Do or Die Reluctant Heroes Read online

  Truth was, Shel’s sister Francine was the best driver Aaron had ever met—and that included his Navy SEAL brother. She was no slouch when it came to security, either. Rory was safe in her capable hands.

  “I haven’t even showered yet,” she grumbled, as she threw her bag into the back, next to Roar’s car seat. “I smell like feet, ass, and onions rings.” She realized that he was holding open the driver’s side door for her. “Where are you going?”

  “You remember where the safe house is?” Aaron asked.

  “Yeah, but I’m not going to say it out loud,” she countered, narrowing her eyes at him. “Especially since we’re going there together. Right?”

  He shook his head. “I’m going back to take a look.” She started to argue, but he cut her off. “Only a look. I’m not stupid.”

  “That’s arguable. But I’m not going to tell you what to do—only what I’d do. What your brother would want us to do. Which is get the fuck out of here. Fast.”

  “Yeah, well, Ian’s not exactly here, is he?”

  “It’s common sense. We get to safety, then regroup.”

  “And what happens if, after we regroup and go back to investigate, the car’s already gone?” Aaron asked. “Do we just stay away from the house, never go home again, in case it was Davio? Maybe someone just parked in front of the wrong house.” But as he said those words, he didn’t believe it. “I’ll go, I’ll look, I’ll meet you. Soon.”

  “Suit yourself.” Francie shook her head in disgust as she tossed her clothes onto the passenger seat—with the exception of the bra which she now fastened, backward, the clasp around her waist. She twisted it so that the cups were facing forward, and she tried to pull it up underneath her tank top—or maybe she didn’t try, at least not very hard—to keep it all under cover. With Shel’s sister, anything was possible.

  But accident or not, she very definitely flashed him a nipple in the process, then laughed at whatever strangled noise had come out of his throat.

  “You know, you could’ve married me,” she teased him as she climbed behind the wheel.

  Aaron said what he always said when she got obnoxious. “Only in your dreams, Angel-cake.” He closed the door, and she rolled her eyes and laughed derisively up at him through the open window, same as she always did.

  This time, though, neither her laughter nor her tough-guy attitude hid the cloud of worry in her eyes. “I love you. Be careful.”

  “I will. Text Shel. Three words: Code one. Charlie. Then shut off your phone. Completely. You know the drill, France.”

  She nodded. “Way better than you, babe.”

  Aaron looked past her at Rory, who was still sound asleep in his seat, still dreaming about things that made him smile.

  “We’ll be okay,” Francie said, and he nodded and turned to go, but she caught his wrist. “No unnecessary risks. And FYI, that car could be the police. Looking for you.”

  Aaron was well aware of that. He almost got in beside her. Almost. But he had to go and look. He had to know.

  “If we need to move on, well, then we’ll move on,” Francine told him. “A full year is a pretty good run. Especially since we’re living practically in the motherfucker’s backyard. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said. “I do know. Text Shel, then go.”

  She nodded again, reaching for her phone as Aaron turned and set off at a quick jog back toward his house. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t sprint. Last thing he needed was to get stopped by the cops for being large and running without sneakers on.

  He knew all the cut-throughs—the backyards without fences or pool cages—because he made a point to run the route every few weeks. Sometimes he did it under the cover of night, sometimes during the day. He knew all the obstacles and all of the alternatives, and in a short amount of time, he was back behind the very solid white fence that provided him and Shel and Rory with privacy. There was a reason theirs was the only house in the neighborhood with a second level. They could see out, over the fence, from the master bath’s window, but none of their neighbors could see in.

  He’d drilled a peephole into the tough plastic wall for precisely this reason, although he never went onto the patio without checking to be sure the hole was properly corked.

  Because a large man could stand on their neighbor’s side of the fence and be completely hidden from view by the shrubbery and tropical plants that grew in their garden.

  Exactly where he was standing right now.

