RULES OF LOVE (A Navy SEALs Romance) (22 page)

They pulled a blanket from the duffel and set it out on the floor near the wall. Beau put his back against the wall and held Eddie close to him as they sat in near darkness, listening to the silence outside. His arms were tightly wrapped around her, and he breathed her in as his heart hammered in his chest.

“You never told me,” she said quietly.

He kissed the top of her head before he tilted his head to look at her. “Told you what?”

“The woman before me who broke your heart.”

Beau’s lips thinned. “She’s not important.”

“No, but she hurt you. I could tell the first time we met… That chip on your shoulder wasn’t just from your job.”

“She couldn’t handle my job,” he said quietly, remembering the last night with her. “Told me it was too hard for her, not knowing when I’d be leaving and coming home or if I’d come back at all.”

Eddie shrugged in his arms, leaning against him. “Not everyone can deal with it.”

Beau nodded. Brittany had been her name, and he’d almost proposed to her. The night he came home from a four-month job to find her bags packed and a plane ticket in her hand had killed him. He’d tried to convince her to stay, but she’d ignored him and walked out the door without glancing back once. Two years later, he saw her again in the city with a man on her arm. He drove a Lamborghini and wore a tailored suit, and Brittany wore more jewels than he’d ever be able to afford in his lifetime. After that, he’d been happy she’d walked out of his life.

Beau’s gaze turned to Eddie, the woman in his arms with her tight jeans, muddied boots, and bloodied t-shirt. Even the holster over her t-shirt gave him a smile. Then he was laughing quietly until Eddie moved enough so she could see his face.

“What’s so funny?”

“Just realizing how perfect we are for each other,” he said, quietly amused at the thought.

She grinned with him. “Well, we’ll never be bored if people keep trying to kill us. And you’ll never have to worry about me leaving you.”

Her words, mirrored by the seriousness in her eyes, wiped the smile off Beau’s face. “Even if we spend half the year apart?”

“Even if you come home and can’t tell me what you were doing,” she said. “As long as you eventually come home, Savage. This is who we are. We can’t change that, and I don’t want to.”

He leaned down and kissed her, unable to say everything he wanted or to explain how much he wanted her and would never leave her side. Their lives would be hard, he knew that, but for once in his life, he knew where he belonged. At Eddie’s side, from now until he was taken from her. His hands hugged her hips, her skin fire beneath his touch. If not for both of their bullet wounds, he’d have her on the floor of this old, abandoned house, and he could tell she knew it.

When he slowly let the kiss end, his lips lingering for that last touch, he saw her pushing her tongue behind her lip. “What are you thinking about?”

“How we’re going to get out of this alive.”

“We’ll think of something,” he said. “I’m not letting go of you that easily.”

“I don’t know who we can trust,” she said. “If Shane is compromised, he’ll be feeding everything straight to Hugh.”

Beau’s arms tightened instinctively around Eddie at the mention of that bastard. “And we still have no idea where he is. I would’ve killed him by now.”

“We can’t just run. He’ll track us down eventually.”

“Unless we get him first,” Beau mused quietly.

Eddie glanced up at him, her face drawn in confusion. “How? We haven’t been able to find him in all this time.”

“Then we let him come to us… Draw him out.”

Eddie’s eyes narrowed with a smile that would’ve worried him if it was on anyone else. He knew exactly what she was thinking because his thoughts were already there. “You want us to be the bait.”

“You want to kill Hugh for what he did to you,” Beau reminded her, his words quiet and filled with the pent-up rage he’d felt since he found out the truth of what happened between Eddie and that man. “And I want to beat him to a bloody pulp before you put a bullet in his brain.”

“The first safe house. It’s already mostly destroyed and our teams have left it alone.”

“You want to draw them there?”

“Single way in,” she announced. “We don’t know how many men he’ll bring with him, if this works.”

Beau pictured the old house. The front entrance was completely destroyed, so there’d be no guarding it once they got inside. It would take picking them off one by one and drawing them in enough to get Hugh.

“And if your brother shows up?”

She stiffened in his arms, but her eyes were cold when they looked up to meet his. “If Shane is working with Hugh, I’ll kill him.”

He wasn’t going to argue with her because if she wasn’t going to, he would, for dragging the woman he loved into this mess in the first place. Silence fell over them again. They didn’t even know who they could trust anymore. Someone needed to know so if they didn’t live—no. Beau would make sure Eddie lived, if nothing else. She would survive. His arms tightened around her as she sighed contently against him. He didn’t know what the morning would bring, but he was going to enjoy holding Eddie in his arms and praying he’d never have to let her go.

***

Jackie stormed down the corridor, searching for Reinhart while Gareth filled out the official report of the ambush at the pull-off. She’d tried to get ahold of Eddie again, but her cell was off. No one would tell her anything, and she swore the next person who told her he couldn’t give her answers because of orders she was going to deck.

“Sir,” Jackie said, turning into Reinhart’s office. “What the hell is going on?”

“I’d like to ask you the same thing, Laon,” Reinhart snapped as he stood.

Jackie glanced around the room serving as his office and flinched when she spotted Shane in the corner, holding his head and looking as if he’d been in a fight. “Shane? Where have you been?”

“I was at the safe house when it was attacked,” he said.

“Attacked? Eddie and Savage?”

Reinhart crossed his arms over his chest, glaring at her. “We hoped you knew.”

“They’re gone?”

“Took off during the fight,” he said. “They abandoned Shane there. Ted is dead, and several more agents. We have no contact with Savage or Sage. They’ve turned off their cells, and the Hummer they took can’t be tracked. They disabled the GPS in it.”

Jackie glanced from Reinhart to Shane, every red flag flying up. “Sir, I request permission to track them down.”

