Jeff thought fast. They needed to get back to the Bat Cave right away. It would take them a good hour to hike from here to a road, get a taxi to the south beach, and board the minisub for the long ride back to the H.O.T. Watch complex. Or they could use the emergency entrance, which was quite a bit closer.
He looked over at Kat’s filmy silk dress and asked regretfully, “Is there any chance you can run in that outfit?”
She glanced down in surprise. “Sure. I could do a marathon in this if I had to. Although I’d tear my feet up. I haven’t conditioned them for long distances barefoot.”
“How ’bout a couple miles on a sandy beach?”
She shrugged. “No problem.”
“Let’s go, then.” He took off running and Kat followed suit. “You set the pace,” he told her.
“How big a crisis is this?” she asked, breathing deeply but easily.
“Don’t kill yourself, but we need to get there with dispatch.”
“Six-minute mile okay, or do you need faster? I can do one four-thirty mile in a pinch. Although on sand…maybe five minutes would be my best time.”
He stared in shock.
She loped along beside him as easily and lightly as a gazelle. “I run marathons in my spare time.”
He just shook his head. “You’re one of a kind.”
“Actually not. One of the women on our team is a triathlete. Now she’s tough to keep up with.”
Jeez. They were all superhuman. Scary.
They settled into a hard but steady run down the beach. He tried not to notice how her silk dress fluttered back against her body, outlining it in glorious, flowing detail. She was as graceful in motion as she looked standing still. He immensely enjoyed the pounding surf, the cool night air rushing in and out of his lungs, the wet sand giving gently beneath his feet and the unison he and Kat fell into, side by side, step for step with one another.
After a good two miles at the killer pace, Kat glanced over at him. “How much farther?” she asked.
“Why? You winded?”
She chuckled. “Not at all. Just curious. Actually, I’m just getting warmed up.”
He was more than “just warming up,” but he could certainly hold this pace for a good long while. “We’re almost there. Emergency entrance to the H.O.T. Watch. Highly classified. I’ll have to kill you if you tell anyone about it.”
She nodded, smiling, and kept running. At least she had the grace to be working hard enough beside him to avoid chatty conversation. But damn, she was in good shape. He’d never met another female who could keep up with him in a full-out run like this.
They rounded a point, and Pirate’s Cove arced away before them. The low, ramshackle shape of Pirate Pete’s Delivery Service came into view. The courier business was a cover for the H.O.T. Watch’s more visible operations on the island, like airplanes and helicopters coming and going and deliveries and departures of large, unmarked crates.
“Over there.” He directed her to Pirate Pete’s and they stopped under the porch’s shadowed overhang. As he dug keys out of his pocket, he commented, “This is the part where you breathe hard after that run and make me feel macho.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She commenced panting loudly.
He inserted a specially coded magnetic key in the lock and glanced up at her, grinning. “Take it easy on that heavy breathing or the guys on the other end of the surveillance cameras are gonna wonder what we’re up to out here.”
She glanced around sharply. “I didn’t see any cameras-”
“They wouldn’t be hidden if you could see them. But trust me. They’re here.”
The sound of voices erupted behind them and he spun to face this new threat. A group of a half-dozen tourists had staggered onto the beach. The three young couples looked drunk off their asses. Their raucous laughter drowned out the ocean behind them.
“Hey!” one of them called out. “There’s some locals. Watch how frien’ly they arrre…” he slurred, weaving purposefully in their direction.
Jeff cursed under his breath. The last thing they needed was to get tangled up with a bunch of drunk kids. He needed an instant distraction. Something that would drive off the intruders-or give him an excuse to drive them off.
He turned to Kat and swept her up in his arms. She went tense, prepared to do him bodily harm.
“Roll with me on this and don’t kill me,” he muttered. And then he leaned down to plaster his mouth against hers.
She gasped as their lips touched…but then, so did he.
If he’d thought Cupid’s Bolt had slammed into him like a brick before, this time it bowled him over like a rushing freight train. She was exactly right for him. Perfect. A sense of destiny washed over him. This was the woman he was meant for. He sucked in another surprised breath, and then inhaled her. She tasted like berries, tart and fresh and sweet all at once, and suddenly he was starving.
Her body hummed, as tense as a bow against his, and then all at once she gave way, melting into him, pressing into him as if a wave of need shoved her against him whether she willed it or no. Her hands clutched his shoulders for balance, and his arms tightened around her convulsively.
