by Eden Connor
Nicholas was a sweet young man. But how the fuck had I turned him into my closest confidant? “What about Bonner? Why wouldn’t you vote for him?”
“It doesn’t matter how many people vote for Bonner. He can’t win because he won’t pull a single white majority district. Thanks to more than a century of gerrymandering, every district in this state has a white majority.” Nick struck the wheel with a closed fist.
That’s why. Because he talks the way Evony did about the politics and history of the state.
Bonner would become the first African-American on the ballot for governor of South Carolina, if he won the primary. An historic moment, to be sure. I could hardly wait to wreck it.
A few miles flashed by.
“We headed home, boss man?” Nicholas asked.
I growled. “Stop for cigarettes.”
Nick tut-tutted, but he got me a pack of Marlboro Reds and a lighter. “You know, they say smoking will be eradicated in another generation. Think about your lungs, chief.”
I ripped the cellophane off the pack and made a mental note to find a reason to let Nick go.
•2•
I pushed my plate away with a contented sigh. “I love this restaurant.” With a smile, I added, “I love you, too. It’s so nice to spend some time together, Kee.”
“Dessert, darling?” While Keelan patted his lips with the linen napkin, I admired the handsome face of the man I’d known since middle school.
I shook my head. “No. I want a piece of cheesecake, but it’s not worth the added miles on my morning jog.”
He took my hand. “I miss you every day, sweetheart. That’s the downside to all this added travel.” His eyes roamed my face. There was something in the look that I rarely saw. A hint of insecurity. Very odd.
“I know you’re busting your ass to get your message to the voters and at the same time, juggling an important job. This too, shall pass.”
“Same as you. You’re a marvel.” He gave my hand a squeeze. “Your father called. He’s going to join us for coffee, if that’s all right with you.”
I couldn’t drink coffee this time of night. Keelan knew that, but I nodded. I resigned myself to having campaign talk spoil our romantic evening. With any luck, Kee would break things off at a decent hour. “I have an early class tomorrow.”
“Babe, I made you a promise and I’m a man of my word. No campaign talk tonight.”
Empty words. My father lived, ate, and breathed state politics. Normally, so did I, but I’d hoped for an evening where we put the race aside. The distance I sensed in our relationship went deeper than Kee’s schedule, but I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt that way.
“There he is now.”
I turned to watch my father wind his way among the close-set tables. Another damn handsome man, if he was my dad.
Keelan stood. “George, so nice of you to join us.”
“Honored to be asked, Kee.” Dad bent to kiss my cheek. “Evony. You’re looking beautiful tonight.”
Kee had made it sound like Dad asked to come, and not the other way around. My bullshit detector revved into high gear while they shook hands. Dad took a seat, but to my surprise, he didn’t say a word.
Keelan cleared his throat. “You know I’m an old-fashioned man, Evony.”
Was he looking to win a prize for understatement of the year? I loved the man, but... Gotta put my tough week aside. He’s really trying. I worked long hours, hoping for tenure at the University of South Carolina, as well as handling my case load at the law firm my father and I owned. Between my ambitions and Kee’s, we just couldn’t seem to make time for each other.
We aren’t kids. Time spent apart isn’t going to kill us. Not like it did the first time.
Keelan reached into his jacket. Dad folded his hands on top of the table, leaning forward. My gut clenched as I looked from one man to the other.
“Mr. Millwood, you’ve been my close friend and advisor for years. I respect you more than any man I know. I’m sweating bullets here, but I’d like your permission to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”
For fuck’s sake. I’m nearly forty-two. There’s old-fashioned and then there’s archaic.
My father gave Kee a broad smile. “Took you long enough, son. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see Evony settle down with.”
Kee pulled something from his pocket. I stared at the box, admiring the robin’s egg blue. The crisp black Tiffany and Co. logo sent my pulse racing.
“Evony, I love you, darling. I should never have let you go. I thank God every day for giving me another chance to take back the heart of the woman He made for me. Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” He placed the box in my shaking hands.
