Hot as Hell (The Deep Six)

by Julie Ann Walker

  Damn!

  “Get down! Get down!” Maddy screamed at the girls as she dropped to her knees.

  Unfortunately, her call came too late. The remaining men each grabbed a girl, using her as a human shield against Bran while they turned and opened fire on Mason’s position behind the seawall. Their rounds chewed up the aging masonry like it was made of Play-Doh. And Mason was left with no recourse but to do the ol’ D and C—duck and cover.

  Bran, on the other hand, surged through the surf toward Maddy in an attempt to gain a better firing position and, you know, save the girl…

  * * *

  7:19 p.m.…

  Chaos…

  That was Maddy’s world. Even so, time seemed to slow to a lame man’s crawl and she felt like she was seeing everything through one of those children’s 3D View-Master toys. She wasn’t pressing the little handle on the side to spin the disk of pictures, but the frames were still flicking in front of her unblinking eyes.

  The body of the unmasked man lay on the sand beside her. Blood slowly seeped from his lifeless corpse and headed in a gruesome red river toward the waiting arms of the ocean.

  Next picture…

  The three gunmen rained lead death on the seawall as they pulled the girls with them up the beach and toward the narrow bridge that led across the moat into the fort.

  Next picture…

  Bran raced through the surf. His broad shoulders, exposed by his black tank top, flexed and bunched. His big thighs churned as he halved the distance between them.

  Even in the chaos, she was struck by the sheer impact of him. Long, lean muscles made for endurance. Big, thick bones designed to keep him standing tall for decades. Deeply tanned skin that glowed with health and vigor and highlighted his Italian-American heritage. Her mind touched on a line she’d read from an Italian poet in college, Francesco Petrarca. He’d written, Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together. But he couldn’t have been more wrong. At least when it came to Brando Pallidino. Because Bran was all things beautiful and virtuous, a real-life, honest-to-God hero.

  Glory be and hallelujah! She needed a hero to help her get the girls away from those awful men.

  He skidded to a stop beside her. And then her world stopped doing that weird stop-action thing. Everything sprang into high definition. Including Bran’s face.

  Before he turned to take aim at the masked men, she caught a glimpse of his dark eyes, and her thundering heart ground to a halt, her blood turning to ice water in her veins. She recognized that look. It was the same one he’d worn the day he stormed her father’s yacht and put a bullet in the brain of the terrorist holding her hostage. The look of a man who had killed and would kill again. A man filled with dark purpose. A man who…frightened her.

  Which was silly. Bran was all things good and valiant. And yet…

  She shuddered at the difference between this Bran and the one who talked her through her bad times, the one who liked to tease her and taunt her and fill her inbox with videos of Meat, the bulldog, snoring so loudly it vibrated the canine’s jowls. It was almost like there were two Brans: Darling Bran and Deadly Bran.

  “Flat on the ground!” he bellowed over his shoulder at her and Rick.

  From the corner of her eye, Maddy saw the young park ranger face-plant. Bran in full-on SEAL mode was not the type of guy you ignored. And as much as she despised getting sand stuck between her teeth, she belly-flopped right alongside Rick. The beach was cold and wet and smelled of fish. The tiny, crushed shells interspersed with the sand scratched her cheek when she turned her head to keep her eyes focused on the helter-skelter scene.

  “Let ’em go!” Bran thundered, his deep voice echoing over the dark water and bouncing against the brick walls of the fort and the seawall.

  “Go fuck yourself, you sonofabitch!” the tyrant who’d been terrorizing Sally Mae, and who now held her in front of him, shouted between the intermittent volleys his cohorts sprayed at the seawall in an effort to pin down the Deep Six Salvage crewman who was obviously hiding there.

  “Let the girls go, or end up like your friend here!” Bran yelled.

  As if to punctuate his point, or else simply to add insult to injury, he nudged the dead man’s body with his foot. The move caused fresh blood to erupt from the wide hole in the corpse’s chest. More dribbled from his slack mouth to pool in the ear closest to Maddy. It was so dark and thick that it reflected the glow of the moon.

