He looked over to her still naked body and then crossed the floor to grab the blanket they had brought with them. He draped her with the cover to keep her warm and then he went back to his room to shower and change. Some corner of his mind told him to take a rag and wipe some of their leftover lovemaking away from her body, but another part of his mind liked that she was still wearing him on her skin.
He pulled the door closed and went downstairs to keep watch. When he saw Skip pulling up while tripping off a few of the sensors he had set up and connected to the computer, he opened the door with his gun still in hand. He was always cautious and never lackadaisical while on a mission—or any other time for that matter.
“Marine,” Skip pulled three bags from the car, checking his surroundings just as much as Chogan was still watching the area. When he came inside he dropped the smaller bag on the floor, cautiously set down the case with a light clunk due to the fabric mesh he had it hidden in, and then there was the big, made for a month long vacation bag. Chogan eyed the setup.
“What’s in there?” He pointed to the larger case. “Did you think we were going into a war the size of China or something?”
Skip laughed. “Well you never know if this guy has hired help, but no; that there is for the lady.”
Chogan’s eyes went wide. “She’s not going to be here forever.”
Skip shrugged. “I didn’t go shopping for all this stuff. The tag did—and what a tag she was. Luscious coffee and cream colored skin, gunmetal gray eyes and the sexiest pixie cut I’ve ever seen on a woman. Yep, I’m going to have to get back to D.C. real soon.”
Chogan shook his head. “I’m sure you’ve gotten a piece of this tag already.”
“Nope. Not that I didn’t want to, but man, she’s a lady. My military status didn’t make her crawl all over me like some women do. And I couldn’t even pull out the Cubin flare on her because she still wasn’t trying to jump my bones. Not that I didn’t want to jump hers but I’m on a mission here. So what do you need me to do?”
Get focused on the mission was what they all liked to do. Get things solidified and focus. Now that Skip was here he could get him updated on the problem a lot better than he already was because when he had the call sent out he hadn’t exactly said the details, just that it was one man, but a lot of work.
“I don’t think this guy would hire anybody. He’s an assassin and I’m sure he takes pleasure in the kill.”
“Your sister was on a hit list? Who put it out because I will take care of that for you?”
“No, she wasn’t on the list. She was cleaning the room of the man with the job and knocked his case over. Long story short, she found his kill list—she probably didn’t even know it.”
“So who are we protecting? Autumn didn’t say—just that it was of the upmost importance to guard her.”
“Remember that woman I told you about.”
“Legs you wished you had wrapped around your body—her?”
He shook his head. Some things really should have been left unsaid, but he was thinking about her and each of the men knew that distant look in his eyes when they got a near back to back assignment that meant they weren’t going to get home on leave. “Her,” he said. “She was helping Amber clean the room. She…she saw the kill. She hid, got out, called in the 9-1-1 to make sure Amber’s body wouldn’t go missing or end up being labeled a different kind of murder. And…well, cops are involved on this.”
“What?” The stern look in his eyes told Chogan that Skip knew just how deep the bomb went on this because step wrong and they would be the ones going six feet under instead of the bastard who deserved to be there.
“Yeah, she heard him calling and asking for two officers to be sent for cleanup. I don’t know which cops are in and which are out, but I know I do not trust any of them right now.”
“Then you have two enemies here. The beast you know, and the one you don’t.”
“I don’t know who this guy is yet.”
“You know what he is and you’re more than capable of assessing how skilled he’ll be with his kill. The man will be more methodical, and will stalk until the prey is ripe for the killing. The cops, the ones you don’t know, are like a live wire. Those are the ones you have to worry about. Those are the ones more likely to pull a favor with somebody who wants to stay out of jail.”
“She doesn’t know who they are.”
“But she knows cops are involved. The man this guy called is going to not want an investigation hitting his house—you know that and I know that.”
Chogan tossed his head back and stared up at the ceiling. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Because he was too busy thinking of how much he needed to protect Olivia from this assassin that he hadn’t thought anything about the cops who might be running wild coming after her too.
“Chogan,” he heard the soft voice as Olivia rounded the corner. Thank God she had been wrapped in the blanket or she would have been sharing her glorious body with Skip and Chogan didn’t like the thought of that at all. Of course her being draped in his Native blanket had a different image in his head, a long, spacious, wilderness kind of image where he hunted for food and came back to taste her before cleaning the animal itself. Of course she was mostly vegetarian, as Amber had said, so he would have to be more berry and vegetable gather he guessed, but that hadn’t changed the fantasy his mind was conjuring up.
“Oh, I didn’t realize.” She took a step back. “I’ll just be um…upstairs.” She waved to Skip as she exited by swiftly backing out the room. He could see the flush of embarrassment in her reddened cheeks and widened eyes.
Skip chuckled softly. “Mission accomplished I see,” he snickered more as Chogan rolled his eyes.
“I’m going to take the clothes up to her.” He shook his head. Yeah, mission accomplished—one of them anyway because he had his woman; now he needed to keep her alive and safe. Eliminate the threat was what he was good at—what they all were good at.
