Second Chance SEAL(144)

It wasn’t every day you got a call from someone just breathing on the line.

My initial instinct was to think that it was aimed at me, since I was the one who answered. But the call had come into my parent’s landline and not my cell phone, which meant that it could easily have been meant for my mom. People mixed us up on the phone all the time.

I started putting together a sandwich, and by the time I was finished I was starting to feel better. I’d just begun my day in a really weird mood, what with that guy in the park and feeling like I was being watched. The phone call was strange, but it had to just be a coincidence. There was no reason that it actually connected with my paranoia.

As I sat down by Mason to start eating, there was a knock at the door.

I sat totally still. We weren’t expecting any packages or any visitors. There was another knock at the door, a bit more urgent. I stood up slowly, fear in my chest.

Maybe I’d dropped something else in the park. Or maybe that guy was back to murder me and steal Mason.

I shook my head. I was being so stupid. I was a grown-ass woman now, right? I had to stop being afraid of the boogey man.

I walked over toward the front door, and the person knocked again. “Coming,” I called out.

I grabbed the knob. Something inside me told me that I shouldn’t open the door, that I should just walk away.

But I ignored that stupid part of myself, twisted, and pulled the door open.

“Remember me?” he asked, grinning at me.

Those intense blue eyes, that tall, ripped body, that cocky grin. I remembered him. I hadn’t stopped thinking about him for a long, long time.

My ghost, my baby’s father.

Emory stood there grinning at me, and I thought I was going to pass out.





Chapter 4





Emory





I kicked my feet up on the table and pulled out one of my many secure cell phones. I dialed the only number in the contacts and waited for it to ring. On the third ring, I hung up and waited.

This was the game I had to play in order to contact my superiors when I was blending in with civilians. My work was too important to risk getting caught up in the surveillance that law enforcement agencies were constantly doing, plus the surveillance various terrorist groups likely had me under.

Three minutes later, the phone rang. I waited three rings and then answered.

“Sir,” I said, “I have a problem.”

“Speak fast, soldier. I was playing golf.”

I grinned to myself. I was speaking with my commanding officer, Colonel Ethan Blackfire. He was the head of the anti-terrorism Special Forces unit, namely my SEAL squad.

“I got a package this morning with a single photograph of a woman I had relations with just before entering Pakistan last year. It had a message written on it in Urdu.”

“What did it say?”

“‘We know who you are and who this baby is. Do you?’” I read to him.

“Baby?”

“She’s carrying a baby in the picture, sir.”

“Shit soldier,” he said. “If that means what I think it does, you might be fucked.”

“That thought occurred to me, sir,” I said.

“What’s the request here?”

“I want to protect the girl, sir,” I said. “The Network is clearly behind this.”

There was a short silence. “Fine. Find the girl and protect her, but be fucking subtle about it. I will get back to you with more orders soon.”

“Roger that, sir.”

“Good luck, soldier.” He hung the phone up.

I hung mine up and tossed it aside. I hated all this spy shit. I was trained to kick down doors and to kill my enemies in any way necessary, not to sneak around like a fucking asshole. Granted, I could do all that shit, but I much preferred the old-fashioned method of firing my weapon into some terrorist twats.

I sighed and took out another phone. I took a picture of the photograph and uploaded it to a secure cloud server. I waited a minute and then dialed another number.

“Navy Intelligence,” the woman said.

“Hello there, Lucy,” I said.

“Well, if it isn’t Captain Emory. What do you need today? Drone strike?”

“Nope. Something much simpler. I just uploaded a photograph to the server. Can you analyze it and find out who the girl is?”

“We can do that. I’ll call you back.”

“Got it.” I hung the phone up and then stood.

My orders were clear and simple: protect the girl and don’t make a scene. I assumed Blackfire wanted to keep me out of the spotlight, since nobody knew that The Network was operating domestically in the States.

He probably wanted to avoid any panics or serious incidents. There wasn’t going to be any backup on this one, no local law enforcement or the CIA or some shit like that. No, this was just me, a single, deadly Navy SEAL sent to protect a girl from one of the deadliest terrorist organizations on the planet.