“Try to get rid of me,” I murmur, kissing him softly, putting all the love and need I feel into one kiss before pulling away with a frown.
“Just one thing that’s been bugging me. Why didn’t that shooter you all talk about save me this time? I’m offended, honestly I am,” I mutter.
“Because you didn’t need it. Lex is a laid-back asshole, but he’s deadly when he’s pissed. If that broad had so much as sniffed you, she’d be dead already.”
Lex tenses, and I feel him reach for his hip as I twist my head and look up, staring into the most dazzling pair of eyes I have ever seen on a human being. The man currently smiling at me is…hot. I guess. If you go for the dangerous, I could kill you without guilt type of man.
Which I don’t. I far prefer the laughing prankster.
“Don’t, Lex. I’m not here to hurt you or your woman. Just talk.”
“You took your time, asshole,” Lex snarls, pushing up and grabbing me to pull me into his side.
He seems tense, on edge, and yet the look in his eyes when he looks at the guy is so filled with hope and…joy. I have to admit to feeling confused as hell.
Jericho, on one of his many rambling conversations, told me all about the “guardian angel” who’s been protecting their women for the last year or so. It sounded romantic at first until he told me that no matter what good came out of it, having some sniper watching your every move could be a death sentence.
Not that I feel that way now, looking at the man. He’s big, deadly—even I, with my untrained eye, can see that—but he’s also…
Soft. Yeah, definitely, I think when he smiles tightly and shakes his head, taking a seat without asking permission.
“I’ve been busy. I only came because I need you to stop digging. Please, Lex. It’s for your own good that no one ever finds out that I exist.”
“Jesus, Gunny! You’re a prick you, know that? Storm still mourns you, and the guys still visit the memorial every year on your birthday. You have to tell them you’re not dead,” he snarls, pushing me into a chair before stalking to the coffee machine to grab the pot and an extra cup.
I’m a little confused and somewhat resentful of the fact that my love declaration just got cut short by a man I know should be dead. I’ve heard this story.
I’m also all kinds of curious though when I stare into his face. The only part of him that resembles his photo is the caramel color of his eyes.
“Wait a minute! Are you…? Oh, my God, I cannot believe I’m meeting the infamous Gunny. Jericho told me all about you. Why are you here? Is that a mask or your face?” I ask, checking him out with interest until Lex snarls and pulls my head back for a kiss that stamps his ownership very clearly.
“Stop looking at him. He was uglier before, and he’d make nasty-looking babies.”
We both snort at that, and Lex seats himself with a frown.
“Why now?”
“Because Zulu needs to die, and I can’t do that without help.”
“You expect me to believe that, you fuck? What happened on Hawk Flight?”
“I made the call to die to save someone I loved, Lex. It’s that simple and that complicated.”
“Storm.”
“No. Her,” he says, communicating silently with Lex.
I’m dying to know what they’re not saying but—
“She loved Storm.”
“No. But I wanted her to because she needed him, and I needed her to be okay after I left.”
What? Who? I am so confused here!
“How did you know it was me? Even Storm hasn’t figured it out, and he’s the one I thought would get it first.”
Lex snorts and looks away, his face cast in stone.
“I’m not an idiot, nor am I so naïve as to believe that a trained soldier would throw himself on an IED when you had more than enough room to avoid it, you ass.”
Gunny smiles and inclines his head before turning to grin at me.
“He was always the smart one. And I see he wised up even more with you, sweetheart. She’s a looker, Lex.”
Lex snarls and keeps glaring while I preen and try very hard to remember that I cannot have a crush on another man when I’m in love with and committed to Lex.
It’s hard though, especially with the fine scars covering the right side of his face near his ear and the almost indolently amused twist of his lips.
“Why are you here? And don’t give me that bullshit about Zulu, because we both know all about that shit, don’t we?”
Gunny sighs and shakes his head, chuckling under his breath.
“You always saw through me. That’s why they took me out of it so soon…even knowing it was a risk.”
“Why are you here!?
“They have her, Lex, and I need to get her back.”
OWNING TRACE
Chapter One
Jess
My name is Felicity Daniels. My name is Adriana Legianno. My name is Tammy Sue Baker. My name is Killian Monroe. My name is….
No one.
At least not anymore, I think, as I keep my body language as relaxed as I possibly can and neatly fold the next item of clothing to pack in my bag. It’s been four years since I came to this house, this state, and even longer since I had it in me to pretend that I was Rachel Keene, the woman I had to be for far longer than either of us ever anticipated.
Poor Rachel has been through so much in the last few years. If I stop to think about any of it, I can’t rightly say if I’d laugh or cry at this point. All I know is that she saved my life, broke my heart, and left me all alone in a tale I never wanted to be in.
The deal was four years, but I’m done. I was done the moment she decided she wanted her identity back. I can’t wear another matronly pencil skirt, or look at another little kid without going crazy right now. That’s just the truth of it, so we’ll all just have to buck up.
Sadly, it’s not Rachel who I’ve been these last four years. No, I’ve been Jess Keene, the other twin, the woman who never went into war-torn areas and reported, or got engaged to one of the nicest men I have ever met. Or left him hanging when she had an affair with her boss and got married and had his child.
