Privilege: Special Tactical Units Division: Book Two

by Sandra Marton

  Table of Contents

  PRIVILEGE

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Dear Reader

  PRIVILEGE

  Special Tactical Units Division, Book Two

  By Sandra Marton

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Sandra Marton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. 2016

  CHAPTER ONE

  7:30 pm, a spring evening, The Landing Zone Bar & Grill, Santa Barbara, California

  It was Saturday night, and the LZ was jumping.

  Every vinyl-covered booth was taken. So were the high-backed stools that lined the long, old-fashioned zinc bar. AC/DC was blasting from what looked like a 1940s jukebox but was really a digital miracle that could belt out early Elvis, up-to-the-minute Foo Fighters and everything in between at the touch of a button. The two pool tables way in the back of the long, narrow room were seeing action. The beer and ale were cold, the burgers were hot…

  So were the women.

  Some were wives and girlfriends, here with their men, because this was, after all, a Saturday night.

  Some were what could most charitably be called groupies.

  The thing was, the Landing Zone wasn’t just a bar, it was the bar for the guys based at Camp Condor, on the beach just a handful of miles away. Condor was the home base for the military’s Special Tactical Units Division. STUDs for short, and, yeah, the guys in the units took a lot of grief over that name.

  Chayton Olivieri, who had commandeered a booth ten minutes ago, raised his bottle of Stone IPA to his lips and took a long, thirsty swallow.

  Truth was, they were proud of it.

  Becoming a STUD was hard. Hell, hard didn’t come close to describing it. Most of the men in the units had been recruited as SEALs, as had Chay. And if SEAL training was the toughest in the world, STUD training took that level of difficulty and upped it a notch.

  On average, of the twenty guys who entered a STUD class, five or six would be lucky to make it through.

  The LZ was almost always packed with guys in training, guys who’d just graduated, guys newly returned from the kinds of missions you didn’t talk about, not only because you were sworn to secrecy but because the last thing you wanted to do now that you were home was relive what had gone down in some shithole of a place with a name most civilians couldn’t pronounce.

  The bottom line was that if you filled a bar with hard-bodied military operatives who looked like Special Forces recruitment ads, who had a dangerous edge to them even when they were partying, you had a place that drew women like flies to sugar.

  And most of the women were tens.

  Nines, anyway.

  Like the brunette with the endless legs sitting at the bar right across from Chay.

  He’d been watching her for a couple of minutes.

  She knew he was watching her. He could read the signs. Like the way she crossed those great legs and swung one back and forth the couple of times she’d glanced at him over her shoulder.

  Nice.

  She was easy on the eyes, especially to a man who’d spent the past six weeks looking at mountains, valleys, men out to kill him, and women wrapped head to toe in voluminous black.

  Pretty face, if a little too heavily made up for his tastes, but his tastes weren’t written in stone. Long straight hair that hung to her ass. She was wearing something red and almost sheer on top—he’d already seen the thrust of her nipples against it—and what he figured was supposed to be a skirt below the sheer red thing.

  Actually, below her belly button.

  The skirt ended at the tops of her thighs. After that came those long legs. And finally a pair of spike heels.

  Chay drank some more ale.

  All in all, she looked fine.

  She’d look even better once he got her out of that top and that skirt, but he’d tell her to keep the stilettos. And the thong. Experience told him she was sure to be wearing one. It would be lace. Or silk. Black. Or red.

  He grinned to himself.

  When it came to thongs, he wasn’t a choosy kind of guy.

  He wasn’t choosy about women, either.

  Well, not true.

  He was into eye candy. Nothing wrong with that. And he liked women who were fun to be with. Uncomplicated. Undemanding. He wasn’t the kind who signed on for more than a couple of nights, maybe a couple of weeks, max.

  There wasn’t room in his life for a woman who wanted more, not just because of the demands of his career but because he wasn’t into anything more involved than that.

  And he sure as hell wasn’t into women who were always testing a man. No matter how good a woman looked, if she was confrontational, argumentative, if she was a constant challenge or, to put it bluntly, a constant pain in the ass, why would he want to be with her?

  Chay took a long pull at his bottle of ale.

  A smart dude avoided babes like that.

  Easy enough, because no matter how hot they looked, the warning signs were easy to read and once Chay read them, he stayed away.

  Hell, he stayed away in general.

  Here tonight. Gone tomorrow. That was his motto. The same motto lots of guys in the units lived by. The motto his best friend, his blood brother, Tanner Akecheta, had lived by…

  Until six months ago.

  Tanner had not only fallen for a women, gone into a relationship, he’d gotten married. Amazing. Even more amazing, Tanner was happy.

  If he was happy, then Chay was, too.

