Читать книгу The Perfect Target - Jenna Mills, Jenna Mills - Страница 11

For the first time since they’d met alongside the ocean, Mr. Confident didn’t look quite so sure of himself. He stood unmoving, his midnight eyes wild, his mouth a hard line. Even the shadow against his jaw seemed darker. He stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, arms at his side, hands curled into semifists.

He looked like a man ready to pounce.

The breath stalled in Miranda’s throat. She’d only been playing him, testing him, gauging his competence. She hadn’t expected him to react so strongly. She hadn’t expected the air in the small dank room to thicken, her heart to start hammering.

“Who am I?” he asked in a chillingly soft voice. “Who do I work for? What do I want?”

Her mouth went dry. Suddenly, she wasn’t quite so sure herself. “You tell me.”

“I already have. I’m the man who’s not going to let anyone hurt you.”

The take-no-prisoners words curled though her like an ominous mist rolling in from the ocean. She held his inscrutable gaze a moment, then glanced at the nasty scar slashed across his throat, then over to the briefcase he’d finally set down.

“You’re the backup,” she said.

“Backup?” He spoke slowly. Quietly. “Backup for what?”

“Not what, but who. My father. He’s a very careful man. He knew I’d try to give Hawk the slip the second I saw him, so he sent a backup.” The mere thought caused her chest to tighten. Betrayal slashed brutally. She’d believed her father this time. She’d believed that for the first time in eleven years, he was willing to let her live her own life.

Now she knew everything had been staged, just like so many times before. Hawk was probably throwing back a cold one somewhere, congratulating himself on a job well done, indifferent to the trauma he’d caused.

Just like he’d done with Elizabeth.

“You casually come on to me, then I see Hawk, run, shots are fired, and voila, there you are, ready for me to run gratefully into your arms.”

Like a perfect little puppet.

Over the years, she’d become adept at sniffing out her father’s security drills, but she hadn’t seen this one coming. She’d been too intrigued by the man with the penetrating eyes and flattering words.

Humiliation left a bitter taste in her mouth.

But Sandro didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t frowning anymore, wasn’t glowering, didn’t look like a warrior primed for battle. A purely male smile curved the mouth Miranda found entirely too erotic for a face of such hard lines and sharp planes.

“You were already in my arms,” he reminded.

Miranda narrowed her eyes, wondering where the commando had gone and half wishing he would return. At least she knew how to defend herself against him.

“Your hands, not your arms,” she corrected tartly. “There’s a difference.”

“Not always,” he said, “but we’ll save that nuance for another time. Right now I’m more interested in knowing why your father would expect you to run from someone assigned to protect you.”

Miranda stiffened. With skillful precision Sandro was steering the conversation down a path she had no desire to travel.

“It’s not like that,” she defended, but knew he wouldn’t understand.

“Then tell me how it is.”

An emotion she didn’t understand tangled through her. She couldn’t summon one single memory of any of her father’s men asking her opinion on anything. Ever.

“I’m just…tired,” she admitted, and with the words, the fight drained out of her. Weariness took over, a bone-deep fatigue sharpened by the chase through back alleys and the unexpected kiss, the battle of wills, the long walk to the abandoned villa. She slid down against the wall and sat on the pathetic excuse for a sleeping bag, pulling her knees to her chest as she did so.

The family net had closed around her once again.

“I thought for once I was…free,” she said, surprised by her candor. She and Hawk had rarely spoken, certainly not about anything personal. Of course, she’d never had any desire to confide in the smooth-talking yes-man who’d almost shattered her sister’s life, and he’d never regarded her as more than an escape from the mess his heartlessness had created.

He was ridiculously lucky her father had no idea what had really gone down between his perfect daughter and the hardened bodyguard he’d assigned to protect her.

Intimacy always carried a price.

But Sandro seemed different from the clowns her father usually sent to shadow Miranda’s every step. He seemed…more human. He seemed more real. And the way he looked at her, that dark gaze concentrated fully on her, loosened the tight flag of indifference she normally kept furled close.

“As Astrid, I could go places,” she told him with a smile her grandfather had called impish. The one her father called willful. For two months she’d been traveling the European countryside with her camera as her companion, capturing slices of a life she’d never known existed. “I could do and see things without worrying about attracting unwanted attention.”

Her smile faded, along with the sense of freedom she’d embraced only a few hours before.

“Now I realize these past weeks were just an illusion. I never left the Carrington fishbowl after all.” The sting of disappointment burned her throat. “He’s been watching me every step, hasn’t he? All his talk of trust and freedom was nothing but lies.”

Sandro frowned. “You don’t know that.”

