Her Ruthless Protector (Night Storm Book 1)
Her Ruthless Protector
Night Storm, Book One
Caitlyn O’Leary
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Caitlyn O’Leary
© Copyright 2019 Caitlyn O’Leary
All rights reserved.
All cover art and logo © Copyright 2019
By Passionately Kind Publishing Inc.
Cover Designer, Lori Jackson Design
Developmental Editor, Trenda (T-Bird) London
Editor, Rebecca Hodgkins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and places portrayed in this book are entirely products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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To one of life’s good guys, my brother Jim.
Introduction
In An Instant, He Knew She Was His
Navy SEAL Kane McNamara has narrowed a list of potential terrorist targets down to four in Oman—now it's a matter of keeping all of them safe until his team can figure out which one it really is. Out of all the targets to protect, the last one on his list that he wants to personally guard is an international music show. Until he meets the woman organizing the event, then all bets are off. He's in it for the long haul.
Has She Finally Met Her Match?
A.J. Lancaster has never met anyone like Kane. Nobody's ever given her this much crap or been this much fun. Her job doesn't give her a spare second to think, but she'll make time to flirt with the most interesting and hottest man she's ever met.
It's Turning Deadly...Fast
Soon Kane, A.J., and the rest of the Night Storm SEAL team realize al-Qaeda has the music show solely in their sights. When innocents are injured, Kane and his team stop at nothing to guard the hundreds of people involved in the show, including the one woman who doesn't think she needs protecting. When bullets fly, it's down to Kane and his team to stop al-Qaeda's plans, and Kane must ensure that the woman he loves stays alive so she can have the future she deserves.
1
This was not going to be a cakewalk, that was for damn sure. Kane looked around the back of the sweltering truck and saw that his Night Storm teammates were tense and alert. After hours in the back of this piece of shit vehicle somebody better come up with something more interesting to say than Leo Perez talking about the last decent meal he’d had or Zed Zaragoza talking about the latest home renovations he’d done.
Kane McNamara was second in command of the Navy SEAL team Night Storm, and they had one hell of a mission on their hands. Kane looked down at his SatNav, it showed they had about thirty minutes before they would hit the little town of Ja’ar in Yemen.
He pressed refresh on his comp for the thirty-third thousandth time, and there still wasn’t an update on the satellite images for their target. He glanced up at his lieutenant, who looked up at him. They could always read each other’s minds. Kane gave a slight shake of his head. Still no photos.
Lieutenant Max Hogan looked pissed. Kane refreshed his screen again, still nothing.
It’d been an ass numbing eight-hour trip from the coast of Yemen. The beginning of their trip they’d travelled in style on the aircraft carrier the USS Mason which had even arranged for a Seahawk to fly them to Aden at the start of this little jaunt.
They’d landed well northeast of town and been met with some friendly Marines who were acting as their chauffeurs in this piece-of-shit truck. He took another look around the truck, then glanced back down at his SatNav.
Twenty-eight more minutes until they hit their target.
Kane sighed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his friend, Cullen Lyons, smile and wink.
What did Cullen have up his sleeve?
“Hey, Kane, did I tell you about the blind date I went on last month?” Cullen hollered over the roar of the truck engine.
Oh, thank God, at last, somebody might have something interesting to say.
His friend was a consummate bullshitter, and you always knew that his story was going to be particularly good when he started speaking with a bit of an Irish brogue. Over the years, Kane had gotten pretty good at sniffing out the truth from the fiction—not that it mattered, since both were pretty damn entertaining—and today Kane couldn’t care less.
“No, you didn’t,” he answered. Then he settled back in the truck, and ignored the rough ride over the sand, rocks, and boulders that were considered a road in this part of Yemen, and concentrated on Cullen.
“You let someone set you up on a blind date?” Nicholas Hale asked. He was the youngest member of the Night Storm SEAL team.
“My two little sisters double-teamed me,” Cullen said disgustedly. “Do you have sisters, Nick?”
The kid shook his head.
“Be happy. They can be evil. Especially when they have a bone to pick with you.” Cullen threw a twig into the middle of the transport.
Kane caught Zed’s eye. Both of them had met Cullen’s sisters. They were a year apart and they had a wicked sense of humor. They also didn’t appreciate their big brother’s tendency to meddle in their lives. Kane looked down at his computer. Twenty minutes to go.
“So, you actually showed up on this blind date. Why didn’t you bail?” Leo asked. “For God’s sake Cullen, whenever it comes to a shitty assignment you always figure out a way to weasel. Are you telling me you couldn’t figure a way out of this date?”
“They reminded me of all the times they covered for me with Mom. I was stuck,” Cullen explained.
