CHAPTER 12
“A word of warning, Ram. You can’t be a hardass with Ali Montero,” Wyatt Lockwood told his best operator, Ram Torres. “Not anymore.”
Ram sat in front of his boss’s desk at Artemis, knowing he was in the hot seat. As leader of the mission to rescue Cara Montero, Ali’s younger sister, he hadn’t counted on this little chat. Apparently, Ali was flying into Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., early tomorrow morning. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep a lid on it,” he promised.
Ali was a tough, smart-mouthed—but brilliant—Marine Corps sniper on their SEAL team. They’d gotten along like oil and water. Not good. Not ever. They’d worked together for two years in that SEAL team in Afghanistan.
Worse, she triggered every lusty cell in his body and fueled fiery dreams of her when he was lying in bed at night at the SEAL compound in J-bad. But she never knew about those fantasies, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to tell anyone about them. That little wildcat would use it against him, he just knew it. In fact, Ram was sure she hated his guts, with her golden eyes flashing warnings at him whenever he looked at her. They’d made peace of sorts between each other over time, however. What started off as a war between them was more like a skirmish when she departed the team and went to work for the CIA.
“That’s all in the past,” Ram said, trying to reassure both his boss and himself. “Right now, all I’m focused on is getting her sister away from that Sonoran drug lord, Emilio Azarola. Once he kidnapped her, he was almost certain to get her into his sex-trafficking activities. Did you know that he sends his men over the border to grab American girls as young as age ten? Then, he puts them to work in his sex trade overseas in Asia.”
“Well, Cara is twenty-six, a little over the age for sex trafficking,” Wyatt deadpanned, “but she’s beautiful, which is probably why Azarola’s soldiers took her.”
Nodding, Ram said, “We’re wheels up in less than forty-eight hours, and now I’ve got Ali to take care of. And believe me, she’ll have her own ideas, on how to run things. But I promise to keep myself in check, Wyatt. I’m not going to mix it up with her.”
“You can’t,” Wyatt said flatly, sitting straighter in his leather chair. “I hadn’t expected her to be a part of this op, but we need her now that we know she’s been working with the Mexican military to take down Azarola. None of us knew she’d been watching that bastard for two years while she was working with the Mexican Marines. And of course, the CIA wasn’t cutting that intel loose to us, either.”
“And probably none of us would have known any of this,” Ram added, “if her baby sister hadn’t been kidnapped a week ago by Azarola’s men. Now, Ali’s out there in the Sierra Madre Mountains getting intel on his movements.”
Grimacing, the Texan said, “There’s even more to the story. Ali is what the spooks call an ‘agent of change,’ an operator placed behind the scenes to cause continual disruption. They sent her to Sonora to cause hell with Azarola’s men while trying to move their marijuana, heroin, and cocaine from Central America up to their fortress in Mexico’s Sierra Madres. As it happens, that state sits right on the US border.”
Ram nodded. He was itching to put those guys away permanently, alive or dead, and to get Cara back safely on American soil.
“Because Ali was a Marine Corps sniper,” Wyatt continued, “they chose her to do hit-and-run attacks on the trucks conveying the drugs to his fortress. She was also to interrupt their plans to send away the kidnapped women and young girls by finding out when the convoy was scheduled to go to Puerto Nuevo in Baja, Mexico. That’s where they’d be put on a container ship for Thailand.”
Ram nodded. He had to admit, he’d always respected Ali, even though she was a damned high-handed piece of work. He also knew that Ali was the Mexican Marines’ eyes and ears in this operation. As a result, they’d put a huge dent in the past year into the sex-trafficking operation that Azarola was trying to launch.
“As for the drugs,” Wyatt continued, “Azarola’s soldiers would drive them to the border where his buyers were waiting to pick them up on the US side. They’d transport the drugs to major cities in the West and throughout the Southwest after the transfer occurred. Ali’s job was to create chaos, stop those shipments, and slow the whole operation down. She’s been an incredibly successful force multiplier down there, that has helped collapse sixty percent of Azarola’s operations. He’s got a million-dollar price tag out on her head.”
