The Rookie: A Romantic Suspense Standalone (The Intelligence Unit Book 1) Read online

  “I told you,” Tara said, eyeing him from the gurney. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” Dr. Riley corrected. “But apparently, you’ve caused quite a ruckus in my waiting room.”

  “I have?” Tara asked, and shit. Xander hadn’t wanted to rile her up, but…

  “Yeah. I guess Sansone resisted when the Intelligence Unit tried to take him into custody. They tried to bring him in without a fuss, but he went for one of the guards’ guns, and…”

  “Detective Hollister tasered him into next week,” Dr. Riley said, not unhappily. “Don’t worry. We’ll get him nice and fixed up so he can stand trial. Between him and the huge dude recovering from a concussion just like yours, I’m sure you’ll be busy when you feel up to working again.”

  “Oh, yeah, no,” Tara said. “My boss is going to take this one. I’m officially done with Ricky Sansone and his partner.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Dr. Riley said. “Well, get some rest. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, but when you’re ready to be released, just let me know. I assume Officer Matthews, here, will be your caretaker?”

  “Yes,” Xander said without hesitation. “I’ll make sure she gets whatever she needs.”

  “Great. Take your time. Just ring the nurses’ station if you need anything.”

  Xander thanked her quietly before turning to Tara. “You scared the ever-loving shit out of me today, you know.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Tara said, her auburn brows furrowing. “Amour’s okay, though, right?”

  “She’s perfect,” he said, because he knew she wouldn’t rest until she was absolutely certain Amour was just fine. “After Judge Waters suspended the trial, she went to the Thirty-Third with Isabella. Apparently, Amour is a whiz at picking out a baby registry.”

  “Seriously?” Tara asked, and Xander raised one hand.

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “You’re better than a Boy Scout, Xander,” she said, her expression growing serious as she reached for his hand. “If you hadn’t gotten there when you did—”

  “Stop,” he said, because seriously, he couldn’t bear the thought of what if. “I did get there. And you created the perfect opening for me to get you out of there.”

  “You trusted the Intelligence Unit to have your back,” she said, and here, he had to nod.

  “You trusted me, and I trust them.”

  “So, I guess that makes you a good man after all.”

  “It makes me a man who’s falling in love with you.”

  Xander’s face flushed with heat, and okayyyy, guess he was going to say that out loud.

  Still, it didn’t feel wrong. In fact, the words felt perfect.

  So he said them again. “I love you, Tara. I know it sounds a little impulsive and crazy, but I do. I’ve known it from the minute I saw you, marching toward me at that crime scene with your hands on your hips and all that fire in your eyes. You’re smart and fierce and perfect. You stand up for what’s right, and I always want to stand beside you. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, and wait…

  “You do?”

  “Of course I love you,” Tara said with a laugh. “Who else is going to keep me calm when murderous psychopaths try to kill me?”

  “You have a point,” Xander said. “Although, maybe we could skip the murderous psychopaths from now on, since we’ve had our fair share?”

  “Okay,” Tara agreed. “Just as long as there are rubber ducks, I think we’ll be just fine.”

  Not ready to leave Remington yet? Make sure to preorder the first full-length book in the Intelligence Unit series, “tall, dark, and broody” Detective Matteo Garza’s book, THE GUARDIAN, for a special price right here. While you wait for Matteo to steam up your e-reader, you can catch up on the Station Seventeen series right here (Kennedy and Gamble, Isabella, Capelli…they ALL have standalone romances! Follow the link for the first book, or keep reading to see them all in reading order.) And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter right here for all sorts of exclusives, like freebies and giveaways, sale notices, deleted scenes, new releases, and more!

