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Across town, a man stood at a window overlooking the Potomac, a vodka on the rocks in one hand, his cell phone in the other. Things were not going as planned. Not at all. He took a swig of his drink and sighed heavily. “Did you get the widow?”
“Uh, no, sir.” The voice on the other end of the speaker phone call sounded stilted, nervous.
Good. They should be nervous.
“What about the letter?” His words were clipped, his gaze narrowed on the Washington Monument in the distance.
“N-no, sir. They took her away before we could question her.”
Fan-tastic.
He knocked back the rest of his liquor in one shot, then set the glass aside, turning away from the picturesque view and back to face his penthouse office. Chances were good those goddamned SEALs were involved in this too. If he’d known taking out one of them would cause this much of a headache, he would’ve arranged to have them all terminated at the same time. He slumped into his leather executive chair and rubbed a hand over his face. When he’d started all this, he’d figured it would be over quickly. Make the delivery, infect the terror cell,bing-bam-boom. Done.
Not so, however. This mess was getting more convoluted by the day. Exhausted beyond his years, he shook his head. “Any idea where they’ve taken her?”
“No, sir. US Marshals picked her up from the hospital. She’s gone.”
“Fine.” He sat forward and leaned his elbows on the desk. “Forget her. We’ll work our other angle. Is the story ready to leak?”
“In final edits, sir.”
“Perfect. I want it fed to every major news service by the end of the week. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
He ended the call and took a deep breath. There was more than one way to deal with a pesky SEAL, as Spencer Nixon was going to find out very soon.
END OF SCOTTY
SEAL TEAM TEN BOOK 2
BLURB
Desire is the deadliest weapon…
Navy SEAL Spencer Nixon knows falling for Toni Williams is a bad idea. But some women are impossible to resist. Beautiful, intelligent Toni seems dedicated to helping underprivileged children…but her father is tangled in the dark underworld of international terrorism. And Spencer is convinced Coran Williams may have orchestrated his SEAL teammate’s murder.
To Toni, Spencer seems perfect in so many ways—from his sexy, toned body to his razor-sharp wit. But he has a violent side as well, honed by years as a Navy SEAL. And the truth is, it frightens her. Could she ever love someone trained to kill people?
How can Toni choose between family and a man she just met? When those two clash, will her broken heart be a casualty of their war?
1
Cold-as-Ice SEAL Guilty of Murder?
Spencer Nixon adjusted his tie and stared at the headline of the trashy tabloid he carried everywhere these days. It was a reminder of the mission ahead, the reason he and his fellow SEALs of Team Ten were working day and night. They had to find the true killers of their beloved teammate Nick Matthews and clear their names from the implication that they were responsible for his death so they could get back to business as usual. He shoved the paper back into his pocket. Since the damned article had run a week prior, he’d used it to stoke his already soaring anger levels even higher.
Anger had become mixed with intrigue and suspicion when a little digging had revealed that theDC Times,the paper in question, was secretly owned by Coran Williams. The same Coran Williams whose publishing company put out the romance novels that Nick’s wife, Natalie, wrote under the pen name N.T. Smalls. Spencer and his team had recently discovered that those books included coded and highly classified information hidden within lines of purple prose.
Had Nick died because of some secret that his wife had let slip—or some deal she made with the shady people who were after those secrets? They still didn’t know for sure. What theydidknow was that Natalie had gone missing…not long after she’d been spotted passing information to Michael Becks, a former SEAL they had reason to believe might have been personally responsible for Nick’s assassination. Whatever was going on, classified information seemed to be the name of the game—and Natalie was up to her neck in it.
So was Coran Williams. Not only had he published Natalie’s stories—editing her workpersonallyin a way he did for very few authors—but there were reports that leaked information had made its way to suspected terrorists through e-readers supplied by the Williams family’s charity foundation, Williams Wishes. Those reports were vague and pretty sketchy—they were mostly theories being batted around on conspiracy blogs and hadn’t yet gotten any real attention from mainstream media—but Spencer and the others thought that this one time, those conspiracy theorists might be on to something. The team had decided they needed more information, which meant going to the source.
But tracking down Coran Williams was easier said than done. After an attack on his publishing house a few weeks back, the man had dropped off the map. He’d been held captive by Becks for a few days in the immediate aftermath—they knew that for sure, because he hadn’t been the only one Becks and his men had held. Along with Coran had been Anna, the girlfriend of Spencer’s teammate Gage. While they had rescued Anna, Becks had escaped with Coran in tow. The whole experience couldn’t have been easy for a man in his midseventies. After that? They weren’t sure. Coran had made a few public statements to quell the rumors that he'd gone missing—but was heactuallyat liberty, or was Becks keeping him on a tight leash? Had Coran made some kind of deal to buy his freedom? That seemed possible, especially with the way theDC Timeshad started spouting bullshit pointing the finger at Spencer as Nick’s killer. Why would Coran publish that unless he had an incentive to create a scapegoat and keep others from digging into therealreason Nick had been killed?
Williams’s role in this game wasn’t quite clear, but it did seem like his immediate aim was to protect his own skin. That was something Spencer could work with. It meant that if he and his team could capture Coran, he might be willing to cut a new deal with them to save himself. To do that, though, Spencer would have tofindthe man first. That’s what his upcoming meeting was all about.
Spencer scowled down at a tiny mark on his tie that messed up his otherwise immaculate appearance. The other guys on his team always gave him crap over his obsession with neatness, but there was nothing wrong with looking good, no matter how crappy the mission you might have been assigned. His grandparents, who’d raised him, had taught him that while you couldn’t control the world around you, youcouldcontrol yourself and how you dealt with it. It was his responsibility to make sure he put his best foot forward, always. He considered his attire just one more area that demanded perfection.
