by Amy Gamet
SVX. Four of them, here at the resort, no doubt with orders to erase Jackie and Selena from this earth. They hadn’t made their move, and he wondered what they were waiting for. He knew from experience it could be anything. The final go-ahead coming across the comm set.
Darkness.
Weather.
Opportunity.
Selena had slipped beneath the covers and was playing quietly on an iPad, headphones over her ears. Jackie had her arms wrapped around herself as she slowly paced the room. “What do we do now?”
“We fortify our position, and we wait,” said Razorback.
“I’m not good at waiting.”
Neither was he, especially knowing SVX was outside. “Help me go through Bill’s things, see if there’s anything we can use.” She nodded, following him.
“How long will it take your friends to arrive?”
“Five hours, maybe six.” Razorback had left the shades in this room down when he woke up, which meant they could also move freely in here. He could hear the wind picking up speed outside, and pulled out his phone to check the weather. “Shit.”
He held up the device for her to see the colorful radar image. “The storm went out to sea, picked up speed, and is headed back this way.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not kidding.” He shook his head and pocketed the device. “That’s going to make it harder for them to get here.”
Jackie gave him the key to the gun safe, and he selected an M4A1 assault rifle and a Sig Sauer P226. Razorback might never have met Bill Whitton, but SEALs were SEALs, and the dead man’s weapons were as known to Razorback as a fork and spoon. He found several body armor plates and a vest, grabbing them for good measure.
“Should we barricade the doors downstairs?” she asked.
“It’s too risky. Too many windows for sniper fire.”
“You can’t see the first-floor windows from the cabana.”
“No, but no military-trained sniper would stay in a location that’s been discovered. He’s on the move. We don’t know where he is now.”
She dropped her chin to her chest, and he reached for her as if he did so every day. “Come here.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face against him. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Promise?”
He knew what they were up against, the men just as trained as he and just as dedicated to their mission. But he would fight for Jackie and Selena with everything he had, right up to the death if that was what it took to save them. “I promise.”
He rested his head on top of hers, inhaling her scent. Jackie. Sweet, beautiful Jackie. She drew him in, every movement of her body a siren call to his own. What would she feel like in his arms, beneath his body as he came into her?
So much adrenaline needing a release, energy searching for an outlet. He needed to put some distance between himself and this woman. Maybe then he could stop wanting to touch her face, to tell her it was going to be all right. Stop wondering what it would feel like to pin her between his greedy hips and a brick wall.
Jesus.
He had to stop thinking with his dick. SVX was waiting to make their move, and it would be soon, he could feel it. They weren’t going to wait five hours for HERO Force to get here, and Razorback needed to be ready. Discovering the sniper’s lair had set something in motion, the ticking of a clock counting down to the inevitable confrontation.
He could practically hear it.
Jackie lifted her head, her fingers sliding along the sensitive back of his neck. He froze. The slightest movement toward her would set fire to the combustible attraction that had been rubbing together since she first opened the door to him, a gun in her hand and a gasp on her lips. He wanted to hear her make that noise again in an entirely different context, longed to act on the impulse that was beating in his cock, but he didn’t move.
“Ian…” she whispered. It was a question, a plea that required his response, but still he hesitated. Her fingers curled, her nails lightly scraping his skin.
It was his undoing. Her name was a growl deep in his throat, a hunger refusing to be ignored. “Jackie.” He bent his head and kissed her, their mouths meeting with a desperate urgency that left him dazed and wanting more.
He hauled her against him, the sinew of her torso forming soft curves against his body, her hands skimming every exposed inch of his flesh and driving him higher. There was no time for this now, it wasn’t the place, yet he couldn’t have pulled himself away from her if he’d tried.
She kissed down his neck, his desire growing more intense, insistent. The bed was behind her and he longed to spread her out and follow her down, nestling his hardness in the valley between her legs.
The absurdity of doing so now—with SVX outside and Sloan and Selena next door—was what finally snapped him out of his lustful delirium. He lifted his mouth from hers and threaded his fingers through her hair, holding her forehead against his as their breathing slowed.
His heartbeat returned to normal and he reluctantly let her go, noting the high color in her cheeks and wishing he could have seen it all over her body.
She covered her face with her forearms. “Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I can’t think about that right now.” She walked to the gun safe and back again, giggling.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing.” She giggled again. “I just can’t believe the first time I kiss a guy in eight years is while there are hired assassins parked outside my house, waiting to kill me.”
“You haven’t kissed anyone in this whole time?”
She paced. “And there’s nothing we can do about the assassin people, so hell—I guess necking is as good as Scrabble or painting our toenails to pass the time. But still, it’s really odd. Don’t you find that strange?”
What he really found strange was her current monologue. Strange and oddly endearing. He was smiling as he watched her, and it occurred to him that between his interactions with Selena and Jackie, he hadn’t smiled this much in a long time. “I do.”
She stopped in front of him. “I’m not good at waiting.”
“I can see that.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “You’re safe with me, Jackie. Remember that.” He let her go and picked up the weapons, thinking of the SEAL who’d owned them and wishing the older man was alive to lend a hand in their hour of need. “Did Bill have a nickname in the military?”
