Soldier For Hire

He didn’t care how amped up he got—he wasn’t about to jerk off in this disgusting place. A guy had to have his standards.

As the TL, Scarlett was rigid, by-the-book, hard-ass, hard-nosed, with zero-tolerance for bullshit.

As a lover, Scarlett was wild, insatiable, dangerous and intoxicating as hell.

Basically, it’d been like having sex with Scarlett’s black-sheep twin with daddy issues.

There’d been biting, scratching, howling, grunts, sweat and the smell of raunchy sex.

Like he’d said—epic.

Until morning.

Then things had gotten awkward...fast.

“I think we can both agree this was a mistake,” Scarlett had said stiffly over her coffee mug, her rumpled hair sexier than anything Xander had ever seen, even if her expression had returned to that of his hard-nosed TL. “You’re welcome to a cup of coffee, but then you’re going to need to go home.”

Usually, he was the one giving that speech. Felt different being the receiver. “Either the sex was that good...or that bad. Do I want to know where I landed on that scale?”

“The sex was good.”

“Just good?”

“Are you looking for a medal, because I’m fresh out of those.”

“Too bad, I’m sure a medal for sex would look pretty good against the ones Uncle Sam gave me for meritorious service.” He waited while Scarlett poured coffee into a mug and pushed it across the counter toward him. He grabbed the mug and took an exploratory sip. The hot bracing liquid was black enough to put hair on his chest but he choked it down, not wanting to look like a pussy by asking for cream. “So, out of curiosity...if it was so good, why the one-and-done?”

“Because I’m your superior and it’s inappropriate. Sex last night was a lapse in judgment and I’d appreciate it if we could keep this private.”

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed, realizing she was right. Scarlett was a good TL and he didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize her position within Red Wolf. But he wasn’t going to lie, he would’ve been down for a few more rounds. “It’s a shame, though. We are pretty good together. Between the sheets, anyway.”

That tiny smile she allowed told him she agreed but Scarlett wasn’t one to mess with the rules. Her bones could’ve melted from pleasure but she’d still stick to her guns. Xander respected her attention to detail and the way she held the line but damn, his ego would’ve lapped up the cream if she’d swayed even the slightest in his direction.

Xander shook off the memory as a yawn cracked his jaw. She wouldn’t stop chasing him. He’d have to keep watching over his shoulder while trying to figure out who the hell wanted him to take the fall for the bomb.

Scarlett would only be out of commission for a few days. He had to go underground if he was going to shake her off his tail.

A part of him wished she would’ve listened to him. It would’ve been nice to have her on his side. It also would’ve felt good knowing that she believed him. He supposed that was immaterial but it meant something just the same.

Xander wasn’t a sap, hated mush and generally thought feelings were as tolerable as a case of hives.

His addiction to The Bachelor didn’t mean he secretly pined for love. Hell, no. He watched The Bachelor because he knew that love was bullshit and secretly he was always hoping for them all to fail.

Yeah, he was an asshole, but at least he was honest.

He liked that about Scarlett, too.

Her blunt honesty was refreshing. Even though she’d tossed him out of her apartment, he’d respected her straightforward approach. No posturing, no dancing around feelings—just straight up truth.

We can’t keep screwing each other because I could lose my job.

Couldn’t get plainer than that.

And now she was chasing him like a fox after a rabbit.

Was he a little bit messed up in the head that he found that sexy?

Of course he was.

Xander sighed, mildly surprised when he found himself still rock hard. For crying out loud, he wasn’t going to get any sleep like this.

Curling his hand around his shaft, he closed his eyes and gave into the memory that never failed to do the trick.

It was just so he could get some sleep, he told himself.

Not because he missed her or anything.

Scarlett was released from the hospital and she returned to headquarters where she found her core team.

Zak Ramsey, CJ Lawry and Laird Holstein were playing poker when Scarlett walked into the room. “Glad to see you’ve kept yourself busy,” she said. “We’ve lost valuable time. We need to find a way to get back on track.”

When no one readily agreed, she could feel what was coming, mostly because she was dealing with the same questions as everyone else.

