by Tawny Weber
He tossed the rag back on the deck. “Damn!” Without Jessie, even the water had lost its appeal.
He’d thought about going to see her at least a million times. Once he’d even gotten as far as Nicole’s street. He’d parked halfway down the block and sat, hoping to catch sight of her. But he hadn’t gone in, hadn’t called. He understood how these things worked, how a woman could think she cared for a man during a stressful situation. He didn’t need her to tell him about it. He couldn’t listen to her explain how she wanted to get on with her “real” life. So he’d stayed away, not giving either one of them a chance.
Of course, that was the piece that ate at him: he hadn’t given Jessie a chance. He’d discovered a special woman, with a strength and capacity for caring beyond anything he’d ever hoped to find. And he’d made her decision for her.
“Damn!” he said again.
He might be an idiot, but he had to see her. He was going to make her tell him that she didn’t care. That it had all been a lie.
Below deck, he took a few extra minutes to get cleaned up. He figured if he was going down in flames, he would at least look decent doing it. When he got back on deck, however, a small, dark-haired woman stood on the dock next to his boat. He looked up at her, squinting into the sun.
“You’re not an easy man to find,” she said in a voice that sent shivers down his spine.
For a moment he thought he was hallucinating. Then his heart picked up its pace, telling him otherwise. “I like it that way.”
“You are Sam Cooper,” she said, folding her arms below the sweet swell of her breasts. “The private investigator.”
He held up a hand, offering to help her on board, amazed that she would really come to him. “Well, that depends.”
She took his hand and stepped down. “On what?
“On who’s asking.”
“Just a woman,” Jessie answered in her sexiest purr. “Someone looking for a hero.”
He laughed shortly and captured her face with his hands. “Oh, you’re more than just a woman. But me? I’m nobody’s hero.”
She slipped her arms around his neck and settled the soft length of her body against his. “Are you sure about that?” Standing on tiptoes, she nipped at his mouth, sending waves of heat straight to his groin. “Because I sure could use one right about now.”
“I tell you what.” He slipped his hands down to her waist. “Why don’t we go below and discuss this? Maybe I can find you a hero.”
“It has to be the right one.”
. He worked his hands down to her bottom and pulled her closer. It felt so good to hold her again, to have her near. “Yeah? Why?”
“I’m afraid I’m hopelessly in love.” Again she nipped at his mouth. “And . . .” Her voice faltered, as if she was suddenly uncertain. Then she said, “I think he loves me, too.”
For a moment, Cooper couldn’t speak. Instead he searched her dark eyes for the truth, almost afraid to believe. But what he saw left no doubt. Lowering his head, he gave her a long, searing kiss. Then he whispered against her mouth, “I think you’re right. He loves you, too.”
Dear Readers,
Sam Cooper first appeared in my book, Keeping Katie, a story about a woman fleeing the law in order to protect her daughter. I really hadn’t planned on Cooper. He just showed up on the pages, a dangerous PI with a mysterious background who’d been hired to find my heroine. I didn’t know much about him, except that he was really good at finding people and he stood nose to nose with Keeping Katie’s hero without giving an inch. I had to ask myself, what kind of man possessed the background, training, and skill to do that? So, of course, I had to write a book about him to find out, and Nobody’s Hero was born.
Cooper’s a man fighting his own nature. As a Navy SEAL turned FBI agent turned PI, Cooper’s been denying his hero status all his life. Then Jessie Burkett shows up on his boat dock, a small spitfire of a woman, demanding he help find her missing sister. Although Cooper wants nothing more than to retreat to the wide open waters of the Caribbean, he can’t turn his back on Jessie and leave her to the powerful men hunting her. Instead, he must call on all his training and experience to keep her safe, and in the process, realizes that he can no longer claim he’s Nobody’s Hero.
I hope you enjoy Cooper and Jessie’s story and will check out the rest of The Protectors series, stories about men who served their country, then returned to protect those closest to home.
Pat Keelyn
Website: www.PatriciaKeelyn.com
Facebook FAN Page: https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaKeelyn/
Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/PatVanWie
HERO OF MY HEART by Teresa Hill
Warning: Amanda's story is not an easy one. It includes sexual violence and gun/school violence. Deciding to include those elements in her story was not easy for me. Amanda's a teacher, a brave one who finds herself in a terrible situation. Will is the kind of guy you want by your side when everything goes bad. I tell stories like this because I believe life is sometimes awful, and the important thing is how we survive and move past those things. That's what I hope you'll see in Amanda's story.
Taken hostage while teaching abroad, Amanda Warren was convinced she was going to die until U.S. Navy SEAL Will Gerard charged in to rescue her. Now she wonders if she'll ever feel safe and whole again.
Her injuries left her with few memories of her ordeal, except the fear. Striving to heal, she's driven to find Will and ask him for help once again-and discovers there's something familiar and reassuring about him.
While Amanda considers him her hero, Will tells himself he was just doing his job-to save her, then forget about her. But he admires her courage, wants her to feel safe in his arms. It's up to Amanda to convince Will that he is her hero, the hero of her heart.
