Safe Heart (Search and Rescue #3) - Amy Lane Page 0,1

laid.

Shortly after he arrived, he needed to kill something.

Cash Harper was no party boy on a bender—he was a cunning, sneaky, clever little grifter who had managed to lay down a track of false IDs and goddamned disguises between Nayarit and Jalisco. And worst of all, people loved him.

There was a little town in the hills of Nayarit called Agujero en la Roca—Hole in the Rock for fuck’s sakes—that Glen knew well. For one thing, it had about ten buildings before it got leveled by a goddamned earthquake, and for another, he had knocked on every fucking door asking for “that sweet little American boy singer whose mother was so terribly worried.”

Of course by this time Glen had put together that Cash’s mother could have cared less about her son. Cash’s mother was busy screwing rich doctors in Jalisco and living the ex-pat life there by the lake. The one thing Glen had been able to gather about the kid was that Cash had damned near raised himself.

His agent, a friend of Glen’s from his military days, had been absolutely adamant that this kid be found. “Look—I don’t care about the money—”

“Ha!”

“No, seriously, Echo. This kid trusted me, I put him on a stage, and I protected him. He dragged his bestie along as part of his entourage, and I guess she got into the drug scene pretty hard. I know he’s got party boy written all over his résumé, but I’m thinking something else was going on when he specified he was going to be gone for—and I quote—thirty-five days max.”

Four more conversations like that with Clive Royer, and Glen could practically believe the kid was a saint.

But it didn’t matter if he wasn’t. Glen had given his word.

Finally—finally—frustrated and horny and pissed off at the world, Glen had ridden his motorcycle from Agujero en la Roca to Las Varas and walked into the nearest bar for nothing more than a beer.

A beer. Goddammit, that’s all he wanted.

And there, in a corner playing poker, was the kid whose picture he’d been studying since Clive had first contacted him.

The kid had looked over at him as he’d nursed his beer and seen Glen’s intent expression—eyebrows arched, head cocked—and had known the jig was up.

Sort of.

Glen approached the table, noting that the two guys with their hands toward him both had three aces.

“So you’re a friend of Clive’s?” Cash asked, over the mutter of the poker table—most of it in Spanish.

“I am.”

“Well, you know. Let me finish the game, and we can talk.”

Glen was about to say this kid could damned well talk to him now when he noticed a couple of things in quick succession.

One was that the kid had been winning. Big.

Two was that one of the guys with three aces was fondling a knife under the table.

Three was that the other guy was slowly pulling a gun.

Glen had nodded like everything was copacetic, and then, before he could think about what a complete and total dumbass he was, he’d dropped his beer and slammed the two cheaters’ heads against the table hard enough to concuss them.

“Run, kid!” Glen snarled, and all hell broke loose.

He emerged from the resulting melee with a cut over his eye, bruises over his kidneys, and a scratch down his shoulder from a knife he’d mostly ducked. He hauled ass for the back entrance and sprinted into the tiny alleyway behind the bar, only to find it empty.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!

Glen had kept running, figuring if he was snug in his hotel room before anybody figured the guy who started WWIII in a bar in Nayarit was already gone, nobody would spend too much time tracking his ass down, and he’d never have to call Damien from a Mexican prison, which was what they’d always told each other would be their last straw before they retired on a beach somewhere and wore nothing but Bermuda shorts and smiles.

Damien’s HEA was so damned close Glen wanted to smack him, and Glen was planning on rubbing his daiquiri-drinking, Bermuda-shorts-wearing, sleeping-with-all-the-pool-boys ass in Damien’s face, so he pretty much had to stay out of prison.

Ugh—speaking of Damien, Glen needed to contact him. After so many years of having each other’s backs, knowing where the other one was had become not just habit, but almost superstitious necessity. Glen’s contact from Damien had been the only reason they’d known where his helicopter had gone down—and the rescue presence near the crash site had probably saved Damien’s life.

He