“So, let me guess. Your date was nice and had a good personality, was that it?” Raiden Sato guessed from the far corner of the truck. Raiden always preferred being in the shadows.
“This girl was an old college friend of Chelle’s,” Cullen said, referring to the older of his two sisters.
“Quit peppering him with questions,” Max commanded. “Cullen tell your story.”
They hit a huge rock, the truck took flight, and everybody bounced. Cullen’s story better be damned good to take Kane’s mind off the hellish heat and his bruised ass.
“Like the lieutenant said, start the damn story already,” Kane growled.
“After a week of Chelle’s and Baily’s bitching, I called the woman up. She sounded nice enough.”
“Told you she was nice,” Raiden chuckled.
“Her name was Brittany, and she had Saturday free, but th at was the day I’d promised my Chelle she could borrow my Jeep. Should have known right then and there, that I had been set up,” Cullen said disgustedly. “Brittany said it wasn’t a problem, she’d pick me up, and I, being a dumbass, agreed.”
“She couldn’t drive worth shit, huh?” Raiden commented.
“Oh, you do not know how evil my sisters are. Brittany shows up at my front door. She has the palest complexion I’d ever seen with stark black hair. She looks like someone who should spend her days in a coffin and her nights avoiding garlic and crosses. Hell, she’s even wearing black lipstick and black nail polish.” Cullen’s shudder soon morphed into a smile.
“I see that,” Asher Thorne said as he pointed at Cullen’s face. He’d been waiting patiently for the punch line. Asher knew Cullen as well as Kane.
“Fine, she has the lips and eyes of Scarlett Johansen and legs that went on forever. And she was wearing thigh-high leather boots that stopped just short of her stockings. Don’t get me started on the garter belt, which you could see because of her tiny mini skirt. I couldn’t decide whether to slam the door in her face or drag her inside for the night.”
“So, what are you bitchin’ about?” Kane demanded.
“I know, right? We walk out to her car,” Cullen smiled. “Being a gentleman, I let her walk first, which happily allowed me to admire the view. That’s why I was caught off-guard when she stopped at her gold Mini Cooper. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
He paused for effect.
“Get on with it,” Raiden said.
“The damn thing is covered in raven stickers. I mean covered. Then on the hood of the car, is this huge decal of something called The Raven’s Code.”
Asher snickered.
“Oh no, it gets worse,” Cullen said as he lifted his hand. “Let’s not forget the license plate. Can you guess what that said?” he asked as he looked at each of his teammates.
“Raven?” Nick Hale guessed.
“Nah, too easy.” Leo Perez said. Leo spelled out each letter of the word RAVING, “as in, she’s a raving lunatic.”
More laughter, but Cullen was shaking his head. “First, she looked me up and down like a piece of meat and said that her license plate really fit her mood.”
Kane grinned. “CRAVING,” he said decisively.
Cullen dropped his head into his hands and groaned. Then he looked up. “Yep.”
“But still, hot and crazy isn’t always a bad thing,” Asher said slowly. “At least for a night or two.”
“For God’s sake, think it through, Asher. Crazy is a very bad thing when she’s friends with my sisters and knows where I live. Plus, I’m thirty-two, you do that kind of shit when you’re Nick’s age.” Cullen sat up straighter. “But it gets worse.”
“Regale us,” Asher pleaded.
“The car was a convertible, and damn small. I offered to drive. She laughed and said she was the only one allowed to drive her baby. Here I am, dreading having to fold myself into this tiny car, then I pull open the door to the passenger seat and get in. I shit you not, I’m confronted with a full-sized crystal wind chime hanging from the rearview mirror.”
There was no laughter in the back of the truck. Cullen was met by stunned silence, until finally Max spoke.
“You’re lying.”
“Seriously, how could I make this shit up?” Cullen asked as he hunched his shoulders. It was as if he were reliving his experience.
“What did you do next?” Nick asked.
“I’m thinking it’s time to bail. Enough of this happy horseshit, right?”
Hell, yeah. Gone. Sisters be damned. Not that he had any. But Kane knew he’d be gone.
“Then she turns to me and says, ‘Well, Navy, I owe your sisters some money, I didn’t think you’d have the guts to get in my car.’”
“She just throws down like that?” Dante asks.
“Yep.” Cullen nodded. “So, I ask her, ‘If you end up turning off men with a car like this, why do it?’”
“She says she’s separating the men from the boys right from the get-go. If a guy can’t hang with who she really is, she’s not interested.”
“Holy hell. She sounds like she could be interesting in a good way,” Raiden said.
“Did you forget about the wind chimes?” Asher asked.
