Hard Night (11th Hour #3)

by Jackie Ashenden

  And he was hers.

  EPILOGUE

  Jacob watched as Faith got in the limo and pulled the door shut. Then she sat opposite him and kicked her feet up, resting her boots on the seat next to him.

  Three months of them being together and his heart still leapt at the sight of her coming back to him after a mission. It still leapt at the sight of her, period.

  His one regret was that he couldn’t go on the 11th Hour missions himself, just to help keep her safe, but they’d both agreed that the team worked better if he remained in the background, being the power behind the throne.

  Too much testosterone in one room, Faith had told him, or some such bullshit. He preferred it when she called him their secret weapon, only to be deployed in emergencies.

  Pity there weren’t more emergencies, but then you couldn’t have everything.

  “Really, Ms. Beasley?” he murmured, shaking his head at her muddy boots. “Give some fucking thought to my upholstery.”

  She grinned, looking at him from underneath her lashes in that way that never failed to make his blood run hot.

  Clearly, the operation she and the rest of the team had just completed had gone well, since she always got horny directly after a successful mission.

  Lucky, lucky him.

  “I don’t care about your fucking upholstery,” she said. “I do care about fucking, though.”

  Jacob lifted an eyebrow. “It went well then, I take it?”

  “It did.”

  “Well, don’t be shy.” He spread his legs. “Come over here and show me—” His phone buzzed in his pocket and he broke off. “Christ.”

  “Answer it,” Faith murmured. “You know you won’t be able to concentrate until you do.”

  It was, alas, true.

  Sighing, he took his phone out and stared down at the screen. It was a text from an unknown number and all it said was:

  I didn’t do it for you. I did it for her. J.

  And for a second he had no idea what it meant. Then he did.

  “Fuck,” he murmured.

  Faith must have heard the shock in his voice, because she sat up suddenly, taking her boots from the seat and coming to sit next to him. “What is it?”

  Wordlessly, Jacob handed her the phone. Because it was a message for her as well as himself.

  “Josh,” she murmured, looking down at it. “He did save us in the end.”

  “No, sweet girl,” Jacob said quietly. “He saved you.”

  Faith looked at him and for a brief moment there were tears in her eyes.

  They had, by mutual agreement, decided not to try to find Joshua. It had been a hard decision to make, but it was the right one.

  His brother had demons enough chasing him without Jacob adding to them as well. As long as he kept himself away from anything illegal, at least, and so far he had.

  But this was the first contact he’d made. And it wasn’t for Jacob, but for Faith. His friend.

  “I don’t know what to say.” Faith kept staring down at the screen. “I’m sorry, Jake, I didn’t . . .”

  Of course. She was thinking about him. But that was her all over, wasn’t it?

  “It’s okay,” Jacob said, and it was okay. “I don’t begrudge you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  She said nothing, but took his hand, twining her fingers through his.

  “Joshua made his choice.” He rubbed his thumb against her palm. “He had some loyalty left for you.”

  “But not his brother.”

  “No, but maybe one day he will.” It didn’t hurt, it really didn’t. And he knew why that was.

  He reached out and slid his fingers along the delicate line of her jaw, turning her face gently toward him. “Until then, I have you.”

  In her blue eyes was everything he’d ever wanted.

  In her smile was everything he’d ever dreamed.

  They weren’t alone. Neither of them was.

  Not anymore.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to everyone involved in the production of this book, my editor, my agent, and my support crew.

  Most particular thanks go to my husband, whom I pestered endlessly with questions about fugue states, TBIs, and sensory triggers. Honey, you deserve a drink.

  Once they were soldiers. Now they answer only to honor. . . .

  The 11th Hour is made up of men and women who are no longer deemed fit to serve their country, but still need to fight a war. They work in shadows, keep their secrets—and follow their hearts....

