“A.J. has to help. Chet’s injured.”

  Kane turned to find her backstage and practically ran into her as she appeared before him in the wings. “What do you need?” she asked. Her eyes darted to the stage for just an instant. He saw the flare of panic and pain, but then she forced her attention back to him. Her determination was clear.

  “Where is the control room? The one that Chet took the lighting guy to the other night, for the stadium lights?”

  A.J. bit her lip. “There’s two. There’s one for the overall stadium, and one for events. I’m not sure which one the lights would be considered, and I don’t know where Chet took him. One’s on one side of the stadium, the other is beneath the stage.”

  “Let’s check out the one here first,” he said.

  Kane heard the same spaced-apart shots. Of course, they were computer-operated. How in the hell hadn’t he realized within the first sixty seconds? A.J. was already running across the backstage towards the stairs, her long legs easily eating up the ground.

  He couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. She was whispering. Muttering. Finally, it was clear.

  “Left? Right? Fuck. Think.”

  He caught her and pulled her arm when they got to the bottom of the stairs.

  “It’s okay,” he said. The last thing anybody needed was for someone to panic.

  “I’ve only been to the events control room once.” Her eyes were blazing as she wrenched out of his hold. She pointed down the narrow hall. “I’m almost one hundred percent sure it’s this way. The stadium room is over on the other side below the VIP stands, but it’s on the underground level. It’s a maze down there. I can’t give directions over the comm.” He could see her frustration.

  “It’s okay, Cullen will figure it out, won’t you Cullen?” Kane asked.

  “On it. Who’s with me?” Cullen asked.

  “I am,” Gray said. Dex and Dalton, get over here.”

  “Can’t,” Dalton said. “I’m elbows deep in a chest here in the audience.”

  “I’m with you, Lieutenant,” Wyatt Leeds said over the comm.

  Kane kept following A.J.. She skidded to a stop in front of a gray door that had words written in Arabic. She fumbled with her keys. He stilled her hand and grabbed them from her.

  “I’ll unlock and open, you go in with the gun, isn’t that the way it goes?” she whispered.

  “You stand way the hell out of the way because I have body armor, that’s the way it goes,” he whispered back.

  She opened her mouth, then she nodded and went to the side of the door.

  Kane quietly unlocked the door. He pushed it in a half inch. It squeaked.

  Of course.

  “Uncle?” a young voice asked in Arabic.

  “Yes,” Kane answered in the same language.

  “It’s going so much better than we thought it would,” came the same young voice. “I’m watching the video.”

  Kane didn’t need to hear another word. He slammed the door open. It hit the wall. His gun easily found his target. The surprised look on the young man’s face was Kane’s focus, and he used it when he made his shot.

  He tuned out A.J.’s gasp. No time for that. He needed to stop the gunfire. He needed to stop it now. Kane strode through the room and tapped the keyboard before even pushing the body the rest of the way out of the chair and sat down. Good, he hadn’t been locked out.

  “Kane’s found and killed the guy operating the remote-control rifles,” A.J. was calmly reporting to the team into her mic.

  “How soon can he shut down the shooting?” Max asked.

  Kane looked at the code in Arabic. He didn’t read Arabic. Nor did this shit make sense. “Working on it now. Need a minute,” Kane said as his fingers hovered over the keyboard. He looked behind it to unplug the fucker. It was hardwired to a computer tower.

  “We don’t have a fucking minute,” Max growled. “People are dying.”

  Fuck this noise.

  “Over here,” A.J. called.

  Kane jerked up from the screen and keyboard.

  All of the switches on the wall were labeled in Arabic, but they had to be connected to the stadium lighting because otherwise the little shit couldn’t have been connected to the big lights.

  God.

  Love.

  Her.

  A.J. was frantically pulling big levers and pressing switches from green to red.

  Kane grinned. She was definitely on the right track. He pulled out the knife she loved so much and cut the power cord, then watched as the computer shut off…old school.

