A Prince Among Men (Red, Hot & Blue) Read online

  Hawk let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head. “You won’t believe me if I tell you. She’s a frigging reporter.”

  Oh, boy. It didn’t matter if she was a hottie, the fact she was also a reporter was not good. Ryan hissed in a breath between his teeth. Hawk hated reporters. He had ever since they were in Iraq and one had erroneously written an article that said their tanks were part of a mercenary force that got called into Abu Ghraib to kill innocents. Innocents Ryan’s sweet ass. If innocents were people carrying RPGs, automatic weapons and more, then yeah, they were guilty and had taken out seventy-five innocents that day.

  Why couldn’t that reporter have told people about all their humanitarian aid missions instead of making shit up?

  “Hawk, what the hell are you doing with a reporter?” And can I take her off your hands for maybe an hour…or a week?

  Ryan pushed that naughty thought aside. For now. Unlike Hawk, who’d written off the entire profession as evil, Ryan was willing to give them a chance individually. Particularly the hot one who was now in his hut.

  “Apparently I temporarily lost my sanity.” Hawk took a step closer to Ryan. “The damn woman offered to have sex with me if I brought her here so she could write a damn story about the local women.”

  Ryan’s eyes flew open wide just as his cock woke up a bit at that information. How come things like this never happened to him? “And did you… I mean did she…”

  Hawk’s deeply furrowed frown silenced the rest of Ryan’s stuttered question. “No. Of course not. Jeez, Pettit. I’m not going to cheat on Emily. Not with any woman, but especially not with a reporter.”

  Ryan stood corrected…and hopeful. “Sorry. So why did you agree to bring her here then?”

  Hawk sighed. “She’s totally clueless about pretty much everything, and if I didn’t take her with me she just would have found someone else to do it. Some guy who probably would have taken her up on her ridiculous offer. Suddenly, I pictured Emily wandering around Bagram just as clueless and helpless in the middle of that prison break and hell, I don’t know…”

  “Your protective side kicked in?” Ryan grinned.

  “Yeah.” Shaking his head, Hawk sighed. “So here she is, and what the hell I’m gonna do with her now, I don’t know.”

  Ryan, who was extremely well-versed in the cramped lodging situation on base ever since the collapse, considered the logistics of having not only an extra body to deal with, but a hot, shapely female body, no less. He knew where he’d like her to sleep, but he didn’t think Hawk would take kindly to Ryan stashing the woman in his own bunk, so he came up with an alternate suggestion.

  “Well, I guess she could sleep in the war room. Or even better, in the backroom of the operations center. At least there’s always someone on duty in there so she won’t be alone.”

  “I guess.” Hawk sighed. His leader looked pretty helpless for a man who usually had all the answers. The mighty Hawk, taken down by a single female. It was the most amusing thing Ryan had seen in a while.

  ”Listen, Pettit, I have to go unload this wad of cash I’m carrying and explain to the higher ups why I came home with a woman. Can you go in and make sure she’s okay?”

  “Sure thing, Hawk.” Ryan nodded. Easiest assignment he’d been given in a long time.

  “Better make sure she’s not snooping around either, looking for some big story. And do not make her time here easy on her, Pettit. I mean it. I want her so miserable she’s begging for me to call Lou to take her back. The sooner the better.” An evil grin crossed Hawk’s face. “In fact, why don’t you show her the pee tubes? That should be enough to send this girly girl running for home where she can get a manicure or something.”

  Ryan laughed. “Probably. Okay, Hawk. I’ll do my best.”

  Hawk turned to go, then halted. “Oh and Pettit? I’m pretty sure she still thinks I’m going to collect on her little offer. Don’t tell her any differently. I want to scare her enough she’ll never do anything that stupid again. Got it?”

  “Gotcha.” Oh, boy. Hawk could be really evil when he tried. As his leader walked away to go deal with business, and probably think of more plans for torturing the female reporter, Ryan decided he would remember to never cross him.

