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PRAISE FOR THE BASE BRACH SERIES
“Megan Mitcham's books are well-paced, well-plotted suspense novels edged with stunning sensual intensity. Her lovers are cold and deadly--except when they are skin-to-skin. I can't wait for the next book in the series!”
- DELILAH DEVLIN
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author
"A true gift from an exceptional storyteller.."
- CRISTIN HARBER
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author
"This is a fresh and exciting story with lots of great characters."
- 5 Star Amazon Review, Enemy Mine
“Megan now joins my elite team of must read authors. I fell in love with her work in Enemy Mine, and it just gets better the more I read."
-TNT Reviews
BOOKS BY MEGAN MITCHAM
BASE BRANCH NOVELS
ENEMY MINE
JUSTICE MINE
STRANGER MINE
WARRIOR MINE
DANGER MINE
PRISONER MINE
VERSIONS
VIRTUES
VARIATIONS
NEVER MINE
FURIOUSLY MINE
RELENTLESSLY MINE
CAPTOR MINE
BUREAU NOVELS
FOR ALL TO SEE
PAINTED WALLS
ANTHOLOGIES
ANTICIPATION
CONQUESTS
ROGUES
SEX OBJECTS
COWBOY HEAT
HIGH OCTANE HEROES
WILD AT HEART VOLUME II
benefiting Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge
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Furiously Mine
by
Megan Mitcham
Dedication
Desiree Holt,
Every author I spoke with about you, your work, or this project all eventually said, “When I grow up, I want to be her.” I’m not a natural pessimist, but after a while I got to thinking, why? What’s so special about this lady? I had the distinct pleasure of meeting and speaking with you at Wild and Wicked Weekend in San Antonio and finding the answers for myself.
Your passion for writing, the reader community, and other authors is unbound. While others might be slowing down or settling into a groove, you’re just getting warmed up. I’m thrilled to see what success and new adventure the years bring you. You are infectious and awe inspiring.
Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your amazing journey.
Sincerely,
Megan
Chapter 1
“Look on the bright side.” Janet slapped sweat-soaked blond hair from her forehead while she hollered over the incessant rumble of the washers and dryers lined like soldiers behind her.
Natalie pulled another uniform from the half empty industrial laundry bin. Her gaze roamed the dim canvas tent. Dirt floors, dirt-covered machines, and dirt-laden walls didn’t reveal anything bright.
“Oh yeah, what’s that?” she begged.
“When you get back home, you’ll be able to iron your own clothes.” The woman shoved a full bin in place next to the one Natalie had been battling for the past three hours or so.
“Not likely.”
Janet cringed.
Great. Natalie was shit for coddling. Civilian contractors weren’t Army. Hell, she wasn’t Army anymore. So what did it matter?
The woman old enough to be her mother—not because Janet was old, but because her mother had gotten knocked up at an early age—turned and hurried toward the front of the tent.
“I just meant I don’t own anything that requires ironing.”
Janet continued her retreat.
Great. How was she supposed to get through this with no allies?
“Janet!” Natalie tossed the desert digital fabric onto the pile and ran after her. “Janet!”
Damn the dryers. The civilian contractors jailed in this cacophony should be required to wear hearing protection. She’d had to wear it on the shooting range. These bastards sounded like muffled repeating rifles on loop all day.
Suffocating heat assaulted Natalie as she dipped around the machine, but she pushed past the discomfort and grabbed Janet’s shoulder.
The woman’s arms flailed, and Janet crumpled to the floor. She scampered toward the slits between the dryers, all while shrieking as though her clothes had caught fire.
Christ.
“Janet, it’s just me, Natalie.” She grasped the woman’s shoulders and turned her to face her.
“What?” The frantic retreat stalled. “Oh. I’m…” One of Janet’s hands slapped over her face. “I’m so…sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.” If someone crept up on Natalie, she’d maim them. Why had she snuck up on Janet? She hadn’t necessarily been quiet, but you couldn’t hear much over the machinery.
Shit. The heat was getting to her. Had to be. Two missteps in as many minutes was not good.
“No, I’m just jumpy. You know with all the girls gone missing.” The woman futilely fanned herself.
“Girls? Missing?” Natalie feigned ignorance.
“Yeah.” Janet moved to stand, and Natalie offered her hand. The lady weighed a hundred pounds if that, so Natalie had to tamp her strength to keep from ripping the gal’s arm from its socket. When standing, she looked left and right before leaning in. “Three women have disappeared from the base in the past three weeks.”
“No way?” Lawd, she hated sounding so…whatever this was. Not herself. ‘No shit’ was her go-to, but that might irritate the woman’s sensitive tendencies.
“They’re keeping it quiet, but I know a lady who works in the kitchen. The first one who went missing worked there. She worked dishes. The second worked dishes too.”
“And the third?”
