Stripping Her Defenses Read online

  ~~~

  A couple of hours later, I was canceling the last of my upcoming shoots after long hours of finishing up what Declan had started for me, when I heard a screech of tires outside. I watched as Hammer looked out one of my front windows, cursed, and then yelled at Big Jim to secure Lisa as he ran in my direction.

  I stood there, phone still at my ear, confused as to why Hammer was closing the distance between us like his life depended on it, when a staccato of loud bangs rang through the air. Then the glass of the windows shattered.

  In shocked detachment, I saw the drywall explode as I stood frozen to my spot. Those small puffs of exploding wall were traveling towards me when Hammer was suddenly there, tackling me like he was a defensive tackle and I was the poor bastard with the football. It felt like a brick wall had popped up and hit me in the chest when his body made contact with mine.

  We flew through the air, and I felt the jarring impact along the back of my body as we landed on the unforgiving floor, Hammer’s body covering my own. He had his shoulders, head, and hands covering my head while the loud ‘pop, pop, pops’ continued to rip apart my studio.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. An eerie silence filled the air, followed by the squeal of tires in the distance again.

  Hammer started yelling at Big Jim as he popped up off me, pulled a gun from who knows where, and moved towards the front door. Lisa was hysterically screaming, and Big Jim was saying something to her that I couldn’t hear because my ears were ringing. I laid on that floor in a state of shock, my heart and head pounding, and stared at the drywall debris covering the clean floors Declan had left me.

  Some detached part of my brain kicked in and informed me I’d been shot at. The rest of me was in denial of that statement. Who would shoot at me and why? This didn’t make sense at all.

  Scuffed black boots attached to legs covered in well-worn denim came into my vision. Then Hammer squatted down so I was now looking him in the chest. He placed his knuckles under my chin and lifted my face until I was looking at his.

  “Where’s your man?” he asked.

  I furrowed my brows in confusion. “You don’t know? I thought he was working with the Regulators on something?” Hammer didn’t bother to respond, just kept staring at me, so I blurted, “He mentioned being out of touch for the day because of work.”

  He pulled his hand from underneath my chin, stood up so he was towering over me, and then pulled his cell phone from his pocket. Putting the phone to his ear, I heard him say, “Ice, Kara’s studio was just filled with holes and Sullivan is out of touch.” He paused then spoke again, “We’ll be there in ten.”

  Hammer closed his phone, re-pocketing it as he looked down at me. “Ice says you’re on lock down. We’re goin’.” He grabbed my arms, pulled me up from the floor, and started marching me out as he said something back to Big Jim about securing Lisa. He then put me on his bike, strapped a helmet over my head in about five seconds flat, and had both of us out of there in the blink of an eye.

  I should have freaked out because my studio had just been shot out and once again destroyed. I should have freaked because, if Hammer hadn’t tackled me, I would probably be filled with holes instead of my walls. Instead, I was freaked out because ‘lock down’ sounded a lot like a biker’s version of prison, which was crazy because I hadn’t done anything wrong to be sentenced to biker prison… had I?

  Chapter

  17

  Riley

  “Where’s your mind at, Sullivan?” Jaxon asked.

  Back at Kara’s apartment where I left her exhausted, warm, and naked in bed.

  Not that she was there anymore. It was now night time, and I’d spent the entire day trying to keep my head in this mission instead of on my wife. I wasn’t doing a very good job at it.

  Jaxon and I were on surveillance duty of the warehouse where the deal with Medina was going down. The two of us were on the roof of a neighboring warehouse, lying on our bellies with our binoculars glued in the direction of the target’s meeting location. Minus two, the rest of the Ex Ops Team was staked out in various different locations surrounding the warehouse in case Medina tried to get away. The two not with us were Wyatt Brooks, who served as our medic, and Baker. They were ten minutes away, parked at a gas station in a non-descript SUV that Uncle Sam had secured for us along with the motorcycles the rest of us were riding.

  This was the first mission we’d had where our mode of transportation was predominantly on two wheels instead of four, but we had to keep up the undercover biker persona. For once, we were also decked out in civilian clothes instead of our issued black BDUs. Worn jeans, T-shirts, bandanas, baseball caps and night vision glasses helped conceal our appearances. That meant that I, along with Lucas and Declan, were all wearing the Regulators’ cuts Ice had given us. The rest of the team were wearing blank, black leather cuts under their jackets, as well, to keep up the appearance that we were a pack of bikers out for a ride.

