When Love Intrudes (When the Mission Ends)

by Christi Snow

  “Thanks, Colton.” They exchanged a quick, guy-style thump on the back and then Brian rested his hand in the small of her back to lead her out.

  “You left your cell phone, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I slid it into my desk drawer. Why though?”

  “We don’t want anyone tracing the GPS signal inside it.”

  “You think this has gotten that serious?”

  “Unfortunately, yes, but don’t worry, I’m not going to let anything happen to you or Nathan. We’re gonna figure this out.”

  They hurried out to Brian’s truck. Toni met Nathan’s worried gaze across the expanse of the backseat. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  He gave a sharp nod and scratched Sam behind the ears.

  After Brian got into the truck, Nathan leaned into the front seat. “I’m so sorry I got you guys into this mess.”

  Toni turned to give him a hug. “This isn’t your fault and we’re all in it together, so everything will be okay.” She turned back to Brian to ask, “Right?”

  “Yep, we’ll be fine. You’ll see. Let’s just pretend this is a vacation and I have the perfect spot for a vacation for all of us. Trust me.”

  She couldn’t help but notice as they drove that he watched the mirrors heavily.

  “Is someone following us?” Everything happened so fast. Her head whirled.

  “I can’t tell yet, but Colton will be behind us for a while in Chris’s truck and if there is someone back there, he’ll get it taken care of.”

  Things were quiet, but tense for the next forty-five minutes. So when the cell phone rang in Brian’s pocket, Toni jumped. She glanced into the backseat where Nathan and Sam had both fallen asleep. How were teenagers able to fall asleep anywhere, at any time? Toni envied that.

  “See anything?” he asked into the phone as he glanced up into the rearview mirror. “Yes, I see him. You called Eddie?”

  Toni frantically looked in the side mirror trying to see who was behind them.

  He nodded. “Okay, hang back. Don’t engage. You have a family at home that needs you. Let the police take care of it. Thanks, Colton. We’ll be fine. I have a plan B and plan C so we should be covered.” He glanced over at Toni with a look that was hard to interpret. “Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to her.”

  When he closed the phone, Toni whispered, “Someone’s following us?”

  “Yes, there’s a black Cadillac Escalade back there who Colton thinks has been on us since we left. The sheriff in the next town is an old friend of Eddie’s and plans to pull him over as we go, through.”

  Toni’s stomach spun with adrenaline and nerves. They were about seven miles out of town and she had begun to relax when Brian tensed. “Get down and hang on. This may get rough. He’s coming up beside us.”

  Toni ducked down in the seat just as a set of tires squealed. The truck jolted with a horrible scrape of metal as the Escalade sideswiped them. Brian struggled to control the truck. “Nathan, stay down and hold Sam down, too. They have a gun.”

  The side window shattered and Toni couldn’t hold in the scream. “Brian?”

  “I’m okay! Just stay down. The sheriff should be here as soon as we hit the county line. We just have to hang on until then.” He slouched down in the seat as he punched the accelerator, trying to push more speed out of the truck.

  More gunfire, followed by the squeal of wheels as the lurching truck told Toni they’d been hit again. Another window shattered from gunfire. Brian wildly fought the steering wheel to keep control of the truck. How much farther was it to town? How much longer could they do this?

  “Dammit, Colton!” Brian watched the side view mirror, his gaze intense.

  “What’s happening?” she yelled, afraid to pop her head up to look.

  “Colt is trying to draw them off of us. Toni, get into the glove box and pull out my gun. We’re not going to make it to the county line.”

  Another round of gunfire hit the side of the truck as she fumbled with the latch on the glove box. As soon as she had the gun in her hand, Brian instructed, “Take the wheel. Just hold it as straight as you can so I can shoot, but keep your head down.”

  Their eyes met for a split second. The determination she saw there scared her. He’d do anything and everything to keep them safe, including sacrifice himself.

  “Be careful,” she urged.