But she did. Sandro with the machine-gun briefcase was living, breathing proof of that.

She looked at him standing in the hazy light creeping through the dirty window, but for a moment didn’t see the man who’d chased her through alleys or followed her father’s orders. She saw only the man who’d approached her alongside the ocean.

The picture you’re about to take. It’s all wrong.

Wrong? How so?

Because you’re not in it.

Her heart staggered. Moisture stung the backs of her eyes.

I see myself in the mirror every morning. I don’t need pictures of myself.

Then give it to me.

Now why would I do that?

So I can remember the way you look standing here, with the sun in your hair and the smile on your face.

Emotion swelled through her. She’d wanted him to be real, damn it. She’d wanted the moment to be real.

But like everything else in the Carrington world, the encounter had only been a carefully orchestrated means to an end. Just like her first drink. Her first kiss. Except those hadn’t been arranged by her father but, rather, pathetic scum who wanted to use the Carrington name as a meal ticket.

“Miranda?” Sandro asked, going down on one knee.

The gesture struck her as foolishly gallant. “I’m sorry he dragged you into this,” she said, forcing a smile and pushing to her feet.

“I’m tired and I’m hungry,” she added. “So why don’t you take me back to my hotel, so I can call my father and tell him I’m not interested in playing any more of his games.” If he insisted on having someone shadow her, she didn’t want the man to be Sandro. She couldn’t look at him without remembering the ray of anticipation she’d felt by the ocean. She couldn’t stay with him in a small room like this without remembering the way he’d made her feel for those first few minutes, that seductive sense of intrigue, the intoxicating glow of discovery.

If her father had to keep tabs on her, she’d rather Hawk or Aaron or any other of his yes-men, not this tall man with the midnight eyes and rough voice, who reminded her how foolish she’d been to hope, for even a few minutes, that she could have a life beyond the Carrington mystique.

Slowly, Sandro rose to his full height. “You think this is a game?”

“Not a game. A drill. A lesson. A powerplay.” Eleven years before, a tragic accident had forever changed the Carrington family. After burying his oldest daughter Kristina, her father had never left anything to chance, ever again.

Equal parts grief-stricken and naive, a seventeen-year-old Miranda had been unprepared for the measures Peter Carrington had implemented to protect his remaining children. Only months later, during her freshman year at Wellesley, she’d been horrified when the caring, considerate girl with whom she’d shared secrets, clothes and a dorm room turned out to be a female bodyguard, hired to keep an eye on her. Watch her. Report back to her father. Since then Miranda had become skilled at spotting his setups. It burned her that she hadn’t seen this one coming.

But then, never before had her father sent someone who looked like temptation and spoke like a poet.

“You’re not the first, you know,” she said, deliberately dismissing him. “Dad excels in orchestrating little security exercises to prove I need to be more careful.”

“Security exercises?”

“You know. Because of Kris. Friends that turn out to be federal agents, bouncers that turn out to be bodyguards. Once he arranged for a raid at a college bar, just to prove that if he could find me drinking, so could the media or a kook.”

Sandro swore under his breath. “You think the scene by the ocean was staged for your benefit?”

She lifted her chin. “Wasn’t it?”

“Bella,” he said in that hoarse voice of his, that seeped through her defenses like a smoky mist no matter how hard she worked to reinforce them, “I hate to shatter your illusions, but this isn’t a drill or a lesson. This is as real as it gets.” His gaze on hers, he lifted his hands to his chest, his fingers practically brutalizing the buttons of his black shirt.

Her heart started to hammer again, this time in a halting, irregular rhythm. “What are you doing?”

“Those shots back there were the real thing,” he said, his voice softer than before. Almost strained. Reaching the waistband of his pants, he shrugged out of the cotton shirt.

Miranda braced herself for the sight of darkly tanned flesh and hard muscle, but instead found herself staring at a thick gray vest.

A vest she instantly recognized.

“The man trying to hurt you was real,” Sandro continued, working the buckles and snaps of the familiar body armor. Impatience snapped through his voice. “And come morning,” he growled, dropping the heavy vest to the floor and turning his back to her, “this will be a real damn bruise.”

Shock cut through Miranda. She stared at the nasty green and purple already discoloring the center of a back otherwise magnificently perfect. His shoulders were broad, bronze, thickly muscled. They tapered to the center of his back, which in turn tapered perfectly to the waistband of his pants.

Perfect, that was, save for the nasty streaks of dark red.

Abruptly, she followed the trail of dried blood back to his shoulder, where a crust tried vainly to conceal blood still oozing from a nasty wound. “You’re bleeding.”

