Her Hero After Dark

He was no doubt scaring the hell out of the woman across the aisle, but he was in too much pain to care. A need to do violence, to lash out against the agony eviscerating him from the inside out, nearly overcame him. He clenched his fists until he feared he might break the bones in his hands.

Finger by finger, he forcibly unfolded his hands until his palms pressed flat against his thighs. He could do this. He could survive this nightmare. Just a little while longer.

The woman’s eyes popped open as the sound of the engines changed pitch and the plane began its descent into Bermuda. Leland had a beachfront mansion there where Jeff could stay. More importantly, Doc Jones could fly there with his drugs relatively easily. He envisioned the hilly island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean bristling with gracious, white stucco homes. He had good memories of summers there as a kid. It would be nice to be surrounded by familiar things again. It had been a long time. The past few years had been pretty crazy, culminating in the disaster in Ethiopia.

The plane bumped onto the runway and a groan escaped from between his tightly compressed lips, in spite of his best effort to restrain it. It was probably a perfectly fine landing, but even the lightest jarring sent daggers shooting throughout his body.

He glanced outside as the airplane came to a stop and frowned. Heavy tropical jungle? Since when did Bermuda have such vegetation? Alarmed, he surged out of his seat.

A pair of ominous, metallic clacks froze him halfway out of his seat. He looked toward the cockpit where both pilots, grim-faced, pointed heavy-gauge pistols at him. A glance to his right showed that the woman had joined them in aiming her sidearm at him.

Well, well, well. The lady had teeth, after all. Reluctant admiration coursed through him. Unfortunately, his soft tissue was as susceptible to lead as the next guy’s. He subsided in his seat cautiously.

“Welcome to Uncle Sam Airlines, Mr. Winston,” the woman bit out. “We do not necessarily fly the Friendly Skies. This is my plane and my crew. And you are my prisoner, not the other way around. Is that understood?”

She had guts to stand up to him like this. He’d be amused if he wasn’t hurting so damned bad. But the prospect of having to wait even longer for his drugs threatened to swallow him in panic. He was out of strength to hold on. Out of endurance. Out of time.

With a roar, he surged up out of his seat. But the woman was surprisingly fast. She ducked down the aisle and out the door before he could lay a hand on her. One of the pilots passed her something as she raced by the cockpit, but he couldn’t see what it was.

He followed her outside and came up short as she aimed a double-barreled shotgun at his chest. Her black gaze, leveled at him down the length of the weapon, was lethal. What little sanity he had left recognized death in her eyes. He pulled up short.

“Need us to restrain him, ma’am?” one of the pilots asked from the doorway of the plane.

Her gaze remained locked on him. She spoke slowly, as if she doubted his ability to understand her. He supposed he couldn’t blame her for that. “Let’s establish a few rules of engagement right up front, shall we, Mr. Winston? If you will give me your word of honor that you will not harm me in any way, I will swear not to sedate you or physically restrain you. But, if you break your word, I will not hesitate to do the same. Nor will I hesitate to kill you if it becomes necessary. Is that clear?”

“Crystal,” he answered wryly.

“Do you give me your word?” she demanded.

He studied her curiously. She was a courageous woman to face him like this. But, then, she probably didn’t realize exactly how courageous since she had no idea who he was—what he was. “I give you my word.”

“Say it. What do you swear?”

Another wave of pain slammed into him and he ground out from between clenched teeth, “I give you my word I will not harm you.”

She spoke to the pilot still hovering in the door. “If you’ll off-load my bag for me, Captain, I’ll let you be on your way.”

“Are you sure you want us to leave, ma’am? We can stay here until more backup arrives to, uhh, help.”

“No. The two of us will be fine. We have an understanding. I need you to go.”

Jeff wasn’t sure whether to be complimented that she trusted his word of honor or to despise her naïveté.

“All right.” The pilot sounded deeply doubtful. Smart man.

The woman stood statuelike and continued to point the shotgun at him as her bag thudded to the ground, the jet behind them cranked up its engines and taxied off. He glanced away from the woman and her shotgun long enough to watch the white jet accelerate down the runway and lift off into the afternoon sky.

