Final Siege

by Scarlett Cole

  “We’re right outside,” Mac reassured her. “But we aren’t rushing in, unless shit goes tits up. You want your story, right?” He wanted her to remain focused, wanted her to stay calm and think of something other than her immediate life-or-death situation, because people did crazy shit in this type of environment and he wanted to make sure that she was under control.

  “Just hurry, Mac, because as much as I hate to admit this, I’m freaking terrified right now.”

  “Medical status, Sherlock?” Mac asked, running down the side of the building, covering Six as they took turns providing cover, then leap-frogging ahead of each other. One covering while the other made ground.

  “Nothing critical, but I’m hit,” Sherlock replied. “And we’re running out of ammo.”

  “Cabe,” Mac said, grateful that they were still wearing their headsets. “You guys take the front. See who’s knocking. Maim, disarm if possible. We need information. Don’t take risks, though. Shoot to kill if you need to.”

  “On it.” Cabe moved toward the right and began to give his team orders. With years of experience between them, nobody hogged the airwaves, and communication was reduced to the minimum.

  “Bailey, the vehicles … take them out and disarm the driver. I don’t want anybody having wheels to get out of here.”

  Mac watched as Bailey pulled a large knife and drove it into two of the tires of the unoccupied vehicle before disappearing around the back of it. The driver of the other vehicle was sitting at the wheel, engine running, window open. A rookie mistake. Even if he was supposed to be on guard, there was absolutely nothing he could do to avoid the handle of the knife that Bailey brought down against his skull through the open window. He slumped forward, and Bailey helped ease him down so he didn’t hit the car horn.

  “Sherlock, as I look into the building from the side lot, where are they?” Mac asked as they approached the opening.

  “Two o’clock. Tucked in behind the metal cabinets at the front of the room.”

  Mac and Six crawled along the wall to the point where the shutters were raised. There were three men hidden by the bank of metal cabinets, just like Sherlock said, and a dead body on the ground by the door.

  In the quiet, Mac yelled. “Guns down! Guns down!”

  Nothing, but he wasn’t expecting them to give up quite so easily.

  “We have you surrounded. Put down your weapons and step out from behind the cabinets.”

  “Fuck you,” one of the men responded, but the jerk jumped when he heard rapid gunfire from the front of the building.

  “There are a lot more of us than there are of you. Your friends out front are down. Your driver is down, your vehicles are down.”

  There was a moment of silence and then a flurry of gunshot from within the room. Mac cursed. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they were trying to blow away the security panel where the code needed to be entered to get through to the office area.

  The gap for the roller shutter doors was narrow, and he was going to need to lose his vest to stand a chance of being able to fit through. It was a risk he was willing to take, but there was no way that Six, who was bigger than Mac, would be able to follow him.

  “Louisa, we’re going to need you to open those rear window shutters so that Six and Lite can climb in.” Mac stood up and began to shimmy out of his vest. He hated wearing the thing, but it had saved his life more times than he cared to remember. But for Delaney, he needed to take a risk.

  “Don’t take that off,” Six said. “Come around the back with me. With all the ammo we have between us, we can push forward, provide cover.”

  “We don’t have time, and you know it. Get in the back, make it fast, and guys, have my back.” Mac looked at Six, who nodded and took off toward the back of the building at a dead run.

  “Front of the building is clear,” Cabe said. “All survivors, some casualties. Coming around the side to back you guys up.”

  As Mac began to crawl under the roller shutter door, Ghost, who was lying by the exit, began to move and groan. “Cabe, get Ghost out of here.”

  “On it,” Cabe replied.

  Gunfire streamed across the warehouse as Mac finally pulled himself inside. Aware that both Sherlock and Buddha were about to run out of ammo. Mac knew he should be more cautious, just as he knew they could probably pick off each of the assholes as they tried to approach the door, but the thought of Delaney, sitting alone barricaded in a conference room ripped at his insides. His duty was probably to subdue the men trying to hurt her, but for love, he would fight his way through every single motherfucking one of them.

