Nikita could never get tired of Drake’s caresses. If only there’d been a chance to last night.

Along with the precautionary antibiotic and the local anesthetic—that the doctor had needed more than she did to dress her wound—he’d apparently given her a shot with enough painkiller to level a horse. She’d been staggering by the time they reached the suite, with Drake’s jacket once more draped over her shoulders to hide the bandage.

This time she was still conscious enough to remove her own dress. Though she’d need Zoe’s help to put on the t-shirt, because she couldn’t feel her own arm.

No powerful arms lifted her into the bed, but that didn’t matter. By the time she hit the pillow, she was out.

“C’mon, sleepyhead,” someone was tugging on her foot. “You don’t want to miss every port of call.”

She managed to open her eyes.

Drake was smiling down at her.

“How is it that you always look so good and I feel like shit?” He looked far better than good back in his black t-shirt and tan chinos.

“Good living and I stay off the drugs.”

Her head was still muzzy with whatever the doctor had pumped into her last night. She tested the arm. Sore as hell, but not anything worth writing home about.

Drake was busy throwing open curtains. She didn’t even know if he or Zoe had slept beside her last night.

“Come to bed and maybe we’ll discuss the good living part of that.”

He circled close and once more brushed a finger across her cheek. His easy smile disappeared and his expression became deeply intent and serious. “If the next boat ashore wasn’t in fifteen minutes, I’d take you up on that.”

“Let’s miss a boat.”

“Zoe found out through Norma that Arthur signed up for permission to go ashore. He’ll be on that boat as well and I’d like to have a chat with him.” He dropped into a chair to wait for her.

She’d like a few words with him as well. Nikita rolled out of bed and onto her feet. She had to close her eyes for a moment as the world wavered sharply, but then it steadied. Stripping off her shirt, she headed for the walk-in closet. Disgusted that she was still probably “the babe” of the outfit, she went for the light cotton blouse whose price had so shocked her when she first entered the boutique, and capris in a dark lavender. Two minutes flat she was back in the bedroom with her hair and teeth brushed. And—damn Drake for being right—all her efforts at a ponytail were completely foiled.

Drake was sitting in the armchair with his feet propped on the bed.

He was shaking his head, but his eyes didn’t move from looking at her.

“Damn, woman. I could really get used to being around you.”

Right. He’d been in the room when she’d stripped on her way to the closet.

She kicked his leg hard enough to hurt, “Thought you were in a hurry.”

“You’re enough to make a man think very slow thoughts.” But he clambered to his feet. “Metal detectors at the ramp. No weapons bigger than a four-inch knife allowed.”

“Shit!” She untucked her shirt and pulled the nice little Glock 36 Subcompact Slimline out of the small of her back and returned to the closet to lock it in her rifle case.

“Extra rounds?”

She pulled the two clips out of her back pocket and tossed them in as well.

“My kinda gal,” he took her hand and led her out into the suite.

“That didn’t take the two of you nearly long enough,” Zoe protested from the chair she’d been slouched in.

“Don’t you ever think about anything other than sex?”

“Hunter-killer drones. But other than that? Why bother.”

Altman was already by the door.

Arthur didn’t look happy when Drake led his entourage as the last ones on the open taxi boat, but he was too buried in the crowd to make an excuse and rush for the exit.

Belize City harbor was too shallow for the big cruise ships. Even their mid-sized model couldn’t make it in. But the city had a jitney service of hundred-passenger open boats that had rushed out to unload the cruise ship and take them the twenty minutes to shore. For twenty minutes, Arthur wasn’t going anywhere, so Drake sat in his seat and ignored him.

A very curved lady with skin the color of warm chocolate and hair curling well past her shoulders stood up front. In charming British English she told the passengers about the wonderful opportunities to be found in Belize. There were apparently still open slots in diving, caving, river rafting, and Mayan temple jungle tours. He let her liquid accent lull him into a comfortable semi-trance state as they powered toward shore.

Nikita curled up against him and appeared to be just as content as he was to take in the sunshine, the sea air, and the twenty minutes of peace.

