Amelia Sinatra: What Hammer Wants

by Mallory Monroe

  He leaned forward, pulled out his checkbook, and began writing a check. When he finished, he took up and walked over to Amelia. He handed it to her.

  She looked at it. The check was written for four million-and-five-hundred-thousand dollars. Signed by Hamilton Reese. From his own private bank account.

  She looked up at him. How could she take that kind of money from a man she was trying to break free from? But she was nobody’s fool. She knew she had to take it. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll pay you back every dime when we find that cargo.”

  Hammer was offended. Didn’t she realize he’d do anything for her? “You aren’t paying me back a damn thing,” he said firmly. “You understand?”

  Amelia wanted to fight back, and say she was going to pay him back with interest, but she couldn’t. Because chances were, they were never going to find that shipment. Chances were, she was never going to be able to pay him back that kind of bread. She looked down. She felt defeated. “I understand,” she said.

  Hammer felt her defeat and didn’t like her feeling that way. He placed his hand on her chin and lifted her face up toward his. And stared at her. He knew he had no business being with her. He knew he should have hitched himself to a woman who, at the very minimum, wouldn’t go around breaking the law! But he loved Amelia. Not any other woman. He loved Amelia!

  He leaned down, to kiss her, but Amelia turned her face away. Her heart wasn’t for sale, was what that gesture told Hammer. She was a woman who wasn’t coming cheap. Not even four-and-a-half million dollars cheap. And he understood that. He wasn’t trying to buy her. He was trying to love her.

  He took her chin and turned her face back toward him, and kissed her anyway. He kissed her hard and angrily. How dare she turn away from him? So he went hard with her. At least, that was how it started out. But he was kissing the woman he loved. And he wasn’t that kind of man. His kiss became tender and sweet and passionate.

  And Amelia, all of a sudden, was returning his affection. She wanted to love him too! Until she realized she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t keep letting Hammer break her heart with his need to always have some different woman around, and then he’d claim the woman was nobody to him and Amelia would let him woo her back. The wooing was over for her. She stopped the kiss in its passionate track.

  Hammer was breathing hard, and she could see his erection, but she wasn’t turning back. Her heart couldn’t take it. She had to once and for all get that man out of her system!

  Hammer knew it too. She might have been the wrong woman for him, but he wasn’t exactly the right man for her. Their relationship seemed doomed from its inception.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, standing erect again, trying to conceal his own pain.

  “Where this time?” Amelia asked him, trying to forget how wonderful a kisser Hammer was.

  Hammer couldn’t even tell her where he was going, which was the not-so-wonderful part of his life she used to endure.

  But he did tell her one other thing, from their previous conversation. “You’re not fucking anybody but me,” he said to her again, as if it was a warning, and then he left her house.

  Amelia shook her head. That man had her in heat! How was she going to get over him if all he had to do was show up, kiss her, and she wanted him again?

  But she had to hold strong this time!

  Even though, she thought, as she stared at that check again, he just saved her bacon once again. And the thought that he might love her as much as she loved him excited her. She couldn’t lie. She loved the thought of Hammer truly loving her.

  But then she thought about Reggie Dell getting off of that plane with him, as if she was coming to Canada to spend some time with him in addition to whatever assignment she supposedly had to handle, and Amelia came back down to earth. He helped her out for his son’s sake, not hers, she decided, and finished her drink.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next day, Amelia grabbed a coffee from McDonalds, jumped back in her Bentley, and made her way to work. Lenny had been paid, thank God, and she placed half of the investigators that were searching for that cargo back on their regular caseload. They needed the money. She still had investigators on the case of those missing shipments, and would keep them on the search, but she wasn’t holding her breath anymore. Missing cargo was a built-in problem for everybody in the import/export business. But she knew how to handle any new shipment she might get paid to deliver going forward: she was going to oversee that delivery from start to finish herself. She wasn’t getting ripped off again.

