The sun crept its way beneath the heavy bedroom curtains, a thin line of light in an otherwise dark room. The slow drone of the air-conditioning as it clicked on and off was monotonous but necessary. It was warm despite the cool air coming through the vents.
Amy was pressed up against him, her thigh over his leg, her head on his chest, that blonde hair obscuring her face. At least twice during the night, he’d attempted to brush it from her face, but it had stayed put all of ten minutes before it ended up back the same way. It had made him smile, made him wonder if she was simply so used to it being there that she didn’t even notice.
Cabe ran his fingertip gently down Amy’s arm, careful not to wake her. Sleep was the one thing she needed more than him right now, no matter how much his dick protested the idea. When he’d followed her home after dealing with Woods, it had purely been out of concern for her safety. And when he’d seen the marks on her body, he’d been furious, wishing he’d taken more extreme action. A switch had been flipped inside him as he’d taken care of her, and he’d been unable to stop himself from acting on his feelings. But he couldn’t put his finger on the exact moment it had happened. Maybe it had been as simple as the moment she’d appeared at the door in those damn pajamas. He was only human after all.
But a hot woman in cute shorts wasn’t enough to override his self-control. After all, women often walked around San Dog in not much more than that, and he certainly wasn’t thinking about jumping all over them. It was the woman inside the outfit who had him standing at attention.
Perhaps it was the moment she’d reminded him of his operational priorities when he’d attempted to put her first.
Perhaps it was the moment silence and comfort had filled him when she’d stood in his arms.
Now that they’d slept together, he couldn’t imagine it having played out any other way. He knew he should probably leave. They were going to have to be careful with their interactions at the casino or write their fledgling relationship into the script. Flirting with Amy at the casino would take very little effort on his part because it would require zero acting. And they needed to make a call before the meeting they were both supposed to attend later that morning.
As carefully as his large body would let him, he disentangled their limbs, grabbed his jeans, and wandered into the hallway, where he slipped them on but didn’t bother zipping them up. First, he’d make them breakfast, and then he was going to seduce her one more time before he left. He poked his head in the fridge and noticed the fixings for omelets and toast—easy enough to make. He began the search for a bowl and pan in which to whisk and cook the eggs and a cutting board to chop the veggies on.
He pulled out a stack of nesting mixing bowls, sorting through them to grab the smallest. In the bottom of the next smallest was her FBI badge.
The sight of it was like having to stare at those damn hoses they’d used on him during Hell Week in the middle of the night. SEAL training was not for the fainthearted—but it didn’t come close to the reminder of what she did for a living and how, on a daily basis, she put her life on the line. Fuck. Cabe ran his thumb over the lettering. Federal Bureau of Investigation. He took a deep breath. His thoughts ran to Woods. What he’d done. What he could have done, had Cabe not intervened. Would Amy have gotten away? Would Woods have forced himself on her? Would he have raped her? The thought got stuck in the back of his throat.
Then he thought of his call with Harley. I wouldn’t have been the one risking my cover.
Cabe stood, placing his hands on the counter. Images bombarded him, and he, the iceman of just about any raid they’d ever had to do, fell back on basic box breathing just to calm down. It wasn’t too late to back out. He could let one of the other guys on his team be the feet on the ground. Harley could do it.
But then he looked in the direction of the bedroom where Amy was sleeping and realized it would kill him to not be there to help her if something went down.
This was what had happened to Six and to Mac. And he’d accused both of them at one point or another of jeopardizing their mission because of their torn loyalties to their op and the women involved in them.
He should talk to one of them. To both of them. He knew better than to keep secrets, but when it came to Amy, all bets were off. A wash of disloyalty to Amy flowed over him at the thought of sharing her secrets. Which meant he was going to have to deal with his feelings about Jess and the need to protect Amy if they were going to finish their op successfully.
He replaced the badge in the bowl and returned it to the cupboard. It had been a smart move on her part to put it there. If anyone broke into her apartment, she needed it to look like a dealer, not an FBI agent, lived here. There would be no way for her to pass that off as a fake ID, and if the right person—or in this case, the wrong person—saw it, she could end up in a world of hurt. But she’d thought of that.
