Longshot (Fall of the Amador Cartel #6)

Chapter 1

Nina

“If you think too hard about this, we’re all going to lose our nerve.”

Chris’s words vibrate against my throat as he kicks the hotel room door shut behind us. He backs me into the room until I collide with Wyatt’s solid chest, his hands sliding around my waist from behind while Chris presses forward.

Wedding champagne buzzes through my veins, not enough to blur the edges but just enough to quiet the voice that tries to keep me from doing exactly this kind of reckless, wonderful thing.

It’s Callie’s voice. Not that I ever listen to it.

Besides, she’s no doubt getting boned by her new husband now anyway.

I need this, even if I can’t quite remember how I got here.

Three hours ago, I was giving a maid-of-honor toast. Now I’m pressed between my ex-boyfriend and the man I thought was dead for seven years, both of them peeling off my dress like they’ve rehearsed this.

“She’s thinking again,” Wyatt murmurs, his lips grazing my ear. His hands are steady, deliberate, a contrast to Chris’s urgent grip. “I can feel you analyzing, Nina.”

“Shut up,” I manage, reaching back to thread my fingers through Wyatt’s hair.

His mouth finds mine again, and for a moment I’m back at the reception.

.. the late hours after the cake had been cut and the older guests had retired.

The groomsmen and their dates had pulled chairs together around a table littered with champagne flutes, ties loosened and heels kicked off, trading stories with the kind of reckless honesty that only comes after midnight at a family wedding.

“The best part about having three men?” Elle had announced, loud enough to make Marco choke on his whiskey. “They each fulfill something different. Drake’s the stability, Ben’s the adventure, and Baz...” She’d grinned wickedly. “Baz is the chaos I need.”

Now Chris tugs the zipper of my dress down while Wyatt’s hands follow the fabric’s descent, and I understand exactly what Elle meant about needing different things from different men.

“Last chance to back out,” Wyatt says, his touch betraying his desire.

“If either of you stops now, I will actually murder you both,” I say, shimmying my hips to help my dress pool at my feet.

Chris grins against my mouth. “There she is.”

What he sees I have no idea, because I don’t recognize myself in this moment, standing in matching black lace bra and panties between two men who’ve both held pieces of my heart at different times.

But after watching Maddox with his arm around Celeste, Leo’s hand resting casually on her thigh as they spoke about trust and boundaries, something clicked.

I gasp as Wyatt slides his hands up my ribs from behind while Chris drops to his knees in front of me. They’re so different, Wyatt methodical and reverent, Chris hungry and impulsive.

An old terror rouses deep in my belly, but I manage to subdue it. I’ve wanted this too much for too long. So much I don’t care how risky it is—not just emotionally, but to the very core of my psyche.

“Been thinking about this since the elevator,” Chris murmurs against my stomach. “When you kissed us both.”

The doors had barely slid closed before Chris had me against the elevator wall, his mouth hot and demanding on mine. I’d pulled away, breathless, and found myself turning to Wyatt, expecting jealousy but finding only heat in his eyes. When I kissed him next, Chris’s hand never left my waist.

“The question isn’t whether you could handle two men, Nina,” Sadie had said earlier, leaning across the table with that troublemaker gleam in her eye. “It’s whether two men could handle you.”

And maybe that was the moment the whole night shifted.

Now Wyatt turns me in his arms, his eyes searching mine while Chris works his way up my thighs. His teeth sink into one ass cheek while his fingers graze perilously close to my core along the edge of lace still covering me.

“You’re sure?” Wyatt asks, fingers tracing my cheek. There’s more buried in his question than what’s on the surface. Our shared history, as short as it is, and my much longer history with Chris.

Reckless. Like I was at sixteen, doing donuts in Chris’s car during a driving lesson while he laughed and held on for dear life.

I’d been in love with him since grade school, Callie’s untouchable older brother, and when he finally saw me back at twenty-two, I thought I’d gotten everything. Then he died.

“I’m sure,” I say, and for once, I’m not overthinking. “I want you both.”

The words hang in the air for a heartbeat before Wyatt’s careful restraint breaks.

His kiss is deeper than Chris’s, more knowing.

He’s learned my body over months while Chris is rediscovering it after years.

This collision of past and present has me spinning, but in the best way.

Wyatt was the first man I wanted for more than a one-night-stand in a decade. The first who made me start to forget.