  When Ryan opened the door, he found the poor girl still standing in the middle of the small room, as if she didn’t want to be too close to any one of the three beds. It could be that Hawk was dead on. She did assume she was going to have to put out for him in exchange for the ride here. And after seeing three beds in one tiny room, no doubt she was wondering if Hawk was into sharing with his roommates.

  A far-from-gentlemanly, bordering-on-perverse image involving the woman, Hawk, Wally and himself popped into Ryan’s head. He quickly dismissed this fantasy as being a result of his very long, sexless deployment. Besides, he’d never been one for sharing. One on one was just fine with him and always had been. Forget about a gangbang; after months of dealing with things on his own, coming with a female even in the vicinity would be a treat.

  He smothered a smile at his own joke and instead tried to decide what to do about Hawk’s little care package, the whole quivering mass of her. Now that he’d had an opportunity to study her closer, he suspected she was intelligent, as well as sexy and scared to death. A combination which made her strange offer of sex for a chopper ride even more perplexing.

  “Hi. I’m Ryan.” Slowly and quietly, as if she were a frightened animal, Ryan addressed her from across the small room with as much unthreatening friendliness as he could put into his voice. He glanced down at her bag sitting on the floor with the luggage tag facing him. He could just make out her name if he squinted. “And you must be…Victoria Ann?”

  “I am. But most people just call me Vicki.”

  Vicki. Just like his blog crush. That name he’d have no trouble remembering. “Okay. Um, can I get you anything, Vicki? You hungry? Thirsty?” Horny?

  As the color returned to her cheeks, Ryan decided she was even cuter than he’d first thought.

  She averted her eyes, and in the dimness, he could have sworn she blushed. Ryan added the word shy to his list of observations. It somehow made her even more attractive.

  “Actually, I could really use a trip to the facilities.”

  It took him a beat or so to realize she needed a bathroom. Male soldiers didn’t get embarrassed about bodily functions while deployed, but apparently women were a different story. Worse than her discomfort over having to ask him to take her to relieve herself was the fact that it looked like Ryan was going to have to implement Hawk’s scare-away-the-reporter plan and show her the pee tubes as he’d promised. Shit, he was hoping Hawk would have the honor of messing with the girl’s head and leave him out of it.

  Oh, well. Here goes nothing. “Sure thing. Follow me.”

  The looks Ryan received as he tromped across the base with a woman in tow were pretty damn comical. You couldn’t throw a female into the middle of a yearlong sausage-fest and not expect to get a reaction. In fact, Ryan was starting to wonder if he shouldn’t suggest to Hawk she spend nights in their hut so they could protect her, because a few of the guys were looking a little bit too interested in her.

  Hawk wasn’t the only one with a mile-wide protective streak running through him when it came to women. Ryan definitely could give him a run for his money in that department.

  But sleeping arrangements and Vicki’s safety would have to be put on hold for now because they had reached the pee tubes. It was time for Ryan to torture the reporter. “Okay. There you go. These are the pee tubes. The entire base shares them.”

  With a raised brow, the girl glanced from the row of PVC tubes sunk into the ground and then back to him. Vicki crossed her arms defiantly. “I’ve read all about the pee tubes in my research and I also know there are other facilities. For instance, where exactly does everyone on base…you know…poop?”

  It was so damn cute that Ryan couldn’t resist smiling when she said the word poop. But the bad
news was, she was no dummy. Not only had she heard of the pee tubes, she wasn’t about to let him intimidate her into trying to squat over them when there was a perfectly good latrine she could sit on.

  Ryan’s smile continued to tug at the corners of his mouth. “You got me. Just a little welcome joke. Come on. I’ll show you the latrines. But I’m warning you, they’re not pretty. Why do you think we guys use the pee tubes?”

  With a grimace, she eyed the row of tubes, each one colorfully marked with reflective tape for aiming while peeing at night. “I don’t need pretty. Walls, a door and a seat will be good enough for me.”

  Little did she know that was about all she was going to get as far as the latrines were concerned.

  As they walked, Ryan tried to figure out how to delicately explain to her the latrine procedure. By the time they arrived outside the wooden box surrounded by sandbags to protect the occupant from getting literally blown to bits while his pants were down, he still hadn’t figured out the exact wording yet, so he just dove right in.

