Copyright © 2018 by Sybil Bartel
Cover art by: CT Cover Creations
Cover Photo by: Golden Czermak
Cover Model: Jordan Wheeler
Edited by: Hot Tree Editing
Formatting by: Champagne Book Design
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Books by Sybil Bartel
Callan (The Uncompromising Series Book Five)
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Epilogue
Scandalous
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Sybil Bartel
The Uncompromising Series
TALON
NEIL
ANDRÉ
BENNETT
CALLAN
The Thrust Series
THRUST
ROUGH
GRIND
The Alpha Bodyguard Series
SCANDALOUS
MERCILESS
RECKLESS
RUTHLESS
The Unchecked Series
IMPOSSIBLE PROMISE
IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE
IMPOSSIBLE END
The Rock Harder Series
NO APOLOGIES
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CALLAN (The Uncompromising Series Book Five)
Callan
I was trained to be a hunter. Growing up in the nation’s most infamous, violent cult—my job was simple. Track. Kill. Survive.
And that’s what I did… until our leader threatened to kill his own daughter.
Refusing to watch another senseless murder, I did what I was trained to do. I took his life, claimed his land, and set every member free, including her. I only had one goal left. Find the sister I was told was dead.
But being a hunter in the woods is a far cry from tracking a woman in Miami Beach.
I didn’t find my sister.
I found my stepsister.
For My Family
One year ago
“YOU HAVE TO STICK it in.”
I blinked, then looked to my left.
Brown hair, warm eyes, the female smiled the friendliest smile I had ever seen. “Your credit card?” She raised her eyebrows. “You have to slide it into the slot.”
Holding the plastic payment card, my hand hovering inches from the gas pump, I knew how it worked. “I know.”
“Oh!” She laughed, the sound rich, but all at once feminine and shy. It was the first time in years I had heard a woman laugh. “I’m so sorry. How embarrassing.” She smiled again. “I just assumed you weren’t sure because you were just kind of standing there.”
She was right. I was. I had been thinking about another female. Unsure of what had triggered the memory, I shook away her ghost and looked at the woman in front of me. Warm brown eyes, long dark hair, a body with curves, she was beautiful. “I was remembering someone.” My voice rusty, the words sounded foreign.
Sympathy clouded her smile. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You are not intruding.” I was shocked to realize she was a welcome distraction.
Her smile came back. “Well, okay then. Carry on.” With a soft-looking, printed shirt flowing around her breasts, she stepped back and turned to leave.
Suddenly, I was starved for human interaction. Not just any interaction, but female interaction. Two years was probably too long to go without speaking unless absolutely necessary, but it hadn’t felt lonely, not until this unexpected female smiled at me. “What is your name?”
Denim shorts hugging her womanly curves, showing off tanned legs, she paused and looked over her shoulder. Her brown hair cascaded down her back, the soft waves reaching almost to her waist. “Are you hitting on me?”
I frowned. “Hitting on you?”
“Right, okay, um, sorry.” Her cheeks flushed beautifully. “Of course you weren’t. You’re….” Her hand fluttered in the air gracefully as her gaze dropped to my chest. She gave a small, shy laugh and met my eyes again. “I’m just going to stop talking now. Have a good day.”
“I would never hit you.” The thought was abhorrent.
She stopped. “No, I meant….” Her head cocked to the side, and she looked at me curiously. “Never mind. Are you from around here?”
“Yes.” The compound was close enough.
She kept looking at me, but not in the usual way females on the compound looked at me. Almost six and half feet, blond hair, blue eyes, I knew I was attractive to the opposite sex, but this woman was not looking at me like she merely wanted my seed.
Mesmerized by her, I gave her a name I had never said out loud. “I am Callan.” The six letters strung together on a birth certificate I had never seen sounded as foreign as my voice.
Wide and pure, her smile came naturally and without motive. “I’m Emily. Nice to meet you, Callan.”
I had never met a female outside the compound gates.
When I gave no response, she glanced at my truck, briefly putting her hand on the side. “She’s a classic.”
“1984 Chevrolet K10 Scottsdale.” I rattled off the make and model of the truck I had kept running since I was a boy. The best hunter on the compound, I was the only one besides our leader to have a vehicle. I used it for transporting game too heavy to carry. Once a month, I came to the nearest gas station off the compound and filled the tank.
