The Survivor

by Rhonda Nelson

  As a result of almost dying on the battlefield, he had a whole new appreciation for life, and wanted to live it to the fullest. Every choice, every decision—from what he had for breakfast to what he was going to do with the rest of his life—held infinitely more significance.

  Almost dying would do that to you. Among other things…

  “You’re all settled into your apartment?” Payne asked.

  “Yes.” It was very nice and, lucky for him, fully furnished. The place had been outfitted with every possible convenience. Much like the “boardroom” they were currently in, it had state-of-the-art appliances and electronics and had been decorated with an eclectic mix of old and new. The old had more than likely come from Bess Cantrell, he realized now. The cabinets and fridge had been stocked with essentials and a bottle of Jameson—a gift from Jamie—had been on his counter.

  The apartment had previously belonged to Seth McCutcheon, who had recently married and moved into his new bride’s house in Marietta. Evidently he made the drive into Atlanta when necessary, but otherwise, mostly worked from home. Lex hadn’t met him yet, but everyone else spoke highly of him.

  Despite the fact that he’d lived in different places all over the world, Lex had to admit that the South would always be home. Originally he was from Blue Creek, Alabama—a sweet little town that sat right on the banks of the Tennessee River—but Atlanta was a mere four-hour drive. He hadn’t been this close to home since he’d graduated high school, and while he didn’t have any desire to move back—they practically rolled up the streets at five o’clock—he did like the fact that he could make a quick run over for Sunday dinner and that he would be close enough to visit his parents, and his sister and her children, for holidays and the occasional barbecue.

  All the things he’d missed, Lex thought with an inward sigh.

  “Are you satisfied with the employment package?” Jamie asked.

  Lex smiled. “Quite.”

  “You’ll earn it,” Guy told him. “We offer an extremely specialized service and, as such, our clients pay accordingly. Without our former Rangers—some of the best-trained soldiers in the world, as you know—we couldn’t offer a fraction of the expertise that we do.”

  In other words they needed him and were only paying him what they thought he was worth. He just hoped he didn’t disappoint them. Before he’d been shot he wouldn’t have had a problem accepting such an amount, but now…

  “If we didn’t think you were able to do this job, we wouldn’t have hired you,” Payne said, his cool blue eyes missing nothing. “We’ve reviewed your discharge papers, looked at the medical report. We’re confident that you’re going to be able to meet the physical requirements of the job.”

  Lex released a small breath and nodded. “If I ever reach a point where I can’t, then you can rest assured that I’ll tell you. I’d never compromise an assignment for my pride.” He grinned and shot them a look. “Much as I might want to,” he added.

  McCann laughed and the other two chuckled. “I think it’s safe to say that’s something we could all identify with.”

  Lex released a pent-up breath. “So when do I get started?”

  “Now,” Payne told him. He handed him the file. “The address is on the front. You’ve got a GPS, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Good,” Payne continued. “Bess has her client list, you’ve got your laptop and it interfaces with all the technology here at the office. If you need us for anything, then don’t hesitate to call.”

  Payne stood, prompting everyone else to get to their feet, and extended his hand. “Welcome aboard,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Lex told him. “It’s good to be here.”

  And it was. Or it would be, provided he could prove himself with this first assignment.

  PAYNE WATCHED LEX SANBORN close the door behind him and waited until he was certain he was out of earshot. He turned to Jamie and Guy and arched a brow. “Well?”

  “Much as Garrett has been a pain in the ass, I actually think we need to do something for the old bastard,” Guy remarked, settling back into the recliner. “He sure as hell knows what he’s doing when it comes to sending us recruits.”

  “I think Lex is still a little unsure of that shoulder,” Jamie said, “but otherwise he seems like he’s got it together.”

  Payne agreed. In fact, he actually thought that Lex was going to transition better than a lot of their other agents. Because he’d been through it himself, he could tell that Lex felt guilty for coming out of the service during a time of war and that was completely natural. He’d been career military until a week ago, and leaving friends behind—particularly ones in the line of fire—was never easy.

  But Payne was also pulling another vibe from Lex, one that he couldn’t exactly put his finger on, but if he had to label it… Relief maybe? He’d been hit, had almost died. That would certainly be understandable.

  Jamie chuckled. “Is he really going to take that dog with him?”

  Payne nodded and smiled. He considered himself an animal lover and was married to a vet, so he completely understood being devoted to one’s animals, but even he had to admit he’d never seen anything quite like Lex and Honey. The dog was never more than a foot or two away from Lex and stayed in front of him, as though always ready to put herself between any potential threat and her master. And that adoration was clearly returned.

  “Bess won’t mind,” Payne said. “And like he said, leaving her alone when they’ve only been in the building a few days would be hard on the dog.”

  “Even with Emma watching her?” Guy asked. “She’s like Mother Teresa to the entire animal kingdom.”

  Payne chuckled. “I’ll be sure to tell her you said that.”

  Jamie nodded thoughtfully. “I think he’s going to be a good addition to the team.”

  Payne did, too.

  Guy grinned. “Do you think we should have mentioned that Bess isn’t—”

  “Nah,” Jamie told him, a big grin spreading across his face. “He’ll find out soon enough.”