“We are now arriving in the Tourist Village. There are many shops and restaurants to explore here if you are not traveling farther afield on one of our tours. We do wish to caution you to be careful beyond the boundaries of this area. There are clear signs posted. There are parts of Belize City that I regret to say are not very safe and you certainly don’t want to be caught there after dark.”

After weaving through various anchored boats—mostly luxury yachts in the eighty- to hundred-and-fifty-foot range—the jitney nudged up to a dock and unloaded from the same ramp. They’d been last on, so they were first off.

A glance to Altman, and he and Zoe hung back. Drake led Nikita slowly up the dock and toward town. So slowly that Arthur would have no choice but to catch up with them as the crowd cleared. Zoe and Altman would make sure that he was herded along.

They were three quarters of the way down the nearly empty pier when they all came together. Zoe’s idle chatter warned him that the gap between them was now under a dozen meters. He turned aside.

The big industrial piers with their cargo containers were in another section of the city, away to the south. This was a tourist transit pier, colorfully decorated with a scattering of old maritime equipment tucked here and there under the well-spaced palm trees that he supposed would be considered a festive air.

Arthur had to know he was in a pincer, so he followed them until all five of them were in a tall palm’s shade.

“It would have been easier if you had bought the painting,” Arthur sighed. “I had to go to rather a lot of difficulty to avoid selling it last night.”

“So you had us shot at to make up for it?”

“Shot at?” that surprised him enough that he tipped his head down to look at Drake over the top of his sunglasses. “Who shot at you?”

Altman’s curse was emphatic.

“You are supposed to be the one telling us,” Drake couldn’t believe this was happening. He’d had it all figured out in his head; or part of it anyway. He hadn’t behaved the way GSI historically had, so Arthur’s people were applying pressure to make them behave. A decidedly weak scenario, but that was all he’d been expecting from these people. Paintings of nudes and patently obvious art dealers struck him as awfully lame fieldcraft.

“Okay,” maybe Nikita had some ideas. “If you didn’t shoot me—”

“You were actually shot?” Arthur’s astonishment didn’t look faked, but Nikita ignored him.

“Who else do you have aboard for this operation?”

“No one,” Arthur started looking around as if someone other than Drake was about to shoot him. “There isn’t an operation. What kind of an operation? Did you need one for being shot?”

Drake grabbed him by the lapels of his summer jacket and forced him to focus. “Who the fuck tried to kill Nikita?” He agreed with her that it had been an accident that she was shot, but she could have just as easily leaned in to kiss him, or he her, and taken a bullet to the head.

“I swear to god I don’t know,” the man’s voice actually squeaked.

“Shit!” Drake cast him aside hard enough that he’d have crashed to the ground if Altman hadn’t jammed a hand against this back.

Either he was just as clueless as he appeared, or he was in deep. Head of an operation could perhaps pull it off, but that was too movie-villain evil to be credible. He’d vote for sniveling weasel in over his head—but watch out for scheming bastard.

If it was the former…

He grabbed Arthur’s lapel and yanked him in again until their noses were just an inch apart.

“You want to get out of this in one piece, you find out who else is on that boat. And you don’t tell them, you tell me or her,” he nodded toward Nikita. “On second thought, don’t go near her. She’d be far more likely to throw your sorry ass overboard than I am.”

This time when he shoved Arthur away, Altman simply stepped to the side and let him stumble to catch his balance before racing off.

“Any bets?” Drake asked the others.

“Twenty says that he’s just as useless as he looks,” Nikita pulled out a bill to make her point.

Altman eyed her, “I’m still on the fence about him.”

“Personally, I thought he was going to pee himself,” Zoe sounded delighted. “This is so much more entertaining than sitting at a drone’s ground-control station. You,” she poked a finger against Altman’s chest, “definitely have to show me more, Luke. Much more.”

Altman looked down at her finger as if it was a dangerous weapon to be treated with great caution.

The four of them were the last ones off the pier other than a pair of poor crew from the ship who were standing beneath a small white awning in full uniform just in case someone had a question three hours from now.

At the head of the pier, Drake spotted a familiar face—a pair of them.

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

Nikita startled. She’d never heard Drake swear, except about her being shot.