  As far as he could tell, Tanner’s wife, Alessandra, seemed like the right woman for him—once you got past the fact that it was hard to see how there could ever be a right woman for a man. Tanner kept urging him to take some time off, head up to their ranch in the Dakotas, spend some time riding, fishing, hunting, just hanging out.

  Tanner had met his wife on a mission. He’d rescued her from kidnappers in a Central American hellhole called San Escobal. Chay had been the COM Op in charge, communicating with Tanner via satphone, coordinating their rescue. He’d worked from an office at Camp Condor, meaning he’d ended up spending time with Alessandra’s family.

  With her sister, Bianca.

  Chay took a long, cooling swig of ale.

  One thing was certain.

  Tanner’s wife and her sister couldn’t possibly share much more than their last name. Last names, to be accurate. They were both Bellini-Wildes and man, when it came to not getting that two-name thing right with the sister, you were in deep shit.

  Fact was, you were in deep shit with her most of the time.

  The
good news? She was hot. To look at, anyway, because the bad news was that she had all the warmth of an ice cube, plus she was a pain in the ass. A world-class pain in the ass.

  The brunette took a quick glance over her shoulder, held a couple of seconds’ worth of eye contact, flashed a smile, then went back to talking and laughing with her girlfriends.

  Chay drank some more ale.

  Another few minutes, he’d make a move.

  Jesus, the sister. What a piece of work.

  Bianca Wilde. Bianca Bellini Wilde, if you didn’t want her to rip you a new one, but forget that.

  It made more sense to think of her as Bianca the Tigress.

  Talk about confrontational women…

  She’d turned up at Camp Condor, marched right into his space and tried to take over. At first he’d thought it was because her old man was a four-star and she figured that gave her special rights, but in no time at all he’d realized her attitude had nothing to do with that.

  It had to do with her.

  The Tigress was, to put it charitably, a ball-buster.

  He’d put her in her place quickly enough.

  She’d driven him up the wall, demanding information she had no business demanding, telling him how he should be handling things, interfering every minute and every way she could, making his life hell until, finally, he’d taken her on, gone head-to-head with her, told her she was a total, complete, absolute pain in the ass and if she didn’t want him to pick her up and literally throw her out of his office, she’d better back off.

  The look on her face when’d told her that had been just wonderful.

  The thought of tossing her out had been equally wonderful.

  Or maybe it had been the thought of picking her up. Hoisting her off her feet, lifting her in his arms, finding out if there wasn’t a way to convert all that icy need to control the world into heat and flame.

  Of course, he hadn’t touched her. Why would he?

  Chay looked around, saw his waitress and signaled for another ale.

  Which was why it was impossible to explain what had happened at the wedding. The bride’s sister. The groom’s best friend. Of necessity, they’d ended up sitting next to each other. Being called to the dance floor. Posing for pictures and smiling through their teeth.

  They’d managed to be polite for the sake of the bridal couple.

  Then everybody had gone outside to see the newlyweds off.

  Somehow, he’d ended up alone on the porch with the Tigress. And man, she’d done her best to put him in his place while he’d done his best not to react…

  And then, somehow or other, she’d ended up in his arms.

  All these months later, he could still remember that kiss.

  The feel of her body against his.

  The softness of her mouth.

  The almost overwhelming desire to take her. There. Right there. No preliminaries. No explanations. He’d wanted to pull up her skirt, unzip his trousers and bury himself inside her.

  The kiss had ended, fast.

  So had those ridiculous imaginings.

  The cause? He still couldn’t figure it out. Too much champagne, maybe. There sure as hell was no other way to explain it. She’d made some lady-of-the-manor crack about him never touching her again. He’d followed up with some smartass remark. Then she’d gone back inside the house and he’d driven to Dallas, and he hadn’t thought about Bianca Bellini Wilde again…

  Come on, dude.

  Yeah. He had. He’d thought about that kiss, too, for no reason he could come up with. Replayed it, especially the part where she’d kissed him back. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe he’d imagined it. Maybe…

  “Here you go, handsome.”

  He looked up, smiled and said “Thanks” as the waitress plopped a bottle of ale on the scarred wooden table.

  Jesus.

  Chay lifted the bottle, brought it to his lips and took a drink.

  Why was Bianca Bellini Wilde in his head? Truth was, she’d been there a few times—okay, several times over the last few months. And that was crazy. Crazy. Especially tonight, his first night back in the world…

  “Such a waste.”

  The voice was female, a sexy purr.

  The brunette was standing next to the booth, or maybe it made more sense to say she was damn near draped over it, the sheer red top gaping enough so he knew with certainty that she was braless beneath it.

  “This big booth,” she said. “So much space for one man.” She smiled and ran the tip of her tongue lightly over her bottom lip. “Don’t you believe in sharing?”

