Play It Safe (The Safe House Series Book 2) Read online

  Play It Safe

  By Leslie North

  The Safe House Unit Series

  Book Two

  Blurb

  Ex-Navy SEAL Samson Jackson has lost everything he’s ever fought for – and nothing can bring back his wife. But when he’s offered a new mission protecting brilliant, sharp-tongued biochemist Angela McAllister from those who want to exploit the deadly knowledge she carries, he’s got no choice but to accept. He couldn’t save his first love, but maybe he can finally find redemption keeping the fiery scientist safe.

  Samson knows he has a difficult road ahead of him, but he doesn’t count on the asset he’s charged with protecting being so . . . intriguing. Falling in love isn’t part of the plan. Especially when a rogue government official with nothing to lose plans to harness a lethal bioweapon and take revenge on the terrorists hiding out in Samson’s South African village with Angela’s help—and holds her brother as leverage.

  Now, it’s up to Samson to protect a town full of innocents, one of whom is the son he hopes to adopt, while keeping the woman he loves from harm. He’ll have to fight powerful enemies, and his own demons, to save his world from catastrophe.

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  The King’s Head Tavern reeked of desperation.

  Desperation of southern California patrons to land somewhere trendy, to see and be seen in a place so over-the-top British, the Queen mum herself would have declared it a patriotic disgrace. Desperation of single men to drink themselves into pints of courage and women to pretend they hadn’t come for a one-night roger. And desperation in the form of one out-of-place woman who looked as if she might have swallowed fire.

  And preferred that particular torture to liquor, country or sex.

  Samson Caine shook his head.

  He approached the escort his boss, Rockwell, hired. Jon was soft, just out of training, all book knowledge, little else. Guy’s back was to the bar’s street entrance. That made two mistakes in the span of time it took Samson to estimate the pub’s capacity—hundred and twenty—determine the number and strengths and weaknesses of all exits—four if the ladder in the alley was a reliable indicator of a roof hatch—and size up the woman assigned his protection—a five-foot-five, buck-nothing pound, card-wielding Mensa member afraid of her own shadow.

  Bastard Rockwell.

  Samson’s assignment couldn’t have read more keep-it-in-your-pants had Doctor McAllister worn a nun’s habit and fiddled with rosary beads instead of the pearl button on her matronly sweater. Just once, Samson wished his reputation for getting laid didn’t factor into Rockwell’s assignment matches. He had never compromised someone under his protection.

  His gaze trickled past the knee hem of his ward’s Von Trapp dress to her white tights and Velcro-fastened loafers.

  Nope. No danger this time, either.

  Samson clenched Jon’s trapezius muscle, a firm enough squeeze that he would definitely reconsider ever exposing his back to the street again, not firm enough to cut off blood supply.

  Jon stood, raised the opposite arm and twisted toward the grip, effectively sliding out of the maneuver. His closed fist stopped short of striking Samson’s temple.

  “Impressive for a surfer boy, Bon Jon,” said Samson. “First defense is your brain. Corner booth would have been a better choice.”

  “You’re a dick, Caine.”

  “A dick who’s training will keep you alive, nonetheless.” Samson glanced at the bar glass that had tipped over in their scuffle: clear liquid, no fizz, lemon and lime wedge. Water meant to look like gin. “Good work, man. I got this.”

  Jon stood, skirted the bar corner and whispered something in Angela McAllister’s ear.

  Her dusky, copper eyes collided with Samson’s stare. She blinked twice as if she were trying to clear a sudden fog that had descended. Subjects often didn’t see hand-offs coming. Safer that way.

  The whisper continued. Too damned long, though Samson couldn’t guess why it should bother him. Bon Jon was probably telling her how very much he enjoyed her diatribe on the history of wind instruments or knitting scarves. Samson tapped him on the elbow, effectively dismissing him. With a final splay of his hands to Angela, some sort of covert wave, Jon exited the pub.

  “What was that about?” Though Samson couldn’t guess why he wanted to know.

  “He didn’t tell me he wasn’t my guard.”

  “Standard protocol. You should feel safe with every contact on Rockwell’s payroll.”

  “Why can’t I stay with him?”

  “Jon’s still a tadpole.” At her quizzical expression, a pinch that centered around her pert, button nose, Samuel added, “In training.”

  “And you are?”

  “Your best bet at reaching the age where those shoes are fashionable again.”

  “Chemical residue on my lab floor eats away at the soles. They’re practical.”

  “They’re hideous.”

  “Spoken like a fashion-forward man who made the clichéd choice of barbed wire ink around his bicep.”

  A smile scratched its way up through Samson’s chest and itched to squirm free of his lips. Maybe protecting Our Lady of the Chemical Weapon wouldn’t be so dull after all.

  “If you can tear your eyes away from my bicep long enough to focus, I want you to find the hallway hidden behind the bar back, tan brick wall. That’s our extraction point.”

  “Does this macho-ego thing you have going play well with all your women or just the women with a noble, monotomic gas between their ears?”

  “They all scream the same, Madame Curie.”