  Jesus Christ and all his followers!

  Once again her lunch was threatening an encore performance.

  “I can knock the beak off a chicken at two hundred yards. Which means I’m gonna give you to the count of three to let that girl go! If you don’t, I’ll send you straight to your Maker with a bullet between your eyes! And then I’ll do the same to your two friends!”

  “You’re bluffing!” the tyrant called, still easing Sally Mae backward. The girl’s eyes begged Maddy for help. And it killed her that all she could do was lie there and watch. Her hands, still tied behind her back, curled into claws with the urge to scratch the tyrant’s evil eyes right out of his head.

  “I might be bluffing, you miserable, vomitous mass!” Bran yelled. Oh, for heaven’s sake. Really? He’s quotin’ The Princess Bride? “But if you wanna test me,” he added, “I’m your huckleberry!” And now he’s quotin’ Tombstone. “Last chance to let the girl go!”

  The tyrant ignored him and continued to backpedal toward the fort.

  True to his word, Bran began to count. “One!” The word exploded over the beach like an atom bomb. “Two!”

  Maddy bit her tongue to keep from crying out. In the next second, Bran would let his bullets fly and she prayed he was as good as he claimed to be.

  “Thr—”

  Rat-a-tat-tat!

  The sand around Bran’s bare feet erupted with a hail of gunfire as the man holding Louisa suddenly turned his aim away from the seawall and opened up on Bran. Bran spun like a top just as the fabric on the left leg of his cargo shorts shredded.

  “No!” Maddy screamed when something hot and sticky sprayed across her face. Then the world went black. All the air was punched from her lungs. And a terrible, suffocating weight fell over her.

  For a split second she wondered if she was dead. Did I get shot in the head? Is this what the afterlife feels like? Dark, airless pressure? But then familiar smells tunneled up her nose. Irish Spring soap and Tide laundry detergent. Bran…

  He’d thrown himself on top of her, sacrificing himself to shield her from the melee of flying lead.

  * * *

  7:20 p.m.…

  Mason McCarthy had seen his fair share of wicked bad situations. And this one here qualified as a top ten. After watching the men and the way they carried themselves, he and Bran really thought that once the fuckheads found themselves in a crossfire situation, they would accept the offer to leave the island, no questions asked. Obviously, he and Bran had given them more credit for smarts than they deserved.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” he cursed when another barrage of gunfire bit into the masonry behind his back. But he couldn’t continue to take cover. Bran was in the open and needed his help.

  Turkey-peeking around the corner of the seawall, Mason bellied out flat in the sand and gritted his teeth as he laid on his trigger, aiming for the ground at the feet of the masked men, hoping to draw all their fire in his direction and away from the trio on the beach.

  It worked.

  The seawall continued to take a beating from the assailants’ lead as the end of his M4 flashed with orange lightning in return. The pressure against his shoulder, not to mention the growing warmth of the metal in his hands, felt wonderfully familiar.

  Which just goes to show how far from normal you are.

  He shook off the thought as soon as it hit him. Not because there wasn’t truth in it. But because ther
e was, and it had been one of his ex-wife’s biggest beefs with him. Right behind you’re never home and you never talk to me.

  Ya-huh! On account of me being a fuckin’ SEAL who goes on fuckin’ missions that are fuckin’ classified!

  And she’d known that when she married him.

  Of course, it’d all seemed very romantic while they were flush with hormones and having sex on every vertical and horizontal surface. But once the honeymoon was over and the hard part of being hitched to a covert operator set in, she’d quickly come to see how truly unromantic it was. He just wished she’d had the guts to divorce him before she turned to another. Because what her duplicity and faithlessness had left him with was a sore on his heart. An open, festering wound that refused to heal.

  And what the fuck are you doing thinking about her at a time like this, chowderhead?

  Right. What was he doing thinking about her? She was the past. And his present required all his attention.

