by Becky McGraw
He turned toward the door, but looked back over his shoulder. “I have to warn you though, GAPS doesn’t have another SEAL to send to babysit you. I drew the short straw as the fucking new guy, so it’s me or take your chances with the mob.”
His eyes bored into hers, while Fallon stood there slack-jawed, trying to decide whether she should trust this man to protect her. After a few seconds, Jaxson’s muscles tensed, his jaw tightened, then with a lifted-chin salute he walked toward the bedroom door.
GAPS doesn’t have another SEAL to send to babysit you.
Fallon woke up, her brain engaged and she walked behind him. This man was her only chance of avoiding being fitted for those concrete shoes Willie wanted made for her.
There was no way she was letting him walk out of that door.
“Wait!” Fallon yelled, sprinting behind him to keep up with his longer strides, panicking when his hand closed over the doorknob. She grabbed his thick forearm and his muscles bunched under her fingers. “Don’t leave, Jaxson, please. I need you to help me.”
Jaxson slowly turned around and Fallon stepped back. His heat, the cat-like tenseness in his big body seemed to short-circuit her senses. Or it could be the cologne he was wearing. That rich, leather and wood scent reminded her of her father’s library where she’d spent half of her childhood curled up with a blanket, reading. It set off every nerve in her body when he’d held her down, but it comforted her too for some reason, if that was possible.
“Okay, I’ll stay—but there are a few things we need to get straight.” His eyes dropped to her chest where she was sure he saw her heart pounding. “Either you agree to my terms, or you’re on your own.”
Suddenly, Fallon felt a little more compassion for her wild younger sister’s plight the night she stripped naked and found this man’s tent in the woods in Cancun. Because the way Jaxson Thomas was staring at her breasts right then, almost licking his lips, Fallon thought she might well agree to anything he asked of her too.
CHAPTER FOUR
“First, you are going to keep that big mouth of yours shut,” Jax said, as he walked past her toward the sofa. That big mouth she’d obviously grown into over the last five years. The one with the plush lips that would be a homing beacon for any man now. As would the fact that he now realized she wasn’t wearing anything under her loosely tied black satin robe.
This woman should repulse him, he was not supposed to notice those things, or that her formerly frizzy red was now smooth as silk and smelled like fucking wildflowers.
Jax hoped Fallon Sharpe hadn’t noticed the effects his thoughts and holding her down in the bedroom had on his body. He needed to put some space between them for this conversation so she didn’t notice. He walked past the sofa to the oversized leather chair, grabbed the throw pillow there for a little camouflage, then covered his lap with it when he sat down.
Jax was a little disappointed when she cinched her robe tighter before sitting on the sofa. He was looking for it to gape wider when she sat so he could get a better look at those full breasts that had pressed into his chest when he held her down. The hard dime-sized points at the crest of the proud peaks tented the slick material—and his fucking pants too, when he noticed.
Get your mind on business, Thomas.
With effort, Jax dragged his eyes to her face but the damned cute freckles on either side of her thin nose distracted him. Was she a true redhead, did the carpet match the drapes? Those freckles and her peach-hued complexion seemed to indicate that was true.
Are you out of your fucking mind? This is the woman who had you railroaded from the teams, dumbass.
That was the thought he needed to get his mind right. “You will not have a firearm in your hand as long as I’m protecting you, got that?” he growled.
“I have my concealed carry per—” she started, and Jax had to force himself not to drop his eyes to watch the words leave her porn-star-worthy mouth.
He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. “I don’t give a damn if you have a special permission from the President, babycakes. You will not put your hand on a gun—do you understand?” Except mine, you can definitely touch my gun. His weapon on the other hand would stay in his holster, and hers was going to be safely stored until this damned assignment was over. If she shot herself after he left, that wasn’t his problem.
