Page 27 of Resisting His Target
He held the door open for her. “I like it.”
She laughed, suddenly stopping as she entered the hall. “There’s smoke!”
Dense and black, it came up from the stairwell on a flowing current of air. “Come on!” he called to her, rushing to get Sloan. The house was on fire, and there were snipers outside. Not a good combination if they wanted to live another day.
We might need your help on this one, Peaches, so stay on my six.
14
Leo “Cowboy” Wilson stared unseeingly out the window as the chopper crossed the dark sky. There were thunderstorms to their south, the dangerous up- and downdrafts forcing them to adjust their course to avoid them and increasing their travel time to intercept Razorback and SVX.
Leo tucked his arms tightly across his chest. This would be his first experience working directly with Mac’s team, and he was nervous as a bear shitting in the middle of a highway.
In theory, the new HERO Force office in New York was a great idea, a cross between a charity case and a working business model. Give a bunch of screwed-up SEALs a second chance. Let them do what they were good at while they found a new place in this world.
They owed them that much. Hell, they were brothers.
But in reality it was rife with hazards. Men with PTSD weren’t good decision makers under stress, any more than guys who were missing a limb could rappel down the side of a building as well as his own fully capable men.
It sucked that he thought it. Hell, maybe it made him a bad person. But when half a dozen tangos were firing at your ass, you needed the best of the best on your six, not the leftovers.
They’re human beings, asshole, and Razorback was your goddamn friend.
He ground his teeth together. Ian Rhodes had been on his SEAL team. The guy had been a freaking renaissance man back then, a doctor with a sharp sarcastic wit and a popularity with the ladies that would have gotten a weaker man in trouble. But Ian wasn’t weak. He was faithful to his wife.
Just like I would be to Charlotte if she’d ever let me marry her.
His gut churned at the thought of his girlfriend. He’d fucked himself but good when he brought marriage up a few days earlier at dinner, slipping it into casual conversation right behindI really like these pork chops.It went over like a dead body falling from the sky.
He knew about her first marriage and how hard it had been on her self-esteem, but he hadn’t realized her experience had sworn her off the entire institution for good. Charlotte O’Malley didn’t want to get married—not ever again—and while that didn’t change his feelings for her, it certainly changed his dreams for the future.
He’d grown up in the south, where love meant church bells and kids and matching rings that dug into your finger, leaving a tan line and a telltale dent. He wanted their names detailed on his truck, and that didn’t include a different last name than his own.
So they’d fought, like that was going to help.
Way to be super understanding, dickhead.
Booger’s deep voice came over the comm set. “Are we there yet?” They’d just left the Mexico City airport in the chopper, where they’d arrived by private jet. High winds were wreaking havoc on the commercial flights out of Atlanta, but Logan hadn’t even flinched, rambling on about horizontal versus vertical wind shearing as he moved into the cockpit and started the engines.
“Yep, you can get out now,” Logan deadpanned.
Logan. He was a hell of a pilot. A good soldier who’d matured under Cowboy’s watch, become a father to a child and a true partner to Gemma. But he was also Charlotte’s brother, and that’s where things got complicated.
Cowboy frowned. Logan might be able to help Cowboy with the marriage situation if he was so inclined. Too bad he wasn’t. The other man had gone from barely tolerating his sister and Cowboy together to some uncomfortable form of peaceful coexistence, with the occasional dirty look at family gatherings.
He pushed thoughts of Charlotte out of his head. He had more pressing problems at the moment, not the least of which was Mac’s team of misfits and whatever the hell awaited this crew when they got there.
More than half the HERO Force Atlanta team was on another assignment, which left the men he flew with now—Logan, Booger, and the new guy, Dire—a redheaded sniper from Louisiana who seemed more likely to invite a tango to a crawfish boil than to do anything violent. But the man’s record spoke for itself with more than two hundred confirmed kills, and if they really were flying into a swarm of SVX agents, they’d need his help.
SV fucking X.
He’d seen them in action once while he was still active duty, the team of mercenaries swooping into a war zone and taking out a high-priority target the SEALs were forbidden to touch. The bullets of US servicemen couldn’t be anywhere near that body, and in the end, they were not.
Cowboy had left there thinking SVX had a place in this world. A very necessary place. Anything else he knew about them was the rumor mill gone wild. How much was truth and how much was fiction was anyone’s guess, but the end result was the same. SVX did the dirty work no one else wanted or was able to do, and they were well paid for their efforts.
Cowboy locked his phone, staring at the dark screen before tapping it, his favorite picture of Charlotte appearing on cue. His gaze moved longingly over her bright red curls and lushly painted mouth, the black that lined her eyes lighting up the nerve endings between his eyeballs and his dick. That woman knew how to drive a man crazy.
Logan swore colorfully in the comm set, another thing he’d gotten better at since joining the team. “That storm system’s going to cause us some more trouble after all. Squall line forming six kilometers from our target, right between us and the damn resort. Patching through to Moto in New York so he can help me through this shit storm,” he grumbled. “And I’ve got Mac O’Brady on the line for you, Cowboy.”