  “Since you’re a girl, if you just have to pee, then don’t worry about it, just squat and go. But if you, you know, have to poop, you have to take one of the plastic bags out of the box on the wall, hang it over the hole by the four nails you’ll see in there, and then when you’re done, you tie the bag off and bring it back out here with you.”

  She folded her arms again. “Ha, ha. Very funny.”

  Ryan raised a brow at her, wishing he were joking. “Um, no, actually. That’s the procedure. I’m not messing with you this time.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded.

  “Um, then what do I do with it?” She looked pretty horrified at the prospect of walking around with a bag full of her own poop.

  Ryan contained his grin, barely. “You drop it over there.” He pointed to the ring of charred rocks they’d passed on the walk over.

  Her eyes opened wide as she looked where he had pointed. “I thought you had bonfires there at night or something.”

  At that, Ryan did burst out laughing. “Not exactly.” The thought of roasting marshmallows over the shit pit turned his stomach a bit.

  She drew in a deep breath, and Ryan thought maybe she would run back to wherever she’d come from sooner rather than later over the latrines alone.

  “So do I have to, um, take it out of the bag when I dump it over there?”

  “God, no. You just fling the bag and go. We light it up once a day.” Emptying his shit out of the bag and into the pit would probably even bother him.

  “But then doesn’t it smell like burning plastic with all those bags melting?”

  “No. It smells like shit.” He grinned.

  Damn, this conversation was too good. Ryan considered if he could possibly blog about it, or if that would be inconsiderate of Vicki’s feelings. But then how would she ever know? He’d think about it more later. Now he was too busy enjoying Vicki’s reaction to the whole situation.

  Finally out of questions and looking about as horrified as a woman facing bagging her own feces could, Vicki disappeared into the wooden box as Ryan called after her, “There are magazines in there if you are interested.”

  “Thanks.”

  He bit his lip to stop from laughing out loud as her far-from-thankful voice came through the door.

  Wait until he showed her the lovely, two-stall shower trailer accommodations with the trough sink. Perhaps laughing at her expense was mean, but this was the first non-Groundhog Day he’d had for a long time, and Ryan intended to enjoy it.

  Just when he thought things couldn’t get better, she came flying out of the latrine, backward, holding up her unbuttoned pants as she crashed into Ryan’s chest.

  He grabbed her arms to steady her before she fell. “What’s wrong?”

  She spun to face him, wide-eyed. “Huge spider.”

  With that, Ryan couldn’t control himself. He laughed until he cried, all the while thinking he sincerely hoped she wouldn’t leave too soon because he hadn’t had so much fun in a really long time.

  Chapter Six

  Vicki sat in the one and only chair in the small, dark, mud—yes, mud—hut. She brushed at the back of her neck yet again, still unable to shake the feeling something was crawling on her.

  Spiders. Why did it have to be spiders? She could handle almost anything besides that. Snakes? No problem. Her neighbor had one while she was growing up and she’d play with it all the time. Mice? Piece of cake. Kind of cute, actually, like the hamsters people kept in those tiny plastic cities. But those multi-legged, beady-eyed creatures? Okay, maybe she couldn’t see their eyes, but she knew they were there. They scared the bejesus out of her and always had.

  She glanced around the dimly lit room again. Vicki felt suddenly very alone and out of her element. Ryan had dropped her off and told her to make herself comfortable. He had some meeting or something, but he said someone would be right back with a hot meal for her.

  After the pee-in-this-PVC-pipe joke, God only knew what they would try to feed her. All she knew was that she was going to make one of them taste it before she did. She still wasn’t totally convinced the whole poop-in-a-baggie wasn’t just Ryan pulling her leg too.

  She hated that he had teased her because, in spite of the pee-tube incident, he’d captured her attention like no man had in a long time. No live man, she amended. Groundpounder had caught her eye—online anyway. But unlike him, Ryan was actually here. She hadn’t seen eyes as blue as his in a long time. They set off rather nicely the reddish tint of what little hair he had left after the military cut. He was polite and sweet. She could tell just from the short time they’d been together that, although he was tough enough to be a soldier, there was a sensitive side in there she found extremely attractive.

