Don't Shoot the Messenger: Hazard Falls Book 2 Read online

  Don't Shoot the Messenger

  Hazard Falls Book 2

  Samantha A. Cole

  Don’t Shoot the Messenger

  Copyright ©2020 Samantha A. Cole

  All Rights Reserved.

  Suspenseful Seduction Publishing

  * * *

  Don’t Shoot the Messenger is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  Cover designed by Marisa-Rose Wesley—www.covermedarling.com

  Editing by Eve Arroyo–www.evearroyo.com

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Other Books By Samantha A. Cole

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  T. Carter settled back on the couch in the living room of the hotel suite he’d been staying in for the past twenty-five days and watched Grant Hadley pace back and forth. Although the CIA spook had been released from the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, yesterday, Hadley was a shell of his former self. Despite being rehydrated and fed healthy food, his clothes hung from his thin frame, and his sallow skin still hadn’t returned to normal. That’s what happens when you spend over six years in a North Korean prison camp for espionage while the United States government thought you were dead.

  Carter was still trying to wrap his brain around the fact that his buddy was alive and not thousands of feet below the surface in the Sea of Japan. He’d been too far away to rescue the man he’d thought was Hadley after seeing a body, wrapped in a tarp with weights attached, tossed into one of the deepest trenches found in those waters. Even if he’d had SCUBA gear with him, Carter never would have reached the area in time after agents from the Ministry of State Security— MSS—had finally headed their cabin cruiser inland again. He’d been on his own, in a much smaller boat, with only two handguns and a KABAR knife, and wouldn’t have stood a chance against five heavily armed and highly trained MSS agents.

  Now, Carter, who worked as an operative for the US black-ops agency Deimos, waited for his CIA counterpart to ask the questions he’d been dreading. In fact, he was surprised they hadn’t come up during the past three weeks of debriefing and rehabilitation Hadley had gone through.

  A few times since the rescue op, Carter had almost slipped and called the other man Evan Walker which had been his main undercover persona. It was the only reason Hadley could return to the US using his real name.

  Taking a seat in a chair across the coffee table from Carter, Hadley leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. His scraggly beard and mustache had been shaved off, and his thin, dark-brown hair had been trimmed by a barber yesterday after his release from the hospital. He looked far different from the dirty, raggedly clothed, emaciated man Carter and a team of retired Navy SEALs had rescued, but his hazel eyes still appeared sunken. He took two deep breaths, then asked in a coarse voice, “How is she? How did she take it?”

  Carter bit his bottom lip for a moment before replying. She was Blair Canterfield, the woman Hadley had been engaged to. The woman who’d thought her fiancé had been a Secret Service agent temporarily assigned to the ambassador to South Korea six years ago. The woman the US government had lied to, telling her Hadley had fallen overboard from a yacht he’d been on with his charge, during a storm, and his body hadn’t been recovered. The woman who had no clue Hadley was, in fact, alive.

  “She’s doing okay—took it really hard, but . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence, needing the other man to ask each question at his own pace.

  There was a heavy pause, as Hadley stared at Carter, before continuing. “Has she moved on? I mean, has she . . .”

  “She moved back to Hazard Falls not long after the memorial service they had for you . . . she’s married.”

  The man nodded as resignation appeared in his eyes. “I’m not surprised—Blair’s a beautiful woman, and it’s . . . it’s been a long time—but I was hoping . . .” He ran a hand down his face. “Who? Someone from Hazard? Do I know him?”

  There it was. The hardest thing Carter had to tell his old friend. “Grant . . . she’s married to Drake.”

  Hadley froze, stunned to silence, as Carter waited for the inevitable words of disbelief followed by an explosion.

  Shaking his head, Hadley said, “This is no time for jokes, jackass.” He stood and paced back and forth again. “No . . . no fucking way.”

  “I’m not joking, man. I’m sorry.”

  He stopped in front of Carter and put his hands on his hips. “Blair married Drake? She married my fucking brother?” When Carter nodded, Hadley glared and asked, “When? When, damn it!”

  The black-ops agent sighed. Shit, he hated to be the one doing this, but he owed it to Hadley. He could’ve lied, but things would be worse when the man found out the truth later on. Blair had probably been his lifeline over the past six years, the main reason he’d survived the hellhole he’d been in—he wouldn’t let her go without knowing all the facts. Carter took a deep breath and let it out. “Six weeks after the funeral.”

  “The fuck you say!”

  With rage-filled eyes, Hadley lunged at Carter, but the Deimos spy was far quicker, leaping up and sidestepping out of the way. Hadley landed partially on the couch, his knees hitting the floor, and he struggled to stand. Once on his feet again, he swung at his target, who easily blocked the fist coming toward his face. Carter spun him around, tucked his hands under Hadley’s armpits and put him in a headlock—not for Carter’s own protection, but to keep the broken man from harming himself.

