Turn the Tide

by Ruggle, Katie

  Logan had been too stubborn and angry at the world to pick up the phone and utter a word of appreciation. But not now.

  “You’ve always looked out for us,” he said. “For the spouses and children left behind at home while we risked our lives. Even if we walk away from the family, you still do what you can for us. Thank you.” He nodded, allowing his sincere gratitude to show. “But what about Penny? I thought you had to retire.”

  Sanborn averted his gaze and folded his arms. “I’m sick and tired of my operatives being treated as disposable commodities. I can change that. Penny will understand.”

  Penny was a forgiving, patient woman, but she’d been serious about drawing a line in the sand one day. Maybe she’d give him more time. Logan sure did hope so.

  “The retainer will help with the loss of our pension,” Mike said, “but what’re we supposed to do in the meantime? I can’t go months without health care while looking for a steady gig.”

  “Ethan, Mike,” Logan said. “I’m here for you, whatever you need. I have a little money saved. It’s not much, but it could—”

  “Thanks, but do you have any idea how expensive medical care is?” Mike pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead. “How expensive babies are? With little Lizzie, the other kid on the way, and the preeclampsia, I told Missy to quit her job.” He clutched his chest like he might have a heart attack. “Shit. What are we going to do?”

  “I’ve already thought of that,” Sanborn said, gesturing to his second-in-command.

  “Go see Donovan Carmichael.” Knox scrawled a phone number on a piece of paper. “He owns a security firm. Tell him you worked with us and that you’re no longer…in the system. He’ll understand and will find work for you as soon as possible.”

  “And his medical insurance is pretty good.” Sanborn tossed four economy-class airline tickets on the table. “I’ll be in contact once I have access to funds to put you on retainer.”

  Everyone nodded and voiced their thanks again.

  Sanborn and Knox left.

  “I thought this might end with me dead,” Ashley said in a quivering whisper. “I never imagined I’d get anyone fired, much less disavowed. I’m so sorry, guys. This is all my fault.”

  “No, Ash.” Logan grasped her chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing her gaze to meet his. “I dragged them into this. I should’ve gone to make the exchange at the Reichstag alone. It’s my fault they were disavowed. Not yours.”

  She had enough weighing on her. He wouldn’t let her carry that burden too.

  Mike sank into a chair. “If you had gone alone, you might both be dead.”

  “You definitely would’ve been killed, Ashley.” Ethan patted her shoulder. “If I hadn’t taken out that one guy with my rifle and sent the other one running.”

  “Logan, you needed us.” Mike nodded. “You didn’t force us. We chose to help you, knowing there’d be consequences.” He heaved a sigh. “What’s done is done. At least we’re still breathing. Besides, my stomach has soured for years over some of the stuff the Agency has pulled. I never considered doing what was right, only doing what I was told. What you did took conviction, Ashley, and serious balls.”

  “I should’ve gotten out years ago.” Ethan shrugged. “When Kim finds out, she’s going to kick my ass, then I think she’ll kiss me. She never liked me working for the Agency. I think she’ll be relieved I’m done.”

  Mike picked up the paper Knox had written on. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, and this guy will have work for us.”

  “Let’s hope.” Ethan collected their gear. “Mike and I will wait for you two downstairs.”

  After the door closed behind them, Ashley gripped Logan’s knee. “You were done with this, had washed your hands. I didn’t mean to get you embroiled in my crisis of conscience.”

  “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Nothing. I don’t regret coming here for you. I don’t regret the choices I made to get you back.”

  His only regret was not getting the chance to kill Glasses. But the world of intelligence was smaller than some might think, and for operatives, paths crossed more often than many might like. One way or another, sooner or later, he’d run into Glasses again and put a bullet in his head.

  Logan cupped Ash’s face. “I love you.” He’d come dangerously close to losing her. To never seeing her smile again, or hearing her laughter, or watching anger and arousal stain her cheeks. To never holding her and making love to her. He wanted to drop to his knees and give thanks to a deity he’d never acknowledged to still have those things with her.

