Authors: Stephanie Tyler
Sarah had. And so much for not thinking about her. It was a losing battle.
She’d let him take her that first time against the outside wall of his office, in the dark with her naked and him still fully clothed. He remembered her rubbing against him like a cat in heat, her hips undulating as he drove into her, her sex sheathing him like a tight, soft glove.
The last time he’d taken her had been on a bed in a hotel in Uganda with sheets as pretty as any he’d ever seen and Sarah looking even more so as she told him she loved him. That and every other time he’d held her naked body to his had burned itself onto his brain until the memories were more tortured than sweet, until he wondered if he ever had any control over himself at all.
When it came to Sarah, he knew the answer was no. And that’s why he’d put his plan in motion to get himself free for the second time from GOST—for good. He’d long since left Witness Protection and Delta Force and if he only had himself to worry about, he could remain doing what he was doing now—killing at the government’s mercy—and it wouldn’t have mattered.
But it did matter—
she
mattered.
He wondered if she’d lost faith in him, if she was angry. If he’d ever be able to win her back.
But failure wasn’t an option. The palm reader had been correct—his soul was almost gone and he held on to the last of it with a death grip.
If Kaylee Smith had taken the bait, her plane would land soon. She was a reporter, smart enough to know that there was no fooling around when it came to kidnappings.
Smart enough to know better too, but that never seemed to stop anyone these days.
He wondered if Aaron would even forgive him for what he was about to do, and realized that it was too late to stop it, no matter what the answer would’ve been.
Chris Waldron hitched a ride on a helo from Coronado—the proverbial red-eye, although he really couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through a night—and was back on base in Virginia by 0500.
Dammit, he needed sleep, didn’t function as well as Nick did on short naps.
The thought of his brother made him walk faster toward his office. He pushed through the door and found it all quiet, which was as rare an occurrence as any.
He’d fielded calls from Dad and Jake all day yesterday—with one out of state and the other called suddenly OUT-CONUS and not within reach of a face-to-face with Nick, both were understandably worried.
No wonder Nick had turned his phone off completely. Which Chris would kill him for when he got
him
face-to-face.
“Look, I’m sure he’s all right. This is the way he operates,” he told his dad now, cell phone balanced between ear and shoulder while he quickly went through the shit that had piled up on his desk in his absence.
“He went to the funeral,” Kenny said. “Something’s going on with Walter.”
Shit
. He shoved the mess into a drawer for the time being.
“He is
not
all right,” his father continued. “You go find him, right now. And Christopher Waldron, you call me the second you find your brother.”
There was no saying
no
to that tone. “Yeah, I promise, Dad.”
Chris already had car keys in hand from the second Dad mentioned the funeral. Now, bag slung over his shoulder, he headed for the back door.
“Why is there a female FBI agent in my office asking about your brother?” His CO’s drawl was thick, the way it always got right before he threatened bodily harm on one of the men under his charge.
Escape thwarted momentarily, Chris turned away from the door to face Saint. “Jake’s off the market.”
“Wrong brother.”
“Oh. Well, Nick’s available.”
“Special Agent Jamie Michaels isn’t interested in his dick.”
Chris snorted. “She’d be one of the first.”
“Listen up, Waldron, I don’t have time for this crap. I’m leaving for Coronado and I’m turning this problem over to you. I don’t want to hear another word about Nick and the FBI, understood?”
Chris pocketed his keys, figured the best way to help Nick at present was to keep this new problem as far away as possible. “Consider it done.”
Special Agent Jamie Michaels waited in the CO’s office for Chris Waldron for ten minutes before getting more than mildly impatient. In seconds, she was out of the office, prepared to stalk the still quiet halls in search of any SEAL she could get her hands on. She stopped short when she saw Juliana Sinclair, former model turned actress and new Hollywood hottie, the
it
girl of the moment. She was strutting her stuff all over the large TV screen framed in the doorway of the conference room down the hall from Captain John St. James’s office.
In all fairness, it was the man standing and watching the screen that stopped her in her tracks. She followed his focus to the glamazon while he continued to talk on his cell phone.
