by Angel Payne
Anger was most often spawned by fear.
He wasn’t mad at her. He was afraid for her. From the staunch set of his shoulders to the pulse hammering in his throat, the truth of it came into glaring focus. He was terrified.
Sage pulled her hand back but didn’t surrender her position. “What’s going on, Garrett?” she asked softly. “What are you not telling me?”
He turned his gaze back to the shore. That didn’t prevent her from watching more smoke drop over his eyes. “Just leave me a note the next time you go swimming.”
She blinked. Well, hell. So much for the whole attempt at understanding the ogre. His fist of a tone became a punch to her gut, twisting around everything there in a mix of dread, fury, and frustration.
“Fine,” she spat back. “And I’ll eat my damn cauliflower too. Thanks, Dad.”
It was more than a snarky comment, and she knew they both knew it. The guy who’d contributed his sperm to create her hadn’t been around for her since a drunken rant after her tenth birthday party. She’d been through enough therapy since then to realize she’d likely never speak the word “dad” with affection in this lifetime. Garrett loved her anyway. At least he used to. She wasn’t so sure what he felt for her anymore.
Remarkably, her little bratty test made the slash of his mouth soften a little. He reached and palmed the back of her head, making her breath catch from the warmth it spread through her. When he pressed his lips to her forehead, she released the breath on a sappy sigh.
“You hate cauliflower,” he whispered.
His steps back up the dock were wide, heavy, and resigned.
Sage yanked the towel tighter as she watched him eat up the distance with his strides, letting an equally long thread of bittersweet emotion wind around her heart. A little smile curled her lips. He really remembered…even all the little stuff. And his whisper, given with such tenderness, told her that more than a few sparks of his old self still burned inside his warrior’s shell.
Those sparks gave her hope. Maybe, if those cinders were mixed with the smokescreen he’d billowed to keep the whole world out, they could kindle into something new, someone new. A Garrett who was burned yet better. Different but stronger.
A man who could handle the woman she’d become.
She realigned her stance and held her head high. Okay, there was hope. Yeah, it was going to take more bratty moves, more pissing him off, and a lot more of staying one step ahead of him, especially to find out what had caused that new fear in his stare and that new coil of tension in his shoulders. But the hope was here. The hope was real.
As she let it fill her heart, she smiled and murmured, “Yeah, dork. You hate cauliflower too.” And as she followed him back up the dock, she deliberately set a slow, thoughtful pace. Plans like this took time and care, especially when it came to an attempt at changing the will of her intractable, adorable fiancé. And despite his every-move-you-make watchfulness, she found it funny that Garrett hadn’t grabbed a huge clue about their new reality. The last year had molded her will into an entity as formidable as his. She would not fail this mission, even if she damn near killed herself in the process.
Chapter Nine
The woman was going to kill him.
If she didn’t take out her own gorgeous ass first.
Garrett shook his head with those thoughts as he got to Gray Airfield and slammed his Sierra hybrid into park. Had it really been only seven days since they’d gotten back from Bangkok? It felt like eight decades.
If murder was her intent, she was hell-bent on robbing him of his sanity first. And no, it didn’t matter that he’d deduced her little plan from the second she’d smiled coyly at Archer during the trip home. It was all pretty transparent, her grand scheme to keep him so busy “protecting her from herself” that he forgot his original monster act on her in Bangkok.
Right.
He would’ve laughed at the ludicrous track of her thinking if he weren’t so hideously aware of the bigger threat that shadowed her each day. Zeke made that official less than ten hours after the first time he’d called. One line of text was all it took to turn Garrett’s cautious trepidation into full-blown paranoia.
Bounty on S and R is at $50K each. Don’t leave her side. I’ve got Rayna. - Z
Garrett had taken the charge as serious as a mission order from the guy. He left the den couch and sleeping-bagged it on the bedroom floor instead from that night on. His ass and the dock got to be good friends during Sage’s morning swims. As for his chaperone duties during any of her off-condo excursions? There was actually an upside to that. He was developing some damn good skills for bodyguard work after he left Special Forces. He couldn’t imagine any spoiled Seattle heiress or Hollywood starlet jacking his blood pressure the way Sage had the last week.
At first, her antics were mildly amusing. Day one, she’d announced she wanted a tattoo. Aside from helping her with the pain by getting her hammered at Scotch & Vine afterward, that went surprisingly well. Days two and three, she’d subjected him to nonstop trips to six different malls, where he’d contemplated a few waterboarding sessions in lieu of holding her bags and following her through every store. Just when he’d thought the torment couldn’t get worse, she’d announced she was going back to the custom lingerie boutique for a fitting on new bras. It’s okay, she’d told the attendant, he’s my fiancé. He can watch. When he’d been able to break away from the torment of watching someone else play with her breasts for a half hour, he’d impaled the minx with a glare that told her payback was a bitch—and somehow, he would make sure that was the case.
