Hope's Delta (Special Forces: Operation Alpha) (Delta Team Three Book 5)

by Riley Edwards

  “Baby, that’s fucked-up,” Jangles whispered.

  She didn’t want his whispered words, she didn’t want his pity, his concern, or anything else. All she wanted was to be left alone to drown in her misery.

  That was all she deserved.

  That was all she’d allow herself to have.

  Chapter 7

  Jangles stared down Hope, and he did this thinking about how strong she was. She’d never see it that way, but it was the truth. She’d been through hell and she’d survived. Knowing what he knew now, he understood. The steel-encased shell she’d wrapped around herself. The quick smiles, albeit fake—unless he had her alone in his bed, then she gave him real.

  The tough-chick attitude she tossed around while serving drinks at the Ugly Mug. He’d watched her joke with Lefty, Trigger, Oz, Brain, Doc, Lucky, and Grover. The same with his team. Always pretending to be one of the guys. She’d engage the women when they were there but always gravitated to the men. Now he knew why—men didn’t pry, they didn’t ask personal questions, they didn’t want to gossip and share stories. Especially the type of men they were—they all had secrets they’d never tell. Even if they could, they still wouldn’t.

  She was safe with them.

  And she’d felt safe with Jangles because he was one of those men, therefore he wouldn’t pry, ask questions, or share personal information.

  Until he did. Until everything changed. Now Hope wasn’t safe—at least not emotionally—and she was going to retreat. But Jangles wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

  He just didn’t know how to play this. Nor did he have anyone he could ask.

  “Just let me go,” she hissed.

  Not a chance, baby.

  Jangles yanked the pillow she was resting on away, forcing Hope to roll to her back. Then he slid in beside her, tagged her arm, and rolled her back so her head was on his shoulder. Without releasing her wrist, he held it to his chest and asked, “Four?”

  Hope’s body was already wound tight, stiff as a board, yet he still felt her go solid.

  “Don’t do this.”

  “Four, Hope?”

  “Don’t.”

  He figured since she blamed herself for her parents’ murders, she’d lumped them into the tally, but that was only three when he added Wentworth.

  “Where does your brother live?”

  The solid that Hope was seconds before turned rigid, her nails dug into his chest, and her breathing became labored.

  What the fuck?

  Jangles clenched and unclenched his jaw. He couldn’t get that fucking look out of his head, the one where Hope’s eyes were cold and shattered.

  “Baby? Where’s your brother?”

  “Texas State Cemetery. Section M, lot A, grave 3288.”

  Fuck.

  Christ.

  “Hope—”

  “He was almost sixteen when Mom and Dad died. Got good grades, ran track, always happy, nothing bothered Peter. He wasn’t like me, he didn’t care what other people thought. He didn’t care that they made fun of us because Mom and Dad worked hard but still couldn’t afford to buy us nice stuff. He didn’t care that people knew we wore hand-me-downs or what Mom could find at Goodwill. He didn’t care that people knew we had free lunches at school, or we lived in a rundown old house. He was just him, smiling, happy, in his own world. I killed that. I killed him.”

  Jangles didn’t believe she’d physically killed her brother. But he was dead, so something had gone horribly wrong.

  “Did Wentworth get to him?”

  Hope shook her head and pressed her face deeper. Just like last night, it was as if she wanted to crawl inside him, seek comfort in his arms. Jangles let that slide through him, easing some of the burn her pain caused, filling him with a different kind of warmth. Heat that felt good, that fed the need to protect her.

  “He killed himself,” she whispered.

  Jangles fought to keep his body still, but his eyes closed.

  Damn.

  “After Mom and Dad. He went to live with my grandparents. They didn’t want me. I mean, who could blame them? I killed their daughter.” There it was again, the hollowed out, steely gaze.

  Who could blame them for not being there for their emotionally damaged, distraught granddaughter who had just lost her parents? Jangles could, and he did.

