by Leslie North
Safe and Sound
By Leslie North
The Safe House Unit Series
Book 3
The Safe House Unit Series
In Safe Hands
Play it Safe
Safe and Sound
Blurb
Former Army captain Max Sterling sees the world in black and white. Ever since his days in the military, it’s been his job to defend the innocent, and the elite Safe House Unit lets him do just that. But when he’s assigned to protect Adrien Baudin, a savage assassin set to testify against his mob boss employer, his moral code is shaken to its foundations.
Everything’s going according to plan until Lola Reyes, an innocent first grade teacher, enters the picture unexpectedly, bringing the unwanted attention of her policeman brother. She’s everything Max didn’t think he needed until now—beautiful, caring, and independent—and she’s packing a gun.
When Lola crashes her car at a remote residence, she believes her sexy but secretive rescuer has her best interests at heart. Relief turns to distress when he and his unnerving partner tie her up and refuse to accept her identity.
And after Max learns of a criminal conspiracy involving Baudin, they’re forced to go on the run to keep everyone—including the woman he’s falling for—out of danger. When justice and duty are at odds, he’ll have to choose sides in a game where the stakes are life and death.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Shooting the SEAL (Saving the SEALs Series Book One) Excerpt!
Shooting the SEAL (Saving the SEALs Series Book One) Excerpt!
Chapter 1
Max Sterling believed the sonofabitch might combust.
“Je vous salue, Marie…”
The man under his protection moved rosary beads through his fingertips in a regimented but absent way that brought to mind a cadence more cult-like than Roman Catholic. Maybe what he knew of Adrien Baudin blackened every gray shadow that lurked in the French man’s past. His nicotine-yellow fingers, already showing age spots, turned pink where he pinched the fragrant beads. They had been crafted from crimson rose petals that once occupied the spray on his dead mother’s casket or some bullshit. Baudin never fed Max the truth.
Occupational hazard of a hitman.
“…pleine de graces, le Seigneur est avec vous…”
The two men sat on the back deck of Max’s safe house, their Adirondack chairs positioned a fair distance apart, at obtuse angles from each other, seemingly blown apart by the winds or mutual dislike or both. Locked in by towering, spindly maple and hickory trees, at a stone’s throw from one of the bloodiest battles in Civil War history, the private patch of Virginia soil seemed an appropriate place for someone who had caused so much bloodshed to atone, turn evidence, aim for something besides the back of someone’s skull. Something close to a protected existence for the rest of his days. Far more than he deserved.
Baudin lit a cigarette and continued his litany of prayers to God and nicotine.
“…et ŕ l'heure de notre mort. Amen.”
Adrien Baudin wasn’t Max’s typical client. Sure, Max had guarded plenty of religious nuts and plenty more who chased salvation while Max was the only thing standing between them and certain death. He had often protected criminals and mobsters in the weeks and days before they delivered key evidence to trial. Baudin was different. Practiced. Calloused. Deviant.
Unpredictable.
“Gloire au Pére, au Fils et au Saint-Esprit.”
A curl of cigarette smoke snaked between Baudin's silently murmuring lips. Max could take the hypocrisy no more.
"I thought you were lapsed," said Max.
"That was an assumption you made." Baudin spoke in a thin, understated French accent. His English was perfect, concise, but he had a habit of veering off into his native tongue when he spoke privately to himself or in mid-conversation when he felt like insulting Max to his face. Max had enough knowledge of French to survive in a café or in the arms of a willing but foul-mouthed femme. Not much more.
"Says so in your file." Since claiming his charge, Max had made a sport of lying, too. Kept Baudin from settling into a false sense of control.
"That is American intelligence for you,” said Baudin. "Then again, maybe it is evidence to the contrary?"
"It's a fair assumption." Max kicked his feet up onto the deck railing and crossed his legs. He was not the sort of man who sat casually like this, not on duty, but Baudin trafficked in vulnerability. Max could afford to show none. "I can’t imagine a guy who ended so many lives would have much to say to God."
"You have it wrong, Monsieur Sterling. I have much to say to God." Baudin squinted out toward the twilight horizon. "It is God who has nothing to say to me."
He wanted to make a smart ass comment—something about a violin to play the world’s saddest song or how his latest victim couldn’t play one note of anything because Baudin had sliced off her fingerprints—but Max remained silent. For sanity’s sake, they both maintained some unspoken pact of cordiality. He could only assume that was why Baudin, up until this point, chose to insult him in français. The French were nothing if not polite.
"Feel free to speak your mind now," Baudin continued, drawing the cigarette from between his lips without so much as a sideways glance at Max. "Seeing as God is silent."
The hitman sounded as if he was reciting from a script. He was an untrustworthy soul, incapable of conveying sincerity if his life depended on it, but Max couldn't shake the feeling that there was more to the guy’s story.
He had been on the cusp of saying as much when a loud explosion rocked the front of the house.
The adrenaline dump into his blood stream was absolute, familiar.
