Joe eyed Rico carefully. His opponent would most certainly underestimate him, but he wasn’t about to make the same mistake. Rico hesitated, seemingly unsure as to how to begin.

“C’mon, buddy,” Joe said conversationally. “Let’s get this show on the road. I don’t want to fight in front of Cari, and she’ll be back soon with the med kit. Drop your knife out of that wrist sheath and bring it already.”

Joe wrapped a towel around his left forearm, casually tucking the two ends of it in tightly. The fluffy terry cloth made a great impromptu gauntlet.

Rico’s eyes narrowed. Without further ado, he jumped forward. A wink of metal flashed in his right palm. All right, then. The show was on. The thug held the knife reversed, the blade lying back along his forearm with the tip pointing toward his elbow. Ol’ Rico had a little experience fighting with a knife, did he?

“Let’s dance, shall we?” Joe invited lightly. He circled to his right, forcing Rico to follow him in an arc to bring the knife into play.

Normally, he wouldn’t talk much in a fight. The necessary breathing rhythms of speaking telegraphed too much to an experienced fighter. But today wasn’t only about taking Rico down; it was also about minimizing the desire of anyone else in the Ferrare household to tangle with him. Hence, a certain amount of verbal psychological warfare was necessary.

He had no doubt that all of Eduardo’s office windows were open and that the light breeze was carrying every word he said to the ears of the avid crowd that were practically pressing their noses against the giant glass wall.

Rico growled, “You think you’re going talk your way out of this, pretty boy?”

Joe shrugged. “I’d rather not have to go through with this stupidity, but it was your call. I gave you ample opportunity to reconsider. But now you’ve ticked me off and I am going to kick your ass.”

“Hah.”

“Already out of brilliant repartee, are you?” Joe taunted gently. “Maybe you should stick to fighting, then. Speaking of which, you can give it your best shot any day now. I’m getting bored.” Joe’s message was clear. He wasn’t going to start this fight, but he was damn well going to finish it.

Rico finally leaped forward, swinging viciously with his right arm. Joe ducked the wild blow easily, coming up with a hard fist to the guy’s solar plexus before he danced back lightly on the balls of his feet.

Rico gasped for air, eyeing Joe in surprise. No more talk. Time to get to business. Now that Rico had taken the first shot, Joe went on the offensive, pursuing Rico aggressively. The thug eyed Joe’s right hand warily. Didn’t like that gut shot, eh? There was more of that where the first punch came from.

Joe waited until all of Rico’s weight was on his left foot and then swept his right leg forward, kicking the weight-bearing leg out from under Rico before the guy had any idea what hit him. The big man went down on the concrete with a heavy thud.

Joe took a step back and grinned down at his opponent. “Don’t go taking a nap on me, dude! Get up and get busy before you embarrass yourself.”

Rico climbed to his feet in a not-particularly-nimble fashion. His face was red now, his eyes slits of rage. He would do something wild next, a big offensive move designed to overpower Joe since pure skill wasn’t looking promising against the American.

Joe balanced lightly, waiting for the big move. Sure enough, Rico lowered his right shoulder and made a charge worthy of a bull in a matador’s ring. Joe waited till the last moment and stepped out of the way, his movement blindingly fast and smooth as silk. As Rico barged past, Joe planted a hand in the middle of the big man’s back and gave him a solid shove. Down he went again, on his face this time.

Rico rolled onto his back—a colossally stupid move in a legitimate knife fight.

Joe commented, in his best instructor’s voice, “You shouldn’t roll over like that when you’re getting up. You’re exposing your vital organs to me while you’re down and defenseless. You’d be better off pushing up to your hands and knees and then jumping to your feet. That way, all you ever give me is your back. If I had a knife, I’d have a hard time killing you through all that backbone and muscle.”

Rico was already halfway to his feet but actually paused as if he might roll back over and get up the right way. But then he hitched back into motion and finished standing, scowling. He charged again. And again. And each time, Joe slipped out of the way, landing a punishing blow somewhere on Rico’s body as he slammed past.

By now, it had to be patently evident to even the most casual observer that Joe was a) toying with Rico and b) a vastly more skilled fighter.

After one particularly ugly pass, Rico stood with his head hanging down, blood dripping from his split lip, panting hard.

“Give it up, Rico. Just walk away. I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

“Fuck you,” Rico snarled. He charged again and, this time, Joe didn’t sidestep him. He stepped into Rico, slamming his fist into Rico’s sternum. The thug doubled over and slammed, chin first, into Joe’s other fist. The guy’s teeth clacked together loud enough to be heard across the yard.

Joe followed up with a vicious blow to the guy’s nose and felt the bone give way with a grinding sensation beneath his knuckles.

