SEAL on a Mission Read online

  “If I hadn’t gotten there when I did, would you have killed Nesbitt last night?” he asked, his voice so soft she barely heard it.

  Kyla didn’t answer right away. Was this the question Wes intended to ask her earlier? It was one she’d pondered herself most of last night and a good part of today.

  “I’d like to say I wouldn’t have. Or at least tell you that I’m not sure,” she finally said. “But to be honest, when Nesbitt was standing there in front of me, all I could think about was my dad’s funeral, my mom crying for days, and how much I hated the asshole. At that moment, I wanted him dead more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life beyond all reason or rational thought. So, to answer your question, I think maybe I would have pulled the trigger.”

  She wasn’t sure what she expected him to do or say to that. Maybe give her a startled, disappointed look. Or insist she was wrong, that she was a good person at heart who would never do something like that. But instead, he washed his hands, then took his time drying them on a towel before turning back to her again.

  “I can understand that and I can’t say I’d act any differently if I were in your situation,” he said. “But for what it’s worth, I’m glad you didn’t pull that trigger. Even if it would have been justified, you would never have been the same after doing something like that. Trust me, killing is something I know a lot about.”

  The words were so unexpected all Kyla could do was stare. “I might not have pulled the trigger, but Nesbitt’s dead all the same. That’s the only thing that matters.”

  Wes seemed to consider that for a moment, but then looked at her curiously, head tilting to the side in a way Kyla found so adorable. “So, what now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nesbitt said Stavros was only supposed to scare your father, which implies someone else hired Stavros to murder him.”

  She scowled. “Nesbitt was a lying douche canoe who would have said anything to save his butt.”

  “Maybe,” Wes agreed. “Maybe not. But it’s obvious someone didn’t want Nesbitt talking last night. Aren’t you curious who shot him?”

  “Not really. The list of who people who wanted a jerk like him dead was probably a mile long. Whoever killed Nesbitt did the world a favor.” Tears stung her eyes and when one trickled down her face, she brushed it away with an angry hand. “I’m just so tired of all of this, you know? I’ve been holding this hatred inside me for so long I don’t remember what it’s like not to feel this way. I want this all to be over.”

  Kyla didn’t want to cry, but then next thing she knew Wes’s arms were around her and she was sobbing against the front of his uniform T-shirt. But as much as she hated breaking down, it felt good, too. The sorrow and grief, the bitterness that had been festering inside her for so very long, the rage and the pain all came out with her tears as Wes held her tight.

  “If you want this to be over, then it’s over,” he murmured, his mouth close to her ear.

  She cried even harder then because it felt like someone had finally given her permission to move on when it seemed as if the only reason she was living was for revenge. But with those few words, she felt lighter, as if the weight that had been on her shoulders had disappeared.

  When the tears finally subsided, she wiped the wetness that was left from her cheeks and lifted her head to look at him. “Why did you come after me last night? Why would you risk your career to keep me from doing something stupid?”

  Wes reached up to tenderly cup her face. “I couldn’t let anything happen to you,” he said, his voice low and full of emotion. “I couldn’t let you get hurt. Or arrested. The thought of you not being in my life wasn’t something I was ready to accept. I would have risked anything to keep that from happening. You’re important to me.”

  Hearing him say something like that out loud made her heart squeeze in the best way possible. She didn’t care that they were only friends, didn’t care that she might be risking that friendship if she kissed him. She just did it. And going on tiptoe to touch her mouth to his felt like the most natural thing in the world.

  Man, he tasted amazing. Better even than chocolate…and she loved chocolate.

  She melted into his arms, parting her lips and welcoming his tongue, sighing a little as it teased hers. She’d read in romance books about being kissed until you were dizzy, but she’d always thought that was a silly cliché. Turned out, she was wrong. Wes could kiss like nobody’s business!

  She and Wes pulled back at the same time, both of them breathing heavily. The way he gazed down at her, his gorgeous blue eyes full of heat, made her seriously think about going right back in for another kiss—as soon as she got her breath back.

