Prime: A Bad Boy Romance Read online

  I watch him glare down at me for a moment like a chef might an expensive piece of meat he’s spent the last hour tenderizing for a six hour session in the oven, before he drags over a chair from the corner of the room, the legs scraping lazily against the dirt. Beyond the backhanded slap, I can’t think of a single other action more disrespectful. In his mind, I’m the chair being dragged along the dirt by the scruff of my neck, my knees making tracks in the earth, my death no longer in anyone else’s control but his own.

  They came for me at nighttime like rats hunting prey, knocked me unconscious after breaking into my house, and brought me here, to this room, in what looks like every abandoned house I’ve ever stepped foot into in this country, in what could be a thousand different parts of Mexico.

  There is my aggressor Raul, two guards stood sentry by the door, and at least three others I’ve counted who come and go from time to time, all armed, all idiotic enough to try and shoot me dead if I so much as look at them the wrong way.

  It’s a far from professional outfit, which makes me think that whoever sent them has massively underestimated the extent of the information I have on them. If they’d done their research properly before smashing down my doors to drag me away for what might better be described as extreme bdsm instead of torture, they’d know already that I don’t break easily, and there’s only a single thing in this world more important to me than my job. The only thing about this group being novices is the fact that accidents are more than twice as likely to happen, and the last thing I want is one of these trigger happy teenage goons to put a bullet through my neck by mistake.

  “You’re going to talk”, Raul says, sitting on the reversed chair like a Hollywood movie icon. “We know who you are.”

  “Please”, I try again. “I’m not who you say I am.”

  “I can’t help you unless you talk to me, Ruby”, Raul says, his hand against my cheek to gently caress my bloodied face. “It would be such a shame to see that pretty head broken into a million pieces.”

  My options might be pretty limited right now, but they don’t include giving them what they need, no matter how much he tries to sweet talk me. I have no idea how much time I was out of it, but I’ve been awake long enough since to know that night has already turned into day at least once, and enough people will have realized I’m missing to begin to prepare as much as they can to help me in the event I don’t make it out of here alive. Journalists go missing and turn up dead in Mexico almost every week of the year and the police either do nothing about it because they can’t, or because they were the ones behind it in the first place.

  If I want to get out of here sooner rather than never, I’m going to have to come up with a plan of my own, because no-one else is going to help me now. Getting out of the chair is going to be fairly easy, but getting past at least six armed guards without a weapon of my own a little more tricky.

  “I’m going to give you one last chance”, Raul says. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”

  I think he’s watched too many American movies. “I’ve told you already”, I say, my crocodile tears churning the words. “My name is Alice, I’m here on vacation. I work in a hotel in Boston.”

  Raul sighs with disappointment. I watch him dismount the chair, drag it carefully back to where he got it from and pick up his rifle.

  “I like you”, he says absently, as he strolls back towards me. “I read your blog. I agree with a lot of the things you say. This country is corrupt, the police are corrupt, the politicians are corrupt. Everyone is corrupt, you’re right, everyone knows it too, but it’s not your country, and it’s not your place to try and change it.” He cocks the gun to check it’s loaded, sights it, poses it against his shoulder, indulging himself in the performance. “Tell us where the files are”, he says, the barrel of the gun at my forehead now making a dent in my skin. “It’s as simple as that. Tell us where the information is and we’ll let you go home.”

  This isn’t the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure it isn’t the last.

  “I told you already, I’m not-.” I don’t get a chance to finish the sentence before Raul pulls the gun away quickly, turns it over in his hands and smashes the butt end against my temple in frustration. The force of the impact topples me over towards the earth, my weight bringing the chair with me, where my head thuds heavily against the dirt.

  I can feel blood running from a gash at the side of my head into my eyes, and just before I lose consciousness completely, I see Raul towering above me, his thin smile wrapped around a psychopathic laugh.

  “That’s your last chance”, he says, as he toes my shoulder with the tip of his boot just to make sure I’m still breathing. “The next time I come you’ll tell me everything.”

  It’s at moments like these, where death seems like an inevitable conclusion, where your body is wracked with so much pain letting go feels like a relief, that your mind wanders to those moments of the past, to reflect on the good times and the bad.

  As my breathing dips and shallows, and blood refuses to stem out of the gash across my temple, and I seriously wonder whether I’ll wake up at all when I can’t help myself from finally passing out, I think about my best moments. I think about those things I’d live again in a heartbeat, my best date, my best meal, my best fuck, the times I was most happy, and there is one image that keeps popping into my head no matter how much I try and refuse to let it.

  Even here, broken, bruised and what could be hours away from my inauspicious death, in a moment that should be entirely of my own deciding, he won’t leave me alone. Jaxon, that absolute bastard.

  Chapter Three

  Jaxon

  There are a million reasons why I shouldn’t be doing this, and one massive one that means that no matter how dangerous, no matter how limited the intel, no matter how wrong this could go and how much it could send me tumbling down another black hole, I just can’t say no.