“Yep, that date was a fucking rollercoaster,” Cullen gave a half grin. “I told her where I’d made reservations, and she said that she was taking me to a vegan restaurant instead. Vegan, not vegetarian. Lots of tofu dishes.”
“I didn’t know Virginia Beach had a vegan restaurant,” Max said.
“It doesn’t. She started driving, with the top down and the wind chimes tinkling, toward Chesapeake.”
“I call bullshit. There’s no way you put up with that for forty miles,” Kane said.
Cullen chuckled. “You’d be right. The wind chimes came down as soon as we hit Interstate 264.”
“How’d she take that,” Asher asked.
“She looked over at me and said, ‘Strike one.’ Then she said, ‘You should really try harder to please me’.”
Max gave Kane a questioning look. Kane gave a subtle shake of his head.
Where were the damn photos? They had less than fifteen minutes to go.
“She didn’t actually say that,” Nick’s eyes were wide.
“Swear to God,” Cullen responded.
“What was strike two?” Zed asked with a laugh.
“Hey, you don’t know there was a strike two,” Cullen said defensively.
“Hell, even Nick knows there was a strike two. I’m betting it was when you were confronted with the menu,” Raiden grinned.
“I resent that. After that time where we had the two days of expired MREs, tofu and bean sprouts were heaven.”
“You know, I took a bullet smack dab in the middle of body armor during that raid. Ended up with a bruise that lasted for a fucking month. But it was the case of the runs I got from the expired chili that I remember the most.” Leo shook his head with a wry grin.
“So, how’d you get the second strike?” Zed asked again.
“Well, here’s the deal Zaragoza,” Cullen said, dragging out Zed’s last name. “I personally think the strike was Brittany’s fault. The fourth time that she was getting ready to send back her food for some piddly-ass reason, I told her to shut the fuck up and eat it already. For God’s sake it was already nothing but bunny food. There was nothing the chef could do to make it taste any better and she was being a spoiled little brat.”
Zed grinned. “Yep, your strike was totally her fault.”
“Told ya.” Cullen nodded.
“So, she told you that was your second strike, and you needed to be nicer?” Asher asked.
“Nope, she told me that was my second and third strike, and there was no hope for me.”
“Why the hell did she ever want to go out on a blind date with you to begin with? Did she tell you?” Kane asked. They only had twelve minutes left until they stopped. Needed to get to the bottom of things fast.
“She drove like a bat out of hell to drop my ass off at my house, and I asked her that very thing.”
“So?” Max asked.
“Apparently she’d been complaining to my sisters about the lack of good men and her continual bad experiences in the dating world. Baily had said I was a nice, smart, and honorable man, so she thought she’d take a chance.”
Cullen paused.
“I would have felt bad for her if she hadn’t continued. She said that I was a total troglodyte, and that she would be happy to explain what the word meant. She then went on to say, that any woman stupid enough to marry me would deserve the life of subjugation she ended up with. She again offered to explain what the word meant.”
Kane snorted. “And you said?”
“I told her I didn’t care how good she was at giving beak, no man would think she was worth it. Of course, I made sure I was out of the car before I said it.” Cullen’s smile was huge, and everyo ne was laughing.
“Oh man, I’ve got to remember that, giving beak, that’s fucking priceless.” Asher’s shoulders were shaking, he was laughing so hard.
“Giving beak?” Nick asked.
“Head,” Asher explained. “She’s a raven, so she doesn’t have lips. She gives beak, not head.”
Kane shook his head. He loved his team. He pressed the ‘refresh’ button on his screen again.
Halle-fucking-lujiah!
The images had downloaded.
All thoughts of ravens, feathers, and beaks were forgotten. Okay, he did give a split second to think about how a gothy Scarlett Johansen look-alike might look giving a blow job.
He looked closely at the photos. They were a mega-shit-ton clearer.
“Guys, I have the satellite images, get over here.” Everyone gathered around Kane as he turned his laptop around so they could see. They weren’t infrared so they couldn’t see inside the buildings, but they could clearly see the layout of the compound.
The guys could see the design of al Fadi’s family’s compound. It held one main building that was three stories, and one out building that was a garage butting up against the stone wall surrounding the perimeter.
“This is all wrong. The main gate is here,” Zed said, pointing to a spot opposite the garage. “Meanwhile the garage is next to the wall. I’d bet money that there are tunnels from the house to the garage, and then under the garage to the outside.”
“I sure as hell wouldn’t bet against you.” Asher said.
“Fuck that shit, I’d give ten to one odds that he’s right,” Kane chuckled. “Good eye, Zaragoza.”