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Tonight, his only promise was to himself.

Slowly he stepped forward into the patch of moonlight that swathed the little clearing. He waited, muscles tensed, willing her to look toward him again. Why? Why not just call out and let her know he was here?

The answer was a cold whisper inside his head.

Because he wanted to see what she did when she saw him. Would she run to him? Throw herself into his arms? If she did—God, if she did…

But she didn’t.

Her reaction was like a kick in the gut.

Her eyes widened. Her lips parted on a little exclamation of surprise. She flung one arm across her breasts, the other over her feminine delta in an age-old gesture of modesty.

He knew damned well it was reflex action and nothing more, knew he had all the answers he needed… the answers he hadn’t wanted.

“No,” she said.

He couldn’t hear the word but he could see her mouth form it. “No,” she said again, and Matthew felt the swift rush of adrenaline as it coursed through his body.

His lips drew back in a predator’s smile. He toed off his running shoes, pulled his shirt over his head, unzipped his trousers and stepped free of them.

Stood still, letting her see the full measure of his arousal.

Then he dove cleanly into the dark jungle pool and went for her.

CHAPTER ONE

Cartagena, Colombia, two weeks earlier:

MATTHEW KNIGHT sat at a table outside the Café Esmerelda, drinking a bottle of Colombian cerveza and wondering what in hell he was doing in Cartagena.

Years ago, in what he sometimes thought of as a different life, he’d left here and vowed he’d never return.

He’d even been in this café before, at this table, probably in the same goddamned chair, his back to the wall and his eyes sweeping the busy square, trying to spot trouble before it bit him in the butt.

Old habits died hard. So did memories that drove you from sleep in the middle of the night.

Better not to think about that now.

It was hot but then, it had always been hot in Cartagena. You came down to it, nothing had changed. The smells, the traffic. Even the crowd jamming the square. Soldados and policia, touristas loaded down with enough jewelry, wallets and cell phones to keep the pickpockets happy…

A man had to watch his ass in Cartagena.

He’d known that the first time. He’d thought he was pretty good at it, too, but if he had been good at it—if he had been—

Damn it, he wasn’t going there. The past was dead.

So was Alita.

Matthew drained the last cold drop of beer from the bottle.

He was here now as a civilian, not as an operative of an agency where black was white and white was black and nothing was ever meant to be what it seemed.

And, at thirty-one, he had the world by the balls.

He was in his prime, a hard-bodied six-foot-four-inches with the chiseled bone-structure of his half-Comanche mother and the emerald-green eyes of his Texan father. A razor-thin scar angled across one high cheekbone, a souvenir of a winter night in Moscow when a Chechnyian insurgent had tried to kill him.

Women went crazy for that scar. “It makes you look so dangerous,” a little blonde had whispered to him just a few nights ago, and he’d rolled her beneath him and, to her delight, showed her just how dangerous he could be.