  He gave a sharp nod. “I’m going to shoot out his front wheel, which is going to send him skidding into us if it works. Be ready. I’m gonna try to accelerate before he hits us. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She grasped the wheel, holding onto it with everything she had. A glance at the speedometer said they were going one hundred and thirty-eight mph. Oh God, if they wrecked at this speed, they’d all be dead.

  Then Brian sat up and started shooting. The back window broke as the Escalade returned fire. Bullets ricocheted all over the truck. Brian’s body jerked, but he didn’t stop firing his gun at the other vehicle. Toni tried to focus on her job, holding the wheel steady as more wheels squealed.

  Brian sat up and looked in the rearview mirror. He expelled a harsh breath. “Everyone okay?” he called into the truck.

  “Y…yes,” Nathan said shakily from the backseat. Sam barked excitedly as if to respond.

  “I’m fine,” Toni said, but she knew Brian had been hit. She’d felt his body jerk when it did. “Where were you hit?”

  “It just grazed me. I’m fine. Hand me the phone.” He was leaning forward awkwardly so she leaned up to look at his back. His shirt was ripped and there was a thin strip of blood where a bullet had scraped across the full width of his upper back. Toni was suddenly lightheaded. Oh my God, that had been way too close.

  “Toni, the phone,” he urged through gritted teeth.

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” The phone had ended up on the floorboard in the melee so Toni had to scramble to find it. Finally, she came up with it in hand.

  “Dial Colton. Tell him to get out of here while he can. We’re switching vehicles here and after that, they shouldn’t be able to track us.”

  She did as he’d instructed while keeping a careful eye on him. He grew paler as the blood welled across his back. It didn’t look very deep, but now that the adrenaline was fading, it had to hurt like a bitch.

  Colton answered his phone with a frantic, “Are you all okay?”

  “For the most part, yes. What about you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, Brian says you need to get out of here. We’re switching cars here and then they won’t be able to track us anymore.”

  “Is he sure?”

  Toni glanced over at Brian’s resolute face. She knew how stubborn he could be. “Yes, we’ll be fine. Give Penelope and Baby AnneMarie a kiss from us. Thank you, Colton, for everything.” With a newborn at home, he sure didn’t need to be any more involved with this than he already was.

  “You can thank me by staying safe and getting back into Mad Rob as soon as possible.”

  “Will do. Bye, Colton. Thanks for everything.” She hung up the phone and then sat up on her knees to look into the backseat to check on Sam and Nathan. “Are you both holding up okay?”

  Nathan was pale, but he nodded. He gestured over to the blood across Brian’s back. “Are you sure he’s okay?”

  She glanced at Brian’s complexion again worriedly, but set out to reassure Nathan. “He’s fine. When we switch cars, I’ll patch him up a bit and then I’ll drive. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “How much farther?” she whispered to Brian as they entered town.

  “Just around this next corner,” Brian answered. He winced when he turned the steering wheel.

  Yeah, she definitely had to convince him to let her drive for a bit, at least until his back stopped oozing. She hoped he had some butterfly strips in his first aid kit.

  Around the next corner, they came to a fenced in storage area with a code box on the gate. Brian keyed in the numbers on the pad and then dro
ve down to a garage unit. He slid out of the truck, and dug into his pocket for a key. When he opened the garage, it revealed a mint 1960’s era royal blue Chevy Impala.

  “Whoa, that car is sweet!” Nathan jumped out of the truck to examine the new car. “Is this our ride?”

  “Yeah, this was my older brother’s car.”

  She was caught off guard at the mention of a brother. He’d never mentioned any siblings before, but as she gazed up to his tight shoulders and pain-filled stare at the car, she realized there was a reason for that.

  “Is he gonna be okay with you borrowing it?” Nathan asked.

  “I don’t think he’ll mind too much. He’s been dead for six years.”

  Even knowing something like that was coming, hearing the carefully moderated pain in his voice, made her heart hurt for him all over again.

  “Oh man, I’m sorry,” Nathan responded and looked a little less excited about the car in the face of Brian’s loss.