Sandro twisted around to look at his upper back. “Am I?” he asked, then grimaced. “Son of a bitch. No wonder my shoulder feels like it’s on fire.”

Deep inside, Miranda started to shake. The chill came next, starting in her heart and seeping through her blood. This man had risked his life for her. He’d been not only shot at, but shot.

Because of her.

“Here, let me,” she said, stepping closer. She lifted her hands to his back, not really knowing what she planned to do, but knowing she had to touch him. Help him. Very gently, she touched her fingertips to the heat of his flesh—

“Cristo!” he shouted, then continued in a language she didn’t understand.

She jerked back. “I’m sorry. I—”

“Your hands are like ice!”

And his skin was like fire. She stared at him, but the room started to revolve. The walls pushed closer. The air grew too thick to breathe. Thoughts and possibilities crashed around inside her like bullets in a mausoleum. Horror stabbed deep.

It was real. Everything that had gone down in the crowded marketplace had been authentic, not staged. The shots and the shouting. Hawk going down, then pulling himself back up, only to be mowed down again.

Dear God, Elizabeth. Her sister said she didn’t love Hawk, had never loved him, but Miranda had always believed—

“Miranda?”

She blinked rapidly, working desperately to bring Sandro’s face into focus. He was moving closer, his big body blocking out the meager light seeping through the window, until her world consisted only of him.

“If there was a th-threat, he should have told m-me,” she whispered in a voice she barely recognized as her own. “He should have warned m-me. T-told me about you.”

“Miranda—”

“I wouldn’t have been on the street like that,” she insisted, gazing up at him. She widened her eyes, imploring him to believe her. She’d seen how her sister’s death had shattered her family, would never do anything willingly to put them through that again. She wasn’t foolish. She didn’t have a death wish. She’d taken countless self-defense classes. Had a few tricks up her sleeve. “I would have been more careful.”

“Miranda.” Sandro took her shoulders in his hands and gave her a gentle squeeze. “Your father loves you,” he said softly but firmly. “He wants to keep you safe. Where’s the crime in that? If I hadn’t been there, don’t you realize where you would be right now? What could be happening to you?”

She did realize, that was the problem. If he hadn’t been there, she could be with the horrible man who’d killed Hawk—or dead. But in not warning her about the threat or telling her about Sandro, her father had left her equally vulnerable.

“What if you’d been shot somewhere besides your chest or back? What if I’d stabbed you? Then what would have happened? Both my bodyguards would have been down, and because my father chose an underhanded method of protecting me, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was really going on.”

Sandro lifted a hand to her face, his fingers skimming her cheekbone. “None of that happened. I have you now, and everything’s going to be okay.”

There was an unmistakable gentleness to his touch, a persuasiveness that sent an unwanted rush through her. “Why didn’t he warn me? Why didn’t he tell me about you?”

“Everything happened too fast. There wasn’t time for warnings.”

“He should have found a way!”

“Bella, bella, bella,” he said, his voice like velvet. “Are you always so tough? Do you always malign those trying to help you? Protect you?”

The softly spoken questions hit with unerring accuracy. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, ripping away from his touch. She needed to think, but couldn’t gather her thoughts when he stood so close she felt his every breath, his every heartbeat.

“Don’t you have something more important to do than psychoanalyze me?” she asked with a sharpness he didn’t deserve. “Like report back to my father?”

His expression darkened. “Actually,” he said, glancing at the nasty wound on his shoulder, “I do.”

Regret hit hard and fast. This man had been shot because of her, was bleeding. This man had put his body between her and a bullet. And here she stood, berating him because he willingly followed the orders she’d grown to despise.

“I’m sorry,” she said, appalled at her thoughtlessness. But when she started toward him, he lifted a hand to stop her.

“Don’t, bella. I can take care of this myself.”

“But I can help you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

She didn’t know what she heard in his voice, bitterness or resolve, maybe regret, but she recognized the look in his eyes, that hard, cold look of a man who didn’t allow others to interfere with his code of conduct.

“You’ve been shot,” she said.

“It’s only a flesh wound.” He turned from her then, reached for the body armor. “Bullet barely grazed me.”

“What are you doing?”

He fastened the vest around his upper body and retrieved his black shirt, wincing as he slid the wrinkled cotton over his injured shoulder. “This is wrong, bella. This isn’t how things were supposed to go down.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re not supposed to be with me,” he growled, and almost sounded pained. “There are things you don’t understand. Things I need to find out. What went down back there was a mistake. You’re right. I was the backup. I wasn’t supposed to end up with you. Hawk was. Now I’ve got to figure out what went wrong and what happens next.”

