Hot as Hell (The Deep Six)

by Julie Ann Walker

  Michael’s face instantly fell at the mention of Harper’s ongoing cold…er…at least cool shoulder routine. They’d made a connection, hadn’t they? And the feeling had been like being dealt an ace-high royal flush. Just flat-out unbeatable. “She’s a Southern belle. I suspect playing hard to get is just part of her courtship ritual.”

  At least, that’s what he’d been telling himself with every unanswered call.

  Bran snorted. “Sure, okay. And I’m gonna file that under Bitch and Please. But, hey, I get it, paisano. You managed to break off a piece of something you like, and now you—”

  “Bran,” LT warned, glancing surreptitiously at Michael over the top of his sunglasses, accurately reading his not-so-poker face, which, you know, was pretty much the expressional equivalent of a line of Do Not Cross tape. As well as the hot, fighting blood that was prized among the SEALs, the ability to out-quip or out-insult a teammate was held in the highest regard. Usually, Michael was able to mix it up with the best of them. But not when Harper was the subject at hand…

  Fuckin’ A. You have got to get it together, Wainwright.

  Yeah. That was solid advice. And he’d been trying unsuccessfully to take it ever since that goddamned party.

  “Aw, hell. Sorry, Mad Dog,” Bran quickly relented after grabbing a clue that his jibes were hitting a little too close to home. Even though Bran was the joker in the deck, there wasn’t a malicious bone in the man’s body. Now, irritating bones? The guy had those in spades. “I didn’t realize it was such a touchy subject. And if it makes you feel any better, I figure the real reason she’s pulling that whole mum’s the word shtick is because she’s afraid to go another round with that python you pack in your pants.”

  And just like that, Michael’s frown turned upside down. Leave it to Bran. But before he could respond to that ridiculous bit of alliterative nonsense—python he packed in his pants? Jesus—his cell phone came to life in his hand, vibrating and jangling out the tune to “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake,” Bran cursed, falling immediately back into his role as good-hearted tormentor. “Is it possible for you to upload a ringtone that doesn’t make me want to take a bath with a toaster?”

  Michael liked snappy pop songs. So sue him. Who—if they were being completely honest—didn’t? “Don’t act like you don’t love it,” he told Bran, grinning broadly. Of course, when he lifted the phone and saw who was calling, his expression instantly sobered as his heart drummed out a rhythm to match the melody’s tempo.

  It’s about goddamned time!

  “Or maybe I was wrong.” Bran smiled down at the phone until his teeth flashed white against his dark, scraggly beard. When operating in this part of the world, it behooved the SEALs to blend into the local population as best they could. Which meant facial hair came part and parcel with the job. All of Alpha platoon was sporting full-on scruff. And, no, in case you were wondering, it didn’t do a damn thing to mitigate the heat. “About her wanting another shot at your trouser snake,” Bran clarified. “Not about you being a spostata.” He socked Michael on the shoulder before ambling down the aircraft’s long loading ramp in the wake of the rest of their Team, whistling the tune to “Happy,” and leaving Michael to take the call in private.

  Raking in a deep breath—For the love of Christ, I’ve got it bad. Worse than he’d ever had it before—he thumbed on the phone and lifted the device to his ear. Be cool. Just be cool. “Harper?”

  His voice cracked up at the end like he was pubescent or something. Fuuuuck.

  “Michael? Oh, thank God!”

  She’d only spoken four words, but he immediately zeroed in on the sharp spike of panic in her tone. The hairs along the nape of his neck twanged upright, and he automatically—almost unconsciously—reached for the weapon secured in the nylon holster strapped to his thigh. “What is it, Harper? What happened?”

  “They did it, Michael,” she husked, her Southern accent made stronger by her terror. “The TTP attacked the embassy. I’m on my way down to the safe r—”

  She was cut off when a loud crash echoed through the phone’s receiver, followed immediately by angry voices shouting in a language he only had a passing familiarity with. But he was fluent enough to make out the words capture and kill.

  Then the line went dead.

  Which is when Michael “Mad Dog” Wainwright knew, for the first time in his life, what it was to be one hundred percent, no-holds-barred, shit-the-bed terrified…

  CHAPTER 2

  How much time has passed? Two days? Two weeks?

