Don't Back Down, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2023 by Sharon Sala
Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks
Cover design Ervin Serrano
Cover images © Nantawan Patamarot/Shutterstock, Patrick Jennings/Shutterstock
Internal design by Holli Roach/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Excerpt from Last Rites
Chapter 1
About the Author
Back Cover
Prologue
Hyatt Regency Dulles, Herndon, Virginia
A tall, dark-haired soldier walked into the Hyatt Regency, pausing just inside the entrance long enough to locate the front desk, then headed toward it, unaware he was being watched.
A young woman had just stopped beside a potted palm in the lobby to respond to a text when she spotted the soldier walking in.
When he paused to take the lay of the land, the hair stood up on the back of her neck. It was like watching a panther scoping out its prey. When he shifted his deployment bag higher up on his shoulder and started moving through the throng with a cautious stride, the first thing that crossed her mind was “stealth.”
She watched him as he checked in, saw him pocket the key card, and then as he turned to walk away, he did that thing again—taking that long look before moving forward. She wanted him to see her. She wanted to know what his first reaction would be, so she moved away from the palm and into his line of vision and waited.
He’d already seen the potted palm, and then he saw her—motionless. Watching him. And his entire body went still.
She sighed. Yes. He feels it, too.
Conscious thought fell away as she started toward him. The need to be in his space was as strong as her need to breathe, and then they were standing face-to-face, searching for something, anything, that would explain what was happening.
She scanned the arch of his brows. The curve of his lips. The slight flare of his nostrils.
He saw the steady pulse throbbing at the side of her neck.
And then she spoke, and the sound embraced him. The instant shock of wanting to be inside her rocked him to the core. Was this what happened in love at first sight?
“Hey, Soldier Boy, are you coming or going?” she asked.
He was watching the way her lips shaped the words when he realized she was waiting for an answer.
“Going,” he said.
She shivered. His voice was as deep as his eyes were dark.
“Got someone waiting for you back home?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. I think I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Do you have time for a drink?” she asked.
“I have all night.”
A wave of sadness moved through her. One night. Was that all?
“So do I,” she said. “But if one night is all we have, then no last names, no boundaries, and no regrets. Can you live with that?”
“I don’t think I will live without it,” he said softly.
***
He stowed his bag in her room and then followed her down to the bar. They drank and they ate, and then engaged in the foreplay of lovers. Soft whispers. Quiet laughs. The back of his finger tracking the curve of her cheek. Her knee pressed against his thigh. Her skin was so soft, but the untamed curls of her red hair were what intrigued him. Making him wonder if she was as wild and unruly.
She was in the middle of telling him about the randomness of this happening, and how if her meeting hadn’t run late, she would never have seen him, when he stood abruptly and held out his hand.
Startled, she looked up, saw the want on his face, and went with him.
They made it to her room without so much as a glance at each other—without saying a word. It was the click of the dead bolt after the door closed behind them that broke the spell.
They began tearing off their clothes, and then she was in his arms and they were falling, falling down onto the bed, and the rest of the way in love.
In heat. Lust. Passion.
Call it what you will, they were there.
They couldn’t get enough. They couldn’t find a place to slow down.
She feared she’d never see him again.
He didn’t know if he would come back alive to even look for her.
She was his gift.
He was under her skin.
They would never be the same.
Even after she finally fell asleep in his arms, he lay watching her, storing up this memory for the bad times he knew were coming as he headed into his second tour of duty in Iraq.
***
His flight out of Washington Dulles left at 8:00 a.m., and he was dressed and walking out the door at half past six. He paused on the threshold and looked back, needing that last sight of her. She was curled up on her side, sound asleep and clutching his pillow.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell her goodbye.
She’d laid down the ground rules. No boundaries. No last names. No regrets.
But even as his plane was taxiing down the runway for takeoff, he was filled with nothing but regret. If only he’d known her last name.
***
She woke up suddenly, and even before she opened her eyes, she knew he was gone. His scent was all over her, and she could still feel his mouth on her body and his hands in her hair. She was only twenty-four years old, and he’d ruined her for ever wanting another man. He was in her blood, and she didn’t even know his last name.
