Walk on the Striped Side Read Free Page B

Ivanov’s gun. Take it and go. I don’t ever
want to see your faces again.”
    Gage finally opened his eyes to
look at the pretty brunette as she glared at the bigger man in front of her
like she wished she could take a frying pan to his head. It would have been
hysterical to him if her last words hadn’t pissed him off for what should be no
reason at all.
    She didn’t want to see him ever
again?
    Good . Because he didn’t need
to take a chance with the disaster that she could become to him if he ever got
her alone. He didn’t need to sink balls deep inside some human he couldn’t
claim as his own without the fear of breaking her in the process. He was better
off waiting for the next potential mate that came along.

 
    CHAPTER-TWO
    June 2011
    Elena
     
    She loved her job, but sometimes
this shit was ridiculous. It was damn near midnight and here she was driving to
the edges of the Fort Bragg Army base to investigate an anonymous call about
vandalism. If she got there and found some dumb grunts spray painting she was
going flip out, maybe kick them in the junk after she hand cuffed them, and
then haul their asses down to the station and call their COs. To think she’d
just come back from deployment in Afghanistan, where her unit had patrolled
through roads and cities with constant vigilance for terrorists and suicide
bombers, to this was kind of surreal. Now she was dealing with knuckleheads who
probably needed a good swat upside their heads and a solid dressing down from
their superiors. The difference between where Elena had been a couple of months
ago, and where she was now, almost made her head spin.
    She pulled her car off the paved
road and onto a level dirt road that led to a large abandoned building. She
wasn’t sure how old the building was, but she knew it used to be where some of the
mechanics worked on the vehicles used on base. It hadn’t been used in years
except for the occasional training exercise on how to clear a structure in a
hostile environment. The building itself basically butted up against some of
the woods the Special Forces units also utilized for training exercises, so
overall, it made for a pretty creepy scene to look at as she parked the car
about fifty feet away from the structure.
    As Elena quietly exited her vehicle
she heard raised voices followed by a loud crash coming from somewhere inside.
Her right hand went to the hood of her holster, snapping it open so that she
could quickly and easily clear her pistol if she had to. With quick, silent
steps she hurried up to the front door that was cracked open a few inches and
braced herself against the wall beside it. With the toe of her boot she pushed
the door open a few more inches and craned her neck around so that she could
take a peek through the larger opening. What she saw next made her left eye
twitch. A sure symbol that her patience had been shot to shit.
     Kicking the door open in
annoyance, Elena stomped forward until she stood less than ten feet from a
small group of eight large, burly men covered in muddy BDUs. All of them were
in various stages of wrestling with someone else. Four of those men were
grappling on the floor. Arms and legs tangled around their opponent’s bodies as
they tried to pin their victims to the cold, hard concrete slab beneath them.
As she watched the mayhem in front of her, one soldier put the man he was
tussling with in a kneebar. She grimaced as the man who now had his knee
hyperextended grunted in pain before tapping out.
    As she took a slower, closer look
around the room, some of Elena’s annoyance slipped away as she admired all the
delicious male specimens. Finding this was definitely better than finding some
bored punks spray painting the place, but it still wasn’t worth leaving her
post. Why couldn’t she have found them in a mud pit wearing nothing but their
skivvies? Instead, they had to drag her ass out of the station in the middle of
the night to break up their testosterone fest without