Dare Me (Take Me 2)

Damen knew all of this, given the research he’d conducted on Nikki. Naturally, from the beginning, he hadn’t wanted to believe she was working for a terrorist cell. He didn’t want to believe it now. And he was almost convinced it was true—he was almost certain she was innocent.

What he couldn’t piece together in his mind, however—what he couldn’t rationalize or resolve—was how the information he’d been hoping to intercept when he’d started this mission had ended up on her laptop.

If Nikki wasn’t working with terrorists, if she wasn’t an accomplice in any way… Why had Garcia targeted her and used her computer as the transportation method to smuggle the information out of Mexico City and into the States?

She could have used Kate or Jude for that, if Garcia’s primary intent was to get the data into someone’s hands in New York City in a timely fashion. It would have reached the intended destination quicker, since Kate and Jude had just been in the city, according to Damen’s sources.

In fact, any other mule, particularly within the terrorist network, could have been used to carry the information to its end point.

More interestingly, Damen ruminated over how Nikki hadn’t actually planned this trip to New York. It’d been spontaneously booked. At first, she’d been researching the Maldives.

Damen suspected—if he investigated this motive further—he would discover that, indeed, the Maldives was where her mother was spending the holidays.

He had to also concede that her reason for an impromptu journey to Switzerland was a highly valid one. Her job was to provide counseling to survivors, family members and first responders during times of crisis. She’d built an entire organization around these disaster-relief efforts and had “attached” herself to a specific search and rescue team. She wasn’t currently working with that particular outfit while taking what was supposed to have been a hiatus in Mexico City, but further research on Damen’s part had confirmed that she did know the leader of this alternate SAR group. He led a team that had already been dispatched to Switzerland, immediately following a horrific train wreck.

Damen couldn’t deny Nikki’s story checked out.

Granted, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have been provided some additional funding for her organization, or been offered some other invaluable incentive, if she’d agree to serve as a courier of the intel.

But, damn… As reactive as she was to Damen holding her computer in his hands while he sat right beside her…? Why would she ever willingly consent to allowing her laptop to be the vehicle that carried this sensitive information that others would potentially hunt down and take from her?

She wouldn’t.

That photo of Nikki and her husband on the screensaver had said it all, in Damen’s opinion.

There’d been a spark in Nikki’s eyes. In Conner’s as well. She’d been blissfully happy. And Damen believed her when she’d said all of the photos, letters and memories of their life together were contained on the hard drive.

She most definitely wouldn’t let this laptop out of her sight.

That actually worked to his advantage, in a respect, for it forewarned him of the imminent peril she was currently in.

The computer was being tracked. That meant Nikki was being tracked. Which put her in danger.

Knowing this made Damen infinitely more prepared to protect her.

In fact, he could very well have the upper hand on Garcia and her network. If they didn’t know Damen was sitting beside Nikki at this very moment, that he’d been tracking the device before it’d been activated and they’d subsequently become the trackers. They could merely be working under the assumption, at this point, that she’d been the one to inadvertently trigger the homing beacon.

Just her.

Not him.

It wasn’t a wholly likely scenario, of course. But he latched onto it for the moment, hoping he might have the element of surprise working in his favor.

Reaching for his phone, he contacted an ops assistant who coordinated logistics for Damen and a few other agents he worked in tandem with. He emailed instructions to set up the hotel suite with two bedrooms…disappointing though it was to have to request separate sleeping accommodations in this instance.

Then again…there was no way he was getting any closer to Nikki Kane than having the woman sit next to him on an airplane. For one, she still seethed beside him. Two, he was on an assignment, damn it—and it wasn’t to seduce her, he had to remind himself. It was to stop more bombings, more terrorist movements.

He tapped out additional directives as he made further arrangements, including adding his own security contingent to the top floor of the hotel he’d requested be booked for the next few days. Although he’d told Nikki he’d decipher what he could of the intel tonight, Damen already knew it would take the rest of the evening for the decoding alone to be completed. He wouldn’t be starting his work of processing the data until morning.

He also had to extend nanny duties for Mads.

Damn, he missed his niece. But a couple more days apart was unavoidable.

Now, the tricky part when it came to pulling off his mission in New York was in keeping Nikki Kane at the hotel until he was done. So that he could protect her—and so he could ensure she didn’t give him the slip, with her laptop tucked under her arm as she made a mad dash out the door or down the elevator.

The trickier part was in keeping her from interrupting or inadvertently corrupting or even deleting the data if she attempted to access her personal files and photos to upload them to a cloud environment or transfer them to a thumb drive.

This was a delicate state of affairs, for sure. A trifecta of sorts, when it came to downloading/decrypting the data, keeping Nikki safe…and keeping his hands off her.