Undercover Engagement by Samanthe Beck
Chapter Two
Marc Swain ran a hand over his wet hair, scattering water droplets on the gray vinyl tile floor as he made his way to the Commissioner’s Office in the Funderburk Building of the KDOCJ. A summons to report, mid-shower, in a near-to-last week of basic training could mean a lot of things. Right now, he feared it might mean dear old Dad had come out of nowhere and done something to fuck with his plans to embark on a post-military career with the County Sheriff’s Department. What exactly, he couldn’t guess, but Gerome Swain grifted and conned his way through life, and if dragging his only offspring into the latest scheme benefitted him in some way, Marc never doubted for a minute the man would do it and throw him to the wolves in the process. Family motto? Trust no one, least of all family.
Nerves or no, he paused at the commissioner’s assistant’s cubicle, rested an elbow on the elevated ledge, right next to the small vase of roses he recognized as fresh, and offered Brad a smile. Nodding to the vase, he said, “Based on the clues, I’m thinking someone had a good date with Steve the law student.”
Brad—newly single and ready to mingle—blushed. “We had a nice time, yes.”
“I’ll take that to mean you practiced safe sex. Don’t break that boy’s heart, y’hear?”
The blush deepened, but he replied with admirable sass. “I’m not the heartbreaker in this conversation, Swain. You win that crown, if Marcy Atwell can be believed.”
He’d taken Commander Atwell’s daughter out for a drink precisely once, at her insistence, and paid for five overpriced cosmos at her choice of the trendiest, most expensive bar in Richmond. He’d listened with the attention of a born observer as she—a twenty-eight-year-old woman—complained about how her father frightened away every man who showed interest in her. He’d refrained from pointing out that her drinking habits or spendthrift ways might have done the job all on their own. Then he’d taken her tipsy ass home and poured her into her apartment. Alone, as he had zero appetite for a one-night stand with a woman who’d drowned her capacity to consent somewhere in her second cosmo and to gracefully take no for an answer somewhere in her third. Interesting to learn she was casting herself as the misused one in their extremely brief association. Broken heart? More like wounded pride, but now he had a new reason to worry about this summons to the commander’s office.
He aimed innocent eyes at the dark-haired man. “Can’t believe everything you hear.”
Brad laughed. “Not out of her, no. Go on in.” He gestured to the closed office door. “They’re waiting for you.”
They? That sounded ominous. His stomach tightened at the prospect of the unknown. “Who’s ‘they’?”
Brad, however, knew who signed his paycheck. “They who want to see you,” he replied cryptically and tipped his head toward the office.
Marc combed his hand through his still-damp hair, pasted a no-worries smile on his face, and walked through the door. Inside the beige-and-glass room, Commander Atwell sat behind his modular desk of brushed nickel with faux beechwood finish. Sheriff Malone—his new boss—leaned against the window wall, his arms folded across the chest of his blue uniform shirt, looking like Tommy Lee Jones with a burly gray mustache. Bluelick Police Chief Shaun Buchanan sat in one of Atwell’s three guest chairs. Cool-as-ice, cock-torturingly sexy cadet Eden Brixton sat in another.
Naturally, she’d cut off his balls and staple them to the incident report if he ever called her sexy to her face, but that didn’t change the fact. She fascinated him. Not just her looks, though they factored. Yeah. He took her in from the top of her sleek, dark ponytail to the spit-shined tips of her black tactical boots. They definitely factored. All that smooth, brown skin he craved to touch. A long, agile body that had been straddling him last night in a particularly vivid dream.
Though it shocked the shit out of him, even her unapologetic ambition and single-minded commitment to her training appealed to him. If Brixton was on your six, your six was fucking covered. At the same time, her serious, no-nonsense attitude left him itching to coax a smile to her face. A face designed to break hearts—with wide hazel eyes that missed nothing and went green or gray depending on her mood; high Scandinavian cheekbones that turned the apples of her cheeks positively bitable when she sent him one of her tight, superior smirks; and lips so full and shapely even her sternest expression of disapproval couldn’t hide their lushness.
Not even the DEFCON 1 look of disapproval aimed at him right now.
“Swain,” Commander Atwell said. “Come on in. Close the door, please.”
