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“Permission To Come Aboard, Captain?”

At Devlin’s question, Liz pulled in another breath. She could think of a hundred reasons to refuse his request. She didn’t really know this man, wasn’t sure she believed everything he’d told her.

Yet she couldn’t deny he acted on her like a damn spark plug. Every time he got this close, he transmitted an electrical energy that made her pulse rev faster and her skin get hotter. Still, she was pretty sure she would have denied his request if the rig had remained stable.

Well, It didn’t pitch much. Just enough to send Liz staggering forward a step, smack into Devlin’s denim-covered chest.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, his voice edged with a husky note that had Liz’s toes curling into the deck.

Devlin and the Deep Blue Sea
Merline Lovelace

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MERLINE LOVELACE

spent twenty-three years in the Air Force, pulling tours in Vietnam, at the Pentagon and at bases all over the world. When she hung up her uniform, she decided to try her hand at writing. She’s since had more than fifty novels published, with over seven million copies of her work in print. Watch for the next book in the Code Name: Danger series, I’ll Walk Alone, coming from Silhouette Intimate Moments.

For the Old Farts gang—thanks for a fun day of war stories and tall tales about life on the patch!

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue

Prologue

“You sleazy bucket of slime!”

Fury seared Elizabeth Moore’s veins as she glared at the e-mail she’d printed out less than a half hour ago. In the light of the fat, round Baja moon she could just make out the message her fiancé had zinged her.

Correction.

Ex-fiancé.

Fuming, Liz ripped the e-mail into halves, then quarters, then jagged eighths. Waves, tinted to liquid gold by the moon, lapped at her bare ankles. With May slipping fast toward June, the heat of the Mexican night wrapped around her like a spongy blanket.

Digging her toes into the wet sand, Liz tore the eighths into sixteenths and threw them into the sea. A receding wave carried off the scraps. The soggy bits floated for a few seconds before slowly sinking, drowning Liz’s shattered dreams down with them.

“I can’t believe I fell for such a jerk!”

The truth was only now beginning to register. The man she thought she’d share her life with, the fiancé who’d convinced her to take this job in Mexico while he racked up hours flying as a civilian contract pilot in Singapore had just zapped her an e-mail informing her he’d fallen for another woman. A Malay correspondent for NBC news by the name of Bambang Chawdar.

Bambang, for God’s sake!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the bastard had also cleaned out their joint bank account.

Liz couldn’t decide which infuriated her more—the fact that she’d convinced herself she was really in love with Donny Carter or that she’d remained faithful to him during their long separation.

“Seven months,” she ground out. “Seven months I’ve lived like a damned nun.”

She’d certainly had plenty of opportunities for sin. The oil crews she choppered to the offshore rig some forty miles off the Baja peninsula generally consisted of prime specimens. And when they came off their month-long rotations, they were hungry for female companionship. In the past seven months Liz had become an expert at dodging propositions from horny roughnecks and roustabouts. Most had required only a breezy smile or a firm “no, thanks.” One or two had required a little more forceful response.

Liz certainly didn’t feel like smiling now. She felt like hitting something. Or releasing her fury in a way that would soothe her battered pride and her pent-up frustration.

“I swear to God I’m going to jump the next halfway-sober male I meet!”

Her fierce vow carried clearly over the murmur of the Pacific. So did the amused drawl that came out of the darkness behind her.

“I’m sober, darlin’. And if you’re looking for someone to jump, I’d be happy to oblige.”

Liz’s heart leapfrogged into her throat. She spun around, searching the dunes, until a dim shadow materialized. The moon was behind him. She couldn’t make out his features, but the rest of him telegraphed a clear message. With each step he took toward her, a marquee inside her head flashed the words tall, rangy and buff.

What the heck was he doing out here on this isolated stretch of beach so late at night?

What was she doing here, alone and weaponless?

Cursing the anger that had made her leave both her cell phone and her collapsible baton in the Jeep parked up by the road, Liz stood her ground. She’d spent four years as an air force pilot. Her survival, evasion, resistance and escape trainers had taught her some pretty brutal moves. She could take this guy down if she needed to, despite his height and the impressive set of muscles she could just make out under his black T-shirt and jeans.

“I appreciate the offer,” she replied with a lift of her chin, “but you might want to rethink it. The mood I’m in, a midnight tussle in the sand might not be a particularly enjoyable experience for you.”