Chapter 1
October, five years later, in the Florida Keys
The sun was barely above the horizon. Service personnel were already preparing breakfast in the galley of the Aquatic Adonis, an eighty-foot luxury yacht belonging to Gianni Rodini. Gianni and seven of his friends had been partying onboard for days, but this was their last. Within hours they would be heading into port.
Fancy yachts like his had been disappearing for months up and down the southern seaboard. From the Pacific coast. From the bay area of Houston, and along the Florida coastline. It was assumed the boats were being boarded by pirates who then sailed them to the Bahamas, repainted and refitted them, and then used them to ferry contraband from port to port, or sold them outright to unsuspecting buyers.
The pirates left no witnesses, and the few bodies that had been found all had execution-style wounds. There was nothing on them that would lead the authorities to identify the people responsible.
The feds were getting flack. The ATF was getting flack. And the DEA was getting flack. When the FBI learned of Rodini’s plans to take his yacht out for a weeklong cruise among the Keys, they planted one of their best undercover agents onboard with a sat phone and a gun.
Her name was Rusty Caldwell. She was twenty-nine years old. Average height. Physically fit. A sharpshooter with blue eyes and red hair. She went in as a sous-chef for the galley chef and did what she was told with as little comment as possible. She’d learned long ago that the quieter people were, the more invisible they became to others. And being invisible mattered in her line of work.
The crew knew they were sailing into port today, but instead of the usual morning chatter, they were unusually quiet, and Rusty noticed. She kept following the chef’s orders in a quick and proficient ma nner, never looking up. Never meeting anyone’s gaze. But every instinct she had was on alert. Something was going down. She could feel it.
She had gone to the cooler with a basket to get mangos and pineapple for the breakfast service, and was coming out with the produce when she overheard two of the crew at the other end of the hall. Sound carried in that corridor, and even though their voices were low, Rusty heard enough to make her skin crawl.
“Inbound. ETA four minutes. Same orders. TNP.”
It could have meant anything. More guests arriving. Or maybe a fuel carrier. But in her world, TNP meant take no prisoners. That gave them away.
She went straight into the kitchen, put the fruit on a counter, and then glanced up at the chef. “Making a quick trip to the head, Chef.”
“Fine, but don’t dawdle! Service is in thirty minutes,” he snapped.
“Yes, Chef,” Rusty said softly, and slipped out of the galley.
Moments later she was in her cabin. She grabbed her sat phone and made one call to her contact on the outside.
He answered on the second ring.
“Browning.”
“It’s me. Get a fix on this location. Someone is inbound. ETA four minutes. And the last thing I heard was “Take no prisoners.” I think our link to the pirates is the crew. Whoever is providing crews for these yacht owners has to be in on the thefts and murders. There’s a speedboat anchored just off the starboard bow. I’m going to try and get to it before this all goes to hell. Get somebody here ASAP. I can’t die looking like this. My hair’s a mess.”
Browning grinned. Caldwell’s wild red curls were as unforgettable as she was. “Roger that.”
Rusty grabbed her jacket, stuffed the phone into an inner pocket and zipped it in, then palmed her Glock, pocketed two fifteen-round magazines, and bolted out of the cabin, locking it behind her. If they thought someone was locked inside, the time it took for them to shoot their way in might be the difference between her life and death.
And then she began hearing a lot of shouting and screaming, and gunshots coming from above.
Shit! They were already onboard.
Now she had a decision to make. She was on the lowest level of the yacht and needed to get up to the main deck to escape.
There were two staircases, one at each end of the galley level, that led to the upper decks. She needed to know how many intruders had boarded and where their boat was—and pray to God they hadn’t already taken possession of the speedboat. If they had, she was going to fight them for it.
She paused for a moment, her heart pounding as she listened.
One man was ordering Rodini and the others to move to the edge of the deck. There was more screaming and crying, and Rodini was telling them how rich he was and how they could ransom him for money, when Rusty pivoted and ran the other way.
She could hear men coming down the stairs behind her, but she kept running toward the opposite staircase and then up and out into the sunlight.
The pirates had lashed their boat to the opposite side of the yacht from where she was standing. That gave her the fighting chance she needed as she began to sprint toward the speedboat. And with every step, she kept hearing screaming and begging from the other end of the deck, and with every shot, a splash ensued. She was only seconds away from escape when she heard shouts. They’d seen her, and she’d just run out of deck!