  “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

  She sensed Nathan needed a distraction. “Hey, Nate, can you transfer the bags while I clean up Brian’s back?” She’d found a first aid kit behind the back seat of the truck.

  “Sure thing,” he responded, Sam bounding around his feet. The two of them seemed to feed off each other’s energy.

  “Toni, we don’t have time right now.” Brian’s voice was tight with tension.

  “Come on, no arguments. It won’t take but an extra five minutes to put some antibiotics on it and bandage it up. Those five minutes can save weeks of issues from infection later. You of all people know that.” He’d had massive blood loss when he’d lost his kidney and ended up with an infection from it. That had prolonged his hospital stay from what should have been one week to three. He was on his third week when he kicked Toni out and forbade her to visit him anymore.

  His head dropped to his chest for a moment. “Okay, but we have to do this quick.”

  She’d already begun to gingerly lift his shirt over his head so she could access the wound better. Seeing the full impact of the slice across his back caused her belly to erupt in butterflies. It still oozed and looked angry and red. But the good news was it didn’t look like it had gone too far into the muscle and it was a straight slash across the top of his back, not jagged. She ripped open several packages of gauze pads to clean the excess blood off the area and then cleansed it with antibiotic ointment and alcohol.

  Brian’s muscles flinched across his back each time she touched him, but he didn’t make a sound. If she didn’t know how much she was hurting him, she’d take the time to enjoy the fact that for once she was free to explore the muscles of his back as she pleased. He had such an amazing body.

  As she looked at the six-inch-long slice across his back, Toni debated how to clean it up. Remembering something she’d seen on TV, she grabbed her purse and found the solution. She began to work and was about halfway across his back when Nathan saw what she was doing.

  “Superglue?” His voice reflected his surprise. “He’s not made of plastic is he?”

  Brian hadn’t been paying attention, hanging his head and trying to just bear it as best he could, but at Nathan’s exclamation, he twisted to look back over his shoulder at her. His eyes widened when he saw the little tube in her hand.

  “Seriously?” he asked her.

  “It’s okay.” She worked to reassure him. “I saw it on TV. It’s just like what they use in surgery for medical glue.”

  “Well, if you saw it on TV then it must be true.” His eyes lit up with humor.

  Her stomach was already in knots over what she had to do to his back.

  As he saw her hesitation, he reached back to her to touch her cheek. “It’s fine. I’ve heard the same thing,” he whispered. “Just don’t glue your fingers to my back. Don’t get me wrong, I like them there,” his voice lowered and became more sensual, “but I don’t want them there permanently.” He nodded back to the tube in her hand. “Go ahead and get it finished. We need to get back on the road.”

  “Okay.” She squared her shoulders and finished gluing his skin back together. There was so much wrong with that. She couldn’t stop the need to feather a kiss along his spine right above the cut in apology for the pain she’d caused. His muscles tensed and he stopped breathing as her lips lightly touched his skin. He groaned like it was torn from his soul.

  She jerked back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you even more.”

  “You didn’t.” His voice sounded strained, but he didn’t move a muscle. He was too tense for that to happen.

  She came around and crouched in front of where he sat. His eyes squinted closed; his head hung down on his chest, and his breath was ragged.

  She lightly brushed her fingertips along his cheek. “Hey, are you okay?”

  In a flash his eyes opened and the desire reflected there took her breath away. He grabbed her hand before she had a chance to react, stood, and yanked her against his chest. His lips pressed against hers like she was his source of life. For all of a half a second she thought about pulling back but that was before she became aware of his bare chest against her. Before the heat of his embrace ignited her like a wildfire.

  Then she could think of nothing more than to get closer. To feel all of him. His chest was bare and her palms roamed across his ropey muscles, taking in the dips and hollows of his abs, moving up to his pecs, before threading behind his neck into his hair to pull him even closer. A groan erupted and she honestly couldn’t have claimed whether it was hers or his. All she knew was this wasn’t enough. Her nipples tingled and her core pulsed with the need for more. More of Brian. They needed this after the adrenaline overload of the car chase.