“You look fine, Jules,” he was saying, his drawl barely there but still noticeable—Southern, Cajun, actually. “Christ, no, I’m not—how many times do I have to tell you… Fine. Whatever.”
She looked between the man and the TV, where Juliana was wearing a pink dress and holding up her left hand to show off a huge engagement ring. The reporter was saying something about how Juliana was planning to do a cameo guest spot on a reality show called
Can You Survive It Island
or some such idiocy, and Jamie determined instantly that Juliana probably couldn’t survive a hangnail.
Jamie felt a small twinge of guilt when she heard the reporter say that Juliana was doing it for charity in a friend’s name.
The man hung up and stared Jamie down for a second before he spoke. “She’s my ex.” He nodded at the TV, and then continued to watch the screen.
“Oh. Oh,” she stuttered, and caught herself. “I guess the news of her engagement is upsetting.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“Obviously, you two still have some issues to work out.”
He turned back to her with a slow shake of his head. “The engagement’s bullshit. As in, not real, complete fake Hollywood bullshit,” he explained. “Good for PR on her new movie, though.”
“You’re serious.”
“I just spoke with her. She’s nervous about doing the show—wanted me to come with her and be her consultant so I could give her some tips, like how to make a bomb from a coconut shell.”
“Can you really do that?”
“I can, but it’s not information I give out readily.”
“So you want her to fail on the island?”
“It’s not my problem, now, is it?” His voice was slow and measured, but she’d never mistake that for laziness. The energy was positively vibrating off his body and it shot straight through her when he extended his hand and introduced himself as Chris Waldron.
He was tall. As in, she could wear her tallest heels with her five-foot-eleven-inch frame and she’d still come up shorter by quite a bit. And if they’d met in a bar or on a blind date or under any circumstances other than this, Jamie would have no problem feeling almost petite.
So the CO had gotten rid of her by sending in the distraction. And Chris was distracting, so much so that she wanted to freeze time and just stare at the way one of his eyes was a deep cerulean blue and the other an intense green—eyes that made him look slightly unbalanced but somehow handsome in a crazy, rock star kind of fashion.
The bandanna wrapped around his head, along with the tie-dyed shirt and the green cammies, would’ve looked ridiculous on anyone else. On him, it looked completely right, imposing, even, in a
Don’t fuck with me unless you want to fuck me
way.
She ignored every instinct that wanted to take him up on his unspoken invitation.
“It’s a little early in the morning for the FBI to be poking around, isn’t it? I thought feds didn’t like to get to work before 0900.”
“You heard wrong, Chief Petty Officer Waldron.”
“You’re looking for Devane,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “He could be anywhere—he’s on leave and I’m not his mother or his keeper.”
Yeah, she could’ve seen that answer coming from a mile away. And there was no way she was letting it suffice—this meant far too much to put up with bullshit.
She was still on leave from the FBI and her visit was unofficial, but Chris Waldron didn’t have to know that.
She had no reason to explain to him that it was the most important case of her life, a way to finally help her sister, Sophie. A culmination of months of secret investigation that involved members of Witness Protection who’d disappeared off the face of the earth, just like her sister had, and had been tied into a secret government group of mercenaries. Nick Devane had worked with one of those men. Nick Devane could give her the last known location of Bobby Juniper, aka Clutch, could get her closer to Sophie.
It had been more than eight months since Jamie had seen her sister. Even with her own resources at the FBI, Jamie had been unable to get any help.
There was no way Sophie had gone willingly, not when she’d known Jamie had been hurt. One week before Sophie disappeared, Jamie had been shot twice in the thigh by a drug lord’s right-hand man—an American liaison turned fugitive who she and her partner were attempting to apprehend in Mexico, after an exhaustive investigation and a two-month tail. After extensive rehab and psych testing, she was field ready once again. Alone. She’d requested it that way. She wouldn’t be ready for a partner again for quite some time.
Mike’s death—Mike’s murder at the hands of the same man who’d shot her—had hit her hard. The department thought that was normal; the death of a partner was always difficult for any agent to deal with.
Her thigh still ached, especially when she overdid it on a run or in the training room, but she was ready to get back physically. And the only other person besides her who’d known that Mike was not only her partner but her lover was her personal shrink, the private one she’d seen on her own, under an assumed name, not the FBI-appointed one.