  “Leo, how many more seconds before we know if the shooting stopped?” Kane asked.

  “Four. Three. Two. One.”

  “Anybody see a shot?” Kane demanded to know.

  He knew everybody was on tenterhooks.

  They all waited ten more seconds.

  “Whoo-hoo, the shooting stopped!” Nick Hale yelled.

  “Well done,” Max Hogan said.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Cullen asked. “Cause I’m still lost looking for a room in the basement.”

  “He used his knife to his advantage,” A.J.’s smile was huge.

  Kane listened to his teammates and the men of Black Dawn chuckle.

  “Now don’t just stand there basking in your glory. We’ve got injured to attend to,” A.J. rolled her eyes. Then she shut off her mic and reached over and shut off his mic.

  “Okay, just another minute of glory basking.” She said as she shoved the receiver out of both of their ears so they wouldn’t be bothered with endless chatter.

  “You’re fucking amazing. So amazing.” She bit the tip of his chin. “Bend down, I need a kiss.”

  He didn’t. Instead he looked into her clear blue eyes.

  “I can’t believe I found you. How could that have possibly happened?”

  “Bend down.” She pulled at his neck and he gave way.

  Her lips were so soft. Never had she given so much of herself. A.J. poured everything into this kiss. Who she was. Her past. Her present. Her future.

  She pulled away. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Do you trust me?” Kane held his breath.

  “I trust you with my heart. With my soul.”

  “Because you, A.J. Lancaster, are the most important thing in the world to me. Ah, Love, you’re my universe.”

  A.J. burst out laughing.

  “What?” Kane demanded. “What’s so damned funny?”

  “That’s kind of my name. You said it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Love.”

  “Love is your name?”

  “Yep, my crazy-assed Mom in one of her crazy-assed moments decided to name me Aphrodite Justice.”

  “Aphrodite?”

  “If you tell anyone, I’ll have to kill you. I had it legally changed to A.J.. Now listen here, McNamara, if I hear the name Aphrodite come out of your mouth, I’m going for your knife.”

  “Can I call you Love sometimes?”

  He saw her blue eyes darken.

  “Only on special occasions. Like when you save the world.”

  “Okay, Love, come to Virginia Beach. Spend some time with me.”

  She stared at him so long he worried. Finally, she nodded her head and then she started talking.

  “Okay, basking is done. Let’s get our asses upstairs.”

  19

  Unlike the talent, A.J.’s trailer had been one of the first trailers that had been returned to the RV center the day before the event. That meant when she needed to have her nervous break-down she ended up in Python’s trailer with his cats. That just made her cry harder when she knew that he was in surgery. But now she had her game face on.

  She filed into the conference room that Max had commandeered for some kind of wrap-up session. She’d suggested the room for them—it was well away from prying eyes here at the stadium. The two SEAL teams and Lieutenant Commander McAllister asked her to participate as well, which had stunned her.

  “Is that cat hair?” Kane asked as he sat down beside her.

  She looked over at him to give him shit in return, and saw blood. It made her cringe. She looked around. A lot of men had blood on them. She was pretty sure it was other people’s blood where they had administered to the wounded, but maybe not.

  “Let’s get down to business,” Liam started. “Kane, you stated that the kid in the computer room called you Uncle, is that right? Asher, why do you think it was the guy you took out?”

  “The guy was running up the staircase that Kane and A.J. had gone down. I was just bringing down a wounded acrobat from the catwalk. The guy was pushing past everybody. When he pushed down a man carrying a wounded woman, I yelled at him to stop. He didn’t. I started to run after him, that was when he pulled a gun. I took him out with a headshot. There were just too many civilians around, I wasn’t going to risk trying to take him alive.”

  “It was the right decision,” Max said.

  “That’s two terrorists accounted for,” Liam said. “Rashid and his men have tracked down the electric company that normally does the work on the lights. They went to their place of business. They found the five men in the back room, all dead and two of their cranes are unaccounted for.”