  He released his trigger for a second, looking for an opening to take out one of the motherfuckers. He wasn’t as good a shot as Bran, but more times than not he could hit what he was aiming at. Unfortunately, the three assailants had made it to the bridge over the moat. And they were smart enough to keep the teenagers in front of them while they continued to lay down covering fire aimed in his general direction.

  “Fuckin’ hell!” he cursed again.

  He waited, counting each round that slammed into the masonry above his head, each steady thud of his heart, until the masked men stopped shooting to disappear into the arched entry of the fort. Then he jumped up and zigzagged his way toward the beach in a classic scoot-and-shoot crouched position. But there was no need to shoot. Nothing breached the deafening silence of the island except for the sound of the tide hissing against the sand and the gentle breeze teasing the fronds of the palm trees and making them rattle in delight.

  “Bran!” he whispered, edging ever faster through the sand. “Headed your way, bro!”

  Of their own accord, his eyes traveled out over the dark water. Out there, anchored far behind the fort, was the catamaran. With the intrepid Alexandra Merriweather on board—that is if she hadn’t already decided to set sail for Wayfarer Island like he’d told her to if she thought there might be any trouble headed her way.

  Regardless of whichever outcome she was facing, she was alone in facing it. And the poor woman had to be terrified. She was a pocket-sized historian, for fuck’s sake, not some trained operator.

  For one quick second, he was tempted to dive into the surf, swim out to her, and take her in his arms. But the impulse was fleeting. Firstly, because Alex might be a pocket-sized historian, but she was also completely brazen. So even if she was scared, she’d never let him see it, much less welcome his coddling. And secondly, because taking her in his arms, even for that brief moment on the catamaran when she’d jumped in his lap, had reminded him what it was to hold a woman. All soft curves and warm skin and sweet weight and…

  He’d sworn off the fairer sex. Which was working out wickedly awesome for him, thank you very much. So he could totally do without being reminded of what he was missing. Especially when that reminder came with an adorable mop of curly red hair and freckles across her nose. Little Orphan Annie all grown up and ready for a man to show her what it was like to—

  Aw, hell.

  He shook the image of Alex away at the same time he skidded to a stop beside the people proned out on the beach. At first glance, he thought the blood on the sand beside Bran and Maddy’s pancaked bodies was coming from the corpse sprawled alongside them. Then he realized it was draining from a wound on Bran’s thigh.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” he cursed for the third time.

  Chapter 5

  7:22 p.m.…

  If Bran’s thigh wasn’t barking like a bitch in heat, he was sure he would appreciate the feel of the plump ass wiggling beneath him. As it was, he couldn’t stop himself from growling impatiently, “Maddy! Stop squirming around, damnit!”

  He was beginning to imagine himself a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bull. And if she kept gyrating, it wouldn’t be long before his eight seconds were up.

  “Get off me, Bran!” she howled, her sweet breath brushing his lips when she turned her head to look at him. “If you get yourself killed bein’ all heroic and brave, I swear on my granddaddy’s grave I’ll murder you!”

  He would have pointed out that what she said didn’t make a bit of sense—How do you murder someone who’s already dead?—but he felt Mason skid to a stop beside him, kicking cool sand onto the backs of his calves.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” he heard the big Bostonian grumble.

  Fuckin’ hell is right. That’s exactly where this plan of theirs had gone.

  “They made it into the fort,” Mason said. “Which means in about two minutes they’ll gain the high ground and we’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “Roger that,” Bran agreed as he pushed away from Maddy. He immediately missed her soft, feminine warmth. And his eyes automatically pinged down to the…ahem…not insubstantial derriere that’d been giving him such fits.

  So sue him. He was a guy, after all. And for a petite woman, Maddy had an ass that wouldn’t quit, the kind to make all the ’hood girls green with envy. Or as that pop singer Meghan Trainor liked to say, Maddy was bringing booty back.

  Amen to that!

  “Cut her loose,” Mason said, pulling the matte-black Smith & Wesson Tanto blade from the clip on his waistband and moving toward the park ranger still face-first in the sand.

