Total pages in book: 155
Estimated words: 146392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 732(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 732(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
He was about to put his excellent plan in motion when something warm sprayed across his face, and the dude who was currently trying to crush his windpipe stopped and got the dumbest look on his face. There was a knife in his throat. A slender, delicate knife sticking right out of what TJ suspected was a much-needed artery.
Then a feminine hand came in and pulled it out, spraying blood everywhere.
He looked for his cousin or one of the members of her team.
Lou reached down, holding a hand out. “We have to go.”
Lou. His sweet LouLou had stabbed a man in the throat. She’d killed a guy. She’d killed the guy he was going to kill. She hadn’t even given him a damn chance. “I was going to take care of him.”
Her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding me?”
He pushed the now solidly dead asshole off him and reached for the M-15. “No, I am not. I could have taken care of him without all the blood. Do you know how hard that is going to be to get out of that sweater? It’s cashmere. That sweater was expensive.”
She looked down and frowned. “Oh no. It’s my favorite.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.” What had it taken for Lou to do that? Adrenaline was getting the better of him. “Baby, I’m sorry. Let’s get out of here. Stay behind me.”
Those brown eyes of hers rolled, and she suddenly had a baton in her other hand. His sweet, too-precious-for-the-world baby had a bloody knife in one hand and a wicked-looking baton in the other, and she’d snuck them both into a mercenary compound in her skirt. Come to think of it, she’d likely designed both weapons along with apparently making a quieter freaking C-4.
Fuck, she was hot.
He was standing in the middle of a paramilitary compound with the love of his life in danger and he had a hard-on because Lou doing bad shit did something for him.
She turned, her gaze narrowing on him. “Try to keep up, TJ.”
She jogged out the door, looking like an avenging goddess-warrior queen bitch. The bitch part wasn’t something he would say out loud. She might take offense, but for him she looked like the baddest bitch he’d ever seen, and he’d been raised around a whole lot of them.
Suddenly he was seeing Lou in a whole new light, and he wasn’t sure how to handle it.
He only knew he damn sure wasn’t letting her go.
He gripped the M-15 like it came naturally. Which it did. “When did this become a CIA op?”
“When we realized they had you. No one bought the whole TJ’s screwing around thing,” she said, stopping at the end of the hallway. She flattened her back and closed her eyes, seeming to listen to something in her head.
Or one of his cousins was in her ear. He could guess what had happened. She’d figured it out, gotten on the Dark Web and discovered the plot to take her in and either allowed herself to be taken, or had one of the guys pretend to be a mercenary and haul her in. She’d come loaded with all kinds of devices that would keep her connected to her team and discovered they were jamming the signals.
“When did comms come back online?” he asked.
“I suspect when Kala or Coop killed the jammer. And it all came back at the worst time possible. You should know your uncle might never recover.”
He didn’t care about the whole “we kind of made a sex tape” thing. “Good. Then he understands.”
That got her head to turn his way. “Understands?” Her expression went blank, and then she nodded. “Coming from the east. Yes. I have him. He’s safe but the guard is dead. Yeah, I know.”
She knew? Knew what? He didn’t like being on the outside. Normally he would be wearing a headset and would be able to hear all sides of the conversation.
“I’m on it,” she promised and then started moving again, going to the left down the corridor. They were in some kind of industrial complex with concrete walls.
“Hey, did they take out the cameras?” He hustled to keep up with her, noting the CCTV cams that dotted the hallways.
“No, Tasha took them over. They can’t use them, but we can,” she explained. “Tasha’s taken over back at base since your uncle is apparently traumatized. You should know your parents are there. They flew out with us. Your mom kind of murdered the first guy sent to take her out, so we subbed Coop in.”
That would buy him some points on the maternal front. His mom hadn’t killed anyone in a long time, and he thought sometimes she missed it. “I want to argue with you and tell you how fucking dangerous this was, but I think you’ve been holding out on me.”