  Harper sat huddled in the corner of the spacious, high-tech panic room—her butt having surely made a permanent imprint on the cool concrete floor—feeling like she’d been waiting an eternity for rescue. But in reality, it had only been…she ran a hand through her hair and turned over her cell phone, checking the digital clock for what seemed like the bazillionth time…three and a half hours. Three and a half everlasting hours. Three and a half god-awful, lonely, terrifying hours.

  And even though she knew it was a useless endeavor, she hit Redial. Lifting the phone to her ear, she hoped beyond senseless hope that this time her cell signal would penetrate the walls of the safe room and link her to Michael. But after a couple of seconds, the loud beep, beep, beep of an unconnected call sounded through the tiny speaker. She powered down the device with a disgusted press of her thumb.

  “What in God’s name is happenin’ out there? Why is it so quiet?” She posed the questions aloud just to hear her own voice. Just to assure herself she really had made it into the heavily reinforced chamber, slamming the thick metal door in the angry faces of the Taliban fighters who had been hot on her heels in her madcap dash down the stairs and across the basement.

  And, yup. So that had happened. She still couldn’t quite believe it. Though the fact that she’d shaken like a junkie for the first sixty minutes of her confinement spoke volumes about the awful reality of her very, very close call. There had been such hatred in the men’s eyes in that split-second when she’d come face-to-face with them. Such feral, evil hatred.

  Then, of course, there had been the incessant pounding on the door, followed by a series of muted pinging noises that she had to assume meant the terrorists were shooting at the bulletproof steel of the chamber. But all that had ended long ago. And now she was left with…silence. Deafening silence. A silence so complete that the deep breath of sterile air she pulled into her lungs—the oxygen in the safe room was pumped in through a separate ventilation system to counteract any possible chemical weapons attack—sounded like she was doing her best impression of Darth Vader.

  “Luke,” she growled, lowering her voice a few octaves. “I am your father.”

  The sentence reverberated around the room before the thick walls absorbed the words. She snorted, realizing she was straight-up losing her marbles. Going crazy as a bullbat as they liked to say back in her lowcountry hometown, a place so small it sometimes forgot its own name. And that whole so-small-it-sometimes-forgot-its-own-name thing was precisely why she’d worked so hard to make a name for herself within the pool of diplomatic secretaries. So she could get an overseas assignment. So she could get the hell out of Georgia.

  See the world, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

  “Yeah, right.” She’d give her eyeteeth to be back home right now, sitting on the front porch swing at her folks’ house, drinking a tall, sweating glass of sweet tea. And if she happened to make it out of this thing alive, that’s exactly what she was going to do—catch the first transport home.

  She was done with Pakistan. D.O.N.E. She’d had a taste of adventure and, quite honestly, she didn’t care for it. It was time to go back to the land of the free and the home of the brave and implement her life plan. Husband. Kids. A job that didn’t come complete with armed terrorists…

  Raking in another fortifying breath, she reache
d into her purse, pulled out one of the boxes of Tic Tacs, and tossed a couple of the tiny candies into her mouth. Then she glanced around the space and decided two things. Number one: she was thirsty as all get-out, and those gallon jugs of water stacked beside the door were calling her name. And number two: if she was going to be here for a while, she had better get comfy and stop cowering in the corner like a chicken-hearted cur. There was only so much self-pity she could stand. And she’d just about reached her limit.

  Pushing up, she rubbed her hands over her mostly numb derriere, grimacing when the muscles came back to life in a rush of pins and needles. “Talk about a literal pain in the ass,” she said, hobbling toward the water containers.

  She’d just unscrewed the plastic top on one, using both hands to tilt the room-temperature water down her throat, when a series of soft pops sounded outside. She bobbled the jug, managing to spill a good portion of its contents onto her blouse before she caught it and carefully replaced the cap. Setting the half-empty container back atop its carefully arranged compatriots, she tilted her head toward the door, listening.

  Pop, pop, pop.

  Gunfire. She was sure of it.