She nodded as if she understood vehicles. “She’s a beauty.”
“You are beautiful.” And she was. Like the saplings in spring, she was new and fresh and full of promise.
Heat instantly colored her cheeks, and her full lips formed a perfect O. She looked away. “Thank you.”
I frowned. “Did I say something wrong?”
Her hand waved through the air. “No, no.”
“Emily.” Quick, sharp, I stated her name the way I would any
female’s name on the compound whose attention I wanted.
Her gaze immediately came back to me, and the color on her cheeks deepened. She bit her bottom lip. “Mm-hmm?”
“It was not my intent to make you uncomfortable.” I would not apologize for telling her she was beautiful. “Your shy smile…” I searched for words she would understand, words uncommon to the compound. “It made me happy.”
“Well.” She dropped her gaze to her feet. “Your compliment made me happy.” Inhaling, she lifted her head and rewarded me with another smile. “Thank you. It’s not every day a…” She glanced at my chest, my arms. “A stranger tells you you’re pretty.”
“I said beautiful, not pretty.” She was more than pretty. Something about her was pulling me in each second I dared to stand there.
“Okay.” Her small laugh did not conceal her shyness. “Well, I better get going. It was really nice meeting you, Callan. See you around.” She turned and walked toward the small attached store.
I stared at the swing of her full hips and the curve of her small waist as she disappeared inside. Desires I had buried years ago rose to the surface, and without thinking, I was following her. Striding into the store, I found her smiling and laughing with the male cashier as she set a soda on the counter.
Possessiveness, instant and unexpected, washed over me, and my tone turned sharp. “Emily.”
She turned and her smile changed to surprise, but no words came out of her mouth. She stared at me. The cashier stared at me, and every minute of growing up in a religious compound, isolated from society, culminated in that single moment.
I had read the Bible. I had read any book I could get my hands on. But schematics for bomb shelters and handbooks on survival had taught me nothing about this.
Twenty-six turns around the sun and I did not know how to converse with a female. Tend to one, feed her, give her pleasure between her legs, make her want more—that I knew.
But I did not have words for this.
Not for this sharp and inexplicable need for a woman I had just met who smiled like an angel. I did not have any frame of reference. My tongue felt tied, and my hands felt empty without my rifle. With only a piece of plastic in my hand that electronically connected to a bank account I did not own, I made a decision.
Striding forward, I held the card out to the cashier. “I will pay.”
“Callan, thank you.” Soft, appreciative, her voice washed over me like a drug.
I nodded once.
The cashier rang me up and returned the card. “You want a receipt?”
“No,” I answered him without taking my eyes off the angel in front of me. I did not want any evidence of my stray from protocol.
“So, um….” Emily glanced over my shoulder as a couple walked in to the store. She moved out of their way before looking back up at me. This time, she did not smile. Studying my face, a slight frown drew her eyebrows together. “I know this sounds strange, but have we met before? You look… familiar.”
Her scent, sweet and clean, like spring rain and flowers, drifted around me. Unlike with any other female I had ever laid eyes on, my interest in her grew with each beat of my heart. Not even the memory that had plagued me earlier could compare. I wanted to feel the soft skin of this angel’s cheek. I wanted to taste the fullness of her bottom lip. I wanted to do more than give her fleeting words in a gas station convenience store.
“We have never met.” But the strength of my draw to her was as if this entire meeting was in the hands of fate and its cruel intentions.
She glanced at the fatigues I had worn hunting this dawn. “You’re in the military?”
“No.” Not the kind of military she was referring to.
Her frown deepened. “Do you go to the university?”
“No.” I was taught that school corrupted the soul, nature fed it.
She half smiled. “Are you sure you don’t go to the university?”
“I do not attend school.” I should not have been talking to her, but it was as if I could not stop myself.
She gave me a small laugh that was more hypnotic than a summer rain. If she were an animal, she would be one of the curious does in spring, before instinct taught them fear.
Inexplicably, the need to protect her from that fear, to protect her, period, rushed through my veins. Females in my world never traveled alone, especially not one of child-bearing age, and definitely not one in her state of undress and beauty. “Who are you here with?” I demanded.
