That left Sergeant Rhea, or Sarge, to be the admin and he enjoyed running the business. Passing out the assignments, doing sit-rep reviews, holding the commander position was second nature to him. Kayla loved that her dad continued to be so active in her brother’s lives, in what became the family business. However, there wasn’t a spot for her.
She realized the problem continued to be that she wasn’t male. And because of that little unchangeable fact, the men in her life were overprotective. She proved she had a sharp brain, a quick wit, and was physically fit, none of which her father or brothers paid attention to. They offered her the position of office manager. She had no interest in sitting in an office and getting people coffee. She knew the job included more, much more, but it still came down to something she absolutely hated to do.
Kayla Rhea wanted to be part of the gang, part of the group, not left on the fringes. Then, as if the perception of the situation wasn’t enough to battle, she dealt with another problem, her annual trips to Africa. Somalia to be exact. She recalled her most recent conversation with her father and the team just yesterday.
“It is too much of a hot spot, Kayla. You aren’t going back there. It’s more volatile than when you went a few years ago. Gunn and his unit rescued you for god’s sake. You were scared to death; don’t you remember?”
Oh, she remembered, all right. She remembered a certain, melt your panties, Major Hunter, on her cousin Gunn’s Special Operations Team. The spec op group brought Kayla and three other women in her benevolent aide team out of the fray when a party of village militia kidnapped them. Gunn piloted the transport, so he maneuvered the pick-up. She had been scared out of her mind but the man who grabbed her, Hunter, treated her with respect. He showed compassion even though his assessment of the whole ordeal remained rough. After he made sure she had no life threatening injuries, he shared his thoughts. He chastised her concerning the situation once they were on board the plane headed home.
“What do you mean reckless? I followed the protocol and tried to be safe. I wasn’t raped, not physically anyway. They sure did a number on my psyche though.”
“A miracle you weren’t, yes. You have plenty of bruises and cuts. But don’t hold onto the thought you were spared physically because you were effective in rebuffing your abductor. If he’d wanted to take you, if any had, they would have gang raped you if you were too hard to handle alone. Conscience would not be an issue for them. The bottom line is you knew it was dangerous, and you did it anyway. I’m telling you, don’t ever do it again.”
She wanted to shout, I’m an adult, and it is what I can do to better the world. Instead, the silence had been deafening and yet her ears were full of the beat of her heart as she sat scrunched up next to him. Damn it, she liked his take-charge attitude. By his mere presence alone, he’d helped her feel better, relaxed, more protected. After what she had just gone through, that was not to be taken lightly. She didn’t. They talked more. She loved how his hand went around her shoulders to steady her when they hit turbulence. He did it again when she’d been too tired to stay awake, allowing her to cuddle tight. A piece of heaven she couldn’t get out of her mind.
Her father’s insistent voice brought her back from her musings, causing an irrational, angry blip to flash across her mental radar.
“A young woman who does free-lance writing and produces award winning pictures should be able to find safer work and still get her message out.”
“Dad, why do you think my work is desired so much? It is the subject matter, the realism. Besides, I do plenty of work during the year to finance my annual trip to Africa. It isn’t as though I’m a daredevil looking for a thrill. Those girls and young women need what I can provide them, both physically and in the media. It brings money and awareness, and that’s important.” She knew the trip also created a symbiotic relationship. Her trips were a win-win.
“Until things are settled more, you aren’t going back there. Find a new adventure.”
She’d heard it all before, too many times to count. Even now, the ‘laying down of the law’ continued to be a common mantra in the Rhea household. She learned to tune the arbitrary edicts out. She sometimes lived in a small efficiency she maintained for her days when the house was too noisy, or the conversation too volatile. Like today.
Her father operated the business from his expanded office at home, and sometimes business got loud. The amped up security at home gave her anxieties. Her father paid for space so she could go there to concentrate and to feel normal.
She taught adjunct at the local college ninety-nine percent of the time. She wrote about current world events, she did seminars on them, published and displayed her pictures that told the girls’ heartbreaking stories. Her popularity in the artistic and seminar realms had taken off in the last year. Her notoriety had risen ever since she’d published an article telling her pictorial story of a village in Somalia two years before.
Kayla did as she always did in these situations with the menfolk, she agreed, then went on to do what she wanted to do. This time she noticed her father was not as mollified as in her previous experiences and she feared he’d figure out her stratagem. She would work on a new one after she got back from her next trip. She needed to work on the next expedition itinerary and set things up more quietly since her father forbade her to return to Somalia. She would need to avoid the subject from now on and deflect any more conversation. Not a skill she had honed but she would. It was that important.
Terin walked into the family home the next day after the conversation progressed from another round of the ‘thou shalt nots’ to the more amiable topic of dinner.
“Hey, Lala, what’s going on in your world?”
She hated her brother fell back into the name she gave herself at two. She’d grown past it, but he never had.
“Why can’t you call me by my name or even Kay like Robbie does?”
“Because you still call him Robbie, and you are still my baby sister.”
“Okay, if I start calling him Rob, would you stop calling me Lala?”