You’re confused, right? Most days, these days, so am I. But I’ll do my best to explain so that maybe, just on the off chance you’ll have some mercy and you won’t hate me quite as much as I hate myself.
See…
I have a twin sister. An identical twin sister who just happened to be a reporter many moons ago before she had a car accident and spent months recuperating.
Her name is Rachel.
When my unit got intel that things in Afghanistan were going pear-shaped and that a new big bad was moving around in the area, I decided that I needed to take a closer look and…
Oh, who am I kidding? I was stationed in that hellhole as a Marine on my last tour but had managed to get zero intel at the time because, as hard as this may be to believe, it’s still not as easy for women to integrate into the service, any service really.
Especially not when you have twenty men surrounding you, all looking at you as if you’re the most fragile thing God ever created. I couldn’t do my job, which was actually more than hauling ass across that hellish place and walking patrols.
See, I was there to gather intelligence on a man affectionately named Zulu due to his brutal, warrior-like rep as a skilled tactical planner and a killer. I’d spent months as mousy, little, brunette Sergeant Regina Cob, but then my people called me in and tried to pull me.
Wasn’t happening. Ever. I’m stubborn. I know what I want, and once I have a target, I never let go. At least, I never used to, I think obstinately, as I shove an antiperspirant stick into the side pocket and move on to the last of my clothing.
Once upon a time, I was that woman: Agent Keene. Now I’m just Jess Keene. Disgraced. Fired. Never the same Jess Keene.
I used to work for the CIA, if you haven’t already surmised that. I was a very deep undercover operative, who was known
by my unit to be determined and capable.
Until I stole my sister’s identity and went into a place I couldn’t have…shouldn’t have been. Don’t worry, Rachel was down with all that shit from the get-go and even laughed when I explained that shit could go bad and she’d likely have to grab up my identity if I came back “pine.”
At that point, she and her fiancé, Jasper, were just relieved that someone could keep up her work while Rachel recovered from a spinal injury and had surgeries to repair the burns she’d sustained on some of her upper body and some of her face on the left side.
So, I became Rachel and went into Afghanistan, this time as the blonde, steely-eyed reporter, who had more courage than reason. That was Rachel’s bit. She never scuttled away from her job as a war correspondent and actually loved the danger.
See, twins, we may be polar opposites in many things, but in some we’re entirely identical. We both had a thing for danger and adrenalin. Mine manifested itself as an agent with the CIA. Rachel became a reporter and never balked at going into places even roaches would hesitate to enter.
But, okay, back to explaining. Rachel was T-boned by a car one night on one of the rare occasions she was back home in Boston to see her man. She escaped death, but as I said, she was messed up, physically and emotionally and that…
That gave me the “in” I needed. I won’t lie. I am an opportunist by nature, so when I realized that my famous sister was out of action, well, I capitalized on it I guess you could say.
I needed something to get me into places that I couldn’t go at that time. Being Regina Cob restricted me in ways you wouldn’t believe, and I’m not ashamed to say it was driving me nuts. So, I ditched her mousy ass and came stateside after the director decided to pull my butt out of the mission.
I had to regroup and do something when I realized I was going to be grounded and a man I’d spent months learning about, getting to know and, okay, obsessing over to be honest, would be lost to me—all that hard work down the drain.
I was obsessed with the ghost known as Zulu, a man Central Intelligence reported as being the worst thing since Osama Bin Fuckhead. I admit to being a total robot when it came to him, and I got so desperate I hit on a plan that was both brilliant and stupid at the same time.
Rachel was still grounded with a spinal injury; her face was a mess and…
She had just landed a very rare invite by the military to shoot some footage to help with PR after a very good mission went very wrong. It was basically a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her, which I jumped on when she was at her weakest.
Thus, I became Rachel.
And I spent a good amount of time doing exactly what the military needed me to do. I also gathered a shitload of intel on the monster I later learned was no monster at all, but rather a ghost that floated among mere mortals.
I discovered something that would have changed the face of military intelligence and ruined good men if it ever got out. So, I made a judgement call and managed to fall for one of the worst terrorists that ever walked the face of the earth.
I call him that, and he used to laugh whenever I did, because he enjoyed the irony of it so terribly.
Zulu. Gunny. Granger Darby. Or so he wanted me to believe.
They were all the same man. The man I loved and cherished for the first time, in a life that was planned as a work-only life if I’m to be honest. I’d never had a relationship that lasted past maybe six dates and some mechanical, I-need-an-orgasm sex.
And then I tracked my ghost to a little bomb shelter right beneath the military’s noses and discovered that I was dealing with a man that was no ordinary operative but actually one of the most diabolically genius men I have ever met.
Think 007—the Daniel Craig version—cold and badass without all the cloying suave of Connery, and then add in a sprinkle of Q and M and you have Gunny. The man is literally a ghost, a made-up figment of the imaginations of some very powerful men that I would never out, because there is no rock big enough for me to cower under if they decided to come after me.
