BADGE BUNNIES: The Full 5-Book Box Set

by Mazzy King

  I nod frantically, keeping my hands up.

  He turns his back and goes to harass some of the hostages in the room. I hear frightened whimpers, and anger flares up inside me. These fucking dickheads.

  I glance around the bank. It looks like there’s five dickheads, all wearing black and ski masks like my host. They’re posted up at what I assume they believe are strategic places around the bank—two near the doors, another two at the windows on either side, and the fifth paces the room.

  There also appear to be about two dozen hostages. Now that I’m able to take a good look, I see several wounded people. One man is conscious, blood dripping from his head like he got hit there. One woman clutches her side, her hand bloody. Another man is lying on his side, his back toward me.

  I rotate my body to shield the phone I pull from my pocket, type in the intel in abbreviated words Jaxson will get, and quickly slip the phone away, all in the span of a couple of breaths.

  My gaze finds the brunette a few feet from me. Her eyes are still wide, and now they’re as full of confusion and shock as they are fear.

  “Oh, hey,” I whisper, as if we’re meeting casually in the library.

  She gapes at me. “H-hey?”

  “Don’t worry,” I add under my breath. “This is all going to be okay.”

  “How?” she hisses. “Do you know where you are? Did you not see the cop cars outside? You picked a hell of a time to come make a deposit, buddy.”

  I flash her a little arrogant grin. “Oh, I’m here to make a withdrawal, actually.” If all goes to plan, I’ll be withdrawing every person in here—to safety.

  Including this beautiful woman who looks at me like I’m absolutely out of my mind.

  Chapter 2

  Isla Gregory

  What a damn day to run an errand.

  When I woke up this Friday morning, my agenda for the day went something like this: jog. Shower. Eat breakfast and drink coffee. Get dressed for my first appointment of the day. Drink more coffee. Head to the salon. Then, after I finished the multi-dimensional color for my client, prep everything for a full set of acrylics for my next client. Then, wait for my third client, arriving for a fill of her eyelash extensions. By then, it’d be about two in the afternoon, and time for me to run out for a quick bite for lunch and make that bank deposit I was supposed to make yesterday.

  The rest of the day was supposed to consist of three more appointments, happy hour with my girlfriends, and then a luxurious and rare weekend off I awarded to myself to get my Christmas shopping done early, hoping it might help put me in the spirit. It’s kind of hard to get there when you live in a place where snow is a rarity.

  Instead, after I scarfed down a couple of tacos from the food truck down the street and zipped into the bank, I found myself in possibly the most fucked-up situation of my life.

  I stepped up to the teller and we began the deposit transaction…and then behind me, voices started shouting. In the commotion, all I heard were the words “get down” and “gun.”

  I’ve been in a state of terrified shock since, though this weird—and admittedly, sexy—guy just walked in whistling, got jostled by those masked creeps holding us up, and is now lying on the floor not far from me behaving in a manner I find disturbingly calm. It’s distracted me from the fear a little, and—

  Wait, is he texting?

  “Are you calling the cops?” I hiss, cutting a glance at one of the men holding a sinister-looking sawed-off shotgun.

  The guy glances up at me, his eyes a stormy shade of blue-green-gray. “No, they’re already here.” His brownish-blond hair is deliberately messy, and he has a shade of scruff along his jaw.

  And damn…those lips. Full, and they look so soft.

  Then I shake my head, trying to focus on what he just said. “Yeah, but they’re not doing anything!”

  “That’s not exactly true,” he whispers back, glancing over his shoulder and then back down at his phone. “We’d better be quiet before we upset the very scary bank robbers.”

  If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was actually texting the cops. But that makes no sense at all.

  “You’re over there texting your girlfriend or something, and you’re worried about whispering?” I demand.

  He spares me a glance and one side of his mouth curls up into a little smile that’s so adorably cocky it sends a zing straight down between my legs. “I’m single, actually.”

  That’s it? Either this guy has a death wish, or he’s got balls the size of a gorilla’s.

  But…he is single…

  I normally don’t have issues with priorities. So why is this guy making me suddenly forget the biggest one right now, which is staying alive?

  “You two!”

  Oh, shit. My stomach sinks as one of the men sprints over to us. I glance at the guy next to me in fear, but his cell phone has somehow disappeared and both his hands are empty and raised.

  “Stop talking!” the masked man shouts like he’s a kindergarten teacher and we’re two naughty little pupils.

  “Sorry, I was only trying to calm my girlfriend down,” the guy says. “She’s terrified.”

  I wonder for a brief second if that was what he was really doing. For a couple moments there, I forgot where I was and just focused on him.

  Who is this dude?

  The robber sneers. “I don’t give a fuck. Both of you shut up, or I’ll permanently shut you up.” He gestures with his evil-looking shotgun.

  “Boss,” one of his men calls suddenly. “Cops look like they’re getting ready to do something.”

  The robber in front of us immediately turns and jogs across the bank to the window. My heart leaps into my throat.

  “What’s going on?” I murmur, mostly just to myself.

