Secret Maneuvers (35 page)
Our breaths were sawing in and out of our chests and Bobby had his arms locked around me like he would never let me go.
Touching our foreheads together, he asked, “Who loves you, Belle?”
“You do, Ace.”
“That’s right, sweet baby. Forever.”
Pressing my lips against his, I agreed, “Forever.”
Note From The Author:
Thank you for reading Secret Maneuvers! We hope you enjoyed reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it! If you did, please consider leaving a review at your favorite online retailers, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or review websites such as Goodreads. These are great ways to help spread the word about books to readers who have yet to discover them.
On the next few pages you will find a two chapter excerpt of our last book,
Big Bad Bite
. This is an adult paranormal romance about a woman with big secrets and the growly Alpha wolf who wants her. We hope you like it! Happy reading!
Playlist for Belle and Bobby
Ella Mae Bowen (Cover) – Holding Out For A Hero (
Ex Ops Series Theme Song
)
Carrie Underwood – Blown Away
Tim McGraw ft. Taylor Swift & Keith Urban – Highway Don’t Care
Lissie cover of Fleetwood Mac – Go Your Own Way
Gary Allen –Best I Ever Had
Lumineers – Stubborn Love
Lumineers – Ho Hey
Gary Allen – Every Storm
Taylor Swift – Sparks Fly (
Belle & Bobby’s Song
)
The Band Perry – All Your Life
Jason Aldean - She’s Country
Jason Aldean – Take A Little Ride
Jason Aldean & Kelly Clarkson – Don’t You Wanna Stay
Thompson Square – If I Didn’t Have You
Christina Perri – A Thousand Years
Published January 28, 2013
Two Chapter Excerpt
Chapter One
Sweaty gym socks. That’s what the inside of the Wilmington Police Department’s SWAT van smells like which, in a word, is… nasty. Tamping down on the overwhelming urge to reach over and grab the offending socks, so that she can shove them down the owner’s mouth before giving him a stern warning to wash them, is downright hard. However, somehow Jenna O’Conner manages to keep herself in check because overpowering a two hundred plus gym jock when you’re a woman of only five feet four inches, who looks as if you might weigh a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet, would be hard to explain. So, sometimes it seriously sucks to be her.
Sitting on the steel bench seats that run the length of the black van with its bulletproof dark tinted windows, she does her best to ignore the eyes that are staring at her. Being the new girl on a testosterone overloaded team is more than awkward and being sandwiched in between two guys on her left, another guy on her right, and four sitting across from her makes it feel as if she’s drowning in caveman stupidity. It’s a pain in the ass, but she can’t complain because it comes with her dream job.
Jenna can deal with their basic Neanderthal urges of women being inferior, but she utterly hates being stared at. It’s annoying, and not to mention, rude. It makes her hand, that sits down to the right, twitchy to punch someone. Didn’t their moms teach them some manners? She can keep calm, though. They’re just curious to know if the new girl on the force can hang with the big bad asses they all think they are. Little do they know that this little woman can kick every single one of their mammoth muscled butts. That is part of her little secret, though.
Being a woman, who is also a dedicated cop, is sometimes hard. People tend to assume that you’re going to be the weak link in the chain. Not strong enough. Not fast enough. Too compassionate. None of that applies to Jenna, but these guys don’t know that, yet. Perhaps she can’t show them that she is capable of bench pressing a hell of a lot more than all of them combined, but she has no qualms about using some of her abilities to outrun them if the need arises. She also sure as hell isn’t known back in her old department for compassion. Heck, if she hadn’t been related to the Police Chief back home, then Jenna would have been arrested or fired for her behavior against a couple of drunk, abusive, backwoods bums.
None of that here, though. She has to keep her temper in check. Keep her secrets safe. Not to mention, she is not going to flush a Criminal Justice Bachelor’s degree, six months at the Police Academy, five years of busting-her-ass on-the-job experience and her life’s dream down the toilet. She has to prove to her family that she can live out from underneath their thumb without fucking it all up.