  His smolder slowly transformed into a sexy smile. “I guess we’ve stepped way out of the friend zone, huh?”

  She laughed. Now, she really did feel lighter than air. “Is that your way of saying you want to go out on a date?”

  “Only if you say yes.”

  Kyla leaned in and kissed him again. “Ask me and find out.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I’VE GOT TO get out of the barracks—like yesterday,” Sam groaned, hitching the small backpack higher up on his shoulder as he and Wes walked down the hallway to Noah’s apartment after work the next day.

  The building wasn’t the Ritz, but it was clean and quiet, with actual grass growing in the common areas. Noah’s place was a two bedroom with one and a half bath. And as an added plus, it had a small balcony where he could grill. Compared to Sam’s living situation, it probably seemed like Nirvana. Wes didn’t blame his Teammate. Living in the barracks sucked. If base needed someone to do manual labor, they always looked there first. And if you wanted to hook up with a girl, bringing her back to a room that wasn’t much bigger than a closet with thin walls to boot wasn’t an option.

  Wes glanced at his Teammate. “Why haven’t you moved already? With the limited space in the barracks, nobody’s going to have a problem approving your request to live off base.”

  Sam shrugged as they took a right and headed upstairs to the second floor. “Yeah, that’s not the problem. Apartments are so damn expensive and with the measly housing allowance I have as an E-4, I’ll be lucky to be afford a condemned one-bedroom on crack-house row.”

  Wes chuckled. He couldn’t argue with that. “You’ll find something.”

  Sam only grunted in reply.

  Noah’s apartment was at the far end of the hallway and when they reached it, Wes rapped his knuckles on the door. Their Teammate had been on quarters—aka sent home to rest the bum knee he’d gotten in Nigeria—since getting back from Africa, with the exception of the short amount of time it had taken him to provide his statement on what happened on the mission. Wes and Sam were there to check to see how he was doing, as well as bring him some groceries.

  But a pony-tailed blond pixie with a grin about a mile wide opened the door instead of their slow moving buddy with a bad wheel.

  “Laurissa!” Wes grinned. “Don’t tell me your brother has you over here waiting on him. Does the man have no pride?”

  Noah’s younger sister laughed, opening the door wider so he and Sam could step inside. “Apparently not. He’s chilling on the couch while Mom is in the kitchen making homemade chicken noodle soup for him, acting like he got blown up or something.”

  Out the corner of his eye, Wes caught Sam’s surprised expression and gave him a quick little head shake before his friend could tell Laurissa that was exactly what’d happened to Noah. Because obviously, Noah hadn’t told them.

  Noah was indeed hanging out on the couch opposite the sweet big-screen TV in the living room, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, his leg elevated on a cushion. It had started swelling on the flight home from Africa and by the time they landed, he couldn’t even bend it. The thing looked even worse now. His knee was roughly the size of a cantaloupe with black and blue streaks running through it. Yeah, it was pretty gross.

  Noah’s mother was at the stove in the kitchen, st
irring the soup Laurissa mentioned she was making. From where Wes was standing, the stuff smelled amazing.

  “Hey Mrs. Bradley,” he called, giving her a wave her way as Sam set his backpack on the floor beside the couch. She lived thirty minutes up the coast in Carlsbad and regularly stopped by to bring Noah homemade goodies. “Noah causing you trouble?”

  His mom laughed, glancing over her shoulder at Wes, her straight dark hair brushing her shoulders. “Doesn’t he always?” Covering the pot with a lid, then walked around the counter peninsula and into the living room to give him and Sam each a hug. “You boys are all so slim. You need more meat on your bones.”

  Laurissa snorted. “Mom, I think they call that being fit. Women like that, trust me.”

  Grinning, she waggled her eyebrows at Wes and Sam, earning herself a frown of displeasure from Noah. He was extremely protective of his “baby” sister and was very vocal about not wanting anybody on the team messing with her. Which not only tended to piss Laurissa off, but also pretty much guaranteed the guys joked about asking her out all the time simply to get a rise out of him.