  Her phone began ringing. When her car screen showed that it was Sebastian, she answered quickly. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Why are you pulling the investigators off of the case?” Seb asked her.

  “Just half of them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they have caseloads they need to work. And Lenny’s been paid.”

  “You still haven’t told me which one,” Seb said.

  Amelia frowned. “Which one what?” she asked.

  “Which one of your men paid it for you,” Seb said.

  “I don’t have men, thank you!” Not even a man, she thought sadly.

  “Yes, you do,” Seb said. “You’ve got Big Daddy. You’ve got Mick. You’ve got Hammer Reese. Which one came through for you?”

  Amelia exhaled. “Hammer,” she said.

  “I knew it! I knew you wasn’t going to your brothers. I knew you would eventually get some sense and go to Hammer. And that man just up and gave you all that money? Wow, Millie. He has to really love you.”

  “He loves his son,” Amelia said.

  “Sure, birdy,” said Seb. “And I’m Denzel.”

  “Ha!” Amelia said with a laugh. “You wish! But don’t worry,” she said, “I’m going to find those missing cargos. Or I’ll find the person who intercepted them.”

  “And what are you going to do if you find that person or persons?” Seb asked.

  “Bury their asses,” Amelia said. “What you think?”

  Seb laughed. “You are your brother’s sister,” he said.

  “Bye boy,” Amelia said, smiling, and ended the call. But as soon as she ended it, she received a text message. This one from Rowena. The school, she said, wanted to know if JoJo could participate in the upcoming play they were going to put on. Amelia smiled. That was easy. JoJo was a natural-born ham.

  Since she was on a lonely road heading south, she decided to text YES to Ro. She typed the Y in and the E. But before she could finish, she felt as if something had just crashed into the back of her car, and her entire body flung forward.

  “What the fuck?” she yelled, and looked through her rearview.

  It hadn’t been a hard enough bump for the airbags to deploy, but it was hard enough! She saw that a pickup truck was behind her, and the most likely culprit. And then the truck backed off, and she was about to pull over to the side of the road to check the damage and find out what his problem was. But that was when that same truck sped up and rammed her again. But this time, after the truck rammed her it pressed hard on its gas and began pushing her off of that road as if it wasn’t some innocent fender-bender, but an all-out road rage.

  Amelia tried to steer her car away from the shoulder of that road because, if she left it up to that truck, it was going to give her the kind of uncontrollable momentum that would take her, not onto the side of the road, but into the side of one of the many tree trunks on the side of that road. She had to steer clear.

  And she did steer clear. It took her nearly standing up in her seat, but she was able to force her car back onto the street. And she started trying to straighten her wheels. But the truck stayed on her, and rammed her again. But the ram came at the wrong time. Her wheels weren’t straight and the hard hit was like that PIT maneuver the cops used. Her car went spinning around in the street. It was spinning so violently that the airbags deployed and Amelia wasn’t able to hold onto the wheel. She had on a seatbelt, or she would have been fly
ing all over the interior of that car, or, even worse, through the windshield.

  When the spinning stopped, her car was on the opposite side of the road and careening toward a tree trunk anyway. But it came to a halt before it hit.

  But if that truck thought it was over with, and he could just ride into the sunset, he didn’t know Amelia. She wasn’t afraid. She was angry!

  She deflated the airbag, took control of the steering wheel, and began taking off after that truck. She still thought it was some half-baked road rage idiot until the driver of that truck reached back and fired a series of bullets at her car. She knew then it was far more serious, and planned out, than that.

  As she dodged his volley of bullets by driving her speeding car in zigzags, she managed to pull out the loaded gun she kept in a compartment under her seat. And then she waited. She didn’t fire back. Not until she saw his arm come out of that car window again and try to fire yet another round. But this time she fired on him, and hit him in that arm.

  And it was enough. His truck became the careener. And it careened out of control and ended up running into one of those tree trunks on the side of the road. It stopped with a sudden, hard crash.