  He loved her so much, he might possibly have found religion.

  “I almost got you killed.” She rubbed her palm over his thigh. “And I’m a bruised, broken mess. Nothing but trouble. Sure you want me?”

  His heart thudded with a foreign happiness. Her love and acceptance of him filled in the gaps and cold crevices of his life. She was worth any price he had to pay.

  “Who’s being the idiot now?” He kissed her forehead and cheeks.

  A lump of emotion ballooned in his throat. He ached for her, yearned, but reveled in this deeper intimacy. She rested her head in the crook of his neck, clutching his leg like she longed to be closer too. Skin to skin with nothing else between them.

  “Bruised, broken, a hot mess of trouble, I don’t care, sweet pea.” He tilted her chin up and stared into her eyes. “I’ll take you, any way I can have you. So long as I can keep you.”

  A smile brightened her face, warming her eyes, warming him. “Ditto, Logan.”

  His heart gave a little kick against his ribs. “I plan to hold you to that.”

  “For how long?” She caressed his cheek tenderly.

  He loved the way she touched him, with such quiet reverence as though he bore no scars, inside and out. “Forever.”

  About the Author

  Juno Rushdan draws from real-life inspiration as a former U.S. Air Force Intelligence Officer to craft sizzling romantic thrillers. Although she is a native New Yorker, wanderlust has taken her across the globe. She’s visited more than twenty different countries and has lived in England and Germany. When she’s not writing, Juno loves spending time with her family. She currently resides in Virginia. You can find her at http://junorushdan.com/

  Every Last Breath

  48 hours. 2 covert operatives. 1 chance to get it right.

  Trey Duval, a rancher and firefighter in Wildcat Bluff, is out of luck. His ranch has suffered from several “accidental” fires and there is no explanation in sight. All he wants for the upcoming holiday is to get to the bottom of this mystery, but what he gets instead is hotter than any ranch fire when he meets city-girl Misty Reynolds.

  “A fast-paced, spine-tingling thriller you won’t want to put down!”

  —Laura Griffin, New York Times bestselling author

  For more, visit:

  amazon.com

  Beyond Home

  A Florida Wildlife Warriors Novella

  Connie Mann

  Chapter 1

  Sarah Dutton kept one eye on the angry, churning clouds, hands tight on the steering wheel as she fought the rising wind. Conducting an emergency home-health check in the middle of a storm was not how she’d envisioned her second day as a Forest Medical Center nurse. It was barely 8:00 a.m., but the landscape was already dark, tinted an ominous green.

  She double-checked the map on her phone as she pulled off the pavement and onto a dirt road. The wind whipped up dust devils, and the spinning sand and dirt made it almost impossible to see where she was going. After five years in California, she’d forgotten how fast Florida storms moved in. Her aging little Mercedes coupe was absolutely the wrong vehicle for the Ocala National Forest, especially on a day like today, but she hadn’t had time to beg or borrow anything else.

  When the electronic voice instructed her to turn
right, she slowed too fast and almost got stuck in the sand piled up on the corner. She eased the car around the turn and found herself on an even narrower dirt track than the one she’d been on before.

  She glanced at her phone, groaned at the no signal notice, and took a deep breath. Her new coworkers had warned her this would happen. Cell signal in the Forest was always sketchy. On a day like today, even more so. She grabbed the hand-drawn map someone had given her and made sure she was still headed in the right direction.

  All the while, worry churned in her gut. Everyone in the office assured her that Mama T was regular as clockwork, coming in with her grandson once a month to pick up her insulin. But she hadn’t shown up for her appointment yesterday afternoon, and Sarah hadn’t been able to reach her by phone since. After a sleepless night, she had rushed to the clinic this morning and learned that the one time Mama T had missed an appointment last year, she’d almost gone into a diabetic coma before anyone realized it.

