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“So it seems. How’d he find you?”

She shrugged. “He could’ve followed us back to the hotel last night. It wouldn’t be too hard to find out which room a certain petite Asian woman and her male companion are saying in. Heck, he probably knows the names we registered under.”

“Perhaps he’s hoping to find a higher bidder for his prizes.”

Kat shook her head. “I think not. He’d go straight to his contacts in the art world for that.”

“Maybe you scared the hell out of him and he’s looking to negotiate a surrender?”

Again, she shook her head. “He was confident as he jumped those roofs. He was sure of himself and his ability to defeat me until the last moment before we fell.”

Stunned at what she was implying, Jeff asked, “Are you suggesting that he actually could have taken you in that fight if you two hadn’t fallen?” He found the idea of anybody matching her martial skills hard to believe.

Kat shot him an offended look. “He didn’t stand a chance against me. I was trying very hard not to kill him, and that’s why it was taking me a while to put him down.”

He gaped. “You mean you had a chance to take him out and you didn’t do it?”

She drew herself up and replied defensively, “That’s correct.”

“And why not?”

She huffed. “He wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“This isn’t the eighteenth century and your meeting wasn’t with pistols at dawn! Gentlemen’s rules don’t apply to hand-to-hand combat between you and some criminal you’ve been ordered to catch. You’re a soldier, for God’s sake. You’re paid to win, dammit.”

She spoke with angry precision. “I have never done this job for the money. If I did, I’d be a private mercenary and make ten times what the U.S. government gives me.”

“So you let our target go because it wouldn’t have been sporting to use all your skills on him.” It wasn’t a question. It was an outraged statement of fact.

He could not believe her! He didn’t even know what articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice she’d just blasted to smithereens, but he had faith she’d broken a bunch of them. Great. And as her commanding officer, it fell to him to make the charges against her. How in hell was he going to destroy her career-and furthermore, her honor-and salvage anything at all between them?

“Why does he want to talk to me?” Kat repeated, interrupting his furious-and increasingly panicked-train of thought.

“How the hell do I know?” he snapped.

“Focus, Jeff. I need your brainpower, here. We have to decide if I’m going to that gully or not.”

“One thing I know for damn sure,” he burst out, “you’re not going to that meeting alone.”

She sighed. “He wants to talk to me. If you come along, he may not show himself. He’d head for the hills and we’d never find out what’s so bloody urgent that he went to all this trouble to contact us.”

“You could be walking straight into a trap.”

“So could he. Why would he expose himself like this to such danger? I kept up with him across those rooftops last night, and he fought with me. He has to know that I stand a real chance of taking him down if he and I go head-to-head.”

“Maybe that’s why he wants to meet you. He’s reveling in the thrill of finally coming up against a challenge.”

“I don’t think so. He’d have taken more risks in his robberies to date if he was looking for a cheap thrill.”

Jeff exhaled hard. She was right. At the moment, Kat was thinking a lot more clearly than he was.

He stated forcefully, “You need backup. No way am I letting you go to that meeting alone.”

“Then we’ve decided that I am going?” she asked with infuriating calm.

“Oh, you’re going, all right. But on my terms. Not the Ghost’s.”

Chapter 13

The next morning, Kat had just finished a grueling workout, punching, kicking, spinning and leaping her way through a difficult practice sequence, when a knock on the hallway door startled her. Jeff was not up yet, or at least he hadn’t emerged from his room where he’d retreated angrily-and alone-last night.

Hard to tell what he was madder about-the fact that she hadn’t killed the Ghost or that fact that she was determined to go to this meeting without him. It sure had blown the mood between them last night. And she’d so been looking forward to making love with him. An urge to throw a petulant tantrum stunned her. She never threw tantrums, let alone pouted. And she was on the verge of doing both.

She toweled off the worst of the sweat streaming down her face and cracked open the hallway door. She gasped in surprise and threw the portal wide open. “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed as four of her teammates piled into the suite.

Aleesha Gautier, temporary commander of the Medusas while Major Vanessa “Viper” Blake was on maternity leave, laughed richly. In the thick Jamaican accent she affected when she was stressed or amused, she replied, “Ahh, girly. De way me hears it, our little Cobra got herself a big ol’ mon-fish on de hook.”

Kat stared. “Where in the world did you hear that?”

“Why, from de fish hisself. He say to me, ‘Git your happy self down here to de islands. Your sniper girlie need someone to watch her six.’”

Kat gaped. “Jeff called you?”

Aleesha nodded. “Dat he did.”

“When?”

Misty, the team’s resident gorgeous blonde, replied. “Last night. He said you’re insisting on-I believe his exact words were-being a damn fool and not letting him back you up. He said you needed us.”

Kat didn’t know what to say. She was elated to have her teammates here to help. But she was shocked that Jeff had called them. Why not call in his own team, whom he was accustomed to working with and knew like the back of his hand? The answer was obvious, of course. Because she knew the Medusas like the back of her hand. Apparently, he’d deemed it more important for her to feel safe and in her comfort zone than for him to feel that way. The generosity of the gesture stole her breath away.

Karen Turner, the team’s Amazon look-alike Marine, glanced around the suite. “So where is the good captain? The way we hear it, he’s quite an eyeful.”

“Who told you that?” Kat demanded.

Dark-haired Isabella Torres laughed gaily. “Captain Steiger was on Dex’s team until Maverick was given his own team to command. Dex says he’s quite the ladies’ man.” Dexter Thorpe was Isabella’s significant other and a Special Forces operator, himself.

Embarrassed at this third degree about her love life, Kat asked Isabella by way of blatant distraction, “So, when is Dex going to make an honest woman out of you, anyway?”

Isabella sighed. “His father’s trying to coerce him into taking over the family business again and Dex is frantically taking missions to stay out in the field and out of contact with his family. Which means we haven’t had much chance to discuss that recently.”

And given that Isabella’s family wasn’t too keen on her career either, Kat supposed Bella wasn’t about to throw stones at Dex for hiding from his parents.

The door behind her opened and Kat turned swiftly. Jeff wore a pale blue polo shirt, white Bermuda shorts and deck shoes. He looked like a bronzed god. His hair was neatly combed, still damp from his shower, and his eyes glowed bright blue, so sexy her knees went weak just to look at them.

He flashed a cover-model smile and drawled in his irresistible Southern accent. “You must be the Medusas I’ve heard so much about. It’s a pleasure to meet y’all.”

Misty muttered under her breath, “Way to go, Cobra!”

The other women grinned appreciatively as Aleesha held out her hand. “I’m Aleesha Gautier. Or you can call me Mamba. I’m nominally in charge of this gaggle.”

Jeff stared at her hand cautiously, then spared a quick glance over at Kat. “She’s not going to do the same thing you did the first time you shook my hand, is she?”