Hot For Her Mercenary (Dark Desires), page 1
Hot for Her Mercenary
DARK DESIRES: BOOK 4
PIPPA LITTLE
© 2024 by Pippa Little
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Contents
1. Stephanie
2. Logan
3. Stephanie
4. Logan
5. Stephanie
6. Logan
7. Stephanie
8. Logan
9. Stephanie
10. Logan
Epilogue
Extended Epilogue
Also by Pippa Little
Preview
STEPHANIE
Someone’s going to kill me.
The problem though, is that the man hired to do it happens to be just what I need for a different problem. Dying can wait.
I will not die a virgin.
I’d die of embarrassment over anything else he has planned for me. But the idea of an up-and-coming senator, cut down in her prime before she even…
Well. It’s not what I want to be remembered for, put it that way.
Daddy’s put so much time and effort into making sure I’ll be the next senator in our family to take his place. The pure-as-driven-snow angle has worked well for me so far, but it evaporates into white-hot steam when I’m face-to-face with my killer.
He’s just what I always dreamed a real man should be……and definitely a man worthy of stamping my V card.
Minus the killing me part, of course.
But somehow, even though we just met, I know he won’t do it—kill me, I mean.
I can see it in his eyes. I know I’ll be way more useful to him alive than dead.
For both our sakes.
But if he really, really has to kill me, surely he’d grant a dying girl one last wish.
Wouldn’t he?
LOGAN
My military career's over. Has been for years, officially.
The government, or certain darker parts of it, still has plenty of work for men like me, ghost missions that pay way better than the military ever did.
It was the only thing left after official brass made it clear I was certainly expendable when they slaughtered my whole platoon.
That ambush in Africa took my brother Jase, the only family I ever really had.
My final assignment: take out an up-and-coming senator.
Quietly.
Although I have no scruples initially, the planned assassination of a US citizen let alone a wealthy heiress senator on home soil has 'set up' printed all over it.
But once I have my own intel on the target, once I see her in the flesh…It's clear what I need to do. And it isn't following orders.
Money buys a lot, but it can't buy her safety forever.
Unless she has her own private full-time mercenary.
The kind who puts a ring on her finger and his baby in her belly.
CHAPTER 1
Stephanie
“Ineed you to do this for me, Stephanie. God knows you’re old enough now to be left alone for five minutes.”
My mouth crimps shut. I know better than to interrupt him now.
“I mean, one weekend without anyone to babysit you or do everything for you. You’ll be twenty-one in a month!”
Daddy’s sentiment is far from touching, but it’s as close to it as he gets. I’m used to his moods as well as his frequent trips away.
“I’ll be fine, daddy. Really,” I assure him. He hates it whenever he doesn’t have me all to himself. And not because I’m his only daughter.
He’s mentoring me to be his replacement, settling for a senator's daughter over the son he never had to carry on the family tradition.
The tradition he’s trying to establish anyway.
All that means for me is most waking hours since I finished school have been flushed with campaign coaching, ‘how to senator’ lessons, and endless meetings.
I never get out and Daddy’s paranoid about me spending more than two minutes with anyone else.
Daddy can well afford the campaign, but I can tell even he’s edgy about it the longer we both wait for the voter support he banked on getting.
Nobody even knew he had a daughter. He’s kept me out of the public eye until now. And no, I’m not senator material. A child could tell you that.
I know I wouldn’t vote for me, but then again, I never voted for Daddy either. I guess that’s one little secret out of the way.
The other isn’t really a secret. Not to me anyway.
All this political ‘training’ and never having a minute to myself. The idea that if I did have a chance at becoming senator, would it be so obvious to everyone I’m still a virgin?
Sounds silly and not the thing an up-and-coming senator should be having. So Daddy’s ‘emergency’ trip away, taking the whole staff with him too and leaving me at home alone, is probably just what this girl needs.
Daddy’s punishing me for something, or maybe it’s more of his tough love, priming me for the rigors of office. Yawn.
A hot bath, a little wine, a little self-care that may or may not involve my toes curling—that’s all I’m thinking about.
It never really got me during college. Maybe because it was an all-girls school. Pushing twenty-one and out in the world beyond what Daddy shouted at me, and he’s right. A world outside of my own life that I’m learning fast is one that most people only dream of.
But not even having done it yet? It might sound a bit poor little rich girl. But I think a girl, a young woman knows when it’s her time, rich or poor. Stunningly beautiful or Jane Doe average like me. We all just know when something needs to be taken care of.
And tonight, this whole coming weekend, in fact, is going to be all about me.
“It’ll just be you,” Daddy reminds me, sounding as if he’s actually testing me somehow. But I know there’s some security downstairs.
