The Omega Team: Love: Classified (Kindle Worlds Novella)

A Kindle World Novella

Desiree Holt’s Omega Team

By Liz Crowe

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

Love: Classified

When a spring morning fog shuts down the Detroit Metro airport, Omega Team member Joey Preston is stranded along with thousands of others—including one harried young woman trying to get home to Kentucky.

Paige DiFerrari thanks fate for keeping her on the ground in Detroit, since all she really has waiting for her back home are disapproving parents and a wedding weekend her prettier, more successful, younger sister has planned. Preoccupied with thoughts of escaping the ordeal completely, thanks to the weather, she turns a corner of the crowded airport, gets coffee dumped down her front thanks to Joey, and her life changes forever.

What starts as a trick to convince her parents she has a cute, private security employed boyfriend, ends in a way neither Joey nor Paige expect once they get home and encounter the full force of the DiFerrari family dysfunction in the face of a stressful weekend. Before Joey leaves Kentucky for his next assignment, he must confront his feelings about Paige—the good and the bad—as well as reveal the truth about himself.

“You do realize,” the voice on the phone said to Joey, “we put you on a month’s leave. You don’t have to keep checking in for new assignments. Actually,” the voice continued, “we’d prefer it if you
actually
take a damn vacation. Consider it a gift. One you’re under strict orders to accept and implement. Got it?”

Joey Preston frowned and slumped farther down in the molded plastic airport seat. His elbow bumped the lady to his left. She shot him an evil glare that he ignored as he stared down at his civilian-appropriate, unobtrusive, fit-in-anywhere dark jeans and tan work boots.

“Do you hear me, Preston? Or do I need to meet you somewhere and beat it into you?”

“Yes, I hear you, sir. No, you don’t have to beat anything into me. I was just . . . I don’t know. I don’t like vacations. I never have.”

The sound of Grey Holden heaving a huge sigh from hundreds of miles away made Joey wince. “I’m sorry, sir. Consider the vacation on board and currently downloading.” He dropped his backpack to the floor in front of him and propped his aching feet on it.

“Go someplace with lots of sunshine, beer, and hot chicks,” Grey suggested helpfully. Joey grunted by way of reply. “You have to decompress, Joey. You’ve taken on three back-to-back assignments that put you in the line of fire. I can’t have you going into overload on this. We need you sharp. And if I have to remind you of your stay in the hospital—”

“No, you don’t have to remind me of anything. I get it. I know you talked them out of making me see a therapist. But shit, Grey . . . I mean, uh, sir, I had that asshole in my grasp, literally, in his kitchen, surrounded by all the fucking kiddie porn and those . . . little girls in the basement.” He groaned and leaned forward on his knees, willing the images out of his brain. “That monster didn’t deserve to draw another breath. I still don’t get why you stopped me from—”

“Enough,” Grey barked so loudly the two people crammed in on either side of him must have heard it. Joey sat up ramrod straight, his innate, years of honed instincts to obey orders kicking in. “Let it go, Preston. I had to arm wrestle Athena to keep from slapping you in front of a therapist instead of sending you on vacation, so do not—I mean,
do not
—prove me wrong.”

Joey smiled when he heard Athena Madero, Grey’s partner in the Omega Team, talking in the background. He’d admit it—he had a secret crush on her. No healthy man who liked his women tall, strong, and sexy could
not
have a crush on
her
.

“Give me that fucking phone,” she said. There was a rustling, a few more curses, and then Athena’s voice hit his ear. “Get your ass on a beach with a beer in your hand and a beautiful woman on the chair next to you in the next five hours, Preston, or I will hunt you down, drag you back here, and slap you in front of a psychologist so fast—”

“Point made, Athena. Thanks,” he said, shifting from one butt cheek to the other, attempting to find a comfortable position in the torture-worthy chair. “I’m gonna close my eyes and point at the departures board. I’ll let you know where I am, just in case, once I get there. Deal?”

“Deal.” He heard a soft sigh before she continued. “Joey, you know we only want you refreshed and ready for the next assignment. We’re not banishing you from the Team. But even you have to admit the last one . . . it took something out of you. With good reason. It was God awful. You need a break.”

