Willing

Chapter 17

Josie stood beside Daniel at the airport’s security exit and watched for her father. Daniel had been quiet since she’d told him of her love, but not distant, so she had hope. He wasn’t pushing her away for bringing emotion into the equation of their mutual obsession.

He wasn’t embracing those emotions, though, either.

She didn’t blame him. He’d said all along his feelings for her were not rooted in sentiment, but physical desire. Whether or not he could change his attitude remained to be seen, but she certainly wasn’t giving up on him because he hadn’t made any declarations.

Several passengers came through the exit as they waited, but none of them were Tyler McCall, and she grew antsy.

“Do you think he missed the flight?” she asked.

Daniel’s hand settled on her shoulder, giving the comfort of his touch. “Don’t worry about it. Hotwire confirmed Tyler checked in for his seat assignment.”

“It could have been a smoke screen.” Her dad was tricky like that.

“He’ll be here, sweetheart.” The hand on her shoulder squeezed and then fell away. “Relax.”

A dapper older gentleman, wearing a conservative gray suit and carrying a briefcase, came toward them, and it was only as her dad got within ten feet that Josie recognized him. His military haircut was hidden under what had to have been a wig. It looked like a very real head of graying hair, cut in a typical businessman’s style.

He smiled as he reached them, his eyes warm with approval behind the silver-rimmed glasses he wore. “I knew you’d figure the journals out.”

With better than perfect eyesight, he’d never worn glasses, but they complemented his alter ego rather well. While one part of her admired his ability to camouflage in any environment, she was pretty frustrated by the whole cloak-and-dagger thing at this point. He could have been hurt while she was busy trying to figure out the clues in his diaries, and she’d spent a lot of unnecessary time in a state of anxiety.

She did not appreciate the added stress. “Why didn’t you just call?”

“Could have had a bug on your phone. Didn’t need the enemy realizing I had lived through their little explosion sooner than they had to.”

“I’ve been worried sick about you.”

He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Why?”

“Someone tried to kill you,” she reminded him with exasperation. “Why did you leave the hospital?”

Her dad’s eyes dimmed. “I’m not sure. I was a little confused. Couldn’t remember why I had to get away, just knew that I did. I was halfway here before I remembered why I was headed to Nevada and what had happened. By then, I figured you’d find me through the journals, and like I said, I didn’t want to risk your phone being bugged.”

He started walking, even his gait that of a businessman, not a soldier. “Come on. I’ve got a checked bag.”

It took several minutes to get his single piece of luggage, and when she asked him why he checked it, he told her it went with the cover.

He picked up the medium-sized suitcase. “Did you bring a car?”

“Yes.” Daniel put his arm around Josie’s waist and began to lead the way outside.

She raised a startled gaze to him, but he was looking at her dad and asking how the recon mission went. Her father’s reply confirmed Daniel had been right in assuming reconnaissance had been her father’s objective.

“They’ve got fifteen soldiers, nine wives and eleven kids in the compound. Four of the soldiers have been through my training camp in the last year. Little pricks thought they could get rid of me after a six-week training course when I’ve been a soldier longer than most of them have been alive.”

They’d reached the car, and Daniel opened the trunk for her dad to drop in his bag. Josie climbed into the backseat and waited for the men to get in.

Once they did, she asked, “Did you get any names?”

“No more than the ones I’ve already got. I didn’t want to risk going in through security until I’d scouted the whole area. When I did go in, I didn’t have time to do anything but get some details on the internal structure of the compound I hadn’t been able to achieve via long distance observation.”

“How’s security?” Daniel asked.

“It’s all right. Nothing like what you and your friends would have set up. We’ll get past it pretty easily.”

She’d been afraid of this. “Get past it for what?”

“Not to blow them to kingdom come, if that’s what’s worrying you, Josie-girl. I don’t kill innocent women and children.”

“I know that.” It was her turn to look at him as if his brains had leaked out through his ears during the flight from Missoula. “However, that doesn’t mean whatever else you’ve got planned won’t get you into trouble.”

He rolled his eyes and looked at Daniel. “She been worrying like this the whole time?”

“Not all of it,” Daniel said noncommittally.

Her dad grimaced. “I guess the feds are already involved?”

“Yes.”

“Would be a hell of a lot easier if they weren’t, but I figured they would be, what with the Homeland Security Act and the area surrounding my property being national forest.”

“They thought you’d set the explosion yourself at first,” Josie said, still unable to comprehend what kind of logic had worked that scenario out.

“Idiots.”

“Josie’s also a suspect. The extremists took out a life insurance policy in your name and named her as beneficiary. Then told the press about it.”

She hadn’t wanted him to tell her dad that. He was bound to be angry enough as it was.

“They spread the blame around. The press also acted like they’d received tips indicating the responsible parties belonged to ELF,” she said by way of getting his attention focused on something else.

