Page 2 of Fast Kill

“Sure, I’ll text it to you. Tell her I said hi.”

“I will.” After ending the call, he waited for the number to come through while his pulse thudded in his throat. When it popped up on the screen of his burner phone, that unfamiliar apprehension began to surface again.

This time there was no shoving it aside. Of all the evil things he’d done in his life, this was surely going to be the one that landed him in Hell.

****

“You are worthy.”

DEA Special Agent Taylor Kennedy stared into her own eyes in the bathroom mirror as she repeated the same words she’d said to herself every morning for the past three years. Somewhere between that day and now, they’d lost their impact, but she was a creature of habit who thrived on routine and refused to stop simply because the message didn’t resonate with her these days as much as they once had.

“Okay. Moving on,” she muttered in annoyance, giving her light brown, shoulder-length hair a final fluff before exiting the bathroom. Taylor had a busy day ahead of her, helping her friend Charlie unpack at the new apartment she’d just moved into with her boyfriend.

On the way through the kitchen she snagged her phone from where it was charging in its little station she’d set up on the counter, and paused to glance around. A sense of peace and satisfaction filled her at the sight of the spotless kitchen. No dishes in the sink, countertops gleaming, glass cooktop scrubbed clean. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. Exactly the way she liked it.

Exactly the way sheneededit, in order to function mentally at an optimum level.

She pulled her shoes from the little basket she kept beneath the padded bench by the mudroom door and grabbed her coat and purse from the panel of mounted hooks she’d installed on the wall.

In the midst of setting her alarm, her phone rang. Not recognizing the number with the out of state area code, she didn’t answer, set the house alarm and hopped into her car in the neatly-organized garage.

Charlie’s place wasn’t going to look like this when they were done with it, so Taylor had to make an effort to scale back her anal-retentive control freak tendencies today.

Fifteen minutes later she knocked on Charlie’s new apartment door. Her friend pulled it open, gave a big smile and enveloped Taylor in a tight hug. “So glad you’re here! Help me,” she said, grabbing Taylor’s hand and towing her inside. “I’m so overwhelmed I don’t even know where to start.”

A mountain of moving boxes filled the hallway, kitchen, and spilled into what looked like the living room. “Oh, wow…” Taylor didn’t know what else to say. It was worse than she’d imagined.

“I know, right? Worst timing for Jamie and the team to get called out of town.”

“Yeah, another day or two later would at least have let you guys get settled in.” They’d just moved into the two-bedroom unit together yesterday.

Charlie turned sideways to squeeze past the boxes blocking most of the hallway, her long, dark brown hair hanging damp between her shoulder blades. “I figured I’d start in the kitchen, since I’m gonna need food sooner or later. Though we managed to get the coffee pot out this morning before he left.”

“Good thinking.” Taylor’s phone rang in her purse. Fishing it out of its little pocket, she checked the number and put it back again when she saw the same number as before. Very few people had her number aside from her coworkers, so she assumed it must be a wrong number.

She followed Charlie into the surprisingly spacious kitchen—well, it would be once they got all this stuff unpacked and put away—and took a quick survey. “Do you care how it’s organized?” Because there was a right way and a wrong way when it came to organizing things in order to make a functional space. Not that Taylor would say that aloud. She tried not to fly her OCD freak flag high in public.

“No, but I know you’re the queen at that sort of thing, so have at ‘er.”

Oh, thank God, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. “Deal. Let’s start over here with this pile.” She gestured to the one marked “dishes and silverware”.

They started with the one nearest them and tackled the mountain from there. Taylor quickly decided where everything should go to maximize functionality and convenience, and Charlie went with it. Within two hours they had the kitchen and master bedroom all squared away, and Taylor was fully invested in finishing the job.

Charlie’s phone rang. She answered, chattered away for a minute from the depths of the master walk-in closet, then poked her head out. “That was Piper.” Charlie’s soon to be sister-in-law, engaged to the youngest of Charlie’s three brothers, Easton, who was also a member of FAST Bravo. “She’ll be here in twenty minutes, with pizza.”

“I was so craving pizza.” Taylor left the boxes in the master bathroom for Charlie to deal with, since she didn’t want to invade her friend’s privacy by rummaging through toiletries and other personal items. Instead she headed out to the hallway to start unpacking linens. “How did you guys get all the furniture moved in here so fast, anyway?” she called over her shoulder.

“The team guys all helped,” Charlie replied from the master bedroom. “Three of them loaded the trucks, two of them drove the trucks over, and Logan and Easton helped us carry everything in.”

Logan.

At the mention of that name, two distinct and opposite images of the incredibly sexy Bravo member popped into her head. One from the night of their fake “date” a few weeks ago, when they’d been doing surveillance while Jamie and Charlie were at dinner during an undercover op. He’d sat across the table from her in the swankiest restaurant in midtown Manhattan, in a dress shirt and slacks, his blue-green eyes fixed on her in a way that had made her aware of every masculine inch of him.

Too aware.

The other was of Logan the next day in full operational mode, M4 in hand as he burst from the van she and the other members of the surveillance team had occupied in Long Island. In those moments, he’d been nearly unrecognizable to the man the night before, transforming from laid-back to lethal warrior in the blink of an eye.

She couldn’t decide which version was sexier, but the combination of the two, knowing he wasbothof those men, was hot as hell. Their paths had crossed a few times since then and he’d been friendly enough, but she’d maintained a careful professional distance from him, unsettled by her instinctive reaction to him.

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