  But before he could point that out she continued in her cold, dead tone. “But they took in Peter. I wasn’t allowed to see him. I understood that, too. But when he was eighteen, he found me. He was a wreck. Gone was my little brother. I hated what I’d done to him and he told me he hated me. He wanted money and I gave it to him. He came back months later demanding more and I gave it. I knew he was using it to buy drugs, but I still gave it to him. The last time I saw him, I begged him to get help. I offered to pay for the treatment. He was furious and rightfully so. But I wanted to get him help, not support his drug habit. He was of a different mind and took all the money I had and left. Then he left a different way. Two days later, my grandmother showed up, threw my brother’s suicide letter at me, spit on me, and left.”

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  “Yeah, I did. He told me I did. His final words to me in the letter were to make sure I never forgot that I killed Mom and Dad, and killed him, too. He told me. So you see, I killed four people. I’ll live with that until I die. I want to live with it, I want to remember, I owe it to them never to forget.”

  Fucking jacked.

  The tangled mess inside of Hope was so fucked he wasn’t sure where to start. And if he found a starting point, he wasn’t sure how to get it all untangled, especially because she was hellbent on keeping it. It was unhealthy as fuck but she wanted to hold on to the pain. Hell, she wanted to breathe it in and keep it fresh.

  There were so many things wrong with what Hope said, it sliced through him like a blade, but hurt worse than any he’d physically felt cut his flesh.

  God knew, if he felt shattered, she had to be shredded.

  Chewed up and spit out.

  He needed to find a way to break through and pull her from the hell she was purposely living in.

  Jangles had seen a lot, done a lot, lived through gunfire and bombings. He watched good men die, extinguished many lives. But never in all his years living through the horrors of war had he seen anything so cruel as what Hope was doing to herself.

  He couldn’t stand by and watch it.

  He wouldn’t have been able to do it if she was just Hope the bartender, but after finally admitting to himself all that she meant to him, there was no chance in hell he was going to watch her suffer.

  Not a fucking chance.

  Chapter 8

  “Yo!” BF’s loud, gravelly voice echoed in the small office. “Little Bit, you got a visitor.”

  Hope clenched her fists until her short nails cut into her palms.

  “Stop calling me Little Bit,” she clipped. “Unless you want me to start calling you Sebastiano.”

  “You call me Sebastiano and I’ll fire your ass.”

  No, he wouldn’t. BF threatened all kinds of crazy shit but never followed through.

  “I’ll save you the trouble and quit, you don’t stop with the nickname.”

  “You gotta problem?”

  Um, yeah, I have many problems.

  Top of her list of problems was Jangles, one notch down was BF calling her Little Bit. A nickname said familiarity, friendship, belonging, comradery. None of which she wanted.

  She preferred anonymous, lonely, nothingness.

  Something that BF had never given her in the eight years she’d known him. He’d taken one look at the broken twenty-two-year-old she’d been and promptly tucked her under his wing and given her a job. She’d worked hard for him, starting as a barback-slash-janitor and had worked her way up to managing the Ugly Mug and his shooting range. He’d taught her everything she knew about cars, how to fix them, how to maintenance them, then he’d taught her about plumbing, electrical work, and how to
keep his house, the trailers, and her RV in tip-top shape. And he’d taught her gunsmithing.

  He did this cantankerously, which seriously worked for her because she didn’t want kindness. But then the old man had slipped past her defenses and she started to like him. Now she adored him.

  But she still hated the dumb nickname.

  “Yeah, you coming back here bugging me when I’m trying to replace Bozo’s trigger. You know I have approximately three minutes to get it done before your friend starts yelling about the reasons why a woman should never touch a firearm. And if I have to hear him say it one more time I’m gonna lose my shit, so maybe you wanna let me get back to it?”

  A deep chuckle filled the space and Hope knew it hadn’t come from BF. Her gaze lifted from the Beretta in front of her and there he was, Problem Number One in the flesh, leaning on the doorjamb right behind BF.

  Shit.

