Leveling the Field

by Elise Faber

  Leveling the Field

  KTS #3

  Elise Faber

  LEVELING THE FIELD

  BY ELISE FABER

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

  * * *

  LEVELING THE FIELD

  Copyright © 2021 Elise Faber

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-63749-017-4

  Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-63749-106-7

  Cover Art by Jena Brignola

  Contents

  KTS Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Epilogue

  Scorching The Earth

  Newsletter

  KTS Series

  Also by Elise Faber

  About the Author

  KTS Series

  Prequel Novella

  Fire and Ice (Hurt Anthology)

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  Full Length Books

  Riding The Edge

  Crossing The Line

  Leveling The Field

  Scorching The Earth (December 28th, 2021)

  Chapter One

  KTS Satellite Base

  Western Georgia

  06:58hrs

  Jesse

  Bleary eyes were the least exciting side effect of being a secret agent.

  Gunshot wounds sucked, but at least they made someone seem tough. Burning, aching eyes that came from staring at a computer screen for hours on end sounded far less intimidating.

  Then again, despite my size, hardly anyone found me intimidating.

  I was a giant Raggedy Ann doll—red hair, pink cheeks, freckles. Unfortunately, I was also six feet tall and, as one lovely ex-boyfriend had said, “built like a brick shithouse.”

  Such romantic sentiments.

  Probably why I was still single.

  Of course, even aside from the Raggedy Ann and brick shithouse vibes, being a secret agent didn’t exactly mean my love life was rocking.

  Kind of hard to get close to people when I had to hide half of my life.

  Okay, so, if I were being truthful, my job was much more than half my life. It was . . . the entirety of my existence.

  Sighing, I rubbed my eyes, closed down my computer, and stretched.

  My entire team and I had been working even longer hours than normal because . . . we had a traitor in our midst. Two traitors, actually. One who we’d known about, and one—

  “Fuck,” I whispered, shoving away from my desk and swirling my chair, staring out the dark window.

  Because the other traitor had been my friend, my teammate.

  So now the question was, how far and deep did the rot go?

  Did I need to look over my shoulder with people I’d once never hesitated to trust with my back? How could we move forward when we kept having to look behind us to make sure that a knife wasn’t going to find its way into our spines?

  How did I work here, live here without being in a constant state of alert?

  My sanctuary.

  The one place where I’d never felt judged for being me.

  And that sanctuary was gone now.

  But we’d get it back. I was determined that we would excise the traitors, and my teammate, Lily, and I had been working on ferreting out any remaining collaborators at KTS.

  We’d investigated every angle, we’d thought about every possibility.

  But even then, I still couldn’t be sure that I had considered them all.

  There must be something I was missing, something that I could plan for, something . . . I wasn’t going to find tonight because I was too freaking tired.

  There was a knock at the door, and I spun my chair back to face the door, which was just sliding open to reveal a gorgeous, green-eyed man, his grin absolutely contagious. I found myself grinning back . . . along with stifling the urge to run my fingers through the stubble lining his jaw.

  “Leo.” I waved him in, despite my fatigue. “When did you get into town?”

  “Just tonight.”

  “That’s awesome.” My smile didn’t fade. “It’s really good to see you.”

  Leo, who’d been a member of my former team before I’d shifted gears and landed under the direction of my current commanding officer, Hannah, smiled back. “It’s good to see you, too, Jess.”

  I nodded.

  Waited.

  He just stared at me.

  Which was a problem. Because the man had the dreamiest green eyes I had ever seen. They were pools of blazing emerald, a shocking contrast to the deep olive of his skin. And his smile—that one he’d just unleashed on me—well, I wasn’t a woman who swooned over a man, but this one? He’d always made me hyperaware of his presence, desperate to be more than friends with him.

  But he’d been a teammate.

  And further that, I was me.

  I wasn’t cute. I wasn’t curvy. I was . . . strong.

  I had broad shoulders and muscular thighs. I could program an explosive—or take one apart—in seconds to minutes, depending on how complicated they were, but I wasn’t a woman who inspired attraction in a man.

  I was the funny friend.

  The great buddy to hang out and have a beer with.

  Which was fine. I loved myself, loved the strength I’d worked hard for. It was just . . . part of me wanted the romance, wanted the fancy dress, wanted the man who thought I was the most beautiful woman on the planet.

