Page 15 of Near Miss

He drank in Sophia’s face and breathed in her scent to ground himself. His hands lifted to cover hers, pull them off, but instead, he held her to him until his ragged breathing slowed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sure who he was apologizing to, Sophia or Katherine, the woman he hadn’t been able to save.

Sophia’s thumbs moved across his cheeks in a gentle caress. He dropped his gaze to her pink lips. His muscles tightened. His heart pounded, sending blood south to his awakening cock.

He needed to taste her.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” she whispered.

Guilt rose in the back of his throat, bitter as acid, dousing his arousal. He stepped back, breaking from her hold and the spell she’d woven around him.

She had no idea of the amends he had to make.

He needed to focus on bringing down Khan and his supplier, not indulging himself in a stolen moment of pleasure. With a colleague, no less.

The lift jolted, the overhead lights flashed on, and the car began to move.

Lachlan cleared his throat, carefully avoiding the questions in Sophia’s eyes. “I’ve got to take care of something. We’ll need to continue working on the report another time.”

When the car opened to the lobby, he headed for the revolving glass doors that spit him out into the cool spring afternoon, leaving Sophia in his wake.

His leg didn’t feel up for a long walk, but exercising his Mercedes’s high-performance engine on the Beltway before traffic piled up might clear his head.

He strode to the surface lot next door. He’d handed over his car this morning to Jeremy Powell. The lad probably made more money detailing cars than he would if he had stayed at uni and finished his studies. With Jeremy’s brains and motivation, he’d be franchising his business before his twenty-fifth birthday.

He spied Jeremy buffing a white SUV. “Jeremy.”

Jeremy lifted a hand in greeting. “Hey, Mr. Mackay, I was just about to get to yours.” A light breeze ruffled Jeremy’s shaggy, dark brown hair. He swiped the strands out of his eyes with his forearm.

Lachlan hesitated. His skin itched with the need to escape, and he had meetings this afternoon. “I need to take the car, pal. Any chance you can clean it tomorrow?”

Jeremy dropped the rag he’d been using to buff the SUV and pulled his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans. “I’m pretty booked this week. How about next week? I can do it on Monday.”

Lachlan nodded. He kept his car clean enough. It could wait another week. He accepted his key fob from Jeremy and gave him a friendly pat on the back. “You’re a hard worker, lad. Keep it up, and soon you’ll have people working for you whilst you build your empire.”

Jeremy grinned, his brown eyes lighting up. “That’s the plan, Mr. M. That’s the plan.”

Lachlan headed for his Mercedes, his mood darkening again. His ghosts mocked him as he drove out of the surface lot to the street, determined to leave them behind.

Chapter Seven

TheToyotaHiluxpickupRoshan Haider rode in smelled like a rubbish bin. He stared at the sheer cliff face on his right as the truck careened around another curve and avoided looking to his left. The low stone guardrails on this mountainous stretch of Afghanistan’s AH1 highway reminded him of the stone fences found in rural Great Britain and appeared a flimsy barrier separating the winding, narrow road from the Kabul River some three hundred meters below.

One mistake and not even the grace of Allah would prevent them from plunging to their deaths. The air conditioning from the truck’s vents barely reached him and did little to cool the sweat beading his forehead.

He leaned forward as far as his seatbelt would allow. “Perhaps you could slow down?”

The driver sent to pick him up at the Kabul airport met his gaze in the rearview mirror with a smirk but said nothing, nor did he decrease his speed. He was transporting Roshan to Mohammad Razul Khan’s home outside Jalalabad, three hours away.

Roshan slumped further into the backseat and sent up a prayer.

He replayed in his head the message from his contact two days ago.Khan knows the name of the man who murdered your sister.

The warlord was a dangerous man, well-connected and feared by many, including Afghanistan’s current leaders. He managed to deftly play all sides of the conflict between the Afghan government, the Western governments, and the Taliban.

Khan’s son, Razul Sharif, had joined the Taliban and had been the one who’d filled Nadia’s head with the misbeliefs that led to her death. After the video of Nadia taking credit for an operation killing Coalition soldiers circulated on the Internet, it hadn’t taken the British press long to brand his sister a traitor.

When she came home in a coffin three months later, the official story the UK government had given to Roshan and his parents was that Nadia tragically had been caught in the crossfire during a Coalition assault on a Taliban stronghold.

It was a lie. Two British Army soldiers had been buried in Hereford at the SAS cemetery shortly after the video’s release. The operation that killed Nadia and Khan’s son had been a joint operation between Afghan and allied special forces. Afghanistan’s president had been furious that the son of a powerful warlord was killed and leaked the information that he died at the hands of British special forces, not the Afghans.

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