Colleen lay on warm desert dirt, glad that she’d worn denim jeans the previous day when they’d been breaking and entering at GameShack. But she was regretting her choice of the cotton tee-shirt that had been delivered. The grit of the soil ground right through the thin knit, dusting her stomach with fine, dry clay.
Her clothes certainly weren’t the black mercenary fatigues that the other guys on Delta Team were wearing, but they’d given her a webbing harness that buckled around her body.
Eian Summerhays, her personal mercenary, had fussed over making sure the straps over her shoulders and around her waist were latched securely and cinched down snugly. He’d watched closely, bracing himself on his knees to inspect how tightly she’d yanked the harness, and he’d instructed while she tightened the ones around her thighs.
Weird.
Delta Team was hiding among the enormous burnt ochre boulders at the base of the resort, directly below the balcony of the presidential suite. The floodlights illuminating the sleek, modern hotel built into the side of the mountain reflected a dark twilight where they were hiding in the shadows.
Colleen was lying among the rocks, cacti, and presumably rattlesnakes, spiders, and scorpions.
A trace of chlorinated water wafted on the dry breeze. Fifty yards away, hotel guests drank fruity drinks while relaxing around the pool in the ninety-five-degree heat. Mariachi music played from the speakers while kids splashed, despite that it was after midnight, while their parents slowly got drunk.
Around her, five men lay prone, stuck flat to the desert floor. Because Colleen didn’t have a walkie-talkie or whatever they were using, Eian Summerhays whispered what was happening to her. “They got the go signal. Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie teams are going in. The operation has begun.”
“When are we going to know if she’s okay?”
“Soon.”
The air cracked like a gun thundering beside her ear.
A crash and clatter of smashed glass blasted above them.
Colleen’s arms flew around her head and face, but nothing rained down on them.
Over by the pool, hotel guests screamed and ran.
Eian said, “They’re in.”
“Jesus, are they shooting?” she asked him.
“Flashbang grenades. Nonlethal weapon. Like a thousand flashbulbs going off in your face all at once and a sonic boom right by your head.”
Ten long seconds later—ten seconds that lasted an hour in Colleen’s mind as she pictured Anjali terrified or Sergey holding a gun to her head while the Rogue Security mercenaries broke in— ropes dropped from the balcony of the presidential suite at The Boulders Resort and dangled, twisting in the dim light.
Eian leaped to standing. “Let’s go.”
The rope stretched five stories up to the hotel balcony. “I don’t think I can climb that.”
“No worries.” Eian grabbed Colleen around her waist and pulled her against his chest.
“Dude! I have a boyfriend!”
While that was her usual retort when a guy got too handsy in a bar, never mind the societal implications that she had to be some other man’s property for a guy not to molest her, it rang differently in her mind when she said it that time.
Did she?
Did Colleen have a boyfriend?
Tristan was definitely something. They’d definitely somethinged a whole heck of a lot since they’d met eight days before. They’d somethinged more than she’d ever somethinged before in her life.
With better results, too.
And then Tristan had called himself the man who loved her, but they’d both agreed that it was just an excellent comeback when her father was being a jerk.
But Tristan wrapped himself around her at night like a protective cocoon, and he’d written the Anonymity Plus program just for her, and he’d bought her a cup of coffee exactly the way she liked it every morning.
As Eian Summerhays crushed Colleen against his chest, she said, “I mean, I think he’s my boyfriend.”
Eian held her around the waist and shoved his hand between them. Two crisp clicks tugged at her harness near her belly button and sternum, and Eian waltzed her backward so that a rope swung right beside her shoulder.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
He reached around her, grabbing the rope and hooking it to both of their harnesses in several places, and then he hitched a device with two handles to the rope above their heads.
“What the hell!” she yelled.
Eian grinned down at her, his smile and teeth visible below his NVGs. “Hang on to my waist.”
With a yank on her harness at her chest, waist, and under her seat, Colleen zipped into the air, tethered to Eian the mercenary and the rope.
Floors of the hotel careened past.
Colleen grabbed Eian’s torso with both arms and both legs and clung to him because her soul was trying to leave her body.
She screamed with her teeth clenched together and her lips clamped shut, so her own scream echoed in her ears and nose as they were sucked up the rope to the top.
Eian said, “Lift your feet,” and they sailed over the parapet and onto the balcony.
The ropes were not secured by a grappling hook on the rail but to a support jammed between the roof and the deck.
Eian landed on his feet.
Colleen clung to him like a frightened squid, her fingers cramping from holding onto fistfuls of the black fabric he wore.
The male body she was vining around as hard as she could, with her arms and legs clamped around him rather than plummet to the boulders and cacti below, was stonelike firm and whipcord strong.
Not that she noticed.
Well, of course she noticed. That muscular beefcake was the only thing available for her to hold on to while she’d flown through the air and nearly plummeted to her death, so she’d plastered herself to him with every last bit of strength she had.
But Colleen had a boyfriend.
Maybe.
They should get that sorted out.
Eian shout-whispered, “Get off. Get off! We aren’t secure yet.”
Colleen pried her fingers off the fabric and tried to swallow the horrified squeals in her throat.
Her body was hanging from the two places their harnesses were latched together.
Eian unclipped them.
Colleen fell on her butt on the balcony.
She swiveled and scrambled to her feet. “Where’s Anjali?”
Eian said, “Front room is clear.” He led her inside, both of them stepping gingerly on the slippery gravel of the broken glass on the floor.
“Where is she?” Colleen scanned the living room of the suite.
Four Russian men who were clearly not as athletic as the commandos she’d come in with were lying facedown on the carpeting, their fingers interlaced behind their heads.
Tendrils of blue smoke drifted through the air. The noxious vapors stung Colleen’s nose and were bitter in the back of her throat.
“Where is she?” Colleen asked Eian.
Eian said, “Bedroom is secure. The female target is unaccounted for.”
“Unaccounted for? What the hell does that mean? What do you mean Anjali is unaccounted for?”