Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella
Read Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella Online
Authors: Lisa Marie Rice
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Adult, #General
F
ATAL
H
EAT
A SEAL Novella
L
ISA
M
ARIE
R
ICE
Contents
Introduction to Bonus Excerpts
Excerpt from INTO THE CROSSFIRE
Excerpt from HOTTER THAN WILDFIRE
April 2
San Sebastian, California
“That must have hurt like a bitch,” a voice said out of the darkness. A female voice. A very sexy female voice. “Here, have a cookie.”
Max Wright sat up painfully, shocked out of his funk. Someone lived next door?
Fuck.
He’d assumed he was going to put his broken body back together without anyone watching. His commander had simply handed him the keys to his vacation beach apartment and given him orders to get better. He hadn’t said anything about neighbors. Not this early in the season.
Get better
.
Those orders still had a bitter taste. Because with a lot of time and a lot of pain and a lot of rehab, he was walking—or, to be honest, limping—again, and he’d gotten back most of his upper-body strength.
But he was out of the navy and no longer a SEAL—permanently. So how was “better” in any way a possibility? Even in the same fucking ballpark of a possibility?
The voice was female. Soft, sympathetic, slightly amused.
He wasn’t going to growl,
Yeah, it hurt like a bitch
, even though it had, because pain wasn’t important. As every senior chief in the history of the universe screamed,
pain is weakness leaving the body.
Pain was nothing.
He wanted to snarl something but it would be to empty air, because there was a slight click, then a light
woof!
that had him raising his eyebrows, and he was alone.
With a plate of cookies on the tile divider between the two balconies.
Shit. No one to snarl at.
But… cookies.
Max had had no appetite since the attack, none. For the first month in ICU, they’d fed him through goddamned tubes bored into his belly, and when they took the tubes out, food tasted like cardboard dipped in shit.
The cookies smelled really good, though.
Really
good. The plate was within reaching distance, and a good thing, too, because getting up and walking at the end of another day in which he’d pushed the limits entailed a cane and a whole lot of pain.
As a matter of fact, the doctors had been adamant that he still needed to stay in the rehab unit for another month, maybe two. He’d had to check himself out, signing his name with a flourish and handing it to the nurse, who clicked her tongue in disapproval.
Tough shit.
Max wanted
out
. He wanted out of this place with all the sick people. He didn’t need reminding he wasn’t whole. He knew.
He’d been strong all his life. He knew what he was now.
Weak.
He wanted a place that didn’t smell of Lysol and Formalin, a place where no one would harp that he was overdoing it, and a place where people didn’t smile at him professionally when he was in a shitty mood. Goddamn it, snarl
back.
It was a good thing they’d taken his guns away in rehab because he’d have ended up shooting someone.
Prison would arguably be worse than the rehab clinic, so before he offed the next smiling sadist, he signed himself out. His XO, Commander Mel Dempsey, offered the use of his vacation beach house about half an hour north of Monterey, handing him the keys and telling him to get better.
It was off-season. Max wanted peace and quiet and solitude while he put himself back together again.
He didn’t want next-door neighbors, female or otherwise. He liked women as much as the next man, maybe more, but not now. Not while he threw up if he moved too fast, not while one leg wouldn’t bear his full weight, not while he was this pathetic… fucking…
cripple
.
Cookie Lady had a real sexy voice, and the very little he’d seen of her in the dim light—wow. But he wasn’t coming out to play. Not for a long while.
He was going to eat what he could choke down, sleep as well as he could, pump iron, do the exercises the rehab doc had given him, and walk along the beach, making sure he didn’t fall on his ass. All those good things. And keep his dick down.
Not hard to do.
His dick had disappeared after surgery. Oh, it was physically there, all right. Mainly as a tube to piss through. Not even a twinge of sex, not even with the nurses in the hospital. Not even with Nurse Carrie, who’d looked really hot in white and had offered.
Max didn’t want any. He didn’t want anything at all except to get back on his feet and back in the Teams.
Not going to happen.
He didn’t want pity or commiseration, he wanted to be left fucking
alone.
Though, actually, the neighbor lady had left him alone. With cookies.
Goddamn it, who the fuck left cookies for a SEAL? SEALs ate rocks and shat nails. They didn’t eat fucking cookies. They—
A stray gust of wind blew from the sea and he froze.
Damn, those cookies smelled good.
He had long arms. He didn’t have to get up. He held a cookie up in the dim light and bit in.
Best cookies he’d ever had, bar none. White chocolate chip. Perfect cookie in a world of imperfection.
He sat and glowered at the dark sea and ate the plateful up.
I
n his dreams, it was always the same and always different.
He was in Helmand: the desolate dun-colored peaks of the Hindu Kush rising sharp and jagged around him, the air so clear his binocs showed him the valley floor as clearly as if it were ten feet away instead of a thousand.
He saw everything with crystal clarity.
It was a mission to take out a real bad guy, Ahmed Sahar. A warlord who’d become Al Qaida’s go-to guy and was funnelling arms to the Taliban. Also a world-class crazy. A fucking psychopath.
From his hilltop sniper’s den, Max had watched two executions and the lashing of a young girl. He couldn’t wait to have the fucker in his crosshairs. Sahar was a psychopath—but a crafty one—and stayed in his compound year-round. But they had intel that a major operation was in the works and Sahar would have to travel.
Max had been waiting for three days in his hide STET under netting, pissing in a bottle, never sleeping, barely breathing. Because he really,
really
wanted to nail the fucker.
And—there he was! Coming out of the gates, looking around for his enemies.
Up here, fuckhead
, Max thought, finger lrosht, finoose on the trigger.
It was a convoy, but Sahar wanted to oversee something, and got out of his vehicle to shout at the lead driver. Max kept him in the sights: that gross, misshapen head he’d studied for hours while being briefed.
This was it. Sahar straightened and took one last look around as Max let out half a breath and gently squeezed the trigger. Sahar’s head exploded. A swift clean head shot.
His work here was done.
Except when the bullet pulped Sahar’s head,
another
crazy shouldered a long tube. Someone had told Max—who was really good with guns, who had shot maybe a million rounds in his life—that some Afghanis had a mystical relationship with arms. Max believed it, because though Second Psychopath couldn’t have had a clue where the supersonic bullet came from—and it would take a team of forensic experts hours to ascertain the direction of the shot—Second Psychopath had no problems.
Second Psychopath’s head swivelled and in one second he somehow nailed Max’s position. Max watched as the tube foreshortened and Second Psychopath was rocked back on his sandals, something trailing a cloud of smoke spearing its way to him.
The world exploded in fire and pain…
Max bolted up, panting, twisted in sweat-soaked sheets, teeth clenched hard against any possible sound, the way he always woke up from his nightmares. The legacy of a childhood spent terrified of waking up his stepfather, who plunged into terrifying rages at the slightest provocation.
Nightmares without noise were his special gift, learned before he could talk.
But even without noise, they left him sweaty and drained and shaking. He hated it, hated them.
He slipped out of bed, lurched once on his bad leg, and caught himself.
Getting strong again would help. Being strong and staying strong had always been his touchstone, was the reason he’d survived his childhood. That was how he’d got his Budweiser. That and being too damned stubborn to quit.
Losing his strength after the RPG attack had been the hardest thing in a hard life.