  Hoping that a spider wasn’t on the verge of crawling down his shirt, and that the lush vegetation didn’t include poison ivy or one of its tropical cousins, Aaron used his pinkie to push the tiny cork through. He could imagine it falling, near-silently, into the flowering shrubs that lined his side of the barrier, in the yard just outside of the pool cage, to the right of the house. The previous owners had used the contained outdoor area for a dog run, and after Rory got a little bit older, he and Shel had been planning to do the same. Get a dog, or better yet, get two. Butch and Sundance. Shelly already had their names picked out.

  Stick around for a few decades.

  Grow up and grow older here, together, in their beautiful home.

  Christ, this was his home. For the first time in his life, Aaron had had a home that was really and truly his own.

  Francie’s words echoed in his head. If we need to move on, well, then we’ll move on.

  A year was a pretty good run, considering that he and Shel had been nomads for so long, first in the Marines, and then working for Ian. But Aaron had wanted more. He’d wanted happily-ever-after.

  He closed one eye and brought the other to the tiny peephole, expecting to see nothing but an open or broken door, assuming that whoever belonged to that car was already inside his house.

  Instead, she was right there, lurking near the slider to the kitchen—a woman. And even though she didn’t look like any mob hit man Aaron had ever seen, he could tell, immediately, that she was carrying. Her hand was in her bag and she held herself at ready. Her clothing was dark—the kind of outfit that a businesswoman might wear. The better for getting lost in a crowd after a gangland-style execution.

  Her shoes were … stupid. Really nice and extremely expensive, but they were not designed for running or even moving swiftly, and it was this that made the hair on the back of Aaron’s neck rise even more.

  Whoever she was, she was confident that she wouldn’t have to run. Not even a little bit, not ever.

  She came, she killed, she slowly strolled away.

  As he planned his next move—she would hear him if he took her photo with his phone, so he worked to change its settings to silent—she said something. Her voice was too low for Aaron to make out her words, but he put his eye back to the peephole so he could look at her again. And he realized that she wasn’t alone, because she wasn’t on the phone—she wasn’t wearing a Bluetooth or any other kind of headset. And he realized in a flash of horrified dismay that Ian was with her—his brother was here!—and that she must’ve had him at gunpoint.

  Except Ian moved toward her so quickly that she didn’t have time to aim her weapon and fire. He pushed her hard against the wall in a full body slam that made Aaron’s teeth hurt in sympathy. He knew exactly what that felt like—although he wasn’t too sympathetic because his brother had just essentially disarmed his captor.

  Ian said, “Who the hell are you?” Those words came through clearly. The next part was harder to hear, what do you something, then, “Or did his brother Davio send you?”

  Words to make Aaron’s blood run cold.

  “No!” The woman’s voice was low but clear. “God, no! The Dellarosa thing was just a guess. A good one, apparently. I had no idea—”

  Aaron was up and over the fence in an instant—he’d practiced that move weekly, too. But he realized, as he was in midair, his boots heading for the crunchy gravel in the dog yard, that his surprise entrance was going to be viewed by his brother as an attack, rather than the
appearance of the cavalry reinforcements that it truly was.

  Sure enough, Ian heard Aaron before he even hit the gravel, and did one of his Navy SEAL ninja moves, going from up in the mystery woman’s face to a left-handed draw with a deadly-looking Glock. Right or left hand didn’t matter—Eee could shoot the stinger off a wasp at a hundred feet in the dark. But what surprised Aaron was the fact that his brother didn’t pull Dellarosa’s hit woman in front of him as a shield. Instead, Eee stepped in front of the bitch, as if he were protecting her.

  It didn’t compute, but Aaron had other things to focus on—such as making sure his own older brother didn’t kill his ass. As he headed for the gravel, he had to decide whether to curl down and make himself the smallest target possible, or to go big and make sure Eee recognized him, maybe by shouting out some of that verification code that his brother was so keen on using, if you could overlook all the months that he didn’t bother to visit, call, or write more than one of his stupid postcards.

  But Aaron didn’t get a chance to say more than “Yo, Eee!” because he didn’t stick the landing. His ankle rolled—son of a bitch—the pain hot and sharp. As he went down, hard, he kept his hands spread, out and empty, to show that he wasn’t armed.