  Sneak peeks and other works

  The Station Seventeen Engine Standalones (super-sexy firefighter/cop romantic suspense):

  Deep Trouble (Kylie and Devon’s story, best friend’s little sister/forbidden lovers) (prequel, with 1,001 Dark Nights)

  Skin Deep (Kellan and Isabella’s book, enemies to lovers)

  Deep Check (January and Finn’s book, second chance lovers)

  Deep Burn (Shae and Capelli’s book, opposites attract)

  In Too Deep (Luke and Quinn’s book, friends to lovers)

  Forever Deep (companion novella to Skin Deep, Christmas wedding story)

  Down Deep (Kennedy and Gamble’s book, forced proximity)

  The Remington Medical Contemporary Standalones (sexy medical romance)

  Back to You (Charlie and Parker’s book, second chance lovers)

  Better Than Me (Jonah and Natalie’s book, best friends to lovers/accidental roommates)

  Between Me & You (Connor and Harlow’s book, enemies to lovers)

  Beyond Just Us (Tess and Declan’s book, marriage of convenience/single parent romance)

  Baby, it’s Cold Outside (Emmett and Sofia’s book, Christmas story/enemies to lovers)

  The Cross Creek series (sexy small-town contemporary, available in KU):

  Crossing Hearts (second chance lovers)

  Crossing the Line (opposites attract)

  Crossing Promises (friends to lovers/workplace romance)

  Crossing Hope (forbidden lovers)

  The Line series (chef/first responder contemporary novellas):

  Love On The Line

  Drawing The Line

  Outside The Lines

  Pushing The Line

  All four books available in a bundle: The Line Collection

  Read on for a sneak peek at the first book in the Station Seventeen series (yes, Kellan and Isabella’s story!), SKIN DEEP.

  Kellan made his way up Washington Boulevard, where he’d parked yesterday morning before shift. Funny how quiet the city could be before things like rush hour and regular workdays kicked in, all soft sunlight and clean storefronts. He slid in a breath of cool air, scanning the sidewalk and the two-lane thoroughfare where Station Seventeen was situated.

  He saw the woman leaning against his ’68 Camaro from forty feet away.

  Kellan’s pulse flared even though his footsteps never faltered. Long, denim-wrapped legs leading to lean muscles and lush, sexy curves. Loose, confident stance that spoke of both awareness and strength. Long, caramel-colored hair that she tossed away from her face as soon as she saw him coming, and God dammit, that was the second time this week he’d been blindsided by Isabella Moreno.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, wincing inwardly as the words crossed his lips. Not that he didn’t feel every inch of the attitude behind them, because after her fuck-up had put his sister’s life in danger three months ago, he so did. But slapping his emotions on his sleeve wasn’t on Kellan’s agenda, good, bad, or extremely pissed off. Of course, Isabella already knew he was chock full of the emotion behind door number three, anyway.

  She pushed herself off the Camaro’s cherry red quarter panel, sliding one hand to her unnervingly voluptuous hip while the other remained wrapped around a cup of coffee. “Waiting for you.”

  “I got that.” His tone left the what-for part of the question hanging between them, and Kellan had to hand it to her. Moreno wasn’t the type to mince words.

  “I need a favor. I want you to walk me through the scene of Monday’s fire.”

  Jesus, she had a sense of humor. Also, balls the size of Jupiter. “You want me to take you back to the scene of a fire that gutted a three-story house just to give you a play by play?”

  She nodded, her brown eyes narrowing against the sunlight just starting to break past the buildings around them. “That ab
out sums it up, yeah.”

  “It’s a little early for you to be punching the clock, isn’t it?” he asked. Most people weren’t even halfway to the door just shy of oh-seven-hundred on a weekday morning.

  Moreno? Not most people, apparently. “What can I say? I’m feeling ambitious.”

  Kellan resisted the urge to launch a less-than-polite comment about her work ethic, albeit barely. “I already told you and Sinclair everything I know.”

  “Okay.” Her shoulders rose and fell beneath her dark gray leather jacket, easy and smooth. “So humor me and walk me through it again anyway.”

  His sixth sense took a jab at his gut, prompting him to give the question in his head a voice. “Is this part of the investigation?”

  “Why do you ask?” she said, and yeah, that was a no.

