Smoked
Heather Slade
The Invincibles Book Five
Copyright © 2020 by Heather Slade
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-1-942200-86-4
Also by Heather Slade
BUTLER RANCH
Prequel: Kade’s Worth
Book One: Brodie
Book Two: Maddox
Book Three: Naughton
Book Four: Mercer
Book Five: Kade
Butler Ranch Boxed Set: Books 1-5 with Bonus Book: Ainsley
* * *
LOS CABALLEROS
Coming Soon!
Book One: Gabe
* * *
K19 SECURITY SOLUTIONS
Book One: Razor
Book Two: Gunner
Book Three: Mistletoe
Book Four: Mantis
K19 Security Solutions Boxed Set: Books 1-4
Book Five: Dutch
Book Six: Striker
Book Seven: Monk
Book Eight: Halo
Coming Soon!
Book Nine: Tackle
* * *
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE SECTION 6
Book One: Shiver
Book Two: Wilder
Book Three: Pinch
Book Four: Shadow
Military Intelligence Section 6 Boxed Set: Books 1-4
* * *
THE INVINCIBLES
Book One: Decked
Book Two: Edged
Book Three: Grinded
Book Four: Riled
Book Five: Smoked
Coming Soon!
Book Six: Bucked
* * *
KB WORLDS EVERYDAY HEROES
Book One: Handled
* * *
COCKY HERO CLUB NOVELS
Book One: Undercover Agent
* * *
COWBOYS OF CRESTED BUTTE
Book One: Fall for Me
Book Two: Dance with Me
Book Three: Kiss Me Cowboy
Book Four: Stay with Me
Book Five: Win Me Over
Cowboys of Crested Butte Boxed Set: Books 1-5
Contents
Smoked
Prologue
Part I
1. Smoke
2. Siren
3. Smoke
4. Siren
5. Smoke
6. Siren
7. Smoke
8. Siren
9. Smoke
10. Siren
11. Smoke
12. Siren
13. Smoke
14. Siren
15. Smoke
16. Siren
17. Smoke
Part II
18. Siren
19. Smoke
20. Siren
21. Smoke
22. Siren
23. Smoke
24. Siren
25. Smoke
26. Siren
27. Smoke
28. Siren
29. Smoke
30. Siren
31. Smoke
32. Siren
33. Smoke
34. Siren
35. Smoke
Epilogue
Want more?
Handled
Bucked
About the Author
Also by Heather Slade
Smoked
/smohkd/
verb
to smolder, burn, singe
Prologue
Smoke
“Siren!” I called out as I ran into the burnt-out building I’d seen her enter a few seconds before I did. “Siobhan! Where the fuck are you?”
I knew why she’d run past the fire marshal and into the scorched shell of the former antique shop: she was looking for the safe that was in the back storage room of the derelict place. I also knew why she refused to answer me.
“Siren!” I yelled again, staying low to the ground, hoping to get a glimpse of her through the haze of smoke.
As if it were a special effect, the cloud suddenly cleared, and in front of me stood the woman I’d hated and loved equally in the months I’d known her.
“Get out of here, Smoke. This is none of your concern,” she shouted.
“It may not be,” I said, taking a step in her direction. “But you are. Let me help you, Siobhan.”
“I was never your concern, Broderick, except to play with.” Her Irish brogue was thick, like when she was about to cry.
“Please.” I took another step closer and held out my hand. Before I was near enough for her to take it, I heard a crack above us. I dove in her direction, covering her body with mine as the still-smoldering ceiling came crashing down on us both.
I
Two Months Earlier
1
Smoke
I held my breath when the doctor came out of the double doors with a grim look on his face.
“Siobhan Gallagher’s family,” the nurse with him called out. I stood and walked toward them.
“That’s me.”
“Your name?”
“Broderick Torcher.”
The doctor cleared his throat. “The surgery was successful, and Ms. Gallagher is in stable condition.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding, sensing there was a “but” coming. Sure enough, his next sentence confirmed it.
“There was brain trauma associated with her injuries…”
I felt the bile rising in my throat.
“Ms. Gallagher has suffered a series of small strokes. Some movement may have been affected, as well as her memory.”
“What do you mean by ‘affected’?”
“As with any stroke, when the patient first regains consciousness, the symptoms are typically at their worst. Some regain full physical and mental capacity immediately. Others, it takes longer.”
“What, specifically, has been affected?”
“We don’t know fully as she’s only regained consciousness intermittently.”
