Breaking Loose

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Costa del Rey

Suzi woke in the night to the sound of a river running. Lying calmly in a lavender-scented bed, she slowly opened her eyes.

She didn’t know where she was, but the sheets on the bed were white, and the pillows were soft. A stone fireplace on the far wall crackled and glowed, casting a soft, flickering light over the room.

The door to the outside was open, leading onto a moonlight-washed deck, and beyond the deck was the river she heard-a rippling chorus of running water, eddies, and the deeper pull of the river’s flow.

She’d been kidnapped in her underwear.

She could feel the soft organic undies perfectly in place, the same with Dax’s polo shirt.

She looked down at herself and felt a moment’s relief. She’d been kidnapped, rendered unconscious, and hauled off somewhere, but not molested, and nobody knew better than her what a miracle that was.

It had all happened unbelievably fast. One second, she’d been sitting at the table in the Posada Plaza, and in the next second, she’d been scooped and swooped. The last thing she remembered was being on the balcony at the hotel, being held very close against a rock-hard chest. She’d looked up, still holding her dinner fork, and… and something had happened.

She’d gasped.

She remembered now. Looking over the balcony railing, five floors up from the street, and suddenly realizing that they were going over the side-all of this in the space of a second or two. There had been that first initial sensation of being in free fall, and then nothing, until now.

Nobody could move that fast, could they?

And yet somebody had, somebody with a very expensive house.

She rolled her head a few inches, looking up at an open-beamed ceiling. Soft, subdued light spilled out of a door on the wall opposite the deck. She could see a marble floor and a pedestal sink, and thought there was probably a decadently large jetted tub to go with the sink.

Wow. Where was she?

She felt safe. Her instincts weren’t clamoring for her to leap up and get out.

Quite the opposite.

Her instincts were somnolent, unconcerned about her odd dilemma.

She let her gaze drift back to the fireplace-and in the space of a heartbeat, all those somnolent instincts went screaming into action. She froze in place, her pulse skyrocketing, her attention riveted by the shadowy figure sitting in the corner of the room, a man, his shoulders broad, his countenance very still-and she knew it was him, the man who had taken her from the Posada Plaza.

“You’re awake,” he said.

Very awake. Ultra awake. Her eyes wide open. Her heart pounding.

He leaned forward into the light of the fire, his hands clasped together, his elbows resting on his knees, and for one long, endless second after another, she barely breathed. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out.

Confusion warred with perception and kept winning, over and over again. What she was seeing was impossible. There wasn’t any way to comprehend him, the reality of him sitting in this room with her-John Thomas Chronopolous, J.T.

He rose from the chair, and if she’d had an ounce of strength, she would have leaped from the bed and run like hell-somewhere, anywhere. But she didn’t. Her limbs felt heavy.

“Don’t worry, cariño.” He walked with all the lazy grace of the superbly fit, no wasted movements, no “visual noise.” His strides were long, easy. “You’re tired, that’s all. Sleep tonight.” He stopped by the side of the bed and smoothed his hand around the side of her neck to the back of her head. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

She felt herself falling again, but it was sweet, a release of tension allowing her to drift back down into sleep.

Yes, sir, for a moment there at Vargas’s estate, things had been going completely Dax’s way, and the minute he’d stepped out of the library with Erich Warner, it had all gone to hell. They’d been at this “get the hell up the river” trip for-freaking-ever-and Dax was afraid he was going to start foaming at the mouth.

He felt pretty damn rabid, and Warner was starting to look like a deer in the headlights. This was his gig going down the drain. Hell, Dax didn’t even want to live forever, especially if he couldn’t save Suzi from Conroy Farrel.

Dax had been on completely FUBAR missions that had gone more smoothly than this. For starters, getting twenty armed drug runners onto a boat for an unplanned, middle-of-the-night sortie had taken an ungodly amount of time. Dax truly could have gotten his butt back into the city and down to the docks and stolen half a dozen boats and rented six more in the same amount of time-but that wouldn’t have done him a damn bit of good. He needed frickin’ Erich Warner with him, and Warner seemed to think he needed a small army to protect him.

He was going to need more than Vargas’s twenty goons if anything happened to Suzi-that’s all Dax could guarantee him.

All the time spent at Vargas’s, screwing around getting ready to go, Dax had been painfully aware that Suzi was up on the river somewhere, kidnapped and alone, and in her underwear-which was why his nerves had been sliding along a fine edge by the time they’d launched the mission in an honest-to-God gunboat with two squads’ worth of hardened criminals, no intel, the man he was taking to his death, and one psycho bitch who he swore was eyeballing him like tomorrow’s lunch.