Aware that conversation had ceased at the tables around us, I managed to lift the lid and pry the velvet ring box free. Lifting the lid, I gasped.
The candle in the table centerpiece sparked rainbows off the round-cut solitaire. I couldn’t resist a peek at the inside of the band. The bold ‘950’ stamped beside the elegant Tiffany maker’s mark told me the fretwork around the stone was platinum.
I raised my eyes, unsure why I hesitated. “Yes.”
Polite clapping broke out. My father’s laugh seemed a bit too loud. Keelan took the diamond from me. I spied the slight tremble in his fingers when he slid the ring on my third finger. He held onto my hand. Leaning close, he pressed a kiss to my lips.
Pulling back, he vowed, “I’m going to put you in the governor’s mansion as First Lady, Evony, if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
You’d make a beautiful First Lady. The voice in my head wasn’t Keelan’s. The elegant restaurant faded for a moment. Fuck you, Ben. Get out of my head.
“Hrmph.” My father only cleared his throat before he delivered bad news. My gut did that clenching thing again. “I know this topic’s off limits tonight, but this can’t wait.”
I held my breath.
My father darted a hard look in my direction. “Ben Collins asked Perry Gaines to handle his election campaign. He’s planning to run against you. He’s a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination.”
Oh, shit. He can’t do that. The press will go digging. Daddy will go digging.
The world tipped. I swallowed hard, pushing back the sour acid leaking into my mouth.
Ben has no idea what he’s walking into.
Thanks to me.
Beaucoup Dinki Dau (Plenty Crazy)
Eden Connor
Assigned to protect the USMC Commandant's goddaughter from a bomber threatening to kill her family, former Force Recon Operative Captain Tanner Caldwell is stunned to find the Navy psychiatrist that is his assignment is the prison shrink he spent one night with during a personal mission he'd rather not have come to light. She’s career suicide in a khaki shirt. Makes no sense for a man already on thin ice with his commander to be delighted by the turn of events that might land his ass in Leavenworth.
Happy to be back on active duty, Tori needs to focus on helping the traumatized men under her care at Bethesda Naval Hospital, but the sharp-eyed sniper dogs her every step. It doesn’t take the hard-bitten combat veteran long to ask if he's the one who got her pregnant. If only her problem was that simple.
When a warrior cries, the angels stop to listen and bow their gilded heads. For there is power and majesty in the tears of one who has looked into the fires of hell and can still lay claim to his own soul.
Honor must be paid, for the claiming comes at no small cost.
Chapter One
“Trip wire.”
Following the dark line of Crash’s extended finger, seasoned Marine Corps Captain Tanner Caldwell spied the faint gleam of silver, six inches from the toe of his boot. He froze. A bead of sweat inched down the back of his neck. Sundown hadn’t done much to cool things off. Looking left and then right in the gloomy woods, he reassessed the situation.
How the hell did I let Crash talk me into this?
Right up to this point, he�
�d thought Crash had been full of shit. The wire belied that assessment. Did it connect to some kind of alarm, or some kind of ordinance?
The wire sat three feet inside the tree line. Ahead, sparse scrub scattered an open field. The moon coasted from behind a cloud long enough to reveal a cabin seventy-five yards away. The scrub provided plenty of concealment for men trained to use it—as he and Crash were—but deep down, Tanner knew better than to expect to tippy-toe across this field, throw a little shock-and-awe, ask a couple of questions, and be back in town, drinking a toast to Crash’s baby brother by dawn.
He got paid to be paranoid.
This little recon job could go to motherfucking hell in a hand basket. Although his buddy’s demeanor was impassive as ever, Crash’s grief guaranteed the master chief was in no shape to make decisions. Besides, Tanner was the one with the bars. Crash was enlisted personnel—but this wasn’t exactly a military maneuver.
Eying the dark balls dangling from his friend’s belt, Tanner did not want to know where Crash got the frag grenades. Two-digit midgets—guys with ninety-nine days or less till their hitch was up—did that shit, started smuggling out the goodies they were gonna miss when they turned in their uniforms and put on their civvies.