I took another deep breath, restraining myself from grabbing the man by the throat, putting his back to the wall, and insisting he answer my fucking question. Instead, I spoke slowly. “For the third time, what…did…you…mean…by…affected?”
“Ms. Gallagher was having difficulty controlling movement on the left side of her body. We expect this to improve relatively quickly.”
“You said physical and mental.”
“The patient was experiencing confusion—”
My patience was gone. “What kind of confusion?” I growled at the man.
“As I said, for now, much of her condition is unknown.”
“You’re not answering my questions.” I was trained to recognize when people were hiding something, and this man sure as shit was. If this doc thought he could get anything over on me, he was in for a rude awakening when he experienced my ire in full force.
“It would be premature to give you any definitive answers regarding her symptoms.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, wishing I could turn around, walk out of the hospital, and never look back.
“What is the nature of your relationship with Ms. Gallagher?” he asked.
“Work colleagues.”
The doctor raised his brow and looked at the nurse, who opened the folder she had in her hand and shuffled through the papers inside. She gave him a sheet containing the information I assumed he was looking for.
“You’re listed as having her medical power of attorney.”
“That’s right.” The reason why was none of his business.
“It’
s unlikely she’ll remember you.”
“Excuse me?”
“As I said, Ms. Gallagher has only regained consciousness for short amounts of time.”
“And yet you predict she won’t remember me?”
“We have reason to believe her memory has been affected.” He studied me for a moment. “Do you have any other questions?”
A thousand, at least, but his track record at answering any I’d asked so far was zilch. I shook my head.
“You may see her now. If you’d like, the nurse can escort you to her room.”
If I’d like? There’s nothing I’d like less. However, this wasn’t something I could walk away from. Siren wasn’t someone I could walk away from.
* * *
The nurse waved her arm for me to follow.
“Hold up,” I said, motioning to where I left a book and a cup of coffee near where I’d been sitting.
She folded her arms and drummed the fingers of one hand. I’d been sitting here for seven hours, waiting for some kind of word on Siren’s condition. She could damn well wait for me to throw away a coffee cup.
I followed her behind the double doors and down a corridor.
“As you were informed, she’s been awake on and off.” The nurse stopped walking and cleared her throat. “I’ll warn you that Ms. Gallagher’s appearance may be somewhat alarming.”
I didn’t bother to tell the nurse that I’d seen things exponentially worse than alarming. Horrific. Nightmarish. Gruesome. Those were appropriately descriptive adjectives of the carnage I’d witnessed. Many of the scenes, I’d caused. A tiny woman lying in a hospital bed was the last thing that would alarm me.
Or so I thought. The woman who’d infuriated me like no other ever, sent my blood pressure skyrocketing with her inability to follow simple directives, and caused me to consider strangling her on countless occasions, looked like a broken doll lying on the gurney.
Her skin, already pale as alabaster, was ghostly white save for the purple bruises that marred its otherwise flawlessness. Beneath the edges of the thick bandages covering most of her scalp, I could see that her long inky-black hair had been shaved. The worst of what I saw, were the straps tying her arms to the bed’s rails. I lifted the sheet and saw the same with her legs.
“Is this really necessary?” I slowly turned when the nurse cleared her throat but didn’t answer. “What?”
“I’m sorry, Mister…”
“Torcher.”
“Right. You have five minutes, after which, I’ll need to accompany you back out to the waiting area.”
I shook my head and looked back at Siren. “I’m not leaving.”
“But you can’t remain—”
“Watch me.” I seethed, looking over my shoulder at the woman who was half my height and probably a quarter of my weight.
“Well, I suppose that since you have Ms. Gallagher’s power of attorney, you would be considered her next of kin.”
When she left, closing the door behind her, I pulled a chair closer to the bedside. I untied the bindings and studied Siren’s features in a way I couldn’t when she was awake. She’d never kept her devil tongue still enough for me to take my time appreciating her true beauty.
Like her hair, her lush eyelashes were black, as were her thin eyebrows that I’d seen more often raised in annoyance with me rather than at rest like they were now. Her angular cheekbones were pronounced on her oval face, more than her button nose, lush mouth, and soft chin.
Her appearance was similar to the photos I’d seen of my own grandmother, Nanna Ryan, when she was in her mid-twenties like Siren was.
You would think that two people who’d spent as much time together as Siren and I, would’ve talked about our families, but we hadn’t.
