Better with You: Outback Skies, Book 4 (10 page)

Charlie’s gut dropped.
Fuck.

“You’re right,” a female voice declared a second before the end of a Berretta sub-compact pressed to the back of the director’s head. “But I do.”

Charlie’s stare snapped to Dani standing at the director’s back.

His heart smashed into his throat.

She looked lethal and gorgeous. A savage intensity burned in her eyes. Her hair was a harried mess. Dirt smeared her cheek. Her lips, a perverse part of him noted, were slicked with gloss.

Fuck a duck, he wanted to kiss it from her.

“No, you don’t,” the director snarled. However, he didn’t move.

“Ben Morecroft.”

Charlie had no idea who Ben Morecroft was, but the affect on the director was instant. His eyes widened, his chest swelled with a swift intake of air. His shoulders bunched.

“Goodbye, Bruce,” she said, the minute shift in her arm and body telling Charlie she was about to pull the trigger. “Have fun dying.”

“Dani,” Charlie raised his hand, his stare locked on her face. “I can’t let you—”

“Hey, Baynard!” Evan’s shout sounded through the roaring wind, a second before a car door slammed shut. “Hope you’re ready to buy me a—”

Everything happened at once. A blur of honed speed and skill and lethal intent.

And at once, everything slowed to a crawl only Charlie, Dani and the director existed in.

At Evan’s shout, Dani jerked her stare from the back of the director’s head. The director spun, dropping into a semi-crouch as he did so, and smashed his forearm into Dani’s elbow.

Charlie leapt forward and then staggered backward as the director slammed Dani’s hand—the one holding the sub-compact—into his face.

Dani yanked her arm free of the director’s grip, reaching for something behind her back. At the same time, the director snatched the Berretta from her fingers and leveled it straight at Charlie.

“Fucking boom.” Bruce sneered at Charlie, just as Charlie recovered his balance and threw himself forward at the man.

“No,” Dani screamed, lunging for the director.

A gunshot shattered the air.

Followed by a startled, “What the fuck?”

And then white-hot pain flooded Charlie’s side.

His brain told him he’d been hit. It had happened enough in his life to recognize it for what it was. His body reeled, spinning in a lurching semi-pirouette by the force of the bullet’s momentum.

Before he could regain his stability, before his hand could find the wound, the director and Dani stumbled past him off the pub’s verandah—two people driven by hate. Out onto the road. Into the dust storm.

Fuck.

“What the
hell
?”

Evan’s stunned shout punched at Charlie. Body on fire, the right side of his stomach hot and wet with blood, he hitched in a dust-filled breath and pressed his palm to the bullet wound harder. “Get inside, Evan,” he ordered, yanking one of the scrubbed Glocks from the small of his back with his free hand. “Now. And stay there.”

Evan—now on the verandah—gaped at Charlie. “Jesus, Baynard, you’re shot. What the—”

“In the pub, Evan,” he ground out, removing his blood-drenched fingers from the hole in his side to pull the other Glock from his waistband. Fresh warmth flowed down his side, over his hip, down his thigh. His head swam. “Now. Keep everyone in there until you see me or my wife. Got it.”

He didn’t wait for Evan to nod.

He had to get to Dani.

An inferno of agony searing through his side, he hurried off the verandah into the blanket of whirling dust.

It lashed at him like a billion needles piercing his skin, his eyes.

He ran through it, squinting, searching for Dani.

Blood pumped from his side. He didn’t need to look at it to know the flying dust turned it to a red mud oozing from his body.

Gust after dust-filled gust buffeted him. Sent him staggering. He fought against it. Ignored it. Dani and the director had to be here somewhere. Had to be—

“I’ll…him…I’m done with…”

The wind lashed at his back, bringing with it faint words. The director’s words.

Charlie spun, guns raised.

There. Two dark shapes in the dust. Close. To him. To each other.

“…fucking suf…”

He ran forward, head giddy. Black splotches danced on his vision.