  “Get off me! Get the fuck off me, you bastard!”

  Bucking, twisting, and kicking, Hadley made every effort to break the hold, but his weakened body was no match against the other man’s physically-fit one. He finally gave up, and his knees buckled. Tears rolled down his face and a sob ripped from his chest as Carter lowered him to the floor, relaxing his grip but not completely letting go. “I’m sorry, Grant. I’m so sorry.”

  For a few minutes, Carter silently allowed the other man to let it all out—the grief, the rage, the fear he’d never be rescued that had plagued him for so long, and the relief when he’d realized the rescue was really happening and wasn’t a dream. This
was the first time Hadley had broken down since Carter and his team had found him in a North Korean mountainside prison camp. He’d been living in a dirty cage, unfit for any animal, covered in scars and cigarette burns in various stages of healing, The US operatives had killed every one of his fourteen captors and had also rescued a French national, two South Koreans, and a member of the UK’s MI6. Those men, all in similar condition to Hadley, had each been returned to their respective countries under a cloak of secrecy. There hadn’t been a single mention of the dead North Korean soldiers left in the mountains on any media outlet, which meant it’d been covered up.

  Carter had been shocked when his boss had called him with the news that a man who looked eerily like Hadley had been spotted and photographed by an MSS mole who’d passed the information onto his Deimos handler. Upon seeing the images, guilt and remorse had overwhelmed Carter. He hadn’t taken things at face value all those years ago, but the investigation that’d followed after seeing the body tossed overboard hadn’t turned up anything to dispute the belief that Hadley had ended up at the bottom of the sea.

  Seven or eight minutes passed before Hadley caught his breath and stopped sobbing. Carter let him go and got to his feet, as the other man slowly stood and wiped his face with his bare hands. “Tell me . . . tell me the rest. There’s more, isn’t there?”

  Surprisingly, Hadley’s mind was still sharp after all he’d been through. Carter nodded. “There is.”

  Instead of launching into the next bit of intel he had to report, he strode over to the suite’s wet bar and poured the expensive Macallan Fine Oak scotch he preferred into two lowball glasses. He handed one to Hadley, who’d slumped into the chair again, then returned to his seat on the couch. Taking a sip, he relished the familiar burn and waited for the other man to stop coughing after knocking back a swig of the amber liquid.

  Hadley looked at him. His voice even raspier than before. “Tell me.”

  “The reason Blair and Drake got married—she was three and a half months pregnant.”

  The man’s brow furrowed in confusion, but not for long as the true meaning of Carter’s words sunk into his brain. “Pregnant? I . . . she was pregnant . . . with my child?”

  He nodded. “Apparently she found out the week after you left on the assignment. She was waiting for you to come home to surprise you. When she told Drake after the funeral, he stepped in and married her, so she’d be on his insurance. She’d already made the decision to return to Hazard, and he didn’t want her to worry about anything. He knew if something happened, and the baby needed medical care or Blair couldn’t work, it would be harder to get him on the insurance policy after the fact, so Drake made sure they were both covered in advance.”

  Hadley blinked. “Him? I—I have a son?”

  “Yeah. Trevor—cute kid. Smart as a whip.”

  He leaned back in the chair and pondered that for a few moments. “So . . . it was for the insurance only? They weren’t . . . together?” He sounded hopeful, as if there was a chance his former life could still be salvaged.

  Shit, here comes the next bomb. At least Hadley was unarmed, so he couldn’t shoot the messenger, no matter how much he would probably want to. “No, not at first . . . but down the road, I guess they fell for each other. They have two more kids now—a girl and another boy. Regan is three and Michael just turned two.”

  His jaw clenched, and his eyes went blank before he drank the rest of his scotch in two gulps. Standing, he dropped the glass on the coffee table with a clunk and headed for the door to the hallway and the elevator beyond. Carter stared after him. “Where are you going?”

  “Doesn’t fucking matter.”

  The Deimos operative sighed heavily, downed the remainder of his own drink, and glanced at his watch. He had an hour before he was due to check in with his woman, Jordyn Alvarez, who was currently on an assignment in North Africa, after assisting with Grant’s rescue. She’d managed to visit him for two days last week, but it felt like a month since then. Although they’d known each other for years, their boyfriend/girlfriend and Dominant/submissive relationships were relatively new.

  Getting to his feet, he followed Hadley. The guy may not want company, but since he didn’t have any ID or a dime in his pocket, it was Carter’s duty to at least tail him and make sure he stayed out of trouble. Yeah, that was probably going to be easier said than done.