Because she’s smart.
And a good agent.
But Jess had been a great soldier.
Shit, he had to stop that loop somehow.
Cabe reached into the fridge and pulled out peppers, onions, and cheese, and started chopping. The mindless act gave him something to focus on.
“What are you doing out here?” Amy came to a stop near the entrance to the hallway and leaned against the wall, wrapping both arms around her middle. She wore a soft gray robe made of jersey, and he imagined how one pull on those ties would open it to reveal a perfectly naked body. But he needed to stop that line of thinking before he blew off the idea of breakfast and simply snacked on her instead.
“Thought I’d make you some breakfast, or us some breakfast, before we go in and face the music,” he said. He placed the knife down on the chopping board and stepped toward her. Her hair was up in a messy bun, but her face still had that sleepy morning look. Soft cheeks, sweet pout. All welcoming warmth. He put his arms around her, but she froze before stepping into his embrace.
She didn’t move her hands to put them around him. In fact, she didn’t seem to want him in her space. He stepped away immediately. “What’s going on, Ames?”
She sighed as she walked by him to the stool under the kitchen island and pulled it out before sitting down, taking a moment to make sure her robe covered her thighs. “What happened last night after I left?”
Okay. She was going to dodge the question, and he was going to let her. For a minute or two. “I told you last night. I took Woods back into the casino and he bought me a whiskey. It’s quite possible I gave him a lecture on how to treat a woman. When I left to go home, he told me he owed me one. And I intend to cash in that chip, pun intended.” Saying it out loud now, he was relieved his training had overridden the urge to beat the crap out of the guy. Now he had Woods on his side.
“While you were patting yourself on your back, did it occur to you that he could be the reason the women are missing?” Amy asked. She placed her hands on her hips. “I’m not going to be stupid and say I wasn’t a bit scared, but we blew it. What if he’d talked those girls into going home with him, told them to keep their pending hookup quiet, and then killed them?”
He knew she had a point. He’d come to the same conclusion himself. There was every chance Woods was the reason the girls were missing. But there was no way he was going to stand back and watch the same thing happen to Amy. “Follow that through in your head, Ames. What if that was exactly Woods’s MO? You could be dead. So, yeah, maybe I should have let you go then followed you because there was no way I would have let you go off with only Harley watching your back. But then I would have had to explain to Sokolov why I ran off and got into Harley’s car. And, yes, perhaps I should have called for backup instead of weighing my ability to deal with a single untrained antagonist, but how on earth was I meant to make that call with Sokolov breathing down my neck? I didn’t go in blindly, Ames.”
“Don’t call me Ames,” Amy said, tugging her robe more tightly around her mid-section. “Don’t make this any more personal than it already is. And Harley’s a professional. He would have known to follow me, right?”
Cabe reached for her hand, but she folded her arms in front of her chest. “Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but last night was as personal as it can get. The genie is out of that bottle, and there’s no forcing him back in. And yes, just so you know, Harley is also pissed I didn’t leave it up to him.”
“Listen. I’m as guilty for what happened last night. I should have played it different with Woods. And I shouldn’t have opened the door to this … to us. You gave me an out, and I didn’t take it. I get that this is on me. But I’m professional enough and smart enough to know when I made a dumb call. This … the two of us … feels like something that should wait because it obviously affects our thinking. I should have stuck to my guns instead of folding. I need some space.… I’m going to need you to leave.”
Cabe shook his head. “This feels like something we should talk through.”
Amy shook her head. “There’s nothing to say. We need to stop this before we make another stupid mistake on the case.”
He wanted to fight, to convince her that she was wrong, but the look in her eyes told him he should leave it. “Fine. For now. But we should talk about this after the briefing. And we need to get our stories straight.”
“Simple. We tell them a version of the truth, everything that happened exactly as it happened in the parking lot, and that you came to check I was okay. We say I was a little freaked out, and that you crashed on the sofa. But that’s where we end it.”