There, just outside of security, in front of a row of glitzy tourist shops thick with bad ugly t-shirts and tiny collectors’ plates with pictures of a palm tree, stood Jared Westin and Sugar.

Drake blew past the pier’s security guards. In a dozen steps he had grabbed J-dawg with a pincer grip around his windpipe and pinned his back against a palm tree even though the guy was a couple inches taller and several times broader than he was.

“Do you have a shooter on the boat?” Drake was practically spitting in his face.

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you have a goddamn team on board our boat?”

J-dawg narrowed his eyes and looked down at Drake, not appearing to even notice the death grip on his throat. “Did you say a shooter?”

“Just answer the goddamn question!” Wherever the mild-mannered Drake Roman had gone, he was awfully far away.

Nikita noted that the rest of the team had circled up, masking the action as much as possible. The waterfront was mostly quiet; the initial blast of cruise passengers had moved farther into the city. The only local paying them any mind was a little girl in an I Heart Belize t-shirt and eating a chocolate ice cream cone. She was watching with avid interest.

“No,” J-dawg sounded like he was talking to an idiot schoolboy. “I do not have a team on your boat. Now answer my goddamn question. Did you say shooter?”

In answer, Drake released his hold on J-dawg’s throat. He shot out a hand so fast that it surprised even her instincts. He grabbed her good arm and pulled her to him. Then he slid up the sleeve on the other one and showed him her bandage. There hadn’t been time to change it, so there were some spots of blood seepage from last night.

J-dawg’s eyes went as dark as Drake’s had last night.

“Somebody did that to Sugar, I’d annihilate the bastard.” His voice went just as rough and scary, too.

The two men shared their agreement with very mano-a-mano looks.

“What is it with over-protective men?” Nikita had to yank a bit to recover her arm from Drake’s grasp.

“Aren’t they just the sweetest little things when they do that?” Sugar was smiling up at her husband.

Nikita wasn’t sure about sweet. She was getting sick and tired of being “the babe” of this whole operation.

“When I find him,” Drake wasn’t over it yet, “annihilation is the least of what I’m going to do.”

“I’ll hold him down for you,” J-dawg muttered and pulled Sugar close. “Any guesses?”

Drake just shook his head. “It must be someone who really doesn’t want GSI returning to Honduras, but that’s all we’ve been able to come up with. Up half the night sketching out scenarios, didn’t find squat that made sense. Shooter is aboard. Silenced .22. That’s all we know.”

Nikita looked at her three teammates and saw the dark circles of their sleepless night. And she’d been asleep, well drugged, but she didn’t like feeling useless.

The kid who’d been watching them all so intently while she ate her ice cream leaned against Sugar’s other side and earned a hand around her shoulders. She’d watched Drake attack J-dawg as if such things happened every day.

“Yes, Swimmer Girl, she’s mine.” Sugar noticed the direction of Nikita’s attention. “Asal saved my life on an Afghan hillside and I jes’ figured that returning the favor was about the only thing I could do.”

“She fought like a demon for the kid,” J-dawg said with obvious pride. He turned back to Drake. “You’ve got a good grip. Glad you didn’t use it.” There were still five red fingerprints on his neck but he hadn’t even flinched. How strong was this guy?

It was time she took control of the situation.

“If you don’t have a team on the boat, J-dawg,” Nikita dragged it out, “what the hell are you doing here?”

Asal answered for him in a high, girl voice and acceptable English, “Checking up on his invesrent.”

“His investment?”

The girl nodded and then began practicing the word to herself.

“What investment?”

J-dawg shrugged, “When we took over GSI, we took over all of their bank accounts, too. I get all the bills for everything charged to them, including this trip.” Then he looked her up and down, once, assessment with no trace of a leer. “Hope the rest of what you bought looks this good on you. It better, it was a hell of a bill.”

“Good!” She still didn’t want to like the guy.

“You’ve got taste. Keep it all.”

“I’ve got the taste,” Zoe piped up. “She’s hopeless. Black t-shirt and camo pants is her idea of a Sunday formal.”

“With a McMillan Tac-50 over my shoulder. I always wear a good rifle with my Sunday best.”

