Shannon McKenna Bundle: Ultimate Weapon, Extreme Danger, Behind Closed Doors, Hot Night, & Return to Me. Shannon McKennaЧитать онлайн книгу.
found.
Val had found her, but now he wished he had not. He didn’t want to deliver her to Luksch, who was at best a criminal grown rich by trafficking in drugs, humans, and everything else, and at worst, a psychotic freak. But PSS was not inclined to criticize a client so immensely rich.
Val carried the cup back to the laptop glowing in the middle of the wood floor and sank down in front of it. His naked chest was covered with goosebumps, but the tea would warm him, and he didn’t want to bother finding a shirt or turning on the heat.
He clicked the footage he’d obtained yesterday. The toddler’s swim class. He took a sip of the hot, bitter tea and skipped through the footage to his favorite part. Here he was again, allowing himself to have favorites. Like the tea. An uncharacteristic indulgence.
From one moment to the next, it would distort into a need. And from that, an obsession. He had always wondered what an obsession would feel like. It would seem that he no longer had to wonder.
She came out of the women’s dressing room, silent and graceful as a slant-eyed female panther among the crowd of chubby, chattering women with their squealing offspring. She led the wobbly-legged, huge-eyed little girl carefully by the hand.
Her body was stunning in the black maillot. He always watched the exit from the dressing room, having grown addicted to the hot rush of delighted surprise that it gave him no matter how many times he saw it. He skipped through the class, which he had already watched ad nauseam, to the moment that she lifted the dripping child out of the water and vaulted out in turn onto the pool’s edge, poised in the perfect equilibrium of a predator’s crouch. The curves and hollows, the highlights and shadows of her wet body. High, lush breasts, the discreet mandolin curve of hips and ass. Endlessly long, strong, shapely legs.
He’d seduced many women in his career, and some of them had been very beautiful, but he’d never reacted like this to mere visual stimuli. Or any stimuli, in truth, visual or otherwise. He liked sex, but he took his usual three steps back from it—particularly in the context of a professional operation. From the beginning of his career with PSS, they had required him to use his looks and body as a means to an end. His sexual technique was flawless, but he stayed cool. Always.
So why was he sweating now? Panting like a hormone-intoxicated teenager? There was no logical explanation. And no excuse.
The thought of that woman soiling herself with that prick Georg Luksch made his hands clench. It made his gorge rise. A bad sign.
Ah, here it was, the best part. The women’s changing room. He had seen a hiding place for the tiny camera behind the fluorescent light fixture in the shower area the night he’d broken into the place. He’d been unable to resist. After all, a long look at the target’s naked body could yield useful data.
Ah, no. Unfortunately, he was not as adept at lying to himself as he was at lying to the rest of the world.
That footage was incredible, though. High breasts, water coursing around her taut, protruding brown nipples as she soaped herself. The child was wrapped in a towel after her own bath, playing with a rubber frog, unaware of her mother’s nudity. Tamara rinsed. The suds sluiced into the minuscule swatch of decorative pubic hair over the smooth, depilated cunt, filling the alluring hollows of her groin.
Steele ignored the other women in the room, who sneaked slack-jawed peeks at a body the likes of which they’d only seen in their husbands’ airbrushed men’s magazines.
His cell phone rang. Val was savagely irritated at the interruption, and yanked off the earpiece clipped to his waistband.
He hung it on his ear. “What?” he asked, with ill grace.
“So?” It was Hegel, his direct superior at PSS, the man who had recruited and trained him. The tone in the man’s voice put Val’s teeth on edge. Tough. Resentment was another thing that he could not afford.
“So what?” Val countered.
“It’s two weeks since you located her. The fat cats are breathing down my neck. Stop sitting on this thing like a fucking hen. Have you got the kid yet?”
Val’s jaw tensed. “That is not the correct approach.”
“It’s quick,” Hegel said. “We need results.”
Val was silent for a moment. “I cannot be sure that she even cares enough about the child for her to be an effective lever,” he said. “I’d prefer to try a subtler approach first.”
“Subtle. Hah.” Hegel made a doglike growling sound. “Come on, Janos. One of Daddy Novak’s ex-thugs should be more professional. What is your brilliant alternative plan? Knock her on the head and put her in a box? That works for me, as long as you do it soon.”
Val clenched his jaw. Three steps back. Hegel loved waving Val’s old connection to Novak’s organization in his face, but it could only irritate him if he allowed it to. “I’m working on it,” he said finally.
“Hmmph. Work harder, Janos. I hope you’re not having an attack of scruples about the kid. That was what fucked up your performance last time. Patience is growing thin up here. Damn, I should have called Henry for this job. He would have been done and gone by now.”
Val was stonily silent. Hegel liked to sow discord, believing that a situation that he had destabilized himself was more easily controlled. But Hegel could not control him. He could have him killed, yes, perhaps. But he could not control him.
Nor could he interfere with Val’s bond with his closest friend and fellow operative, Henry Berne. In fact, Henry might well be his only friend. The person known as Val Janos had “friends,” but none of them knew about his double life. Only PSS staff knew, and of them, only Henry could be counted as a friend.
One friend, in all the world, unless he counted Imre. But Imre was in a category all his own.
“This job is your ticket to retirement,” Hegel ground out. “Do not fuck it up, Janos. I am tired of your superior attitude. I would love to see the ass end of you head off into the sunset, because the alternative would be stressful and bloody. And my personal responsibility since I was the dick who recruited you. Think about that.” Hegel hung up.
Val pulled off the earpiece. It flew across the room and hit the wall before he could even try to grasp for his elusive, detached calm again.
God. Twelve years of sweating blood and taking bullets for those ungrateful bastards, and still they waved their fucking threats at him.
Scruples. Another thing he could not afford. His scruples had been a problem for most of his life. Ironic, considering the career destiny had in store for him. Imre’s influence, no doubt. He could hear in his mind’s ear exactly what Imre would have had to say about that, but he blocked the lecture before it could start to play in his head. He had no time or energy to spare for guilt.
He had told Hegel that he didn’t know if Steele cared enough about the child to use her as a lever, but he had lied. No woman of her type sacrificed an hour of her life to suffer through the tedium of Mommy & Me, or spent hours rolling a ball back and forth across the grass in the park except out of love. She cared, intensely.
From the point of view of expediency, it was difficult to justify not doing what Hegel had urged. Take the child, and start negotiations.
But he disliked hurting children. Kidnapping that child would hurt her. It would hurt any child. Particularly a small, wounded one.
That child was wounded. He knew her story, he’d seen her files, read her charts. He would not be the one to inflict the next blow in an endless series of blows. To say nothing of the practical logistics of caring for a small child with medical problems. He would need a team. It would be chaotic, complicated, messy. A state of affairs he took pains to avoid.
In the course of his career, he’d managed to finesse his dislike of hurting children, and still obtain successful outcomes. He’d relied on luck and cleverness, but his luck had run out last year in Bogotá.
The problem