Ricochet (12 page)

“My team and I love your movies.”

Rachel fought the roll of her eyes as she crossed her arms. She adored Jax and admired his acting abilities, but nothing annoyed her more than people who buttered up the famous so they could say they associated with them.

“Thanks,” Jax said easily.

“But then, we
are
out in the middle of a sixty-four thousand mile desert,” Nathan added with a shrug and a smirk. “We’re pretty easy to please.”

Jax, Wes, and Troy burst out laughing, and Troy shoved Nathan’s shoulder. The grin that lightened Nathan’s face made something inside Rachel tighten and swell uncomfortably, and she looked at the floor.

“You’re gonna fit right in, dude,” Wes said.

With everyone but Rachel.

“Jax.” She purposely softened her voice to round out the rough edges so she didn’t sound like a bitch. But her internal and external pressures were mounting. I can’t be effective if I don’t know what’s going on. Troy says you got a call from Townsend? And that Ryker is formally consulting on this job. I have to clear that with Precision”—her mind pinged between the risk-assessment company and the insurance company—“and I don’t even know which risk assessor they’re assigning yet, which is a problem when Cinematic will only work with certain assess—”

“We agreed on Josh Marx.”

Rachel’s stomach made another uncomfortable flip. A flood of turbulence overwhelmed her. “
What?
”

“Sorry, Rach. I got the call an hour ago while I was still up there.” He gestured over his shoulder. “Or I would have told you sooner.”

She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from throwing a fit…or storming out…or just quitting on the spot. She was that flustered.

Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

One, two, three, four, five…

“Jesus Christ,” she finally spat out without reaching ten. “
Josh Marx?
” She gestured toward Nathan without looking away from Jax. “Are we seriously going to add someone new to the team when Josh is nearly impossible to satisfy with our normal crew?”

“Uh…” Nathan started, “I’m not—”

“We don’t have another option, honey,” Jax said. “You’ve done a damned good job of exhausting every last one, and Townsend’s job ran long, so he can’t do it. And you know we have to get this started…like, yesterday.”

Rachel’s mind tumbled. This was the biggest stunt she’d managed to date. A freaking huge deal for Renegades as a company.

“Maybe I’m a little more uptight than you guys,” she said, “but you can’t throw anyone into the position and expect it to fly. I don’t know anything about
Ryker
,” she said his last name purposely, meeting his gaze directly, which only earned her a smirk. “His background. His experience. His credentials.

“With another adjuster, that wouldn’t matter, but with Josh… Of the half-dozen specialists you could have chosen for this job,
this job,
Jax, when you knew ahead of time you were planning on consulting Ryker, why
Josh
?”

Jax gripped her upper arms firmly and met her gaze. “Sweetheart,
relax
. It’s going to be fine. Josh was the only guy available for our timeframe.”

She was overreacting. She knew that—logically. But emotionally, walls started to close in on her chest, making it tight. And, yes, looking into those steady, confident eyes of his helped her breathe a little easier.

But it didn’t solve any problems.

She exhaled, dropped her head, and closed her eyes. “Fuck me.”

Nathan attempted to cover a surprised burst of laughter, but failed.

She lifted her head, glare ready.

He held up a hand. “Sorry.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes and planted her hands at her hips. “Huddle.” When she opened her eyes, no one had moved, and her frustration flared back with a surge. “Like…
now
.”

Wes cut a sidelong glance at Ryker. “Take a seat, man. When she’s unhappy, we’re all unhappy. Know what I mean?”

Rachel opened the refrigerator and pulled out an armful of water bottles and another armful of Rockstars. Starting around the circle, the guys obediently took one of each. She’d learned within the first week of working with these men that if she didn’t keep them hydrated and caffeinated, they got as tired and cranky as she was now. They ended up bickering, making mistakes, and generally driving each other—and most importantly, her—crazy.

