by Paige Tyler
“What’s wrong?” Nash asked. “Is Hayley okay?”
Chasen told the guys about the story Hayley had been investigating, what they’d learned from The People, and how she’d been attacked last night.
“What are you going to do?” Dalton asked.
Chasen clenched his jaw. “I’m going to go see Nesbitt and make sure he realizes if he ever comes within a hundred miles of Hayley again, they’ll be fishing parts of him out of San Diego Bay for the next week.”
Anyone else would probably tell Chasen doing that would probably get his ass court martialed, but his teammates grinned.
“Need help?” Logan asked.
* * * * *
Hayley was thrilled Chasen was coming home. He’d only been gone a few days, but she’d missed him like crazy. She wished they hadn’t spent most of the time on the phone talking about Nesbitt and Stavros, though. Now Chasen would worry over nothing, especially since her editor had officially put the Nesbitt story on hold for a while. But if they were going to make this relationship work, they had to be honest and open with each other. And while she hated dropping the investigation into Nesbitt, on the upside, her calendar was wide open now. She and Chasen could go up to San Francisco whenever he was able to take leave.
She tossed her cell phone on the couch beside her just as the doorbell rang. She jumped up and was hallway across the room when she remembered her promise to Chasen about not opening the door to anyone.
She cautiously looked through the peephole to see Brad standing there and reached for the doorknob. When she’d told Chasen she wouldn’t open it to anyone, that didn’t include Brad, so her promise didn’t count.
“Hey. Sorry I haven’t been around,” Brad said as he walked in. “I’ve been working through some stuff, things I should have told you about a while ago. I just had to work up the courage to do it.”
Hayley had been so caught up in what happened last night after she’d left Jillian’s she’d completely forgotten their conversation about Brad. But looking at the anxious expression on his face, she was beginning to think Jillian might be right. She’d never seen Brad show the least bit of interest in another woman since they started working together. It bothered her she’d never noticed, but it bothered her even more he thought he couldn’t tell her.
She motioned him to the couch then sat down beside him. “You know you can talk to me about anything.”
Brad opened his mouth then closed it again as if he was figuring out how to start. After trying a few times, he finally asked where Chasen was then wondered out loud if he’d missed anything with the Nesbitt story.
She’d thought for sure Brad had heard about what happened last night, but he clearly didn’t have a clue about Stavros threatening her. She quickly filled him in then told him her editor was putting the story on hold for a while.
“It’s just as well since Chasen and I are going up to San Francisco for a few days.”
Brad’s eyes widened. “You can’t!”
“What are you talking about? Of course I can.” She frowned. “I’d thought you’d be thrilled I was finally taking some time off to get away from it all and deal with everything that happened in Nigeria.”
Brad shook his head. “You can’t go with him because I love you.”
Hayley’s mouth fell open. Wait, what? She couldn’t have heard him right. But Brad was talking again, the words pouring out faster and faster, none of it making any sense.
“I love you,” he repeated. “I’ve always loved you, since the first day we met at the paper. You’re the reason I never tried to do any other job for the paper even though we both know I could have easily been a better journalist than half the hacks at that place.”
Hayley opened her mouth to tell him to stop, that this was crazy, but her friend kept talking like he didn’t even know she was there.
“I put my whole life on hold for you,” he said brokenly. “I travelled to all those horrible places to be with you and keep you safe. I think I actually would have died if something had happened to you in Nigeria.”
He caught her hands in his, holding them tightly. “I’m sorry I never told you earlier, but I deluded myself into thinking you already knew, that I was the reason you never went out with any of the guys you dated for very long. Now I know I was too scared to tell someone as amazing and beautiful as you exactly how I felt. But I’m telling you now because I can’t let you walk away with someone else.”
Hayley’s heart felt like it was slowly being crushed in her chest. How the hell could she have missed all this? She and Brad had been friends for a long time. They’d worked a thousand stories together, lived in mud-and-stick huts in a hundred different places together. How could she have not realized he liked her that way?
“Brad, I’m so sorry.” She didn’t want to lose her best friend, but she couldn’t let him think there was something between them when there wasn’t. “I don’t feel that way about you. You’ve always been, and hopefully always will be, my very best friend.”
He shook his head, going on about how much he loved her like he didn’t even hear her.
“Stop it, Brad!” she said sharply, hating herself for being so blunt but not knowing what else to do. “This thing you want to be between us can never be. You’re my best friend and I’d go anywhere with you, but I don’t love you. Not like that.”
Brad stared at her, his eyes going unfocused for a moment before his face twisted in a way she’d never seen before. There was a rage there she didn’t even know was inside her friend.
“It’s Chasen, isn’t it?” Brad demanded. “He changed everything.”
“Chasen has nothing to do with how I feel about you, Brad.”
He snorted. “Right. You’re honestly trying to tell me having sex with him like you did right here on this couch and in your bed didn’t change everything?”
The words stopped her cold. A horrible feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. “How do you know where Chasen and I made love?”
Brad’s lip curled. “I put cameras around your apartment after we got back from Nigeria so I could keep an eye on you and make sure you were safe.”