  Bran shook away thoughts of Maddy’s incredible ass and grabbed the K2 tactical folding knife from the sheath he’d strapped around his calf. Before he could put his blade to use, however, Maddy flipped on her side and pushed up to her knees, facing him. Her forehead and cheeks were speckled with blood.

  If it was possible for a man to live after having his beating heart ripped out through his chest wall, Bran was doing it.

  “You’re hit!” he croaked at the same time she screamed, “He shot you!”

  Her chin jerked back when she registered what he’d said. She looked down at herself, trying to locate her injury, then shook her head angrily. “I’m not hit, damnit! You’re the one who’s hit!”

  “That’s your blood on her face, numbnuts,” Mason whispered.

  “Oh, thank God.” Relief hit Bran so hard he felt dizzy. When he let his head fall back, the stars overhead spun in lazy circles.

  “Thank God?” Maddy said. He lowered his chin to find her eyes blazing. “Thank God? Are you crazy? For the love of… Someone cut me loose!”

  Before Bran could gather himself, Mason did the honors, skirting around Maddy to slice through her restraints. The minute she was free, her little hands landed on Bran’s face.

  The hairs on his arms lifted when her cool fingers smoothed over the skin of his cheeks, his lips, his chin. “Bran.” His name sounded sweet on her tongue. “Oh, my sweet Jesus!” Her Texas twang turned the word my into an adorable-sounding mah.

  Before he could suck in a breath, she gripped his thigh on either side of the deep furrow cutting through his flesh. A little pool of his blood was gathering on the sand, mixing with the blood of the man he’d eighty-sixed.

  “What do I do?” she cried, her eyes beseeching. “Tell me what—”

  “It’s just a flesh wound,” Mason said from beside them, having given the laceration a cursory glance.

  “And who are you?” Maddy demanded, turning on the poor guy with a look hot enough to set his face on fire. “Monty Python?”

  It hit Bran then. “Man, I really like you,” he blurted.

  Maddy turned to him, upside-down mouth hanging open in a little O that was far more tempting than he would have thought possible at a time like this. “I—” She hesitated. “I really like you too, Bran.”

  “You got a satphone in
that ranger’s station?” Mason asked the young ranger, ignoring them.

  Bran was still absorbing the fact that Maddy had admitted to liking him, really liking him—But she doesn’t know the real you, he reminded himself. She doesn’t know what you have inside you or what that means you’re capable of—when her fear-tinged expression turned to desperation.

  “The ranger’s station? But the girls!” She searched the exterior curtain wall as if she hoped to see the teenagers there. “We have to go get them!”

  “First we hafta get off this beach,” Bran told her, hating the way the pulse was hammering in her throat, hating that she was caught in the middle of a hostage situation. Again. “They could start taking potshots at us any minute, and storming the fort to save those girls will be a lot easier if Mason and I are both alive.”

  “Storming the fort will also be easier once we stop your bleeding,” Mason added.

  “Right.” Maddy turned back to Bran. “Can you make it? You’re bleedin’ like a stuck pig.”

  He responded with a smirk. “I ain’t got time to bleed.”

  “Would you stop doin’ that?” She curled her plump top lip like Elvis. It was a gesture he remembered well. One that made strange things happen to the butterflies that had recently taken up residence in his stomach.

  “Doing what?”

  “Quotin’ bad movies at a time like this!”

  He gasped exaggeratedly. “You think Predator is a bad movie?”

  Before she could answer, Mason told the park ranger, “Lead the way. But stay low.”

  Apparently Mason wasn’t of a mind to hang around and discuss the merits of one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s better movies. Considering their current situation, Bran couldn’t blame him.

  Grabbing the dead man’s weapon from where it had fallen on the beach, Bran slung the strap over his shoulder before reaching for his M4 and tactical blade. Once he’d shoved the latter into its sheath, he lumbered to his feet and offered a hand to Maddy. When her palm landed in his, he felt a jolt of awareness, like two wires on a car battery suddenly making a connection.