Her Rogue Alpha (X-Ops Book 5)

by Paige Tyler

  As she threw a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and picked up her helmet, she knew one thing for sure. She definitely couldn’t go back to her apartment or her shop—not until she figured out how to get off Thorn’s radar.

  Chapter 10

  Layla lay on the floor of the library watching as sunlight slipped through the cracks in the rubble above her and highlighted the dust motes floating through the air. At her side, Jayson was asleep, his breathing deep and relaxed. This had to be one of the most perfect mornings ever.

  She wiggled over to Jayson, practically purring with pleasure as he wrapped his arm around her in his sleep and pulled her close. They fit together perfectly, like two spoons in a drawer. When she was in his arms, she could almost forget they were in a hostile, foreign city that was crawling with soldiers who would kill them on the spot, all while looking for a young woman no one had seen in days.

  Hopefully, that last part would soon change.

  Things hadn’t turned out as well as they’d hoped last night. If they had, she probably would have woken up this morning in a nice, soft hotel bed in Kiev beside Jayson with plane tickets for the States sitting on the nightstand. Dylan and his friends would have been back with their families, and Mikhail would no longer have a death sentence hanging over his head. Other than the fact that she had Jayson at her side and they’d discovered that they made an awesome team in the field, nothing else had gone according to the vague plan they’d been following.

  Shortly after leaving the RSA building in their rearview mirror, Mikhail had given them directions to a warehouse large enough to hide the truck in. By the time the Russian teen and the others had gotten there, most of the more mobile prisoners she and Jayson had rescued were long gone. That had left them with those people too weak to walk on their own and the seriously wounded. Mikhail had come through for them again, knowing people who would not only take the injured locals in, but also help them get medical aid. That Russian kid was starting to impress the crap out of her.

  Of course, Dylan had been devastated when he’d been told that Anya wasn’t in the RSA building. Like Jayson predicted, the diplomat’s son had wanted to immediately turn around and go back, sure they had missed her somehow.

  Luckily, Mikhail had brought over the old man who had spoken to them in broken English back at the RSA. The man had wanted to tell them how grateful he was for what Layla and Jayson had done for him and the other prisoners. She couldn’t help but be curious about how a sweet, old man like him could have ended up locked in one of those cells, so she had asked.

  “I would not give food in my store to the militia soldiers for free,” he said. “When I stood up to them and said they must pay, they beat me and took me away. They tell me they would release me if I promise to give them what they want, but I say no.”

  “How long were you in there?” Jayson asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Eight months or so.” That had shocked Layla even more than the reason they’d arrested him. “I am a stubborn old man who does not fear death. I would die before backing down from those pigs!”

  “Did you see a Ukrainian girl named Anya in the cells?” Dylan had asked urgently. “It would have been about four days ago. She’s tall, with dark hair, and was wearing a bright red shirt when she was taken.”

  The old man thought a moment. “I think maybe…yes. Over the last week, they bring several young girls in. One of them was wearing a red shirt. I remember because very few people wear red now. It draws too much attention. But she was only in the cells for a little while. Then the soldiers came and took her somewhere else.”

  “Do you know where?” Mikhail asked.

  But the old man hadn’t.

  It had taken over an hour to get the old man and the last few prisoners somewhere they would be safe. By then, Layla and everyone else had been exhausted—and worried.

  “I know a guy who might be able to help us find Anya,” Mikhail had said when they’d gotten back to the library. “He’s a cop, or at least he was before the militia came in and took over. He was a soldier in the Russian army before he was a cop, and has worked in this city for something like forty years, so he knows everything that goes on here. If there is anyone who would be able to tell us why the militia grabbed Anya and those other girls and where they took them, it would be him.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you mention him before?” Dylan demanded angrily.

  Mikhail shrugged and gave him a sheepish look. “I’m not exactly on the best of terms with the guy. He arrested me a few times. I would not willingly go to see him, but we have nowhere else to turn.”

  Jayson had wanted to meet with the guy right away, but Mikhail had said no. “This man doesn’t like outsiders. I’ll take Olek and go talk to him first, convince him that you are really here to help. If I tell him what you did tonight, he might be willing to talk to you.”

  “I’m going with you too,” Dylan had said firmly. “Anya is my girlfriend. We need to make him understand how important this is.”

  Layla had heard him and the other teens leave thirty minutes ago.

  She’d had been leery of letting them go alone, but it wasn’t really like they were asking for her permission. Besides, Jayson had pointed out that they had very little choice. If they wanted to find Anya before it was too late, they were going to have to take some chances. Jayson trusted their instincts to bail if anything felt off. Hopefully, they’d be back in a couple hours with information about where Anya was being held.

  Layla sighed. Knowing where Anya was being held was only the first step. Getting her out of wherever that was would come next, and something told Layla the next rescue was going to be a lot harder than the on-the-fly mission into the RSA building.