  Chapter Two

  Blair Hadley startled awake, her gaze sweeping the room as she tried to catch her breath. A sheen of perspiration coated her skin as her heart pounded in her chest. The early morning sun peeping around the edges of the curtains hanging over the windows gave her enough light to see where she was. It shouldn’t surprise her that she was in the same bedroom she’d shared with Drake for the past five years in Hazard Falls, Kansas. It was where they’d consummated their marriage a full year after their courthouse nuptials. But her dream had been so real, so seemingly tangible, she’d expected to find herself in her old townhouse near Washington D.C.—the one she’d lived in with Grant for four years.

  Turning onto her side, she found the other half of the bed empty, which wasn’t unusual. Drake was an early riser, sometimes heading out to his studio, a converted barn behind their farmhouse, to work on his “latest masterpiece,” as Blair called it. Others would see it as a custom-made piece of furniture. Her husband was very talented and could turn fallen trees into stunning, yet functional, art. It had taken a few years for his reputation to grow to the point he’d been able to leave his job in construction and still support his family. Blair’s income from translating novels from English to French for indie authors and a publishing company, Red Rose Books, had helped. It was a career she loved, satisfying her reading addiction and letting her work from home, in between raising three young children. Now that Drake also worked from home, they split the child-rearing duties and housecleaning. After several hours of crafting furniture or the occasional commissioned sculpture, Drake would join his wife and kids for lunch, before taking over for Blair, so she could lock herself in her office and translate in peace.

  After six years of marriage, though, she still thought of Grant. He’d been her first love and her first devastating heartache, other than losing both her parents within eight months of each other a few years before. But then Drake had stepped in and taken care of her in the aftermath of Grant’s death. She hadn’t expected him to propose to her, and at the time, she’d called him crazy, but once things had calmed down, she’d realized his idea had been a good one.

  Blair couldn’t stay in D.C. after Grant’s death—honestly, they’d both been so busy with their careers, they really hadn’t made many friends in the area. She’d had no one she was close to whom she could rely on as a grieving-mother-to-be. She’d done some novel translations in her spare time, during the evenings and weekends when Grant had been out of the country, so she knew she could make a good living at it if she did it fulltime. And with almost everything done via the internet nowadays, she could easily do it from anywhere in the world. However, a major drawback from leaving her job as a document translator at the French embassy would’ve been paying for her own health insurance. Adding Trevor onto the policy, after he was born, would’ve almost doubled her monthly costs.

  She’d never thought she’d fall in love again—hadn’t wanted to after Grant had been ripped from her life—but as time went by, she and Drake had gotten close. She’d always thought he was just as attractive as Grant, and when her body had started to come alive again, whenever he was in the room, she’d thought it was one-sided. Then one night, a few months after Trevor had been born, it’d been like someone had flipped a switch.

  Five years earlier . . .

  “Finally, he’s asleep,” Blair announced as she entered the kitchen where Drake was cleaning their dinner dishes. She grabbed a towel from where it had been hanging on the oven handle and took a saucepan from him to dry.

  He smiled at her. “Guess the medicine is working. Maybe you can g
et some sleep now too.”

  They’d both been up since around five o’clock that morning with an inconsolable Trevor. He’d developed an ear infection and had been screaming his head off more than not. They’d taken him to his pediatrician’s office as soon as it’d opened. The doctor had told them the medicated drops and antibiotics would work for now, but it was possible Trevor would eventually need tubes placed into his ears to avoid future occurrences. His ear canals were narrower than average for a baby his age. Having Trevor and her covered by Drake’s insurance was just one of many reasons Blair was grateful for his help. Without him, she’d be all alone, juggling her income versus her bills, in addition to working and caring for the infant.

  While their marriage was one of convenience—they slept in separate bedrooms—they’d become close friends over the past year, more than ever before. Somewhere along the line, she’d stopped thinking of Drake as just the brother-in-law he would’ve been by this point or Grant’s younger brother, and now he was Drake—her husband. The man she’d grown attracted to over the past few weeks, ever since her body had recovered from giving birth to a ten-and-a-half-pound baby that had required her to have an episiotomy. Yup, that hadn’t been fun. But Drake had been there for her every step of the way. He’d read dozens of books and blogs on what to expect during her pregnancy and the first few years of Trevor’s life. He’d never once complained about her invading his life and home, and she thought he’d had more fun than she’d had picking out furniture, toys, clothes, and other necessities for when the new baby arrived. It had been a bittersweet moment when Trevor Grant Hadley had come into the world, looking so much like the biological father he’d never know. But Drake had stepped into the role without a moment’s hesitation, and, as he became the only father figure Trevor might ever have, he’d begun to crawl into Blair’s heart and mind as well. Now, she found herself wondering what it would be like to kiss, touch, and make love to the man standing next to her.