by Liz Crowe
“No, thank you,” she said, tugging him back down for more of his toe-curling kisses. “Terry,” she mumbled around his lips. “But, I gotta go.” She disentangled herself. A challenge, since he held on tight to her, sticking his face into her neck, running his hand up and down her bare skin.
“No going,” he insisted.
“I have to, sorry.” She pushed him away and sat, running a hand through her hair.
He stared at her for a few seconds, then put a hand alongside her cheek. “Come back?”
“Maybe,” she said, already panicking at the thought of those particular logistics.
No. This should be the one-off she wanted, needed. The very thing to ease her into the next phase of her life.
“I hate maybes,” he said, tugging her back into his warm, welcoming embrace. “Maybes suck.”
Chapter One
“Trigger!”
The smoke filled his lungs like a noxious fog. Panic lit the edges of his consciousness. But he fixated on the voice calling his name—or more precisely his Delta Force nickname.
You’re okay, Terry. Stay calm. This is what you trained for. Don’t panic. Drop below the smoke and crawl. Get behind the desk. Your fellow Operators are all around you.
But something had gone wrong.
Horribly wrong.
“Trigger,” the voice called again in a whisper-yell.
He blinked, but otherwise sat as still as a statue, allowing his mind to clear from the explosion and take in the pertinent details. It had been something like two in the morning. He’d been in the middle of encrypting cell phone conversations, preparing to transfer them via a secure backdoor connection to the satellite before they bounced back to a target computer.
Easy. The computer stuff was his specialty. That and sharpshooting and hostage negotiation.
Putting a hand over his mouth to stifle the urge to cough, to clear his lungs before the acrid smoke consumed them, he squeezed his eyes shut and counted to twenty until the urge passed. The room remained eerily silent. Or maybe he’d been deafened by the explosion.
“Trigger! Goddamn it, get over here.”
He opened his eyes and flopped over onto his belly, using his arm muscles to tug the rest of him as quietly as possible toward his commanding officer’s voice. A hand closed around one of his biceps and hauled him forward as if he were not a six-foot-five-inch, one-hundred-ninety-five-pound slab of pure muscle. But if anyone could yank him around like a toddler, it would be Keane Bryson, “Ghost” to his Delta Force subordinates and friends.
“Fuck me runnin’,” Ghost muttered under his breath as the two men sat with their backs to the huge metal desk. “What happened?”
“I…I’m not sure,” Trigger said, digging his fingertips into his ears in a desperate attempt to clear them. Ghost’s voice seemed to come from far away, as if from the bottom of a deep well. “I was encrypting and about to shut it down for the night.”
Ghost pinned him with an evil glare. Their makeshift tent city was in the middle of the desert where they’d been dropped, tasked with a simple listen and learn mission near Cairo. They’d been stuck here for going on a week, under strict orders to stay dark—literally—while monitoring and transmitting the chatter from a recently activated terrorist cell in the middle of the nearby, teeming city.
Boring as hell, as far as he was concerned, but vital, as always.
Boring—until tonight when apparently someone or several someones had targeted them directly. That in and of itself was alarming as his Delta Force squadron had never been discovered by any of the whack-ass terrorists they were tasked to surveil or, at times, take down.
It’d been almost a year since his squadron had been called on to do anything that dramatic. Their collective, pent up, testosterone-fueled tedium had hit a breaking point, resulting in some loud, steam-blowing fights and other BS that Ghost had been forced to break up, as recently as mid-day yesterday. But Terry would take the tedium at this point—since he still couldn’t take a full breath and his damn ears were ringing so loud it felt like someone had his noggin between their marching band cymbals.
“Shit,” he muttered, when the clatter of fire from a semi-automatic weapon broke the strange, hazy silence in the tent. It also served to open his battered eardrums all the way up again, making it feel like someone had buried a hook into his brain nice and deep. He groaned but at the same time experienced an odd sensation of relief—finally, he had somebody to fucking shoot at.
