Shiver

highly charged a state, and fighting it so doggedly, he would have smiled at the fierceness of her as she walked away from him.
    The girl had attitude. Balls. By putting the brakes on somethinghe knew she was as hungry to have happen as he was, she had surprised him once again. Jesus, he was ready to walk over hot coals barefoot to find out what she would be like in bed. Would she be sweet? Or wild?
    Imagining the possibilities set him on fire all over again.
    But whether she was hot stuff in the sack or not, taking her to bed wasn’t on the agenda. Getting her and her kid to safety was what he needed to be focusing on. What he was going to focus on.
    Just give him a couple of seconds.
    Danny stood where he was for another minute or so, willing himself to chill out with only so-so success. Then he turned and headed for his bedroom. Since arriving at the town house, he’d slept with his bedroom door open, the better to keep an eye and an ear on Tyler and Sam. Sam slept with her bedroom door open, too, to listen for Tyler, he knew. And Tyler’s bedroom door was left open, probably so Sam could hear him if he cried out in the night.
    But a moment ago Sam had shut her bedroom door with a decided snap, which he had taken as another manifestation of ain’t happening directed at him. And now he was closing his, too. And locking it. And turning on the radio that also served as an alarm clock, the better to keep from being overheard.
    His bedroom was the smallest of the three, and simple: white walls, beige carpet, a framed landscape over a double bed. Plain oak headboard, oak nightstand with a lamp and the clock radio, oak chest. Navajo looking bedspread, and in one corner a small brown armchair.
    He sat down in the armchair—it was a rocker, he discovered, upholstered in some kind of plush—and started taking apart his right crutch. The handful of Advil he had popped maybe an hour before had taken the edge off his leg, but it still hurt like hell. He was just getting better at ignoring it. His finger, his bruises, and other injuries, they were healing, and he barely noticed them now. They were nothing he hadn’t suffered before. His worst problem at the moment was that he was horny as hell and stuck with it, no relief in sight. In fact, he was getting ready to make sure that the woman he was jazzed with lust over to the point where he was having trouble thinking about anything except taking her to bed was whisked away out of his reach.
    With the crutch lying dismantled near his feet, he snapped the battery back into the cell phone and turned it on. A second later, it flickered to life. He punched in a number that only a few people knew, and waited.
    “Panterro,” he identified himself to the man who answered. Using his real name felt risky—when he was undercover he did his best to forget it—but this situation had gone so far off the rails that the rules he usually operated by had flown out the window. Besides, unless the house was bugged, no one was listening. And if Veith or the Zetas knew where the house was, bugging it wouldn’t be what they did, so talking freely should be safe.
    “Danny.” Associate Deputy Director Keith Mayhew didn’t sound particularly glad to hear from him. Which Danny could understand. Last time they’d talked, which had been about sixmonths previously, Danny had just completed an undercover operation into a foreign government that provided prostitutes for members of Congress and other high-ranking officials, then videotaped and subsequently blackmailed them. The fallout hadn’t been pretty, and the director’s office had caught significant flack. Fortunately he and Mayhew went further back than that, all the way back to when Mayhew, as special agent in charge of the Houston office, had hired him straight out of college. “What bad news do you have for me now?”
    “None.” Danny almost smiled at the resigned tone in the older man’s voice. “I’m on assignment. I need a favor.”
    “So lay it on me.”
    Danny gave him a quick rundown of the situation. “Bottom line, I got two civilians in the line of fire. I want them out of it.”
    “What do you expect me to do about it?”
    “Send a crew you trust to get them out of here. Take ’em back to Washington or somewhere and protect the hell out of them until I get this over with.”
    “They’re that important to you, hmm?”
    Until Mayhew said it, Danny hadn’t really thought about it that way. But the truth was,