J-dawg roared with laughter at her joke. “Now that is my kinda woman. You pay attention, Asal,” he reached over to scrub the kid’s hair. “You wanta grow up to be just like Lily or this lady here.”

Asal studied her for a long moment, then nodded as if she’d seen something in Nikita.

“Are you deluded enough to think that the clothes would be a bribe, J-dawg?” Zoe asked. “What are you expecting in return?”

Nikita appreciated that Zoe was reminding her of just who they were dealing with.

“A gift, Pint-size. Just a gift.”

“So, what are you doing here? A family vacation snorkeling on the reef?” Zoe waved a hand at the waterfront. It had a case of the late-morning sleepies, not even a cat was stirring. The only boat on the move was a water taxi scuttling across the wide mouth of Haulover Creek—the river that cut the city in half.

“Not so much.”

Nikita felt slightly nauseous and didn’t think it was the last of the drugs seeping out of her system. “You’ve got assets on the ground in Honduras? A bunch of trigger-happy goons that we’re going to stumble on where we least want to?”

J-dawg finally stood up from where he’d been slouching against the palm tree Drake had slammed him into. “Colonel Be-damned McDermott said I’d never get another government contract as long as I lived if I put someone on the ground there.”

“So where are they?”

Nikita saw his eyes flicker aside for a second at her question. They all turned to look while J-dawg cursed at being caught out. A couple hundred meters off the harbor wall, among the anchored motor yachts, was a long, dangerous looking one. Black, sleek, and at least a hundred feet long—it looked as dangerous as its owner.

“Real subtle, J-dawg. Real subtle.”

J-dawg had led them to a place called Baymen’s Tavern. It was actually an outdoor restaurant at the Radisson Hotel with a sweeping view from the north side of the peninsula that formed Belize City. They sat beneath the shade of a massive umbrella. The tall palms around the edge of the patio rustled lightly in the sea breeze. The waitresses were efficient and a pleasure to look at. All very high-end.

“This place is upright, respectable—”

“Family friendly,” J-dawg cut him off.

Drake could only laugh.

“Come down here with just the team, I can show you where to get real food, but it’s deep in a bad quarter. Food is worth it though.”

Drake would bet on more than just the food by his expression, though with the way he acted about Sugar, it was probably for memories past, not futures planned. He didn’t like what Titan did, but he understood Jared’s need to protect, even if Nikita didn’t. It wasn’t a conscious, thought out, or innately macho plan. It was simply a fact of life—nobody was getting to her without going through him first. He could see that whatever else was going on, he and Jared were in a hundred percent agreement on that point.

“Family changes a man in surprising ways,” J-dawg looked at Sugar and Asal discussing the meal with the contentment of a man well pleased with the way his life was going.

Asal was working her way through an appetizer of chicken tenders like she’d never stop.

“Kid hasn’t slowed down eating since we pulled her off that mountain six months ago. Stays thin as a rail, just keeps getting taller. Most of the way to starved when we found her, probably set her metabolism for life.”

Asal had ended up between Sugar and Zoe. Drake had made sure Nikita sat between him and Altman. J-dawg was across the table with a lazy arm on the back of Sugar’s chair. Without even noticing, Drake had mirrored J-dawg’s position with an arm behind Nikita. It was surprising that Nikita hadn’t chopped it off and fed it to a piranha or whatever Belize had. Maybe he’d leave it there and see how long before she noticed. The open spot at the end of the table was in glaring sunlight and not even the mad-for-sun Zoe had taken it.

“So, Jared.”

“Finally gonna use my damned name. About time someone in your outfit did.”

“What are you doing here?” Drake had opted for ice tea instead of Belikin Beer, much to Jared’s disgust.

“Already told you that.”

“I don’t buy checking on your invesrent. Try again.”

“My mess to clean up.”

“Not according to Colonel McDermott,” even Nikita’s tone seemed to be easing around Jared. She only sounded disgusted rather than her usual murderous.

“Still mine. I should have taken them down years ago. Would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain. You want someone who should have been shot by his own men in the field, head of GSI was the poster boy.”

“How can you—” Nikita flopped back, clearly angry again, and knocked Drake’s arm off the back of the chair without even noticing.

