Page 17 of Seal of Honor
Jean-Luc Cavalier was the fake policeman she’d already had the pleasure of meeting, but he swept into a bow as if this was their first introduction, murmured something delightful sounding in French, and kissed her hand. Her opinion of him did a complete one-eighty. In fact, she melted into a big, gushy puddle of girly giggles and didn’t even hate herself for it.
Jesse Warrick, the medic, touched the brim of his Stetson with a polite, “ma’am”—somehow when he said it in that cowboy drawl, it didn’t sound as condescending as it had when Gabe said it earlier.
Trucker hat guy was Marcus DeAngelo. He nodded toward her wrist. “You do much surfing in Costa Rica?”
She glanced down, at first not sure how he’d drawn that conclusion. Then she remembered the surfboard charm on the bracelet her brother had given her for her twenty-fifth birthday. “Sometimes.”
Marcus grinned and wagged a finger in the air between them. “You. Me. We’re gonna talk.” He held up his coffee cup. “Want some?”
“Oh, very much. Thank you.”
Gabe made some displeased grumbling noises until Marcus returned with a mug, then continued with the introductions.
Eric Physick, whom everyone called Harvard, was the computer geek tapping away at his laptop keyboard. He looked up and offered a distracted smile when Gabe said his name. His glasses sat crooked on his nose. Audrey had to fight the urge to straighten them and comb down his spiky mop of brown hair.
Ian Reinhardt leaned against the wall in a motorcycle jacket with bad attitude rolling off him in waves. He said nothing to her, but his lip curled in a faint sneer of disdain.
O-kay. Mental note: she never wanted to be in a room alone with him.
Finally, camo pants, Travis Quinn, gave her a solemn nod, but kept his distance.
Such an odd assortment of men. She wasn’t sure whether to cheer, laugh, or cry that they were apparently her brother’s only hope since the FBI was doing jack to save him.
“Nice to meet everyone,” she said when Gabe finished the introductions. She might be frightened out of her wits and confused as hell, but she was a Southern girl, born and bred. Mama would fly down from heaven and tan her hide good if she wasn’t polite, of that she had no doubt.
“But,” she added, “that still doesn’t explain who you are.”
“We’re HORNET,” Jean-Luc said.
“Horny is more like it,” Gabe muttered and gave him a blistering stare. “Keep your eyes above her neck.”
Jean-Luc grinned shamelessly. “Aw, mon capitaine. No worries. I wouldn’t dream of stepping on your turf.”
His turf? Audrey scowled at them both and yanked at the slipping neckline of her tank top. In the sticky heat of the jungle, she often went braless, and hadn’t changed that habit since arriving in Bogotá, despite the cool, rainy climate. A half-inch more, and she’d have had to ask Jean-Luc for Mardi Gras beads in exchange for the show. Not that she had a problem with nudity. If she could get away without wearing clothes, she would, but she needed to keep these guys focused. And one surefire way to get a man off task was to flash him.
“What’s HORNET?” she asked.
“That’s not what we’re called,” Gabe said. “We’re a private hostage rescue and negotiation team. And you’re right, we have been hired to bring your brother home.”
“Who hired you?”
“That’s confidential.”
Audrey huffed out a breath. Pulling teeth was easier than getting information out of him. A pit viper’s teeth, to be exact. “Maybe I can help.”
“No, you can’t. And every second we waste explaining ourselves to you is another second your brother spends in captivity. So you need to back off, Ms. Van Amee, and let us do our job.”
“Gabe,” Harvard called across the room. “I got it.”
Without another glance in her direction, Gabe strode over to stand behind Harvard and studied the computer monitor. “Go back to his first appearance.”
Since nobody had told her to stay put, Audrey drifted over to see what Harvard was doing. An image of her brother leaving his apartment building showed on the computer screen. The timestamp in the corner read 5:58 a.m. Forever prompt—that was so like Bryson. His pixelated image left the screen.
“Another angle?” Gabe asked.
Harvard pecked a few keys, and Bryson’s image returned to the far left corner. He waited there for something, impatient.
The limo, she thought as Bryson checked the screen of his phone and answered her call. A few minutes later, the limo arrived, and a tall, dark-haired man opened the door for Bryson. A moment after that, the vehicle pulled away from the curb with her brother inside.
