The End Zone: SPORTS ROMANCE (Contemporary Sport Bad Boy Alpha Male American Football Romance) (New Adult Second Chance Women’s Fiction Romance Short Stories) (23 page)

He failed to suppress a grin, and Nikki sensed that she had guessed correctly. “Oh my God! Our little sailor boy lost his virginity! Who was the charitable lady, Kirk? Did some girl stumble drunk into your apartment?”

“If I told you who it was, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

“Oh, come on—someone we know?”

“Someone I need to talk to the boss about.”

“Holy shit! Kirk slept with Natasha, the Russian spy.”

“No,” Phil said. “It was Ivana, Ivana Fukalot. She gets those long Russian legs wrapped around a guy one time, and he’s wrapped around her finger forever.”

“That sounds great,” Jed added. “Does she have a sister?”

“What is it with you and sisters, Jed?” Mary had just walked into the room.

“Kirk slept with a Russian spy and her sister,” Nikki said, “so now he thinks he needs to talk to you.”

“That true, Kirk?”

“Well, I do need to talk to you about a woman, and you may not be very happy about it.”

“Holy Moly, it wasn’t some CIA bigwig’s wife, was it?”

“No. Worse, I think. And I’m going to need some favors.”

“Uugh, I knew someone was going to ruin my Friday.” Mary stood up. “Okay Romeo, let’s go to my office.”

Once they got settled in the boss’s office, Kirk laid out the past day’s events in chronological order and was surprised to see Mary’s expression turn lighter as the tale went on, with a minor frown as he related the part about Linda’s ex-husband. By the end, he had to ask why she looked to happy.

“Well hell, I’m a sucker for a good love story. And I love being right. I made it known from the outset that I didn’t think it was a good idea to draw an unwitting American into an overseas operation—too many unknowns.” She shook her head. “Also wasn’t my job to make sure the woman didn’t live in the same apartment complex as the officer who bumped her. Personally, I wouldn’t have approved that bump on anyone from all of Northern Virginia.” 

“So what about Ms. Dorgan and her friend?”

“You can tell your girlfriend as much as you want, and the friend can know that you were traveling under an alias, but nothing beyond that. Do you think Linda can draw that line?”

“I’m sure she can, Ma’am.”

“Knock of that ‘ma’am’ crap.  I’ll make some calls on this asshole cop, and you can start the weekend early with your lover. “

“Thanks, Mary.” Kirk said. “I think I’m the best option for keeping her safe.”

“Avoid confrontation, Kirk. Also, just leave here without telling the others about your girl. I’m going to have some fun with that before I break it to the team.”

*****

Linda woke to find her dress folded neatly at the foot of the bed along with a few t-shirts and some cotton athletic shorts with drawstring waists. Her phone sat atop the pile. She read Kirk’s note and decided that she didn’t at all mind staying away from her own apartment for a few hours. Instead, she walked to the bathroom for a shower and found unopened bottles of shampoo and conditioner set out for her next to a folded bath towel on a low bench.  

She was lounging in shorts and a t-shirt with a fresh cup of coffee when she spotted her shoes set neatly by the door and her panties hanging from the knob. For a brief moment, she considered hanging them on the outside for Kirk to find when he returned, but then she imagined a surprise visit from Kirk’s sister, or his mom.   That would not be good, though it might become a funny story told at some holiday dinner a few years down the road.

Linda was scrolling through email on her phone when she heard a small pop come from somewhere near the door. As she stood to investigate the noise, the door swung open and Joe stepped in with his Taser drawn.  Her last thought before crumpling onto her broken coffee cup was that being Tased hurt way more than she would have expected.

She regained consciousness in the trunk of Joe’s police cruiser, her hands cuffed to a metal ring in the floor.  Each bump along the way caused the cuffs to bite into her skin, and the bumps seemed to be coming in regular intervals, like speed bumps in a residential neighborhood.  There was no discernable traffic noise outside the trunk, even as the car accelerated for a long stretch. After a sharp turn, the car continued much slower for a minute before coming to a stop.  The engine turned off, and she heard him get out of the car.

