to kiss her, untimely and entirely out of the question, surged through him as powerfully as fear had done just a moment before. He had the ridiculous sense that if he could just kiss her, if he could feel her warm, soft body pressed to his, feel her fingers on his skin and breathe her breath into his lungs, everything would be okay.
He tore his gaze away, reminding himself that no matter what happened in the next few hours, everything would never be okay.
Ever.
He let her arm go. “Be very quiet and very careful. We’ll have only one chance to get this right.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her check the magazine of her Glock. He reached into his pocket, pulled out one of the pistols he’d scavenged from Fuentes and Escalante and checked the magazine to see if there were any rounds left. The pistol, an FNS 9, held seventeen rounds. Fourteen remained.
He kept that one for himself and checked the other pistol. It was also an FN Herstel firearm, a twenty-round FN Five-seveN MK2. Eighteen rounds in that magazine. He offered the MK2 to Ava.
“Eighteen rounds. Use it first.”
She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly widening and her lips curling inward as she nervously licked her lips.
This is her first big challenge, he realized, suddenly feeling deeply sorry for her. Despite her training, despite the FBI credentials in her pocket and the Special Agent in front of her name, she’d probably never been in a situation as dangerous as what they were about to face.
“If you don’t want to do this, go,” he said quietly. “The motel should be due west. Be careful, stay out of sight and you’ll probably be there in a couple of hours. But I have to do this.”
Her nostrils flared. She took the MK2 from his hands, checked the ammo herself, sighted down the barrel to familiarize herself with it and gave a short nod. “Then let’s do this.”
Sin felt a cracking sensation in his chest, as if something had broken open and spilled out courage and fear in equal parts. Swallowing the fear and marshaling the courage, he followed Ava forward through the woods.
* * *
CABRERA AND HIS men had set up camp in a small, sheltered cove just over the edge of a shallow escarpment. Ava had nearly stumbled over the edge of the bluff, as the trees beyond the valley camouflaged the narrow dip between ridges. She pulled up short, grabbing the trunk of a nearby pine to keep from tumbling over the edge.
Ignoring the pain in her hip and the increasing tremble of her aching thigh muscles, she dropped to her belly, seeking and finding a clearer view of the small valley that lay about twenty yards below the ridgeline.
Sin nudged his way next to her, his body warm against hers. She drew strength and determination from the solid heat of him. Crazy, she thought, that I’m colluding with a terrorist to take down his buddies.
But since she’d looked up in the parking lot of the Mountain View Lodge and seen a ghost, insanity had become the least of her problems.

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