“He’s gone? Just like that?”
“That’s how these things work,” he said.
“Where is he?” I couldn’t believe that after ten years I’d finally found Brooks only to lose him again because of a douchebag like Byron. One massive mistake in the heat of the moment and this is what happens. I swore the last time I’d never work with him again, but the executives gave me no choice. I listened to him whine about giving him another chance the entire way to Kandahar. The funny thing was he never had a chance. He had me for a few minutes, lonely and a little bit drunk…and super regretful the next morning. I’d never given him a hint I wanted something more or that I planned a repeat of what happened. He showed up at my room less than an hour after Brooks had left with a smirk on his face and a self-satisfied look in his eyes. I knew right away he’d done something he couldn’t take back, but from the dirt on the knees of his pant and the slight tremble in his hands, Brooks had gotten at least one lick in. Good for him. I’d sent Byron packing with strict instructions to stay out of my way or I’d cut his balls off and feed them to him.
Time would only tell if he took my warning to heart.
The officer didn’t answer my question. I shut the door in his face and sank down onto the cot these geniuses tried to pass off as a bed. I wasn’t going to give up so easily this time. I would find Brooks if it was the last thing I did.
* * *
The weeks passed in a haze of dust and loneliness. I’d heard nothing from Brooks, but every time a report came in about any military personnel, a sinking feeling would worm its way into my heart and stay there until I managed to get out of my funk and tell myself the odds of it being him were low. Hopefully.
I snapped photographs to the best of my ability, but my best was only satisfactory. The three men on my team had given me a wide berth and we all did our jobs.
When the time came to leave, I packed up my gear and took one last look around the room where I’d shared such scarce moments with Brooks. All of my research had led me exactly nowhere. When the military didn’t want to cooperate, leads came to a standstill. Besides the dead end on him, all in all Kandahar was a success. No injuries, no fatalities, no out of the ordinary events, except for a big, fat personal one for me. We’d escaped the hot zone with only pictures and, for me, memories I would cherish.
I settled myself in on the dusty, tiny plane, said a prayer for safety and let it lead me home with me thinking of the one I’d left behind.
Brooks
I woke up suddenly with no memory of where I was or how I’d gotten there. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a white popcorn ceiling instead of the canvas of the tent I’d seen for the last six months.
You gotta love the military. I was supposed to have been home weeks ago, but my little indiscretion led me to a crap assignment and extra time in the zone.
I had a splitting headache and my arm was in a cast.
“Shit,” I muttered. I was in the hospital, God only knew where.
“Shit is right,” a soft voice said beside me. “That’s a whole lot of what you managed to get into Mr. Brooks.”
I turned my head to the voice only to see a pretty, redheaded civilian nurse standing beside me.
I tried to speak but it came out as a croak. She tsked and picked up a glass of water with a straw and helped me take a sip.
“What happened?” I asked when the dryness in my throat cleared.
She snorted. “A better question would be what didn’t happen.”
I waited, not wanting to expend any more energy talking when I could hopefully try to will my headache away.
She sighed. “I’m not exactly sure. I only hear the whispers. From what I understand there was a security breach and someone got wind of the VIP you were guarding.” The pretty nurse shrugged. “You seem like a smart enough fellow to figure out what happened next.”
Memories came flooding back to me. The quiet of the day. The empty roads. The supposedly easy mission. Then fire and blankness. I did a quick internal scan. Head wound. Broken arm. Multiple bandages. Cast on ankle. Sore ribs. Possible internal bleeding. All limbs appeared to be intact.
“RPG?”
“Yep.”
I cursed. “And the VIP?”
She snorted. “A few scratches. They found you unconscious lying on top of him. You saved his life.”
I brushed her words away. “The others?”
She turned away but not before I saw the flicker of unease in her eyes.
“Christ,” I whispered. Rog had been in the vehicle behind me.
“Your vehicle was at the tail end when it exploded. You are a lucky man.”
Was I? It didn’t feel like it.
Epilogue
8 months later - Lennox
Sunlight streamed in through the porch and warmed my skin with its touch. It was a peaceful day. Almost every day I’d spent here was peaceful. I’d given up combat photography after Kandahar.
After Brooks.
I’d been considering it for a while and once I left the country I wondered why I’d ever become one. I’d wanted to put a truth to the war, to show people the face of those fighting it…and those enduring it. But the harsh reality of it was that no one seemed to care anymore.
That was the problem. If something was in your face long enough you became desensitized to it, and the images no longer provoked a reaction strong enough to create change. So I’d hung up my cargo pants, bought ten acres in rural North Carolina and built a photography studio out in my backyard. Business was good. It usually was when you set up shop in an area where there were lots of families and not much to do. I never managed to get my fill of sweet little baby pictures and engagement portfolios. I couldn’t lie to myself, though. Each one I did made me a little bit lonelier.
There were a lot of good things about a small town, but there were some bad things too. The only single men around here liked mudding and country music and they liked their girls a little less citified than I was. Not that it had stopped a few of them from sniffing around my doorstep, but I’d sent every single one of them away for a simple reason.
