King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13)
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King’s Ransom
Suzanne Brockmann
Suzanne Brockmann Books
“The name Brockmann means romantic suspense!”
—RT Book Reviews
“Openly gay FBI agent Jules Cassidy (is) one of the most charming and original characters in popular fiction today.”
—Library Journal
“You know when you hear a Lady Gaga song on the radio—it has a definite sound. You know when you see a Kate Spade handbag—it has a definite look. And you know when you’re reading a Suzanne Brockmann book—it has a definite style.”
—Marissa O’Neill, BN Heart-to-Heart Blog
About Some Kind of Hero:
“With brilliant sexual chemistry, laugh-out-loud humor, riveting action, and flawlessly rendered characters, Brockmann’s latest quickly draws readers back into her high-stakes Troubleshooters world…Beautifully written and as heart-gripping as it is satisfying.”
—Library Journal *Starred Review*
“Well worth the wait. Jam-packed with adrenaline-fueled action and sizzling sexual tension, this is grade-A romantic suspense that will delight RITA award-winning Brockmann’s dedicated core of fans as well, and lure new readers.”
—Booklist *Starred Review*
“Brockmann brings her typical storytelling virtuosity to this new setting and also delves into the dark history of the Japanese internment during World War II and subtly comments on domestic abuse as well as society’s continuing racial prejudices through the characters’ experiences. A thought-provoking, deeply satisfying romance from a master of the genre.”
—Kirkus *Starred Review*
King’s Ransom is a work of fiction.
Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Suzanne Brockmann Books Original
First publication: December 2020
Copyright © 2020 Suzanne Brockmann
Cover Design: Scott Fowler
Photographer: Jason T. Gaffney
Cover model: David Allen Singletary
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Thank you for respecting this author and supporting her work.
Kindle Edition
ISBN: 978-0-9994645-9-5
www.SuzanneBrockmann.com
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Dedication
King’s Ransom
For the other 80,957,452* of you who voted for truth, empathy, kindness, compassion, equality, equity, justice, and inclusion.
It’s time to show the world what light and love can do.
*As of December 2, 2020
Special thanks to my kick-ass team of beta readers, and to all who supported the Kickstarter campaign for my latest LGBTQ rom-com movie, Out of Body.
Contents
About King’s Ransom
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Author’s Note
Excerpt from SEAL Camp
Excerpt from Out of Body
Also by Suzanne Brockmann
About Suzanne Brockmann
About King’s Ransom
Tall, Dark & Dangerous Series (Navy SEAL Team Ten) # 13
Hero: Navy SEAL LT (jg) Thomas King
Heroine: Tasha Francisco
First published December 2020
Tropes: Childhood friends to lovers
Snowbound/trapped in close quarters
The book that readers have been waiting for.
In Frisco's Kid, Tasha Francisco was a strong-willed, independent child, thrown into the temporary care of her Navy SEAL uncle, Alan "Frisco” Francisco.
Years older, but still just a kid himself, Thomas King lived nearby. Tasha took one look and declared she'd marry him someday. Thomas wasn't quite so sure about that.
Now Tasha's a strong-willed, independent young woman, and Thomas is an officer and a hospital corpsman with SEAL Team Ten.
When Tasha's Uncle Alan asks Thomas for a favor—to help keep his niece safe as she travels to a remote ski lodge with her wealthy boyfriend’s royal family—Thomas grimly accepts his role as Tasha's bodyguard. But things go horribly, terribly wrong, and Thomas and Tasha find themselves alone together in the freezing wilderness, on the run from the dangerous men who want her dead.
Thomas knows only one thing for sure: He'll sacrifice everything and anything to keep Tasha safe.
Chapter One
Timeline: King’s Ransom (TDD #13) is set both in the pre-pandemic present day, about a year after SEAL Camp (TDD #12), and about two and a half years after the end of Night Watch (TDD #11). Please embrace the time warp!
Sunday
He came to with a gasp and a splash, coughing and hacking brackish water out of his lungs as he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
He was in a ditch.
Icy rain pounded down around him and on his head, his bare shoulders, and back. He slipped in the mud—his arms were ridiculously weak—and went down, face-first, into a rapidly growing puddle.
This time he rolled to get out of it—drowning in two inches of water was not even close to a proper death for a U.S. Navy SEAL. Not that he had plans to die any time soon.
Except...