  Noah’s mother was too busy checking on his busted knee to see the looks being passing back and forth between everyone, which was probably a good thing. “Well, they may be fit, but do they have to play so rough? I mean, seriously. This much damage from a volleyball game is crazy.”

  Wes lifted a brow in Noah’s direction. “So, what did the doctor say about your volleyball injury?”

  As fibs went, it wasn’t that far-fetched. The guys on SEAL Team 5 did play volleyball a lot and it usually tended to get violent. Hell, that’s why they called it Combat Volleyball.

  “She said it’s a Grade 2 ligament sprain to my MCL and ACL,” he said. “Luckily, nothing that needs surgery. Just some rest and rehab. If it were any worse, I could have been looking at a complete knee rebuild. Maybe even a medic discharge.”

  Damn. That thought silenced Wes immediately. From the expression on Sam’s face, it hit him equally as hard. As SEALs, they all knew they did a dangerous job. But the idea of any of them getting injured badly enough to get kicked out of the Navy was something none of them ever thought about. They couldn’t…not if they wanted to keep doing the job.

  After Noah gave them a rundown on how long he’d be off his feet and what his rehab would look like, his mothered pestered him about the importance of “healthy” food during his recovery. Apparently, she’d discovered his kitchen cabinets were full of nothing but “junk” food.

  “That’s why I filled your chicken soup with lots of vitamin packed kale and ancient grains,” she added. “And I’ll bring more food tomorrow, so don’t worry about running out.”

  Wes almost laughed. He was pretty sure running out of healthy food was the last thing Noah was concerned about. He was right.

  “Please tell me those are cheeseburgers I smell in that backpack you brought,” Noah said to him and Sam when his mother and sister left a little while later.

  Sam unzipped the backpack with a chuckle, handing a take-out bag with burgers and fries from In-n-Out to Wes and Noah before eagerly opening his own.

  “What am I missing at work?” Noah asked as he pulled the grease-stained paper wrapper off the first burger and took a big bite. “Have they figured out where the leak came from yet?”

  Wes unwrapped his own burger with a snort. “Not yet. Be happy you’re stuck here on your couch. Because work was absolutely shitty.”

  “Everyone is trying to blame us for the leak that ended in the ambush,” Sam added, shoving a handful of fries in his mouth.

  Noah frowned. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. There must have been thirty investigators at HQ today.” Wes bit into his burger. It was juicy with the perfect amount of melty cheese. “CIA, NCIS, SOCOM, even the frigging National Security Agency showed up. Nash, Sam, and I dissected every single moment of the mission from the second we got the call to come in until that IED went off. None of them came right out and said it, but it’s obvious they think there’s a leak and that it had originated with our team. Some of the investigators from the CIA even went so far as to imply we’re jealous of having to take a backseat to SOG and that we purposely leaked the plans for the raid so they’d look bad.”

  “That’s frigging insane,” Noah said. “We work with those guys from SOG all the time. They can’t believe we’d be that petty we’d put their lives—and ours—in danger.”

  Wes dunked a handful of fries in the ketchup he’d squeezed out of the packets onto the wrapper. “They didn’t seem to think that part through.”

  “Things only got uglier after that,” Sam said. “If Commander Hunt hadn’t stepped and got everyone to calm down that might’ve been the end of anymore joint CIA/SEAL operations.”

  “It might still be,” Wes pointed out. “To say everyone is walking on eggshells right now is an understatement. The CIA is pulling out all the stops to find Chapman and those drones, and when they do, the plan is to once again use our team for backup. But if something goes wrong next time, I don’t want to think about how bad the fallout is going to be.”

  Noah ate in silence as he considered that. “So, what’s the latest on you getting arrested?”

  “My lawyer doesn’t think the district attorney’s office is going to prosecute,” Wes said.

  He hoped so. If they did, it was likely to have serious implications for his security clearance—and his job as a SEAL.

  “That’s good.” Noah shook his head. “I still can’t believe Kyla showed up at Nesbitt’s with a gun. I mean, not that I blame her. How’s she doing?”

  “Well, on the bright side, after I got arrested, we finally sat down and talked about us. We’re going out on a date this weekend.”

