by Sherrilyn Kenyon; Dianna Love; Cindy Gerard; Laura Griffin
He rolled over to his back, willed the fatigue away, and indulged himself in his surroundings. Soft greens, pale, pale blues. Cloud whites. The woman knew how to create a serene, peaceful haven.
Ultimately, that’s what he’d come here searching for. A safe haven in the arms of this woman he loved.
“You’re awake.”
He glanced toward the doorway and felt both arousal and gratitude when he saw her standing there. Her pretty blond hair was a mess and he felt a swell of pride that he’d been the one to mess it up. To mess her up. Her lips were swollen. Her eyes were slumberous and dark.
She was wearing his shirt. One button buttoned, falling off her left shoulder. It had never looked better.
He held out a hand. She crossed the room, took it, and sat on the mattress by his hip. He lifted their linked hands and studied the fit of their entwined fingers before shifting his gaze and searching her face.
Her beautiful, open face.
She was uncertain about what would happen next. And she was edgy with it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, because she needed to hear it, he needed to say it, and because it was true.
She closed her eyes and lowered her head, but not before he saw a tear trail down her cheek.
“Come ’ere,” he whispered and tugged her down beside him.
He wrapped her in his arms and held her while she cried.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured against the silk of her hair.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this.” She sounded embarrassed and angry at herself.
He knew why. And it broke his heart.
“I’m not usually such a weenie.”
“Sweetheart.” He squeezed her hard. “I know what you’re made of. You don’t have to apologize for anything. But I do.”
She sat up and wiped her eyes. He scooted over so she could sit cross-legged beside him, the tails of his shirt tucked between her legs.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again.” She looked down at the cuff of his shirt, which hung well past her fingertips.
“That was the original plan.” He reached for an extra pillow and propped it behind his head.
“But you changed your mind.”
Hands crossed behind his head, he stared at the ceiling. “I’m not sure I’m going to be any good at this,” he admitted. “At being the man you need. At being the man I need to be. For you. And for me.”
“Cav—”
He cut her off with a shake of his head. “You need to know up front what you’re getting into, Carrie.”
More than that, he needed to tell her.
“My old man was career military,” he said after the long moment it took for him to decide to just tell it like it was. “Loved the army, his booze, and his family, in that order. He was a good man. Just didn’t always have his priorities straight, you know? He always figured he’d die in action, but in the end it was the booze that got him.”
He glanced at her, then away, and went on before he lost his nerve.
“Look, I don’t want this to come out like the ramblings of a poor, neglected army-brat son of an alcoholic. It wasn’t that way. I admired him. Even though I knew where I stood on his food chain. And it was okay. It set my career course.”
He glanced at her again, half expecting her to ask, but she didn’t. Another measure of her intelligence and sensitivity. She knew instinctively that he had to tell this in his own time, his own way.
“I was CIA,” he said, knowing those three little letters were right now painting a picture in her mind of shadowy warriors pushing the envelope of diplomacy and international law.
“We’re not everything the novelists and journalists would have you believe we are. We don’t do all the things you might have been led to believe we’ve done.”
“You save lives,” she said simply. “You serve your country.”
He swallowed, humbled by her absolute, unquestioning belief in his motives and integrity.
“Yeah,” he said. “All that.”
He looked at her then. “It… it takes a toll after a while.”
“How could it not?”
He firmed his lips, looked away. This was the hard part. “Service to country isn’t all I inherited from the old man,” he finally admitted.
She was quiet for a while. “You said he was an alcoholic.”
“Yeah.” He looked back at her. She watched him with quiet eyes, no judgment. “And I don’t want to be.”
Her gaze held his, steady and unwavering in the face of what he hadn’t said. That he had a problem. That he wanted to fix it.
“That’s why I resigned,” he clarified, and even now he felt the weight of that decision and the shock wave that had rippled through the chain of command. “I’ve developed an unhealthy relationship with scotch over the years.”
“To help you cope.”
And to help him forget. “I don’t want to use that crutch anymore. I can’t use that crutch anymore.”
“Then you won’t,” she said simply.
He smiled, feeling cynical and weary. “You don’t know me well enough to know that. And I don’t deserve that much credit.”
“This is what I know.” She reached for his hand and folded it between both of hers. “I know that I love you. I know that for you to open up to me this way, you love me, too.”
“I do.” He reached for her and pulled her down until her mouth was a breath away from his. “I do love you. More than life.”
“Damn,” she whispered against his mouth. “I’m going to cry again.”
And he was going to spend the rest of his life making sure she didn’t ever have a reason to cry again.
“SO WHAT TOOK you so long?” Carrie teased as she wiped her hands on a napkin.
They were naked in the middle of her bed. Still working on slaking their desire for each other, refortifying their energy with a bucket of take-out chicken.
“To come for you? The guys and I had a little unfinished business to tend to.” Cav set the bucket aside.
She settled into his arms like he’d had a place for her there forever. “The guys?”
“Reed, Green, Colter, and Black.”
Her eyes went all soft and adoring. “You went back to the mines.”
“I told you I wouldn’t forget about those people.”
