by A. S. Green
That’s when a bulky, shaggy-haired man walks into view on monitor B. Unlike the tall bald guy, this guy doesn’t hesitate. He’s heading straight for Jax, bypassing Baldie without acknowledgment, so I guess my suspicions about him were off.
Jax spots the guy as he gets close, and then suddenly they are both on monitor A, together. Jax pushes off the wall and straightens his spine. They’re talking.
No, now they’re yelling.
“Titus.” My voice comes out as a pleading whisper. He’s still four blocks away. “Goddamn it, Mo, get these radios working!”
When Shaggy puts his hand on Jax’s shoulder and shoves, I’m on my feet. Debra isn’t coming. This is a setup.
“Mo!” Of course he’s too far away to hear me.
Benson and Schaeffer spin around in their chairs. “What’s wrong, Natalie?”
I get up without answering and rush to the stairwell, then fling open the door. I yell down for Mo again. “Mo! Get up here! Something’s wrong… Mo! … Jesus, Mo!”
He doesn’t respond. Shit! When I get back to the monitors, the night crew guys have their hands on Mo’s desk and are leaning in. I’m there just in time to see Shaggy pull a handgun out of the back of his waistband and push Jax toward the alley. Oh, shit. Oh my God! “Do something!”
“Settle, Natalie,” one of them says. “Sparke’s got this.”
“He doesn’t got this!” How could Jax hire such idiots? This isn’t like that loser drug dealer Jax muscled into the interview room. “That guy has a gun!”
“Calm down. You’ve got to—”
I let out a howl of outrage. Jax thought he was meeting his mom; he won’t be armed.
Acting purely on adrenaline, I grab one of the new stun guns off my desk and race out of the office, shoving it into my bag as I go. I hear the men cursing loudly behind me and calling for Mo. There’s no time to wait. It may already be too late.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, but at least I know where I’m going. That’s a start. There’s no way I’m going to let Jax get hurt. Oh, please, don’t let it be too late. What good is a stun gun against an actual firearm?
It’s dark. The soles of my high heels strike the pavement as I run the two blocks to the bodega and skitter into the mouth of its adjacent alleyway. That’s where I stop.
I was right about the gun, but—thank God—Jax has disarmed Shaggy, and it’s now on the ground. Jax and Shaggy aren’t arguing anymore. They’re beating the shit out of each other.
Jax bends over and wraps his arms around the guy’s middle. He pushes him several feet until the guy’s head cracks against the opposite alley wall. Shaggy pulls up his knee, slamming it into Jax’s chin, and Jax’s head flies back.
I scream out his name, instantly regretting the reflex because Jax’s face goes blank as he looks my way. In that second of distraction, Shaggy slams his fist against his jaw.
“You’re his backup?” says a rasping voice in my ear. I glance up. Baldie. Damn, I knew something about him wasn’t right. I should have trusted my instincts.
He laughs, and my blood curdles. I am vaguely aware of Jax doing a complicated set of hand-to-hand combat moves that would be super impressive if I wasn’t in trouble myself.
“What do you say?” Baldie asks. He has me by the neck. “Do I take you right here?” He slams me against the brick wall, and I see stars. I’m barely aware that he’s pushed my skirt up above my waist. “Make your boy watch?”
I wince in pain as I blindly fumble around inside my bag, one-handed, searching for the stun gun and hoping he doesn’t notice.
Baldie’s hand is around my throat, his mouth at my ear. I can’t make sense of what my fingers are feeling. Wallet. Lip junk. Cell phone. There.
His other hand slides off my shoulder and down around my breast. His mouth is breathing hot, foul air all over my neck, and he’s rubbing his crotch against me. “So how do you want it, bitch?”
More uffs! and gasping breaths from Jax’s direction. Oh, God, I can’t think. Baldie tightens his grip on my throat, and my head floats from lack of oxygen.
I close my eyes and curl my fingers around the stun gun’s handle. Baldie steps back and undoes his belt.