She saw his head angle, felt the prickly heat of his gaze as it traveled from her face to her stretchy white T-shirt to her cutoffs and the bare legs below. His face was a blur in the darkness, but she couldn’t miss the wolfish grin that appeared as he stepped closer.

“I’ll take my chances.”

The slow drawl pegged him as an American. The laughter lacing it stirred an unexpected response from Liz. For an insane moment she was actually tempted to follow through with her rash vow. God knew she could use a little stud service, and this six-foot-plus hunk of hard muscle certainly looked like he could provide it.

Maybe it was the moon, she thought wildly. It had to be the moon exerting some weird gravitational pull, like the riptides so prevalent along the Baja coast. Whatever is was, Liz felt the surge of something dangerous. Powerful.

Caution shouted at her to step back, put a safe distance between her and this broad-shouldered stranger. Anger, singed pride and an uncharacteristic recklessness kept her in place as he moved closer.

She could see his features more clearly now. With the precision of an aviator verifying her course headings, she cataloged each one. Strong, square chin. Nose with a slightly flattened bridge, as if it had taken a punch or two. White squint lines at the corners of his eyes. A grin that was pure sex.

“How about we…?”

A sharp crack split the night. Another followed a heartbeat later. The stranger spit out a curse, lunged forward, and slammed into Liz. She went down hard and landed on her butt in the shallow surf.

He went down with her, but rolled to his feet a second later and sprinted in the direction of the shots.

“Stay here!”

Like she could move? She was sprawled like a beached porpoise, wheezing from the impact of what had felt like 180 pounds of solid male.

It took Liz several seconds of painful effort to suck air back into her lungs before she, too, was up and running.

One

In the silent hours before dawn, only the occasional set of headlights stabbed through D.C.’s embassy district. The brick town houses lining a side street just off Massachusetts Avenue were shuttered and dark. From the outside, the elegant, three-story town house halfway down the block appeared as somnolent as its neighbors.

Light from a nearby streetlamp glowed dully on the discreet brass plaque mounted beside the front door. The plaque identified the building as housing the offices of the president’s special envoy. Old-time Washingtonians knew the title was meaningless, one of dozens doled out after every election to wealthy campaign contributors itching to be part of the hustle and bustle of the capital. Only a handful of insiders knew the special envoy also doubled as the director of OMEGA, a secret agency that reported directly to the president and was activated as a last resort, when all other measures failed.

One of OMEGA’s operatives was in the field now, and behind the darkened windows of the town house’s third floor a high-tech operations center vibrated with rigidly restrained tension. The agent’s controller sat at an elaborate console, his face tight with concentration.

“I didn’t copy that last transmission, Rigger. Come again, please.”

Joe Devlin, code name Rigger, responded with a heavy dose of disgust. “I said this part of the op just blew all to hell. I’ve got a corpse floating in the surf and I’m following a set of tracks fast getting washed away.”

“Is the corpse our informant?”

“Negative. The contact said to look for someone in a Mazatland Tigres football jersey. The dead guy’s in a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt. My guess is he followed our pigeon, spooked him and got drilled in the process.”

Everyone in the control center shared the frustration in Devlin’s terse reply. Their first real lead—their only lead so far—to the ring suspected of murdering U.S. citizens and selling their identities to dangerous undesirables was now on the run.

Devlin’s controller flicked a glance at the man listening to the exchange from a few yards away. Nick Jensen, code name Lightning, stood with the jacket of his Armani tux shoved back and his hands buried in the pockets of the hand-tailored trousers. He’d swung by the control center on his way home from one of the endless ceremonial dinners he regularly attended, and stayed for Rigger’s anticipated report.

His wife, Mackenzie, sat perched on the edge of the console, sleek and elegant in a sheath of black silk and matching spike heels. With or without those three-inch stilettos, Mackenzie Blair Jensen was a force to be reckoned with. Formerly OMEGA’s chief of communications, she now directed a team that supplied several agencies, including OMEGA, with equipment that would give any techie wet dreams. She remained as quiet as the others in the control center until Devlin came back on, huffing a little.

“Dammit! The shooter just jumped into a vehicle and took off. He’s heading south on the coast road. Get some surveillance in the air ASAP.”

“Will do. And I’ll—” The controller broke off, eyeing a blinking red light. “Stand by, Rigger. I’m getting a flash override.”

He switched frequencies, listened for a few seconds and switched back.

“We just intercepted a phone call to the Piedras Rojas police. There’s a female on the line, reporting a shooting at approximately your location. Our listener says she sounds like an American.”

“Well, hell! The blonde!”