He grabbed the bigger bag and took it upstairs. The clothes came just in time because now she could walk around in something other than a dress that showed off her bare breasts from different angles, or just the blanket. She would also have panties, and while those would get in his way, he couldn’t deny he didn’t want her commando while the men were here. Why was he being so primordial in his thinking? He trusted her. He trusted his teammates in action—but maybe, just maybe, he didn’t fully trust them to keep their paws off his woman. They were probably still on a high adrenaline rush from their last mission and knowing they had something Stateside helping out a member of the team had probably amplified the rush. She was the only woman within reach and he knew they better keep their hands off her.
He shook his head at himself. The guys would never cross that line and he knew it. Man, he was in trouble if the thought of them here with his woman had sparked this kind of heat in his protective mode. “Focus on the threat,” he had told himself, “not on the team you know would give their life for you.” He mentally admonished himself.
“Hey,” he dropped the bag on the floor on the side of the bed. “Skip brought clothes.”
She nodded. “Thanks—for everything.”
“Always,” he said as he kissed her forehead. He would have loved to kiss her lips but with what he was feeling right now he knew a taste of her lips would make him do something else with that naked body beneath the blanket. “I have to go do some work.”
She nodded. “I’ll get showered and put together. I’ll come down and cook something for you all.”
“Thanks.” Normally he would cook, but he really needed to get in on this and get a plan completely solidified. The sooner they got this guy the sooner she could go back to feeling one hundred percent safe, and the sooner he could get the legal side of their union taken care of.
Olivia showered first and then, wrapped in a towel, searched through the bag of clothes. This tag that Chogan had spoken of was definitely a stylish woman. The clothes were exactly
what she would have bought if she could have afforded them. This is like the style she wore while she was economically fit. Not that her clothes lacked grace and beauty now, just that she spent more time in the uniform getting to and from work than she did out of it these days.
She pulled on the skinny jeans and the soft coral shade knitted sweater. She was thinking of pulling on one of the dresses, but given the situation she wasn’t sure if she was going to have to be ready to run fast. Not that she couldn’t run in a dress. She had done a lot more than run in one. Kind of like her uniform dress where she ended up sliding down the dirty laundry disposal shoot. Yeah, she could move in a dress, but these jeans with the sweater, underwear that actually fit her and boots that were stylish and would keep her feet warm felt right.
She pushed her hair up in a classically retro protective up-do like she had worn for years now. She used to wear her hair down more than up but had gotten into up-do styles while in her college later years. A challenge to wear protective up-do styles for three months had gotten her used to the look and she found herself staying with the style even after the challenge ended. Although when she was around Chogan she had a tendency to let her hair down. In fact, whenever he was in town and she knew she would be around him she made a point of either straightening it out or wearing it with soft curls loosely flowing down her back to just at waist length.
She smiled to herself. She was always trying to impress the man even if she didn’t admit that ever so openly; she knew she was trying to impress and seduce. She wanted to catch his eye, and clearly she had managed to do that. If it hadn’t been for recent events she wondered if they would have ever connected.—Probably not seeing as though he never even gave her a hint of a sign that he saw her as anything more than his little sister’s friend.
She went downstairs to the kitchen and started the breakfast meal for them. Chogan had food already in the place and fortunately he remembered she didn’t eat meat so there was some fruit there as well. Breakfast would be done with the same flare for beauty and delicious taste that her father and mother had raised her with. Her father was the master of the kitchen, while her mother had conquered etiquette and proper table settings that could give even Martha Stewart a run for her money. When she finished cooking she set everything up on the table, turkey bacon in one dish, turkey sausage in another, eggs were in another bowl with aluminum foil over it to hold in the heat. The toast was in a basket and the butter was on the butter dish. Everything was set. She went back to the office-like room where the men were and told them to come eat.
“Thanks, beautiful,” the other man said and Chogan growled. “Well she is beautiful and we haven’t exactly been introduced yet.” He eyed him with a glare to let him know proper introductions were his job.
“This is Olivia, Liv to me,” he said in a way that told her he expected these men not to call her Liv. “Liv, this is Skip.”
“Howdy,” he tipped an imaginary hat and she laughed.
“Hi.” She looked at his light golden sun kissed, but naturally so, skin. “Where are you from?”
“All over,” he avoided giving too much detail. “But I’m from Cuban heritage—first generation American.”
She smiled. “Nice ancestry there, Skip.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, they all call me Skip for a reason. Maybe one day I’ll tell you my real name.”
“Now that sounds like a mystery worth solving. But maybe I can convince Chogan to tell me sooner.” She looked at her man and saw the hint of a smile in his eyes. Oh yeah, he knew exactly what she would use to convince him. Her curiosity was definitely peaked. She knew Trace’s real name was Tracer, but she had just assumed Skip’s real name was Skip. She hadn’t imagined Chogan had been calling him by a code name or something. These men were interesting to say the least. If she lived long enough maybe she could get to know more of his friends.
