Soldier For Hire

Scarlett let him go. CJ had a temper. She didn’t need him going off over something as stupid as this. Emotions were running high in the room, the tension thick enough to slice through. She needed time to think and her head hurt. If she pressed her team right now, they’d push back and that would get them nowhere fast. “We’ll reconvene at 0700 hours tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t let your emotions call the shots. I don’t have time to deal with any of you hotheads getting into trouble.”

Scarlett watched as her team filed out and as soon as they were gone, she swallowed a few Excedrin for the excruciating pain in her head.

Maybe she ought to be thankful for the drum beating her brain. Seemed pain was the only thing keeping other thoughts at bay. She talked a good game but the truth was, Xander had gotten under her skin.

Had been since that night.

She hated the clichéd “there’s just something about him” but damn, if it wasn’t appropriate for what she couldn’t quite explain about her attraction to Xander.

The energy between them snapped and crackled like a downed power line, whipping about, wreaking havoc and mayhem with its promise of destruction.

Destruction was an apt description for what would happen if word of Xander and Scarlett’s indiscretion got out.

It wasn’t like her to lose her grip like that.

But Xander, goddamn, that man was unlike any she’d ever come across.

Oh, she’d known it, too. The minute their eyes had met, there’d been a powerful zap at the base of her spine and that electrical current had traveled the length of her body like a bullet train straight to no-man’s-land.

The tequila had just been a convenient excuse to do what she’d wanted to do from the beginning—bang the ever-lovin’ shit out of that hard, chiseled, scarred and beautiful body.

Eyes closed, it was easy to remember every moment of that night.

Scarlett groaned at her own weakness, grinding at the pain behind her eyeballs. It would take a week to be back to 100 percent but she didn’t have that kind of time to waste.

She grabbed her laptop, logged into the encrypted Red Wolf interface and pulled Xander’s file. She knew it by heart, but she went over it again just to be sure she wasn’t missing anything.

Her gaze skimmed the basic blotter information: name, highest active rank, MOS, commendations, etc.

The psych evals were her favorite—to sum up: the guy had issues, but who didn’t in their line of work? Scarlett didn’t hold that kind of stuff against her team members. She judged them based on their performance, their skills and their ability to walk unflinching into a shit storm.

Xander was the best of all of them when it came to looking danger straight in the eye and laughing.

From the outside looking in, one might say Xander was bat-shit crazy.

But Scarlett understood Xander on a different level than most. She recognized that need for danger that flowed through Xander’s veins, that hunger to face death and win.

It wasn’t hero-syndrome. It was something far darker.

It was the need to feel worthy of being alive.

Each successful mission appeased that insatiable desire for redemption, even though they all lived with the knowledge that redemption wasn’t in the cards for most.

They’d all done things in the service of their country that had left scars, nightmares and broken off a piece of their souls.

But hey, that was the job.

And they accepted it.

Scarlett closed the laptop, knowing she wasn’t going to find the answer there. In spite of her gut instinct telling her to screw the evidence, she had to trust the process. If Xander was innocent of the charges, the courts would exonerate him.

It wasn’t her job to prove his innocence.

It was her job to bring him in—and that’s exactly what she was going to do.

Chapter 3 (#uacb5bfd1-8f56-5df2-bcbf-8a8117fb8080)

Xander kinda wished he could call up his buddy Zak and rub it in his face that a certain level of mistrust in banking institutions had worked out in his favor.

When you were on the run, cash was king. Seeing as Xander had kept his money in weird little stashes around his apartment, when he’d made the decision to cut out and run before Scarlett could bring him in, being able to stuff his bag with cash had been a plus.

It wasn’t like he could’ve waltzed up to an ATM to pull out his money because then his face would’ve shown up on the Big Brother spy network. And yeah, if people didn’t believe that all their shit was on display in some techno-nerd’s deep web, they were naive.

And the government was the biggest techno-nerd around.

But Xander was prepared. He had a wad of cash, a burner phone and a laptop with the latest encryption software that zing-zanged around the globe for IP addresses so if he needed to nose around for intel, he could do so without risking a trip to the city library to use their public terminals.

Still, being on the run wasn’t chill.

It sucked.

Not to be a wimp about it, but he missed his bed. Too many tours on the ground had turned him into a crotchety old man when he didn’t get a good night’s sleep on his expensive Tempur-Pedic.

He chuckled, hearing in his head how the team would’ve busted his balls for being such a baby. God, he missed those guys already.

He’d give his life for any of them. Even Scarlett.

Irony, right?

Xander wasn’t going to hold it against them that they were following orders. Although, he kinda wished they’d given him more of the benefit but that was selfish, and it went against their ingrained training. Soldiers followed rules or people died.

He wanted to shake some sense into Scarlett so she’d recognize that Red Wolf was being used to do someone else’s dirty work.

But until he could show her that he was right, she was going to chase him down. Simple as that.

The neon light of the dive bar beneath the seedy motel gave the room a reddish glow, appropriate for the rattrap but it served his purposes.

The place reminded him of a roach motel he’d crashed in once in a while in DC. At the time he’d found the parallel between the place where self-important men made decisions that affected everyone, except themselves, was a seething cesspit of political bullshit where people smiled right before they plunged the knife in their so-called allies’ backs and the shitty motel amusing. Xander couldn’t take the hypocrisy any longer, which was why he’d gotten out of the Rangers, but found, like most Red Wolf team members, there just wasn’t a place for guys like him in society.

Red Wolf had been his sanctuary, his lifeline.

Once again, he’d found purpose. And, not gonna lie, the pay was pretty sweet, too. But then the private sector had always been superior on the pay scale in comparison to government work.

Unless you were so far up the chain you could sniff what Uncle Sam had for dinner the night before. Xander had known that he’d never be cut out for that kind of work, so getting out and doing merc work with a private company would’ve been his only option.

Until Red Wolf had approached him.

Yeah, Red Wolf wasn’t a place that advertised on Craigslist for job opportunities. No, they sought out their targets carefully and then made a surgical strike, quietly and efficiently.