She sucked hard at his lower lip, pulling him down to her, seeking his tongue and finding it with hers. Her hands crept up to the back of his head while his crept down to her buttocks. They both used their not inconsiderable strength to draw closer to one another. Good didn’t even begin to describe how she felt against him. Delicious, succulent, opulent images raced through his brain, and none were adequate to describe her or the cravings she evoked in him.
He backed her up against the wall and she wriggled in his arms, straining toward him as hard as he strained toward her, wild in her need. He drank in her desire, as greedy for her as she was for him. Avidly, he absorbed her essence, learning the delicate but iron-strong feel of her, savoring the faint floral scent that seemed to hang around her, touching her satin hair and the softer satin of her skin.
“Hoo, baby! Look’ee at ’em goin’ at it! You go, guy!”
Jeff lurched as he abruptly remembered the drunks behind them. He tore his mouth away from hers to glare over his shoulder. “Can’t you see we’re busy? Go find your own dark corner to neck in. This one’s occupied.”
“Well, daa-amn, I guess so, dude. Youze two’s throwin’ sparks all the way to Miami. Git out the fire extinguisher, Roscoe!” one of the drunks caterwauled back.
He continued to glare at them steadily, letting overt threat infuse his body language. In his experience, it took strong signals and a few extra seconds for drunks to perceive peril. He held his pose, a promise of violence glinting dangerously in his gaze.
Finally, sluggishly, the group registered the menace he posed. One of the girls grabbed a guy by the arm. “C’mon,” she whined. “I wanna swim in the ocean.”
Another girl piped up. “I wanna skinny-dip. First guy there gets to take off my bra.”
With a whoop, the young men took off running, tripping and stumbling in the sand, the girls trailing behind. Their laughter faded into the roar of the waves. Jeff watched until they disappeared around the point, and then he turned back to Kat.
“Now, where were we?” he murmured.
“What’s happening?” Kat whispered. “What is this between us?”
“This, my dear, is grandmama’s bolt. Hits ya kinda hard, doesn’t it?”
“Like lightning,” she grumbled.
He laughed quietly. “Nothing to do for it but to sit back and enjoy the ride.” He pushed a lock of sable hair out of her eyes. “Who’d have guessed you’d be the one? Never in a million years did I expect you.”
She tensed in his arms. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Not a blessed thing. You’re perfect.” He leaned down to show her how perfect she was, this time kissing her gently, letting his lips slide across hers, letting their tongues play lightly, sipping sweetly at each other. The pounding lust of a minute ago was less hurried now, still driving spikes of need deep into his gut, but with quiet assurance that time to explore this thing between them was near at hand.
“I’ve never…” She hesitated.
He prompted, murmuring against her lips, “Never what?”
“Never…felt like this before. What are you doing to me?”
“This is commonly referred to as kissing. Or necking, or canoodling, if you want to be old-fashioned. It’s when a boy and a girl mash mouths together and swap spit while fantasizing about doing much messier and more intimate things with each other.”
She laughed, a breathy wisp of humor that shot straight to his groin. “Thanks. I got that part. How is it that of all the guys I’ve ever kissed, you make me feel like this? I mean, like you said, a kiss is just mashing mouths and trading saliva.”
He jerked back far enough to look down at her. “How many guys are we talking about, here?”
She blinked up at him, startled. A slow smile spread across her face. “Enough to know you’re the best kisser I’ve ever gone out with.”
“Honey, I’m the last kisser you’re ever going out with.”
Skepticism shone in her gaze, but he ignored it. “So, you like kissing me? I like kissing you, too. You taste like blueberries.”
“Blueberries?”
He nodded, dropping light kisses across her neck to her cheek and back to her mouth. “You never know when you bite into a blueberry if it’s going to be sweet or sour, but it tastes uniquely like blueberry either way. When I touch you, I don’t know if you’re going to toss me on my butt or kiss me till my hair catches fire, but I know I’m gonna love it either way.”
That garnered several owl blinks out of her. “You like me tossing you?”
“Actually, it hurts. A lot. But I love the fact that the woman I’m going to marry can plant me on my butt now and then. Not that you’ll ever need to. I’m going to spoil you so bad you’ll never need to lift a finger.”
“M-marry?”
As he closed the inches between them for another lingering kiss, he murmured, “Mmm-hmm. It’s fate, darlin’. Cupid’s Bolt always strikes true…”
And then all thought of bolts went right out of his head as Kat kissed him back. They might just have enjoyed a gourmet meal, but darned if she didn’t make him hungrier than a bear in the spring. He wanted more of her. A lot more.