  An operation like that would normally have called for a larger, more experienced DCO team, like the one she’d been part of in Glasgow. But they didn’t have a larger, more experienced DCO team. They had three teenagers, a former Special Forces soldier with a back full of shrapnel, and her—a barely trained shifter not qualified to be in the field on her own. Even considering how well she and Jayson had performed last night, their odds of rescuing Anya and getting out of this alive didn’t seem good.

  Layla had called Kendra last night after getting back to the safety of the library, hoping for news on their backup. Since they still weren’t sure Clayne and Danica had received the order to divert to Donetsk, John had reached out to coyote shifter Trevor Maxwell and his industrial espionage team, telling them to drop what they were doing and get to Eastern Europe ASAP. But Trevor’s team was in Buenos Aires, and it would take at least thirty-six hours for them to reach the Ukraine, maybe longer.

  “This is all probably going to be over well before they get here,” Layla had explained to Kendra. “Whatever the militia is grabbing these girls for, it can’t be anything good, and Jayson is going to want to move as soon as we figure out where they are.”

  Not that she blamed Jayson. She was just as eager to rescue Anya and the other girls as he was. Layla shuddered to imagine what might be happening to a handful of missing young women.

  Kendra had sighed. “Look, I know this isn’t the mission either of you went over there to do, but it’s the one that needs doing right now. And with Powell gone, you two are on your own. I know it seems impossible, but you’re going to have to find a way to make it work.”

  Layla lay there listening to Jayson’s steady heartbeat now, trying to imagine how they could possibly make it work. Especially when they still didn’t know exactly what was going on with the hybrid serum Jayson had taken. She was still agonizing over whether to tell him about the antidote Zarina had given him. After what she had seen last night, it seemed obvious that the serum hadn’t turned Jayson into any kind of hybrid as she thought of them, but beyond that, she honestly had no idea.

  Had it healed his back? Increased his pain threshold? Sped up his reflexes? All she could sa
y was…maybe.

  She’d already been impressed as hell with what he had done since arriving in Donetsk, then last night, she’d watched him hump those injured people up three flights of stairs and survive a running gunfight with at least a dozen militia soldiers. Maybe the hybrid serum had done something to him. Then again, maybe it hadn’t and he was just being insanely reckless because he thought he was something he wasn’t.

  That was the biggest reason she needed to tell Jayson about the antidote. What if he went into this next rescue mission—assuming they could find out where Anya was—and did something insane because he thought he had hybrid abilities that he really didn’t? Just the thought of him doing something crazy—and getting hurt—made her heart freeze into a solid block of ice in her chest.

  Then again, telling him that he was essentially no more than the battle-scared vet he previously believed himself to be could prove just as deadly for him. There was a good possibility that everything Jayson had been able to accomplish up to this point was because he simply believed he could. If she took that confidence away from him, what would he have left?

  Layla closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath. As a psychologist, she should know what the hell to do in a situation like this, but when it came to Jayson, she didn’t have a clue. Her heart was simply too involved.

  She was still contemplating what she should do when she picked up on the fact that Jayson’s breathing pattern had changed while she’d been lost in thought. She opened her eyes to find him wide-awake beside her, his head cradled in one hand and a smile on his lips.

  “What?” she said, suddenly self-conscious. “Was I drooling?”

  He chuckled. “No.”

  That was a relief. “Then is my hair a tangled mess?”

  “No,” he said, reaching out to smooth his hand over it. “It’s perfect, like the rest of you. I was just lying here watching you and thinking about how beautiful you are.”

  Layla made a face. “Right. I’ve been sleeping on the floor of an abandoned building for the last two nights. I’m pretty sure I look the opposite of beautiful right now.”

  “I disagree,” Jayson insisted.

  She laughed and would have said something about him needing glasses, but he rolled her onto her back and kissed her. His fingers threaded their way into her hair as his mouth roamed over hers, taking everything she had to offer.

  Layla wrapped a leg around him, pulling him closer and letting out a little shiver at the feel of his hard-on pressing against her body. He grabbed her thigh, running his hand up and down her jean-clad leg, making her warm all over. What she wouldn’t give for the two of them to be nestled in a pile of warm, soft blankets back home in her apartment with nothing to do but make love all day.

  Suddenly, Jayson pulled back. She chased him, extending the kiss and letting him know that she was more than ready to keep going if he was. Dylan and the others would be out for a while. They might as well make good use of the time. But the serious look on Jayson’s face was enough to make her back off.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, rolling onto her side as he did the same. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine—better than fine.” He gently caressed her bottom lip with his thumb. “It just occurred to me that I’ve never told you how beautiful you are until now, which has to make me either the slowest or dumbest man in the world.”

  She opened her mouth to tell him he was being silly, but he stopped her with a gentle finger on the lips.

  “And since we’re on the topic of me telling you things that I should have said a long time ago,” he continued, “I also need to tell you I know how incredibly lucky I am to have you in my life, even if I haven’t always shown it. I’m sorry about that. But I want you to know that you’re the most important thing in the world to me.”

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for, Jayson,” she said softly. “Not after everything you’ve had to go through.”

