Page 18 of Stolen By the Billionaire
He changed his camo outfit for dark slacks and a cream dress shirt at a giant rest stop, buttoning the front over the spiderweb of tattoo ink that covered his torso. He rubbed a paper towel in his hairline to remove the last smear of green grease paint. Once he was back to looking like his civilian self, that stranger meandering through his life, he turned back onto the highway and sped toward his house.
When he’d been in the US Navy and a part of DEVGRU, the current name of the Navy SEAL program, a debriefing or postmortem recap followed every operation. The SEALs would discuss what went wrong and what went right, along with ideas for the future.
But this foray to threaten (sort of) Mary Varvara Bell’s niece had been a solo act, and thus, no one was around to break down the op with him.
With no outlet, the debrief churned in Blaze’s head.
Threatening a civilian was regrettable, but the whole Bell family was mobbed up. Blaze had gone to school with one of Mary’s distant relations. Logan Bell was definitely connected and “gray hat” at best. Logan had hung out with the Russian bratva nepo babies as much as he had Blaze and the other two scholarship kids.
Sarah Bell must be into organized crime up to her neck, even though her homestead appeared to grow corn as a cash crop and eke out a subsistence garden.
That farm was probably a money-laundering operation for Mary Varvara Bell. Maybe tax evasion or grant fraud, too.
The corn was probably for show.
Yet, when he’d grabbed Sarah, she’d hollered, You can’t kill me! They’re all counting on me!
Her list of the stock and crops that depended on her had felt like his own list of responsibilities, except his list included veterans coping with PTSD who were at risk for self-harm instead of food crops and livestock.
Blaze knew what it meant to be the responsible one.
Scaring the responsible one did not align with his morals.
Also, while his ethics had waged war in his mind for just a moment, the feeling of Sarah’s soft body writhing in his arms had distracted him from the op.
Everything around Blaze was hard: his operation-honed body, his morals and philosophies, and the steel of his weapons.
Sarah had fought, flailing uselessly against the dead rock of his chest and arms, but she’d fought. Even when she’d had to know fighting him was futile, she’d fought.
She hadn’t given up even when she didn’t know that the gun wasn’t loaded and the knife was so dull that its only possible weaponization was as a paddle.
When she’d been standing across from him in the kitchen, adrenaline crackling through her nerves, she’d been trying to find a knife in that drawer and still not surrendering.
Too many people surrendered too soon. In DEVGRU, the Forty Percent Rule was that, when your mind tells you that you’re finished, fried, and totally tapped out, when you want to lay down and die rather than take even one more step, you’re only forty percent done. You still have sixty percent of your energy left in the tank.
Sarah had kept going, even when her fate had looked hopeless and she’d been overpowered.
In those moments in her kitchen, when he’d been attempting to explain what he’d done and why and trying to make amends, he’d kept his eyes averted, trying not to ogle Sarah out of respect, but it had been difficult. Her lush curves had stretched her jeans like she’d painted that denim on, and her hourglass body was a temptation.
Staying on his side of the dining table, laying the money down, and leaving had taken more than forty percent of his willpower.
Even while he drove eastward on the Iowa highway, his car and the semi-trucks speeding over the hot asphalt under the summer sun, Blaze dreamed about turning the car around, walking back into that farmhouse with the door banging behind him, and setting her up on that tiled kitchen countertop to press himself between her thighs and kiss her senseless. The illusion pulled at him, cajoling him to spin his Aston Martin off the side of the highway, bump through the grassy median, and speed back toward Kalona.
Blaze did not give in to temptation.
He never did.
Yes, he was attracted to Sarah, but that did not change his plan to break Mary Varvara Bell’s hold on him.
So he continued to drive east on I-80 toward Chicago.
He had five hours to kill between Sarah’s farm and his house, so he listened to the road for a while, feeling the silence between the air rushing around the car, the motor roaring somewhere below his shoes and the floor, and the tires under him clawing the asphalt.
After a while, an itch started in his head and then traveled through his flesh, the slithering knowledge that he was useless, passive, and thinking about a woman he was driving away from when he should have been leading.
Without taking his eyes off the road, Blaze tapped the CarPlay screen in his dash, and his phone rang through the car’s speakers.
A lady said, “Vets in Crisis admin line. Hello, Lieutenant Commander Robinson. I was praying you’d call in today because we are swamped. I didn’t want to pressure you because you work the phones so much, but with that thing in Afghanistan dominating the news for the last twelve hours, I figured today was going to be rough. I knew I could count on you, though.”