Ram wiped his face, a lot of emotions—both good and bad—bubbling just beneath the surface. “I didn’t know all that, Wyatt. I lost track of Ali a long time ago when she left the team and went back into civilian life.”
Well, that was true in one sense, but Ram had never really forgotten Ali or gotten her out of his system. He still dreamed about her, even imagining the sweet cries of pleasure that only he could give her. And was it his imagination, or had he felt her radiating the same lust and yearning toward him all those years ago? Every day was a battle not to tell her how he really felt. How he wanted to have sex with her! But she was defensive, on guard, and wary of him. With her hyper-intuition, she probably sensed him wanting her and that accounted for some of her cautiousness toward him. That would be his luck. Snipers were well known for damn near psychic sensing, they were so attuned to their environment and everything within it.
Ram knew she was always watching him. Of course, if he was brutally honest with himself, he’d never given Ali an opportunity to trust him in a personal sense. Yes, when on the team, he did have her back after Wyatt took him to the ‘woodshed’ about it. From then on, he tried hard to forge a better relationship with her.
Raising one eyebrow, Wyatt drawled, “Somehow, my gut instinct tells me you’re still attracted to her, Ram. Yeah, I picked up on that, and it’s okay if you don’t want to admit it, but it’s there. I see it in your face and I hear it in your voice whenever you use her name.”
Lockwood had been a stellar Navy chief in the SEALs and Ram knew of his ability to ferret out the truth in a situation or op. Squirming, he muttered, “Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . ”
More lies. He saw that Wyatt didn’t believe him in the least, giving him that gimlet-eyed look he bestowed on someone who was bullshitting him. The guy missed nothing—absolutely nothing.
“This is going to be tricky, Ram. You’ve got her under your skin again at the same time that you’re the leader of this mission. You can’t be distracted by her or your prejudicial past with her. It just isn’t gonna work and you know it. I want whatever it is you two have with one another shut down and shut off. Cara is our objective, along with those other three women in that cell at Azarola’s fortress in the Sierra Madres.”
“I get it,” Ram huffed, sitting up in the chair, moving his sweaty palms against the chair arms. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly 0700 on this October morning in Alexandria, Virginia. “You going to give her this little talk, too? Because I won’t tolerate her taking things into her own hands, doing something without consulting me first when I’m leading this op.”
“I’ll see her after you pick her up at the airport early tomorrow morning, and she’ll get the same prep talk that you just heard,” Wyatt promised. “And after I’m done chatting with Ali, we’re all going down to the briefing room at 0900. She’s given us a lot of intel to work with via Captain José Gomez, the commanding officer of the Mexican Marine detachment up where she’s been working.”
“Copy that, Wyatt,” he said, standing. “We finished?” He was dressed in a tan t-shirt, jungle-shaded camos, and black combat boots.
“Yep,” Wyatt said, pointing toward the closed door. “I’ll see you in the briefing room with the rest of your five-person team at 0900 tomorrow.”
Ram scowled as he left Wyatt’s office for his own, which was above ground, on the third floor. The first two floors of Artemis were buried deep inside the earth under a three-story farmhouse just outside Alexandria. To all outward appearances, it was a hydroponics farm. But inside, the structure of the house was one of the most advanced security firms in the world. Only a special few knew about it and that was the way Tal Culver-Lockwood, Wyatt’s wife, herself an ex-Marine captain and sniper, wanted it.
Wyatt agreed, he liked working in black ops and being anonymous. Camouflage was a great invention, in his book.
Ram had joined Artemis six months earlier after being hounded and hunted down by Lockwood himself. Before that, he’d worked with the DEA as an undercover agent after finishing his enlistment with the SEALs. He enjoyed working under Wyatt—at least, he had up until this moment.
Turning left, he swiped his entry card and opened the door to his office. His desk was a mess, as usual, his laptop sitting on a mountain of files that needed his attention. Commanding the room was a large screen on one wall. Below ground, there were no windows and he was glad to have light pouring in from the bullet-proof windows of his third-floor office. The company’s decorator had thoughtfully put up a wall of nature photos, even though he could see the vast woodlands of Virginia from his desk. It was always a gentle reminder to Ram that he’d much rather be out in the field than stuck in an office—any office, above or below ground.