When the trunk popped open, sunshine beamed in on her dilated pupils. She couldn’t see Joe at first as he stood off to the side, probably so she couldn’t kick at him when the trunk lid swung open. He may have been an asshole, but he was smart enough to learn from the mistakes of the previous evening, and he knew Linda would fight back if he gave her an opening.

He bent over her, and the metal ring popped open. Then he backed off and ordered her to step out of the car. His pump action shotgun was pointed at her as her bare feet touched the stone driveway.

“Turn around and close the trunk,” he said.

As the trunk clunked shut, she saw that they were in the driveway of a two-story brick McMansion adorned with yellow crime scene tape.

“Time to go inside, Honey. The door’s unlocked.” 

She stepped onto a cool marble foyer that opened onto a plush living room with a stairwell to the second floor on the left side and windows looking out over a creek to the right. More yellow tape crisscrossed the bottom of the stairway.

He marched her to a white leather couch and ordered her to sit, and then the cop in the overstuffed uniform sat opposite her in an overstuffed chair.  “I hope you like your new home,” he said. “It just became available last week.” He smiled, and she decided that his teeth were entirely too small for his puffy face.  “I’d give you a tour of the master bedroom, but a meth lab blew up under the stairs. It’d be a pity to see you fall into the basement.”

“How long do you think you can keep me here, Joe? How long before someone comes looking for you?”

“I’ve got a week off. That’s plenty of time to make you see the error of your ways and to put a beat-down on your little boyfriend. Maybe I’ll bring you some of his tender parts in a jar.”

“You’ll need a really big jar—bigger than I ever imagined before I met him.” She didn’t even know why she said it. She knew it was a dig at his insecurities, but she didn’t know why she made that particular dig while he sat across from her with a shotgun in his lap.

His ruddy complexion turned even more crimson as his jaw clenched and his eyes glared. He looked almost nothing like the man she had met and married. To think that they had tried to have children—that she kept trying even as his behavior became more controlling and her friends became more concerned. Now he sat across from her in puffy skin with a badge and a puffed-up ego surrounding a sad little core. And he thought she was his property, apparently, despite the fact that he had divorced her for another woman.

The divorce had been a blow to her, but she turned it into the blow that forged the blade. She was the stronger alloy now, and she sensed that he knew it as well; sensed that he could feel the rust in his veins and the lead in his gut, and it scared him.

And fear had led better people than him to do terrible things.

*****

Kirk knew what had happened the second he saw Linda’s phone and the broken coffee mug on the floor. He retrieved his semiautomatic pistol and a leather-handled fighting knife from a hidden lockbox in the closet and turned immediately back out of the apartment and called Mary, who asked for five minutes to contact a friend inside the Arlington County Police Department.  It was seven and a half minutes before she called back.

“I’ve got a location on Officer Asshole’s patrol car, Kirk. It’s in northern Arlington County just northwest of Chain Bridge. I’ll send you the lat/long via text. Also, I talked to our friends on the FBI side, and there’s not much they can do through unofficial channels. I can try the Virginia State Police, but they may do a handoff to the Arlington County Police. ”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“My contact worries that officer Platt may be monitoring their frequencies or that one of his buddies might send him a warning. There’s also the small matter of how my contact came to know about this in the first place.”

“No worries, Mary. I’m already heading north on the GW Parkway.”

“Are you armed?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No. I’m pretty sure you know how to take care of yourself, Kirk. I suppose you can forget what I said about avoiding confrontation.  I’ll get some kind of help to you as soon as I can. “

Kirk parked in a church parking lot off of Rt.123 and set off through the woods, staying parallel to the river.  He reached a small creek and turned to follow it uphill to the target, but there was too large an open area and too many windows on that side of the house, so he worked his way back down to the river’s edge and moved fifty meters upstream.  Then he turned ninety degrees and crept uphill again to where the woods were closer to the house.