  He knew the correct answer. He’d say, I believe in sharing everything, baby. Where would you like to start?

  And she’d laugh and say she was here for the weekend, she had a room nearby, one of the motels on the ocean, probably, and her girlfriends would know enough to stay away.

  Or maybe not. Maybe they’d come along, too. Maybe that was her idea of sharing and that was fine.

  The brunette leaned towards him.

  He could smell her perfume.

  Sweet. Cloying. So sweet and cloying it made bile rise in the back of his throat—and suddenly, he was back in a meadow in the high mountains he’d left not forty-eight hours ago. The meadow had been a place of death. Bodies. The burnt remains of vehicles lying, underbellies up, like big dead bugs.

  And yet, for all the destruction, flowers had somehow pushed their way above the soil. Their smell was sweet. Sickly sweet, almost like the smell of blood.

  Chay and the seven other men in his until had been making their way cautiously through the flowers when he’d heard something behind him.

  Or sensed it.

  The guys in his unit joked about that ability of his. The sensing-some-other-presence thing.

  “It’s what comes of being an Indian,” he’d say, and they’d all laugh, but yeah, he was an Indian. Part, anyway. Lakota Sioux. And even as a kid he’d had that sensing-thing. It had saved his ass a couple of times back home in South Dakota, the feeling that a mountain lion was approaching him from behind or that a bear was noiselessly following his trail.

  That day in the meadow, the feeling had come to him again.

  Something was coming up behind him.

  He’d spun around quickly.

  No cat. No grizzly.

  A kid.

  A boy.

  Young.

  Ten. Twelve at the most. And when he saw Chay looking at him, the kid began to run. Straight for him and the others, and he had a bulge under his shirt that could have been anything from a stack of naan or a jug of doogh or, Christ, a bomb, a bomb, and he was almost on them so that Chay knew he had all of one second to decide which of those fucking things it was and…

  “Hey.”

  And it turned out he’d made the right decision, which was maybe his problem tonight because he could still hear the roar of explosives after he’d shouted a warning and the kid had kept coming, so he’d pulled the trigger and, fuck, all these days later, he could hear the BANG, see the flames, smell the stink of burning flesh—

  “Hey, dude.”

  Chay shot out his arm, grabbed hold of something warm and slender…

  “Hey. What are you trying to do? Break my arm?”

  He blinked. His hand was wrapped around the brunette’s wrist.

  “Crap,” she said. “All I did was snap my fingers.”

  The world came into focus.

  He let go of her. She pulled back, rubbing her skin, staring at him as if he’d turned into an alien life form.

  Chay drew a deep breath. “Sorry.”

  “You’d better be sorry.”

  Her gaze was assessing. A second passed. Then she tossed her head. “Well, okay. I mean, you want to buy me a drink…” She smiled, leaned in. Her perfume engulfed him.
“We can start over. How’s that?”

  “That’s…” He took another long breath. “The thing is…Sorry. Not tonight.”

  The brunette looked at him as if he’d spoken in Sanskrit.

  Shit.

  “What I mean is, thanks for the offer…”

  Double shit. Now she was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m just not into this tonight…”

  Jesus H. Christ.

  “Some other time,” he said, and she straightened up, slapped her hands on her hips and gave him a look that he figured was pretty much the same as the one Medusa had wanted to give Perseus.

  “Not even in your dreams,” she said, and then, probably for good measure, she leaned in again. “I was just trying to do my patriotic duty. Otherwise, why would I even talk to an idiot whose cock is probably the size of a fruit fly?”

  She turned on her heel and flounced away.

  Chay tried to laugh. At himself, for being the idiot she’d called him even though she was wrong about the size of his cock.

  He’d never had any complaints whatsoever about that.

  Yeah, but he couldn’t laugh. Couldn’t even smile.

  Chay closed his eyes.

  Maybe it was time to get out of here.

  Maguire and Sanchez had said they’d meet him, but they’d understand. What he needed was some air. A long walk on the beach. Maybe he’d shuck his clothes and head into the surf. The Pacific was cold at night. The surf was rough. For all he knew, maybe that was what he needed. Cold air. Rough water. Something, anything to empty his head of that fucking meadow.

  “Dude, if you’re an ad for meditation, you are doin’ one shitty job.”

  Chay’s eyes flew open. He shot to his feet, hands fisted, adrenaline pounding, all six feet two inches of him ready, hell, eager for a fight…

  “Hey. Olivieri. Take it easy, man. It’s me.”

  Chay shook his head—and brought into focus the face of his oldest friend, his best buddy, his blood brother, Tanner Akecheta.

  “Akecheta?”

  Tanner, who he hadn’t seen since that wedding months ago, grinned.

  “Not unless you know some other dude who’d be dumb enough to say hello to somebody with an expression like yours on his face.”