Hero for Hire Read online

  “Last time I checked, you weren’t married, planning on getting married, or even dating the same woman for consecutive nights. The better question is…can you go without having sex?” Gray dropped onto the bench beside Levi, buckling up as the door slammed shut and the plane started its taxi down the runway.

  He’d tried dating when he was younger. Hell. The word younger made him feel like Methuselah, but the feeling wasn’t inaccurate. Courtesy of Uncle Sam, he’d seen plenty and done more. The civilian women he’d dated once upon a time didn’t understand what his job entailed. They’d seen the movies or read the books, but they still popped out perky How was your day?s like the words were Percocet. And too many times he’d been under orders not to discuss what had gone down.

  Or he’d had days that were all training or sitting in a foxhole, waiting for the action to start. Nothing to talk about there, so he’d stayed mute and his woman of the moment had gotten upset. And then when shit did go down? What chick wanted to hear about the kill shot he made at long range or the building he’d cleared at the end of an M-4? Sure as shooting, she hadn’t been planning to help him pack for combat deployment, and he hadn’t been packing socks and briefs, anyhow.

  Sex was much simpler. He gave an orgasm; she got an orgasm. Or three. Everyone walked away happy, and the next time he jumped out of a plane there were no pesky emotional entanglements messing with his freefall.

  He certainly had no plans for celibacy. On the other hand, fate had just slapped him with the moral equivalent of a chastity belt. Levi pulled the marriage certificate out of a pocket of his flight suit and waved it. He needed a second opinion, and sure enough, Sam leaned over and snagged the paper. As the team medic, Sam had even fewer personal boundaries than the rest of them, probably because he’d patched them all up on more than one occasion. Funny how once you’d had your fingers in a guy’s bullet holes you felt like you knew him.

  “Levi brought reading material.” Sam unfolded the paper, read it over and whistled, the sound all but drowned out by the steady drone of the engines as the pilot took them to altitude. “And trouble. You’re married?”

  “Not on purpose,” Levi admitted with a scowl.

  Mason held out a hand for the certificate. “When did this happen?”

  “I’m blaming you.” Levi flipped Mason the bird. His teammate was a big bear of a SEAL, a damned good sniper, and the second member of their unit to find true love when they’d been undercover on Fantasy Island three months ago.

  Not that Levi understood how two experienced warriors could fall in love while taking down a drug kingpin, but that was apparently what had happened. Levi had been looking forward to giving both of them crap about it for years to come—until he’d checked his mail this morning and discovered he had his own romantic woes to contend with.

  “Your girl asked Ashley and I to be the stand-in bride and groom for a beach ceremony. She didn’t tell us we were getting married for real.”

  Mason grinned. “Heads up. Every photo shoot with that woman is an adventure.”

  “Yeah,” he grumbled, “but can you really imagine me married? To Ashley?”

  Ashley Dixon had been a DEA tagalong on their last two missions. As far as he could tell she disliked everything about him—she’d been happy to detail her opinions loudly and at length. Naturally he’d given her plenty of shit while they’d been in their field together, and she’d really hated him calling her Mrs. Brandon after they’d played bride and groom for Mason’s girl.

  After they’d parted ways on Fantasy Island he hadn’t thought of her once. Okay. He’d thought of her once. Maybe twice. She was gorgeous, they had a little history together and he wasn’t dead yet although he was fairly certain he would be if he pursued her. She wasn’t the kind of woman who shared her toys, and monogamy didn’t work for him. So how the hell had he ended up married to her?

  Mason returned the certificate and Levi jammed it back into his pocket. “Does Ashley know about this?”

  He doubted it. “She hasn’t said anything.”

  Because if she had known, she’d have told him everything he’d done wrong that had led to an actual wedding. He’d butted heads with her every time he turned around on their past missions.

  Well, every time except one. There had been that steamy alleyway kiss when they’d been surprised by a member of the motorcycle club they’d been investigating. He’d pinned Ashley against the wall and kissed her hard, because at the moment the only good excuse he could come up with for their presence in the alley was sex.

  She’d kissed him back, too, in the interests of not jeopardizing their cover, but she’d made it clear later and in private that the next time his tongue got anywhere near his mouth she’d cut it off. His kiss had pissed her off that much, he thought with a smirk, and now he was gonna rile her up even more with his hey-babe-we’re-married bomb. That was the only silver lining in this whole situation.

  “Trickery’s the only way Levi’s getting our Ashley to say yes.” Sam high-fived Mason. “Ten bucks says she’ll skip the annulment and go straight to the kill you part of marriage. She gets to be a widow—you get to be dead. Problem solved.”

  Which was no fun at all. Levi would prefer to aggravate her, get underneath her defiant, snarky surface, if only because she was the one woman who’d never, ever contemplated saying yes to him.

  Mason grinned. “I bet you can’t get her to voluntarily say ‘I do.’”

  Levi wasn’t Superman. No one could get Ashley to agree to anything she didn’t want to do without wielding some powerful ammo. “Say ‘I do’ to what?”

  “You.” A big, obnoxious grin creased the face of the other SEAL.

  “Are you doubting my powers of persuasion?”

  The skeptical look Mason sported said that was an affirmative.

  Gray cursed as if maybe, in some weird parallel universe, a Levi existed who actually wanted to be married to Ashley Dixon. “Ashley could out-stubborn a mule. She’d take a hell of a lot of persuading.”

  “Just a matter of leverage.”

  “Two minutes, ladies.” Gray stood and motioned for the team to head to the back of the plane. Air tore through the cabin as the National Guardsmen chauffeuring them to the day’s jump lowered the back ramp to reveal nothing but blue sky, empty air and a long drop to the landing zone. Levi slapped his hand on Sam’s shoulder, taking up his position behind the other SEAL as he braced against the plane’s upward pull.

  He had never been wild about heights, but jumping out of a plane at thirty thousand feet beat the three-hour commute his brother bitched about, even if he was Navy and frogs weren’t meant to fly. The good thing about HALO jumping, however, was that once he’d gotten his ass out the door, the hard part was done. Gravity took over, and as long he’d packed his chute correctly the happy ending was practically guaranteed.

  “Ready?” Gray bellowed the words in Levi’s ear, fighting to make himself heard over the slipstream’s roar. “Don’t make Ashley a widow. She’s gonna want the chance to kill you herself.”

  “You betcha.” He touched the knuckles of his free hand to Gray’s. Seconds later, their team leader bellowed the order to jump and Sam flew out of the open bay. Gravity and the engine wake did their thing, sucking Levi out of the plane as he whooped, riding Sam’s ass as they hung in the air for a long moment.

  Then they plummeted through the air at terminal velocity, facedown, arms and feet up as strips of road and field swung in crazy circles beneath them. Seventy seconds of flying—or falling—and he pulled the ripcord at four thousand feet above ground level, popping his chute. On a mission rather than a training run, he might wait until as low as a thousand feet to minimize the amount of time hostiles had to spot him. Today, though, he’d maximize his chances of getting to the ground intact. If his chute failed, he’d still have time to deploy the back up. The chute shot out of his back, the canopy catching air and jerking him sharply upward. Bingo.

  Sure, Ashley would prefer skipping the