Rico surprised him by reversing his grip on the knife and lunging at Joe, knife point first. In a reflex move honed over years of combat training, Joe crowded in fast and hard, grabbing Rico’s wrist and twisting it violently. The knife dropped out of useless fingers as both wrist bones gave way with an audible crack that sounded like a rib of celery snapping in two.

Joe bent to scoop up the knife. But desperation made Rico fast and the thug’s fist met his at the knife. Rico got his fingers around the handle and shoved up with all his remaining strength, which was formidable, and Joe had no choice. He had to deflect the blow into Rico’s gut. The blade buried itself in Rico’s abdomen with a sickening slide of slippery guts giving way before hard, cold steel.

Thankfully, the thug knew when to give up. He fell to his knees, his hands clutched around the hilt of the knife sticking out of his belly.

Joe stepped back and took a couple of deep breaths. He didn’t take his eyes off Rico, though. More than one good man had had a fight won, only to take his eyes off the downed opponent and die from a sneak attack from the ground.

“You finished?” Joe demanded.

“Yeah,” Rico grunted.

“You ready to let me treat that wound and keep you from dying?”

Rico glanced up in surprise. Blood was starting to seep between his fingers. A lot of it. The whole front of his shirt was turning red quickly. “For real?” he panted.

“Yes. Lie down. The way you’re bleeding, I might’ve nicked an artery.”

“That ain’t good, is it?” Rico grunted.

“No, it isn’t,” Joe snapped. This idiot could bleed out in a matter of minutes if that artery wasn’t found and clamped off.

While Rico rolled clumsily onto his side and then his back, Joe glanced up, looking around for Cari and that med kit. There she was, standing over by the dining room door. Gunter was standing beside her and had her upper arm in a firm grip. Good man. The last thing he’d needed would have been Cari diving into the middle of the fight.

“Bring me the first aid kit,” Joe called sharply. “And call an ambulance if you have them in this godforsaken country.”

Gunter grabbed the heavy canvas pack and ran over to Joe. The German dropped the kit on the ground. “What can I do?”

“Open that up and get out a scalpel and a big wad of gauze pads,” Joe answered. “And surgical gloves, if you’ve got any.”

He glanced up at Cari. “Put on a pair of gloves, then place your hand here and press down as hard as you can.” He placed her gloved hand on the towel he’d unwrapped from his wrist and used as a makeshift pressure bandage.

She complied and he grabbed the gloves Gunter held out, snapping them over his wrists with the speed of long experience.

“Gunter, grab the knife hilt, and, when I tell you, pull it out. Lean it back against the non-sharpened side. We don’t need to slice him up even more on the way out.”

Gunter nodded and put his hand on the knife protruding from Rico’s belly.

Joe pushed his fingers into the top of the wound on either side of the blade, preparatory to prying the wound open to have a look for that artery. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be buried deep. Rico groaned. No time to sedate the guy, assuming this kit even had the right drugs to knock him out.

“Do it,” Joe ordered.

Gunter eased the knife out and a gush of blood flowed over Joe’s fingers. Working by feel, he wedged his fingertips into the wound and held it open. Rico cried out in pain.

“Cari, use that wad of gauze to mop up the blood. I’ve got to see where the blood’s coming from. Gunter, get me a locking clamp. It’s the one that looks like a cross between scissors and pliers.”

Cari leaned over his arm, sopping up the copious blood. She pulled the gauze away and, for a second, he had a clear view of the wound. Hallelujah. He’d spotted the bleeder. It wasn’t cut all the way through; it was merely torn. A simple clamp should hold it for long enough to get this jerk to a hospital.

“Bring that clamp over here, Gunter, right by the wound. Okay, Cari. One more time.”

She mopped up the blood again and, as she lifted the soaked mess away, he used his left hand to hold the wound open and his right hand to grab the clamp and slap it onto the arterial tear. The blood flow from the wound diminished noticeably.

“I need a condom,” he ordered no one in particular.

“Why?” Cari blurted.

“Just get it. I’ll show you.”

Gunter ended up passing him a foil-wrapped condom. Joe tore open the package with his teeth, stuffed the condom in the wound, and then leaned down to Rico’s belly and blew into the latex bladder, inflating inside the wound to put pressure directly on the bleeder internally.

He grabbed one last handful of gauze and packed the wound open for whatever surgeon got to repair the artery for real, then field-dressed it quickly.

God, he couldn’t count how many wounds like this he’d treated over the course of his career. The guys in the Blackjacks usually did a pretty good job of not getting themselves hurt, but civilians who bumbled into the crossfire, and nimrod bad guys like Rico, were a dime a dozen. No common sense at all.