Jared leaned in hard and fast enough that Drake leaned forward ready to block any attack on Nikita. “Because a lot more of my unit would have come back alive it wasn’t for him.”

Nikita shot to her feet. Her face wasn’t red with anger, instead it was the palest white, as if all the life and blood had been drained out of her.

When Drake tried to rise, she placed a hand on his shoulder, keeping him in his chair. Then she simply turned and walked away.

“J-dawg,” Sugar said sharply as she rose. “You did not just say that to her of all people.” She sounded pissed as hell, as primal a force as Jared. For the first time Drake could see that, despite how she might look, she was actually a good match for him.

Also, she obviously knew exactly what trigger Jared had just hammered his fist down on.

“Zoe, would you mind staying with Asal?” Sugar didn’t wait for an answer.

When the two of them were gone, Jared looked across the table at him.

“What the hell did I say?”

Drake tried to figure out how to say it without punching Jared a good one, but Altman saved them both by speaking up first.

“Did you hear about the mess that took down Curtis Contracting?”

“Sure, cheap bastard strung his own men out to dry. Wouldn’t authorize the fee for the intel some chick had a lead on. Chas Hayward and Barry… Wait. Didn’t Nikita say her last name was Hayward?”

“Chas was her dad. The other guy was her fiancé. She was the ‘chick’ stuck holding the bag.” Altman’s voice was grim.

“And I just said… Aw, shit.”

“Whoa, Swimmer Girl. Just whoa some.”

Nikita didn’t want to whoa. She wanted to break her fist in some man’s face. She wanted to take down Marcus Curtis so hard that he’d never do more than crawl again.

She hadn’t even had the satisfaction of taking him down herself. He’d gotten drunk that night and decided to prove how tough he was. Apparently not as tough as the switchblade that slit his throat after he beat a whore halfway to death. That had been the end of Curtis Contracting as well.

Sugar finally rested a hand on her arm, “My legs aren’t as long as yours. At least slow down enough that I don’t have to run in this heat.”

“You’re the one who wears leather all the time.” But Nikita slowed her stride. Finally grinding to a halt somewhere a lot less nice than the Baymen’s Tavern. But the sign said “Tavern”, so she turned in.

It wasn’t like a ’Bama bar, all battered pickups and neon beer signs out front. Inside also wasn’t all battered tables and country boys nursing long-neck Budweisers.

The only thing lined up out front were poor people. The only thing inside were people with enough money to buy a beer and maybe a bowl of chicken escabeche soup. Shorts, short-sleeve shirts, and flip-flops were the dress code. She and Sugar must look like aliens from another planet.

The walls had once been white and the floor was still concrete. But the beer bottle handed across when she asked was just as beaded with sweat as the one in the peeling poster of a bikini-clad babe holding it between her breasts.

She dropped into a wooden chair at a table that rocked a good ten degrees when she set her bottle on it.

Sugar sat down across from her.

“Why do you wear leather?”

“You already know that.”

Nikita nodded. She did.

Sugar answered anyway. “Thought I was defining self-worth with the way I could draw those boys. Showing them I was just as tough as they were never seemed to make any difference. They just saw these,” she cupped her breasts, “so I gave them that. No one saw more, not until Jared. He taught me there was more to me than I knew.”

“But still you wear leather.”

“Jared is male. He likes it plenty, he just sees the woman behind the leather as well. Asides, it’s a part of who I am now. Not gonna be leaving that behind just because I fell in love with the man.”

Nikita sipped the cold beer, which soothed her parched throat.

“Just like you being all in love with Sweet Cheeks doesn’t change who you are. It makes you better.”

“It makes me get shot and doubt my sanity.”

Sugar smiled, “Yes on both accounts. Though I got shot when I was still in the ATF, back before Jared.”

“You were a field agent for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms?”

“A few of my low connections in high places. At least I was until Jared blew my cover trying to save one of his crew’s life. Still not sure if I’ve forgiven him for that. Now I’m mostly just a guncrafter.”

“You’re Lily Chase?” There couldn’t be that many top gunsmiths named Lily.

