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  He knew he had to be wholly focused every second of every minute of every hour, until the job was done. He raked his fingers through his hair, then brought his hand down and held it out level. Jesus. His hands were shaking.

  Thirty-five

  BLIKIESFONTEIN

  The only good thing about fellatio was that it gave a woman ultimate power over a man. When a man had his dick in a woman’s mouth, he was defenseless. But in some instances, Lisa Maki thought, resting her palms on the table behind her, that control had to be seasoned with necessity. A man with his head buried between your legs was almost as defenseless.

  She had Morales’s man exactly where she wanted him. She let him do his thing while she stared out of the dusty window. Waiting.

  She wasn’t good at waiting.

  The Black Rose had given her a second chance. A nod to her sterling reputation. But a second chance was all she’d get. How Black Rose had so much inside information, Lisa had no idea. Maybe when she completed this mission, the Black Rose would take her into her confidence. And maybe not.

  Lisa squeezed her thighs closed, trapping the man’s head close and holding him there. He made a muffled protest and used his palms to try to pry her knees apart so he could draw a breath. It didn’t work.

  “I repeat. When will your boss be here in Blikiesfontein?” she asked, checking her manicure, bored out of her mind.

  He made another muffled protest, tried to lift his head, or at least get up off his knees. She contracted her strong thigh muscles even harder. He subsided. Like a monkey with its hand in the jar, the idiot wouldn’t just close his mouth and release his prize to free himself. Jesus, men were like children.

  “Let’s try something else,” she told him, giving him a moment to lift his mouth off his target to gasp for air as she pulled her tote bag closer and started looking for an emery board.

  Like a starving man at a banquet, he forgot the momentary danger and went back down for more. Paradise was right under his greedy mouth, and he was too busy satisfying his greed to concentrate fully.

  “Members of the Black Rose,” she told him in a sultry voice, as she filed the rough edge off her thumbnail, “have killed your five friends.” They had, of course, killed considerably more than Morales’s five incompetents. There’d been a dozen people in the small burg who hadn’t wanted to give up their chicken-scrabble homes to her or her people.

  Honest to God. Sometimes it was so much easier to kill than to argue endlessly. No challenge, of course. No creativity needed. It’d been like shooting fish in a bowl.

  She inspected the rest of her nails then, satisfied, tossed the file back in her bag and glanced down at the dark head bobbing between her thighs. “José, I’m sure, is en route from London. When should I expect the pleasure of his company?”

  Her people, new people, were in place. A small select team. The Black Rose had sent her twenty-three men and women for this all-important job. It made her a little nervous that none of them had ever worked together before arriving in South Africa yesterday. It made her nervous not knowing the strength and weaknesses of her group.

  Unlike Morales, who enjoyed wielding his sick power with might, she used her smarts to make her point.

  Black Rose would be the most powerful, the most respected, the most feared terrorist group in the world. And she, Lisa Maki, would be right there near the top.

  Couldn’t be easier. It was like fucking taking candy from a baby. She stared out of the window. Where the fuck were they anyway? She’d been here for hours already, and she was bored, bored, bored.

  No point getting any closer until T-FLAC brought the girl and she’d done her thing. Now that thought gave her heart an excited kick start. She crossed her booted ankles across his back, digging in the sharp, black, five-inch heels. “One more chance, dickhead. When will José be here?” She knew damn well José would want to park his zealotous butt in this little no-nothing dust bunny of a town as he waited for someone else to get him in to his treasure.

  Soon to be the Black Rose’s treasure.

  What a fucking moron, to actually allow this to happen in the first place! The time for Mano del Dios time was over. Morales was too crazy, being afraid of God’s wrath, to be fully effective. She had no such problem.

  God didn’t bother her and she didn’t bother Him. A good arrangement, all in all.

  She almost laughed. Except this was no longer amusing, just annoying and time-consuming.

  Using her muscles like a vise, she started squeezing, effectively clamping his head and holding him inches away from what he craved. His hot, struggling breath rushed at her damp heat. “Last chance. When’s he coming?”