“Look, I get it,” she said, addressing the elephant in the room. “Xander is one of our own. We are a tight group, but the facts are clear—he broke the law—”

“Allegedly,” CJ cut in with a shrug. “I mean, innocent until proven guilty, right?”

“Of course, but that’s for the courts to decide, not us. Here’s the deal—either we bring him in or the FBI does. The only reason they’re letting us handle this is because we’ve assured them we can get the job done on the DL. That’s what we do. We get shit done. This job is no different.”

“It’s plenty different,” Laird disagreed, tossing his cards, folding. “Look, something ain’t right about this deal. You know it, we know it, and we’re just supposed to toe the line against one of our own? A man who’d give his life for any one of us in this room, including you, TL?”

“That was before,” Scarlett said sharply. “Things are different.”

“It’s bullshit,” CJ said, tossing his cards, too. “It’s a goddamn frame job. There’s no way in hell Xander did what they’re saying he did.”

Scarlett felt the rising tide of animosity and she didn’t blame them. They weren’t pissed at her, just the situation. But what the hell was she supposed to do? Break the law for the sake of a man who may or may not be guilty?

“As much as I hate to do this, we all know that Xander’s got demons. How are we supposed to know whether or not those demons got the better of him?”

“We all got demons,” CJ returned, casting Scarlett a flat stare, daring her to go down that road. She knew they were all damaged goods in some way or another. “I ain’t saying that Xander wouldn’t consider taking out a politician if the wind conditions were right but he’d never take down civilians. That shit ain’t right.” CJ rose and grabbed his jacket. “If we’re done here, so am I.”

Scarlett let him go. CJ had a temper. She didn’t need him going off over something as stupid as this. Emotions were running high in the room, the tension thick enough to slice through. She needed time to think and her head hurt. If she pressed her team right now, they’d push back and that would get them nowhere fast. “We’ll reconvene at 0700 hours tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t let your emotions call the shots. I don’t have time to deal with any of you hotheads getting into trouble.”

Scarlett watched as her team filed out and as soon as they were gone, she swallowed a few Excedrin for the excruciating pain in her head.

Maybe she ought to be thankful for the drum beating her brain. Seemed pain was the only thing keeping other thoughts at bay. She talked a good game but the truth was, Xander had gotten under her skin.

Had been since that night.

She hated the clichéd “there’s just something about him” but damn, if it wasn’t appropriate for what she couldn’t quite explain about her attraction to Xander.

The energy between them snapped and crackled like a downed power line, whipping about, wreaking havoc and mayhem with its promise of destruction.

Destruction was an apt description for what would happen if word of Xander and Scarlett’s indiscretion got out.

It wasn’t like her to lose her grip like that.

But Xander, goddamn, that man was unlike any she’d ever come across.

Oh, she’d known it, too. The minute their eyes had met, there’d been a powerful zap at the base of her spine and that electrical current had traveled the length of her body like a bullet train straight to no-man’s-land.

The tequila had just been a convenient excuse to do what she’d wanted to do from the beginning—bang the ever-lovin’ shit out of that hard, chiseled, scarred and beautiful body.

Eyes closed, it was easy to remember every moment of that night.

Scarlett groaned at her own weakness, grinding at the pain behind her eyeballs. It would take a week to be back to 100 percent but she didn’t have that kind of time to waste.

She grabbed her laptop, logged into the encrypted Red Wolf interface and pulled Xander’s file. She knew it by heart, but she went over it again just to be sure she wasn’t missing anything.

Her gaze skimmed the basic blotter information: name, highest active rank, MOS, commendations, etc.

The psych evals were her favorite—to sum up: the guy had issues, but who didn’t in their line of work? Scarlett didn’t hold that kind of stuff against her team members. She judged them based on their performance, their skills and their ability to walk unflinching into a shit storm.

Xander was the best of all of them when it came to looking danger straight in the eye and laughing.

From the outside looking in, one might say Xander was bat-shit crazy.

