by Honor James
Hawt Men In and Out of Uniform 7
Assignment: Second Chances
Olivia Smith’s heart was broken by Ulysses Jacobs when they were kids. They had their lives planned but a misunderstanding tore them apart forever, their parents ensuring that they stayed apart as well. Now Olivia's life has been turned upside down by a monster that she had escaped from with three other women years earlier. Her only chance to stay free is to trust in Ulysses one more time.
Life has given her more than bringing Ulysses "Lee" Jacobs back to her though, it's given her Nathan Gordon, a man she easily and quickly falls for.
These three have to work together to heal old wounds and stop the monster once and for all before he's able to destroy the life they are working to create together. Olivia and Lee have to overcome the pain of misunderstanding from the past, face up to the truth of their time as teenagers, and learn to accept the love that they have now formed with Nathan.
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Romantic Suspense
Length: 74,715 words
ASSIGNMENT: SECOND CHANCES
Hawt Men In and Out of Uniform 7
Honor James
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
ASSIGNMENT: SECOND CHANCES
Copyright © 2015 by Honor James
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-176-0
First E-book Publication: July 2015
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2015 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
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www.SirenPublishing.com
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DEDICATION
To my fans, thank you all for being part of my wild and crazy world. You are all amazing, special, and I love you all.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
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
Epilogue
About the Author
ASSIGNMENT: SECOND CHANCES
Hawt Men In and Out of Uniform 7
HONOR JAMES
Copyright © 2015
Prologue
She had to survive. Olivia wouldn’t allow this son of a bitch to get away with what he had done to her. She wouldn’t allow this to go unchecked. He had spent every single waking moment torturing her. He had done vile things to her and now he just sat there looking at her.
“You do know, you will call me Master,” he said with a sick smile on his face, a look that had Olivia’s stomach turning.
“I will be dead and rotting in the ground before I call you anything other than ‘fucking bastard.’”
“You will,” he said again and rose with the branding iron in his hands. “Now then, my darling Olivia, let’s see if we are able to make you sing for me?” He pressed the hot iron on the inside of her ankle. Olivia didn’t scream. She bit the inside of her cheek and held back the screams because she knew that it only got him off.
She could smell the flesh burning, could hear the sizzle, and while she kept her screams in check she couldn’t keep the tears from falling.
Over and over again he touched the hot iron to the insides and outsides of her ankles, branding her as his.
Finally when she went fully limp on the chair he untied her and tossed her down the stairs to the basement, not bothering to tape her hands again as he typically did. She tumbled down the basement stairs, feet over head.
She landed in a heap at the bottom, where she woke up. She moaned, shifted as she did so, and lifted a hand weakly to her head. She was shocked when she could actually touch her head. She looked into the darkness at the other women that were bound hand and ankle with duct tape and then taped to chairs in the center of the basement.
She moved slowly on her hands and knees toward Clara Smith, the woman that was closest to her. “He didn’t tie me,” she said with utter surprise. She hurt, she knew that she had broken bones, many of them, her vision was blurry and felt the blood oozing from her body but she still moved because this might be their only chance.
“Holy shit,” Clara said when Olivia pulled the tape from her lips and looked to the other two women, Olivia could see. “Be still, when she frees me. I will get you.” God love Clara, Olivia was glad she was taking charge because Olivia didn’t know how much more she had in her.
Olivia freed Clara’s hands first and then helped her with her feet. She then passed out on the floor. She had done all she could.
* * * *
When Olivia woke next, it was in a bright hospital room. Standing at her side were a doctor and a police officer. She frowned. “Where am I?” And then the pain came back, and she sobbed, gasped and shuddered. “Please, no more,” she begged. Somehow
he had twisted the torture and while she had thought they got free they hadn’t. She wouldn’t be hurting if they had gotten free, right?
