Page 36 of Texas Hold Em'
I eyed the interior of the car suspiciously. For all I knew, I wouldn’t be able to get out once I got in. From my time as a Ranger, I knew for a fact that the best advice for staying alive as a woman was toneverget in the car with someone you didn’t trust. Once you got in that car, your odds of getting away alive were greatly reduced.
And yet Ineededto get in that car. I needed to talk to Bates. I needed to get the ball rolling.
With a heavy sigh, I stepped forward.
Something slammed into my back. I yelped in surprise and stumbled forward, tripping over my own feet. I landed hard, half my body in the back seat of the Rover, and smashed my nose on the side of the back seat. My eyes burned with tears as someone grabbed hold of a fistful of my hair and dragged me out of the car and back into the lot.
Caroline released me with a shove before winding back and slapping me hard across the face with the back of her hand.
I reeled and pressed a palm to my stinging cheek. “Youbitch,” I hissed.
Caroline grinned as she tugged her gloves higher up her wrists. “Show me what you’re made of, Ranger.”
I rolled my shoulders.
She wanted smoke?
I’ll give you fucking smoke.
CHAPTER 15
JAMESON
The Assistant Director blinked at my badge sitting on his desk. “What the fuck is this, Jameson?”
I removed my gun from the holster on my hip and set it down, too. “I quit.”
“You what?”
“I quit,” I said again, this time through clenched teeth.
Abraham, my director, pressed his large, scarred hands to the top of his desk and stood up. He was only fifty-one, but he had the body of a much older man. His youth had been eaten away by working as a Ranger himself, and he’d acquired dozens of injuries, some of them life threatening, in his relentless and fearless pursuit of justice.
For the longest time, I’d wanted to be just like him, and I’d seen his career trajectory as a path for myself.
All that had gone up in smoke, though.
“You can’t quit,” he said. “This shit is in your blood. You’re a Ranger. Put your fucking badge back on and pick up your gun, son. I’m in no mood for fuckery today.”
He didn’t understand.
How could he?
This wasn’t a choice. Fuck. Nothing in my life felt like a choice anymore.I was being run out of town—pushed out by a fat bastard with no sense of honor. He’d threatened my family when I went after him. He’d sent files to my house full of black and white photographs of my mother at the grocery store, my father on his back in the driveway working under the old Jeep, my sister waiting in line outside the cinema with her boyfriend.
They were so much more important than my badge.
“This isn’t fuckery, Abraham,” I said. I never called my boss by his first name, and it made his already furrowed brow crease even more deeply. “I quit. I’m done.”
“Did you get an offer from somewhere else?” He grasped at straws. “Tell me who poached you. I’ll match whatever they’re offering. You’ve just made a name for yourself here, Jameson. Don’t throw it all away for some opportunity from a pompous ass in a fancy office.”
“There isn’t another job.”
“Then why are you walking away? Where are you going to go?”
I shrugged. “Anywhere that isn’t here.”
He massaged his still furrowed brow. “Is this about a woman?”