  Be sure not to miss all of Jackie Ashenden’s

  11th Hour series, including

  TOTAL CONTROL

  Helicopter pilot Kellan Blake has always hated being told what to do, so being discharged from the Army for insubordination doesn’t come as much of a surprise. What does surprise him is that when he joins up with the elite, underground 11th Hour squad instead, they send him straight home. The nest of vipers that calls itself his family is the next target for the team’s tech unit, so he’ll either have to brave their traps and deceptions himself—or watch his sweet, shy friend Sabrina walk into them alone....

  Sabrina’s no femme fatale, but since there’s no one else with the tech skills to get the info they need, she’ll put on a party dress and take one for the team. But whoever decided she should pretend to be Kellan’s new fiancée hit a little too close to home. How can she concentrate on a dangerous mission when she’s worried about giving away what she really feels for her loyal, passionate, smoking hot partner? At least she isn’t likely to blow their cover. Until she’s in the line of fire, and neither Kellan’s demons nor his heart are hers to tame....

  Keep reading for a special excerpt.

  A Kensington trade paperback and e-book on sale now!

  PROLOGUE

  “I thought you said that you could fly this thing.”

  Kellan ignored Ian’s growl from behind him and tried to keep a tight grip on the joystick, the helo bouncing around in the air like a ball in a pinball machine.

  Of course he could fly this thing. He’d been a Night Stalker once, a member of the elite helicopter unit who dealt with the insertion and extraction of military black ops teams. But that had been a couple of years ago and he’d gone from green to blue, leaving the Army and joining the Navy, becoming a SEAL instead. And although he’d tried to keep up his flight skills, he hadn’t had as much practice as he would like.

  Certainly not for a mission like this, where the team’s extraction point had been compromised, which meant they had to rely on him, his chops as a pilot, and a helo with a bullet-damaged rotor to get them out of here.

  “Fucking hell,” Ian muttered, grabbing at his seat as the helicopter lurched again, almost brushing the tops of the heavy fir trees below them.

  “Jesus,” one of the other guys in the back said, amid more cursing from the rest of them. “You need more practice, Kel.”

  Kellan tuned them all out. He had to. If they were going to survive this, his concentration had to be total.

  Keeping a helicopter in the air was bad enough at the best of times, but with a damaged rotor? Fucking thing was like a bumblebee with only one wing and those things shouldn’t have been able to fly with two.

  Impossible in other words.

  The helicopter lurched again as something hit it, the joystick in his hand jerking hard. He could feel the machine become even more unstable and then more fire hit, taking another piece of rotor out.

  Shit.

  His last thought before the helicopter dipped, then began to tip, the skids brushing the tops of the trees, was that his father was going to be really pissed with him for fucking this up.

  Then the world turned upside down and there was a massive bang, and the darkness and the heat came for him.

  CHAPTER 1

  “We suspect your father’s been associated with an illegal arms ring, Kellan.” Faith Beasley’s blue eyes were coolly sympathetic. “I’m sorry, but we’re going to need to in
vestigate.”

  Kellan Blake, former Night Stalker helicopter pilot, former SEAL, now member of the “special projects” semilegal 11th Hour team, and still total badass motherfucker, laughed.

  He liked Faith. She was the one who gave the team their “jobs” on behalf of Jacob Night, the shadowy figure who’d set up and basically owned the 11th Hour. She was cool, calm, and collected, a complete professional, and he had a lot of respect for her.

  But this? This was bullshit.

  They were sitting in the gutted building that comprised the 11th Hour’s San Diego HQ, a massive wall-less space that had been divided off into various areas with furniture.

  The area Kellan was in was the “living area.” There was a couch, a couple of armchairs, a coffee table, and a floor lamp with a fringed shade. In his opinion all they needed was a large screen TV so he could watch the Giants play and it would be fucking complete.

  Sadly no one else was a football fan. Philistines.

  In the recliner near the couch sat Isiah, the grizzled former Army Ranger who was the ostensible CO of the team. He wasn’t laughing.