  The stones in the dog yard were various shades of yellows and browns, most of them round and smooth, but not round enough or smooth enough to keep from tearing the crap out of his elbow as he bounced through them a few times before skidding to a stop.

  Ian had moved with him, tracking him with the business end of the sidearm that he didn’t fire and he didn’t fire and … The expression on Eee’s face didn’t change. He didn’t blink, didn’t smile, didn’t otherwise move a muscle, he was so in the moment. But Aaron knew that he’d been recognized because his brother lifted the barrel of the weapon and turned his attention back to the woman, who’d taken advantage of the few seconds of chaos to make a break for the door that led out of the pool cage and around to the other side of the house.

  Ian stashed the Glock in the back waist of his jeans, his movement deliberate and calm in comparison to the woman’s flurry of panicked flight. Just a few steps and a turn and he caught her by the arm, and he used her own momentum to swing her back around.

  Those shoes she was wearing were definitely not made for running. As Aaron watched, pushing himself up and onto his feet—ouch—she tripped or maybe slipped on the pavers that surrounded the pool.

  And instead of catching her, steadying her, and keeping her from falling, Ian put his other hand on her real-woman-sized butt and pushed, giving her lift—enough so that she went, pinwheeling and flailing, shoulder bag and all, into the pool.

  Splash.

  It was only then that Ian turned to Aaron and said, “Hey, D.A. Nice to see you.”

  * * *

  He’d pushed her in.

  Ian Dunn had pushed her into the swimming pool.

  Phoebe sputtered and coughed as she flailed her way up to the surface. Her wet clothes were heavy and she only managed to get a quick bit of air before the water closed over her head again.

  She was in the deep end, and it was pretty freaking deep, and she struggled to get the strap of her bag up and over her head, because it was helping to weigh her down. She wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer to start with, and the cut of her jacket made it hard to move her arms, so she kicked her feet, which did little more than dislodge her shoes. Still she somehow again broke surface, and she tried to see which way she needed to swim to get to the shallow end, but she ended up gulping water instead of air, which was not good.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” she heard Dunn say before she went under again.

  There was no way that she was going to drown in someone’s backyard swimming pool, but now she was gagging and choking, her lungs burning, and the urge to inhale was strong even though she was underwater, and she had to get back to the surface, but she couldn’t.

  And the consternation and annoyance she was feeling took a solid turn into a flash of full panic—holy God, was she really going to drown in someone’s backyard swimming pool?—when she suddenly felt Dunn join her in the pool with a rush of force and bubbles.

  She felt his arms go around her and he unceremoniously hauled her up out of the water so she could breathe. Air, air, real air! She flailed as she coughed and spat and choked, and the terror wasn’t gone because she still couldn’t stand and there wasn’t much of Dunn to grab onto because he had her from behind in a rough version of a lifeguard hold. She felt him pull her through the water, and even though she couldn’t see much of anything through eyes that were both stinging from chlorine and tearing from the coughing that still wracked her, she tried not to fight because she knew he had to be taking her to the side of the pool. And sure enough, he kept one arm around her, looped just under her arms, as he grabbed for the edge to keep them from both going under again.

  And still, Phoebe could do little more than cough and wheeze and hack as her lungs burned and she replaced water with air, thank God. She felt Dunn maneuver his leg beneath her, attempting to support her butt with his rather massive thigh, as if she weighed little more than a child.

  It served to boost her up a bit more out of the water, which was good, except when he tried to loosen his hold on her, which made her turn toward him in alarm and grab him more tightly.

  Before jumping in to rescue her, he’d taken off his shirt and his jeans and probably his boots as well, and her hands slipped against the wet smoothness of his shoulders and back. He was a large man, and there was a lot of smooth skin beneath her fingers, covering a vast expanse of very firm muscles.

