Safe Heart (Dreamspun Desires Book 102)

by Amy Lane

  Table of Contents

  Sneak Peek

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Past and Present

  The Real Bottom Line

  Research

  Voices in the Dark

  Wheels Up

  Crystal Beaches

  Rushing Waves

  So Close

  Unexpected Package

  Bound

  Such Great Heights

  Stubborn

  Emotional Rescue

  Fallout Boy

  Once More Forever

  Flying into the Sunset

  Spencer and the Colonel

  Now Available

  By Amy Lane

  Love Romance?

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Glen’s snort stirred the hair on Cash’s crown and gave Cash hope. It was the first noise he’d made that hadn’t been robotic, his defense mechanisms on full. Glen moved his hand so it rested on Cash’s hip, and a tiny cold sliver in Cash’s heart melted.

  This wasn’t hopeless. He’d needed to know that.

  “No, he’s genius,” Cash said.

  “What makes him so fucking smart?”

  “He told me not to give up on you.”

  “Kid—”

  “I’m not leaving, and I’m not giving up. I think I’ve finally learned my lesson. Men stay.”

  Safe Heart

  By Amy Lane

  Search and Rescue: Book Three

  Five months ago boy-band lead singer Cash Harper left Glen Echo in a hospital in Jalisco… and broke his heart.

  Glen’s heart is the only home Cash has ever known. He’s spent the past five months trying to find his friend Brielle and make sense of his own instincts. Now he’s ready to be a real partner and lover to Glen—but first they have to finish their original mission.

  Glen is ready for Cash to walk through his door needing help, but he is absolutely determined not to let him back into his heart. Men don’t run. Cash did. End of story.

  Rescuing Brielle will take the full talents of Glen’s search-and-rescue company, and that means Cash needs to re-earn the team’s trust. Between Bond-villain traps, snakes that shouldn’t be there, and bad guys with guns, they all have plenty to negotiate. If Cash can prove he can stay the course and that he deserves Glen’s faith, they might survive this op whole and ready to love.

  Dedicated to real heroes; search and rescue, first responders, and medical personnel. I write fantasy—you do the heavy lifting. Also to Mary, who loves Glen best. And Mate. Always.

  Past and Present

  GLEN Echo dragged his sorry ass down the hallway of his South San Francisco apartment building, wishing like hell the elevator hadn’t crapped out on the sixth floor of the eight-floor building. Usually the complex was prime—the two-bedroom, two-bath unit was pricey because it was a cat’s spit away from San Francisco itself, but his former roommate had also been his business partner, and the two of them had worked to be as close to the airfield by Napa and as close to the city as possible.

  The compromise had been here, and they gladly paid the rent.

  Of course Damien now lived in stupid bliss with Glen’s brother, but Glen wasn’t going to hold that against either of them. Much. Sure, he loved Preston—enjoyed his company even—but Damien had been the brother he’d chosen, and he halfway wished Damien had called bullshit when Glen told him to go live in Napa and have a happy life. Sure, they still had lunch together once a week, and at least twice a month, Damien spent the night on the couch of what used to be his apartment, because, well, beer. But in the meantime, Glen was here with a new roommate and a pain in his chest he was doing his damnedest to forget.

  And the last two days had been bullshit, pure and utter bullshit.

  Glen had actually hit his hour limit in the plane while it had been on the fucking tarmac. It was just a cargo run, but the cargo had been three Alaskan Husky puppies, and finding a place for him and three crates of noisy, vocal, woe-is-me fuckin’ dogs to sleep hadn’t been easy.

  He hoped one of those fluffy, happy assholes had gotten some sleep in between debating the weather, the traffic, and the state of the world, since letting Glen sleep had not been any one of the host of things those bitches and one son of a bitch discussed.

  And the hotel bed had been a fuckin’ treat too.

  His upper back and shoulder had still not recovered—might never recover—from being crushed under a wall nearly six months ago, and Glen thought longingly of the ibuprofen in the flight bag over his shoulder. Soon—soon, he would be in the apartment, on the special mattress Damien had insisted on buying to facilitate his recovery, washing the ibuprofen down with a beer and some shitty TV.