  “If I had to guess,” the guy says, “the cops outside are probably gearing up for an assault, now that they know how many robbers are in here and how many hostages. We should probably start trying to spread the word to the other people in here to move out of the way—behind the counter for safety in the next couple of minutes. It’s probably gonna get pretty fucking crazy.”

  My head swims. “How do you know? Why are you so calm? How do you know? Who are you?”

  The guy flashes me both a smile and a small, shiny object in the palm of his hand.

  It’s a police badge.

  “Because I’m a cop,” he whispers to me. “Name’s Gunner Hansen.”

  I gape at him.

  He glances toward the front of the bank where the robbers are peering out the window and talking among themselves in harsh, worried tones. “This is the part where you tell me your name, beautiful.”

  Normally, I find nicknames from men I don’t know to be totally offensive and grounds for an all-out verbal assault, but that word dropping from his sexy lips makes butterflies erupt low in my belly. Damn, there goes that momentary distraction again. He’s good.

  He’s a cop. He must be an undercover one. It seems so obvious and also so shocking.

  “I’m…I-Isla,” I stutter. “Isla Gregory.”

  He holds out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  I shake it. His hand is large and warm and strong and a little rough. I love the feeling of it against my skin.

  “Isla,” Gunner continues, growing more serious than he’s been since he first strolled in, “I need your help with something.”

  “What?”

  He glances toward the window. “I’ve been communicating with my team outside. In a few minutes, they’re going to start shooting until SWAT can bust in here. I need you to help me tell these people to start moving out of the way so they don’t get hurt. Can you do that?”

  No. No, I don’t think I can do that. But I nod anyway.

  Gunner’s stormy eyes gleam with pride. “I know you can. Thank you. You go that way, I’ll go this way.” Without another word, he starts belly-crawling toward a group of people to his left.

  Is this normal? Do civilians get asked to pa
rticipate in these kinds of things in these kinds of situations? I don’t know, but what I do know, deep down, beyond the fear, is that I can’t let someone die or get hurt because I was too scared to tell them to move.

  I slither over toward a group of about ten people in clusters of two and three to my right. My instincts tell me now is probably not a good time to share that Gunner is an undercover cop. What if one of them yelled it out?

  “Hey,” I whisper to the man closest to me. He’s in his early sixties, if I had to guess, and he looks relatively stoic. His arm is wrapped around a frightened young woman. Her beaded braids conceal her face, but her shaking shoulders and the way her hands grasp at his lapel tell me she’s crying.

  He keeps his gaze pinned to the robbers but angles his face toward me.

  “The cops outside are about to start shooting,” I tell him. I don’t know what to say. Am I supposed to say that? “You should move. Behind a counter or at least against the back wall.”

  He lifts his brows at me. “How do you know?”

  “I heard them talking about it,” I reply, nodding toward the robbers. “Pass it down.”

  I crawl to my own place against the back wall and hug my knees. I’m relieved to see the people begin shifting toward the back. The robbers, focused on what the cops outside are doing, hardly notice.

  Meanwhile, the other group of people on Gunner’s side begin doing the same thing. Finally, one of the robbers turns around.

  “What are you doing?” he yells, lifting his gun. It’s not sawed-off like the other guy’s—this thing looks huge and long and sleek. An automatic rifle. “Did I tell you to mo—”

  A gunshot cracks through the air at almost the same time as the front window’s glass shatters. It’s so quick I can’t tell which noise happens first.

  I clap my hands over my mouth to hold in a scream and instinctively cower against the wall.

  But it’s the robber who collapses to the floor.

  And then, all hell breaks loose.

  Chapter 3

  Gunner

  If I were a betting man, I’d guess that shot came from a SWAT sniper rifle. Maybe even Rhys Hartley himself, who’s back on the job after recovering from a gunshot wound. He’s always had impeccable timing.

  The people in the bank do what people usually do when they hear gunshots—fucking run. It’s both a good and bad thing, as weird as that is to say. Good because, duh. Bad because the bank becomes a madhouse with people running to and fro. When people are scared to death, they often can’t think straight, and being unable to think straight causes them to make bad choices.

  The bank robbers are no exception to this, and immediately the remaining four turn and open fire out the front window, a couple of them letting loose earth-shattering howls of what I assume is grief. I don’t mean to sound callous. A loss of life sucks, no matter whose life it was. However, I tend to experience less concern when that life once belonged to an asshat hell-bent on murdering people. I don’t have room in my heart for people like that. If that makes me an asshole, cool. I’ll take it.

  I snatch a woman in a suit as she runs past me, her eyes wide and, I’m certain, unseeing. Unfortunately she’s about to run right into the path of oncoming bullets from our side. I don’t want this lady to lose her life—she’s a wife, maybe someone’s mother, and I want her to live. But I really don’t want her losing her life due to taking friendly fire. Not on my watch.

  I swing her around toward the other direction and shove her toward the long stretch of counter that is the tellers’ stations. That’s the safest place to hide, and if they’re really smart, all those folks will escape out the back with their hands up. I whispered that to the man nearest me and told him to pass it on, so I sincerely hope he listened to me.

  I duck behind a large Roman-style column, then edge around the curve, trying to get a bead on the shooters.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Wait a minute. Where’s Asshole #1?