All of that may not seem like much of an accomplishment to the other guys sitting in this van with her, but that’s because they don’t know her circumstances. Not that she would share those facts with them anyways. When they eventually find out how young Jenna is, they will inevitably shoot her dubious looks of disbelief. More than likely, they will begin to doubt that someone so young is really cut out for the job.
Her over protective family had home-schooled her in their exuberant efforts to keep her hidden and safe. So, sitting at home with nothing to do except study with her mom, she managed to obtain her high school diploma at the tender age of fifteen. After graduating, Jenna enrolled in an online University where she finished a four year degree in three, since her mother obviously didn’t trust Jenna to be out of her sight without doing something monumentally stupid to get herself ousted for what she was. So, at the age of eighteen, she had a high school diploma and a Bachelor’s degree.
When Jenna then told her mom that she wanted to be a cop like Uncle Rick, her mother had no problem shipping her off to the academy because that didn’t mean Jenna was out of her family’s sight for six whole months. No, her Uncle Rick had a friend at the academy that knew just enough to keep an eye on her, but not enough that he would be a danger to her.
Now at twenty-three, almost twenty-four, Jenna is the youngest member of this SWAT team with a whole lot of job experience, but almost no life experience.
Leaving the small town of River Bend for the bigger city of Wilmington, North Carolina had always been a goal of hers. It had only taken five years to prove to her Uncle Rick that she could handle what he considered to be big city problems, without outing herself to the populace.
When his friend, who happens to be the Captain of one of the Wilmington precincts, told him that he was interviewing for a new SWAT team officer, Uncle Rick threw her name in.
A month after a stringent application process and many, many tests, here she is sitting in the back of this van in black BDU’s with a bullet proof vest on. She has a standard issue duty weapon strapped to her waist, an assault rifle in her hands and a solid fifty pounds of equipment strapped to her body; just like the nine other officers in the vehicle. Black hair that falls just past the bottom of her shoulder blades is secured in a tight bun at the base of her neck and the lower part of her face is covered with a black mask that only leaves her eyes visible. A helmet strapped onto the top of her head completes her uniform; she is clearly ready for action.
Heat is pumping along with excitement at the thought of going out on a suspect retrieval mission the first day on the new job. This is the kind of shit Jenna lives for. Most women want to bask in the luxuries of shopping, high heeled shoes, and days at the spa. That’s definitely not her. Sure, she has sexy clothes and shoes in her closet, but most of it was bought for undercover work. Instead of the usual womanly highs, Jenna gets off on the chase of a suspect. It’s the best high of all. If she gets to tackle the suspect to the ground and accidentally elbow them in the head, well, that’s just a bonus.
Silently running through the particulars of the suspect they are going after keeps her occupied so that she doesn’t get the urge to look any of the guys in the eyes. It isn’t that she’s afraid of any of them. Jenna could kick their ever lovin’ asses from here to China, but she doesn’t want to intimidate any of them, either. Yet. Most men aren’t used to having a woman stare them down. It unnerves them. Not to mention, gives them a bum rap with the other guys. So, she just stares off into space, in no direction in particular, while mentally going over the facts.
Suspect is a white male in his early thirties, approximately five-feet eleven; so he is seven inches taller than her. He weighs approximately one hundred and ninety pounds, sixty pounds more than her, but still not a problem; Blond hair, blue eyes; and wanted for the murder of a woman whose husband is still listed as missing. Suspect is supposed to be apprehended alive to be interrogated for information regarding the missing husband.
“Hey, O’Conner, you nervous, yet? Should we drop you off somewhere so you don’t piss in your pretty little pink panties?” Moron. Note to self–Trip jackass into a wall.
Oops. Did my foot get in your way?
Turning her head to look the idiot straight in the eyes she sneers, “I’m good, Dubinski, but maybe we should stop at the store and buy you some big boy diapers so that when you scare yourself shitless, it’ll be an easier mess to clean up.” The men surrounding them snicker as Dubinski gives her a grudgingly respectful look.
