Alpha, Delta

Alpha, Delta

RJ Scott

Officer Finn Hallan has never run from a fight. With Niall’s life and love at stake, he’s not about to start now…

Finn Hallan is a member of the elite Norwegian Emergency Response Unit, code name Delta. When the team is sent to respond to a hostage situation on an oil platform in the Norwegian Sea, he has to face demons he thought he had buried a long time ago.

Scottish engineer Niall Faulkner’s skills in oil platform decommissioning takes him to the Forseti platform at the worst possible time. When he’s captured by terrorists, his only thought is that he will never get to tell his lover how he really feels.

Can Finn keep Niall alive? Or will they both die at the hands of hijackers in the frigid waters of the Norwegian Sea?

eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement of the copyright of this work.

ALPHA, DELTA

Alpha Series

Copyright © 2015 RJ SCOTT

ISBN: 978-1-936387-79-3

All Romance eBooks, LLC Palm Harbor, Florida 34684
www.allromanceebooks.com

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or business establishments, events, or locales is coincidental.

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever with out written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First All Romance eBooks publication: February 2015

“This is the second fucking time we’ve had to do this and I’m telling you now I’m not staying for the whole thing.”

Finn Hallan glanced over at his teammate and wondered if he should check him for any visible weapons. Erik was one of those guys who was never happy about sitting still, let alone in a meeting as seminar dealing with health and safety.

“Cap’s not going to like you backing out of this,” Finn warned. He was just as restless, too used to action and getting on with things instead of sitting here in a briefing room listening to changes in policy. Thing is, this shit was statutory and Cap had made Finn and Erik attend, in case there was anything important about oil platform safety. Finn was certainly not going up against Cap, and he knew Erik needed to keep his ass in the chair if he wanted to stay on the team.

Delta was a highly sought after group of people to join and if you made it you didn’t refuse to sit in meetings that you’d been ordered into.

“We need a serious emergency,” Erik groused. “A hostage negotiation or at the very least a terrorist threat.”

The woman in front of him turned and frowned at the words, but she took one look at both Erik and Finn and turned back to face the front. Finn knew they looked out of place. Both in the dark dress colours of the Delta uniform, not long off duty, they probably gave the impression of some kind of hardass security detail. Certainly not the kind of guys you told to shut up. She would know who they were, members of the ERU, codenamed Delta, and the ones who policed for terrorist activities in Norway and out into the Norwegian sea. Which, incidentally, was where most of these NorsDev employees in the briefing worked.

Erik grinned and raised his eyebrows suggestively before cupping his groin and looking pointedly at the back of the blonde’s head. Finn shook his head. She was a NorsDev exec and everyone knew the high-ups at the energy company had nothing to say to the ranks. If only she knew how much Finn and Erik could do for her if she was in trouble, if only she was aware of the kind of men they really were—ones who never sat still—then maybe she’d be a little more understanding of the boredom factor.

The presentation on the large screen at the front of the room switched to a new slide with a name in block capitals. Niall Faulkner. Not a name that Finn recognized and he couldn’t help the groan when he saw the line under the name.
Platform Decommissioning Engineer.

“Oh Jesus fuck. Save me from nerds with clipboards and PowerPoints. I think my last brain cell up and died,” Erik muttered.

The speaker indicated the slide, “And now I’d like to hand it over to Niall Faulkner. Some of you will recall Niall was responsible for the X220 additions.” A ripple of murmurs around the room indicated that at least some knew what the hell that meant. Evidently this Faulkner guy was someone with a name at NorsDev. A man stood in the front row of the lecture theatre and made his way up the four steps to the stage, tripping on the last step and grabbing at the retreating previous speaker as he left. Luckily the new guy, Niall, Finn assumed, didn’t fall flat on his face, but he couldn’t help the smile on his face. It was funny shit seeing someone fall over.

Niall made his way to the lectern, looking down at his notes and shuffling them into some kind of order. The main spotlight flickered then focused directly on him and Finn had an instant gut reaction to the man on the stage.

Short and slim, with dark hair and glasses, he was the hottest safety officer Finn had ever seen.

“Woo boy,” Erik said under his breath. “You thinking he’s way to pretty to be a man?”

Finn didn’t dignify the comment with a response. Erik was the only member of the Delta team who knew Finn was gay and that comment was directly aimed at Finn and the fact Erik kept trying to get Finn hooked up with someone.
Anyone
.

“Not my type,” Finn lied very quietly. Actually, this Niall guy was pretty much the epitome of Finn’s type. Preppy with a side order of nerdy was just exactly what Finn liked under him, or over him, or hell, anyway which around him. And the glasses? Hell, glasses got him every time.

“You think he’s batting on your team?” Erik asked.

“Absolutely,” Finn deadpanned.

Erik frowned and peered to the small stage below. “You can tell from here?”

Finn punched Erik in the leg, “No, fucker. I can't.”

Erik huffed and pulled out his cell phone, putting it in his lap and shielding the glow with his hands. He was clearly booking out of this presentation. On the other hand, Finn found himself absolutely fixated. He wasn’t entirely sure what Niall was saying because he wasn’t listening to the words, but Finn could listen to his soft Scottish accent all day. Kind of a cross between Ewan McGregor and Sean Connery.

All too soon this Niall guy, who apparently could remove oil platforms in a responsible and environmentally sound way, had finished the presentation. There was a polite ripple of applause before he threw the meeting open for questions.

Finn had a lot of questions, only none of them were to do with… He peered at the last slide…ethical decommissioning.

