Beau and Cassidy both stepped out of the shadows, the barrels of their weapons aimed at the intruder, who lay on his back in a spreading pool of blood. Beau had aimed a little high, going for the man’s shoulder and upper chest, determined to keep him alive. Cassidy’s shots had both been aimed low.
Clutching his shoulder, the man groaned as Cassidy flipped a switch and the room lit up.
“Move an inch and I’ll finish you,” Beau warned.
The man didn’t flinch, just lay there clutching his shoulder, his other hand reaching toward his bloody knee.
Cassidy hurried toward the phone in the kitchen. “I’ll call security, have them call 9-1-1 while I check on Frank.”
Beau fixed his attention on the assailant. “Did you kill Marino?” His gun remained steady as he studied the man’s face, covered in black greasepaint beneath a black wool cap.
“I wasn’t paid to . . . kill him.” He took a ragged breath. “Since I don’t work . . . for free, I loaded him up with . . . ketamine. The voice was high and soft, a female voice, Beau realized in shock. “He’ll be out for a while but . . .” The woman sucked in a heavy breath of air. “He’ll live.”
“Who are you?”
Instead of answering, the woman hissed in pain and let her head fall back on the floor. “Look . . . it wasn’t personal. A girl’s got to . . . make a living, okay?”
“No, it isn’t okay. Who do you work for?”
She took a ragged breath but didn’t reply.
“We need an ambulance,” Beau said. Whoever she was, they needed her alive; the FBI needed her alive.
“Ambulance is on its way,” Cassidy said as she walked back into the living room.
Beau looked at her, thought how she could have been killed, and his chest clamped down. He forced himself to focus, push away thoughts of what might have happened.
Security arrived. Worried about the hit, Will Egan had been spending his nights on a cot out in the cabana. He strode in with a group of his men, silver hair sleep-rumpled, semiautomatic pistol pointed at the intruder.
“Frank’s out cold,” Cassidy said. “He’s been drugged. I found a needle on the floor in his room. His breathing’s even and his pulse is strong.”
Beau felt a sweep of relief. He tipped his head toward the assailant. “Our hit man’s a woman. According to her, Frank should be okay.”
“I’ve got this,” Egan said, gun held steady. Several othersecurity guards had their pistols aimed at the intruder, enough men that Beau finally felt comfortable lowering his weapon.
He turned to Cassidy. “We need to call Taggart,” he said.
Cassidy nodded. “I was hoping with everything out in the open, we’d be safe. Apparently, the assassin didn’t get the message.”
“I guess not,” Beau said. Arrests hadn’t yet been made, though the case was rapidly progressing. He slid a glance toward the woman groaning in pain on the floor. “I think she got the message now.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Federal agents swarmed the house, along with EMTs and Dallas PD, but Agent Quinn Taggart went directly to the hospital where the female assassin was admitted to surgery for three bullet wounds: one to the upper chest, one to the shoulder, and one to the knee. A groggy, semiconscious Frank Marino was admitted for overnight observation.
Since the house was a crime scene, Beau and Cassidy packed overnight bags, grabbed their laptops, and Beau drove them to the nearby Highland Dallas hotel, taking a suite there instead of holing up in his private rooms at the Tex/Am office, where he would have to deal with employees in the morning.
The sun was coming up by the time they’d checked in at the front desk and taken the elevator up to the room. The suite was well furnished and spacious. Beau pulled the curtains in the bedroom, blocking out the early dawn sunlight, yawning as he stripped off his clothes and padded over to the bed.
“These all-nighters are getting to be a habit,” Cassidy said, stripping off the T-shirt and jeans she had put on after the shooting.
Beau paused to watch her. Surely he was way too tired to be thinking of sex. Surely. But when Cassidy unhooked her bra, setting her pretty rose-tipped breasts free, when she shook her mane of dark curls back from her face, he felt a shot of lust that went straight to his groin.
No way, he told himself. Both of them needed rest even more than the hot wash of sexual release.
He glanced up to see her watching him the way he’d been watching her, her green eyes drifting over his chest, his abs, lower.
Beau bit back a groan as he started getting hard. “You’re killing me here. You know that, right?”
