He grimaced as he shifted in the bed, his back clenching in an angry spasm, reminding him who was in charge. He washed down the potent painkiller with a generous swallow of his beer.
He was no different than most in his position. His body was screwed and tattooed. Literally. But chicks dig scars, right? Yeah, but did chicks dig drug addicts?
His body had been broken and mended back together again one too many times. The pain was just a part of who he was now. The painkillers were part of his management.
That was the story he told the docs and they’d bought into it for a long time, but then government regs changed and the lockdown on narcotics got downright militant.
He’d gone from getting his shit the legitimate way to paying an exorbitant amount to a man named Pablo who sold him Oxy by the tab.
And he needed more and more just to get through the day.
Okay, and maybe sometimes he took a little more than he needed but who didn’t play fast and loose with prescription drugs these days? Hell, college kids lived off Adderall during exams and that was perfectly fine when everyone knew it was just legal amphetamines. But hey, it’s all good...until they get caught and then mommy and daddy throw a fit, demanding to know how little Johnny got his hands on something so addictive.
Maybe the doc should’ve warned Xander how addictive Oxy could be; maybe it would’ve made him look for an alternative.
Hell, there were a lot of what-ifs but what good did they do? Didn’t change the facts of what’d happened in Tulsa.
Scarlett wanted to know why he’d run?
Because he was guilty.
Not of setting that bomb—No, he’d never do something so cowardly as to kill innocent people.
But make no mistake, he was guilty as hell.
And whoever had set him up knew of his little problem.
Former bomb-squad, Army ranger and current drug addict.
Yeah, his life read like a damn play-by-play for how to draw a direct line toward the easiest chump to take the fall.
The evidence may be circumstantial but Xander would make a terrible witness.
They’d take one look at the evidence—Xander couldn’t account for his whereabouts when the bomb went off because he couldn’t remember shit about that day—and they’d lock him up tight.
The people wanted a head on a spike for what’d happened in Tulsa.
And someone had already prepared Xander’s skull for the presentation.
His eyelids started to drag, his head to bob.
First thing tomorrow, he’d...
And he was out.
* * *
The team stared, some frowning, some bewildered.
Zak was the first to break the stunned silence. “No. You’re not going alone. We’re coming with you.”
Scarlett hadn’t slept at all last night. She knew what she needed to do, and she didn’t want anyone else to end up as collateral damage if things went south.
She’d spent the night trying to talk her way out of this one decision but by morning, she’d known there was only one way this situation could go down.
“Look, here’s the situation. I can move faster without a detail slowing me down. Xander is on a ticking clock. If we don’t bring him in, the FBI will take over and any chance Xander has of beating this will disappear.”
Zak narrowed his gaze. “You believe he’s innocent.”
“I don’t know that,” Scarlett said, shaking her head. “But there are questions that I can’t answer and my gut is saying... Hell, I don’t know but I can’t let someone else bring Xander in. If he’s guilty, I need to be the one who brings him in. He’s one of our own.”
“All the more reason why we should help.”
“I need you back at headquarters being my eyes and ears. You’re going to need to run interference if too much attention swivels Xander’s way. Trust me, this is going to be a bitch for everyone involved but I can’t deny that something doesn’t feel right.”
It took a lot to admit that to her team when she’d been the most adamant that they weren’t there to uncover any hidden truths about the case.
She’d learned a long time ago that ignoring her gut was a bad idea, which meant she was about to do something either really stupid or really dangerous—either one would probably kill her career or put her in the ground but she knew it was the right decision.
However, she wasn’t going to put her team at risk. “I don’t need any of you in the direct line of fire. If Xander is right and someone is framing him, that means we could have a snake in our home. If Xander is lying and he’s just trying to save his ass, I need to be the one to bring him down.”
“That’s what I’m talking about, let’s shake out the traitor,” CJ said with a gleeful smile because CJ was a little crazy. “Holyyy shit, I’m ready.”
Zak cast CJ a warning look before returning to Scarlett. “We need a timeframe. How long?”
“FBI is going to start sniffing around after a week. If I haven’t found him by then, there’s nothing else we can do. But until then, you’ve got my six here at HQ. No communication through our regular phones. We’ll use burners for any intel on this mission. Any questions?”
Laird piped in. “Yeah, what happens if he’s actually guilty?”
Scarlett allowed a grim smile. “Then, I’ll do what I do best... Bring the asshole down.”
“Simmer down. He’s not guilty,” Zak said to Laird, then to Scarlett, “I don’t like it. You need backup. Anything could go wrong.”
“Xander isn’t going to hurt me.”
“Well, he did nearly crush your skull,” CJ pointed out with a shrug. “I mean, that was pretty savage.”
“He didn’t nearly crush my skull, CJ. He knocked me out to gain time to get away. It was my stupid mistake to let him get the tactical advantage. I swear, I’ll never live this down.”
The team chuckled in spite of the serious situation but that was their MO. Make jokes before heading into a screwed-up situation.