  Her laboratory-pale features turned slow-boil pink. On any other woman, the flush would look like makeup or the localized cheek swell after orgasm, but on the very ordinary, very plain woman before him, the effect covered her from hairline to chin and bloomed feverish and hypnotizing. He liked having learned how to disarm her dry sarcasm so quickly. For the repressed, most-likely virginal, woman before him, it was sex.

  Regarding that topic, there was no end to his arsenal.

  “We move when Flogging Molly kicks in.”

  Again with the strained expression.

  “Irish? Punk? The music? Nevermind. My silver Spyder is waiting in the alley.” He thought maybe he should amend his statement, like the non-arachnid kind because she probably drove a VW bus, but she surprised him.

  “Boxter or 918?”

  “You know high-performance cars?”

  “Sodium Azide. Air bag reaction at top speeds. Freshman project.”

  “College?”

  “High school.”

  Damn. Samson felt like a caveman unworthy of her cave. The crowd grew raucous at the sudden lively tune. Perfect time to depart. “Ready?”

  The cell phone beside her lit up and inched across the dark mahogany bar.

  Angela reached for the phone.

&
nbsp; “Don’t answer that.” Samson’s hand clenched hers, effectively freezing out her free will. His free will, however, froze the moment her petite, warm hand filled his. He wasn’t sure what he expected. Frigid. Unyielding, maybe.

  She protested—something about a team and work—but he couldn’t make it out over the noise crowding his ears. In seconds, she had slipped off her barstool and headed toward the vacant, candy apple-red British phone box near the restroom, cell to her ear.

  Shit.

  He followed and squeezed inside the booth just as she turned to accordion the door closed. Standing, she barely cleared the Guinness logo on the t-shirt he’d worn to blend in.

  Samson grabbed her phone and pressed the end button, severing the call.

  Her stink-eyed stare more than made up for the presence she lacked in height. “Give me that back.”

  “Who was it?”

  “None of your business.”

  “The moment you signed a contract with Rockwell to keep you alive, everything about you became my business. Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. A man. I never got a chance to find out.”

  Samson pressed the back button on the display. Unknown.

  Angela snatched the phone out of his hand.

  “You just compromised our location. We have to go. Now.”

  The cell phone rang again. He’d have laughed at the paradox of her ringtone—female, rap, Getcha Some Ah Dis…uh…uhhh—had they not just signed their death warrant.

  Again, she answered it.

  He wanted to bash his head through one or six glass panes. Had she not been planking his nuts in the tight space, he might have. The woman was razors under his fingernails.

  “This is Angela McAllister.”

  Samson glanced at the street entrance, the time stamp wedged at the bottom of every sports-broadcasting television in the place. They should have been gone. Ten minutes ago gone.

  “I’m sorry….I can’t hear you. You have who?” She pressed a palm to her free ear and twisted like an old handset on a spiral cord as if she was trying to find better reception. All she found was her enormous shoulder purse wedged against his junk, preventing further turns.

  He wanted to grab the phone again, sling her over his shoulder caveman-style and take her to his waiting car, somehow get it through that Nobel-caliber brain of hers the level of danger she was in being one of a handful of scientists capable of conceiving a militarized weapon that could decimate entire nations, but he didn’t have to.

  Beneath her studious glasses, her eyes overly-magnified, Angela McAllister’s expression distorted into an ancient tribal mask of horror.

  Her cell crashed to the floor between them.

  Chapter Two

  “Angie? Don’t do it. Whatever they tell you…forget about me, Angie. Pleeeease!”

  Her brother’s voice begged, pleaded, his vocal cords hoarse and strained from god-only-knew. Starvation? Torture? The certainty of hopelessness?

  In front of her, her guard—what had Jon called him? Samuel? Samson, like in the Bible—gripped her elbows to keep her knees from buckling her to the same place as the dropped phone.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  Her thoughts were like dropped magnetic filings, charged in all directions, unable to lock onto any coherent charge. The only thing that kept her grounded, in a red booth, in the King’s Head Tavern in Fresno, California, was the formidable man blocking her connection to a world of unpredictability and violence. The same world that robbed her of her parents all those years ago.

  “Breathe.” His voice came to her again, soft, but still more powerful than the muffled electric bass line pumping through the bar’s speakers.

  She inhaled. Air bumped along her windpipe, threatening to squeeze out another asthma attack.

  No-no-no. Not now.

  Her shaky exhale sounded like the first notes of air forced from a balloon.

  No-no-no. She had to focus on her brother, the caller. This was no time for her stupid body to betray her.

  With an impressive display of physical agility and a close encounter of his mouth to her left boob, he retrieved her phone and placed it back in her hand. But her lungs felt like a fifty-ton battleship, pulling her down, down, down and the last thing she could process was finishing the call.

  She dug through her bag, but the airhorn-shaped inhaler did not swim into her touch. By then, the phone booth filled with her rusty exhales, and it was increasingly harder to remember why she was there with a handsome and rather beefy calendar-guy with a beer shirt.

