A moment of silence. Then a voice—distorted and low.
“You don’t belong here.”
Click.
The call ended, but Lainey stood frozen, the phone still pressed to her ear. Her breath was shallow, her heart beating fast.
“Something wrong?” one officer asked.
She lowered the phone, her fingers cold around it. “Wrong number,” she lied.
The officer raised a brow. “That so?”
Lainey shrugged. “Kids.”
The officer jotted something on his notepad. “We’ll add it to the file.”
She didn’t bother hiding the eye roll. “Of course you will.”
He didn’t look up. “Nothing was stolen. Could have been teenagers. Or someone blowing off steam.”
Lainey crossed her arms tighter. “Yeah. Bored kids come armed with spray paint and a message.”
The officer looked like he wanted to argue but didn’t.
She bit back the rest. She sure wasn’t about to explain—not again. Not like she did the first time she called the police here when the back door to her office had been jimmied open and her desk rifled through. And certainly not after the last job, when the police brushed off a slashed tire on one of the crew’s trucks.
Why would this time be any different? She was tired of being dismissed.
Behind them, Gus was already sweeping up the damage and whitewashing the words. Lainey stood there, arms wrapped around herself, rubbing the chill away.
She could pretend all she wanted. Pretend she wasn’t rattled.
But she knew better. This wasn’t over.
But whoever was calling didn’t know her very well.
Lainey Harper didn’t quit.
And she sure as hell didn’t scare easily.
CHAPTER 2
Finn Ryder gotoff the plane in Orlando and wiped the sweat from his brow. After the cooler, drier air of Riverside, California, the humidity hit like a punch to the gut. Not unexpected but still jarring.
The temperate climate of California already felt like a distant memory.
The two weeks he’d spent with Matthew “Wolf” Steel’s SEAL team and their spouses catching up, laughing, and rehashing all the good times they had was exactly the break he’d needed. A reminder of who he’d been. Who he still was in some ways.
But watching all those hardened warriors who risked so much to fight for their country yet still found love made him wonder about his own life. What was he missing?
Washe missing anything?
The night before he left, they’d all met at the bar that Kason “Benny” Sawyer’s wife, Jessyka, now owned. He remembered Aces Bar & Grill as loud, sticky and a frog hog’s paradise—full of women who just wanted to brag that they bagged a SEAL.
Finn couldn’t complain, though. When he was young, all he wanted was to find a woman more than willing to be with aSEAL, have a night of fantastic sex and then leave the next morning. At that time, the bar fulfilled all his dreams.
But the bar was different now. Jessyka had cleaned the place up and made it more family-friendly.
