Yummy.
And also…a potential fire hazard.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Hey, tabarnak, how’re you, my friend? I thought you were dead.”
Alone in Adam’s office off the kitchen, Grant’s grin damn near split his face in half. It’d been a long time since he’d heard Jean-Pierre Tessier’s mangled French Canadian accent, never mind seen his ugly face. “That’s because you left me to die in a cave in the middle of the Syrian desert, asshole.”
Not exactly the whole truth. His team had just rescued a valuable target, and securing the former hostage and getting him out of the country without anyone being the wiser had been the priority. If roles had been reversed, and JP the one wounded in action, he would’ve been the one left behind…temporarily.
“Don’t be a special snowflake, bébé. We were coming back for you.”
“In what century?”
“Hmph, always the impatient one.” JP’s mud-colored eyes crinkled at the corners as he leaned toward his computer screen. “You look alive and well. How did you get out? And when did you get so fat?”
Grant shook his head at the old joke. “After four days of waiting for you to drag your tiny dick back, I shot myself full of morphine and walked out. Took me another three days to get to Deir ez-Zur by camel, truck, and fucking bicycle. Do you have any idea how hard it is to pedal a pint-sized banana-seat bike with a bullet in your leg? And I’m not fat, dickwad. It’s called muscle.”
At five foot four and a hundred and fifty pounds, JP was the kind of guy people regularly underestimated, but despite being borderline crazy, he was a fearless operator who liked to poke the bear just to stare him down—until the bear found some sense and turned tail and ran.
“Eh.” JP shrugged. “What doesn’t kill you. Did you have the amnesiacs too? Forget to tell us you were leaving the team?”
“It’s amnesia, you French motherfucker, and I didn’t forget. Orders are orders.”
As a member of the JTF2, an elite counterterrorism and hostage rescue special operations unit under the command of the Canadian Armed Forces, Grant had been a tier one assaulter who lived and died under the cover of secrecy and a code of honor not often found among the general population.
Hell, half the time their own Prime Minister had no clue where they were or what the fuck they were doing. Their commanding officers gave the orders. They followed without question. So when Grant escaped the rebel army trying to bury his ass in the sand, and his CO suggested the only way out without starting an international crisis was to disappear…
He disappeared.
He hadn’t meant for it to be permanent. Except his sister had needed his help extricating herself from a gambling debt, and he’d limped up to the plate, took the target from her back and slapped it onto his.
There’d been no choice in the matter. The Las Vegas money boss holding her debt had threatened to put a bullet in her brain before forcing her thirteen-year-old daughter to work as a prostitute to get his cash back.
Nope. No way in hell Grant would’ve let that happen. Not to his sister. Not to his niece. They weren’t exactly a tight-knit family, but they were the only blood relatives he had left, and that meant doing everything in his power to keep them safe.
Including leaving behind his country, the life of adventure he loved, and the men who’d always had his back because the army didn’t pay enough to keep the money sharks at bay. Sixteen grand a month for thirty months—or it would’ve been his blood turning the water red.
After more than two years, he had eight months left to pay off a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. It’s why he’d stayed with the JTT after their original mission had gone sideways and they’d gone on the run, hiding in their Montana base from the very people they’d sworn to protect.
Liar.
Okay, fine. Whatever. Fuck him.
One of the reasons he’d stayed. Thanks to the two-point-five billion appropriated by Jay, the JTT had money. Lots of money. Enough money to pay him a salary that more than covered his contractual obligations to the Vegas bookie.
The other reason had sharp green eyes, a barbed tongue, zero self-preservation instincts, a killer snow globe collection, and happened to be happily married to a man he genuinely liked and respected.
Yeah, Grace Mackenzie had his number.
Call him a fucking idiot, a brainless twat, in love with a woman he couldn’t have. Christ, he could’ve paid the bookie ten times over by now, but slow and steady gave him the excuse he needed to stay.
“Sacrament, orders are orders, but I think you took yours too literally, mon ami.” JP double-tapped his trigger-happy index finger above his eye, indicating the scar bisecting Grant’s brow. “I see you have some new decorations.”
Grant grinned, the memory of the last time he’d been in Canada a good one. “Head-on collision with a pine tree.” He left off the part about Gray being the cause of the accident when she’d forced the matchbox car he’d been driving off the road and into a steep ravine.
In her defense, he had kidnapped her.