“Breakfast is ready so come out while it’s still hot.”
“Could you just bring it in here?” Chogan asked.
“Certainly not!” She had that shocked tone in her voice. “The table is set and we are going to eat like a family.” She walked away not even waiting for rebuttal. They weren’t family really but she missed the family sit down dinner setting. She had been eating alone standing up or hovering over a magazine about fashion she wasn’t interested in for so long that she wanted this moment of normal togetherness.
She heard the men enter the room behind her. They were soft walkers, especially Chogan. Chogan could walk into a room and nobody knew he was there. She heard Skip’s footsteps though. Skip was a little heavier, but not in an out of shape kind of way. He couldn’t have been more than five foot ten inches because he was shorter than Chogan, but kind of the size of a guy she knew in college when it came to height. He was nicely put together if she did say so herself. Pale brown eyes with dark black hair set off the coloring in his skin—more islander hot than American bred in the look. But he wasn’t Chogan and there was no threat of any attraction forming outside of respect on her part. She could tell Chogan was sending up the warning to Skip that she was his so keep his hands off. Something about that made her giddy like a schoolgirl. Maybe she was the kind of woman who could cause a car crash even though she didn’t think she was. She was apparently the kind of woman a man would fight over—more importantly, the kind of woman a man would protect.
“This all smells and looks so good.” Skip started digging in as well as Chogan. “You’re not eating?” He looked at her.
“Oh, I’m mostly vegetarian; all that is for you all. The fruit and nuts here are for me.” She pointed to her plate of grapes and pear, peach, portions along with the small bowl of peanuts and pecans. “Eat up guys. I wasn’t sure about your appetites, but I figured military men, physically fit, you probably need a lot of calories to keep it moving.”
Skip nodded in agreement as he bit half the turkey bacon strip apart and munched on it with satisfaction. “She should see D-camp eat,” he said before taking another bite.
“D-camp?”
Chogan chuckled. “The man could eat the portions of a small country probably. He’s army—big black guy but big in muscles, not fat. He’s called D-camp, shortened from code name Death Camp. An enemy goes into his camp and they don’t come out breathing.”
“Oh,” she said. “What’s his real name?”
Skip shrugged. “I never bothered to learn it.”
Chogan laughed. “Yeah, we’re all code name for the most part, but D-camp is really named Yorkshire. Yorkshire Garvey.”
She laughed. “Yorkshire…does anybody call him York?”
“Uh, no. He hates when people call him that. The last fool who tried it in jest ended up getting a serious connection with one of his near lethal right hooks.”
“I see,” she nodded. “So what’s your codename, Chogan?”
“It’s what my name actually has meaning for.”
“Blackbird,” she said with certainty.
“Amber told you?”
“No. I looked it up…uh,” she squirmed at her admission. “I had a crush on you for a long time before I fell in love with you. I researched your name and your tribe, as much as I could find anyway.”
He looked pleased with her admission. She blushed as she tried to occupy her mouth with food so she could stop spilling all her details.
“D-camp says he’s like a da—um darn,” he cleaned up his language. “He’s like a blackbird. You see him and you better put boots to the ground running. Apparently, and I know he’s right on this; Chogan here can spot the enemy in his sleep. He’s also lethal as a warrior.”
“She doesn’t need to know all that,” Chogan said in an attempt to shut the man up.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
“Yeah, he’s saved us a great many times.”
“And you all have saved me too. We work as a team. No one man is greater than the next.”
Skip nodded in agreement.
“That’s how it should
be,” she said. They were a team, a family. They would put their lives on the line to save each other, and that to her was an amazing force of nature all on its own. She sighed sadly.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“I was just thinking I wish Keisha and I had this kind of relationship.”
“Who’s Keisha?”
“My sister. She’s…we were never close really.”
“Well it’s never too late.”
“It is when I can’t find her,” she nearly snorted.
“What?”
“Her sister caused a whole lot of trouble for her family. Liv left the doctoral pursuit to come back and help her parents. They were killed, her sister just vanished. She’s probably out there somewhere so long as she didn’t decide to get herself mixed up with somebody else’s mafia.”
“What?” Skip nearly choked on his toast.
“She…she likes to gamble and she got in with the wrong family. It cost my parents everything…cost me everything. She ran off and I haven’t been able to find her. I’ve given up trying.”
“So you don’t even know if she’s still alive?”
“Nope. I hope she is. I mean she’s family so it would be nice not to think the last of the family line rest with me. My father was an only child. My mother…well, her parents and eldest brother were killed when the passenger train they were on derailed. My mom spent the rest of her childhood with her aunt, but her aunt died just after she married my father…my mother married my father that is, not my aunt.” She didn’t want any confusion here. “So I’m the last one if my sister isn’t still out there somewhere. The bloodline ends with me—when I die we’re gone. So yeah, I hope Keisha is still out there somewhere.”
Kill List (Special Ops #8) Page 9