  Sarah had tucked the insulin in a padded bag and hopped in her car, determined to get to Mama T’s before the roads became impassable. When she’d first become a nurse, not taking immediate action had almost cost a patient her life. Sarah would never make that mistake again.

  The road hooked a sharp left, and Sarah kept steady pressure on the gas pedal as she spotted the heavy sand up ahead. If she remembered right, the trick was to keep just enough speed to get through without sinking down into it and getting stuck.

  “Come on, come on,” she muttered, heart pounding. “Please let me get through.”

  She patted the dash as the car started into the turn like a champ, steadily plowing through the sand. “That’s it, Beauty. You can do it. Just a little further.”

  But between one heartbeat and the next, she lost traction. The wheels started spinning, and the car began to sink. “No! Oh, please no, don’t stop!” She gave Beauty a teensy bit more gas, and that proved to be her downfall.

  The tires spun faster, sand flying out from under them as the car settled down into the groove like a tired turtle.

  Sarah hit the gas, hard, desperate to break free, but that only dug the car in deeper. She laid her head on the steering wheel as frustration washed over her, but then she jerked upright. No. She didn’t have time for a pity party. Mama T needed her insulin. Sarah tried to open the door and had to fight to push the sand aside so she could climb out.

  Once she was free, one look at the car confirmed what she already knew. There was no way she could get it unstuck. She didn’t even have a shovel in the back, though she’d never leave home without one again.

  The wind whipped her hair into her face as she surveyed the area around her. There was nothing but trees and scrub in either direction. No houses or any other buildings resembling a source of help. She shivered as she realized how alone she was.

  In San Francisco, she might be by herself, but she was never truly alone.

  She reached into the car and pulled out her medical bag and the hand-drawn map. It wasn’t until she reached for her windbreaker that she realized she’d left it at the clinic in her rush to leave. She scanned the eerie green sky again. She was going to be very wet before this was over.

  Sarah slung her bag over her shoulder cross-body style, clutched the map in the other hand, and set off toward Mama T’s. She regularly jogged all over hilly San Francisco, so this part should be easy. As long as she didn’t miss the turnoff. “Now is not the time to be a wimp,” she told herself. “With this nasty weather, all the really scary critters will be hiding.”

  She hoped.

  ***

  Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer Marco Sanchez kept an eye on the darkening sky as he flew through the Ocala National Forest on his ATV. Even though the meteorologists had predicted the storm wouldn’t hit until later in the day, Marco and his squad members knew better. Anyone who worked outside learned to sense these things. They’d already checked on a few elderly residents in this part of the Forest, but they were running out of time to check on Mama T and get the community center battened down before Mother Nature unleashed her fury.

  He scanned the area as he drove, cataloging every tree and stump, making sure all was as it should be. Behind him on their own ATVs, FWC officers Josh Tanner and Hunter Boudreau and former FWC officer Charlee Tanner did the same.

  Marco saw a flash of silver behind a stand of trees and slowed to get a better look. What was he seeing? He aimed the ATV in that direction and wove around trees and scrub until he came to a stop on one of the many unpaved Forest roads.

  A shiny little Mercedes coupe was stuck in the sand.

  Hunter and Charlee pulled up beside him. Marco slipped off his helmet and unsnapped his holster as he approached the vehicle.

  Hunter approached from the other side.

  “Anybody here? Hello?” Marco called as he walked up to the vehicle and peered inside. Empty. And locked. He touched the hood. “It’s still warm, so they can’t have gone far.”

  “Heck of a day to be out here on foot,” Hunter said.

  Charlee joined them, hitching a thumb over her shoulder. “California plates.” She leaned closer, scanned the interior. “I think we’re looking for a woman.”

  “How can you tell?” Josh asked his sister, coming up behind her.

  “Because I’m smart,” Charlee quipped. “And because the air freshener is pink and shaped like a flower.”

