by Em Petrova
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved
To the Xtreme
Xtreme Ops
Book 2
Copyright Em Petrova 2021
Ebook Edition
Electronic book publication 2021
Cover Art by Bookin’ It Designs
All rights reserved. Any violation of this will be prosecuted by the law.
SUBSCRIBE to Em Petrova’s Newsletter to keep up to date and for special reader features.
More in this series:
HITTING XTREMES
TO THE XTREME
XTREME BEHAVIOR
XTREME AFFAIRS
XTREME MEASURES
In the Alaskan wilderness, meeting their match takes on more than one meaning.
Special Operative and second-in-command for the Xtreme Ops team, Harris Lipton, aka Lip, finds himself sidelined after an accident. While laid up, locating a loony in the national forest won’t be easy, especially by shooting off text messages instead of bullets. To make his life more difficult, he’s got a free-spirited granola-type park ranger nursing him—and she’s driving him crazy with a cute factor he never saw coming.
Jenna is up to her neck in securing a national park from a lunatic with enough C-4 to blow off the corner of Alaska, and now she has a better likelihood of surviving a grizzly attack than military man Lipton. The pain in the neck is demanding and bossy with monumental ideas…and enough fire in him to warm her through the coldest of Alaskan nights.
Jenna and Lipton must band together to assist the Xtreme Ops team in stopping the criminal, but they have just enough time on their hands to discover that opposites DO attract. With sparks flying and a heavy mix of chemistry, what they discover is how to create some fireworks of their own.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
THE END
TO THE XTREME
BY
Em Petrova
Prologue
Harris Lipton must have lost his damn mind.
For six months he’d been in the Alaskan wilderness hunting fugitives, drug smugglers and human traffickers, and the minute he got a short leave from his duties with the Xtreme Ops, he took off backpacking into Denali National Park. Instead of heading to Cali for some sun and sweeties, he was trekking through thick mud on the edge of Big Stony Creek.
He planned to set up in one of the zones that permitted camping, but he already knew a week wouldn’t be nearly enough time away from it all.
Picking his way through the high grasses, he forced himself to slow down. There was no run to the finish line on vacation. He pulled in a deep breath of mountain air.
From the corner of his eye, he spotted the bleached white of bone and froze mid-step.
Fucking great.
The fact he was totally desensitized to the possibility—and likelihood—that it could be human remains told him this time away from work was essential.
Lipton changed his path to circle closer to the bone. He might face the remains of some grizzly’s dinner. Or a murdered hiker. Out here, he never knew what to expect.
As soon as he saw the long, spikey tines of a caribou antler shed, relief surged through him.
Scrubbing a hand over his face to clear out half a dozen images of death flitting through his mind, he stood staring down at the antlers people enjoyed searching for and collecting. If he had a home of his own, he might tie them to his backpack and haul them back to nail over a mantel.
At present, home consisted of Quonset huts—small buildings with rounded roofs lined up along the base and outfitted the same as a basic dorm room. After some of the places he’d stayed over a lifetime, he didn’t take it for granted.
Serving four years in the Marines had been the root of his training, but he’d quickly climbed ranks and become the Marines’ number one person to call when they needed a bomb deactivated.
As if the pressures of not blowing himself up every week hadn’t been enough, he jumped at the chance to join Xtreme Ops. His buddies called him a stress junkie. Lord knew he spent enough months in therapy to figure out the same thing. Bottom line—a stressed young boy sought other stressful events as a man searching to control them.
Which made him a control freak too.
He squatted next to the antlers and stroked a fingertip along the smooth, bleached bone. Pretty in a primitive way, just like everything here in Alaska.
Lipton continued on his journey, hiking for miles along the drainage area where mountain runoff created a creek of sorts and sometimes flooded out. Someday, he’d return during the flood time just to witness the power of the water changing the land.
In the distance, Denali rose up, awe-inspiring with its massive size as North America’s tallest mountain. She had some clouds on her, softening her jagged peaks. Yes, Lipton damn well needed more of this.
He pulled in deep breaths. Cool, fresh air washed through his head, clearing out the dark, cobwebbed corners. Early in his military career, he learned he had to find a way to let shit go. Right now, right here, he was making peace with all the unpleasant but necessary deeds he’d done.
His only plan was to commune with nature. Maybe say fuck it to shaving for a week. And he definitely would not be pulling out a map anytime during the course of his leave.
In the distance, he spotted a grizzly with two cubs, the babies a darker shade than their mother and striking against the landscape. He stopped to watch them play for a little while before continuing on with no sense of purpose. It felt good to shut down the tactical portion of his mind. Was this how normal people lived? Just blue sky, pines and himself.
Wandering out of the flat land came as second nature to him. He couldn’t go long without a challenge, so he angled up the hill. Soon his muscles burned with the exertion he was so familiar with on a daily basis, but this time his goal was personal—to reach the top and find a view.
