“Back door,” Angel said, already turning. Angel was a former Israeli Mossad agent turned fellow BKI badass. Emily didn’t know much about him otherthan that he was a big ol’ question mark, his past even more shadowed than Christian’s.
“Right. Good idea.” She hustled after him. Unfortunately, before they reached the back door, they heard the sound of voices coming from behind it.
“Trapped,” she whispered, her heart kicking into overdrive. She would have liked to think the sudden uptick was a product of their increasingly alarmingsituation. But the truth was, it was at least partly due to Christian having come to a stop directly behind her, close enough that she could feel the blast of his body heat.
Once again, the wild, careless part of her tried to rear its ugly head. And who could blame it, considering Christian’s looks were those of the high desert. Harsh. Dangerous. Stark. Like an oasis in the sand, his eyesglittered and shone.
Intensely masculine, that’s what he was. Carnal.Primal. Six feet, three inches of big bones and hero hair and a tempting little chin dimple. The kind of guy who was attractive because he oozed confidence and testosterone and power. A breaker of hearts. A slayer of vaginas. He could get most women sweaty just by breathing.
Lucky for her, she wasn’t most women.
Fine. So maybe shewas. Because, seriously,notlusting after his hot bod was kind of like saying to herself,See that fat, furry bulldog puppy? Donotthink he’s cute. Still, whether she wanted to jump his bones was neither here nor there, since she’d learned not to mix business with pleasure. Once bitten, twice shy, baby.
“This is bad,” he muttered, taking a step back. The wild, carelesspart of her wept while the sensible, practical part of her rejoiced.
“Worse than bad,” Ace agreed.
“We need to calm down,” Angel insisted in that precise way he had. Jamin “Angel” Agassi’s diction was some of the best Emily had ever heard. But his voice? It was a wreck. Likely due to the fact that he’d had his vocal cords scoured after he left Israel to avoid voice-recognition software.
Talk aboutew, not to mentionow.
“Right.” Ace nodded. “Before we get overly excited, we need to know what we’re dealing with.” He lifted an inquiring brow at Christian. “Is it true? Were you the one captured during the Kirkuk Police Station Incident?”
Emily turned to study Christian’s face and saw the muscle twitching beneath his right eye. As far as she could figure, it was his onlytell and happened when he was really pissed or really annoyed. Which, okay, meant it happened alotwhen she was around.
“Yes,” Christian said after a five-second beat. “That would be me.”
“Holy hobbling Christ on a crutch,” Ace swore, running a hand through his blond hair.
“What?” Rusty Parker, a.k.a. the only civilian in the group, asked. “What was the Kirkuk Police Station Incident?”
Rusty was a former marine who had worked one summer as a CIA asset before he up and moved to England to become a charter boat captain. Emily had helped him out of a jam that summer, and they’d kept in touch ever since. When she and the other members of BKI had needed help fleeing the country the week before, after they had screwed up their mission to bring down a notorious underworld crimeboss known only by the code name of Spider, Rusty had been the first person she called.
Poor guy, she thought now. She wouldn’t have dragged him into this if she’d known how much trouble she was going to cause him.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “I’m with Rusty. Whatwasthe Kirkuk Police Station Incident?”
Christian shook his head. “We’ve no time for this.”
“Sure we do. Since our only exitsare blocked by reporters, we have all the time in the world.”
Christian blew out an exasperated breath that caused a whorl of hair to fall over his brow. It tried to distract Emily, but she refused to let it.
“Fine. But let’s bloody well make this quick, okay?”
“We’re all ears,” she assured him. “Fire away.”
That muscle twitched beneath his eye again. It was joined by one in hisjaw. “It was near the end of the Iraq War, after major hostilities had ceased and before the incursion of ISIS into the country. I was sent in to keep an eye on a group of Iraqi policemen who were running a crime unit with rumored links to corruption and brutality in the city. My job was to gather enough evidence against them to warrant a takedown.”
“Oh, I remember reading about this.” Rustynarrowed his eyes in thought. “There was a shoot-out at a roadblock, right?”
Christian nodded, and that dadgummed whorl snagged Emily’s attention. Again.
Down, girl, she admonished her recalcitrant libido.
“Unbeknownst to me, the policemen I was tasked with surveilling had sniffed me out. I was setting off from the city to deliver a situation report to my commanding officer when Iwas stopped at a roadblock. At the start, I thought I could talk my way out of it, yeah? But things got quite serious quite quickly. They pulled their weapons and began shooting. I pulled mine and did the same. Took a round to the gut that put me in sad shape. But before they managed to overwhelm me, I slotted two of the wankstains.”
He said it so casually.Before they managed to overwhelmme.But Emily knew Christian. It must have been one hell of a fight.