There went his best and fastest hope for relief from his private, living hell. He swore under his breath and looked back at the woman. How to convince her to get his drugs for him before he died from the agony of his withdrawal?

“Now what?” he asked her cautiously.

She lowered the weapon slowly. “Now we head up to the house. I imagine you’d like a shower, shave and a decent meal. Then we’ll talk.”

What he’d like was a nice fat injection of Doc Jones’s magic serum. Although he had to admit, a shower didn’t sound half bad. In the first days of his imprisonment, before his world collapsed down to a pinpoint of exquisite agony, he’d craved a hot shower almost more than he’d craved a good meal.

The foliage looked Caribbean … No way. They wouldn’t have brought him to the one place he’d kill to go, would they? A low-level hum of eagerness to do violence vibrated in his gut. Patience. Someone would pay someday.

He fingered his thick beard. He must look like some sort of wild mountain man. Although maybe the look wasn’t so far from the truth. Without comment, he followed as she slung the strap of her duffel bag over her shoulder then turned and walked toward a small, metal storage building.

She grasped the lock and dialed a combination. It didn’t open. She tried again. No luck. She swore under her breath.

“Problem?” he asked.

“They must’ve changed the lock since the last time I was here. I’d call and ask for the new combination, but you destroyed my phone.”

“What’s inside?”

“A golf cart. Trust me, it’s a long, steep hike up the mountain to the house without it. And it’s really hot out here.”

He shrugged. After the searing heat of Africa, this tropical climate felt almost gentle. Daytime highs in Ethiopia at this time of year routinely hit the high one-twenties. But the lady did look badly overheated. He eyed the lock and muttered, “Step aside.”

“Excuse me?”

He brushed past her and she gasped as his arm came into brief contact with hers. Gritting his teeth, he ignored the light sound. He took the lock in his hand and gave it a sharp jerk. The hasp tore half off the building. He yanked again and a rectangular piece of galvanized metal sheeting gave way. The entire lock tore free in his hand.

“Door’s open now,” he announced.

She stared at him in shock. “How did you do that?”

He shrugged. There wasn’t much to say. She’d seen exactly how he did it. He grabbed the lock and ripped it off.

“Do you have any idea how much strength it took to do that?”

He frowned down at the ragged hole in the building. “Aluminum of that gauge can typically hold something like twenty pounds per square inch. Given the size of the hole … maybe thirty square inches … that means it took about six hundred pounds of force.”

Her jaw sagged.

“Of course, if there was metal fatigue, the required force might have been much less,” he added lamely. What in the hell was he doing? He knew better than to show off for some woman he’d just met! Especially one who worked for the U.S. freaking government. It would be disastrous if she caught even a hint of his secrets, and here he was, laying them out before her like an open book for the reading!

He grabbed the handle and lifted the garage-style door hastily. Must distract the woman. Fast. His ploy seemed to work, for she ducked under the door as it was still rising and headed for the golf cart inside.

The vehicle groaned as he eased his weight down onto it. She threw him a strange look, which he pointedly ignored. After tossing her bag in the back, she drove the cart outside. He waited, arms folded, as she got out and closed the door behind them.

She guided the cart onto a dirt path that zigzagged back and forth up the steep side of a substantial mountain. It looked like a dormant volcano covered in heavy tropical undergrowth.

Near the summit, a small clearing opened up and a gracious one-story home came into view under a canopy of trees. It was long and low with a deep, covered front porch stretching its entire length. A ceiling fan cooled a pair of cane rocking chairs, and plantation shutters slatted the windows. Unquestionably Caribbean architecture.

The Caribbean, huh? So his guess had been correct. He eyed his companion speculatively. What were the odds she was attached to the secret government surveillance facility in that region of the world? The one that had gotten so many of his men killed and caused him no end of problems?

His more immediate problem asserted itself as a wave of molten agony engulfed him. He needed his drugs, and soon. At least he wasn’t far from the United States. He should be able to get his drugs flown in here fast.