He couldn’t save the world. He’d thought he could once, but he knew better now. He could save those starving, abused souls who’d been enslaved at the Myanmar ruby mine, though.
And thanks to this woman, he might even be able to save himself.
“Thank you,” she whispered, pressing soft kisses along his jaw line.
“The pleasure”—he rolled her beneath him, thanking good fortune that she’d come into his life—“is all mine.”
When she fell asleep a little while later, he simply laid there and watched her. She was smiling. At peace.
So was he. He’d made the right decision to come to her.
He still had no idea what his future held. After years of service, that should have been unnerving. But now he had Carrie by his side.
Haven. Yeah. It was right here, he thought, drifting off to sleep. Right by this woman’s side.
Unstoppable
LAURA GRIFFIN
One
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN
0200 hours
Sometimes they went in with a flash and crash, but Lieutenant Gage Brewer always preferred stealth. And tonight, because the team’s mission was to outsmart a band of Taliban insurgents, stealth was the operative word.
The night smelled like smoldering garbage and rot as Gage crept through the darkened alley in an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. They were in a hot zone, a place where anyone they encountered would like nothing better than to use them for target practice.
As the SEAL team’s point man, Gage moved silently, every sense attuned to the shadows around him. Particularly alert at this moment was Gage’s sixth sense—that vague,
indefinable thing his teammates liked to call his frog vision. Gage didn’t know what to call it; he only knew it has saved his ass a time or two.
In the distance, the muted drone of an electric generator in this city still prone to blackouts. And, closer still, footsteps. The slow clomp of boots on gravel, moving steadily nearer, then pausing, pivoting, and fading away.
Wait, Gage signaled his team. Lieutenant Junior Grade Derek Vaughn melted into the shadows, followed a heartbeat later by Petty Officers Mike Dietz and Adam Mays. Gage approached the corner of the building, an unimposing brick structure that was supposedly a textile factory. Crouching down, he slipped a tiny mirror from the pocket of his tactical vest and held it at an angle in order to see around the corner.
A solitary shadow ambled north toward the front of the building, an AK-47 slung casually across his body. The shadow told Gage three things: the intel they’d been given was good, this building was under armed guard, and what was going down tonight at this factory had nothing to do with textiles.
Gage eased back into the alley.
“Sixty seconds,” Vaughn whispered.
Gage had known Vaughn since BUD/S training. Besides being a demolitions expert, the Texan had the best sense of time and direction of any man in Alpha squad, and tonight he was in charge of keeping everyone on schedule.
Soundlessly, they waited.
Then, like clockwork, a distant rat-tat-tat as the rest of Alpha squad exchanged carefully staged, nonlethal gunfire in an alley much like this one.
Beside Gage, the building came alive. Footsteps thundered in a stairwell. Excited voices carried through the walls. A door banged open and more shouts filled the night as men poured from the building. A truck engine roared to life. Gage and his teammates watched from the shadows as a pickup loaded with heavily armed insurgents peeled off, no doubt to help wipe out the American commandos gullible enough to walk into a trap.
Twenty more seconds and Vaughn gave the signal. Gage peered around the corner. The guard now stood in a pool of light spilling down from a second-story window. The sour expression on his bearded face told Gage he wasn’t too happy about being stuck guarding hostages while his comrades got to slaughter American soldiers. His lips moved, and Gage guessed he was cursing his prisoners—two Afghani teachers whose heinous crime had been taking a job at a newly opened school for girls.
Their boss, the school’s principal, had been beheaded on live Webcam two days ago.
Watching the footage had made Gage’s blood boil. But his anger was tempered now, a tightly controlled force he would use to carry out his mission.
In addition to rescuing the Afghanis, the SEALs were tasked with finding and retrieving forty-two-year-old Elizabeth Bauer, an American reporter who had been working on a story for the Associated Press when the Taliban stormed the school. She was thought to be next in line for execution, if she wasn’t dead already.
Gage chose to believe she was still alive—at least, pictures of her beheading weren’t yet bouncing around cyberspace. The picture Gage had seen—the one provided during the briefing—reminded him of his aunt back in Chicago. The minute he’d seen it, Gage had felt an emotional connection that went beyond his usual hundred-and-ten-percent commitment to an op.
The guard turned the corner. Vaughn and Dietz fell back, circling around to the building’s other side.
Follow me, Gage signaled Mays. The kid was young, green. He’d grown up in Tennessee and spoke with the thickest accent Gage had ever heard. But he could shoot like nobody’s business.
A quiet thud as they rounded the corner told Gage that Vaughn and Dietz had neutralized the guard about ten seconds ahead of schedule. Gage stepped over the lifeless body and entered the building with his finger on the trigger of his M4. He glanced around. The space was dim and cavernous, empty except for a few junked-out trucks and some tires piled in corners. A band of light shone onto the dirt floor from some sort of upstairs office. Given the satellite dish they’d seen mounted outside, Gage figured it was used as a media room. According to their intel, the hostages were being kept in the basement.
Vaughn went up to take out any hostiles who might have stayed behind. Gage scanned the room’s perimeter and quickly located an open doorway leading down to a lower level.
