Heated Pursuit

by April Hunt

  “You don’t need to prove anything to me, Rafe,” Penny murmured. “Ever. And there’s nothing sacrificial about loving you or wanting a life with you.”

  “I’m not a knight in shining armor, sweetheart. I’m bossy and overbearing, a practical Neanderthal when it comes to keeping you safe. Despite the fact you’re more than capable of taking care of yourself, I want in on the action, too.”

  She palmed his cheek. “And I wouldn’t change a single thing. I love you—Neanderthal parts and all. And if you don’t kiss me right now, I’m going to be forced to take matters into my own hands.”

  “One more kiss and there’s no getting rid of me. You’ll be stuck with me. For life.”

  She brushed her lips against his, making his soul tremble. “That’s exactly the life I want.”

  EPILOGUE

  Lebanon County, Pennsylvania

  Six Months Later

  Penny nibbled her lower lip, smiling and giddy as she stood in front of the weather-beaten door. Instead of rushing through, she took a deep breath. It was done. She was finished. The next phase of her life could officially begin, and the man—at least one of them—in the building in front of her would be part of it in a very huge way.

  She couldn’t wait any longer. Heart trilling in her chest, she pushed through the front door of Alpha. Not yet opened for business, the former biker bar sat empty, its only occupant the fine layer of sawdust coating the floor. Plastic tarps hung in each doorway. Tables and chairs were tucked into one corner and new windows were stacked neatly along the far wall, waiting to be installed. Alpha, both the bar and the agency, was nearly done with its face-lift.

  Finally.

  Those that needed to find them could, but only if they already had one foot in the door or knew someone who did. When they weren’t being the official badasses behind Alpha Security, they were going to take over the lives they’d been comfortable portraying during their stint in Central America.

  Bar owners. Bartenders. Bouncers. To everyone around them, they were a band of brothers, all former military, all not to be trifled with. But to Penny, they were family.

  “Well? How’d it go?” Penny heard Charlie before she saw her. And then the other woman stood up from behind the bar, a crate of bottles in her hands.

  “Flying colors.” Penny beamed. “Nearly as colorful as your hair.”

  With a laugh, Charlie leaped the counter and wrapped her in a bone-crushing hug that Penny returned. “I told you that you could bloody well do it.”

  “You were bloody right.” Penny chuckled.

  Charlie snorted on a laugh. “You finally used bloody in the right bloody context. I’m so bloody proud.”

  Penny chuckled harder. Much to the chagrin of the guys, she and the other woman had become instant friends. Charlie didn’t apologize for her colorful hair or her multiple tattoos, or for telling people the truth, regardless of its popularity. Her sharp mind and keen wit made her the perfect person to keep the men of Alpha in line, and Penny adored her to death.

  No doubt sensing they were no longer alone in the front room, Charlie smirked. “We need tattoos to commemorate the occasion. I bet you that Axel down at the tattoo parlor would give us a discount if you let him put it on your arse.”

  “No one’s putting anything on my lady’s arse except me.” As if summoned, Rafe leaned against the doorway.

  Penny ran straight at him. He caught her easily, his palms giving her butt a firm squeeze as she instinctively wrapped her legs around his waist.

  “See? My hands. Your ass.” Rafe waited a beat before lifting a single eyebrow in question. “Well? Are you going to tell me how it went or am I going to have to guess?”

  With a squeal, she started peppering his face with kisses. “I did it! I really did it! The final is over, the credits are mine. Mine! Mine! All mine! You’re now looking at Alpha Security’s official trauma psychologist—or you will be once I complete the internship.”

  Rafe’s coy smirk morphed into a true smile. He nuzzled into her neck and, for her ears alone, murmured, “Congratulations, Red. I knew you could do it.”

  Like always, a simple hug turned into a hot clash of mouths and tongue. Penny tightened her hold around his neck and let out a soft groan of appreciation…right until the mixed sound of laughter and gagging had them pulling away. Slightly.