“And caused reporters and cameramen to park themselves in Josette’s front yard and harass her through the door or in person whenever she went outside.”

“You are not helping,” she said as her dad slammed his fist against the dashboard.

“Those sons of bitches!”

“My feelings exactly.” Daniel sounded only slightly more controlled in his fury than her dad, and it occurred to her that he’d been hiding from her a lot of his reaction to what had happened.

They couldn’t afford to dwell on their anger. “The important issue is what you’re planning to do about it.”

“Take them down.”

“How?”

“Break in to their compound, dispose of their armory and weapons, find their records and turn the sons of bitches over to the feds for disposal. If my investigator’s research is accurate, and there’s no reason to believe it’s not, getting documentation of the group’s activities to the feds will have several members facing arrest and long-term prison sentences.”

“Not to mention the ones responsible for your attempted murder.” She wasn’t sure how practical his idea of neutralizing their armory and weapons was, but his objectives were way better than she had been expecting. “I assume you have an idea of how to go about doing all this.”

“I do, but I’ll want some time to put it into mission-briefing form before I present it to you and Daniel. I spent the flight flirting with the woman in the seat next to mine.”

Shocked, Josie squeaked, “Flirting?”

“Part of my cover, but she was a nice-looking woman. Oriental. Tiny thing, with a voice as soft as an angel’s. Gave me her phone number. She only lives about twenty minutes from my house here. Can you believe that?”

She couldn’t believe any of it, but before she could think of a way to phrase such a statement diplomatically, Daniel asked, “How did you know the Society of New American Patriots was responsible for the bombing?”

“The man who runs the background checks on my students discovered a connection between a soldier who’d been in my January training camp and one that had just taken the early summer training. He had just figured out that they both were involved in this stupid-ass white supremacist organization when the compound got blown up.”

“You knew you had somebody after you, and you didn’t say anything?” Josie asked, much more dismayed by this revelation than by her father’s apparent attraction to a woman for the first time in her memory.

“I didn’t know they were after me. I only knew I’d been training domestic terrorists. I was deciding what I wanted to do about it when they tried to kill me.”

“You didn’t tell me about it,” Daniel said.

“It was my problem. They came through the camp before you bought in to it.”

“I’m your partner. All problems related to the school are mine, too.” There was no give in Daniel’s voice, but then she hadn’t thought that argument was going to hold water with him.

“Hell, Nitro, you’ve got enough trouble on your hands courting my daughter. Any idiot could see that.”

“He’s not courting me, Dad. I swear, sometimes you talk like you were born two centuries ago, not a few decades before the new millennium.”

Her dad snorted. “Doesn’t matter when I was born. Call it what you like. Courting is courting, and I wasn’t born yesterday. I can see what’s going on right in front of my face.”

“You’re more perceptive than Josie is. She thought I didn’t like her.” Daniel sounded amused, and she glared at the back of his head.

Was this some kind of guy thing or just another case of her dad and Daniel being alike? How was she supposed to know that glaring, brooding and general cranky behavior was the male mating call for the modern-day warrior?

Her dad turned around to face her. “I guess you’ve worked it out different by now?”

“Yes,” she clipped, still irritated with both of them for acting so superior.

She didn’t repeat the assertion that Daniel wasn’t courting her because he hadn’t denied it.

There were only a couple of reasons she could think of for that, and the first one she already knew to be false—that he really was interested in marrying her. She remembered what Daniel had said about how her dad had been warning men off of her since she was young. As his new partner, her mercenary lover probably didn’t want to start his new working relationship with a huge fight over his desire to bed but not wed the other man’s daughter.

Since she wasn’t up to a big argument with her dad either, she understood where Daniel was coming from. She didn’t know if his present silence on the truth was going to help anything in the long run, however.

“I’m glad you finally got smart,” her dad said. “I thought Nitro was going to self-destruct the way you ignored what he felt for you.”

“I didn’t realize you were aware of it to that extent,” Daniel said, his voice now laced with chagrin. “I’m not usually so easily read.”

“I notice everything related to my daughter.”

He hadn’t noticed she craved some level of normal domesticity in her life, but then even the best parents were blind to some things about their children.

Tyler’s plane had arrived late evening, so it was dark when Daniel and Josie drove him back to his house. He was tired and wanted to get working on the mission strategy, so they left him and continued to the hotel.

They returned the next morning after breakfast.

Tyler made coffee and served it on the brick patio, having pulled some chairs out of the storage area attached to the back of the house.

“I noticed you didn’t stay here while I was gone,” he said as he took his seat next to Josie. “I wouldn’t have minded.”

Josie smiled, looking so sweet Daniel wanted to lick her lips like a lollipop. “We knew that, but we thought staying at a hotel would be better.”