Day four didn’t bring him the chance. Nor did day five. She’d learned there was a two-day emergency preparedness drill going on at Tacoma General, and she’d wanted to help by being a fake disaster victim on which the hospital’s staff could practice. Garrett had grudgingly agreed to the choice, figuring King’s street spies would never think to look for her under wound makeup at a major city medical center, though the drill wasn’t the simple roleplay he’d expected, either. She’d left out the part that she’d be constantly sped into and out of the ER, jostled onto stretchers, dropped from stretchers, and gotten her limbs twisted and banged in a variety of ways and the rest of her body jabbed in ways that had Garrett rear off the wall a few times to remind the bozos they were working on an actual person, not their personal version of Fix-Me Barbie.
He’d gone to bed that night in a fuming silence. His voice came back with thundering resonance the next morning. He’d been tugged awake by the sound of Sage talking on the phone, agreeing to a forty-minute interview at the KOMO 4 station that afternoon. By the time he’d barreled downstairs, demanding she tell the fuckers no joy, she’d already confirmed the interview time and hung up. He’d picked up the headset to call the station back, but Sage stood there with folded arms and a tight glare, made worse by a backdrop of unshed tears.
The shitty thing was, he knew exactly what caused those tears. She didn’t give a crap about the interview, but his unexplained tension was clearly eating at her. If he canceled the interview, she’d demand some answers and drill at him for explanations. That was so not going to happen—so the interview would.
He’d stormed back upstairs and called Zeke, who relayed that Rayna received the same call and had pulled the sulk on him as well. They’d both shown up to the station and tried to comfort each other with the “let’s hide the targets in plain sight” logic, but it didn’t prevent the afternoon from being one of the longest of his life. While the girls had fun and the phone lines were jammed with Seattleites clamoring to welcome them home, he and Z had battled to keep tabs on the fifteen semisecure entrances into the building. Missions in Bumfuck, Egypt, had been less stressful.
Today’s little “Sage adventure” was going to be worse.
If he didn’t kill her first.
He locked the truck with a flick of the fob over his shoulder. As he stuffed his keys into his backpack, his cell rang. When he saw it was Z, a fusion of
dread and relief hit him. He could almost predict what Zeke’s opening comment would be in response to the frantic text he’d fired off before driving here, but his chest already felt lighter knowing one other person on the planet understood the agony assaulting him right now.
He leaned against the outside wall of the hangar and then pressed his wireless earpiece to answer the call on the third ring. Zeke’s roar filled the line as soon as the line activated.
“Is she fucking nuts?”
Garrett grimaced as he glanced up. On the tarmac forty yards away, a DHC-6 Twin Otter was getting checked out, fueled up, and loaded. Several people in nylon parachute suits strode out to the plane with prechecked jump packs. “Apparently, that answer would be yes.”
As he spoke, he swept his stare around the rest of the area. Goddamnit. The Fort Lewis airfield backed right up to several of the McChord Air Force Base tarmacs, making this area one giant snatch-and-go opportunity for any of King’s minions who still knew the base and could get around the security gates in their sleep.
“How the hell did she slip out on you?”
“I took a shower,” he responded. “So sue me.” Hell, he felt like doing much worse than that to himself already. “I thought it was okay. I left her on the couch, half dozing under a blanket and watching a Friends marathon.”
Z made a gagging sound. “Friends. Shit.”
“Uh, yeah. Needless to say, she knew I’d linger in the rain locker.”
“And the second you were under the spray, she left.” His friend blew out a harsh but sympathetic breath. “But she left a note too? I don’t get it.”
Even forming the answer to that made Garrett’s gut feel like a chunk of the concrete under his boots. “The note told me nothing except she was safe and not to worry.”
“Huh?”
“The first ten pages of the Airborne Jump School study guide, dropped in the middle of the driveway, told me something different.”
His buddy chuffed. “Somebody was in a hurry to get into somebody else’s car.”
“Yep.” He emphasized the last of it with a pop of fury.
“And something tells me you know who volunteered for shuttle service.”
“Ditto on that affirmative.” It was all he had to say. He knew Z would figure out the rest. He could practically hear the gears of the guy’s mind at work over the phone.
“Yo, Hawk?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t kill Archer.”
“Is that an absolute order?”
“He knows four languages, and he’s one of the best heads on the team for negotiating.”
“How nice. I don’t negotiate.”
“You don’t say.”
His friend’s knowing mutter got phased out as Garrett activated the skills he was good at. Z often joked about it being good his family name invoked a bird that saw the world ten times sharper than a human, complete with invisible feathers that stood up when an enemy was near. That was the part that worried him now. His feathers were suddenly at full ceremony salute, as if something wasn’t right about the air around here. About the people around here.
Keeping Z on the line, he tucked his head around the corner. After docking his sunglasses atop his head, he swept his gaze through every nook and crevice in the cavernous building. A crew was working on the Chinook chopper that served as the workhorse for the Reserve Aviation unit in supporting local Ranger troops in search-and-rescue operations. Everyone seemed to know their role. Plenty of smack talk flew while an iPod screamed a Nine Inch Nails song. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. In spite of the way NIN always relaxed him, a frustrated snort peeled loose from his throat.
Wait.
Bastard. There he was!