When she reached Ryker, she pushed the last of the drinks into his hands with a scowl. When he took the can of Rockstar, he covered her fingers with his, holding tight. And—
bam
—his gaze hit her, sharp and hot, and led her thoughts directly to skin and sweat, passion and pleasure.

Hell.
She should have left the idea of one-night stands to the experts.

Ryker sipped his Rockstar, trying like hell to keep his mind in the moment. Seeing her again made his thoughts travel backward to relive their night together moment by luscious, mind-blowing moment.

His gaze roamed over her again, over the simple white dress that framed her her narrow waist and the curve of her breasts. As a whole package, she was country-girl fresh and apple-pie sweet with a streak of Tonka-truck tough. Underneath, she hid a siren, a temptress, a woman who liked things edgy.

She fascinated him.

But he already missed the intimacy they’d developed last night. The easy way they’d talked and laughed together. The comfort of lying quietly while they caught their breath.

Yeah, he’d really fucked up good.

She returned to her desk, slid her glasses back on, and plucked a pencil from a Renegades coffee mug. Dragging a legal pad from beneath a stack of papers, she started writing. “Are you sure there’s no one but Josh?”

“I’m sure,” Jax said. “We could try another company, but I want to get Ryker past Precision. Cinematic prefers Precision.”

Rachel put two fingers against her temple with a sigh. “Everything needs to be seamless to make this work.”

Ryker’s brain slowly returned from a fantasy of Rachel on her knees, those librarian glasses still perched on her nose while she took his cock deep into her mouth. “Look, I’ll talk to you guys about anything you want. I’ll give advice. I’ll even hang around and watch, make sure everything is safe and kosher, but you sound like you’re—”

“Hear us out,” Troy said, annoyance clear in his voice. “I wouldn’t have brought you here if there wasn’t something in it for you.”

Reflexively, Ryker’s gaze darted back to Rachel. If she was the prize, he might reconsider…

“Not her.” Troy slapped Ryker on the back of the head. “Use that flabby muscle between your ears for a change.”

Ryker gritted his teeth and braced his forearms on his knees, glaring at Troy over his shoulder. “Do that again, and the gloves come off. And the brain is not a muscle, idiot. It’s an organ.”

“What-the-fuck-ever.”

“You should have told me what this was really about.”

“Gee,” Rachel said, “sounds like we’ve got a theme going.”

“Listen,” Jax said. “I’ll give you the scoop, you tell me if you’re interested. No pressure.”

“Criminy,” Rachel muttered, covering her eyes. “No. No pressure.”

Ryker didn’t understand where her pressure was coming from, but 50 percent of his was sitting beside him on the couch. Another 50 percent came from his desire to get closer to Rachel.

Okay, more like 10-90.

“Go,” he said, inviting Jax to talk with an open gesture.

“We’re finishing up the next Bond film, and the last scene—” Jax started.

“Bond?” he said. “As in—”

“James Bond,” everyone in the room said in unison. The question had obviously been asked before.

“Okay.” He shrugged. “Go on.”

“The last scene with big stunt work is the climax,” Jax said. “The script calls for a car racing across a bridge with Apache choppers in chase, Hellfire missiles raining down. Normally, we’d do all the explosives with computer graphics, but we’re under a
really
tight budget, and, I know it sounds crazy, but blowing up a real bridge is way less expensive.”

At some point during that explanation, Ryker’s jaw unhinged and his mouth hung open, his mind trying—and failing—to envision how anyone could possibly pull off the stunt they’d described.

“What we need is an explosives expert who can take down the bridge in the most cinematically dramatic way possible, while maintaining a safe environment for crew and location.”

“Wait…” Ryker glanced at each face and found Rachel tracing the eraser of her pencil over the wood-grain pattern on her desk. Then he met Jax’s gaze again. “This doesn’t sound like consulting.”

“It was when Troy first called you, but as I told Rachel, we lost our blaster. We’d like you to take the lead on this. So.” Jax stretched out his legs and dropped one ankle over the other, kicking back as if what he’d proposed was as simple as the rock climbing he’d been doing earlier. “What do you think?”