“Was. Took Jared’s name, mostly because we adopted Asal.”

Nikita wondered if you could ever really know anyone. One of the best gunsmiths working was a busty babe in the modern version of designer buckskin.

Sugar handed her another beer while Nikita looked at Miss Belikin Beer Bikini Girl in the poster again. She could have been the twin of the jitney boat tour guide. Maybe she was the same woman. Or maybe she was a banker making extra cash on the side.

Drake was like two different people. Or maybe more. The womanizer gunner. The angry man who wouldn’t let anyone help him clean up his fellow crew chief’s blood. The glorious male who had pounded into her against the shower wall yet whispered so gently that it was okay to not remember while he carried her in his arms.

“Can you ever really know someone?”

“Where would be the fun in that?”

She didn’t know. But she wished she couldn’t remember.

“You sure you don’t know what’s going on down there in Honduras? We land tomorrow—next port of call is Roatán. Anything would help.” Drake wasn’t sure when he’d switched from ice tea to beer. Altman had as well. Zoe and Asal had gone off to the hotel pool, leaving the three of them at the table with their beers.

“Why didn’t you just buy the damned picture?”

“It was tasteless, crass…”

“So was the bastard who ran GSI. It was a goddamn lead. Get the painting.”

“Why? You like nudes?”

“Yes, as long as her name is Lily Westin. You?”

Drake had to admit there was a nude he was very partial to himself. “But that stupid painting—I don’t like playing games.”

Jared crashed a fist down on the table. “Dammit! Listen, GI Joe. This whole goddamn thing is a game. You think that half the shit I did while I was on the inside made any sense? You think even that much makes sense on the outside? Do you have any idea how much they pay me for what I do? It sure shouldn’t be so much more than you make. What kind of sense is in that?”

It was one of the reasons that the people who served didn’t like the mercs, but only one of them. Few were like Jared and Titan. A lot more were like GSI and Curtis.

“How does it make sense that you guys are cleaning up GSI’s mess and not me,” Jared growled at his beer bottle as he worked at peeling off the label with a thumbnail.

“Are you still harping on that?”

Jared shrugged but didn’t look up.

“When Titan can launch people like SEAL Team 6 and the Night Stalkers 5E, you let me know.”

“Okay. Point taken. Can you at least explain to me why I never even heard about the 5E until I drove onto Fort Rucker a couple days ago?”

“Because,” Drake could see Altman eyeing him, but Drake wasn’t drunk. Well, not drunk enough to reveal state secrets. “Because like Nikita said, when we go through a door, no one knows we’ve been there.”

“What are you fighting so hard against, Swimmer Girl?”

“Don’t want to repeat the past.” Nikita considered another beer even though she hadn’t finished her current bottle. She considered getting blind drunk and missing the boat’s midnight departure.

“Doesn’t work that way,” Sugar pushed aside the empty plate of Belize Rice and Beans. That again changed the balance of their wobbly table and Sugar had to grab to rescue her beer.

“Sure it does.” For a crappy bar in a bad quarter, they served an amazing version of the traditional dish. It was rich from the coconut milk used instead of water. The heavy spices and the thick gravy from the stewed gibnut meat—whatever kind of local animal that was, Nikita didn’t want to know—soaked up some of the beer in her belly, but not too much.

“How is your past going to repeat?”

Almost everything. Maybe she could just stay in the present because the past and future were whacked-out worse than a plugged cesspool. She leaned back to stare up at the fan whispering overhead. It was close to sunset and the few bare bulbs above the bar did little to light the space. In this semi-twilight moment, it almost looked merely disreputable.

As she looked back down to answer Sugar’s question, a big man sat at their table and a hand clamped around Sugar’s wrist.

And it wasn’t J-dawg.

“You two will come with me,” his English was as thick as a swamp with Spanish.

“Fuck off!” Nikita had been about to say something important, but now couldn’t remember what it was. “Private conversation.”

With his hand that wasn’t pinning Sugar’s wrist, he did one of those flashy gang moves to flick out a switchblade instead of just opening it.

Nikita glanced at Sugar, who just grimaced. Amateur!

The way Sugar’s eyes flickered up behind Nikita told her that she was wrong.