Heat flushed her cheeks. “Um, no one. I just came in for a Coke.” She held her soda up. “Which, by the way, thank you again. You didn’t have to do that.” She smiled wide and dared to nudge my arm with her shoulder. “You better go get your gas.”
“I will.” In a minute. I had to. I only had permission to be off the compound for as long as it took to fill the tank.
“Okay, Callan without a last name.” She stepped toward the front of the store.
Sunlight streaming through the glass storefront hit her face, and she was no longer just an angel in name. The rays casting a glow over skin and hair, she became a visual of everything I never knew I had wanted until that moment.
With no heed for convention, no honor to the strict compound rules, I did something I never should have done. I cupped the gas station angel’s face, and I allowed my thumb to stroke her soft cheek.
Then I gave her words that betrayed everything I should have stood for. “I wish things were different.” But they were not, and I had already failed a woman.
Her full lips parted and she drew in air. Then slowly, as if she understood every way I could not have her, she closed her eyes and did something I never expected. She leaned into my touch.
For one heartbeat, I fed off the warmth of her simple act of trust and let it mask my failed past and present responsibilities.
Then I dropped my hand. “Goodbye, Emily.”
She cleared her throat and stepped back a foot. “Maybe I’ll… see you around sometime?”
Not if she was lucky. I was River Ranch. A hunter for the most feared religious compound in the states, I had no business being in charge of a woman. I had already lost one. “Maybe,” I lied for the first time in my life, giving her a hope I could not fulfill.
“Maybe could be good.” With one last smile, she pushed the door open and walked into the hot Florida sun.
Six months ago
I STARED AT MY past.
A female, my female, who I had thought had been killed in an FBI raid on the compound three years ago, was standing in front of me, breathing the same air.
Decima.
She was not dead. She had deserted.
“Hero.” She used my compound name by way of greeting.
Deserters of River Ranch had a bounty put on their head. But here Decima was, with a dozen armed men behind her, a communication device in her ear, and a truck full of weapons she planned to trade for her freedom.
The move was unprecedented.
“Turn off the communication device in your ear, Decima,” I instructed, not wanting the men with her to hear our conversation.
She reached up and touched the device.
“It is off?” I had read about such technology, but I had no experience with it.
“Yes.”
My gaze roamed over her body. Everything about her slight, muscular build was the same, but she was different. Her shoulders were proud and brave, and she no longer looked afraid. “You cut your hair.” All compound women had long hair. The gas station angel had long hair.
“I’d had enough of someone pulling it,” she clipped.
I stepped close to her back, not wanting my armed brothers hidden in the tree line to hear our conversation. They would report back to River and the shooting would start. I did not want that to happen before I had a chance to converse with her. Before I had a chance to make amends. “I was led to believe you were dead.”
She did not turn to face me. “Lucky you, I’m not.”
> “I would have come for you had I known.” I had been responsible for her. I would have found her. I would not have left her alone in the world outside the compound. I had owed her that much.
She turned.
During my eighteenth turn around the sun, she had been given to me as a burden and my charge. I had been resentful at the interruption of my responsibility to hunt. But the moment I’d taken her into my quarters, I’d found out what it meant to be responsible for another life beyond the scope of my rifle.
She craned her neck, her gaze traveling up my chest to meet my eyes. “You look older.”
“You look no different.” She looked very different, but it was not physical. I glanced at the slight swell of her hips that did not come close to the gas station angel’s. Then I gave her the respect she deserved and made eye contact. “You act no different.” She was the only woman on the compound who had ever been challenging. I had both hated and admired her for it.
“Surprise, I’m still me.” A familiar sarcasm she’d only used in private with me colored her tone, and the one question that had haunted me for years came back.
“You never cried,” I abruptly stated.
Her muscles tensed.
“That first time,” I explained. “You did not shed tears.” She had been given to me the day she became a woman, and I had been tasked with completing the cycle. It was how compound life worked. When women got their first monthlies, they were taken by a man. Any man, unless someone chose to fight for the right. But then you paid for that right, the least of which would be a beating you endured like a man deserving of a woman.
I had heard compound brothers tell stories of how females begged and pleaded, cried, even screamed when you took their innocence. The more a female showed distress, the more the brothers bragged, relishing in their conquest as if pain was proof of manhood.
Those brothers, their stories, they had disgusted me. When the brothers saw my expression of judgment, they had laughed and promised one day I would understand.
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