Page 16 of Hercules

Half of them weren’t prepped to discharge fire at all.

Instead of carbon steel barrels filled with bullets, those four firearms were outfitted with long clear tubes that glowed with dark-green liquid. Herc didn’t want to draw the worst conclusion about the stuff glooping around with more ease than magma but clonkier than a milkshake, but he did. He had to.

Just like he was forced to allow a long growl up his throat. In its wake, he was ready to spit a number of filthy lines—but nothing made it past his stunned frustration. And clutching fear.

Plenty of that.

“Hercules!” Aphrodite’s scream was past the point of listen-to-me urgency. Her scream took his alarm and cranked the knob to new decibels. “They’re packing falmouth!”

“What?” Natasha cried. “What the hell is—”

“I’m aware,” he yelled at his sister. “Now save yourself. And the others!” He hadn’t missed the arrival of a half dozen more speed daters to Aphrodite’s lobby, all trying to help his increasingly distraught little sister.

“They’re not after me, you big mule!” she shrieked.

“Adelfi.” The ferocity of his reply was as necessary as the snarl that still burned his esophagus. He already sensed Aphrodite’s ache to jump in here and do something stupid for his sake. “Do it. Now!”

He prayed she’d comply but was denied the chance to check. As he wrapped Natasha closer against his chest, acknowledging his options in this shitshow were narrowing by the second, an undeniable presence loomed in his periphery.

And then, in his direct sights.

The team leader.

He knew it before she tugged up her knit mask, exposing a face as sleek as it was sinister. Skin of light tan silk and lips like crushed cherries, but a glint in her lime candy eyes that fit the comparison. She was hard. Honed. Impossible to crush.

So was her gritted ultimatum.

“Give her to me.”

Herc grimaced. It’d be so easy to just lunge and knock heads with this bitch. Easy but potentially catastrophic. Who was she?

Without knowing that, he had to settle for spitting, “Fuck off.”

“Sure.” She chuckled. “Want me to leave fresh toilet paper and put up the Do Not Disturb on my way out too?”

A hiss ripped the air. Herc was only positive of the source because of how thoroughly it vibrated at the base of his throat. But rebuking Natasha was out of the equation once she stabbed into the fray with her own fury.

“Okay, biya, what the hell is your game?” She swung out her head, clearly ready to follow through on the fantasy that’d just tempted Herc. “Circumstances or not, I’m not his to give. Secondly, you want to know how soundly you’ll all be scourged once you’re on trial for kidnapping a star who just sold out a summer tour during the hour she was performing at the White House?”

This time, Lime Candy succumbed to a full laugh. As in, barked out the damn thing.

“You think the zeroes in my bank account care about the White House, hotshottie?”

She finished by yanking her ski mask into place then circling her head toward the biggest pair of her henchmen. Luckily, Herc’s instinct borrowed some heat from a batch of mental Hot Tamales and predicted the move before she made it.

He was ready.

Though the opening was only a couple of seconds, he jumped on fate’s rainbow and took advantage of the moments like they were gold bars at the bottom.

Second number one: he jerked Natasha’s thigh straight so she’d lie flat beneath him.

Then number two: he gripped her hard enough to roll them over as a single unit, pressing nearly all of her pretty curves against the demanding boards of his body.

It was his exact intention: forcing her to feel the demand in his muscles before she heard the matching command from his mouth. Oh, he’d be fun, flirty, and flattering about it, but she’d receive the message all the same. She would tell him where that lyre string was before the night was through.

And there were the thoughts that coaxed an actual laugh from him.

Fun. Flirty. Flattering.