see you again to be able to apologize. I tried to find out where you’d gone after you were discharged and Hannah came clean, but they wouldn’t tell me.”
Shock rocked him when his body suddenly slingshotted forward toward the windshield and his seatbelt locked. He slammed back against the seat, a flash of black caught his eye and the black van appeared beside the car. The passenger window rolled down quickly and a man with dark hair and olive skin pointed a foreign machine pistol with a long suppressor on the end directly at him. Jax hit the brakes hard and the van zoomed past them with the guy hanging out the window to line up a shot.
The unmarked exit seemed like divine intervention when Jax twisted the wheel to get off the interstate. The back window shattered, Fallon screamed and Jax hit the gas, launching them over a bump on the exit ramp. His teeth rattled when they landed, but he didn’t let up on the accelerator, even when he ran the red light at the intersection to make a two-wheeled right turn and the sexy British woman on his GPS began telling him she was recalculating.
Jax slammed his foot to the floorboard to put as much space between them and the van as he could. He knew they’d be following. The look of determination on that hitman’s face, the coldness in his flat, black eyes, told Jax he wasn’t giving up.
That was a professional hitman, he thought.
Jax focused, went into ops mode to assess the situation, and decide what his options were while he had a few minutes to do that. Thank God, before they left he’d transferred his weapons bag from the trunk to the back seat.
“Get into the back seat, hand me the weapons in that duffle bag, then lay down on the floorboard and cover yourself with it,” Jax growled.
Fallon’s hands shook as she fumbled for the seatbelt release. She scrambled through the space between the seats and Jax watched in the mirror as she quickly unzipped his weapons bag and pulled out his assault rifle, before she carefully laid the muzzle on the console beside him. Jax pulled it through to prop it on the passenger seat. She handed him the three other smaller weapons and he stacked them on the seat.
“Now the ammo in the outside pockets.” He took inventory as she piled the magazines and boxes of bullets and shells on the console. When he knew she had it all, he met her eyes in the rearview. “Get down and cover yourself.”
Her eyes filled and pressure built in his chest when she stuck her hand through the seat and he saw what she held. His desert-digital-camo field cap with his trident pinned on it. The only thing he had left from his time in the teams, because on his way out of the base for the last time, Jax had tossed his entire bag of uniforms into the trash.
He hadn’t been able to throw the hat that had been with him to hell and back into that dumpster, or the pin he’d gone through hell to get, so he kept it. He’d forgotten it was stashed in the pocket of his weapons bag.
“Please put it on,” she said, her voice husky. “You deserve to wear this, and maybe it’ll bring us luck.”
“I’m a SEAL, I don’t need luck,” Jax replied gruffly, dragging his eyes back to the road. No, he wasn’t a SEAL—he was a former SEAL, thanks to her, he thought, his anger building again. He refused to use the term ex -SEAL, even though that more aptly described his sit.
“ Please , Jaxson—it’ll make me feel better.”
Jax didn’t want to make her feel better about what she’d done. But when it became obvious she wasn’t going to lay on that floorboard until he did, he snatched the cap from her and slapped it on his head. A strange sense of peace and calm worked through him to take the edge off of the adrenaline pumping through his heart. He adjusted the fit a little, then met her eyes in the mirror.
“Happy now?” Her lips wobbled up at the corners, and Jax dragged his eyes back to the