  Well, everyone had their fantasies, and I wasn’t immune, and in the meantime (because that was and would most definitely always be a fantasy), I’d focused all of my energy on being a good agent, a good teammate, and a good friend, all in that order. But none of that gave me any clue how to proceed with this conversation.

  “Um, did you need something?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I waited. Again.

  He smiled. Again.

  And heat coiled in my abdomen, my thighs clenched together. I could have sworn I smelled him from all the way across the room.

  Then he crossed to me, tugged me up into his arms, and for one moment . . . for one moment I thought that perhaps the fantasy in my mind might be for real. That he was a heartbeat away from declaring that he had always loved me and then he was going to swipe a hand across my desk, lay me across the table, and have his merry way with me.

  But . . . fantasies.

  Because that one moment passed.

  He released me, stepped back, and punched me in the s
houlder. Not lightly either, but hard, like one dude would punch another. It didn’t hurt . . . not physically anyway. “I’m your new teammate, Jess!”

  Then he punched me again.

  And I felt my heart crack . . . just a little bit.

  Because it had only been a fantasy. Just a fantasy.

  And maybe if I kept telling myself that, it wouldn’t hurt so much.

  Chapter Two

  Jesse

  “So, we busted through the doors,” Leo said.

  “Then what happened?” Hannah, my team leader, asked, leaning closer, her beautiful face displaying her rapt attention.

  Lily, the last of our trio of women on our five-person team, was equally entranced.

  God, he even enthralled the lesbians.

  It was enough to make me want to punch him.

  I made a face, because he’d probably punch me back, and the man had fists like Thor’s hammer, and nothing like chivalry would stop him. We were agents in life-and-death situations on the regular, and we’d been trained to view anyone as a threat—gender and age aside.

  If I went after him, he’d come right back after me.

  And then he’d probably pin me to the ground, and I’d feel all the hard lines of his delicious body pressed to mine, and I’d be in an even worse spot than I was now.

  Aching and wanting.

  Instead of just . . . aching and wanting.

  Fucking hell, Harrison, I thought. Get it together.

  “Then we hit the fucking deck because some dumbass missed the trip wire, and the world exploded around us,” he said, taking a sip of his beer.

  “Who was the dumbass?” Lily asked.

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Me.”

  Lily and Hannah roared, and even Linc cracked a smile, though I knew he was more than distracted because his girlfriend and fellow medic, Olive, was currently out on a mission with her team.

  Just reconnaissance.

  But there was a risk with every mission, and Linc loved Olive more than life itself.

  So, he’d worry until she got back.

  What I wouldn’t give for someone to worry about me. I’d never had that, at least not outside of my teammates’ friendship and the general watching of each other’s backs so we didn’t die. As a foster kid, I hadn’t had a real family, not being in and out of homes all the time after my mom had died.

  My family, they weren’t . . . good people.

  And for a long time, I hadn’t thought I was good either.

  But I’d long ago shed that veneer. I’d gone into the military, had excelled, and then had been poached by KTS.

  Then had never looked back.

  Who wouldn’t want to be part of the premier military force in the world, albeit a secret one? Though, I supposed, being secret was part of the appeal. To feel like part of a secret club of awesomeness, especially when I’d spent a long time feeling particularly unawesome.

  And that wasn’t a track I wanted to revisit, even if just being around Leo brought to light all those unawesome feelings.

  I wanted to be confident and unaffected.

  I wanted to be able to jump into the conversation, to ignore my feelings . . . well, at least I knew I was good at the last. I’d been ignoring my feelings for years.

  “I’ve still got the scar,” I blurted, earning three pairs of eyes turning in my direction, and yeah, they were my team, but no, I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with all that staring.

  Especially when one of those sets was a gorgeous green pair.

  A trace of regret went across his face. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  I hadn’t.

  The piece of shrapnel had slit straight through my thigh, too damned close to my femoral artery for comfort. It had been the first time Leo had put his hands on me, and I was a sick fuck for having enjoyed it.

  Just for a moment.

  Before the tourniquet and the pressure and the whole nearly dying thing.

  I shrugged, knowing I’d just made things weird and scrambling for anything to say that would turn the conversation back to something relaxed and normal. “Trust the explosives expert to get down and dirty with the bomb.” A beat, my lips forced up into a smile. “Plus, it’s a cool scar.”

  Silence.

  Then Hannah and Lily laughed, Linc smiled again, and Leo . . . his face softened.

