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little by little, hair all mussed and cheeks pink with fever, eyes glassy. Jasmine went to her immediately, feeling her forehead and frowning.
    “ She’s in no shape to walk around,” she told her brother. “Gabe isn’t going to hurt us.”
    He appreciated the vote of confidence. He scanned the room. “Where is the aunt?”
    All he got were funny looks. “The aunt from Arkansas,” he clarified.
    “ Spending the winter with her sister in Florida,” Tekla said.
    Thank God. The last thing they needed in the middle of this volatile situation was another civilian.
    “ When are the men coming?” Tekla asked Jasmine.
    She shot a questioning look to Gabe.
    He glanced at his watch. “In about forty minutes.” As a gesture of goodwill, he tucked his weapon away. “She needs help.” He nodded toward the younger sister.
    Jasmine rolled her eyes at him. “Why did you think I came to you?”
    “ Didn’t have a chance to ask, with you trying to scratch my eyes out and all that.”
    Tekla shot a dark look at Jasmine.
    “ I can’t do this alone, okay?” She pulled a bottle of water from the rubble and handed it to her sister before looking back at her brother, her eyes begging. “You need as much help as Mandy does. We can’t just hang tough. It’s gone beyond that. I can’t fix this.”
    The quiet desperation in her voice touched Gabe’s heart.
    She’d been surviving with no resources, no support, in a foreign country, trying to save her brother and her sister. And the thing was, she’d done it. She’d taken care of them. She’d evaded an entire commando team, risked her life, putting everything on the line when she’d come to him.
    “ I’ll help.” Hell, that had been a forgone conclusion probably from the moment he’d caught her on the roof and first faced her spirit and courage, first realized that something might be off with the op.
    “ You turn yourself in to me,” he told Tekla, “and I’ll make sure your sisters will be safe.”
    “ Absolutely not.” Jasmine shot to her feet with a look of betrayal on her face. “I brought you here to help my brother escape.”
    “ Your brother made some bad choices. He’s going to have to face the music for that, but the rest of you don’t have to get hurt.”
    “ You don’t understand anything!” she yelled suddenly, wrapping her arms around her slim body. She began to pace, throwing desperate looks at her brother.
    “ Then tell me what happened.” Gabe turned to Tekla. “If there’s a rational explanation for what you’ve done, let’s hear it.”
    “ The less you know, the safer you are.”
    “ Like your sisters?” he snapped. “Do you know what a miracle it is that they’re still alive? How long are you prepared to gamble with their lives?”
    Gabe caught himself and toned it down a notch. “If you don’t trust Brent and his crew, I have connections I can call on. I can turn you straight over to the U.S. authorities. The FBI, even.”
    “ This thing goes too high. Brent has a backer. Someone in the government.”
    Gabe considered the possibility and the implications. Brent was one of two dozen team leaders at a fairly small private security company that specialized in overseas missions. The contract to retrieve Jake Tekla had come from the government that couldn’t send military forces after the man into a sovereign country like Italy. Maybe they could have justified something like that in the Middle East, but certainly not in Europe.
    The U.S. government didn’t want to get local law enforcement involved, at least that was the way Brent had explained it to Gabe when he’d been hired on. A rogue American soldier, a killer on the loose wouldn’t have inspired much confidence in the U.S.
    And the Italians were already wary of military presence in their country, especially since the cable car accident a few years back when a U.S. jet flew too low, cutting the cables, sending twenty people plunging to their deaths.
    So sending a private