  But this was different than what she’d heard before. For one thing, it didn’t sound like the rounds were hitting the walls of the panic room—praise be for small miracles. For another thing, the frequency was steady, almost…calculated. Of their own accord, her feet shuffled her closer to the door. She’d just placed a hand on the cool surface when—Ring, ring! Ring, ring!—a phone sounded in the room behind her.

  She jumped like a scalded cat, glad the water jug was no longer in her hands. What the what? A phone? Where the heck had that been for the last three hours? She spun, her eyes searching the ceiling-high shelves stacked against the south side of the room and piled with canned foods and dry goods.

  Ring, ring! Ring, ring!

  Where was it coming from? There was no phone on the shelves. No phone on the lone wooden table in the middle of the space. No phone atop or beneath the half-dozen cots crammed together on the opposite side of the room. No phone—

  Aha! On the back wall, a yellow light blinked over a small door no bigger than that of a mailbox. She raced toward it, wrenching open the little aperture and revealing a cubbyhole where, sure enough, an old-fashioned corded phone sat nestled all safe and sound.

  “Now, why wasn’t this part of my orientation?” she grumbled as she snatched the receiver from the cradle, running a hand through her hair again. It was a nervous tic. One she’d been working to overcome until today when nervous tics were the least of her worries.

  “Hello?” she barked, not surprised when that one word sounded like it’d been broken on a hard edge. She prided herself on being a gutsy gal—after all, she’d spent nearly a year living and working in Pakistan, hadn’t she? A country where females, especially American females, weren’t all that highly revered—but the last few hours had definitely taken their toll.

  “Miss Searcy,” an authoritative voice sounded in her ear, “this is General Pete Fuller. Sorry we took so long to contact you. We’ve been a bit busy around here, but—”

  The line crackled and cut out just before another voice, a wonderfully deep, wonderfully familiar voice, rumbled against her eardrums. “…thought I told you to patch me through, goddamnit. She knows me and—”

  “Michael?” she wheezed, allowing her forehead to fall against the edge of the cubbyhole. The cool kiss of the metal was a reassuring caress but not nearly as reassuring as Michael’s bass-drum New Jersey accent.

  “Harper?” His hard exhale sounded like a windstorm coming through the receiver. “Do you copy me? Am I coming in clear?”

  If she wasn’t mistaken, that burning at the back of her eyeballs was the prick of tears she’d managed, up until now, to hold at bay.

  He’d come to save her.

  She knew he would.

  Her relief was so immense, the muscles in her legs threatened to quit their job of keeping her upright. She blindly reached back, bracing herself with the help of one of the chairs pushed beneath the table. “I-I-I…” Okay. So, now was not the time to fall apart. But try telling that to her st-st-stuttering tongue. She swallowed and finally managed, “Yeah, I can hear you.”

  “Good. Now open the damned door.”

  • • •

  It had been one ball-busting, gut-wrenching, head-spinning hell of a fight…

  As Michael leaned against the door of the safe room, blowing hard, his heart pounding while he waited for Harper to open up, he glanced at the carnage he, LT, and Bran had wrought in the basement. Six Taliban fighters sprawled lifelessly around the dank-smelling room, staining the concrete floor with the growing pools of their deep crimson blood.

  After fifteen years in the military, two wars, and over two hundred missions, he was used to seeing death. But when it came by way of a lead round traveling at nearly three thousand feet per second, it was never pretty.

  There was a part of him that felt remorse for these men. For the poverty, dejection, and desperation that made them easy targets for brainwashing, radical militants. But that jab of sympathy hadn’t stopped him from doing his job and taking them out. Just as it hadn’t stopped him from doing his part in helping his teammates and the Marines cut down the more than four dozen—total guess there, since he’d lost count after twenty—Taliban fighters they’d come face-to-face with during their two-and-a-half-hour battle to retake the embassy after they’d fast-roped in from the helicopter they’d grabbed at the Air Force base. When it came to kill or be killed, he chose to kill every damn time.

  And speaking of carnage and killing, he glanced over at LT.

