by Anya Nowlan
“I thought Connor would burst out of that damn suit, I swear,” the troublemaking one said, chuckling as he leaned back and undid the first two buttons on his dress shirt.
She hadn’t noticed that they were both wearing suits and that they looked damn good in them too. Then again, they were definitely the kind of men who would have looked mouthwatering in anything. Working at a restaurant for the past six months had really made her appreciate the occasional piece of eye candy—it seemed like the kind of guys who could fill out a suit were paradoxically the only ones who never came by the Lazy Tuxedo Frog.
“You can give the guy a break, Tex. Him being off on his honeymoon is the only reason why we’re getting to go down home,” the other one said, shrugging off his black jacket and folding it next to him.
They both had just two light duffels with them that seemed half-empty. She thought with almost painful discomfort at the two huge, hulking suitcases she had waiting in her sleeping car. And her trip was only supposed to be two weeks long.
“True. I’m happy for him. The whole raising-a-family thing is sounding more and more like a good idea,” Tex commented and it was then that Madeline snuck another glance at them, Tex locking eyes with her.
She blushed like a schoolgirl, quickly looking back at her book. Of course, he wouldn’t let her get away with it.
“What about you, Miss? What’s your take on families? Yay or nay?” Tex asked, smirking knowingly.
Yeah, he had her. No point in pretending like she hadn’t been sneaking looks at him and his brother like a love-struck puppy. Closing her book again—at the same location as before, no surprise—she looked up and glanced from Tex to his brother and then back again. It was certainly the first time two guys who looked like they were part of the Olympic swimming team had asked her how she felt about babies and marriage. So she had to give them a point on creative openers!
“I’m Madeline. I like kids. I like the idea of having a family – I have three brothers and a sister, so you can imagine I’m used to the idea of having a big pack around me.”
That seemed to strike them as amusing, as the men shared a quick smirk. Madeline frowned slightly but kept going, using the excuse to get away from her work for a second longer.
“But I think kids can only come to a household with love. I don’t want to bring a new life into a situation where he or she is not at the heart of a family, surrounded by affection. I don’t want to be the kind of woman who has to be supermom, doing it all alone.”
She bit into her tongue, trying to make herself shut up. Why the hell was she telling them all of that? She didn’t even know their names, not really, so sharing intimate details about her twisted little mind was not exactly kosher behavior. Tex’s brother seemed to share her opinion, though, nodding his head.
“I’m Thatch. That knucklehead over there is Tex,” Thatch introduced them and Tex gave a short wave and a wink that seemed to be a lot more loaded than she could have expected.
“Pleased to meet you,” Madeline said, smiling genuinely and feeling some stress lifting from her shoulders.
So far, so good. She hadn’t made a complete fool of herself yet! Not that she was trying to impress these godlike creatures that the train spirits had decided to shove in her path, but there was something about the whole exchange that made her feel warm and fuzzy inside for not having fucked up.
“So, are you two from Louisiana? I think I recognize the accent,” she said, feeling a little more confident.
“Creole, born and raised,” Tex announced, grinning. “And I bet you’re a New Orleans girl too, right? I never miss a pair of Louisiana legs,” he said, that bad boy smirk glued on his lips.
Madeline tucked her legs underneath her a bit more, sort of happy with the fact that she’d chosen to wear a yellow and white sundress that day that looked nice even with her pale complexion. She had the bad luck of being a Louisiana redhead—the heat killed her every time. And of course, to get away from it, she’d moved to California for school. The hits kept on coming.
“Yup, I’m from New Orleans,” she said, very aware of the pink blush that must have been lighting up her cheeks and making Tex grin even wider.
She glanced at Thatch, the brother with sterner features and more gold in his eyes, and she was not at all surprised to find him camouflaging a slight wry grin too. Great, they were both bad, one of them just hid it better. This had all the makings of being one fun conversation. Or a really awkward one, depending on how she managed to play it.
“Means we might have the whole ride home together, hmm?” Thatch noted mildly, leaning back and giving her a long look as he moved on his seat a bit, closer to her.
Suddenly, she felt very much like a deer caught in the headlights. Her stomach twisted and she felt an odd tingling sensation in her fingers and toes. Her ears might have been humming a little as she looked from Tex to Thatch and then back again, goose bumps prickling on her skin.
Okay. You can’t make this up. They’re hitting on you. You! Freckles and yesterday’s hairdo and everything.
It wasn’t that she had anything against her own looks—hell no. She was tall and curvy and had inherited her mama’s wide hips, so she knew she made a certain kind of man look after her in a long, ponderous kind of way. But there were never two of them. And they never looked like… that.
Gulp.
The ground seemed to rumble under her and for a second, Madeline wondered if it really took that little to shake her world. By the way that Thatch and Tex jumped up and into action immediately along with it told her that it wasn’t just her feeling the earthquake.
“Shit,” Tex commented matter-of-factly, throwing off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.