  Payne smiled. He most certainly would.

  2

  BESS CANTRELL OBSERVED the mutinous look on her assistant’s face and heaved an internal sigh of frustration. In addition to everything else that was going wrong, she did not need Elsie’s drama. But if she hadn’t wanted drama, she should have never kept on the spotty psychic/occasional nudist/full-time pain in the ass as her help after her grandfather died.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Elsie predicted. “You never listen to me, but you’re going to wish you did this time. I know I’m not always spot-on—”

  Bess gave a mental eye roll. “You mean like the time you told me that you saw me taking a beach vacation and the pipes burst beneath the kitchen sink?”

  “—but I’m telling you, this time—”

  Bess tidied her client list once again, then slipped it into a folder. “Or the time you told me that you saw me having a hot night of passion with the UPS man and the next day his face was on the front page of the paper for setting a warehouse ablaze?”

  Elsie’s papery cheeks flushed, but she continued on. “Be that as it may, I have a terrible, terrible feeling that you’re going to get—”

  Bess heaved a deep sigh. “Or the time you told me that I shouldn’t go to the grocery store on Lentil, to go to one on Hillengrove because you were certain that the one on Lentil was going to have some sort of trouble, and I went to Hillengrove and was held hostage for over an hour while the store was being burgled?”

  “I got those two confused!” Elsie finally exploded, her dark penciled eyebrows winging up her forehead. “My sight isn’t perfect! How many times do I have to explain that to you? But the point is I was right about something terrible happening.” She grimaced primly. “I merely got the store wrong,” she said, as if this little detail didn’t signify.

  And in Elsie’s mind, it didn’t.

  Bess looked out the storefront and continued to wait f
or the agent Brian Payne, one of her good clients, was sending over. She didn’t have any idea how much his services actually cost—and would have been more than willing to pay—but Brian had insisted on trading the service out. As such, she was going to be on the lookout for anything she thought he might be interested in. Over the years he’d bought everything from old lighting fixtures to antique clear gas pumps. He had eclectic taste and had been a good customer.

  When the police had failed to give her any true hope of catching the person who’d stolen her hard drive and was now in the process of harassing her clients, Brian had been the first person she’d thought of. She’d had no idea that the book in the picture had actually been a Wicked Bible and, furthermore, had had no idea that a thing like that even existed. But given that Brian had told her he knew of one that had gone for a hundred grand at auction recently, she could certainly understand the appeal.

  Elsie released a self-suffering sigh. “You aren’t going to listen to me, are you?” she said, frowning tragically. “I have this sight—this gift,” she continued with a theatrical wave toward the sky. “And you are going to go about your mulish, headstrong ways.” She harrumphed. “You are just like your grandfather. Always have been, even when you were just a wee thing.”

  “Thank you,” Bess said, even though she knew Elsie didn’t exactly mean it as a compliment. She’d loved her grandfather to utter distraction and had appreciated everything about him. She’d lost him three years ago and there wasn’t a day that went by when she didn’t miss him terribly. Her father had died in a car wreck when she was seven and her mother, racked with grief, had taken her own life a year later on the anniversary of his death. Officially orphaned then, she’d moved in with her grandfather—a widower himself—and had been with him ever since. So had Elsie, for that matter, which was no small reason why Bess didn’t let her go and hire someone more competent. But Elsie tried and, though there had never been anything romantic between the older woman and her grandfather, she’d been the closest thing to a grandmother Bess had ever had. Since she’d always collected odd things, Elsie fit in perfectly.

  Her grandfather’s house was hers now, of course, and Bess had renovated it more to her liking, but there were certain things she hadn’t been able to touch. His tobacco stand still sat next to his old leather tufted wingback chair and the small needle-point footstool was still stationed in front of it, waiting for a pair of aching feet. She grinned.

  Usually hers.

  They’d made quite a pair, she and her grandfather. Though he hadn’t told her until much, much later, she hadn’t spoken at all for the first year after her mother had committed suicide. She’d nod or shake her head and occasionally cry, but she hadn’t talked and she hadn’t smiled. Rather than send her back to school before she was ready, he’d homeschooled her instead and, though he’d tried to reintroduce her to public school later, she’d become so distraught he’d refused to make her go.

  Beyond second grade she hadn’t set foot in a classroom until she’d gone to college, and even then she would have rather been tutored by her grandfather. Frankly, her education would have been better. She’d learned the Classics at his knee, could read bits of Latin and knew more about the solar system than the general population. He’d taught her Roman and Greek mythology, had taken her to almost every major battlefield in the continental U.S. and had made history so alive for her, it was a passion she still had today.

  They’d ride the back roads of the South “picking,” as he liked to call it, and he’d drill her on various mathematical theorems and throw out famous quotes and expect her to know them, based on all the biographies he’d wanted her to read. “I cannot live in a world without books” had been one of his favorites. Thomas Jefferson, she remembered.

  Her grandfather had wanted her to have the degree in the event she ever decided to do anything besides “rescue history,” picking through old barns and houses for people’s “junk,” though she abhorred that term. Nothing was ever junk in her opinion. Everything had value and purpose.

