The Espionage Effect(79)
Not that I wasn’t glad to see him. I snuck a furtive glance at Anna, who’d been similarly waylaid by Miguel. They were bound in lip-lock, bodies pressed together, hands roaming as if no one else existed around them.
“Miguel insisted. Claimed he’d gone long enough without seeing his woman. I was in no condition to argue.”
Thoroughly confused about Alec’s plans with Escobar, yet unwilling to voice anything revealing within earshot of Miguel, Anna, and the rest of the dancing guests no matter how loud the music pumped, I furrowed my brow, attempting to harness a simple question. “Are you here for the night, then?”
He replied with a quick headshake. “No. Only a few minutes. We meet back at Escobar’s at 10:00 p.m.”
We: Alec and Miguel, two men thick as thieves, appearing to be friends to the two women they’d hooked up with. One a spy. The other…undetermined. I didn’t even know enough to place Miguel into a category of foe or friend—warn Anna or rejoice with her.
I frowned at the time limit. Couldn’t help it. Anna and I had been here for a couple of hours, and although the party seemed to be picking up speed, with the arrival of Alec, all I wanted to do was go somewhere private and curl up with him. Naked. Repeatedly.
No longer a product of the darkness I’d relegated myself to, I’d become someone who sought comfort from another. From him. I’d become more addicted to what he offered than I’d realized. And I understood the risk of wanting, of…loving. I’d had it cruelly ripped from me once before. But not one part of me cared about the risk.
I burrowed deeper into his embrace. On my heavy sigh, he eased back, touched a gentle finger under my chin, and lifted my face. He gazed down at me, his midnight eyes sparking with emotion. “I wanted to hold you again.”
My heart melted at his words and the tension in my body dissipated. In the face of danger, before heading out on a mission where every time could mean life or death for an agent, he wanted to see me. Hold me.
And in my newfound world of happiness, I gave him want he wanted.
Standing on the beach, amid a blur of bodies moving to music I no longer heard, I returned his embrace, tightening my arms around him—well aware that a moment was fleeting and we lived in a world that was ever-changing.
A choked-off scream curdled in my ear. Terror slammed into my chest, panic firing hot through my veins as I startled awake and jolted upright on the bed. Black-clothed figures towered in the darkness. One ripped my sister from my side.
She kicked, flailed her arms, but her puny size was no match for the hulking might of her captor. In the dim light, her panic-stricken eyes widened as her gaze collided into mine. Another man beside her stared hard at me, then her. My lungs burned, frozen in shock, before I released them to gasp in a lungful of air.
A ceiling fan whirled lazily overhead.
An air-conditioning vent blew cool air over my skin.
The muted roar of distant ocean waves crashed.
Wrong. All wrong.
Memories warped, transparently morphing, overlaid onto crisp reality.
A cloth suddenly slapped onto my face, hard pressure clamping down on my mouth, suffocating me. An arm banded around me from behind as I watched the man holding my sister back away from the darker shadows while her form went limp in his arms. Her silken black hair fell straight down over the man’s muscular arm, exposing her face.
My mind stuttered. Not my sister. Anna.
Renewed panic fired another shot of adrenaline hot and hard through my veins. I held my breath and kicked against the bed while jabbing an elbow backward. A low grunt and an angry growl ripped into my ear. The band around my ribcage tightened, restricting my ability to inhale, even as I fought the urge to.
When my head yanked backward, and the arm around my ribs jerked me up from the bed, the cloth over my mouth knocked loose, exposing part of my lips to cool air. Shooting my arms and legs wildly in every direction, fighting with everything I had to break free, gain leverage against something to push away from my attacker, I parted my lips on the open side, sucking in oxygen before I passed out.
But my captor retaliated with renewed force. When the cloth slid fully back into place, I screamed with what little air remained in my lungs, terrorized by the sight of Anna’s ragdoll body tossed over one man’s shoulder.
Through tear-blurred eyes, I barely made out the other man in front of me. He stared at me with indifference, watching until I finally succumbed and inhaled deeply through my nostrils, unable to stop my body’s automatic survival instinct to breathe. A heavy, sickly sweet odor assaulted my senses…familiar, but different.
Ether? That meant I still had time to fight. Yet my burning lungs gasped for a second deep breath. Then a third. And with every inhalation, my awareness faded as the chemical-soaked cloth made short work of disabling me. Had to be some kind of designer anesthesia.
Milliseconds of awareness remained as black dots speckled my vision, my lids dropped shut, and the last thing I heard was the sound of deep voices muttering incoherent…
“Welcome back, Miss Hill.”
A bass voice, thick with a Spanish accent, slithered into my ear. I shuddered, recoiling instinctively, jerking my face away from soft material while shoving my arms at whatever pressed against my entire front side.
The world rapidly spun. My left knee smacked against a hard surface, the right onto a thick cushion. I yelped as pain lanced through the one knee and my hands collapsed onto more soft padding. A wave of dizziness overcame me, and I sucked in air, pinching my eyes tighter shut. When the vertigo calmed to a degree, I exhaled slowly and shook my haze-filled head. Then I winced as pain hammered from inside my skull with an instant headache like none before.