Driven by Fire (Fire 2)

“Because he’s your brother. You’d know passwords he could use.”

“I don’t think I can help you.”

“Oh, I think you can. I have friends who can be very persuasive.”

Why did everyone want to hurt her? Jenny thought. How the hell had she gotten involved in this mess? It all led back to Billy and her father, two people who’d do nothing to ransom her from a militant army of thugs. Billy didn’t have the money, and her father simply didn’t care.

“How did you even know I had the smartphone?” She rose to her feet at Soledad’s gesture. She towered over the smaller woman, but even if Soledad hadn’t held a gun Jenny wouldn’t have made the mistake in thinking she could best her. All the watered-down martial arts training she’d gone through in her teens would be nothing against the determination of one small, vicious woman.

Soledad laughed. “How do you think? Your brother told me.”

Ryder was in a particularly foul mood, one he attributed to simple lust. After all he’d spent the night pressed up against a nubile female, one who interested him far too much, and he hadn’t done a damned thing about it. A case of blue balls would put anyone in a temper.

His life had gotten so fucking complicated since he’d met Ms. Jennifer Parker, Esquire. He wasn’t the kind of man who let women mess up his life, and Parker should have been nothing more than an inconvenience, one he could pass off to someone else, but from the very beginning he wasn’t letting anyone else near her. He was still furious with her about her lies, furious that she’d covered for her nasty li

ttle fuck of a brother, but he could understand. Reluctantly, of course, because he’d always made it a rule never to sympathize with the bad guys.

Parker didn’t quite qualify as a bad guy, no matter what she did. She was just a misguided optimist who thought she could save the world. Definitely not the woman for him—he knew the world was long past saving.

Why would he even think of that? There was no such thing as a woman for him—women screwed things up, complicated them, distracted men and got them killed. Women operatives were a different matter—the ones he’d known had been so cold-blooded they could probably mate and then bite their partner’s head off once they were done.

When it came right down to it, men were more susceptible. Once they were deluded into thinking they were in love, then all bets were off. He had little doubt that many of the Committee operatives, both in the US and in Europe, would toss a mission in favor of a woman’s life. He’d never make that mistake. Collateral damage was an ugly fact of life, and he wasn’t about to let some misguided streak of sentimentality get in the way of procuring that smartphone. She’d insisted on coming along—if she paid the ultimate price it wasn’t any skin off his ass.

“Yeah, and pigs fly,” he said out loud, disgusted with himself. “You are one sorry son of a bitch, Ryder.” So okay, he’d do his best to keep her alive. But if something happened to her, those were the dangers she’d signed on for. Once she’d covered up for her brother, let him escape the justice he deserved, she’d sealed her fate.

But even so, he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. He moved deeper into the jungle, every sense alert for signs of La Luz. His first stop this morning had been the cantina, and Rosario had been extremely helpful. She would have been more than happy to relieve him of his acute state of horniness, but he wasn’t tempted. No, Parker had gotten under his skin, and for some reason she was all he wanted right now. It was a temporary affliction—he’d get over it the moment they got back to the States, but all his commonsense lectures to his libido did absolutely nothing. If he’d ever possessed something as useless and vulnerable as a heart, it would have refused to listen, but he could imagine what another man, a better man might be feeling. He wouldn’t be off beating the bushes, leaving his woman alone and unprotected in an abandoned convent.

Good thing he wasn’t that man, good thing she wasn’t his woman. He didn’t believe in all that crap anyway—love was a trap at worst, a business arrangement at best. Parker would be lying in bed, sound asleep, dreaming about God knew what. Him again?

Well, tough shit. He had things to do. He needed to find some sign of the Guiding Light, and if that nagging feeling at the base of his skull weren’t so irritating, he wouldn’t give it a second thought.

But one reason he was still alive was because he knew things. His senses were so highly trained he knew instinctively when there was trouble.

Parker was nothing but trouble. He had work to do—he couldn’t be babysitting her on the slight chance that something was wrong.

He turned, looking back the way he’d come. The overgrown track made for tricky walking, and he could just imagine her going down in a heap, a victim of the wrong shoes or the wrong terrain.

And why the hell did he keep thinking of her when he had so many other things to do? He needed to forge on ahead, look for signs of La Luz, and ignore the uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Fifteen minutes later he gave in. She was perfectly fine, there were no more snakes, and La Luz was in a small town somewhere up the road. The most Parker was suffering from was boredom.

Hell, he was bored too. He’d drag her along with him, listening to her gripe—yeah, that was it. Because leaving her alone in the last outpost from hell wasn’t really an option.

He turned in his tracks, and a moment later he began to run.

Chapter Nineteen

Soledad hadn’t come alone. There were three large men in the hallway and another half dozen wandering around the place, turning things upside down. They’d bound her wrists in front of her with some kind of plastic tie, and it seemed as if Soledad took particular pleasure in hurting her. Jenny was more troubled by the gag and blindfold and her awful feeling of helplessness. A moment later she was shoved forward, stumbling her way toward some kind of vehicle, and then she was picked up and tossed into what she could only guess was the back of a truck. The hands that had thrown her had touched her between her legs, squeezed her breasts, much to the amusement of all the men, until a sharp command from Soledad silenced them. Not that Soledad had any interest in protecting her dignity, Jenny thought. She simply wanted them on the road.

Men climbed into the back of the truck around her, and she knew she was lying at their feet, no shoes, no bra, trussed like a rabbit and completely vulnerable. “Not yet,” Soledad had warned them, and Jenny had to put up only with the occasional kick that was far from accidental.

It was a long, bouncing drive, one that gave her plenty of time to berate herself for her epic stupidity. Why had she trusted Soledad? Why had she been so certain the woman had been an innocent victim of the traffickers? Ryder hadn’t believed her, and he was experienced in things like this, and yet Jenny had refused to listen, so certain her instincts were right. If she’d been this far off when it came to Soledad, what other mistakes had she made? Was her brother more than the foolish participant in something he didn’t understand, or had he lied to her? Why in the world would he tell Soledad that Jenny had the smartphone and put her in that kind of danger?

Billy had always been so sweet, unlike her older brothers, who could be as vicious as their father. Only Billy had still seemed to care about her, and she couldn’t give him up without a fight. Surely she couldn’t have been that wrong about both Soledad and her baby brother.

It seemed as if they drove for hours, though Jenny could tell by the feel of the hot sun overhead that it couldn’t have been that long. She should have been starving but she’d lost her appetite, the softly murmured threats from the soldiers convincing her she’d never want to eat again. Fortunately her Spanish was of the schoolgirl variety, and she didn’t understand half their nouns and verbs. She was pretty sure that was a blessing. If she had she might have panicked.

As it was, an almost unnatural calm settled over her. She had no more illusions about Soledad—the young woman would happily feed her to the sharks once she got what she wanted from Jenny. It was up to her to take as long as possible to unlock the phone, something that was going to be difficult. She wasn’t used to dissembling, and she’d been able to come up with Billy’s passwords when she first got the thing. The contents were incomprehensible—encrypted files, Excel spreadsheets, an address book full of code names. Unfortunately, all that probably made perfect sense to Soledad, and it must be important if they would go so far as to kidnap her.