Fall to Pieces

Jami Alden

Smashwords
Edition

Copyright ©2014 ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED

To Special Ops soldier Dylan Decker, spending
a month in his home town of Big Timber, Montana while he recovers
from an injury sounds like torture. After ten years as an elite
operator, asking him to live a civilian life - even temporarily -
is like asking him to live on another planet. All he cares about is
getting cleared for duty and getting back to his team. Then
temptation appears in the form he least expects it.

Sadie Thornton's life has been on hold since
she had to move back to Big Timber to help her ailing father. She
can't wait to get back to her life and career in California, away
from a father who never got over the disappointment that Sadie
wasn't born a boy. Then Dylan Decker, who never noticed her for
anything but her brains, rolls back into town. Sadie can't wait to
her high school crush that she's nothing like the girl he
remembers.

Dylan can hardly believe Sadie's
transformation from the awkward, skinny girl he remembers. But
while she's changed in ways that make his hands itch to explore her
newfound curves, inside she'd still the sweet, vulnerable girl who
followed him around with her heart in her eyes. Not the kind of
woman who can have a temporary, no strings affair without getting
hurt. And right now, that's all he has to offer.

But it isn't long before temptation
overwhelms Dylan's good intention, and what starts out as a casual
quickly becomes so much more. And when everything falls to pieces,
Sadie is the only one who can help Dylan put it all back
together.

March 2013

Southern Afghanistan

It was hard to believe that Hamad Mohammed Al
Abdul, who was no more than five and a half feet tall and a buck
twenty soaking wet, was one of the highest value targets in the
ongoing war on terror. But with his close ties to Ayman al-Zawahri,
who had stepped into the void left after Seal Team Six had taken
out Bin Laden, Al Abdul was high value enough to warrant the
involvement of Dylan Decker and his 1st Special Forces Operational
Detachment-Delta—aka The Unit —teammates to retrieve him.

They'd apprehended him five days ago, and now
their task was to deliver him to the CIA agents waiting to
interrogate him at an undisclosed location.

After a grueling 5 day, fifty mile march
through the mountains of southern Afghanistan, they were less than
five miles from the meet up point.

The terrain was gut bustingly beautiful,
Dylan couldn't help but notice. The sky was so blue it almost hurt
your eyes, almost as blue as the sky back home in Big Timber,
Montana. Steep, jagged peaks the color of flint stretched to the
sky.

But as beautiful as they were, the mountains
were as treacherous as any terrain he and his team had ever
covered.

Especially in this last stretch, where their
route took them nearly three miles through a narrow pass,
surrounded on both sides by sheer cliffs.

Dylan and the guys who made up their team of
five—Zander "Mac" McWilliams, Mike "Cheese" Bender, Chris "Slick"
Andrews and Tommy "Skip" Westphal—moved at a steady clip,
constantly scanned their surroundings, their M41A rifles held at
the ready.

Al Abdul, tethered to Dylan by his bound
hands, was forced to keep up. When they'd started out, he'd tried
the old floppy kid trick in an effort to slow them down, only to
realize pretty damn quick that Dylan was able to drag him for as
many miles as necessary.

It only took Al Abdul a hundred meters or so
to decide it was better to walk than have his hide chewed into
hamburger by the rocks and gravel.

It was eerily quiet, nothing but the sounds
of their boots crunching against the ground.

They froze as a sudden spray of rocks came
bouncing down the north side of the pass.

Weapons raised, trained on the shadowy ledge
thirty meters above them.

He looked through his scope to get a closer
look and heard Cheese's voice in his headset asking if they were
picking up any hostiles through the surveillance satellites.

"Negative. Proceed ahead," was the reply.

Dylan couldn't get a visual through his
scope, and he followed Mac's signal to keep moving forward. But the
prickling sensation that something wasn't right dogged his
steps.

And in the space of a breath, their as yet
uneventful operation turned into a total goatfuck.

"Shit," Mac yelled as a hail of AK-47 fire
ripped through the silence.

Dylan dove behind a boulder as the others
scrambled for cover. Al Abdul yelled and tried to jump up. Dylan
yanked him back down and pinned him as bullets hammered into the
rock in front of them. Not because he thought the terrorist piece
of shit didn't deserve to be shot, if not worse.

Because the fucker had key intel about the
whereabouts of his boss, and his team was under orders to bring him
in alive at all reasonable cost.

"Must be a fucking cave up there," he heard
Skip—so nicknamed because he was a prep school boy from
Connecticut—yell as they returned fire on the dozens of Taliban
soldiers now lining the ridge.

If there was, it wasn't on any of the intel
they'd gathered before planning their route. But it appeared the
enemy was accessing the ledge from a hole in the mountain.

How the fuck they got there undetected was a
mystery he had no time to solve as AK fire continued to rain down
on them.

He heard Skip grunt, and looked over to see
his teammate bleeding where a bullet had caught him in his upper
arm.

"We are pinned down and taking heavy fire,"
he heard Cheese yell. "Requesting air support immediately."

But it would take at least twenty minutes for
the jets to get here from the base.

Twenty minutes that passed in a blur as they
struggled to hold them off.

Bodies fell from the cliff side as they fired
kill shot after kill shot, but more appeared to take their place.
There was no way to know how many hostiles were hiding in the
recesses of the mountain.