She watched him fight with little black buttons far too small for his fingers. “Why can’t we just go to the embassy?”

“Too risky,” he answered without hesitation. “Too public.”

“What if someone sees us?” she asked, glancing toward the window. Not much light made it through the grime and the overgrown foliage surrounding the villa, but beyond this secluded world, the sun shone brightly.

“No one will see us,” he said.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because we won’t be anywhere. You’ll be here, and I’ll be doing what I do best.”

Miranda just stared at him. “You’re leaving me?”

He strode toward the small window and peered outside. “You’ll be safer here than out there with me.”

She hugged her arms around her middle, not wanting to be left alone, but unaccustomed to asking one of her father’s men for anything. “What if you don’t come back?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

But what if it does? she wanted to ask, but the words jammed in her throat. He was hiding something, she realized with cold certainty. Holding something back. It was there in his eyes, an edgy, unsettled look, like he wasn’t quite sure what he’d find when he turned the corner.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

He picked up his briefcase. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Nothing I need to worry about?” She crossed to him and took hold of his forearm. “A man shoots at me and my bodyguard goes down, then I’m dragged through alleys to some abandoned old house and led through a secret passageway to a room that looks more like a jail cell and you tell me not to worry about it?”

His lips twitched. “You do have a way with words, bella.” He glanced at the black-banded watch around his wrist. “Give me an hour, two tops. When I get back, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Until then, I need you to try and relax.”

“Sandro—”

He took her hand and led her to the door. “Here,” he said, pressing a metal object into her hand. “This lock works both ways. When you hear me turn it from the other side, I want you to do the same.”

She looked at the small silver key in her palm. He was trusting her, she realized. He was giving her a small measure of freedom, of respect, just like when he’d given her back her grandfather’s knife.

Beware of strangers bearing gifts, she’d always heard.

“How do you know I’ll let you back in when you return?” she asked softly.

“I don’t.”

Surprised, she looked up, just in time to be blinded by his smile.

“I’ll have food, clean blankets, and flashlights,” he said matter-of-factly. “If you’d prefer to spend the night hungry, cold and in the dark, that’s your decision.” He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a small black device, which he pressed into her palm, as well. “If anything happens, if you hear anything, if you get frightened for any reason, push this button, and I’ll be back before you can catch your breath.”

Her throat tightened. God help her, she wanted to believe him. “When I’m scared, I breathe pretty fast,” she said with a small smile.

His expression gentled. “There’s no need to be scared.” Reaching down to the bottom of his pant leg, he came back up with a sleek black semiautomatic. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”

He had no way of knowing how many memories a simple question could unearth, memories that tumbled hard and fast, of long afternoons spent at the shooting range, determined to prove to her father that she could take care of herself.

He’d been furious when a tabloid photographer had found her instead, splashing her photo over the cover, along with a headline that insinuated she didn’t trust the government to protect its own. “Yes.”

Sandro put the butt of the gun into her hand. “If anyone comes through that door besides me, shoot.”

She swallowed hard. “You’re trusting me not to shoot you?” she tried to joke, but his expression remained grim.

“You’re a smart woman,” he said, lifting a hand to her face. An odd light glimmered in his midnight eyes. “I think you realize someone out there wants to hurt you. I also think you realize that as much as you don’t want to be with me, you want to be with him even less.”

And then he was gone. He didn’t give her time to protest or agree, simply let himself out the door, turned the lock, and headed down the stairs, until footsteps faded into silence, leaving only the ragged rhythm of her own breathing. She tried the door, desperately, vainly, but the lock wouldn’t budge.

She was alone in the small room, but Sandro’s presence lingered like a seductive mist. She inhaled deeply, drawing in not the scent of a villa abandoned to the fate of time, but of a man who’d stepped out of her dreams and into a nightmare she’d never imagined would come to pass.

Frowning, Miranda put her key to the lock, then wandered to the other side of the room, where she sat on the old sleeping bag, pulling the threadbare fabric around her legs, not at all sure why she’d suddenly become so cold.

Or why she wanted to have something of Sandro as close as possible.

The backup. Sweet Mary, she thought he worked for her father. The absurdity of it would have made him laugh, if the stakes hadn’t been so obscene. For now, Sandro figured, they were both better off if he let her continue believing the simple explanation.

His real identity didn’t matter, he reminded himself as he kept to the shadows and made his way back toward the resort community. The nature of his ultimate goal didn’t change the immediate objective. He had to keep the ambassador’s gypsy daughter away from the general’s men and arrange an exchange that didn’t jeopardize her life or his cover.