Dedication
In memory of these fallen heroes:
Former U.S. Navy SEAL Glen A. Doherty
Former U.S. Navy SEAL Tyrone S. Woods
Rachel D'Avino
Dawn Hochsprung
Anne Marie Murphy
Lauren Rousseau
Mary Sherlach
Victoria Soto
Chapter 1
Buhkai, Africa
January 16th
Navy Master Chief Petty Officer Will Gerard was one of those guys whose heartbeat stayed as steady as a metronome, even in the middle of a firefight.
It was a quirk in brain chemistry that few possessed, one that short-circuited the body's natural alarm system against danger. It made him one of those people who stayed calm and could think under pressure, a highly prized quality among candidates for the SEAL teams.
No one was shooting at him now. Nothing had blown up. He wasn't about to jump out of an airplane. He wasn't in a helicopter going down.
So he was surprised to realize his heart was pounding fast and heavy, just because of a phone message.
It had started out as a perfectly ordinary day, if he ever had such a thing. He'd been hot and sweaty. He seemed to have dust or dirt in every cell in his body, and he'd have given anything for a decent meal.
Perks of the job, as one of his friends and fellow SEALs said when anyone complained. And the job did have its perks. Will thought it was the best job in the world, although sometimes he had to do it in really lousy places. Like here in Buhkai, a crazy little country on the eastern coast of Africa, where a full-scale uprising seemed more likely with every passing day.
Something had happened. He didn't know what, because the Buhkai Presidential Guard officers he was training didn't really trust him yet, or the United States. For that matter, Will didn't fully trust the Buhkai officers. All he knew was that a few minutes ago someone had come roaring up in a ragtag Jeep, yelling in an obscure dialect Will didn't understand, and his pupils had taken off.
Again.
It was the third time inside of a week. They'd come back when they came back, Will knew.
Officially, he was here, in this long-abandoned town ni
nety minutes from the capitol, teaching the small group of officers how to fight in an urban area, where it was too easy to kill innocent civilians instead of bad guys.
That is, he would teach them if they stayed long enough for him to do it.
Heading back toward the shell of a building where he slept, to get out of the sun for a while, he hit the one spot where he tended to get a satellite signal, and his phone rang.
"Gerard," he said, as the line crackled.
"Will? How are things in the big city?" It was Mace, one of Will's buddies in the SEAL teams.
"Peachy," Will said.
"You know, I'm about to get off duty, and I'm thinking about finding a nice icy cold beer, maybe a big T-bone steak for dinner."
"Yeah? Me, too, asshole." They both knew Will wasn't near anything cold, and certainly no beer. No hot food, either. "You call just to give me shit?"
"No, I called to tell you to call home." Mace laughed, because it was the kind of message a kid would get from the teacher in the middle of a school day.
A normal kid.
Will's childhood had been far from normal.
So the message—call home—sounded like a joke.
"Mace, what do you want?"
"That's the message. Call home. Have you got some woman stashed at your place that I don't know about? Because I didn't think you had anybody waiting for you at home."
"I don't," Will said.
Home, to him, was a condo he hardly ever saw near home base for the east coast SEAL teams in Little Creek, Virginia, near Virginia Beach.
People didn't leave him messages that said, "Call home."
He'd never seen his father. His mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict, in and out of one destructive, abusive relationship after another his whole childhood. He wasn't even sure if she was still alive. The whole story of his sorry childhood was one even those closest to him in the teams didn't know. There was no one who'd leave him a message like that except...
Damn.
He started to feel vaguely uneasy, because there was someone who might... just might... if something really important came up, call the emergency contact number and leave a message like that.
"That's it?" he asked. "Just call home?"
"Yeah. 'Sam says, call home.'"
And there it was.
Sam.
That was when his heart rate kicked up about twenty notches. The flight-or-fight response, an automatic reaction from caveman days that, for most people, sent blood to the extremities and away from the brain. It made it easier to run away or fight, rather than think. It made sense when you were a caveman faced with a wild animal, but not so much if you were a Navy SEAL executing a carefully crafted plan of attack.
Thinking in times of chaos had always come easily to Will. He and chaos were old friends.
Not so much at the moment.
He made himself think anyway.
Sam was the closest thing Will had ever had to a father, despite Will carefully trying to keep a certain distance from the man and his whole family. Sam had left the message, so he was probably fine.
Rachel? She was every pleasant image he associated with the word Mother, even though she'd been his for such a short time, and so long ago. She loved to stuff him with glorious things she cooked. In the rare times he had visited her in the last two decades, she would have catered to his every whim, like he was some kind of visiting royalty, if he'd let her. She and Sam behaved like it was an act of kindness—his toward them—when he so much as showed up for a day or two every few years.
Please, he thought closing his eyes, don't let something be wrong with Rachel. Or one of the foster kids they had actually gotten to adopt, unlike him. Surely some people should get to have damned fine lives, easy and trouble-free. If he got to pick people for that, he'd choose that whole family.
"Hey, you still there?" Mace asked.
"Yeah, I'm here."
"Need the number?"
"No. I've got it."
"Hey, call me back if I can do anything. If we need to get you home, we will."