  “Maybe we should start charging tickets,” Rafe teased before allowing her to slide down the front of his body. By the time her feet touched the ground, he was hard everywhere. Keeping his arms wrapped around her, he held her close enough for her to feel the erection pushing against her stomach.

  Charlie shuddered. “Forget the tickets. Just do…that…somewhere else. Bloody hell, this is a place of business. Or at least it will be if Navy ever gets on the ball with these renovations.”

  Vince, now standing between Logan and Sean, shot her a glare. “Vince would’ve been done a long time ago if some snooty little English girl weren’t so damn picky.”

  “You know what? You lot are off gallivanting for weeks at a time. If I’m going to be stuck inside these four walls more than the lot of you, then I’m damn well going to make sure it’s something I want to look at,” Charlie growled right back. “Get the windows done or I’m going to hire the Beau brothers to finish the job.”

  “Like hell. You just want to hire them so you can watch their asses while they work.”

  She shrugged. “Your point is what?”

  Trey stepped between Vince and Charlie moments before suspected bloodshed. “All right, kids. Don’t make me put the two of you in separate corners.” With a small smirk, he dropped a kiss on Penny’s cheek. “Congratulations. I think this calls for a party by the lake. What do you think? Swimming, beer, and barbeque?”

  “That sounds great.” Penny looked up at Rafe, her smile mirroring his. “I want to call Dr. Phillips and see if Rachel would be okay coming out with us. Is that okay with you?”

  Rafe gently guided her mouth back to his. “It would be more than okay, baby.”

  Penny squeezed him tighter. God, she loved him with every inch of her being. He’d been by her side, her mountainous support as they found both medical and emotional help for all the women that had been trapped in the warehouse bunker. He and Charlie had helped her find Carlotta’s family…who lived in New York…and who hadn’t named her Carlotta, but Nora.

  And thanks to Alpha’s connections, Rachel was in a government-sponsored rehab facility less than an hour away. It would be a long recuperation process, her battle with Freedom sometimes needing to be fought minute to minute…but if anyone could fight it—and win—it was her. Knowing that both Fuentes men died in Honduras and couldn’t hurt another soul helped the darker times seem just the smallest bit lighter.

  It would be a long road to normal—Penny’s new kind of normal, one that involved a new family and a new job. As a trauma psychologist, she’d help the people Alpha saved after the bullets stopped flying. It was an exciting new chapter in her life, and she couldn’t wait to get started.

  Penny lifted to her toes and kissed Rafe until her head went dizzy. “Can you and I have our own private celebration when everyone goes home?”

  “Red, we can have our own private celebration every damn day of the week. As a matter of fact, I encourage it…demand it even.” Rafe feathered his mouth against hers.

  “Jesus. Get a hotel room,” Trey grunted to the chorus of everyone else’s chuckles. “That’s basically my little sister you’re groping in front of me, Ortega.”

  “Learn to look away, brother, because there’s no way in hell I’m ever going to stop touching her or let her venture out of my sight. And speaking of…we’ll meet you guys out at the lake.”

  Before Penny could ask what he meant, she found herself thrown over Rafe’s shoulder like an economy-sized bag of potatoes. This time, there were no gag, no handcuffs, and no blindfold. This time, she could see exactly where she was going…or would have if Rafe’s smackable ass weren’t i
n the way.

  And that was straight into the future with the man she loved.

  Nurse Elle Monroe never expected to see her one-night stand on the steps of her clinic. But Alpha Security operative Trey Hanson isn’t back for a repeat performance. He’s come to save her from heavily armed guerillas—and maybe to steal her heart…

  A preview of Holding Fire follows.

  Elle stared, transfixed, on the clock behind the airport’s claims counter. Each twitch of the second hand took about five years off her life. Being a month shy of her birthday, she estimated she had roughly ten and a half seconds until the coroner needed to be called. Twelve max, with a little bit of luck, but luck seemed to be in short supply.

  Her normal patience was at an all-time low, sucked into a black hole right along with her personal hygiene and her luggage. Twenty hours in flight time from Thailand to New York was to blame for the first. The latter was entirely the fault of the airline.