  It sounded so heavenly the apartment practically had a halo.

  And then Glen saw him.

  He’d lost weight, his small frame looking damned near elfin, and his famous cheekbones almost slicing through skin. His dark eyes were large and shadowed and haunted in that peaked face, and Glen got the smell of a guy who hadn’t showered in a while, probably about five steps before the kid got the same thing from Glen.

  “Cash?” The name he’d been trying so hard not to say over the last six months sounded strange in his own ears.

  “Hey, flyboy,” Cash said weakly, standing in Glen’s doorway on obviously stiff legs. “I’m, uh, so sorry to drop in on you like this. I… I wanted to be all perfect, you know? Take care of my own shit? But I—” He looked away, an agony of embarrassment crossing his features.

  “You need my help?” Glen supplied, and he’d meant for it to come out bitterly, but it didn’t.

  “Yeah,” Cash said, his shoulders slumping in defeat. “I’m so sorry. I… I owe you so much better than—”

  But Glen didn’t want to hear it. He wrapped his arms around Cash’s slender shoulders and held him until his shoulder screamed for mercy.

  Cash rested his head against Glen’s chest and cried.

  Six Months Earlier

  CASH hadn’t looked like a handful when Glen had finally caught up with him in a tiny bar in Nayarit. Now, if you were hunting down a boy-band member who was reported to have gone on a bender in Nayarit, Mexico, you would probably find him in one of the resorts. There were some beautiful stretches of sun and sand, with little private bungalows and secluded swimming coves on the beaches of Nayarit, and when Glen had first taken the job from Cash Harper’s manager, that was where he assumed he was going.

  He’d signed on enthusiastically—he hadn’t had his knob waxed in forever and figured once he got Harper squared away, he’d have a chance to rectify that situation, because oh my God, he needed to relax.

  His best friend was breaking his heart over Glen’s damned brother, and it just hurt to watch. Glen needed to get laid.

  Shortly after he arrived, he needed to kill something.

  Cash Harper was no party boy on a bender—he was a cunning, sneaky, clever little grifter who had managed to lay down a track of false IDs and goddamned disguises between Nayarit and Jalisco. And worst of all, people loved him.

  There was a little town in the hills of Nayarit called Agujero en la Roca—Hole in the Rock for fuck’s sakes—that Glen knew well. For one thing, it had about ten buildings before it got leveled by a goddamned earthquake, and for another, he had knocked on every fucking door asking for “that sweet little American boy singer whose mother was so terribly worried.”

  Of course by this time Glen had put together that Cash’s mother could have cared less about her son. Cash’s mother was busy screwing rich doctors in Jalisco and living the ex-pat life there by the lake. The one thing Glen had been able to gather about the kid
was that Cash had damned near raised himself.

  His agent, a friend of Glen’s from his military days, had been absolutely adamant that this kid be found. “Look—I don’t care about the money—”

  “Ha!”

  “No, seriously, Echo. This kid trusted me, I put him on a stage, and I protected him. He dragged his bestie along as part of his entourage, and I guess she got into the drug scene pretty hard. I know he’s got party boy written all over his résumé, but I’m thinking something else was going on when he specified he was going to be gone for—and I quote—thirty-five days max.”

  Four more conversations like that with Clive Royer, and Glen could practically believe the kid was a saint.

  But it didn’t matter if he wasn’t. Glen had given his word.

  Finally—finally—frustrated and horny and pissed off at the world, Glen had ridden his motorcycle from Agujero en la Roca to Las Varas and walked into the nearest bar for nothing more than a beer.

  A beer. Goddammit, that’s all he wanted.

  And there, in a corner playing poker, was the kid whose picture he’d been studying since Clive had first contacted him.

  The kid had looked over at him as he’d nursed his beer and seen Glen’s intent expression—eyebrows arched, head cocked—and had known the jig was up.

  Sort of.

  Glen approached the table, noting that the two guys with their hands toward him both had three aces.

