The Bodyguard's Assignment. Amanda Stevens

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СКАЧАТЬ shifted her weight until she could see through a narrow opening between the carpet rolls. She recognized Kane and Priestley, but the other three were unfamiliar to her. She thought one of them might be Stephen Rialto, but he kept his face turned away from her. She had to imagine the cruel set of his mouth, the coldness in his eyes. From everything she’d learned about Rialto, she suspected he would slit her throat—or order it done—without batting an eye if he found her there.

      He was flanked on either side by the other two men who had gotten out of the Mercedes. Grace couldn’t see their features clearly, either, but she had the impression of dark eyes and swarthy complexions. Bodyguards, she decided. Trained thugs whose orders were to shoot first and ask questions later.

      Her gaze shifted to Priestley. He stood at the periphery of the group, white-faced and jittery as he glanced around the warehouse.

      Come on, Grace urged. Stay cool. Don’t give us away.

      She prayed the others would be so busy forging their unholy alliance they wouldn’t notice his nervousness. But neither Lester Kane nor Stephen Rialto had gotten as far as he had by being careless. Grace couldn’t hear much of what was being said, but she could tell they were all tense.

      Kane was talking in low, persuasive tones, and Grace strained to hear him. The other man’s voice rose as he responded tersely, “Then prove your loyalty, Kane. We have to know we can trust you.”

      “If that’s what it takes, then so be it,” Kane said.

      From her vantage, Grace saw what none of the others could see. Unobtrusively, Kane reached around and drew a gun from the waistband of his trousers. Grace had only a split second to wonder why Rialto’s men didn’t react before Kane swung his arm toward Priestley. He fired the silenced weapon twice. A soft spit, spit, and Alec Priestley, husband, businessman, father of two, crashed back into a wooden pallet, his face and chest a crimson explosion.

      Grace clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from gasping in shock. She watched in horror as the other men began to swing back to their cars. “Torch the place!” someone ordered.

      One of the bodyguards grabbed a gas can from the trunk of the Mercedes and began dousing the carpet rolls while Kane reversed the Jag from the warehouse. The other two men climbed into the Mercedes and followed. The first bodyguard finished his job, then tossed the empty gas can aside. Running to the open doorway, he stood gazing around for a moment before flicking a lit match toward a trail of fuel on the floor. Then he disappeared through the opening, and the door immediately closed.

      As the ribbon of fire raced toward the drenched carpet rolls, Grace grabbed her recorder and scrambled through the narrow channel between the pallets. The natural carpet fibers would burn quickly, but the synthetic rolls were potentially even more dangerous. The nylon would melt and smolder, causing black smoke to build inside the warehouse. The acrid smell already burned her eyes and throat.

      The side door was somewhere just ahead of her. Don’t panic, she told herself. She had plenty of time to get out. Just a few more yards…a few more feet…a few more inches…

      Her hand closed around the metal knob and she pulled. When the door wouldn’t budge, she gave it a fierce yank, and then another and another, each more desperate than the last until she realized the exit had been padlocked from the outside. Other than the overhead door through which the cars had driven, there was no other way out of the warehouse.

      Grace whirled to retrace her steps, but the flames had spread quickly. The entire warehouse was ablaze, the smoke nearly opaque. In another few moments, she would be overcome.

      A few yards in front of her, the smoke curled upward, fanned by a breeze. Grace’s gaze followed the writhing trail, and she realized that a pane in one of the windows was missing. The night air was drawing the thick haze like a flue. It was also showing her what might be another way out.

      But the windows were a good twenty feet from the ground. Grace wasn’t at all certain she could reach them. Knowing it was her only hope, she began to climb the wooden pallets, her lungs searing in agony. She wouldn’t let herself look down, or think about the flames that were licking toward her, the rolls of carpeting that were melting beneath her feet.

      She wouldn’t contemplate the reality that if she died in this warehouse, she would never be able to redeem herself in Brady Morgan’s eyes.…

      Chapter One

      The landscape was as vast as it was empty, a wasteland of rugged plains made even more bleak by the dead of winter. In the distance, mist settled over the craggy peaks of the Davis Mountains, softening the jagged edges until gray rock melded almost seamlessly with slate sky.

      Brady Morgan huddled in his sheepskin coat as he watched a hawk circle overhead. He’d been living and working on the Smoking Barrel Ranch for almost five years now, but he still hadn’t gotten used to the loneliness of the place.

      West Texas was a world unto itself, and he guessed he was still a city boy at heart. He’d grown up in a rough area of Dallas, had been a street cop for several years before joining the Narcotics Division. During those years, he’d seen the worst human nature had to offer, and sometimes the best, but nothing he’d experienced as a cop had ever made him as aware of his own mortality, of his insignificance in the whole scheme of things, as the boundless isolation of the ranch.

      He’d been riding fence all morning, and in spite of the thick cowhide gloves he wore, his hands were numb from the cold. The white ranch house was hardly more than a speck on the endless horizon, but Brady could imagine the curl of smoke from the chimneys, the rich aroma of Rosa’s strong coffee permeating the warm kitchen. He gave Rowan a nudge, urging the red chestnut homeward across the rocky turf.

      They’d stayed out too long. Rowan’s breath rolled from his nostrils like steam hissing from a locomotive, and the dull ache in Brady’s knee had turned into searing pain. But he wouldn’t give in to that pain. He’d had enough drugs and doctors to last him a lifetime, and besides, none of them could fix what really ate at him anyway. A shot-up knee would heal in time, but a young woman he’d sworn to protect couldn’t be brought back to life.

      Idly, he watched a tumbleweed roll across the frozen tundra in front of him, but in his mind’s eye he pictured a cloud of dark hair and soft, soulful eyes. Rachel had been a good person, but she’d gotten herself mixed up in a bad business. A nasty business. When she’d wanted out, her ex-lover, a Houston drug lord named Stephen Rialto, hadn’t thought twice about sending his goons to storm the safe house where Brady had taken her until she could testify. Brady’s leg had been shot to hell in the raid, but Rachel had been killed. She’d died in his arms.

      The burning throb in his leg was a grim reminder of how powerful and dangerous Stephen Rialto had become. Obviously he had a mole somewhere—in the FBI, the Department of Public Safety, maybe even in the Texas Confidential. But Brady didn’t think the latter was too likely. The Confidential was a tight-knit organization. He knew all the agents personally. In some ways, they’d become his family. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe that one of them had betrayed him. But then, betrayal could come where and when you least expected it. He’d learned that lesson a long time ago.

      As he drew near the sprawling, two-story ranch house, he saw the front door open, and a figure stepped out onto the wide front porch. She waited until Brady had dismounted and tied Rowan to the cedar rail outside the bunkhouse before running lightly down the porch steps.

      Protected from the cold by a dark blue parka, Penny Archer strode toward СКАЧАТЬ