  “Goddamn! What’s taking so long? It’s a trigger. I didn’t ask for a custom build and engrave!” Bozo shouted and Hope raised a brow in annoyance. “Shoulda done it my damn self.”

  “It’s a two-hand job, Bozo. Shut up and let the girl work,” Chief returned and Hope shook her head.

  “See what you did?” Hope asked. “Now Bozo’s gonna lose his mind because Chief made a crack about needing two hands. So, thanks to you, I’m gonna have to listen to all the things Bozo can do one-handed, and a lot of those things are gonna make me happy I skipped breakfast so it doesn’t make a reappearance. And so we’re clear, if he talks about callouses, baby oil, and self-love, I’m freaking quitting.”

  “Better get out of my way, Jangles,” BF said as he wheeled himself around and started to roll out the door, but not before he muttered, “Maybe you can fix her pissy-assed mood.”

  Jerk.

  Fat chance, considering Jangles was the reason she was in a pissy-assed mood.

  Jangles closed the door, thankfully drowning out the men who were gathered for the bi-monthly get-together. Normally, Hope loved hanging with the old coots, listening to them rib and joke with one another. But mostly she liked being around the vets because, like her, they were all what society would call damaged. They weren’t perfect. Some were missing a limb, some more than one—arms, legs, fingers. Some had burns, chunks of flesh missing. And some had injuries you couldn’t see unless you looked deep. Like her injury, they were of the soul, not body. So being around the men gave her a sense of peace.

  But unfortunately, Jangles closing the door meant she was locked in a room with a man she didn’t want to think about.

  “Trigger spring break?” Jangles asked.

  “No. Bozo didn’t like the stock trigger. He said it was mushy. I’m dropping in a Wilson Combat.”

  Hope kept her head down as she continued to work on the Beretta, hoping that if she ignored Jangles he’d go away. It was rude, but necessary if she wanted to keep her sanity intact. A trigger job didn’t take three minutes but it also didn’t take thirty, and she was done before she was ready to face Jangles.

  “You’re good at that,” he noted. “BF teach you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hope, baby, look at me.” Jangles’ words might’ve been soft but the demand was clear.

  She didn’t look up. Instead, she kept her eyes trained on the now reassembled Beretta and said, “You know, it would be really awesome if for once in my life something could go right. Just once have something go my way. Like, say, when I break things off with a hot Delta operator, he walks away without showing up at my place of business a few hours later to torture me. That’d be super great.”

  “Hot Delta operator?” He chuckled. “I don’t even know what that is. Is Delta even a real thing?”

  “I’m not being funny.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Hope’s gaze lifted from the gun to Jangles and her eyes narrowed. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m taking you to lunch.”

  “No, you’re—”

  “Babe, I get why you bagged on breakfast. I gave you that. But you’re leaving here to go directly to the bar to work another six hours. You’re eating before you do that.”

  “How big of you to give me that,” she mumbled.

  Unfortunately, Jangles didn’t respond to bitchy bait.

  “You need to fire that before you give it to the owner?” Jangles gestured to the Beretta.

  “Of course I do. I never give someone back a gun I worked on without firing it first.”

  “Right. Grab the nine and let's roll. I’m starving.”

  “Then you should mosey on out to your truck and go get food.” Jangles’ lips twitched and her irritation soared. “Seriously, Jangles, you should go. I’ll grab something at the bar.”

  Then in a supremely annoying maneuver, Jangles grabbed the gun off the workbench and turned to the door.

  “I changed my mind.” Oh, thank God. “I’m Beau. Just Beau. Anytime, anywhere, whether I got you naked in bed or having a beer at the bar. No more of this Jangles shit.”

  “That’s how you introduced yourself,” she returned.

  “No, it’s not. That’s what you heard Woof call me when I was standing at the bar waiting for your fine ass to finish serving every fucking cowboy in the place that chose your side of the bar instead of Jake’s. Which, babe, I fully understood at the time, because you’re gorgeous. But now it just pisses me the fuck off when every patron with a dick would rather wait five minutes to be served by you than not wait and have Jake pour them a drink.”