Both of them were breathing hard when Kat slid right, holding his hands, to draw him away from the porch.
“Ow!”
His senses went on to instant alert. Who or what had hurt her? “What’s wrong?” he replied quickly.
“I banged into something sharp…” She turned in his embrace to examine the wall. “It’s this knob.”
Knob-oh, Christ. The H.O.T. Watch intercom. The summons to the bunker. They’d been standing out here trading lungs, and the folks downstairs were waiting for them.
A horrifying thought popped into his head. Had they been pressing on the intercom button all this time? Transmitting their steamy kiss to an audience below? He closed his eyes in despair. “Did you just bang into the button now, or have you been leaning on it?” he asked reluctantly.
“I just hit it.”
Thank God. He didn’t need Kat taking endless ribbing from his guys. They wouldn’t bug him too much because he’d take them out on the practice floor and break them in half. Although, now that he thought about it, Kat might do the very same thing to them.
“Ready to face the lions in their den?” he sighed.
A pause. “Oh, yeah-work.”
He swung open the concealed panel beside the front door to reveal a palm telemetry reader. He laid his hand on the pliable gel surface, which squished up between his fingers slightly. A click in the door lock indicated he’d been recognized. He turned the knob and stepped inside.
“Thanks,” he commented to the dark interior of the store, or more precisely, to whatever duty controller downstairs at the other end of the security cameras had let them in. “This way,” he said, leading Kat quickly toward the storeroom behind the counter.
A loud voice erupted without warning from the large birdcage in the corner. “Baawk! Pirate Pete is a dirty old bird. Repeats everything that he’s heard. Especially the bits about asses and tits-”
Jeff called out sharply, “Shut up, Pete!” To Kat, he muttered, “Sorry. That’s Pirate Pete. He’s a parrot. With a filthy mouth, I might add.”
“Shut up, Pete!” the bird squawked.
Kat giggled.
The sound was incongruous coming from her. Particularly since at the moment, her knees were deeply bent, her hands held shoulder high before her, and everything about her announced her readiness to kill something right here, right now. Apparently, when Pete had opened his big beak, she’d used those lightning-fast reflexes of hers to drop into a defensive stance.
She straightened to her full height, relaxing from the battle alert Pete’s outburst had thrown her into. Jeff commented, “In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, your reflexes are freaking unbelievable.”
She shrugged as he opened the storeroom door, using a keypad and a retinal scanner this time.
“In here.” He led the way into a cluttered storeroom littered with packing boxes, rolls of tape, and garbage bags full of packing peanuts. And dust. Lots of dust.
Using the tiny penlight on his key ring, he found his way over to what looked like a circuit breaker box in the corner. “If you’ll close the door…” he instructed over his shoulder.
Throwing him a perplexed look, she did as he asked.
He pushed on one of the circuit breakers, which was actually an elevator switch, and the room lurched. Kat grabbed at the nearest shelf in surprise to steady herself.
He grinned. “The entire room is an elevator. Cool, huh?”
She grinned back. “Very cool.”
They rode downward for nearly a minute, the silence between them so thick with the memory of the steamy kisses they’d just shared that he could hardly breathe. Work, buddy. Focus on work.
The storeroom/elevator lurched gently to a stop. “You can open the door now,” he said.
She did so, and one of the familiar stone tunnels of H.O.T. Watch headquarters stretched away from them. He followed her out of the elevator, unabashedly enjoying the view of her pert little derriere.
She asked curiously, “How do people navigate around here? All the halls and doors look the same.”
“They’re supposed to. When you get assigned to work down here, the first job you’re given is to memorize a map of the place. If any intruder were ever to get in, he’d have a hell of a time finding his way around.”
She nodded. “That’s what I figured.”
Man, she was quick on the uptake. He’d bet she was hell on wheels when it came to gathering intelligence from live targets. She’d talk circles around ordinary mortals. But then, all she probably had to do was flash those big brown eyes of hers and her targets would sing like Pavarotti.
“This way.” He headed right.
“Is this really a hollowed-out volcano?” she asked as they strode down the hall.
He matched her businesslike tone. If she had the discipline to set aside for the moment what they’d just done together, he could, too. “Yup, this is an extinct volcano. Problem with most natural caves is too much water. And with all the electronics we needed to put in this facility, we had to find a dry cave system. Volcanic remnants are often dry cave networks.”
“Aren’t they occasionally very hot, lava-filled places, too?” she asked.