Anger was starting to bubble inside, and he wasn’t sure who it was aimed at. “Okay,” he said, even though it wasn’t okay at all. Pinning down his emotions was difficult when Amy stood against the wall, looking as desolate as he felt.
“I’m going to shower,” she said as she walked to the bathroom. “And I’d prefer it if you were gone by the time I got out.”
* * *
“What were you thinking?” both their bosses said at the same time.
Which meant they were in trouble—Dolby-surround-sound style, like at the movies.
Amy had avoided any meaningful eye contact with Cabe since entering the room. She wasn’t ready to dissect all the things that had happened in the last fifteen hours with him, even if he’d made it hard by being caring and considerate when he’d come in. You okay, Ames? he’d asked her quietly, a passing whisper, and she’d nodded without tearing her glance from the landscaped grounds at the front of the building. She’d even waited for him to sit down and then turned and took her own seat away from him.
“I was thinking it was not okay for Agent Murray to be potentially sexually assaulted in the parking lot when there was something I could do about it,” Cabe replied. Sitting back in the chair, his long arm reached out over the back of the empty seat next to him, he looked cool and calm. Meanwhile, her insides were churned up so badly that she wondered if she shouldn’t grab some indigestion tablets from the drugstore.
“You okay, Murray?” Cunningham asked her.
She nodded. “Perfectly fine, sir. Although I’ll admit it’s not really something I want to repeat. We’re in agreement that unless my life is threatened, Cabe won’t intervene again. Right, Cabe?”
Now she met Cabe’s eyes. He still looked as cool and calm, but there was something she couldn’t put her finger on telling her that beneath the still-lake exterior was a raging waterfall. “That’s right,” he said easily, holding her gaze for a moment before he looked to Aitken. “Plus, I now have an ‘in’ with Woods. He owes me one. While things could have gone a little differently, I think it brings us to the same place in the end. We’re getting in.”
Amy looked across the table at Cabe and wondered if he realized that he held so much of the power in their messed-up dynamic. She wondered if he realized that this would end way worse for her than it would for him if word got out about their relationship. Their op was in jeopardy because of their relationship, their growing feelings making Cabe go off plan to protect her instead of focusing on his own goals. From the look on Cunningham’s face and the fact that his skin had taken on a mottled look, she knew he wasn’t happy with how things had gone down. He was probably questioning just how far she was really willing to go when she was undercover. For the sake of her career, she needed him to know that she was willing to do whatever it took.
But, to be honest with herself, she wasn’t sure that was true.
And what if the men she worked with found out about what had happened between her and Cabe? Would they then believe that what happened in Atlanta was her fault, if they even knew about it? Would they take it as carte blanche to hit on her, or to ask not to be partnered with her? Or both?
Cabe, on the other hand, even though he was about to get his ass kicked, would at the end of the day only suffer from a little hurt pride over her asking him to leave after the best sex of her life.
The very best.
The kind that made her press her knees together under the table.
The kind that made her forget for a millisecond that they were in a world of hurt.
“You,” Aitken said, pointing at Cabe, “know better than this.”
“Not going to disagree with that,” Cabe replied.
“But you’re not going to apologize, are you?” Cunningham asked.
Cabe shook his head. “No, sir. I had a call to make. I felt it was too early in this op to risk Agent Murray.”
Amy’s ire rose. “It wasn’t your call to make,” she said, forcefully. “You don’t get the final say in what happens to me and how it gets handled.”
Cabe looked across the table, his eyes narrowed. “I only—”
“I don’t need you to figure out my role. Did I like Woods’s handsy moves yesterday? No. But would I have been able to get myself out of them if I really needed to? Yes. And could I have done it all without blowing cover? Yes. If he crosses a line I can’t live with, I’ll fight my way out of it and pretend I take Krav Maga classes at the Y.”
“We haven’t determined pattern of life yet; we don’t know enough about how these people, Woods especially, operate day to day. The drone was being used to follow a money-laundering suspect, so we couldn’t have it follow you too,” Cabe replied.