He gripped his guns tighter, the fingers of his left hand sticky and gritty with blood and dirt.

A meaty thud blasted at him on the wind and then suddenly, he was there beside them. Right beside them.

In time to see Dani hook her arm under the director’s chin and sink her blade into his side. Right beside a knife wound so fresh the dust hadn’t clung to the blood flowing from it.

“Bitch!” the director squealed, scrabbling for her head, her eyes, as his feet slid and tangled on the dirt-whipped road.

Dani yanked out her blade, threw it aside and grabbed at the director’s head. Ready to snap his neck.

“Done, dickhead,” she growled, shoulders bunching. “Told you I wouldn’t let you kill him.”

“
Dani
,” Charlie shouted, leveling his guns on them both. Christ, his head was light. Giddy. “
Dani, stop.
”

She tensed. Flicked him a look. Her eyes were red, her face streaked with sweat, dust and blood. “You want me to keep him alive, John?” Stunned disbelief filled the question. “After everything he’s done?”

Charlie stepped closer to them, one gun trained on the director’s chest, the other on Dani’s. In her arms, face growing a dark breath-chocked purple, the director continued to struggle.

“What I want,” Charlie said, drawing closer, “is a life with you. A
real
one. Not the life we were living before. But an actual human life.”

She stared at him.

The dust lashed at them. Swirled around them. Yanked at their hair.

The director gurgled something.

“Shut the fuck up, Bruce,” Charlie snarled without looking at him.

Dani coiled her arm tighter around the director’s neck. She didn’t say a word.

Charlie let out a snort, the sound becoming a chuckle. “Yeah, who would have thought? I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Aanjay. And that life has to start the
right
way.”

She narrowed her eyes. “The right way?”

He nodded, keeping his guns trained on them both. “Nothing illegal. Nothing the
old
way. A new start for us.”

“A new start? Like a wedding? A
real
wedding? And
real
names?”

Charlie grinned. “With a flower girl and everything.”

“You better not make me regret this, Charlie,” she shouted before sliding her arms from the director’s neck and head and taking a step backward.

Charlie’s grin stretched wider. “I won’t,
hatiku
. Promise.”

Dropping the gun trained on Dani, he shoved it into his waistband at the small of his back and dug his handcuffs from the back pocket of his jeans. “Bruce Fisher, as senior constable of the Wallaby Ridge police force, I am placing you under arrest for—”

The director lurched to his feet. Spun towards Dani.

Charlie had a second, just one second, to see the throwing knife in the director’s hand, to register its intended trajectory, its intended target, before his finger automatically squeezed the trigger of the Glock still leveled at Bruce. A split moment
after
the sound of another gunshot cracked the air and a bullet slammed into the director’s chest.

Charlie’s bullet struck Bruce’s chest right beside the first. Sending the director reeling backward.

Backward.

Tripping over his feet.

Hitting the ground, blood gushing from the twin holes on the right side of his chest.

Charlie moved, spinning to his left, snapping his gun to the man standing there.

His head swam and great big black splotches swirled in his vision. His side felt cold. Cold and wet and hot with blood all at once.

“Sorry, Senior Constable,” Timothy shouted, lowering his gun. The wild wind whipped at his uniform, tugged his normally neat hair into a crazy halo around his head. “But I couldn’t let him do that.”

Holstering his gun, the deputy crossed to where Charlie stood beside the fallen director. “Not and keep my job with ASIO.”

Charlie stared at him.

Something warm and firm pressed to his side. Something that smelt like Chanel No. 5 and jasmine and life. Firm fingers pressed to the gun wound in his side.

Dani. It’s Dani.

He blinked. The black blotches in his vision smudged, blurred and grew blacker.

“You’re ASIO?” Dani asked.

Charlie blinked again. Or maybe he swayed.

Was that why Dani held him tighter?