  “Next.” Behind the counter, the gray-haired hospitality worker never bothered looking up at the next traveler.

  One more person. One more step. The closer Elle got to the cracked yellow Formica counter of the claims department, the more that surface looked like a goose-feather pillow. To leave or not to leave.

  Jeans. Shorts. Granny panties. All cotton, no sexiness. Everything in her suitcase could be easily replaced by her modest paycheck and the nearest discount store. She could call it a loss and find the nearest hotel, be damned the health department reports.

  With a deep sigh, Elle looked around the open room. People littered the airport, bulky suitcases bouncing behind them as they scrambled to their destinations while others coveted blankets and pillows and looked to be settling in for the duration. On the left, two children tackled the legs of a tall, slender woman dressed in desert camouflage.

  A smile ghosted over her lips…and froze. That tingle, the one she’d felt the moment she and Shay unloaded from the gate—the one that came with the ardent focus of someone’s attention—took root in the pit of her stomach. When she sensed it earlier, she blamed the paranoia on her long hours of travel and lack of sleep. But the prickle of awareness came back tenfold, turning her head and stopping at the man leaning against the far wall.

  Elle did a double take. It wasn’t Trey. It couldn’t be. She’d left him back in Thailand without so much as her last name, much less her travel itinerary, yet every second her gaze stayed narrowed on the stranger across the room, her heart pattered a little faster.

  Jeans encased his thighs perfectly. Not tight. Not baggy. No doubt if he turned around, the rear would look as impressive as the front. Both his face and his hair were disappointedly half hidden by a baseball cap and sunglasses, but they had the same strongly chiseled jaw and sexy blond scruff that made her want to throw every razor known to man straight into the garbage.

  Even though he never looked away from his paper, his lips twitched almost as if sensing her visual appraisal. That smirk. Those lips. The tight stretch of a long-sleeved T over a chest wide enough to land an airplane. Elle nearly collapsed into an X-rated memory of how lips nearly identical to the stranger’s had pleasurably ripped away all her sensibilities only a scant few days ago.

  Standing in the middle of a busy airport definitely wasn’t the time to give in to a never-ending mental replay of her time with Trey. When her turn came up at the counter, she gave them all the information they needed in the hopes of reconnecting with her suitcase, and then with a “Have a nice day” and her single carry-on, Elle bounced off the chest of another traveler.

  On reflex, she reached out to steady her victim. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Shut it,” a low voice snarled.

  Oh, hell no. Exhaustion mixed with an insane need to shower off the last twenty-four hours made her head swivel to Mr. Attitude. Normally she would’ve taken a step back and gone on her merry way, a side effect of her upbringing. But she was eight hours past polite, and people who wore sunglasses indoors annoyed her to no end—unless they were sexily coy and leaning against a wall.

  She narrowed her eyes, wishing him to squirm at least the smallest bit, but there wasn’t so much as a flicker of remorse. “It was an accident. I said I was sorry. There’s no need to be a jerk about it.”

  “Actually, there is.” Mr. Attitude clamped a hand around her upper arm.

  “Ow. Hey, watch it!” She tugged and he tightened his hold.

  He leaned his large body way past her personal boundaries until his mouth brushed against her ear. Elle cringed.

  “I told you to shut. The hell. Up.” He emphasized each word and punctuated it with a nudge to her ribs. It took a moment to register the cool steel as a gun. “If you so much as twitch, sputter, or look at anyone cross-eyed, I won’t hesitate to make this very bad for you.”

  Elle forced bile back down her throat. Yeah, she had luck—bad luck that smelled worse than a skunk den. “I should probably warn you that I don’t have any money. Well, I have about ten dollars’ worth of Thai baht, but that’s about it. And maybe a fuzzy breath mint.”

  “I don’t want your money, Miss Monroe.”

  His grip tightened as he steered them away from anyone who would remotely care what was happening. And let’s face it: this was one of the busiest airports in the country. No one was going to notice one travel-ravaged blonde and a tank of a man, probably not even if she stripped down to her cotton undies and streaked through the terminal.

