Assassin (An SOBs Novel Book 2), page 2
A dream come true…
“Aw, you’re turning me down?”
Are you turning me on? “Yes,” he damned near shouted. “Work. I’ve got work…” Or something. “…to do. Right now. Goodbye.”
Miss Hex knew no boundaries in her specialty. In less than the time it took Pagan to draw in a belly full of air, she was in his face, her quivering girls plastered pleasantly against his wary pecs. Automatically, his gaze fell into the tempting valley between those girls. Soft. They had to be soft and warm. Femininely fragrant. A tempting place where a man could bury his face at the end of a long, hard day, right before he buried himself in her warm, wet folds and...
Umm, yeah. About that... Pagan knew damned well his brother had bedded Miss Hex at least once. That was his big brother’s piggish style. Love the one you’re with and leave ’em in the dust when you’re done. Never look back. Never bed the same chick twice.
Suddenly, Miss Hex’s elbows were on Pagan’s chest, her fingertips teasing the curled hairs behind his ears, and her lips were within kissing range.
“I need a shave and a cut,” he told her, not sure why that trivia blurted out of his mouth, but okay. His hair was shaggier than usual, and he hadn’t shaved his face in a week. It meant nothing. An undercover operator had to be ready for short notice recall to the Mideastern countries where beards and unkempt hair were the norm. He might have to insert quickly.
Yeah. Insert.
Not on my best game here, he thought. Mostly, cuz I got no game. Kruze is the one with game.
Her lips pinched, and Pagan closed his eyes, not because she might kiss him, but because this was a dream, although one of his most favorites. Had to be. He’d wake up any second now, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself when he did.
Instead, the softest lips caressed his firmly closed mouth like butterfly wings, brushing over his skin, asking. Just asking. Tasting. Not assuming and not taking, which surprised the hell out of him. He’d always envisioned Hex as a domineering wildcat in the sack. She surely dressed the part. Yet here in the dark where anything could go, and where no one would ever know if they did or if they didn’t, her tongue flickered like a whisper and a promise, wetting his lips just enough to start a fire roaring in his gut.
He kept both eyes closed. God, she tasted sweet.
“Come on, big guy,” she coaxed, her breath in his flared wide nostrils a heady hint of whiskey sour and forgotten good intentions. “Just one beer?”
And all bets were off. The beer could wait. Circling her with one arm, he cupped the nape of her neck with his hand, his other on one leather-clad cheek of her ass. Tilting her head for easier access, he took her mouth hard, mashing her lips against his, thrusting his ready tongue into the slick warmth of her eager mouth. All the while he imagined what other slick warmth her body offered, and what it would feel like to spread her legs and know her in every carnal sense of the word.
Victoria growled, but not in disgust. Giving back with passion and heat, her boots lifted off the floor when she wrapped her long legs around his hips, pressing her core to his belly and trapping him against her. What a rush. He now had both hands full of the most delectable ass in the world, and a painful hard-on in his pants.
“I’m not doing this with a dead man upstairs,” he told her open mouth. Kruze probably would, but I’m not made that way.
Her fingers slid up his jaw and into Pagan’s too-long-for-military hair, smoothed over his scalp, and set off every last milliliter of testosterone in his body. “I know a place,” she whispered.
Suddenly he was nitroglycerin, unstable and ready to blow. Oh, yeah. If this was what she wanted, she was going to get it. Here. Now. He could push the thought of Johnny Boy out of his head for a few minutes. He could do this!
Until his common sense re-engaged.
Until he realized who she’d most likely been with at least once in the past.
Until he remembered what a real woman was, and what Victoria Hex most definitely was not. Wife material. All those family values and dreams he treasured most. Family. Babies. Sons and daughters.
His ardor expired as quickly as Johnny Boy upstairs probably had.
Pagan wasn’t sure what had just happened, but he was certain he was not—NOT—going down this road with one of Kruze’s used girls. Not in this lifetime. Not now that he was back in control.