“Here. She had your job. She went missing two days ago. Renee said she got transferred, but I’ve asked around. No one has seen her.” Janet’s droopy eyes widened to the point Natalie worried they’d pop out and roll across the floor. The woman’s grip on her hand tightened, and pain shot up her arm.
Natalie strangled the smile threatening to spread across her lips. Screw the heat, the never-ending piles of clothes, and the burns from the steamer iron. This couldn’t be more perfect.
“Who do you think is trying to keep it quiet?” Natalie asked.
“I know I’m old, but I’m not senile. I told everyone we had to get through five hundred uniforms today.” Renee, the laundry services supervisor, lumbered around the staggered rows of laundry bins and stopped several feet away. Her gremlin gaze scoured the room, gathering the fear flowing from every other woman in the tent until it landed on Janet. The laundry lordess guzzled her terror, smiled, and then leaned in.
Rank coffee wafted off the little twat’s breath. Natalie wondered why these women feared her. Was it the offending aroma of burnt grounds or the fact she growled everything she said? She straightened and noticed the black scrunchie securing Renee’s top knot. Natalie could squash her under her boot without breaking the point on her heel, but these women cowered like the bitch was a deity.
Then again, these ladies were undereducated and under-accomplished. They had the shittiest jobs in the shittiest place in the world. It was safe to say they hadn’t drawn the best hand in life. And here she was, one among them.
“Get to work, Janet.” The rumble of Renee’s voice scraped its way across Natalie’s cheek. Janet released Natalie’s hand and rushed to the nearest open washing machine.
So much for her ally.
Renee’s beady green gaze slid to Natalie. “Three days here and you’re already causing trouble.”
“I was—”
“Interrupting the flow.” One short, thick finger leveled at Natalie’s chest. “You iron.” It swung to the three other women in the front of the tent, taking a turn with each. “She’s intake. She’s wash. She’s dry.” The finger returned, stubby and accusing as ever. “You’re iron. If iron needs more starch, iron asks me. If iron runs out of uniforms, iron tells me, so I can find out why dry is interrupting the flow. You get me?”
Natalie’s skin tightened over her frame like she’d been left in the dryer for too long. She yearned to stretch her muscles, to claim the badass bitch she tamped down inside herself, and be free. But the power-hungry woman would win. Many more would lose.
“Yes, ma’am.” She smiled because it was the only recourse that wouldn’t get her fired.
“Our soldiers can’t go into battle naked. Get to work.” Renee sneered.
Natalie waited for a beat too long.
Renee’s sneer cracked, and her mouth opened, but the lunch horn sounded through the tent. Janet and her front of the house cohorts bolted for the exit. Natalie stepped to the side, ready to round the woman.
“Get. To. Work. Natalie. You owe me five minutes.”
Obediently, she stomped back to the steaming iron and wrestled three more uniforms through the machine before begging off. The rows of tents and aisles of dirt were deserted, a lunch rush having gone before her.
Natalie turned down a side row and slipped into her empty barracks, thankful for the extra five Renee had demanded. It gave her alone time, something she’d had none of since arriving. She hurried to her bunk, removed the false back from her footlocker, and pulled out an earpiece and thick folder. The moment she inserted the device, it beeped.
“Delta. India. Charlie. Kilo. Two. Zero. Zero. Five,” she whispered.
The line beeped again, and then an operator came on over the earpiece. “Voice recognition complete. Hello, Agent Winston. How may I direct your call?”
“Director Tucker.”
While Natalie listened to the open line, the soldiers milling, and equipment being shuttled around the perimeter of the compound, she flipped through the pages of information on the missing women, the surrounding area, and her exit strategy. Minutes ticked by. In another minute, two max, she’d have to abandon her communication attempt to make it to the mess hall before Renee came looking for her minions to drive back to the laundry tent.
“Tucker.” The leader of the D.C. headquarters of the Base Branch answered in his usual gruff tone.
“About damn time.”
“Look, you irreverent dick. I’m busy saving the world over here. I hope that’s your excuse for taking three days to make contact.”
“I wish it was too,” she groaned.
“It’s going that well, huh?”
Most people got pissy with Natalie because she “didn’t act like a woman should act,” but not Tucker. He got her and gave her shit right back, which was why she’d taken the job with the Special Forces branch of the United Nations to begin with. They needed her skillset, and she needed out of the Army, for reasons she couldn’t yet admit.
“I’ve made my first enemy and ally.”
“Allies are good. Enemies…don’t we have enough of those already?”
“It’s my boss. The enemy. Not the friendly.”
“Not me, of course.” Tucker chuckled.
“Of course, not.” A demonic laugh rumbled up her throat until she started thinking about the capital B of a boss she had and how much she got in the way. “Seriously, Renee Wheatman runs the laundry on the base. She’s down my throat all day and in the way of my investigation. Can I knock her unconscious, put her in a crate, and ship her back to the States?”
