Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(41)
She glanced up to find his eyes half-lidded and sparkling. Then movement in her peripheral vision had her gaze once again darting down to his penis. Now the thing was fully engorged, standing almost vertical, and bouncing with every beat of his heart.
Her breath left her lungs in a whooshing rush and for a moment she thought she was going to have to physically reach up and, with thumbs and forefingers, force her eyeballs away from the sheer masculine beauty that was Carlos Soto in his gloriously aroused birthday suit. But after a bit of a struggle, she was able to direct her attention to the root beneath her feet.
“Come on now,” he teased as he stepped back into his boxer shorts. For the love of St. Christopher’s cane! Hurry up and get ’em on, already! She was about two seconds away from taking him up on that offer of pushing her back against the tree. And that would be so, so bad. For many reasons. “Surely you’re not shy after what we just did together.”
“I’m not shy.” She decided to play the logic card. It was the only thing she had in her deck that was worth anything. “I just think we shouldn’t press our luck. Let’s cross the Thai border, catch a ride with that extraction team, and then we can talk about…” what happened “…whatever.”
“Probably for the best.” His tone was amused. Although she didn’t lift her gaze from the pattern of brown bark winding beneath her black flats, she could hear him slipping on his pants and then hopping from the root to retrieve his jungle boots and holster. The subtle clanking sound of a jostled handgun told her he’d re-strapped the latter to his thigh. And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, she was able to draw a full breath.
She’d done it. She’d resisted him. And it was as if she’d run a marathon. She was completely and thoroughly depleted.
“You ready?” he asked.
No. Not in the slightest. “Of course.” She forced a smile.
“Good girl.”
God, why did he have to keep saying that?
*
“Tell me why you planted those bombs!” Dan thundered, slamming his hands down on the little circular table and glaring at the blubbering hotel maid with so much fire in his eyes Penni thought it was a wonder the woman’s hair didn’t ignite. Just whoosh! “Tell me how you knew which rooms to put ’em in!”
Penni curled her fingers under the seat of her chair as Dan’s voice echoed around the cramped storage space the hotel manager had allowed them to turn into an interrogation chamber. The hotel’s security director had called in sick to work, and the only surveillance footage the manager had known how to access was that from the elevators. But it had been enough. Because after spending a couple of hours combing through the previous day’s archived digital recordings, they happened to come across footage of a maid, the very maid seated across from them now, as she exited the elevators onto the twenty-third floor, their floor.
Under normal circumstances, this would not have been strange. But the Secret Service eschewed housekeeping services because number one, it was a breach in security, and number two, by their very nature they were a private, reclusive lot. And given both of those factors, upon arrival they’d made it abundantly clear to the hotel that there was to be no staff allowed on floor twenty-three.
And, okay, was it conceivable the maid had not been informed of that particular protocol? Hello? Of course, it was. Mistakes were always a possibility when the human factor was involved. But what were the odds she just happened to stumble onto their floor the one time all of them had been on duty while Abby gave her speech?
Most definitely slim to none, Penni figured. And Dan had wholeheartedly agreed. When they showed the footage to the hotel manager, and after yet another call from the U.S. State Department, the blubbering maid had been handed over to them, apron, wheeled cart, and all.
So here she was. The culprit. The fiend. The monster. This small, slightly pudgy, middle-aged woman with her hair twisted up in a bun was the whole reason Penni could barely breathe for the crush of sorrow and guilt. This weeping, wailing, dark-skinned stranger had taken the lives of Penni’s friends and colleagues with nothing more than a universal room key, a set of cheap timers, a few pounds of accelerant and shrapnel, and some duct tape. Uh-huh, Penni had taken a peek at what remained of the incendiary devices, and though she was no expert, she could tell they’d been rudimentary.
And effective…just as Dan had said. Mad, mad effective. Christ on the cross!
“Tell me!” Dan demanded again.
The woman just sat there bawling her eyes out and shaking her head.
“Check her cart,” Dan grumbled, tipping his chin toward the wheeled contraption. “Maybe there’s something in there that’ll help loosen her tongue.”
Penni figured that fell under the heading of Yeah, right. “Dollars to doughnuts she was smart enough to clean out any evidence before she started today’s shift,” she said. Then, “But what the hey, it’s worth a try.”
Standing, she walked to the cart. Ignoring the weighty lethargy of her tired limbs, she dug through various cleaning apparatuses and dirty room service breakfast trays until she came to a half-used roll of duct tape. “Well, would you look at that? I guess I gave her too much credit, huh?”
And, oh! How she wanted to turn and hurl that roll of tape at the maid’s head. But by gritting her teeth so hard she was pretty sure she heard enamel crack, she managed to simply lift it and brandish it in front of the woman’s nose.