  In fact, no one else was laughing. Not Jack, a former Marine who’d joined a few months earlier, not Faith, and not Callie, Jack’s fiancée, who’d somehow become part of the team along with Jack, even though she wasn’t ex-military.

  Then again, Sabrina, his best friend, wasn’t ex-military and she was also part of the team. And she wasn’t laughing either.

  Her wholesome freckled face was pale and her big hazel eyes were full of what looked a hell of a lot like worry.

  Kellan stopped laughing. “Jesus Christ,” he said to her. “Please don’t tell me you believe this arms dealer bullshit?”

  She shifted on the couch beside him, glancing at Faith, who was sitting in one of the armchairs opposite, then back at him again. “I . . . don’t know. Do you think there might be . . . you know . . . something in it?”

  Kellan was aware of a deep kind of shock seeping through him.

  Sabrina had lived with the Blake family since she’d been ten years old, after her father—the Blakes’ gardener—had walked out and left her behind. She knew his parents. Sure, she was closer to his mother than he was, but surely—surely —she didn’t believe this gun running crap?

  The Blakes were an old money New York family and his father had been one of the top brass in the Army. He’d had a well-respected career and was still incredibly well thought of even after he’d retired.

  Kellan had wanted to be just like him.

  Until the helicopter accident had put an end to that.

  Best not to dwell on that failure. Best to think about what was happening now. Sabrina and her reaction, which was . . . weird.

  He laughed again, because that tended to be his general response to shit that didn’t make any sense. “You’re kidding, right? Come on, Bree. Dad? Five-star general Dad? Running guns?”

  But Sabrina didn’t laugh along with him the way she normally did. Instead, she glanced down at her hands where they clutched her favorite laptop and said nothing.

  Okay, this was getting weirder by the fucking second.

  Kellan looked at Faith. “So this is according to who? How? Why?”

  “Mr. Night has reason to believe—”

  “Mr. Night can go fuck himself.”

  Faith didn’t even blink. “As I said, Mr. Night has information that implicates your father, along with a number of other high-ranking members of the military, in a black ops mission that went wrong two years ago. A mission that was deliberately sabotaged.”

  Kellan grinned, pushing his shock and anger way down deep the way he did with every emotion he didn’t like. “Do you know how fucking crazy that sounds?”

  “We think that this mission was sabotaged because it was getting too close to uncovering an illegal arms ring providing guns to various drug cartels in Central America. An arms ring that was being run by these high-ranking military members.”

  “Including my father, presumably?” He grinned wider. “Because Dad really likes guns and loves selling them to people who shouldn’t have them?”

  No one smiled.

  Isiah’s hazel eyes were sharp. “This isn’t a joke, Blake.”

  “Yes, it is.” Kellan flicked a glance at him, then back to Faith again, skewering her with it. “It’s a massive fucking joke. Dad gave forty years of his life to the military. He was a general, for fuck’s sake. He wouldn’t throw that all away to sell a bunch of guns.”

  “The information Mr. Night has is—”

  “Wrong,” Kellan interrupted. “The information Mr. Night has is wrong.”

  Faith opened her mouth again then shut it. She let out a breath. “Then consider this a chance to prove your father’s innocence.”

  A bolt of pure fury shot down Kellan’s spine and he could feel his smile become edged and sharp. “I don’t need to prove Dad’s innocence.” He had to fight to keep his voice steady. “I know it.”

  And he did. Phillip Blake would never turn traitor. The man who’d raised him, who’d taught him how to learn from his mistakes and move on, who’d protected him, shown him what it was to be a good man, to aim high and to never accept anything less than complete success . . . Yeah, the idea of a man like that being associated with a secret and highly illegal arms ring, along with a whole lot of high-ranking friends, was ludicrous.

  Beside him, Sabrina shifted and he felt her hand come down on his thigh. She squeezed his leg in reassurance and, he thought, as a warning.

