Chapter 17 Kyle
KYLE
As she’d requested, I gave Cami her space.
We came together for lunch and dinner, and we even managed to make conversation.
But nothing was the same as it had been hours earlier, while we’d been in our happy, sex-fueled bubble with no HEAT team, no FBI leaking that bullshit story to try to flush out leads, no fucked-up investigation.
The bubble had burst, but I couldn’t stand to go back to the way things had been before last night, going to bed early and alone.
I might not have any choice in the second one, but at least I hoped to talk Cami into spending some time with me. No sex, no pressure, no conversation if she didn’t want it. But I needed to feel close to her again on some level.
I wanted to take her on a date, something intimate and romantic. Or maybe a meet-up with good friends, over cold beers and bar trivia. But for now, until this investigation was over and she and Bella were safe, I needed to figure out a way to date her here, to woo her, to win her back.
“Would you be up for a movie?” I asked while I stacked plates into the dishwasher, “Here, I mean, not going out.”
“Um.” She shrugged. A crack in the armor she’d donned to protect herself from me. “Will there be popcorn?”
I grinned. “There will be now. I’ll make it while you choose something to watch.”
“Wow, I get popcorn and the remote. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re trying to impress me.”
“Always,” I said seriously.
She sat on the sofa and Bella snuggled into the dog bed on the living room floor, one of three she now had at various spots throughout the house.
With Cami melting ever so slightly, I could pretend we were a happy little family.
Shit, was that what this was? Last night, I’d admitted to myself that I was falling for this woman, but a happy little family?
Meanwhile, she was barely speaking to me.
When the hell had I become such a masochist?
Ten minutes later, I set a large bowl of popcorn, a bottle of whisky, and two tumblers on the coffee table.
I sat down beside her, leaving a space between us that was about the width of person.
A very small person. She didn’t protest or shrink away.
I took it as another win. By the end of the night, she might even let me touch her again. But I wouldn’t push it.
Halfway through the movie and the whole way through the popcorn, we’d inched closer to each other.
Our shoulders were touching, and I was calculating the risk/benefit of putting my arm around her, like a stupid teenager on a first date, when the security system alarm beeped four times in rapid succession.
Cami jumped to her feet. Bella whined and tried to crawl behind the sofa.
I palmed my phone and checked the security feeds.
A vehicle, an SUV by the looks of it, with no lights on had turned into the driveway and stopped at the top of it.
If they were smart, they were doing electronic and heat signature surveillance to do a very different kind of risk/benefit analysis than I’d been doing a second earlier.
“Cami,” I said calmly so neither of them would freak out, “take Bella to my room and lock yourselves in.”
I ran to the armoire and pulled a comms unit out of the top drawer, tapping it to life as I shoved it into my ear.
“This is Rogers reporting an emergency incident at my residence. Who’s on the line?”
“You got routed to me,” Pasco said. “I’ve alerted the state and local police and notified the team.”
I reached behind the armoire and punched a code into the keypad, then pulled on the front of the cabinet to reveal the floor-to-top-of-the-armoire weapons safe behind it.
When Cami gasped, I realized two important things: one, I’d freaked her out again and, two, she hadn’t moved.
“Cami, did you hear me? Take Bella to the bedroom.”
She still didn’t move.
“Pasco, I need thirty seconds.”
“Roger that,” he said, and my comms clicked off.
I took Cami’s hands and looked into her eyes. “Cami, I need your help to keep Bella safe.”
That snapped her out of her stupor. “Of course.”
“Take up her up to my bedroom and close yourself in with her. There’s small button under the right door handle. Push that to engage the deadbolt. Can you do that, can you keep her calm until I come to get you both?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “I’ll take care of her.” She called Bella and ran toward the stairs, then ran back to me. She grabbed my face between her hands and kissed me. “Don’t you dare get hurt, hero. We have unfinished business.”
Cami took off again with Bella trotting obediently behind her. When the pup glanced at me, I nodded, and I was sure she understood I was telling her I’d keep her safe. She followed Cami up the stairs.
I tapped my comms. “Pasco, Rogers here, back online.”
“Roger that,” Pasco said, then resumed coordinating communication between all the personnel now on the line.
I strapped on a bulletproof vest, slung a loaded rifle over each shoulder, and slid a pistol into my vest holster.
The second the deadbolt on the bedroom door slid into place and I knew Cami and Bella were safe, my heart rate slowed down to a manageable speed.
The adrenaline pouring into my system hyper-focused me on the task at hand, which was to pin down the intruders.
I strapped on my helmet and bounded up the stairs two at a time.
In the upstairs hallway, behind the plastic separating the finished from the unfinished side of the house, I tugged on a barely visible cord.
A metal ladder dropped from the ceiling and I scrambled up it, into the attic space.
I snapped on infrared goggles and peered out through the slats of the ventilation system cover at the front of the house.
“I have heat signatures on three hostiles,” I said into the comms. I slid open a small panel to my right and slid a rifle barrel through it.
“Rest of the property is clear,” Pasco, who was monitoring all my security feeds, said. “These idiots came alone.”
“Then they’re probably only here to send a message. And I have one for them. Permission to engage, boss.”
