Unintended Love (Black Swan TEAM #2)

Prologue

“Dammit, Ashlin, answer the phone.” Clint Riggs quietly ordered the familiar long list of numbers on the small screen of his satellite phone.

He wanted to talk to her before he had to leave on tonight’s mission.

He’d only be gone for about six hours on the surveillance op, but he knew her team had been working up for a longer mission, and it might be his last chance to talk to Ashlin for several weeks.

He mindlessly spun the gold band that encircled his left ring finger while staring at his wife’s familiar phone number.

Wife. Clint never thought he’d have one of those, least of all the beautiful Ashlin Cartwright, who’d ended up across from him at their family dining table nearly every U.S.

holiday for several years. She’d come home from military training with his younger sister, Xena.

Ashlin had always been off-limits…until Las Vegas.

The bright light on his desk caught the polished gold of the cheap ring.

He wondered whether she wore her simple matching band.

Yeah, they were pieces of crap, probably without a gram of real gold between them, but that night, they’d been grateful that the wedding chapel had them available.

He really needed to get them better bands, especially since his family had a strong connection to the owner of nearly all the Ethiopian mines.

As he stared at the black screen, he wondered if she had kept her wedding vows these past several months while they had been apart.

He had. He hadn’t desired any other woman since he and Ashlin had stood before an Elvis lookalike and vowed to love, honor, and cherish each other until death parted them.

At those last words, his team of former Army Delta operators chuckled, while her active-duty team of Black Swan operatives had drunkenly giggled.

All the men and the women in attendance at the over-decorated white chapel lived on the edge; their lives could end between one heartbeat and the next.

In one form or another, they all worked covert ops for the United States government.

When his phone vibrated in his hand, Clint nearly dropped it. It was a text from Ashlin: Can’t answer. Deep in prep shit. Thinking of u tho.

His heart warmed at her words on the tiny screen.

She was thinking about him. It was Tuesday night, nearly midnight in his Ethiopian time zone.

They tried to video chat every Wednesday morning at six a.m. his time, which was usually around eleven p.m. Tuesday night in D.C.

, where Ashlin was currently assigned to Section 7 Operations at Homeland Security.

Time zones were a bitch, but ever since they’d gotten married, Clint and Ashlin had managed to stay connected, usually being able to see each other on a video call.

They’d talk for hours about everything, from their pasts to training to the latest in guns and bullets.

Other times, it was a short conversation because Ashlin was exhausted or had an early morning.

They’d gotten to know each other quite well.

Each time, it was like a date, without the meal or being able to hold her hand, gently run the finger down her soft face, or nibble on her ear, something he knew drove her crazy with lust.

“Hey, Clint,” Javier yelled from the doorway. “We gotta go.”

“Give me one minute.” Clint typed as fast as he could with his clumsy thumbs: Going dark tonight. Talk 2 u in the am.

By the time he tucked his long dark hair, tied in a ponytail, under his black watch cap and pulled on his night camouflage gator, Ashlin had texted back: Stay safe.

That was the nearest thing to “I love you” either had ever gotten.

As he followed his former First Sergeant down the hallway of his parents’ massive home into the secure compound, which covered several acres, Clint turned his mind to the mission.

Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen tangoes. Their bodies were easily identified as human form through the thermal binoculars.

“I count eighteen,” Clint announced quietly into his nearly invisible communication unit.

“Same,” Javier agreed. “Scanning the woods, now. I don’t see a single camp guard. Are these men fucking stupid?”

“Looks to me like they’re drunk. Several are passed out around the campfire.

” Clint continued to watch the rebel camp for movement, but nobody even twitched.

Blade, from his sister Xena’s team, had dropped them off in one of the company’s helicopters in the next valley over, masking the sounds of the chopper.

He and Javier had hiked five miles up the far side of the mountain to get a bird’s eye view of what was supposed to be a terrorist training camp, according to CIA intelligence.

He made himself as comfortable as possible, given that he was wedged between a boulder and a tree.

He knew his own thermal imprint was close to a lion, especially the way he was stretched out.

