“And no one knows you found me?”
He shifted his gaze from the road for a moment to look at her. “I told my sister and her ex-husband.”
Her eyes widened. Scott forgot that she knew about Colt.
“The same ex-husband who hates you and threatened to kill you?”
“Yeah, that’s him,” Scott admitted. “But Colt has changed his tune a little since he found out the truth. Myformer teammate is, uh”—how to sum up Colt?—“complicated. It’s hard to explain, but even before he found out Kate and I were related I would have trusted him with my life—and yours. He would never betray a fellow SEAL.”
The team had been Colt’s family; his loyalty to it—to them—was unwavering. Scott would have been dead otherwise.
She seemed puzzled but willing to take his word for it. “Then how did they find me?”
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”
But he was going to have to be a hell of a lot more careful, especially if, as he suspected, someone had been monitoring Kate’s computers. Did the Russians have moles that deep? How else could they have tracked him?
He didn’t know, but clearly someone wanted Natalie dead—and maybe him, too. The question was why. The Russians knew Natalie’s role as a spy had been compromised. She was no use to them anymore and already dead and quiet so why go to all the trouble to kill her again and risk exposure? Mick, her only contact, was dead. It could be punishment for betraying them or was there another reason? Did Natalie know something that she wasn’t telling him? Something she wasn’t supposed to know?
Whatever it was, Scott was beginning to think that there was more to this than there seemed. Travis’s death—like the attempt on Natalie’s life—proved that the Russians weren’t going to quietly let it go. They were eliminating anyone who knew the truth. So what else was he missing?
“What aren’t you telling me, Nat?”
He was watching her out of the corner of his eye and saw her stiffen. “What do you mean?”
“They sent five professional hit men after you. Why do they want you dead so badly?”
She looked at him as if he was accusing her of something. Maybe he was, although he wasn’t sure what.
“I thought...” Her voice dropped off and she turned away, staring out the black windows.
“You thought what?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment before looking back at him. Her eyes were big, luminous, and filled with disappointment and unshed tears in the semidarkness of the car’s interior. “I thought you believed me.”
“I want to,” Scott said, steeling himself against the misery in her voice. “I do. But you have to tell me everything.”
“I am,” she cried out in frustration and obvious distress. “I have told you everything I can think of. I have no idea why they want me dead so badly. And frankly right now I don’t care! All I can think about are my parents and sister.” The tears that had been threatening started to slide down her cheeks. “If the people Mick was working for know I’m alive, that means my family isn’t safe anymore. They could go after them to punish me.” Her eyes widened and she covered the gasp that came from her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God, what if they are after them now? What if they decide to kill my family because they couldn’t kill me?” He didn’t need to glance over to see her escalating panic; he could hear it in her voice. She sat up and put a hand on his arm. “Please, Scott, I have to warn them. I have to do something to try to protect them. If anything happens to them...” Her voice broke and her hand squeezed. “Please.”
Scott would have truly had to have had ice in his veins not to be moved by her pleas and terror for her family. He didn’t think they were in danger, but he wasn’t going to take the chance and be wrong. He was going to do what he could to help her, and protecting her family was a big part of it. He held the wheel with one hand and pulled his phone out of his pocket with the other.
The number he wanted was programmed into the first speed dial slot. Scott and Dean Baylor might butt heads every now and then—or most of the time—but Scott knew he could count on his senior chief for anything. “It’s me,” Scott said when Baylor answered. “I need you to do something for me.”
• • •
Natalie’s emotions were all over the place. She’d gone back and forth between terror and relief too many times tonight. But the panic over her family gradually subsided as she listened to Scott’s calm, authoritative, take-command-of-the-situation conversation with—she assumed—one of his men. She had to fill in information a few times, such as names and addresses, but it was clear, he was sending in a team to watch over them.
He was helping her. She’d been right to put her trust in him.
When he hung up, she didn’t know what to say. “Thank you” in no way captured the enormity of the gratitude she felt for him right now. He believed her. At least enough to help her protect her family, and that was all that mattered. It mattered a lot.
It might not be enough, but she gave him her thanks anyway.
He glanced over at her and accepted it with a nod. “There will be a team in place within a few hours, and they will stay there as long as we need them.”
Natalie hadn’t been expecting something so quick. Whatever residual panic she’d been feeling slipped away and her emotions seemed a little less frazzled. “Do you have a private jet you didn’t tell me about?”
He shot her a sideways glance, obviously not sure whether she was joking. She wasn’t sure, either. With Mr. Understated, Never Talk about Money, you never knew.
