Comeback

The gun muzzles pointed at Selena, and her partner, Dobry, trapped her gaze and didn’t let her look to the people beyond. Inside she raged for freedom, wanting to strike and fight and even lose rather than stand here unresisting.

Dobry’s next words shocked her. “This woman is one who knows your people. She saved your homes in the past.”

The pause was excruciating. The magistrate, an older man with a full, gray beard, walked deliberately around Dobry to examine Selena. She knew this man would not hesitate to order their deaths if he truly thought they were a threat. “I was here this past winter,” she said. “I called for help when the Kemeni rebels attacked.”

“There was a woman here,” he agreed. “We know she was Selena Jones, of the American FBI. That she worked against terrorism.” Then he smiled. “What we don’t know,” he said, “is who you are.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. Eyed Dobry and found him eyeing her back.

Because of course, they didn’t have any papers on them to prove their identities.

Dear Reader,

Offered the chance to go back and revisit Selena’s world, is there anyone here who thinks I so much as blinked before leaping to my feet and wildly waving my hand— “Me! Me! Oh, pick me!” (The muse has no shame, really.) For while I had an extensive chance to explore Selena’s character in Checkmate and to learn a little about Cole, I didn’t really have the opportunity to see how they were together. How would they work as a team, at home and in the field? And given more “air time,” what sort of fellow would Cole turn out to be?

Along with all that, I wondered, what would it be like to be Selena, trying to cope with the events of Checkmate as she went on with her life? The answers made for a delightful writing experience, and I hope they make for good reading, as well. Enjoy!

Doranna Durgin

Comeback

Doranna Durgin

www.millsandboon.co.uk

DORANNA DURGIN

spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. After obtaining a degree in wildlife illustration and environmental education, she spent a number of years deep in the Appalachian Mountains. When she emerged, it was as a writer who found herself irrevocably tied to the natural world and its creatures—and with a new touchstone to the rugged spirit that helped settle the area and which she instills in her characters.

Doranna’s first fantasy novel received the 1995 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award for the best first book in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres; she now has fifteen novels of eclectic genres on the shelves. Most recently she’s leaped gleefully into the world of action romance. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds Web pages, wanders around outside with a camera and works with horses and dogs. There’s a Lipizzan in her backyard, a mountain looming outside her office window, a pack of agility dogs romping in the house and a laptop sitting on her desk—and that’s just the way she likes it. You can find a complete list of titles at www.doranna.net along with scoops about new projects, lots of silly photos and a link to her SFF Net newsgroup.

Dedicated to my own teammates:

Duncan, Belle, Jean-Luc Picardigan and ConneryB.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 1

Someone’s following me.

Selena’s heart rate skyrocketed higher than expected, surprising her with reactions left over from months ago. Reactions that came from two intense days inside the Berzhaan capitol during which she outwitted, outran and outlived the terrorists who’d taken everyone else in the building hostage. Now that familiar tension zinged through her body—a body she somehow kept walking at a normal pace. Outwardly oblivious, inwardly on high alert.

Except this was the modest little Virginia town closest to the CIA training facility called the Farm, and if the description sleepy didn’t quite do it justice, bustling went too far. On a crisp early fall evening, headed from the family-owned pharmacy along the main street to the sports shop, Selena was in no danger from terrorists. Down the sidewalk, a teenage girl walked her dog. Across the street, a middle-aged couple shared an ice-cream cone. A man in running shorts headed down the sidewalk away from Selena; a woman in more sensible sweats jogged in place, waiting out one of the town’s few signal lights. Vehicle traffic was sporadic, heavily populated with the practical rather than the luxurious.

And still, someone followed her.

Selena Shaw Jones didn’t waste time doubting herself. Never did. Doubt hadn’t gotten her out of Berzhaan alive. She’d done that on her own, using her wits and her grit…and trusting her instincts. So now, without changing her stride, she headed past the big brick structure of the sporting goods store, ducking down the alley beside it. Choke point. Anyone following her would stand out clearly if he so much as hesitated at the intersection, while the alley itself was dark enough to hide Selena from a casual glance.

Except she quickly realized she could go one better. The old brick building’s deeply inset windows, half a story above her, offered plenty of ledge for a woman quick and nimble. The darkened panes meant an unoccupied room and no one likely to notice her or give her away. Up she went, scraping knuckles and ignoring the stinging pain as she caught her balance, crouching with her back to the brick and her eyes on the alley entrance. Her left hand crept beneath her black leather duster to her back pocket and pulled out the knife clipped there, thumbing the short tanto blade open. A blade meant for close work, with wicked angles of hard steel.

And yeah. Here they came. One at first, hesitating on the decision to enter the dark area. And then a second, meeting up with quick whispers and a few restrained gestures. One male, one female, features deliberately obscured by deep jacket hoods.