“No live ammunition,” Kat said. “Deadly force not authorized, I repeat, not authorized unless they breach the house.”
“Fuck me,” I muttered, but I already had my tranq rifle in my hand, not the live ammo one.
HEAT agents weren’t assassins, killers, or vigilantes.
We saw our targets as potential witnesses, snitches, or future defendants.
That suited me because I had no problem behaving like a civilian in a civilized society.
If those fuckers entered my house with Cami and Bella in it, though, we’d be having a different conversation.
“I’m on the road,” I heard Hayes say as he joined the conversation.
“Same,” Wheeler chimed in.
“Both of you head straight to HQ,” Kat instructed. “Rogers and Lang, I’m six minutes out. Do not engage with law enforcement if they beat me there.”
“I’ll be there in three,” Lang announced. He must be breaking land-speed records.
“Police will arrive right behind you,” Pasco told him.
“By the time any of you get here, it’ll all be over but the crying,” I said.
One hostile had slid out of the SUV and crouched beside it while the other two waited inside it.
I lined up the idiot in my sights. Did he really think the vehicle would protect him?
I wasn’t as good a shot as a certified sharpshooter like Hayes’s sister Mai, but I kept up my skills.
They sometimes came in handy for extractions.
And now, apparently, for protecting my homestead.
I squeezed the trigger. The tranq dart hit the guy dead-on center mass.
He fell backward. The asshole must have made a noise as he hit the ground, because inside the vehicle, his buddies were making frantic movements and one of them peered through the side window.
He motioned to the third guy, who hesitated, then slid out of the passenger side door.
“That hesitation was your lizard brain trying to keep you alive, asshole,” I said. I lined him up in my sights and took him out the same way. Sadly, he was only unconscious. But he’d be in custody soon, HEAT custody, if there was any justice in the world, his life would then change forever.
The last conscious guy was really frantic now, sliding from side to side on the back seat, looking out the windows at his buddies who, for all he knew, might be dead.
He was probably shitting himself. I would have taken him out with a shot through the windshield, but if they were even a few IQ points smarter than they’d appeared to be up until now, that would be bullet-proof glass, and the tranq darts wouldn’t penetrate it.
He finally slid into the driver’s seat and began backing up the lane, leaving his fallen comrades behind. That took a special kind of asshole.
“There really is no honor among thieves,” I said. “Or drug runners, or whatever the hell they are. Lang, be aware, you’re barreling down on a moving SUV.”
“I’m on it,” Lang said.
His bike’s headlight appeared at the top of the drive.
A few seconds later, an explosion underneath the SUV knocked it onto its side.
I changed out my infrared goggles for binocular ones.
The last remaining hostile was climbing slowly out of the vehicle with Lang’s rifle pointed at his head and the scope light shining in the asshole’s eyes.
He lay down on the ground and Lang zip-tied him at the wrists and ankles, then, taking no chances, put a tranq dart in him.
I covered Lang from my perch as he checked the other two hostiles because I wasn’t taking any chances, either. Lang gave me the thumbs up, indicating they were out cold. The invasion was over. The hostiles were contained.
Lang slipped out of his vest and helmet and stashed them and his weapon behind some shrubbery.
Kat would have enough to explain when the local cops arrived on the scene without having to justify apparent civilians using military gear.
Soon enough, the locals would get the order to stand down and hand over custody of the suspects to the feds, but in the meantime, they would have a lot of nosy-Parker questions.
We liked to do our part to give our boss as few headaches as possible.
In that spirit, I left my weapons, helmet, and vest in the attic, and climbed back down to the second floor. I went to the bedroom door and pressed my hand against it. “Cami, it’s me. It’s fine now. You’re safe.”
She didn’t answer.
“Cami, I’m coming in, okay?”
“Okay,” she said so softly, I almost missed it.
I used my number code and fingerprint to unlock the doors and enter the owner’s suite, which Cami now knew doubled as a safe room.
She sat on the floor at the foot of the bed with Bella curled up in her new dog bed beside Cami.
The pup wagged her tail as I approached and nuzzled my hand when I petted her.
Cami stared at Bella, not looking at me.
“You’re safe now,” I told her.
“Is anyone hurt or…”
“The hostiles are unconscious in the driveway. Other than a sedative hangover and possible contusions from falling, they’ll be fine.”
“Is sedation an FBI tactic? Or police?”
She was really asking me to explain myself, but I couldn’t. Not yet.
“I can’t tell you what you want to know,” I said.
She glanced at me, then looked away. “I know. I just wish...”
I took her hand and was grateful when she didn’t pull away. “There are protocols in place. I need to run a request through proper channels to get permission. And you’ll have to have a briefing and sign an NDA.”
“Really, you would make that request?”
“I’ll do it tonight. But you’ll have to agree to the terms.”
“I’ll sign the NDA and do whatever it takes to be allowed to hear the truth.”
“Good.”
I hoped it would be. Even as I said the word, I wondered if her learning I was a covert agent for the government would bring us closer together or push us further apart.
I didn’t know what I would do if she decided it was all too much and decided to walk away, because I’d already given her my heart.