Ignoring the pain that threatened to blind him, he rolled to his side and snagged his weapon—a Beretta M9 that he adored more than his own mother—from the holster he’d slung on the back of his temporary camp chair. A rush of nausea threatened but he got himself into a crouch, aiming at the tent flap now riddled with bullet holes.
A quick glance to his right netted him a reassuring sight—Ghost, with his Benelli, an Italian-made automatic shotgun raised to his shoulder. When his superior officer gave him the “stay low” then the “cover me” signal, Terry sighed but did as he was told, keeping his weapon trained on the tattered fabric flapping in the stifling hot night. A fresh barrage of auto fire came from their left, forcing them away from the tent entry.
Terry’s face burned hot, but his pulse remained calm. One of the reasons he’d breezed through the physical portion of the Delta training had been his superior physical shape. In spite of what they’d thrown at him, day or night, Terry O’Leary had knocked it out of the park. He loved the pure release it offered him and was never more at peace than when he was being pushed to his absolute limit—mainly so he could shove that bastard even further out.
He waited, aware of the sounds of running footsteps, of the guttural bark of Arabic, and of his own calm breathing. Everything had gone muffled again, however, thanks to whatever damage he’d sustained from the initial blast. A drop of sweat hit his eye, blurring his vision for a millisecond.
Ghost gave him the “I’m moving forward” signal. Terry gripped his weapon tighter. A loud shout broke through the fog surrounding him. Gunfire peppered the tent once more as a dark shadow crossed in front of the tent’s opening.
“Drop,” he barked to Ghost as he gave the sensitive trigger a subtle squeeze once, then again. His target fell half in-half out of the opening. An arm in a dirty white covering flopped into the tent, the hand gripping something. Terry stared at it, his aching brain moving slowly—too slow.
“Trigger,” Ghost yelled, reaching for him. “Outside, now.”
“The computer,” he said, moving as if he were mired in molasses, the contents of his stomach doing alarming surges up his throat. His mouth watered and his nostrils flared in the rank confines of the tent. “I can’t leave—” His hand closed on the black laptop computer he’d been using before he’d been hit by some kind of primitive, yet effective explosive device.
There was a slight clicking sound behind him.
“Trigger,” he heard once more, the voice, urgent, but yet somehow distant.
Then he knew nothing but white-hot pain, followed by cool, blessed darkness.
***
Mariah stared out the window, watching California retreat beneath her. Regret and frustration fought for dominance in her brain. A tear slid down one cheek but she brushed it away, angry now, and determined that she’d done the right thing.
“Hey aren’t you…,” her seatmate began. She sniffled and sat back, closing her eyes as the huge plane lifted itself higher into the air before banking right, turning east and taking her home. “Sorry, honey,” the older lady said, patting her arm. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“It’s fine,” Mariah insisted, swiping at her leaky, traitorous eyes. “And yes, I’m the girl from the show.”
“I knew it,” the woman said. “I watched every episode you know. And I voted for you every single time. You’re so talented and pretty.”
Mariah squeezed her eyes shut, partly to ignore the way her stomach dropped when the plane made its slow turn, b
ut also to shut out the woman’s voice. Because she knew what was coming next.
“Why aren’t you staying in L.A.? I mean, not that it’s my business, of course. But this is your real break isn’t it?”
The woman was patting her arm again. Mariah curled her fingers around the ends of the armrests to keep from batting her hand away. She was getting tired of explaining it. Every time she tried to it sounded lamer and lamer, even to her. But no one understood, least of all the producers of the glorified talent show she’d just won in front of a live studio audience, four celebrity coaches, and millions of rabid fans.
“I have to go home,” she said, her voice breaking. “I have to go home.”
Tears fell—as they always did. She glanced down at the magazines stuffed messily into the seat pocket in front of her. One of them, a gossip rag posing as a legit publication, featured her. The words “America’s New Sweetheart—What Is She Hiding From?” were plastered in accusatory red letters across her beaming, overly made-up face. The photo had been from the night she’d been voted the winner, based on votes and song downloads. She’d been so star struck, so proud of herself.
So naïve.