Hayley swallowed hard, feeling ill. She’d felt like someone was watching all these weeks because someone was. She’d given Brad a key to her apartment years ago because he spent so much time there dropping off photos and story material, picking up computer files, even packing bags for her for short-notice trips. She had a key to his place too, but had never gone there without letting him know. What he’d done went beyond caring about her. She felt violated.
“I saw what you did on this couch with him and it sickened me,” he said coldly, then his tone softened. “But that can all be in the past if you tell me you love me.”
Hayley couldn’t stop the fury rising up in her. Yanking her hands out of Brad’s grasp, she jumped to her feet and marched across the room to dig through the crap in her entertainment center, trying to find the camera she knew was there.
Brad grabbed her arm, but she shook him off.
“Don’t touch me!”
She barely knew what half of the stuff on the shelves was, but then she spotted a small rectangular box not much bigger than a pack of gum. That had to be it. Of course, if she’d noticed it before, she would have thought it was something to do with her TV or cable box or streaming video service or wireless router. She didn’t know anything about this crap.
But Brad knew that about her and had used that piece of information to spy on her.
“Is this it?” she asked, yanking the thing out from between the electronics and shoving it in his face. “Is this the camera you used to spy on me?”
The thought her best friend would do something like that made her want to throw up. Worse, he’d known how bad it had been since coming back from Africa. He’d know she’d felt like she was being watched. And he’d done this to her anyway.
When he didn’t say anything, she threw the camera on the floor, stomping on it with her bare fe
et until it broke into smithereens.
“Get out!” she shouted. “Get the hell out of here and never let me see your face again!”
He held out his hands beseechingly. “Hayley, please…”
Hayley was so damn furious, she didn’t hear the rest. The fact he was trying to convince her that somehow this was all justified, that he was the injured party here made her more angry.
She put her hands on his chest, shoving him backward toward the door. She’d gotten him halfway there when she smelled the most godawful stench. That’s when she looked down and found him holding a handkerchief and a small brown bottle.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
Then he lunged at her.
Panic shot through Hayley. She struggled against him, refusing to be captured again by anybody. But Brad was bigger than she was and while she got in a few shots, she couldn’t keep him from getting the smelly rag over her face. The sweet, antiseptic odor was cloying and made her feel lightheaded.
She tried to hold her breath as she kept fighting, but Brad spun her around and pinned her to the door with his forearm, shoving against her chest until she didn’t have any air left.
Hayley slid down the door even as she heard Brad telling her over and over he was sorry.
Chapter Twelve
AS USUAL, EVERYTHING the Navy touched took ten times longer than it should. By the time Chasen got back to San Diego, the sun was already going down.
He stopped by his apartment only long enough to yank off his dirty uniform and dump it on the floor then changed into jeans and a T-shirt. He could have used a shower, but didn’t want to waste the time. He’d do it over at Hayley’s place. After hearing about what happened last night, he needed to see her and make sure for himself she really was okay.
Traffic was a bitch, but he still made it to her place in record time. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, he took the stairs up to the fifth floor and practically ran down the hallway to her apartment. But when he knocked on the door, it swung open on its own.
He tensed, the hair on the back of his neck standing up.
“Hayley, you here?” he called.
No answer.
Chasen walked in and looked around, taking in the empty kitchen and adjoining living room. His gaze locked on the pile of broken plastic on the carpet in front of the entertainment center. While he was curious, he ignored it for the moment to search the rest of her apartment. Hayley wasn’t there, but her purse, car keys, and cell phone were.
Something definitely wasn’t right.
Going into the living room, he crouched down to check out the pieces of plastic on the floor. It didn’t take him long to figure out what it was. The small glass lens like the kind in a cell phone was a dead giveaway. He frowned at the electronics attached to the back of the lens, then looked at the entertainment center where the cable box and DVR had been hastily shoved aside. That had to be where the camera had been. Which meant whoever had put it there had gotten a good view of the couch.
Shit.
Chasen was up in a flash and running for the bedroom. A quick look around confirmed his worse fears. There was another camera hidden in an air conditioning vent overlooking the bed. A few minutes later, he found another one in the kitchen, hidden in the fake plants Hayley had on display along the upper cabinets.
Whoever had planted the cameras would have been able to see into every room except the bathroom. It didn’t take a genius to figure out it was Nesbitt. The councilman must have placed the cameras in Hayley’s apartment to find out how much she knew. No doubt he’d sent Stavros to shut her up.
The thought of what they might be doing to her even now made Chasen feel so lightheaded he almost dropped to his knees. He gripped the edge of the counter to steady himself. He had to keep it together. Hayley needed him.
He was out the door and halfway to his truck before he remembered he didn’t even know where the hell that asshole Nesbitt lived.
Pulling out his phone, he called Brad, hoping Hayley’s photographer would have the information, but it went straight to voicemail. Had Nesbitt told Stavros to grab Brad, too? It made sense since Brad knew as much about Nesbitt as Hayley did.
Scrolling through his list of contacts, he called the number the hacktivists had given to them the other day.
Kyla answered on the third ring.