  Amelia pulled over, far from the car just in case, and got out. She kept her gun at her side as she ran to confront the driver. But when she got up to the car, she realized the driver, a white guy with matted hair, was slumped over the steering wheel dead, his arm bleeding profusely.

  She knew she had to leave the scene. The cops weren’t going to want to hear that it was his fault and she was just defending herself. They wasn’t going to want to hear none of that. She therefore pulled out her cell phone, to take a picture of her tormenter, and grabbed him by his matted hair and pulled his head back. And she took a picture of his face.

  But as soon as she took that flash, she realized he wasn’t dead at all. And he opened his eyes. She also realized, to her shock, that he had a grenade in his hand. And before she could react, he put that grenade to his mouth and, with his teeth, pulled the pin.

  “Ah, shit!” Amelia screamed and dived onto the hood of the car just as he threw the grenade out of his car window.

  Amelia made it over to the other side and took off running for the woods. But the explosion occurred before she made it, and she had to dive again.

  The truck lifted up on two wheels from the impact of the explosion, and then it lifted all the way up and landed on its roof. It flattened like a pancake, and the driver flattened with it.

  Amelia waited in the woods for all of the falling debris to finally rest in place, and then she took off again. She ran for her Bentley. It was just a matter of time before the cops came around and she was arrested. The sister of Mick the Tick arrested? They’d never let her see the light of day again. It would take Hammer saving her bacon yet again to get her out of that one.

  She wasn’t having that.

  She jumped into her car, still shaken by the close call, and sped away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hammer Reese had been forced to spend the night in Wyoming going over strategy all night long with Cordoba and his generals, but the news that came from Washington that morning changed everything. When the call came in about Amelia, he was just delivering the bad news to Cordoba.

  “But why?” Cordoba asked him. They were on a government-owned ranch in Jackson Hole that Hammer selected as a hideout for Cordoba until they got him what he needed: more men and more ammo. “I thought everything was approved.”

  “It was,” Hammer said. “Until the SecDef said he had to run it up the chain.”

  “To the president?”

  Hammer nodded. “Correct. And the president won’t approve it.”

  “But why?” Cordoba asked again, his voice strained with stress. “They want me to fight and win, but they do not give me what it will take to win?”

  “I understand your frustration. Double it and you’ve got mine. Secretary Bellamy understands both of our frustration. But the president doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t want the political blowback.”

  “Then what am I to do?” Cordoba asked. “I thought you would have the final say.”

  “I would have. But Bellamy ran it up the chain.”

  Cordoba was highly upset, although he fought to maintain his composure. “It was a done deal. We had strategy in place and everything. Why would Bellamy do such a thing? Why would he tell the president if we had it well in hand?”

  “In America we call it CYA,” Hammer said. “Cover your ass. Bellamy’s covering his ass.”

  Cordoba nodded. “We call it the same thing in my country,” he said.

  And then Hammer’s phone rang. When he saw that it was Ozzie, he knew he had to take it. Ozzie would not be interrupting a meeting with Cordoba unless he had to. “Excuse me,” Hammer said and went into the back of the home.

  “What’s up?” he asked into his phone.

  “It’s Amelia, Ham,” Ozzie said.

  Hammer stopped in his tracks. “What about her?”

  “She was attacked.”

  His heart squeezed. “Attacked?” He held his phone with both hands. “Is she alright?”

  “She’s okay. I know that much. And she was able to flee the scene apparently. But that’s all I know.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She went to work, believe it or not. She took her ass to work.”

  Hammer believed it. Amelia had ice water in her veins. “My son at school?”

  “Yes, sir. I already ordered extra security on him. Although, I found out, Amelia already had extra security on him. And Ro went to school with him too. Between you and me, Ro’s the one who called me and told me what happened after Amelia told her.”

  “Okay, good,” said Hammer. “And you’re certain Millie’s okay?”