Assuming the prickly woman beside him allowed it.

He stared at his beard in the mirror. He would need clippers to trim it down enough to be properly shave-able. Not to mention, the idea of dragging a razor across his super-sensitized skin made him cringe in abject terror. There were not many things in this world that scared him, but the prospect of inflicting that kind of pain on himself was one of them. He was already stretched just about to the limit of his tolerance.

For now, he’d leave the beard be. He eyed the shower stall warily. Desire to finally be clean warred with his fear of the water hitting his skin. What if he couldn’t take the pain? What kind of a wimp would he be if he couldn’t even tolerate that small pressure? Fear won out over filth. Like his mother always said, a little dirt never killed anyone. But more pain could very possibly break him in his current state.

He backed out of the bathroom and headed down the hall toward the mouthwateringly delectable smell of meat charring.

“Steak okay for supper?” the woman asked from beside one of those indoor grill stoves that sucked down the smoke into a powerful fan.

He groaned as his mouth puddled with anticipatory saliva.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you make a sound of pleasure instead of pain. What did your guards do to you, anyway?”

Not much, truth be told. He’d ripped out of a pair of metal handcuffs trying to save his guard’s life that first night in jail when the guy was murdered, and the rest of the jailers had stayed well out of arm’s reach of him ever since. They thought he’d been the one to garrote the cop in the interrogation room with him. With what, he’d like to know, since he had no wire, rope, chain or other material on him or in the room strong enough or long enough to wrap around a man’s neck and choke him to death. But that hadn’t swayed the Ethiopians.

His big problem had been the other prisoners trying to kill him for the huge bounty El Mari had put on his head. As miserable as he’d been never coming out of his tiny, dark, sweltering cell, it had been better than getting killed. But three months living in a five-foot-by-eight-foot box had been hellish.

The woman was speaking again. “Look, you’re far from the only guy I’ve debriefed. Nothing you can say to me will shock me. I’ve heard it all before.”

He highly doubted she’d heard anything close to the story he could tell. He’d bet a million bucks his tale would shock her speechless. But that wasn’t a theory he planned to test.

Wincing, he eased himself into a sturdy-looking kitchen chair. It held his weight, thankfully. If he were at anything remotely approaching full speed, he’d offer to help with the meal. Not that he could cook a lick. But he could’ve set the table or poured drinks or something. As it was, the room was starting to spin while invisible bad men poked him with cattle prods. His body jerked spasmodically as the pain assaulted him.

Clenching his teeth, he ground out, “What’s your name?”

She slid a juicy slab of sizzling steak onto a plate and set it down before him. “Jennifer. Jennifer Blackfoot.”

Desperate to distract himself, he concentrated on her name. Blackfoot? That sounded Native American. She looked Native American, too. Her face tended to roundness, her skin was a lovely walnut hue, and her exotic brown eyes were so dark they almost looked black. Her hair was true black with almost blue highlights glinting out of her long braid. He’d wager her hair reached past her slender hips when it was loose.

“What tribe?” he bit out.

“Despite my last name, I do not belong to the Blackfoot nation. My family is Chiricahua Apache. And yes, we were the violent ones who scalped white settlers and kidnapped white children. I am, in fact, a direct descendent of Geronimo, although in our tongue, his name was Goyakhla.”

A warrior woman, was she? Not surprising based on what he’d seen so far.

“Do your friends call you Jefferson?” she asked as she sat bowls of cold Caesar salad and hot green beans dripping with butter on the table.

“No. Jeff,” he muttered as he picked up a steak knife and fork. He swore as his palms cramped so violently he nearly cried out. The utensils clattered to his plate. His hands were too tightly clawed at the moment to master the fine motor skill required for steak carving.

The woman frowned but asked matter-of-factly, “Need some help with that?”

He scowled at her, too humiliated to admit that he couldn’t control his hands.

She leaned down next to him and efficiently cut his steak into bite-size pieces. Through the haze of his despair, he noticed incongruously that she smelled good. It was a floral scent, but not overwhelmingly sweet. It was green and wild and entirely fitting for her. His instincts flared in response to the light musk.

