Bonus Excerpt: Beck
Natalie Warner can’t ignore the risk any longer. A star on the rise, her latest film is on track to be the biggest box office breaker of the summer but Natalie isn’t safe. Someone is after her. Could it be her angry addict father, or her mother who always wanted to be a star herself? What about her ex-boyfriend who just did time? The Studio refuses to ignore the threat and forces Natalie to take on a bodyguard, but that bodyguard comes in the shape of rugged, irresistible Beck Tatum, because whoever is after Natalie isn’t going to stop until someone makes them.
A question, wrapped in a riddle, Beck Tatum doesn’t know what part of the government he worked for before he lost his memory or what exactly his mission was. He can remember that he loved and that he lost that woman as well as his memories on that final mission. Now with a second chance, he’s assigned to protect a high-value asset. Rich and entitled but yet kind and vulnerable, Natalie Warner isn’t the spoiled rich woman Beck expected. But falling for her would put her life on the line and Beck isn't about to lose anything else.
Chapter One
“Fucking American scum.”
The gun clicked. The barrel between Beck’s eyes.
“Marisol?” His bed was empty and reflexes pushed him forward.
“Beck, no!” Marisol screamed. He turned toward the noise coming from the darkness. One light shone in his eyes and one gun pressed to the center of his forehead.
“Don’t move.” Andreas’s voice thundered through the dark room. “Shut that bitch up.”
The smack of a hand against flesh. Beck’s body poised to spring forward, to grab the son of a bitch hurting Marisol.
“You really think you can beat a bullet, asshole?” Andreas stood beside the bed. “You come here, to my house, my country, pretend to be my friend and fuck my sister and lie to me?” His voice was low and quiet. Deadly quiet. But fury raged in Andreas’s eyes. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out why you’re here?” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s certainly not for that whore.”
His gun, if Beck could get to his gun. One under his pillow. One on the floor under the bed, one—
“Ah, ah, ah,” Andreas said, a wicked smile on his face. “Don’t. Even if you could beat a bullet, I don’t think you could save her.” He turned the flashlight toward Marisol. A goon held her in a choke hold with a gun pressed to her temple.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“Not very nice, now is it? To talk to your host that way. The host you lied to, and were spying on for the American government.”
“I’m not a spy. You’re fucking paranoid, Andreas. Too many fucking drugs. That’s your sister.” Beck held out his hand, and the barrel of the gun pressed harder between his eyes. He took a deep breath. “I love her, Andreas—let her go. This . . . we should have told you . . . we should have—”
“You think I give two shits that you’re fucking my sister?” A cruel laugh exited Andreas’s mouth. “Let me show you how little I care about her.” He looked over his shoulder. “Kill her.”
“What? No, fuck, Andreas . . . no, fuck you can’t—”
“No!” Marisol screamed. “Andreas, no!”
“This is my fault, not hers, no . . . she didn’t—”
Marisol’s screams pierced the night.
Andreas leaned down and lowered his voice. “I can’t kill you, asshole, because I need to make a trade and your spying ass is valuable. But her? She can pay for your fucked-up decision to spy on me.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Did you hear me? Shut that bitch up.”
The gun popped. The screams stopped. A hard knock to the back of Beck’s head, and the room went black.
Chapter Two
Nine months later…
Beck Tatum would die in this room. They were finished with him. Whoever they were. A secret behind a lie. A group, concealed by a shadow government, hidden behind the military, buried beneath the global panopticon. Exactly who Beck worked for was the answer to a riddle that was too deadly to solve.
Whoever those fuckers were, they were finished with his ass.
They’d traded something or someone for him after they’d chewed him up, spit him out. Now Beck was too unsavory to complete their dirty work. He’d spend the rest of his life in a facility that was trying too hard not to look like a facility. This place had gardens, a library, a pool, and hot meals, everything that made a man like Beck want to jump from his skin. A little too clean, a little too nice, a little too easy. Like a calf being fattened up on milk and rich grain before the slaughter.
Most things that looked this good had a horrible bite. MT-55 was no different. He guessed that was his location. Officially nonexistent, if the whispers were true, this was where they sent the guys who weren’t crazy enough to be crazy, but dangerous enough to be deadly. After nine months Beck had chipped away enough of the gilded gold and the pretty-pretty grated.
What the fuck? The last mission . . . He pressed his hands to his forehead. The only thing he remembered from his last fucking mission was that Marisol was dead and her death was his fault. Every other detail was gone.
He turned to his sketchbook. Marisol. Those eyes. Those eyes . . . were gone. Marisol was dead. How? He couldn’t remember, but he knew that he’d been the cause.
He had to get out of this place. Had to find out who and what and why . . . why what he’d thought he’d been doing in South America really wasn’t what he was doing.
He pressed his eyes closed. Fuck. All the details, the memories, were jumbled and fractured like bits of stained glass shattered by a bullet.
“Beck, you got a visitor.”
He opened his eyes. One of the orderlies, with the soft shape of a guy who used to be muscled and now never worked out, stood in the doorway of Beck’s room. This guy was always here on Tuesdays . . . or was it Wednesdays? The information Beck tried to process didn’t fritz out all the time, but just often enough for Beck to notice.