“Yeah, okay, I got it.” His head pounded with stress at the thought of an entire month to himself with nothing but the sun’s rising and setting to structure his days. He toyed with the concept of staying where he was in Michigan, renting a remote cabin somewhere in Michigan’ Upper Peninsula and sleeping for ten or twelve hours a day. God knows he could use it. But the few days he’d spent with his aunt and uncle in their retirement community condo had made every inch of his skin crawl. He loved what was left of his family, but he’d kept himself distant from them and visits were awkward. His own doing, he knew. Why he’d even come here, he couldn’t explain to himself.

So here he sat, in the Delta terminal of the Detroit Metro Airport, along with what felt like approximately three-quarters of the world’s population, being told to take a vacation by his boss, or else. “Gotta go, Athena. Thanks.” He ended the call before either of them could say anything else.

He spotted a woman with a toddler on her hip and a pile of carry-on luggage, looking exhausted. Shouldering his backpack, he waved at her to get her attention, then stood so she could take his seat. But before she could gather her stuff, some punk kid with a spray of zits across his nose, earbuds jammed in his ears, and in sore need of a decent haircut, slid into the vacated space.

“Excuse me,” Joey said, trying not to lose it. “That’s my seat. I was just stretching.”

The kid stared up at him in silence. When he looked back down at the computer tablet in his hand, Joey tapped him none too gently on the shoulder, then tugged one of the buds from his ear. Tinny sounds of crappy, profanity-laden rap music made Joey want to throw things. The kid made a bleat of protest, not exactly a recognizable word, and started to stick the thing back in his ear. Joey reached down and lifted the kid up by the front of his thin T-shirt in a matter-of-fact manner as if he were moving a box out of his way.

“Hey,” the kid blurted. “What the fuck, asshole?”

“Watch your mouth,” Joey said as calmly as he could manage. He moved the kid a few feet away and encouraged him to take a seat on the floor against a large pillar where several other people were already sitting and charging their devices. This encouragement involved kicking his feet out from under him, but Joey didn’t let him get hurt since he kept his grip on the T-shirt, which allowed him to lower the kid down, more or less gently. “Sit. Stay. Good boy,” he said, holding up a hand and smiling.

“Fuck off, you fascist army prick,” the kid spat out. But Joey kept smiling at him. Using what were no doubt vast powers of deduction that to further antagonize the large, muscular man in the jeans, work boots and Army Ranger T-shirt could put a crimp in his style, the kid dropped his gaze and slumped over his tablet, still seated on the floor.

He turned to see the people on either side of his former seat giving him a thumbs-up and grinning. He re-shouldered his pack and motioned for the young woman with the little kid asleep on her shoulder to take the seat. He moved away from the tableau before anyone tried to engage him in conversation.

He was not in the mood.

Not at all.

His brain boiled with aggravation at his enforced month-long banishment from the only job he’d found he truly loved, that of special agent for the Omega Team—the guys you called in when regular cops were too corrupt or incompetent, or the target was too big for any government agencies to want to dirty their hands over. It used all his years of Army Ranger and Special Ops training but, as a bonus, it actually allowed him some leeway when it came to methodology—all in the name of giving the bad guys what they deserved.

As he pretended to study the outgoing flight board, all the computerized lines went blank. Confused, he turned around to see all the boards had done the same thing. A voice pierced the cacophony of noise around them:

“Ladies and gentlemen, due to severe fog conditions, all flights in and out of Detroit Metro Airport are canceled for the next three hours. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

A collective groan rose from the crowd. Joey raised an eyebrow, his mind already working through the problem. He grabbed his phone and sent a quick text to Grey to let him know about the delay and to assure him once the fog cleared, he’d be making his way to Hawaii on the first available flight—something he could now afford, thanks to the bonus he’d gotten from Omega Team for taking that last assignment. Even though, for many reasons, that one had nearly killed him.

He decided to find some coffee because one thing he did know was that a good cup of java put almost everything in perspective. Whistling, he headed through the irritated crowd of humanity, the chaos having its usual calming effect on his psyche.