  A bolt of lightning hit the ground not far from where they stood, and thunder boomed right on its heels. “We’d better find her quick, then,” Marco said.

  They remounted and roared down the dirt road in the direction the car was pointed, scanning the surrounding woods all the while.

  When ten minutes had passed and they still hadn’t found her, Marco’s concern ratcheted up another notch. Today was not a good day for an unsuspecting tourist to be lost out here.

  ***

  Freddie Marshall casually slumped down in his seat as the sheriff’s work-farm van made its way out of the Marion County jail compound. He shook his head at the idiots surrounding him. They followed the rules like a bunch of pansies, didn’t even try to escape, the wusses. He kept his head down to hide the grin that stretched across his almost toothless mouth and kept his hand over the snake tattoo on his neck. He didn’t want someone remembering it later, when they were asked about a prisoner nicknamed Fang. A few more minutes, and he’d be home free.

  Who would have guessed that Derek, a kid he’d gone to middle school with, was now a guard at the jail? He snorted. It had been incredibly easy to demand his help. Derek had defied him once in seventh grade, and Freddie had taken a knife to Derek’s old hound dog as punishment. Threatening Derek’s family now was child’s play. Derek didn’t doubt his resolve.

  Freddie wanted his freedom, and Derek had made all the arrangements. The time had come to make that slut, Patty, pay for getting him locked up like some animal. Maybe he’d teach her meddling mama a lesson, too. Mama T had gotten between him and his boy one too many times. Donny should be with him. A boy needed his father to teach him to be a man.

  Once he took care of Patty—and he grinned thinking about his plans for her—he and Donny would finally be together all the time. He had a lot to teach the boy, had to make sure his good-for-nothing-but-sex mother didn’t turn the kid into a total wuss.

  He glanced down at his hands, saw the dried blood from when he’d knifed the guy whose green-and-white “nonviolent” prison uniform he was now wearing. If Derek did his job, nobody would realize for several hours that the guy wearing Freddie’s red “violent offender” uniform, bleeding in the cell, wasn’t actually Freddie. He didn’t know if the shank had killed the man, but he didn’t care. Trading places was the only way out. He wasn’t letting anything stand in his way.

  Anticipation built as the van turned onto Twenty-Seventh Avenue. Freddie had made sure he was th
e last one in, so he sat by the door. The van slowed for a traffic light, and he grabbed the back of the seat.

  Time to make his move.

  He reached over the front seat and grabbed the driver’s gun, yanked the van door open, and leaped out. Trusting idiots didn’t even keep it locked. He raced across the street and disappeared into the nearby subdivision in a matter of seconds.

  By the time the guard appeared on the street behind him, spare gun drawn and shouting into his radio, Freddie was already in the passenger seat of a small sedan, gun pointed at the terrified businessman behind the wheel.

  “Drive,” Freddie growled. “And don’t be stupid unless you have a death wish.”

  The man swallowed hard and hit the gas.

  Chapter 2

  Sarah was breathing hard as she ran, the map clutched in her hands so the wind couldn’t snatch it from her grasp. Her eyes darted between the landscape and the paper, desperate to find the “tree with the big hole at the base” that marked the turnoff to Mama T’s place.

  A bolt of lightning hit the ground nearby, and the hair on her arms stood up from the electricity. She jumped in surprise when a clap of thunder boomed right on its heels.

  She slowed as she looked around, then up at the sky. If she stayed on the dirt path, she’d be out in the open. Not ideal in a thunderstorm. Taking cover under the trees wasn’t the preferred location either. So what were her options?

  “Run faster, girl.” Sarah took off down the road in an all-out sprint. With the Florida humidity, she was soaked, her medical bag banging against her hip as she scanned the side of the road, frantic she’d miss the very landmark she was searching for.

  Another crack of thunder startled her so badly she stumbled and went down, rolling several times before she came to a stop in a drainage ditch beside the road.