Amateurs! More than one.

Sugar jerked her arm toward her chest, dragging the man closer by his grasp on her wrist. Under the table, she planted one of her spike-heeled boots between his legs and hard into his crotch.

His scream hurt Nikita’s ears.

She felt hands come to rest on her shoulders from behind. With a hard shove off the floor, using all the leverage her SEAL-strong legs could give her, she flipped her chair over backward.

Her attacker stumbled away, knocked aside by the back of the chair.

When her back hit the floor, Nikita used her momentum to continue into a backward somersault. Halfway through she lashed out with her feet and caught the guy’s kneecap. There was a satisfying crunch up through the leather of her sandal as his knee broke and doubled over in the wrong direction.

Her continued roll knocked him onto his back with his leg doubled up under him. She rammed a punch into his sternum. Her aim was off but she was in a hurry. Instead of just knocking the wind out of him, she might have broken a couple of ribs as well.

A third attacker had Sugar by the hair, dragging her head back hard.

Somehow, Nikita still had her beer bottle in her other hand. She heaved it into the guy’s face hard enough to startle him into easing his grip on Sugar, maybe breaking his nose as a bonus.

It was all Sugar needed.

With a sweep kick, Sugar knocked his legs out from under him. As he fell forward, Sugar managed to get her hands behind the guy’s head.

Nikita kicked the table closer and Sugar rammed him down, chin-first onto it. By the look of the blood coming out of his mouth when Sugar let him fall to the floor, he was going to need a new jaw and some teeth to go with it.

They surveyed the scene.

The first attacker was still on the floor holding his crotch with one hand, but groping for his knife with the other.

Rather than kicking his knife aside, Sugar planted the pointed toe of her boot into his temple with a hard enough kick that he stopped having interest in anything other than bleeding. His cellphone lay close beside him and Sugar put a spiked heel through its heart with a satisfying crunch of glass and metal.

It had happened so fast that the other patrons hadn’t had a chance to do anything other than draw back and look aghast.

They looked at each other, then down at the table still standing between them.

Sugar laughed. “Table is stronger than it looks.”

Nikita nodded.

“The past isn’t,” Sugar’s suddenly fierce, dark-blue eyes were studying Nikita.

Maybe.

“Why don’t I like that sound?” Jared had Asal riding on his shoulders.

Drake didn’t like it either.

The women had been gone for hours, long enough that it had become an itch, so they’d all gone looking for them—Altman and Zoe starting to the north, Drake and Jared with Asal working from the south. The problem was that the trail had gone cold and there were five hundred cruise passengers reconvening on Belize City from their adventures, all in time for a pre-sailing dinner. Asking shopkeepers if they’d recently seen two pretty women in nice clothes didn’t work.

They’d rapidly worked their way out of the Tourist Village and into the rougher section of Belize City.

There were a lot of sounds that were strange in this city, but the whoop of a police siren was a very distinctive one.

Drake spotted it racing by two blocks over, closely followed by a wailing ambulance.

“Really don’t like that sound.” They broke into a jog, Asal clamping both hands around Jared’s forehead like a stoic captain weathering the tossing seas.

Around the corner and two more blocks up were a trio of flashing cop cars and a second ambulance.

Altman and Zoe came out of a side street and joined them as they reached the police perimeter.

“There,” Asal pointed from her perch atop Jared’s shoulders.

They forged forward as a unit, brushing aside the few policemen foolish enough to get in their way.

In the midst of it all, Sugar and Nikita were standing at ease, as if merely watching a parade go by. It might have worked as a ploy if not for the three cops hovering close beside them with their notepads out. They’d been at the center of whatever was going on.

Drake barged through, knocking a protesting sergeant and his notebook to the side.

“You okay, honey?”

“Honey?” Nikita looked at him in surprise. “When did I give you honey privileges?”

“Your apartment in Alabama? In a men’s shower maybe?” Drake was just glad to have found her. He’d missed her through the long slow afternoon—actually missed her. That was a strangeness he hadn’t noticed until this moment when he suddenly felt so happy to be standing next to her again.

“Maybe,” Nikita sounded as if she was in a much better mood than she’d been in days.