Both of them pulled the duffels up on the seat and unzipped them almost in unison. Madeline yelped and pressed herself against the seat as they pulled out matching assault rifles and ammo belts, hooking the belts around themselves and checking the contents of them.
“Don’t worry, sugar, we’re the good guys,” Tex said, grinning like someone had given him a shot of endorphins.
“I don’t know about that. But for the sake of this conversation, let’s assume that we are. At least this time,” Thatch commented with a smirk.
“The hell’s going on? Who are you?!” Madeline gasped, her mind racing far faster than the train.
“Your knights in shining armor,” Tex said, stepping closer to her and taking her hand.
He kept his green eyes trained on her grays as he raised her hand to his lips and kissed the top of it. Her heart literally skipped a beat. It was ridiculous. His touch made a whole new kind of heat rush through her at supersonic speeds.
“Come on, Prince Charming, let’s save the world and then flirt, okay?” Thatch growled, yanking Tex toward the door by his collar. “But I’m expecting to see you later, Miss Madeline. Don’t go too far,” Thatch said, giving her a quick salute and then disappearing out of the door along with his brother.
Madeline was left sitting there, dumbfounded, her damn physics book still in her lap.
“What the hell!” she said out loud, just when another loud bang shook the train.
It was only then that it dawned on her—those were explosions. And the view outside her window was muddled by thick black smoke coming somewhere from the front of the train.
Was it a good time to panic now?
CHAPTER THREE
Thatch
“It’ll be a fast trip! Just standing around, nothing will actually happen!” Tex hissed, running down the train cars. “I told you we should have taken the midnight one and skipped the work. I could be flirting with that hot piece of ass right now instead of saving the world all over again.”
“Can we skip the dramatics for now and argue later? We took the job, now we got to see it through,” Thatch growled, his hands locked around his rifle.
People were screaming around them, but he wasn’t entirely sure if it was because of the black smoke that licked at the
sides of the passenger cars or if it was because of him and Tex. They cut an odd picture, partially dressed in their black suits from Connor’s wedding, plowing down the corridors with assault rifles in their hands.
For a second, Thatch wondered what the hot chick in the sitting room had thought when she saw them pulling out their guns and swinging into action like a couple of action movie Rambos. He made a mental note to track her down later when this nonsense was put to rest. You know, to make sure she was okay. A redhead, especially one with a nice set of legs on her, always got his blood pumping as hard as any mission could.
“Sure,” Tex grumbled, slamming a door open with his foot and sliding in with seasoned ease. “We can get home and then pretend like this is normal dinner table talk. Mama will love it.”
Rolling his eyes slightly, Thatch took up a flanking position as they drew nearer to the front of the train. Tex had always been the melodramatic one out of the two of them. In fact, he had also always been the one getting them into trouble, so the fact that now it was Thatch that was getting them muddled up in other people’s business was an unwelcome surprise.
“Our fathers are generals. I’m pretty sure she’s used to this crap,” Thatch growled under his breath, his shoulders slouching forward as he had to squeeze through one of those narrow corridors that hooked up a service car to a passenger one.
The smoke was getting thicker now, seeping in through half-opened windows and the couplings between the cars. It was getting harder to breathe. Counting his blessings, Thatch noted that there weren’t that many people on the train. No wonder.
There were far more comfortable ways of getting to Louisiana these days than taking the forty-eight hour train ride. Even he and Tex usually flew, to save time and their sanity, but this time Thatch had insisted on the train.
You had your reasons, he reminded himself.
Barely noticing that he had a snarl on his lips, Thatch already knew things weren’t good. The job they’d taken on the train was supposed to be an easy one. Even though his team, Squad Six, was officially out of commission because of their leader’s honeymoon, that didn’t mean they couldn’t work. And while most of the others chose not to, Thatch had insisted that he and Tex try and make some cash off of their trip down to see the pack.
Tex would have preferred to just get drunk in the dining car, but he was never one to back away from a fight, and so the explosives expert of Squad Six was pretty easy to convince. Especially when Thatch personally promised that nothing would happen anyway.
Guess I was fucking wrong about that last bit, though, he noted to himself, slamming against the half-rigid walls of one of the corridors while Tex took the other, hearing noises from farther down the train.
They paused for only a moment before moving onward. No one was running in their direction anymore; the front of the train had either been cleared out or there had been no one there to begin with. Either option seemed questionable to Thatch.
These trains weren’t usually full, but this one was eerily empty. He had to wonder if it was by design, if whoever had put up the freelance gig had made sure that most passengers would pick another time for their trip through the wild South.
“I don’t hear anything anymore,” Thatch said, sneaking a look at Tex. “That’s either great for us or horrible for everyone else.”
“Why not both?” his brother commented, peeling himself off their position and running down the last car at full speed.
All the locks were essentially blown off and the route to the engine was open before them. Thatch could barely see two feet in front of him with the thick smoke surrounding them, making it fucking impossible to breathe. He moved forward thanks to his hearing, listening to Tex’s steps and following in his footsteps. A gust of fresh air just about smacked him in the face when they got through the service car, kept as a place for the engineer and some supplies that were occasionally needed in the freight engine.