The only good thing about these guys was that
though they were heavily armed and outnumbered Dylan's team, they
were shitty shots, peppering the air haphazardly with round after
round.

Plus, they didn't have the advantage of state
of the art body armor that Dylan and the others did.

But Al Abdul wasn't as well equipped, and
they needed to get him the hell out of here, stat.

After what felt like hours, the F15's
screamed overhead like a chorus of angels.

"Incoming! Get down!" Mac shouted.

There was a whooshing sound as the missile
honed in on the target. Dylan braced himself, his gaze focused on
the ledge above.

"Enjoy your seventy-two virgins,
motherfuckers!"

There was a sound like a thunderclap and his
whole world turned red.

The Last Chance bar was in full swing as
Dylan Decker followed his older brother, Damon, through the front
door. Bodies jostled for position at the bar and on the dance
floor.

Music blaring from the jukebox and the din of
voices straining to be heard above the sound of Garth Brooks hit
Dylan like a full frontal assault.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the scents of
spilled beer and crushed peanut shells, overlaid with the sweet
smell of perfume and hair product.

As he followed his brother through the crowd,
he felt the familiar, unwelcome, squeezing sensation in his chest,
followed by a sudden pounding of his heart against his ribcage.

Calm the fuck down,
he scolded
himself.

There was no reason in hell he should be
having one of his rifuckingdiculous mini panic attacks here at the
Last Chance, where he had spent countless nights drinking, dancing,
and trying to coax the cutest single girl on the floor into taking
him back to her place.

In the ten years since he'd left his tiny
town of Big Timber, Montana, for basic, a stop at the Last Chance
to see what was what was part of his routine, signaling his
re-entry back into civilian life if only for a few short days. The
signal he could relax, let his guard down, enjoy a break from the
unrelenting intensity that dominated his life as a Delta Force
operator.

But tonight, even as he pasted on a smile and
waved hello at the familiar faces dotting the crowd, he couldn't
shake the restlessness that had dogged him for the last few months,
ever since he'd been released from the hospital. The fire in his
belly that had pushed him through the pain of his recovery and
rehab until he'd commandeered his body back into the shape it was
in before the accident.

Other than a mess of scars running the length
of his right leg, no one would ever know he'd nearly bled out after
the misfired bomb turned his leg into hamburger.

Lying low, focusing on healing all these
months, had left him itchy and edgy, ready to get back into action
with his team before the boredom finally pushed him over the
edge.

Which made his CO, Zander McWilliams's
decision to send Dylan off on an extended, four week leave before
his final medical evaluation all the more frustrating.

Go home. Get healthy. Get your head on
straight so you can come back a hundred percent.

A few days ago, Dylan had requested to leave
Fort Bragg for a few days to attend a surprise party for his
brother, Deck. McWilliams had floored him by telling him to take
nearly a month.

"No way," Dylan protested. It was bad enough
having to hang around base, knowing he was missing out on a covert
op only because he'd wake up one morning to find his teammates had
vanished.

But being banished to civilian life, even
farther out of the loop for four weeks?

Unbearable.

But McWilliams refused to back down. "If you
don't want to do it for yourself, do it for the rest of us. We're
tired of seeing your grumpy-ass mug around here. Besides, once
you're back in action, who knows when you'll see your family
again."

Dylan conceded he'd been in a surly mood
since his injury. Who could blame him? He'd always been a man of
action, always wanted to be on the front lines, in the thick of the
fight. When he'd become a Delta Force operator, he knew it was the
job he was meant for.

Was it easy? No. Fun? Not by most people's
definition. But he couldn't imagine doing anything else.

And right now, spending a month in the sleepy
mountain town where he grew up?

Sounded like torture.

Pull up your shorts and stop being such a
whiny bitch,
an internal voice that sounded a lot like his CO
snapped.
You've got a month off with your family and
friends—something the other guys would kill for. Stop feeling sorry
for yourself and make the fucking best of it.

He wove with Damon through the crowd, trying
take comfort in the fact that no matter where he went, no matter
how much fucked up shit he saw in the world, things at home stayed
remarkably the same.

As always, the Last Chance was crowded with
locals—the place was far enough off out of town and sketchy enough
looking not to attract the tourist crowd that overflowed the places
downtown this time of year.

And as usual, Damon was headed for a corner
table next to the jukebox, which had been the Decker brothers’
unofficial spot since they'd scored fake IDs back in high
school.

"Dylan!" he felt his mouth pull into a smile,
a real one this time, as two female voices squealed his name in
stereo and he found himself with an armful of curvy blonde
exuberance. His grin widened as Molly Tanner, who'd been one of his
best friends since her mother moved them back to Big Timber in the
fourth grade, squeezed him so tight he could barely breathe.

Over her head he caught sight of Molly's
friend, and his breath caught for another reason. Long, reddish
brown hair, big dark eyes with the kind of lashes most women had to
buy.

And her mouth... red and full lipped even
though it was stretched in a grin that took up the bottom half of
her face. The kind of mouth that put the kinds of thoughts in his
head that sent all the blood in his body flowing south.

Maybe this month won't be so torturous
after all,
he thought as Molly released her death grip and
stepped away.

Warmth curled in his gut as he stepped toward
the brunette, tearing his gaze away from her face to scan the body
that more than matched what was above her shoulders. Tall—he
guessed her to be almost six feet—with long, lean legs and curves
in all the right places.