“You said to call if I needed your help hacking into something,” Chasen said after he identified himself. “Well, I need your help.”
Chasen quickly told Kyla about the cameras. “Hayley’s missing and I’m pretty sure Nesbitt is the one who grabbed her. Can you get his address?”
“Oh God. Yeah. Do you want us to figure out where the video feeds were being sent first? To make sure he was the one kidnapped her,” Kyla said.
“Who else would it be? She was investigating the asshole,” Chasen said. “I need Nesbitt’s address. Now.”
Kyla hesitated. “What are you going to do?”
“Whatever I have to,” Chasen said.
Forty-five minutes later, he, Logan, Dalton, and Nash stood hidden in the tree line outside Nesbitt’s ego-inflated McMansion in La Jolla.
“So how are we going to handle this?” Logan asked.
Chasen looked over to see his teammates checking the clips on the 9mm semi-automatic weapons Chief Travers had scrounged up. Chasen had no idea where the guns had come from but he hoped they weren’t easily traceable.
He hated getting his teammates involved in this, especially since their careers would be over if they got caught. People were likely to take a dim view of Navy SEALs running an operation on American soil, regardless of the reason. Although getting kicked out of the Navy might be the least of their worries. Going to prison or getting shot were real possibilities, too. But without any intel he had no way of knowing if Nesbitt had security guards around. Chasen wasn’t going to risk Hayley’s life by storming in there without at least some kind of plan—and backup.
“Nothing complicated,” he said in answer to Logan’s question. “We ghost in and avoid contact if at all possible. Our primary goal is to find Hayley and her photographer Brad if he’s here. If we can’t find her, we go for Nesbitt. Then I start breaking fingers until he tells me where Hayley is.”
Avoiding the security cameras was a piece of cake, which made getting onto Nesbitt’s property almost too easy. The fact there weren’t any guards around worried Chasen, though. Did that mean they were all positioned around the room where Hayley was being held?
Once inside the house, they split up into pairs so they could search faster. He and Dalton had just made it to the immense kitchen when he heard shooting coming from the other side of the estate.
“Shit! Logan and Nash were made,” Dalton whispered.
Chasen cursed. “Status?” he said softly into the mic attached to his headset.
“We’re good,” Logan said. “Nash is about to kill the lights.”
As if on cue, the whole house went dark as the small explosive charge Nash had placed on the main circuit breaker blew.
Chasen dropped his NVGs into place as pounding feet headed their way. A moment later, four men came toward him and Dalton. Chasen put the first guy into the kitchen down by hand, making the others immediately pull back behind the partition wall leading into the living room. A moment later, they opened fire on him and Nash.
Cursing, Chasen dived for cover behind the kitchen counter. He hadn’t wanted to get into a gunfight with Nesbitt and his goons. Not only would it bring the cops down on them, but it might also prompt whoever was guarding Hayley into doing something rash. There was nothing to be done about it now except end this ASAP.
“Who the hell are you and what the fuck do you want?” Nesbitt yelled from his position behind the wall.
“You know what the hell we want!” Chasen shouted back. “Where’s Hayley Garner? I know you grabbed her.”
Nesbitt was silent for so long Chasen was afraid the bastard had taken off without him hearin
g, but then the man answered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen Hayley Garner in two days.”
“That’s bullshit,” Chasen replied.
Catching Dalton’s eye, Chasen gave him a nod. Dalton quickly moved forward to get into position to lay down cover fire that’d keep the bad guys occupied so Chasen could charge while they were busy ducking. Whatever happened, he needed to take Nesbitt alive. If Hayley wasn’t being held in the house, the councilman was the only one who could lead them to her.
Chasen was about to give Dalton the signal when his cell phone vibrated. Oh hell. Now really wasn’t the best time to be taking a call. Then again, it could be Kyla. She might know exactly where Nesbitt was holding Hayley.
Digging the phone out of his pocket, he thumbed the button without looking at the call screen and held it to his ear. “What?”
“Oh God! Is that shooting I hear in the background?” Kyla asked.
“Yeah, so I’m kind of busy. Did you call for a reason?”
“Um…yeah,” she said. “Nesbitt didn’t kidnap Hayley—Brad did.”
Chasen frowned. “What? That can’t be right.”
Kyla quickly explained they’d found traffic cam footage of Brad going to Hayley’s apartment then footage of him leaving a little while later with a blanket covering something—or someone—in the backseat that wasn’t there on the way in.
“Plus, we traced the IP address on those wireless cameras back to the computer at Brad’s apartment,” Kyla added. “He was the one who kidnapped her, I’m sure of it.”
Chasen cut loose with a string of profanities, making Dalton turn and look at him. Chasen jabbed a finger in Nesbitt’s direction, reminding his teammate there were guys with guns right around the frigging corner.
“Does Brad have her at his place now?” he asked Kyla.
“I don’t think so. We tracked the GPS on his cell phone to a house on Wilkerson Drive in La Jolla. It’s a few miles from where you are now. I’ll text you the address.”
“I owe you one.” Hanging up, Chasen spoke into his mic. “Guys, we’re pulling back. Hayley is at another location. This is the wrong place.”