None of them were Corey Brooks.
I sipped a cup of sweet iced tea and tried to shake off my maudlin thoughts. The passage of time started making me think that maybe Corey and I hadn’t been on the same page. That maybe once he’d been forced to leave he’d had time to think. Being away from regular life for such a long period of time can make people jump into relationships or otherwise forget themselves.
I’d thought we were different, but I hadn’t heard a peep from him, so maybe it was just one of those stories that were never meant to be finished.
I checked the time on my cell. Thirty minutes to my next appointment. I set my tea down on the table next to me and stood to head in and change out of my blue jeans into something more professional.
The noise of a car stopped me in my trucks and I cursed. I hated it when people showed up so early! I sighed, wiped my hands on my jeans and stepped off the porch into the driveway to await the clients.
Except…as the car grew closer I realized there was only one person inside the vehicle.
A male.
It couldn’t be.
My hands began to tremble and tears welled up in the corner of my eyes. The vehicle stopped a few feet away from me.
Corey and I stared at each other for a long moment.
He shut the car off and stepped out of the vehicle.
I was rooted into place. Shock at seeing him had made me immobile. I watched as he walked toward me. He was thinner than normal and had a slight limp. There were a couple more lines around the edges of his eyes, but it was still him.
He had come back to me.
He stopped at too far of a distance and cleared his throat. “You were a little more difficult to find than before.”
I gave him a wobbly smile. “You’re here.”
Brooks nodded. “Finally.”
I closed the gap between us
and buried my face into his chest. His arms wrapped around me and held me close.
“Lennox, I have so many things I need to tell you. So many things I need to make you understand.” He tilted my face up to look at him. “But before we go into all that, I just want you to know that my home is wherever you are.”
And I would follow him anywhere.
S.E. Babin
Sheryl has had a book in her hands pretty much from the time she could hold things with her hands. Her love of reading turned into a curious exploration to see whether or not she could write her own. Beginning with random, terrible poetry and a slightly popular reimagining of Beowulf’s Grendel in her high school English class, Sheryl spent way too much time in the library, killing any chance of her becoming a cheerleader or anything even remotely cool.
When she graduated and college funds were low (more like nonexistent), she enlisted in the military and spent several years doing everything but writing. She managed to find a cute guy who had a job that could afford her expensive book habit and who also appreciated that she embraced her inner geek, so she did what any smart gal would do. She married that guy.
Somewhere in those years she had a few children, pursued several degrees and eventually obtained a few of them. She is a Gemini so that means she has her fingers in all sorts of pies. To outsiders it may look like she is disorganized, but in her own head she is the master of random talents. Sheryl runs one of the largest book clubs in her area where wine is drunk and books are actually discussed.
Her immediate plans are focusing on the release of her first novel, a paranormal mystery where Aphrodite is on the hunt for a stolen relic. Future plans involve world domination and the subsequent destruction of all boxed cake mixes and artificial flavoring. Her fascination with from scratch baking has ruined her husband for other women. After she takes over the world and forces everyone to invest in quality bakeware and real vanilla beans, she believes you’ll eventually thank her.
Sheryl has a fondness for humorous, lighthearted stories but also secretly covets bad-ass leather wearing chicks who curse too much. It helps if they’re funny, too. She writes a little bit of everything but is currently focusing on light paranormal mysteries. She also has a secret squirrel women’s fiction project socked away for a rainy day.
For more information:
@hungrybiblio
SEBabin
www.SEBabin.com
Taken by the SEAL
by Carly Carson
Navy SEAL Declan Moynihan has orders to clandestinely shut down a notorious slave brothel in a Middle East war zone. Laila Catami, his accidental captive, is the mysterious woman being brought in to run the brothel.
Chapter One
Laila Cantami watched in horror as the two Kurds she'd hired to guide her through the Sinjar Mountains of Iraq were thrown to the hard floor of the tent. The dozen black-clad ISIS fighters who crowded around the Kurds ignored her attempts to plead for mercy.
One of the Kurds had been bashed on the side of the head.
Laila rushed over to him as blood spurted.
"Back off," the ISIS leader snarled in her direction. "We have other plans for you."
"I have first aid supplies." She spoke calmly, to try to keep everyone else calm. That's how they'd been trained in the NGO where she worked, a non-governmental charity dedicated to improving education for girls in poor countries.
But these jihadis didn't seem to have received the same training.
"Silence, whore." One of the fighters backhanded her casually across the cheek. She stumbled and barely managed to stay upright. The damn burka horribly compromised her ability to move, but it would be death to remove it.
"I'll be fine," the Kurdish guide said, although she could see his eyes were glazed with pain.
The second guide turned pleading eyes on Laila. "Don't fight with the jihadis. It will inflame them to have a woman defying them."
"I'm not defying them," she said, but she kept her voice low. "I'm trying to help."
"I have children," he answered. "I want to see them again."