Terin’s muscles flexed as he tried to fold his arms. He was only partially successful in the attempt. Not for the first time, Kayla admired the man her brother had become. His military career had been a great experience for him, but she appreciated he kept many of the darkest times away from her. She caught her dad and Terin talking about it at night, but they would shut it all down when she came into the room.
Robbie treated her the same way with his deep, and Kayla suspected alarmingly dark, web work. It didn’t interest Kayla in the least, but whatever it involved, it had many interwoven tales of intrigue in the defense and security realm. Robbie was their ears to the ground, her dad said, and she didn’t doubt it. They and the rest of the crew worked well together, she wished they would let her do what she did best. Well, she wished their expectations didn’t obligate her to sneak around them to accomplish her task, anyway.
“Nah, don’t think so but Robbie might like it.”
“Robbie might like what?” Out of the back of the house came the subject of the last statement.
Kayla rolled her eyes. “Oh, never mind. What do you want for dinner?”
The conversation flowed free and easy over the dinner table until Robbie asked Kayla about the dreaded subject. “Hey, not going to Africa right? Not this year? Things are incredibly hot over there.”
“Why? What changed?”
“No, she isn’t. We just had this conversation, and it is irrelevant why, young lady, you aren’t going. Go somewhere else.”
“Yeah, I don’t have time to pull your hind end out of a mess. There likely wouldn’t be anything to retrieve. It has really gotten unstable this last year.”
“Listen, guys, you know I have worked at this little clinic for four years. It is dangerous, I know, but I want to help. It’s in an area that loses their daughters and young wives often to soldiers, marauders, other villagers and more. Women have no intrinsic value in that region of the world. It isn’t the
only region, by far, but I found this corner, and I am staying in it for now. I told you before. If the young girls survive the violence in captivity and the fallout of their immediate disfavor with the kidnappers, they’re abandoned after abuse. They are thrown away with nowhere to go.”
“Kayla, I get it. But, hon, you can’t go back there right now, it would be almost suicide. Then whom would you help, no one, because you would be dead.”
Kayla sighed. “Fine, Terin, I get it. I won’t go at Christmas but there is another one in six months, and I intend to go. You need to freaking stay out of my business. I stay out of yours.”
Terin put his hand up as if to ward off the verbal attack. “Whoa, sis, I get it. I’m there at least once a year myself, but you’ve just proven my point. It’s too dangerous for females. It is tantamount to a death sentence in many cases. You can’t go, not now and maybe not ever. Dad’s right. Get another project.”
Kayla blew her own decision of not talking about it. Her passion was too strong to let it go. She stood up and scooted her chair back noisily. “I hear you. I’m going for a walk.” The men in her family wisely let her.
Chapter 2
Jonathan Hunter Barrett III, known as Hunter to his friends and family, controlled an empire. At age thirty-seven, he was an ex-Special Ops soldier, acquiring the rank of major in the process. He spent downtime with his buddies and yet, sometimes he was lonely. Often, in fact. The few times he tried dating, were unfulfilling and it had been more than two years since he warmed his bed with anything but a blanket. Hunter got his education at a prestigious university earning an MBA with an emphasis in public nonprofit administration, with a focus on strategic administration. At the end of those accomplishments, he’d already felt trapped.
Before anyone realized it, he’d jumped the business ship and taken his twenty-fourth year to travel the world. Just when his family took a collective sigh of relief, he joined the Army as a strategic officer. His mother cried, and his father remained strangely silent on the subject. Hunter often wondered if his father envied his impulsivity and daring to go against family tradition and expectations to do what he wanted to do.
Being the strategic officer for several extended campaigns and several handfuls of involved missions, he honed his strengths as an intellect and military fighting machine. And it had been good for a while, excellent, in fact. Hunter enjoyed the strategic planning and collaboration the missions always offered him, but the actual missions themselves wore him out.
He’d felt the continual responsibility for other soldiers’ lives with little break. It had ultimately been the wearing away of his mind, body, and solid bits of his soul that made him decide to surrender his commission. He’d served his country twelve years doing recon intelligence for the last four years. When his last assignment ended, he gave it all up, because he didn’t like the man he faced in the mirror each morning who was hard, cold and unforgiving.
The last mission came as a surprise, and he never forgot it. Now, after two years, he could function whole weeks without thinking about the blonde firecracker whose attitude melted, and her bravado disappeared when he had drawn her close after her ordeal. But she never surrendered ground she didn’t want to. He knew she was the only daughter of CSM Robert Rhea, now retired. He’d heard of the sergeant in his day, and his daughter was definitely a chip off the old block. He later found out more after striking up a conversation with Gunther Rhea, his operations pilot and the sergeant’s nephew affectionately and respectfully referred to as Ray Gunn.
“Hey, Rhea, how is your cousin these days?”
“As insubordinate as ever but she is gaining in popularity with her humanitarian work.”
“I bet her dad spends all day keeping her in line.”
“You’d think, but really, except for the stubbornness in doing riskier humanitarian work, she is really a great girl. Besides, her brothers and dad started a new venture a few years back. They own and operate RRhea Defense and Security Corp. They have a good handle on watching over her, you might say.”
