Perfect.
Oh, God, his kiss.
Suzi just gave herself up to it, to the taste and the heat of it. He was rock solid up against her, the muscles in his arms flexing around her, the gentle strength of his hand on the back of her neck, the sensual thrill of having his tongue pushing into her mouth again and again, the erotic rhythm of it melting her brain. He was insistent and tender at the same time, turning her on with every move of his lips over hers, with every thrust into her mouth, making her want to give him more.
Oh, God, she usually had more sense.
And she wasn’t fooling herself. This didn’t have anything to do with being scared half to death by Jimmy Ruiz getting massacred in her room or by the police descending on the hotel.
This was all about Killian the Konqueror, “Konk” to the guys with their boots on the ground, or sometimes K.C., to those who could spell, she guessed. Rumor had it that it was tattooed on his ass in Chinese-”Conqueror,” his nom de guerre, his war name.
God, she believed it. There was enough “boy” left in the Boy Scout to pull a stunt like that. And so help her, she wanted to find out, to get him out of his clothes and just get so damn close to him.
She slid her fingers up into his hair and kissed him like her life depended on it, slow and deep, teasing him with her tongue, breathing him in and tasting him-and it was all so impossibly good, so impossible.
“Konk”-geezus, who in the world let themselves be called Konk?
She sighed and moved against him, pressing herself against his chest. God, he was built like a slab of granite, and she loved it, and yes, she knew what kind of guy let himself be called Konk, the kind of guy who’d earned the name the hard way from the kind of guys who’d been up there on the ridge with him in Afghanistan seven years ago and innumerable times since.
She’d had to dig deep for that information, for the story of the ambush, of the overwhelming enemy forces, and of the deeds that had brought him and his guys home that long-ago night. Dax’s cousin Esmee Ramos didn’t have access to those facts, but her husband, Johnny, did, and so did the other SDF guys. They knew Dax was a legend in the wasteland, and Johnny hadn’t been shy about telling that story and all the others. Before joining SDF, Johnny had been a U.S. Army Ranger, one of the bad boys who hoped to end up with the big bad boys like Dax and the A teams.
But this kiss…this kiss was crazy and had no place to go.
No place, she told herself.
Off in the distance, but getting closer at an accelerating rate of speed, the wail of sirens cut through the air-trouble and nothing but, just like Daniel Axel Killian, and heading their way.
Somebody needed to show an ounce of sense, and considering the way his hand was sliding up her side and heading toward her breasts, she figured if there was going to be any sense in this front seat, it was going to have to come from her.
Damn.
With a monumental effort, because he tasted and felt so good, and because it had been so, so long since she’d been kissed, she broke away from him-and there they sat, still wrapped up so close, their noses touching, his breath soft on her skin, the temperature in the Land Cruiser heading for the deep freeze with the air conditioner going full blast, and her still absolutely melting inside.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rough.
Yeah, that was about all she had left, too.
“Hey.” She needed her head examined, and they were still so damn close, one of his hands still in her hair, rubbing the back of her neck, the other no more than an inch away from her breast, their foreheads still touching.
Behind them, the second flank of police cars screamed by, their sirens descending in the other direction.
“We need to…”
“Yeah.” The quicker the better, and still she didn’t move away from him.
Who the hell was he to affect her this way? Some guy who’d walked into the Toussi Gallery one night and looked too good to be true. Some guy who’d smiled at her and with one unabashed, come-on curve of his mouth had told her that he knew all about her, everything-and for a moment, she’d believed that he had.
But he didn’t. No one did, except for Buck, and probably Hawkins, maybe Dylan, her family, and the few people who had been involved. An accident, it had been termed, and rightly so, a violent accident covered up by the money and power of one of Australia’s most prominent families, the records sealed, the rumors squelched, the story barely heard. The Weymouth clan was synonymous with the Northern Territory, be it cattle stations, gold, or uranium, and by their choice, a life had been nearly wiped off the slate of the world, nearly forgotten.
Nearly, but not quite.
Suzi would never forget. She couldn’t, no matter how many years passed.
She pulled away from him and was so disappointed by the effort it took. She was usually smarter. He was an unnecessary complication, the competition, the guy to beat, not the guy to be kissing.
“That was a mistake,” she said. Unacceptable. Dangerous territory.
“Yeah.”
“We have a job to do.” She had unfinished business, and she couldn’t afford to fail, not in the work she did for Buck, and never again in the work she did in Eastern Europe. She wasn’t trying to save the world, or even every poor woman who fell into prostitution-but the younger girls, the ones who were trafficked from the U.S. to the Balkans, the Czech Republic, and the one she’d found in Ukraine, in Odessa on the Black Sea-with the SDF crew’s help, and Buck Grant’s documents, she’d returned six of those girls, almost seven.
It was the “almost” that kept her going. The “almost” she hadn’t forgiven herself for. The last thing she’d needed was another black mark on her soul, but there it was now, and like the first one, it had a sweet name-Lily Anne Thompson, but at least she could voice that name. The other one, the one she felt with every breath, that one she couldn’t speak.
Hell, sometimes she wondered if she was going to live long enough to make up for her failings and wash away her sins.
“Which one next, Warner?”
Inside the luxury cabin of his Learjet, flying high over the western edge of southern Brazil, Erich Warner closed his SAT phone and returned to watching his mistress roll half a dozen pretty pills around a small silver bowl-blue, red, green, orange, yellow, purple, all gelcaps, bright and shiny.
She was fascinated by her pills, as well she should be. He’d only let her go a minute too long without medication half a dozen times. Each time had been a punishment, a lesson taught. Each time had been a lesson learned.
Sometimes he wondered if he would ever let her go longer. Two minutes, possibly. The pain, he knew, was excruciating. He’d spent enough time in Dr. Souk’s lab to have seen human suffering on a truly epic scale-not in quantity, but epic in the quality and the depthless wonder of the suffering.
Pain had been Dr. Souk’s stock in trade. No mere torturer, he’d been a medical genius, a chemist, and Shoko was one of his finer creations. Erich knew why she cut people to ribbons, literally, with her knives. She was sick. Her mind twisted by the pain of her countless near deaths and rebirths in Souk’s laboratory.
Poor, bitter little thing. He’d been known to give her prizes as well as punishments, and today, he’d decided, would be a prize day. Maybe his generosity would bring him luck. His faith in Killian was being tested.
Tonight, the man had said. He’d have the Memphis Sphinx tonight.
If he didn’t, Dallas, Texas, was in for a very bloody Monday morning the first week in April. Heroin made for predictable bedfellows, drug lords and warlords, and nobody had more heroin to transport than a man who was both, Akram Jamal in southern Paktika, Afghanistan. For the favor of piggybacking one of the Afghan’s loads into Marseilles in one of Erich’s cargo ships, and for facilitating the land transportation of a shipment of surface-to-air missiles, SAMs, across Tajikistan, Jamal had given him the name of a restless Saudi deep in the heart of Texas.