  “Because you called it a favor, and you just answered my question with a question.”

  Moreno paused. “I’m a cop. We do that.”

  Nope. No way was he buying this. Not even on her best day. “And I’m a firefighter who’s not interested in putting his ass in a sling just to humor you with an unsanctioned walk-through.”

  The RFD might offer a little latitude on firefighters revisiting scenes—a fact Kellan would bet his left nut Moreno damn well knew—but just because he’d worked the job didn’t mean he had carte blanche to prance through the place like a fucking show pony now that the fire was out.

  Not that a little thing like protocol seemed to bother Isabella in the least. “Your ass will be fine. I’ll take full responsibility.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that one from you before.”

  The words catapulted out before Kellan could stop them. Moreno flinched, just slightly, but it was enough. “Look, I need to get back onto that scene,” she said. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  His brain formed the word “no”, but all of a sudden, he registered the weary lines bracketing her eyes and the shadows that went with them like a matched set of good and tired, and his mouth tapped into something entirely different. “Did you even sleep last night?”

  An image of her in bed, honey-bronze skin against pristine white sheets, barreled through his mind’s eye, and Jesus. Maybe he was the one who needed some shuteye if his subconscious was going to go off the deep end like that.

  “Not really, no,” Isabella said, shifting her weight from one heavily soled boot to the other in order to stand at flawless attention on the sidewalk. “I was a little busy worrying about those girls in the pictures you found.”

  The answer hit him like the sucker punch it was. Fuck. Fuck. “Your boss doesn’t seem to find them quite as concerning,” Kellan managed, and at her look of surprise, he continued. “If he did, he’d have opened an official investigation and you wouldn’t have needed to haul yourself all the way down here at o’dark-thirty to ask me to get you into that house, right?”

  For a long minute, she just studied him with those chocolate-brown eyes. But rather than copping to anything, Moreno said, “And what’s your gut on those pictures, hmm?”

  Damn. For a detective who had botched the hell out of keeping Kylie safe, she sure was asking all the right questions to get him to cave.

  Unease tightened his muscles, speeding his heartbeat by just a notch. “I have a sister. What do you think?”

  “I think those photos are evidence of a crime being committed against the women in them, and I think you wouldn’t have had your captain call them in unless you do, too.”

  She’s kind of got you there, dude. Kellan exhaled, mashing down on his inner voice. “So how come your sergeant doesn’t agree?”

  “I never said he didn’t,” Moreno pointed out. Her expression matched the utterly noncommittal tone of her words, but come on. He hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck, for Chrissake. She wouldn’t ask him to bring her back to the scene of this fire unless it was her last resort.

  Kellan hit her with a high-level frown. “If you want me to consider helping you out here, the least you can do is not bullshit me before I’m caffeinated.”

  “Fine.” She pressed her lips together, a swath of light brown hair serving as cover for her eyes as she lasered her gaze toward the sidewalk beneath her feet. “Hypothetically, on occasion we catch cases that don’t have quite enough evidence to pursue in an official capacity.”

  Seriously? “You have pictures,” he said. What better evidence was there?

  “Yeah, and that’s all I have. Pictures of women I can’t identify, who might be of legal age and participating in consensual acts.”

  Kellan’s stomach knotted. He was hardly vanilla when it came to sex, but the girls in those photos had looked terrified, not to mention dangerously young. Role play was in a whole different universe than rape. “You don’t really think what’s going on in those photos is consensual, do you?”

  “You don’t really think I’d ask you to take me back to the spot where you found them to look for more evidence if I did, do you?” Moreno asked archly, and damn, she was tough.

  Too bad for her, so was he. “Let me get this straight. You want me to take you back to a house the fire marshal has almost certainly condemned, without the permission or knowledge of your sergeant or my captain, just because you have a gut feeling that can’t be substantiated by any evidence found at the scene?”

  “Give the firefighter a gold star. That’s exactly what I want.”

  Kellan took it back. Jupiter wasn’t big enough for the stones on this woman. “Give me one good reason why I should put my ass on the line for you.”