  For me?

  No. He probably had gas, or something equally unappealing, and it just made his expression do that . . . that . . . thing. Certainly, that was more likely than the fantasy scenario I was weaving through my head—that he was getting all soft and gooey, just for me.

  So not happening.

  On that pleasant thought, I reached for my bottle of beer, drained the last sip I’d been nursing, saved for just this moment (in case I needed an exit), and stood. “I’m beat,” I said, inching toward the door. “See you all in the morning.”

  Hannah’s eyes narrowed, just the slightest, going from the bottle to my face, studying me for who knew what.

  Okay, I knew what.

  She’d picked up on something, was nosy as hell, and wanted my deep dark secrets.

  Good thing I was excellent at hiding them.

  “Night,” she said after a few heartbeats, Lily echoing her, Linc nodding, and Leo . . . my dumbass got ensnared in those emerald eyes, his gaze searching mine for one brief moment before I managed to pull my stare away.

  “Night,” I repeated.

  And then I was out.

  Chapter Three

  Leo

  The girls were cool.

  Really cool.

  I was used to being surrounded by women, though not so much in my work environment. Typically, there was one woman on a team, sometimes not even one. Yes, there were women sprinkled throughout KTS, but during my tenure here, every one of my teams had been all male until Jess had joined my former unit. At least until this one, where Linc and I were the minority. So yeah, the gender dynamics were changing.

  And now the Georgia base had two teams where the majority were women, which was . . . cool? Yeah, that.

  A little strange?

  Yeah, that, too.

  I’d stayed just a few minutes after Jess took off, jetlag hitting hard and knowing that I’d been brought in to fill a hole left by some big shoes. That hole was good and bad. Good because Jack, the agent I was replacing, had been generally well-liked . . . at least, until he’d proved to be a traitor, who was putting agents and KTS as a whole at risk, taking their resources away from taking down the bad guys and putting them toward tracking down the turncoats who’d begun working with those bad guys.

  Which was also the bad.

  Having to prove I wasn’t one of them.

  Having to track down agents I might have once considered friends.

  Now I walked slowly down the hall, making my way to the rooms I’d been assigned here, and though I was tired, I knew it was going to be hard for me to settle down and actually sleep. That was normal—the itchy, prickling feeling under the surface of my skin, pushing me to go out and find a mission, to take down some of the assholes KTS had their eye on, and if not that, then to find someone to fuck, to burn off that energy until I was ready to crash.

  Except, I’d been here for one day.

  I’d spent that time learning the base, getting my shit set up and ready to go—my office with its tech, my room with my clothes in the drawers and some snacks in the small pantry.

  Then Hannah had briefed me on our team’s directive—to ferret out any additional traitors at KTS.

  Small task, that.

  One that forced us to look deeply at the people who we were supposed to trust with our lives.

  Shit-show, this was.

  And Yoda, now I sounded like.

  Snorting, I made my way down the hall, scanned my keycard to enter the living quarters area, just in time to see Jess pushing into her rooms.

  Right next door to mine.

  “Jess!” I called.

  She
spun to face me, dark smudges beneath her eyes. “Hey, Leo.”

  “Did you want . . .” I trailed off, not really sure what I wanted to ask.

  A weary smile curved her lips. “Let me guess. You’re tired, but not tired.”

  I shrugged.

  Her deep blue eyes twinkled with amusement, and she shut her door with a soft click. “Come with me.”

  I stepped up next to her, letting her lead me through the hallways and then out through a side door. The air was cool, and she tilted her head back, inhaling deeply. Her skin was silver in the moonlight, and I froze, mesmerized by her profile. A delicate nose. Lush lips. A slender column of a throat.

  My cock twitched, and I blinked, stepped back a full pace, glaring down at the organ in question.

  What the fuck?

  Seriously, what in the actual fuck was that?

  This was Jess. My friend. She was funny and kind and a great agent. And she was . . . asexual and totally off-limits.

  Right.

  She rolled her shoulders, nearly as broad as my mine, and stepped forward. Jess was strong, only a few inches shorter than me, and though her face was pretty, her body type wasn’t my typical. That typical being slender and waifish, small enough to be able to toss around, pin against the wall. Not tall and muscular, who’d kick my ass if I attempted to do any such hauling.

  My cock settled.

  See? I thought. Just the jetlag. Well, that and the fact that I haven’t been able to fuck anyone for a while.