blew out a breath and moved to her communications station.
Where for the first time, she hesitated. That in itself pissed her off. So a year ago she’d nearly died out in the field. She hadn’t. And she wasn’t going to this time, either. Shrugging off her nerves, Abby looked around and caught the long, assessing look Hawk shot her as he pulled on a flak vest. He was sharp, she’d give him that. Clearly, he sensed her hesitation, but hell if she’d let him see her sweat. She lifted her chin and sat down.
But if she was a good actress, then he was a great actor, because she had no idea what he was thinking behind that perpetually cynical gaze.
And she didn’t care. She was here for the job. She would remain in the van, in charge of communications, while the team made their way to the farmhouse, and then to the barn a half mile beyond that, where they’d execute the raid.
“There,” Watkins said to Hawk as he finished wiring him.
Hawk shrugged back into his shirt. “You fix the problem from the other day?” he asked.
Abby’s eyes had wandered again to Hawk’s body—bad eyes—but her ears pricked. “Problem?”
“Bad wire.” Watkins lifted a shoulder. “Happens.”
“It shouldn’t,” she said. “Make sure it doesn’t.”
Watkins nodded.
Hawk let his T-shirt fall over his abs, hiding the wires as his gaze again met hers. One eyebrow arched in the silent question: Were you staring at me?
No. No, she wasn’t. To prove it, she turned to her own equipment, trying not to remember the last time she’d been wired before a raid. Elliot Gaines, the head honcho, had done her up himself.
Of course he’d had a personal interest. They’d had a burgeoning friendship, at least on her part. For his part, he clearly wished for more, far more. In any case, he couldn’t have known how bad it would all go….
And it had gone extremely bad. One minute she’d been listening to Gaines’s quiet, authoritative voice in her ear, telling her she was doing great, just to hold her position while his team to the west “handled it,” and then the next, there’d been a 12-gauge shotgun to her temple and she’d been taken hostage.
Now, a year later, in another time and place, someone murmured something in a low voice that she couldn’t quite catch, and several of the men behind her laughed softly.
Releasing tension, she knew, most likely with an off-color joke that she didn’t want to hear. Living as a woman in a man’s world was nothing new, but she had to admit, tonight, it was grating on her nerves.
Granted, her nerves were already scraped raw just by being here, but that was no one’s fault but her own. Gaines had transferred her at her request after a leave of absence. She’d wanted to prove to herself that she could still do her job, that she hadn’t let the “incident” take anything from her.
But with damp palms and butterflies bouncing in her gut, she wondered if maybe she had more to overcome than she’d thought.
“Hey.”
With a start, Abby turned toward Hawk. He was geared up and ready to face the night, looking big, bad, tough and prepared for anything. She bet he didn’t have any butterflies.
The others were engaged in conversation, but Hawk stood close, looking at her as if he could see her anxiety. “Ready?”
That he could see her nervousness meant she didn’t have it nearly as together as she’d like. “Of course I’m ready.”
“Of course,” he repeated, but didn’t move. “Listen, I know you’re going to bite my head off for this, but I’m getting a weird vibe from you here, and—”
“I said I was fine.” She swiveled back to her computer to prove it.
“All right, then.” She could feel him watching her very closely. “You’re fine. I’m fine. We’re all fine.”
She heard him turn to follow the others out the door, and glanced back to watch the long-limbed ease that didn’t do a thing to hide the latent power just beneath the surface. Or the irritation.
Abby let out a rough breath. Damn it. He might be a hell of a charmer, but he was also a hell of an agent, and truth be told, she admired his work ethic even more than she secretly admired his body. And she wanted him to be able to admire her work ethic. “Hawk.”
He looked back, his broad shoulders blocking the night from view, but not the chill that danced in on an icy wind. “Yeah?”
“Watch yourself.”
A hint of a self-deprecating smile crossed his lips. “Thought you were doing that for me.”
She felt the heat rise to her face, but he’d caught her fair and square. His smile came slow and sure, and far too sexy for her comfort.
As he left, she let out a slow breath and fanned her face.
“DAMN, IT’S BUTT-ASS COLD out here.”
At Logan’s statement of the obvious, Hawk blew out a breath, which changed into a puff of fog before being whipped away by the cutting wind. The two of them lay on their bellies on the battered roof of the barn that had been pinpointed as a bomb-processing plant.
And yeah, it was butt-ass cold up here, but he was more focused on the fact that he was thirty feet above the ground without a safety rope, with the wind threatening to take him to the land of Oz.
Christ, he really hated heights.
Logan lowered his binoculars to blow on his hands. “Maybe we could do this thing before we freeze to the roof like a pair of Popsicles.”
Like Hawk, Logan was built with the capacity to do whatever, whenever. Tough as nails. Physically honed. Trained to be a weapon all on his own, with or without the aid of bullets. But he enjoyed complaining. Always had, and Hawk should know—they’d been together since they’d been eighteen and in boot camp. They’d gone from bunkmates to brothers and knew each other like no one else.
To get here, they’d drugged a pack of rottweilers, disabled the alarm on the farmhouse and stealthily made their way through the woods to the barn. The place was a nice setup for criminal activity. Surrounded by the sharp, jagged peaks of the Bighorn Mountains, there were also rolling hills and a maze of lakes and streams, all of which were nothing but an inky black silhouette in the dark night. No neighboring ranches, no neighboring anything except maybe bears and bison and coyotes.
And the many cars and trucks parked behind the farmhouse.
Odd. It would seem that there was a large group of people here somewhere, and yet there hadn’t been a soul in the house or in any of the small storage sheds behind it.
Which left the huge barn.
An icy gust hit Hawk in the face, burning his skin. He had to admit, things had definitely gone from interesting to tricky, because now the metal tiles beneath them were icing over. Any movement could be detrimental to their health, because slipping off here meant a thirty-foot