“Thanks.” Black soot covered Beck’s fingers and slid slippery against his skin. His gaze locked on the picture he’d sketched with charcoal. Those eyes. Those damn eyes haunted his dreams.
“Atrium,” Craig or Colin or who the fuck knew said, and knocked his knuckles against the doorframe, gently pulling Beck back to the present.
Beck nodded and with one last look closed the cover of the sketchbook. He stood and stretched his arms overhead. Pain sliced through his hip and up his back. Each day a little less, but according to his physical therapist the pain wouldn’t ever go away. Fuck it. He could live with physical pain. You didn’t hump through the desert and the training and the corps and then do the dirty work that Beck had done for a decade without some permanent dents. The physical pain wasn’t the problem, but the mental . . . that was the shit that would kill you.
Visitor, huh? Who the hell . . . ? Not family. His bosses had wanted him untraceable. He’d kept his life just that way . . . until he hadn’t. He glanced at the sketchbook. Nope, not thinking about that face, those eyes, not now, not ever.
He walked down the hall toward the stairway, his feet not making a sound on the plush carpet. This place with its pretty-pretty and sketchbooks and fresh air and all the other psycho-babble bullshit was pulling the skin from his bones. He had to get out or he’d stick a fork in somebody’s eye.
The guy standing in the atrium was a stranger. Beck made him for about forty-five. He stood tall like a former athlete, like the guy knew how to move. Sharp demeanor but decidedly relaxed. Light smile, intense eyes, black skin. The sharp-edged haircut gave him away as former military, but he wasn’t in now, because the guy sported a three-thousand-dollar hand-cut suit and two-thousand-dollar Italian shoes. Unless he was on special assignment, in deep cover, there wasn’t a military man alive sporting those threads.
Details. The Agency had schooled him on those types of miniscule details. Those teeny tiny details conveyed the reality and facts of a situation. Nothing escaped Beck’s eye. Nothing.
He took the final step into the atrium, and he’d summed up this guy, knew he was left-handed and had an injury in his right leg. Yeah, he had him all summed up, but didn’t know what the fuck the guy wanted with him.
“Beck Tatum, I’m Remi Prince.” He grasped Beck’s hand. A firm shake. His gaze locked with Beck’s. “I have a proposition for you.”
***
Beck carefully refolded the letter. His sharp gaze focused on Remi, and the muscle in Beck’s jaw flexed. “You want me to be a fucking babysitter?” His eyebrow lifted a millimeter, conveying his disgust and yet also his grudging interest, because if Beck Tatum wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the offer that Remi Prince’s boss had just made, Beck wouldn’t still be sitting in this swank, high-end living room with bars on the windows.
“Babysitters don’t usually come equipped with psyops, twelve hostile excursions, and a 18 tk record.”
“19.”
“Heard the last one wasn’t authorized.”
Beck’s nostrils flared. He’d gotten Beck’s attention. Remi’d put the “babysitter” shit to rest—he’d heard it all before, and so had Estrella.
Beck squinted. Remi leaned back in the leather chair and steepled his fingers. He knew Beck Tatum—hell, two decades before he’d been Beck Tatum, but with an even bigger chip on his shoulder. A chip so damn large that the cement block weighing him down had nearly sunk him into an early grave. Beck Tatum didn’t know it now, but what Remi’s boss Estrella was offering Beck was not only a chance out of this loony-bin on happy-steroids and into a well-paying gig, but also his fucking salvation.
“You’ve seen my record.”
This time, Remi’s eyebrow twitched upward. He could neither confirm nor deny such access, but knowledge of an operative’s kill record came only with the highest level clearance or access. Direct access.
Remi’s boss had both.
“You’re not dealing with fucking Sesame Street here, Tatum. This is real. My boss recruits on a case-by-case basis and matches the operative with the correct client. Your life to protect their life. And we both know that bullshit doesn’t go down easy.”
No, not easy at all. Especially when you didn’t like the person you were meant to protect. And operatives? Hard, tough, battle-tested operatives had a tendency to dislike a number of Estrella’s clients, who were entitled, overindulged, and often had too much money but a big fucking fear of whatever chased them.
Beck’s client would be no different. Beautiful, with a big public life, but a pain in Remi’s ass and hopefully, soon, primarily Beck’s problem.
Beck didn’t know any of those details yet. The letter contained an offer. For a job. To protect and—if necessary—to hit.
Beck crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back into the couch. Odd combo, this giant operative sitting on cushions that had pink flowers decorating the cloth.
“How you like Club Crazy?” Remi asked. “Hear it’s been nearly nine months.”
“Two hundred and sixty-eight fucking days, six hours and”—Beck glanced at his watch—“fifteen minutes.”
“Like it that much?” A slow smile slid over Remi’s face. Beck was interested, not convinced, but interested. Remi could work with interest, and while he had his reservations about Beck Tatum, Estrella thought she could work with Beck too.
A haunted look flashed in Beck’s eyes, didn’t make it to his face or to the hard creases around his jaw. Not a fleck of movement, but those eyes? Yeah, Remi knew that look, knew those feelings. The concern was, did the op have his shit under wraps or was he a fucking time bomb ticking his way to detonation?
“I’m listening,” Beck said. His gaze was hard again.
“Good,” Remi leaned forward. “Now let me tell you how you get out of this Shangri-La with bars.”
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