by Cari Z.
Riptide Publishing
PO Box 1537
Burnsville, NC 28714
www.riptidepublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.
Friendly Fire
Copyright © 2016 by Cari Z
Cover art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm
Editor: Carole-ann Galloway
Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].
ISBN: 978-1-62649-481-7
First edition
October, 2016
Also available in paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-62649-482-4
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Elliot McKenzie is the king of reinvention. Five years after losing his job and his lover and almost going to prison, his self-help program, Charmed Life, is more successful than he’d ever dreamed. He thinks he’s put his sordid past firmly behind him, until he starts receiving cryptic threats . . . and realizes it might not be as over as he’d hoped.
Security expert Lennox West has been lost since a deadly skirmish in Afghanistan led to his forced retirement from the Army. His PTSD makes helping his ex raise their daughter a challenge. When his ex’s sister asks him to set her boss up with a security system, Lennox isn’t expecting anyone like Elliot McKenzie—a man who captures his attention and makes him feel relaxed for the first time since leaving the service.
But Elliot is dangerously stubborn. Even as the threats against him escalate, he refuses to involve the police, and Lennox fears that stubbornness could kill him. A battle of wills ensues that brings them closer to each other than either man expected. But if the threats turn real, they might not live long enough to get their future together.
This is a book about being outside of your comfort zone, which makes perfect sense, because writing it took me outside of mine. I hope you enjoy the ride.
About Friendly Fire
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Dear Reader
Acknowledgments
Also by Cari Z
About the Author
More like this
Excerpt from Shockwave reporter Clarissa Hanes’s article on Elliot McKenzie, founder of Charmed Life:
Conman.
Businessman.
Player.
Penitent.
Elliot McKenzie could, and sometimes does, lay claim to all of these labels, the contrasting pieces of his complicated public persona. He’s one of the up-and-comers in the psychospeak community, a self-made self-help guru of the modern kind. His company, Charmed Life, has been called “Facebook for felons,” and it’s managed to turn a person’s criminal history into an exclusive entrance pass to the hottest social media site in years. Applicants are admitted on a case-by-case basis, and while you won’t necessarily be denied if you don’t have a record, it does make it a lot harder to get access.
McKenzie runs his self-help business out of a communal office space in a converted firehouse in downtown Denver. The unalloyed brick interior gives the place a rustic feel overall, but there’s nothing rustic about McKenzie’s eclectic office. There are hints of the Victorian in the antique wooden desk that sits apart from the center of the room, kowtows to the East in the Hokusai prints on the walls, and elements of a frat house playboy in the beanbag chairs that sit next to demure black leather couches on the blue-tiled floor.
The air smells like expensive coffee and cologne, and along the far wall, on top of a cocktail table, is his fabled shrine to a silver-screen star from Hollywood’s golden age, Wilhelmina VanAllen. I go to get a closer look, but before I can take two steps, he’s here.
“Where the hell have you been?” Serena hissed at Elliot the moment he walked in the door, jumping to her feet and coming around her desk to yell at him with her hips. He didn’t know how she did it, but his personal assistant’s hips could speak more clearly than most people’s mouths. Right now, with that slight cock to the left and her fingers tapping along the seams of her skirt, they were calling him a fuckup. Not that he didn’t agree with them at the moment. He ran a hand over his navy silk tie, checking its line as he set his briefcase down on Serena’s desk.
“My lunch meeting ran late! I texted you from the car.”
“I got that, and don’t text and drive. You don’t need to be in an accident,” she scolded him. “But you should have let me know sooner, so I could have had a plan in place for when Stuart showed up!”
Elliot groaned, internally at first and then externally when that just didn’t cut it. “Stuart Reynolds?”
She rolled her eyes. “How many other Stuarts do you know? Yes, Mr. Reynolds. He brought you a cupcake.” Sure enough, there was a red velvet cupcake in a silver foil wrapper, topped with a perfect swirl of cream cheese frosting, sitting on the edge of Serena’s desk. Elliot frowned.
“I told him to stop doing that.” Stuart Reynolds had a greater capacity to cling than dog hair on a wool suit. “How did you get rid of him?”
“I told him you were out for the rest of the day and that I’d let you know he stopped by. He and Ms. Hanes missed each other by a few seconds, thank God. I got her into your office the moment I saw him coming.”
Elliot’s greatest and most inconvenient admirer and a hard-nosed, unsympathetic reporter in the same room together? It would have ended in bloodshed. “You are the light of my life,” he told Serena with complete seriousness as he buttoned his suit jacket. “Now tell me truly: am I hopelessly rumpled?”