“The bed was more comfortable. She’d have had to sleep on top of me in yours,” Daniel added, winking at Josie and enjoying the way she choked on her coffee.

She was damn cute when she got embarrassed.

“You’ve staked a claim on my daughter.”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

The look Josie gave him was enigmatic, and Daniel wished he knew what she was thinking. She’d said she loved him and given him one of the most amazing experiences of his life, but he didn’t know how she felt about the fact he hadn’t repeated the words. He couldn’t.

He didn’t equate the way he felt about her with the way his mother had been devoted to his father in the face of her own compromised safety. He sure as hell didn’t see what his father called love as having anything to do with the way Daniel reacted to Josie. He wasn’t sure what he did feel about her, except that he had no intention of letting her go.

“So what are your plans for taking the target?” Josie asked in the silence that had stretched after his declaration of intent.

Tyler looked from Daniel to his daughter as if he was trying to gauge what was going on between them. Daniel wished him luck.

With a small frown, the older man shrugged and focused on Josie. “I figured a small force of four to six soldiers would have the best chance of pulling it off. We go in at night when they’ve got two sentries patrolling the perimeter. The soldiers guarding the compound are pretty much weekend warriors, despite what they might think—even the four that have been through my training camps. They rely heavily on their not-so-incredible security system.”

“So, we disarm the system, neutralize the sentries and follow through on our objective uninterrupted? It sounds too easy.” And Daniel didn’t trust easy on a mission.

“It shouldn’t be, but sons of bitches stupid enough to think they can use my training camp to develop domestic terrorism techniques are stupid enough to be brought down without a five-star effort.”

Maybe his business partner was right, but Daniel planned to call Wolf and Hotwire in to be two on the team. He wanted the best with him because he knew Josie was going to insist on coming along, and he wasn’t going to let her get hurt if he had to stop a bullet with his body.

She was the other half of his soul, and somehow he was going to have to come to terms with that truth, whatever it meant.

“I’m not sure about your plan to disarm them.” Josie wrinkled her nose as if she’d smelled something bad. “That doesn’t seem like a simple objective with an organization like this one.”

“The armory is kept in an underground storage facility. We weld the doors shut, and it will be days before they can get the supplies in necessary to cut through the two-inch-thick metal. They’re a real live-off-the-land type of group, and their transportation in and out of the compound is pretty rudimentary.”

“But what about their personal weapons?”

Tyler grimaced. “That’s going to take more doing. Everyone in the compound is armed, but they store their weapons in communal rooms when they aren’t using them, and as far as I can tell, only the sentries take firearms with them at night. We have to infiltrate the rooms and take out the arms.”

“The easiest thing to do would be to put them in the armory before we weld it shut,” Josie said musingly as Daniel became more convinced this was one mission she should not go on.

Tyler nodded. “I think so, too.”

But Daniel shook his head. “No way.”

“Why not?” Josie asked.

“We’re good, but no matter how good we are, with the kind of invasive mission objectives your father has outlined, someone is going to wake up and raise the alarm.”

“Not if we put a sleeping agent in their evening meal. They all eat from the same supplies. All we have to do is mix it in with the flour the women use to make the bread they serve every night.”

“Too risky.”

“I got in before; I can do it again.”

“There’s no way to regulate how much of the agent they ingest. Enough to knock out an adult could kill a child.” And Daniel wasn’t willing to take that chance.

“What do you suggest?” Tyler asked.

“Change our objectives.”

“To what?”

“The four men who went through your training school are probably the same ones who set the bombs on the mountain. I assume you noted their sleeping quarters. We take them prisoner and deliver them to the FBI, along with copies of the extremists’ files. Welding the armory doors shut is doable, but one level of risk higher than I think we should take.”

“With the four soldiers gone, won’t the others run?” Josie asked.

“Possibly, but with the evidence we’ll provide them, the FBI can put a hold on their funds and confiscate the property housing the compound under the Terrorist Act.”

“And unlike big-name terrorists, these men don’t have a whole lot of financial resources at their disposal,” Tyler mused. “The feds will get them eventually. From what my investigator can tell, their alternative identities are pretty thin. Even the suits in Washington should be able to see through them.”

Josie nodded, her expression saying she had a lot more confidence in the authorities than her dad did. “And if they don’t run, with the inside information you’ve accumulated, the FBI should be able to infiltrate the camp without allowing a hostage situation to develop with the terrorists’ families.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can talk you out of being on the team that goes in to take down the extremists?”

Josie looked critically at the paint job she was giving her toenails. She’d never done this before, but it wasn’t all that hard. Not for a woman who had been trained to hit a target before she’d learned how to ride a bike.

The pink nail polish she’d picked up at one of the airport stores while they were waiting for her dad glistened with a pearly shine. She wiggled her toes. Nice. Very feminine.

She raised her gaze to Daniel. “Why would you want to?”

