Don't Shoot the Messenger: Hazard Falls Book 2

by Samantha A. Cole

  The people in their small town had figured out Drake and Blair’s marriage was one of convenience, after she could no longer hide her pregnancy two months after their quickie wedding at the courthouse. Most of them had been supportive, but Blair had become the target of several single, jealous women who’d been hoping to wrangle the good-looking former bachelor for themselves. Part of their marriage agreement Blair had insisted on was that Drake would date other women if he felt like it, and he’d conceded by saying he’d be discreet if it ever happened. However, as far as she knew, he hadn’t been with another woman since she’d moved into his home. Until recently, she’d felt contrite about putting such a damper on his dating life, but now that her attraction to him was growing, her own green-eyed monster didn’t like to think of him being with another woman.

  “Are you going to spend an hour drying that or can I put it away?”

  Startled, she glanced at his amused smile, then down at the counter. Everything else had been put away and the sink had been drained. Sheepishly, she handed him the pan. “How long did I zone out for?”

  He shrugged, then placed the pan into its proper cabinet. “A few minutes, but it’s no big deal. I’m surprised you haven’t crashed already. Between Trevor this morning and staying up late last night, and finishing that translation you were working on, I’m surprised you’re not asleep on your feet.”

  “Me too, actually.” She yawned and shook the gathering cobwebs from her mind. “Is it wrong of me to hope he sleeps through the entire night for once?”

  “Not at all.” Moving closer, he took the towel from her hand and tossed it on the counter. “In fact, why don’t you head to bed now. I’m going to watch some TV for a while and do some work online.” While their jobs paid the bills, Drake had been trying to grow his side business by increasing his presence online. The new Drake Hadley Designs website Blair had helped him create was getting more and more traffic lately, and there was currently a three-month wait for the completion of a custom-made order.

  “Sounds like a plan. Do you need anything from the market? I’m going grocery shopping in the morning.”

  “I’ll leave a list on the table if I think of anything; now, go to bed.”

  Giving him a sassy salute, she did as ordered, or, at least, she tried to. Leaving him in the kitchen, she walked down the hallway to the master bedroom suite. When she’d first moved in, Drake had insisted she take it while he moved into one of the three other bedrooms in the house he and Grant had grown up in. She’d tried to argue with him, but he’d refused to take no for an answer. At least his room had an adjoining bath that was shared with Trevor’s nursery.

  Entering the bedroom, she flipped the wall light switch up, and nothing happened. She tried it again, and the room remained dark. The switch activated the overhead fan but not the light, and the bulb in her bedside lamp had died yesterday. Lightbulbs were on her shopping list for the morning, but that didn’t help her now. “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Blair let out a short scream and spun around, her heart pounding in her chest. She hadn’t heard Drake come down the hallway behind her. She lightly smacked his upper arm. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  He chuckled, the deep sound setting off goosebumps on her skin. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I was going to get my laptop. What’s wrong?”

  “The bulb went out in the fan light.” She flipped the switch up and down a few times again, as if to prove it to him.

  “Damn, woman, I never knew you were so hard on lightbulbs. You’re not a serial bulb killer leading a double life, are you?”

  His teasing made her laugh—something she’d rarely done for almost a full year following Grant’s death. But since Trevor had been born, she no longer felt guilty for enjoying life again.

  “No, I’m not. I’ll just get one—”

  “I’ll steal one from—”

  They’d both spoken and turned toward the living room at the same time, bumping into each other. Blair’s foot struck the doorjamb, tripping her, and Drake quickly grabbed her by the upper arms to prevent her from falling. But the momentum of both their movements sent them crashing into each other, chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis.

  “Oh!” Blair threw her arms around Drake’s neck as they stumbled together. Her back hit the wall as Drake’s body pinned her against it. Finally, they both got their feet under them and stabilized.

  Lifting her gaze, Blair’s eyes met Drake’s. The heat she saw there matched the warmth stirring in her core. Neither of them moved. Was she imagining things or was he . . . wait . . . something hard pressed against her belly. Something very masculine and hard. That answered the unfinished question in her mind—his body was reacting in a way that demanded hers do the same.

  She zeroed in on his mouth and couldn’t resist the temptation. Going up on her tiptoes, she brought their lips together. For a moment, Drake didn’t respond, but that changed in a flash. His hands grasped either side of her head and held it at the angle he needed to devour her. His body was flush against hers as she ran her fingers through his hair. Their tongues danced, each one taking a taste of the other. It wasn’t long before they were both gasping for air.

  Pulling back until he could study her face, Drake gulped. “Please . . . please, tell me you kissed me first, and it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. If you did, I’m all for it and would love to do it again. But if you didn’t, and I took advantage of the situation, then that makes me an asshole. Because—”

  Her fingers covered his mouth. “I kissed you first, and I liked it . . . a lot.”

  He smiled under her hand and then grasped it with his own, moving it away so he could speak. “Thank God, because I’ve been wanting to kiss you for months and—”

  Closing the distance between them, Blair didn’t let him finish, because she didn’t want either one of them analyzing what they were doing just yet—not before she had a chance to taste him again. For the first time in over a year, Blair felt like a desirable woman again.

