Don't go there.
Bottom line: While it was beyond his ability to comprehend, it appeared that despite her daddy's billions at her disposal, she was actually
serious
about her career and her independence. That meant Nolan was
seriously
stuck with her. For the foreseeable future, he'd have to stick to Jillian Kincaid like a piece of lint to her pricey suits and actually do the job he'd been hired to do.
And there was the rub and the reason he'd been burying his head in a bottle. The last person who'd relied on Nolan to keep him alive was dead.
Since he hadn't been able to sleep, Nolan hit the shower in the guest bedroom. He'd just turned off the taps when his cell phone rang in the bedroom. He dragged one of the half-dozen plush towels he'd found in the linen closet across his wet chest and glanced at the bedside clock. One ten a.m.
He punched the
connect
button expecting to hear Ethan on the other end of the line and muttered a subdued "Yeah."
"No-man! Brethren! That you, buddy?"
Nolan closed his eyes. It was not Ethan. It was not anyone he wanted to hear from. Not tonight.
He'd recognize Jason Wilson's nasal twang anywhere. Un-fucking-believable.
"Plowboy."
"The one and only. How the hell are you, you lucky civilian bastard?"
Unprepared. That's how he was.
He was unprepared to hear the voice of a soldier he'd never expected to see again. He was unprepared for the punch of emotion. When he'd left Battalion, he'd left the life behind. All the rules. All the BS. All the regrets.
A big part of those regrets had been the men who'd depended on him. It sliced every bit as deep as he'd known it would to hear a voice that reminded him of his biggest failure.
Scenarios too numerous to sort flashed through his mind's eye. Ranger School at Fort Benning. All-nighters mucking through mud and swatting mosquitoes after endless hours with no sleep. First Airborne Ranger Bat and the guys of Hardrock Charlie Company. A bar in Atlanta they'd closed one night with the help of the MPs and a royally pissed-off bartender—other nights in Columbus with used women in used cars and a six-pack that had never had a chance to live long enough to go flat.
Afghanistan.
Iraq.
Where he'd done what he'd been trained to do: kill bad guys and break their toys.
"What's up, Wilson?" he asked as the
whump, whump, whump
of the helos, the sting of sand peppering his face, and the stench of sweat and blood and death hummed in the back of his mind like a surreal movie brought back to life at the sound of Plowboy's voice.
"Well, here's the deal," the Ranger said, and in the background Nolan heard hard rock blaring from a jukebox and the unmistakable sound of a head-knocking bar crowd. "I'm here."
A curl of dread coiled in Nolan's gut. "Here where?"
"Here,
here. West Palm. Hey!" he yelled, apparently to anyone who would listen. "What's the name of this fine establishment?
"Nirvana," he said after a moment. "Somewhere on—"
"Yeah. I know where it is."
Nolan's chin hit his chest. His grip on the phone tightened.
Nirvana was one of his favorite watering holes of late. It had a darkness to it that often fit his mood and just enough of a dangerous edge that a man with a death wish might get that wish fulfilled.
"What are you doing in Florida?"
"It's block time, man. We're sprung for a couple weeks. No way was I sitting out my leave at Bat. So I told Uncle to shove it and decided to haul my tired ass to the Keys for a week, where the women are as bitchin' as the booze. Told you when I asked for your cell number that I'd be comin' your way, you sorry sonofabitch. Now, hump your ass down here. I've got about two hours before my connecting flight leaves and we need to talk, man. We need to talk bad."
Panic, as thick as Plowboy's midwestern accent, had Nolan reaching for excuses. "Caught me at a bad time, bud."
"Fuck that. You want to talk bad time? They've got me by the
balls here, No. Seems the locals don't cotton to us
suave types muscling in on their territory."
Nolan went rigid. The Iowa farm boy had an off-duty reputation for hitting the hooch too hard, shooting off his mouth, and landing with his ass in a sling.
"What did you do?"
"Well, that's the thing. It's more like what's going to be done unto me that's—"
Plowboy's words were cut off by the unmistakable sound of a fist hitting flesh and the resultant grunt of pain.
When he came back on the line, he was breathing hard and his voice was raspy. "I sort of... promised these needle-dick... no-loads that we ... you and me ... we'd show 'em—"
Another thud—another punch landing—then the racket of a body crashing against what was most likely a table. More groans in the background along with the ominous
thump, thump, thump
of the receiver hitting the wall as it dangled from the cord.
Adrenaline shot through Nolan's blood as he waited the interminable length of several heartbeats before he heard someone grapple with the phone.
"Nolan, that you?"
He recognized Charlene's voice and felt a small measure of relief. Char tended bar on weekends. The forty-something divorcee with the sandpaper voice and bulldog jowls could hold her own in any brawl he'd ever seen break out in Nirvana ... and he'd seen plenty.
He pressed thumb and finger to his eyeballs. "What's happening, Char?"
"What's happening," she ground out, "is that if this stupid shit is a friend of yours, you'd better get down here fast and pull him out before they start dismantling him. He's a tough SOB but too ignorant to keep his mouth shut."
That was Plowboy. On the clock, he was all Ranger—all business, all team. Off the clock, he had always been and would always be a loudmouth, primed for a fight.
"Get down here, Nolan. I don't want no cops and I don't want no one biting it on my shift. He's not gonna last much longer," she warned, and hung up.
5
THE FIRST SURPRISE WAS THE CRACK OF the door hitting Jillian's bedroom wall. The second was that she'd been asleep—dead asleep. She shot straight up in bed, then covered her eyes with her forearm when the overhead light flicked on, blinding her.
"Get up and get dressed. We've got to move."
She squinted through the cobwebs, then blinked at the man who'd sent her heart into orbit for the second time that night as he stalked across the room and rifled through her bureau drawers.