  Gun raised, knowing his men had his back, he crawled his way behind the low shelving that contained the binders of the protocols for security guard training. It was made of wood, not the best thing to hide behind but better than walking across the warehouse out in the open minus his vest. There was too much gunfire, too many shots … but then a thought struck him. Since everybody was already inside, what harm would it do to raise the roller shutters completely?

  Jumping from his spot, he ran to the wall and hit the red button to begin that process. On a sprint, he dove back through the gap that was now increasing between the floor and the shutters and careened around to the front of the building, where Gaz and Lite had two of the suspects cable-tied on the ground.

  “Lite, follow me in.” Mac fumbled with the keys on his chain, found the one he wanted, and yanked it to the front door, opening it as quickly as he could. From his vantage point looking through the front door, he could see straight down the hallway to the men who were trying to beat him to the conference room. When the door finally opened, his heart lurched, his chest tightening as he powered his legs down the hall.

  “Delaney, it’s me. I’m about to hammer on the door three times. Let me in.” After he did, he heard furniture being dragged across the floor. When the door finally opened, she flew into his arms, her eyes red-rimmed with tears. Never in his life had he been more relieved to see her face. “I’m with Delaney,” he said into his communication unit. “Rain down hell.”

  As gunshots echoed through the building, his only thought was for her safety. “Let’s secure this place back up again,” he said, lowering her to the ground. There would be time to hold her later, time to tell her everything he wished he’d said to her already. But first, he needed to have confidence that his brothers would conclude the battle in the warehouse and simply protect Delaney.

  He locked the door and piled the tables in front of it just as she had. Then he cleared another of the tables and turned it on its side, pressing its legs against the back wall. “Jump over,” he said. “If for any reason they do get past my guys, they’ll come in shooting high, so stay low. Nobody ever shoots toward the floor.”

  Once she was settled, he stepped over the table and joined her, kneeling, with his weapon pointing toward the door, staying that way until he received the all-clear from Six, at which point he threw his earpiece to the ground, lowered his gun to the other side of the table, and pulled Delaney into his lap.

  “It’s okay, Buttons,” he said, holding her shaking body against his own. “I’ve got you. I promise you, I’ve got you a thousand times over.”

  Delaney looked up at him, those eyes of hers killing him more than the feel of her chilled skin or the way her chest was expanding and deflating rapidly as she sucked in air to deal with the shock of what she’d just gone through. “I’ve never been so scared,” she said. “Even when I was in that damn room in Kunduz.”

  “I would never have let them get to you,” he said, running his fingers through her hair. “Never in a million years would I have let them reach you.”

  Delaney brushed her lips against his. “No, I wasn’t worried about me. I didn’t want them to hurt you.”

  This time Mac pressed his lips to hers. After everything she’d gone through, he had been her biggest concern.

  “I’m serious, Mac. I get it. I get what you do. But promise me
you’ll always come home to me.”

  He looked down at her. “If it comes down to love or duty, I promise, you win every time.”

  EPILOGUE

  It had taken two more months to clean up all the mess. And not just the literal mess that had been created within the Eagle Securities building, although that had been bad enough. They’d dealt with the police, the FBI, and the CIA and argued successfully that it had been their right to defend their property. Though it wasn’t technically their castle, their home, it was their business, and they had a right to defend it against anybody who would try and take it or its contents from them.

  Mac carried his coffee and laptop out on the balcony, savoring the warmth of early June, his favorite time of year. Delaney was still in bed, where she had spent most of the last three days recuperating from eight weeks of solid research and writing. Along the way, they’d seen the closure of both the chemical lab that had been manufacturing the drug Louisa had created and the research lab Louisa had been a part of. Best of all, Delaney had been able to connect the shell company behind the lab to Lemtov, who was finally behind bars awaiting trial. And with the support of a couple of cooperative assailants from the attempt to place Eagle Securities under siege, there were solid testimonies to back up his involvement. All of it due to Delaney’s relentless focus.