  “Well, we can account for the trucks’ whereabouts two days ago,” Kane said bitterly. “We can’t possibly think that just the kid and his uncle did that, can you? Taking out the five guys I mean.”

  “Highly doubtful,” Liam agreed.

  “Everything outside of the stadium was Rashid’s responsibility,” Max said.

  Fifteen pairs of eyes swung to him.

  Max raised his hands, palms out. “I’m just telling you the agreed upon parameters, as far as I’m concerned, we are the ones that screwed the pooch on this one, gentlemen.”

  A.J. let out a small sigh of relief. She was going to think worse of Max if he was going to pass the blame.

  “They’re getting better at this,” Liam said. “They’re keeping information to smaller and smaller groups of people and then carrying out missions that require far less manpower so that it is less likely someone will get caught or talk before the mission. This one was smooth. Gray questioned Chet at the hospital. According to him, there were two guys doing the lamping of the lights. They were there for hours. One of Rashid’s men did a cursory check of their equipment, but obviously not thorough enough.”

  “For God’s sake, they even connected cable in order to get the connection they needed.” Kane was outraged. “What about at two-o’clock in the morning when they did the systems test? Was the kid there?”

  “Chet says no.”

  “Good to see he didn’t overlook that.”

  “Kane, lay off Chet,” A.J. murmured.

  “You’re right, this is on our head. We all take the blame for this, it went down on our watch,” Kane shook his head tiredly.

  “Kane, you can take a lot of credit for the success of this op. You shut this shit down fast, if you hadn’t it could have been much worse,” Liam said. He turned to Max and Gray. “Your teams went above and beyond.”

  “It could have been so much better if the Sultan had taken it seriously and given us more manpower to begin with,” Asher said.

  “We’ll talk about that in a moment,” Max said. “Let’s move to A.J.’s portion of the meeting,” he gave her a smile.

  A.J. realized that something deeper was going on that she couldn’t be privy to. That was fine by her. She felt privileged to be part of what they had allowed her to listen in on as is.

  “A.J., I know you’ve been working with the hospitals. What’s the numbers?” Max asked.

  A.J. pulled up her little notebook.

  “Four dead contestants. Seven in the audience dead, which included two reporters. And we’ve got twenty-two hospitalized, four aren’t expected to make it. I really need a story to tell the press. What everybody’s clamoring for is whether the next two nights will be safe. Will they?”

  “A.J., there was one arm of this particular cell that was working on this project. This attack ended with what went down today. Is it possible someone else, another terrorist, has their eye on your show? Anything’s possible,” Max said.

  “Can I say that? Is that okay to release to the press?”

  “Yes, you can,” Liam said.

  “Okay,” she got up from her chair. “No rest for the wicked. By the way, how’s Zed?” she asked.

  “They flew him home last night,” Hunter said. “He’s mending faster than they expected.”

  “That’s good.” She opened the door and headed out.

  “Come on, you know you can’t talk about that kind of political shit in front of civilians,” Kane admonished Asher.

  Asher sank down in his chair and looked around the room, “Sorry.”

  “Fine. Ash is sorry. But he’s wrong.” Cullen said. “It would have been good if the Sultan had given us any manpower, let alone some. Liam, does the Sultan have his head out of his ass now? Now that he knows we’re on the side of the angels, does he believe that we’re not working against him?”

  Liam paused. “Somewhat. The Sultan has to look at facts, and the fact is that we saved the day, so he’s seeing that we’re here to help. Unfortunately, he still has an asshole whispering in his ear that we’re in league with the Saudis. I’ve identified who the mole is, but he’s family to the Sultan. There’s no way he’ll ever believe that this man is working with al-Qaeda.”

  “Seriously?” Max asked.

  “Seriously.” Liam looked disgusted.

  “So al-Qaeda is going to continue to stir up shit with Oman,” Gray sighed. “Great. Wonderful. Christmas in the desert again.”

  “Kind of a shitty attitude, don’t you think, considering it’s only April?” Liam raised his eyebrow.