  “So you’re a friend of Clive’s?” Cash asked, over the mutter of the poker table—most of it in Spanish.

  “I am.”

  “Well, you know. Let me finish the game, and we can talk.”

  Glen was about to say this kid could damned well talk to him now when he noticed a couple of things in quick succession.

  One was that the kid had been winning. Big.

  Two was that one of the guys with three aces was fondling a knife under the table.

  Three was that the other guy was slowly pulling a gun.

  Glen had nodded like everything was copacetic, and then, before he could think about what a complete and total dumbass he was, he’d dropped his beer and slammed the two cheaters’ heads against the table hard enough to concuss them.

  “Run, kid!” Glen snarled, and all hell broke loose.

  He emerged from the resulting melee with a cut over his eye, bruises over his kidneys, and a scratch down his shoulder from a knife he’d mostly ducked. He hauled ass for the back entrance and sprinted into the tiny alleyway behind the bar, only to find it empty.

  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!

  Glen had kept running, figuring if he was snug in his hotel room before anybody figured the guy who started WWIII in a bar in Nayarit was already gone, nobody would spend too much time tracking his ass down, and he’d never have to call Damien from a Mexican prison, which was what they’d always told each other would be their last straw before they retired on a beach somewhere and wore nothing but Bermuda shorts and smiles.

  Damien’s HEA was so damned close Glen wanted to smack him, and Glen was planning on rubbing his daiquiri-drinking, Bermuda-shorts-wearing, sleeping-with-all-the-pool-boys ass in Damien’s face, so he pretty much had to stay out of prison.

  Ugh—speaking of Damien, Glen needed to contact him. After so many years of having each other’s backs, knowing where the other one was had become not just habit, but almost superstitious necessity. Glen’s contact from Damien had been the only reason they’d known where his helicopter had gone down—and the rescue presence near the crash site had probably saved Damien’s life.

  He pretty much fired off two sentences into Damien’s sleeping ear before hanging up. By then, he’d reached the corner to the main street. He paused to make sure there were no police at the bar. He’d sort of figured there wouldn’t be. Las Varas wasn’t a bad place, but this was a seedy bar. He moved on, skirting the shadows, keeping his footsteps quiet on the dusty, cracked pavement, until he made his way to the town’s second-best hotel. Glen liked it. The place had a fountain in the center quad, boasted some truly amazing mole on their dinner menu, and rented the little cottages circling the place for a fair rate.

  Glen had one of the cottages, and as he drew up, he was fairly surprised at the figure sitting with his back to the door, knees drawn up to his chest.

  “Heya, you little carpetbagger,” Glen said dryly. “Need a place to hide for the night?”

  Cash pushed to his feet and grinned gamely. “Hey—I wasn’t the one who was cheating.”

  “Counting cards? Marked deck? What?” Glen opened the door for him anyway. “There were two guys there with three aces, which meant you had the entire table pretty fucking desperate.”

  “Good at math, mostly, and it couldn’t be helped,” Cash muttered, ducking under his arm. “I’m not hitting Clive up for any more cash. That’s not fair.”

  “You like the guy so much, why don’t you go back to make some money for him?” Glen shut the door behind him and locked it. Then he drew the shades and turned off all the lights but the one in the bathroom. “I suggest you sit on the floor,” he said, grabbing a pillow for his own ass because he wasn’t twenty-five anymore.

  Cash Harper was, though—he plopped down cross-legged like hard floorboards on the assbones wasn’t a thing, the pair of them sitting in the aisle between the two queen-size beds. Glen had left the ceiling fans on and opened the windows halfway since a closed window on a muggy night with only a swamp cooler for company would have looked suspicious too.

  “I’ve got to do something first,” Cash said softly. “It’s… it’s not Clive’s fault, but I have to do it anyway.”

  Glen laughed softly. “Kid, ten minutes ago all I wanted was a beer and bed. Now I’m just hoping those assholes don’t find me the same way you did. How did you find me anyway?”