“Fine. I don’t like it but I see your plan,” Zak said, sighing as he straightened. “We’ll get burners and hold down the fort, make it look like business as usual.”
“Good.” Scarlett released a pent-up breath, relieved. With Zak on board, he’d get the rest of the team in line. “So, from now on, this mission is locked down, eyes only. Code name Double Down.”
CJ grinned. “Yeah baby, ’cuz it’s all or nothing in this game.”
“Exactly,” Scarlett said, nodding. “Any questions?”
“Yeah, are you sure you can handle Xander if he’s guilty? I mean, I’m the last person to even want to think that it’s possible, but we’ve all seen people we trust go bad for whatever reasons. I love the guy, I do. But Xander has always been a wild card,” Laird said.
Laird was right. They’d all seen the ugly side of humanity at one point or another because combat situations were hell and greed was an insidious evil. But there was something in her gut that told her Xander wouldn’t hurt her.
Even if he was guilty. “I can handle Xander,” she assured Laird but she hoped to God her intuition wasn’t wrong. She was putting her career and her life on the line for the dipshit and he’d better be straight about the facts or she’d happily throat punch him.
Plan in place, they broke off like a well-oiled machine. Scarlett had been the TL for this team for three years. She knew them well and trusted them more.
Even Xander.
Trust was a funny thing, though. Either it was strong as steel or fragile as glass, but you never knew how well it was going to hold up until tested.
Well, she was about to find out if she was standing on steel or falling through glass.
Time to double down, baby.
Chapter 4
Xander knew concussion protocol would require Scarlett go through bureaucrat
ic hoops to ensure her brain was okay after he’d knocked her out, which meant he had a finite amount of time to put some distance between them.
He had to get to Tulsa, back to the scene of the crime, to see if anything jogged his memory about that day. Thank God, he had a duffel of cash; otherwise, he’d be driving nineteen hours instead of taking a four-hour flight.
Admittedly, he was taking a risk flying, even with a fake ID, mostly because Scarlett knew his aliases and once she was cleared for duty she’d find his destination pretty quick, but he didn’t have the luxury of taking things safe.
He had to hope that Scarlett didn’t tell those bureaucrats to shove it and hop back on his tail like the maniac she was.
God, that woman... If she weren’t so damn hot, he’d say she was crazier than him.
Not his kind of crazy—no, Scarlett was more controlled—but still, you couldn’t lead a Red Wolf team without being a little left of center. None of them were right in the head, which was how they were able to do the jobs they were assigned without batting an eye.
But it also made believing that he could blow up a bunch of civilians to get to one politician totally plausible.
Hell, no one was looking twice at that story.
Messed up vet with a checkered past and a previously unknown prescription drug addiction—yeah, he knew just how perfect he was for this frame job but it pissed him off that Scarlett was playing into the game.
She knew him.
She, of all people, should’ve been able to see through that smoke screen and then he wouldn’t have had to knock her lights out.
Although, if he managed to clear his name and get his job back, he was totally going to rub Scarlett’s nose in the fact that he’d gotten the jump on her. Actually, that thought gave him the warm fuzzies. Lord knew he had precious little of those to pass around.
He grabbed an Uber to the airport, made quick work of buying a ticket on the first flight out of Virginia and settled into his seat, prepared to sleep through the four-hour plane ride. With any luck, his resting asshole face would deter any eager Chatty Kathys from striking up a convo. He wanted to shut his eyes, slip into dreamland and wake up in the dreary nothingness that was Oklahoma.
His lids had only just closed when he heard a familiar voice.
“You’re getting sloppy, Scott.”
His eyes opened slowly to find Scarlett standing in the aisle, looking pissed and deadly as hell. He wanted to say she wouldn’t shoot him in front of all these passengers but he was willing to guess her trigger finger was damn itchy after what he’d done.
Damn it. He should’ve rented a car. “You going to stand there all day? You’re gumming up traffic.”
Scarlett smirked as she swung into the seat beside him, flashing her ticket at him. “Looks like we’re travel buddies.”
He eyed her warily. “Yeah? And how do you figure that?”
Scarlett leaned toward him, her voice lowered to a sexy rumble. “Well, it seems this is your lucky day, Scott. I’m going to see for myself if your story is total bullshit. If it turns out you’re innocent, I get a valuable member of my team back. If it turns out you’re a damn liar, I get to put you away. Either way, it’s a win for me. So yeah, buckle up, baby, you’ve got yourself a travel buddy.”
Awww hell. He didn’t want Scarlett riding shotgun with him on this adventure but the way he saw it, he didn’t have much of a choice. Either he accepted Scarlett’s dubious help or he tried to ditch her again and spend the entire time looking over his shoulder for one angry TL who was a crack shot.
Yeah, seemed better to play nice.
Xander chuckled and shrugged. “Guess it is my lucky day. The team on board with this?”
“I wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”
He didn’t want to seem like a sap but it meant something that the team was willing to take a chance on him. He jerked a nod and sent his gaze out the small window, needing a minute to collect himself. He wasn’t usually a crier but this hit all the feels in all the tender spots.