  I was ready to move into action. Or, at least, my body was. I was still working on getting my mind to think of nabbing Medina and off what my Kara might be doing right now.

  “Well, are you going to tell me what’s got you distracted or what?” Jaxon asked again.

  Assuming I was being reprimanded for lack of focus by my Commanding Officer, I did what any smart soldier would do. I sucked it up and apologized. “Sorry, sir. My head’s in the game now.”

  Jaxon snorted in disbelief. “I’m not busting your balls, Sullivan. I just figured that, whatever it was, if it had you distracted, maybe you’d want to talk about it so you could get your head straight. I’m guessing it’s about that pretty little wife of yours.”

  I shrugged out of habit even though he couldn’t see the motion since his eyes were trained on the warehouse just like mine. “Kara is always on my mind.”

  “I assume more so than usual, though, since you’ve just reconnected.”

  “Something like that. We’re workin’ it out.”

  “Sun Tzu said in the Art of War, ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.’ You know your enemy, Sullivan. Work it to your advantage and stop fretting like a little, old woman.”

  “My wife is not my enemy,” I retorted, somewhat peeved.

  “Have you won the war for her heart yet?”

  “I’m working on it,” I replied cautiously, perhaps hopefully.

  Jaxon sarcastically supplied, “Then she’s your enemy until you’ve won. You were a seal. For shit’s sake, Sullivan, figure it the fuck out already.”

  “The problem with your advice, Commander, is that I don’t know my enemy like I used to. She’s practically a different person now.”

  “You like what you found?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Had I loved my old Kara? Hell yes. She was my first love. My high school sweetheart. The girl who had seen me through the hard times to obtain my dreams. But the proverbial light bulb had gone off at some time since I’d left her bed this morning, and I had realized something vital.

  We had needed the time away from each other to realize what was important.

  Had her leaving me hurt? Fuck, yeah. It had crushed me into a person who was barely living. I had been merely going through the motions to get from day to day. The loss of both Kara and our son had forced me to think about what was important in my life.

  I might have loved being a Navy seal, but I loved my wife more. She should have been my first priority. Now I understood I had to face whatever problems we encountered head on instead of hiding behind my job in the hopes that the hard times would blow over. Because, no matter how good things seemed to be going right now, I knew hard times were coming again.

  When Kara had admitted she couldn’t have any more children, the pain in her eyes had almost killed me. She had already lost so much when she had lost our boy, but to lose the future, too? It seemed too cruel to be real.

  What broke my heart further was t
hat she had told me that while thinking I would leave. That I would want another woman who would be able to bear my children. I couldn’t blame her for that line of thinking, but I could prove her wrong.

  We could never have children, and I would be all right with that as long as I had Kara. Or, if down the road she decided she did want a child, there were a number of possibilities open to us —surrogate mothers, adoption, whatever. What was most important was having Kara by my side. Without her, I’d go back to being that walking, talking robot that went straight into danger without caring if I walked back out again.

  Which brought me back around to Jaxon’s question.

  Did I like what I had found in the new Kara? I thought of her newfound sass and attitude, her drive to pursue her dreams and independence. She might have had a tough road without me, but Ice had been right when he had said that she’d blossomed into something priceless. She had truly come into her own, which was a sexy, intelligent woman who was now okay with both her body and her mind. What about that would a man not appreciate?

  “Yeah, boss, I like what I’ve found.”

  “There any of the old Kara still in there?”

  I thought about Kara’s sweet disposition, her compassion, her acceptance of me as I was. Those were all Old Kara qualities that had survived. None of those things were something I’d share with Jaxon, though, because they were all for me and me alone.

  “Yeah. Some of the Old Kara is still in there.”

  “Then fight your battles with the pieces of Kara you do know for now until you get the rest of her figured out. Then leash a full assault on her until she’s submitted to you and accepted how you feel about her,” he advised.

  My Commander was a nut.

  “You do realize we’re talking about a woman and not some mission, right?”

  “Trust me, same thing. Now let’s play a game because I’m bored. We can make a bet on how many poorly hidden DEA agents we can find. Sort of like Where’s Waldo, DEA edition. I see two peeking through that window in the brick building diagonally from us and the warehouse. How many do you see?”

  Yeah, my Commander was totally nuts.

