Hot Ice (A Hostile Operations Team Novel - Book 7) (2 page)

She was still too young to understand most of it, but she often cried about things Mommy told her about him. All he could do was tell Cammie that her mother was wrong and prove to her that he loved her. But holy fuck, he often wanted to wrap his hands around Melissa’s throat and squeeze. It was gut-wrenching to hear his child crying on the phone to him when he could do nothing about it.

Garrett slipped his phone into his pocket as he stood. Best thing he could do right now was hit the weights. He was stripping out of his clothing so he could put on workout gear when Matt “Richie Rich” Girard appeared in the locker room.

“Hey, guys.”
 

Flash and Garrett acknowledged him before he turned to Garrett. “The colonel needs to see you, Ice.”

Garrett started buttoning his shirt again. He had no idea what the fuck Colonel Mendez could want with him, but it was just fucking icing on his shit cake today. Mendez was tough, secretive, and wily as hell. And if he wanted to see you alone, there had to be a reason. Garrett thought back to that stupid bar fight he’d gotten into a couple of days ago—after a call from Cammie—and gritted his teeth.

He’d known responding to that posturing asshole who’d called him a pussy was a stupid thing to do, but he’d done it anyway because he’d wanted to punch something. And it had been damned satisfying to hit that guy.

“Any idea what it’s about?” Garrett asked as he joined Richie in the hall and they started walking toward Mendez’s office.

“I’ll let him tell you.”

Fuck—that was never a good sign.

Richie knocked on the door and then swung it open when Mendez’s gruff voice replied. Garrett followed his team leader inside and stood at attention. The colonel stood and came around his desk. He was tall and muscular, his hair always cut in a high and tight, the salty gray making him look older than he probably was. Hell, not that it was a problem for him, Garrett imagined. If George Clooney had a twin in the Army, this guy could be him.

But that was as far as the resemblance went. George seemed like an amiable kind of guy—hell, he’d even been Garrett’s idol for his stance on marriage until he’d decided to get married—but Mendez was the kind of man you never underestimated if you were smart. Amiable on the surface, but ice-cold the deeper you went.

And they called
him
Iceman rather than Mendez. The irony.

“How you been, son?”

“Fine, sir,” Garrett replied, keeping his eyes straight ahead.

“Heard you got in a fight in Annapolis.”

Shit.
Garrett’s insides clenched just a little. “The midshipman called me a pussy, sir.”

“Did he indeed?” Mendez folded his arms and leaned back against his desk. A deceptive pose if ever there was one.
 

“He did, sir. He suggested the entire United States Army was filled with pussies who had no other options in life but to become ground pounders, sir. The smart ones went into the Navy, according to him.”

“I see.”

Garrett resisted the urge to close his eyes. Fighting with Naval Academy cadets was not the wisest course of action, that’s for sure. But the middie hadn’t been in uniform, at least. Not that it would have stopped Garrett in the mood he’d been in.

“Sergeant, when a midshipman calls you a pussy, just smile and tell him that you are what you eat. Got it?”

Garrett nearly choked. “Uh, yes, sir.”

Mendez waved a hand. “At ease, soldier.”

Garrett relaxed his stance and met the colonel’s eyes. He would have sworn he saw a gleam of humor there, but then the colonel reached down and picked up a folder from his desk.

“You have an interesting background. Football champ in high school, scholarship to the University of Georgia, great freshman season on the team—and then you dropped out and joined the Army.”

Garrett swallowed. Of course Mendez knew his history. He’d known that from the beginning. No one got into this outfit without a thorough background check. Garrett had chosen never to discuss his marriage with his team when he’d arrived in HOT a year ago, but he didn’t kid himself that the colonel didn’t know. Of course he did.

“I had a wife and child to support, sir. College football doesn’t do that.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Had he hoped to be a college football star? Hell yes. Had he coveted the Heisman and an NFL career? Of course he had. What football-playing college freshman didn’t?

But then he’d met a hotter-than-hell psychology major who was two years older—and the rest was history.

Mendez cleared his throat. “Your mother teaches Junior Cotillion. Tell me about that.”

Garrett blinked. If this wasn’t a strange turn of conversation, he didn’t know what was. “Sir?”

“Cotillion. What is it? And did you go?”

Garrett felt his brows drawing down. But what the colonel wanted to know, the colonel was going to know. Though Garrett also knew damned well that Mendez already knew the answers to both those questions.

“Cotillion, sir, is where young Southern boys and girls learn how to be gentlemen and ladies.”

“Dancing. Which fork to use. Polite conversation. Proper behavior. That sort of thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And did you learn these things as well?”

“I’ve attended more Cotillion classes than any kid alive in Paris, Georgia, sir. I guarantee you that.”

Because when his mother needed another boy for the dancing or needed an extra set of eyes on the students, he got dragged into it. He could “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir” his way through a fricking White House dinner if he had to, and all without using the wrong fork or saying anything inappropriate.

Mendez was grinning, and Garrett felt his ears growing hot. Yeah, he was a big, muscular, tattooed, tough soldier who could mince his way through a waltz and use a fish fork with aplomb. Of course, it was a ridiculous mental picture for anyone who knew him now as opposed to when he was a child.

He blew things up when required and patched up his teammates when necessary. He hadn’t waltzed since his wedding reception. And these days, he microwaved his meals or got takeout that came with plastic forks. Or sporks. No etiquette necessary with those.

“So if you were to suddenly be thrust into the presence of a United States senator and his family, you wouldn’t make an ass of yourself?”

“Uh, no sir, I don’t believe so. Anything is possible though.”

Mendez did laugh this time. Even Richie looked a little astonished. But the colonel quickly got himself under control.