The psychiatrist had told her over and over again that it wasn’t her fault Mike was dead, that she had to stop blaming herself or she’d never be very good at her job.
She’d given herself back over to work but refused to think about dating again. Or sex. Or any combination of the two in the near future.
But this man who stood so arrogantly in front of her made her belly clench in that really good way—she wanted to pull her jacket off and let him buy her dinner and drinks, wanted to flirt her ass off and then take him to bed.
She took two steps back and turned on her heel in order to regain some inner control, to remind herself that she was close to finding out what happened to her sister. “I’m assuming he’s got to check in sometime?” She held her card out to Chris, who was busy typing something into his phone.
“What? Yeah, I guess. I’ll tell him to get in touch.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that, Chief.”
“Could you please call me Chris? And what, you gonna put a tail on me, sugar?”
“Could
you
call
me
Agent Michaels? And if I have to, yes.”
He seemed to like that answer, enough to scribble something on the back of her card and hand it back to her. “I’ll meet you later—I’ll find him and bring him along. How’s that?”
“You do that, Chief,” she called over her shoulder, with absolutely no intention of sitting around waiting for it to happen. She was under the gun—and according to the rumblings she’d heard, so was the future of the group called GOST. There wasn’t a moment to waste. “I’ll see you tonight.”
He merely nodded at her before turning his attention back to the TV screen.
Nick knew the back roads leading to his house better than anyone—mainly because he and his brothers had cut some of them out themselves, then covered them so to the naked eye they didn’t look like there was any passage. And as he wound his car under the branches through the dark, the radio blasted away the silence between himself and Kaylee.
The house was on a quiet block, on a corner facing the woods. Originally, the location had afforded privacy to the more famous musicians Kenny and Maggie worked with—Nick remembered, in those first months, the house often teeming with people and music and parties, until Maggie had gotten sick. But even then, there had always been music playing, although the soundproofed recording studio downstairs had been silent for years.
He slid the car smoothly into the garage and waited for the door to close behind them. When he saw it had armed, he cut the engine.
“We should go inside,” he started, but she shook her head.
“I’m not ready to go inside yet—I like being here, inside this car with you. Inside means serious business, more talking and what-ifs. But here, against the leather, sitting close to you, nothing’s a problem.” Her fingers stroked the soft upholstery on the seat on either side of her thighs—her hair was loose around her shoulders and her cheeks slightly flushed. She looked vulnerable and hot at the same time and when she tugged at his arm he knew what she wanted. What he wanted.
Yeah, the headers in this car tended to do that easily enough thanks to the vibrations they created.
He closed the small space between them in seconds, kicked his shoes off as he went over the gear shift and ended up on top of her.
She didn’t appear to have any problems with being in the small car, in the dark, inside the closed garage. No problems at all, judging by the way her body rocked easily under his, her breathing quick from lust, not fear.
Her hands were still on either side of the seat, bracing herself in the small space, the seat all the way back … and this long, slow grind was going to kill him. It was like being a teenager and dry-humping in the backseat all over again, although for Nick the dry-humping usually moved quickly to skin on skin. But as much as he wanted Kaylee’s skin, he wanted the warmth of her breath against his neck more, liked the way the windows fogged and the Porsche rocked with them. He had the willpower, the ability to take things slow when necessary. This seemed like one of those times, especially with his brain already doing the
What the fuck do you think you’re doing
dance.
He knew, though—the recent danger was more of an aphrodisiac than anything, and this slow, rough make-out session was life-affirming. Neither of them knew what was going to happen next, and the attraction between them was something he wasn’t about to deny.
“God, I could come like this,” she murmured against his ear and he pressed his cock, straining against denim, between her legs. She arched up into him as he did that again and again, until he knew she’d come by the small, soft noises she made, the way her body went rigid for a few seconds and then relaxed back against the seat.
He wanted that too, the mother of all releases, but he had to get things back on track. He reminded himself that he was dealing with two crises threatening to break down life as he knew it and reluctantly pulled away from her. He helped her climb out of the car, their limbs tangled, clothing wrinkled and askew.