  “Fucking hell, honey, gimme a minute to come first, ’kay?”

  “One.” She tightened her ankles. Oops, her heel tore through the cloth of his shirt leaving a bloody gash down his back. He bucked at the pain. “Two—”

  “Okay, okay, fuck. Okay! He’ll be here first thing tomorrow. Please, baby, let me—”

  She tightened her knees, gripping harder, giving an expert twist, up and around from her powerful leg muscles. She loved the sound of a breaking neck. Almost like a chicken bone—but better.

  Thirty-six

  Taylor had never imagined spring in Africa.

  If anything, she’d pictured a blazing sun above parched, seared-brown vegetation. Or maybe green, junglelike foliage teeming with creepy crawlies and wild animals. Neither image fit with the reality she saw stretched on either side of the two-lane road they traveled several hours north of the cosmopolitan city of Johannesburg.

  Impressed in spite of herself, she’d observed the military precision of Hunt’s team as they mobilized for the trip. They were met at a private airport and driven to an industrial park on the outskirts of the city, where a dozen more members of the T-FLAC team waited with five fully equipped all-terrain vehicles. Within fifteen minutes the jeeps were loaded, everyone had their last-minute instructions from Hunt, and they were off.

  Now, several hours into the journey, the late afternoon sun beat down on their Land Rover and they hadn’t seen a house or a human for miles. She sat in the back with Hunt, who stayed in contact with the others through a lip mic.

  The driver—Piet Coetzee—was as tough-looking as a piece of jerky, and quite friendly. Of course, to these spy types she’d been meeting, quite friendly was a relative term, she thought with an inward smile. He’d actually greeted her and almost smiled when they were introduced. Coetzee was probably in his late forties, but with his tanned-leather skin, and with more salt than pepper in his military-short hair, he looked about sixty.

  Daan Viljoen, sitting up front in the passenger seat, was, Taylor was discovering, the usual manly man T-FLAC operative. Monosyllabic and focused. Short and wiry, with reddish-brown hair. Both men wore khaki . . . everything. Pants, shirts, hats. Very Out of Africa-ish.

  Other than their own convoy, there wasn’t another car in sight. On either side of the road, as far as the eye could see, spring-green grass gently waved in the breeze. It was dotted with thornbushes and the occasional gnarled and ancient-looking baobab tree. “Will we see any animals?” Taylor asked as they zoomed along the road.

  “Vasbyt. In about an hour,” Coetzee told her. “When the sun starts going down and it gets a bit cooler. Plenty of animals where we’re going.”

  She had no idea if he’d just called her a rude name or told her to wait. Both men had such heavy accents, it was hard to understand them when they deigned to speak. Scary, but she was starting to get used to the way these guys communicated in a sort of verbal shorthand, as if they were too busy to bother with complete sentences.

  “About sixty miles from here we’ll pass close by a waterhole. By the time we reach it, the animals will be coming down to drink. Here’s our turn,” Coetzee said, turning the wheel off the tarred road and into the long grass. The vehicle shuddered as he put it into four-wheel drive.

  Here’s our turn? There wasn’t a signpost or e
ven a rock indicating any sort of road or trail. Taylor glanced back to see the other vehicles following in precision formation. Her teeth snapped together as the jeep bounced and thumped along over hill and dale. She missed that nice comfy road.

  The incongruous sound of a fax machine hummed. She wasn’t surprised. These guys had lots of interesting toys.

  “Aerial photos,” Viljoen muttered, hand hovering over the paper coming out of a fax machine cleverly built into the console between the seats. He passed the first sheet back to Hunt.

  “Aerials confirm village head count, one hundred and sixty,” Hunt said into the mic, then proceeded to read off a string of numbers to his men as Viljoen passed him the fax pages.

  Taylor craned her neck and strained her eyes, looking for wildlife. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to one of the enormous conical mounds of dirt as they passed. There were hundreds of them, all over the place.

  “Termite mound,” Viljoen offered, in a vaguely British accent as he opened his window and lit a cigarette. “See how smooth is the sides? Elephants use them as scratching posts.”