  Unlike Hawk. She had no doubt he was behind the teasing. He was probably laughing his head off right now, just like Ryan had when she was attacked by the giant leaping spider in the latrine. Sweet or not, Vicki was sure Ryan had told the story to Hawk the minute he left her. He had been too amused not to.

  Then there was the matter of that little ill-advised bargain back at KAF that she’d struck with Hawk to convince him to bring her here. Vicki nervously looked again at the three beds squashed into the hut. Surely, if Hawk were going to try to collect his payment from her, he would have done so in Kandahar where they had some semblance of privacy, not to mention sanitation facilities and decent showers.

  Maybe it was lack of sleep, or food, or the spider scare, but Vicki felt herself begin to shake. Instinctively, she knew she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t have sex with Hawk. Even though he had stuck to his end of the bargain and gotten her here, she’d been crazy to even offer.

  It was a bit late for regrets, considering she was currently stashed in Hawk’s bedroom. What would he do when she told him she wasn’t going through with it? He was beyond a doubt the scariest man she’d ever laid eyes on, and she, for one, did not want to be the person to piss him off.

  She would just have to talk to him, calmly and rationally. Strike a new bargain. Offer him cash. Something, anything, and if all that failed, she still had Mel’s card somewhere in her bag. With any luck, her satellite phone worked here and Mel could call in the Australian cavalry or something to come rescue her. When she did get out of this mess, she would never, ever let herself get into a situation like this again.

  Vicki bent down and had just started to dig in her bag to find out if her phone did indeed work here when the door opened. Any light that might have entered the room from outside was blotted out by the bulk of the man standing in the doorway.

  “Hi, honey. I’m home.” Hawk entered the room and closed the door behind him. “And look, I made dinner.”

  Vicki’s throat constricted and she couldn’t breathe or swallow. Hawk had arrived and he was even scarier with his new, overly familiar, nice-guy act.

  He put the tray down on the desk next to a closed laptop computer and then stood there, right next
to her, much too close.

  Swallowing past the lump in her throat, she gathered her courage. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “You are?” He raised a brow.

  “Yes, I am. Sit down. I’d like to talk.”

  Sit down way over there on the other side of this ridiculously small, bed-filled mud hut of yours.

  “Sure, sweetheart. I’ll sit so we can talk.” With that, Hawk physically lifted her out of the chair, lowered himself into it and then sat her back down in his lap.

  Vicki couldn’t have leapt off him faster if he’d been covered in a million hairy black spiders. “What are you doing?” Her voice came out sounding like a cartoon mouse.

  “I’m sitting so we can talk.” He looked a bit too amused at her expense. “I’m assuming you want to talk about our deal, which is good, because I figure since we’ve got the place to ourselves for the moment, I might as well collect the first payment now for your transport here.”

  First payment? Her heart began to pound.

  “Unless of course you want to wait until Pettit and Wally get here. That would knock three payments off at once and would probably be a hell of a lot of fun too. It’s up to you, of course.” Hawk waited expectantly.

  Vicki eyed him suspiciously. Hawk, who’d been like an unmoving stone, who’d uttered as few words as possible until now, was acting too weird for this all to be real. That last over-the-top line had clinched it. She was convinced Hawk was messing with her, and she didn’t like it one bit.

  Eyes narrowed, Vicki crossed her arms. “Why are you doing this?”

  He sobered and stood to physically dwarf her, which she was sure was his intention.

  “Why? Because I want you to realize you made a huge mistake, first when you made that ridiculous offer to me and second, by coming here at all. I want you to go home, and I don’t mean Kandahar, where you’ll just offer another Joe your body to get your damn story. I mean I want you to go home home. All the way back to Idaho or Minnesota or wherever the hell naïve women like you who don’t belong in Afghanistan come from. That way I won’t have to worry about you anymore, and I can go back to concentrating on keeping my men from getting killed. You got it?”