Vicki Hex hadn’t a motherly bone in her body. There’d be no kids in her future, and Pagan desperately wanted a family like the one he’d been raised in. A family required a real mom for his future sons and daughters, not some killer dominatrix with a leather fetish and a delectable but well-used ass. Pagan didn’t do one-night stands, and he didn’t do easy. If nothing else, the woman he married would be respectable and reliable from day one. She would gladly stay home where she belonged and raise his children, not because she had to, but because she wanted to.
Disgusted at his lack of control and his suddenly too-loose morals, Pagan uncupped his fingers from said ass, inhaled deeply to clear his head, then settled the soles of Miss Hex’s boots back to the floor where they belonged, and where they should’ve stayed.
What was wrong with him?
With his heart jackhammering up his throat, Pagan stepped away from the hottest temptation of his life. He’d done crazy a time or two in the past, jumped off a couple bridges, driven too fast, hitchhiked, and downed too many fifths of Irish Whiskey in one sitting.
But this was more than his future on the line. This was his future family he was thinking about. Miss Hex had no hold on that, and he wouldn’t give her one now.
“I can’t do this,” he told her firmly. “Not now. Not ever.”
Hex was a gorgeous mess of long, black hair, her just-kissed lips still wet from his tongue. She stood there with her boots spread, breathing hard, and her plump girls heaving beneath that tiny tee. “Pagan, I—”
He reached for those plump, moist lips and ran the pad of his thumb across the bottom one. Walking away from an offer of free sex that would’ve been out of this world, but would’ve also been so damned wrong. “I’m not that guy,” he told her gently before he changed his still-considering-the-offer, red-blooded, all-male mind. “I don’t go through women like Kruze does. I’m not made that way. Sex has to mean something for me. Sorry.”
Her nose wrinkled. “Kruze? What’s he got to do with this? With us?”
“There is no us, Victoria. I’ve got” —he ran a quick hand over his head, not sure what he’d just heard in her voice or why he’d called her by her full name— “I’ve got to go.” Before this night gets any weirder.
Her fingers hit his wrist, clutching him before he got away. “I’m… I’m sorry. I… I didn’t know that you....” Her voice trailed off to a throaty whisper.
That got his pride’s attention. “That I what?”
Her head came up and her eyes flashed. “Never mind. Go. Just go.”
Pagan couldn’t help but nod. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never understand how the female mind worked. “Fine then. Bye.”
Finally at Mills’ rear doorway, it hit Pagan hard. Something was wrong with this picture, but damned if he knew what it was or how to fix it. Victoria had looked and sounded sad—or something. But turning back was not an option. No doubt, she’d read weakness into a weak-kneed, dumb-jock move like that. To Hex, love was nothing but a kill-or-be-killed game, and he didn’t play that way. He just plain didn’t have the heart for it.
Yet he couldn’t stop his big mouth from asking, “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
Why wouldn’t she be? She was every bit the assassin he was, and why the holy hell was he suddenly feeling protective? Of her? Of all the females in the universe, she needed no man on her six. Not unless he was there for a quickie.
Victoria stood there in the dark, alone again, but not as cocky as before. Her arms crossed over her magnificent chest, but her chin was down, her hair a thick black curtain hiding her face. “Yeah, fine. No worries,” she replied without looking up, her voice unusually tight and—small.
Pagan slanted a curious look. What was that very un-Hex-like tone in her voice about?
“Tell your brothers hi for me. Later.”
“Will do.” And that was that. Pagan shut the door behind him. He had a flight to catch. Like the way it ended or not, this mission was over. He was on his way home to Montana—until his wide shoulders turned all by themselves. Until he found himself facing the door he’d just closed instead of the fast getaway he’d planned. Until his fingers turned Johnny Boy’s backdoor knob one last time.
“Oh, hell. What’s one beer?”
Chapter One
“Excuse me?” Pagan wasn’t sure he’d heard Chance correctly. “You want me to end who?”
Chance Sinclair, his oldest brother and the leader of the SOB black ops team affectionately nicknamed Sin Boys, stared from beneath thick dark lashes. Unblinking. Unreadable.
At the moment, all three brothers were in different locations. Chance, in their Montana headquarters handling the business end of, well, the business of running the covert black ops team known as the Sin Boys. Pagan didn’t begrudge his oldest brother that seemingly easier workload, not since Chance had recently married the only woman who’d ever turned his hard head.