“Hopelessly,” she said with a little smirk, “but it’s Zegna, so you get a pass.” She adjusted the angle of his fedora, then nodded. “Go, impress, be charming like you always are.”
“I’ll do my best.” He shut his eyes for a moment to get his mind back to where it needed to be, then picked up his briefcase and walked into his office. “Ms. Hanes!” He smiled brightly as she turned
to him, ready to set her at ease.
It wasn’t necessary. Clarissa Hanes was a dark-haired viper in crimson silk, snapping her fangs before Elliot could so much as apologize for being late. Her whiskey-colored eyes narrowed as she looked him over. “Mr. McKenzie. You move very fast for a man who’s been shot twice.”
Ah, so it was going to be one of those interviews. Elliot bought himself some time by unlocking his desk drawer to put his briefcase away. Interviews generally tended to come in three flavors, starting with vanilla, which were safe and dull and easy on everyone. Vanilla interviews were decent press but boring to do, and he preferred to avoid them unless he owed someone a favor.
Chocolate interviews were fun, full of oddball, zany questions that ran the gamut from fluffy (mostly about his dog) to semiserious (the transition from lawyer to self-help magnate) to truly bizarre (his favorite Disney princess, what he liked best in a cheese). Those ones could get him trending if he answered just right. BuzzFeed’s piece on him three months ago had done more for his business than a dozen vanilla interviews could.
Then there were the chili interviews. They were the ones that made Elliot sweat, the ones that cheerfully raked him over the coals of his history, holding his feet to the flames of every poor decision he’d ever made and asking him, yet again, to justify himself. As far as he was concerned, doing these interviews was a form of penance. If there was a god, Elliot hoped he took note.
“I made a full recovery,” Elliot said as he finally locked his desk up again, keeping his smile on but toning it back a bit. Charm wasn’t going to help him here. “And neither of the bullets hit me in the legs. Would you care for something to drink? Serena can bring water, tea, coffee . . .”
Ms. Hanes hmmed thoughtfully. “A martini, perhaps?”
He shook his head. “No drinking alcohol of any kind at work. It’s a firm policy of mine.”
“Because of your issues with addiction, Mr. McKenzie?”
Shots fired, shots fired. He changed tack. “Please have a seat.” He pointed to the leather lounge chair. “And do call me Elliot, Ms. Hanes.”
“Clarissa is fine.” She sat down and crossed her legs with a raised eyebrow. “You’re not going to offer me a beanbag chair?”
“I wouldn’t want to insult your dress. It would clash so terribly with the paisley pattern.” Elliot sat across from her. “Now. What would you like to talk about first, my being shot or my addictions?”
Clarissa tilted her head slightly, examining him. He bore the scrutiny without blushing. His life was an open book: all his triumphs, all his many, many mistakes out there for any interested party to know. Relentless personal honesty was his platform; it was what he’d built his new reputation on. He wasn’t going to be intimidated by the past.
“Actually, I was wondering about the Gauloises.” She nodded toward the little table in the back, one eyebrow arched as she took in the crumpled packet of cigarettes.
Elliot’s smile fell away for a moment. “Those aren’t my bad habit. I keep them around to remember another time.”
“And another person?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” Clarissa took a recorder out of her purse, turned it on, and set it on the table between them. “Tell me about meeting Wilhelmina VanAllen in rehab.”
Elliot had a spiel he liked to give whenever he talked about Willie, but Clarissa had already brought up the addictions angle. She wanted to play? They’d play. “She was a chain-smoker when I met her. Smoking was no match for the morphine addiction but by that point she was convinced she was dying anyway, so why should she give up one of her last pleasures in life? She used to smoke Picayunes, the brand that Audrey Hepburn’s character smoked in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Once she couldn’t get those anymore, she switched to Gauloises, which use the same sort of tobacco.”
“You call her your inspiration for Charmed Life,” Clarissa noted. “How is a former movie star turned chain-smoking morphine addict who, if I remember correctly, committed suicide not long after you met her, a logical choice as a muse for second chances?”
Ooh, the redirection game. Yes, let’s. “Willie died at the age of eighty-eight, in the time and place of her choosing. Given some of the demons she fought against her whole life, that should be considered a triumph, not a tragedy.” He could handle people coming at him for his mistakes―he did every day―but Willie’s circumstances had been different. “She was born during an era when struggling with depression could get you institutionalized. It did get her institutionalized, several times, when she was a young woman. Her family actually tried to have her lobotomized at one point. The fastest way out of that bad situation was marriage. Her first of five, in fact.”