He grinned down at her. Their gazes met and instant sparks leaped between them. Hah. So she hadn’t entirely put their kiss from her mind. His ego was unaccountably gratified. Belatedly, he answered, “We’ve been assured this volcano is extinct. But just in case, we have seismic sensors all over the island to monitor Mount Timbalo.”
She threw him a skeptical look, but then he stopped in front of another anonymous door, opening it for her. She brushed past him, and yet again, their gazes snapped to one another. Oh, yeah. She was as aware of him as he was of her. Her mouth twitched for the barest instant into a smile, and then she was back to being all business. He followed her into the Ops Center.
The sheer size of the main control room never failed to daunt him a little. Kat, in front of him, hesitated before striding toward the cluster of people at a console in the middle of the room. They were staring up at one of the Jumbotrons in the far wall.
He glanced up. Monet’s study for his painting, The Poppies near Argenteuil, shone down at him. Jeff winced. The Ghost was moving up in the world. That had to be a twenty million dollar painting if it was worth a cent. No doubt the pressure to catch the thief was going to ratchet up commensurately. Sighing, he walked over to his boss.
Navy Commander Brady Hathaway glanced up at him. “You know the painting?”
Jeff nodded. “Where was it?”
“The Valliard estate.”
Another one of the fabulous estates of the Golden Mile. The Valliard place was not the largest among them, but was touted as one of the most opulent. “Did the Ghost take any other paintings?”
“Just the one,” Hathaway replied. “There are other valuable pieces in the house. Why only this one?”
Jeff shrugged. “He may have a specific buyer for this piece, or he may prefer to travel light.”
Kat added, “The thief may also want to limit his risk and only take time to steal a single piece.”
Jeff nodded. “Could be.” To Hathaway, he said, “When did the theft happen?”
“Sometime in the past twenty-four hours. A caretaker reported it stolen about an hour ago. Said he walked through the main house yesterday afternoon and everything was intact. But when he went through tonight, the painting was cut out of its frame.”
Jeff cursed under his breath. That was an enormous window of opportunity for the thief. He kept hoping for a theft where the Ghost would have to work fast. It would tell them a lot more about the thief’s M.O. But to date, all the thefts had been of unoccupied estates. The winter season didn’t start for a few more months, bringing the residents of the Golden Mile to its tropical shores. Of course, at the rate he was going, the Ghost would have picked the island clean long before then.
Kat asked him, “What’s the common link between all the paintings?”
He’d been over that a thousand times from every conceivable angle. “They’ve got no common thread except that they’re excellent, if little-known, pieces by masters.”
“Any chance I can make a phone call to a colleague about this?” Kat asked.
Jennifer Blackfoot glanced over at Hathaway. The two exchanged a nod and Jennifer said, “There’s a phone right here. Any help would be appreciated.”
Jeff listened with interest to Kat’s one-sided conversation.
“Viper, it’s Cobra. Sorry to call you so late. Did I wake you up? Morning sickness at night? That sucks. Hey, I have a problem. We’re trying to find a link between a half-dozen paintings that have been stolen recently. Can you get a minute or two on the super array to run them and see if there’s some obscure link between them? Great. I’ll send you an e-mail with the information in the next few minutes. You rock.”
Kat hung up the phone and looked up at him. “Do you have a detailed inventory of the paintings?”
“I’ll have to add the Monet to it, but that’ll only take a minute. Were you talking about the supercomputer array at the Pentagon, by any chance?”
Kat nodded.
“Your friend will have to wait for weeks to get time on that puppy. It’s booked up solid.”
Kat grinned. “Not for her. Besides the fact that the Medusas can usually get time on the basis of operational necessity, Viper knows a bunch of the computer techs who work on the array. A couple of them owe her favors.”
Jeff nodded. Ahh. The ubiquitous favor owed. Special Forces types had a tendency to collect long lists of people who owed them one. When it was your job to save the world and help people out of impossible binds, gratitude frequently followed suit-along with offers to repay the favor.
He sat down at a computer terminal. It was an easy matter to look up an online catalog listing Monet’s works and cut and paste information about the newest theft into his existing list of stolen works. He glanced over at Kat. “Where do I send this file?”
She rattled off an e-mail address, and he hit the send button. He highly doubted this Viper person and her supercomputer would have any success, but he was grateful for any help he could get.
“Incoming call for Captain Steiger,” Carter Beigneaux announced from the next row of consoles over. “It’s General Wittenauer. I’ll patch it to your station.”