Had she filed some kind of complaint against him? Really? Out of line as it may have been, he actually couldn’t control the way his body had reacted when she’d put her hands on him a week and a half ago during the pat-down practicum. Faced with the prospect of explaining to a room full of superiors as well as the woman in question that, with all due respect, Cadet Brixton could get him rock hard just by breathing, he preferred to take the fifth, which might get him bounced just shy of graduation. It wouldn’t be the first—or probably last—time his dick had gotten him into trouble, but it would suck like hell, because six years of finessing intel from unlikely sources on behalf of Uncle Sam had given him the notion that being on the badge side of the law might fit his particular skill set like a glove.
Swallowing the sour taste of disappointment, he offered Brix a grin. “We here to thumb-wrestle for the number-one spot, choux?”
“Keep your thumbs to yourself, cooyon,” Brix muttered. “My number-one slot isn’t up for grabs.”
The tension in his chest eased a bit at the debut of her new nickname for him. Cooyon. Fool. Dumbass. As endearments went, the average guy might find this one less than encouraging, but he recognized the pains she’d taken to research the perfect insult. He wasn’t above complimenting the effort. “You look that one up just for me?”
“I learned it from your mom,” she replied, then turned her attention to the commander. A click of the ballpoint pen in her hand and the way she poised it over the clean page of the spiral notebook balanced on her lap indicated the end of their cozy exchange. “Maybe next, we can both learn something relevant, like the purpose of this meeting.”
“By all means,” he said and pretended not to see Malone’s gesture to take the empty chair in front of Atwell’s desk. Damn if he’d heel like a dog while they jerked the only career he’d had any enthusiasm for since discharge from the corps out from under him.
Commander Atwell cleared his throat. “We have the utmost confidence in all our graduates, but I want to commend Brixton and Swain. Their scores on all scales of measurement have been excellent. Their styles are different, I understand from our training officers, but the results can’t be refuted. Gentlemen, I’m proud to confirm they are two of the readiest recruits we’ve produced.”
Okay, that didn’t sound like he was about to be shit-canned. The pressure in his chest eased.
Malone shoved away from the wall and strode to the front of Atwell’s desk. “Swain, Chief Shaun Buchanan of the Bluelick PD. Chief, Marc Swain. Our top recruit.”
Buchanan looked younger than expected for someone with the rank of police chief, but the dark-haired man had steady eyes and the carefully neutral expression Swain associated with military training. “Brixton is ours, as you know.”
Malone nodded. “So, here’s the deal, boys and girls. Chief Buchanan and I consulted recently regarding a statistically significant spike in drug possession citations in our jurisdictions since assuming our duties as chief of police and county sheriff, respectively. We don’t know if this uptick is genuine new activity or merely the result of properly enforced laws and documented infractions now that we’ve cleaned house. Could be my predecessor accepted certain incentives for turning a blind eye to drug trafficking throughout Bluelick and the surrounding environs. Since he was the only law around at that time, and, according to the lawyers, neither he nor his cronies are inclined to shed any light on the question, the history remains unclear. Buchanan and I prefer to focus on the present and the future. Unknown persons are engaged in the cultivation, distribution, and sale of marijuana in our area. We want to pull this thing out by its roots, so to speak. Shut it down swiftly and completely.”
“Do you want to start a zero-tolerance policy, arrest for each and every instance of possession, and pressure them to name their source?” Brix asked.
Swain shook his head. Book smarts had their limits. “That’s going to take forever and ultimately miss the mark.”
Brows arched, she glanced at him. “Why?”
“Why would anyone talk?”
Now she looked at him like he really was a cooyon. “Oh, I don’t know…maybe to stay out of jail?”
“Jail? Nah, choux. Unless someone’s caught with a shit ton of weed, possession is still a Class B Misdemeanor in Kentucky. Nobody’s going to get jail time for a first or second offense, but they’re likely to get their asses kicked, and kicked hard, for ratting out their dealer. ‘I found it’ is the preferred response to the source question for a reason. Why create the risk of violence? Besides, the dealer is definitely not going to roll on the supplier, at least not before the supplier has an unfortunate ‘fire’ and all traces of a grow house are dust in the wind. Especially in a small jurisdiction. Word starts traveling back to the powers that be almost before the first pothead to get a baggie pulled out of his pocket can say ‘I found it.’”