I’d never said, but like her, my mother’s family was Irish. Maeve Ryan-Torcher’s family hailed from Kinsale in County Cork, only sixteen miles south of the city bearing the same name as the county. The port and fishing village was best known for the hard-drinking yachtsmen and fishermen who spent whatever time they had off the water, on the nearby golf courses.
I’d visited a few times with my grandmother, the last of which was only a month before she passed away.
I knew from the background report I’d received on Siren from both the CIA and the Invincibles, the private intelligence firm she and I had accepted our last mission from, that her mother died when Siren was a teenager. There was no name listed as her father on her birth certificate.
In the same way I’d never been able to sit and stare at Siren’s exquisite face, any perusal of her body I’d done was only when she wasn’t looking. She was a wisp of a thing but with boobs that made everything she wore look sexy as fuck, even the cotton hospital gown.
When she shifted and groaned, I looked up into her wide-set Arctic-blue eyes.
“Smoke.” Her voice was soft but made gravelly by the since-removed intubation tube required during her surgery.
“Siren,” I murmured, stunned when she looked at the palm of her delicate hand as if she was reaching out to me.
“Closer,” she wheezed.
“Don’t try to talk,” I said, scooting the chair forward.
Her eyes surveyed the room, and she looked at me questioningly.
“You’re in Fernwood Hospital, about an hour outside London. Do you remember anything that happened?”
“No.”
“You were shot during an op. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Her eyes opened wide. “An op?”
“We were on Konstantine von Habsburg’s detail at Broadmoor Hospital.”
Siren sunk deeper into the pillow, her brow furrowed. “Detail?”
Admittedly, I’d rarely heard the woman’s voice be so subdued, unless she was speaking to someone other than me, but its frailty was worrisome. I remembered the doctor saying Siren’s memory might have been affected by the series of strokes she’d suffered, but she clearly knew me.
“What’s the last thing you recall?”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “The island,” she whispered.
The island? I clenched the fist she couldn’t see and willed my body not to react in any other way. Of everything she might have said, that was the last thing I expected. I barely recalled it myself, not only because I’d pushed it out of my thoughts so many times, but also because of the rum-induced haze I’d been in on the one night when the heated passion between us turned from hate to lust.
Siren looked down at her open palm a second time and then up at me. “Smoke?”
I leaned forward and stroked the area around the place where the intravenous line was taped against her skin. “Siren…”
“Please,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Hold me.”
If she were any more alert, I would call her out for fucking with me, but the longing I saw in her eyes was too sincere.
I stood, trying to figure out a way to get my six-feet-five, two-hundred-and-sixty-pound frame positioned in such a way that I could put my arms around her without ripping out her IV or crushing her.
When she scooted her body over, the sheet moved with her. I could see her hospital gown had ridden up, exposing her bare hip. I grabbed the bedclothes and covered her before reaching down to give her an awkward hug.
“Lie with me.”
It popped into my head again that Siren was playing me, but after one look into her imploring eyes, I rested my hip on the bed. “Be careful,” I warned when she tried to scoot over a second time. I gingerly put one arm around her waist and folded the other above her head. She closed her eyes.
A few minutes later, the door opened and a different nurse scowled at me. Before she could speak, I eased away from the sleeping Siren, put my finger to my lips, and stood. I brushed past her and out the door when my cell phone rang with a call from the man who’d hired me to do a job I failed.
“Rile,” I answered, leaning against the tiled wall of the corridor.
�
��How is Siren?”
“Out of surgery.”
“And?”
I shrugged my shoulder, not that he could see me. “Stable,” I muttered, trying to recollect the thoughts I’d been able to formulate before Siren’s request to hold her caused my mind to go blank. “Rile, I—”
“Say no more. Your first duty is to your partner.”
“But, Konstantine—”
“Is dead,” he said, interrupting me for the second time.
“Kensington?” I asked of the woman we’d been hired to protect from a Hungarian madman. The Hungarian madman I’d let escape after he shot and almost killed Siren.
“She is safe and asleep at my side.”
“I’m sorry, Rile.” I got the words I’d wanted to say at the beginning of our conversation out.
“I’ll notify Director Hughes of Siren’s condition.”
“Listen, can you keep the details vague for the time being?” If the Director of Irish Military Intelligence found out Siren had suffered several mini-strokes and her memory was sketchy at best, not to mention what the doctor had said about her having trouble controlling movement on the left side of her body, the likelihood of her ever being able to return to duty was minuscule.
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