Cover Me (Elite Force 1)

If only he’d gotten it before, he could have rushed Andrea to medical help faster. That crucial hour could have given her full use of her arms, or even more.

He thumbed the pain building between his eyebrows. In control. In control.

Blinking away the red haze, he scanned his instrument panel. He did need to adjust his plans now that Rocha was on board along with Sunny Foster. Disposing of one female would have kept things cleaner and easier. But he wasn’t the kind of person to let a setback derail him.

Already he’d put together pieces of a world-changing event—anonymously. He was smarter than either of those two sappy lovebirds behind him.

Definitely smarter than the pansy-ass deputy who’d choked when it mattered most.

How hard was it to walk up a couple of flights of stairs and pop two people in their sleep? It wasn’t as if the guy hadn’t killed before. Except now Rand Smith was dead, and that had brought a crap-ton of attention from law enforcement with military resources at their disposal.

Now he was stuck cleaning up the mess. Having to deal with Sunny’s bulky military pal too made things a little trickier, but he could handle it. He tucked the lone parachute farther out of sight, tucking away the memory of jumps with Andrea before her accident. Change of plans, now that he had two passengers instead of one. Originally, he’d intended to parachute from the plane, leaving it programmed to fly into the side of a mountain. With so many aircraft in the skies, it wasn’t unusual for one to crash.

End of Sunny.

Enough time bought to complete his week’s work.

Mission accomplished.

But now he had to adjust that plan. He would go ahead and land on the island as Sunny and her pal expected. They could head off for their trek up the mountain.

Wade glanced at them in the mirror, their heads tucked together so obliviously. He had plenty of connections now in the spies he’d helped place. He would simply have one of his people stage an accident for Sunny and Wade later, on their way up the mountain.

The power plant explosion would go off on schedule—and his most high value terrorist yet would slip into the U.S. with enough of a payoff for him to slip the other way, right out of the country and into a life of luxury, tucked away in Europe.

Again, he checked the altitude, air speed, heading. And ahead of him, miles and miles of nothing. No cities. No lights. So few people lived out here, he could get away with anything.

He was in control. The beauty of smuggling so many terrorists into the country? He had untraceable people to call on at the drop of a hat. He preferred to steer clear of the fanatics, but at least they could be counted on to plow through to the end.

Even Sunny’s new special ops boyfriend wouldn’t stand a chance against the unlimited resources at Brett’s disposal.

***

Misty stifled a yawn behind her hand, the fading sun and warmth of the truck’s heater making her drowsy.

She couldn’t believe she was sitting in the front seat with Flynn again. It had been so long. Everything felt familiar in some ways. And in others? The differences were painfully apparent.

He passed the thermos of coffee over. “Need some caffeine?”

“Thanks, I think I do.” She took the metal cylinder, twisted off the cap, and poured herself half a cup. The rich java scent drifted up as she blew into the still-steaming drink. As she pursed her lips to blow again, she felt the weight of Flynn’s stare.

She looked over quickly. “Keep your eyes on the road, Flynn.”

“I want you to see what I’m saying.”

“You assume I want to know,” she snapped back.

“Then why aren’t you looking away?”

Oh crap. She pulled her gaze off the potency of his pale blue attention. She gulped down her coffee and struggled not to wince as it scalded her tongue.

Holding a conversation in the truck had been difficult all afternoon. Signing was tough one-handed, and even when he tried to spell out words, he kept having to reach for the wheel. Maybe if they had practice communicating, time to be comfortable with each other. He couldn’t turn fully toward her except when he stopped—not unless they wanted to risk sliding off the icy road and off a cliff drop. The dangerous curves in the roads and paths were all the more apparent in this nearly treeless landscape. Just ice and craggy angles.

Stark. Like her life.

Not for the first time, she wondered what her world would have been like if he hadn’t cheated—or if she’d forgiven him—even if she’d still lost her hearing. They would have settled into their own routine, their own unspoken ways of communicating. She likely would simply have slid over to the middle of the seat. She would have leaned against him, soaking up her last view of the Aleutian volcanic mountain where she’d lived for the past fifteen years.

She would miss the summer thaw, the kayaking, even walking across glaciers. Sunny had always reminisced about California vacations and the openness of their Iowa home. Their home before this isolation.