But Scarlett understood Xander on a different level than most. She recognized that need for danger that flowed through Xander’s veins, that hunger to face death and win.

It wasn’t hero-syndrome. It was something far darker.

It was the need to feel worthy of being alive.

Each successful mission appeased that insatiable desire for redemption, even though they all lived with the knowledge that redemption wasn’t in the cards for most.

They’d all done things in the service of their country that had left scars, nightmares and broken off a piece of their souls.

But hey, that was the job.

And they accepted it.

Scarlett closed the laptop, knowing she wasn’t going to find the answer there. In spite of her gut instinct telling her to screw the evidence, she had to trust the process. If Xander was innocent of the charges, the courts would exonerate him.

It wasn’t her job to prove his innocence.

It was her job to bring him in—and that’s exactly what she was going to do.

Chapter 3

Xander kinda wished he could call up his buddy Zak and rub it in his face that a certain level of mistrust in banking institutions had worked out in his favor.

When you were on the run, cash was king. Seeing as Xander had kept his money in weird little stashes around his apartment, when he’d made the decision to cut out and run before Scarlett could bring him in, being able to stuff his bag with cash had been a plus.

It wasn’t like he could’ve waltzed up to an ATM to pull out his money because then his face would’ve shown up on the Big Brother spy network. And yeah, if people didn’t believe that all their shit was on display in some techno-nerd’s deep web, they were naive.

And the government was the biggest techno-nerd around.

But Xander was prepared. He had a wad of cash, a burner phone and a laptop with the latest encryption software that zing-zanged around the globe for IP addresses so if he needed to nose around for intel, he could do so without risking a trip to the city library to use their public terminals.

Still, being on the run wasn’t chill.

It sucked.

Not to be a wimp about it, but he missed his bed. Too many tours on the ground had turned him into a crotchety old man when he didn’t get a good night’s sleep on his expensive Tempur-Pedic.

He chuckled, hearing in his head how the team would’ve busted his balls for being such a baby. God, he missed those guys already.

He’d give his life for any of them. Even Scarlett.

Irony, right?

Xander wasn’t going to hold it against them that they were following orders. Although, he kinda wished they’d given him more of the benefit but that was selfish, and it went against their ingrained training. Soldiers followed rules or people died.

He wanted to shake some sense into Scarlett so she’d recognize that Red Wolf was being used to do someone else’s dirty work.

But until he could show her that he was right, she was going to chase him down. Simple as that.

The neon light of the dive bar beneath the seedy motel gave the room a reddish glow, appropriate for the rattrap but it served his purposes.

The place reminded him of a roach motel he’d crashed in once in a while in DC. At the time he’d found the parallel between the place where self-important men made decisions that affected everyone, except themselves, was a seething cesspit of political bullshit where people smiled right before they plunged the knife in their so-called allies’ backs and the shitty motel amusing. Xander couldn’t take the hypocrisy any longer, which was why he’d gotten out of the Rangers, but found, like most Red Wolf team members, there just wasn’t a place for guys like him in society.

Red Wolf had been his sanctuary, his lifeline.

Once again, he’d found purpose. And, not gonna lie, the pay was pretty sweet, too. But then the private sector had always been superior on the pay scale in comparison to government work.

Unless you were so far up the chain you could sniff what Uncle Sam had for dinner the night before. Xander had known that he’d never be cut out for that kind of work, so getting out and doing merc work with a private company would’ve been his only option.

Until Red Wolf had approached him.

Yeah, Red Wolf wasn’t a place that advertised on Craigslist for job opportunities. No, they sought out their targets carefully and then made a surgical strike, quietly and efficiently.

Xander sighed, giving into a moment of self-pity before reaching into his shirt pocket for his meds.

He grimaced as he shifted in the bed, his back clenching in an angry spasm, reminding him who was in charge. He washed down the potent painkiller with a generous swallow of his beer.

He was no different than most in his position. His body was screwed and tattooed. Literally. But chicks dig scars, right? Yeah, but did chicks dig drug addicts?

His body had been broken and mended back together again one too many times. The pain was just a part of who he was now. The painkillers were part of his management.