“Come again?”

“There was a woman on the beach. I was just about to get rid of her when the bullets started flying.”

Frowning, Lightning stepped forward. “What was she doing at the rendezvous point so late at night? Acting as a lookout? A decoy?”

Three thousand miles away, Joe Devlin scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck. He’d spent almost six years as an OMEGA operative and had learned long ago never to take anyone at face value. He’d also learned to trust his instincts. The little he’d overheard suggested the blonde had come out to the beach to conduct a personal exorcism.

“I don’t think she’s part of this op. Sounded like she just got a ‘Dear Jane’ letter and was working off steam.”

Judging by her crack about living like a nun, it also sounded as though she’d built up a bad case of the hungries. Wishing like hell he’d had time to satisfy them, Devlin got back to business.

“We need to run her through the system and see what pops.”

“Did you get a name?” Lightning asked.

“No, but I did tag her Jeep when she drove up.”

Luckily, he’d arrived at the rendezvous site early. He’d seen the woman drive up and had tracked her from her Jeep to the water’s edge. He’d planned to call in her tag and have OMEGA check her out, but matters had moved too fast. Drawing the numbers from his memory bank, Devlin relayed them along with a brief physical description.

“I’d say she’s about twenty-eight or-nine. Five-six or so. Maybe 120 pounds. It was too dark to be sure, but I’m guessing her eyes were brown.”

“We’ll run her,” Lightning advised. “How about the corpse? Did you find anything on him that gave you a clue as to his identity or why he showed up at your rendezvous?”

“I didn’t have time to check. I’ll go back now and do a search.”

“Better do it quick. The locals will arrive on the scene shortly.”

Devlin flipped the lid on what looked like an ordinary cell phone. Despite its innocuous appearance, the device contained enough ultrasonic signals, secure satellite frequencies and encryption capabilities to orchestrate an intergalactic expedition. Mackenzie Blair, bless her state-of-the-art soul, believed an operative couldn’t carry too much in the way of communications into the field.

Keeping an eye out for the blonde, Devlin jogged back to the dark hump in the surf-washed sand. Damn! Whoever this guy was, his untimely demise sure put a kink in the mission.

Dropping to one knee, Devlin dragged out the tail of his T-shirt to use as a glove. A quick search turned up a fat wad of pesos wrapped with a rubber band, the kind of switchblade you could buy in any Mexican market and a container of dental floss.

Flipping the cell phone up again, Devlin punched a single key. “Robbery obviously wasn’t the motive. The guy’s still carrying his stash.”

“Any ID?”

“Negative.”

Lightning greeted that news with a grunt. “What about the woman? Can she ID you to the police?”

“Not by name, but she can give them a general description.”

“Then I suggest you disappear. We’ll track the locals’ investigation. In the meantime you need to maintain your cover.”

Devlin acknowledged the order but threw a regretful glance along the shoreline. He hated to leave with so many unanswered questions. Not to mention a very curvy, very delectable female who sounded as though she was in dire need of male companionship.

So long, Blondie. Sorry to leave you with this mess.

An hour later Liz wished fervently she’d high-tailed it back to town instead of calling the local gendarmes. They were hardly CSI types.

The first officer on the scene had poked at the body with the toe of his boot, tugged on plastic gloves and shooed away the crabs. After feeling around in the victim’s pockets, he extracted some objects and entered a sort of inventory in a notebook before ambling over to Liz.

She told him what happened. He made a few more notes and asked her if she knew the deceased. She didn’t.

About that time, Subcommandante Carlos Rivera and the crime scene unit arrived. Liz waited while the inspector studied the corpse and conferred with the uniformed officer. Finally he turned his attention to her. Slowly and methodically, he went over every word of her statement. Such as it was.

“You say you do not know the identity of the man who has been shot?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What about this Americano? The one you say appeared out of the darkness?”

“I don’t know his identity, either.”

“Yet you spoke with him.”

Liz had done more than speak with the guy. She’d responded to the laughter in his voice and that damned grin and let the man get close enough to touch her. Worse, she’d wanted him to touch her. Okay, more than touch her. She’d actually entertained notions of rolling around in the surf with him. How stupid was that?

Too stupid to admit to Subcommandante Rivera.

“We only exchanged a few words,” she muttered.

The inspector nodded, his face grave beneath the visor of his cap. “Perhaps you will be so kind as to explain again what brought you to such an isolated spot at this late hour.”

Liz dragged a hand through her cropped hair. She’d gone through this with the first officer on the scene. It didn’t sound any better the second time around.