She smiled. “Peaches. He was a baby-faced redhead from Georgia when he enlisted.”
He held the door open for her. “I like it.”
She laughed, suddenly stopping as she entered the hall. “There’s smoke!”
Dense and black, it came up from the stairwell on a flowing current of air. “Come on!” he called to her, rushing to get Sloan. The house was on fire, and there were snipers outside. Not a good combination if they wanted to live another day.
We might need your help on this one, Peaches, so stay on my six.
14
Leo “Cowboy” Wilson stared unseeingly out the window as the chopper crossed the dark sky. There were thunderstorms to their south, the dangerous up- and downdrafts forcing them to adjust their course to avoid them and increasing their travel time to intercept Razorback and SVX.
Leo tucked his arms tightly across his chest. This would be his first experience working directly with Mac’s team, and he was nervous as a bear shitting in the middle of a highway.
In theory, the new HERO Force office in New York was a great idea, a cross between a charity case and a working business model. Give a bunch of screwed-up SEALs a second chance. Let them do what they were good at while they found a new place in this world.
They owed them that much. Hell, they were brothers.
But in reality it was rife with hazards. Men with PTSD weren’t good decision makers under stress, any more than guys who were missing a limb could rappel down the side of a building as well as his own fully capable men.
>
It sucked that he thought it. Hell, maybe it made him a bad person. But when half a dozen tangos were firing at your ass, you needed the best of the best on your six, not the leftovers.
They’re human beings, asshole, and Razorback was your goddamn friend.
He ground his teeth together. Ian Rhodes had been on his SEAL team. The guy had been a freaking renaissance man back then, a doctor with a sharp sarcastic wit and a popularity with the ladies that would have gotten a weaker man in trouble. But Ian wasn’t weak. He was faithful to his wife.
Just like I would be to Charlotte if she’d ever let me marry her.
His gut churned at the thought of his girlfriend. He’d fucked himself but good when he brought marriage up a few days earlier at dinner, slipping it into casual conversation right behind I really like these pork chops. It went over like a dead body falling from the sky.
He knew about her first marriage and how hard it had been on her self-esteem, but he hadn’t realized her experience had sworn her off the entire institution for good. Charlotte O’Malley didn’t want to get married—not ever again—and while that didn’t change his feelings for her, it certainly changed his dreams for the future.
He’d grown up in the south, where love meant church bells and kids and matching rings that dug into your finger, leaving a tan line and a telltale dent. He wanted their names detailed on his truck, and that didn’t include a different last name than his own.
So they’d fought, like that was going to help.
Way to be super understanding, dickhead.
Booger’s deep voice came over the comm set. “Are we there yet?” They’d just left the Mexico City airport in the chopper, where they’d arrived by private jet. High winds were wreaking havoc on the commercial flights out of Atlanta, but Logan hadn’t even flinched, rambling on about horizontal versus vertical wind shearing as he moved into the cockpit and started the engines.
“Yep, you can get out now,” Logan deadpanned.
Logan. He was a hell of a pilot. A good soldier who’d matured under Cowboy’s watch, become a father to a child and a true partner to Gemma. But he was also Charlotte’s brother, and that’s where things got complicated.
Cowboy frowned. Logan might be able to help Cowboy with the marriage situation if he was so inclined. Too bad he wasn’t. The other man had gone from barely tolerating his sister and Cowboy together to some uncomfortable form of peaceful coexistence, with the occasional dirty look at family gatherings.
He pushed thoughts of Charlotte out of his head. He had more pressing problems at the moment, not the least of which was Mac’s team of misfits and whatever the hell awaited this crew when they got there.
More than half the HERO Force Atlanta team was on another assignment, which left the men he flew with now—Logan, Booger, and the new guy, Dire—a redheaded sniper from Louisiana who seemed more likely to invite a tango to a crawfish boil than to do anything violent. But the man’s record spoke for itself with more than two hundred confirmed kills, and if they really were flying into a swarm of SVX agents, they’d need his help.
SV fucking X.
He’d seen them in action once while he was still active duty, the team of mercenaries swooping into a war zone and taking out a high-priority target the SEALs were forbidden to touch. The bullets of US servicemen couldn’t be anywhere near that body, and in the end, they were not.
Cowboy had left there thinking SVX had a place in this world. A very necessary place. Anything else he knew about them was the rumor mill gone wild. How much was truth and how much was fiction was anyone’s guess, but the end result was the same. SVX did the dirty work no one else wanted or was able to do, and they were well paid for their efforts.
Cowboy locked his phone, staring at the dark screen before tapping it, his favorite picture of Charlotte appearing on cue. His gaze moved longingly over her bright red curls and lushly painted mouth, the black that lined her eyes lighting up the nerve endings between his eyeballs and his dick. That woman knew how to drive a man crazy.