Clint was relatively sure he didn’t have to worry about it, though, because the men in the camp didn’t seem to be well-funded, certainly not enough to have thermal or infrared binoculars.

As their campfire died down, Clint glanced over to check on his longtime friend and teammate.

Javier had been his senior-enlisted man when Clint commanded a Delta team.

Together, they had seen a lot of action.

At the moment, he was so well hidden that if Clint didn’t know Javier’s exact location, he wouldn’t have known he was there.

He heard his friend’s jaw crack as he yawned.

“Did Theodora keep you up all day when you should’ve been sleeping?” Clint teased.

Javier chuckled. “Pregnancy has made her insatiable…now that she’s not throwing up all the time. We’ve had more sex in the past month than—.”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence. Given I haven’t had any sex since the night I got married, I don’t remember what that was like,” Clint admitted.

The morning after his middle-of-the-night wedding, he’d awoken alone in the king-sized bed in the honeymoon suite of the hotel where both teams were staying.

He’d eventually found the note from Ashlin in the bathroom, announcing that her team had been called out.

She’d sworn she would call him. It took nearly a month for her to fulfill that promise.

After weeks of silence, Clint had been thrilled to hear from her.

“I can’t believe you married that fox you met in Las Vegas.” Javier could be heard shifting his position.

“Why?” Clint also readjusted a fraction of an inch. “You told me that marrying Theodora was the best thing you ever did in your whole life.”

“Actually, the best thing I ever did was follow you to Ethiopia and join your dad’s teams. Theodora loves it here, too.

Who would’ve thought that my military medical retirement pay, and the measly amount you pay me,” Javier jabbed, “would be enough money for us to live like a king and queen here. My wife has a cook four days a week and a full-time housekeeper, which has allowed her to concentrate on finishing her graphic design degree online. Now that she has that piece of paper, she works her own hours and for the clients she wants. The adage is true: happy wife, happy life. So, following you halfway around the world was the best thing I ever did.”

“You’re telling me you love your job?”

“Most of the time. I hate these fucking observation-only jobs.”

“Yeah, me too,” Clint admitted, “but they pay so fucking well that we have to take them.”

“Like you really believe that Osama bin Laden’s son, Adeel, is going to show up at this ragtag camp here, in the middle of the fucking mountains of Ethiopia, and activate these drunks to sneak into the United States and wreak havoc?”

Javier was right. No one believed the so-called CIA informant. But the United States government was willing to pay an enormous amount of money to the Riggs Corporation, his father’s black ops company, to sit on top of this mountain and watch these men pass out drunk.

“I agree,” Clint said. “Those chances are just about zero. But, according to all the intelligence reports coming out of the Middle East, Adeel is currently running all terrorist activity around the world. Even though these idiots in the valley below us couldn’t overthrow the Ethiopian government a few years ago, they have been refinanced and refocused.

On what, we have no fucking idea. All these men know is fighting and killing.

I’m not sure it matters who they’re fighting or killing.

For most of these men, the reason doesn’t matter. ”

“That’s exactly why Adeel has been so successful,” Javier added. “There are groups like this all over the Middle East and Africa, just waiting for someone to come along and point them in any direction.”

“And Adeel has plenty of money,” Clint noted.

“I guess it helps to be born into a rich family. Osama was a favorite son of a billionaire, back when people in the United States were impressed by millionaires. Thanks to all that Saudi oil and tight nobility in the sixties and seventies, Osama’s father got insanely wealthy building the aristocracy’s massive palaces.

He grew up as friends with some of the wealthiest children in the Middle East, easy families to tap when raising money to support Al Qaeda.

Now that he’s gone, his son, Adeel, is raking in so much money off his father’s name to continue his goals of radical Muslim world domination.

Especially now that they have a new caliphate who just happens to be another direct descendant of Osama bin Laden. ”

Javier chuckled. “I grew up in Georgia, as you well know. That Bible Belt is cinched so tight, I can guaranDAMNtee you that they will never give up praising the Lord Jesus. Southern women aren’t ever going to give up those pretty little shoulder-baring sundresses that barely cover their ass for an abaya.