“I received news that upset me. I needed to vent.”

“And you could not do this in Piedras Rojas, where you live?”

After receiving Donny’s e-mail, Liz had thought about stopping by her favorite cantina in town and drinking herself into a stupor. But she had a flight tomorrow morning. Her training and professionalism went too deep to climb into a cockpit hung over. Since the small, sleepy village of Piedras Rojas offered no other outlet for her anger, she’d headed for the beach some miles south of town.

Piedras rojas. Red stones. When the sun sank toward the sea and set the cliffs along this stretch of coast aflame, there wasn’t a more awesome sight anywhere in the world. The other twenty-three and a half hours of the day, dust swirled, trees drooped, and the locals baked in the unrelenting heat.

For all these months Liz had ignored the dust and the heat and the flies and socked away every peso she earned ferrying crews out to and back from the offshore drill site. She and Donny had talked about purchasing a fleet of helos and starting their own charter service. Anxious to make the dream a reality, Liz had used her savings as collateral and taken out a loan for deposit on their first bird. The sleek little Sikorsky single-pilot craft had a Rolls Royce turbine engine, a 2,000-pound load capacity and the best auto-rotational characteristics of any helicopter flying today.

Now her savings were gone, she’d have to forfeit the nonrefundable deposit and she still had to make good on the damned loan. Pissed all over again, Liz shoved her fists into the pockets of her cutoffs.

“No, I couldn’t work off steam in town. Look, Subcommandante, I’ve told you everything I know. Are we done here?”

“We are done. For now.”

“Fine. I’ll head back to town.”

With a curt nod, she turned and plowed through the dunes. Talk about your all-around crappy nights! This one ranked right up there with the night she’d said goodbye to Donny. Liz had dreaded another long separation. He’d seemed eager to return to Malaysia and finish out his contract. Too eager, she now knew. He wanted to get back to Bambang.

Bambang. God!

Liz shoved her Jeep into gear, slinging mental arrows at her former fiancé. To her surprise, she had trouble putting a face on the target. The tall, lanky American who’d appeared out of the night seemed to have crowded Donny out of her head. No wonder! The man had shaved a good five years off her life popping up like that.

If and when she met up with him again, Mr. No-Name would have to answer a few pointed questions. Like why he’d been out here at the beach so late at night. And why he’d disappeared. And whether he knew who had put a bullet into the dead man’s skull.

As Liz navigated the narrow road that led up from the beach and along the rocky cliffs, the questions buzzed around inside her head like pesky flies.

They were still buzzing the next morning when she pulled into the small regional airport that serviced the resorts springing up along this stretch of the Mexican Riviera.

The temperature was already climbing toward the predicted high of one hundred plus. Liz threw a glance at the wind sock drooping in the heat above the building that served as both terminal and tower and knew she’d be swimming inside her flight suit by the time she returned from her run. Sighing, she retrieved her flyaway bag from the passenger seat.

The corrugated tin Quonset hut that constituted Aero Baja’s hangar and operations center occupied a patch of rock-and cactus-studded red dirt to the left of the terminal. Liz was one of three Aero Baja helicopter pilots under contract to the American-Mexican Petroleum Company to ferry crews and supplies to the giant rig forty miles off the coast. All of the pilots were qualified in a variety of craft, but their platform here at Piedras Rojas was the Bell Ranger 412.

The Ranger sat on the red dirt pad, being prepped by Aero Baja’s chief mechanic. This particular model had been configured for over-water operations by a single pilot, could carry up to fourteen passengers and cruised at 120 knots. The aircraft was almost as old as Liz. Thankfully, it had been updated with two GPS receivers, a new altimeter and a marine band radio in addition to the usual UHF, VHF and HF radios. It looked and handled like a mosquito on a leash after the heavily armed, superpowered choppers Liz had flown in the air force, but she’d gotten used to its aerodynamics and thoroughly enjoyed taking it up.

The mechanic prepping the Ranger had seen as much service as the aircraft itself. Retired after thirty-plus years with the Mexican air force, Jorge Garcia could take the Ranger apart and put it back together in his sleep.

Liz had formed a close friendship with the affable, mustachioed mechanic during her months in Mexico. She couldn’t count the number of beers they’d shared after work or the meals his wife, Maria, had fed her. Hefting her flight bag, Liz joined him on the pad.

“Buenos días, Jorge.”

“Buenos días, Lizetta.”