“But if you keep working it,” Brix insisted, tapping her pen to her notebook. “Keep pressing for names. Keep building the case—”
“You might slow down the traffic,” Malone interjected. “You might even put enough heat on things to shut it down completely. But that’s all you accomplish. Maybe we catch a few little bugs, but the big ole spider who built the web scuttles away and spins himself a new one in a place that’s not as hot.”
“The kind of localized operation we think we’re dealing with,” Buchanan said, “would be more efficiently and effectively dismantled from the inside. That’s where you two come in.”
“They don’t know us,” Brix murmured, proving why she was number one in the class. “In a small town where everybody knows everybody, nobody knows us. Nobody knows we’re the law.”
Buchanan nodded. “Exactly. Right now, we have a rare opportunity to conduct a joint sting. We get one or both of you in there, then take the whole web down, and all the spiders with it.”
His stomach sank, but Eden sat up a little straighter. “What do you need me to do?”
“Nothing,” he said before Malone or Buchanan could respond. Maybe she didn’t yet see where this was leading, but he did—a place she would definitely not like and would probably result in failure for both of them. Pointing at her, he added, “Y’all don’t need the A team for this.”
Her mouth dropped open. Before she could argue, he clarified, “You don’t need two people,” and topped it off with a “nothing personal” shrug, although the heart of it was personal, plain and simple. “It’s a relatively straightforward undercover job. Not dissimilar to what I did in Afghanistan, mostly without a partner. Set me up with a cover. I’ll get in, gain trust. I’ll get it done.”
His boss shook his head. “This isn’t the Marines. On my team, you’re a rookie. But even if you were both seasoned officers, I’d still go with a two-person team. However, as it happens, this is bigger than a simple drug sting. We want to demonstrate to the greater community that there is no bad blood between the Bluelick PD and the Sheriff’s Department. We want a joint effort.” Malone lowered his chin and skewered him with a hard look. “A successful joint effort.”
“So, you’re thinking we set up house. Married? Engaged? Young couple who like to party, like to live a little beyond our means. We could use some extra cash to pay for the…what? Maybe turns out we have a baby on the way?”
Now Eden shot out of the chair, scattering pen and notebook, and faced Malone. “You want me to go undercover as a pregnant party girl, and he’s the baby daddy?”
Malone put up his hands. “I didn’t say that, although a financially challenged couple on the verge of a wedding or a baby would create a credible need for a fast, free-flowing income stream. I personally like the engaged option. Our department will provide cover IDs. Buchanan assures me we can get Swain crewed up with a local contractor and situate you as the light of his life. You circulate in town. Shop like you’re feathering the nest. Spend a little more than he makes and tell anyone who will listen how you have your heart set on a big wedding—white dress, fancy flowers, custom cake, and champagne toasts. Get the right people to give a damn, and one of Swain’s new friends, or one of yours, will mention how you can earn extra cash, quick and easy. You guys take the meeting. One of you wears a wire.” Malone snapped his fingers. “And bam. We’ve got ’em.”
Swain cleared his throat. “It won’t work. She can’t sell her end of it.”
Now she spun fully to him. “What is your problem?”
“Nobody’s going to believe you like me, choux, much less want to spend the rest of your life with me.” He threw the nickname in just to nudge her past pissed to righteously pissed. “You’re not that good an actress. Need me to prove it?”
Her chin came up. Her eyes flashed green. With a voice that could freeze a man’s balls off from fifty feet, she issued a challenge. “I’d like to see you try.”
Resisting Cadet Eden Brixton was a full-time occupation under normal circumstances, but when she went stone-cold bitch on him, he was a goner. Two steps closed the distance between them. He cupped the back of her head, tilted her face up, and covered her mouth with his. For one glorious moment, she stood stock-still, offering the soft, heady heat of those lips that had played a starring role in his jack-off fantasies for damn near twenty weeks. Then she tore them away, cocked an arm back, and threw a punch that landed hard enough to spin his head around.
Be still my aching heart.
Luckily, his heart was a lost cause, pretty much from birth, but he slowly straightened and worked the ache out of his jaw. When he was sure it wasn’t dislocated, he addressed the room in general. “See?”
Malone raised his bushy eyebrows. “See what? Looks like true love to me.”
Buchanan stood. “Okay, people, here’s the bottom line. We want a joint op, and we need two new faces to pull it off. That makes you not just our best possible candidates but our only possible candidates. You’re our team. Make it work.”