Page 8 of Fast Kill

Kai shot Zaid an incredulous look. “You took out Granger’s knee on his first mission? That’s cold, brah. So cold.” He shook his head.

“Yeah, I’m a heartless bastard. This hurt?” Zaid asked Logan, probing the knee.

Logan winced, barely resisted the urge to swat Zaid’s hands away. “Shit yes. Quit poking at it.” The sooner everyone left him alone and he could get off his feet, the better.

Zaid stood and grabbed Logan by the upper arm. “How about we find you someplace to sit down before this swells up even more,” he said, starting across the beach toward the nearest vehicle.

It was that swollen? Face hot, wishing the others would just go away already, Logan did as he was told. The pain in his knee was worse now without the numbing effect of the adrenaline that had been pumping through his veins during the firefight. He limped over to the closest truck and hopped up on the lowered tailgate, biting back a growl as he bent his knee.

Zaid stuck a penlight in his mouth and resumed his inspection. After squeezing and prodding he tried to bend the knee more and earned a warning snarl from Logan, who’d now broken into a cold sweat. Zaid pulled the penlight from his mouth. “You need an x-ray once we get back to base, and you’ll need to keep your weight off it until we know what’s going on.”

“I can walk,” Logan grumbled stubbornly, removing his helmet. No way he was pussying around on crutches or whatever in front of the guys because of a sore knee.

Zaid looked up at him, his expression bland. “I think you might’ve fractured your patella. Not too sure about ligament damage.”

Oh, a fracture would suck huge donkey balls. He glanced down at his knee, which was throbbing in time with his heartbeat, and saw that it was already roughly the size of a grapefruit. His heart sank. “Shit. How long would something like that take to heal?”

“Depends on how bad the fracture is, and how good you are about staying off it until it can heal. Every time you put your weight on that leg, your quad tendons pull on the bone. That’ll screw with the healing, if you get what I mean. Hope you didn’t plan to go out dancing when you got home.”

Logan scowled at his kneecap. No, he didn’t plan to go dancing, although he did have dinner plans. He hadn’t gone dancing much since his divorce three years ago.

Did Taylor even dance? He couldn’t picture it; she seemed so serious and contained all the time, it just didn’t fit. Still, he got a kick out of her rigid and sometimes snarky personality and wondered just what it would take to tear all that rigid control to shreds, get her to let go. Might be fun to drag her out to a club sometime, see what she did.

“My first mission,” he muttered in disgust. He’d finally seen action with the team and didn’t want to be sidelined for any amount of time. The fast operational tempo of the unit was one of the reasons he’d wanted to join in the first place. He lived for action, for a challenge. A fucked-up kneecap was not what he needed.

“Well, now it’s even more memorable,” Zaid said with a grin, standing to thump the side of Logan’s shoulder. “Sorry about the knee, brother, but welcome to the team.”

A grudging smile tugged at Logan’s mouth at the official acceptance. “Good to be here.”

Zaid ruffled Logan’s hair with one hand, then bent and looped Logan’s arm across his shoulders. “My turn to look after you now, rookie.”

Logan might have argued, but the fear of worsening the injury stopped him cold. He hopped along using Zaid as a human crutch, until they reached Hamilton and the others near one of the command trucks.

While Zaid relayed what had happened, Logan surveyed the action going on at the dock. His eye caught on a female figure standing over at the foot of the pier, and everything inside him stilled. She was facing away from him, her shoulder-length brown hair tied back into a ponytail, and she was the same height and build as Taylor…

A burst of excitement swept through him, taking his mind off the pain in his knee. What the hell was she doing down here? Had she been called down to investigate the money trail? “Hey, is that—”

Zaid and Easton turned their heads to look. “Who?” Zaid asked.

The woman pivoted. In the glare of the floodlights, Logan saw her face, and a surprising jolt of disappointment hit him, taking him off guard with its force.

He’d thought about Taylor a lot since the New York op, but until that moment he hadn’t realized just how much he’d wanted to see her. She was so different than any woman he’d met before. He wanted to get to know her more, see if the tug of attraction was as strong as he remembered it. And find out whether it was mutual.

“Nothing. Forget it,” he murmured, feeling stupid. Of course it wasn’t her. There was no reason for her to be here on an op like this.

Easton looked at him, a sly, knowing smile spreading across his face as he realized who Logan had thought it was. “Got a certain someone on the brain, huh?”

Logan scowled. “No.” Except he did, and a vision of SA Taylor Kennedy’s pretty face was now stuck in his head.

That was almost as bad as the news about his knee, since recent experience over the past few weeks had taught him that the picture of her wasn’t going away any time soon.

Chapter Three

Most people she knew hated paperwork. Not Taylor. She thrived on it.

Here in her cramped but tidy cubicle in the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force area, surrounded by her spreadsheets and data, she was in her happy place. Here, she was in her safe zone, comforted by the knowledge that her work was valued and making a difference in the war on drugs.

Because at the end of the day, money really did make the world go around, especially for drug cartels.

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