  Almost five years have slipped by and all I have to do is close my eyes and she’s right there again tormenting me. The girl I should never have let get away in the first place, the girl that was too proud to admit she was hooked.

  The last thing I want to do is get to Mexico and replace the image I’ve got in my head of Ruby on top of me riding the wave of a multiple orgasm with one of her dumped heartlessly somewhere in the dry Mexican dirt, but if I don’t go and later realize I had a chance at saving her, the rest of my life won’t even be worth living.

  If she’s dead already, no matter how much it’ll kill me to see it, at least I’ll know I’ll have done everything I can to try and avoid it. If she’s alive, and as much as I don’t want to think about the possibility she might not be, we might just have a chance to pick up where we left off. Of course, with Ruby that could either mean an open handed slap right across my cheek, the kind of kiss that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, or a knee right to my balls, and maybe even all three. Describing our short term relationship as passionately volatile really undersells it.

  “First time going to Mexico?”

  The voice belongs to the woman in the seat next to me who has spent most of this journey looking like she’s been waiting for the right moment to ask me something. Now that we’ve started our descent I guess she figures she’s running out of time.

  “Yes”, I lie. She’s pretty enough that five years ago she might have stirred my interest enough to bother, but everything changed so much after Ruby anyway that there really isn’t anything further from my mind right now.

  “Vacation?” she adds, keen to keep the conversation going.

  I nod politely, keen not to engage.

  “It’s a beautiful country”, she continues, unaffected by my silence. “You’ll love it. The people are so friendly.” I guess she must be talking about the ones that don’t kidnap journalists. “And the beaches, oh my God, they are to die for. How long have you got?”

  He
r teeth are so white they look like they’ve been treated with fluorescent paint. I can see cracks at the edges of her eyes that poor aircraft lighting and badly applied makeup do nothing to hide. She’s older than she’s trying to make herself look, about a million degrees of perfection away from the girl I’ve come here to rescue.

  “A week”, I lie, hoping to be back home by this time tomorrow.

  She nods. “You don’t say much do you?” she says. “I like that in a man. If you need someone to show you around, help you with the language-.” She leans over, across the arm separating our business class seats from one another. “I’m in Mexico all the time, it’s like my second home.”

  “Thank you”, I say meekly, trying to make it clear by my body language that I’m in no way interested in what she’s offering me. “I’m actually meeting someone there.”

  “Oh”, she says, with a hint of disappointment, before an announcement by the pilot about our estimated arrival time cuts into her train of thought. When he’s done, she’s thankfully already missed her chance to continue and we spend what little is left of the flight without another word to each other, despite the heated glances she keeps sending in my direction.

  Passing through customs is a breeze. I’m a dumb tourist visiting Mexico for the first time in my life, my guidebook practically bursting through the side pocket of my backpack, nothing in my briskly packed bag but beach clothes and worn out sandals. I don’t even need to explain where I’m going or how long I plan to stay before I’m waved through the gates and the lazy guard’s calling the next arrival to the desk.

  I don’t have a bag to collect from the carousel, so I make my way quickly through the terminal building, get outside and hail a cab.

  It takes just over thirty minutes to carve through the traffic and get to the address I provide the driver, and he spends most of that time advising me on how to avoid getting robbed, before overcharging me for the journey.

  I’ve been on missions all over central and south america and it’s given me the opportunity to pick up enough of the language to let him know I’m not easily fooled, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself, hand over what he’s asking for and get on with what I came here to do.

  I’ve been out of active service for two years, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t maintained a network of contacts. If the Mexican authorities allowed me to enter their country with enough weaponry to take out an army, I wouldn’t have to waste time buying guns, but the quicker I get this over with, the faster I can get to Ruby.

  The information that was passed to Ruby’s father was provided by a journalist friend of hers who managed to track their convoy of vehicles on the night of her kidnapping to a destination just outside of the city. According to his intel, there were at least six men involved, possibly another six more as back up, all belonging to a mercenary group and possibly working for either government or terrorist factions.

  Somehow Ruby’s got herself into some seriously deep shit, which, understandably, he was reluctant to go into. According to Ruby’s father, he’s now gone into hiding, which means that if Ruby’s not at the location he’s suggesting, or she’s since been moved from there to somewhere else, I’m looking for a needle in a haystack.

  I’ve found missing people before, but missing people who’ve been taken hostage usually have a window of about seventy two hours at the very most before they turn up dead if they turn up at all, and right now we’re over half way there.

  “I’ve got a team if you need it”, Diego tells me. I’ve never seen him before but I know all about him. He’s ex-police, anti-government, extremely well connected, highly professional, and has experience of working with special ops teams before.

  He’s brought a decent selection of weaponry, some classics and some stuff I haven’t even seen before.

  “It’s low key”, I tell him, which roughly translates as it’s personal, and I work better alone, and after what happened in Iran, I can’t be putting anyone else’s lives at risk.

  Diego crosses and recrosses his legs. The ash on his cigarette needs tapping but he lets it fall to the ground instead. He’s got a scar across his neck that didn’t come from shaving and a glazed look in his eye that people tend to get when they witness too many atrocities.

