Soldier For Hire

“Yeah, are you sure you can handle Xander if he’s guilty? I mean, I’m the last person to even want to think that it’s possible, but we’ve all seen people we trust go bad for whatever reasons. I love the guy, I do. But Xander has always been a wild card,” Laird said.

Laird was right. They’d all seen the ugly side of humanity at one point or another because combat situations were hell and greed was an insidious evil. But there was something in her gut that told her Xander wouldn’t hurt her.

Even if he was guilty. “I can handle Xander,” she assured Laird but she hoped to God her intuition wasn’t wrong. She was putting her career and her life on the line for the dipshit and he’d better be straight about the facts or she’d happily throat punch him.

Plan in place, they broke off like a well-oiled machine. Scarlett had been the TL for this team for three years. She knew them well and trusted them more.

Even Xander.

Trust was a funny thing, though. Either it was strong as steel or fragile as glass, but you never knew how well it was going to hold up until tested.

Well, she was about to find out if she was standing on steel or falling through glass.

Time to double down, baby.

Chapter 4 (#uacb5bfd1-8f56-5df2-bcbf-8a8117fb8080)

Xander knew concussion protocol would require Scarlett go through bureaucratic hoops to ensure her brain was okay after he’d knocked her out, which meant he had a finite amount of time to put some distance between them.

He had to get to Tulsa, back to the scene of the crime, to see if anything jogged his memory about that day. Thank God, he had a duffel of cash; otherwise, he’d be driving nineteen hours instead of taking a four-hour flight.

Admittedly, he was taking a risk flying, even with a fake ID, mostly because Scarlett knew his aliases and once she was cleared for duty she’d find his destination pretty quick, but he didn’t have the luxury of taking things safe.

He had to hope that Scarlett didn’t tell those bureaucrats to shove it and hop back on his tail like the maniac she was.

God, that woman... If she weren’t so damn hot, he’d say she was crazier than him.

Not his kind of crazy—no, Scarlett was more controlled—but still, you couldn’t lead a Red Wolf team without being a little left of center. None of them were right in the head, which was how they were able to do the jobs they were assigned without batting an eye.

But it also made believing that he could blow up a bunch of civilians to get to one politician totally plausible.

Hell, no one was looking twice at that story.

Messed up vet with a checkered past and a previously unknown prescription drug addiction—yeah, he knew just how perfect he was for this frame job but it pissed him off that Scarlett was playing into the game.

She knew him.

She, of all people, should’ve been able to see through that smoke screen and then he wouldn’t have had to knock her lights out.

Although, if he managed to clear his name and get his job back, he was totally going to rub Scarlett’s nose in the fact that he’d gotten the jump on her. Actually, that thought gave him the warm fuzzies. Lord knew he had precious little of those to pass around.

He grabbed an Uber to the airport, made quick work of buying a ticket on the first flight out of Virginia and settled into his seat, prepared to sleep through the four-hour plane ride. With any luck, his resting asshole face would deter any eager Chatty Kathys from striking up a convo. He wanted to shut his eyes, slip into dreamland and wake up in the dreary nothingness that was Oklahoma.

His lids had only just closed when he heard a familiar voice.

“You’re getting sloppy, Scott.”

His eyes opened slowly to find Scarlett standing in the aisle, looking pissed and deadly as hell. He wanted to say she wouldn’t shoot him in front of all these passengers but he was willing to guess her trigger finger was damn itchy after what he’d done.

Damn it. He should’ve rented a car. “You going to stand there all day? You’re gumming up traffic.”

Scarlett smirked as she swung into the seat beside him, flashing her ticket at him. “Looks like we’re travel buddies.”

He eyed her warily. “Yeah? And how do you figure that?”

Scarlett leaned toward him, her voice lowered to a sexy rumble. “Well, it seems this is your lucky day, Scott. I’m going to see for myself if your story is total bullshit. If it turns out you’re innocent, I get a valuable member of my team back. If it turns out you’re a damn liar, I get to put you away. Either way, it’s a win for me. So yeah, buckle up, baby, you’ve got yourself a travel buddy.”

Awww hell. He didn’t want Scarlett riding shotgun with him on this adventure but the way he saw it, he didn’t have much of a choice. Either he accepted Scarlett’s dubious help or he tried to ditch her again and spend the entire time looking over his shoulder for one angry TL who was a crack shot.

Yeah, seemed better to play nice.

Xander chuckled and shrugged. “Guess it is my lucky day. The team on board with this?”

“I wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”

He didn’t want to seem like a sap but it meant something that the team was willing to take a chance on him. He jerked a nod and sent his gaze out the small window, needing a minute to collect himself. He wasn’t usually a crier but this hit all the feels in all the tender spots.

“You going to cry?” Scarlett asked, frowning. “Pull yourself together or I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”

He laughed, not entirely sure that she was joking. “How’s that head of yours?”

“Pounding like a mother. You clocked me good and don’t think for a second that I’m not going to pay you back for that one.”

“Oh, I know you will.”

“Good.”

Maybe he was an asshole but he took a certain amount of pride for getting the jump on Scarlett. She was TL for a reason—shrewd, smart and always on target—Scarlett didn’t mess around. “Admit it... I got you good,” Xander couldn’t resist teasing, even though he knew poking at Scarlett was like poking at an angry bear.

She leveled a short look his way and changed the subject. All business. “What’s your plan?” she asked.

“My plan? Well, presently, I plan to sleep. In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve been on the run for the past week and a half and it hasn’t exactly been a vacation filled with rest and relaxation.”

“Boo-hoo. You shouldn’t have run in the first place.” She had zero sympathy. “If you would’ve trusted your team, we could’ve handled this the right way. Now we have to do things the wrong way and that means it’s going to be ten times harder than it needs to be.”

“Yeah? So turning myself in would’ve been the right way? What makes you think that I wouldn’t have met an untimely end while in custody? Something tells me that whoever is framing me isn’t real keen on having me around for long. Dead men tell no tales and all that.”

She conceded his point. “Still, you made it worse by running. You could’ve at least told me.”

There was something behind her curt response that tugged at his conscience. Did Scarlet have feelings? And if so, had he inadvertently stepped on them? To be real, that was more disconcerting than the idea of being framed. “Yeah well, hindsight and all that. Kinda hard to think rationally when you’re being framed for a crime you didn’t commit.”

“Copy that,” Scarlett acknowledged with a solemn nod, then added, “But you have to believe in your team. You know that without the strength of your team behind you, a mission is bound to fail. You panicked—and that’s exactly what a rookie would do.”

He disagreed. “You call it panic—I call it calculated self-defense. I wasn’t about to give up my control and walk into a potential ambush like a lamb to slaughter. Sorry, it is what it is, but that ain’t happening.”

The idea of walking meekly into anything remotely close to what Scarlett had been suggesting made his balls shrivel up.

Scarlett could tell he wasn’t going to budge and she wasn’t going to waste the energy, which was good because he was done talking about it anyway. Pulling his ball cap down low, he folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes.