“I’m good,” Schroder, a former Air Force Pararescueman replied as the others filed out into the cold. Briar had read files on every member of this HRT team back in September, including Commander DeLuca. Because she made it a point to research people before she met them.
He walked over to stand behind Schroder, arms folded across his chest. A wide, well-muscled chest, she couldn’t help but notice. Last time she’d seen him he’d been wearing business attire, black slacks and a dark blue dress shirt. In his utilities he looked every inch the lethal warrior he’d once been, until the promotion to commander had taken him out of the direct action. He was a good-looking man, forty-one years old, with an impeccable service record. And the laser-like focus in his gaze as he stared at her would have made a lesser woman squirm.
Lucky for her, Briar wasn’t like most women.
“So, you gonna tell me who you really are?” he asked with a slight tilt of his head. Assessing her. Gauging her expression, body language and response.
He could examine her all he wanted, he wouldn’t get anything she didn’t want him to. And for right now, that included her name. “I need to make a phone call.”
He snorted. “I don’t think so. Tell me who you are and who sent you to take out Ramadi.”
Briar lifted her chin, looking down the length of her nose at him even though he was towering over her. She hid a wince as Schroder pinched the edges of the wound together.
“Can you hand me a suturing kit?” he asked DeLuca, frowning in concentration.
DeLuca reached over to search in a med bag and handed him one before meeting Briar’s eyes again. “Not gonna tell me?”
She gazed back at him calmly, determined to hold her ground.
His jaw tightened. “Fine.” Pulling a phone out of his jacket pocket, he dialed a number and held it up to his ear, his expression closed and unreadable. “Rycroft, it’s DeLuca. I’ve got a situation.”
Briar bit back a gasp and half sat up, barely stemming the urge to snatch the phone from his hand. NSA agent Alex Rycroft wouldn’t give her away, at least she didn’t think so, but with one phone call he could alert people within the intelligence community she didn’t want knowing about any of this.
He listened to whatever Rycroft said, those hard green eyes never leaving hers. “Know anything about a sanctioned hit on Hassan Ramadi in Colorado tonight? Because he was already dead when my team went in and we just captured your friend B less than two miles from the target location.”
****
Matt generally had a long fuse, but given that his team had been put in direct jeopardy twice tonight—once by the leaked intel on Ramadi and the other while finding and capturing B, or whatever the fuck her name was—he wanted some goddamn answers.
“Is she injured?” Rycroft asked him, sounding concerned.
Matt studied the woman in question. He’d thought about her several times over the past few months, wondering who she truly was and what she was doing. Her bronzed skin looked a bit grayish and there was a blue tinge around her mouth from the cold. Her nearly black eyes stared back at him with quiet defiance, her coffee brown hair now cropped to chin length instead of falling halfway down her back like it had when he’d met her in New Orleans in September.
“Flesh wound. Someone else was hunting her too but we didn’t find them. If the round had hit her a few inches to the left, we would’ve brought her body back down the mountain with us.”
Rycroft was silent a moment. “Let me make a call. I’ll get back to you.”
“Yeah,” Matt said and disconnected.
Slipping the phone back into his pocket, he folded his arms across his chest and sized up the female operative before him. She was pretty, even now when she was pale and wounded and in shock, and young, mid to upper twenties if he had to guess.
When he’d first met her through Rycroft at the major security conference in New Orleans, he’d immediately noticed something mysterious about her that just didn’t add up. She’d been a knockout in that business suit, the snug skirt hugging her hips and her high heels showing off the sleek muscles in her bare, bronzed calves. Though he’d suspected from her watchful gaze and the way she moved that she was a trained agent, finding out she was a full-on assassin had come as one hell of a shock.
It had happened after an op in Baton Rouge just as the security conference was wrapping up. They’d received perishable intel on another major player in the domestic terror game the same night his team had gone in to rescue two female hostages from a dirty undercover DEA agent. One of whom had been Clay Bauer’s girlfriend, Zoe.