“You going to cry?” Scarlett asked, frowning. “Pull yourself together or I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”
He laughed, not entirely sure that she was joking. “How’s that head of yours?”
“Pounding like a mother. You clocked me good and don’t think for a second that I’m not going to pay you back for that one.”
“Oh, I know you will.”
“Good.”
Maybe he was an asshole but he took a certain amount of pride for getting the jump on Scarlett. She was TL for a reason—shrewd, smart and always on target—Scarlett didn’t mess around. “Admit it... I got you good,” Xander couldn’t resist teasing, even though he knew poking at Scarlett was like poking at an angry bear.
She leveled a short look his way and changed the subject. All business. “What’s your plan?” she asked.
“My plan? Well, presently, I plan to sleep. In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve been on the run for the past week and a half and it hasn’t exactly been a vacation filled with rest and relaxation.”
“Boo-hoo. You shouldn’t have run in the first place.” She had zero sympathy. “If you would’ve trusted your team, we could’ve handled this the right way. Now we have to do things the wrong way and that means it’s going to be ten times harder than it needs to be.”
“Yeah? So turning myself in would’ve been the right way? What makes you think that I wouldn’t have met an untimely end while in custody? Something tells me that whoever is framing me isn’t real keen on having me around for long. Dead men tell no tales and all that.”
She conceded his point. “Still, you made it worse by running. You could’ve at least told me.”
There was something behind her curt response that tugged at his conscience. Did Scarlet have feelings? And if so, had he inadvertently stepped on them? To be real, that was more disconcerting than the idea of being framed. “Yeah well, hindsight and all that. Kinda hard to think rationally when you’re being framed for a crime you didn’t commit.”
“Copy that,” Scarlett acknowledged with a solemn nod, then added, “But you have to believe in your team. You know that without the strength of your team behind you, a mission is bound to fail. You panicked—and that’s exactly what a rookie would do.”
He disagreed. “You call it panic—I call it calculated self-defense. I wasn’t about to give up my control and walk into a potential ambush like a lamb to slaughter. Sorry, it is what it is, but that ain’t happening.”
The idea of walking meekly into anything remotely close to what Scarlett had been suggesting made his balls shrivel up.
Scarlett could tell he wasn’t going to budge and she wasn’t going to waste the energy, which was good because he was done talking about it anyway. Pulling his ball cap down low, he folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes.
“You’re really going to sleep?”
“Mmmhhmmm.”
“Damn it, Xander. We need a strategy.”
“No, I need sleep. It’s two and a half hours to Oklahoma. Cool your jets until we land. Read a magazine or something.”
Scarlett exhaled in irritation, muttering under her breath, “You’re making it real hard to remember why I’m putting my ass on the line for you.”
He smirked from beneath his ball cap. Because I’m the best dick you’ve ever had, baby. In the interest of self-preservation...he kept that comment to himself.
* * *
Scarlett was fuming.
She narrowed her gaze at Xander—who, by the way, was already lightly snoring as if he were sacked out in the Hilton and not folded into an economy seat two sizes too small for his solid frame—and wanted to shove him out the plug door.
And if she took a moment to enjoy the image of Xander flailing from the plane at thirty-thousand feet elevation, she didn’t feel an ounce o
f guilt, mostly because her head hurt and that was squarely Xander’s fault.
She’d purposely purchased the seat next to her so that no one else would be sitting in close quarters to them; the last thing she needed was some yahoo eavesdropping on their conversation.
But as it turned out, the extra seat was unnecessary. Well, Xander was going to pay her back for that extra seat, seeing as she’d purchased it with her own money.
Almost three hours to kill and Xander was off to la-la land, sleeping like the dead. Scarlett grabbed the in-flight magazine and thumbed through it, not really looking at anything in particular, just using it as a distraction.
But her mind was difficult to distract.
Part of the reason she suffered from insomnia.
Her brain didn’t recognize the “off” switch.
And one of the memories her brain liked to chew on was that night with Xander.
First, it had been an epic mistake. Let’s just get that out of the way right now.
Second, it had been the best sex of her life.
Third, she had been pretty drunk so it was possible her recollection of the event couldn’t be trusted.
Yet, knowing that she’d been sauced didn’t seem to water down what she did remember.
Xander, his body crisscrossed with scars and tattoos—she was a sucker for both—with muscle cording that solid frame like he’d been carved from stone and his hands, calloused and rough like a real man’s should be, touching her bare skin with urgency.
Yeah, that kind of loving was hard to forget.
It didn’t help that she’d been in a bit of a drought, either—did three years qualify as a drought or a cry for help?—and she’d been about ready to hump the table leg.
The liquor had only made that need for human contact worse.
Most people didn’t understand their job, how ending an assignment successfully is an adrenaline rush unlike any drug and if that adrenaline wasn’t channeled, it turned restless, which with their demons, was dangerous.
Blowing off steam was a necessity, not a luxury. Usually, she went off on her own but that night she’d needed companionship.
Soldier for Hire Page 3
