SEALed With A Kiss(20)

“There is,” Joe Montgomery assured him. Lacing his big-knuckled hands on the table in front of him, he leaned in and pitched his voice lower. The SEALs had rallied around Vinny within hours of Ophelia’s disappearance. A ray of late afternoon sunlight sliced through the window over the kitchen sink and emphasizes the disfiguring scar on Monty’s otherwise handsome face. “Rawlings wants John’s manuscript badly enough to trade Ophelia for it,” he conveyed, causing Vinny to cover his eyes briefly to conceal his relief.

“Can we trust him to keep his end of the agreement?” he asked hoarsely.

Senior Chief gave a snort of derision.

“We don’t have much choice,” Joe replied, darting his senior chief a quelling look. “But that doesn’t mean we’re going to sit here with our thumbs up our asses. I’ve got a friend in the FBI—you know Hannah Lindstrom. She’s monitoring Rawlings’ phone calls as we speak. He’s been talking to his assistant, David Collum, every few hours. Hannah suggested the three of us take off to Harrisburg tonight to keep tabs on both men. If they do anything suspicious, then we film them. It’ll take convincing evidence to put a powerful man like Rawlings behind bars.”

Vinny’s temples throbbed. “I’m coming, too,” he insisted.

“Negative.” Joe fixed him with a stern look. “You’re going to stay right here and protect your sister. Think about it: Rawlings has a motive for wanting her out of the picture, too. If he had Ophelia and Bella followed this morning, then he knows where Bella lives. You need to stay here to protect her.”

Joe’s observation pushed Vinny’s concern to new heights. His commander was right. He had to think about his sister’s and mother’s safety, too. “You’ll keep me updated,” he pleaded.

“Absolutely,” Joe assured him.

Vinny nodded. “Does Penny know what happened yet?”

“Not yet.” Joe regarded him steadily. “You want me to tell her?”

Vinny pictured Lia’s sister’s reaction to the news. “No,” he decided. The fewer people who felt as miserable as he did, the better. “We’ll tell her tomorrow, when it’s over.” That was assuming everything went as planned—which it would, Vinny assured himself.

Joe sent him a sympathetic grimace. “I know what you’re going through, buddy,” he reminded his brother-in-law. “Believe me, when Penny was kidnapped by that thug working for the ricin thief, those were the longest twenty-four hours of my life. But if she managed to outsmart her kidnapper, who knows what Lia can do? She’s hell on wheels when she makes up her mind to be; you know that.”

Oh, he knew. And while Joe meant for his words to be reassuring, they only notched his anxiety higher. It would be so like Ophelia to undermine their rescue attempt by trying to escape on her own. The very real possibility that she could end up getting hurt, even killed, pushed tears of distress into his eyes.

Joe flicked a glance at his watch. “We should probably get going.” He shoved his chair back, signaling to the others to do likewise. The diminutive kitchen could barely contain the four large men standing shoulder to shoulder.

“We’ll see you at John’s funeral.” Senior Chief McGuire threw an arm around Vinny’s neck in an uncharacteristic show of affection.

“Keep this,” Sean Harlan said, pulling a Sig Sauer P226 out from under his T-shirt and laying it gently on the table, along with two boxes of extra ammo that he fished from his pockets.

Vinny reached for the weapon, still warm from Sean’s skin, and tucked it into his waistband against the small of his back. “Thanks,” he said, “all of you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Hell, you wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for us,” Joe pointed out.

That wasn’t exactly true, Vinny ruefully reflected. It was Ophelia letting her professional ambition get the better of her common sense that had gotten them all involved.

Trailing his teammates down the hall to the door, Vinny let them out. He watched them slip into their government-issued sedan and drive away before shutting and locking the door and killing the lights.

Creeping up the stairs, he found his mother and sister consoling each other on his mama’s bed. The picture they presented, crying and hugging each other, reminded him so forcibly of the night his father had abandoned them that he shut the door so he didn’t have to see them. Then he made a perch for himself at the top of the stairs and waited. If Rawlings did send someone tonight to try to silence Bella, Vinny would be ready for him.