  “Ag, man,” Coetzee groaned. “Don’t get him started—”

  “I don’t think we’re looking at the same thing.” Taylor peered back over her shoulder as they passed a mini mountain. “That thing is all of thirty feet tall.” And there were a lot of them.

  “Termites.” Viljoen, elbow on his open window, blew out a plume of pungent smoke. “We’s call them rysmeer—rice ants—around here, you know? But they’re termites. Very interesting. Inside is a hella complicated series of tunnels that—”

  Coetzee knocked Viljoen’s hat off into his lap. “Nobody cares, oke.”

  “I’m interested,” Taylor assured him as he grumbled and returned the felt hat to his head. But apparently Viljoen’s loquacious moment had been quelled. When he didn’t expound on the subject of termites any further, she went back to trying to spot wildlife in the long grass, or perhaps lurking in the shade of the wide, spreading thornbushes dotting the veldt.

  They passed through the tiny, dusty town of Blikiesfontein. Population twenty-seven. The road they were on was Main Street, and actually ran through the middle of town. It was no more than two rows of houses, a volunteer fire department, medical clinic, a bar, and a little grocery store. The only sign of life was a dusty red pickup truck parked in front of one of the houses, a big ginger and black cat sleeping bonelessly on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store, and a large black bird perched in a Stephen King–like way on the railing nearby. The brilliant sunshine wasn’t flattering to the little ghost town.

  “Used to be miner’s housing way back, you know?” Viljoen told Taylor as they drove through. “The Blikiesfontein mine played out back in ’74. Morales bought it from DeBeers in ’98 through a dummy company, which was incorporated through a succession of other dummy companies. Guy’s as slippery as shit.”

  Tension knotted the muscles in Taylor’s neck. A nice lion attack would get her mind off worrying that maybe she’d bitten off more than she could chew. What if she couldn’t get into this frigging mine of Morales’s? What then?

  She’d be responsible for killing everyone for miles around. Not to mention over a million innocent people in Las Vegas.

  “How many vehicles?” Hunt asked into the lip mic.

  Coetzee said, “Four, not counting the red bakkie. You?”

  “I only made three,” Viljoen said, clearly put out.

  Since all Taylor had seen—and she’d looked—was the red truck, she had no idea which town these guys had passed through.

  Hunt listened for a few moments. “I counted six, seven with the pickup. Not a surprise that he’s here. He’ll keep a low profile. For now.”

  Oh, great! No pressure here.

  Hunt gave her a reassuring smile. Her eyes were intensely blue, and filled with so much fear, Hunt felt it echo in his own gut. “You’re going to gnaw a hole in your lip if you keep doing that,” he said quietly.

  “What if I can’t do it?” she asked quietly. “What if we get there and I haven’t a clue?”

  I’ll breathe for a change, and happily put your sweet ass on a flight to Paradise, Hunt thought. Instead of voicing the concerns gnawing at him, he said calmly, “Then we’ll be no worse off than if you hadn’t come.”

  She swallowed, then resumed chewing her lower lip. “No offense, but we both know Francis doesn’t have the experience to do it.”

  Francis? Who the hell—ah, Frank Fisk. “My money’s on you. You’re the best, aren’t you?”

  “I’m the best,” Taylor told him fiercely, “because retrieving stolen articles for Consolidated Underwriters is a game. Nobody’s ever gotten hurt. It was fun. But this . . .” She waved at the bushveld as they passed. “People will die—millions of people will die if I don’t—if I can’t—”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Hunt cut her off. “Maybe you won’t be able to open whatever the hell it is we find when we get there. But you know what? No one on our team has a tenth of your skill. So at least with you here we have a shot, don’t we? A chance that you’ll know exactly how to do it, and because of that, perhaps nobody will have to die.”

  People would die. That was a given. Who, and how many, that was the question.

  Taylor gave him a steady look. “Do you really believe that?”

  Please God, Hunt prayed, keep Taylor safe. Because the answer wasn’t just no, but hell no. “Yes. I do.”

  She leaned over and brushed a kiss to his jaw. “I don’t either,” she whispered.