He sat back on his heels and had a look at the rest of his patient. The wrist wasn’t in too bad a shape, although it would need to be set, and maybe pinned, while the surgeons had him under anesthesia. Joe slapped a quick splint on the wrist to keep Rico from doing something stupid like poking the broken wrist bones through the skin.

A couple wads of cotton stuffed up Rico’s broken nose to keep it from swelling shut and that was about all he could do for his patient for now. He was actually capable of doing the required surgery to clean and repair the knife damage to Rico’s gut, but he would rather leave it to a qualified surgeon in a nice, sterile hospital. Meatball surgery always carried a certain amount of risk, and guts were filthy places to mess around in without the proper equipment.

He looked up at Gunter. “This idiot’s going to need minor surgery to repair the damage in his gut and to set his wrist. He’ll also need a heavy-duty antibiotic to keep him from getting peritonitis from all the gunk that’s leaking out of his intestine into his abdominal cavity right now. Make sure both things happen—surgery to repair the gut and wrist, followed by antibiotics to combat the infection. He’ll die if he doesn’t get both, got it?”

Gunter nodded briskly, then looked up candidly at him. “Thanks.”

Joe retorted wryly, “For not slitting his throat or for patching him up?”

“Both.”

He shrugged. “No sweat. I told him I knew how to fight. But did he believe me? Nooo.”

Cari caught his gaze, some strong emotion swimming in her eyes, but damned if he could name it. Awe? Dismay? Disbelief? Hard to tell. She was good at masking her real thoughts when she wanted to. After a few minutes, she went inside, mumbling about getting dressed.

He stayed on his knees by Rico, monitoring the guy’s vitals for the next half hour while an ambulance made its way from St. George to the seaside estate. Several of the guards brought out a stretcher and carried Rico through the house to the ambulance when it finally arrived. Joe picked up the sterile packaging that was strewn all over the ground by the pool and bundled up the gauze, wrapping the whole lot in the bloody towel.

A maid scuttled out to help him, looking scared. He handed it to her and said kindly, “Burn all this stuff, okay?”

She nodded and hurried away. He needed a shower. He was sweaty and covered in sticky blood. Heading for the house, he drew up short as Gunter stepped in front of him.

“Mr. Ferrare would like to see you.”

Joe blinked. “He’s home? I thought he was in town on business.”

“He got back in time to witness the…excitement.”

Joe slapped Gunter on the shoulder and laughed. “Excitement, huh? Where I come from, it’s called an ass whupping.”

Gunter grinned. “It’s called that where I come from, too.”

“Can the boss cool his jets long enough for me to take a shower? I’m covered in blood, and who knows if Rico has any weird sex diseases? He’s not bright enough to bother with condoms, if you ask me. Wouldn’t want to expose my father-in-law to any nasty shit that rots off your weiner.”

Gunter opened his mouth to answer, but Eduardo spoke from the doorway to his office. “Go take your shower. I’ll wait.”

Joe blinked. Eduardo almost sounded friendly there, for a second. “I’ll be down in a jiffy.”

Eduardo nodded and turned, disappearing into his office.

Cari looked up as Joe burst into the bedroom.

“Oh, hi,” he said. He sounded mildly distracted.

Apparently, it was an everyday occurrence for him to nearly knife a man to death and then patch him back together. Abruptly, just how little she really knew him hit her squarely between the eyes.

He stripped off his bloody T-shirt and carried it into the bathroom. “If you’re here when the maids pick up these clothes,” he called out over the sound of the shower turning on, “tell them to burn ’em. Rico’s blood has to count as hazardous biomedical waste, don’t you think?”

He was joking? Joking? He’d just about killed a man a few minutes ago. Appalled, she stood up and walked across the room. Joe had pushed the bathroom door closed but hadn’t locked it. That was all the invitation she needed to barge in.

He spun around fast, his hands out in front of him like he was going to grab her. Some reflexes he had, there. The reflexes of a killer. Normally, she would be riveted by the sight of him naked. But now, visions of him circling Rico, toying with her father’s guard, delivering blow after punishing blow to the man, danced through her head. And then the final moment. She would never forget the sight of Joe grabbing Rico’s fist, twisting that knife up and back into Rico’s gut. The mere thought of it now made her sick.

Joe straightened. Relaxed. “What’s up?” he asked casually. As if he hadn’t a care in the world.

“You almost killed Rico,” she accused.

He shrugged. “What do you want me to say? I tried to talk him out of it, but he jumped me. It’s no crime to defend myself.”

“You didn’t defend yourself. You crushed him.”

Joe frowned. “If you mean that I beat him soundly, yes, I did. I’ve studied armed and unarmed combat since I was a kid. If you mean that I crushed Rico’s feelings, that’s too damn bad.”

Her eyes narrowed. Anger stirred in her belly. “You knew you’d make mincemeat out of him, but you still got into a fight with him.”