“Easy, Ms. Green,” the doctor said and leaned in. “I’m Dr. Eustes. I’m going to give you a little something for the pain but I need for you to stay awake for just a couple of minutes.” He looked to the police officer. “We’ve gotten the statements from the other women, however, you were far too injured to let you come out of your coma before now.” She gasped, instantly hating the inhalation.
“Coma?”
“You were seriously injured,” the doctor told her. “The others are in protective custody but in a safe house. You had several broken ribs, your arm, your leg, and then the burns around your ankles and other areas.” She saw the blush on his face. She knew what he was talking about. The impotent asshole that burnt her took great pleasure in burning the insides of her thighs as well as other places.
“The man who held you all captive has been identified as Carl Parker.” This came from the detective that she hadn’t seen earlier. He approached her. “I’m Detective Bloom. I’m sorry for the pain you are feeling and I promise that I will make this as short as I can.”
“Thank you,” Olivia said softly. “Has he been caught?”
“We are searching for him now,” Olivia was told. “We have a few questions.” He pulled up a seat and looked at her. She could see the sympathy in his gaze as he looked to her. “He seemed to be very focused on you. From what we understand, you were the second to the last one that he took but the one that he seemed to take a liking to.”
Olivia nodded, the pain in her head intense. “Yes. He wanted me to call him Master and I told him to go fuck himself.”
There was a chuckle from the uniformed officer. She was glad someone found it funny. “I wouldn’t bend. No matter what he did to me, I wouldn’t sway. I think that he made it his personal mission to break me. He had tried with Clara Smith and failed as well. Luckily for her he found me while going out for dinner one night.” She gagged. “From that second on he focused on me. Limp-dick fucker.”
“Will you be willing to testify against him? We’ve found a number of tapes, but in each he’s kept himself just out of frame and no audio.”
“You better believe it.” Olivia finally started to feel the pain medication that had been injected into her IV by Dr. Eustes and sighed. “I’m sorry, Detective Bloom, but I really want to go back to sleep.”
“Of course. We will keep an officer in the room with you as well as two outside of your door. We haven’t caught him yet but we will and we will make him pay.”
Olivia nodded. She wasn’t safe, that’s what went through her mind. As much as she didn’t want to sleep, she had no choice. She was forcefully tugged into slumber by the heavy medication that had been given to combat her pain.
Chapter One
The last few months had been both heaven and hell. It had been heaven because she realized that the boy she had fallen for so long ago was alive and well. He was living his life and he was whole. He wasn’t dead as she had half expected when his mother had told her that he had joined the service.
For just a moment, Olivia let herself think back to those days. She had been so in love with Lee Jacobs that nothing would have stopped her from giving herself to him in every way possible. Then it happened.
* * * *
Flashback to ten years earlier...
“Brian, I swear to Jesus that if you touch me again I will kill you,” Olivia told him. “I said no.”
“Come on, baby,” Brian Byrd said as he stood before her, in her bedroom nonetheless, absolutely naked. “You know you want me.”
He had walked in on her when she had been showering. Brian, a friend of her older brother’s, had a key to their home that she hadn’t known about. He had been harmless, flirting with her for years, so she hadn’t thought anything about it. She tightened her towel around her body again and glared at the man. “Get the hell out of my bedroom.”
He walked toward her then, grabbing her and throwing the towel into the bathroom and began to kiss her. Olivia had been so shocked that she hadn’t moved.
That was when Lee walked in. He hadn’t said a word, just walked right back out again and never said a single word.
When Olivia was finally able to break free of Brian’s grasp she slapped him and pushed him out of her room, never realizing that had been the reason for Lee walking out of her life, not until she had written him the next letter while he was in boot camp. That’s when she found out that the man she loved obviously hadn’t loved her as much as he had claimed, otherwise he would have believed her when she told him that it hadn’t been what he had thought.
After that she found out she was pregnant, had tried to tell him but he refused her letters...