"Down!" Max’s Army-captain order wrapped the word tight.
Even a lawless prick like Baudin knew when it was in his best interest to obey. The hitman rocked forward in his seat and slid to his knees. Rosary beads landed and bled into a puddle left by an afternoon rain. His cigarette still wagged between his teeth.
"The fuck was that?” Baudin lapsed into muttered French curses as Max rose and drew his M9. If there was a silver lining to protecting a criminal, it was that his client didn't rattle easily at the first sign of violence.
"Under the deck," Max said. "Storm cellar. Now." They had gone over the safe house's escape routes countless times in the past week. Baudin looked only half-attentive to him at the best of times, so Max didn't trust the man to remember which defensive maneuver to enact now. Baudin kept his head low as he darted down the stairs. Max wrenched open the screen door.
The crash had resonated from the front of the house, likely out on the road. A cursory once-over of the living room and foyer confirmed for him that the safe house structure had not been breached. Max moved stealthily toward the front door of the house and backed himself behind it. Drawing in a long breath, he stared out the peephole.
Wrapped around the trunk of the eighty-year-old oak in front of the safe house, the smoki
ng carcass of what had once been a two-door red coupe. A figure slumped over the steering wheel.
"Shit."
His first train of thought: a set up. Bait to extract him while agents of Baudin’s former employer descended upon the unguarded house. But how could they have found out their location? How could anyone?
The figured stirred. Even at a distance, even though the distorted convex lens of the peephole, Max witnessed the slide and spill of long hair.
The driver was a woman.
His second coherent train of thought: Because she’s a woman, I’ll risk my nuts blown off? Landing against his brain, it was absurd. Stick to your training, Max. It’s a trap.
“Shit-shit-shit.”
But nothing about it smacked of a trap—the clown-like red car, some disco-ball girly object tethered to the rear view mirror, still swinging wildly, and the bloody arm resting against the driver’s window sill, adorned with enough jangly bracelets to horseshoe every railroad stake in the county.
Max Sterling exhaled once sharply through his nostrils. He wrenched the front door open, ignoring every warning shot firing off in his gut.
Chapter 2
Smoke and sundered metal cloyed her throat.
Lola Reyes coughed and stirred in the driver's seat. She opened her eyes, but nothing made sense. Books that once filled a box in her back seat spilled across the dashboard in her line of vision. The radio no longer played Green Day. Her legs no longer had room to maneuver. A spasm of panic gathered deep inside her and organized an uprising through her lungs.
She tried to release a scream for help. Nothing came, as if everything but silence had been knocked free of her body. Glass shards popped free of the remaining windshield in tiny explosions. The scrap of paper she had glanced at—for just a moment, maybe two, to check the address—still crowded her fist.
An enormous man eclipsed her field of vision.
Lola recoiled, though her seatbelt still stretched taut and didn't allow her to go far. The wide, masculine shadow became more distinct, and her rescuer’s face sharpened into focus. Judging by his size and the squared, mature angle of his jaw, she put him at a few years older than her, perhaps even circling his early thirties. His hair was a close-cropped honey brown, and the coarse stubble that shadowed his jaw appeared slightly reddish.
The doctor from Grey’s Anatomy.
Sweet Ginger hottie, she was delusional. Concussed. Possibly dead. In heaven, yes, but dead.
His expression was anything but mc-dreamy. Possibly angry. Handsome yes, but supremely stressed.
"What happened?" She pushed the question out with difficulty as she felt the seatbelt slither off her. Her breath came up short, from the accident or the off-putting but totally arresting attention of the stranger, she couldn’t say. "Is anyone hurt?"
“You hit a tree.” The man’s voice was even, calm, totally contradictory to the way his eyes darted around the wreck and beyond as if he was looking for another passenger who had fled into the woods. "Do you feel any pain?"
"My head. I think I hit my head."
"Anything else?"
“My legs are crunched."
In one effortless scoop, the stranger's hands slid beneath her bottom and lifted her clear of the seat. Lola wasn't a waif by any means—in fact, she was blessed with the curvy figure of her Nona, Rosita Reyes, a burlesque and Broadway dancer from the 1950’s—but the man drew her out as if she weighed as much as a plume in a glittery headpiece. He loaded her into his arms, hefting her once to get a firm grip, and carried her across the woodsy front lawn and up the steps of the lone residence. Just as he seemed about to balance her on his thigh while he grappled with the door handle, someone inside the house opened the door.
"Who the hell is this?" Another man demanded, his voice an odd blend of sophistication and savage. The second stranger was average height, built lean and hungry. His veal-colored lips looked like a deflated tire wrapped around an unlit cigarette.
Her rescuer deposited her gently on the living room couch, careful to support her neck against a roll pillow. When he turned to respond to his companion, all the care had vaporized from his countenance.
"I told you to wait in the cellar," said McGinger. "But while you're here, you might as well make yourself useful and watch her. I'm going back out to the car. Make sure she doesn't close her eyes or go to sleep."