Thatch usually would have expected to see an engineer lounging somewhere, but currently it was deafeningly quiet, except for the high-pitched whine coming from the engine that definitely didn’t sound normal.
“It’s locked,” Tex said, fumbling for something in his pockets. “And not just locked. I think they’ve fused the doors shut.”
“Shit,” Thatch said, his jaw set rigidly as he tried to see through the small slits in the door into the engine room.
All he could see was thick, suffocating smoke.
Not a small mission.
“What are they supposed to be carrying in this thing?” Tex asked, slapping some gray putty on the links of the door that seemed to hold the hardest.
“Never specified, like I said. I was told that the clients would feel better if they knew there was some extra security during the trip. With those Marines we saw before, this couldn’t be entirely civilian, though,” Thatch mused, knowing to duck back when Tex did his magic.
The sound of the explosion that threw the doors open was nothing compared to the loud, wailing cracks that had previously shaken the entire train. Tex dove in first, always the foolhardy one, and Thatch followed. Their level of training was the kind that was ingrained deep in their DNA. There was no need to think, just act. Everything was muscle memory, leaving them plenty of time to recalibrate and recalculate if the situation warranted it.
Tex coughed, fumbling through the narrow freight car in front of Thatch. It was one long, massive engine block when it came down to it and the engine room itself was small and cramped even for a train’s standards. When Thatch’s foot hit something soft and solid, he closed his eyes for a moment. Of course.
“Found the engineer,” he commented shallowly, dropping down to feel the man’s pulse.
His hand came away sticky with blood. He was still warm to the touch, but there was nothing that Thatch could do for the man.
“Think I found the brakeman too,” Tex said. “Dead as a doornail.”
“Yup.”
“Well, that’s good,” Tex commented wryly and Thatch shrugged past him toward the windows.
Slamming them shut to keep at least some of the smoke out, he tried to look out and see where the smoke was coming from. It seemed like the whole damn engine was trying to go up in flames, though he couldn’t actually see any threatening yellow or orange licks of fire yet. Frowning, he searched through the console, looking for the communications station. When he found it and rolled through the frequencies, he heard nothing but silence. The comms were busted.
“Comms are down,” he said, snaking his cellphone out of his pocket. “And there’s no reception here.”
He dialed the emergency number anyway, raising it to his ear.
“Nothing. Someone’s jamming radio and cell reception here. Whatever’s going on, this isn’t some little trainjacking.”
“Yeah? What tipped you off? The fact that no one’s in the engine room and the whole fucking thing is smoking like it’s a steam engine, or did the two dead bodies really nail that one in?” Tex snorted, inhaling deeply with his nose scrunching as he must have caught a whiff of something. “That isn’t just burning, you know. Someone’s sabotaged that engine with a liquid explosive.”
“Guess we better find the brakes on this fucker, then,” Thatch said, cursing their collective luck.
Jumping at the job now seemed like a really shitty choice. But he needed the money. That had been his reason to pick up a number of distasteful missions lately, all the way down to volunteering as the comms guy for other teams. He knew he was the best that The Firm had to offer, so any rapid response team was happy to have him. But it was starting to slowly weigh on his body and mind, and this was another hit in the gut, one of many.
Thatch went through the controls methodically and Tex stood guard at the door. Between the two of them, they made a dangerous combination, as most werewolf Alpha twins did. Trained to win and to succeed from when they were pups, losing was never an option. Whether it was in life, war, or who could down the most shots, the C
rawley brothers had always been fiercely competitive. They fit in well with the rest of their team in that sense, all shifters and ex-SEALs.
He found the hard levers that were supposed to control the brakes. Pulling on them, he expected resistance, but the levers slid back easily and then flipped back to the original position when he let go of them. His stomach dropped.
“Shit, is it me or is this thing speeding up?” Tex asked, scuffing a hand through his brown hair.
Thatch looked out and saw the countryside rolling by at increasing speeds. He’d been on plenty of trains in his time and this one as well when he was younger, and it was going far faster than it was supposed to be. Checking the speed gauge, Thatch groaned as he saw it steadily climbing past seventy-five already. It was supposed to go at around a steady forty-four at best.
“Yup,” he acknowledged softly.
His mind was racing. Cut off from the rest of the world, plunging down the railroad tracks like something straight out of hell and with a damaged engine, the recipe for disaster was so easy that even Thatch could cook it up.
The Sunset Limited line was one of the least traveled lines in the whole country, but even that one went through a couple of high-density cities. If the train came off the tracks in one of those, they’d be thoroughly fucked. Or, well, odds were that everyone onboard this miserable steel coffin was already fucked, but jumping the track in a city would just make it that much worse.
When it seemed like shit couldn’t get any worse, a distant banging noise sounded again, making the train shudder and creak dangerously as it whirred down its demonic path. Tex and Thatch locked gazes and the seriousness of the situation was lost on neither of them.