“Mama, for the millionth time, I don’t know when I’ll be able to take off.” Paige rolled her eyes at the clump of strangers taking up the four chairs across from her in the crowded airport. They stared back at her, glassy eyed, the little kid’s faces exact replica combinations of their parents’. She tried not to shudder.

Kids. She really didn’t like them or want any—which, apparently, was in direct opposition to her biological imperative according to her mother, Caroline Cole DiFerrari.

“I’m not in control of the weather or the decisions these people make about when it’s safe to fly. So just calm down.” She waited, half-listening to the ongoing tirade on the other end of the phone, half-planning her possible escape.

“No, I’m not gonna rent a car and drive. The fog affects roads too. Besides, I already bought the ticket, and they’ll honor it, just a few hours later than planned.”

After another few minutes spent taking in the worried nattering her parents kept tossing at her from the two phones at either end of her childhood home, she interrupted them. “Mama, tell Leslie I will be there, but I could possibly miss tonight’s . . . whatever the hell it is you’ve planned.”

“Young lady, you’d best watch your mouth. I knew you going up there to Detroit to work was a bad idea. You’ve gone all . . . all—”

“I’m sorry, Mama. But I gotta go, okay?” She could hear herself slipping back into the familiar contours of her Kentucky accent and hated it. “Bye.” She ended the call, cutting both her parents off mid-squawk. She closed her eyes and forced her racing pulse to slow as she leaned against the huge column in the middle of the Delta Terminal of the Detroit Metro Airport by taking slow, steady, yoga breaths. Thus revived, she looked down to see if her phone had managed to take any charge while she’d been on it. With a curse, she jiggled the charging wire, noting how the little “battery charging” icon flickered on the screen, which was festooned with an impressive spider-web of cracks.

Determined to make the best of this crap situation, she sat a few more minutes, holding the cord still at the right angle to allow the device to suck up a few precious bars of juice. “Why don’t you ever remember to plug the thing in at night,” one of her more organized co-workers had asked her once when she’d been doing the phone-charging dance during a ten-minute coffee break. “I do that. And every morning, I wake up to a fully charged, ready-to-roll phone.”

Paige blew a lock of hair back that had flopped down over her eyes and forced herself to sit another five minutes to allow for more power. The hair budged for a second, then dropped over her eyes again. She crossed her legs and tried to ignore all the muttering unhappiness around her. The damn airport was chock-full on a May morning. It figured. The one day she had to leave town, the quirky Michigan weather would pull a blanket of dense fog across the city, halting air travel and endangering lives on its already tricky roadways.

Finally, she could sit no longer. She gathered her laptop and the random papers that had spilled out of her second carry-on bag, collected her one-quarter charged phone, and stood to survey her surroundings. Sweat gathered under her blouse, dripped down her back and between her breasts as she tried to plow through the clots of pissed off people dotting the terminal, most in varying stages of arguing with each other or in frantic phone conversations about meetings, doctors’ appointments, funerals, and, of course, weddings.

Paige sighed.
Dear Lord
, she thought, knowing it for blasphemy but no longer caring.
Please let this fog keep me trapped here for two days. That’s the only excuse I can use to skip my sister’s stupid wedding weekend back home in Kentucky.

She figured she could very well be the only stranded passenger in this entire airport who wanted to be that way—who hoped to stay that way. “Excuse me,” she muttered, trying to work her way around all the humanity. Her head pounded from lack of caffeine. She’d slept through the alarm, as usual, and had only managed a sip of day-old, room temperature coffee as she threw all her stuff in a suitcase and made her way out her apartment door. By this time of the morning, she would have had at least three cups of office coffee, all the better to fortify her day spent following her boss, hotshot sports agent Braxton Gill, around.

The one thing she’d learned in the year she’d spent as the man’s personal assistant was if he were not sufficiently propped up on endless cups of expensive espresso, he turned into Mr. Hyde and happily took his fury out on her. So far, she’d learned more about how to read his caffeine-deprived signals than about the business of sports.

She hated the man. But she loved the energy of the office, the non-stop sports talk and various celebrities who’d wander in and out, and she flat out adored living in Detroit—a city smack in the middle of a massive revival, thanks to a couple of guys with a ton of dough and determination to make it happen.