  During that time, Mac had returned to work and life had begun to take on a new kind of normal. He hadn’t asked Delaney if she intended to keep living with him, and she hadn’t asked him if he wanted her to go. But it was time to put a line in the concrete, a modified cliché that Delaney had once tried to use on him. If he was going to ask her to live with him permanently, he needed to move out of his brother’s condo and find a place of his own. So, before he opened the laptop to read the article that was being run today that Delaney had put so much of herself into, he picked up his phone and called his brother.

  “Hello,” his brother said gruffly. “Any chance you could try to check your messed-up early-morning-early-riser military clock before you call on a Saturday morning?”

  Mac checked the time on his watch. Seven a.m. Perhaps a tad early for the weekend. “I’m sorry, but there’s just something I need to deal with.” Mac heard bedding being moved around, and the shuffle of feet on the other end of the line. “I wanted to talk to you about the apartment. I’m going to ask Delaney if she’ll move in with me, and I’m thinking it’s time I should try and look for a place of my own, but I don’t want to leave you in the lurch, so I’m curious what your plans are.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. “Yeah, so about that…”

  The comment hung between them.

  “What do you mean, ‘so about that’?”

  “I’m not coming back to San Diego. That was never my plan. I have a house here.”

  Mac looked around the apartment and the way the water shimmered under the Coronado Bridge. “So what have I been house-sitting for? You should be renting this baby out. You’d make a killing with this view. I can get out of your hair as quickly as—”

  “Shut up, Mac,” Lochlan grumbled. “It’s too early to listen to my big brother in problem-solving mode. You don’t need to get out of the house because it’s not mine.”

  Now Mac was really confused. “What do you mean ‘it’s not mine’?”

  “Go to the office and get that big black box off the top of the closet.”

  Mac followed the instructions. “Is this some weird tax break for you or something?”

  “Just get the box. There should be a black folder in there.”

  Sure enough, there was, and Mac pulled it out. “Got it.”

  “Open it up.”

  It was a legal document … with his name on it, and something about “transfer of ownership.” “What is this?”

  “Thank you for your service, brother. I bought that place for you.”

  Little dots appeared in Mac’s peripheral vision. “What do you mean, you bought it for me? That’s not a gift. A gift is a new pair of jeans from the Gap.”

  Lochlan laughed. “That’s probably right if your net worth isn’t slightly over the mid-nine figures. I knew you wouldn’t let me buy a place for you, but if I told you it was mine, I knew you’d stay there, make a home there, fall in love with the place.”

  “Lochlan … I…” Shit. Words wouldn’t come. He choked on them as they left his throat. His baby brother had bought him an apartment, and a fancy one at that.

  “Yeah, I know. You don’t do emotion and shit, but everyone knows except you. Ma, Dad, everyone.”

  Mac wandered out into the living room that had started to become his and Delaney’s over the past few months. The dining table was still Delaney’s office, but plants had appeared, and some bright cushions. Lochlan was right. He had begun to fall in love with the place.

  “Oh, and there’s a trust for apartment fees. So, don’t worry about that shit.”

  “Thank you,” Mac said, his voice gruff.

  “Yeah, whatever, dog breath. See you at Ma’s in a couple of weeks, all right?”

  “Fuck you with the dog breath, and yeah … It’ll be good to see you again, Loch. Seriously … I’m—”

  “Going back to bed.” And with a click, Lochlan was gone.

  He hung up the phone and wandered back out onto the patio. His patio … no, wait … their patio.

  Thinking of Delaney made him open the laptop. Her article was live, and he started to read through it. It was nearly an hour later when Delaney padded out onto the balcony in one of his Navy T-shirts. It barely skimmed her thighs, and he could see her breasts bounce freely beneath it, always a good thing.

  She grabbed his coffee and took a sip before making a face. “Bleurgh,” she shivered. “I don’t know when I’ll learn that I don’t like sugar,” she said, sliding one leg over his knees so she sat astraddle his lap. Her shirt rose a little higher, revealing what he already knew and had zero complaints about, that she was naked underneath.

