car and take it to a body shop,” Jax said, hoping that would settle her upset a little.
Nothing in his SEALs training or subsequent team missions had prepared him to deal with an emotional woman. Give him RPGs, IEDs, or any other deadly acronym, and he could deal with it. PMS was one that struck fear in his heart and he avoided at any cost.
It appeared today was the day for him to get his fill of it.
Not only was Fallon Sharpe having an episode, which given the ordeal she’d just been through was understandable, Rick Mann’s sister Darci was having a bout too when they dropped by her house to pick up the keys and alarm code to Jon Rudnick’s condo. Her breakdown was a little less understandable. She was dating a former Navy SEAL, and had one for a brother too, but she was upset because Chris Cassidy had gone OCONUS with Jon Rudnick for a few days.
The two men weren’t in a war zone on a mission, not in a bit of danger except maybe from sunburn if they forgot to coat up with sunscreen, or perhaps an upset stomach from the rich food in the Abu Dhabi, but she was acting like they were on a suicide mission to Mogadishu or something. When he called Rick at the nuke plant to give him a SITREP on the assignment, even he seemed to be suffering a male version of it because he was in a mood too.
Jax was starting to wonder if there would be a full moon tonight. He sure as hell hoped not, because he knew what that usually meant. Whatever he was involved in, a mission, an assignment, or whatever, was going to experience a Charlie Tango Foxtrot, otherwise known as a cluster fuck in the teams.
Seven of the thirty or so missions he’d been on as a SEAL had been on a night with a full moon. Yeah, it made traveling, entry and recon a lot easier, they could actually see what they were doing without using night vision goggles, but on the flipside they could be seen by the enemy too.
All seven of those missions—Charlie Tango Foxtrot before it was all over.
The hostage extraction mission to Cancun, where he’d first met Fallon Sharpe and her sister, his last mission with the teams, had been on a full moon. Being seen by the drug lords hadn’t been the problem that night though. The op had gone down like clockwork, they’d rescued the women without even being noticed. The problem came later when they had to camp at the LZ to wait for extraction, because of weather in the states, but it still counted. The night the Prince’s son was kidnapped—yep, full moon.
It was understandable why he was a little superstitious about it, and that superstition explained why Jax picked up his phone to hit the weather app to find out what the moon phase would be that night. When he saw that it was indeed a full moon, his stomach clenched and he threw his phone into the slot above the radio.
Jax needed to keep his eyes open, because it would be dark soon. He looked into the rearview to get a fix on the van that had ticked his internal radar when it followed them on the surface roads to the interstate, merging on behind them after they left Rick Mann’s house. He relaxed when he saw the van was still about ten cars back in the left lane.
The last thing they needed was to be followed to their safe house, a place that Rick assured him was better fortified than Fort Knox with surveillance cameras, a high-tech alarm system and enough locks to make it a vault. According to Rick, Jon was obsessive about security, went way overboard, but in Jax’s mind there was no overboard on security. Knowing the measures Jon had taken to secure his place put Jax’s mind at ease that they might be able to sleep there tonight.
He glanced over at Fallon, who seemed to be in a daze watching the highway roll by out the side window. She might need a little help from a drink or sleeping pills to find any rest tonight.
Jax was immune, because danger was something he’d dealt with daily in the teams—not so much