“Dry cleaners,” Dawg finally growled. “And I don’t think you called us here to discuss my laundry.”
“Watch him, Natches.” Rowdy grinned, his dark green eyes, sea green, crinkling at the corners with mirth. “Dawg’s been a hair upset over the laundry. Crista put her foot down over the wrinkled, hole-ridden T-shirts he likes wearing to the store. She won’t let him play the disinterested owner anymore.”
Dawg grunted as Natches smirked absently and glanced back toward the hotel.
“That call you made earlier sounded kind of important, dumb ass.” Dawg sighed as he addressed Natches again. “What the hell is going on?”
Natches turned back to him, glaring at his cousin for the nickname that was becoming more frequent.
“You keep calling me ‘dumb ass,’ and I’m going to split your head open for you.”
Dawg grunted and it was his turn to smirk. “I think it suits you. You go moving out of your houseboat, for solitude over that damned garage, and start working like a man who’s grown some principles, and I start worrying about you.”
Natches’s nostrils flared as anger began to churn inside him. Damn Dawg. He didn’t need his damned advice or his snide-assed comments, which pretty much described the reason why his cousin was calling him names. Because he refused to listen to either.
“Cranston’s running another op in town,” he told the other two men before he let that anger take hold. The rest of the accusation he ignored completely.
He didn’t need to get pissed right now. He’d spent a lot of years trapping that emotion so deep inside him that it didn’t burn in his gut anymore. Keeping it there was important. Keeping it there kept breathing certain and Natches’s conscience clear.
“What the hell does that fat little fucker want?” Dawg straightened and glanced toward the hotel with obvious animosity. “Is he in there?”
“No. Not yet. Miss Chaya Greta Dane is there right now, and if my guess is right, she’s watching us right now from room three oh four. Do you think maybe she’s figured out we’re onto her?”
“How did you find out?” Rowdy was watching Natches.
Natches hated it when Rowdy watched him like that. Like he knew something, or saw something Natches didn’t want seen.
“Anonymous tip.” Natches grimaced. “And that ain’t no joke. A call to my cell phone an hour ago—untraceable so far—letting me know she had hit the county line and was here for DHS. If Cranston’s lost more missiles, boys, I might have to kill him.”
He was joking. Kind of.
“We haven’t heard anything.” Dawg rubbed at his clean-shaven jaw as he glanced toward the window of Chaya’s room.
She liked to go by the name Greta, but hell if that name suited her. With her multihued blond hair and exquisite features, she was as exotic as a tropical flower. Chaya suited her. The name rolled off the tongue, and in the darkest nights, as he jacked off to the image of her in his head, the name sounded like a prayer as he spilled his release into his hand.
“I’ve not heard anything from my contacts either,” Rowdy murmured. “Not even a whisper that a DHS agent was coming to town.”
Which meant Cranston was keeping whatever he was up to very close to his chest. And that was a very bad thing. When that rabid little bastard kept his mouth shut, then things were about to get ugly.
The thought of that had him glancing toward the hotel again. Chaya was a hell of an agent, but her heart wasn’t in it. Natches had seen that the year before. She hadn’t wanted to be in Somerset, and she hadn’t wanted to play Cranston’s games.
“She was supposed to have resigned,” he murmured, his eyes narrowing against the bright autumn sunlight overhead. “Turned the papers in just after the op here was what I heard.”
He was unaware of the curious looks his cousins gave him. Rowdy glanced at Dawg questioningly, but all his cousin had in reply was a brief shrug.
Natches never cared enough about anyone except his cousins, their wives, his sister, and Rowdy’s father, Ray, to check up on them over anything. He often claimed when it came to people, he wouldn’t stop the train from wrecking, because it was too damned amusing to sit back and watch the cars piling up.
He hadn’t been nearly so amused by the role Cranston had forced Miss Dane into though. He had placed her in danger, and that had pissed Natches off. Just as Cranston had placed all their asses in the fire.
“What do you need from us?” Rowdy turned back to his younger cousin, his chest tightening as it always did whenever he stared at the other man too long.
Natches was almost cold now. It had been coming for a while, but sometimes he feared that cold had taken full hold of him, and chilled him clear to his soul.
Natches seemed to shrug at the question, as though he either didn’t care, or wasn’t certain what he needed.
“Doesn’t little Lucy Moore work here?” Dawg asked then. “She works registration, doesn’t she?”
Natches nodded at the question. Lucy was a third cousin on his mother’s side, a sweet little girl, but sometimes she was a little too smart for her own good. She had put Chaya in the room he wanted her in, but she had been curious as to why he wanted her there.
“Then just wait till she leaves and slip into her room. Check her shit out and see if she’s as anal as she used to be with her notes,” Dawg suggested.
Natches glared at him. “She’s not stupid, Dawg. Those notes, if she has them, will be locked tight in that laptop and none of us are hackers.”
“Slip in and seduce the information out of her.” Dawg grinned at that one. “You’re good at that shit. Get her to talk, then send her ass home.”
It was an idea, except he knew something they didn’t know. Chaya didn’t have a home.
