Cry Baby

 

He smelled her the moment he slipped into his home. She was good, he’d give her that. He’d never saw her tail, and then realized that he never had one to start off with. Tiffany caught him with his pants down, figuratively, and it hadn’t tasted good to swallow that crow. But he had, and he’d come home. Now her light citrus scent just barely hovered over the old paper and vinyl scents that normally permeated his home. He wasn’t sure where the weak point in his security allowed her to come in. There was no forced entry on the front door, and none of the alarms had had been tripped on the couple of windows that could be opened. Tiffany Cannon was good, and that only intrigued him more. He’d found out what he could from Tex while he dodged her tail, but it hadn’t been much.

“Tiffany’s a ghost,” Tex told him in his southern drawl. John “Tex” Keegan was a former SEAL that every man in Cry Baby’s team respected with the utmost care. The double amputee had received a CROW—Cranial Receptor Overhaul Wearer—in the last couple years, a prototype built for him, and could walk once more. He’d been working hard with Hawk to solve the mysteries of the Qatar ISIS cell.

“No one gets by you, Tex,” Cry Baby told him.

“She didn’t get by me either, just almost did. Other than the information given to you guys, I haven’t been able to get much more, except her codename: Vixen.”

“That’s all?”

“Okay, I’ll repeat: the woman is a ghost. I’ve got hints of thirteen aliases that can be hers, sightings on nearly every continent if I dig hard enough, and then I get a missive, signed with a bright green pen and the letter ‘C’.”

“What the hell is that all about?” Cry Baby asked, confused.

“C stands for Chief, and it’s the title given to the head of the MI6. The green pen is traditional. It’s authentic.”

“You mean the Chief of the international British intelligence wrote you.”

“Yeah, and was pretty nice about the threat. I was to “cease and desist any further inquiries into the status, placement, or validity of an agent by the name of Tiffany Canon, as there is no such person”,” Tex explained.

“Why the hell—”

“Because if there was anyone who could snatch my access to the world, Chief could be one of them. Think twice about having a tango with that one. Tiffany’s got connections even deeper than mine.”

Maybe it wouldn’t be his best decision, but Cry Baby was never one to walk away from a fight. In fact, the secrecy surrounding Tiffany Cannon was like a red flag to a bull. Never put insurmountable odds in front of a SEAL, that was just asking for trouble. He wanted to figure out what made such a special agent like Tiffany tick, and why she thought their SEAL team could handle her secret, despite being pulled off the mission.

Following his nose, he moved around the house, careful to remove his weapons and lock them in his fire safe. Then he tossed off his jacket and t-shirt. There was a to-fold reason for going half naked. One, he would have less material to grab and have used against him. The collar was the easiest things to use to choke someone out, and took the least amount of effort. No matter how strong you were, could fight the Sandman. Two, he wasn’t above tempting with a good view, and he wasn’t above a bit of distraction.

He heard a whisper of a chuckle, behind and to the right of him, but had a feeling it was done it on purpose, so he held his ground in the center of his house, where there was just enough open space around that they shouldn’t bust up much. He shook his limbs out and waited.

He didn’t have to wait for long.

A knife whistled by his face, and lodged itself in the wall across from in. In the split second it took to watch its trajectory, Tiffany was there, falling from the air, and slammed into him. He rolled with her, but she had him locked to her with her legs wrapped around his waist, and punched him on his chin. He couldn’t reduce the entire strike, but he ducked his head and rocked with it.

Movies made fighting seems long and drawn out, and the battlers had enough time to talk shit to each other while it was happening. That wasn’t the case. It was fast, brutal, and a battle of life and death. Tiffany didn’t pull her punches, and was a lethal fighting machine that could kill him if he didn’t fight with everything he was. That was the point. She needed to know how far he could go as much as he was testing her for the team.

That in mind, he spun her toward the wall and slammed her into it. Her head rocked and cracked against the plaster. As her legs gave, just a bit, he used his elbow to land a blow to the inside of her thigh. It forced her to let him go, but Tiffany wasn’t out of the fight. Not by far. She punched him in the throat, a glancing blow that constricted his airway and he stumbled back to catch his breath.

Tiffany gave no quarter, and he could let her gain an inch. They traded blows, her swinging at his head he blocked with his right arm, and he threw his knee at her side. Grabbing his leg, she threw her weight into his body, taking him to the ground. Brute force it is, he thought. He lifted her off him and tossed her across the floor. He hustled to follow her as Tiffany slid down the hallway. Her body suit—all black, that hugged her form like second skin—stopped him from getting a grip on it to choke her out.

But damn, he’d never seen a sexier sight in his life.

Breathing hard, she leapt to her feet and blood trickling from her lip. When Tiffany roared at him his cocked stiffened. She was a warrior princess, and he would bow the hell down, or get broken in the process. They met in the middle, punching and kicking, shredding each other. He blocked as many blows as were landed on him, and, after a few minutes, he felt the wear and tear of the battle. Warm blood slid down his cheek from cuts on his face, and his sides heaved. One side of her face was a bit more swollen and she favored her left side, but they fought on.

He could see it in her eyes, the determination to not fail, anger, and the real threat that it was very possible he’d lose his head. Stunned, and a little amazed at her strength, he didn’t block properly when Tiffany raced toward him and leapt into the air. Her legs locked around his throat and she used her momentum to swing around and flip him to the floor. She had him on the floor, locked into an armbar before he could react. Fucking beautiful. In the split second it took for him to lock his fingers together so his arm wouldn’t be extended fully, he realized two very important pieces of information. One, Tiffany was not a woman he was going to let go soon. Anybody who could fight like her was brilliant in his book, and he had to admit the woman made him more than hot. Two, when he escaped this arm bar, he was going to make sure she understood their attraction too.

With his locked fingers, he pushed against the inside of her top leg, the one pressing down over his neck, and forced it up and over his head. Then he put his feet flat on the ground and pushed up between her legs, his body bowing into half bridge so that all his weight was on that same leg he’d move. She wouldn’t be able to move that leg and put him back in the arm bar when he rolled into her. He used his feet to propel himself up and over, twisting his torso so that he was between her legs and her back was penned to the ground.

“You lose,” he teased.

She bucked against him, but he didn’t let her go.

“Get up,” she raged at him.

“You don’t like to lose,” he said, bending over her.

“I haven’t lost, and you bring that face any close I’m going to bite you.”

He lowered his face to hers, and rolled his hips against her. “Say what now?”

Her eyes dilated and her breath hitched.

“What are you doing?”

“I have a beautiful woman on my floor, she got my blood pumping with a fight, and my jaw is aching like a sombitch. The least you could do is kiss it better,” Cry Baby told her.

“You’re out of your mind!”

“Then tap out. Admit defeat, and I’m done.”

She growled at him and tossed her forehead at him. He was just a second shy of her breaking his nose.

“Spoilsport,” he admonished.

“The fight isn’t over yet.”

“Tap out, or I can make things worse.”

She smiled up at him, a devilish, taunting smile that took his breath away. “I’ll have you pinned and tapping in about ten seconds. Want to bet?”

“You’re on, hot stuff. You get me pinned and tapping, I’ll admit defeat, and you get to say you beat a SEAL. But if I win, I get my kiss.”

“A kiss? That’s it?” she asked, and her chuckled at the confused look on her face.

Wasn’t she aware of how beautiful she was? “A Kiss. That’s all I want.”

“You’re on,” she called out.