That’s when the gurneys started rolling out of the hole-in-the-wall tavern. Three big guys, looking awfully battered.

Drake glanced at Nikita and Sugar. Neither of them looked the least bit hurt, though they were making a point of straightening their clothes and finger-brushing back their hair.

When he met Jared’s gaze, the man’s smile was electric. Don’t you just love these women?

He did. Drake slipped a hand around Nikita’s waist and she let herself be pulled against him. He truly did.

Once the police let them go, they strolled together back toward the ship’s pier. Just three couples and a kid talking softly among themselves.

Other couples and groups were wending their way through the warm evening back to the ship, none close enough to hear quite how bizarre the conversation of their group might be.

Nikita had always liked that feeling of being special, being elite. It was her dad’s doing. Chas Hayward had taught her young about the high of being better than everyone around her. Better at martial arts, better at shooting, better at noticing details that no one else did. Curtis Contracting had fed that too, at least until it all came apart. Being a Team Six SEAL absolutely did that. But being in this little circle of specialists was something else. Here she wasn’t better than—she was part of. That was something else ST6 had taught her to understand, but this moment was somehow stronger and more powerful.

“I chatted with the bartender before the police arrived,” Sugar was explaining. “These guys were complete strangers. And a couple of the patrons said that their Spanish accent was wrong. Any Belizean would have more Creole or British influence.”

“Wish we could ID the bastards.” J-dawg’s growl said that whatever else he might be, he cared deeply about Sugar. Nikita could hear it in his voice.

Even mercenary bastards had feelings. Who knew. And now that she’d count Sugar as a friend, did that mean she had to accept J-dawg as well? That concept she didn’t like so much.

“I forgot to ask the damn cops how long it would take to get IDs.”

“Oh, we already know that without asking,” Nikita said in an offhand way.

Sugar’s smile said that Nikita was doing a fair job of channeling Sugar’s strong-woman attitude.

“It’s going to take them a long time. Those three didn’t seem like the chatty types.”

Their group had reached the head of the pier, where J-dawg and Sugar wouldn’t be able to follow past security.

While J-dawg and Drake cursed over the news, she turned aside to where the lights on the pier made a dark, shadowed area behind a wide palm. It was also out of sight of the pier’s security watch.

She and Sugar reached down their blouses and pulled out the three men’s wallets and passports.

“It may take them a very long time without these,” Nikita held them up.

The others’ laughter made it feel like she was taking a bow at the end of one of Drake’s stage performances.

“Careful with those,” Nikita stopped Jared from flipping one open. “We took fingerprints of each person on the inside flap.”

Jared peeled it open carefully, “What did you use for ink?”

“They each seemed to be leaving a lot of blood around. We also smeared a dollar bill on each of them so that there’d be plenty for a DNA sample.”

“IDs look fake as hell. Whatever port authority let these aboard should have his eyes examined.” Jared took all three wallets, “I’ll get these to Parker right away.”

“Hold it,” Altman reached out to stop him, but Jared fended him off.

“You people have a boat to catch. And don’t worry. Parker can get to any database he needs to.”

“That’s what worries me,” but Altman desisted.

“What worries me is this.” Nikita reached into the edge of her bra where the damn cards had been poking her.

She held out the men’s three cruise ship passes.

“And this,” she nodded to Sugar.

Sugar opened her leather vest and lifted her blouse enough to extract the long barrel of a silenced Ruger 22/45 LITE. It was a lean, nasty gun accurate out to seventy meters plus—well past the distance from observation deck to bow. The shooter had put those two shots exactly where he’d intended.

“Scare tactics with the gun. Then a kidnapping attempt. Someone is trying to spook your team,” Sugar concluded.

Nikita took it from her. They hadn’t had time to inspect it carefully before. She dropped the magazine and held it up to the light.

“Full,” Drake said looking over her shoulder.

“So no way to tell if this was the weapon that shot at us, but the model and silencer make it likely.”

“Please tell me you hurt the man bad.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing, Sweet Cheeks,” Nikita leaned in and kissed Drake on the nose. “After what Sugar did to him, he may never have sex again.”