She was too shocked to order him out. "What... what do you think you're doing?"
"Saving time. Put these on."
Her hands lifted reflexively to catch the white shorts and red T-shirt he tossed at her chest.
"What?" She threw her legs over the side of the bed, dragged back her hair. Scowled. Yawned. And finally got a slippery grip on the emotion she was most used to dealing with around Garrett. "Let me rephrase that.
What?"
"I don't have time to explain. Just get dressed and make it snappy or you're going like you are. Your choice."
Jillian wasn't sure if it was his warning snarl, the fact that her sleep-drugged mind was only half-functioning, or the very real possibility that whoever was threatening her had turned up the heat, but the moment he strode out of her bedroom she scrambled out of bed and dived for her pantie drawer. She didn't bother with a bra, but she didn't go commando for anyone, and if she was going to start, it sure as the world wasn't going to be for him.
Less than a minute later, she skidded into the living area carrying her sandals and finger-combing her hair. "What's happened?"
The black scowl on the face of the man shoving ammo into the clip of a weapon that made her .22 look like a squirt gun said it all. A lot. A lot had happened.
She noticed then what she hadn't noticed in her sleep-fogged state when he barged into her bedroom. He'd evidently showered—his hair was wet and he smelled of soap and shampoo, something leathery that hinted at sage and citrus. He was dressed all in black again. His short-sleeved T-shirt clung to his chest, damp in spots, like he hadn't taken the time to dry himself off completely.
She spun toward the door, toeing on her sandals, sensing his urgency as he armed himself. "Is someone trying to get in?"
To the gun, which he expertly holstered, he added a long, lethal-looking knife that he tucked in his boot, then covered with his pant leg.
No doubt about it. He was preparing for battle.
She was stubborn, but she wasn't stupid. For the time being, she was going to take this at face value—even though she had to gnaw on her lower lip to keep from peppering him with more questions that he clearly did not want to field.
"Let's go." He snagged her elbow and led her toward the door.
Steel. The impression of steel beneath honed flesh and wrapped around bone burned through her skin and had her keeping pace at a fast trot as they streaked out of her penthouse and scrambled toward the elevator.
"Can you at least tell me what's going on?" she whispered as they waited for an elevator that was notoriously slow to rise to the penthouse floor.
''What's going on is that you need to keep your mouth shut and do exactly what I tell you."
She was wide-awake now and her initial surge of surprise, which had transitioned to fear, was quickly listing toward irritation. No. Make that anger. She'd seen no one in the hall. Had heard nothing. And on their little jaunt to the elevator, he hadn't seemed particularly intent on keeping her close and shielding her from whatever he'd perceived as a threat.
"If this is a drill," she said after assessing the situation and finding imminent danger remarkably absent, "I'd just as soon skip the rest of it, thank you very much."
What she'd
just as soon
didn't seem to matter to him. He didn't say a word. Long moments passed and silence, as thick and palpable as the tension radiating from his body, engulfed the air around them. And oddly, hovering over it all, awareness, for the first time, of him as the man who would protect her, stalled her questions and her anger and held her in
a grip that rivaled his hold on her arm when he dragged her down the hall.
Along with the scent of soap and shampoo that he must have brought with him, because it didn't smell anything like the rain forest products she'd stocked in the guest bathroom, she could literally smell the testosterone, could feel his coiled strength as the relatively roomy hallway shrank to roughly the size of a microchip.
Jillian was a trained observer. It came with the job. And when she wasn't run over by hysteria—standard protocol, in her opinion, when you stepped out of a shower and found a man in your bathroom packing a gun—her mind assessed, cataloged, and filed details neatly away for later recall.
There was nothing neat about Nolan Garrett's details. In fact, the devil was clearly in his details—all raw power, consummate masculinity, and a pretty good measure of mean thrown in to thicken the stew.
The elevator finally hit her floor. The doors slid soundlessly open, then shut behind them when they stepped inside.
She knew now that he hadn't come to kill her, but she'd bet her top slot during ratings week that he h
ad
killed. Call her crazy, but that still made him dangerous in her book.
Fallen angel.
She stood by her initial assessment.
The reporter in her couldn't help but be intrigued by him. Under other circumstances, the woman in her might even have appreciated the sheer male beauty of the man. The full lips that even now were compressed in a hard, unyielding line as he stared straight ahead at the panel of lights on the elevator wall were unsettlingly sensual. His dark hair was a little on the long side. It gave him a reckless and a bit mussed-up look—like he'd just gotten out of bed or was about to tumble someone into one. Coupled with the heavy five o'clock shadow darkening his jaw, the look didn't quite fit with the clean, defined lines of his face or the honed precision of his body, which he held in a rigid, almost military posture.
Whoa. Back up. Military.
Bingo.
She could see it now. In his ramrod straight stance, in the spring-loaded give of his powerful legs. Regardless of his casual air, it was apparent he was perpetually balanced and ready for action. The man was on red alert. Trained to act and react. Kill or be killed.
If she'd suspected it before, she was sure of it now. He
had
killed. Would kill again. For her, if he had to. And while she didn't want to be—she
wanted
to be angry and incensed— she found herself hopelessly compelled to find out more about him.
"Special Ops?" she asked into the silence that had thickened to syrup.
With the slightest shift of his gaze, he met her eyes. He looked annoyed. And something else suddenly. Aware. Of her. Of the fact that they were strangers and alone in an elevator on a hot Florida night—and that he'd seen her naked stepping in and out of her shower little more than an hour ago.
Before she could stall a damnable blush, his expression closed up again, leaving her wondering if she'd been imagining things. And she still hadn't gotten an answer to her question.