Selena wiped a trembling hand along the thigh of her navy cargo pants. Tailored enough for casual chic, they nonetheless had the flexible pocket capacity she wanted. She’d become quite fond of the style since it had served her so well in Berzhaan, holding a plethora of small improvised weapons for her private guerrilla war against the Kemeni rebels. She wasn’t so fond of the trembling. Not fear, that trembling. Just awareness. Readiness. A need to act.

Come a little closer.

And oh, they did. They tried to cover it, as the man playfully backed the woman into the darkness, nuzzling at her ear and murmuring something to make her laugh. But Selena saw the surreptitious glances, even from within their hoods. They were looking for her. They wondered if she was hidden in some dark corner or if she’d found a hidden exit. She pushed her back against the brick, waiting…

Until finally they’d gone beyond her.

She leaped down from the windowsill, cat-light, and covered the ground between them in a mere pounce. Just enough time to put the knife up to the side of the man’s hood-covered neck before shoving him, hard, against both the woman and the wall. The woman’s eyes widened; the man froze at the sharp touch of metal as it pierced his jacket through to his skin. Impulses left over from Berzhaan surged through Selena, urging her to be swift and final. A quick stab into the man’s neck and a forward slash of her arm—messy but effective—and she’d get the woman with the end of her swing.

Get real, Selena. This wasn’t Berzhaan. These two weren’t good enough to pose an immediate life or death threat.

And then she recognized the woman—saw enough of her to know those rounded features, that stubby nose. Shock made her step back, but not without shoving the man aside and off balance. By then she’d recognized him, too.

Students. From the Farm, where she’d been teaching these past months.

But they shouldn’t be here—not trailing her. She’d played rabbit for them before, but never unknowingly. “What the hell—”

She didn’t have time to finish, not with the woman’s eyes going even wider as a pair of hands clamped down on her arms. No more thinking, then, just reaction. Pure adrenaline hit. She yanked herself forward, sliding those hands down to her wrists, and then she whirled, her captured arms twirling over her head in a fast, deadly dance. They faced each other only for an instant, his now-crossed hands still on her wrists, and then she jerked back with her right hand to throw him off balance, jammed her right leg in behind his and shoved him backward. He fell over her leg—so simple, so effective—and she levered him around his own arm. He twisted to fall facedown in the gritty soil and even then she didn’t stop, shoving the arm up high and landing on his back just as the joint cracked. By then her knees were on her attacker’s spine and the knife at the base of his skull.

She knew better than most how little it took to kill a man that way.

“No!” The woman leaped forward as if to grab Selena’s arm and thought better of it, hovering without touching. “He’s with us! He’s the trailing eye!”

Selena’s fierce intent abruptly faded away into nothing more than a pounding heart. Of course they’d had another “eye” on the team. Why he’d been so foolish as to come up on her from behind, bodily yanking her out of a confrontation that had nearly been resolved without him, she couldn’t imagine. Now he moaned in pain, afraid to move. She stabbed her blade into the ground in pure disgust. “Goddammit, what were you thinking? What were any of you thinking, following me on my personal time?” She yanked the knife free and folded it, standing away from the man so the other two could check on him. Dislocated shoulder, for sure. She still hadn’t gotten a good look at him—didn’t even know which student she’d disabled.

But as pure reaction faded, thoughtfulness returned. Enough thoughtfulness to know there’d be an aftermath to this moment. The injured man would lose his place in the class. Conversations would be had, explanations demanded. She swore again, more softly this time. And finished the question she’d once started. “What the hell are you doing out here? Didn’t anyone apply a sanity check to this little stunt? What did you think would happen if you followed me without bringing me in on the exercise?” She looked down at the injured man. The other two had carefully moved his arm so they could roll him over, and she recognized him well enough. Not a great student, but not a bad one. Not generally this stupid. She reached into the deep pocket of her leather duster—a little worse for wear, this duster, but repaired well enough after the previous spring—and fumbled for her phone.

The woman looked at her, eyes big all over again, and then going suddenly narrow. “You were supposed to know. We thought you knew.”

A noise from the sidewalk—someone had finally noticed the ruckus. Selena snapped her head around to face the new arrival, ready to drive him off with a few snappy orders and the badge jammed into her pocket.

Instead she found Steven Dobry. The burly Farm instructor and CIA technical ops expert was older than Selena, his features and bearing an unremarkable and perfect canvas for demonstrating his disguise strategies to the students. He didn’t do a very good job of hiding his own desire to be in the field, or his skepticism that Selena—younger, female and formerly FBI—had ever belonged there. Dobry said, “I’ve already called for help.”

“Suddenly,” Selena said, “this all makes a certain twisted sense.”

“Nothing about this makes sense.” Dobry waved at the scene before them. “What the hell is this all about?”