He’d been certain that he was going to die.
He remembered that clearly, even though he didn’t remember much else. An assault rifle aimed at his face as a voice screamed—No!—before the world went painfully dark.
Not again!
He remembered thinking that—Not again!—but nothing about this place was familiar.
He reached up to touch the throbbing back of his head as he lay there, still choking and coughing, on the side of that ditch. Rain streamed down his face and onto his bare chest and...
What the hell...?
He was naked.
And he’d definitely been hit from behind. His hand came back red with still-fresh blood.
They’d stripped him of his sidearm and his clothes, whoever they were, before rolling him into this ditch, no doubt hoping he’d drown when the skies opened up. It could’ve been worse. They could’ve left him with a double-pop to the head. There’d be no coughing that out of his aching lungs.
Why they hadn’t killed him outright, he didn’t quite know and...
Tasha!
Thomas King sat up fast, and the world spun around him, even as he scrambled up and out of the ditch to look at the road.
The road was empty—he was alone.
It was Tasha who’d screamed no
, right before he’d been hit.
Not again...
But she was as gone as the car—a black SUV—they’d been riding in.
As gone as the roadblock that had stopped them.
As gone as she’d been that distant, long-ago day, back when they were both still kids, before he’d joined the Navy, before he’d gone through BUD/S and become a SEAL. He hadn’t been able to protect Tasha then, either.
Not again!
Today’s clusterfuck rushed back to him then, in herky-jerky bits and pieces.
Tasha, a grown woman now, laughing at something he’d said—some joke he’d made to try to cut the tension as they sat together in the backseat of the SUV. The brightness of her quick smile; a flash of her golden-red curls...
Riding with Tasha Francisco, not quite ninety minutes into the three-hour trip from the remote airfield in northern New Hampshire to the even more remote mountain enclave in western Maine where the crown prince and his family were spending the week, skiing on artificial snow because the month was unseasonably warm.
Thomas shivered now. The forecast had been unusual for winter in New England, with lows in the mid-fifties, which felt far less warm in this cold, soaking rain, without his jacket or pants or boots.
The helo they’d been scheduled to take from the airfield to the resort had been in use for a medical emergency.
Allegedly in use. He had to add that, now.
The backup helicopter had had a rather massive mechanical failure—also allegedly—so he and Tasha had opted to just get it over with and make the long, slow, winding drive up into the mountains.
Three hours in the small space that was an SUV backseat would’ve been a challenge for anyone.
Tasha had been arguing with Thomas as they’d rounded one of the many curves along the mountainous road.
What else was new?
She was still embarrassed. Despite his jet-board attempts to smooth things over by going point-blank. Or maybe because of his attempts.
Tell me about Ted, he should’ve said. Tell me you’re happy. I just want you to be happy.
Instead, she’d been questioning his authority as her bodyguard, starting immediately after the sound of an explosion penetrated the high-end vehicle’s cone of silence. It had to have been relatively close—or massively large—for it to have been that loud.
Tasha had been in the middle of leaving a voicemail for Tedric, but after that boom she frowned at her cell phone. “That’s weird. I just lost all bars.”
Thomas immediately looked to their driver—white, mid-thirties, receding hairline—a man whose picture ID blandly claimed his name was Robert Johnston. The man’s brown eyes met his in the rearview.
“We’ve got some granite quarries in the area,” Johnston said in his curiously accent-free voice. Most of the locals in this part of New England sported heavy accents, but he didn’t. “Maybe they’re blasting again.”
On a Sunday? That was clearly bullshit—that, and the fact that Thomas’s own device, a military-grade dual-mode satellite phone, wasn’t able to get a cell connection either made him say, “Pull over as soon as you safely can.”
“Oh, God, please, no.” Tasha groaned.
“My cell’s out, too,” he informed her.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” she pointed out. “Service is spotty.”
“Which is why we need to stop and make sure I still have satellite access.”
She was from a career-military family—her uncle was an admiral who’d come up from the Teams—and she knew as well as any Navy SEAL that a SAT phone needed a direct line-of-sight to the satellite. That was close to impossible do in a moving vehicle, in the mountains.
Still, she rolled her eyes. “Thomas, come on, this is Maine, not Afghanistan. And you’re really only here because Uncle Alan is overprotective and probably a little insane—”
Thomas cut her off. “Why I’m here is irrelevant. I’m here. You’ve gotta let me do my job.”