Without a second of hesitation, she leaped. Only after she was in midair and looking down did she realize she was going in the water.
Then fate handed her a miracle.
A wave hit the speedboat, rocking it back against the yacht just as she came down. She landed in the boat on her hands and knees, popping her neck and biting her tongue from the jolt of the fall. Her body was one solid ache, and she was spitting blood, but there was no time to think about what she may have done to herself.
She scrambled to her feet, threw off the rope securing the speedboat to the yacht, and ran for the controls. Rodini had insisted on keeping the key in the ignition after someone misplaced it onboard days earlier. She had been counting on it being there. And it was.
She slid into the seat and turned the key. The engine fired at the same time the first bullet sailed past her head. There was no time for an engine warm-up as she grabbed her gun and turned, firing off a round of shots at the same time she pushed the throttle forward.
The sudden burst of power lifted the nose of the speedboat so high out of the water that for a moment Rusty thought it was going to flip over, but then it came down with a thud and she was flying, leaving a four-foot wave of water in her wake.
They were shooting at her again, the bullets zinging past her like a swarm of angry bees. She turned sideways, making herself a smaller target, and began firing back at the armed men lined up on the deck. She saw some of them fall and others ducking for cover, but she knew their faces. The men shooting at her were part of the crew. Her suspicions had been correct.
She emptied the first clip and shoved in a second clip before moving out of range. Even though she’d taken three of them out and wounded a couple of others, the fight was far from over. The pirates had the yacht, and their boat, and they didn’t leave witnesses.
Rusty turned back to the stretch of water before her to get her bearings. They’d dropped anchor at Big Key. The sun was at her back, so she was moving west. Club Key was the small island to her right, which meant the Florida coast should be somewhere ahead.
She pulled the sat phone from her bag and made one more call, with salt spray in her face and the roar of the engine in her ears.
Again, Browning answered. “Backup is on the way, and we’ve got someone in a speedboat on radar.”
“That’s me. Don’t shoot. I made it off the yacht, but I’m going to have company ASAP.”
“Copy that. Choppers in the air and closing in. Less than two minutes out. Are you hurt?”
“Not so it shows,” Rusty said, and then glanced over her shoulder. “They’re coming after me. Can’t talk now. My daddy always told me to keep both hands on the wheel.”
She dropped the phone back in her bag. The speedboat was hitting the tops of the waves so hard it kept bouncing her out of the seat. There was a life jacket at her feet, and she needed to be wearing it, but the best she could do was get her foot between the straps. Maybe if she went into the water, it would go with her.
The wind was burning her eyes and tearing at her hair, but she didn’t look behind her again. She was focused on the faint green shoreline of the Everglades ahead of her when the image of a man’s face flashed before her.
Soldier Boy! That shocked her and then scared her. Was this her life actually flashing before her eyes? Was this some celestial sign that she wasn’t getting out of this alive?
Then she saw a Coast Guard cutter in the distance and two choppers in the air above her, and when the choppers roared over her, she lifted her arm in jubilation. But it wasn’t until the Coast Guard cutter blew past her, too, that she eased back on the throttle.
She’d made it. Home free again, but how many lives did she have left?
Each time she got into a situation like this, it felt like the end of her, and yet she kept going back in. She still hadn’t decided if that was a death wish, or because she was so alone in the world that it didn’t really matter.
Now that she had the power of the FBI and the Coast Guard behind her, she began to breathe easier. But coming down from the adrenaline surge of what had just happened was beginning to make her shake.
Every muscle in her body was throbbing. The coppery taste of blood was still in her mouth, her fingers wouldn’t uncurl from the steering wheel, and the wind was drying the tears on her cheeks faster than she could cry them.
A short while later, the Coast Guard picked her up and towed the speedboat into port. Rusty was taken to a hospital for treatment and then, later that same day, returned to her home in Virginia to recuperate.
A week passed. She finally graduated from soup and pudding after her tongue had time to heal, but she was still suffering from whiplash, a swollen knee, a twisted ankle, and daily headaches from the hard landing in the boat.
It wasn’t the first time she’d given thought to reconsidering her career choices.
***
Jubilee, Kentucky
