Out of Time Read online

  Praise for the Lost Platoon Series

  “[A] steamy, high-octane thriller. . . . A story full of edge-of-your-seat thrills and unexpected twists, all perfectly underscored by a toe-curling romance.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “McCarty’s first installment in her Lost Platoon series—Going Dark—features betrayal, murder, and ecoterrorism. The nonstop action and love story are guaranteed to keep you turning the pages to find out what happens to Dean and Annie.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter

  “A sexy thrill ride from start to finish. Steamy and suspenseful, Going Dark is a must read.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L. Armentrout

  “McCarty’s exciting contemporary series launch will not disappoint fans of her historical Highlands romances.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McCarty’s foray into romantic suspense is nonstop action from beginning to end.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Readers will find it hard to wait for the next in the series.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  Also by Monica McCarty

  The Lost Platoon

  GOING DARK

  OFF THE GRID

  OUT OF TIME

  The Highland Guard

  THE GHOST

  THE ROGUE (novella)

  THE ROCK

  THE STRIKER

  THE ARROW

  THE RAIDER

  THE KNIGHT (novella)

  THE HUNTER

  THE RECRUIT

  THE SAINT

  THE VIPER

  THE RANGER

  THE HAWK

  THE CHIEF

  The Campbell Trilogy

  HIGHLAND SCOUNDREL

  HIGHLAND OUTLAW

  HIGHLAND WARRIOR

  The MacLeods of Skye Trilogy

  HIGHLANDER UNCHAINED

  HIGHLANDER UNMASKED

  HIGHLANDER UNTAMED

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Monica McCarty

  Excerpt from Going Dark copyright © 2017 by Monica McCarty

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780399587757

  First Edition: December 2018

  Cover art: Ranch by ipkoe / Getty Images; Storm clouds by Herianus Herianus / EyeEm

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my longtime friends and

  fellow Hawaii writer retreaters,

  Jami, Nyree, and Veronica.

  You guys are the best.

  Looking forward to a “Four Non Blondes”

  repeat next year.

  Contents

  Praise for the Lost Platoon Series

  Also by Monica McCarty

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Going Dark

  About the Author

  Prologue

  VORKUTA, RUSSIA

  MAY 28, 1500 HOURS

  “What are we gonna do now, sir?”

  It was Travis Hart who posed the question, but there were five gazes pinned on Scott, waiting for his response. Scott was the officer in charge. The leader. The one who was going to get them out of this shit creek without the proverbial paddle. FUBAR, the age-old military acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition,” was putting it mildly.

  They were lucky to be alive. Even if it didn’t feel that way. Instinctively, his hand went to the circle of metal in the chest pocket of the high-tech tactical black uniform they wore for clandestine missions. He didn’t even know why he’d brought it with him. An engagement ring wasn’t exactly something you carried on a mission, like a blowout kit or extra ammo. A good luck charm, maybe? If so, it had worked.

  For six of them.

  The platoon had been on a highly covert, no-footprint recon mission to Russia in search of doomsday weapons that broke God-knew-how-many laws and treaties. It had seen over half their team killed in a missile strike that would have killed all of them if the girlfriend Scott wasn’t supposed to have hadn’t warned them of the trap. Six of them had survived the missile strike with little more than the clothes on their backs. Now they had to find their way out of BF Russia without letting anyone know they were alive—good guys or bad—because they didn’t know whom to trust.

  Just another day at the office for SEAL Team Nine.

  After fifteen years in service, Scott should have been ready for something like this. First he’d had four years as a midshipman at the Naval Academy—his last year as brigade commander. That had been followed by twenty-four of the most miserable weeks of his life in BUD/S, three weeks of jump school, and twenty-six more slightly less hellish weeks of SEAL Qualification Training. Add another two years of training, workups, and overseas deployments with Team One as a JG (lieutenant junior grade), six months of sniper school, and finally, after another two-year tour, he’d had the brutal six-month selection process that had gotten him into the tier-one (aka highest level Special Mission Unit) SEAL team.

  Scott had jumped from airplanes at high altitudes too many times to count, run until his feet were bloody stumps, swum in icy-cold water until he thought his fingers and other more important appendages might fall off, gone without sleep and food for too many hours to remember, been deployed to more shit hole corners of this world than anyone in their right mind would want to see, and led hundreds of successful missions in the past five years as lieutenant (as of a few months ago as lieutenant commander) of one of America’s most elite special operations units. He’d been shot at, stabbed, ambushed—he’d even gone do