“Nice, so what exactly do they do?”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like and more. The old man runs the admin, his eldest, Robbie, is in bed with all sorts of IT dark web people, and his younger son, Terin, is using his spec ops to work the ground.”
“So they do it all alone?”
“Nah, they handpick their own people, and I do mean handpick. When I leave this hellhole, I’m going to work with them. Better pay and a different commitment because I’m doing what I believe in. You know we get to where we don’t think the mission is always done for its moral rightness. Sometimes we just do it. Sarge only does what he believes in.”
“Sounds like heaven.”
“Hey, when you separate out, give him a call. Hold on, here’s his number. He would jump at a chance to sign you on.”
“I have family business obligations I am expected to meet. It does sound good, though.”
“Listen, maybe you could just do something every now and then. You know, to keep your hand in the game. And believe me, your hand will be able to do more as a civilian.”
“Thanks. I’ll see how it goes.”
Gunn obviously tossed his name out immediately, because two weeks to the day after Hunter separated from the Army, came the call from Robert Rhea.
“Hey, I know this is intrusive, but it’s worth a shot. I know you just relinquished your commission, and I wondered if you were interested in checking out my operation and maybe give me a hand now and then. Your knowledge and occasional boots on the ground missions makes you prime real estate for a business like ours. Why don’t you come in and let’s chat?”
Ultimately, Hunter agreed to help the building and running of the odd ops for them from the chair, no boots on the ground.
“I have the family’s foundation to run so it I wouldn’t often be available, maybe a couple times a year.”
“Perfect. I’ll pay you well for your time.”
“Okay then, it’s a deal.”
“Sorry, but we need to fill out this shit load of paperwork first. I’ve done as much as I can from my side, but it still leaves you with enough. I’ll call in lunch and get you something cold.”
Hunter nodded as he started filling in the blanks. He thought it a great idea to keep his hand in without it running him into the ground or destroying his attempts to restart his life. Sounded a little too perfect but it was how it exactly worked out for a while.
When Hunter returned to the family engineering business, his own father, Jon Barrett, Jr., was still at the height of his game. So, at thirty-seven, Hunter took over as head of the Barrett Family Foundation full-time.
Everything changed when his father had a stroke six months later. Jon’s stroke, from which he fully recovered, showed the fifty-seven-year-old, he needed more corporate help from Hunter and a few more department heads. Hunter stepped in to help run the business with his sister. She was great at accounting, but the people part would never be her thing. His either, but being diplomatic in the military was one of the things you learned fast in ops. Who said grunts couldn’t find a job in the ‘real’ world?
As an entrepreneur for his family’s foundation associated with their engineering endeavors, he oversaw putting in wells across the world and other engineering assistances through the Barrett Family Foundation. This year he intended to go back to Somalia and the surrounding region to strategize how to expand their work to a series of villages close by.
With his father in a semi-retired state, his sister buried in her accounts and boyfriend, it left Hunter to do the majority of the day-to-day operations. He hired a good business projects manager, and together they got things under control. Hunter designed and oversaw the projects, and his assistant put them into play. Unfortunately, his father insisted the benevolent work continue in its scheduled ventures. That would cause additional work to stay on time.
“Sorry, but the foundation must meet their obligations. With all the unschedule
d interruptions, we’re behind. That’s where you come in and save the day.”
“Dad, a stroke is not just an interruption, it is a crisis. Yes, we handled it, but I don’t think anyone would fault us if we elongated our timetable some.”
“No, I need to know we’re committed to keeping our word. It’s important to me, son, and we have already begun to send over equipment. It won’t likely be there if we delay.”
Hunter knew the assessment to be correct. “We could off load it at another storage site we trust until we can get to the project. We need to wait until it is cooler anyway.”
“I understand the weather timing, but you did an admirable job of putting competent people in place, and I intend to get this done. Now, who are you sending over to manage things?”
Hunter studied the year’s schedule and tried to decide what would be the greatest good he could accomplish while still working on the family’s many divisions of Barrett Engineering. It was a natural thing for well digging and irrigation. The company was experienced in it, and it would bring the most good for the expense of time, money and effort.
He would operate this project himself on the ground. He needed a break. His father showed all the signs of complete recovery and was at the helm most days now. Hunter had good people in place, he knew the region better than most, and he spoke Swahili. Things were tougher in some ways in that part of the world, but he possessed the skill and knowledge to survive. Not like a young woman intent on stirring up trouble.
“Okay, Dad, we will do it if I go to oversee the beginning of the project then go back to see the final results.”
“Excellent. Now, we need to talk about the plans for the Foundation Annual Benefit. This project should bring in plenty of donations. Especially if they know where you’re heading and that you’re blessing the work. Many of our contributors respect you.” And now was the time to put his own personal plan into play.
Kayla looked at the last of the four-part article she’d written and sighed. She entertained mixed feelings on this one. She loved that she could tell the story, but it left her with many unresolved feelings. It wasn’t about her brothers’ warnings or even her father’s edict. How could she not go back if it things were getting worse? The girls needed a loud, universal voice.
Hero Undercover: 25 Breathtaking Bad Boys Page 100