Amy took a deep breath. Cabe’s only saving grace was that he was coming from a place of caring about her. She wished deeply that someone had been looking out for her mom the same way Cabe looked out for her. But his protective act nearly jeopardized the case, and that she couldn’t live with. “Harley could have. You could have. And anyway, I had no intention of going anywhere with him.”
Cunningham looked between the two of them.”Okay then, Murray. From your perspective, what the hell happened?”
She’d practiced her answer to this over and over in the bathroom mirror before she’d left the apartment. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t feel it was in the best interests of the FBI, CIA, or myself to go off with the casino owner without anybody being aware of my whereabouts. I couldn’t be sure that Cabe would know because he’d left earlier than I did. But I do agree with him that the way it was eventually handled has given us an advantage with Woods. But, it may have come at the cost of my being selected for the private games. I don’t know how Woods will handle things with me after Cabe’s intervention.”
“Listen, as for tracking Agent Murray, that’s what her GPS is for.” Cunningham looked at Aitken, who tapped his pen against his notebook. “Sort this out, the two of you. It’s beginning to sound like amateur hour. Now tell us about Sokolov.”
Amy listened as Cabe told them some improvements he wanted to see, such as insisting they get their own cameras set up. The team wanted an opportunity to go in under darkness that evening to set it up. Cabe hated they were flying blind on intel, something with which Amy agreed. After a little back-and-forth, they got their go-ahead.
When they were done, Aitken stood and left the room, and Cunningham followed. At least they’d done Amy and Cabe the courtesy of reaming them a new one in private.
Her heart raced, grateful that this was as far as it had gone and that neither of them had questioned Cabe’s excuse of staying over at her home to ensure Woods didn’t look up her address in the employee records and decide to stop by. It was most definitely a stretch, but way better than admitting the real reason.
“You okay, Ames?” Cabe asked from the other side of the table once the room was empty. “Won’t be the first time you get your ass kicked, won’t be the last.”
“The ass-kicking I can handle. But I need to know whether you can handle what needs to be done to see this through. You can’t repeat what happened last night, and if you can’t manage that, I’m going to ask that you’re removed from this investigation.”
Cabe didn’t react … or not in a way that most people would catch. But having been around poker players forever, she took in the way he reached down to his wrist and straightened his watch and knew something was happening inside him. It was a funny tell, it gave away his real emotions. She supposed he thought he gave off the impression of boredom, of looking down at the time as if to say How much more of this do I have to deal with? But she’d noticed he did it when he was mad. Or under pressure.
For all his calm demeanor, she knew that what she’d said had hit a nerve.
And despite, or possibly even in spite of, her own feelings for him, she knew it had to be said.
“Ames,” he began.
She loved and hated the name equally. Loved it because a man she’d developed feelings for was calling her something she hadn’t been called before. Hated it because it hinted at the relationship they were missing out on.
The women who had disappeared needed her help though, assuming any of them were still alive. Doing anything that jeopardized her role on this case went against everything she held dear. She was smart enough to know that she wasn’t the only one who could solve the case of the missing women, but there wasn’t anybody who cared more or would work harder than she would.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “I asked you this morning to stop.”
Cabe got up and walked to her side of the table. He pulled out the chair next to hers, but instead of sitting on it, he perched his butt on the table and crossed his arms and his ankles. “Let’s get a couple of things crystal clear,” he said, his eyes pinning her to her seat in a way that shouldn’t turn her on—but, like everything about him, did. Even those arms. “There are reasons, really good fucking reasons, why you and I should keep our distance. There is shit you don’t know about me, about my past. And there’s this case. And there’s everything that happened to you in Atlanta. It feels like a lot. And yeah, I get it feels insurmountable, because I find myself wondering why the hell I’m even considering you and me.”
He took a moment and looked out of the window, up toward the sky.
“But?” she whispered.
“But doesn’t it feel worth it, Ames?” he said quietly.