  “I’m certain. She wasn’t harmed.”

  “Thank God,” Hammer said.

  “You’re still in Wyoming, aren’t you?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “I hear Bellamy’s backing out. That true?”

  “Fuck Bellamy. Any read on who pulled that shit on Millie?” Hammer asked.

  “None. And I’ve got our guys on it too. So who knows? Maybe Lenny the Butcher? Maybe she didn’t pay him.”

  “She paid him,” Hammer said. “Amelia handles her business.”

  “You’re right about that,” Ozzie agreed. “But okay, what’s the plan?”

  “I’m heading back to Baltimore ASAP. Contact my Pilot. Tell him I’m heading his way.”

  “Will do, boss. But what about Cordoba?”

  “I’ll deal with him later. He’s a no-go anyway.”

  “I heard. Fucking Bellamy! Why would he even run it up the chain?”

  “Who knows? But I’ll be in Baltimore.”

  “Don’t call Amelia,” said Ozzie. “I doubt if she wants to see you. My advice and from what Ro’s been telling me about her mood: you should just show up.”

  Hammer knew it too. “I don’t plan on calling her,” he said. “But you’re certain she’s alright?”

  “Damn, Hammer, yes! She’s fine or Ro would have told me so. You know that.”

  Hammer knew it, and he ended the call. Ozzie and Rowena had a thing going on.

  Hammer told Ozzie the truth. He hadn’t planned on calling Amelia at all. But as soon as he ended that call with Ozzie, it took everything within him not to call Amelia. He wanted to hear for himself that she was alright.

  But only time would tell that tale.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She sat in front of her desk and JoNathan “Nate” Latimore, her African-American field supervisor, and Seb, sat in front of her. And they were shocked when she told them what happened.

  “But I thought you said you paid Lenny,” Nate said.

  “I did pay him.”

  “Then why would he send his goon after you?” Nate asked.

  “You’re assuming it was Lenny’s goon that was after her,” Seb said. “There’s no e
vidence of that.”

  “Then who could it be?” Nate asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Amelia said as she pulled up the picture on his phone. “But I have his photograph.” She showed the picture she took of her attacker after his car had wrecked. “That was just before he pulled that grenade stunt,” she said. “Either of you recognize him?”

  Nate and Seb shook their heads. “Doesn’t look familiar to me,” Seb said.

  “Me neither,” said Nate.

  “I’ll send the pic to both of you,” Amelia said, sending the picture to their cell phones. “Get it on the street. Get me a name and a who does he work for. I’ll handle the rest.”

  “Will do, boss,” Nate said. Then he looked at her. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask,” Amelia said.

  “Just how many enemies do you have?” Nate asked, and Seb laughed. Even Amelia, despite the trauma she was still reeling from, laughed too.

  She didn’t make it back home until later that night. When she heard voices in JoJo’s room, at that time of night, she immediately pulled out the loaded gun she always kept on her person. There was plenty of security outside. She saw to that. And she knew Rowena was inside protecting JoJo. But that wasn’t Rowena’s voice she was hearing. She tiptoed her way down the hall to his room, and then eased open the door.

  When she saw JoJo on the floor of his bedroom, putting together a big-faced puzzle, and then saw Hammer lying on that floor, on his side, helping put the puzzle together, too, she exhaled. He must have heard about her accident and hurried back from wherever he was. He came. But then again, he always came when she was in trouble. But unlike all those other times, there would be no makeup sex for him this time, because they weren’t going to makeup this time. Amelia was going to see to that.

  For a moment, since she wasn’t detected, she just stood there staring at the muscularly handsome Hammer. The man’s man. She was nuts to think a man like him, a man, as that reporter said, that belonged to the world, could possibly be faithful to a woman like her. Despite what all those other men always said about her, she was no prize and she knew it. They just wanted to get in her pants. She was a woman with gangster in her core and the need for thrill in her DNA. She was no catch.