The earthen steps were steep and Gage took them silently. Clearing out the bulk of the tangos with a diversion had been a good plan, but one that relied on a fair amount of luck. Gage was a gambling man, and the first rule of gambling was that luck eventually ran out. He expected an armed guard at the foot of the stairs and that’s exactly what he found.
Gage delivered a well-placed blow with the butt of his rifle, rendering the man unconscious before his weapon even clattered to the floor. A collective gasp went up from across the room as Gage knelt down to collect the Kalashnikov. He slung it over his shoulder while Mays zip-cuffed the guard. Their orders were to keep at least one of them alive, if possible, in case they needed him for information.
The hostages stumbled to their feet and Gage turned his flashlight on them. The beam illuminated two slightly built Afghani men and a fortyish woman.
“Lieutenant Gage Brewer, U.S. Navy.” He zeroed in on the woman. “Ma’am, are you—”
“Betsy Bauer.” She reached out and touched his arm, as if to make sure he was real. “And I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life.”
Vaughn tromped down the steps to join them. “All clear up there.” He held up a black piece of cloth. It was a flag with a skull and a sword painted on it, and Gage recognized it from the video footage.
He’d found the beheading room.
“Anyone injured?” This from Dietz, the team corpsman. “Anything that might prevent you from—”
“We’re fine.” Betsy Bauer cast a worried look at the door. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Gage’s thoughts exactly. He led everyone up the stairs. Mays and Dietz guarded their flanks and Vaughn watched their six.
“Five minutes,” Vaughn said from the back.
They were ahead of schedule. Another stroke of luck. More than four minutes until their helo would drop down in a nearby field. The other half of their squad would already be on it, after having spent a few minutes pretending to be ambushed by Taliban fighters before vanishing into the night.
Gage started to get anxious as he neared the door. That damned sixth sense again…
His gaze landed on something long and black sticking out from the back of one of the trucks. He jogged over to investigate.
“Holy shit.”
“What is it?” Mays asked.
Gage blinked down at the truck bed. “I’m looking at a shit-ton of weapons. RPGs, AKs, a couple of Carl Gs.” He glanced up at Vaughn and a flash of understanding passed between them.
“Let’s hit the extraction point,” Gage said, jogging back to the group. He checked the surrounding area before hustling the hostages to a nearby clearing. Gage watched the reporter, relieved that she seemed to be moving okay. No telling what hell she’d endured these past forty-eight hours.
A familiar whump whump grew louder as their helo approached. Gage scanned the area, ready to eliminate anything that might try to botch their extraction. Dust and trash kicked up as the Seahawk dropped down onto the landing zone. Gage loaded in the hostages, then counted the heads inside. Every man in Alpha squad accounted for. They were good to go.
Another glance at Vaughn. He was a demo man, as was Gage, and they were thinking the same thing.
“Two minutes,” Gage yelled at his commanding officer.
Dirt tornadoed around them as Gage squinted into the Seahawk. It was too loud—and time was too short—for him to explain what he wanted to do. It was a critical moment. Did his CO trust him or not? The officer gave a brief nod.
Gage and Vaughn took off at a dead run. In under ninety seconds they had the two truck beds rigged with enough C-4 to blow up a tank. No way were they going to leave a fuckload of ordnance around for the enemy to
use against U.S. troops.
“Ten seconds,” Vaughn said.
Gage’s heart pounded as he added more C-4, just to be sure. Then they got the hell out.
Less than a minute later, an earsplitting blast ripped the night. Gage’s face hit the dirt. The earth shook beneath him as the building fireballed and then fireballed again. Debris rained down around him—concrete, mud, chunks of brick.
Burning embers pelted him as he tried to move, but his body seemed cemented to the ground. Vaughn grabbed his flak vest and hauled him to his feet just as a truck careened around a corner and barreled straight for them.
“Go, go, go!”
They leaped for the helo as a dozen arms reached out to pull them aboard. And then Gage was inside, his heart hammering, his face pressed flat against the metal floor as the Seahawk lifted into the air. Machine-gun fire sputtered below, and Gage sat up, shocked. He gazed down at the inferno. He glanced at Vaughn.
A little too much boom, his friend’s look seemed to say, and Gage smiled. He couldn’t believe they’d made it out of there unscathed.
A bullet whizzed past his cheek. Gage whirled around.
He wouldn’t smile again for a very long time.
Lower Pecos River Valley, Texas
Three months later
KELSEY QUINN CROUCHED at the bottom of the damp grave, her heart pounding against her sternum.
It couldn’t be. She’d shot this sector with the radar herself. And yet as she dragged the trowel ever so gently across the earth, she felt it again—that barely perceptible resistance.
“Kelsey?”
Reaching for the sable hair brush tucked into the back pocket of her shorts, she bent closer to the patch of dirt. She dusted away a layer of silt, blew, then dusted again. Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. She held her breath as the smooth slope of a cranium began to emerge.
“Kelsey?”
Her brush moved swiftly now, in time with her pulse. Cranial sutures not yet fused. It was a child.
“Dr. Quinn?”
Everything went dark. Kelsey’s gaze snapped to the person who’d stepped in front of the lamp. She recognized her field assistant’s gangly silhouette instantly.