That was the story he told the docs and they’d bought into it for a long time, but then government regs changed and the lockdown on narcotics got downright militant.

He’d gone from getting his shit the legitimate way to paying an exorbitant amount to a man named Pablo who sold him Oxy by the tab.

And he needed more and more just to get through the day.

Okay, and maybe sometimes he took a little more than he needed but who didn’t play fast and loose with prescription drugs these days? Hell, college kids lived off Adderall during exams and that was perfectly fine when everyone knew it was just legal amphetamines. But hey, it’s all good...until they get caught and then mommy and daddy throw a fit, demanding to know how little Johnny got his hands on something so addictive.

Maybe the doc should’ve warned Xander how addictive Oxy could be; maybe it would’ve made him look for an alternative.

Hell, there were a lot of what-ifs but what good did they do? Didn’t change the facts of what’d happened in Tulsa.

Scarlett wanted to know why he’d run?

Because he was guilty.

Not of setting that bomb—No, he’d never do something so cowardly as to kill innocent people.

But make no mistake, he was guilty as hell.

And whoever had set him up knew of his little problem.

Former bomb-squad, Army ranger and current drug addict.

Yeah, his life read like a damn play-by-play for how to draw a direct line toward the easiest chump to take the fall.

The evidence may be circumstantial but Xander would make a terrible witness.

They’d take one look at the evidence—Xander couldn’t account for his whereabouts when the bomb went off because he couldn’t remember shit about that day—and they’d lock him up tight.

The people wanted a head on a spike for what’d happened in Tulsa.

And someone had already prepared Xander’s skull for the presentation.

His eyelids started to drag, his head to bob.

First thing tomorrow, he’d...

And he was out.

The team stared, some frowning, some bewildered.

Zak was the first to break the stunned silence. “No. You’re not going alone. We’re coming with you.”

Scarlett hadn’t slept at all last night. She knew what she needed to do, and she didn’t want anyone else to end up as collateral damage if things went south.

She’d spent the night trying to talk her way out of this one decision but by morning, she’d known there was only one way this situation could go down.

“Look, here’s the situation. I can move faster without a detail slowing me down. Xander is on a ticking clock. If we don’t bring him in, the FBI will take over and any chance Xander has of beating this will disappear.”

Zak narrowed his gaze. “You believe he’s innocent.”

“I don’t know that,” Scarlett said, shaking her head. “But there are questions that I can’t answer and my gut is saying... Hell, I don’t know but I can’t let someone else bring Xander in. If he’s guilty, I need to be the one who brings him in. He’s one of our own.”

“All the more reason why we should help.”

“I need you back at headquarters being my eyes and ears. You’re going to need to run interference if too much attention swivels Xander’s way. Trust me, this is going to be a bitch for everyone involved but I can’t deny that something doesn’t feel right.”

It took a lot to admit that to her team when she’d been the most adamant that they weren’t there to uncover any hidden truths about the case.

She’d learned a long time ago that ignoring her gut was a bad idea, which meant she was about to do something either really stupid or really dangerous—either one would probably kill her career or put her in the ground but she knew it was the right decision.

However, she wasn’t going to put her team at risk. “I don’t need any of you in the direct line of fire. If Xander is right and someone is framing him, that means we could have a snake in our home. If Xander is lying and he’s just trying to save his ass, I need to be the one to bring him down.”

“That’s what I’m talking about, let’s shake out the traitor,” CJ said with a gleeful smile because CJ was a little crazy. “Holyyy shit, I’m ready.”

Zak cast CJ a warning look before returning to Scarlett. “We need a timeframe. How long?”

“FBI is going to start sniffing around after a week. If I haven’t found him by then, there’s nothing else we can do. But until then, you’ve got my six here at HQ. No communication through our regular phones. We’ll use burners for any intel on this mission. Any questions?”

Laird piped in. “Yeah, what happens if he’s actually guilty?”

Scarlett allowed a grim smile. “Then, I’ll do what I do best... Bring the asshole down.”