His pet name for her usually produced a smile. Liz had to work to dredge one up this morning. She was gritty-eyed after the late-night session on the beach and still steaming over Donny’s betrayal.

“Is the Ranger ready to fly?”

Grinning, Jorge patted the helicopter’s fuselage with a callused palm. “She is.”

Stowing her bag in the cockpit, Liz did a careful walk-around. The American-Mexican Petroleum Company was paying her serious bucks to ferry its cargo and crews. She took her responsibilities to AmMex and to her passengers seriously. Before transporting anything or anyone out to the patch, as they referred to the monster rising up out of the sea, she made sure her craft was airworthy.

Jorge followed, marking off the checklist items as Liz completed them. They had worked their way from the rear rotor to the main-engine driveshaft before Liz dropped a casual question.

“Did you hear any rumors about some trouble last night?”

There hadn’t been any mention of a shooting in Piedras Rojas’ morning newspaper. Probably because Piedras Rojas didn’t have a newspaper, morning or otherwise.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Gunshots down at the beach just after midnight. A dead body, maybe.”

The mechanic’s eyes rounded above his bushy black mustache. “Are you saying you go to the beach after midnight?

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“It started out that way.”

“Ayyyy, Lizetta, that is not wise!”

She certainly couldn’t argue the point. Last night’s misadventure had driven home just how unwise.

Despite its slow pace and mañana approach to just about everything, Piedras Rojas was only a half-hour drive from La Paz, situated at the very tip of the Baja California peninsula. The city had become a major crime center since antidrug operations in the Caribbean had forced Colombian drug lords to shift their operations to the Pacific coast.

The cartels’ vehicle of choice for their smuggling trade was the Mexican tuna fleet that operated out of ports all along the coast. The tuna boats were fast, long-range clippers that could spend months at sea. In a good year the fleet generated approximately a hundred million dollars in tuna revenue. A single boat could carry a load of cocaine worth twice that. As a result, drugs, corruption and violence had become a part of life in this corner of the world.

“Then why do you go to the beach so late?” Jorge wanted to know.

“Donny sent me an e-mail.” The words tasted as sour as three-day-old frijoles. “He’s dumped me. Seems he’s fallen for a foreign news correspondent.”

The mechanic fired off a string of highly colorful Spanish. Liz caught only a few of the more exotic phrases, but they were enough to produce a reluctant smile.

“That was pretty much my reaction, too.”

Spitting out a final curse, Jorge squinted at her through the iridescent waves of heat rising from the dirt pad.

“Will you go back to the States now?”

“Maybe. I haven’t decided.”

“But the helo you have saved every peso to buy! The charter service you plan to start! You do not need this pig, this Donny. You can start your own company without him.”

Liz didn’t tell him about her now-empty bank account. No sense broadcasting her monumental stupidity in making Donny joint on her account when he’d somehow never got around to putting her on his.

Nor did she care to reveal that she didn’t have enough cash left to cover her rent, due tomorrow. She’d have to swallow her pride and ask the smarmy AmMex on-site rep for an advance on next month’s salary. Trying not to wince at the prospect, Liz repeated her often made promise.

“When I do open my own charter service, you will most definitely be my chief mechanic.”

“Bueno! We make a good team, yes?”

“That we do.”

Satisfied, Jorge returned his attention to the pre-flight checklist. While he inspected the main driveshaft forward coupling for grease leakage, Liz checked the engine inlet and plenum to make sure they were clear of obstructions. The rumble of an approaching vehicle announced the arrival of their passengers.

The bus pulled up at the terminal and a half-dozen men filed into the building. Liz went back to the pre-flight inspection, knowing it would take the sleepy-eyed terminal official a good half hour to search the crew members’ bags for drugs and alcohol, weigh both men and luggage and show them a video explaining the safe boarding and ditching of a helicopter at sea. The video would play twice, once in English, once in Spanish. Hopefully, the non-English-, non-Spanish-speaking crewmen would get the idea from the video.

When the crew filed out of the terminal, Liz pasted on a smile and went to double-check their IDs against the manifest provided by AmMex. Like most of the men working the big rigs, these were a mixed bag of nationalities and skills.

A big, beefy Irish driller led the pack. A Filipino welder followed, then a Mexican radio operator and two Venezuelan cooks. When the last passenger stepped forward, Liz read off his name from the manifest.

“Devlin, Joe.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The slow drawl brought her head whipping up. “It’s you!”

He responded to that with the same wolfish grin he’d given her last night. “Yes, ma’am.”