* * *
The employee door was the only way to get into the casino undetected, and they were going to come at it through the woods. Six and Ryder had done a detailed surveillance around the casino earlier that day. They’d found a route whereby they could park the van with all of their equipment on property away from the casino. Property that didn’t have security cameras or patrolling guards. They’d also figured a route to the casino from the parking lot that wouldn’t fall in the range of any CCTV camera, enabling them to disappear like ghosts.
And it was close enough that if the plan went to shit, they could sprint from the back of the building to their transport in less than thirty seconds and be on their way back to Eagle HQ before anyone had time to call the police.
In their night gear and goggles, nobody would be able to ID them anyway.
Lite, Buddha, and Harley were hidden on the other side of the lot with the required tech equipment: the digital kit to hack the entrance, the pass they’d cloned from Amy’s employee pass to open doors, and the laptop to create copies of the video surveillance before they entered so it could be used to wipe the footage when they arrived.
Next to Cabe, Six lay on his stomach, hidden in the safety of the trees, with his favorite .300 Win Mag stretched out in front of him. He’d get one shot. The silencer would minimize but not completely eradicate noise. Cabe breathed slowly as Six took his time figuring out wind speed and direction. Cabe didn’t have an ounce of doubt that Six would do what was required.
But not yet. The pattern of life they’d constructed for the casino over the previous evenings revealed a security team would do a drive-by in a white van at approximately three thirty, which was four minutes away, and wouldn’t return for another hour.
Mac crouched beside Cabe and blocked his own mic. “Want to tell me why you spent the night at Agent Murray’s house?” he whispered.
“Relevance?” Cabe asked as he stared straight at the building, completely unmoving.
“You got to be fucking kidding me.” Mac said, although the humor in his voice was evident. “This isn’t like you. You could have blown the op.”
“Do we need to talk about this now?” Cabe sighed and shook his head. For once, he didn’t have an answer. “What do you want me to say?”
“Careful, Cabe,” Six said, without taking his finger off the trigger or his eyes off his target. “The next thing you know, Mac’ll pull the fraternization policy that none of us really give a shit about out of his ass and rub you down with it.”
He didn’t want to lie to his friends, but he’d promised Amy his confidence. He felt torn, and ambushed. “There’s nothing to tell. After I went to check on her, she was bruised up. I didn’t think she should be alone after something like that, but she isn’t in the kind of situation where she could call up a girlfriend to come over.”
“Since when do you do the whole comfort thing?” Mac asked.
Cabe rolled his eyes. “I’d have done the same for either of your sisters. Would you have wanted me to just drive off and leave one of them alone?”
“Fair point,” Mac said.
He didn’t want to tell them that Amy had pretty much kicked him out of her apartment after the most mind-blowing sex he’d ever had. It was bad enough that he had a feeling he’d relive the stunned look on her face when she’d come in his arms, those pretty blue eyes of hers going wide before flickering shut, every night when he fell asleep and every morning when he woke up with a raging hard-on. “Can we just let it drop?”
The white van pulled into the lot, silencing them all. According to the intel they’d collected, the men never got out. They slowed until they were crawling around the rear of the building. And as per the intel, the men gave scant attention to what was happening around them. The beam of a flashlight pierced the darkness, its light aimed at the rear doors for a few seconds before it was switched off.
It was Breaking and Entering 101. Close the door behind you once you are in, leave the place as undisturbed as possible. Shining a freaking light to check that a door was still sealed was as useless as … well, hiring a dumb-ass security company.
Finally, the van pulled out of view, and a black sedan picked up the van’s trail. While their intel said the van would return in another sixty minutes, Gaz and Jackson, two Eagle operatives, were going to follow them as a precaution and report in when the van was far enough away to give Cabe and the team time to get in and out.
Thirty minutes would have to be enough for them to do what they needed to do. As long as Lite could hack into the internal cameras quickly. They needed him to loop the previous thirty minutes of internal camera footage to cover footage that would show them actually being inside.
With the careful squeeze of the trigger and a silent pop, the camera on top of the large pillar exploded.
Then they waited.
They waited to see if Gaz and Jackson would instruct them to stay hidden, to tell them that the security van had been given instructions to return to the casino.
They waited for a security team to come running out from the shut-down building.