  Her armed captor kept the barrel of the gun snug against her side as he directed them to the airport exit.

  Elle’s heart went from a steady thunder to an apocalyptic roar when it finally sank in. Her name. He knew her name, knew she’d be returning to the states today. At this airport. Elle Monroe, certified trauma nurse, wasn’t exactly a hot commodity for kidnapping, which left only one other reason…and a desperate need to get away.

  Elle whipped her head from side to side in hopes of catching someone’s eye, but everyone was too involved with their own travels. Even the station cop clear across the room seemed to be dealing with a minor scuffle between two passengers.

  “So I’m your meal ticket, huh?” Elle kept talking, hoping someone would eventually catch on to her dilemma. “You obviously need me alive or you wouldn’t be going to all this trouble to get me out of here. I could scream bloody murder at the top of my lungs.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it. Not only could you get hurt in the process, but you could get a lot of innocent people hurt, too. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you? And what about your friend? You don’t want anything to happen to Miss Chandler while she’s in the bathroom. And just so you know I’m not bluffing, it would be the bathroom directly across from the newspaper stand—the one with one working stall and a dripping faucet.”

  Oh God. She wouldn’t jeopardize Shay’s safety or that of any other innocent bystanders, but she also couldn’t continue to let this man lead her straight into whatever hellish nightmare he had planned.

  She needed to think. She needed her own plan. She needed—

  Elle’s gaze snapped to the far wall where she’d last seen Mr. Tall, Ripped, and I-Can-Flick-a-Man-with-My-Fingers-and-Send-Him-Across-the-Room.

  Her baseball cap–wearing stranger stood in the same spot, but instead of leaning against the wall, he stood erect, newspaper tossed to the side, and was looking straight at her, twitching smirk nowhere to be seen.

  “Keep up.” Elle’s captor tugged her closer to the exit.

  She dragged the tips of her toes in hopes of slowing him down even the slightest bit. When she looked back to her looming stranger, he was gone.

  Panic seized her throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe. Even though her life plan was currently one big question mark, she knew it didn’t involve ending up in an unmarked burial plot somewhere near LaGuardia Airport.

  The second she felt the cool January air slide through the glass exit doors, she locked her legs and forced both herself and her captor into
a stumble. A small bit of space was all she needed to plow-drive a fist straight into his man goods.

  He released her arm to deflect the blow. Thank God for those hospital-sponsored defense classes. Anticipating her new freedom, she snapped her tennis shoe straight across his kneecap. The man howled, his legs buckling for a split second when a whir of black zipped by her shoulder.

  Sounds of flesh on flesh sent her gaze backward just as her wall lounger’s fist connected with her captor’s jaw. Much to the horrified fascination of nearby travelers, the two men exchanged punch after punch. People stopped and stared. Across the lobby, the uniformed cop finally looked their way. But with one final blow, her stranger put Mr. Attitude down on the ground—and then Elle found herself in a completely different set of hands.

  “Walk faster.” Her stranger hustled her through the sliding doors and into New York’s as-fresh-as-can-be air, one hand resting on the small of her back. The tingling touch was far better than the other’s bruising grip.

  She opened her mouth to object, but he cut her off. “Save the questions for when we’re not about to become target practice.”

  Elle’s head spun around and she realized her savior had a point. Her would-be abductor stood in the airport lobby, sunglasses off and gun twitching at his side. She’d seen those eyes before…and the scar that slid down his cheek.

  Cold dread licked up her spine. She couldn’t pull her gaze away, watching as the man from the Thai alley lifted a cell phone to his ear.

  Her stranger turned her focus back to him and the looming SUV half-parked on the drop-off zone’s sidewalk. “Get in the car.”

  Elle’s feet screeched to a stop. “Yeah, I may be blonde, but I’m not stupid. What makes you think I’d get into a car with you any more than I would with him? Thanks for helping me back there, because I’ve obviously landed in the Twilight Zone instead of LaGuardia, but if you want me to get in there”—she gestured to the door he held open—“then you’re going to have to physically toss me in there and sit on me.”