Page 90 of Peace Under Fire

Every muscle in Squish’s body clamped tight.

Pipe. Fuck.

“Why the hell would she call you?” Squish snarled.

The dude raised his eyebrows and studied Squish’s face before shrugging. “Because I was trained as a medic.”

For the first time Squish noticed the first aid pack slung over the dude’s shoulder. He noticed something else as well. The guy had blue eyes.

Blue eyes, for fuck’s sake.

CHAPTER 22

Mandy groaned and rolled over, trying to escape the billion nuclear needles drilling into her head. Moving, however, was a mistake. A big one. The contents of her stomach tried to vault up her throat. She moaned, clamping a hand over her mouth to keep the bile inside. Her head spun. Her stomach churned. Her mouth tasted like something had died in there. The tweeting of countless inconsiderate birds pierced her head like daggers dipped in lava.

She loved animals, she really did. But if those birds were close enough, she’d wring their freaking necks.

What happened? She must have been hit with some fast-acting plague. She’d never been this sick before. God, even her skin was burning.

Slowly, flashes of memories flitted through her mind. Alaska wielding the blender, liquor, and daiquiri mix like a cocktail wizard. Henley dancing with her arms above her head, her long brown hair swaying against her back. Shrieks of laughter. The scream of the blender. Barry Manilow’s Oh Mandy blaring from Spotify on the television. Amused blue eyes staring down at her.

Blue eyes? She frowned. Had Brick joined them? No, that didn’t feel right. The blue eyes in her flashbacks were a shade lighter. Another burst of images. Blondish-brown hair. A square, chiseled face. An English accent.

“It looks so bad.” Alaska’s voice broke into giggles. “I mean look at it. It’s so…so blue. It must really hurt.” A pause, a long one, then—“Maybe you should kiss it and make it better?”

A dumbfounded silence was shattered by shrieks of hysterical laughter.

“Oh, my God,” Mandy moaned, horrified. “What did I do?”

“Other than proposition Pipe?” A gruff voice asked. Jacob’s voice.

Mandy lifted the hand clamped over her mouth and cracked open her eyes, wincing as daggers of light blinded her. “I did not proposition Pipe. Alaska did that.”

“On your behalf,” Jacob drawled.

Mandy squirmed. There was truth to that statement.

“How’s your head?”

Was that sympathy she heard in Jacob’s voice? Probably not. It was more likely her sense of perception had taken a siesta.

“My head? Are you talking about the floaty balloon sitting atop my neck? It’s in the same shape as my stomach and eyes. They are all dying.” She moaned as a bird screamed and her head tried to split in two. “You have your gun on you, right? Can you shut that stupid bird up?”

He turned his laugh into a cough. “Sit up. I have something that will settle your stomach and help your head.”

Sit up? She thought about that, whimpering as her stomach lurched in warning. “Sitting is not a good idea.”

“How many daiquiris did you have?” Jacob sounded amused. “Alaska swears you only had one and sipped it all afternoon.”

Was he implying she had a hangover? Surely not. Alaska was right. She’d nursed that one cocktail all afternoon. One couldn’t get a hangover without getting drunk, right? She hadn’t been drunk. She’d just been…happy and silly and carefree.

“I don’t remember how many I had,” she said in a vague voice.

Yesterday—or was it today?—was the first time she’d had any type of alcoholic beverage. Would that account for her current state? Maybe she had no tolerance for alcohol.

“Do you know how hard it is to get drunk on one cocktail?” He sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “Particularly when it’s spread out across hours?”

Screw him.

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