She stepped back a bit too hastily. Scared of him, was she? Smart girl. She mumbled, “If the fork’s too much to handle just now, go ahead and eat with your fingers. It won’t bother me. It’s how my people traditionally eat.”

Too famished to stand on pride, he ended up doing just that. God, he felt like a savage, shoveling food into his mouth with his bare hands. But to Jennifer’s credit, he didn’t catch even a single glimpse of disgust or revulsion in her eyes. He was stunned when she mimicked him and skipped utensils to eat with her fingers. She managed it quite a bit more daintily than him, of course. The compassion of the gesture startled him.

Near the end of the meal, which tasted better than anything he could ever remember eating in his life, she asked, “Any reason you didn’t take a shower?”

Glaring, he muttered, “I need a bath.”

She nodded evenly. “No problem. My bathroom has a soaker tub that even you should fit in. After supper, it’s all yours.”

He made eye contact with her just long enough to nod, but then he locked his gaze on his plate and refused to look back up. There was only so much embarrassment a man could stand.

Jennifer carried the empty plates to the sink as Jeff disappeared down the hall toward her bedroom. What a strange man he was. He’d fumbled with that knife and fork like he had no idea whatsoever how to use them. Which was absurd. The man was from one of the wealthiest families in the world and had the finest in education and lifestyle. Had he suffered some kind of weird memory loss where such basic skills were lost to him? More strange yet, she got the distinct impression that he was appalled at his own eating habits. Why, then, did he persist in eating like a savage?

Surely he wasn’t trying to make some grand social statement, was he? The man didn’t strike her as the type. He wasn’t defiant enough for something like that.

He seemed about equal parts angry and desperate. But desperate for what?

The longer she was around Jefferson Winston, the more the mystery deepened.

Jeff eased into the tub of steaming hot water and was overcome by ecstasy that momentarily overwhelmed his pain. The bliss was so intense as to be almost sexual. He exhaled a long, slow breath of relief.

That same wild, sweet perfume he’d caught before swirled around him as he luxuriated in the water. His body shocked him by responding hard and fast to the scent of the woman. She was extremely attractive if a guy went for that whole earthy, natural thing. Which, he had to admit, he definitely did at the moment.

Just how much comfort was she authorized to give him, anyway? He pushed away the idea of bedding Jennifer Blackfoot. Not only was he in no shape to withstand the physical rigors of sex, the woman was so wary of him she looked about ready to jump out of her skin most of the time. And then there was that shotgun of hers to consider. Did sex constitute harming her? Would she kill him afterward for violating their deal?

That outcome was likely enough that he satisfied himself with merely imagining her slender, bronze limbs wrapped around him, her black eyes sparkling in pleasure, her body taking his into her and satisfying his long-denied lust.

When the additional pain of his aroused flesh became too much to bear, he forcibly turned his thoughts to his mission gone terribly wrong. That first night in jail, to his shock, instead of questioning him, his Ethiopian interrogator had whispered urgently of a conspiracy. Of classified military intelligence from the United States being sold to El Mari and used to ambush Jeff and his team. The interrogator’s last words before the door burst open and a masked man jumped him and garroted him were that El Mari was determined to kill him. Even here in jail, Jeff would not be safe.

The guard had been right.

Thankfully, the other prisoners vastly underestimated his strength the first time they tried to kill him. They only jumped him with a half-dozen men armed with shivs. He beat them all to a pulp, retreated to his cell and never came out again to give them a second chance.

Jeff added more hot water to the cooling bath. When he found out who in El Mari’s organization had stepped into the bastard’s shoes now that the guy was dead, he vowed to himself to take that guy out, too. The unholy work of El Mari’s mercenaries had to be stopped.

But more importantly, he would find and punish whoever in the United States government had sold him and his men out. Five good men dead on his watch. God help Jennifer Blackfoot if she was part of the conspiracy that had killed his men.

His grim thoughts grounded him back in the reality of his suffering. He supposed it was fitting that if he was the one man on his team to survive, he was also the one who would suffer the most for it.