Instead of nodding though, her brown eyes sparked with amber fire and her shoulders stiffened. “I’m a federal judge—definitely capable of understanding you, so I’d appreciate you not treating me like an idiot. But there’s something you need to understand too, Mr. Thomas. Since I’m not an idiot, I won’t blindly do something just because you tell me to. This isn’t the Navy, and I’m not your recruit.”
Anger shot up to make Jax’s head pound. One thing hadn’t changed about this woman, her attitude, and that didn’t bode well to the success of this mission or keeping her safe.
“Is that sparkling intellect and attitude what got you into this situation, Judge Sharpe?”
“No that would be my morals and firm belief in right and wrong,” she replied superciliously. “Something, I’m sure you wouldn’t know anything about.”
And that did it. Jax had enough.
Standing, he reached behind him to pull her weapon from his waistband to flip off the safety, pop out the magazine and eject the round from the chamber, before laying both on the table. Her eyes widened with what looked like fear, but that wasn’t stopping him from getting the hell out of there as fast as his legs would take him. And that was pretty damned fast, since he was one of the fastest guys on his SEAL team.
“Give Willie my regards, Judge Sharpe,” Jax said smugly, as he walked toward the front door. “I’m sure you won’t have any problem cutting his throat with that mouth of yours.”
Jax stalked to the front door, flung it open and jogged halfway down the flower-lined brick walk toward his car, before she grabbed his arm. Brushing off her hand, he gave her a hot glare then proceeded to his car. He opened the door, but she skirted the car to stand at the front end.
With a curse, Jax scanned up and down the street for tangos, deciding right then that despite all the intelligence Fallon Sharpe claimed to have, she had not one iota of common sense. Someone was trying to kill her and here she stood, half-dressed in her front yard, giving any decent shooter a perfect target.
“Get back in the house,” he growled, pushing his door wider to put one leg inside the car. He eased behind the wheel and made the mistake of looking at her through the windshield.
That thick lower lip of hers trembled, her chin quivered and the tears gathering in her eyes turned them to rich, dark whiskey. When one streaked down her pale cheek, Jaxson huffed a breath, fighting the pull inside of him.
Looking in the rearview thinking to back out, Jax saw he had even less sense than she did evidently. A sleek little Mercedes convertible, presumably hers, parked right behind him on the street blocked him from backing out.
Defensive driving 101—always anticipate having to make a quick exit—never park where you can’t back out if necessary.
He leaned out of the car. “Get away from my car so I can leave.”
When she still didn’t move, Jaxson got out to walk around the front to physically move her out of his way, but she turned in his arms and suctioned herself to him like saran wrap. Her arms were so tightly wound around his neck they almost choked him.
“Please don’t leave me here alone—I am so sorry for insulting you. I’ll keep my mouth shut, I promise.” Fallon’s voice quaked almost as much as her body in his arms. “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”
His body perked and Jaxson bit back a growl. It had been almost five years now since he’d seen her. Every minute of that time he’d hated her. His body’s reactions to her now, no matter how much she’d changed physically, just didn’t make a damned bit of sense to him. It was a good thing he decided to leave, because this would never have worked for weeks.
A loud squeal of t
ires down the street sent a shot of adrenaline through him. He spun, putting himself in front of her, watching as a black SUV with blacked out windows barreled down the quiet residential street toward her house. He shoved her away, turned her toward the house and pulled his pistol from his ankle holster.
With a push he said, “Run into the house, go into your bedroom and lock the door. Get in the closet and call the cops!”
Without arguing, she took off at a dead run for the front door. Jax quickly checked his pistol and wished like hell he had time to retrieve his other weapons from the trunk, but he didn’t. Running behind her, he blocked a direct shot from the approaching vehicle and trained his weapon on the black SUV, which had almost reached their cars now.
Once inside the house, he slammed the door and flipped the locks, knowing that wasn’t going to stop a damned thing with the viewing panels in the front door. One bullet and they’d shatter and that’s just what they did. Jax dove, slid across the tile entry on his belly, then rolled around the corner to position himself to shoot whoever came through the door.
