One Tough Marine

She followed his gaze to the gold wildcat set into the cut crystal of the box’s top. “For our wedding.” Matt’s nickname had been Wildcat, and at the time he’d given her the box, she’d thought the gesture wildly romantic, as if he were giving himself to her symbolically.

She hadn’t realized that the box was almost all of himself he intended to give to her or any other woman. His first love was intrigue, and he’d have sacrificed anyone and anything for that beguiling temptress.

She took the piece of crystal from Luke’s hand. It was warm, but only from the heat of Luke’s fingers. She dropped it in the trash can by the kitchen nook and retrieved Stevie from the rocker, settling him on one hip. With the gym bag in her other hand, she looked back at Luke. “Let’s go.”

He caught up with her at the door, taking the bag from her hand. “He loved you, the best he knew how,” he murmured as he opened the apartment door for her.

She knew he was right. Matt had loved her in his own way. She’d loved him, as well. For all his faults, he’d been a hard man not to love.

It just hadn’t been enough.

THEY LEFT ABBY’S CAR at her apartment and took his Mustang, transferring Stevie’s car seat before they left. As Luke navigated through light traffic on the way back to University City, he found himself glancing in the rearview mirror now and then to check on the sleepy little boy, who’d fussed a bit when Abby had told him they were going on a trip.

“He’s past his bedtime,” Abby murmured. “He’ll probably be asleep by the time we get there.”

Luke looked at her. “You look pretty worn-out yourself.”

Her lips curved. “Gee, thanks.”

“I’ll call my supervisor tonight and tell him I’m working from home the rest of the week.” It was one of the perks of his job, directing his own schedule, for the most part. Now that the case in Rancho Santa Fe was over, he just had some paperwork to fill out and some loose ends to tie up, most of which he could do over the phone or by e-mail.

“What are you doing now?” she asked, stifling a yawn. “Jobwise, I mean.”

“Security work. Protective detail, investigations. That sort of thing.”

Her chuckle was low and warm, like cello music. He felt a rush of pure male heat flood his veins in response. “So, basically the same kind of work you did in the corps.”

“Basically,” he agreed, proud of how steady his voice emerged, despite the tremors going off low in his abdomen. He tried to concentrate on her question rather than his libido. “Compared to the corps, my job’s a day at the beach. Sometimes literally.” He grinned. “What about you? Where are you working these days?”

“I freelance with a couple of local school systems that don’t have full-time speech therapists. A few nonprofits that need temporary translation services. Some private tutoring.” She turned to look over her shoulder at Stevie. “I do some consulting work for Homeland Security, too. Linguistics stuff relating to wiretaps, that sort of thing. I’m looking to branch out, though. Bring in a little more money so we can afford a real house.”

MSI might be interested in her services, he thought. For a moment, his first thought was to mention her to Dave Malkin to see if he could find her some more freelance work.

But he quickly quashed the notion. The last thing Abby and her son needed was to have Luke in their lives, even hanging around the periphery.

He was dangerous to know.

“Luke, what if we don’t find what Matt took?” A tremble in Abby’s voice belied her calm expression. “What if these people are wrong and he didn’t take anything from them to begin with?”

“We’re going to sort it out, I promise.” He wasn’t yet sure how, but the one thing he knew, as surely as he knew his own name, was that he wasn’t going to let anyone hurt Abby or her son. He’d spent the past three years wishing he could have done things differently with Abby Chandler, and this was all the chance he could expect to make up for his mistakes.

He had no intention of letting her down this time.

He made the turn down his street and scanned the area, looking for anything that seemed out of place. He recognized all the vehicles parked within a block of his bungalow and didn’t see any strange people walking the streets. He lowered the car window as he made a pass down his street once without stopping. He could hear the muted sound of music coming from within a couple of the houses, and here and there dogs barking, but nothing seemed out of sorts.

“Didn’t we just pass your house?” Abby asked.

“Yeah. I wanted to drive around once, just to make sure everything’s calm.” He circled the block, moving neither too fast nor too slow, and kept his ears open. A block over, a beagle was baying frantically at something in the backyard of a small yellow stucco house located directly behind Luke’s own backyard.