Selena shook her head. “No. Nice try, but no.” She released the phone and let her hand settle in her pocket. There, he wouldn’t see that she had it clenched. But on the outside she’d found her cool, the guise of the experienced FBI legate and specialist in international counterterrorism. She’d attended embassy balls and palace dinners; she’d negotiated with heads of state and walked through terrorist territory in more countries than Dobry could even imagine. “That’s your question to answer. You knew they couldn’t tail me undetected.”

“Did I?” He raised an eyebrow at her, visible enough in the faint fan of light from the closest streetlamp.

Fury swept through her, along with the sudden understanding. “You thought they could do it. You figure I’m full of crap, and you were going to prove it. This wasn’t a training exercise…it was an exercise in embarrassment. My embarrassment.” She narrowed her eyes at him, her fist still clenched inside her pocket and her voice deceptively casual. “And how’s that working out for you?”

The woman looked over at Dobry, anger rising on her face. “You used us. You set us up!”

Dobry sent a cold look Selena’s way. “It’s a shame you overreacted so badly. This should have been a perfectly safe exercise.”

“It could have been,” she agreed. “If you’d let me in on it. Not to mention it would have been infinitely more challenging—I could have led them on quite a chase before I dumped them. But instead you sent them out cold and green. I’ll bet you didn’t even warn them not to take me on.”

“He was no threat to you!”

The woman stood up, now freely glaring. “And how was she supposed to know that? She didn’t even know it was us.”

Selena heard sirens in the background, still faint and far away. “You knew my background, whether you believed it or not. You lied to your trainees. You left me out of the loop. Me? I’m just a CIA officer on my private time who reacted exactly as I should have. I know who I’d rather be when it comes to facing the DDA over this.”

“Damned cold bitch, aren’t you?” His sullen anger told her she’d scored a point.

“No,” Selena told him. “I’m smoking hot. Too bad you’re only now beginning to figure it out.”

The DDA—Deputy Director of Administration, the ultimate boss of the Farm—didn’t actually put in an appearance for the chewing-out phase. The Director of Training and Education handled the job just fine on his own. Equally scathing on both their counts, troweling the blame thick. Selena thought she imagined frustration when he looked at Dobry and concern when he looked at her.

On the other hand it could have just been a twitch.

But unlike Dobry, the DDA knew her background. He knew the CIA had offered her a spot high in the counterterrorist hierarchy, but that as she had healed physically from those several intense days in Berzhaan, as she had debriefed and reported and followed through on the incident, the need for an extended period of lower stress had made itself clear as well.

Selena hated it. She saw it as weakness. Yes, she’d spent two days fighting for her life—and yes, during that time just about everyone she’d seen had been trying to hurt or kill her. She’d saved the lives of the prime minister and most of the hostages. Outgunned and outmanned, even on the brink of what seemed like certain death, she’d managed to convey information to lurking rescue forces. She’d won, dammit.

These days, she felt like maybe they’d won, too. Instead of surging forth into her new life, she’d ended up here, instructing. De-stressing. There’d been that one clandestine meeting with Oracle shortly after her return from Berzhaan, but she wasn’t of any great use to that supersecret fledgling intelligence agency as long as she was here. Recovering.

Not that the teaching position was a bad thing in and of itself. She was good at it; she enjoyed it. She just wanted more.

She wasn’t likely to get it as long as she was doing things like turning clueless newbies into broken bits of student. At least the injured trainee would be allowed back for the next session. Small consolation, but one that Selena held on to.

So she didn’t make excuses to the DDA—he knew exactly why she’d reacted with force, and he knew she’d pulled her punches or the injured trainee would be a dead trainee. She limited her responses to acknowledgments and she glared at Dobry’s back on the way out of the Farm’s administration building, holding her anger tightly inside. When she would have walked away, heading through the dark night and the newly falling mist, he hesitated.

“Selena—”

The anger snapped. She pivoted, glaring at him with such force that he fell silent. She said, “Don’t, Dobry. Don’t even try to pretend what happened tonight was my responsibility. I’ll take it like a good soldier for the director, but you haven’t earned that from me. If you hadn’t disrespected me and used your students to prove the point you thought you had, none of this would have happened.” She took one step toward him, lowering her voice into the dangerous range. “And it better not happen again. Not this, not anything like it.”

He paused, that sullen expression lurking and an overlay of his own anger on top of it. Finally he said, “You don’t belong here. Maybe not for the reason I first thought, but you don’t belong here. The CIA doesn’t take on FBI castoffs. They broke you…let them fix you. The rest of us here don’t need your problems.”

Selena let the words sit there until he seemed to give up on a response at all. What she felt underneath—half-believing the validity of his words, half-believing she couldn’t be fixed at all—stayed private. Hers only. She kept her voice matter-of-fact, devoid of the intensity that had startled him a moment earlier. “Too bad that’s not your decision to make.”