  “I got you,” Dunn said into her ear. “You’re good.” His voice changed then, and Phoebe knew that he was talking to the man who’d come over the back wall—the one that Dunn had drawn her Glock on before he’d tossed her into the pool. Why on earth had he tossed her into the pool? “Who the hell lives in Florida but doesn’t learn to swim?”

  “I know how to swim. I just don’t do it particularly well,” she tried to protest, but her voice was weak and the man who was outside the pool spoke over her.

  “Who the hell buys a house in Florida—in cash,” he said, with a ton of snark in his tone, “but then doesn’t live in it for more than a few days before vanishing off the face of the earth?”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Dunn said. “How are you?” He didn’t wait for the other man to respond. “Help me get her out of here.” He spoke into her ear again. “Come on, honey. Loosen your death grip on me, and use those hands of steel to grab onto my brother, Aaron.”

  His brother?

  Phoebe looked up, way up, at the man standing at the edge of the pool. Up closer like this, even without her glasses, which were now at the bottom of the pool, she could see that he was younger than Dunn by quite a few years. His hair was shorter and lighter, and his eyes were more green than blue. And even though he was tall, he wasn’t quite as super-sized. He was more sculpted, more … elegant. More slender and beautiful and less raw-boned. Less Stone Age and more Bronze Age—but still the kind of man who enjoyed living in a cave. He was completely, obviously, absolutely Ian Dunn’s brother.

  “Aaron, Phoebe.” Dunn kept the introductions cursory. “Phoebe, Aaron.”

  With a great deal of unhidden disgust, Aaron held out his hands and Phoebe let go of Dunn and reached for him. He took her by the wrists, and she did the same, and with Dunn pushing from the pool, she was up and out of the water and plopped inelegantly down onto the pink brick pavers, still working to spit the last of the chlorinated water out of her raw and burning lungs as her hair dripped into what was surely her makeup-streaked face.

  Former SEAL that he was, Dunn wasn’t going to need any assistance getting out of the pool, and Aaron didn’t try to help, instead stepping back so as not to get splashed. But Dunn first dove to the bottom to collect her glasses, and then her bag and shoes, which he set beside her—as if they weren’t completely ruined and useless. Her phone, her wallet, the fi
les she’d taken for one of the other cases she was supposed to be simultaneously working on …

  “You pushed me in,” Phoebe accused him in a voice that was raspy and raw as she put her glasses on with shaking hands, while he used the edge of the pool to thrust himself up and out, water sheeting off of him.

  She expected him to deny or at least make excuses: It was an accident; I tripped; I didn’t mean to … But instead he said, “Yup. Sorry. It had to be done,” as he used his hands to squeegee off his face and push back his unruly hair.

  From her vantage point, looking up at him through the water-spotted and slightly blurry lenses of her glasses, he was quite literally larger than life. Right at that moment, with his hands up on his head, his muscular chest bare, and his boxer shorts clinging to him in a most revealing way, water matting the hair on his chest and his legs and his eyelashes, he was ridiculously attractive. Even with his more conventionally handsome younger brother standing next to him.

  Of course the fact that Aaron was looking down at her with unconcealed dislike in his pretty hazel eyes might’ve had something to do with it, as if she weren’t a person but instead a pile of excrement left on his pool deck by a wart-covered troll with an intestinal ailment.

  “Phoebe who?” Aaron was asking Dunn. “Who the hell is she?”

  “Phoebe Kruger.” Dunn glanced down at her. “She says she’s my lawyer.”

  “I am your lawyer,” she said, still in that raspy voice, taking the opportunity granted by the eye contact to ask, “It had to be done?”

  But Aaron was even more incredulous than she was. “Your lawyer works for Davio Dellarosa?”

  “No,” Dunn said, but then corrected himself. “Well, she might. But it’s more likely that she works for Manny. We just met this morning, so …”

  “I don’t,” Phoebe said. “Work for Manny. Or Davio. Or any other random Dellarosa.” With her ability to breathe mostly back, she started to peel her wet jacket from her shoulders—until she realized that the water had made her white blouse transparent. Neither man noticed, since Aaron had gotten way up in his brother’s face.