“I’ll kill you, you bitch.”
He picked up a metal tube that had been discarded on the ground and hit a glancing blow to her shoulder. She stumbled, slipped on some oil, and went down. Glass bit into her forearm, but the pain was there and gone in a white-hot burst as adrenaline swept it away.
She scrambled to her feet and went into a fighter’s crouch. She ducked his wild swing, coming up and punching him hard in the soft flesh of his underarm. The man gasped in pain and tried to grab her around the neck. Sienna danced away and delivered a roundhouse kick that sent her attacker to his knees.
It wasn’t until after she’d cuffed him and read him his rights that she saw that A.J. was tying up the gunman he’d dealt with.
Her eyes met his and something fizzled along her nerve endings, the same kind of feeling she’d felt when Lana had pushed her out from under that beam.
Without breaking eye contact, she pulled out her cell phone and called the division asking for backup, stating she’d just walked into a major arms deal.
She couldn’t get around the fact that he’d saved her life. She’d missed that fourth man. It would have been a costly mistake if A.J. hadn’t been there to back her up.
Sienna didn’t know how long she stood there staring at him, meeting those intense blue eyes, expressive and gorgeous. Somehow that didn’t seem as terrifying as it should have been.
A.J. gave her a slight smile and Sienna could barely contain the raw and turbulent feelings that rushed through her.
She broke her gaze when she heard the sirens wailing as they got closer and closer. The intimacy didn’t fade, although she was across the parking lot from him. It was still there, swirling around her, making her feel things that she’d never thought she’d ever feel.
The cold hard truth hit her. She’d never wanted to rely on anyone before, but in the short time that she’d known A.J., she had this sudden urge to lean. It was too dangerous to even think about it. Too dangerous to contemplate what would happen if she let herself feel too much, want too much.
The patrol cops took the men away as Sienna gave her statement.
* * *
With the surge of adrenaline still ping-ponging around in his body, A.J. was in his element. Search and destroy was something he excelled in. Yet, he’d been a bit slow off the mark, another reminder that the grenade had done more damage than was possible to heal.
When he’d taken down the hidden man, he had to check his fury. A.J. knew many ways to kill a man and he would have used deadly force if he thought there had been any more of a threat from the downed man. There was no way that anything would happen to Sienna, not on his watch.
She was calm and professional as she gave her account to the patrol officers and relinquished the suspects to them.
He relived that moment when her eyes had met his. She had been shaken and he knew why. He suspected that Sienna didn’t make many mistakes and considered it a weakness to do so.
He watched her from a short distance away talking to Captain Sandoval, who had shown up on the scene about ten minutes ago.
A.J. came up to her, his emotions shut down in order to keep himself from acting unprofessionally by taking her into his arms.
“I want a full inventory of those weapons and a list of serial numbers on my desk in an hour,” she blurted.
“I think under the circumstances, you ought to go home,” A.J. said.
“No. These weapons could be the ones. I need to interrogate Rojas.”
“Sienna. You’re bleeding and exhausted. You need to rest.”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically, the cop to the core, not willing to leave a job undone.
“The guns and Rojas aren’t going anywhere.”
“But your brother…?” she persisted.
He admired her tenacity, and he was worried sick about his brother, but in this case, further interrogations of Rojas wouldn’t get them anything.
“My brother’s not here. I searched the building while you were talking to the uniforms. After Rojas tried to shoot you and I took him down, I asked him where David was.”
“Maybe you didn’t ask him the right question.”
“I was very persuasive,” he said, arching his brow, his mouth kicking up into a grim smile. “Believe me, if he knew where David was, he would have said so.”