  Cash’s even white teeth glinted in the dark. “I bribed the clerk—told her you were my uncle. She raised her eyebrows, so I’m thinking you just became my sugar daddy.” Cash gave an impudent leer. “Hellooo, Daddy.”

  Glen had to chuckle. “Well, she’ll probably not tell those guys, then. She likes you.”

  “How do you know they’re not going to charge through the door and bash my gay ass?” Cash asked, confirming pretty much everything Glen had sized up from the minute he’d seen the kid in the bar, his artfully tousled sandy-brown hair falling softly over one eye, his award-winning cheekbones on display like porn.

  “’Cause she likes me too,” Glen said meaningfully.

  “Ooh.” Cash’s eyes got wide. “I did not know that. Hello, Daddy, indeed.”

  “Don’t even think about it, kid,” Glen told him. “You are way too young for me, and Clive thinks of you as a son. I am so not going to let that man down, you hear me?”

  “He’s a good guy,” Cash said, his shoulders slumping. “I wish I could have been a good little pop star for him. He deserves a meal ticket like no one else in the business.”

  “Yeah, well, he got the idea from the guy who manages Outbreak Monkey—but Clive decided to go more Hollywood, I guess.”

  “Damn,” Cash said, sounding impressed. “Well, pop was more my thing. I don’t know what made him decide to go searching Puerto Vallarta—”

  “Lack of money and desperation,” Glen filled in.

  “That’s probably it. Our first record was a lot of Auto-Tune, you know.”

  Glen snorted. “Yeah—my buddy called it Auto-Tune and cheekbones. And I laughed, you know—’cause you and the four other guys on the cover, you gotta admit….”

  “We look like we don’t have a brain in our pretty little heads,” Cash said, admitting it freely. “Well, that’s the package. Sincerity without substance. And a nice hook.”

  “You wrote the lyrics yourself,” Glen told him. He wanted the boy to know he wasn’t fooled.

  Glen may not have been fooled, but Cash was definitely surprised. “You saw that?”

  “Yup—you got songwriting credits on the entire album—sometimes, w
ords and music, sometimes one of each. Was that bullshit?”

  “No!” Cash’s voice rose, and Glen shushed him. They could hear voices outside. Not close, but still. No reason to blow their presence now. “No,” Cash whispered, more quietly this time. “I had a hand in every damned song.”

  “Then that album meant something to you besides a meal ticket,” Glen said, voice steady. “Why’d you go ghost on Clive?”

  Clive had run the tower for more missions than Glen or Damie could count. When he’d retired to go do the agent thing, using up his grandmother’s inheritance to launch himself, Damien and Glen had made a lot of jokes about how they were about to become twin stains on the tarmac. Clive had been a steady voice on the intercom, guiding them in for too many years for them to not miss him when he left.

  “I….” Cash’s “I got this” faded from his voice, and his shoulders slumped again. “I… I let someone down.”

  Glen grunted. At this kid’s age, that could mean anything from “I slept with the wrong guy,” to “I set the world on fire just to watch it burn.” “You are going to have to be just a mite more specific than that,” he said grimly.

  Cash leaned his cheek on his knees. “Have you ever had a friend you’d do anything for?” he asked.

  Glen grunted, thinking about Damien back home, closed off and sad and afraid. He’d used to keep up with Glen, snark for snark and with a hero’s strut, but after a helicopter crash that was not his goddamned fault and a bunch of surgeries that scared Glen just thinking about them, Damien was struggling to find his own way.

  It hurt Glen to watch him do it. Glen would die for Damien Ward, but he wasn’t sure how to bring him back to life.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Cash said softly.

  “Business partner,” Glen said briefly. “Knew him since flight school. Lots of saved bacon between us.”

  “Has he ever been in trouble?”

  Glen laughed shortly, thinking about being part of a rescue party that located helicopter wreckage at the base of a cliff. Damien and his passengers had gotten out before the thing had fallen off the ridge, but Glen hadn’t known that as his brother had brought the dogs close to the wreckage, looking for bodies because nobody could have survived that fall.