When the offers to represent her, to record her, to manage her nascent career started pouring in as early as an hour after she’d been named the winner, she’d allowed herself to think she could do it. That she could actually stay in California, continue avoiding her real life with its real responsibilities like some kind of dilettante.
That fragile illusion got shattered but good. All it took was one terse phone call from her mother, who’d stayed behind in Louisville, which had allowed Mariah to perpetuate this extreme fantasy of hers.
“It’s all right, honey,” the woman’s soft Kentucky accent soothed and irritated her in equal measure. “I’m sure you can jump right back into it once you deal with whatever it is back home.” She kept patting. Mariah gritted her teeth as her throat closed up with regret, frustration, anger, and shame.
Chapter Two
The light hit Terry square in the face, forcing him to groan and roll away to escape it, forgetting or perhaps ignoring the fact that if he rolled too far, he’d end up on the floor. Luckily the lumpy mattress had nothing between it and the hardwood beneath, so it was a relatively short trip. He grunted when his nose met the cold, dusty surface. He got up on all fours, attempting to figure out where, exactly, he was at that moment.
He recalled the smelly dive bar, the one beer he’d bought himself before someone had figured out that he was “a brave serviceman,” and had entire bar buying him brews and shots and God knows what else. He hadn’t even meant to drink that night. He needed to get further away from Texas.
But he’d pulled off the interstate somewhere between Texarkana and Little Rock, thirsty, his eyes burning, hoping to find a cheap no-tell motel to lie down for a while. Within the span of about two hours, he’d been fed—a kick-ass steak with all the trimmings—and watered by a bar full of rednecks, all eager to prove their patriotism by making him keep his wallet in his jeans pocket and getting him shit-faced drunk.
Again.
A sound made him flinch and lurch to his feet. Big mistake. His brain seemed to slam into the front of his skull with a meaty thwack. Stumbling over his own feet, he grabbed the back of a chair to keep from face planting again, ignoring the increasing sounds from behind him, emanating from the disgusting mattress where, apparently, he’d passed an entire twelve hours.
“Hey, lover boy. Where ya going?” The cigarette-rough voice hit his ears like sledgehammer.
“My head,” he muttered, staring through the filthy window, hating his own guts so much he had to stop himself from ripping the cheap fabric currently bunched under his palms. His head was pounding. From a stellar hangover, yes, but also from something else. “Bathroom,” he said, letting go of the chair and grabbing his jeans from the floor.
“Right over there, hon,” the woman said. Terry refused to look at her as he hopped around, trying not to trip over bizarre items scattered all over the place. Bottles, ashtrays, and something that looked like a pile of matchbox toy cars littered the space beneath his feet.
“Shit,” he said, rubbing his eyes, trying to recall what he’d done.
And why.
Oh God, why was he even here?
Once he located the tiny room with its pre-fabricated stand-up shower, green toilet and cracked white sink, his stomach clenched in a familiar way. Familiar now, anyway, thanks to the fucking Army.
No. Not the Army. That was your choice. You knew the dangers. You loved them. You got off on the adrenaline. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Get over it.
He glared at himself in the mirror, running a hand down his gaunt, stubbly face. Exhaustion gripped his entire being, which was dumb since he’d just woken up. But of course, he’d not really slept. He’d merely passed out. Again.
Fucking wino—a useless drunk. That’s what he was now. Nothing more or less.
Balling his hands into fists on the sink’s edge, he forced himself to keep staring into his own eyes, noting their wateriness and slightly yellow tinge.
Terrance “Trigger” O’Leary, you’ve gone a long way down the proverbial rabbit hole, haven’t you?
Soccer prodigy as a kid, legit super star as a teenager and young man with a full ride to Akron, tryouts for MLS teams filling his summer days, groupie chicks and hangers-on his nights. So much so he would never have graduated with a real degree anyway, so who the fuck cared?
Thank God for soccer, he’d said a lot back then.
His own twin brother—the bookworm smarty-pants of the two of them—himself a soccer goalie had graduated Summa Something or Another from high school and followed him to Akron, the way he always did, letting Terry lead.
