Thrill Ride (Black Knights Inc. #4)(9)

Head between your knees. Put your head between your knees…

She bent at the waist and grabbed the backs of her legs, pulling herself down in a long stretch that impeded the rapid contractions of her diaphragm and kept her from hyperventilating and passing out.

And wouldn’t that impress him? If I keeled over in a dead faint?

Um, no. The answer to that was a definite N.O.

She remained like that, doing her best impression of a human taco, for a couple of seconds, pressing her cheek to her kneecaps until the stars stopped spinning in front of her eyes, and then she straightened. In the dim circle of illumination cast by the flashlight, she could just make out Rock’s concerned frown.

“Y’okay?” he asked.

“Yes, I—” She raked in a calming breath, appalled to discover her entire body was shaking. So much for the whole hard-ass operator persona she’d been working on since starting at BKI. “I’m all right,” she finally managed.

“What did you think I was gonna do?”

“Oh, uh…” She bit her lip and squinted when he shined the light in her face.

“You actually thought I was gonna shoot you, didn’t you?”

“Stop shining that thing in my eyes,” she barked, holding a hand up in front of her face. It was a good excuse to one, hide her expression from him because she was so totally busted, and two, change the subject.

“Sonofabitch! You did!” His tone was incredulous. He spun around, stomping a few feet away. She blinked against the darkness—which was made even worse by the fact that she’d just had a flashlight directed in her eyes—and tracked his movements only by following the thin, bouncing beam of illumination. Then, suddenly, he had the thing aimed at her face, and she was blinded again. “So you believe all that stuff you’re hearing about me? You think I—”

“No,” she cut him off. Taking a step toward him, imploring him with outstretched hands. “I don’t believe it.”

He was silent for a long, pregnant moment. The chorus of frogs and the drone of nighttime insects struggled to fill the void, then, “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Rock, I—”

“Save it.”

She snapped her mouth shut. What more could she say? For a split second there, she had thought he was going to shoot her.

“You think you can keep up?” The question, so sudden and so far off topic, momentarily befuddled her.

“I—I’ve done okay so far, haven’t I?”

A resonant grunt was his only response. And then there wasn’t any time for words, because she was too busy trying to stay close to him and the light in his hand.

The darkness, that stygian, black abyss…It brought back too many memories.

She shivered and tripped over a large root. Flailing, she tried to keep her balance and failed. But before she oh-so-gracefully face-planted into the ground, he was there, grabbing her under her arms, hoisting her up against his solid chest.

And time came to a screeching halt.

It was like someone tipped the hourglass on its side and the grains of sand stopped falling. The sounds of the forest faded away. The oppressive humidity faded away. The unbearable darkness faded away. There was nothing but the two of them, locked in an embrace, faces inches apart, ragged breath mingling.

Kiss me.

The thought slid through her mind, unwelcome and startling. She knew it wasn’t right. Knew he wasn’t going to change his mind about what he could offer her. Knew she was only wasting her time hoping that he would. But right now, in this moment, that wasn’t really a moment at all since it was a brief instant out of time, she wanted to know what it was to hold him in her arms. To feel his passion, taste his essence, and share with him those same things in herself.

He bent just slightly, his full lips so close, his sweet breath so warm…

And then he set her away from him, pressing the penlight into her palm.

“You take the light,” he instructed. “Just make sure to shine it at my feet.”

With that, he turned away, and she was left with no recourse but to follow him on knees that’d turned to jelly.

***

“We think we’ve found him.”

Rwanda Don—that code name always elicited a smile—sat forward, hand tightening around the prepaid cell phone. “Where? How?”

“Costa Rica,” announced the CIA agent who’d been working on The Project since the beginning. A tickle of excitement trilled up R.D.’s spine. “And they did it by planting a radio frequency device on Vanessa Cordero. According to reports, she’s been in the Monteverde Cloud Forest for a few hours now, and the general consensus here is she wouldn’t be there unless she’d found him.”

Could it be? After all these months?

“Are they going in after him?”

“That’s the plan.” The agent’s voice sounded smug. And why shouldn’t it? They were very close to their ultimate goal of finally catching and/or killing Richard “Rock” Babineaux, assuring their secret—and illegal—activities over the last few years would forever be kept in the dark.

Let him get killed. Please, let him get killed.

Just the thought of the accusations Rock could make upon capture, and the possibility of the ensuing investigation, was enough to have R.D.’s stomach turning somersaults. Of course, even if someone did begin to investigate, it wasn’t as if they’d ever find anything.