Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 189(@200wpm)___ 151(@250wpm)___ 126(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 189(@200wpm)___ 151(@250wpm)___ 126(@300wpm)
It was a disgusting threat, made even more so by the fact that I knew what a gentle soul Jill Mancuso was. She rescued dogs and cats, was kind to strangers, and for Chris to even imagine losing his wife, his soul mate, the linchpin of his entire family, would be too much to bear.
As soon as the words were out of the guy’s mouth, he flinched, and the color drained from his face. I understood why. I’d been a witness to the same reaction when I was in the field with Chris. Because when he looked at enemy combatants we’d secured, when they started spewing threats, it was all fine until someone stupidly mentioned his family. Chris was terrible at hiding his feelings.
Each and every time, his eyes did this thing that I always likened to a shark. They deadened, all trace of humanity replaced with absolute coldness. Chris never got angry; instead he ceased to care, which, ultimately, was far worse. The man had seconds to live.
But something occurred to me, and I took hold of Chris’s shoulder as I spoke to the man. “You said Mancuso needed to stay out of your way.”
“Weren’t you listening?” he spat at me.
I was actually, and neither Dante nor Chris seemed to have noticed the wording. Dante had no excuse, but the guy putting Jill into the mix was what had shorted out Chris’s brain. “Hey.”
Chris looked up at me.
“He’s warning you to stay outta the fuckin’ way.”
At first, he glared at me, but then, suddenly, his eyes widened with understanding.
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Shit,” Chris muttered, exhaling as he stood up beside me. “You’re saying I need to steer clear of you guys or my wife will suffer the consequences as a warning to me.”
“That’s what I just said,” he growled. “What the fuck?”
Both Chris and I turned to Dante then.
It took him a second to notice. “What?”
Chris gestured at the guy who was sitting between them looking back and forth. He was probably wondering how Dante even got the drop on him with how obtuse he was being now. “This is about you.”
“I have no idea what’s happening right now.”
“These guys want me to stand down so they can get to you.”
“No.”
Both Chris and I nodded.
“How have you lived so long, man?” the guy asked Dante.
“Hurtful,” he replied, then looked back at us. “This has to be a mistake. It can’t be me.”
“What have you done lately that has annoyed the Jalisco cartel enough to send a guy all the way out here to Maine to murder you?” Now I had to know.
Dante appeared pensive.
“I will tell you what—”
“No,” Chris cut the guy off, leaning over and placing the gag in the man’s mouth.
“Why would you do that?” Dante barked at him.
“Because you should be able to figure out all by yourself why a cartel wants you dead.”
Dante glanced at me, and I shrugged.
“You’re taking his side?”
“I would prefer if you left this guy here and we all forgot about this until after I said I do, but that’s not gonna happen.”
“You want me to fill up my B and B with people trying to kill me?”
“Just for, like, the next six hours, yeah. I would appreciate it.”
Dante squinted at me.
“I’m being honest here.”
“Normally,” Chris said, “I would just shoot this asshole, but Dante won’t learn anything that way.”
Crossing my arms, I glared at Dante.
“I’m thinking,” he grumbled.
Because the guy had talked about his wife, Chris now needed to hear her voice. Walking a few feet away, he called her and put it on speaker.
“Hello, angel,” she greeted him, her voice a sultry, smoky sound, since she was talking to the man she’d loved for longer than I’d been alive.
“Hey,” he rumbled, and I watched his eyes narrow. “You drinking all Dante’s wine?”
“Yes, shhh, don’t tell him that Noah and I are hitting the good stuff in the very back of the wine cellar.”
Chris turned to Dante, grinning, and Dante flipped him off.
“Also, Owen and Jared are coming up to you in the attic with one of Kurt’s friends.”
One of Kurt’s friends? That made no sense.
“How did you know I was in the attic?”
“Oh, my darling, I always know where you are.”
She hung up then as the attic door opened to reveal retired Colonel Jared Colter and his fiancé, Owen Moss. They made a beautiful couple, the silver fox and his auburn-haired, green-eyed mate.
Behind them—and the one who didn’t fit—was their companion, Horace Gleason, supposedly a very angry man from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was both a skinhead and a terrorist. The latter was a ruse—he’d been undercover for just over six months. The group he’d infiltrated, the National Patriot Party, NPP, were a bunch of Neo-Nazi trash that the FBI had dismantled with the help of Horace’s life-and-death interactions. Now, as far as the NPP knew, Horace had been shot and killed in the raid on their camp outside Choteau, Montana. He was a hero, but no one would ever know that because the FBI operation was classified. The official, public version was that the NPP had wanted to take their racial war to the streets with a series of bombs and were stopped, the catastrophe averted.