Her Tempting Protector
Night Storm, Book Two
Caitlyn O’Leary
Contents
Synopsis
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Caitlyn O’Leary
© Copyright 2020 Caitlyn O’Leary
All rights reserved.
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By Passionately Kind Publishing Inc.
Cover by Lori Jackson Design
Edited by Rebecca Hodgkins
Content Edited by Trenda Lundin
Cover Photo by Wander Aguiar Photography
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To my husband John, who always tempts me while still having my back.
Synopsis
CAN HE GET THEM TO SAFETY IN TIME?
Navy SEAL, Cullen Lyons, knew the moment he saw Dr. Carys Adams treating her patients in an African war zone that she was stubborn, selfless and extraordinary. Ignoring the danger surrounding her, she concentrated on keeping the young mother and newborn alive. Now it was Cullen’s job to evade the brutal rebel forces who had targeted Carys and the young family and get them to safety.
HOW WILL THEY SURVIVE?
Carys knows that a three day journey to Khartoum could kill her patients, but staying in hiding would sign their death warrant. She had never met a man like Cullen Lyons, every instinct told her that she could trust him, that she had finally found someone she could lean on, but what if she was wrong? Was he really the hero he seemed to be?
1
“Doc, is it as bad as I think it is?”
Dr. Carys Adams glanced sideways at the sweating man who had been assigned to lead their security detail here in Sudan.
Had he really just asked that?
Carys glanced back out the window, it felt like there were at least forty gun barrels pointed directly at her head. There weren’t, it just seemed like it. Logically she knew they were trying to protect the hospital from the Rapid Support Force troops who had been responsible for the massacre last summer, but that still didn’t make it any easier for her to see all the matte black steel in the crowd. She swallowed down bile-flavored saliva, then tried to calm her expression before turning back to Hans.
“It’s bad, really bad. Hans, I need you to do me a favor.”
“Anything,” he nodded.
“Get Isaac down here, then you go back and make sure all of the nurses have the patients ready to evacuate. I don’t want one single patient left behind. Do a double sweep, make sure you don’t miss anyone.”
“Why do you need Isaac?” His voice was petulant.
Oh, for pity’s sake, was he worried that she was giving Isaac a more important job when they were about to be killed? Or worse? Again, her thoughts went back to what had happened here in Khartoum a few months back before the regime change.
She rested her hand on Han’s forearm. “I know I can depend on you to keep those people safe. I can, can’t I?” she asked softly. He stood straighter.
“I won’t let you down, Dr. Adams.”
Great, he responded to flattery, instead of just getting the job done like he should.
He started to sprint across the dilapidated linoleum lobby. Then he turned back when he hit the elevator button. “I’ll make sure the patients stay safe,” he promised.
“Hans, the power’s iffy. Take the stairs just to be safe.” She kept her voice low, but loud enough to carry across the empty room. She gritted her teeth at his ineptitude.
He ran to the stair entrance.
Carys went back to looking out the window through the blinds. With the angle of the sun, nobody could see through to her vantage point. She watched as a beautiful woman in a bright orange robe spoke from the back of a truck. She had a bullhorn in one hand, and her other hand pointed upwards to heaven. She spoke Arabic to the crowd, telling them that their new prime minister was their way to salvation. He would save them from their decades of struggles. He was their nation’s salvation.
Carys hoped she was right. She hadn’t just bet her life on the new prime minister, she had bet her team’s lives on the regime change.
The woman continued. Abdalla Hamdok was a man to believe in. Her voice was melodic as she explained that he was a steadfast man with a realistic vision for his nation. Carys concurred.
When his people had contacted her two months ago to consult with the Central Committee of Sundanese Doctors, she’d weighed all the pros and cons, and finally agreed to take the assignment in Sudan. Especially knowing that she would be reunited with one of her med-school friends, Joyce Dandekar, who’d been a surgeon at the hospital in Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum, a huge modern city of five million. It had a deadly regime change, but that was over—she’d been so sure.
But here she was, once again in the middle of a bad dream.
Please, God, don’t let it turn into something like the horror she’d lived through almost four years ago in Santa Flores.
Carys heard the stair door open and turned to see Isaac move quickly and gracefully toward her, he was tall and thin, with a commanding presence. As he got to her, he gently pulled her to the side of the window, so she was even farther from sight. “We’ve got five patients who can’t be moved,” he told her quietly.
Carys winced. She knew that some would be stuck here, but she’d really hoped the number would be lower. “Who made the call?”
