Soldier For Hire. Kimberly Van Meter
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.
His lids had only just closed when he heard a familiar voice.
“You’re getting sloppy, Scott.”
His eyes opened slowly to find Scarlett standing in the aisle, looking pissed and deadly as hell. He wanted to say she wouldn’t shoot him in front of all these passengers but he was willing to guess her trigger finger was damn itchy after what he’d done.
Damn it. He should’ve rented a car. “You going to stand there all day? You’re gumming up traffic.”
Scarlett smirked as she swung into the seat beside him, flashing her ticket at him. “Looks like we’re travel buddies.”
He eyed her warily. “Yeah? And how do you figure that?”
Scarlett leaned toward him, her voice lowered to a sexy rumble. “Well, it seems this is your lucky day, Scott. I’m going to see for myself if your story is total bullshit. If it turns out you’re innocent, I get a valuable member of my team back. If it turns out you’re a damn liar, I get to put you away. Either way, it’s a win for me. So yeah, buckle up, baby, you’ve got yourself a travel buddy.”
Awww hell. He didn’t want Scarlett riding shotgun with him on this adventure but the way he saw it, he didn’t have much of a choice. Either he accepted Scarlett’s dubious help or he tried to ditch her again and spend the entire time looking over his shoulder for one angry TL who was a crack shot.
Yeah, seemed better to play nice.
Xander chuckled and shrugged. “Guess it is my lucky day. The team on board with this?”
“I wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”
He didn’t want to seem like a sap but it meant something that the team was willing to take a chance on him. He jerked a nod and sent his gaze out the small window, needing a minute to collect himself. He wasn’t usually a crier but this hit all the feels in all the tender spots.
“You going to cry?” Scarlett asked, frowning. “Pull yourself together or I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”
He laughed, not entirely sure that she was joking. “How’s that head of yours?”
“Pounding like a mother. You clocked me good and don’t think for a second that I’m not going to pay you back for that one.”
“Oh, I know you will.”
“Good.”
Maybe he was an asshole but he took a certain amount of pride for getting the jump on Scarlett. She was TL for a reason—shrewd, smart and always on target—Scarlett didn’t mess around. “Admit it... I got you good,” Xander couldn’t resist teasing, even though he knew poking at Scarlett was like poking at an angry bear.
She leveled a short look his way and changed the subject. All business. “What’s your plan?” she asked.
“My plan? Well, presently, I plan to sleep. In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve been on the run for the past week and a half and it hasn’t exactly been a vacation filled with rest and relaxation.”
“Boo-hoo. You shouldn’t have run in the first place.” She had zero sympathy. “If you would’ve trusted your team, we could’ve handled this the right way. Now we have to do things the wrong way and that means it’s going to be ten times harder than it needs to be.”
“Yeah? So turning myself in would’ve been the right way? What makes you think that I wouldn’t have met an untimely end while in custody? Something tells me that whoever is framing me isn’t real keen on having me around for long. Dead men tell no tales and all that.”
She conceded his point. “Still, you made it worse by running. You could’ve at least told me.”
There was something behind her curt response that tugged at his conscience. Did Scarlet have feelings? And if so, had he inadvertently stepped on them? To be real, that was more disconcerting than the idea of being framed. “Yeah well, hindsight and all that. Kinda hard to think rationally when you’re being framed for a crime you didn’t commit.”
“Copy that,” Scarlett acknowledged with a solemn nod, then added, “But you have to believe in your team. You know that without the strength of your team behind you, a mission is bound to fail. You panicked—and that’s exactly what a rookie would do.”
He disagreed. “You call it panic—I call it calculated self-defense. I wasn’t about to give up my control and walk into a potential ambush like a lamb to slaughter. Sorry, it is what it is, but that ain’t happening.”
The idea of walking meekly into anything remotely close to what Scarlett had been suggesting made his balls shrivel up.
Scarlett could tell he wasn’t going to budge and she wasn’t going to waste the energy, which was good because he was done talking about it anyway. Pulling his ball cap down low, he folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes.
“You’re really going to sleep?”
“Mmmhhmmm.”
“Damn it, Xander. We need a strategy.”
“No, I need sleep. It’s two and a half hours to Oklahoma. Cool your jets until we land. Read a magazine or something.”
Scarlett exhaled in irritation, muttering under her breath, “You’re making it real hard to remember why I’m putting my ass on the line for you.”
He smirked from beneath his ball cap. Because I’m the best dick you’ve ever had, baby. In the interest of self-preservation...he kept that comment to himself.
Scarlett was fuming.
She narrowed her gaze at Xander—who, by the way, was already lightly snoring as if he were sacked out in the Hilton and not folded into an economy seat two sizes too small for his solid frame—and wanted to shove him out the plug door.
And if she took a moment to enjoy the image of Xander flailing from the plane at thirty-thousand feet elevation, she didn’t feel an ounce of guilt, mostly because her head hurt and that was squarely Xander’s fault.
She’d purposely purchased the seat next to her so that no one else would be sitting in close quarters to them; the last thing she needed was some yahoo eavesdropping on their conversation.
But as it turned out, the extra seat was unnecessary. Well, Xander was going to pay her back for that extra seat, seeing as she’d purchased it with her own money.
Almost three hours to kill and Xander was off to la-la land, sleeping like the dead. Scarlett grabbed the in-flight magazine and thumbed through it, not really looking at anything in particular, just using it as a distraction.
But her mind was difficult to distract.
Part of the reason she suffered from insomnia.
Her brain didn’t recognize the “off” switch.
And one of the memories her brain liked to chew on was that night with Xander.
First, it had been an epic mistake. Let’s just get that out of the way right now.
Second, it had been the best sex of her life.
Third, she had been pretty drunk so it was possible her recollection of the event couldn’t be trusted.
Yet, knowing that she’d been sauced didn’t seem to water down what she did remember.
Xander, his body crisscrossed with scars and tattoos—she was a sucker for both—with muscle cording