“What the hell is up with this, Natches?” Rowdy questioned him then. “You knew her before she came here; don’t deny it. Now she’s back with no clear reason why. Maybe she’s back to see you.”
Natches shook his head slowly. No, she wasn’t back to see him. He came with memories, and Natches knew exactly how that worked. Those memories were too painful, and they were rife with too much emotion for Natches or Chaya to willingly touch them with a ten-foot pole.
“She’s not here for me,” he finally said, wondering at the regret that pricked at him. “This is an op, boys. Anonymous call, pretty agent, and no agency gossip. Cranston’s trying to pull something over on us and I want to know what the hell it is.”
Chaya stared through the filmy curtains at the three men gathered in the parking lot. There weren’t a lot of cars parked out there, and it was as plain as the dark glasses on Natches’s face that they were there because of her.
For a moment, just a moment, she could hear screams in her head. Desperate, clawing sounds that ricocheted inside her, shredded her hard-won composure and had her swinging away from the sight of Natches to pace through her bedroom.
It wasn’t just her own screams she heard in her head. The feel of flames licking at her, the horror and stench of death poured into her senses and left her shaking.
She had to swallow tight, clench her fists and force herself away from the memories just as she had to force herself not to return to that window and stare at the men who occasionally glanced up at her room.
They already knew she was here. So much for the element of surprise where Natches was concerned. She had hoped to surprise him with her appearance, hopefully throw him off balance just a little bit.
She snorted at that before pacing back to the window, drawn, despite her best efforts, to the sight of him.
Natches Mackay. He was almost a legend in the Marines. He had been inducted into sniper training right out of boot camp. Within four years he had a kill ratio that made her flinch at the thought of it. Then, in a trick of fate or, as Timothy liked to say, a trick of Natches, a stray bullet had slammed into his shoulder, taking him out of the game.
For years it was rumored Natches had never regained the ability to handle a sniper rifle again. Last year, they had learned differently. Natches was just as silent, and just as deadly, as he had ever been.
She flinched as his head turned and he stared back at her. Surely he couldn’t see her behind the filmy curtains, but he knew she was there. He knew which room she was in, and he knew once she saw him out there, she wouldn’t be able to look away.
“Put your head down! Close your fucking eyes, Chaya. Ah God. Sweet mercy! Don’t look, baby. Don’t look.”
She closed her eyes. The feel of him lying on her, holding her down despite her struggles, her screams, still brought her awake at night.
Very few people in the world knew that she and Natches had a history. She prayed that only she and Natches knew, because if Timothy had managed to find out exactly what happened before she came to DHS, then he would never let her go. And he would have the edge he needed to pull Natches into Homeland Security rather than merely using the Mackay cousins as contract agents whenever he could manage to trick them into it.
She opened her eyes and stared out the window again, those dark glasses shielding his eyes, his too-long black hair pulled back at the nape of his neck, the savagery of his features more pronounced than it had been the year before.
He always looked like a dark avenging angel to her. But now, he looked like a savage warrior. She knew if he pulled those glasses off the forest green eyes would be piercing, dark, and filled with knowledge and anger.
So much anger. And she couldn’t blame him. Not in the least.
“You’ve done it this time, Chaya,” she murmured into the silence of the room.
And she had. She had allowed her boss to blackmail her into another mission that threw her directly in Natches’s path. Big mistake. Very big mistake.
Rowdy strode into the upstairs office of Mackay Lumber and Building Supplies and glared at Dawg as his cousin pulled a beer from the fridge and threw himself in the big leather chair behind the desk.
“Someone needs to let me in on the secret,” he snapped as he slammed the door closed. “What the hell is going on? Or has gone on?”
Dawg slouched back in the chair and tipped the beer to his lips thoughtfully. A long drink later he sat the bottle on the desk and stared back at Rowdy.
“Now see, I was hoping you would have the answers to those questions.” He wiped his hand over his jaw before shaking his head in obvious confusion. “He was actin’ stranger than hell with her last year. Every time he got around her he was pokin’ at her or watching her. Don’t you think she’s a little plain for him?”
Rowdy moved to one of the comfortable leather chairs across from the desk and lowered himself into it as he considered Dawg’s question.
“She has pretty hair.” He finally shrugged, his expression creasing into male contemplation.
“She’s homely,” Dawg grunted.
Rowdy snorted at that. “We’ve been saying that about every woman we’ve come across since Kelly and Crista got their hooks in us. Admit it, Dawg; we’re prejudiced.”
Dawg glared. “I know a pretty woman when I see one. Just because you’re blind as a bat doesn’t mean I am.”
Rowdy shook his head. “She looks okay, I guess. Can’t tell much with those loose clothes and the way she scrapes her hair back from her face.”
“She smokes.” Dawg tapped the desk with his fingers, his expression worried.
“You’re nitpicking. What’s the real problem, Dawg?” Rowdy leaned forward, watching his cousin carefully. “It’s not like you to nitpick.”
Dawg’s lips tightened, then pursed thoughtfully.
“Natches brought a woman out of the Iraqi desert with him on that last six-week mission he took. You know he was always goin’ off on a hit and taking his good ole easy time loping back to extraction so he could spy a little on the enemy?”
