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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Anne Elizabeth is an award-winning romance author and comic creator of the teen-rated PULSE Series. With a BS in business and MS in communications from Boston University, she is a regular presenter at conventions, as well as a member of The Authors Guild and Romance Writers of America. AE lives with her husband, a retired Navy SEAL, in the mountains above San Diego. They are very active in the West Coast SEAL Community and volunteer for the California Parks. For more information, visit AnneElizabeth.net.
HOME FIRE INFERNO
(Burn, baby, burn!)
A Troubleshooters Novella
SUZANNE BROCKMANN
Timeline: This Troubleshooters story takes place in January 2010, about eight months after the end of Breaking the Rules.
CHAPTER 1
Jenn
Jennilyn Gillman’s water broke.
At first she’d thought it was some kind of horrific pregnancy-induced incontinence. For a few short seconds she’d actually been glad that she’d gotten out of her sister-in-law Eden’s car and was standing at the side of the road.
But she—and Eden, too—were standing there because the car had broken down on a lightly traveled stretch of highway in the butt-ugly desert, north and east of San Diego, far, far from civilization.
“Oh, my God,” Jenn said as she realized that the pain that had nearly doubled her over was a labor contraction and that she hadn’t just peed her giant maternity underpants.
No, she was going to give birth. Right here. Right now.
“You okay?” Danny’s voice echoed bizarrely over her cell phone, as if her Navy SEAL husband had called her from Mars instead of the Philippines. It was twice as strange that the call from his international cell phone had gotten through, when just moments before neither she nor Eden could get either of their phones to work. Even now, Jenn had maybe half a bar of signal, at the most. And yet Dan’s voice, although distant with that odd echo, was clear.
“Yes,” Jenn told him, working hard to keep her voice even. Despite her attempt, she sounded raggedly out of breath, still reeling from the shock of that sharp pain. “I’m fine. Cramp.”
It wasn’t a lie. Labor contractions were cramps, of sorts. And she was fine. Or rather, she was going to be fine.
Dan, however, was going to be full-on, steam-out-of-his-ears pissed when he got the news that she’d given birth to his baby daughter in a ditch at the side of Obsidian Springs Road.
He would’ve been pissed that she’d even agreed to go on this little road trip through the mountains to the tiny desert “resort” town of Obsidian Springs, even if the trip had been completely uneventful and car-trouble-free.
This was their first pregnancy, and Dan was more stressed out about it than Jenn. Not about the having-a-kid part. He was more than okay with that, happily helping to set up their nursery, and even bringing home a collection of adorable stuffed animals in varying shades of pink. No, it was Jenn who was freaked about her lack of experience with infants, and her imminent responsibility for the life of this completely helpless human being that she was about to drop onto the searing hot asphalt.
Danny’s issue was all about Jenn’s health. This baby they’d made was already ginormous. It was a full-on mystery to both of them exactly how their daughter was going to emerge from Jenn’s womb without medical intervention. If it were up to Danny, Jenn would stay in their apartment, feet up, in their bed, 24/7, until their little girl was born.
So yeah, the fact that Jenn had gone on this road trip with Eden was going to create some noise when Dan found out about it.
But there was one thing of which she was certain. He wasn’t going to find out about it from her, not right now, anyway. Nope.
Eden had opened the hood to glare at her car’s engine, but when Jenn had squeaked out that Oh, my God, she’d glanced up. Now she looked from the expression on Jenn’s face to the liquid still splashing on the pavement between her swollen ankles and sensible sneakers, and her eyes widened. “Oh, my God,” she echoed in a much higher octave, at a much louder volume. “Seriously?”
Yes, Jenn agreed that this seemed like a bad joke, because there was no way this was supposed to be happening. She was only eight months along. First babies were always late and never early—or so everyone had told her, over and over. It was part of the rationale she’d used in order to convince Eden that it was okay that she ride along with her today.
Meanwhile, Dan had heard his sister and was now asking, “Wait, is that Eden?”
