“Miss Porter checked into one of the hotels on the beach,” Deke reported as he frowned down at the pocket PC he was tapping quickly into. “We tracked her down pretty fast. We lost Algeria Winters though. She was on a private flight off the island within hours of the hit the other night. She’s slick.”
Ian grunted.
Deke was able, a master at strategy and a hell of a gutter fighter.
“And we’re just now finding out Kira’s here?” he gritted out, stalking to his desk and planting his hands flat on the deep, glistening wood as he stared back at Deke. “Where the hell are these informants I’m paying good money for? Wasn’t her name on the fucking list?”
It was all he could do to keep his voice level, to rein in the need to pull at every hair in his head. Kira Porter had a habit of doing that to a man. She raised a man’s frustration level just by being in the same room with him.
For a moment, one flashing second, he remembered more than frustration though. He remembered slipping into her Atlanta condo, trapping her in her bed, and demanding to know just exactly what she was doing there living next door to a senator’s daughter who had been kidnapped two years before by Diego Fuentes.
He remembered waiting for an answer as his cock swelled beneath his jeans and visions of fucking her until she screamed his name had danced in his head. Those dreams still danced in his head. He was just smart enough to keep them under control. For now.
Damn it to hell. He didn’t need her here.
“I’m not hearing any answers,” he snarled. “Did I or did I not put her name on the list of those that I wanted to be notified if they arrived on the island?”
“You did.” Deke nodded. “Someone must have been sleeping on the job. She’s been here a week now, her and her bodyguard. Evidently her uncle owns some interest in a few of the hotels on the island and she’s here checking those out. I got the information on our way back from the buy. I don’t know why her name slipped past our informants.”
“Then maybe you should wake someone’s ass up,” he snapped, glaring at the other man furiously. “It’s your job to get this information and to make certain those well-paid little snitches stay on the ball.”
He dropped into the chair behind him, pushed his fingers wearily through his long dark blond hair, and glowered back at the other man.
Hell, this was just what he needed. He had a hard-on stiff enough to hammer nails.
He rubbed his hand over his cheek, grimacing at the rough day’s growth of beard and wondered why the hell he hadn’t just killed those damned Missern brothers rather than letting them go. Son of a bitch, he had known those two were going to betray him the minute the runner had arrived that afternoon changing the location of the buy. Not that either of the Missern twins had actually been there. Hell no. A highly trained team of assassins had been there instead, and one luscious little spy.
He should have put a bullet in both their heads and left them lying there after he wiped out that warehouse. He knew they had betrayed that buy to Sorrell, knew they were behind the information suddenly leaking to the French terrorist intent on taking over the cartel that Diego Fuentes had built.
If it were anyone else but a terrorist, he would have handed it to them on a silver platter rather than using what he was learning was considerable skill in deceit, treachery, and running drugs to keep the cartel growing in blood money.
But he was running out of time as well. If he didn’t have Sorrell’s identity soon, then there would be no way to counter the terrorist strike Ian and DHS knew Sorrell had planned against a major U.S. installation. Which one, they didn’t know. When and where, no one was certain. All Ian knew was that he had until the next month, because after that, it could happen any day.
He shook his head wearily. “Get out of here,” he ordered. “Catch a few hours’ sleep. We’ll be heading out tonight and we’ll need to be on our toes to deal with that one. She’s hell on wheels and damned hard to pin down.”
“She’s been hitting the clubs since she arrived as well, pretty much nightly, several a night and never the same one twice. Our guys at the clubs claim she watches the door for a few hours, sips at a drink, then leaves quietly. She’s been watching for you,” Deke reported.
Tonight she was going to find him.
He nodded abruptly at the information and waved toward the door, almost groaning at the need for sleep as Deke closed it behind him.
He felt like a man with a hangover and he knew he hadn’t had that particular pleasure for too many months now. And it was too early this morning to start drinking.
He stared around the room instead. The wide windows that caught the sun, shades partially drawn across them and spilling slanting rays of light onto the wood floors. The cream-colored walls, the heavy wood furniture. It was a masculine room. Two heavy, dark leather chairs sat in front of his desk; along the side of the room an overstuffed couch and two chairs were grouped around a coffee table. A bar at the far end and a plasma television on the wall close to his desk.
It wasn’t his office. The villa was leased, the grounds heavily patrolled, and the small island a haven from the estate in Colombia that had seemed to grate on his nerves worse by the day when he had been there.
Hell, he didn’t need this.
He ran his hands over his face once again and restrained another curse. Kira was a complication that he knew he should have anticipated. He had known a year ago that she could fuck his plans up royally.
Because he wanted her. He wanted her until the want burned in his guts. Until the hunger for her interfered with his ability to even take another woman.
He hadn’t had a woman since meeting up with Kira in Atlanta last year. Since he lay over her in the monstrous bed in her condo, felt her body conform to his, and her kiss burn into his soul.
He had been insane to kiss her at that point and he had known it. If it had stayed at a kiss, maybe he could have retained a measure of control. But now, he had to touch, taste sumptuous flesh and push to the edge before he pulled back in the gathering realization of where it was going.
If he had taken her that night, he never could have never walked away from her.
He shook the memory away at the sound of a brief knock, his head lifting as Deke stepped back into the office.
“I told you to get some rest, Deke,” he sighed.
They had existed on catnaps for most of the week, working to get the arms shipment in place on this tiny island and make certain that parts of it headed to Colombia in a timely fashion. The processing warehouses for the cocaine the Fuentes cartel dealt in was in too much danger from the forces looking to take over the business.