“Negative.”
“She can be another one of the missing.”
“No leads?”
“Not yet. I’ve been in laundry school for the past two days. But get this…a third woman’s gone missing, and she had my job two days ago.”
“Christ. You’re in the thick of it.” She could picture him scrubbing a hand over his face as he said it. The hand with his thick wedding band. All the hot, smart, capable ones were either married or toted a world's worth of baggage. Or both.
“I know.” Natalie couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.
“Watch your six, Winston. Don’t deep-six Wheatman and find the assholes taking these women.”
“Gosh, so much to remember. How about two of the three?”
The line went dead. She stowed the spy goods that made her feel like James Bond—scratch that—a Jamie Bond level of cool and slipped from the barracks. In the two times she’d headed from the barracks to the mess hall, she’d taken the shortest route with the crowd. Now she meandered, cataloging brick buildings, vehicles, and other tent facilities. She needed to make it around the back of the mess hall to the kitchen, where the first two women—Adella Rankin and Lena Bradley—had been abducted.
Thirty feet down, a soldier turned onto her row. The instinct to flee left toward the scent of pre-packaged, additive-laden food took hold. She didn’t want to be questioned, but if she was, “I got lost,” usually worked. While the battle waged inside her mind, her feet still had five steps until the end of the tent to make the decision. Each step brought her closer to the soldier…toward the man who looked…
He turned down another aisle, away from the mess hall, and out of Natalie’s line of sight.
Her boots ground to a halt in the hot desert sand. “No way.” Her head shook away the notion. Dixon McCabe wasn’t a new recruit in the Army. He wasn’t in Afghanistan. Though, she really didn’t know where he was, how he was, or who he was these days. Who in their right mind would be in Khost Provence, the place the United States should have been able to turn over to the Afghan Police four years ago? Just like men, they could fight to defend the Pakistani border, but household chores and grocery shopping—maintaining supply lines? Not so much.
A flash of heat swept her skin, and her heartbeat kicked up. An image of their last combustible interaction seared her gray matter. His hand on her throat. His other on her thigh. Blindingly blue eyes hypnotizing her into one last submission.
She wiped at the sweat on her upper lip and strained for rationale. Tucker had called her dick, her callsign. Most people at Base Branch assumed it was because she’d been a major in the military police, a top-notch detective or dick. Others, she was sure, thought it was because she was an asshole. Neither hit close to the real meaning behind her callsign. Tucker’s comment, combined with the fact muscle-bound men with buzz cuts surrounded her, of course her mind had conjured a ghost from her past.
“Hey?” a baritone called from behind.
Her body had whirled toward the voice before her mind switched gears from fiction to reality. Training had all kinds of benefits.
Two men in uniforms approached. One, presumably the one who’d called out to her, hosted a wide grin, sunburned cheeks, and a marbled green and blue bruise below his left eye. His comrade tempered a smile behind large sunglasses and the brim of his hat.
“Hello, gorgeous.” The leader, Wide Grin, smoothed the front of the uniforms she was growing to despise and closed the distance between them.
Natalie scanned the horizon, assessing her options for retreat and attack while maintaining her self-deprecating cover. Who me? She—the Special Forces operative— knew her appearance struck a chord with people, knew how to use it to manipulate people, and knew what it had, and could, cost her.
“I’m talking to you, Ms.…?” When Natalie didn’t fill in the blank, Wide Grin chuckled. “It’s just us out here.” His index finger pointed level at her breasts, covered by a thin government issue T-shirt. “You.” The digit fell to her desert brown cargo pants and boots. “Me.” His finger joined the others, and his hands formed two arrows that gestured, WWE “suck it” style, to a surely sorry excuse for a cock. “And my friends.”
The friendly smile dropped a sinister tone or two.
Footsteps sounded behind her. Two, maybe three sets. It was hard to hear over the raging pump of adrenaline.
How had she ever thought pricks like these could conjure memories of McCabe? He outmanned them in every aspect. Height. Breadth. Manners. Muster. Malice. If he intended you harm, you never knew it, not until it was too late. These overactive dildos tipped their hand far too soon.
Was it really this easy? Shutting down the base’s kidnappers on her first real day of sleuthing would go a long way with Director Tucker. Of course, being a dipshit didn’t qualify them as kidnappers. She’d play along, hopefully until it wasn’t too far gone. Finding the other girls was as important for her as punching these pricks’ balls into their nostrils.
“Your cheeks are flushed.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “You’re one of those naughty girls, huh?”
“You have no idea.” Natalie giggled. Inside, she laughed a long, deep devilish rumble. She’d make that black eye look like a love tap if he came closer. From the looks of things, someone had already taught him a lesson, and he learned from it, with backup and distance.
The Omega Team: Furiously Mine (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Base Branch Series Book 12) Page 1