None of which pleased her parents, of course, since it didn’t involve her living in Kentucky, preferably within a few minutes of her childhood home, or having a nice boyfriend with husband potential. Her mother was the nosiest pain in the ass about that last item, and Paige knew this entire wedding weekend for her little sister would be a nonstop nag-o-rama.

Hence, her actual relief at being stranded in the damn airport.

She shoved past a bunch of little kids screaming and racing in circles beside the walking sidewalk, dragging her likely too large wheeled carry-on and gripping her second-hand, shoulder-strapped briefcase.
Coffee. Get to the coffee
, she thought as she rounded a corner a few airport shops down from one of about a zillion Starbucks.

She felt her phone buzz in her jeans pocket so she stopped to drag it out, figuring it must be her little sister Leslie’s turn at bitching and moaning. As she looked down at the cracked screen, it took her about a half-second to register that someone had rounded the blind corner in front of her, avoiding the crowds by hugging the inside, as she’d been doing.

“Shit,” she squeaked when hot liquid landed on her shirt, making her drop the phone, again.

“Oh, my God,” the someone said as she stood, hands at her sides, trying to decide if it was worth the energy to scream. The coffee had been hot, but not scalding. But if her nose didn’t deceive her, it was also laced with cream and some kind of sticky flavoring. She touched her blouse and put her fingers to her face.

“Vanilla,” she muttered. “What kind of a lame-ass puts vanilla in their—”

“Uh, miss,” a deep voice intoned, “I’m really sorry. Here . . .”

She looked up into a set of dark brown eyes set in the face of a tall man-boy. A man-boy with the widest shoulders she’d seen in a long time. He’d grabbed a stack of brown napkins and was holding them over her drenched chest, looking about as awkward as any human being could.

She frowned and took them from him before he pressed them to her breasts. “Watch where you’re going next time,” she grumbled as she tried to blot the worst of the mess.

“Well, you were kind of standing in the middle of the thoroughfare, as it were,” the guy said. Paige looked at him again, taking a full measure of his height along with the boy-next-door handsomeness, the dark blond, close-cropped hair, and the wide smile.

“I’m glad you think this is funny,” she said and allowed that he was quite adorable if she were to admit that to herself. “Here.” She handed him the wet napkins. He took them and dumped them in a trash bin without once taking his eyes off her. “Did your mother ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”

She attempted to collect herself and not notice that the man was flat out hot, not just adorable and that he hadn’t moved. After refastening her ponytail, she grabbed her rolling case and handed it to him.

“Help me out and take this over there. I gotta find a clean shirt.”

He took her case and put it on a tall chair. She opened it and pawed through the mostly unfolded mass of clothes until she located a Detroit Lions T-shirt.

“Turn,” she said as she started unbuttoning. She had on a sports bra, and they were tucked into a corner, mostly shielded by a wall of people still milling around looking lost and angry. He raised an eyebrow, moved in front of her, turned and folded his arms. She noted that he’d formed a sort of hot adorable man-boy shaped wall of his own.

She stripped off the coffee-infused blouse and tugged the tee down over her head, tucking it into her jeans. On a whim, she loosened her ponytail and fluffed out her curly brown hair a little as she appreciated the klutzy guy’s most impressive rear view.
Damn, Sam
, she thought, biting her lip at the sight of his ass perfectly framed in the tight, dark jeans.
This might actually be fun.

“Okay,” she said, stuffing the befouled shirt in the front zipper pocket of the case, away from the rest of her stuff. “I’m good.”

Cute guy turned and smiled at her, and Paige actually experienced a distinct tingle down her spine. She blinked. “So,” adorable man said, sticking his fingers in his jeans pockets. “I guess I owe you a coffee.”

“Screw that,” she said, doing a flirty hair-flip over one shoulder and pushing the handle of her rolling bag at him. “This calls for a Bloody Mary.”

“Little early for booze, isn’t it?”

She smiled her best smile at him. When he actually blushed, she thought she might die right on the spot.

“Never. Come on. I know one of these bars actually makes decent ones.”