  ~~~

  Approximately four hours later, we finally saw movement from who we suspected was meeting Medina. A newer, white Cadillac pulled up and parked in front of the warehouse. The driver, and presumably a bodyguard, exited the front and then stationed themselves at the back of the vehicle as human shields while the occupant in the back got out. His skin was so dark both he and his tailored black suit almost blended into the night around him.

  We didn’t have to wait too long for Medina to finally show up, though. A silver Mercedes pulled up, parking as close as it could to the warehouse without being too close to the Cadillac. An average sized Hispanic man with a protruding belly exited the vehicle cockily along with three other men and disappeared inside the warehouse where the other men were already waiting.

  “Get ready for go time,” Jaxon muttered.

  It took about fifteen minutes for the DEA to strike. The shouts and gunfire started inside the warehouse, yet quickly spilled out to the outside where a swarm of other agents were waiting for them. In the end, they nabbed Medina and one of his men, the other two had been shot dead. They also managed to arrest the driver and the other major player, but his bodyguard must have been killed on the inside because he didn’t emerge with him.

  As soon as we witnessed the DEA agents leading Medina and the other men to a white van nearby, Jaxon spoke into his ear piece to the rest of the team. “They got ‘em, boys. Get on your bikes and head towards Baker and Brooks. Sullivan and I will follow the van until we’re in your vicinity for you to line up behind us.”

  Jaxon and I, quickly and quietly, raced down to our bikes before riding out until we sat behind another building. Once the van passed us, we followed at a discreet distance. Approximately ten minutes later, we passed by the gas station and our team slyly blended themselves into traffic behind us in a way so as to not draw attention to seven bikers followed by a black SUV.

  We tailed the DEA’s van through the outskirts of New Orleans to the other side of the Parrish and were heading down a stretch of highway that I knew led to the detention center when the last civilian vehicle turned off at an exit. That was when Jaxon gave us the go to move.

  Jaxon threw the throttle down on his bike and revved ahead with me close behind him. I saw his left arm move off the handlebar and towards his waist, which meant he was pulling his pistol from the waistband of his jeans.

  As he pulled up next to the driver’s side window, he aimed at the uppermost corner of the glass and fired two shots, shattering the glass. He then maneuvered his bike out of the way. I quickly drove up in between Jaxon’s bike and the van. Pulling the pin from the tear gas grenade I had ready, I threw it through the gaping hole and watched as smoke filled the interior.

  Slowing my bike down so the van shot forward in front of me and I was out of the way, I listened to the agents’ frantic shouts as they swerved and screeched to a stop on the side of the road.

  Motorcycles surrounded the van. Lucas and Declan were in position to take out the two agents with tranquilizer darts as they hopped out of the front of the van. Our mission was to secure Medina for questioning, not to harm innocent, good men who were doing their job.

  Both agents fell to the ground, and then Declan and Lucas dragged them to the safety of the other side of the van so no oncoming traffic would accidentally hit them.