My thumb finds the switch. I flip it on, and it crackles. Before he knows what’s happening, I have the stun gun jabbed into his ribs, sending what I hope is a debilitating electrical shock. His body jerks. His face goes blank, and his eyes roll back.
I keep it pressed against him, counting two…three…four…until he drops like a bag of sand. Once he’s down—Holy shit! He’s down!—I kick him right in the groin. I don’t think he even feels it, but then he starts to get up, so I zap him again.
Jax gets his feet under him and lands a punch across the other guy’s jaw. Down he goes, too. It doesn’t take more than a couple seconds before Jax has Shaggy trussed up in zip ties, then Baldie, too.
Titus comes rushing into the alleyway and skids to a stop. “Ah, shit.” Then he says into his wrist, “Mo, call NYPD.” Apparently the radios are finally working. Titus surveys the scene, then mutters, “Yeah, Mo. It’s as bad as it looks.”
Jax slowly rises to his feet like some kind of phantom emerging from the dark. His eyes are shadowed and locked on mine, his eyebrows drawn together as he scans my body for possible signs of damage.
“You hurt?” He comes closer, and his eyes don’t leave mine as he pulls my skirt back down around my legs.
I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head. It’s pounding, and I’m sure there’s a big bump on the back of it.
“Debra never showed,” Titus says.
“She never planned to,” Jax says. I hold my breath as he pries the stun gun from my fingers and hands it off to Titus.
When I finally have the courage to open my eyes, that’s when I know what it truly means to be in trouble.
Chapter Forty-Six
Natalie
“Jax, I—”
“Not. Here,” he says, just as the sound of a siren whines its approach. “Titus, stay and make the report.”
Titus nods. I start to explain myself again. “I—”
“I said, not here.” He grabs my wrist and leads me out of the alley and down the sidewalk, back toward the office. He’s moving so fast that he’s pulling me, and I’m tripping and trotting behind him, trying to keep up.
“I saw you on the monitors, and the radios weren’t working,” I explain to the back of his head. My voice comes out in breathless gasps, and my reluctant feet are going tap, tap, tap against the pavement.
“Natalie. Shut it.”
I yank back on my arm. “Don’t tell me to shut it. You couldn’t have expected me to do nothing.”
He doesn’t let go; neither does his breakneck pace falter. By the time we enter the command center, he’s a veritable ticking time bomb. Mo is standing at his monitors, his face ghostly. It’s obvious he watched the whole thing go down.
“Madre de Dios,” he mutters, looking at both of us. I guess we do look kind of beat up.
Jax grabs an empty cardboard box off the shelf above the printer and shoves it into my hands. “Get out!” he says through gritted teeth. I can see the pulse in his neck. “Pack your things.”
“Jax.” I put one hand up, palm out. “Please. You’re being impulsive. We can—”
“Thank you for all your help, but bringing you here was a mistake. I want you gone. You’re fired.”
I don’t follow him when he storms out and heads for his apartment. I’m fired? This has got to be some kind of joke. I jump when I hear him slap his hand against his apartment door sensor, but Mo only exhales in frustration.
Blinded by the pain of rejection, I throw the box on the ground and run out of the command center, through reception. For the second time in less than an hour, I don’t wait for the elevator. I’m halfway down the stairs when I stop.
I look down the stairwell, weighing my options. The immediate humiliation has passed. It has suddenly been replaced with the desire to
go back upstairs and crack him over the head with one of his goddamn monitors. I might not do that…exactly. But I’m not leaving here without telling him off good and proper.
Nobody talks to me like that. Jax got exactly what he bargained for when he agreed to hire me, and now he treats me like shit when all I tried to do was save his sorry ass?
I stride angrily through command, ready to give Jax the tongue-lashing he deserves. He’s going to hear once and for all what I think of his “I am an island” routine and where he’s going to find himself in ten years if he doesn’t snap the hell out of it. Alone, that’s where he’s going to be. Sitting in his brightly lit apartment, hiding from the shadows.
