Page 15 of Lacey's Fight

Like take her up on her offer.

Although he was sure after his harsh dismissal it had been taken off the table.

“Rabbit.”

At the sound of that ridiculous nickname that he’d hated ever since he’d been given it—although he had beat up the first person that tried to use bunny, at least rabbit was marginally better—he stopped running. Since he’d been wired with energy that he was determined to call anxious energy but which anyone else would likely claim as sexual energy, he’d been running laps on the beach since he and his team finished their morning PT.

Ben had no idea how much time had passed, but he was drenched in sweat, and the muscles in his legs felt like Jell-O, so he guessed he’d been running for a couple of hours at least. Running on the sand was always his go-to when he needed to clear his mind. The slip and slide of the sand was the perfect workout to make you forget about everything else.

For a little while at least.

“What’s up?” he asked as his commanding officer and another man crossed the sand toward him. As he drank from his water bottle, Ben realized the other man was familiar. Tall, dark hair, blue eyes, and carried himself with a confidence that he recognized. Whoever the man was he was a former SEAL, Ben would bet anything on that.

“Rabbit, this is—”

“Eagle Oswald,” he cut off his CO when it clicked. The man was an utter legend in military circles. A former SEAL who had been raised off-the-grid until he was eighteen and enlisted. After his team was betrayed and he was medically discharged after losing part of his leg, he started the world-renowned Prey Security with the billions he and his five siblings had inherited upon their parents’ murders.

There wasn’t a single person in the special ops world who didn’t know Eagle Oswald and his teams. Knowing that Lacey had been chosen to work for Prey’s Artemis Team told him she was highly skilled as well as tough and brave. All things he’d learned about her when he found her determinedly towing the young woman through the storm toward the yacht.

Without attempting to hiding it, Eagle gave him an assessing once over. Since he had no idea what the man was looking for, he could do nothing but stand there and wait for the assessment to be over. Eagle had a decade on Ben’s twenty-seven years, the man was happily married with a two-year-old daughter, Luna, and his wife Olivia was four months pregnant with their second child.

After what seemed like a solid minute of silence, Eagle nodded. “He’ll do perfectly.”

“Perfectly for what?” Ben asked, somewhat suspiciously. Why was Eagle here? And with his CO? What exactly was going on?

Lacey wouldn’t have said anything about last night, would she?

No.

He couldn’t see that.

And even if she had, it wasn’t like he had done anything wrong. There was nothing Eagle could be angry with him about except maybe the way he’d talked to one of his employees.

But there was no way a man like Eagle, who ran a multi-billion dollar a year company that provided security for wealthy clients as well as doing black ops missions for the government, would waste time coming to talk to him about his tone of voice.

“A job,” Eagle replied.

“What do you mean?” Ben already had a job. It wasn’t like he could just walk away from his team. Sure, they were supposed to take some scheduled downtime, something he hadn’t been looking forward to. Without his work, he had too much time to think—to feel—but that didn’t mean he was looking to go and work for Prey.

“Eagle has a special assignment he needs you for,” his CO informed him.

“I don’t understand.” Truth was, he wasn’t sure he wanted to understand. After last night with Lacey, he wanted to give all of Prey a wide berth for a while. It was inevitable that sooner or later his team would wind up working alongside them, but he was hoping it wouldn’t be for a good few months. Or longer.

“I need someone to go undercover with one of my operatives,” Eagle said. “It’s a short-term assignment. It shouldn’t take more than a few days, a week or two at the most. We’ll have you back with your team before they go back in the rotation.”

Ben couldn’t deny he was vaguely interested.

Working with Prey again so soon wasn’t ideal, but he was pretty desperate not to spend the next couple of weeks with nothing to do but hang around his tiny apartment with too much time for thinking.

“What does this involve exactly?” It was one thing to want an excuse not to take time off, but it was quite another to go blindly walking into a mission he knew nothing about.

“We’ve been after a man known to have bought young girls several times. Each time we get close he slips through our fingers,” Eagle explained. “We got wind of an auction at a remote estate in England. We believe he might be there. Even if it turns out our intel is wrong, we can take down a huge number of buyers and sellers. So, are you in?”

What kind of question was that?

A chance to help take down several traffickers?

Hell, yeah.

---