Most people—myself included at one naïve point—assume that all these intelligence agencies are their own entities. They’re not. Everything, I mean literally everything, is a web that connects at one point, and when I found it, and Gunny, I wished I never had.
I spent months helping him lead the Army exactly where he wanted them to go, and it was all good until a few nights before my kidnapping. See, turns out that sleeping with and falling for a man like Gunny was not my brightest moment.
Also turns out that when you get kidnapped by a man who is supposed to love you, and then uses you to facilitate a hostage tag, well…
Let’s just say I was pissed and hurt and so damned numb I actually didn’t do a thing to get myself out of it. Gunny used me and almost got me killed, and the only damn thing that makes up for that was the fact that I got out alive.
And that I got to love Storm. Not in the right way, granted. But hell, I was up for something other than a boyfriend who used me like a piece of rotten meat and then got himself blown all to hell.
And now I’m here after spending years hiding away. See, Rachel eventually got back on her feet, had numerous surgeries to repair her face, and got her happily ever after.
Unfortunately, that meant I had to walk away from Nick Storm, the first good thing that ever happened to me. It’s really hard to be Rachel, the woman he loved and was engaged to, when another identical Rachel was going to marry her very high-profile fiancé and live in the limelight.
So yeah, that happened. And you know what…it wasn’t okay. Not because I left Nick and broke his heart, because let’s face it, he deserved more than a bitter woman who clung to him to get over her dead lover, the one who’d betrayed her.
No, it sucked because I actually adored him. A lot. And the sex was good, too. And dammit, I was all alone after I skipped out on him. He hates me now, so yeah, I don’t even get to be remembered fondly.
All I have is a little house in a little town where I teach. I had to leave the agency after Gunny’s little clusterfuck. It turns out that helping a terrorist—as everyone thinks of Zulu—is treason.
The only reason I escaped that and received walking papers was because my director knew a little of the score. Not enough for him to want to hunt Zulu, but enough that I escaped waterboarding and staring at a concrete prison wall for the next sixty years.
I’ve been fine, at least I thought I’d accepted my lonely, achingly boring, “Jesus let me have a freak embolism and die instantly” existence until I got a call yesterday on my secure line.
That’s when I roared back to life in the worst possible way because, as they say, there’s nothing like revenge, and that bitch is definitely best served cold.
Ice cold and bitter as poison.
Seems someone forgot to tell me that my errant lover survived the—
“Move and you die.”
I tense and go still as I hear the softly uttered voice. My mind goes blank for a good few seconds when I feel the barrel of a gun at the back of my head and what I know is a spook at my back.
Shit. Great going, Jess. You let yourself get so rusty you just let them creep up on you, huh?
Not really. Look, I was an agent for a long time, and I still am. Of course, I knew someone was following me. I can feel that shit in my sleep. What I didn’t anticipate, and what pisses me off a lot, is the fact that someone just snuck up on me because I was thinking about Gunny instead of doing what I should have been doing—concentrating.
The feel of the cold metal against my skull is a wakeup call I don’t need, because honestly, all I wanted out of this was a chance to get out of here and run.
Seems cowardly, but it’s what I have now. I’m no longer up for running and hiding because I have a family I get to see every three months, if I’m lucky and Rachel’s husband lets me near them.
“You do not want to do this,” I say slowly, raising my arms in surrender.
“Bitc
h, I really do. You know we’ve been looking for Shadow for a while now. We never suspected it was a woman.”
I snort because, yeah, no one ever suspected little old me of being the fly in their ointment. That’s what made me an effective operative, and it also kept me alive far longer than was reasonable too.
“What?”
Play dumb. The first thing I learned that the agency never taught me. Oh, I got the whole torture disassociation training, etcetera, but this is something I’ve had to teach myself. Deny. Deny. Deny. Talk a good game if possible.
The gun digs deeper, and I hear a chuckle.
“Dewy, this isn’t funny anymore, and I’m not going to play your role-playing games if you get nasty again. I told you last time! What is that? The potato peeler again? I asked you not to use the one grandma Rina gave me!”
Okay, I haven’t had to do this in a while. The closest I’ve gotten lately is telling a kid that I’ve never met the devil, but hey, what do you expect, some kids just hate their teacher no matter what.
“You know what’s sad? They threw you away, and you’re still loyal.”
That’s the last thing I hear before I pass out. Darn it.
Chapter Two
Jess
My body isn’t mine anymore. I’ve screamed and cried and begged till my throat is raw. I’ve got nothing left, and part of me knows that the Frankenpersonality guy was right; I’m loyal to people who don’t give two shits about me.
Pulling myself up despite the agony that streaks through me, I look around at my cell through one eye, hating the cold concrete that has no give beneath my ass, hating the oppressive heat that’s like an ever-present blanket around my shoulders.
Hating that I’m so beat up I can’t even keep my head up without use of the wall. I’ve long since lost my clothes, the only thing I have left is a pair of cruddy panties and my sports bra.
I can smell myself, at least I think I can through my swollen nose, and it is not a pleasant smell. I’m way past ripe at this point though half of it is cut by the metallic scent of blood.
THE WATCHERS: 6 Military Romance Bundle Page 75
