ground rushing up to meet him, not that that helped much because he had a helluva imagination, and could picture it just fine.
The wind doubled its efforts to loosen his hold, blinding him with debris. All he could do was hold on and pray for mercy as he lowered himself, even though praying had never really worked for him.
When his feet finally touched ground, he inhaled a deep breath and nearly kissed the damn tree trunk. Instead, he drew his gun and backed to the wall of the barn. Just to his left was a window, boarded and taped, and yet he’d swear he saw a quick flash of light from within.
Someone was definitely inside.
Watkins?
Or his very secretive bomb maker?
The radio was still eerily silent, and foreboding crept up through his veins as he slipped the night-vision goggles back over his eyes and turned the corner of the barn. There his gaze landed on a door low to the ground—a cellar entrance. Before he could try the radio again, the door flipped open, catching the wind and hitting the barn wall like a bullet.
A man crawled out, silhouetted by stacks of ammo behind him, and piles of guns, rifles, awfully similar to the ones that had been stolen from beneath his nose. Apparently the Kiddie Bombers liked to be armed. With ATF-confiscated weapons. Hawk steadied his gun and waited for the rogue agent to reveal himself.
The man’s head lifted and all Hawk’s suspicions were immediately confirmed. Gaines.
He managed to get a shot off, then a white-hot blast knocked him flat on his ass.
2
THE BASTARD HAD shot him, point blank, and given that it felt like his lungs had collapsed, he assumed he’d taken the hit in his chest. God bless the bulletproof vest. Stunned, gasping for air, he tried to remain conscious, but his vision had already faded on the edges and was closing in as he lay on his back, staring up at the night sky as a whole new kind of hurt made itself at home in every corner of his body….
“Hawk? Check in,” Abby said in his ear.
Check in? He felt like he was checking out…. But the radio was back, good to know, and man, did she sound hot. Too bad he was floating…floating on agony, thank you very much, and utterly unable to move.
Or speak.
“Hawk.”
Ah, wasn’t that sweet? She sounded worried. He was touched, or would have been if he could get past the searing pain. He needed to get up, to protect himself—
A foot planted itself on his throat, and then the fire in his body sizzled along with his vision as his air supply was abruptly cut off.
By Gaines. Regional director.
Traitor.
Hawk tried to lift one of his arms to grasp at the foot on his windpipe.
“Don’t bother.” Gaines pressed harder. “You’ll be dead soon, anyway. I just wanted you to suffer a little first, you know, for screwing with me for so long.”
Hawk found himself shockingly helpless, an absolutely new and unenjoyable experience. He simply couldn’t draw air, and good Christ but he felt like his chest was burning.
“Hurts like a mother, doesn’t it?”
What hurt the most was that he couldn’t remember if he’d managed to spit out Gaines’s name before he’d gone down. In case this all went to shit, he wanted Logan to know they’d been right. That is, if the radio was even back up. “Logan—”
“Sorry. It’s going to be a tragic evening all around. You’re both going to die trying to double-cross the agency.”
Through a haze of agony as he choked on his very last breath, he realized he was still gripping his gun. Now if only he could get the muscles in his arm to raise it. As he struggled, he heard everyone checking in.
Watkins.
Thomas.
Logan. Thank God, Logan.
Any second now they’d realize Hawk hadn’t checked in as well.
That he couldn’t…
“HAWK? COME IN, HAWK.” Abby said this with what she felt was admirable calm, even as a bead of sweat ran between her breasts. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t just that their equipment had failed—even the backup equipment—for five long minutes.
“I don’t see him,” Thomas radioed.
“Me either.” This from Watkins.
“I’m going back up to the roof,” Logan responded. “Maybe he never got down.”
She expected Hawk to jump in here with laughter in his voice to say that everything was good. But he didn’t. Oh, God. She needed to sit down. For several months. Because he would not joke, not at a time like this. He might be surprisingly laid-back and easygoing considering the constant, nonstop danger the job put him in, but he knew protocol. He’d been a soldier, Special Forces. He lived by the rules, and to her knowledge, always followed them. “Hawk.”
When he still didn’t answer, she visualized him. Her therapist had taught her that picturing the cause of her grievance helped.
Of course her therapist had meant the men who’d taken her hostage, but the idea behind it was the same. Hoping it would work, she concentrated on the image of Conner Hawk.
It took embarrassingly little time—like one-point-two seconds. He came to her shirtless, which she didn’t—shouldn’t—speculate about. The only time she’d ever seen him that way had been six months ago, on her first day. He and Logan had spent hours lying beneath a truck in the broiling hot sun, surveying a house. After the arrests, Hawk had come into the office for a change of clothing he kept in his locker.
Abby had been sitting at a table in the employee room eating lunch, her fork raised halfway to her mouth, her salad forgotten as he’d stalked past, eyes tired, several days worth of growth on his lean jaw, sunglasses shoved up to the top of his head. He’d ripped off his sweaty shirt and stood there in nothing but jeans riding dangerously low on his hips as he and Logan laughed about something while he fought with his locker door.
Ever since the hostage situation, her therapist had been promising her that her physical desire for men would eventually return, probably when she least expected it. She’d traveled a bit, visited her parents and sister in Florida, where they’d busily set her up on all the blind dates she’d allow, and yet nothing had really taken. But sitting there in that room, it had not only returned, it came back with bells and whistles.
Holy smokes.
Conner Hawk had it going on.
Unable to help herself, she’d continued to stare at him, soaking in his tanned, sinewy chest, the tattoo, the various scars that spoke of how many years he’d been doing the hero thing. His jeans had a hole in one knee and another on the opposite thigh, exposing more lean flesh.
Then he’d glanced over and caught her staring.