A machinist lingered near one of the work benches, only that was all he seemed to be doing. Garrett watched the guy rearrange a tray of wrenches three times in a row. The soldier’s uniform looked three sizes too big, and his boots didn’t match the regulation eight-inchers worn by the other techs. He was plenty alert, however. His constant glances around the area, made furtively from beneath his cap, were long enough to qualify as sneaky stares. Or outright infiltration.
The intuition became certainty when Garrett observed the biggest object of the guy’s attention.
Sage stood just outside the hangar, laughing at another joke made by Ethan Archer.
Jealousy screamed for entrance to his brain, but Garrett shoved the feeling aside. There was no time to be chums with the hulking green emotional monster. Protecting Sage was more important than kicking someone’s face in for charming her, though this didn’t mean he deleted Archer off his to-do list. Not by a screaming long shot.
“Zeke.”
“What?”
His friend’s voice, weighted with a quarry of stony meaning, conveyed that he’d heard the change in Garrett’s tone. Not for the first time today, Garrett was deeply grateful that the man knew him so well.
“There’s a face in this place that isn’t saying Go Army to me, man.”
“What is it saying?”
“All the King’s men.”
“Fuck. I had a feeling, when you didn’t speak up for a few seconds…”
“Damn glad you’re turning part hawk too.”
“He’s none of the minions we got in Thailand, though.”
“He wouldn’t be. Only King was extradited, and the bastard’s in solitary now at FDC, thank fuck.”
“Well, someone’s still taking orders from him. Every instinct I’ve got doesn’t trust this guy, especially the way he’s sizing up Sage.”
“Can you get a shot of his face on your cell?”
“Working on it.” He scooted around the perimeter of the hangar, hanging in shadows whenever he could. “Stand by.”
He caught a lucky break when one of the machinists called to the “soldier” from his perch on a ladder next to the copter’s rear rotor. The tech needed a special wrench from the tray right in front of the guy. Sneaky Boy was forced to come out of his corner. As he lifted the tool to the tech, Garrett captured three decent shots of his features. Though the asshat didn’t get the wardrobe right, he was spot-on with the guise from the neck up. He was clean-shaven, and beneath his work cap his haircut looked like a flawless high-and-tight.
“Got ’em,” Zeke confirmed less than two minutes later. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Thanks.” Garrett’s gaze swung outside again. Sage was still there and laughing with Archer. Six other guys from the team ambled over to join them. She greeted them with that stunning smile of hers, bouncing a little on her toes, adorable and impish even in her one-piece yellow-and-black jumpsuit. Archer must’ve scrounged that up from somewhere as a cute little gift, damn him.
She was beautiful. Golden. Glowing. Happy. She hadn’t looked like that since the moment he’d cut off her gag in the jungle, half a world away. The realization twisted through him like a poison vine from that jungle, turning his heart just as deep and deadly a shade of green.
“What are you going to do now?” asked Z.
Garrett fought to cut back the vine. He battled hard, damn it. He told himself this wasn’t the time or the place to be a mindless caveman.
None of that seemed to matter when he spat his response to Zeke.
“I’m going to negotiate.”
He clicked the call off before his friend could utter a word of repercussion.
Chapter Ten
“Hell.”
Before she even turned, Sage sensed what Ethan’s tight utterance referenced. More accurately, to whom it referred.
Moments ago, she’d sensed a change in the air itself, a surge of strength that jolted the depths of her stomach and made her nerve endings burst in awareness. When she’d gotten the same rush ten nights ago in Thailand, she’d written it off to her terror as well as the gun battle fireworks outside King’s hut. No terror now. No guns going off now. There was only one common factor to both situations. One person. Only now, his entrance carried
one distinct change.
Garrett was a more magnificent sight this time around.
She struggled to keep in mind that his conqueror’s stride and his granite-hard glower were likely—probably—the result of his wrath with her. Major failure on that front. All she could fixate on were how long his legs looked even in his baggy camouflage pants and how incredible that black T-shirt defined the perfect male V of his torso. She didn’t dare let her gaze travel along his biceps… Another major flop. God, how she looked at him, enduring another attack of oh-my-God-he-isn’t-real because of it. And of course, Hades take him, he’d slipped on his all-man, battle-toughened work boots before chasing after her, too.
Yeah, chasing after you, remember? Not here to pick you up for lunch, not here to bring you some flowers. He looks like a gladiator, but he’s pissed as a lion, girl—and his claws are aimed your direction.
She suddenly craved some cat scratch fever, lion style.
The sunlight hit the top of his head as he stepped clear of the hangar. His hair, still damp from his shower, literally glittered in the sunlight. Before he jerked his sunglasses back over his eyes, the blue flames in them licked out, incinerating what was left of her logic.
She was in deep shit. On a bunch of crazy levels.
She opened her mouth to say something, but not a peep spilled out. She sure as hell wasn’t going to feed his misplaced rage with an apology. They were barely still engaged, if that was what they were still calling it. But a “hey, how’s it hangin’” wasn’t going to help the situation, either.
Garrett handled the dilemma for her. Sort of. From the inside of his jacket, he pulled out a sheaf of papers. “I think you dropped something.”
Her heart thudded in her throat. The Jump School insignia practically lifted off the top page like a magical curse, searing into her conscience. “Thanks.”