With a smirk, Captain Nelson barks from the front passenger seat, “Keep it down, kids. Our ETA is three minutes, so let’s go over the basics one last time.” As the Captain rattles off the same information on the suspect that Jenna has just been going over in her head, she takes the opportunity to get a subtle whiff with her nose, testing the air. The inside of the van smells like sweat, leather, gun oil and anticipation. No one smells scared, just a little anxious. Good. No one here is a threat that is going to freak out and freeze in a dangerous situation. Having a super sniffer of a nose sometimes comes in handy. If one of these jerks starts leaking sweat out of his pores as if he’s trying to help keep up with the water supply at Niagara Falls, she’ll have to worry about him accidentally shooting her in the back. That would make it hard to concentrate on the mission. Luckily, this isn’t the case.
The van rounds a corner quickly as Captain Nelson wraps up the specifics. “O’Conner, you’ll be right behind Kent; so, third through the door. The entrance is a kill box due to the enclosed space so we have to break the door down quickly and catch the bastard before he does something stupid. After O’Conner, it’s the usual line up. Everybody ready?”
The team nod their heads in consent as the van jerks to a stop in front of the target’s temporary residence. As one, they fly out of the van and race towards the front door. A few seconds later, a group of bodies are piled up with Captain Nelson at the front, Kent behind him, and Jenna third in line with the rest of the team at her back. Less than ten seconds later, the Captain kicks down the door while screaming, “Police!” Moving quickly through the entrance hall, she uses her nose to smell the air again. There’s a whiff of something out of the norm. Two distinctly different male scents that fill her nose and she is positive neither of them are human.
Moving quickly through the house, the SWAT team starts clearing rooms as they spread out through the small ranch home. She follows where her nose happens to lead her, with Kent behind her, towards the back of the house where the scents become stronger. Three doors are ahead of them and she can hear sounds of a struggle coming from behind the closed door at the end of the hall. Pushing forward with Kent at her back, she kicks a foot out, knocking the door halfway off of its hinges, and barks, “POLICE! FREEZE!”
Before her stands a massive guy who has mussed auburn hair that’s sticking up in almost every direction and rippling back muscles. The blond hair, blue eyed suspect is positioned across the room from all three of them, facing Mr. Messy Head, with a gun pointed at his head. In the split second that Mr. Messy Head is distracted, the suspect takes the opportunity to tighten his finger on the trigger. He’s seconds from sending a bullet into his rather large opponent who still remains between them.
Dropping the aim of her rifle from the suspect’s head to his hand, Jenna squeezes off a round just as his finger starts to compress the trigger of his pistol. Mr. Messy Head jerks his body to the side, avoiding the bullet by a hairsbreadth, before an explosive spray of red mists the air where half of the man’s left hand used to be. A cry of pain fills the room as the gun thuds to the carpet. The suspect stares at his remaining thumb and trigger finger connected to the remnants of jagged bones and uneven, ripped flesh that is bleeding profusely. At this point the stranger shoots into action, leaping to tackle the suspect to the floor. In less than a minute, he has their man belly down to the ground, with his hands bound behind his back using flexi cuffs, while she and Kent stand, blocking the door, with their guns aimed at the pair.
Kent yells, “Freeze! Hands in the air, now!”
Hands slowly lift into the air as the red-head looks up at them. Bright amber eyes bore into Jenna’s as she looks down the barrel of her gun at him. Caught slightly off guard by his startling, strong, handsome face she drags in a subtle breath, but what she finds there makes her nervous. It’s a smell she hasn’t experienced in a very long time. A smell that she has been taught most of her life to avoid at all costs. It’s the clean, fresh scent of the outdoors that is unique to shifters alone with an underlying spice that could only be singular to Mr. Messy Head. It isn’t the latter of those scents that bothers her. It’s the other smell that means trouble. This guy on his knees, holding his hands calmly in the air in front of her, isn’t human. He spends his spare time in some kind of fur, whether its cat, bear, or wolf, she isn’t sure. He is Other. Whatever it is, though, isn’t beneficial for her to be around too long. So she needs to get this guy away from her, pronto.