"You leave me alone with a stranger?" said the smoker.
"She's unarmed. I checked. And concussed. She’d have to be superhuman to fake pupils that big."
"Not impossible if well-trained.”
The smoker sniffed. French accent. Definitely French. His fingertips continuously moved toward his nose. Tweaking. Itching. Fidgeting. Lola had seen the same during an in-service on how to spot drugs in schools. A sliver of unease inched along her spine, sore ass to sore neck.
"Something tells me you can handle yourself," said McGinger. "Back in a minute."
He disappeared out the front door.
No-no-no, don’t leave. The sliver grew as big as a splintered plank and settled in her gut. She much preferred the company of her rescuer, but who was she kidding? If the guy who smelled like ash was strung out, most likely McGinger was, too.
Cancer-man paced along the rug, lit up and puffed away like a chimney. He wore gold-toe executive socks like a business man, but his button-up shirt screamed auto mechanic.
Lola’s head spun in the wake of his movements. She closed her eyes, sank deeper into the sofa’s puffy, leather cushions, and raised her palm to her forehead. Her bracelet collection jangled, wrist to nose. The noisy intrusion niggled from her eardrums straight to the epicenter of her massive headache. She winced and rose on her elbows to remove them. Blood smeared her palm.
“I’m bleeding,” she said to no one, especially not Pepe Le Pew.
Her words acted as a summons. He ambushed her in one nervous, carcinogenic wave that flipped her stomach. Her tear ducts surged into action.
"Let me see your eyes," he demanded.
She burrowed deeper into the couch. A litany of responses begged utterance: no; not in a million years; get the hell away from me—you smell like a chimney; maybe for your hot friend. Before she could decide on a prudent answer, the door opened again.
The smoker moved away.
Lola savored a deep inhale of untainted oxygen.
Her red-headed rescuer deposited her purse on the coffee table and lowered into an armchair across from her.
"What's your name?" he asked her, none too politely.
Was this a test? He could have figured that out from her wallet.
"Lola. Lola Reyes," she said as she struggled to a seated position. Her head felt like it had been clocked by a bat. "What's yours?"
"Not important."
Okaaaay. McGingerHottie-with-the-bad-attitude it is.
“You should not have involved yourself in this.” This more like dis on the French man’s tongue.
Lola wasn’t entirely certain to whom he directed his warning.
“Someone would come looking for her,” said the red-head. “Cover blown.”
“I’m right here,” said Lola, with a little too much attitude. She remembered the drug thing and dialed it back a bit. “Fully conscious. No need to pretend otherwise.”
"How are you feeling?" McGinger asked.
"I'm all right now." She reached for her purse and rifled through it for her bottle of aspirin she tapped into on indoor recess days. The room tilted on an invisible axis. Two shakes of an open bottle in her palm, she continued, "Really. I appreciate all your help, but I really need to call my insurance agent."
The men exchanged a look she couldn’t decipher. Either they’d had a bad experience with an insurance man in their past or the thought of her calling—anyone—set them on edge.
Which, in turn, had her stomach crumbling like a tower of alphabet blocks.
Oh, god. She’d call her brother instead. Pretend it was her insurance agent. He’d know something w
as wrong and bring back up.
“Some water for the lady,” requested McGinger. Not really a request so much. More like a thinly-veiled order. The French man’s stare could have launched poison darts, but he shuffled around the countertop and filled a glass from the tap.
Had she not witnessed every ounce of that water drain from the faucet she would not have used it to wash down the pain pills in her hand.
"When I found you, you were unconscious," McGinger reminded her. "I wouldn't call you 'all right'."
The hard angles of his eyes softened a bit. In another lifetime, when circumstances didn’t make her want to tap into every Criminal Minds episode she had ever binge-watched, his concern would have tapped into her hair-trigger aww response. Dispensing six Band-Aids a day does that.
"Really," she reiterated. "I’m fine. And I'm late for an appointment."
"What brought you all the way out here?" Max inquired.
Just like that, the walls were back up between them. It was an innocent enough question, but when he added, “There aren't any other houses around for miles," Lola’s hand went straight back to her purse for her cell phone.
Max’s reach was longer. He got to it first and nudged the leather satchel out of her reach.
Lola's fingers swiped empty air. Her face warmed, but not from embarrassment at having missed. He had moved it as casually as if he was rearranging a stack of magazines, but there was intent behind it, and the realization sent a bolt of panic surging through her limbs. He had brought the purse inside, but he appeared to be in the unnerving business now of keeping it away from her.
“You should lie back down.” He sat on the coffee table where the purse had been, effectively putting himself as a two-hundred pound barrier between her and her plan to call her lieutenant brother. He fluffed a pillow for show, encouragement to get her to go prone, something. She second-guessed herself. Maybe moving her purse out of the way was an absent gesture. Her Nona always said she had a wild imagination.