  He nods and takes another drag on his cigarette.

  “All unmarked”, he says. “But you already know that.”

  I take the MK23 with sound suppressor, the HK45CT, a Glock 22, a HK MP7 sub, a Strider SMF knife and an Ontario MK 3 for back-up. I could take six guys out with my bare hands, but I want to make sure I’m fully loaded just in case intel is bad and six turns out to be sixty. Along with the weaponry I take lightweight clothes, a bullet proof vest, grapple hooks, infrared heat sensor goggles, first aid field kit and some good old-fashioned solid desert boots. If this were a planned extraction I’d get full battle dress uniform, but as a lone mercenary soldier I’d prefer to fade into the background as soon as I need to.

  “Anything else?” Diego asks, a pile of ash now gathered up by his feet. With his sandals and shorts he looks even less like he belongs in this world than I do right now. “Grenades, smoke, pyrotechnics?”

  I shake my head. “I won’t have time for a show”, I say.

  “In and out”, Diego comments. “Next time you should stay a little longer and enjoy the tequila.”

  “Next time I come to Mexico”, I say, “I’ll make sure it really is for a vacation.”

  I pay Diego, change into the clothes I’ve just bought from him, wrap the guns and knives in a dirty towel and bury them in my rucksack beneath the beach clothes I brought with me, and head back out to the street. My stopwatch tells me that two hours and thirty seven minutes have passed since landing, which means nearly forty hours have passed since Ruby was kidnapped.

  The building I believe she’s being held in is approximately forty five minutes from the outskirts of the city. The sky is already dark, I can feel the buzz of another rescue mission running through my veins and I know the time has come to get back to work. I can’t deny it, it finally feels like I’m alive again.

  I flag a cab down, get into the backseat this time as a soldier and not a tourist, and tell him to take me to a hotel as close to the building as he can.

  This time the driver doesn’t warn me about robberies, about how dangerous the city is for a guy like me, about how I have to be constantly on guard. He takes one look at me through the rear view mirror and then keeps quiet for the rest of the journey.

  As we drive I try and focus my mind on Ruby. What state am I going to find her in? Will she even be alive? How much will she have changed and what the hell am I going to say to her? I think about the last moment we saw each other, almost five years ago, and then I think about the first time we got together, the countdown from ten to zero, the ride home and the incredible sex that lasted well into the next day.

  Whatever happens tonight, one thing’s for sure. Nobody has ever come even remotely close.

  Chapter Four

  That first time over five years ago...

  Ruby

  Muscles on muscles and oozing confidence isn’t my usual type. I try to stay away from men like this because past experience tells me it’ll only end in trouble, but here I am with absolutely no intention of walking away until I get exactly what it is he’s promising me.

  Jaxon could be a made up name for all I know. To be honest, he looks like he could have walked straight out of the pages of a superhero comic book, and I’m pretty damn sure if I gave him a spandex suit and cape, he’d wear it like a uniform.

  I could lose myself for a million years in those turquoise eyes, if there wasn’t so much of the rest of him to appreciate as well. A messy crop of unbrushed hair of the perfect length and color, the slightest shadow of stubble covering a rock hard jaw you could strike matches against to burn down entire forests, full kissable lips shaped like Apollo’s bow, a thick chest, a tight belly, a bulge between his legs to take your breath away.


  Muscles on muscles and oozing confidence isn’t my usual type, but real men absolutely are, and if you strip away the hard sell, the unbreakable shield of conviction, the over the top braggadocio, that’s exactly what you are left with.

  I let him drive me home, keeping up the pretense all the way to my apartment that that’s all I’m going to let him get away with, despite the fact that both of us know exactly where this is going to go. The sexual tension in the car is at explosive levels, and the way my stomach turns somersaults tells me that no matter how long this interaction lasts, the memory it leaves is going to take a lifetime to shake.

  I’m not the kind of girl that typically falls for this kind of chauvinistic bullshit, but I’m not the kind of girl that’s just going to lie on her back and let someone fuck her for a free ride either. The only reason I’m letting Jaxon think he’s the kind of guy that can win me over in less than ten seconds is because I’m going to get him to give me exactly what I want. Short term, and as long as this is only about sex, I can cope with his attitude, long term, I’m not the kind of girl to put up with it. He’s got player written all over him, and I don’t want to even think about how many hearts he’s broken on his way to me. Tonight I’m going to forget about all of that and make sure he gives me exactly what he’s promising, because if he even falls only a little bit short, he’ll know it.

  “Just a ride home?” he asks as he wrestles me to the bed, his eyebrow arched, his T-shirt already nothing but a crumpled mess in the corner of the room.

  “I couldn’t exactly not invite you in”, I say, trying to feign disinterest.

  My skin tingles at his touch, my breath catching in my throat. “Just tell me-”, he begins, his fingertips dancing to places I don’t stop them going to. “If there’s anything that you don’t like.”

  I don’t want to give him the pleasure of knowing how much he’s turning me on, but my body can’t hide the lie. My panties are soaking wet and have been since I began to entertain the possibility of this happening.