  Chapter Three

  Present . . .

  “Hey, Hadley! Wait up!”

  Grant glanced over his shoulder and slowed his gait as his foreman, Rhys Buchanan, jogged toward him. It’d been a long day on the construction site, and he was looking forward to a three-day holiday weekend off, with nothing to do but go fishing with a cooler full of beer in the Gulf of Mexico. The temperature in Tampa, Florida, had been tipping past the ninety-degree mark over the past week as Memorial Day approached.

  He liked getting away from the loud city. Most people were able to tune it out. But after six years in a mountain-side prison camp, where the nighttime silence was almost as harsh as the beatings he’d endured, Grant found it difficult to tolerate the excessive noise sometimes. Hell, they’d made him dig a hole in the ground before throwing him into it and covering it with a sheet of metal held down by rocks. More than once, he’d thought they’d never come back and let him out, and the hole would become his grave. But his captors always came back for him, and then the interrogators would take another crack at him.

  He hadn’t been the only prisoner being held in the camp, but he had been the only American.

  Stopping behind his gray Ram 1500 pickup truck, he dropped the tailgate and set his toolbox in the bed, just as Buchanan caught up to him. Grant eyed the tall, blond-haired man. “What’s up?”

  “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  He shrugged. “Planned on going fishing. Why?”

  “Parker and Shelby are having a big barbecue, and she told me to invite you.”

  Rhys’s amused grin told Grant all he needed to know. Parker Christiansen, the co-owner and founder of New Horizons, the construction company they worked for, was a really nice guy and took good care of his employees. His wife was a cute pixie of a woman who loved to play matchmaker for some of the single men who worked for her husband, and she’d been determined to hook Grant up with someone. For the past few months he’d been successful
at dodging her attempts of setting him up on blind dates, but the woman was like a bulldog if she thought someone needed a significant other.

  “In other words, she’s invited some woman she thinks is perfect for me.”

  “Yup.” His boss clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t take offense—it just means she likes you.”

  He leaned against the tailgate. “Yeah, I know. Any chance I can get out of it without hurting her feelings?” He really liked Shelby, despite her matchmaking efforts, and didn’t want to insult her.

  “Not unless you want her to get more devious. C’mon—show up for a few hours, flirt with the woman Shelby introduces you to, and maybe you’ll find you both have some things in common. It’ll be fun.”

  “Says the man who’s already in a committed relationship,” he replied dryly. While some of the guys they worked with had a problem with the rugged-looking foreman being gay and living with his architect boyfriend, Lincoln Perry, Grant didn’t. Those who did, wisely kept it mostly to themselves. New Horizons was an equal-opportunity employer, and any form of harassment, especially based on gender, race, or sexual orientation, was a reason to be canned—and the policy was strictly enforced. However, Grant had heard a few jackasses talking behind Rhys’s back a few months ago at a bar after work, using plenty of derogatory names to refer to the boss. One of them hadn’t known when to shut his mouth and ended up with a black eye, bruised jaw, and sore ribs courtesy of the former CIA man. Since then, none of the bigots had said anything about Rhys, Linc, or anyone else they disliked in front of Grant, which was fine with him.

  Sighing, he rolled his eyes. “Okay—what time? I’ll brush up on my magic tricks.”

  Shelby and Parker had adopted two adorable boys from Argentina last year. While they weren’t blood brothers, they were both seven years old and had been best friends in an orphanage. They got a kick out of the simple magic tricks Grant had learned as a kid. His skills had improved as he’d gotten older and some of the slight-of-hand illusions had come in handy during his time with the CIA.

  After deciding to remain “dead”—at least in the eyes of anyone who’d known him nearly eight years ago, with a scant few exceptions—he’d assumed a new life and relocated to Tampa. One of the people who knew about his past was Ian Sawyer—a retired Navy SEAL, the co-owner of a private security company with government contacts and high clearance, and a friend of Parker’s. The man and his special-ops teams had been the ones who’d snuck into North Korea with Carter and rescued Grant. With Ian and Carter’s help, Grant had started a new, low-key life in Florida twenty months ago. If his past ever came back to haunt him, he could count on Sawyer and his men to provide backup.

  As far as his boss and coworkers knew, Grant had done a four-year stint in the Navy, where he’d supposedly met Sawyer, before opting out and going into construction. It hadn’t been too difficult to fake, since his father had worked in the blue-collar field, and Grant and Drake had spent their teenage summers working side by side with him. The old man had passed away of a heart attack two years before Grant had been allegedly killed, and he was grateful. It would have destroyed Joseph Hadley if one of his sons had preceded him in death after raising them as a single father. Grant had been ten, two years older than Drake, when their mother, Susan, had died from complications during childbirth—her premature daughter had been stillborn. Joe and his young sons had been devastated but managed to carry on with their lives, despite their loss.

