“First, you move to Vegas, then you get depressed, then you get blackout drunk, and voila… You wake up with a ring on your finger. He has a whole spare apartment where he stashes the wives until he works out how to get rid of them.”
“When you say ‘get rid’…?”
“Mostly, they only last a few days, a month tops, so he just buys them a car or fancy jewellery and they go away quietly. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they throw things.”
It struck Nolan that the Blackstone men were the closest thing to male role models that Alexa had ever known. A sobering thought, especially considering Brax ran a chain of sex clubs and Zach liked his women tied to his bed.
“When we get married, it’ll be for keeps.”
Alexa’s head snapped up, her eyes wide. “What?”
“You heard me.”
For years, Nolan had suppressed his feelings, but now he’d given up trying to deny the truth, and the floodgates were open. Alexa was the only woman he wanted. Perhaps the only woman he’d ever wanted. She didn’t have to worry about sifting through a parade of douches because he’d always be by her side.
“Fuck! I nearly crashed the damn drone.”
“I thought you knew how to multitask?”
“I do, but not when you’re (a) standing there without a shirt on, and (b) talking about marriage.”
He pulled his rumpled T-shirt over his head. “Better?”
“Not really. Nolan, I’m not marriage material. I’m not even girlfriend material, and I spend every day wondering what I’m doing here.” She angled the screen so he could see. “Are those the Hayes boys?”
“Sure looks like them.” He knelt to see better just as fourteen-year-old Wyatt raised a rifle and fired. “What the fuck?”
Juno began barking in the distance, and now Nolan was worried. Those kids shouldn’t be on his land, and they shouldn’t have a gun, and did they even know what they were shooting at?
“Juno!” he yelled, but the dog didn’t come.
Another shot rang out, and Nolan sprinted toward the sound, but halfway to the trees, he realised he’d left Alexa’s gun behind and paused. There was no time to go back. The boys wouldn’t shoot him on purpose, he was confident of that, and they probably thought Juno was a deer crashing through the forest. The fact that they were on Nolan’s land at all, never mind taking potshots at animals, was a problem for later. For now, he just had to get them to stop.
Bang. Another shot.
He ran faster.
CHAPTER 26
ALEXA
Before joining the Choir, Storm, our best pilot, tore up her knee chasing a mugger. She’d caught the guy, then spent a week in hospital having things screwed and sewn back together. Oh, and bitching heartily. The doctors wouldn’t let her fly jets for a while, so rather than take sick leave, she’d gotten involved with the drone program at Creech Air Force Base. She didn’t like flying drones, but she was good at it. From there, she’d been recruited to work on another program involving smaller, sneakier drones. Officially, it was called Project Firefly. Unofficially, it was called “How much whacked-out shit can we load onto a MAV?”
My MAV—micro air vehicle—looked like a regular commercial model, but Storm’s buddies had dicked around with it a little. It didn’t carry the firepower of some of the more fun toys, but it did come with a self-destruct option. If that kid with the rifle hurt Nolan, I’d get the MAV in close and blow his fucking head off.
On-screen, I caught sight of Juno running through the trees, heading back in my direction. At least she wasn’t hurt. But where was Nolan? He must not have seen the dog because he was still pressing forward, toward the two junior psychos. Dammit, I should have given him my spare comms unit. With no cell signal, I couldn’t even call and tell him to come back.
The taller kid was fiddling with the rifle’s magazine. From a distance, it looked like a .22 calibre, but even a small round could do significant damage if it hit in the right place. A .22 pistol was Jez’s gun of choice for close-quarters assassination, I knew that much.
Nolan, why’d you have to be a hero? He was closing in on the boys, and I heard him start yelling. Even though I couldn’t make out the words, the sentiment was clear. Get off my land.
The boys looked at each other, but instead of running, the taller one shouldered the rifle. What did he plan to do? Commit cold-blooded murder?
They ducked when I buzzed them with the drone, and technology was clearly still a foreign concept because the short one screamed something about aliens and shook his fist. Aliens? Even I hadn’t found evidence that they existed yet, although for sure there was some weird shit going on at a military base in Nevada.
“Get ’em!” the smaller kid yelled, and his brother raised the rifle again and took a potshot. Motherfucker. I neatly evaded, then switched to thermal mode and set off the onboard smoke screen. There wasn’t much breeze, and the boys were quickly blanketed in a curtain of white.
“Yee-haw! You got ’em, Wyatt. Them aliens be dead!”