“Perkins.” His voice was devoid of emotion, but which made it all the more clear he was not impressed with his assessment. Isaac might not be a doctor, but he had a heck of a lot of common sense.
“They’re all on upper floors?”
He nodded.
She twisted the Claddagh ring on her pinkie. It stung.
Deep breath, Adams, same thing, different country…kind of.
“What has she been saying?” Isaac nodded toward the beautiful woman who had captured the crowd’s attention.
“Right now, she has them in the palm of her hand. She’s a great orator. She’s saying they can’t riot, because it will just end up with more innocent people dead.”
“It shouldn’t. Those bastards should have gone
to ground with the regime change.”
Carys looked sideways at Isaac and rolled her eyes.
“Okay, you’re right. Nothing’s ever that clear-cut here in Africa,” he sighed.
“There you go.”
She wanted to hit something. She should have done more due diligence before coming here. She’d taken Hamdok’s people at their word that they had more say than the Transitional Military Council, that things were peaceful and democratic and that the RSF had disbanded. Instead, they had reared their ugly heads twice in the last three weeks. They attacked two enclaves outside of Khartoum; maiming, raping and killing. Sometimes, the way they chose to murder people, was to set them on fire. Carys shuddered.
The window was open so they could hear her speak even though the blinds were partially closed. They continued to listen.
“I can’t make out what she’s saying, she’s talking too fast. Can you translate?” Isaac asked.
“She’s trying to talk them into going home. She said that Hamdok will keep them safe, but some people who lived through the last massacre months ago aren’t having it. They’re insisting on staying here, and at the other vulnerable sites to stand guard. Besides this hospital, there’s the orphanage and two schools.”
“I agree with them,” Isaac said.
“I don’t. We’re asking for a riot, which will just lead to more citizens dead.”
“Bullshit,” Isaac’s voice was controlled. “Hamdok’s people still aren’t here. Hell, even the police are nowhere to be seen. They’ve run away like cockroaches when the light comes on. We don’t know when the rebel RSF will attack next. Five days ago, they were in Sinjah, and three days before that, they were in Al Fao. They’re not making any sense. They could be in Khartoum today for all we know. Have you gotten ahold of anyone on Hamdok’s staff?”
She had, but she’d only gotten the runaround, they kept telling her that it was in the hands of one of the generals on the Transitional Military Council, but right now they were worried a coup had taken place. Therefore, no one knew who oversaw the RSF—there were currently some sanctioned by Hamdok’s government, and a great deal more who were not.
None of the citizens knew who they could trust. Hamdok was trying to form a coalition of forces that the masses could believe in, but it was slow in coming. Meanwhile, atrocities occurred, and the citizens took aim at anyone in an RSF uniform, afraid for their lives. Carys couldn’t blame them. She didn’t even know how the two RSF forces identified themselves against one another.
Then when she talked to some of her patients, they told her even the Rapid Support Forces, who had always been under the government auspices, took part in some of the rapes and killings. So Carys didn’t know who could be trusted except for Hamdok himself, her security team, and the citizens. But guns, in the hands of scared neophytes, were never a good thing. They were in the deep stinky stuff.
The woman’s voice rose higher as she praised the assembled citizens for their courage. She said it was because of their hearts and minds that Sudan had found peace and freedom, and it was up to them to continue down that path.
Carys waited with bated breath. She couldn’t decide if she wanted the people with guns in the crowd to go home or stay and protect them from the rebel RSF members. Carys had about given up hope on any kind of military aid from Hamdok’s newly formed government and watched dejectedly as the crowd dispersed.
“I’m going out there to talk to her,” Carys said.
“You can’t,” Isaac pulled at her arm. “You’re in charge, and we need your direction.”
“Isaac, you can’t go out there, you’ll seem like you’re trying to tell her what to do. Me asking questions, woman to woman, will go over better.”
He finally nodded his head.
Carys hurried through the front doors of the hospital and made her way through the scattering crowd toward the truck the woman had been standing on.
“Hello?” Carys called out in Arabic.
The woman replied in English. “You’re working with Doctors without Borders there in the hospital, right?” she guessed. “My name is Nasifa Alhassan. I teach at the University.” She held out her hand.
Carys took it and introduced herself. “How worried should we be here at the hospital?”
Nasifa sighed. “Worried.”
“Then why did you tell everyone to go home? I don’t want any harm to come to our patients. I also don’t want anything to happen to the men and women I recruited to come here with me,” Carys said fiercely.