Mo is standing just outside Jax’s open apartment door, as if there’s a force field he can’t pass. I can hear Jax yelling from inside. “Bishop is Debra’s dealer. Those guys were his suppliers. Debra got the two grand he lost out of me a couple weeks ago, but that was supposed to be added retribution for interfering. What…the…fuck happened with the radios?”
“Don’t know, but when I left to get the frequency fixed, I told her to sit tight.”
“And you thought she’d listen to you? She doesn’t listen to anybody.”
“I think you need to listen to her,” Mo says. “If it’s not too late. You can’t let her run out of here like that. Anyone can see that girl loves you, and, with all due respect, you’re acting like a complete ass. Boss.”
Mo startles when he realizes I’m standing directly behind him. His mouth tightens, and he excuses himself. I move into the doorway and see Jax leaning against the far wall, braced on his forearms, his biceps bulging and his head hung low. He’s shirtless, and there are bruises already forming over his kidneys. His cheekbone looks red and swollen.
Seeing him like that, all my anger fizzles like a bonfire doused. Well…at least…most of it.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Jackson
Gardenias. At first I think I’ve imagined the scent, but then I hear the door slide shut and feet softly brush against the area rug. Natalie. Oh, God. Natalie.
I never should have agreed to bring her here. I should have thought it through better. It was wrong, and it was selfish of me to hold on so long. And now my life almost ruined hers. She could have died before she ever had a chance to really live. I turn and see that we’re alone. She lays into me.
“Just like that, huh? You’re getting rid of me?”
“You could have been killed.”
She straightens her shoulders but doesn’t respond. I soldier on.
“You took a weapon that you were not approved for. You went out. Untrained. Unprepared. Got yourself in a compromised situation where I couldn’t get to you. It was stupid. I had it handled.”
“He had a gun. I didn’t think you did, and I was right, wasn’t I? If Baldie decided they didn’t need a lookout, he would have jumped in and you would have been outnumbered.”
“Natalie, I’ve faced far worse than that. I’m government trained. You don’t think I can take down a couple local assholes? I had it handled.”
“There was a gun. And…two of them. And the radios weren’t working.”
“I. Had. It. Handled.” Sure, the guy got in some good licks, but there was never any doubt in my mind how it was going to end.
“But I didn’t know,” she says, pleading with me to see her point. I don’t. I’ll never see it.
“Because you didn’t stop to ask.” I throw my hands in the air in exasperation. They fall noisily against my thighs.
“There wasn’t time to ask. Mo was—”
I point my finger at her, stopping her from going where I think she’s going. “Don’t put this on Morales or any of those guys. You’re rash. Reckless.”
“Rash?” she practically shrieks. “Reckless? Which one of us joined the fucking navy on a whim?”
I can feel my mouth tighten, and I inhale through my nose. She’s right. We are so alike. It’s why we work, and why we can’t.
I raise my hand and stab my finger at her. “That’s not the same thing, and you know it. Time after time you jump into situations not knowing all the facts. You’re the same wild kid as when we first met. You need to grow up.”
“I was trying to help.” Blood floods into her cheeks, and God, she looks so beautiful.
“And that’s the problem,” I say. “Why do you always think it’s your duty to help everyone else?”
Her mouth pops open like she’s been slapped. “Because.”
I shake my head. “That’s not an answer.”
“Because”—her throat sounds thick—“if I make myself useful…people don’t leave me, okay?” She drags the back of her hand under her nose. “Are you happy?”
So this is about her dad. But she can’t be worrying about me leaving her. I never left her in the first place. She left me. And for the last six years, my heart has never left her. Not really.
Since I found her again, I’ve kept her close, even against my better judgment, even when I thought we would never, should never be together in that way again.
Still, she needs to go home to her real life. I know she’ll be going eventually anyway. It has to be now. It’s already too unbearable.
“No,” I finally say in response to her question. “I’m not happy you’re afraid of people leaving you.” God, we really are so much alike.
“Jax, I know your life hasn’t been—”
I put up my hand to stop her. She can’t go there. “You don’t know shit about my life.”