  Arturo and Logan, both ex-Marine Corps Special Operations soldiers, covered the back of the van. Logan had another dart gun raised in preparation for the two guards we knew were in the back. Arturo had his pistol drawn and waiting for Medina and the other three criminals housed back there. They waited for Declan to line up next to Logan with his re-loaded dart gun and then both Jaxon and I positioned ourselves by the van’s doors.

  We could hear a male voice calling out the names “Johnson” and “Wemes,” who were probably the two DEA agents who were incapacitated on the side of the road. Lucas handed Jaxon a keycard he had pulled off one of those agents before positioning himself next to Arturo in case he needed help with subduing the subjects. Jaxon and I both grabbed one of the door handles, and then he reached over, swiping the card through the keycard lock.

  The lock disengaged and we both threw the doors open, stepping out of the way while Declan and Logan simultaneously knocked out the two remaining agents. Medina’s driver tried to spring out of the van, but Arturo had obtained a reputation for being one of the quickest, and deadliest, shots in the Corps. He had Medina’s driver crying on the ground with his knee caps blown out before the man could make it two steps.

  Jaxon and I reached in and pulled out a cursing, bucking Medina, holding him still while Declan shot him in the ass with one of the tranq darts. Jaxon gave my brother an ‘are you kidding me’ look, but Declan only smiled in response.

  Our Commander and I handed a quickly fading Medina over to Brooks and Baker, who then dragged the man to the back of the SUV. They secured a gag over his mouth, a hood over his face, and zip ties above his metal cuffs at his wrists, which were behind his back, and his ankles. The zip ties might have seemed like overkill to some, but it was our way of insuring Medina stayed subdued in case he had tools on his person to pick the locks of the cuffs.

  We then turned back to Arturo, who was still standing with his pistol aimed at the two remaining subjects in the back of the van. His face was hard, his eyes haunted. I knew Arturo had grown up in a rough neighborhood where gangs were a way of life to try and keep safe, although beyond that, no one except Jaxon knew his whole story. It must have been a bad one because Jaxon stepped forward with concern on his face.

  “We need to go, Chavez. And we need to leave them alive so the Feds can get what they need out of them.” His order to Arturo was firm.

  Arturo nodded his head and then fired four rounds so fast no one would have been able to stop him. I was a little shocked Artur
o would so blatantly go against orders when he had been the most obedient soldier out of all of us. The sounds of two criminals now screaming in pain was my only relief. He hadn’t killed them, at least.

  Looking over, I watched as the blood spurted out from their legs, leaking down to the floor of the van beneath their flailing bodies.

  He’d shot out their kneecaps, just as he’d done to Medina’s driver.

  Arturo walked up to Jaxon, his face blank, waiting for our Commander to reprimand him.

  Jaxon surprised us all when he slapped Arturo on the shoulder and said, “At least we don’t have to worry about them getting away now. Declan, put some tranq darts in those three to shut them the fuck up. Their whiney ass screaming is going to make my ears bleed before we get out of here. Now, let’s boogie before the cavalry arrives, boys.”

  I’d always respected Commander Jaxon Wall. How he had dealt with Arturo and whatever demons the man was obviously battling was only one of the reasons why.

  ~~~

  “Let’s have a chat, shall we?” Declan murmured as he straddled a chair in front of a bound Medina.

  We were holed up in a foreclosed house Uncle Sam had given us the coordinates for in Jean Lafitte, Louisiana. It was roughly forty-five minutes from where we’d taken Medina, and now the rush was on to get him to talk. We had a bird waiting for us at nearby Alvin Callender Field, the Naval Air Station.

  The tranq darts we had used on both the DEA agents and their subjects would knock them out for another three hours. However, we didn’t have three hours to wait for Medina to come around. Wyatt had hooked an IV up to him and then injected Narcan into his line. The bound man went from unconscious to wiggling and screaming through his gag in minutes. Now he was glaring at Declan over his gag.

  “I guess you’d like your gag taken off now. Seems only fair since I want to chat and all. You going to do anything stupid like scream?”

  Medina shook his head no, but none of us believed him.