  Sam’s barking separated them faster than a bucket of ice water could have. Yanking out of his embrace, she stared into his smoldering eyes as they both gasped for air. Sam jumped around their heels, sure they were playing some sort of game that he missed out on.

  She reached down to scratch behind his ears. Just touching his soft fur helped to settle her jangling nerves. Whoa.

  “Yo, Alpha. I grabbed a new shirt for you,” yelled Nathan as he rounded the corner of the truck, holding one of Brian’s T-shirts in his hand.

  Nathan had been busy transferring their bags to the trunk of the car, so had missed their display. Thank God. How had she managed to forget he was even here? How had she managed to forget absolutely everything, but the man standing before her with lust burning in his stormy blue-grey eyes? It made her skin tingle and her core throb.

  Nathan shoved the shirt at Brian. He glanced between the two of them, with a frown wrinkling his forehead. “Is everything okay?”

  She looked away from Brian’s mesmerizing gaze. “Yes.” She cleared her scratchy throat, working to get her body to function on its own again. “Is everything ready to go?”

  Nathan nodded.

  She placed her empty palm out to Brian, gesturing for the keys. “Nathan and I will switch the cars around. I’m assuming you want to leave the truck in the garage.” She looked over the battered truck and almost cried. There was only one window left in it—the window on the passenger’s side in the back of the cab. The driver’s side of the frame was a completely mangled, scraped up mess. It would definitely attract attention if they left it in full view.

  “No.” Brian pulled her attention from the truck.

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?” She raised an eyebrow at him. He couldn’t want to leave his truck out in the parking area, which meant one thing. He didn’t want her driving his cars. Did this spread to everyone or was he just one of those guys biased about women drivers?

  He seemed to know enough to look a bit scared, but that didn’t keep him from burying himself. Was he really going to go there?

  “I’m the only one that’s going to drive my vehicles.”

  Yes, he was.

  Nathan gave a snort of derision. “Um, Alpha, I know you’re the big he-man and all, but man—look at your truck. Hones
tly, I don’t think she can do too much more damage to it.”

  They both glared at the teenager, but Brian looked a little more pained as he glanced back over at his truck. “You may have a point there,” he said drolly.

  But the teenager wasn’t done. “Now the car, I totally feel you on that one. I sure as hell wouldn’t trust a woman driver to keep it safe.”

  “Excuse me?” Toni wasn’t sure which one of them to beat first. She was tempted to leave both their wounded asses out here in bum-fuck nowhere and just disappear with Sam in the hotrod. The two of them could have a good time together, but as she had that thought, she realized the bastard was getting his ears scratched by Brian. Her own dog had defected to the testosterone side, but since he was male, it only made sense. She was definitely outnumbered in this group.

  She sputtered. “What. The. Hell? I have taken care of all three of you, nursed you, and fed you.”

  Nathan snorted and began to make what she could see was going to be a smartass remark.

  She raised a hand to cut him off. “No. You are not allowed to talk about that ER visit anymore. Get over it.” This was about something else entirely. “And now you have the balls to look down on my driving?” She threw her hands in the air. “Well, screw you all. You can have a great time crowded in the front seat, because I am going to take the entire back seat and read my damn book.” She glared at Sam, who whimpered. “Yes, I mean you, too.”

  He, at least, had the decency to drop his head in shame as she stomped over to the car and crawled into the backseat.

  As she situated her purse and jacket as a pillow for her new accommodations, she heard Brian murmur to Nathan, “Was it something I said?”

  “Man, don’t ask me. I may be gay, but women are still a complete mystery to me. I didn’t get that gay gene.”

  She almost giggled. Almost. But she wasn’t ready to let them know that she wasn’t truly ticked. Honestly, this was what she needed. She needed to put a little bit of space between Brian and her and her emotion overload after he’d been hurt. Her head still spun from that mind-blowing kiss and she needed a little bit of time to sort it all out in her head.