  Jayson smiled wryly. “That’s where you’re wrong, Layla. Last year may have been total shit, and there were times when the pain became so unbearable and the future so hopeless that I thought about giving up and just ending it, but I still had no right to treat you the way I did. I was hurting and couldn’t see my world ever getting better, so I lashed out at the only person who cared enough about me to put up with it. I need you to know how incredibly sorry I am for putting you through all that.”

  Tears filled Layla’s eyes. Suddenly, she had a hard time breathing. Part of her had always known that suicide was something Jayson had considered. Still, it was hard for her to hear him say it out loud. But having him apologize for things he had said and done when he’d been in that deep, dark place was tough too. Worse, it was scaring her. It was like he was trying to get stuff off his chest before they went on this rescue mission, like he thought he might not have a chance to say it later.

  “Why are you telling me this all of a sudden?” she asked. “You’re not going to do anything stupid are you?”

  He frowned in confusion, but apparently figured it out because he shook his head again. “No, I’m not going to do anything stupid. If I scared you, I’m sorry about that too. All I’m trying to say is that I was in a bad place for a long time, and I did some things then that I’m not very proud of. But I’m not in that bad place now, and it’s all because of you.”

  Her heart squeezed. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yes, you did,” he said firmly. “You had no way of knowing this, but when I first met you at Landon and Ivy’s wedding, I was at my lowest point. The Army Medical Review Board had just told me that my request to be allowed back on active duty had been denied. I’d known it was a long shot, but I’d still invested a lot of hope in that chance, and I was seriously down. I almost didn’t go to the wedding, but I figured Landon would harass the hell out of me if I didn’t. I planned to show up and say congrats, then bail. But I met you and everything changed.”

  Layla smiled, remembering the first time she’d seen Jayson. He’d looked so handsome in his suit, though she could tell he’d been in pain even back then. She barely remembered any of the reception because she’d spent the whole evening with him.

  “From the moment we met, there was something about you—a spark,” he said. “While we were hanging out together at the reception, I forgot I was a wounded warrior. I was just a guy attracted to a beautiful woman.”

  “The attraction was mutual,” she assured him, leaning in for a kiss. “I can assure you of that.”

  It was just a short, playful tangling of the tongues, but it was enough to make her body start to heat up again. When Jayson pulled back, the serious expression was still there.

  “But that evening was just the beginning,” he continued. “When you started coming to see me at Walter Reed, I found myself getting out of bed a little earlier in the morning on the chance you might show up. And when I was transitioned to outpatient status, you were the one who helped me find a place to live.”

  Now she was getting seriously embarrassed from all the praise and adoration. “Anyone could have done that.”

  “Anyone could have, but you were the one who did it. You were the one who put up with the grouchy, medically chaptered army guy.”

  “You weren’t grouchy,” she protested.

  He lifted a brow.

  Layla laughed. “Okay, maybe you were a little bit grouchy.”

  “I was way more than that,” he corrected. “I was a total ass on more than one occasion, but you hung in there and never walked away, no matter how much I pushed.”

  She caressed his stubble-covered jaw. “There was nothing you could ever do that would make me walk away. My only fear was that you would be the one to leave without ever giving me a say in the matter.”

  He caught her hand and pressed his lips to her palm, his breath warm on her skin. “Thank God I was never stupid enough to do that. I
f I had been, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.”

  She laughed and kissed him. “You mean in a bombed-out library in Donetsk?”

  “No,” he whispered. “I mean lying in the arms of the most beautiful woman in the world, telling her how important she is to me and how much I love her.”

  Layla almost missed the significance of what Jayson had just said, but then his words sank in. “Did you just say…?”

  He grinned. “That I love you? Yeah, I said it. I love you, and I have from the first moment I met you. It just took me a while to figure it out. Though I have to admit, I envisioned it coming out completely differently—more romantic, you know?”

  “I think it was perfectly romantic just the way it was,” she said, her voice a little husky because her throat was tightening up again as emotions began to pour through her.

  She realized now that some part of her had become convinced that she’d never hear those words from Jayson, and that she was okay with it. She’d come to accept that it would be enough to love him, but she’d been lying to herself. She’d needed to hear those words. The joy of hearing them now, having never expected them, nearly overwhelmed her.

  She wrapped her arm around his shoulders, pulling him close and burying her face in his neck. As she breathed in his amazing scent, tears filled her eyes. She needed the tears as much as she’d needed to hear that he loved her. She’d been holding her emotions in check for so long, it felt good to finally let it all go.

  Jayson held her close, his hand gently caressing her hair. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m sorry it took me so long to get to a place where I could say I love you, but to be truthful, I couldn’t imagine ever being good enough for you. I’ve realized that I had to tell you though. Or risk losing you. I couldn’t live with that. I’d die rather than live without you.”

  Layla pulled her face away to blink at him. “You’re never going to have worry about being without me because I love you too. I have since the day I saw you at the wedding. I’ll always love you, and I’m not going anywhere.”