  “Any time after two. Parker said just bring yourself—food and drink are on the house.”

  “Sounds good. See you there.”

  Getting into his truck, Grant turned up the radio and the AC. He pulled out of the dirt parking lot and headed home for a shower. After that, he’d walk over to Donovan’s, an Irish pub owned by the brother of one of the retired SEALs on Sawyer’s team. It was only four blocks from his apartment, so he didn’t have to worry about drinking too much and not being able to drive home. A few beers, a good dinner, a baseball game, and some mindless chatter with a few of the barflies would kill another few hours of the day. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

  Chapter Four

  Grant woke up later than usual, with the mother of all hangovers. A few beers had turned into shots of whiskey after a couple in their twenties had sat next to him at the bar. Everything had been fine until he heard the guy say his girlfriend’s name—Blair. Of the hundreds of thousands of names in the world, why in hell had her parents named her Blair? And out of almost 400,000 people living in the city of Tampa, why had those two ended up sitting next to him? Contemplating his rotten luck, and the memories they’d conjured up, he’d knocked back enough shots that Mike Donovan had insisted on driving him the short distance home.

  After popping a few Tylenol caplets into his mouth, Grant threw on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers and took a two-mile run to sweat the last of the alcohol out of his system. He also did it to punish himself for getting that drunk.

  Once he returned to his apartment, a shower and a greasy bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich had him feeling much better. One or two bottles of “hair of the dog” at the barbecue, and he’d be back to normal. Last night had been the first time he’d gotten falling down drunk since the three-day bender he’d gone on after finding out Blair and Drake had gotten married. His brother had the family, complete with children, Grant was supposed to have had.

  Pushing the thoughts of the happy couple from his head, Grant parked behind a row of cars on the residential street the Christiansens lived on. Just as he turned off the engine, his cell phone chimed with an incoming text. His eyes narrowed as he grabbed the phone from the dash. He rarely got texts—hell, he rarely got phone calls. Maybe it was Mike checking to see if Grant was okay after last night.

  The phone number on the log wasn’t familiar, and he opened the text. His blood ran cold as the image registered in his mind. It was a picture of Blair, with a boy about six- or seven-years-old, strolling down the sidewalk on Main Street in Hazard Falls. But the image had been altered. Someone had photoshopped in crosshairs, with Blair and the boy in the center. The boy . . . his son. Grant had never seen him before, even in photos—he’d resisted the urge to look up Blair or Drake on social media. But it had to be Trevor. His blond hair was the same shade as his mother’s, and Grant would bet anything his eyes were blue too. But the rest of his facial features came from Grant. Right now, though, that didn’t matter. Trevor was in danger and so was Blair. The only reasons someone would send the photo to him was they knew who Grant really was and they were threatening his family.

  Scrambling from the truck, he ran up the street to Parker’s house and through a gate in the fence leading to the backyard. Several people greeted him, but he ignored them, his gaze searching for the two men he needed. Spotting both Ian Sawyer and Carter sitting at a table with their women, he pushed through the small crowd of partygoers. The Deimos spy saw him coming and jumped to his feet. Grant could almost imagine what he looked like for Carter to go on alert like that. The man frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  With a shaking hand, Grant held out his phone with the image on the screen. Carter took it, cursed under his breath, and showed it to his girlfriend, Jordyn, and then Sawyer, who responded with his own muttered expletive. “Shit.” The retired SEAL turned back toward the table. “Angel—Carter, Jordyn, and I have to take Grant to the compound. Do you want to stay here?”

  As she held their new baby, his wife eyed Sawyer in confusion, but she seemed to know that was not the time to ask what was going on. “I’ll stay. Kristen and Jenn will be here soon—one of them will drive me home.”

  “I’ll leave you the SUV, so we don’t have to swap out the car seat.” After kissing her and their baby goodbye, Sawyer slapped Grant on the shoulder. “Let’s go. I’ll call Egghead on the way and tell him to get his ass over there. He’ll trace where this came from.”

  Without another word to anyone else, and ignoring all the stares being sent their w
ay, the three men and one woman left the party in a hurry. Grant knew Parker and Shelby wouldn’t be surprised that some of their operative guests had to run out of there, but he was sure they were curious about why he was with them. However, he didn’t care about anyone else but Blair and . . . and his son, right now.

  Thirty minutes later, they were in the war-room at the Trident Security offices. The computer setup could rival that at the CIA headquarters. Brody “Egghead” Evans was grumbling about how the message had been bounced all over the world before landing in Grant’s cell. “It wasn’t actually sent from another phone. Whoever sent it used a texting service site and rerouted it through numerous servers. Give me a few more minutes, and I might be able to narrow it down.”

  At least the man was no longer complaining that his pregnant wife had to drop him off then go to the party without him and there had better be some of her strawberry shortcake left by the time he got there.

  Grant paced back and forth while the others worked. Jordyn was on another computer, checking out chatter on the Dark Web. “So far, I can’t find any mention of you, Blair, or Hazard Falls, but it could take hours or days to find a reference if it was coded.”