Nasifa gave her a steadfast look. “I don’t want that either. I don’t want one single person in my country to be hurt. One of my former students is with the rebels that’s how I know that’s the reason we’re not seeing any of Hamdok’s men here, they are out meeting with the RSF rebels, trying to come up with a way to make peace. Many of those men were not part of the atrocities that have occurred. Some are just young men and boys who have been forcibly recruited into their midst.”
“But some of them were. Some of them are guilty of war crimes,” Carys protested.
“If they can’t make peace, the rebels will continue to attack our people. Peace is better than punishment,” Nasifa said sadly. “At least this way, you know your patients and people will be safe.”
“But any kind of peace negotiation is days away. What about today?” Carys demanded as she thought about the people in her care.
Nasifa gave her a pitying look. “You can only pray.”
2
Cullen Lyons was the last one to enter the briefing room. He hated it when that happened. Why couldn’t he have been an only child? How about the youngest child? That would have been good, right? Then he wouldn’t have little sisters. Instead of taking care of them, they would have had to take care of him—that would have been great.
As he slid into a chair at the back of the room between Kane McNamara and Asher Thorne, he shuddered. Come to think of it, Chelle would have been an evil big sister. She would have tortured him to death. She probably would’ve tried to make him sit down at those imaginary tea parties she’d always had with her dolls and teddy bears.
“What’s your problem?” Kane asked out of the side of his mouth as their lieutenant shuffled papers at the podium.
“It’s Chelle. She and the guy she picked up from the boyfriend-of-the-month-club broke up, and I was her shoulder to cry on.”
“Isn’t that like the fifth one this year?” Asher asked.
“Sixth,” Cullen whispered. “I deleted her dating profile when she wasn’t looking.”
“You didn’t,” Kane laughed.
“McNamara, you got something to share with the class?” Max Hogan asked from the front of the room.
Cullen figured that Kane probably would have, except for the fact that one of the newer SEAL teams, Omega Sky, was peppered in with theirs. It wasn’t personal, but they still hadn’t earned the trust of the men of Night Storm. Maybe after they’d worked a mission together.
“Nope, nothing to see here,” Kane said.
“Okay, so listen up,” Max began. “Things have been heating up in Africa, specifically Chad and Sudan. Both embassies are on alert, with Chad on high alert.”
“Big surprise there,” Cullen whispered to Kane. Raiden Sato sat in front of them and nodded his head imperceptibly. Yep, they all knew the Boka Haram wasn’t just relegated to Nigeria.
Max hit the lights and satellite photos appeared on the screen in the front of the room. “Right now, we aren’t moving because we don’t have any Americans in harm’s way,” Max explained. “But here are Boka Haram training camps in Chad. You can see they’re close to the Nigerian border. According to the satellite monitoring, they’ve tripled in size over the last two months.”
“Shit, that’s bad.” Kane murmured.
“Your analysis is correct, McNamara,” Max said from the front of the room.
Cullen smothered a grin. Kane should have known better, their lieutenant had ears like a bat.
&
nbsp; For the next twenty minutes, Max went over all the terrorist movements that had been captured by satellites, as well as all of the ground intel they had available. When Max hit the lights again, Cullen raised his hand and Max pointed at him.
“What’s going on in Sudan? I thought things had calmed down with the election?” Cullen asked.
“The old special forces group, i.e. the Rapid Support Forces, were supposed to have been disbanded with the election of the new prime minister. They were the ones were responsible for the massacre that killed over a hundred people last summer. The war crimes trial still hasn’t happened and they’ve gone to ground. Unfortunately, the general who oversaw all of the special forces is now part of the new government, and the people in our embassy say he’s not working hard to bring his former special forces group to justice.”
“So, are they still part of the current army?” Asher asked.
“Some are, some aren’t. It’s a rat’s nest. Several cities far outside of Khartoum have been attacked. According to our sources, the new government is coordinating a peace talk with them in the next couple of days.”
Cullen wrote Fuck that noise on his notepad.
Asher and Kane nodded at what he’d written.
“But Chad is still the one that we’re most worried about?” Ezio Stark, the second-in-command of the Omega Sky team, asked.
“That’s the one the brass is telling us to focus on,” Max confirmed.
Cullen heard the slight hesitation in his voice. Obviously, his spidey senses told him that Sudan was going to blow up first.
Her Tempting Protector: Navy SEAL Team (Night Storm Book 2) Page 1