“Dan,” Jenn managed to gasp, “I gotta…” She started over, forcing her voice to sound less squeezed and stressed. “I’m sorry, Danny, I’ll call you back. I love you! Everything’s fine!” She cut the connection as Eden came toward her.
Incredulity mixed with the concern on her sister-in-law’s face. “I’m sorry, but everything’s, like, the opposite of fine! Why would you tell Danny that? I mean, even without this magic”—she gestured to the puddle on the asphalt—“we need a tow truck at the very least.”
“His status—the SEAL Team’s status—is mission ready.” That was all Jenn had to say.
Eden nodded, instantly sober. She got it. Her own husband, Izzy Zanella, was also a Navy SEAL. He was one of Dan’s teammates, which meant that Izzy was currently mission ready, too. The last thing a SEAL needed was to go into a combat situation distracted by problems from back home. It was a hard and fast rule when sending emails or during these rare phone calls. Everything was always fine. It had to be.
“Still, this might be an exception to the rule,” Eden pointed out.
“Childbirth is completely natural,” Jenn countered.
“In four-billion-degree heat?” Eden shot back, gesturing around them to a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. “With a bottle and a half of water between the two of us…?”
Jenn looked down the empty road, in both directions. Nothing moved. Nothing real, that is. It was unnaturally hot for January, and heat mirages shimmered and danced. “This is California. Someone’ll drive by. We’ll flag ’em down—”
“No one passed us on this road when we were heading north,” Eden dourly pointed out. “The only traffic was down on Route 78, which is at least five miles in that direction.”
Which meant that Obsidian Springs, with its single still-open gas station, was five miles back in the other direction.
“Well, they say you’re supposed to walk while in labor…?” But not even Jenn could manage to sound optimistic about a five mile hike in this heat.
“Yeah,” Eden said. “To make the baby come faster. I don’t think that’s what we want here.”
“Maybe this was just a freak thing,” Jenn said. “I know the fact that my water broke is not good and I need to get to a hospital relatively soon, but there was only just that one contraction—” As she said it, her body proved her to be a liar, another pain hitting her so hard that she had to sit down, right there in the dusty road.
“Come on.” Eden looped Jenn’s arm around her neck and lifted the larger woman up. “Let’s start by getting you back into the car and out of the sun.”
“Oh, my God,” Jenn gasped again. She knew from experience that Eden was much stronger and tougher than she looked, with her skinny jeans, her clingy pink top, and her high-heeled sandals.
Eden had, after all, just identified the body of Greg Fortune, her wicked stepfather, at the Obsidian Springs morgue. What the man had been doing in the ghost-town-ish “resort” was unclear, but he’d had a massive heart attack while watching porn on pay-per-view at the Lantern Inn Motor Lodge.
Eden hadn’t flinched as the woman in the white lab coat pulled back the sheet to reveal her stepfather
’s mottled face. She’d just quietly nodded and signed the paperwork. She’d even settled up his motel bill—which was more than Jenn would’ve done, had their roles been reversed.
“I love you dearly,” Eden told her now as she checked both her and Jenn’s phones for a signal, “but I am not delivering your baby all alone in the back of my car, in the middle of nowhere. How did Danny’s call come through…? I’ve tried calling Tracy, I’ve tried calling Jay, I’ve tried calling Ben”—all of whom were in San Diego—“I’ve tried the county sheriff in Obsidian Springs, I just tried 9-1-1, but I get nothing. Even my texts won’t send. Maybe an overseas call uses a different cell tower or satellite…?”
“No! I love you dearly, too,” Jenn said, reaching out to grab Eden’s arm, her fingers tightening as yet another contraction ripped through her—God, that last one hadn’t even ended and a new one was starting. It didn’t seem fair. She tried to talk through it, and her words came out half-shout, half-snarl, “but you are not calling Dan. Or Izzy. They are. Mission. Ready!”
Eden gazed back at Jenn with those movie-star gorgeous dark brown eyes that were so like Dan’s—except for the fact that she was remarkably unperturbed by Jenn’s outburst. It was possible that with everything Eden had been through in her short life, she was incapable of being frightened by anything or anyone.
