Hot as Hell (Deep Six 0.5)(30)

If I get my hands on her—when I get my hands on her—I won’t ever wanna let her go.

A hot sense of possessiveness gripped him, which immediately sent a cold, spidery feeling crawling into his chest. He might have fallen victim to old memories if Lead A-Hole hadn’t picked that moment to make a move. It was subtle. Just a slight sliding of his left foot behind his right. But Bran recognized the stance. His internal warning system flashed from yellow to red.

Sonofabastard’s in a hurry to be a dangerous man.

Combat training and years of dodging bullets kicked in. Bran dropped to his knees in the surf at the same time Lead A-Hole swung his rifle in Bran’s direction, pulling the trigger. A bullet whizzed by Bran’s ear with a dull-sounding zzziiippp followed immediately by the booming report of the SCAR-L.

The trigger on Bran’s M4A1 rifle was worn smooth. It felt like coming home when he squeezed it and the weapon bucked against his shoulder. The familiar smell of spent cordite perfumed the air as his bullet left his barrel.

He wasn’t labeled one of the best sharpshooters ever to go through BUD/S training for nothing. His aim proved true, and his round buried itself in Lead A-Hole’s wicked heart. The man’s eyes flew wide, the whites shining eerily when he realized he was dead.

He had the wherewithal to wheeze “Can’t breathe,” and yank off his balaclava before he fell to his knees, gripping the hole in his chest. Dark blood spurted between his fingers with every ineffectual beat of his heart. And a face that was all-American GI Joe stared at Bran, mouth going slack, eyes going glassy. Then he tumbled onto his back, staring sightless into the star-studded sky.

I warned you, Bran thought.

The guy with the bum knee gaped at his fallen comrade. “You sorry sonofabitch!” he screeched at Bran, his lips moving behind the fabric of the balaclava, his eyes narrowed and filled with fury.

Bran wished he could say he was sorry. But he wasn’t. The death of men who tried to kill him had ceased to make a dent in his psyche years ago. Not to mention he was completely convinced that any rat bastard who took women and children hostage at gunpoint deserved nothing better than a dirt nap.

He readied himself to dive beneath the surf to escape the bullet sure to leave Bum Knee’s SCAR-L in the next second. But Mason came to his rescue, lighting up the sand at Bum Knee’s feet. Mason didn’t dare try for a body shot for fear of hitting one of the teenagers. And Bran was left with no clear line of sight either.

Damn!

“Get down! Get down!” Maddy screamed at the girls as she dropped to her knees.

Unfortunately, her call came too late. The remaining men each grabbed a girl, using her as a human shield against Bran while they turned and opened fire on Mason’s position behind the seawall. Their rounds chewed up the aging masonry like it was made of Play-Doh. And Mason was left with no recourse but to do the ol’ D and C—duck and cover.

Bran, on the other hand, surged through the surf toward Maddy in an attempt to gain a better firing position and, you know, save the girl…

*

7:19 p.m.…

Chaos…

That was Maddy’s world. Even so, time seemed to slow to a lame man’s crawl and she felt like she was seeing everything through one of those children’s 3D View-Master toys. She wasn’t pressing the little handle on the side to spin the disk of pictures, but the frames were still flicking in front of her unblinking eyes.

The body of the unmasked man lay on the sand beside her. Blood slowly seeped from his lifeless corpse and headed in a gruesome red river toward the waiting arms of the ocean.

Next picture…

The three gunmen rained lead death on the seawall as they pulled the girls with them up the beach and toward the narrow bridge that led across the moat into the fort.

Next picture…

Bran raced through the surf. His broad shoulders, exposed by his black tank top, flexed and bunched. His big thighs churned as he halved the distance between them.

Even in the chaos, she was struck by the sheer impact of him. Long, lean muscles made for endurance. Big, thick bones designed to keep him standing tall for decades. Deeply tanned skin that glowed with health and vigor and highlighted his Italian-American heritage. Her mind touched on a line she’d read from an Italian poet in college, Francesco Petrarca. He’d written, Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together. But he couldn’t have been more wrong. At least when it came to Brando Pallidino. Because Bran was all things beautiful and virtuous, a real-life, honest-to-God hero.

Glory be and hallelujah! She needed a hero to help her get the girls away from those awful men.

He skidded to a stop beside her. And then her world stopped doing that weird stop-action thing. Everything sprang into high definition. Including Bran’s face.

Before he turned to take aim at the masked men, she caught a glimpse of his dark eyes, and her thundering heart ground to a halt, her blood turning to ice water in her veins. She recognized that look. It was the same one he’d worn the day he stormed her father’s yacht and put a bullet in the brain of the terrorist holding her hostage. The look of a man who had killed and would kill again. A man filled with dark purpose. A man who…frightened her.

Which was silly. Bran was all things good and valiant. And yet…

She shuddered at the difference between this Bran and the one who talked her through her bad times, the one who liked to tease her and taunt her and fill her inbox with videos of Meat, the bulldog, snoring so loudly it vibrated the canine’s jowls. It was almost like there were two Brans: Darling Bran and Deadly Bran.