Pleasing Her SEAL(4)

                       
       
           


       
"No worries, sweetheart. See you around?"

"Pancakes," she answered, sounding slightly breathless, and he couldn't  hold back his grin. God, she was fun. When she went left, he hung back.  Partly just to watch her go because, hell yeah, he enjoyed the sassy  swing of her hips. Maybe she was trying to drive him crazy. It was a  possibility.

Mr. Guzman, his ass.

The groom-to-be in Maddie's photo was Diego Marcos and he would be  arriving precisely never. His reservation had been canceled, courtesy of  SEAL Team Sigma. The possibility of Marcos's brother showing up on  Fantasy Island, however, was an unpleasant wrinkle that he'd need to  alert the rest of the SEAL team to. If they didn't have intel on where  the brother was, they needed to get it stat.

And added bonus... If Maddie ever found out what Mason had done, he'd  be on her shit list for more reasons than scaring the bejesus out of  her.

He opened his hand and looked down. He'd taken advantage of her panic  to pop the memory card out of her very expensive camera. He'd always  used an inexpensive point-and-shoot himself, but then his usual model  was a dead enemy target that needed documenting. Sunrises clearly  required better technology.

Unfortunately, boosting her memory card might not have been enough. If  she'd transferred pictures via the resort's Wi-Fi, he had a bigger  problem than the square of plastic in his hand.

By the time he'd made it back to their base camp, the prisoners were  long gone on the Zodiacs, and the rest of the SEAL team was waiting for  him. He'd take camping over five-star luxury resorts any day. The entire  team, minus Remy, who was now somewhere between here and Belize, was  present.

Gray nodded acknowledgment when Mason stepped into the campsite. Gray  was one of the biggest SEALs Mason had ever met. The team's standing  joke was that Gray didn't parachute out of the plane so much as he  plummeted. Like a rock. Although he sprawled at ease on a pile of  backpacks, there was nothing casual about the glance he raked over  Mason. Blood stained his camo. He'd stayed with the injured Remy until  the medevac lifted off.

Mason was last to arrive at the debriefing about to start. It was  standard operating protocol to review every mission, identifying areas  of concern where they could improve next time. The team sat in a  semicircle, their attention focused on Gray. As soon as Mason dropped to  the ground next to Levi, Gray reviewed the mission that they had just  completed, beginning with their target's arrival on Fantasy Island and  ending with Remy's medevac to Belize for emergency surgery. Since Gray's  maybe-girlfriend Laney Parker was a surgeon and she'd accompanied Remy  on the flight, Mason figured his teammate had a fighting chance.

When Gray finished the medical update and Levi had confirmed Marcos's  handoff to the US Navy, Gray dropped a new bombshell. "We're not done  here," he said.

"We get to vacation for real? Hooyah." Levi leaned forward. "I'm borrowing your black AmEx, Mason."

"Dumbass," Sam said. Their field medic was a laidback Alabama boy, but  his lean build and easy smile were deceptively mellow. He could kick  butt with the best of them, and no one on the team swam faster or blew  more stuff up. "He means you get to work overtime."

Gray shook his head. "Real mature, Sam. And accurate. Our mission  parameters have changed. We were charged with bringing in Diego Marcos,  but now we've got a second target. Marcos has a brother, who operates as  his right-hand man."

"Would that be Santiago Marcos?" Maybe Maddie had it wrong. Maybe she  wasn't planning to shoot the wedding of a notorious drug dealer who,  according to her, had invited his equally notorious younger brother to  the celebration.

Gray eyed him. "Are you psychic? Or is there something else we need to  know about? Levi already mentioned that you hit a snag earlier today."

Maddie was definitely a complication. A beautiful, very alluring complication.

"We had a resort guest up on the hillside lookout spot." The place had  some froufrou name like Lovers Lookout. He didn't think Gray needed to  know that, or that the spot apparently starred front and center in  Maddie's bridal portfolio. "She had a camera."                       
       
