Nic rolled his eyes, not fighting his smile. The exchange, while frustrating as hell, felt like normal. Like them. Not like the weird limbo they’d been in earlier that day.
“You strapped under the coat?” Cam asked. Nic flicked back the front flap of his jacket, flashing his Beretta. Cam nodded. “Try not to get into trouble.”
“Says the man in tactical gear.”
Sliding forward, Cam angled toward him, brushing their knees together and dropping his voice low. “It’s the only thing keeping me from jumping you right now.”
Nic tilted his head toward the back of the van on the other side of the curtain. “That and your best friend in there.”
Cam clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Low blow, Price.”
“Says the man telling me to stay in the fucking van. Again.”
Cam glided his knee inside Nic’s, higher up, pushing his legs apart. Doing what his hands couldn’t in case anyone saw through the window. “You’re my rope. I can’t have it severed. So yes, I’m ordering you to stay in the fucking van.”
Losing the battle to frustration and desire, Nic shot out a hand, grabbed a vest strap, and yanked Cam closer. Not all the way into his lap, because there was only one place that would lead, which was a no-go with other agents in back. But close enough to smell the lingering traces of Cam’s soap, to feel the heat of him beneath the gear, to press his cock against Cam’s knee between his thighs. “I’ll stay in the fucking van,” he growled. “But you hold tight to the rope.”
Cam grinned, wicked. “Count on it.”
Sixteen
“Half past,” Jamie radioed, and Cam gave the signal for his team to move. On quiet approach, he was depending on Jamie cycling through position checks to gauge where each of the teams were, including Matt’s across town.
Cam led his team down an alley a building over from their target. Peering around the corner, he looked for the gate in the target garage’s back fence.
Every other building on this street was a garage and most of them had caged-in yards where cars were parked overnight. The fences around the garage yards usually had two entrances. A big rolling gate for cars to pass through and a smaller swing gate easier for people to enter and exit. A better-than-average B&E guy, Cam had always counted on those pedestrian gates for quick and easy access.
He spotted the smaller gate on this side of the target near the back of the garage structure. Good, they wouldn’t have to expose themselves darting across the yard. He signaled his team to move again. They crouched low, sliding along the back of the neighboring building, hiding in the shadows.
At the near corner before they crossed the next alley, Cam signaled his team to stop and did a one-eighty sweep with his eyes and helmet cam, trusting Jamie to double-check the alley and target building.
He saw the problem as soon as Jamie did, the other man saying, “Hold.” A flurry of keyboard strokes, then the security cameras at the corner of the target building dipped, their power light clicking off.
“Clear now,” Jamie said, just as Matt radioed, “Murphy texted them a picture of the goods. He’s approaching the drop location now.”
They had to time this exactly right. Cam wasn’t lying when he’d told Nic he didn’t think the kidnappers would actually meet Murphy at the drop. At least not with Shannon. But he did think they would be in that vicinity, not too far from where they could claim their prize. That left Shannon here—potentially unguarded—while the henchmen were distracted.
Cam signaled his team to move again, and Jamie kept the others updated. “Alpha team approaching target.”
“Car approaching the drop point from the west,” Matt said. “Slow, lights off.”
Jamie rattled off the car’s specs, as seen through Matt’s camera. A red nineties Camaro—something about the details of the car rang familiar to Cam. He made a mental note to follow up, then got back to work on the gate’s lock, focused on his team’s advance.
Matt counted down the approach in feet until the car was parked, and Murphy was at the driver-side door.
“Driver’s in a mask,” Jamie reported, and Cam bit back a curse. Through the comm Murphy was wearing, he heard the conversation.
“Give us the goods,” someone in the car said.
“Yeah, here.”
“Murphy’s handing over the package,” Jamie reported. Forgeries of documents that were supposedly stolen out of the D-4 evidence locker.
“We’ll be in touch with our next request,” the same voice from the video replied, and then the roar of an engine blasted over the line, followed by Murphy’s screams of “Where’s my daughter?”
Cam’s team had to move. Now.
He blocked out the burgeoning chaos on the other end—Matt ordering his team to converge, a gunshot, “Murphy’s hit”—and charged forward with his team, through the gate to the back door of the garage. Holding up a hand, he counted down the breach with his fingers, making it all the way to one, then paused when the squeal of tires burning rubber echoed not in his ear but close by. On the same block as them and gaining speed by the sound of it.
