Page 81 of Strangers in Love

It wasn’t really a choice. Not when fate or destiny or the universe or whatever had brought them back into my path doing something heinous enough that killing them all wouldn’t just be acceptable – it’d be a good thing. The kind of men who bought and sold other human beings didn’t deserve to live.

Some people might’ve said that was too harsh, but I didn’t give a shit. I’d seen the atrocities that happened to trafficked people, and it’d all been the stuff of nightmares no matter the location. I believed in second chances because I’d been given them, but there were certain types of people I didn’t think should ever be given one. Traffickers were one of them.

By the time we were at the half-way point in the flight, we’d finished everything we could do ahead of time, and everyone was taking the time left to rest so we’d be fresh as soon as we landed. We were going in as military contractors, so we didn’t have to pretend to flirt and smile and spend money. We were there to get a job done, and we weren’t apologizing for it.

As I settled into the same chair I’d sat in last time, Cain moved to sit across from me again, and I had a moment of déjà vu before he asked the question I’d been waiting for.

“What happened between you and Aline Mercier?”

“Nothing she didn’t want.” I knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment it came out. “Seriously. We had sex. That’s all it was.”

He gave me a hard look. “The way Freedom talks about her sister makes me think Aline’s not exactly a casual sex kinda girl.”

I shrugged and tried not to think about the way I’d treated her after I’d gotten Cain’s call. “Most women who take sex seriously don’t fuck a guy they barely know. Twice. Maybe Freedom doesn’t know her sister as well as she thinks.”

It was harder than I liked to keep my face blank while Cain studied me. If he asked when, exactly, Aline and I had first had sex, I’d be honest, but I wasn’t going to volunteer the information. I already felt like shit for talking that way about Aline, but it’d be worse to tell him the whole truth.

That I couldn’t stop thinking about her. That it was killing me that I’d hurt her. That every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face. The way she looked when she came. I could feel her touch, especially on my scars. The taste of her.

I struggled to not shift in my seat. It didn’t take much for me to get hard when it came to Aline. I didn’t even have to think about how tight her pussy was or how much I wanted to come in her mouth. I’d get turned on just thinking about her laugh or how she’d gone off on me that first night, insulted that I’d led the staff to think she’d been a prostitute.

And then there’d been the fact that she hadn’t flinched at any of my scars. She hadn’t asked about them either, but because she hadn’t been weird about them in other ways, I’d known she hadn’t avoided the subject because it made her uncomfortable. No, it’d been more like they hadn’t been the most important or interesting part of me.

“I’m only going to ask one thing.”

Shit. Here it came.

“Any of this going to keep you from focusing on the mission? Aline? Who these bastards are?”

I shook my head, relieved that I could answer him honestly on this and not fuck myself over at the same time. “Getting the hostages out safe is priority one. Nothing’s going to interfere with that.”

He nodded. “Good. Now, get some sleep so we can get our people out and home before Thanksgiving.”

Focus on that, I reminded myself. I needed to get my head in the game and keep it there. I refused to lose anyone else. They’d all be going home alive, even if I had to sacrifice myself to do it.

But even with my promise to myself to focus, a small part of me couldn’t help wondering if Aline would mourn me if the worst happened.

Fifty-Four

Eoin

We’d landedon Sunday morning, and it was now Monday evening, but if anyone had asked how many hours we’d been in the country, I’d have no idea. Honestly, the only reason I even knew the day was because Bruce had announced it when he’d come out of the bathroom at the shithole hotel where we were staying.

Bruce was a morning person.

We’d landed on an out-of-the-way runway a friend of Cain’s had directed us to, paid a bribe to the man in charge there, and then took a piece of junk van that looked like something a serial killer would use to lure victims.

The pilot stayed with the plane, both to keep an eye on it and in case we needed to take off fast. I didn’t know much about him other than he was a scary-looking son of a bitch, and Cain trusted him. That was good enough for me.

All the intelligence that Cain had gotten said the kidnappers were in the area, but we’d still had to do some legwork. So to speak, anyway. We’d spent the first three hours on the ground driving that shitty van around, both to make sure no one was following us and to get an idea of the lay of the land.

I’d been in the city once before, but it’d been during my first tour, and we’d only come into the city twice. Things looked familiar but not triggering, which was the one thing I hadn’t let myself even think about. I would’ve taken myself out of the equation if I’d been a liability, but it would’ve killed something in me to do it. For once, luck was with me, and we were a good twenty miles from where the ambush had happened. Unless our intel was wrong, we wouldn’t be heading that way.

We’d gotten one room with two beds so we could have three of us on watch – one in the room and two at other points around the motel and grounds – while the other two slept. We hadn’t known how long we’d have to keep going like that, but a couple hours ago, one of the people Dez had talked to had reached out.

We’d made it back in time.

The hostages were being auctioned off tonight, and the word was that the group planned to use the money to finance their next wave of violence. If we got the captives back, it’d prevent more bloodshed, and if the people coming in to buy were pissed enough, they might just take out the entire group.

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