His captain wasn’t giving orders in his ear. He didn’t tote a rifle. And he wasn’t out here to hunt a criminal. As he hiked, he repeated these things to himself. Didn’t people say they needed a vacation from their vacation? No wonder—doing nothing was hard work. He had to continually remind himself to unplug, shut down the internal grind of his mind.
When the sun reached high in the sky, he found a clearing in the trees and stopped.
Staring across the lowlands he’d just hiked, a sense of peace gripped him. Like having a hot cup of coffee on a frigid morning at camp before his teammates climbed out of their tents. Or knowing he’d gone the distance to serve and protect.
He reached out and gripped the tall, thin pine tree in front of him to get a closer look. The clouds were blowing away from Denali, revealing the majestic snow-capped peak.
Above his head came a loud crack and Lipton ducked, his body trained to find cover in an instant. His feet went out from under him, and he slammed into the bruising earth just as branches and pine ru
shed at him. He reached for his weapon out of instinct, but he never laid hands on it.
When he opened his eyes, he didn’t register anything but the gritty scent of dirt and sap. Then a pair of warm green and gold eyes burned down into his.
Someone was trying to kill him. What else could have happened?
He must be losing his fucking mind. He couldn’t even take a vacation without fucking it up and conjuring some danger that wasn’t really there.
“Are you okay? Can you hear me?” The green eyes were attached to a voice, as soft as the whisper of breeze through the pines just before that blast sent him into full alert mode.
Lipton’s memory sparked in his temporal lobe, and he dug the heels of his hands into the forest floor to push upward.
“Don’t move fast. You could be injured.”
He turned his head to see more than the green eyes. A crunchy-granola type of woman sat there wearing all green. Her curly hair had one small braid tied with a gold thread at the bottom that brushed across the top of her breast.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m one of the park rangers here in Denali. It’s my job to help lost hikers…or lift the top of a pine off a big, muscled man.” She pointed to a pile of branches to the side of where he sat.
He shook his head, trying to make sense of what happened. “What the hell?”
“I didn’t see it, but I heard it. Looks as if that treetop snapped, probably weakened from high winds and snow, and it fell on you.”
He raised a hand and scrubbed it over his face. That explained the branches rushing toward him. Had he blacked out? What a damn sissy, he could hear his fellow Xtreme Ops team member, Hepburn, ribbing him now.
“I’m trained to check for concussion. Can you tell me your name?” the woman asked.
“No. I can’t.” He shoved to his feet, but the instant his boot tread touched down, his ankle folded.
He collapsed, hitting the ground hard again. A stick cut into his palm, and he issued a low growl of fury.
“Oh my God! Your ankle is clearly broken.”
“No way.”
“It went out from under you. I’m pretty sure it’s broken,” she insisted.
He shoved to a standing position again, leaning all his weight onto the opposite foot. There—he was up. Nothing broken. No—
As soon as he set his foot down, his ankle buckled again. This time, pain shot through him, and he grabbed his calf.
The woman made a quiet noise and moved closer to examine him. Up close, he made out fat freckles across the bridge of her nose and slim gold hoops hooked in her earlobes.
“I’m going to radio for help. You can’t make it down the mountain alone in this shape.”
“Goddammit, I’m fine.”
She paused in reaching for her radio, arching a brow at him. “You sure about that?” She depressed the button on the side of the radio. “Moon Shadow to base.”
Lipton stared at her for a long minute. Had he hit his head? Did he just hear the green fairy nymph call herself Moon Shadow?
A voice came back to her instantly. “Go ahead, Moon Shadow.”
Lipton blinked.
“I found a hiker down with what I suspect to be a broken ankle.”
He issued a growl. He did not break his ankle like some fragile flower. He was a goddamn special operative. He hiked through treacherous conditions every day of his life, and a calm hike on vacation was not going to put him out of commission.
Seconds later, Moon Shadow—or whoever she was—stowed her radio on her hip again. She started stripping pine off one of the fallen branches.
“What are you doing?” Lipton couldn’t contain his annoyance, and it seeped into his tone.
She shot him a sympathetic look, ticking him off more. “I’m going to make you a crutch. We need to get you to the closest path for the ATV to pick you up and take you to the hospital.”
“My ankle is not broken!”
She went back to stripping the pine branch. “Uh-huh.”
“I’ll show you.” With a determined grunt, he launched to his feet once more. This time he placed his foot flat on the ground and it held his weight. At least until he took a step.
He landed on his ass, seated beside Moon Shadow. She trapped her lower lip in her teeth to hide her smile.
Lipton stared up at the snapped top of the trees, his mind locking in on the situation with the speed of a sniper bullet.