She was, after all, married to Izzy Zanella.
“I’m not calling either of them,” she informed Jenn matter-of-factly as she finished dialing a number and brought her phone up to her ear. “I’m trying the senior chief. Maybe he can call Jay Lopez, who can then call Obsidian Springs to get you an ambulance to the nearest hospital.”
Where was the nearest hospital, Jenn wanted to ask, but as the contraction gripped her harder, all she could do was moan, “Don’t let him tell Dan! I’m gonna be fine…”
CHAPTER 2
Izzy
“I’m having your baby!” Navy SEAL Izzy Zanella sang in his best falsetto. “I’m a woman in love, and I love what it’s doing to me!”
Dan and Jenk were both on their burner cell phones, talking to their wives—both of whom were pregnant. Mark Jenkins gave Izzy a rueful eye-roll before turning away. Danny just completely ignored him, instead frowning down at his phone as if he’d maybe lost his connection.
And although Danny’s wife, Jenn, was farther along in her baby-making journey, it was Marky-Mark’s wife, Lindsey, who was the biggest cause for concern. She’d miscarried last year and was playing this current pregnancy super-safe, at least while still in her first trimester.
And, yeah, the fact that words like trimester were front and center in Izzy’s working vocabulary was proof that conversations with both Danny and Jenk had become rather narrowly focused of late.
Izzy knew that Jenn’s biggest issue was backaches and swollen ankles, while Lindsey was still actively riding the morning sickness train. Like it or not, he and his other SEAL teammates were getting a crash course in Pregnant Wife 101.
Most of it was not new to Iz, who’d been the youngest in his family. He’d grown up with a pack of much older brothers who’d regularly knocked up their girlfriends and/or wives. Starting in his tweens, there was nearly always someone pregnant in the house, sifting through his fridge, searching for the pickles to top her mint chocolate chip ice cream.
It was essential, always, to have salt-free soda crackers at hand. And the sympathetic words, I know you feel exhausted/nauseous/awful/homicidal. I’m so sorry, baby. How can I help? were also good to keep near the tip of one’s baby-making tongue.
But both crackers and placating words—along with other gifts like takeout for dinner or voluntarily vacuuming the house or folding the laundry—were impossible to provide from the other side of the vast Pacific Ocean.
Right now, Izzy and Danny and Jenk were sitting in the airport in Manila, moments from being given the go to participate in the takedown of a commercial cargo vessel that had been hijacked by pirates from a tiny, neighboring island nation.
Alleged pirates. Rumblings from the intel community had made Izzy rather certain that the nameless tiny island nation’s current ass-hat dictator was only calling them pirates, and claiming that the cargo ship had been hijacked so as to bring down the full wrath of the U.S. Navy onto their heads. Other rumblings implied that said pirates were, in fact, representatives from the opposition party, meeting illegally to discuss an impending election that would move the country toward democracy.
Another quirky thing about this sitch was that the SEALs hadn’t been briefed for this mission in some covert ready room at the nearby U.S. military base. In fact, they’d barely been briefed at all.
Instead, Izzy’s team of SEALs, led by the very stern and scary looking Lt. Commander Jazz Jacquette, had trooped through Manila’s commercial airport in full battle gear—sans only their weaponry. Which, had they’d been wearing, would’ve been rattling loudly—sabers and HKs alike. The only thing missing from their ultra-dramatic public display of force had been a neon sign flashing red, white, and blue, reading U.S. Navy SEALs, while it pointed directly at them in all their military tough-guy glory.
Izzy was pretty damn certain that his SEAL Team wasn’t going anywhere—that that go command wasn’t coming—at least not today. He and his SEAL brothers were, instead, an exclamation point on whatever diplomacy was happening. They were the unspoken or else in a message about democracy that was no doubt being delivered to Dictator Ass-Hat.
It wouldn’t surprise him one bit if they marched through the airport a few more times before the stand-down order came through, sometime after midnight tonight.
HoboMofo, who was sitting beside Izzy, was thinking the same thing. “I missed Bree’s meet-my-dad day at school for this?”