Might be a squirrel or an opossum driving him nuts.

Or not.

Luke pulled up the short drive to his garage and reached across to press the door opener. The whir of the door’s machinery seemed deafening to his ears, though he knew from testing the security system that the sound of the garage door opening wasn’t nearly as audible in the house.

But if someone had managed to bypass his silent alarm and made it inside his house, would the faint noise of the garage door opening give them warning that he was on his way?

“Is something wrong?” Abby asked softly.

He met her worried gaze, not surprised that she was able to read his body language so well. She’d always seemed to know what he was thinking and feeling more clearly than he had known himself. “I’m cautious,” he admitted.

“Why don’t you have a security system?”

“I do,” he said with a smile. “It’s a silent one. You tripped it, by the way.”

“I’m an amateur. These people aren’t.”

He forced himself to smile. “So we’ll be cautious. You and Stevie stay here in the garage. I’ll lock the side door from the outside, so nobody should be able to get in. You’ll have the door opener if you need to get out, and I’ll leave the car key here with you.” He removed the Mustang’s ignition key from his key ring and handed it to her. “If you don’t hear anything from me in ten minutes, get out of here and go to the nearest police station. Tell them everything you know.”

He could tell from the look on her face that she had no intention of going to the police. But he wasn’t going to sit out here in the garage all night arguing a hypothetical.

“Once I make sure the house is safe, I’ll come back and get you.” He got out of the car and closed the driver’s door behind him, bending to look back in the open window. “We’re going to figure this all out, Abs. I promise.”

In her eyes he saw her desire to believe doing fierce battle with disillusionment. He wondered how much of that disillusionment was thanks to Matt’s lies and how much was a product of his own grave mistakes.

He slipped out of the garage and locked the door safely behind him, walking the flagstone path to the house with care, knowing that one slip onto the pebbles below would alert anyone lurking inside his darkened house of his approach.

He eyed the side-door lock to see if it had been tampered with. Everything looked just as he’d left it. But he wasn’t so egotistical as to believe there was no way an intruder could get past his security setup.

He closed his hand around the Glock at his belt and slipped it from the holster. Falling back on years of urban combat training, he entered the door fast and low, sweeping the kitchen for any signs of occupation.

It was empty.

He almost let his guard down at that point, listening to the familiar silence of the house. But he hadn’t spent a decade in the Marine Corps just to forget the hard lessons.

He scanned the kitchen once more, looking for any signs of something out of place. The lack of disorder only amped up his tension. Because somewhere in his gut, he sensed he wasn’t alone in the house.

Which meant whoever was waiting somewhere behind a door or around the corner was damned good at his job.

There were times to fight and times to regroup. Deciding which time was which was something he’d learned over almost ten years in uniform. Suicide missions were last-ditch options. Much smarter to beat a strategic retreat, then regroup and make a plan of attack from a more advantageous position.

Especially when you had a two-year-old boy and his mother waiting in the garage to be collateral damage.

He turned quietly and edged toward the back door. He almost made it there before he heard a metallic click a few feet behind him.

“Major Luke Cooper, United States Marine Corps. Retired.” The slick voice behind him ended with a soft clucking sound. “So young for a retiree. Battle fatigue?”

Luke started to turn around.

“I’d appreciate it if you lowered your gun,” the man behind him added in what Luke guessed, from what Abby had told him, must be a Boston Brahmin accent.

“If you think I’m going to put my weapon on the floor and go down without a fight, you don’t know much about the Marines,” Luke said, his voice calmer than the roiling sensation in his gut would have suggested.

“I don’t think either of us needs to use our weapons,” the other man said, his tone slightly amused. “In fact, I think we probably want the same thing, don’t we?”

Luke lowered his Glock to his side but didn’t holster it. He turned around to find the man Abby had described from her earlier encounter—tall, muscular, dressed in black from head to toe. The ski mask fit him snugly, hiding all but a circle of pale skin around his sharp blue eyes and two thin, hard lips. He held a nasty-looking Colt M1991 in his left hand.