  He snatched her bag, knelt, and unceremoniously dumped the entire contents of her purse out on the phone booth floor. A jolt wiggled up her spine to protest the invasion of her privacy, but it fizzled on the realization that she had bigger issues at hand. The man pawed through her mound of crap—tampons, tape recorder, sticky notes, scientific calculator, her prescription bottle of anti-anxiety medication, enough used Kleenex wads to stuff her bra to a double D—until he seized her inhaler and passed it up to her.

  Lips firmly around the mouthpiece, she squeezed the life-altering mist into her airway. Almost instantly, the anchor on her chest lifted. She sagged against the glass panes, trying to keep tears from erupting while grasping greedy pockets of air into her lungs. The guy watched her with such concern, she didn’t want him to see weakness.

  “Better?”

  She nodded.

  He released an audible sigh. Samson. His name returned to her.

  In the span of one minute, the phone call that had been such a point of contention between them, became a non-issue. She would have never pegged him for someone so…

  Samson pressed the speaker button and shoved the phone back to her lips. Two quick nods of his head and there was no mistaking his intent. He wanted her to speak.

  So much for nurturing.

  “Hello?”

  “That was quite a commotion.” The original caller’s voice filled the booth. Slight accent. Full-bodied with an edge of impatience.

  “I…I dropped the phone.”

  “Yes, yes. I imagine hearing your brother’s plea was quite shocking.”

  Samson fished for the tape recorder at their feet and pressed buttons until the green bulb glowed.

  “I want to talk to Mike again.”

  “Not possible. You heard what you needed to hear.”

  Samson found a charcoal pencil she used to mark test tubes and wrote Keep him talking on one of the glass panes.

  “What do you want?”

  Samson nodded his approval.

  “You. In exchange for your brother. He’s simply a bleeding heart who fails to see beyond his poverty-stricken patients. But you and I see the big picture. Don’t we?”

  Her eyes scanned Samson’s new written directives: Where? When?

  She regurgitated the questions.

  “All in good time, Angie.”

  His tainted use of her brother’s nickname for her made her stomach somersault.

  “Might want to rid yourself of your hired muscle. My men see you with Guinness again, Angela, and your brother here becomes a casualty of this war you created. I’ll be in touch.”

  At the caller’s words, Samson scrambled to shove the remaining clutter at their feet into her bag. They were out of the booth and hauling ass down the brick hallway before Angela noticed the call had severed.

  As soon as they were in the alley, Angela broke free from Samson and sprinted toward the streetlamp at the alley’s mouth. Not the best idea after her lungs had abandoned her in the phone booth. Only three unsatisfying breaths passed before he caught up to her and hauled her back against his chest.

  Frustration boiled up into hot tears, stinging her sinuses. “Let go of me! You heard him.”

  “Get in the car, Angela.”

  The vice grip of his arms proved too powerful to overcome. When the rubber wedge of her sensible shoes connected with his shin, he let out a string of foul curses and maneuvered her off the pav
ement and over his shoulder. The swing of gravity threatened to unleash the contents of her stomach. In the fray, her enormous bag clocked him across the face.

  “They’ll kill him if you’re anywhere near me.” Her voice erupted volcanic, victimized. She hated that those desperate notes came from her throat. She hated that he would so easily manhandle her.

  He cleared the distance to the passenger side of his Spyder impossibly fast and deposited her feet back on solid ground. Still, she fought.

  “Me or them?” His question was loud, angry, unquestionably in control.

  He gave her a choice, but it was really no choice at all. She glanced in the direction he pointed. Two shadowy figures stood beneath the streetlamp, stance wide, blocking their exit. The struggle within stalled. The lesser of two evils became clear. Without another note of protest, she slipped into the bucket seat of the sports car and reached across to ensure the driver’s side was unlocked.

  Samson slid into the car’s cockpit, a capable hand into a formfitting glove. The Spyder’s engine purred to life, the digital readouts a silvery-blue glow that colored the tears she finally allowed in the closed confines, in the darkness. Her brother’s cries echoed in her mind—Don’t do it, Angie. Forget about me. Pleeeease—followed by a more stilted— My men see you with Guinness again and your brother here becomes a casualty of this war you created.

  You created.

  In seconds, the car accelerated from zero to thirty…forty…fifty-five.

  Oh, God. He was driving straight for them.

  “Get down,” he commanded.

  Angela did as she was ordered. By the time the streetlamp invaded the darkened interior from above, a short succession of pops ricocheted into her awareness.

  Oh, God. Gunfire.

  Her stomach threatened to erupt. She inhaled a cool gust from the vents past her nostrils. In her line of sight, Samson worked the steering wheel and gears with expert precision, his jaw rigid, his lips a barely-there pinch of determination, his lower lids raised and molded in concentration.

  She jostled left then right then left, like a windsock at the mercy of a powerful gale. Through the floorboard, powerful revolutions of the engine eased the nerves hijacking her ability to move. Streetlight after streetlight whisked by overhead. She knew Samson had entered the highway by the way he no longer orchestrated the brakes. The road noise became one long, even, calming note.