Page 19 of Playing With Love

Just like I knew would happen, anger tinged Frank’s cheeks before he begrudgingly admitted, “I haven’t actually had an undercover assignment.”

At his tenure with the ATF that said something not so great about his previous superior’s confidence in his abilities. And I knew where Shannon stood on giving him an undercover assignment. She’d rather outsource it than send him in.

“I’ve spent approximately seven out of the last ten years undercover. Most of those assignments lasting more than eighteen months. I get we all gotta start somewhere but this is not the assignment for you to cut your teeth.”

My eyes snapped to Tucker. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking back to Tucson. He’d just come out of a twenty-month assignment that had shaken him to his core. There was no question Tucker was good at his job, probably one of the best agents the DEA had when it came to undercover work. His skill and mental toughness were never in question, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have two weaknesses—women and children. I would never forget the look on his face when he told me how his case had pivoted to sex-trafficking.

“They’re a bunch of hippies cooking meth and using Dremel tools to finish off eighty-percent lowers. Any moron with YouTube can figure out how to do either of those things in less than a week. Not to mention we’re not even sure if there are weapons on the premises.”

He wasn’t completely wrong. A person could buy an eighty-percent lower receiver and with some effort could finish the last twenty percent and build an off-the-books gun.

However, his attitude was all wrong and Tucker jumped at the chance to point that out.

“And there’s your problem, Frank. Just you calling them hippies, disregarding the danger they pose means you’re out. I don’t give a shit if they’re circus clowns moonlighting as drug manufacturers. They’re criminals and criminals are dangerous when their rackets are threatened.”

“I didn’t mean⁠—”

“Yes, you did. You’ve already made up your mind this will be an open and closed easy job. There’s no such thing. You never know what you’re walking into. You never know where a case will take you or how long you’ll be under. A case like this is fluid and you need to be prepared to follow where it takes you, not the other way around.”

I needed to stop this back and forth before it turned any uglier. The problem was, to do that I’d be sealing my fate. Before I could figure out a way to finesse this without committing myself to an operation that included spending a lot of time with Tucker, a man appeared in the doorway.

He was older now, his dark hair had threads of gray that in my humble opinion only added to his good looks. But it was the green eyes I’d never forget that had me pushing my chair back from the table.

“Specialist Monroe,” Lenox drawled.

“Sarnt,” I smoothly returned, falling back into Army slang.

The good ole days when everything was easy.

“I heard you were coming in, couldn’t miss my chance to see you.”

“I can’t believe you remember me.”

A handsome smile tugged at his lips.

“Forget the woman who saved my life?”

“I think that’s a wee bit of an exaggeration.”

And it was. I hadn’t actually saved his life, I was just the first person who called out the sniper.

“Wasn’t me who saw the glint of the scope on the rooftop.”

“My angle was better than yours,” I reminded him.

One could say my first time out of the Green Zone had been enlightening. It was my first lesson in battle tactics. Within the first hour I’d learned more than I had all the previous months of training. Lessons that had served me well.

No plan was foolproof. Humans were unpredictable. There would always be disruptions in the field, no one could foresee how enemy combatants would behave.

“You were Army?” Liberty Hayes inquired.

“35M.” I quickly amended to explain, “Human Intel.”

Liberty nodded but it was Lenox who spoke, “My niece was SF.”

The man’s beaming pride couldn’t be missed.

Back when I served, a woman in Special Forces was unheard of. Since then and only in recent years had any woman passed the Q Course. With a fifty-percent attrition rate, either gender passing selection was impressive.