And this time she did turn and walk away, heading for the sophisticated gym inside what looked like a perfectly picturesque barn. She hit the locker room to strip away her leather duster, the navy cargos and black trail sneakers, and replaced them with black spandex. Shorts and sports bra and attitude, all of which she took to the gym. She put on a pair of lightly padded gloves and tackled the workout bag, pounding the dust from it with fist and foot alike. She pounded out what was left of the adrenaline, chasing the unfinished feeling left from the alley encounter. Unfinished, because she’d pulled her punches even after the trainee had grabbed her from behind, invoking body memories of life and death in the hands of the rebels-turned-terrorists. Tafiq Ashurbeyli, with his gun jammed to the back of her head. With his body pressing her against the wall. With his men ambushing her when she’d thought herself as of yet undiscovered, unknown.

She wished the punching bag was Dobry, or the dead Kemeni leader, or any one of the men she’d been forced to kill.

She wished it hadn’t been that poor stupid trainee.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. That was Cole’s voice, popping up in her head. Cole, who’d dropped everything to sneak inside Berzhaan when the terrorists struck. Who’d put up with her in the months since, just happy enough she was still alive. A rededicated marriage, and he’d meant it. And now a ghost of his voice said, If you were as bad as you think you are, you wouldn’t care so much.

Cole.

She glanced at the wire-covered clock, eyes bleary with sweat. Eleven o’clock. He’d be waiting. He’d had a meeting this evening—something to do with his security consulting job. It was a position he’d once called laughably easy, by which she knew he’d soon be bored. But he’d taken it so they could stay together—so for once they could both be at work in the same country. In the same city. Even in the same temporary housing. Talking about children and family life and not particularly getting anywhere with either.

Selena cursed and thudded her fist into the workout bag—this time without any force behind it, and she used the motion to push herself away and head for the locker room. She pulled on the sweat suit she had stored there, transferring her badge, her knife, and her ID to the kangaroo pockets of the hoodie. She slammed the locker closed on the remainder of her things, twisting the token lock in place. The students might ply their newly learned skills on the neat row of locks, but they knew better than to actually take anything. Another time, she might have left a booby trap for them. Something involving a paint ball.

But not this time. This time she hesitated at the barn’s big sliding door, squinting into precipitation now too hard to call mist. Moderate rain. Not enough to deter her.

She felt someone’s eyes on her and turned to discover a figure by the corner of the barn. He stood in the shelter from the rain, just close enough to identify as the male trainee from earlier in the evening—the one who’d been lucky, and come away intact. He stood hunched, his hands in his pockets, his posture straightening as he realized she’d seen him. But he hesitated, his mouth just barely open—on apology rather than accusation, Selena thought, but she was in a mood to hear neither.

She turned away and ran into the dark rain.

Cole Jones dropped for a few push-ups, just enough to get his blood moving. Then he returned to the paperwork spread over the kitchen counter and pondered whether this particular client needed the super-duper countersurveillance electronics, or the super-duper-whooper version.

He thought the super-duper would do. But these people had money and they seemed to like to spend it. He shook his head at the papers and contemplated letting a game of darts make the choice. The countersurveillance protection, he could provide. The security, he could provide. Dealing with the people? Another mind-set altogether. He found himself constantly fighting the urge to sell them some Florida swampland just to see if he could. Not that they were stupid people. By no means.

Just not possessed of much imagination.

Cole’s own imagination was getting lonely. Time for a Selena Sanity Fix.

He perked up at the sound of the key in the town-house door. A two-story town house, every bit as big as their own apartment in D.C.—bigger, even. But it had a closed-in feel; more rooms, but smaller ones. Not as airy. Didn’t feel like home at all.

On the other hand, it felt like they were getting away with something just being here together. Cole left his papers and headed for the door, hesitating at the kitchen entry just in time to find Selena standing in the entry hall. Dripping, bedraggled, cheeks flushed and breath still coming fast. He didn’t even have to ask. She’d tried to out-batter and outrun her demons again.

She hadn’t yet acknowledged that it didn’t really work. Like a drug, the effect wore off. Like a drug, it seemed to take more and more out of her each time.

He didn’t have to ask what had triggered her this time. He’d known since receiving her phone call from town that she’d have a hard night. He held out a hand. Wordlessly, she removed wet shoes, then stripped off her soaked sweats and gave them over to him. Given his own personal clothes management, he would have tossed them on the floor of the small laundry closet—but for Selena, he hung them in the bathroom. Passing the thermostat on the way back, he turned it up a degree or two.

He found her at the darkened living room’s picture window, staring out rain-smeared glass into the darkness. Still in her workout shorts and sports bra top, all long, lean muscle and more angles than most women. Unless, from this view, you looked at her ass.