Her face falls, and I can see the pity in her eyes. I don’t need her pity. She takes a step closer. “I know your parents were never going to win any parenting awards—”
“Parenting awards? That shit tonight was all Debra. She calls me when she needs something. Family only wants you for what they can get from you. Your money, your help, for you to drop everything the moment they say run.”
Natalie acts unaffected by what I’m saying. It’s like she doesn’t hear me, or like she doesn’t believe it. “You don’t believe those things of your grandmother.”
“Natalie.” I say her name like a warning. If she’s smart, she’ll shut up.
“Tell me about Charlie Ridgeway.”
There it is. I exhale through my nose.
“Is he why you have a C and an R on your tattoo?”
I take a step away. “Back off, Natalie.”
She takes a step closer. “Your future doesn’t have to be a replay of your past. You were a SEAL, and like you just said, you’ve fought through lots worse than this. I’ve missed you, Jax.”
I put up my hand to beg for some space.
She stares at me for a long second, then she crosses her arms in front of her and takes the hem of her shirt in her fingertips.
“Stop,” I say when she has her shirt raised a few inches, exposing that enticing strip of pale, milky skin. “Sex is not the fix. There isn’t one. Don’t you understand? I’m not some young kid chasing after bands anymore.”
“I know I can’t fix you,” she says. “I only want to be there when you decide to fix you.”
Slowly, she pulls her shirt over her head, revealing a black lace bra. She drops her shirt on the floor and stands there, on display, waiting for my reaction.
My whole body is shaking like some fucking coward, but I don’t tell her to stop. I don’t tell her to go. Fuck. I’ve never been able to say no to this girl. Never. How does she do this to me?
Emboldened by my silence, she shimmies out of her skirt and panties together, then lets them slide down her long legs to pool around her ankles. Goddamn. My cock is straining painfully against my zipper.
She steps out of the small puddle of fabric, unhooks her bra, then stands there in front of me in the center of the floor. All woman. All gorgeous. I’m totally fucked.
As if on autopilot, I step closer, tearing off my own clothes as I move. All rational thought has left me. It’s been too long, and seeing her here, every day, barely having the
courage to touch her, except for a few random kisses… The agony of it all comes crashing down on me.
“Natalie, it—”
“I know this won’t fix anything. Just touch me, Jax.”
I raise my hand, touching my fingertips to her shoulder, then letting them skate down the length of her arm. Goose bumps skitter across her skin, and she inhales, closing her eyes. I take a step closer so our bodies are flush.
She’s smooth. Soft. Everything I want. The pebbled tips of her breasts brush across my chest. Her lips part, and her skin glows with anticipation. I’m sure I look the same.
“Touch me more,” she says, and her words… God, the sound of her voice. Here. In my apartment again.
My hand slides up over her hip, her ribs, palming her breast. She moans and bites into her lip.
I reach down and cup her, sliding one finger into her wetness. So tight.
She palms my balls, and I work her until her head goes back and I have her hovering at the precipice. When I pull my hand away, her eyes open, then go hooded.
She leads me to the side of the bed and sits on the edge. She puts her hand on the bedside table drawer, silently asking, Condoms? In here?
I nod and swallow hard, regretting that my answer might give her reason to think I’ve had much opportunity to use them here, with other women. I haven’t. I want to tell her that, but she doesn’t seem to care.
She opens the drawer and takes out one of the silver foils, rips it open with her teeth, and slowly rolls it down over my shaft. It’s enough to undo me, and I have to close my eyes and clench my teeth to keep from coming right then.
I’m so concentrated on my loosely held self-control that I barely notice her pulling me down over the top of her. I open my eyes, and she’s looking at me as if she’s waiting to see my reaction to being face-to-face. Can I do it like this?
God, she’s always had my number; it kills me that she’s figured out how hard the intimacy is for me. Even with her.
I put my hand behind her knee, wanting to flip her to her belly. Her hands come up and press on either side of my face.