After the tragic loss Chance had recently suffered in South America, when his SEAL team found themselves ambushed, Pagan didn’t begrudge his big brother anything. He was just thankful Chance was still alive and finally back to being himself again. His pretty wife Suede had everything to do with that.
Pagan himself was hanging out in southern Alabama, waiting for his flight back home after a particularly distasteful job. But that white supremacist with subversive and perverse Al-Qaeda ties, the guy with the end goal of kicking off an American-style Islamic caliphate? The redneck with the big mouth and the bigger opinion of himself? The one who’d thought his merry band of assassins would further his cause if they bombed every school bus on the first day back to school? Uh-uh, no way. Not happening in Montgomery. Not in Chickasaw or Mobile, either. Bubba Dumb Butt was currently toe-tagged and blank-eyed on some morgue’s freezer tray, alongside three of his best assassin buddies thanks to Pagan’s dead-eye.
Kruze, brother number two, was on assignment in Houston assisting the SOB team known only as Night Shadows. Comprised of nobody knew precisely who, the Shadows did the dirtiest work of all the teams. They were the darkest of the dark, the covert empire builders and the destroyers of political kingdoms and ambitions. Think Pablo Escobar, Saddam Hussein, or Idi Amin. Think the various mystery assassinations on far-off continents that terrorists had yet to take credit for—but most definitely would if they thought there was a modicum of power or influence to be gained. Yeah, them.
The Shadows were the ultimate powerbrokers behind polished, politically correct and diplomatic scenes. They were the unseen guys and gals who toppled regimes and dictatorships. What Kruze was doing with or for them, Pagan had no idea. The call had come in way above his pay grade, and a smart man knew when to mind his Ps and Qs. If Senator McQueen Sullivan, the man who operated the SOB teams, had wanted Pagan to know Kruze’s mission, he’d have told him. Plain and simple. M.Y.O.B.
“You heard me, brothers. Victoria Hex is our next assignment,” Chance repeated, his tone deliberate, soft, and low.
Pagan jostled his laptop monitor, picking up on Chance’s unease. It wasn’t often the Sin Boys were called out to end a woman, much less a friend, which, like it or not, Victoria Hex was.
“As of noon today, we’re the final vote of concurrence. All other teams have agreed with the evidence provided. She’s gone rogue, and the CIA’s provided adequate and substantive backup to support their request for an assist from Sullivan. We greenlight this kill and—”
“Is McQueen serious? He honestly thinks we’re going to end Hex?” Kruze hissed all the way from Houston, his face lean and edgy and too damned close to the monitor, making the end of his nose look larger and wider than it was.
Took you long enough to engage. Pagan had expected that question long before now given his brother’s perpetual dalliances with anything in skirts.
But really? Victoria? “Does Julio know?” Pagan asked.
Julio Juarez was Victoria’s older and only brother, and the reason she was considered a friend in this nightmare scenario. In Pagan’s opinion, Victoria was no real threat, just eye candy. He’d nearly taken her up on an offer to hang out and have a beer a month ago, but like the snake Julio’s little sister was and always would be, Vicki vanished without a trace, left him high and dry. Not like Pagan hadn’t seen that brush-off coming. Miss Vicki didn’t care for him, and he absolutely never thought twice about her.
But really? Victoria? You want me to kill Vicki? WTF?
“Of course not.” Chance shook his head at Kruze’s question, but seemingly answered Pagan’s unspoken doubt as well. “Sullivan doesn’t run these kills by anyone but team leaders. You guys know that. And we’ve got another problem. JJ’s been off the grid for months. Hasn’t answered any of my calls or texts since he lost his son. I honestly don’t know where he is. Do you, Kruze?”
Kruze ran a hand over his head. “Haven’t kept track of him. Sorry. Been busy.” Well, shit. “What’d Vicki do to merit a double tap?”
“Sullivan’s got hard evidence she’s turned.” Chance’s tone offered not one hint of enthusiasm for this job. If anything, he sounded as doubt-ridden as Pagan felt. “He’s got multiple photos of Miss Hex with Vito Seranzino, others of her chumming with Dillon Roberto.”