Tanner cut his gaze back to the cabin and saw something he liked less than the grenades.
Crash held up two fingers, but he’d already spied the guards. The moon slid behind another cloud, but any sniper could make out the guards’ automatic rifles, magazines, and scopes.
Tanner gave a curt nod, but wanted to strangle Crash. Without a doubt, this little Q and A session would require some hands-on persuasion. He hadn’t signed on to manhandle civilians in the good old U.S. of A when he’d hopped a plane to attend Crash’s brother’s funeral. The scary dude was welcome to pull the pin in one of those grenades in parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, but if this little recon party disintegrated into a full-out assault, they’d end up holding hands at their motherfucking court martial.
His certainty Crash had misunderstood the snippet of conversation that led them here evaporated. Grief did funny things to a man, but the wire gave credence to Crash’s wild-ass story that he’d heard two of his brother’s friends say some arms dealer had ordered Samson killed.
Fuck. This is why you don’t hang with the rank and file. Still, he and Crash had been friends long before the Corps yanked Tanner out of line, shipped his ass off to ECP, and slapped bars on his collar.
Soon as they’d hit the tarmac after their last mission and Crash got the news his brother had been killed, they’d rushed through their debriefing while the unit secretary nabbed them a ride to Georgia on a transport plane.
It was just FUBAR—military lingo meaning Fucked Up Beyond All Repair—for the big man to circle the globe, as Crash had done, surviving more fire-fights than Tanner cared to recall, only to have his baby brother gunned down on the streets of sleepy little Athens, Georgia.
Tanner checked to be sure he had a round in the chamber of the piece of shit Ruger 77, glad now he’d spent the evening cleaning the old rifle, adjusting the sights, and loosening the trigger pull. “When we get back to town, remind me to kick your black ass,” he hissed.
“Aye, aye.” Crash’s teeth gleamed in the dark. Tanner heard sarcasm in the retort. Tanner thought of Crash as “the scary dude” for a reason. Only a crazy man would jump his fellow Marine—or one who didn’t know what the big motherfucker was capable of. Neither attribute described Tanner.
Crash bent, unearthing a potato-sized rock. Watching the stone arc across the charcoal sky toward the far side of the field, Tanner thought, not for the first time, that Uncle Sam didn’t know what Crash had given up to serve and the MLB would never know what they’d missed.
Shots cracked like lightning, revealing they were up against automatic weapons. Not so bad, since they were wielded by morons. Twin, continuous bursts of orange, fifty feet apart, told Tanner they confronted even numbers.
He grinned. The odds were even on paper, maybe.
Feeling that first rush of adrenaline, he knew he’d take Crash into a party of nine, armed and waiting, but it’d be nice to have U.S. Grade A hardware in hand instead of this Ruger and his dick. The hard band of leather at his ankle said all he had to do was cross forty feet of ragged grass and he wouldn’t need the fucking rifle. The fact that both sentries were firing said they were strictly Mickey Mouse. His paranoia said they might be smarter than everything so far indicated, so he scanned the area around the cabin for any sign of movement.
There was something familiar about the gunfire.
“M-16,” Crash hissed. “They got our hardware, Cappie.”
“I ain’t deaf, master chief.” Stepping over the wire, Tanner hugged up to a slender oak at the edge of the field and dropped to his knees. Raising the barrel, he squinted, unable to suppress a grin.
“Got you covered.” With a slash of his arm, Tanner indicated a cottonwood scrub at their one o-clock. Handicapped by his size, it took Crash six seconds to haul his size fifteens to the fucking tree, but the welcoming party was still shooting at a rock that couldn’t shoot back. Crash dropped to one knee. On his partner’s signal, Tanner burst from the tree line, about to commit a crime and grinning like a motherfucker anyway.
Ten minutes later, the pair of sentries writhed on the ground, hands bound at their backs by zip ties. Crash set his boot on the neck of the one he’d taken down, but looked to Tanner for orders.
Tanner liberated his Kabar from the sheath at his ankle. The moon obliged, peeking from the clouds long enough to send a gleam along the honed edge on the blackened steel. A wedding band circled the third finger of the man’s left hand. He has more to lose.