  Before he could move or blink or even breathe, Isabella had stepped toward him, so up close and personal that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face as she said, “Because I don’t want you to put your ass on the line for me at all. I want you to do it for those women. You and I seem to be the only people who think this case is worth pursuing right now, and I can’t change that without more evidence, which I can’t get if you don’t help me. So are you in or not?”

  And don’t forget to read this sneak peek of Kennedy and Gamble’s book, DOWN DEEP, too!

  Ian Gamble was going to get good and fucking drunk. A solid bender wasn’t usually in his repertoire, what with the whole twenty-four hours on, forty-eight hours off thing he did at the fire house. By the time he caught up on his sleep and his workouts, there wasn’t usually much time to get shit-faced and recover, especially if he was going to abide by Remington Fire Department’s eight-hours-from-bottle-to-throttle rule. Being Station Seventeen’s engine lieutenant and a former Marine, Gamble was big on regs. Order. Control.

  But tonight was an exception. One he made every August. One he’d continue to make until the day he went into the ground.

  Because he was the only person left from his recon unit who could.

  “Hey, boss! Who died?”

  The words, spoken by Gamble’s engine-mate and resident smartass, Shae McCullough, ripped into the old scars he kept hidden, turning them fresh and raw. “What?”

  She traded a tiny bit of the sparkle in her stare for concern, sliding into the space next to him at The Crooked Angel’s bar. There was no way McCullough could know how spot-on her words had been, namely because Gamble had never told another living soul all the gory details (okay, fine…or any details) of his past as a Marine, aside from his CO and the headshrinker they’d made him see after he’d come home from Afghanistan. But he had to give his friend credit. She wasn’t an idiot. In fact, right now, she was looking at him shrewdly enough to make his heart pump out a potent cocktail of defenses and dread.

  “That’s a mighty serious look you’re wearing,” McCullough said, and yeah, it was time to lock this shit up, no matter how tight the two of them were.

  “All good. Just having a drink since we’re not on shift tomorrow.” Gamble picked up his beer for a nice, long draw as proof, rolling his shoulders beneath his T-shirt and leather jacket combo. “What about you?”

  The gruff redirect worked, just
as he’d known it would. “I’m watching DC lose her shirt to Faurier,” McCullough said brightly.

  Shit. “Please tell me that’s not literal.”

  Without waiting for a response, he turned from his spot at the bar to laser a stare at the pool table by The Crooked Angel’s side door. Lucy de Costa, who had been nicknamed “DC” by both McCullough and their other engine-mate, Kellan Walker, on her first day in-house a couple of months ago, was standing among the other firefighters from Seventeen and a few cops from the Thirty-Third district, wearing an epic frown and—thankfully—her damned shirt.

  McCullough threw her head back and laughed. “Please. Girlfriend might be a rookie, but she’s not making that rookie mistake. Especially not with a horndog like Faurier.”

  Gamble exhaled in relief. Not that it was technically any of his business who de Costa got down and dirty with. But she was brand-spanking-new to the RFD, and it was his job to look out for her. Plus, if she decided to ride the bone train with their rescue squad’s second-in-command—or any other firefighter at Seventeen, for that matter—it would likely make Gamble’s universe a fuck-ton more complicated in terms of getting her and her bed-buddy to focus. Especially when shit started burning down.

  “I assume you’re talking about Lucy,” said McCullough’s live-in boyfriend and tech brainiac for the police department’s elite intelligence unit, James Capelli, as he walked up to stand beside her. Gamble wasn’t shocked to see the guy, mostly because he and McCullough were far enough gone for each other to be attached at the hip most of the time, but also because Gamble’s head was on a permanent swivel. He’d seen Capelli approaching from fifteen paces out. Not to mention where he, and nearly everyone else in the bar, had been in the room for the last fifteen minutes on top of that. Score one for the highest state of awareness. Not that Gamble could turn that shit off even if he wanted to.