Walker (In the Company of Snipers #21) - Irish Winters Page 0,74

in her heart, most assuredly not the eight-by-eleven glossy portrait of USN Lieutenant Walker Judge staring up at her from Ember’s meticulous file.

Talk about being ambushed!

But it was him. Persia would know. No other man could steal her breath like this guy had, when he’d first stalked out of the ocean like a svelte, sexy, dripping wet predator. To be honest, she’d been enthralled the moment she’d seen him. He’d put on one helluva strip show peeling out of that wetsuit. He’d been exhausted. That had clearly shown in how his shoulders slumped when he’d dropped his ass to the sand. How he’d sat there staring at the surf for so long, as if he’d just wanted to breathe.

But those tanned, chiseled shoulders… Wide. Thick. Impressively bulged and muscled. Capable of sweeping her off her feet. And yet, he’d rolled to his hands and knees, and he’d kissed the sand the moment he’d cleared the surf, like someone who’d been away from home too long. Someone who’d been emotionally impacted by that homecoming, obviously overjoyed to be back in America. Which told her how much he loved his country. Made her wonder now why he’d been in Cuba. She hadn’t thought to ask. Now she wished she had.

Also made her think of that sandy, but heartfelt kiss to America’s farthest southern shore. Did murderers love their country like Hotrod loved his? Did they swim a hundred miles just to get back to her, risking life and limb through shark-infested waters?

There was something—not right—about this man being anywhere on the FBI’s most wanted list, much less in the top ten. Spec Ops guys were a different breed of American. She would know, since she’d also served her country in ways most people could never understand.

Infiltrating Domingo Zapata’s perverse world of child slavery and all it entailed, had been a damned tough physical war for Persia, as well as an excruciating, daily mental struggle. Yet every second, and with every breath of her time there, she had fought valiantly to keep not only her sanity and perspective, but her soul.

Persia swallowed hard, remembering the smell of those blood-stained concrete walls. The memory of the despair etched within those walls was still so sharp and bitter, she could taste it. But all those poor, helpless women and children…

Domingo Zapata hadn’t tortured anyone during the months she’d worked for him. But he had terrorized them. Living under the gruesome death threats he promised was enough to drive anyone insane.

Yet she’d had the balls to face that horrible monster, and she’d done it alone. Without any backup. How? She’d arrived at his bunkers dressed in rags, begged a handout, and acted as if she had no idea who he was. Then she’d convinced him that she was just as sick and perverse as he was. How? By killing a lamb, then licking its blood off her fingertips, painting her face and dancing, laughing like a maniac. To this day, she didn’t eat anything mutton-related. Never mind that the lamb she’d killed was destined for stew after she’d killed it. Lambs cried for their mamas when they were hurt, did you know that? And their mamas bleated for them once those babies were dead. They mourned for days and sometimes they died because they just stopped living. Because of her! She had that baby’s blood on her hands! The whole damnable mess still turned her stomach.

Automatically, Persia clapped her palms over her ears, denying yet again, the quivering fear in that tiny animal’s bleating cry for help. Wishing she could go back in time and tell her FBI handler, ‘No,’ that she didn’t want to work for the CIA. Not in South America. Never in Brazil. Never, ever with a psychopath like Zapata!

Despite her night terrors now, she had brought him down. The bastard was dead. With her own eyes, she’d watched Julio Juarez put two hot rounds straight into Zapata’s brain. She’d seen the blood splatter, and she’d rejoiced in every single drop of it. Because Persia had also watched while Agent Juarez’s wife had played games with Domingo when Julio’d thought she’d been kidnapped. Persia knew for a fact that Bianca Juarez had willfully, and with malice, deserted her husband and her only child—Julio’s one-year-old boy, a toddler, for fuck sakes!

It took a few moments of mindfulness and steady, slow breathing to banish the ugly memory again. Yet reliving those awful months made Persia realize that Hotrod, err, Lieutenant Walker Judge, a decorated USN