“I suppose we want the same thing,” Luke agreed, “but I doubt we’ll agree on what to do with it.”

The thin lips curved into a humorless smile. “Well, I guess we’ll have to deal with that when the time comes. Meanwhile, Mrs. Chandler has told you what my employer wants.”

“Actually, she doesn’t seem very certain what it is we’re looking for,” Luke countered, wondering how many other people were hiding in his house. One more? Two? Three? He’d feel a lot more confident about what he needed to do next if he had some way of knowing what he was up against.

“Captain Chandler took something from my employer. He wants it back.”

“Something? That’s a little vague.”

“You’ll know it if you find it.”

“Also vague.” Luke cocked his head. “Your employer must not think very much of you if he couldn’t even tell you what you’re threatening women and children to find.”

The other man drew a swift breath through his nose, sucking the black knit up tighter against his face. His eyes flashed with hate, but when he spoke, it was in the same slightly bemused tone he’d used all along. “You served with Captain Chandler. You were close friends.”

“Look who knows how to use Google.”

The masked man smiled again. “You served side by side with the captain in Afghanistan four years ago, and again with him in Sanselmo shortly before he died.”

“What did you do, memorize my service jacket?” Luke asked, feigning boredom, although the intruder’s breadth of knowledge about his time in the Marines suggested he had some pretty well-connected sources, probably in the government.

Which meant they were up against an even tougher enemy than he’d anticipated.

The intruder’s smile grew ugly as he saw through Luke’s mask of indifference. “You see, I wasn’t bluffing when I told Mrs. Chandler she really had no choice but to help us find what we’re looking for.”

“She didn’t think you were.”

“We were wondering who she’d run to for help.” There was a hint of innuendo in the man’s tone that made Luke’s skin crawl. “You see, we knew she’d go to the person most likely to know what her husband had been hiding from her.”

“But you didn’t know who that was?”

“We do now.” The masked man chuckled. “Isn’t technology wonderful? A phone call, a text message, and in mere moments, almost everything you need to know is at your fingertips.”

“You should be in a commercial.” Luke made a show of looking around the spotless kitchen. “Should I feel insulted that you didn’t trash my place the way you did Abby’s?”

“You haven’t seen the rest of the house.”

Luke arched one eyebrow. “Say, did you find a dark green sock anywhere? I’ve been looking for it for weeks.”

The man’s smile faded. “Seven days, Major Cooper. Mrs. Chandler clearly believes you can help her find what we’re looking for. If you can, I suggest you do.”

“Or what? You’ll hurt a two-year-old?” Luke sneered. “What a fulfilling job you have.”

The masked man took a swift step forward. Luke’s gun hand twitched upward.

A second man in a black mask stepped around the corner into the kitchen and put a restraining hand on the other man’s arm. He murmured something Luke couldn’t quite make out.

The man with the Brahmin accent visibly took himself under control. “Seven days.”

“Got it. Now get out of my house.”

The second man—African-American, Luke noted, just as Abby had described—nodded toward the back of the house. He went around the corner and out of sight.

The other man stayed where he was, staring Luke down. Luke didn’t drop his gaze, more than happy to wait him out.

“Don’t let me down,” the man said. Then he turned as well, disappearing around the corner on silent feet.

Luke stayed where he was, knowing that trying to stop them was a fool’s game that wouldn’t end well. He tightened his grip on the Glock, waiting for the sound of a window opening in the back of the house.

It came, softer than he’d expected. They’d probably greased the window first to cut down on the creaks. He didn’t hear it close at all, but after a couple of minutes, he decided it was safe to check the rest of the house.

The man in the mask hadn’t been lying. Both bedrooms, both bathrooms and the living room had been trashed in a fast but thorough search. He suspected they’d searched the kitchen as well, though they’d clearly taken more care to hide their tracks there, apparently knowing from their earlier reconnaissance that he customarily entered through the side door. Easier to get the upper hand if they didn’t leave a calling card for him to discover the second he walked through the door.

He was surprised they hadn’t tried the garage.

Or had they?