“He got into a fight with me. All I did was make the point to every wannabe hero in the house not to come sneaking into your room late at night with the bright idea of taking me out.”

“Nobody would sneak into my room to kill you.”

“Oh, yeah? Then how in the hell did Tony die in your bed?”

The air whooshed out of her like he’d just buried a fist in her stomach. She gasped a couple of times, but no air went into her lungs. Finally, she managed to draw a shaky breath. “That was a low blow.”

“That’s the truth, Cari. Wake up and look around you. This is a house full of killers working for a killer. One of them got froggy and decided to test me, and. I had to prove that I’m not someone who can be trampled all over. I did no more than I absolutely had to out there.”

His voice was sharp as a whip, cutting into her skin and flaying her heart. She heard the truth of his words, knew in her head that he was right, but she just couldn’t accept the idea that he’d turned out to be no better than her father. Both men lashed out in violence whenever their dominance was challenged.

“How can you measure violence so precisely? What differentiates I-had-to-do-it violence from it-felt-good-to-show-how-strong-I-am violence?”

Joe snorted. “You don’t know the first thing about measuring violence.”

“Oh, but you do, don’t you?” she snapped.

He took an aggressive step forward and she backed up fast, slamming her shoulder blades against the tiled wall at her back.

“Yes, honey, I do. I’ve forgotten more about violence than you’ll ever begin to know.”

And she could see it in his eyes. The knife fights he’d been in before. The men he hadn’t stopped fighting with to treat their wounds. The men he’d killed.

“How many men?” she whispered in horror.

“How many men what?” he repeated.

“How many have you killed?”

“I have no idea. I don’t keep count. More than I’d like and less than you’d think.”

“You’re just like him,” she accused.

“Like who?”

“My father,” she spit out, turning her back on him in fury.

Joe’s hand, powerful and angry, grabbed her upper arm and spun her around. His voice was cold. Flat. Furious. “I’ve got plenty of flaws, and I’ve done stuff that would curl your toes, but don’t ever compare me to that bastard again.”

She would compare him to whomever she wanted to, dammit. And if she saw her father in him, tough.

The thought arrested her. Was that why she was falling for Joe? Was he just a younger version of her father? Was she repeating the same mistake she’d made her whole life of trusting a man to whom everyone—including her—was merely a tool to be used and discarded at his convenience?

“What do you want, Joe? Why are you here?”

He scowled. “You know why I’m here. I’m getting you out of here. Away from your father.”

“Yeah, and you’ve really made huge progress in that direction, haven’t you?” Cari snapped. “You’ve learned all kinds of things about my father and his organization and haven’t done a damned thing to spring us out of here.”

“It’s been only a few days since I slipped that ring on your finger, Cari. But I’ll be ready to leave tonight. And don’t bother packing. We’ll be traveling light.”

“You got me away from my father’s men once so we could get married. Why did we come back here? What is it you want so badly in this house?”

He stared at her, his gaze blazing hot. “I’ll say it one more time,” he ground out. “I’m here to get you out.” And with that, he stepped into the shower.

She wanted to scream! To rage against what he’d done. To force him to allay her doubts about him. To swear to her that he was different from her father. To convince her that his brand of violence was somehow better. Noble.

But at the end of the day, it was all the same thing. He’d harmed a weaker opponent in cold blood because it helped establish his macho reputation. If she didn’t know better, she would say he was trying to worm his way into her father’s good graces and leapfrog to the top of her father’s crime empire, just like Eduardo had accused him of doing yesterday.

She slid down the cool wall at her back as the room slowly filled with steam. Hugging her knees close to her chest, she finally let the tears flow. Tears of the abject terror she’d felt, standing there watching Joe fight for his life against a much larger, much stronger opponent. Tears of frustration that he wasn’t being forthcoming with her and that she had no way of knowing for sure if he was telling the truth.

And for once, she shed tears of sorrow for herself. Just for once, she wanted to be a normal person and have normal problems and live a normal life and love a normal guy.

A normal guy—her personal misery derailed as yet another distressing thought burst into her head. Speaking of normal guys, surely it was against the Blackjacks’s rules of engagement to attack and knife bystanders for the hell of it. Was Joe really a member of the Blackjacks, after all? Had he hoodwinked Julia into believing he was a good guy when he really wasn’t? Had Cari seen a heroic soldier in Joe because she so desperately wanted him to be one?

He’d steadfastly denied being in the Blackjacks from the very beginning. Even last night, when she’d told him her father was out to kill every member of the team, he’d denied being one of them.

Her whole life was unraveling around her, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to hold it all together. The threads were slipping through her fingers faster than she could gather them back up. She just wanted Joe to be who he said he was, needed him to be a good guy, to love her back a little.

Was that too much to ask?