She exhaled her exasperation heavily. “Unless the noise we heard was your satellite crashing to earth—hashtag, it wasn’t—”
“Look, I’m just following protocol.” Which meant that Thomas now had to confirm he still had access to communication.
“Again,” she said, “this is Maine, not—”
“I’m aware of that, thanks.”
“And if you can’t get through...?”
“We’ll need to find a landline,” he informed her.
“We’ll find a landline if we keep going,” Tash said. “At the ski lodge.”
“We’ll find one sooner, at that gas station we passed,” Thomas said.
“That was nearly an hour ago!” Tasha wasn’t happy.
He leaned forward as the driver passed a patch of open shoulder that would’ve been a perfect place to stop. “Something like that would’ve been good,” he told the man.
But the driver’s eyes were now glued to the road as the SUV’s engine worked to take them farther up the mountainside. They were actually accelerating. Clearly, the man didn’t want to piss off Tasha.
But Tasha wasn’t in charge. Thomas added volume plus some SEAL lieutenant to his voice. “Pull off. Over there.”
But the driver again sailed past another wide patch of gravel at the side of the road.
At that point he was more annoyed than concerned, and he checked his phone to see if cell service had returned.
Tasha, meanwhile, kept arguing as the driver finally slowed. “Going all the way back to that gas station will add two more hours to this trip. We’re nearly halfway there.” But then her voice changed. “What is that?”
It was then that Thomas had looked up to see the roadblock.
He knew instantly it was not the police—neither local nor state. There were no flashing lights, and the men in the road were wearing faux-military combat gear.
And suddenly, it all seemed appropriately connected and sinister: the conveniently out-of-commission helicopters plus the sound of that massive explosion they’d just heard.
Not again!
“Turn around! Do it! Now! Don’t stop!” he’d shouted, but Johnston stopped at the roadblock anyway.
Inside job. Thomas had thought it then. The driver was in on whatever this was—a kidnapping. And he still thought it now.
Johnston had gotten out of the SUV fast, popping open the locks, hands in the air.
Thomas already had his sidearm in his hands but he holstered it—no way would it be an effective weapon—because the team blocking the road with a big red truck and an extra-large white van was made up of six men in body armor, all holding AR-15s.
Before he could say more to Tasha than, “Don’t let them separate us, but if they do, I promise, I’ll find you!” the armed men immediately pulled open the back doors and dragged both of them out onto the road, on two opposite sides of the SUV.
“Don’t you touch her! Don’t you hurt her!” Thomas shouted, his hands high in the air, even as he was shoved roughly away from the vehicle, away from where they were pulling Tasha.
“Thomas!” he heard her scream, and yeah, one of the two men who were herding him toward the side of the road looked at him then and raised his weapon, and Thomas knew it was over.
He was dead.
But he wasn’t going down without a fight so he went for his sidearm, but never got to it.
Which was when Tasha screamed again, “No!” and the world went away, courtesy of what had to have been a rifle-butt to the back of his head.
Why hadn’t they killed him?
He honestly didn’t know.
Thomas now looked up at the sky, trying to judge what time it was—to figure out how long he’d been unconscious in that ditch. But thick, gray clouds hid the sun. It could’ve still been early afternoon—or less than an hour before sundown.
He wouldn’t know until the sun actually set.
He could smell smoke—something, somewhere was on fire despite the rain—and he could see the darker gray of
its haze mixing with the overcast skies. But he couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
Instead, he squinted inwardly at his foggy memories of the drive, also accessing the detailed map of the area that he’d burned into his brain before leaving San Diego. Had the general store with the big sign out in front of its old-school single pump saying “Last Gas” been forty miles down the road or fifty? Either way, there had been no new buildings or other signs of civilization for quite a distance, no turn-offs or side roads back the way they’d come, either.
One thing he knew for sure was that the road ahead—up this part of the mountain range and then back down into a valley before heading toward the bigger peak, atop of which sat the Ustanzian royal family compound—remained as desolate and isolated. There were no tourist attractions—selling sweatshirts or, you know, pants—just around the next bend.
The royal family had chosen this location specifically for its remoteness.
And Thomas guessed that the last gas station was forty miles down the road. If he were staging an abduction, he’d go no further than necessary into the middle of nowhere. There was virtually no chance, out here, of being stumbled across by casual passersby.