“I need you to be utterly perfect, soldier. I need you to dredge up every bit of politeness and etiquette your mama drummed into you, and I need you to use it. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

What the fuck?

Mendez pulled a photograph from another pile and handed it to him. Garrett stared at the woman, memorizing her. The first thing he noticed about her was the black-rimmed glasses. The second was her eyes. They were brilliant blue, fringed in dark lashes. They were filled with intelligence… and haughtiness, as if she knew she was smarter than everyone else in the room. Her hair was dark brown and pulled back from her head, probably in a bun, and her skin was pale, as if she spent a lot of time indoors.

She wasn’t precisely beautiful. But she wasn’t unattractive. She looked to be about average weight judging by her face, but he couldn’t really tell since the photo was cropped at her collarbone. Maybe she was stacked with curves. Or maybe she was bird-thin. No idea what lay beneath that glimpse of creamy skin in the vee of her shirt.

“That’s Dr. Grace Campbell,” Mendez said. “She’s a genetics researcher at Magnolia Laboratories. She’s also the daughter of Senator Preston Campbell. He just announced his run for the presidency a few days ago.”

Garrett hadn’t paid much attention to who was running for president just yet. It wasn’t important until election year so far as he was concerned.
 

“She’s working on something… sensitive,” Mendez said after a long pause. “And the night her father declared he was a candidate, she was attacked at the lab.”

Garrett’s head snapped up, his gaze crashing into Mendez’s. He didn’t like the idea that this woman had been assaulted, even if she did look like she thought she was smarter than everyone else.
 

But he liked it even less that she was working on
something sensitive
.

Genetics scared the hell out of him. Had ever since the day his parents came home and said the word leukemia in connection to his brother. Why Ben had gotten cancer and not him was something he’d never understood. It’d killed Ben, but here he was, going strong. It still terrified him every day that Melissa might call and tell him Cammie was sick.

Researchers had sequenced the human genome, they could tell you whether you were more susceptible to things like cancer because of your genes, but they couldn’t really do a fucking thing to stop it from happening when it came right down to it.

“Is there a connection between her father and the assault? Or her research and the assault?”

Mendez lifted both eyebrows as if he was surprised Garrett had gotten that far on his own. Jesus, he was really going to have to stop being such a moody dick and start acting like he had a brain. Fighting with middies wasn’t helping him impress his commanding officer in the brain department, that was for sure.

“Good questions. No one knows the answer to that. Yet. But the senator has… requested protection for his daughter, especially since she’s due to make a speech at a WHO conference in Rome next week.”

“Wise of him.”

“This is where you come in, Ice.”

Garrett blinked. “Me?”

He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like this. At all.

Mendez’s gaze slid between Garrett and his team leader. “HOT’s missions have changed as we’ve gone deep black. We have money and access we didn’t have before. We also have a reputation—and there are certain members of Congress who have been made aware of our existence, because without them we have no funding. Senator Campbell is one of these men. He has personally requested HOT to provide protection for his daughter.”

“Sir, wouldn’t the Secret Service be better suited for the task?”

“The senator doesn’t think so. He wants us. And I am in no position to refuse.” Mendez straightened and walked over to the window. “Nor do I want to. There’s something going on over there”—he was looking west, toward DC—“and I’d really like to know what it is.”

He turned back to them.

“Ian Black disappeared without a trace. And he shouldn’t have. We should have been able to track him at the very least. But we couldn’t. Explain that one.”

Garrett didn’t say a word. Neither did Richie. The colonel was talking about the mercenary they’d gone after in Qu’rim recently when Nick “Brandy” Brandon had gone undercover and tried to ferret out the secrets of Black Security. Brandy hadn’t found any secrets, but he had found a girlfriend. Victoria Royal was now a contract sniper for HOT, her Army record cleared, her sister rescued from terrorists and rebuilding her life here in the States. A fucking beautiful story, except for the fact Black had gotten away.

“And then there’s still the fact that someone protected Stavros Metaxas when he turned up in DC and almost killed Hawk. I want to know
who
is leaking information to terrorists and
who
is protecting arms dealers. If I have to fucking send my guys to guard an entire stadium full of heiresses, I will.”

Mendez’s dark eyes flashed, and Garrett knew he was screwed.

“Brush up on your table manners, Ice, because you’re about to become arm candy for a senator’s daughter. Do what you have to do keep her safe. You don’t need to be her lapdog or take any bullshit if she tries to give it to you. Charm her if you have to. And above all,
don’t
fucking touch her for anything other than her safety, you got that?”

Garrett snapped to attention. “Sir, yes, sir!”

CHAPTER TWO

GRACE STOOD IN HER FATHER’S OFFICE in the Senate building and gaped at him. Through the window, she could see the Capitol dome. It always looked so stately, so surreal. It made her throat tighten up when she thought of what it stood for. And it made her proud that her father—her family—had served this nation for so many centuries, all the way back to her Revolutionary War ancestors who’d persevered against what must have seemed insurmountable odds.

But right now her throat was tight for a different reason.

“I’m sorry—did you say
security detail
?”

Her father was a tall man, robust, and deadly serious. He loved his family with all his heart, of that she had no doubt. But he was just so… so much larger than life and so forceful that he sometimes terrified her.

Right now, he was looking at her from across his desk—the desk that had been his grandfather’s when he’d been a senator and then his father’s when he’d been governor—his blue eyes as serious as a heart attack, as she and her sisters used to say.

“Yes, sweetheart, I did.” He’d steepled his hands in the pose that used to annoy her so much as a child because it indicated a lecture was coming. It still annoyed her because she didn’t like lectures any better now than she had then.