Free Cutting Loose by Tara Janzen

dozen years, and tough enough to die for it.
    Dei gratia
. He crossed himself, the action nearly unconscious—nearly. He knew the risks of what he did. He knew how easily and how quickly he could end up just like Devlin.
By the grace of God.
    â€œDid he say anything to you? Anything at all?” He’d asked her that question before, the night at his villa, and she’d said no.
    By the slow shake of her head in the front seat, he guessed she was saying it again. For her sake, he hoped she was telling the truth. Even a New Mexico schoolteacher would be tempted by the kind of money in her suitcase, let alone by the fortune promised by the bracelet. If Devlin had told her what he was giving her, he figured Lily Robbins was smart enough to figure out what to do with it.
    Which made him wonder again about what in the hell was up with the FedEx envelope. If she’d worked fast, and if she’d been connected, she’d had three weeks to put wheels in motion and get her name and product out into the marketplace. Plenty of time for an interested buyer to make an offer, and if the deal was to be finalized in Tahiti, well, then he had a believable scenario that put her at the top of the U.S. government’s Most Wanted List.
    But nothing in her file had pointed to the kind of person who had the kind of connections necessary to put together a piece of high-order espionage in under a month. Hell, it would have taken
him
three weeks, at least, and he was connected from Manila to Mazatlán to Mozambique.
    He went back to the suitcase. Closer to the bottom, things started looking more promising—and less promising. Her jewelry and whatnot and makeup bags had been dumped, and lots of small stuff had settled in the bottom. He’d found the mother lode, but he was afraid the true treasure had been lost.
    â€œDid you put the bracelet in one of your jewelry bags?”
    â€œYes.” The word was spoken quietly, but firmly.
    He liked that in a woman, too, being on the verge of tears, and still being able to pull it together.
    He sifted through everything—every earring, every eye shadow box, every necklace, every teeny brush and doodad—and got nothing.
    There was no macramé bracelet.
    Fuck.
Buzz Boy and the Aston Martin had just locked in the top spot on Charlotte’s chase it, shake it, and eat it for lunch list—and there was only one way for her to do it.
    Sliding back into the front seat, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and started to dial. The audible intake of Lily Robbins’s breath stopped him in mid-number.
    He looked up, and immediately felt like the bastard she’d accused him of being.
    â€œTh-the, the…the—” She was stuttering, and her face had gone deathly pale. Rightly so. And truly, he was a bastard.
    â€œThere’s no bomb,” he said, the look of terror in her eyes more than enough clue to remind him of his threat. He went back to dialing his number. “I lied about the cell phone.”
    â€œY-you…”—she took a breath—“you
lied
?”
    He nodded. Yep, he sure had, and considering how effective that little bit of subterfuge had been, he’d do it again in a heartbeat.
    He finished up with the sequence of numbers guaranteed to get him what he needed. Alex was his best bet for a quick communications patch anywhere in the world. This morning, he only needed to go about three hundred miles due north.
    â€œLied?” she repeated. “There was no bomb?”
    â€œNo.” He brought the phone to his ear and waited for his coded entry to route through to Langley. When Alex answered, he got straight to the point.
    â€œI need a secure line to SDF, Steele Street in Denver. Can you put me through…Albuquerque…yes, sir…no…I’ve got a tracker that belongs to SDF on a car I need to find, an Aston Martin, silver, Nevada plates, 01B-4381. One of the guys from the car is now dead in