“I don’t want you hurt.”

“I’m a soldier. This is what I do.”

“No, you aren’t. You’re building a different life for yourself. Maybe you should consider giving that life a chance before taking on a mission like this.”

“There isn’t going to be another mission like this.”

His expression said that wasn’t a bad thing.

She went back to painting her toenails, giving them a second coat. “Wow, the color really changes when you add another coat.”

“Haven’t you worn nail polish before?”

“No. There’s tons of stuff I haven’t done.”

“Like what?”

“I’d never been in a girls’ locker room until I joined a health club near my house.”

“Did you join so you could go in one?”

She finished her right foot and switched to her left. “Yeah. It probably sounds crazy to you, but there are so many normal life experiences I want to try.”

“You can’t exactly do stuff like go to dances, pass notes with your friends and have a crush on the most popular boy in school now.”

“I didn’t go to school at all. The one time I tried in junior high, I felt so out of place I never wanted to go back. I like college, though. Claire and I have even passed notes.” Having finished her toenails, she closed the bottle of nail polish and put it on the nightstand beside the bed. “I wonder how long these will take to dry.”

“What does the bottle say?”

“It doesn’t. I guess they figure women don’t need directions for this sort of thing.”

He came around the bed and sat down beside her, laying his long legs alongside hers. “I’d give it at least fifteen minutes.”

She wiggled her toes again, careful not to let them touch each other. “Sounds good.”

“Are you sure you’re up to a mission right now?”

She looked sideways at him. “Of course.”

“But you’re having your woman’s thing.”

“Woman’s thing?” she asked and giggled.

That was another thing she hadn’t really done before, but her big, bad mercenary was looking distinctly uncomfortable, and she couldn’t help herself. Considering how solicitous he’d been of her, this obvious discomfort over discussing her monthly was hilarious.

“Well, men don’t have them.”

“I guess not, and anyway,” she said, dismissing the subject for a more important one, “I’ve gone on lots of missions during that time of month.”

“You were so fragile yesterday morning.”

“I’m feeling better now. It’s not a problem.”

Daniel didn’t look as though he trusted her current state of healthiness, but after the day before he couldn’t very well argue that she was still in a state of fragility.

“No more excuses. I’m going.” She grinned at him, ready to talk about something else again.

She’d said what needed to be said on the subject, which was that there was no reason for her not to go.

“Would you like to hear what else I want to try?” she asked with a wink, making her voice as provocative as possible.

It worked. His eyes narrowed with interest. “Sure.”

“I want to be kissed on a first date, preferably by a guy I can’t resist.” She looked down at her hands, fanning her fingers out. “Do you think I should paint my nails, too? I don’t know if it’s conventional to paint your toes and your fingernails the same color. Do you suppose the fashion police will get me if I do it?”

He grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him. He’d been tense about her involvement in the mission, but now he positively vibrated with obvious displeasure. “No way in hell.”

“You don’t think I should paint my fingernails?”

He clenched his jaw. “No first date. No kissing.”

“Why not?” she asked, all innocence.

“You belong to me.”

“And that means I can’t go out on a first date and get ki—”

“No other man is touching you with his lips or anything else,” he growled.

“Did I say another man?”

“You said on a first date.”

“Since we’ve never actually been on a date, is that a problem? Don’t you want to go out with me? We could see a movie, or go to a show, or go on a picnic in the park.”

“We can go on a date.” He sounded as if he was agreeing to take her on a tour of a mushroom farm the day they fertilized.

“That’s magnanimous of you.”

“I mean, if you want to go out, I’ll take you out.” His voice was infused with slightly more enthusiasm.

She cocked her head back, giving him her best come-hither look. “And will you kiss me?”

“Are you saying I’m the irresistible guy you were talking about?”

“I haven’t been able to resist you yet, have I?”

His eyes dark with the desire that never seemed to diminish, he cupped her face. “Then I think I can take care of this first for you, but maybe we should practice a little just in case.”

She didn’t get a chance to answer because he was already starting.

Later that night Josie was snuggled against Daniel on the verge of sleep when he said, “We’ll have to play spin the bottle when your woman’s thing is done, too.”

That would mean a lot of kissing between them if they were the only ones playing. She smiled around a yawn. “Sounds good.”

Curling around her more securely, he settled his hand possessively over one of her breasts. “I bet you never played doctor either.”

“No.”

“We’ll have to get a stethoscope.”

“Who gets to be doctor and who gets to be patient?” she asked after another yawn.

“We’ll take turns.”

She thought of something else that would be fun with him. “Can we have a slumber party where we stay up all night, too?”

“I can guarantee when all this is over that I’ll give you an all-nighter you’ll never forget.”

She wiggled her bottom against him. “Sounds wonderful.”

“It will be.” He groaned when she wiggled again. “And it can’t come soon enough for me.”