Bullets shattered every piece of glass at the front of the house, pinged off the sheetrock inside throwing dust and debris into the air, and ricocheted off of the bricks outside. From the sound and pattern of the gunfire he identified they were using short range automatic weapons.
For a professional hit? In broad daylight in a residential neighborhood?
Either they were the dumbest criminals he’d ever encountered or these guys weren’t professionals at all. Jax needed to get a look at who was doing the shooting, so he waited until a break in the fire to crawl to the window beside the front door. Sitting, he glanced outside and saw the shooter standing in the middle of the front lawn.
One guy—an Italian with greasy slicked-back black hair in an ill-fitting olive green business suit and loud tie. Any casting director in Hollywood would kill to have this guy in a bad B-type mafia movie. Jax laughed as he watched him struggle to eject what was probably a stovepipe jam from an older TEC-9, a particularly unreliable weapon because if not cleaned properly or when used in full-auto mode it jammed a lot, as Mr. Mafiosa just discovered.
And didn’t that just suck for him?
Jax swung his weapon out the window, checked for possible collateral damage, then squeezed off a round even though he knew his hold gun didn’t have the range to kill him. Unless they came closer, his goal was to scare them off which may have been their goal here today with Fallon Sharpe. The loud grunt told Jax he’d hit his target, and the distant sirens alerted him the cops were almost there. He wasn’t surprised to hear the squeal of tires as the goons left, probably because they heard the sirens too.
Relaxing, he looked back outside but flinched when metal crunched loudly as the big black SUV sideswiped the Mercedes when it took off down the street. His eyes fixed on the plate as the truck passed the front end of his car, but the license plate was covered. No big surprise there either, he thought, standing to stride to the bedroom.
The sooner they got the hell out of this house, the better. The bad guys had just advertised they knew where she lived, and he wasn’t going to wait for them to come back with more than a warning for her. Jax opened the bedroom door without thinking, a loud pop sounded and he dove just as a bullet whizzed past his head to embed in the doorframe. Heart pounding he rolled to his feet, stormed over to Fallon and dragged her up to her feet.
“What did I tell you about that fucking weapon?” he growled, shaking her.
Ignoring her terrified eyes, he reached down to take it from her before she shot herself in the foot. He didn’t want to be, but he was really impressed that she’d put it back together that quickly, since he’d left it in pieces on the coffee table.
Jax snapped out the magazine, laid the pistol on the bed, ejected every bullet from the magazine and put them in his pocket. Next he picked up the pistol, ejected the round in the chamber but he didn’t stop there. No, he was going to make sure the damned thing never fired another bullet—especially one at him.
“Get packed. We’re leaving as soon as the cops leave,” Jax said without looking up, as he disassembled the pistol by rote memory, dropping the pieces onto the bed.
At least whoever helped her get the damned thing had gotten her a subcompact 9mm, instead of some hand cannon she couldn’t have controlled. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw she hadn’t moved. He laid the frame down on the bed, and turned to take her shoulders.
“Fallon, you’ve got to get yourself together.”
“I almost shot you,” she said, in a barely there voice.
“Yes you did, and that’s why I told you not to get that gun. I’m trained with weapons, and have a whole damned arsenal in the trunk of my car.” Jax huffed a breath, and his fingers dug into her shoulder as he held her eyes. “I promise I am not going to let anything happen to you, so just trust me, okay?”
She stared at him a long, long time, as if she were trying to find the answers to the universe by looking into his eyes. Jax could almost see the wheels spinning inside her head. Finally, on a shuddering sigh, she nodded, and he pulled her to his chest for a quick hug then pushed her back.