“Protection?” Wyatt murmurs against my lips.

“I’ve got it covered,” I assure him. Under normal circumstances, I’d still insist on condoms on top of my IUD, but tonight I want nothing between us, no barriers, no boundaries, nothing to separate me from these two men who have occupied different chambers of my heart for so long.

Chris rises behind me, and I’m sandwiched between them again, Wyatt’s fingers working the clasp of my bra while Chris’s lips trace my shoulder blade.

“Tell us what you want,” Chris says, his voice rough with need.

What a question.

I want to stop being afraid, stop choosing between them. To understand how Sadie can look at Marco, Katrina, and Jake with equal desire, how Celeste can lean into both Leo and Maddox with complete trust.

But mostly, I need to feel everything, every touch, every kiss, every moment of connection I’ve denied myself with walls of analysis and fear.

“Everything,” I whisper. “I want everything.”

And as they lower me to the bed, I realize I’ve stopped thinking about how I got here.

I’m only thinking about now.

Sunlight stabs through a gap in the hotel curtains, cutting across my face in a line of unwelcome brightness. I groan and roll away, my hand landing on cool, empty sheets where warm bodies should be.

The realization hits me before I even open my eyes: I’m alone.

My head throbs, more from emotional overload than the three champagnes, as fragments of last night flash behind my eyelids.

Chris’s mouth on my breast. Wyatt’s hands steady at my hips.

The way they moved together with surprising coordination, as if they’d choreographed this collision of bodies and histories.

I force myself to sit up, wincing at muscles protesting in places that confirm nothing was a dream.

The room tells the story my memory struggles to complete: a necktie draped over the desk chair (Wyatt), my dress carefully hung in the closet (also Wyatt), a hotel water glass on the nightstand with a smudge of lipstick (definitely mine).

No note. No text. No evidence of Chris beyond the phantom sensation of his stubble against my inner thigh.

I know what this is. Years of training gave me the language for what I’d already felt.

Chris doesn’t leave because he doesn’t care.

He leaves because staying means facing the full weight of what he feels.

He’d throw himself in front of a bullet without hesitation.

It’s the quiet, tender aftermath he can’t survive.

Understanding the psychology doesn’t make the empty bed sting less.

And Wyatt, who hung my dress in the closet like he was tucking in a memory, probably left because I’ve spent four months asking for space. The one morning I would have given anything for him to ignore that request.

“Well done, Nina,” I mutter, pushing tangled hair from my face. “You’ve officially complicated everything.”

My phone buzzes from somewhere in the room. I follow the sound to my clutch, abandoned near the door where they’d sandwiched me between them while Wyatt worked the zipper of my dress. The memory sends a traitorous heat through me that has no business existing alongside my morning anxiety.

CALLIE: Still meeting for breakfast before we leave? Need all the wedding gossip before Mason drags me to the high seas.

Reality crashes back. My best friend’s wedding. Her honeymoon departure. The actual world beyond whatever alternate dimension I stepped into last night with two men I can’t seem to figure out how to love separately, let alone simultaneously.

NINA: Meet you at the restaurant in 30. Coffee emergency.

In the shower, I let scalding water pound some clarity into my skull.

Professional DEA psychologist Dr. Nina Palmer, who counsels agents through post-op trauma and identity crises, who prides herself on emotional intelligence, who literally has a framed diploma certifying her understanding of human behavior, somehow thought sleeping with her ex-boyfriend and the man she’d mourned for the better part of a decade was a brilliant idea.

Worse, some rebellious part of me is already wondering when it might happen again. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t have happened the first time.

I scrub harder, as if soap might wash away the memory of Chris whispering filthy encouragements while Wyatt’s mouth—

No. Absolutely not. This was a champagne-fueled anomaly. A wedding reception aberration.

I step out of the shower and wrap myself in a towel, catching my reflection in the steamy mirror. My eyes look different somehow. Like they belong to someone who’s seen another version of herself and can’t quite unsee it.

My phone buzzes again on the counter.

WYATT: You okay?

Two words doing all the heavy lifting. Caring from a safe distance. Exactly what I asked for, and exactly what I don’t want right now.

I set the phone down without replying. I’ll need at least two cups of coffee before I can begin to process this, preferably with Callie, who will either talk me off the ledge or push me over it with her particular brand of best-friend honesty.