Unease squirming in his belly, he raced to the garage, unlocked the door and let himself in. The place was just as he’d left it, no sign of a struggle or anything out of place. They’d probably checked here first, he realized, and, as they had with the kitchen, left it as they’d found it in order to cover their tracks.

Inside the car, Abby had shifted to the driver’s side, her pale face staring back at him through the Mustang’s open window.

“Is it safe?” she asked softly.

He thought about the ease with which Abby had broken into his house earlier. It was probably ten times easier for the intruders he’d just encountered in his kitchen. And they’d been able to disable the silent alarm before it sent him a warning. Had they had access to his personal files at MSI? What else might they know about him and his life in San Diego?

“No,” he answered Abby’s question firmly, reaching into the car to unlatch the trunk. He checked the trunk to make sure the duffel bag he kept stashed there for emergency travel was still in place. It was, and a cursory check of the contents reassured him that he had enough extra clothes and supplies inside to get him through the next few days.

Abby had gotten out of the car and come around to stand beside him, her gaze flickering down to the travel bag. “We’re not staying here tonight, are we?”

He shook his head. “No, we’re not.”

“What happened?”

He told her about the intruders, keeping it short and sweet. But even his sanitized account was enough to reignite the terror that had finally started to fade from her blue eyes. She bit her lip and looked back into the car at Stevie, who was sleeping peacefully in his car seat.

Her chin came up, and when she spoke, there was not a hint of shakiness in her voice. “Where are we going?”

Until that moment, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. But clearly, staying in San Diego would only subject them to more surprise visits from their tormentors. Luke wasn’t foolish enough to assume their bark was worse than their bite; nobody played such aggressive mind games unless they were pretty damned sure they had the goods to back up their threats. Whoever their employer was, he had high-powered connections and, Luke assumed, enough firepower to do what he threatened.

Luke might be a well-trained retired Marine who could still hold his own in a fight, but going up against that kind of enemy alone was stupid. He needed backup and he needed to change the playing field to give himself the advantage. And there was only one place he could think of where he’d have the upper hand.

“Right now,” he answered Abby, “we’re going to find a cheap motel where they’ll take cash and ask no questions.”

“And after that?”

He smiled genuinely for the first time in a long time. “Ever been to Alabama?”

Chapter Four

“If they know all about you, won’t they be staking out your family?” Abby broke the tense silence that had hovered between them for almost three hours. Interstate signs signaled that they were nearing the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona. The drive east had taken longer than it should’ve, thanks to Luke’s wandering tour of eastern San Diego before they’d hit I-8 near El Cajon.

The dashboard clock inched toward 11:00 p.m.

“I haven’t been back to Alabama in almost ten years,” Luke answered flatly. “They know that.”

“That long?” She looked up in surprise. He’d always spoken lovingly of his big, boisterous family in Gossamer Ridge. For Abby, an only child whose parents had passed away in a car crash when she was eighteen, Luke’s stories of his wonderful, crazy family had always evoked a sense of envy. “It’s complicated.”

She tamped down an acid rush of bitterness. The job, of course. Military intel—the secrets, the lies, the constant danger all took a toll. Marriages crumbled, friends became enemies, families self-destructed.

She glanced at Stevie, sound asleep in his car seat. He was still young enough that car travel was a surefire sleep aid. At least he could sleep in peace tonight. She’d do anything to spare him even a second of fear or concern.

“We’re stopping in Yuma for the night,” Luke said. She saw his gaze fixed on the rearview mirror. Did he see Stevie in the reflection,? Could he see how Stevie’s square jaw was a carbon copy of his own??

For his first year, Stevie had looked just like her, saving her from awkward questions and convoluted explanations about his origins. But now that she saw glimpses of Luke in her son—the darkening gray eyes, his lopsided smile—she was painfully aware of how selfish she’d been to keep father and son apart just to avoid complications.

Maybe Luke hadn’t wanted her enough to stick around. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t want to know their son.

“You haven’t contacted anyone since we left my house, have you?” Luke asked. “Maybe when we stopped at the ATM?”

“No.” His sudden tension made her stomach hurt. “Why?”

