Black Jack (Elite Ops 4)

Page 1

Chapter 1
Two months later
a steady, rain-filled wind whipped around the dark helmet covering Travis Caine’s head, sang around the leather pants and jacket he wore, and whispered a caress over the full, face-shielding helmet he wore. Heavy boots covered his feet, protecting him against the elements as rain poured down from the skies, and lightning lit the darkness with jagged forks of power.
The Harley he rode roared down the open highway, throbbing with the increased power it had been customized with. The display beneath the handlebars was lit with a muted glow indicating speed, time, and location. The embedded electronics in the night-vision shield of the helmet provided other readouts considered imperative in his line of work.
According to that information, he was growing closer to his destination and a mission he still wasn’t certain he was prepared to be a part of, because of the woman he was partnered with, because of a night they shouldn’t have shared.
He shouldn’t have loved her.
No, he shouldn’t have fucked her, he corrected himself. He immediately felt an edge of distaste at his attempt to make that night into something unemotional. Something less powerful than it had been.
It was a night he hadn’t been able to forget. In the past two months it had tormented him, torn at him, and left him hungry for more of her in ways he had never hungered for another woman before. She was the last woman he should have ever touched.
What the hell was she doing to him?
Elite Two and the women that were a part of that team were a hidden, rarely mentioned section of Elite Ops.
The Ops was more than the one team Jordan commanded, Travis had learned. For years he and the other agents under Jordan’s command had believed that Elite One was the only sanctioned operation and that the women they had helped train were meant to be backup, nothing more.
They hadn’t realized just how good those women were.
Elite Two had hidden even the slightest sign that they, too, were agents. No one had told Elite One what those women’s true purpose was, nor had anyone explained the full extent of the Elite Ops and the units that comprised it until after the Warbucks mission months before.
Warbucks had been stealing and selling top-secret military weapons as well as agents’ identities. He’d managed to infiltrate government agencies as well as the companies his father had had interest in to acquire the stolen resources.
Elite Two had gathered the information that had led them to Warbucks because of their covers as very exclusive, well-trained escorts.
Once the mission had revealed Warbucks’ identity, Elite Two had also managed to reveal his associates, his buyers, and his silent partners in many of the sales.
It was then he and the other agents had begun questioning the organization that had taken them in, that had saved them, and created new lives for them.
They’d learned it was much more extensive than they could have imagined. And the missions were drawing together slowly, linked by a thread of information here, a suspect there. Travis could feel it edging toward a single denominator, which made him begin questioning all the missions they were given.
This latest one had him questioning ev
en himself.
It was a damned dangerous game he was getting ready to participate in, and thinking about it left a sour taste in his mouth. Despite all the good it was doing, there were times the Elite Ops had little tact and even less taste. To use a woman in the manner they were prepared to use her had his back teeth clenching in anger and a sense of injustice rising inside him.
The fact they were using his woman, despite her agent status, only pissed him off more.
And he was damned if he could figure out why he was letting it bother him. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t learned the hard way how easily a woman could betray a man. He’d “died” with that lesson pounding in his head years ago, and when he’d been reborn, he’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t forget it.
He’d lost everything in his life because he’d trusted a woman and it wasn’t a lesson he cared to repeat. It was one he had sworn time and time again he wouldn’t repeat. But the minute he’d learned how the Elite Ops was forcing this woman to face her past, he’d become enraged.