"Thanks, Mace."
Will disconnected the call, an odd heaviness settling into his mid-section. His phone got something that resembled really poor Internet service, with text-sized messages that came in like e-mail, when he had a connection.
He tried that next, and there it was, a message from Sam.
Call home.
Another just like it, and then, Call home. Emergency.
"Fuck," Will said.
It was nearly 11 a.m. here, so not quite 4 a.m. in Baxter, Ohio, where Will grew up. He checked the message again, saw that it was sent around two-thirty in the morning, Ohio time, and... that day. Not that long ago. Whatever it was, it had just happened.
He looked at the number on Sam's message. Home, not Sam's cell, so that's what he dialed. Sam answered on the first ring.
"Sam? It's Will. What's wrong?"
Baxter, Ohio
January 13th
Three days earlier, Sam McRae sat on a stool at the diner, his coffee getting cold, while on the flat screen TV mounted on the wall, chaos unfolded on the other side of the world.
Another country, long ruled by a dictator until a year ago, was trying to hang on to a fragile democratic rule.
Too bad the process was proving so perilous.
The camera cut to a close-up of protestors being beaten back with clubs by militants loyal to the former dictator, who was fighting to return to power.
Sam winced and looked away. Then he realized a man he knew was two stools away, watching the same news report.
"I can't watch that anymore," Sam said.
"It's killing me, but I can't bring myself to look away," said James Warren, who had served as U.S. ambassador to a dozen Middle Eastern and African countries. He was retired now, working on his memoir and teaching at a nearby college. Sam had finished restoring a beautiful Georgian home for the man nearly a year ago.
The two shook hands, and Sam asked what James thought of Buhkai's chances of surviving without sinking into all-out war.
"For a while, I thought... maybe, but I swear, every time I see the news in the last few weeks, it looks worse. It's driving me crazy."
"Me, too," Sam said. "A kid I know is over there."
"You're kidding," James said. "My daughter's there. She's teaching in an international primary school and living with a diplomatic family we knew when I was posted in Saudi Arabia. If I didn't know how seriously the man took his family's—and my girl's—safety, I'd have yanked her home for good over the Christmas break. Assuming I could have ordered her home, and she'd have actually come. Daughters, you know?"
Sam nodded. "I do. I'm afraid the Frenchman my youngest married is an idiot, and I'm no art critic, but his paintings suck, which is how he supposedly earns a living. That and the family trust fund. If it ever runs dry, he'll be in serious trouble."
"It was so much simpler when they were younger, and we could run their lives. I tell Amanda that, and she says I'm the one who raised her in countries just like the one where she is now. What can I say to that? It's true." James shook his head and laughed briefly. "Who's the kid you know in Buhkai?"
"I shouldn't call him a kid anymore. He's thirty-eight, a soldier, and a damned good one."
"We don't have U.S. soldiers stationed in Buhkai," James said, looking even more uneasy.
"Yeah. He's Navy. But the truth is, I'm not exactly sure who he's working for these days or what he's doing."
"Special Forces?"
Sam nodded. "He told me not to worry, that what he's doing there is no big deal, routine even, but he always says that."
"When I was at the State Department, we sometimes had Special Ops guys working security for U.S. officials, or even our allies, in especially hairy places. Sometimes State loaned them out to the locals, for special projects, things like helping train security forces for governments we'd like to see stay in power."
Sam swore softly. "Which would pu
t him right in the middle of things now."
"Yes, it would." The ambassador shook his head. "I wonder, if I paid him enough, if he'd kidnap my daughter and bring her home."
They both laughed, then turned back to the TV, sobering instantly as they watched an unconscious protestor being dragged through the streets.
"Kidnapping is looking pretty good to me now," James said.
Back at home, Sam didn't say anything to Rachel, not wanting to worry her. But he kept an eye on the news and tried three times to call Will, with no luck. That wasn't unusual. Getting him was often iffy, even by cell or satellite phone.
Three days later, around two-thirty in the morning, the phone rang.
Time difference, Sam thought. Will, calling despite the hour, because he'd finally gotten Sam's messages.
Sam snapped on the light. Rachel's eyes came open. She pushed her long hair off her face and frowned. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I bet it's Will. I've been trying to call him." Sam gave her a quick kiss. "Go back to sleep."
"Is he okay?" She looked tired and worried but still beautiful after all these years. He was a lucky man, and he knew it.
"Last time we talked, he was fine." Sam got out of bed, grabbed the bedside phone and walked into the hall, closing the door behind him, hoping Rachel would go back to sleep.
"Hello?" he said.
"Sam? This is James Warren. I'm outside your house. Can I come in? It's an emergency."
"Sure," Sam said, wondering if something had happened to the ambassador's daughter? Or Will? Or both?
Baxter, Ohio
Seven weeks later
Amanda Warren knew where she was.
In her bedroom, in her father's new house in Ohio.
She knew she was safe, that her ordeal was over, and yet it wasn't. It was coming back to try to grab her, pull her back inside. She could feel it, like someone in the shadows always following her, waiting for a chance to pounce. She could keep moving, but she couldn't outrun it.