           


       

Gray scrubbed a hand over his head. "How long was she up there? Did she shoot the Zodiacs coming in?"

Yeah, but that was only the first problem in a long list. "The guest is  Madeline Holmes. She's a blogger, one of those girls who hangs with  Ashley."

Ashley waved a hand. "Maddie runs Kiss and Tulle. She covers  destination weddings, wedding favors, wedding cakes, wedding dresses.  Last month her blog had over two hundred thousand unique visitors."

"In other words, any noun that can be modified by the adjective  wedding," Levi interrupted. Mason was willing to bet that Levi wouldn't  recognize a wedding blog-or a wedding anything-if it bit him on the ass.

Ashley made a face. "Pretty much."

"Well, today she was covering sunrises." He had no idea why a bride  would want to hike up a hill at dawn in her dress for a few photos, but  far be it from him to judge. "And she set up her camera yesterday to do  time-lapse photography."

"She likes to vlog," Ashley said with a sigh. "And live post."

Whatever vlogging was, he'd bet it was a security risk because Ashley made another face.

Gray cursed. "Give me options."

"I snagged her media card, but she claimed she'd already transferred her pictures over the resort's Wi-Fi."

Ashley leaned forward. "I've been monitoring traffic in and out, but  she'll likely keep copies on her laptop. Unfortunately, our resident  wedding blogger has been experimenting with time-lapse photography. Even  more unfortunately for us, her photos got picked up by a national  travel site."

Ashley flipped her tablet around, exhibiting a series of sunrise  photographs shot over the pier. The first half dozen shots were harmless  unless you had a thing against waves and pretty colors. The  next-to-last picture, however, was a problem. It showed a Zodiac  shooting through the opening in the reef and heading toward the dock.  Mason had a bad feeling that if he zoomed in, he'd see Marcos's  bodyguards bouncing over the water in that Zodiac. Worse, there was no  sign of the Zodiac tied up to the dock in the next and final frame. The  boat had disappeared in the thirty minutes between shots.

Gray nodded slowly. "We need to see what else she got."

"There's more," Mason said. "Maddie mentioned she was planning on  shooting a wedding later this week and the bride's and groom's pictures  are a match for Diego Marcos and Julieta Ortiz. She's been emailing  Julieta and she expected them to show up yesterday. She doesn't know  their real names, but she knows their faces."

Gray pointed to Ashley. "Have the resort notify Maddie that the wedding has been canceled."

Ashley nodded. "Got it."

"She also mentioned Santiago," Mason divulged. He relayed what she'd  told him about Santiago coming to the island to attend his brother's  wedding. "What do we know about him, and do we have confirmation on his  current whereabouts?"

"He could have been part of the advance team we took out. I'll reach  out to command and see what they've got for us. In the meantime, no one  breaks cover until we've got a bead on where Santiago is currently.  Mason, you stick by Maddie's side. Use the time to find out exactly what  she has-or doesn't have-on her laptop and to re-verify the identities  of the other guests on the island. Make sure no one slipped past us,  because if Santiago is here, he knows that Diego isn't and that's a  problem."

"Smash and grab on the laptop?" Levi stepped up like he was ready to volunteer.

"Do I need to define undercover for you?" Gray crossed his arms over  his chest. "You steal or break her laptop, and she's got a problem that  becomes our problem. How much crime do you think there is on a luxury  private island? The first people she's going to point a finger at will  be staff."

"We could bring her in," Mason suggested reluctantly. "Interview her. Or ask US Customs to intercept her on her return trip."

If Maddie had had her camera trained on the lagoon overnight, there was  a very good chance she'd captured faces. Given what even amateur  photo-editing software could do these days, leaving any images in  Maddie's hands was a security risk. Put it together with the rest of her  vlogging and... Diego's brother could connect the dots. Plus, if  Santiago was here, Maddie could ID him, and he'd bet Santiago had come  undercover if he'd come at all.