“Okay.” Carlos glanced left and right. Then he stared straight at Yonus—poor Yonus who’d suddenly found himself stuck in the middle of some deadly international tomfuckery. The guy probably wished he’d stayed in bed this morning. “I’ll step out, lay down covering fire, and you and Abby hop in the truck. Once you’re in with the engine running, I’ll jump in the back.”
Now hold the mothertrucking phone. “Wait a minute,” she hissed, her heart going from a wild jog to a full-on sprint. This was the grand plan she’d been giving him so much credit for? “You can’t just step out in the open. You’ll be shooting blind while basically wearing a big ol’ bull’s-eye on your chest.”
“It’s the only way.”
“No.” She shook her head, holding up a hand she discovered was shaking. “No, it’s not. We could come up with something else, and I—”
“You have your keys ready?” he asked Yonus, completely ignoring her.
“Yes.” Yonus lifted the ring and the keys attached to it jangled quietly. In the continuing quiet of the jungle, they sounded like the frickin’ bells of Notre Dame chiming the hour…and giving away their position.
She winced, making a face, but undo noise was currently the least of her worries. “Damnit, Carlos. This isn’t—”
“If things go sideways”—he interrupted again, his black eyes boring into her with enough force to bring her to her knees. Luckily, blood was the only kryptonite to her Superman. Pushy, courageous, idiotic men she was completely immune to. Well, at least outside of the bedroom—“I don’t want you playing the hero, mi vida. You make a run for that border just as quick as you can.”
Uh, yep… And she would file that under Hell No.
“If things go sideways?” she stressed. “See, you think this plan is just as crazy as I do.” She grabbed his arm, giving it a shake, growing more and more desperate with each passing second. Desperate and scared. No, desperate and terrified. Her pulse pounded through her veins, burning like it was full of weed killer, and her brain buzzed like she’d wrapped it in a string of outdoor electric lights and flipped the switch. “So there has to be another way to—”
“Abby,” he stopped her with a finger on her lips. “This is our chance. And by the way, I love you.”
Um…wha?
Had she heard him correctly? Surely not, because in what world did those six words ever go together? By the way belonged in sentences that ended with I forgot to fold the clothes in the dryer or your mother called to see if you wanted to go to brunch next Sunday. By the way did not go with the words I love you.
But before she had time to dig a finger in her ear and ask him to repeat himself, he bent to press a quick kiss to her lips, his warm breath so sweet she almost wept. Then the brave, beautiful sonofabitch raised his sidearm, shouldered one of the machine guns, and stepped out into the road…
Chapter Twenty-two
Steady laid on the Kalashnikov’s trigger and sawed a continuous arc of hot lead across the jungle and road behind the beat-up pickup truck. Globs of mud jumped from the surface of the logging track, bark splintered on the trees, and leaves ripped to shreds under his steady barrage. The constant rat-a-tat-tat of the rusty Russian special was a deafening roar. Luckily, he’d learned long ago to ignore the distracting thunder of gunfire and concentrate instead on the task at hand.
“Now!” he yelled over his shoulder to Yonus and Abby. “Go now!”
He didn’t see them emerge from the brush, too preoccupied with dropping the weapon when the clip ran dry and quickly shouldering the remaining AK. But he could feel them race into the open. His heightened senses telling him they’d left the tree line as surely as if he’d seen them with his own two eyes. And that was more than enough impetus to have him squeezing the trigger, gritting his teeth against the bruising pressure of each recoil, and raining a Rambo-style path of destruction in a violent arc down the road in what he hoped was the direction of the remaining terrorists.
Was he scared to stand out in the open when he wasn’t sure where the enemy was? The quick answer was no. He was a spec-ops soldier, a strange breed of man who’d lived and worked so close to the edge that life-and-death situations no longer engendered in him the usual—some would say sane—emotional response.
But the thought of Abby catching a stray round? Dios mio. Now that filled him with the kind of terror he hadn’t experienced since his very first combat mission. Or, quite honestly, maybe ever. Never before had he had so much to lose. When he’d joined the Rangers, his parents had already been dead for five years, he’d just put his twin sister in the ground, and the one girl he wanted more than his next breath had soundly rejected him—or so he’d thought at the time.