  To the illiterate eye her place was probably a catchall for useless items, but to Bess it was a cache of things that had almost been lost. She was holding on to them for safekeeping until they could be sold and passed on to someone who would appreciate them.

  “I can see you’ve made your mind up,” Elsie continued, her nostrils flaring.

  The luggage next to the door had probably “told” her that, Bess thought, squashing a smile.

  “I have. Brian is sending someone over to keep watch on the store so you’ll be safe, and I’ll have my cell if anything comes up while I’m off with the additional agent.” She sent her a harsh look. “And by ‘comes up’ I mean a legitimate issue, not any premonitions, you understand.”

  Elsie tsked and shook her head. “Poor Nostradamus,” she said. “I have an inkling right now how he must have felt.”

  Bess smothered a snort. “Just cover the store and handle the auctions, please. Hopefully we’ll be able to take care of this relatively quickly.”

  Where was the agent anyway? The longer it took them to get on the road, the more time the asshole who was terrorizing her clients had to get ahead of them. One of the advantages she and the agent would have was that Bess knew which clients were ones she’d sold stuff to and which clients she’d bought things from. The would-be thief was drawing from a master list and had been going to see both, and he was working in a pretty direct line, moving from place to place. If he kept to this pattern, then they should be able to catch up with him.

  Initially Brian had tried to talk her out of going along, as well, but he soon gave that thought up. These were her clients, with whom she had credibility, and it was her foolish mistake that had put them all in jeopardy.

  To be fair, it was her practice to take pictures on-site, particularly if the piece was going to be something she’d put up for auction online. It was faster to do it that way and it made the process a whole lot simpler. She’d come in from the road, upload the photos, write the descriptions and activate the auction. If things needed a bit more cleaning up before selling, she’d do that once she got back to the store, but for the most part, her clientele didn’t care if something was “clean.” Like her, they could look at it and see the potential. Furthermore, collectors weren’t as picky.

  If only she could remember where she’d gotten that Coca-Cola sign, Bess thought for what had to have been the millionth time. She’d racked her brain, had gone through everything she’d had on auction during that time, and could not recall where she’d gotten the sign. It could have been someone she regularly visited or someone she’d never picked before. If she saw promise—barns, old buildings, rusty cars and bicycles in the yard—she’d stop and do a cold call. She always kept a record of what she bought, but the truth was she’d bought dozens of Coca-Cola signs—the brand was highly collectible—and it could have come from any one of those places.

  Luckily she’d been in the process of trying to organize those records and had off-loaded them onto her laptop, so the—she was just going to call him Bastard—didn’t have access to them.

  And really, without those particular records, Bastard was looking for a needle in a haystack. She took a mild amount of satisfaction from that.

  “Ooo, I think he’s here,” Elsie murmured, peering out the window. She patted her extremely teased hair and moistened her heavily painted lips. “That has to be him. Nice khakis, black cable-knit sweater—you know how I love a cable-knit sweater on a man.” She gasped. “And, oh, look! He’s brought a dog!”

  He had, Bess thought, watching covertly off to one side of Elsie, who was positioned behind the counter. While she would have ordinarily been more interested in the animal than the man, it was the man that held her attention right now.

  Mercy.

  Bess sucked in a shallow breath as every hair on her body suddenly prickled with goose bumps. Her heart galloped into overdrive and her mouth instantly parched, forcing her to swallow. She f
elt a bizarre sort of tug behind her navel and then a swirl of heat slid into her belly and settled there, making her more aware of the warmth than was strictly comfortable.

  He was big and broad-shouldered with dark brown hair that was more swept to the side than styled, and the way that it clung to his head made her want to slide her hands through it, to see if it was as sleek as it looked. He had a face that was incredibly masculine—broad planes and angles, a nose that had been broken at least once—but an especially full mouth that gave him a slightly boyish quality, one she instinctively imagined he resented.

  But the mouth was…incredible. She licked her own lips as she stared at his and wondered what it would be like to kiss him, to feel his lips against hers. Her nipples beaded behind her bra and she released a small sigh and leaned closer to the window.

  As Elsie had pointed out, he wore khakis that showcased long legs, a narrow waist and, from the side anyway, an ass that was nice and tight. The sweater stretched over a pair of heavily muscled shoulders, clung to an equally muscled chest and basically let a woman know that there was a rock-hard, beautifully maintained body beneath the clothes. The only part of him that she couldn’t truly see were his eyes, which were hidden behind a pair of designer aviator sunglasses she desperately wished weren’t in the way. I bet he has brown eyes, Bess thought, imagining a warm dark chocolate with long sooty lashes.

  He opened the car door and clipped a leash to the dog, a blond mutt of questionable origins, but pretty all the same, and the animal leaped down onto the pavement. He scoped both ends of the sidewalk before studying the storefront and she watched his lips—that sinfully carnal mouth—twist with something akin to humor, but not as kind. A pinprick of disappointment nicked her heart, but she shrugged it off. Just because he was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life didn’t mean he was going to be any different from the rest.