“A serial bride,” Clarissa noted. “Even after she found success in films with the help of her second husband, who was a director, if I remember correctly.”
“Willie was someone who wasn’t afraid to strive for what she really wanted out of life,” he said. “Someone who wasn’t afraid to fight for a second chance. And her success was entirely down to her own skills as an actress, not nepotism from her husband,” he added. “They were divorced before she ever got a starring role in a film.”
Clarissa glanced back at the table again, and Elliot followed her gaze. It had the cigarettes, a copy of her favorite poem, and a picture of Willie lying back against a couch wearing enormous white sunglasses on her gaunt face with her dog in her lap. “And did she achieve the life she wanted in the end?”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t say. I can’t speak for anyone but myself.”
“And what would you say about yourself?”
Ah, back into familiar territory. “That’s what starting up this company has been all about: living a better life than I had before, and helping other people to do the same. It’s about being more genuine in everything you do, and letting your present actions speak louder than your past mistakes.”
“Hmm.” Clarissa wrote something down on her phone. “Do you think you’re a more honest person now?”
“I think that honesty, especially with yourself, is a vital part of living a more genuine life. Honesty toward everyone else can be a little harder to follow through on, but if you want to make connections that will help you move forward in life, then you need to come to terms with being open about your life. At least professionally,” he amended, because while his skeletons were all very much out of the closet, not all of his clients’ were. And considering who some of his clients happened to be, ruthless honesty wouldn’t always be in their best interests.
Clarissa smiled slightly. “What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told about yourself, Elliot?”
He smiled right back at her. “That I thought I could ever truly be anything other than an opportunist.”
She arched her eyebrows. “You admit that you’re exploiting people, then?”
“No more than they’re exploiting me,” he said. “Charmed Life is a company made to facilitate networking between like-minded individuals with similar, challenging histories. We don’t only specialize in romance, work, or everyday life, though―we specialize in betterment, in helping our members climb up from the very bottom rung of the ladder. Charmed Life is about how to commit yourself to the path you’ve chosen, how to persevere where others would get knocked back. How to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and emerge stronger and more focused than ever. My company is about providing second chances, and our members share their success with the next generation of seekers.”
“It sounds lofty and high-minded when you put it like that,” Clarissa said. “But you rather pointedly market to celebrities, don’t you? I don’t see Charmed Life reaching out to halfway houses or prisons and working with the people there.”
“Believe it or not, I have great compassion for that segment of the population. I almost ended up there myself, after all,” he said candidly. “But you can’t force someone to make a positive change in their life; they have to decide that for themselves. I’d li
ke to offer classes and maybe mentorship in prisons, particularly for juvenile offenders, but currently I’m focusing on growing other parts of the business.”
“The lucrative parts, you mean.”
“The self-directed parts.” Clarissa could dig at his business model all she wanted; Elliot could doublespeak with the best of them. Not that that was the purpose of his work, but it was definitely the way to survive a chili interview without getting bad publicity.
“I see.” With a tiny toss of her hair, Clarissa changed the subject once again. “Let’s talk about your sister.”
Oh boy. He hardened his smile and straightened his spine. “What would you like to know?”
Seeing the red soles of Clarissa’s Louboutin pumps vanishing two hours later gave Elliot a far greater sense of relief than her exodus really merited, but damn, that had been rough. He was an old hand at interviews at this point, but none of his experience had prepared him for anything quite as thorough, or as diverse, as Clarissa Hanes had managed. It would either be the greatest article he could ever ask for, or public perception of his company would tank the day after it was published next month.
It was after hours, but Serena was still there, parsing through the usual pile of snail mail that seemed to accumulate more quickly the closer they got to the Meetup. Elliot had embraced a paperless format for communicating with his clients, but some of them wouldn’t be dragged into the future even if he tied their feet to the back of the Mars rover. He sat down on the edge of Serena’s desk and sighed heavily. “Why did I ever let you convince me to do an interview with Shockwave?”
“I didn’t convince you of anything―it was your idea,” Serena said, wielding her letter opener like she was cutting throats. “I said to avoid Clarissa Hanes at all costs: look what she’d written about Zuckerberg, remember what she had to say about the guy who wants to make those mobile apartments. But you told me—”
“Hey, in her defense, mobile apartments really are a terrible idea,” he said. “Why bother moving your tiny box of a home from New York to LA when you could put a down payment on a new tiny little box for less than the price of shipping? It doesn’t make sense.”