* * * *
“No, no more thoughts about that,” she whispered to herself and wiped at her tears. She touched the locket she wore, the one and only picture of her son inside of the object and a picture of the man she loved on the other side. “I can’t go down that road again.” Even today, even when he suddenly showed back up in her life, she noticed that he refused to talk to her, he ignored her completely and hadn’t even looked her in the eyes. No, he might be there to protect her, but that was it. The feelings that she had for him were obviously far more than the ones he had for her way back when. It was time for Olivia to stop living in the past, she hoped.
She picked up the basket of flowers and retied the bow. “Okay, there we go.” She closed the back door of her delivery van and walked up to the house of the Foster’s. It was the annual delivery of flowers to Anna Foster from her husband, such an incredibly sweet gesture. The old man had come to her one day and asked her to ensure that his wife received a bouquet of tulips every year on their anniversary until she was dead and gone and even then he wanted them to be left upon the woman’s grave. He had pre-paid for everything. He had been such a sweetheart.
That was love. That was real and true love, an undying love. Something she had thought she had with Lee, but she had obviously been wrong. Plastering a smile on her face, she rang the doorbell and waited for Mrs. Foster to answer and receive her flowers as she did every single year.
When she got back to her van, she saw another note on the windshield from Lee telling her that she better ensure that they knew from now on when she was leaving. She rolled her eyes. Of course he would leave her a note instead of actually talking to her. Nice. She wadded the note up and threw it into her van before she climbed in and headed back to the flower shop.
Chapter Two
Driving his taped-up knuckles harder into the heavy bag. Jacobs tried to push out all his rage with each punch. It wasn’t working any better than it had all the other times he’d come in to the office gym early to work out.
Ever since Olivia Green had come back into his life, he’d been fighting wave after wave of emotion inside of him. She was the only woman he’d ever loved, the only woman he could see himself marrying, and in one moment she’d shattered every illusion he’d had. He knew he should really let the past go. He also knew that what he’d seen that had torn him apart wasn’t what it had appeared.
He’d been hurt, gutted even by the scene he’d witnessed, and yeah, he’d done something stupid. He was a guy after all, and guys tend to bury their emotions down deep when they are struck a painful blow. Yet he couldn’t let it go now any more than he had back in that moment.
Jacobs remembered it like it was yesterday. In a way it was yesterday in his memories. It was the day he’d stopped living, the day he’d given up hoping for a future, and gone on a self-destructive bender that had ended with him signing up with the Marines. What did he care if he died in some foreign country? He’d lost all that mattered to him anyway, his life was over. Or so it had felt at the time.
For all his years in the military, he’d been a machine, doing whatever was necessary to get the job done even at great risk to his own survival. While he’d eventually o
pened up enough to let the team in, and to see them as brothers, there still had been a part of him that was coated heavily in ice, never to be thawed out. All because of her.
Not that letting them in had stopped him from being the first to always volunteer for the suicide missions. Only once had he regretted making the choice. A flaw in the ice around his heart had, for a moment, given him that small moment of wishful thinking.
Two years before he’d finally gotten out of the Corps, he and the team had been on mission, strictly recon and information gathering. They’d found themselves in a shit storm instead.
Catching the punching bag, Jacobs rested his forehead to the leather and closed his eyes as he panted hard. He could feel sweat trickling down his spine in a chilling touch as his mind swept back to that moment.
* * * *
Two years, eight months ago…
“I count six crates of RPGs, Burner,” he said quietly to their commanding officer, Michael Burnett. Pulling the binoculars down, he shot a look to his right where the man waited. “There are more crates there, but I can’t see from this angle what the fuck they are.”
Another man crouch-walked up to their position, and flopped down on his ass with his back to the outcropping of rocks they were using for cover. “I think someone lied to us, Burner,” Aeron “Razor” Cutter said. “There are a hell of a lot more than a dozen men down there. Reaper says that he’s counting forty-nine males. He’s also spotted a convoy of sorts coming this way. No count yet, it’s still too far out, but we’re going to have to move. They’ll spot at least two of the positions if they are even half looking when they come around that bend up the way.”