The fact that a SEAL who’d been given the most awesome nickname of not just Mofo, but HoboMofo was the single dad of a girl in the fifth grade, was pretty mind-bending. Izzy didn’t know ’Fo all that well, but if he’d been playing a round of Two Truths and a Lie with the other SEAL, and the three statements about the guy had been (1) Wrestles lions for fun; (2) Born on the dark side of the moon; and (3) Lives with his mom and his ten-year-old ballet-dancing daughter named Brianna… Well, Izzy would’ve picked number three as the blatant, flat-out, had-to-be lie.
Mofo, or Mohf for even shorter, could be best described by someone saying, Picture the scariest serial killer you can imagine, with a build like a no-neck monster with hams for hands, give him dead, soulless eyes, a buzz cut that makes his blond hair look oddly colorless and even gray, and then make him twice as huge-large and terrifying… Bingo!
The SEAL even had the requisite bodies-buried-in-the-back-forty Louisiana bayou drawl.
It was kinda fun imagining him in a “World’s Best Daddy” apron, cooking pancakes with mouse ears and dancing with his kid to the soundtrack from The Little Mermaid. Unda dah sea… Yeah, that worked for Izzy in a dangerously perfect way. But he swallowed his laughter, because Mohf was clearly bumming at missing his daughter’s whatever-it-was at school.
“Didn’t I hear you tell Jenkie that Lopez was gonna fill in for you?” Izzy asked. Their teammate, Jay Lopez, had been Left Behind for this current op, after fucking up his knee during a HAHO training jump. He was still hobbling around on crutches, wearing one of those really stupid knee braces that made it so you couldn’t bend your leg. But he’d hobble his way into little Brianna’s class and flash his perfect smile, and give his super-special G-rated I am a Navy SEAL talk.
Most of the little boys and some of the girls in the class would want to grow up to be him. The rest would want to marry him.
Izzy tried to imagine Mohf speaking publicly, even to a bunch of kids, and got a searing vision of sweat pouring off the big man as he attempted to explain the duties of an E-7 SEAL without mentioning the importance of delivering double pops to a terrorist’s head to absofuckinglutely make sure they were not just dead,
but motherfucking dead.
Yeah.
But whatever Mohf was thinking, it wasn’t Thank you Jesus and Jay Lopez, for saving me from that travesty. In fact, at the mention of Lopez’s name, Mohf shook his head and laughed the way a man might laugh when finding out that his house’s sewage line had backed up into the bathtub.
“Yeah,” Mohf said, shooting Izzy a decidedly dark look. “Great. That was actually Jenkin’s idea. Lopez. Fuck.”
Lopez. Fuck. The words didn’t make all that much sense. On top of being charismatic and handsome, Lopez was, like HoboMofo, a hospital corpsman—the Navy’s version of a medic. He was hands down the nicest guy Izzy had ever met, not just in the Teams, but in the entire U.S. Navy. He was sincerely, honestly kind. His name, Jay, was even short for Jesus.
He was great with kids, women fainted when they met him and…
Oh.
There it was. The reason for HoboMofo’s heartfelt Lopez. Fuck.
“So how’s the school year going?” Izzy asked, trying to sound conversational. “For Brianna. Everything okay? She like her teacher…Missus…or maybe Miz…?”
Hobe was a SEAL, which meant that, even as scary and gene-deficient as he looked, he was far from an idiot. He knew exactly what Izzy was fishing for, and he gave Izzy his famous deadeye look. “Yeah,” he drawled as he pushed his massive frame up and out of his seat. “She likes her teacher just fine.”
As HoboMofo walked away, Izzy reached for his phone. He could at least leave a message for Lopez. Back slowly away from the hot fifth-grade teacher…
But before he could dial, Danny Gillman plopped his lanky frame into ’Fo’s still-warm seat.
“I need you to call Eden,” his teammate, former best-frenemy and still relatively new brother-in-law through Izzy’s marriage to Dan’s little sister announced. “Something weird is up with Jenn.”
Way of the Warrior Page 34