had died of a massive coronary less than a year after his daughter pinned on her wings, but she’d lived up to both his name and his reputation as a crack pilot. She’d spent four years inserting special-ops teams into particularly nasty spots all over the globe before leaving the military with the announced intention of opening her own charter service.
Unfortunately for her, Captain Moore’s smarts didn’t extend to her choice in men. According to OMEGA’s hastily assembled dossier, she’d fallen for a jerk by the name of Donald Carter and let him talk her into taking this boring, if highly lucrative, job as a contract pilot in Mexico while he did his thing in Malaysia. In recent months said jerk had reportedly been getting his rocks off with a Malaysian newswoman.
It didn’t take a NASA engineer to fit the pieces together. Obviously, Moore had just found out about her fiancé’s affair. Just as obviously, she’d gone to the beach last night determined to flush the bastard out of her system.
Devlin wished to hell he’d been able to help with the flushing. The woman looked even better in the bright light of day than she had in the glow of the moon, and she’d looked damned good then! Her zippered flight suit didn’t display her long, sexy legs the way her cutoffs had, but the tan fabric hugged her curves very nicely. Very nicely indeed. Devlin almost hated to depart for the oil rig.
Assuming he did depart. The issue looked doubtful at the moment, judging by the suspicion in Moore’s brown eyes.
“Jorge!” Her face tight, she called to a mechanic in grease-stained overalls. “Get our passengers briefed and strapped in. Devlin, you come with me.”
She shoved the clipboard at the crew chief and stalked toward the corrugated tin hangar. Devlin followed, eyeing her trim behind with real appreciation.
“In here.”
She led the way into an office with a beat-up metal desk, a single file cabinet and an ancient air conditioner rattling in the window. The walls were decorated with the usual clutter seen in operations shacks around the world. Weather updates. Flight schedules. Area NOTAMs. A fly-specked calendar depicting a luscious Miss May falling out of a blouse unbuttoned almost to her navel.
Devlin spared Miss May only a passing glance. Ms. Moore held his full attention. Her blunt-cut hair swirled in a silky arc as she slammed the door behind them and spun around.
The woman didn’t waste time. Spearing him with a narrow-eyed stare, she launched a direct attack. “What were you doing on the beach last night?”
Devlin had anticipated this meeting since learning Moore’s identity and had his cover ready. Luckily, it fit him like a second skin. Born and raised amid the oil fields of Oklahoma, he’d worked his way up from mud man to pipe handler to site supervisor. Along the way he’d accumulated undergraduate and graduate degrees in petroleum engineering and drilled holes in every ocean floor from the Gulf of Aden to the Bering Strait.
He’d also racked up a brief marriage and quick divorce. Candace had insisted his pay and benefits compensated for the long separations, but had soon gone looking for other distractions. Devlin didn’t blame her. Divorce was an occupational hazard in his line of work.
His life had become even more erratic after he’d joined the OMEGA team. Nick Jensen, aka Lightning, had recruited him just months after terrorists blew up an American-operated rig in international waters off the coast of Kuwait. Devlin had lost friends in that explosion and had jumped at the chance to use his civilian cover as a means of bringing the murdering bastards to justice.
Now another friend had disappeared. A close friend. And a real badass who specialized in transporting underage aliens across the border to sell into sexual slavery had been picked up while using Harry Johnson’s passport and ID. Law enforcement officials from a dozen different agencies had grilled the imposter but didn’t get much. Turned out he’d never met the man who’d supplied the stolen documents. They’d been left at a designated drop site after the recipient had deposited a hefty sum in the same location.
Nor had Harry’s body ever been recovered. All his fiancée knew, all anyone knew, was that Harry had disappeared after rotating off an AmMex oil rig, and someone using his passport had popped up on U.S. customs screens a few weeks later. What little intelligence OMEGA had been able to gather indicated the brains behind the ring supplying stolen passports operated out of this general vicinity. Devlin fully intended to nail the bastard. He wouldn’t let anyone—Captain Moore included—jeopardize this mission.
Hitching a hip on the desk, he responded to her sharp question with a deliberate combination of fact and fiction. “I went to the beach last night to meet someone.”
That part was true. What came next wasn’t.
“He said he had a onetime good deal for me on personal gear for use on the rig.”
“Why didn’t he come to your hotel in to conduct this sale?”
“My guess is he lifted the equipment from a roustabout, either on the rig or after he came off.”
That didn’t happen often, but it did happen. Rig crews hailed from just about every country on the planet. That made communication a distinct challenge. Their staggered rotations also presented opportunities for high-dollar tools and unsecured personal items to disappear.
Still suspicious, Moore tapped a booted toe. “So who fired the shots? This light-fingered entrepreneur?”
“Maybe. Or maybe the man he stole from. The shooter had departed the scene when I reached his victim.”
“This victim. Was he dead when you got to him?”
“He took a bullet between the eyes. You don’t get much deader than that.”
Her foot tapped the floor again. Once. Twice.
“You didn’t kill him,” she said, scowling. “I could have vouched for that. So why did you disappear?”
“I only arrived in Mexico with the replacement crew yesterday.” Another lie, followed by another truth. “But I’ve been around enough to know you don’t get mixed up in an incident like this unless you want to spend some not-so-quality time with the federales.”
“So you left me to do the explaining?”
The disdain in her eyes stung. Devlin deflected it with a shrug. “I went back to look for you. You had departed the scene, too.”
“Wrong! I ran up to my car to get my cell phone and call the police.”
He hooked an incredulous brow. “And you hung around to wait for them?”
“Someone had to.”
He let that pointed barb hang on the air for a moment before giving her a smile of genuine regret. “I have to admit, I had to think twice about leaving. If I’d stuck around, I might have gotten real lucky.”
The ploy worked. The reminder of her rash vow brought her chin up and a flush to her cheeks.
“Not hardly, Devlin. You’re not my type.”
“Best I recall, you didn’t specify a type last night.”
The pink in her cheeks deepened to brick. “Yeah, well, that was last night.”
He