  Both of which he ignored.

  “Well,” Faith said in her usual calm way. “Mr. Night disagrees. Your father is implicated. So your choice is to either accept the job of investigating and discovering the truth yourself, or he’ll find someone else to do it.”

  The job . . . what a goddamned joke.

  He and Jack, with the support of the rest of the team, had just finished up a mission dealing with a scumbag drug lord when yet another job had come in from Night. Usually the jobs involved protection or handling threats, and most of them barely legal, though he’d never had a problem with that.

  He had a problem with this.

  “We need you, Kellan,” Faith went on when he didn’t say anything. “Mr. Night wants the contents of a computer file apparently in your father’s possession.”

  “What file?”

  “Well, that’s it,” Sabrina muttered. “We couldn’t find it. There was nothing on his computer when I hacked in to take a look.”

  Kellan gave her an incredulous look. “You hacked into Dad’s computer?”

  She flushed and opened her mouth, probably to explain, but Faith answered before she could.

  “I asked Sabrina to,” Faith said. “She’s the best hacker in the business and your father had some heavy firewalls.”

  Jesus. What the fuck did Faith think she was doing getting Sabrina to hack into Phillip Blake’s computer?

  “Regardless of the fact that Sabrina didn’t find anything,” Faith went on, “Mr. Night is convinced that the file is there. Either on another computer elsewhere or stored on a portable hard drive. All of which means that we need you to search for it personally.” She paused. “You and Sabrina.”

  Well, shit. Bad enough that it involved his family, but Sabrina too? Christ, no. Just . . . No. She never went physically to jobs since that wasn’t her strength, and there was no reason for her to go now.

  “Why Sabrina?” he asked, making no effort to keep the demand from his tone. “She doesn’t need to be part of this.”

  Beside him Sabrina stiffened, but he ignored her.

  “Why?” Faith glanced at her. “If the file is anywhere, it’ll be heavily encrypted, plus, if it’s on another computer, there’s likely to be all kinds of other protections in place to keep it safe. Which means we need her skills.”

  He hated that it sounded so . . . logical.

  “Fine,” he said curtly. “But find someone else.”

  “Easy enough.” Faith’s
blue gaze was steady. “We have others who can be Sabrina’s backup.”

  The fury inside Kellan seemed to solidify at Faith’s deliberate misunderstanding. “No, you don’t get it. If I’m not going, then she’s not going either. We’re a package deal.”

  Sabrina stiffened even further, removing her hand from his thigh as if she’d burned herself. “Hey, wait a second—”

  “Sabrina is nonnegotiable,” Faith said before Sabrina could finish her protest. “As I said, she’s the only one with the necessary skills. Your family connection would make the job easier, but we can do without it if necessary. Sabrina knows your parents. Jack could easily pose as her friend or boyfriend—”

  “What?” Jack interrupted from his position near the armchair Isiah was sitting in, at the same time as Kellan let loose a growl, not liking that thought at all .

  Faith merely looked back at him. “A friend, then. Jack could pose as her friend.”

  Kellan gritted his teeth, fighting to get a handle on himself and keep that fucking smile on his face. But for the first time in years, it was difficult. Anger—or indeed any extreme emotion—was unproductive and didn’t get you what you wanted, or at least, that’s what his father had taught him. Charm. A smile. And action. Those were the three keys to success according to Phillip Blake and Kellan had found that to be true.

  He’d certainly gotten everything he’d wanted by employing them.

  Not quite everything.

  Well, no. But the two other things he’d wanted and hadn’t gotten didn’t matter anymore. Not since he’d decided he didn’t want them after all.

  “I could,” Jack said after a moment. “It wouldn’t be that hard.”

  Kellan only just stopped himself from snarling. The scarred former Marine was good, and since he’d joined the 11th Hour team three months earlier, he’d gotten even better. And if there was a guy he needed at his back or to protect those he cared about, Kellan would have chosen Jack King.