“Denied.”

She flinched at the harshness in his voice. “Excuse me, sir?”

“I said denied. For all I know those two have gone rogue!”

“With the person who’s trying to kill them, sir? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nothing about this makes sense, Laon, but I am not about to send more agents to track them down,” Reinhart yelled. “Where were you and Gareth?”

Jackie ground her teeth, her eyes shifting quickly to Shane. The brief look of surprise she’d caught on his face when she walked in played through her mind again. “Following up on a lead which turned out to be a bust, sir.”

“Wasting time, again. You and Gareth are not to leave again unless I give you the order. Is that understood, Laon? Or I will have both of your asses parked behind desks until the day you retire!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get out of my sight, Laon,” Reinhart snapped.

Jackie turned on her heel and stormed out of the room, the door slamming behind her. The news that Ted was dead would hit Gareth hard, but there wasn’t time to mourn, not yet. If Eddie and Beau had taken off, then she must’ve received Jackie’s message to know Shane was dirty. Now they needed the proof.

She found Gareth at his laptop, working on the report until Jackie told him to delete it—all of it.

“They saw the gunshots on the Hummer,” he said. “We can’t lie forever.”

“We don’t need to.” She glanced around the room at the other techs and leaned closer, whispering in his ear, “Shane’s with Reinhart.” She filled him in on the situation quickly before she sat down.

“What are we going to do? Do we even know they’re still alive?”

Jackie held her head. If they left, Reinhart would find out and they’d be out of the field for good. She needed to contact Eddie, but if her cell was disconnected it was so they couldn’t be found, and the GPS tracker in the Hummer… She nudged Gareth.

“Is anyone else monitoring the Hummers right now?”
Gareth leaned forward and brought up several different screens. “No, there’s no need. The only one missing is Ted’s, and it’s offline… Wait!”

Jackie held her breath, watching Gareth’s fingers fly across the keyboard.

“It’s doing something, but I’m not sure…” he leaned closer and cursed. “Get me a piece of paper.”

She slid a pad and pen his way and watched him jot down the lines and dots. Morse code.
Damn that woman
, she thought and let out her breath. It took a few minutes, Jackie watching the others in the room closely, not knowing now who they could trust, until Gareth was done and slid it back to her.

She read the short message, stood, and shoved the paper through the shredder. Eight hours. That was all the time they had before Eddie and Beau sprung their trap, and there wasn’t a way to get a message back to them. She tapped her fingers on the table, her mind rolling through ways to sneak out when one of the techs stood and started packing his bag.

“Where are you headed?” she asked casually.

“Reinhart’s sending some of us to another location,” he said. “Following up on leads with the footage at the warehouse.”

Jackie shot Gareth a look before she turned to the tech and asked as innocently as possible, “Who’s taking you and when are you leaving?”

***

Beau checked his Sig and tucked a few extra magazines in his tactical vest. His knife was secure at his back once again, and two more were tucked in his boots. There were two rifles in the back of the Hummer. Eddie was busy loading both and tucking spare ammo in her vest. He watched her closely, her shoulder stiff every time she moved it, but she didn’t mutter a single complaint. He was more worried about her knee. It had stopped shaking, but she hadn’t put any real weight on it yet.

“Think they got the message?” she asked without meeting his gaze.

“Only one way to know,” he said.

She leaned the rifles against the wall and stretched her shoulders again, checking her watch for the time. “I can feel you staring at me, Savage. I’ll be fine. We both will.”

“How good a shot are you with those?”

Eddie pulled out the Sig, checked it, and tucked it back in the holster before she answered. “I don’t miss.”

Beau tucked the last of the ammo in his vest as he took her hand. “I wanted you that first day I saw you at the house,” he said quietly. “And now, I want you even more.”

“Then live through today,” she whispered. “And you’ll keep me.”

His arms were around her, and despite the pain in his side, he lifted her off her feet to hold her against him, his lips hard against hers as they fought to claim each other’s mouths. Eddie was his, and he let her know it as his tongue danced along hers, his hands digging into her back in his desire to have her.

There was no time for anything else.

He set her back on her feet, and she glanced at her watch, breathing heavily, her eyes darker than he’d ever seen them before. “Time to go.”

She grabbed the rifles as Beau started the Hummer. When they reached their destination, Eddie would turn her cell back on. Then they’d wait. Beau’s hands gripped the steering wheel hard, fighting the urge to tell Eddie to stay behind. She’d deck him if he suggested it.

If they lived through the day, he’d look forward to many more hits from her.

If they lived.

***

Shane paced back and forth, weighing his options, when his cell beeped. The sound echoed around him as he stared down at the location, a grin stretching across his lips. “We have them.”

“Then finish this,” Reinhart snapped. “I want it taken care of.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll collect the boss on the way.”

“See that you do,” Reinhart said. “And when you’re finished cleaning up your mess, see that he remembers who he really works for.”

Shane put his holster back on as he reached the door. “Of course, sir.”

He walked down the corridor, whistling, picturing the bodies of Agents Eddie Sage and Beau Savage dead on the ground at his feet. Just a few more hours, and all his problems would be solved. If only the admiral could see him now.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Beau stopped the Hummer just outside the front gate as night fell around them, the engine stalling as Eddie and he stared into the house’s darkened windows and the front doorway, destroyed in the explosion. Eddie tapped Beau’s arm, and he got out of the Hummer while she scooted over. He opened the front gate, letting her drive through, then closed and locked it behind and jogged to the house, following the taillights to the front porch. Eddie parked and turned the vehicle off. She checked that her Sig was secure in her shoulder holster before stepping out. Beau was already at the back, taking out the two rifles and the shotgun he’d loaded for his use.