Dammit, he broke his ankle like some frail weakling trekking up a hill he wouldn’t even call steep. And he was at the mercy of a woman calling herself Moon Shadow who was deftly crafting him a crutch from a pine branch…and who wore slim gold hoops in her cute earlobes that he couldn’t quit staring at.
And now he had to figure out how and why the fuck someone had loaded this group of trees, on a hill in a national park, with C-4.
Chapter One
“Son. Of. A. Bitch.” Harris Lipton bit each word off between clenched teeth as the doctor finished applying a cast to his ankle.
In the corner of the hospital room, the captain of Xtreme Ops gave him a stoic look, but he saw the amusement in Penn’s eyes.
“You wouldn’t be laughing if it was you,” Lipton snapped.
“Am I laughing? We’re down a man.”
Lipton bit off another growl that had the female nurse glancing up with worry pinching her brows. Suddenly, he felt like an ass for being a surly grizzly bear of a patient. “Sorry,” he said to her.
She turned her attention back to the cast. “I like your choice of black for the cast.”
In the corner, Penn hid his chuckle behind his hand.
God, could this get any worse? He wasn’t six. He was a grown-ass man, a special operative, and now he’d be laid up for weeks due to his stupid mistake of slipping on that mountainside.
Of course, he had good reason to hit the deck.
Like a treetop loaded with C-4.
The guys were out there right now in Denali National Park investigating, and he couldn’t be there with them. It rankled and irritated him more than he could let on in the confines of a hospital, at least not without getting arrested.
The doctor applied some cotton around his calf and his toes to provide comfort. As if he could ever be comfortable in this fucking thing or sitting around on his ass while his team was out battling threats on the Alaskan landscape.
“When can I walk?”
The doctor glanced up at him but quickly dropped her gaze to his leg again. Was he imagining things or was she blushing? He glanced over at Penn, who had to leave the cubicle, probably to laugh his ass off.
“Well, since the fracture is on the minor side, I would say you can apply weight to it sooner than the six weeks we normally recommend. I’d say three is the minimum rest time before you bear weight.”
Three. Fucking. Weeks. No—just no.
He swiped his fingers through his hair, and both the doctor and nurse looked up to watch him. Then they quickly glanced down at his leg again.
“I can’t be off my leg.”
“If you want it to heal properly, you will. And I’m sure in your line of work, it’s more important to have your body in working order.”
“I’ll make sure he stays off it.” Penn had entered the space partitioned off by curtains and stood a few paces from the hospital bed. The nurse glanced at him, Lipton, and turned their attention back to his cast.
The doctor finished wrapping the material that would harden and stepped back from the bed. “Jill will finish by giving you instructions. Good luck, and if you have any problems, call the hospital or come in.”
A low noise similar to a growl emitted from him. How had shit gone so sideways? He was as sure-footed as a fucking mountain goat. Yet when he heard that crack overhead, he’d moved fast and next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground staring up into a pair of deep green eyes flecked with gold.
The woman who appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast confused him as much a
s how he was going to sit on his ass these next few weeks.
“Have any questions?” the nurse asked.
He hadn’t been listening past how to keep the cast from getting wet, but he nodded anyway. He had no damn intention of following recommendations. Those were for civilians and not special forces with several tours in the Middle East. He’d singlehandedly rescued a political figure from a hostage situation, for fuck sake. A broken ankle wouldn’t keep him down.
He nodded to the nurse and hopped off the bed. He started to set his cast down, but the nurse hurried to hand him a set of crutches. As soon as he had one in hand, he remembered the crutch that woman had fashioned for him out of a fallen tree branch.
“Take it easy,” the nurse told Lipton. She turned to Penn. “And keep him quiet.”
Penn gave her a solemn nod. The minute she was out of earshot, Lipton grumbled, “I’d like to see you try, Captain.”
Penn snorted. “C’mon. Let’s get outta here.”
Lipton wanted nothing more, but he still hesitated. “What happened to the fairy girl?”
His captain delivered a what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about and a did-you-hit-your-head look in one go. “Fairy girl?”
“The nymph.” He wasn’t making any sense even to himself and shook his head. He tried again. “The woman who found me after I fell.”
“Oh. She went back to work. She’s a park ranger.”
“Yeah.” Moon Shadow was her radio handle. Or for all Lipton knew, it was her real name. It sure suited her carefree curls and that thin braid she wore tied up with a shimmery gold string like some gypsy mixed with hippie.
“I’ll talk to the park office and find her so I can thank her.” Yeah, he only wanted to extend his gratitude for her helping him get off that mountain, first stomping his way through the thick Alaskan underbrush of summer by way of that hand-fashioned crutch, and then to a trail, where he was picked up by an ATV and shuttled down the mountain to a park ranger vehicle waiting to transport him to the nearby hospital.