His gaze darted to the rearview mirror. “That car a quarter mile back’s been with us for the last few miles. I slow down, speed up, no matter. He stays the same distance away.”

Over her shoulder, all she saw was a blur of lights. But she trusted him. “What do we do?”

“Take this exit and see what happens.” Luke whipped the Mustang into a narrow gap between a truck and a sedan just in time to take a quick right onto the off-ramp.

“Did it work?” Abby’s heart raced from the daredevil move.

“Can’t tell yet.” At the bottom of the off-ramp, Luke went right and pulled into a well-lit gas station nearby. He cut the engine by one of the pumps, keeping his eyes on the exit ramp. “You pump the gas.” He pulled his wallet from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.

Tamping down fear, Abby took money from the wallet and headed off to prepay the cashier. When she returned, she found Luke rummaging through the trunk.

“Did they follow us?” She unscrewed the cover of the Mustang’s gas tank.

“Not sure.” He closed the trunk. In his left hand, he held a small gray device with red lights at the top. One light was lit up. He showed it to her. “See that light? There’s a GPS tracking device within a twenty-five-foot radius.”

There were no other cars at the gas station, and the road was at least forty feet away. “Does your car have GPS?”

He shook his head. “I never wanted it used against me. Do you have a GPS tag on any of Stevie’s stuff?”

“I don’t let him out of my sight except to take him to Mrs. Tamburello’s while I’m working.” She returned the gas nozzle to the pump, her mind racing. “You know, I don’t know how long those men were in my apartment—”

Luke opened the driver’s door of the Mustang and shoved back the driver’s seat. Hearing Stevie’s soft whimper, she raced around to the passenger door. “What are you doing?” she demanded, glaring at Luke across the backseat.

Luke’s expression of horror was almost comical. “God, I’m sorry—I wasn’t—” He laid his hand on Stevie’s head, stroking his damp curls. “Sorry about wakin’ you up there, Little Bit.”

Stevie’s snuffling subsided. “Firsty.”

“You’re thirsty, huh?” He glanced at Abby.

“I’ll get him an apple juice.” She ran to the food mart, grabbed an apple juice from one of the coolers and added it to the gas purchase. Back at the car, Luke stood by the driver’s side door, Stevie cradled in his arms. Abby faltered, her heart stuttering at the sight of Luke’s big, muscular arms wrapped around their son.

She was going to have to tell him the truth. Soon.

Luke’s gaze locked with hers as she reached the Mustang. He held up a black device a little smaller than a credit card. “Found it inside Mr. Hoppy.” He nodded toward the small animatronic stuffed rabbit sitting on the roof of the car, its ears still wiggling and nose twitching. “Inside the pouch where the batteries are. I guess they put it there when they trashed your house.”

Her heart lurched. “So they know where we are.”

He nodded. “No wonder they didn’t risk a wreck to follow us off the interstate. They can pick us up wherever we go.”

“Throw it away!” The sensation of being watched made her skin crawl.

Luke shook his head. “I have a better idea.”

THE BUDGET ARMS MOTEL was the sort of nondescript, vaguely shabby motel a motorist could find near almost any major interstate exit. Walk-ins were welcome if there were vacancies, and some of the places didn’t even require identification as long as you could pay cash up front for the room. The only amenities would be basic cable and local phone service, if that.

Luke had stayed in worse places.

Abby, apparently, had not, judging by the look of horror on her face when Luke pulled into the motel parking lot.

“This is your better idea?”

“Wait here,” he said, parking in front of the motel office. As Abby started to protest, he leaned toward her, cupping her chin in his palm. “Trust me, Abs. I know what I’m doing.”

He could see the struggle in her blue-eyed gaze, but her expression finally cleared and she gave a little nod.

He handed her the keys before he got out. “Any sign of trouble and you get the hell out of here, understand me? Just go. I’ve got the tracker, so they can’t find you that way.”

She nodded again, worry flooding back into her eyes.

He pocketed the GPS tracker as he got out of the Mustang and headed up the uneven concrete walk to the office. Inside he found a dark-haired man reading a bodybuilding magazine. He looked up with a hint of annoyance as Luke entered.