Texas girls will never cover that big, beautiful hair with a hijab.

No matter what state they’re from, especially girls from the north, they certainly won’t give up those teeny-weeny bikinis at the beach.

Nope. Extreme fundamentalist Muslims are never going to take over the United States. ”

“Teams like ours and Ashlin’s are here to make sure they don’t even come close,” Clint asserted as he slowly turned and scanned the mountain behind them.

“Speaking of Ashlin, in case I never told you before, I’m flattered as hell you chose me to be your best man.”

Clint smiled. “Nobody else I’d rather have at my side.” That was the truth. He and Javier had fought side-by-side for years during their tours as Delta Operators. Each had dragged the other off the battlefield, injured and bleeding.

“I’m still surprised you married her. You barely know her.”

“Actually, I’ve known her for several years.

” And lusted after that compact little body of hers almost the entire time, not something he would admit out loud to anyone.

“It’s been at least four, maybe five years since she came home with Xena for the first time at Christmas.

She showed up at our house, usually the one in the States, but she’s been here several times, too.

My sister would bring other women home she was training with who didn’t have someplace to go over a holiday.

Ashlin is a lot of fun. She has a real crazy streak a mile wide in her.

She’s quite the daredevil.” Clint didn’t dare mention that both Ashlin and Xena had trained at the Joint All-Female Special Operations School and were as skilled as any of the men on his former Delta team.

“I thought you two were very familiar, more so than you did with the other women we partied with in Las Vegas,” Javier admitted.

“Until that night, I’d never touched her, say nothing about kiss her.” He grinned to himself as he remembered their wedding night. He wasn’t as drunk as everyone thought.

“You made up for it that weekend. The two of you couldn’t seem to take your hands off—argh,” Javier cut off mid-sentence.

Clint quickly peered around the rock he was hiding behind. Through his night vision goggles, he watched a tall man grab Javier from behind, tilt his head back, and slit his throat. In thermal mode, he could see the blood spurting from his friend’s neck.

Quietly, he pulled his pistol from his thigh holster and aimed.

The shot hit the intruder in the head before he scanned the woods behind him for more targets.

Identifying no human forms, he quickly crawled from behind his rocky hidey-hole and sprinted the seventy-five feet to Javier, praying he’d arrive in time.

After hurriedly checking the tango to be sure his headshot killed the man, Clint tapped his in-ear communication device.

“Operations command. Did you get that last? Javier’s down.

His neck—” Clint swallowed hard on the next words he had to say.

“He cut his fucking neck.” He pulled Javier’s balaclava down to apply pressure on his femoral artery. There was so much blood.

“Clint. Operations here. Helicopter is in the air. Can you get him to the extraction point?”

He scooped up his teammate in a fireman’s carry and ran down the mountain as fast as his long legs would go. The shot had no doubt awoken at least a few of the rebel soldiers. They’d be looking for them within minutes.

“Headed there right now. We need to get him to the clinic as fast as possible. Wake up the doctor.”

Clint didn’t remember anything about the trip down that mountain. At the edge of the meadow designated for extraction, he carefully laid Javier on the ground next to him, hidden in the trees.

Javier grabbed Clint’s bicep with more strength than he thought possible. Eyes closed, he croaked out, “Prom…me.” The toll it took him to expel each word was evident in the gap between them. “Care…of…Th…dor.”

“Save your breath. Don’t you fucking die on me,” Clint threatened through clenched teeth.

“Prom…sss.” His grip on Clint’s arm weakened.

“Stay with me.” Clint held Javier’s head in both hands, staring into his now-open eyes. “Hang in there, buddy. You want to see that baby of yours.”

Bubbles of blood gurgled from his neck.

Javier gasped for breath and gazed into Clint’s eyes. “Prom…ise.”

“Fine,” Clint snapped with more anger in his voice than he’d wanted. He pulled Javier’s torso to his chest and wrapped his arm around his injured throat to slow the blood flow. “I promise to make sure your wife and baby are taken care of.”

Javier closed his eyes and melted away into Clint’s lap on his last exhaled breath.