Besides, anyone who wanted to get in here would have to be a ghost. This place is like a vault.
“I’ll be fine, Daddy. Give me a chance to go over my speech practice.” I fib out of habit.
“And don’t forget to work on that walk. You look like a goddamn duck waddling, just like your mother-”
His own words stop him. The pained flash in his gray eyes that should be begging my forgiveness turns into something else. Something darker before he closes them momentarily.
Daddy changed when Mom died. Always said it was his fault. It made him angry and bitter about a lot of things. The life we’ve lived, his position in business and politics. It’s like none of it is enough for him anymore.
I try to tell myself it’s because Mom was the love of his life, but the older I get, the more I see how he really is when he talks about her.
I don’t get the feeling he liked Mom much at all. It was her family’s money that gave us everything. Without Mom, Daddy’s political as well as business career wouldn’t have happened.
Sometimes I catch him looking at me the same way, a sort of loathing but not today. Even though we both know I’m just like her in every way.
“I-I’m sorry, Stephanie,” he murmurs, absently reaching for me before jerking his hand back, recovering his usual stony composure instantly.
“It’s just this meeting… The Whitehouse though, think of it!” he exclaims, his eyes widening with an almost crazed look.
There’s been some noise about Daddy running for presidential nominee, but his senatorship and business ties, our family history basically, it’s not what the bigger wheels that turn actually want. But for my dad, it’s like the Holy Grail.
“You’ll be late,” I remind him clinically. I gave up years ago trying to reach Daddy anymore. I play the innocent, pure daughter, and he plays the grouchy man of authority with the whole world at his feet.
The list of instructions he reels off as I keep pace with him all the way to the front door is his farewell. No hugs or kisses. No emotion.
Once he is gone—and I make sure he is, watching for his limo still long after it disappears into downtown traffic thirty stories below—I shiver a long breath out.
“Finally.”
He’s not the only one who can switch his mood. I can play my part to the letter, but as I said, there are just some things a girl—hell, even a future senator—has to take care of before anything else.
I swear, the next man I see, if he has a pulse, I will devour him whole.
Senator Stephanie Foster, virgin.
Not what I want on my tombstone, but more important than that, it’s not who I want to be anymore either.
CHAPTER 2
Logan
My scar itches. Still half asleep, I scratch at it, working hard in my mind before I even open my eyes to forget the recurring dream that jars me awake a dozen times a night.
Hearing the envelope I already know is thick, brown, and oblong sliding under my apartment door, my eyes snap open like steel traps.
Taking a long breath through my nose, I absently scratch my jaw again, reminding myself it’ll be the last time.
I’ve got plenty of scars, but when my latest one itches, I
I earned the scar the same day I lost my kid brother Jase and my military career. Lucked out by winning an honorable ‘psychiatric’ medical discharge for my troubles. Ruined my chances at any official military employment but I somehow managed to escape with my life.
No family left to look out for. No official duties from the only life I’ve ever known. Nightmares for the rest of my days. Worse than that, I’m a loose cannon now.
A solo operative. No platoon, no rank or C.O., and what should worry folks the most—no rules for me to follow.
An ex-black ops soldier who has a chip on his shoulder as well as an ax to grind with his former employer. Who, as fate would have it, still has plenty of work for highly trained, specialized killers, but none of it’s on the record.
A mercenary assassin for hire, a bodyguard, or even sometimes just a common thief—if that’s what the assignment entails. It’s not who I am, it’s what I’ve become.
A darker shadow than the one that took Jase and my men that night.
This mission though, ‘the last mission’ I’d call it out of habit. This one really is, I can feel it in my gut, on my scar.
It feels different before I even spot the telltale mail call. A ripple of something I haven’t felt since Jase and my team were ambushed that night in a jungle so dense, there’s no way it was a chance encounter.
We were sent there to be slaughtered. A team of perfect killers who had seen too much. Collateral damage removed. Wiped clean.
Except I was the only one who managed to get away, leaving my men, leaving Jase behind. That’s what keeps me up most nights.
I’ve never run from anything, but that night, I know every one of my men, Jase included, would have ordered me to save myself over being bushwhacked by our own like that.
The same caution, my gut instinct that I ignored only feels like yesterday, letting him go ahead when it should have been me who got his face blown off.
The same bullet that was meant for me gave me my scar after passing through Jase’s skull. So when it itches and I get this feeling, when I’ve been re-living the same ambush over and over every night for days on end like this, I know to be more than just careful.
Every mission’s my last because I know deep down that all this, this life I’ve made for myself, it could all just be another setup to finish the job, using me as a sweeper in the meantime, cleaning up their other shit before they take me out properly this time.