  “Y’okay?” he asked his lieutenant, tilting his chin toward the deep, bloody furrow in the guy’s left arm. If that bullet had been eight inches to the right, Leo “The Lion” Anderson might be pushing up daisies instead of standing beside him. Because even though each man from Alpha platoon was geared up in desert-tan camouflage Kevlar, it was well known that the TTP liked to use armor-piercing rounds. Armor-piercing rounds that had not been enough to puncture the reinforced steel skin of the safe room—evidenced by the pockmarks riddling the structure. And Michael had never really considered himself an overly religious man but, all the same, he sent up a silent prayer of thanks for that one glorious miracle. Figured a little ecclesiastical gratitude couldn’t hurt.

  “Yeah. I’m okay,” LT said, lifting his slowly seeping arm while cupping his junk with his other hand. “But the boys may’ve retreated permanently.”

  “Ain’t that a fact.” Michael barked out a laugh before quickly sobering again. Then a clanking sound told him Harper was working on the door’s locking mechanism, and his heart began pounding for a whole new reason.

  Flexing against the sudden tension gripping his shoulders—and, okay, so he fully realized how ridiculous it was to feel tense now, in this moment. You know, considering all he’d been required to do in the last couple of hours—he turned to LT. “So I’ll wait in there with Harper until command calls and gives me the all-clear?”

  “That’s affirmative.” LT nodded, his jaws pulverizing a piece of chewing gum.

  Bran, who’d been busy slamming a new clip into his gas-operated, air-cooled Colt M4 and then checking the bodies of the Taliban fighters for any pesky explosives, walked over to slap a hand on Michael’s shoulder. The man’s brown eyes sparkled like he had an ace in the hole.

  Michael made a face. “Okay, Captain Googly Eyes. Why don’t you just go ahead and spit out whatever it is that’s causing you to give me that look.”

  “I’m just imagining what will happen once you’re in there with Harper,” Bran said.

  “Oh, yeah? And what’s that?” Although, in all honesty, Michael had a few ideas. All of which included Harper naked, sweaty, and sated. Adrenaline did many things to a man’s body, but one of those things was…sch
wing!

  “Just that she’s going to play you like a fiddle at one of those Blue Ridge Mountain hoedowns she probably went to when she was a kid.”

  Rolling his eyes—mostly to deflect from the fact that he was scared shitless the guy was probably right—he opened his mouth to retort when, with a pop and an air-tight hiss, the door to the panic room swung open.

  And there she was. Harper Searcy. Her face so pale it looked like she’d been snacked on by a horde of vampires. Her big blue eyes as round as the pepperoni pies served at Tony Boloney’s on the boardwalk back home. Her thin blouse…wet? Sweet Jesus. And her wildly curling cascade of red hair sticking up every which way like she’d repeatedly run her hands through it.

  It was that last thing that unglued his boots from the floor. Because he’d noticed months ago that she only fidgeted with her hair when she was nervous or, in the case of today, scared to death.

  “I’ll be waiting on the call,” he told LT, shouldering his way into the sterile-looking space, forcing Harper to take a step back. He heard his lieutenant murmur “Roger that” right before he pulled the door closed behind him, twisting the large spinning lock into place. And just like that, he’d sealed himself inside the safe room with her. With lovely Harper. Smart Harper. Brave Harper.

  He wanted so badly to pull her into his arms and tell her everything was going to be all right. That he was here with her now. That she was safe. To kiss her and hold her so tight she wouldn’t know one additional millisecond of fear. But considering she’d been giving him what he’d come to suspect was the world’s most blatant brush off? Well, he figured she might not welcome his overtures. Which is why he decided to go with, “So, what’s with you avoiding me the last couple of weeks?”

  • • •

  Harper had never been as happy to see anyone in her entire sorry life as she was to see Michael “Mad Dog” Wainwright. And all geared up in desert-tan camo, his wide chest made even bulkier with the addition of body armor, his deadly M4 machine gun gripped loosely in one big callused hand, he struck her as beautiful in the way warriors were beautiful. Harsh and fierce and furious. Not one hint of delicacy about him, except for maybe the soft curling length of his thick, dark lashes and the full, almost pouty curve of his lower lip visible through the dark-chocolate beard covering the bottom half of his face.