Laila stepped back, dread almost swamping her as the stench of unwashed bodies clogged her nose. This was the worst outcome she could have imagined when she'd planned this mission to rescue her sister.
She was captured, her guides had been disarmed and abused, and rescue was impossible, since no one knew anything about her situation. They didn't know she was captured, missing, nor even what country she was currently in. If, in fact, this part of the world could even be said to be part of a particular country. It had been the Iraqi home of the Yazidi minority a couple years ago. Then it had been overrun by ISIS terrorists, who ruled their areas as a religious caliphate. Now? Who knew?
What she did know was that she was in deadly trouble.
As her captors had hastily erected their tent, they'd joked and laughed about their upcoming sport.
Her rape.
She understood Arabic more than well enough to comprehend their plans. Her stomach churned even as her mind whirled furiously. What could she do? Would the Kurds try to save her or themselves? Could they possibly prevail against so many? Since she was being ignored for the moment, she began to inch toward the one side of the tent which was open to the cold black night.
Panic threatened to overwhelm her. Even if she escaped the tent—
No. She couldn't think like that. She forced her mind to draw up a picture of her sister, a teenaged girl with blond hair and a soft smile. Her sister, who was also a captive of ISIS, but further south, in the city of Sinjar. She couldn't save her sister if she allowed panic to crush her. And that was the only thing that mattered.
The goons—she couldn't think of them as men—were drinking. One of them had pulled a bottle from beneath his long black tunic and they passed it around.
The leader strode back and forth in front of the open side of the tent. She'd heard him called Behaid. He was tall and easily identifiable due to a black patch tied across his right eye. A still-red scar angled beneath the patch. Laila could only wish whoever had stabbed him had plunged the knife in more deeply.
"Settle down, believers," Behaid said. "The night is long enough for our sport."
"Let's start." An older man with gray in his long beard spat something onto the floor. "Might be we could each get more than one turn."
The goons guffawed and cheered.
"Patience," Behaid said. "I need to know why this eahira"—he spat the Arabic word for whore—"is out here in this Yazidi wasteland."
"She's here to service us," a man with a black and white checked bandana called out. "Why else?"
"She will," the leader assured him. "A woman who travels with men not of her own family is a woman deserving of punishment. But she must have some reason of her own to be here and I need to know what it is."
"Strip her and question her," someone shouted. "That's a good way to start with a whore."
"First, we'll deal with these non-believers."
Laila shivered. Everyone knew how ISIS dealt with those of a different religion, whom they called non-believers. But she was well disguised as a Muslim woman. And the Kurds were Muslims, not Yazidis. Surely that would save their lives.
As if he'd heard her thought, one of the men near her kicked her, casually, knocking her onto a pile of dirty rugs. Her eyes closed to absorb the pain. But she had to pay attention. There was an uproar on the other side of the tent, blocked from her view by shouting fighters. She inched a bit closer to the open side of the tent. A sudden opening between two goons showed her two fighters were kneeling over the yelling Kurds. Before she could register what was happening, two dirty knives flashed, the screams of terror were silenced abruptly, and the Kurds flopped back down on the floor.
"Too easy a death." One of the terrorists spat on the body. "Should have had some sport with them."
"Our fun is with her." The terrorist leader made a crude gesture in her direction.
Laila froze so completely that she was
sure her heart stopped beating. Maybe she wanted it to stop beating. Because she certainly wouldn't survive a gang rape from this group, and she might as well die before experiencing that agony. Those two Kurds had been her last hope of anyone saving her.
Behaid raised his arms and they all calmed. "Set out the stones. We'll play for turns with her." The men gathered around him in a ragged circle, sitting on their haunches. A few of them were setting out small stones in the center of the circle.
Only the leader stood, his black bandana pulled down from his mouth, now that they felt safe. Laila thought the bandana was a stupid affectation because the man was easily identifiable due to the black patch over his eye and a strongly hooked nose protruding from under it.
She tried not to listen to his words, but she understood Arabic well, even though it wasn't her native tongue.
"This eahira here—" He pointed and Laila cringed again at the Arabic word for whore, even though she knew it didn't matter. "This eahira is the prize in our game."
"Strip her," one of the men called out again. "Let us see what we're playing for."
The leader held up his hand. "Patience, you whore-masters. You'll all get a turn. But let's have a little fun, eh? A bit of anticipation will sweeten the prize."
The men settled back, playing with their stupid stones while Laila's terrorized thoughts whirled frantically. She forced herself to calmness. She had to think. What could she use as a weapon, no matter how flimsy? The pistol didn't have enough bullets. Even if she managed to draw it from its hiding spot in her burka, she couldn't kill them all. No, she needed something more chaotic—
Her eye fell on the tin lamps set around the tent, which provided the only light. The sides and the top of the metal holders were open. A few had candles inside. Others burned with some type of fuel, perhaps kerosene or butane gas. She could smell it, slithering among the other noxious odors in the tent. If she could spill them—
Field Stripped: 15 Steamy Military Romances Page 107