“I am,” Timothy answered, voice calm, relaxed. “Five years next week, in fact. But I’ll explain everything after the senior constable here is taken care of.”

The words sent a dull anger through Charlie. He straightened—as much as he could—and glared at Tim. His deputy…

“Taken care of?” he snarled. The words sounded weak, even to Charlie’s ears.

Timothy chuckled. “It’s all good, Senior Constable. I’m not here to bring you in,
or
terminate you. As far as the agency is concerned, you and Agent De Vries no longer exist. You’ve just helped us tie up a loose thread with the ex-director.”

Dani hugged Charlie closer. He liked that. “Ex?”

“Ex. As of forty-eight hours ago. Now, if you’ll excuse me, if Fisher is still alive, he and I have some talking to do.” He grinned, and in that one expression, Charlie saw what he hadn’t seen before but recognized all the same—a trained killer.

It was an expression Charlie had worn for too many years to remember.

Years he wanted to forget.

“Doctor Corvin’s about thirty seconds away, Aanjay,” Timothy said. “Will you help him with the senior constable?”

At Charlie’s side, holding him close, Dani chuckled. “I can do that.”

Tim smiled, once again an overenthusiastic city cop in the Outback. “Enjoy your retirement, you two. And your honeymoon.”

Dani laughed. “We—”

Before she could finish, Charlie reached up, cupped her face in his palm and silenced her with a kiss.

His head may be swimming, his vision blurring and his blood flowing from him at an alarming rate, but he’d be fucked if he was going to wait any longer to start living his real life.

He was starting it now.

They
were starting it now.

About the Author

Lexxie Couper started writing when she was six and hasn’t stopped since. She’s not a deviant, but she does have a deviant’s imagination and a desire to entertain readers with her words. Add the two together and you get romances that can make you laugh, cry, shake with fear or tremble with desire. Sometimes all at once. When she’s not submerged in the worlds she creates, Lexxie’s life revolves around her family, a husband who thinks she’s insane, an indoor cat who likes to stalk shadows, and her daughters, who both utterly captured her heart and changed her life forever.

Contact Lexxie at
[email protected]
, follow her on Twitter
www.twitter.com/lexxie_couper
or visit her at
www.lexxiecouper.com
where she occasionally makes a fool of herself on her blog.

Look for these titles by Lexxie Couper

Now Available:

The Sun Sword

Tropical Sin

Triple Dare

Dare Me

Sunset Heat

Suspicious Ways

Party Games

Suck and Blow

Twister

Heart of Fame

Love’s Rhythm

Muscle for Hire

Guarded Desires

Steady Beat

Lead Me On

Blame it on the Bass

Getting Played

Savage Australia

Savage Retribution

Savage Transformation

Principatus

Dark Destiny

Dark Embrace

Outback Skies

Breathless for You

Burn for You

Bare for You

Don’t miss the other titles in Lexxie Couper’s Outback Skies series!

Not all cowboys ride horses.

Outback Skies,
Book 3

Jeremy Craig is on the cusp of being named the deputy prime minister of Australia. Which means he’s got to play his cards right and stay deep in the closet. Australia is a lot of things, but there’s no way the country is ready for a gay prime minister. So far, it’s been an easy ruse to maintain. Until he meets Ryan Taylor. Then all bets are off.

Ryan is sick of the Brokeback Mountain jokes. For starters, he’s an Australian stockman, not an American cowboy. For another, he spends most of his working days alone in a helicopter, not on the back of a horse. As Wallaby Ridge’s only contract heli-musterer, he gets to escape any small-town scorn high in the sky. He’s happy up there. Lonely, but happy. Who needs passion and wild sexual pleasure in their life when they have the boundless skies of the Outback, right?

Then Jeremy Craig climbs into his chopper…

Warning: This book may change your opinion of politicians. It also contains scorching, no-holds-barred passion between two alpha men, one with a Ryan Gosling fetish and the other with a secret deeper than the ocean. Yes, it’s that complicated.