“Because Rosa told me you once told her that my smile was the sweetest you’d ever seen. And that my dimple should be outlawed.” And you had better believe that had stayed with him through the years. There’d been times when he thought he wouldn’t make it out of this battle or live through that mission that he closed his eyes and relived the memory of the day his sister fed him that delicious little nugget, imagining Abby’s adorable face as she confessed.
He expected her to hit back with one of her patented jabs. So watching her face blanch and then crumble caught him completely off guard. “Ah, hell. I didn’t mean to—”
“No.” She shook her head, lifting a hand to stop him. “Please don’t apologize for anything. Really.”
Back in the hut, he’d noticed she had a difficult time talking about his sister. And the question of why she was still mourning Rosa so vigorously bothered him. It’d been eight years. His own grief had mellowed from a sharp, searing pain that nearly brought him to his knees to a soft, blunt kind of remorse that was almost wistful in its melancholy.
Yes, he missed Rosa like crazy. And there wasn’t a day that went by when he didn’t think of her and wish she was still by his side, still giving him shit, and still holding the fact that she was a full two minutes older than him over his head. But he’d managed to move on with his life, move past his sorrow to a place where he could look back with laughter and love on the time he’d spent with her.
Why hadn’t Abby done the same?
“Seriously.” She ran a hand under her nose. “Don’t mind me. It’s just been a really long day, and I’m feeling—”
“There it is!” Yonus called back to them. He pointed up the road. And though the jungle did its best to obscure their view, faint red taillight covers and the silver glint of a back bumper were visible.
“If that isn’t a sight for sore eyes”—Steady slung an arm around Abby’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze—“I don’t know what is. Can I get an amen?”
“A-frickin’-men,” she replied, forcing a smile to her lips, and lengthening her stride. She seemed content to drop their conversation, and he didn’t dare push her to finish whatever it was she’d been about to say.
They joined Yonus and were barely thirty yards from the truck when the familiar crack of igniting gunpowder sounded a second before a round bit into the ground near their feet. The hairs on Steady’s scalp lifted so fast and high it was a wonder they didn’t jettison off his head. He reached for his Beretta as another loud, malicious crack echoed through the jungle at the same time a bullet nicked his upper arm. Pain bit into him with sharp, jagged teeth, but he gave it barely a fleeting thought.
“Get down!” he yelled to Yonus who was standing beside the road, eyes wide, face slack in shock. “Stay low and make for the tree line!”
And then, wrapping both arms around Abby, keeping her in front of him so that his body was between her and the shooter, he heeded his own advice. Two bounding steps brought them to the relative safety of the jungle’s edge. After securing her behind the huge trunk of a tree—and after a quick look assured him she was unharmed—he thumbed off his safety and prepared to let the bullets fly…
* * *
“Okay, so this should be the place.” Penni leaned against the front bumper of one of the big, black SUVs the Secret Service had rented to use as transport to and from the airport. Dan was propped beside her, arms crossed, watching as she glanced down at the piece of paper on which the hotel manager had scrawled the security director’s address. When she looked over at him, she pulled a face. “I mean, this has to be the place.”
“You sure?” he asked as she folded the slip and tucked it into the front pocket of her austere black slacks before pushing away from the vehicle to stand on the side of the street. Until today, until seeing how the material draped around her long, slim legs while delicately cupping her heart-shaped derriere, he would’ve sworn there was no way a pair of pants like that could ever be made to look sexy. But, man, he did not mind in the least that Penelope DePaul had proved him wrong. Ozzie called her a tall drink of Secret Service agent, and he couldn’t disagree.
“Considering I thought the other two houses we checked were the right ones,” she frowned, “the answer to your question is no. I’m not sure. But if your friend Vanessa translated what that lady at the last place said, the address we’re looking for is the blue house at the end of Jalan Putra. This should be Jalan Putra and that is definitely a blue house.”