But the van was never notified, and nobody ever came out. As they’d thought, the building was empty.
Silence fell between them until the comm lines crackled to life. “You’re clear,” was all Jackson said.
Grateful that the rear of the casino was bordered by woodland, they hurried the short distance across the parking lot. Dressed in black from head to toe, they blended seamlessly with the night, their footsteps silent as they hit the asphalt.
As Buddha began working the mechanical locks, Mac began working the electrical ones. Cabe kept watch until he heard the click that told him they were in. Silently, they crept into the building, and Lite immediately sat behind the security monitors. He cracked open his laptop and went to work. Within two minutes, he looked up and gave the okay.
Everyone had his plan. Lite was on security cameras, and Buddha was putting the entry panel back together so they could leave quickly. Mac and Harley were finding a way to put a camera near the vault, while Six and Cabe would put one in Woods’s office along with a listening device on his desk. When they were finished on the employee side of the casino, the needed to hit the main floor with a focus on the cashier’s cage.
Cabe’s heart raced. Flawless execution was required to pull this off. Everybody had to do his part. Leave no trace—that was the goal. Or, more accurately, leave no trace of what they left behind.
Cabe and Six took the stairs together to Woods’s office. It took Cabe less than twenty seconds to pick the locked door. Wordlessly, they set about their tasks, Six finding a place to plant the camera, Cabe finding a place to plant the bug. Given that they’d have one chance to place it, Cabe wanted to put it somewhere it would last. And somewhere it could pick up the most sound. It was a cliché, but he hid it in the lamp fitting.
Thanks to DCSNet, the Digital Collection System Network, they didn’t need to tap Woods’s phone. The FBI had already done that with the touch of a button, but the tap had revealed very little. They could only assume that Woods and Sokolov either used burner phones or held their conversations in person at the casino.
“We’ve got company.” Buddha’s voice crackled through the comms unit.
“Jackson?” Cabe called out.
“Security car is still ten miles out.”
“Who the fuck is it?” Six mumbled, pressing his body against the wall alongside the window. Thanks to their night vision goggles, they hadn’t needed to turn on any light. “Another white van, a second one from the security company,” he whispered. “We must have triggered something.”
“Entry panel is reassembled. Door closed,” Buddha said.
“We … wn in … hear … at.” The voice was clearly Mac’s, but Cabe he couldn’t tell what he was saying. He wondered if the vault was protected by poured concrete. It would definitely interfere with the efficacy of his comms unit.
“Shit. If we can’t hear him, he probably can’t hear us.” Cabe planted the second bug on the underside of Woods’s two-story letter inbox.
The security guard got out of the van and looked up at the building before saying something into a radio. There was no way he could see them, the interior way too dark. Maybe they’d still have time to plant the cameras on the gaming floor.
“The guys we were following just ran to their van,” Jackson said. There was a pause. “They’re heading back in your direction at speed.”
“We need to get out of here,” Six said.
Cabe watched the security guard look between the van and the building. “Wait. He’s scared. Doesn’t know what to do.”
The guard walked back to his van. “He’s going to do a loop around the building. Everybody out. Buddha, make sure Mac knows to get out.”
Six and Cabe ran down the hallway, Cabe’s heart racing in the adrenaline-filled way it used to when he was on a mission. Mac, Harley, and Buddha came pounding down the hallway behind them. Cabe stopped, letting them run ahead.
Last out was Lite, as he made a minor adjustment to the security recording before packing up his laptop.
Buddha stood by the door, ready to close both the mechanical and electronic locks as Cabe and Lite ran from the building.
At the far end of the lot, a beam of headlights appeared along the side of the building.
“He’s turning into the lot in three seconds. Move your ass, Buddha.”
“On it,” he whispered.
Lite took off toward the dense tree line.
The van began to turn.
Shit, please let the guy be nearsighted.
“Buddha?” Cabe warned.
“Easy,” Buddha said, and the two of them sprinted after the rest of the team.
“Little more hustle next time, okay?” Cabe said with a grin on his face as they disappeared unnoticed into the trees.