At the bright, brittle memory of Quentin, he clenched his jaw and stepped away from the sink. When his back hit the wall he slid down to the dirty tiles, elbows on his knees, shaking, sick, and craving another slug of booze even as his head pounded in time with his heartbeat.
“Hey sugar lips,” the woman called from the other side of the closed bathroom door. “Whatcha doin’ in there?”
Sucking in a breath, he reached for the doorknob and pushed the door open. The woman—whatever her name was—smiled. She was naked, he noted, somewhat clinically, even as his dick got hard. He rose to his feet, feeling the hot rush of lust shoot up his spine to his brain. “I need a drink. After you suck my cock.”
She smiled and dropped to her knees.
When Terry peeled opened his crusty eyes again, he found himself face to face with something his brain couldn’t process at first. Shoving himself up and away from the strange visage, his knees hit the floor before he remembered the mattress’ location once again. The snot-nosed toddler was of indeterminate gender—naked but for a diaper sagging so low it was framed by his knees, with a mop of wild, curly blond hair. His or her eyes were red and watery and he or she had a thumb jammed in his or her mouth.
“Mama,” the kid mumbled around the fleshy pacifier. Tears dripped down fat, flushed red cheeks. “Hung-y.”
Terry glanced down at himself. He was naked, pale under his once formidable, desert-earned tan. He no longer boasted the hyper-fit, Delta Force required physique. He wasn’t fat. Quite the opposite—more like scrawny and disgusting.
Blinking, trying to clear the boozed and sexed up hours out of his brain, he noted the strange sight of a rubber hanging off the end of his dick. As he watched it, still too mired in hangover and shame to move, it slid all the way off, hitting the dirty wood floor with a feeble plop.
“Mama,” the kid yelped, louder this time before he crawled onto the bare mattress Terry had just vacated. Body frozen in place, his mind slowly focused and snapped to attention, sharpening the squalor, the filth, and the reality of what he’d been doing for the past however long. He watched the kid poke the woman’s bare shoulder. She mumbled, rolled, and smiled at the child who in turn giggled and patted her thi
n face. “Mama,” he or she said in a content, all-is-right-with-the-world voice.
The woman who’d picked him up in the skank bar however many hours ago, before driving him here, and let him fuck her until they passed out—before they woke and went at it again— lifted one thin arm. The little kid cuddled into her and closed his or her runny eyes. That thumb never dislodged. The woman—God help him what was her name—tugged a threadbare blanket around them.
“Hung-y, Mama,” the kid said, sleepily.
“I know baby. I know. Sleep some first. Mama will find some food after our nap.”
Cursing, Terry scrabbled around for his clothes that seemed flung to the four corners of the dismal space. After taking a lukewarm shower and rinsing out his mouth with some toothpaste and water then downing a couple of extra-extra strength pain killers he still had from his stint at the hospital before his discharge he opened the bathroom door. The room was silent but for the kid’s damp-sounding breathing.
His phone buzzed from inside his leather jacket pocket. He tugged it out and stared down at the multiple texts and missed calls from Ghost and Fletch, the two Operators he’d been closest to during his years assigned to Company B, Delta Force.
Their tone—inquisitive as to his geographical location and the condition of his psyche at first—devolved over the hours he’d spent here, with this woman, who had a fucking kid, a kid who needed to eat for Christ’s sake. He’d been drinking rot-gut whiskey and cheap beer, fucking, sucking, dancing to bad eighties rock at one point, he recalled with a wince.
Where had that kid been the whole time anyway?
He shuddered and backed into the bathroom, meeting his eyes in the mirror once more. They were as watery and red-rimmed as the toddler’s. All he lacked was a diaper, fat with his own piss, dangling down to his fucking ankles and a penchant for sucking his own thumb and they’d be quite the pair.
“Get a grip, Trigger,” he growled to himself. The stranger in the mirror scowled back at him. “Get your fucking shit in gear. Go home. Leave this…pity party bullshit.”
