Page 6 of Clean Slade
My mom thought I was crazy for coming here to join Commander Wyatt Goodman’s undercover team, but I couldn’t spend any more time adrift trying to find purpose in my life.
It also didn’t help that the dating pool in the city was abysmal for anything serious. Or maybe it was just my luck.
I knew how it was. I’d been young once. I’d done crazy things. Fucked around. But I wasn’t twenty anymore. I needed something meaningful. Someone to share this hopeless life I’d built for myself.
Despite taking the long route, we reached our base a few minutes later, and I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. The constant whirring under my foot was only making the throbbing more intense.
I stumbled into the Outpost, the bar Wyatt had bought and opened since his retirement, and collapsed on a chair.
Autumn, the bartender and my teammate’s sister, rushed to my side and dropped to her knees.
“I just need some ice. That’s all,” I told her, and she rushed to bring it to me.
She insisted on holding it in place, but I reassured her I was fine, so she turned her attention to the rest of the team that had just arrived. We’d had to split up after the carnage we’d left behind at the warehouse full of cocaine.
Despite the mission’s success, however, the team was on edge. And they were pinning it all on Joey, as usual.
“I didn’t blow those people up!” Joey said, a little hurt discernible in his voice.
Commander Goodman had given a strict no-kill order. And they thought he was responsible for blowing up the brains of the operation in his escape boat.
I loved my teammates to death, but sometimes they were blind regarding Joey. So quick to accuse him of bad things just because of his troubled past.
“Oh, come on. You love explosives,” Parker Hawkins, Autumn’s brother, said.
I sighed and focused my attention on my leg. The longer I left the ice on it, the better it got, but I knew it would bother me for the rest of the night and the following day.
Maybe I made a mistake coming here. Who needs a damaged man?
I wouldn’t be any help. I would be a liability.
Fuck.
I should have listened to Mom.
“If you didn’t blow them up, then who?” Ash, another of my teammates, said before someone slammed the bar door open and walked through with a little girl by his side.
“I have an idea who,” he panted.
That voice. That face.
Why did he look so familiar? Where had I seen him before?
“King! Oh my God, are you okay?” Santiago rushed toward the man.
“Mac, sweetie, do you want to use the restroom?” the man asked the girl he was with.
“I’m okay, Daddy,” the girl said.
Autumn stepped in and took Mac to the back, luring her with the promise of a drink before Santiago spoke again.
“What happened, King?”
King.
Somehow the name fit him perfectly. He was clean-shaven with perfectly smooth skin and dark eyes.
His hair was a wild mess of blond and brown that would make any man want to brush their fingers through or latch onto it.