Logan swore colorfully in the comm set, another thing he’d gotten better at since joining the team. “That storm system’s going to cause us some more trouble after all. Squall line forming six kilometers from our target, right between us and the damn resort. Patching through to Moto in New York so he can help me through this shit storm,” he grumbled. “And I’ve got Mac O’Brady on the line for you, Cowboy.”
And so it began. “Put him through.”
“We just went wheels up,” said Mac. “Sitrep?”
“We’re within a couple hundred miles, but we had storms and need to veer around them.”
“Fuck.”
“Exactly. Doc seems to think he can do it with Moto’s help. We’ll get them out of there and back to the States in a jiffy.”
“Or maybe not. We just got word from Jax, the embassy won’t issue Desjardins and her kid passports. They’ve heightened security coming into the country from Mexico. His contact’s hands are tied, even though McGrath’s probably behind it, not a national security issue as we’ve been told.”
“Hold up a second there, padre. Are we talking about Jacqueline Desjardins, the politician’s wife?”
“That’s the one.”
“She’s dead. Drove off a cliff years ago.”
“My guys swear she’s the real thing.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re saying we’re helping the not-so-dead wife of the Democrat frontrunner for president of the United States.”
“That’s right. She has my men convinced and is looking for passage back into the country so she can deal with McGrath herself."
It was ludicrous. Absolutely asinine, and these guys should have known it. “Just because somebody tells a convincing story—”
“I’d trust Razorback with my life.”
"I know Razorback, too, and I know what he’s been through.” Cowboy heard the implication in his statement but didn’t back down from it. He didn’t know if Razorback could be trusted, if he was the same-caliber soldier he’d been back then. Hell, nothing was the same as it had been and word on the street was Ian had internalized more than just those flames.
“If you have a problem with my men—”
You bet your ass I do. “I’m saying his judgment might not be enough for me to back them up with my own men and a multimillion-dollar bird on some clandestine smuggling operation back into the States for a dead woman. And if you don’t see the sense in that, Mac, I got nothing else to tell you.”
“Not smuggling. And Jax is on board. He was trying to get them passports.”
Cowboy sighed heavily. If there was any doubt in his mind he was prejudiced against this group of men, his internal dialogue at that moment erased that doubt. “Has it occurred to you that the threat against the Mexican border could be very real, and this woman claiming to be Desjardins might be just the person they’re bending over backwards to keep out of the country? It’s a far more likely scenario.”
“No. She got my name from my old CO, Bill Whitton. A SEAL, Cowboy. There’s nobody I’d trust more.”
“Trust. Hmm.” He squeezed the skin between his eyes. “I got a phone call the other day, Mac. I wasn’t going to bring it up, but now I’m thinking it’s relevant. From an old buddy of mine down at Rikers Island. He’s the superintendent there—you know, the prison in New York City.” The silence on the other end of the phone was exactly what Cowboy had been aiming for. “He says you’ve been down there a lot lately, Mac, and I’m thinking the prisoner you’re visiting says a lot about your judgment, man. A hell of a lot about who I ought to trust.”
“You have no right to snoop into what I do on my personal time.”
“Actually, when you go dropping the HERO Force name, I sure as fuck do. So forgive me if I’m not dripping with confidence in your abilities, or Razorback’s, and I’m not willing to forgo my better judgment because you have the same letterhead I do. So that’s where it stands. We’re going to go in there and get S
VX off their scent, but I’m not taking the fall for trusting this woman based on Razorback’s assessment of the situation, or yours. Now have a nice day.” He disconnected the call. “Fuck face,” he grumbled under his breath.
The chopper banked sharply to the right, and Cowboy closed his eyes. The SEALs were a brotherhood, but sometimes you had to hold your brother’s face to the asphalt just to prove a point.
That’s what family was all about.
15
The pungent smell of smoke filled the downstairs hallway, assaulting Razorback’s nose and lighting up sections of his brain that were better left to die. He’d battled fire once before, fighting the eager flames for his very life, and he had no goddamn desire to do it again.
Fuck.
The skin on his face burned with remembered pain as he and Sloan cleared the upstairs rooms, air quality diminishing with every passing minute. But Jackie and Selena were depending on him, and his will was strong enough to prevent even a moment’s hesitation.
SVX was trying to smoke them out, force them to leave the safety of the house and become easy targets for a sniper’s bullet—spurred on by the sound of the HERO Force chopper, no doubt.
He turned on the night vision on his rifle scope.
The staircase to the kitchen spewed smoke like a chimney, forcing them to use the front stairs to descend. He moved in tandem with Sloan as if the two had worked together for some time, their training creating seamless teamwork that earned Sloan significantly more of Razorback’s esteem than Sloan’s sense of humor ever had.
The rifle scope was Razorback’s only window into the world downstairs, and even that was limited by the smoke that burned his lungs like acid with every breath.
He was aware of his increasing distance from Jackie and Selena, the image of the woman and child stuck in his head like a photograph to a corkboard. They reached the bottom of the stairs, Razorback in the lead, and he held his weapon at the ready as he checked the room for tangos. He rounded the bend into the hallway that led to the kitchen and office beyond, the crash of breaking glass ringing out over the crackling of the hungry flames just out of sight.