And to be honest, since Jase went, well, I don’t much care when or even how I die now. He was all the family I had left, as well as the only soldier I knew I could count on every time.
Jase isn’t here though, is he, chief?
Maybe he would still be if I went first. But that tape’s already playing twenty-four-seven.
Mechanically, I disassemble the envelope, tossing the contents. Folding it inside out and flicking on the black light I have set up in front of the mirror inside a kitchen cabinet, I slide it under.
My morning mug of joe can wait. If this is my last mission, I want to open my present early.
At the right angle, even my aging eyes can make out the neon blue-white of my assignment details. It’s 1950s, film noir stuff, but old tech is good tech. Sometimes.
Scanning the short brief, I memorize the relevant names and addresses, fishing in the trash for the original contents.
Stephanie Foster. Daughter of Ret Foster, millionaire state senator.
There’s a photo of my mark amongst the sheets of junk mail from the envelope according to the brief.
A girl.
A glossy, color photo. Like a portrait off her mantlepiece.
I recoil at first, but only because my soldier-trained brain refuses to accept that this girl and my active kill mission could be the same thing.
No. No, I won’t. It must be a mistake, they must mean her father.
Forcing calm, I pinch my eyes a moment before returning to the brief. It’s her alright and a GK assignment.
Ghost kill. No noise, no trace of anything.
Whoever wants her dead wants it done quietly and at a specific time.
Tonight.
Fuck.
No! No, I won’t.
She’s too… She’s too… too perfect.
I know I won’t.
My lip curls into a rare smile as I return to the photo, already feeling a pulse of need from the sight of her sweet smile.
The unwelcome thrill of a final mission swiftly replaced with the kind of urge I haven’t felt in a very long time.
I’ve never refused a mission, there isn’t exactly an option to do that with this kind of work. But what good is a loose-cannon mercenary who won’t follow orders if he follows every set of orders he gets, huh?
Golden curls and blue eyes. A dimple on one cheek from her brilliant smile is the only distortion in her porcelain skin. My hammering pulse floods my groin as I stifle an involuntary groan.
The palm of my hand is already gripping myself through my camo boxers, already feeling the warm wetness of what she’s drawing from me without even knowing I exist.
But she will. I’m gonna make certain of it.
She must be half my age, but she’s the kind of pretty that makes me give in to the fantasy that little bit quicker, giving me the courage to believe that maybe there is something worth living for.
A girl like her on my arm and in my bed every night?
That is living. It’s the life I want the longer I keep myself under the spell of her picture.
“I can’t kill her,” I reason aloud to myself. “But I can rescue her. Save her from being killed, I mean…”
Save her from being killed by you? What a brilliant idea, chief.
It’s all I can think of on the fly, and almost against my own will, it seems. My boxers are yanked down in seconds, my hand greedily pumping my already stiff organ as I growl with satisfaction.
She makes me feel her age all over again, the same sense of wonder mixed with need and a hardness to match.
Having her look at me and showing her what I have for her, it’s enough to set my aching cock twitching violently with each stroke.
“Ohhhh… Fuuuuccckkkk!!!”
I can’t hold it any longer. Moaning aloud, my own legs shudder as I stand in my kitchen, yanking off to a picture of a girl I’ve been hired to kill.
“It’s perfect!” I decide aloud. “Once she falls into my arms after I rescue her, I mean.”
Hey, it’s my fantasy, I’ll play it how I want.
But tonight?
The only real question I have for myself is, can I wait until tonight?
CHAPTER 3
Stephanie
Bath steaming, my own juices not far behind after a half hour and a couple of glasses of red wine help my brain to fully relax.
Something in me feels like it’s wound too tight, a part of me that can’t relax, as if something terrible or absolutely amazing is about to happen.
Wine isn’t my go-to thing, but it does give me the confidence to remind myself aloud as I study myself undressing in the full-length mirrored walls of my bathroom.
“First man you see, huh?”
Sure. Why not? As long as he’s not some crazed killer or something.
I set my glass down, giggling to myself and calling time on the wine idea. I could end up doing something extra stupid, like calling a male escort if this feeling keeps up.
I tell myself I’ll feel much better after taking care of things myself and only just settle into my suds that are by now, the perfect temperature, when the front doorbell chimes loudly, making me freeze in a panic.
The heavy knock that follows it sees me leap from the bath, covering myself in a silk robe that instantly clings to everything I’m trying to cover up.
My mind does backflips as I experience what it feels like to be totally alone. Daddy being away is nothing new, but it hits me that I’ve never been without at least one or two staff.
I’ve never felt so vulnerable, so… unprotected.