  There were five assholes total in the bank. One is down, thanks to the Good Guys. I saw four a second ago, when they started blasting back.

  Now there are only three assholes.

  For the first time today, a real surge of worry shoots up through my chest. Where’s Isla?

  Underneath the explosions of gunfire, my keen hearing picks up the sound of screaming.

  A woman screaming.

  Where?

  To my right and around the corner—near the short side hallway I came in through earlier.

  I take off at a dead run.

  I stop when I reach the corner’s edge and ease around it. When I see what’s happening around the corner, I don’t hesitate. I sprint toward him like I have a motor in each leg, then tackle him around the waist before he can swing the shotgun in my direction. It’s a ballsy move, considering I’m unarmed. I’m probably going to hear about this later from Sarge, actually.

  Leave that to the professionals, kids. Don’t try that at home. Et cetera.

  But it’s worth it to me, because Asshole #1 was pointing that sawed-off shotgun directly at a young woman’s face as she sits huddled on the floor, her back to the wall and her hands in the air.

  That young woman is Isla.

  I slam the guy into the ground and the shotgun goes flying. To my surprise, Isla kicks it toward the side door, well out of reach of either one of us. Then I wrangle him onto his face and dig a knee into his back where it’s meant to hurt the most.

  Now that the threat is neutralized, I allow myself to feel a strange, possessive surge of anger light up my body. I hate anytime a civilian is harmed or threatened, but something about her being on the receiving end of it really stokes the flames of rage. I mean, she isn’t really my girlfriend, of course. I made that up on the fly. But…if she was…

  I dig my knee in a little harder. The guy groans beneath me.

  I don’t have cuffs with me, but I have plastic zip ties that are just as effective, at least until a set of real bracelets can be placed on him. I zip them on and snug them tight, then shove my knee into his back again and mush the side of his face into the ground with my palm for good measure.

  “Lie still and be quiet,” I command. I use my free hand to fire off a text to Jaxson since I’m not wearing my radio that I’ve got one suspect in custody and need backup, then glance over at Isla.

  “Hey,” I say gently. “You okay?”

  Her eyes are huge, her skin pale, and she’s staring at the downed suspect as if she’s in shock.

  “Fuck her,” the suspect moans. “Get off me! Get your fucking knee out of my kidney!”

  “Isla,” I say louder.

  She shifts those jade eyes to me, then blinks several times. Her eyelashes are long and thick and move like butterfly wings. “Y-yeah?”

  “You with me?” I cock an ear toward the main part of the bank. I hear intermittent gunfire and shouting. As the seconds stretch on, the shooting lessens and the shouting increases. My phone vibrates with another text from Jaxson who says he’s coming to me now.

  “Is that one shooter dead?” she asks.

  “He was my cousin, you piece of shit,” the suspect screams.

  I ignore him, my gaze fastened on Isla. I consider “handling” her the way I would with other members of the public, but she’s not a rubber-necker, she’s a victim.

  No. That’s not right.

  Survivor. That’s what she is.

  Something in those intelligent eyes and the way her beautiful, lush, pink mouth sets in a hard line tells me bullshitting her would be a bad move. It also makes me admire her tremendously.

  “He might be,” I say. “It’s likely.”

  She nods, huddling close against the wall, arms wrapped around her body. Then she starts quaking, hard.

  Beneath me, the suspect continues to abuse me in some of the most colorful and thought-provoking language I’ve heard in a while. In another setting, I might have found it funny. But now, I’m more worried
about Isla and the convulsion-like trembling that’s seized her.

  Oh, shit.

  She needs some help.

  Chapter 4

  Gunner

  “Hurry up, Jax,” I hiss under my breath, watching the side entrance like a hawk.

  Exactly three seconds later, I see my partner push through the door and race toward us, three uniformed cops on his heels. Two of them continue past us into the main part of the bank. Jaxson and the other cop take Asshole #1 out of my custody and drag him outside to be tucked into one of their cars.

  I reach down to help Isla to her feet. “Let’s step outside. Get some air.”

  She comes willingly. I keep my arm around her shoulders and try not to care more than I should about the quivers I can feel trembling in her slender shoulders.

  Jaxson walks over to me, ticking his head to the side as if requesting a private word. I step away from Isla toward him. He gives me a hearty smack on the back. “Hell of a plan. We got the other three in custody. But the fifth one…he’s gone.”

  I sigh and nod. Sometimes it just can’t be helped, but it always sucks—I much prefer to see criminals like that brought to justice, not death.

  Did I mention I can be an asshole?

  Jaxson glances at Isla behind me and lowers his voice. “She all right?”

  I shake my head. “She’s pretty shaken up. I’d like an EMT to take a look at her, make sure she’s all right.”

  Jaxson nods and tilts the radio attached to the front of his vest up toward his mouth. “Let me get one for you.”

  While he walks off, I turn toward Isla and place my hand on her shoulder. “How you doing?”

  She looks at me, her forehead slightly bunched as if she’s trying to figure out how to answer my question. Finally she shakes her head. “I’m…not entirely sure.”