“Simmer down. He’s not guilty,” Zak said to Laird, then to Scarlett, “I don’t like it. You need backup. Anything could go wrong.”

“Xander isn’t going to hurt me.”

“Well, he did nearly crush your skull,” CJ pointed out with a shrug. “I mean, that was pretty savage.”

“He didn’t nearly crush my skull, CJ. He knocked me out to gain time to get away. It was my stupid mistake to let him get the tactical advantage. I swear, I’ll never live this down.”

The team chuckled in spite of the serious situation but that was their MO. Make jokes before heading into a screwed-up situation.

“Fine. I don’t like it but I see your plan,” Zak said, sighing as he straightened. “We’ll get burners and hold down the fort, make it look like business as usual.”

“Good.” Scarlett released a pent-up breath, relieved. With Zak on board, he’d get the rest of the team in line. “So, from now on, this mission is locked down, eyes only. Code name Double Down.”

CJ grinned. “Yeah baby, ’cuz it’s all or nothing in this game.”

“Exactly,” Scarlett said, nodding. “Any questions?”

“Yeah, are you sure you can handle Xander if he’s guilty? I mean, I’m the last person to even want to think that it’s possible, but we’ve all seen people we trust go bad for whatever reasons. I love the guy, I do. But Xander has always been a wild card,” Laird said.

Laird was right. They’d all seen the ugly side of humanity at one point or another because combat situations were hell and greed was an insidious evil. But there was something in her gut that told her Xander wouldn’t hurt her.

Even if he was guilty. “I can handle Xander,” she assured Laird but she hoped to God her intuition wasn’t wrong. She was putting her career and her life on the line for the dipshit and he’d better be straight about the facts or she’d happily throat punch him.

Plan in place, they broke off like a well-oiled machine. Scarlett had been the TL for this team for three years. She knew them well and trusted them more.

Even Xander.

Trust was a funny thing, though. Either it was strong as steel or fragile as glass, but you never knew how well it was going to hold up until tested.

Well, she was about to find out if she was standing on steel or falling through glass.

Time to double down, baby.

Chapter 4

Xander knew concussion protocol would require Scarlett go through bureaucratic hoops to ensure her brain was okay after he’d knocked her out, which meant he had a finite amount of time to put some distance between them.

He had to get to Tulsa, back to the scene of the crime, to see if anything jogged his memory about that day. Thank God, he had a duffel of cash; otherwise, he’d be driving nineteen hours instead of taking a four-hour flight.

Admittedly, he was taking a risk flying, even with a fake ID, mostly because Scarlett knew his aliases and once she was cleared for duty she’d find his destination pretty quick, but he didn’t have the luxury of taking things safe.

He had to hope that Scarlett didn’t tell those bureaucrats to shove it and hop back on his tail like the maniac she was.

God, that woman... If she weren’t so damn hot, he’d say she was crazier than him.

Not his kind of crazy—no, Scarlett was more controlled—but still, you couldn’t lead a Red Wolf team without being a little left of center. None of them were right in the head, which was how they were able to do the jobs they were assigned without batting an eye.

But it also made believing that he could blow up a bunch of civilians to get to one politician totally plausible.

Hell, no one was looking twice at that story.

Messed up vet with a checkered past and a previously unknown prescription drug addiction—yeah, he knew just how perfect he was for this frame job but it pissed him off that Scarlett was playing into the game.

She knew him.

She, of all people, should’ve been able to see through that smoke screen and then he wouldn’t have had to knock her lights out.

Although, if he managed to clear his name and get his job back, he was totally going to rub Scarlett’s nose in the fact that he’d gotten the jump on her. Actually, that thought gave him the warm fuzzies. Lord knew he had precious little of those to pass around.

He grabbed an Uber to the airport, made quick work of buying a ticket on the first flight out of Virginia and settled into his seat, prepared to sleep through the four-hour plane ride. With any luck, his resting asshole face would deter any eager Chatty Kathys from striking up a convo. He wanted to shut his eyes, slip into dreamland and wake up in the dreary nothingness that was Oklahoma.