“Hurry up and get packed so we can go as soon as I finish talking to the police,” he said, releasing her shoulders. The cops were in the front yard now, and Jax needed to deescalate the situation, call off the dogs, before they added more bullets to the front of the house thinking there were hostages inside.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You need me to stop for some Kleenex?” Jax asked, groaning as he saw a fresh round of tears streaking down her cheeks. “Hungry?” Maybe that was her problem. He’d heard low blood sugar could make women emotional sometimes. He knew he was damned hungry himself, so she could be too. Jax was running out of guesses to help the woman who’d been almost hysterical since they left Washington two hours ago, after five hours of grilling by the police and the mountain of paperwork signing that followed.
“No-o. Don’t stop until we get somewhere safe,” she replied, her teeth chattering.
Fallon Sharpe’s bravado had left the building. The woman in the seat beside him was as humble and afraid as any he’d ever seen in his life. As shattered as the windows had been at the front of her house, which is what started her breakdown.
The full meltdown hadn’t come until they were getting into his car, about to leave, and she saw her Mercedes. Jax knew the exact moment she spotted her car. The horror on her face, her shrill cry of outrage as she ran to inspect the damage still rang in his ears, and probably the ears of the traumatized neighbors in the high-end neighborhood too. He was sure it wasn’t every day that CSI units, SWAT vans and police cars lined the streets there because one of the homes there had been sprayed with bullets.
“I called a contractor to get your house repaired and secured, and I also called a tow company to pick up your car and take it to a body shop,” Jax said, hoping that would settle her upset a little.
Nothing in his SEALs training or subsequent team missions had prepared him to deal with an emotional woman. Give him RPGs, IEDs, or any other deadly acronym, and he could deal with it. PMS was one that struck fear in his heart and he avoided at any cost.
It appeared today was the day for him to get his fill of it.
Not only was Fallon Sharpe having an episode, which given the ordeal she’d just been through was understandable, Rick Mann’s sister Darci was having a bout too when they dropped by her house to pick up the keys and alarm code to Jon Rudnick’s condo. Her breakdown was a little less understandable. She was dating a former Navy SEAL, and had one for a brother too, but she was upset because Chris Cassidy had gone OCONUS with Jon Rudnick for a few days.
The two men weren’t in a war zone on a mission, not in a bit of danger except maybe from sunburn if they forgot to coat up with sunscreen, or perhaps an upset stomach from the rich food in the Abu Dhabi, but she was acting like they were on a suicide mission to Mogadishu or something. When he called Rick at the nuke
plant to give him a SITREP on the assignment, even he seemed to be suffering a male version of it because he was in a mood too.
Jax was starting to wonder if there would be a full moon tonight. He sure as hell hoped not, because he knew what that usually meant. Whatever he was involved in, a mission, an assignment, or whatever, was going to experience a Charlie Tango Foxtrot, otherwise known as a cluster fuck in the teams.
Seven of the thirty or so missions he’d been on as a SEAL had been on a night with a full moon. Yeah, it made traveling, entry and recon a lot easier, they could actually see what they were doing without using night vision goggles, but on the flipside they could be seen by the enemy too.
All seven of those missions—Charlie Tango Foxtrot before it was all over.
The hostage extraction mission to Cancun, where he’d first met Fallon Sharpe and her sister, his last mission with the teams, had been on a full moon. Being seen by the drug lords hadn’t been the problem that night though. The op had gone down like clockwork, they’d rescued the women without even being noticed. The problem came later when they had to camp at the LZ to wait for extraction, because of weather in the states, but it still counted. The night the Prince’s son was kidnapped—yep, full moon.
It was understandable why he was a little superstitious about it, and that superstition explained why Jax picked up his phone to hit the weather app to find out what the moon phase would be that night. When he saw that it was indeed a full moon, his stomach clenched and he threw his phone into the slot above the radio.
Jax needed to keep his eyes open, because it would be dark soon. He looked into the rearview to get a fix on the van that had ticked his internal radar when it followed them on the surface roads to the interstate, merging on behind them after they left Rick Mann’s house. He relaxed when he saw the van was still about ten cars back in the left lane.