The steaming bath gradually soaked loose the accumulated filth ground into his skin over a period of months. He picked up a surprisingly pink loofah—Jennifer didn’t strike him as a peppermint pink kind of woman, but obviously he was wrong—and very, very carefully scrubbed the crusted dirt and caked sweat off his skin. It hurt like crazy, but being clean felt so good he was able to grit his teeth against the sensory stimulation long enough to finish washing.

As the tub drained, he stood up, naked, and let cold air wash across him. His skin puckered with goose bumps, but it felt good. Even the most minor relief from his pain right now was a blessing. But it did not last. His skin dried and the fires of Hell resumed searing away his flesh layer by blackened layer.

Eyeing his disgusting clothes in a heap on the floor, he couldn’t bring himself to don the filthy garments again. Gingerly, he wrapped a towel around his hips and headed for his hostess.

She was in the living room, reading a newspaper. Eagerness to find out what was going on in the world gripped him. Later, he’d read that thing front to back. But right now, he needed something to wear or access to a washing machine.

She glanced up and made a faintly choked sound. “Problem?” she croaked.

“Clothes. Mine are gross.”

“Aah. If you’ll look in the dresser in your room, you should find some men’s clothing. Although I’m not sure any of it will fit you. But maybe you can find something that’ll work until I can have larger clothing sent out.”

He pounced on that like a lion on prey. “We can get things sent here? How fast?”

A delicate eyebrow arched over her right eye like a swallow’s wing. “Is there something in particular you want?”

He eyed her warily. He didn’t for a second underestimate the intelligence of this woman, his adversary. “I’ll need to have some things couriered to me. Clothes for one. Medications. Business documents. I’ve been away from my company for too long. Things are probably a mess there by now.”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully but made no immediate comment.

Rather than stick around to let her say no, he retreated to his bedroom in search of clothes.

Oh. My. God. Jeff Winston in a towel was one of the most incredible sights she’d ever seen. Sure, she worked around a lot of buff special forces operatives who were blatant exhibitionists when it came to showing off their muscles, but every last one of them would slink away in shame if they ever had to stand next to Jeff. Something primal and female stirred deep within her at the sight of this overpoweringly alpha male.

He looked a bit like a world-class body builder. Except where a body builder would sculpt his body for beauty, symmetry and an idealistic form, Jeff’s body was built for sheer, raw power. The man looked like a rock. Or more accurately, a pile of bulging boulders and slabs of granite stacked into a humanoid shape.

No wonder he’d been so unbelievably heavy when he had landed on her and knocked her out of the way of the gun battle erupting over their heads. The guy hadn’t ever heard of body fat, apparently.

As he retreated down the hallway, she noted that his back was no less defined than his front. He looked like he could lift a truck. Heck, he looked like he could pick up a truck and throw it.

Heat flared in her cheeks as she realized she was ogling her prisoner like some hot-to-trot college coed. She was a grown woman, thank you very much. Fully in control of her desires and not the slightest in need of a man in her life. But good heavens, what a man. She’d seriously never seen a specimen even remotely like him. He was a beast.

But as soon as the word crossed her mind, she frowned. His current appearance wasn’t his fault. But with all that hair and that wild look in his eyes, it was hard to separate the man from the animal he’d had to become to survive whatever the Ethiopians did to him.

She cranked up her laptop and fired off a quick email to Brady Hathaway at H.O.T. Watch. She asked for additional steak to be sent to the island, along with a new cell phone for her. And then she ended the message with,

See if you can back channel an off-the-record conversation with the Ethiopian Army. What in the world did they do to this guy in prison to turn him into what he is now?

Chapter 3

Jeff stared at himself in the mirror. Both the T-shirt and cutoff sweatpant shorts he wore stretched too tightly across his massive physique. But they were the only garments that even came close to fitting him. If nothing else, they highlighted his power pretty blatantly. Hopefully, it would be enough to intimidate his hostess into sending for his drugs immediately.

He rejoined her in the living room, where she was most of the way through the newspaper now.