  Hope knew she looked like a fish when her mouth opened and closed several times before she sputtered, “Are you nuts?”

  “Yeah, Hope, I am. I’m totally fuckin’ nuts because I fell for the one woman in Texas that’s gonna fight me to the bitter end because she refuses to admit that we have something more than great sex. And so you don’t twist this, what I mean by more is that I have feelings for you. I care about you. And we’re gonna explore those feelings. You can bullshit all you want, say I mean nothing to you, but that’d be a lie. I know. You know. We both fuckin’ know it. So let’s go throw a few bullets downrange and hand this motherfucker off to whomever it belongs to so we can leave and I can feed my woman.”

  Hope swallowed past the lump in her throat.

  The self-loathing slithered around her heart and squeezed tight.

  “You can’t care about me.”

  “Wrong, Hope. I can and I do.”

  “No, you can’t. There’s nothing to care about.”

  “Wrong again, baby. And straight up, I’m gonna show you just how wrong you are.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “I know you don’t. That’s why I know I’m doing the right thing.”

  “But—”

  “You got two choices, Hope. Test this gun so we can go to lunch or I lock this door and start educating you on all the reasons why I care about you. And I’ll start by telling you I know this tough-chick exterior you got is bogus. I know because I’ve seen you with BF. He’s old, he’s grumpy, he’s pretty much an ass to everyone unless they’ve served their country in one way or another. He gives you shit and you shovel it right back, but you do it in a way that shows you love him. You’re loyal to him, you bust your ass for him, and don’t deny it because I see it.”

  “You are nuts!” Hope shouted and threw her hands in the air.

  “You already said that. What else you got?”

  “You’re not paying attention. Which is surprising considering who you are. You notice everything. I don’t want more. And trust me, I’m not worth—”

  “Now you’re pissing me off,” Jangles growled his warning.

  “See? I’m a pain in the ass. You should—”

  Hope didn’t finish. In two quick steps, Jangles was across the room, his mouth slammed down on hers, his tongue shoved in—uninvited but not unwelcomed, and damn it all to hell, she kissed him back. Then her hands went to his shoulders, trailed up the back of his neck, and finally, her fingers slid through
his hair as she deepened the kiss. God, she loved his hair, loved that he wore it longer than military regulations. It made him look like a step above badass but one down from a pillaging Viking.

  Hope took and tasted, drank from him. It wasn’t often he allowed her to control the action—not the kissing, touching, or sex—Beau was all about him giving to her. He led the way, he guided them where he wanted them to go. Sometimes that guidance was rough and demanding, sometimes it was slow and coaxing. Whatever the speed, it was magnificent. But right then, he’d passed the torch and she knew it was costing him. Hope felt it—his pent-up energy was rolling off him in waves, washing over her, upping her excitement tenfold.

  More.

  She needed more.

  Hope didn’t want to acknowledge the truth, she wanted to deny her feelings, pretend she wasn’t in love with him. Beau Talbot would wreck her. If she had any chance of keeping what was left of her sanity intact, she needed to let him go.

  But what if I let him in?

  A sliver of hope pierced her heart and apprehension coursed through her blood. But she couldn’t deny it—couldn’t deny that she wanted Beau to bulldoze through all her walls and make her face her demons.

  Blood-soaked dreams or a beautiful future…

  She didn’t deserve a future.

  But Beau did.

  Chapter 9

  Jangles sat across the table from Hope. He’d purposely chosen the corner booth in the back of the tiny diner so they’d have privacy. He knew the only reason Hope agreed to go to lunch with him was because BF threatened to take her off the schedule and call in Brian, another bartender who worked at the Ugly Mug, if she didn’t take a break and get food in her stomach.

  As surly as BF could be, he genuinely cared for his employees. Hope especially.

  “How’d you meet BF?” Jangles asked.

  Hope glanced over the top of a one-page laminated menu she’d been studiously but unnecessarily studying, then without a word, dropped her gaze and commenced ignoring him.