Great. No doubt the Old Man was calling to breathe fire down his shorts to get cracking on catching the Ghost. Sympathetic glances came his way from the people standing nearby. Wittenauer was a great guy until he didn’t get exactly what he wanted. And then, watch out.
The phone in front of Jeff buzzed and he picked it up. “Good evening, sir.”
“Evening. You hear about the latest theft?”
“Yes, sir. I’m in the Ops Center right now looking at a picture of the stolen piece.”
“Any idea who did it or how?”
“I assume it was the Ghost, but that has not been confirmed.”
“Time to take your theories operational, Maverick. Now that you’ve got Cobra to help, I want the two of you to take direct action to stop this guy. I’m catching all kinds of heat over this.”
Jeff grimaced. He knew the feeling.
The general continued. “I want you two to go to Barbados. Catch this guy, dammit.”
“This is a police matter, sir-”
“You and Cobra are smarter than the average bear. Use your heads. Be creative. Come up with a way to bag this guy that the police haven’t thought of. And do it fast.”
Gee. No pressure there. Jeff stared at the receiver as the line went dead. He glanced up at Kat. Her face betrayed not a hint of expression, but he knew without question that she was as surprised at he was to get this order to go operational. How he knew that, he had no idea. Maybe a few of grandmère’s psychic genes had come down to him, after all.
He commented to the gang in general, “Looks like our research project just turned into a mission. Who’s the lucky dog who gets to control it from this end?”
Jennifer Blackfoot spoke up. “I’ll take it. Knowing you, Maverick, you’re going to piss off the local authorities and need my special touch to keep your carcass out of hot water-or, in your case, more like boiling oil.” She glanced over at Kat. “If he ticks you off, you have my permission to kick his butt.”
Kat nodded with an outward serenity he doubted she was actually feeling while everyone else grinned widely. But then Kat startled him by asking Jennifer, “Which one of us is in charge?”
He started. He’d assumed he’d lead the mission since it had been his baby first. But now that she mentioned it, maybe that wasn’t such a straightforward assumption. He and Kat were both captains by rank. Both experienced field operators. Both capable of leading a combat team. Hathaway and Jennifer exchanged another one of those wordless looks of colleagues who’ve worked together for a long time and know how the other one thinks.
Hathaway looked over at Kat. “You okay with Maverick spearheading this thing?”
She shrugged. “Sure. No problem.”
Jordan Yokum, one of his guys in the gym earlier, snickered. “If you pick it by who can kick whose keester, the chick ought to be running the show.”
Jeff surged to his feet and had Jordy by the throat all in one move. “You wanna talk about her, you do it with respect, buster. She’s a hell of fighter, and she can rip your head off in a New York second. If you call her a chick again, I’m gonna order her to do it. She’s Captain Kim to you, or you can call her ma’am. Got it?”
The vignette froze in time as everyone went perfectly still around him. Theirs was a notoriously polite community because their capacity to cause violent harm to one another was so great. A confrontation like this was rare and dangerous.
Kat spoke quietly from behind him. “Thanks for the knight in shining armor bit, Jeff. But it’s okay. I’ll take care of what your guys call me.”
He realized in shock that the fury coursing through him was completely out of proportion to the provocation. Why in hell was he already so possessive of her? He’d known her for approximately eight hours. Yeah, they’d kissed, but he’d kissed plenty of women he’d just met and never roared to their defense like this. She was right. He had no business designating himself the official defender of her honor. Especially when she could, indeed, kick her own asses.
He turned Jordy’s neck loose and took a step back.
The other man mumbled, “Hey, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off.”
Jeff shook his head. “No, I overreacted. My fault.”
Hathaway said grimly, “My office, Jeff. Now.”
Crap. He was gonna get a serious butt-chewing, and he deserved it, too. Even Jordy threw him a sympathetic look as he turned to follow his boss.
Kat said behind him, “If someone will show me to Captain Steiger’s office, I’ll pack my gear. I gather General Wittenauer wants the two of us to leave right away for Barbados. Who around here can arrange for our transportation?”
Gratitude flooded through him. Her comment, made plenty loud enough for Hathaway to hear, was a clear statement of support, an unequivocal announcement that she still wanted to work with him, despite his Neanderthal outburst of a moment before. It would go a long way toward making the upcoming conversation with his boss easier. She didn’t have to do it. But she had. Publicly.
Son of a gun.
Maybe the lady liked him for more than just his magnificent kissing, after all.