Pagan growled. “Isn’t that her job, to swim with the sharks? Chumming, isn’t that what—wait. Who’s her handler anyway?”
“CIA Special Agent Dane Rich, but…” Chance murmured as another phone rang on his end and his gaze drifted from his screen. “Wait. I’ll tell you two more later. I’ve got to take this call.”
“Copy that,” Kruze replied as both his and Chance’s faces faded to black.
Unsettled and feeling like someone had just walked over his grave, Pagan kicked back from the hotel desk where he’d set his equipment prior to departure. It didn’t matter what evidence this federal schmuck had on Hex, if assassinating women was what his future held, it might be time to rethink this whole black-ops SOBs team concept.
Yes, Victoria Hex was an outright paradox in the female gender and in the covert world of blacker than black ops. Maybe she deserved to die, maybe she didn’t. But a long time ago, Pagan had drawn the line at offing children or anyone of the female persuasion. Assholes, yes. They were different, and, surprise, surprise. Most assholes were testosterone-poisoned males, outright psychotic narcissists, or sexual deviants who got off on torturing anyone weaker or smaller. Else they were whack jobs in powerful positions who thought they were above the order of law, truth, and justice because they had more money than God.
But deep down, Pagan hadn’t ever met a woman he’d truly wanted to kill. Yet. He doubted, as vexing as Hex could be, that she’d be his first. Julio’s sister wasn’t evil. She just wasn’t Pagan’s idea of a real woman.
In the hard scrabble world he lived in, he and his former Navy SEAL brothers answered only to the dynamic Senator McQueen Sullivan, Texas. Known for getting the hard and impossible jobs done, McQueen managed six of the blackest black op teams on the federal payroll.
Funded from invisible money that didn’t exist on any budget plan or forecast, each team operated outside the confines of the law. Yet all were comprised of special operators who’d honorably served. Whether former military, CIA, or FBI, none of the team members took this assignment lightly. Each decision to end a life required unanimous votes from the individual team leaders. At that point, the designated leader—this time, Chance—decided who on his team performed the actual hit.
No reports would be filed afterward. No evidence would be gathered at the scene of the kill. Neither would any records or audit trails be maintained. Once the selected agent—in this case, Pagan—reported job complete, the SOBs would all move onto the next in line, be that douchebag a murderer, rapist, or just another psychopath.
But really? Victoria Hex?
It seemed an unfathomable mission, not because he couldn’t do it, but because Pagan truly loved women. Not like Kruze loved women, though. Hell, no. Kruze was the raunchy, bad boy in the family, the love ’em and leave ’em brother who ate women for dinner, but never for breakfast.
But Pagan was different. Born the third and last son of Scarlett Sinclair, the world famous, successful, and most-perfect mother on earth—God rest her soul—he didn’t ascribe to the generally accepted, politically correct propaganda that women were created equal, either. True, if they worked the same job as a guy, they should be paid the same. But like it or not, politically correct or not, Pagan knew damned well that men and women had been created differently.
Men were like drones to the queen bee. They were the robots that lifted their sorry tired asses out of bed each day, went to work, and lived for the sublime joy of protecting that queen and any children that queen produced. Men did the hard, ugly jobs, so their women didn’t have to. They died for their women and children. Least that’s how it was supposed to work.
Not like Pagan had any life experiences with that kind of father in his life. But yeah, a woman’s real job, her natural niche in society, was to bear children and keep the home fires burning, while that faithful—key word, faithful—male she loved, humped his sorry ass out the door every morning and brought home the bacon every night. Right?
Not that Scarlett had lived that way, but she would have if the deadbeat she’d married had been an actual man instead of a loser and a runaround drunk. That was the problem with this world. If everyone had stuck to the original program as Nature intended, if men were real men and honored their wives, then women would be real women and stay at home where they belonged. There’d be no equality crisis, because there simply wouldn’t be a need for one. Children would grow up loved and sheltered inside happy families, and... and… everyone would be happy, damn it.