An absurd scrap of laughter huffed out of his mouth. “I think you’re all certifiably in-fucking-sane.”

“We figured that out years ago.” Troy leaned forward to match Ryker’s posture. “This isn’t any different from those munitions buildings you blow in Afghanistan. In fact, it’s way easier.”

“Whoa.” Ryker sat back. “Hold the fuck on. This isn’t Afghanistan, and you can’t begin to know what that’s like, so don’t tell me what’s hard and what’s easy. You make it sound like we have one big fuckin’ party over there, and you don’t know anything about my work, dude. Don’t tell me—”

“Jesus, stop acting like a fuckin’
girl
, Ry. I wasn’t trying to offend you.” Troy’s voice grew louder, more serious. “But don’t tell me I don’t know anything about your work when I’ve listened to every one of your goddamned stories three times over and watched all your videos and heard you explain every step you took to blow every building safely, without damaging neighboring buildings or injuring civilians. I
know
what you do over there.”

Everything inside Ryker darkened and grew heavy. He obviously talked too much during those late-night drunken calls to Troy after he’d ditched the bars and the girls, still unable to settle or sleep.

He clenched his teeth. Curled his fingers into fists. The urge to escape, to run where no one knew him, crashed like an ocean wave, making Ryker crave a swim. And a run. And an hour or two in the weight room. And a hard, mindless fuck.

Only none of that was working as well as it had in the beginning. Until last night. Last night, Rachel had taken him completely away from his demons for the first time in months.

He glanced toward her, checking her reaction to all this information. She had her elbows propped on the desk, two fingers at each temple, holding her head up, and her eyes closed. But the tight set to her mouth and the vertical line between her brows revealed exactly how unhappy she was with this whole mess.

“You’re here now, Ry,” Troy said. “And you’re stuck here for at least three more weeks. You’re licensed, capable, and you’ve got time on your hands. We need someone good. Someone ballsy. And we need someone now.”

Troy knew more than what Ryker went through in his work. He knew about every death Ryker had suffered, every disaster he’d responded to, every close call that had nearly taken Ryker’s own life. And he knew why Ryker had been put on leave. He’d obviously kept that to himself, or they wouldn’t be looking at him for this job.

Troy had been picking Ryker up off the ground from the first time they’d met during a schoolyard fight, to the day Troy had hauled Ryker’s ass to basic training after he’d stayed out all night drinking.

Nobody understood how the next few weeks looked to Ryker but Troy, and he was offering an opportunity to fill them with focus and purpose.

Ryker blew out a hard breath, sat forward again, and lowered his head into his hands, raking his fingers through his hair. “Tell me about the bridge.”

“It’s in the middle of nowhere,” Troy said, voice leveling. “Three and a half hours north of here in the hills near the coast. There isn’t an inhabitable structure for ten miles in all directions except one defunct cattle ranch that Rachel’s secured to house the staff.

“Rachel’s already done all the preliminary work. The bridge was built in 1912, one of those camelbacks with the curved steel canopies that was replaced a couple decades ago with a modern two-lane highway that bypasses all the twists and turns of the old road. Rachel’s got the city on board, the permits, the engineering survey, and the geologist’s survey. Safety considerations are minimal.”

“
Minimal?
What about your stunt guys?”

“We won’t be using the guys during the blast,” Jax said. “We’ve already filmed Wes driving the car across the bridge. We’ll coordinate the filming so that the explosion filming can be cut into the drive to create the movie’s climax. That way we reduce the risk to safety and still get the drama.”

His shoulders relaxed a little. “So, it’s only the bridge. No people involved.”

Jax nodded.

Ryker glanced Rachel’s direction. Her eyes were open now, but spitting anger. In a lot of ways, the look made her even more beautiful, and he wanted her. Bad. Even worse now that he knew how completely she could settle him.