  “About damn time.” Noah reached over to fist bump him. “So, what’s the not so bright side?”

  Wes hesitated, not sure how to answer that. “I think Kyla is in some kind of denial about the whole thing. She’s not acting the way I expected her to.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Noah asked. “There’s no manual for how she’s supposed to act, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Wes sat back, resting his ankle on the opposite knee. “It’s just that before that sniper shot him, Nesbitt said he only hired Stavros to scare Kyla’s dad, and that if Stavros did, in fact, murder him, he must have been working for someone else. But for some reason, Kyla isn’t curious about who might have hired Stavros. I mean, she started her own underground hacktivist group so she could find her father’s killer and now, suddenly, she’s acting like she doesn’t care anymore.”

  Noah’s brow furrowed. “You don’t believe her?”

  “I don’t know,” Wes admitted. “She’s always been this force of nature, someone not afraid to go after the truth and risk everything for what she believes in. Regardless of what Kyla said, there’s a part of me that’s afraid she’s going to keep digging until she finds out who hired Stavros. I only hope she thinks before going after whoever it is this time.”

  Or ending up in jail again might be the least of his worries.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  KYLA COULDN’T STOP grinning as she quickly led Wes by the hand through the entry plaza, then slipped to the left of the flamingos and headed straight for the monkey trail. As she heard the hoots and whoops of the creatures a few hundred feet ahead, it was all she could to keep from running off like an eight-year-old kid.

  She’d tried to play it cool on the drive over, but to be honest, Kyla had started getting excited the moment Wes had showed up her campus dorm room—looking absolutely droolworthy in jeans, boots, and an untucked buttondown—and announced he was taking her to the San Diego Zoo. She hadn’t been there since she was in middle school, but she remembered having a ton of fun and knew it would be even better with Wes.

  “We don’t have to rush, you know,” Wes said with a chuckle. “It’s not like the monkeys are going anywhere.”

  Kyla laughed even as she picked up her pace. “I
can’t help it. I love monkeys. They’re my favorite thing in the zoo.”

  “Hey! I thought I was your favorite thing in the zoo?” he teased, his boots thumping rapidly against the pavement as he ran faster to match her steps. “Should I be worried?”

  She gave him a smile. “No way. When it comes to favorite things, you’re in my top three…top five at most.”

  “Top five, huh?” Wes’s mouth twitched. “I guess I can live with that. But if I find out you’ve put a warthog on the list ahead of me, I’m going to be hurt.”

  Kyla giggled, dragging Wes to the first monkey enclosure, happier than she’d been in a long time. Taking out her cell phone, she put an arm around Wes, swinging him around for a perfect selfie with some black crested mangabeys swinging by in the background. As she took close-ups of the fluffy-faced monkeys, she told him everything she knew about them, then did the same thing when they visited the chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.

  Her love for the zoo showed as she oohed and aahed over rhinos, koala bears, kangaroos, and pandas. Actually, she about lost her mind over the pandas, probably leaving little doubt in Wes’s mind which position the cute furballs held on her list.

  “You know a lot about animals,” he said when she explained why a panda’s gestation could vary as much as three months. “Seriously, you could work here. If you ever get tired of hanging out with all those engineering nerds.”

  Kyla laughed as they walked to the next exhibit. “I actually did consider becoming a zoologist.”

  “Really?” He looked at her in surprised when they stopped on the overlook above the warthog enclosure. “What made you decide on engineering instead?”

  She hesitated. If she wanted to keep the mood light—which she did—this wasn’t the best topic of conversation. But Wes had asked and she couldn’t avoid talking about the one thing that made her sad forever.

  “My dad,” she said softly, watching one particular warthog, larger than the rest, rooting around, throwing chunks of dirt left and right. “You know about him being a civil engineer, right? Well, he used to do a lot of his work from his home office. He’d spend hours going over building designs, bridges, walkways, irrigation systems, cell phone towers—you name it—and I’d hang out with him. When I got older, he let me help with the math he used to calculate wind resistance and stuff. I loved it because he did.”