Tanner hooked a toe under the ribs of the captive at his feet, flipping him to his back so the enemy got a good look at the honed edge of the knife.
“Hello. Nice to meet you, but I’m afraid we’re short on time. Can’t hang around and chat. So here’s the deal.” His conversational tone made the prisoner sneer. Despite the cloudy night, Tanner assessed the white dude at as he squatted. The tats on his prisoner’s muscular forearms were crossed rifles, clutched in the claws of an eagle. An America flag fluttered in the background.
“Nice ink. Philippines?”
The grin faded and the prisoner’s brows went up. Tanner got a sick feeling in his gut. This guy was former military, meaning what he’d committed to do was bad juju. To his left, he heard bones crack as Crash bore down on his bad guy.
“Crash, I don’t want a witness.” The guy under his knife would talk, Tanner figured, if he could do so without his buddy knowing.
Crash obliged, removing his foot. He fell to his knees at his prisoner’s side and wrapped his massive forearm around the guy’s scrawny neck. Tanner played with the blade while waiting for the sleeper hold to take effect, watching his target’s eyes.
“He’s out.”
Hearing Crash’s assertion, he grinned at his prisoner.
“Okay, since you’re likely a former brother-in-arms, I’ll make this easy.” Lowering the knife to the dude’s groin, Tanner kept his tone polite. “I get info. You get to keep your balls.” Yanking down the zipper on the guy’s pants, he winced, but everything about this setup screamed “homegrown militia”. He had no time to de-program true believers. If there was one thing a man believed in more than his politics, it was his keeping his family jewels in the sac God provided.
“Fuck you.” The prisoner spat. “What are you, some kind of faggot?”
Tanner winced inside, but he removed the guy’s flaccid rod. Centering his blade on the sensitive spot just below the head, Tanner pressed the tip into the shrinking flesh. “I need a name. One name, and I don’t make calamari out of your Johnson.”
NatuLowe, the dumb ass tested him. Tanner lived by several principles. The one that applied here was, don’t make threats; make a plan. The plan was simple, press his advantage and be committed to making good on his threats. Worked on the Tal
iban, it would work here.
“I want the name of the head dude. Crash, get his wallet and take his ID.” Tanner leaned close enough to smell the fear coming off the bound sentry. “You lie to me, and so help me God, I’ll track down your woman.”
Three minutes into the plan, the man writhed, screaming, “Covington! The man you want is Dwayne Covington.”
“Where can I find him?”
“I don’t know,” the man cried. “Honest, I don’t know. I just got hired.”
He heard the ring of truth in the prisoner’s voice, but fuck, the name wasn’t enough. “Gotta give me more.” Tanner pressed the point into the shrinking shaft.
“His son! Heard someone say his kid just got sent to juvie up in North Carolina. Name’s Evel, like the motorcycle dude, but they call him Cotton.”
Chapter Two
Leading a few Spec Ops team gave Tanner some advantages, like the doctored resume and documentation that let him don a Junior Correctional Officer—JCO’s—uniform ASAP, once Human Resources scanned his curriculum vitae. He walked through the gates at Stonewall Jackson for his first shift the same day Cotton did, and was fortunate enough to be assigned to his subject’s cabin. Then, Tanner’s luck ran dry.
Cotton was closed-off, suspicious of everyone around him. His attitude was piss-poor, to boot. He was working his ass off to get close to the little prick, when all he wanted to do was strangle the kid. But Cotton’s pissy attitude wasn’t the worst of Tanner’s problems.
His primary pain in the ass was a tall, cool drink of water with light hair and eyes the color of desert shadows, Dr. Victoria Banks.
“He’s in a foul mood today, Doc. I don’t think it’s a good idea to take him outside. Not alone.”
Swiping her hair out of her eyes, the shrink lifted her chin and squared her shoulders.
“I think there’s some misunderstanding, JCO Martin. I’m Evel’s psychiatrist. If I want to take him outdoors for our session, it’s not your place to dissent.”