Erik leaned over, “Bathroom,” he said.

Finn gripped his friend’s jacket. “Cap will kill you for flunking again.”

Erik shrugged free. “Cover for me,” he hissed, then left out the side door.
Fucker
. The woman in front turned to face him, but this time she didn’t turn away, in fact she was looking at him expectantly, as was the whole of the row. He scanned them, wondering exactly what to say.

“Sir? Did you have a question?” The soft sexy burr of the Scottish voice asked over the microphone.

Shit
. Evidently Erik’s leaving had caught Niall’s attention and he thought the kerfuffle was a freaking question. The woman in front smirked at him, then raked him with her eyes with a large dose of disdain. She was daring him to say he’d been fucking around with Erik and hadn’t listened to a word the presenter said.

“Yes,” Finn said smoothly. The woman looked surprised but she didn’t turn in her chair. “Is decommissioning of oil platforms what you always wanted to do?”

And no, he had no idea where that came from, but it seemed like a reasonable question. People asked that kind of thing? Right?

Niall stared out at him with a look of consternation. Finn waited for that moment when Niall said that in all of his
however
many
years
he had never had such a strange question. Then Niall’s expression cracked and he shook his head ruefully.

“I wanted to be an astronaut,” he admitted. “But mild vertigo and a propensity to being sick whenever I flew meant that wasn’t going to happen. Seemed to me the ocean and the unexplored depths was the next best thing.”

As soon as he’d answered, another question came from the front row, from the lick-asses who actually paid attention in these seminars. The pressure was off Finn. Damn woman was still looking at him, although the rest of the row had turned back to face front. Her expression had changed and she was looking at him with a speculating gleam. He leaned forward toward her.

“Can I help you?” he half whispered.

She lowered her lashes at him. “I don’t know. Can you?”

Finn leaned even closer. “Unless you have a cock under that pretty red dress then I’m not sure I can.”

Her eyes widened and she turned her back to him with an audible huff. It was all Finn could do not to laugh out loud, even if he did feel a bit of a dick for saying that. But then, she had been the one staring.

The rest of the seminar passed in all it’s boring glory, a combination of industry information, safety notes, and that speech from Niall-with-the-accent. When Finn turned on his cell phone he saw he had three missed calls from Cap, and a picture message from Erik of a cup of coffee and a Danish. Just seeing the food made Finn’s stomach grumble and knowing Erik was sat somewhere relaxing pissed him off no end.

He listened to Cap’s messages. If the matter had been urgent then he’d have been pulled from the seminar, but these messages were more on the line of is-Erik-there and I-just-saw-Erik-with-coffee.

Like I have any control over Erik.

He sent off a quick text to Cap, assuring him that Erik must have been on a break, then another to Erik saying he’d been spotted. Let Erik and Cap fight that one out. As for Finn, he’d earned points today by staying through the whole thing and he’d seen the edible morsel that was Scottish-Niall, so it was a win/win for him.

In the breakout area with coffee and snacks, Niall was holding court. A gaggle of women surrounded him, all talking, and Niall looked like he was doing okay. Laughing and smiling and talking, and Finn wanted some of that. Using his best seek-and-destroy tactics, he made his way around the edge of the room until he was behind Niall and a single step forward had him up close and personal with the man. He realized a few things in quick succession: Niall smelled of a fresh aftershave, he was a good six inches shorter than Finn, and his voice was even sexier close up.

Please if there is a god, let Niall Faulkner be gay, or at the very least bi or curious.

“So astronaut, then,” Finn inserted in a lull in the conversation. Niall looked at Finn sharply, then, obviously realizing he was looking right at Finn’s chest because of their height difference, his gaze travelled upward, then down to groin level, then back to Niall’s face. Quickly, but with enough focus to have Finn thinking that Niall was checking him out.

Oh yes, he certainly checked me out.

“Until I was eight at least,” Niall said with a small smile.

Finn wasn’t letting this drop. He wanted to tease Niall, and he sure as well didn’t want Niall turning back to the NorsDev women who surrounded him. “I wanted to be a cowboy like Clint Eastwood.”

“But you ended up a cop,” Niall pointed out with a nod to the uniform that Finn was wearing. “ERU? That’s the special team out of Oslo right?”

“Yeah, and same thing,” Finn said. “Fighting the bad guys.”

“Except you don’t have a horse.”

“I had to leave the horse outside. He never pays attention in seminars.” Finn held out a hand. “Finn Hallan,” he introduced himself. “On loan to the Norwegian Emergency Response Unit.”

“On loan from where?”

“Metropolitan, London.”

“A Londoner working for the Norwegians. I didn’t know the
Beredskapstroppen
opened to non-Norwegians.”

“My father is Norwegian. And you’re Niall Faulkner, the decommissioning expert from Scotland, if I hear right? And you work for NorsDev.” There, that turned the whole conversation about what Finn could or couldn’t do on its head. He’d much rather hear what Niall had to say about himself. And the interesting twist of a Scot using Norwegian words was just the sexiest thing ever. The women around him, all four of them, melted away and just about on time Finn was in a one-on-one situation with the sexy engineering guy.

“Were you actually listening to what I was saying today?” Niall asked with a tilt of his head to punctuate the question. He had the most intriguing eyes but the light here was too bright to properly make out the color. How did Finn explain he was looking at Niall and listening to the tone of his voice rather than taking in the content of what Niall was saying?

“Of course,” Finn lied. “You’re an expert in the field of decommissioning.”

Niall raised an eyebrow, silently mocking Finn.

“And you’re ethical as well,” Finn added.