“Shit!” Nash growled, and he punched the control panel.
Reece placed a bloody hand against Fairchild’s back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She stared at the scanner for a moment, her mind churning with frustration. The bastard had been so close,so close, but he’d gotten away. She took a breath, then another, and the frustration started to fade.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, and she meant it. “All that matters is that you guys are alive.”
Reece chuckled. “Funny,” he said. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”
Dutton and Nash both nodded in agreement.
They were alive. The whole team was alive. That was the only thing that mattered. Fairchild embraced each of them in turn, and each of them kissed her hard and deep, letting her know exactly how much she meant to them. Dutton was the last to kiss her, and when their lips finally separated, he looked her straight in the eye.
“Fairchild,” he said. “About what happened back there—”
She cut him off with a finger to his lips. She knew what he was talking about. He had come inside her—alot—and she had not been on her birth control.
“It’s alright,” she said.
And it was. Very, very alright.
She took a step back and looked at her three teammates. They were naked and wet, covered in the blood of their enemies. They had never looked better. And they had the whole damn ship to themselves.
“You know what I think?” she said.
Reece lifted a brow. His cock lifted too, as if he already knew what she was about to say.
“I think we’d better finish what we started.”
CHAPTER 30
The briefing room looked pretty much as it had the last time Reece had been there. That shouldn’t have been so surprising, he supposed. It had only been a few weeks. Still, it felt longer than that somehow. Much longer.
A lot had happened since the last time he was here.
A lot.
Col. Barnes was parked at the end of the long table, his bulky frame wreathed in cigar smoke and backlit by the glowing holoscreen on the wall behind him, displaying the details of Reece’s post-mission report. Agent Lennox was sitting beside him, studying a handheld data slate that contained the same information. Beneath her severe hairdo, her silver brows were knitted with concentration. The room was dead silent, save for the soft hum coming from the AC vents in the walls.
At last, Lennox set the slate on the table and leaned back in her chair.
“Well,” she said. “At least the mission wasn’t atotalfailure.”
Beside her, Barnes snorted out a little cloud of smoke. “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an understatement? The team made it out alive. Plus, they identified and neutralized a traitor to the Guild. That’s no small thing.”
Lennox sighed.
“Naturally I’m glad there were no casualties,” she said. Her cool tone made it sound as if she were talking about commodities,not people. “But the Mercenaries’ Guild expects more from its combatants than mere survival…”
She rose from her seat and turned to face the holoscreen on the wall. The cold light limned the silhouette of her feminine figure beneath her bureaucratic suit. The agent had kept fit, even with a desk job. Reece noticed, but felt nothing in particular. There was only one woman who stirred his arousal now.
He glanced across the table to where Fairchild was sitting, flanked by the other two members of the team, Dutton and Nash. Her outfit was almost identical to the one she’d worn a few weeks ago to the briefing. Cap. Tank top. Shorts. The tight-fitting clothes left little to the imagination.
Not that Reece needed imagination. He had memories.
After Slayn’s escape, they had commandeered the arms dealer’s ship and piloted it back to Guild HQ. The trip had taken them precisely one week. Lots of time to kill for four healthy adults with no clothes and a lot of pent-up energy. They had fucked like lagomorphs the whole way home, making use of every horizontal surface in the ship, and quite a few of the vertical ones too.