And he had to do it fast, he thought as he pulled his mobile phone from his belt.

“Cristo,” Javier swore a few minutes later. “Are you out of your mind? Taking the girl wasn’t part of the plan.”

Sandro glanced covertly around the alley where he’d stopped to call his ISA partner. “Tell me about it,” he muttered into the phone. He’d wanted to protect her, not take her. But obviously he’d been double-crossed. The informant who’d sold him the information about Miranda’s whereabouts had obviously had more than one buyer.

The question was who?

Regardless, Sandro was stuck with a complication he couldn’t afford. “I had no choice.”

“We all have choices,” Javier reminded.

“Yeah, you’re right. I could have left her for the shooter.” Just the thought had his blood running cold all over again.

“I would tell you to just leave her at the villa,” Javier mused, “call someone from the embassy and let them retrieve her, but there’s no telling who else is on Viktor’s payroll. But you can’t keep her either, amigo.”

“You think I don’t know that? But I can’t let her go right now. She’s safer with me than anywhere else.”

“Do you realize how insane that sounds?”

He did. “Javi, I need you to find out what happened to the bodyguard, Hawk.” If the poor bastard still lived, he might be Sandro’s best chance for a quick handoff.

“Consider it done,” Javier said, then lowered his voice. “But there’s something else you need to know first. Viktor knows you have her.”

Damn. Implications stabbed deep. In order to infiltrate his organization, Sandro had been working to win General Viktor Zhukov’s trust for close to a year. Turning the general’s coveted bargaining chip over to the United States government would destroy Sandro’s credibility. Countless lives, including his own and Javi’s, would be thrown into jeopardy.

“How the hell does he know already?”

“He’s got eyes and ears everywhere. He’s pleased and waiting for you to bring her in.”

Sandro leaned his head against the stone wall. His shoulder burned like a son of a bitch, he had an untrained, frustrated woman on his hands, a ruthless criminal on his heels, and now years’ worth of work threatened to blow up in his face. “Cristo.”

A hard sound broke from Javier’s throat. “I thought you might feel that way.”

“Get word to Omega,” Sandro said, thinking quickly. With international security on the line, arrangements needed to be made carefully. Discreetly. He could afford neither the risk to his cover nor the time of making plans himself. Calls could be traced, tapped, overheard. Any of those would be akin to signing his death warrant. There were appropriate channels and protocols, well-rehearsed methods designed to minimize risk.

Sandro’s job was to keep straddling that line. If the general caught so much as a whiff that Sandro was working to turn his prize over to the United States government, he was a dead man. This time for real.

And the carefully engineered plan to avenge eight operatives and bring the general to justice would be set back immeasurably.

“Tell Omega what’s going on,” he instructed. “Have him notify Ambassador Carrington.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“And I’ll await your call.”

Javier muttered something under his breath. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

Sandro frowned. “So do I.”

Javier Fernandez thumbed off his phone and threw a wad of cash on the small round table, quickly exiting the Stockholm café where he’d been grabbing a late lunch before Sandro’s call. He had to get back to his hotel room, make those calls and figure out how the hell he was going to extract his comrade from a potentially explosive debacle. And he had to do it fast.

“What’s the hurry, Fernandez?”

Javier glanced over his shoulder, realizing his mistake too late. Three men circled him. Three guns were trained on various parts of his body.

“I don’t think you’ll be taking care of anything, after all,” one of them said in broken English. “The girl is ours.”

“It’s me. Open up.”

Shuffling came from the other side of the door. “Sandro?”

“Expecting someone else?”

“How do I know you’re alone?”

He heard something in her voice, a fear and uncertainty that hadn’t been there before. Obviously, the time alone had allowed her imagination to kick into high gear.

“Sweetheart, I appreciate your caution, but you need to know something about me. I’m a trained professional. I’d die before I’d let someone follow me back here. Now open up.”

Nothing. Sandro put his hand to the door, wondering if he’d made a serious mistake by trusting her. But he’d had no choice. Giving trust was the best way to receive it in return.

More than anything, he needed her trust.

He waited, silently, patiently, until the lock clicked and the door opened. The ambassador’s gypsy daughter stood there, blond hair smoothed behind her ears, those fascinating green eyes darker than before, her expression somewhere between relief and alarm.

The sight damn near knocked the breath from his lungs.

Ignoring the reaction, trying to ignore her, Sandro strode into the small room and secured the door behind him. That morning, when he’d awakened in the old sleeping bag, the cramped quarters had seemed stale and dank, but after only a few hours of Miranda Carrington’s presence, everything seemed brighter, fresher, more welcoming. Like sunshine.