  “How was it?” she asked. Despite the fact he knew she was asking about the article, he couldn’t resist teasing her.

  He rubbed his thumb gently over her clit, surprised when she jumped.

  “Ah,” she said, rolling back on his lap a little, revealing even more of herself.

  Mac continued the motion. “As always, it’s perfect,” he said, pressing his lips to hers.

  She began to grow wetter, but the balcony was perfectly private so he slid a finger into her, then another, savoring the way she always took what she wanted from him sexually. It was one of the many ways in which she’d grown, one of the many in which he preferred Delaney as she was now to the young Delaney he’d once known.

  “Mac … mmm … that feels so good.” She bit her bottom lip and rocked slowly. God, he wanted to get her off, and he wanted to get off too. But that would have to wait, because once he got started, that would be it for the rest of the morning. “I gotta stop, Delaney,” he said, withdrawing his fingers, and sucking them clean.

  “No,” she insisted. “You really don’t.”

  “Okay, two things,” he said, lifting her into his arms. He could walk and talk, and then they’d be in a much better position to make love by the time he’d finished.

  Delaney wrapped her arms around his neck. “What’s that?” she asked as he nudged the door open to their room with his foot.

  “First, your article was genius. If you don’t win a Pulitzer, I’m gonna go find where that Pulitzer dude is buried, bring him back to life, and get him to give one to you.”

  She laughed. “You liked it?” For all the humor in her tone, he could hear the small part of her that was looking for approval.

  He lowered her to the bed. “Yes, I loved it, and so did your readership, given the comments below the article.”

  “You read them?” she asked, incredulously.

  Mac nodded. “Every single one.”

  Delaney sighed and closed her eyes, stretching her arms over her head, which only ser
ved to make her breasts stand proud, like his dick. “Good,” she said finally on an exhale. “That’s good. So, what’s the other thing?”

  Mac slipped her T-shirt over her head and then slipped off his own shorts before climbing onto the bed next to her. He reached behind him into the side table and grabbed a condom, which he began to roll on. He was always going to want her, would never get sick of it. As she climbed on him and slid down over his length, he groaned.

  “I love you,” he said, pushing her hair behind her ear while lazily grinding against her.

  Delaney kissed him, a long lazy one with soft, sweet lips. “I love you more.”

  “Move in with me, Delaney,” he said. “Officially. We’ve never spoken about it.”

  She fell forward, her hair tickling his face, and he used the opportunity to slide out and back in. He repeated the action as her mouth widened in a little O. “Yes,” she gasped.

  Mac grinned, and moved faster. “‘Yes’ as in, ‘Oh god yes, fuck me just like that’ or ‘yes’ as in ‘I’d love to move in with you, Mac’?”

  “Is it wrong if I answer yes to both?” she asked, answering his smile.

  He pressed deep inside her, savoring the way she clenched against him.

  “Never,” he said, and set about proving just how right she was.

  Read on for an excerpt from Scarlett Cole’s next book

  DEEP COVER

  Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  Cabe stood and offered Amy his hand to assist her from the seat. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, plus, he just wanted to touch her once more. Her fingers gripped his, and for a moment, he thought she was going to keep hold. The sigh, followed by the slight frown, told him she was grappling with the two of them as much as he was, and she let go of his hand.

  Given the late hour, he led them to the escalator that would take them to their rooms. The Nobu Tower’s elevator required him to scan his room pass before entering, and Amy’s room was just across the hall from his own. The doors slid open, and unable to resist, he placed a hand on Amy’s lower back to guide her inside where they stood with their backs to the rear wall, almost shoulder to shoulder, but not quite touching. The elevator was devoid of people but filled with the same kind of tension that always happened when they were alone. The door slid shut painfully slowly, enclosing them in the small space. He could feel the heat of her skin close to his, and the nearness made the hairs on his arms stand on end as truly as if he were standing in the middle of an electrical storm.