  “Cut him some slack, he’s a newlywed,” Max grinned.

  “Sorry. Tired I guess,” Gray agreed.

  “You’re all tired,” Liam looked around the room. “I can’t tell you just how proud Captain Hale and I are of you.”

  “How about Rear Admiral Anders?” Kane asked. “Is he proud?” He watched Liam intently. He noticed that Max and Gray turned to watch Liam as well.

  “The Rear Admiral knows what a fine group of men serve under him,” Liam said.

  “That’s a bullshit answer,” Max said.

  “Leave it.” Liam gave him a hard stare. “Guys, you’re going home.”

  Asher raised his hand. Kane sank deeper into his seat because he knew what was coming.

  “Yes?” Liam nodded at him.

  “Can I take leave and stay and watch the rest of the performances?”

  “Asher,” Max growled.

  Liam gave Max the side-eye and smiled. “Sure,” he said to Asher. “If anybody else wants to take some R-and-R and stay here until the grand finale, it’s fine by me.”

  Kane perked up. Hell, yeah he was staying. He noted that Cullen was sitting straighter too.

  Cullen and Asher immediately glommed onto Kane as he filed out of the room. “What’s the skinny on you and A.J.?” Cullen asked as soon as everybody walked by.

  “Cullen only wants to know so he can swoop in if you haven’t sealed the deal,” Asher said in a solemn tone, but his eyes were twinkling.

  “Cullen, I dare you to try to swoop in,” Kane said. “In fact, I want to be there to watch.”

  “It’s like that, is it?”

  “Oh yeah.” Kane thought about those moments in the control room. He might not have gotten a life-long commitment, but Aphrodite was his woman.

  “Come on, let’s see what we can do to help A.J. and her team for the next Semi-Final,” Asher said.

  Kane gave a slow smile. He was going to get her into his hotel room tonight if it was the last thing he did.

  Epilogue

  Cabin her ass. When Kane said he had a little place on a lake in Virginia, she hadn’t expected a movie star hideout. She stretched her legs onto the deck railing and sipped her ice-cold glass of pinot grigio and plucked another grape out of the bowl.

  This was living.

  She flipped through the script that Shelly had sent to her. Her friend was really excited about this one. In her words, it was the one. Of course, Shelly was in love at the moment, so A.J. took her perspective with a grain of salt.

  Really? Really? You’re going to dis on your girl like that when you’re in love too? Does that mean your ability to be logical is shot to shit?

  A.J. took another sip of Kane’s fine wine and sat back and turned to the first page of the script. Two pages in and she was hooked. She was pissed off thirty minutes later when her cell phone rang and interrupted her reading, but it was Paul, so she had to take the call.

  “Hey, Paul, how are you feeling?”

  “When are you going to stop asking me that?” the man complained.

  “I don’t know, maybe when you’re healthy?”

  “The doctor gave me the all-clear weeks ago. They only removed my gallbladder, it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “How’s your weight? Blood pressure? Are you still taking your pre-diabetes medicine?”

  “You are a pain in my ass, did you know that?”

  A.J. laughed. She could hear the pleasure in his voice. Paul didn’t have many people in his life who mothered him, so he was happy that she cared. What’s more, now that he had the scare and was taking care of himself, DiDi had asked him out on a date. So, life was really looking up for Paul Seaton.

  “Actually, I’m calling as Python Sexton.”

  “Oh, God, why is he calling?” A.J. moaned.

  “He’s one of your investors. When are you going to stop playing house in Virginia and come up with something to produce?”

  A.J. looked down at the script in her lap and closed it.

  “I have to find something first. It takes time.”

  “Bullshit. Shelly sent me a copy of ‘Lucky Star.’ It’s perfect. You’re perfect to produce it. Get your fledgling little production company up and running. I’m putting money in, Don’s going to get you more. Now get ‘er done.”

  “I’ve only produced game shows and live shows, not movies.”

 

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