He sat down, and started going over email messages from his team, answering each one, and arranged to meet them in the briefing room at 0900 tomorrow. He grimaced as he added the news that Ali Montero would be joining them on the op. So far, none of his men knew her.
Sitting back, rocking slightly in his ergonomic chair, he thought back to how long it had been since he’d last seen Ali. How many times had he thought of trying to find her? She was a challenge, and he wanted to try to breach that high wall she put up, keeping him out. She was open and vulnerable to everyone else but him. Looking back on that time with her, he wasn’t exactly the most mature bastard on the block, either. He knew he’d been instrumental in how she saw him and distrusted him.
He had to admit that it was obvious—they were too much alike, two Type-A perfectionists competing with one another. And she didn’t trust his personal judgment, just as he didn’t trust hers. Hell, he didn’t trust any woman, and never would. His mother had seen to that. But he’d tried to stop seeing Ali as “all women” and as the combatant that she was. It worked to a degree and the war between them ended.
He frowned as he pulled files from the “in” basket on his desk and forced himself to go through the office crap he hated so much. He could never be an office manager like Lockwood. He needed sunshine, fresh air, and the outdoors too much. Without them, he didn’t feel alive, useful, or necessary. Sometimes when he was in here too long, the glass walls started to close in on him. However, he knew that old feeling came from the past and hated to see it rise within him again.
Everyone who had an office at Artemis had a “family wall” where they put photos. Tal Culver-Lockwood, the woman running the firm, was big on family. She considered all the employees her “cosmic family,” and Ram welcomed the idea. His family, if it could be called that, was one miserable hot mess, something he had run from as soon as he could—but not soon enough.
Making a grousing sound, unhappy with his past tapping him on the shoulder like it always did at moments like this, Ram glared up at the whiteboard, his own “family wall.” There were no personal photos on it. Nor would there be, he guessed. In fact, the only photo he had was of Ali. He’d taken it spontaneously after an op to take down a Taliban truck filled with Afghan children who were going to be taken across the border to Pakistan to be sold. She had been kneeling in the rear of the truck, holding Husna, and she wasn’t even aware he’d snapped it.
Ali had worn her long, black hair in a ponytail down her back. She was dressed in combat gear, just like all of them. But it was the soft expression on her face as she held the distressed Husna in her arms that made his heart ache, damned if he knew why.
For some reason, it opened the doors to his own wounded, withdrawn heart. He wondered what it would be like to take this woman into his arms. He could take care of her, Ram knew he could. Would she ever look at him, care for him, as she had for that little girl? Yes, he ached for that kind of human tenderness. Just that one photo of Ali had touched his wounded heart as nothing ever had before or since.
He knew that Ali was fiercely independent, not wanting protection from any man. She certainly knew how to protect herself. And every time Ram had tried to shield her during an op, they’d gotten into it, yelling at each other, exchanging nasty growls and retorts, with him backing off and walking away from her.
Why such fury from the woman when he just wanted to keep her safe? Ram often wondered if Ali resisted every man, or just him? She seemed to get along well with the rest of the male SEAL team. But they accepted her at face value, and trusted her with their lives. Ram never saw her with another man in a personal relationship.
Shaking his head, he couldn’t believe how different he felt about this woman. Sure, he could get sex easily enough, thanks to his good looks and having been a SEAL. However, Ali had never met his other side, so all she did was poke at him with her sarcasm, the blazing defiance in her golden eyes, and engage in one argument after another. She had never backed down from him and that earned grudging respect from him. Fierce was a word he’d automatically use with her name. The two were inseparable.
But now the tables were turned. Wyatt had told him to get along with Ali Montero, even if it killed him, and now he was leading a mission. The big question was would Ali follow him? Or would she dig her heels in, stare belligerently at him and tell him to “fuck off” like she had so many other times when they’d worked together. It was, after all, a personal mission for Ali because it was her sister that was involved in the rescue op.
Because they trusted each other only up to a point, he realized he was in deep shit now. The mission would soon be a thousand times tougher. What would happen when he met Ali at the airport? Ram’s stomach was beginning to feel tied in knots over their coming meeting. Could they be civil to each other, or would this encounter turn into another confrontation, just as it always had in the past?