Bare Nerve by Katherine Garbera

protecting their communities since the dawn of time.”
    She shook her head. “Women have been doing the very same thing, just in a different way.”
    “That’s my point. If you told me you’d be keeping the home fires burning, I’d get that, but your team is telling me you’re going to ride shotgun, and I know you’re capable of doing that, but my brain is saying, ‘Hey, buddy, that’s not right.’”
    She smiled at him. “That’s chauvinism. I’m not sure if you got the memo or not, but it’s dead.”
    “I must have missed that one. In the places where I’ve been, it’s not dead.”
    “Well, I’ll just have to make sure you change your thinking.”
    “How are you going to do that?”
    She shrugged delicately. “I think I’ll keep my plan to myself for now.”
    “You do that,” he said, leaning over. He wanted to kiss that sassy mouth of hers.
    “Savage,” Kirk said.
    He turned away from Anna and glanced toward the middle of the plane where his guys were all seated. Kirk was frowning at him. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Kirk thought he was distracted.
    Fuck it, he thought. Anna Sterling was more than a distraction, and he needed his head in the game. They’d been tracking Andreev for more years than he wanted to count. The man was one of the most dangerous in the world. A merchant of death who sold his weapons to whomever had the money, sometimes prolonging conflicts by years and adding to the death count in places where genocide and rebellion were the standard.
    Jack pushed to his feet and walked to to his men. He needed to remember where he belonged, and it wasn’t next to the softness that was Anna.
     
    “I don’t like this,” Justine said as Anna joined her and Charity at the front of the plane. The Liberty Investigations jet had a desk area in the front of the plane, a general sitting area toward the middle—where the Savage Seven were camped out—and a bedroom/shower suite in the back.
    “What don’t you like?” Anna asked.
    “Them,” Justine said. “There’s just something unsettling about all those men on our plane.”
    Anna agreed to a certain extent, but if it weren’t for her distracting attraction to Jack Savage, she’d almost like having the other men around. They were changing the dynamic of her team. Making her and the others more of a unit than they had been for the last two assignments.
    She missed her friends, and while she didn’t begrudge them their newfound relationships, there was a part of her that had feared their team would never be the same again.
    “It is different, isn’t it?” Anna asked.
    “Change is good,” Charity said.
    “I guess,” Justine said. She was grumpy by nature and didn’t necessarily like a lot of men.
    Anna’s BlackBerry beeped, and she glanced down at the screen to see that the program she’d written to notify her of Andreev’s moves was alerting her.
    “Be right back,” she said and went to her desk. She sat down and pulled up the program.
    Given the jump start Andreev had on them, she expected to find his signal in North Africa. But instead she noticed the cell phone she’d bugged had stopped in Paris.
    “What’d you find?” Charity asked.
    “Andreev’s stopped moving. His signal is in Paris,” Anna said. She started typing to pinpoint his exact location. Jack and his second in command, Kirk, walked over to her desk.
    Anna didn’t look up but kept her fingers moving on the keyboard.
    “He stopped at Charles de Gaulle. I’m not sure what terminal he’s in,” she said—really to herself.
    “Can you access the airport security cameras?” Kirk asked.
    “Yes,” she said. She ignored the others as Hamm, too, joined them. She accessed the airport security system using a master code all international security people used.
    “Can one of you find me the flight numbers that have just landed and which one he might be on?”
    “I’m on it,” Kirk said.
    She accessed the CCTV system and pulled up