  The sun streamed into his side of the vehicle. Even with the air conditioner blasting, it was too hot to be this close. But Taylor turned Hunt’s face toward her with her cupped palm and softly kissed the grim set of his mouth.

  “I’m going to ace this one,” she told him firmly. “We’re going to find that thing in time, and the good guys will win.”

  He shifted to wrap an arm about her shoulders, then pulled her tightly into his side. It was like cozying up to a blast furnace. She rested her head on his shoulder. He nuzzled the crown of her head with his chin.

  Taylor stared out of the window, listening to the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear. He was deep in thought, and clearly those thoughts weren’t good. She wished she hadn’t had to worry him further by telling him of her concerns. But better he be prepared now. Just in case.

  Please, God, she prayed. Don’t let him get hurt.

  For the next hour, she alternately dozed against Hunt’s shoulder in the soporific heat or watched the countryside speed by beyond the windows. She was entranced by the grace and beauty of a small herd of deer—springbok, Viljoen told her—as they ran and jumped through the grass as if they had springs on their hooves.

  She thought she spotted an elephant in the distance, but it could’ve been one of the soft, fluffy wisps of gray clouds on the horizon. Knee-high grasses on gently undulating hills went on for mile after mile as far as the eye could see, the line of sight only broken by the amazing termite mounds and a few sparse trees.

  “There’s your lion,” Coetzee said, pointing to the right through his window.

  She looked, saw a tree . . . “Oh. Oh!” A pride of lions lay in the shade under one of the thorn trees. Three females with half a dozen adorable cubs, and a male, young one in his prime. As the vehicles passed within a hundred feet of them, the big animal rose, all coiled strength and rippling gold muscles, to guard his harem. The ruff of his tawny mane framed cunning yellow eyes, narrowed to slits as he watched their caravan. He opened his mouth—Lord, it was big—and roared.

  “He’s telling us to bugger off and leave his ladies alone,” Hunt interpreted.

  She put a hand on Coetzee’s shoulder. “Slow down. Please?”

  Then, riveted and craning her neck as they passed slowly, Taylor whispered, “My God, look at him. He’s absolutely magnificent. He must be at least eight or nine feet long. I had no idea . . .”

  She actually felt a weird little
clutch in her heart, seeing the animals. Not just because they were almost close enough to touch and were without the confidence-inspiring safety of zoo bars between them, but because of the incredible beauty of observing them here in their native habitat.

  No need for a camera to remember this moment. Without thinking, she reached out her hand to take Hunt’s, wanting to share the moment with him. His fingers curled around hers. Strong. Sure. Safe.

  Taylor’s heart skipped a hard beat. Then another. And another as their eyes met.

  Taylor didn’t know how to interpret the sensation that suddenly arced between them. It was wholly unfamiliar. Oh, God. She was in trouble here.

  Big, big trouble.

  The sensation was a heart-pounding mixture of delight and horror. The very last thing she wanted, damn it, or expected, was to fall in love. Especially with a man like Huntington St. John.

  Emotional attachments didn’t last; she knew that on the most basic level. She’d never been foolish enough to let a man get that close. Not Jörn, not even Daniel.

  She broke eye contact with difficulty, half terrified, half exhilarated. Her heart beat fast and her vision blurred as she turned to look blindly out of her window. How had this happened? When? Was it his swift action in ensuring Mandy’s safety, no questions asked? Oh, God. Perhaps it had been before that. When he’d held her head as she’d thrown up after the bad guys had gassed them? Hardly a romantic moment, and yet . . .

  Oh, God. Oh, God. She couldn’t be in love with this man. It was completely . . . improbable. Impossible. Insane.

  She vaguely heard the shsss of a can being opened. “Here.” Hunt thrust a cold soda into her hand. “What the hell happened? Suddenly you look pale as hell.”

  “Low blood sugar. Thanks.” She took a gulp, then held the cool metal to her forehead. Maybe she was misinterpreting the feeling? she thought a little hysterically. Maybe it was something as simple and uncomplicated as lust. Lust was okay. Lust was manageable. Lust did not rip out one’s heart.