He could see the back of the patrol car parked outside the attached garage, so the target was confirmed. The garage also offered the easiest and most concealed access to the roof, and it was always better to take a building from the top down, even if you had no grenades. Slow and smooth, he crept up to the garage, climbed onto a fence post and then onto the roof.  He made his way to a window and checked for alarms before laying a few strips of electrical tape on the window pane above the lock and tapping the point of his knife at the center of the glass.  The glass cracked in several directions, and he carefully removed it all, placing the rough triangles of glass on a shingle he’d bent up, to keep them from sliding off the roof.

The window opened easily enough, and Kirk listened for a minute before inching through it into an empty bedroom.  He moved down the hallway in a combat glide and cleared every room on the second floor before turning back to the stairs. He scooted down the first few stairs sideways and leaned to get a view of the floor below.  Linda and her ex sat across a low coffee table from each other in a large room. Kirk could see stainless steel handcuffs glinting on her wrists and the blue steel of a shotgun barrel in his lap.   Their shoulders were to the stairway, and Joe seemed warier of the front door than the stairs. Kirk would be somewhat behind him almost all the way down to the landing. Linda would have the opportunity to see Kirk much sooner as he descended the stairs, and he hoped she wouldn’t react.

He was almost two-thirds of the way to the landing when the center of the stairway collapsed. He dove forward, feet twisting behind him, and landed on his right shoulder.  His clavicle gave an unhealthy snap, and the pistol skittered across the landing to the main floor. Kirk rolled to his feet and lunged through police tape toward the towering police officer as the shotgun swung around quickly. The business end would be pointed at Kirk before he made contact.  He was just ready to roll onto the deck when Linda crashed into her ex and the shotgun swung too far and boomed. Kirk hit the man high, and the low coffee table cut his legs from under him so they rode over the stone table top together. The back of Joe Platt’s head smacked to the floor just as Kirk’s fist smashed into his face. Kirk snatched up the shotgun with his left hand, jumped clear, and pointed the weapon back at his opponent, but it was clear that the man wouldn’t be getting up any time soon.

Linda stood across the table from Kirk with her handcuffed wrists extended toward him. “Now that you’ve made your grand entrance, can you help a girl out?”

He found the key in a keeper on Platt’s belt and released her from the cuffs, all with his left hand, since he seemed unable to lift his right arm. Then he rolled Joe onto his stomach and let Linda have the honor of cuffing him. That seemed to signal the real end for her, and her relief came out in silent tears on Kirk’s shoulder.

“That was quite a fourth date,” Kirk said.

She lifted her head from his shoulder and kissed him. “You really know how to show a girl a good time.”

*****

By that evening, it was clear that Officer Joe Platt would survive his injuries, but would not survive the security footage of him shoving his ex-wife into the trunk of a police car. Kirk would survive as well, but a broken right clavicle and a broken bone in his left hand were going to keep him off of the traveling team for a while. Apart from some soreness, Linda was fine, and she didn’t mind at all that her big, tough SEAL needed some help in the shower.

She propped him up in bed that night sans clothing and then left to change into a sheer black babydoll she had fetched from her apartment. When she walked back into the bedroom his eyes widened and he gave a low whistle.

“Come to Papa, little lady,” he said, his fingers curling in a ‘come-hither’ motion.

She walked slowly up the side of the bed, letting her fingers trail up the inside of his leg and bump over his abs. “Remember: Some things are meant to be savored, taken in small bites.”

She bent to kiss him and let her hand drift to his navel and then slowly back up to his chest. Then she moved her lips to his ear and whispered, “Slow is smooth; smooth is fast, right?”

She stepped back, stripped the babydoll up over her head and tossed it onto his shins with an “Oops.”  Then she pinched a corner of the garment in her fingers and dragged it up his legs and around his swollen penis where it climbed like a snake on a branch until it crawled off onto his torso and she flipped it up onto the pillow beside his head.