Killer Countdown (Man on a Mission 6)

Shane shook his head. “Not exactly. As I told you, first let’s just say I’ve been asked not to talk about the attack. I promised Carly Edwards—”

Mike pointed to his laptop screen. “Tiger Shark? Her?”

“Yeah.” He envisioned her in his hospital room...then in his fantasies. “I promised her an exclusive if and when I went public with this information. And I always keep my promises.”

* * *

Carly settled into her first-class airplane seat on the red-eye flight to DC with a tiny sigh of satisfaction. She declined the offer of an alcoholic beverage and instead requested a bottle of water, which was quickly forthcoming. She sipped at it, then closed her eyes. As the plane took off, she let her mind replay everything that had happened over the past two days. High on the list was the scoop she’d managed, even though the police had seized her smartphone and the video she’d taken as evidence in the assassination attempt on the senator.

But even higher on the list was Senator Jones himself. Shane Jones. She could still see him confronting her this afternoon, a seething, very-pissed-off male. She was on the tall side for a woman, but he towered over her. And she would have bet her next exclusive there was not an ounce of fat anywhere on his body. A body that had sprawled protectively atop hers when the bullet had whizzed over them. At the time, she hadn’t focused on anything except her fortunate escape, but now she realized how good it had felt to be held in his strong arms. Safe. Secure. And unbelievably, that embrace had reminded her she was a woman and he was a man. An incredibly sexy man.

Stop thinking about his physical attributes, she told herself, frowning a little. But then she remembered those chocolate-brown eyes, and the way they and his mobile mouth could express a wide range of emotions, as they had in his hospital room. He’d been angry with her this afternoon—and all marine—but yesterday...yesterday he’d seemed human. Approachable. A wounded warrior trying to come to terms with a diagnosis that made a mockery of his seeming invulnerability.

She ran through the facts she knew about him—the ones she’d known for a while and the ones she’d researched yesterday after she’d cut the interview short—and tried to assemble them into a picture of the man.

Knowing he was a widower whose wife and unborn child had died at the hands of terrorists, explained that incredibly protective streak in him. Not just this afternoon, but five years ago, when he’d used his body to shield a pregnant woman from harm in a domestic terrorism incident outside a bookstore. He’d escaped injury this afternoon, but not back then. That’s when he’d sustained the TBI that most likely was the trigger for the seizures he was experiencing now.

Carly had still been in college when Shane’s pregnant wife had been kidnapped and murdered, but it had made the news at the time. She remembered it vividly, but she hadn’t known it was him. She hadn’t made the connection until she’d researched everything she could about the senator.

Wendy Jones, wife of a marine lieutenant stationed at the NATO headquarters in Belgium, had been abducted in broad daylight by a terrorist organization in retaliation for the arrest and conviction of three of its members, including its founder. And then executed in cold blood.

Carly had read with keen interest the interview he’d given his hometown newspaper shortly after the US Marine Corps had retired him due to the injuries he’d sustained that day five years ago. He’d made the Corps his home for so long it almost seemed a sacrilege to even think of “hanging up his spurs,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Shane Jones had explained to the reporter. “Twenty and out” had never been in his mind. He was a lifer. “Once a Marine, Always a Marine” wasn’t just a slogan used by former members of the US Marine Corps to distinguish themselves from lesser mortals, it had been his mantra.

Shane had been reticent, but the reporter had skillfully elicited the information that Shane was one of those rarities, a marine who’d enlisted in the Corps as a buck private and then had rapidly risen through the ranks. Not just as a noncommissioned officer—a noncom—but as a commissioned officer. Tapped at twenty-one for the Marine Corps Enlisted Commissioning Educational Program, the Corps had sent him to Officer Candidates School and then to college. Everything he was, everything he’d accomplished professionally, he owed to the Corps, he’d been quick to point out to the reporter, and he’d had no intention of reneging on the deal.