“Shit,” Eagle said, “I hadn’t thought about that.”
Taylor giggled, and he felt his cock finally slip out of her body.
They both sighed at the loss.
Eagle moved them into a more comfortable position, with Taylor on her side in front of him. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her back against him. His cock nestled against the small of her back, and he couldn’t remember ever feeling more content.
“I promise, Flower, I’ll love you and our children so much, you’ll get annoyed with my hovering and overprotectiveness.”
“I’ll never get annoyed with that, especially when I’ve never had it.”
“Thank you for being strong. For not letting that asshole get you into his car.”
“Thank you for coming after me.”
“Always. I’ll always come for you,” Eagle vowed.
As he held his fiancée and listened to her breaths even out and get heavy, her body completely relaxed as she fell asleep, Eagle let out a long, slow breath. It was almost scary how much he loved the woman in his arms. No one would ever take her from him. She was his, just as he was hers.
He finally understood how Bull could put everything on the line for Skylar. He’d do anything for Taylor. Absolutely anything.
His mind wandered to Smoke and Gramps. He wanted them to find their own women to love. He was grateful they liked Taylor and that they’d protect her with their lives, but he wanted his friends to be as happy as he was right at this moment. Somewhere out there were women who could make their lives as wonderful as his . . . they just had to find them.
Epilogue
A mere month later, after Eagle and Taylor had gotten married and they’d announced that Taylor was pregnant, the team made the decision to go overseas and take care of a situation they’d been anxiously following for a while now. Everyone knew it was hard for Eagle to leave his newly pregnant wife, but this mission was important, and they needed all the manpower they could get.
Though Smoke was happy for Eagle and Taylor, he was itching to get to Africa. He’d been watching the situation with the extremist group Boko Haram closely.
In 2014, they’d kidnapped two hundred and seventy-six girls from a school, taking them into the Konduga area of the Sambisa Forest. They’d forced the non-Muslim girls to convert to Islam. Many of the captives had been forced into marriages with members of Boko Haram. Others had been taken into Chad and Cameroon. Some of the girls who’d briefly managed to escape had been returned to their captors and whipped.
The entire situation turned Smoke’s stomach. He hated everything about the repression of those young girls. They’d had their entire lives ahead of them, and while they’d been trying to better themselves, to learn all they could, they’d been stolen and repressed by adults who should’ve been celebrating their successes.
As of today, over a hundred of the girls in the original attack were still unaccounted for, something that haunted Smoke. He hated to think of those young women living lives that were forced upon them. They may not be able to save those girls . . . but there was still a chance they could keep the same thing from happening to a new group of innocents.
They’d gotten reports a few weeks ago that Boko Haram had raided another school. This time in Askira, a town just south of Chibok, where the original group had been kidnapped. Seventy-two girls were taken this time, stolen away into the Nigerian forest. A lot fewer than in the previous attack, but as far as Smoke was concerned, that was seventy-two girls too many.
Boko Haram wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been back when the Chibok girls had been taken, but they obviously had a large enough following to once again steal innocent kids away from their homes and parents.
And this time, there was also an American woman among the missing. No one had heard from her or the students who’d been taken. At first, it had been hoped that she’d fled into the forest to hide when the school she’d been visiting was attacked. But after a day or two, it had become obvious she’d disappeared along with the girls.
Smoke was ready to go. To find Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, and get rid of him once and for all. It wasn’t just that he’d gone too far and abducted an American—it was also that he’d dared to steal away innocent schoolgirls for a second time. It was abhorrent, and everyone at Silverstone agreed he needed to be stopped. The man had been reported dead several times, yet he always seemed to pop up in propaganda videos, doing his best to incite his followers. It was assumed that he used body doubles to try to protect himself, but Smoke and his fellow Silverstone teammates knew they could find and kill him.
And hopefully along the way, they’d find the missing girls as well. And Molly Smith, if she was still alive.
This mission wouldn’t be as quick as many of their most recent ones had been. They could be gone for months; trying to find a single man in the African jungle wasn’t exactly easy, even if they had intel on the whereabouts of Boko Haram. So Smoke understood why Bull and Eagle had been putting the mission off. They didn’t want to leave their women, and Smoke couldn’t blame them.
But he couldn’t help but picture Molly Smith’s face. She was petite, around five foot two, and if she weighed more than a hundred pounds, he’d be surprised. She’d earned both her undergraduate and master’s degrees from Northwestern. She was smart, and hopefully resourceful. Her grandparents had raised her after her parents had been killed in a freak train accident on their way home from their jobs in the city one day.
In a recent photo, Molly had shoulder-length black hair, and brown eyes that seemed to hold a lot more pain than the average person’s. Smoke couldn’t stand the thought of her being held against her will.
The woman had gotten to him. Smoke didn’t understand why, but he couldn’t shake it. He’d even had a nightmare about her just last night.
She’d been in a cage magically suspended in the air somewhere in the African jungle, and every time she’d tried to jump out, lions and tigers would appear below, preventing her from escaping. Then someone had materialized out of thin air in the cage behind Molly, shoving her toward the opening in the bars.
The scream that had come from her mouth as she’d fallen toward the ravenous animals had jerked him awake, and he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep.
This morning, he waited in the safe room in the basement of Silverstone Towing for his teammates to arrive, and they’d begin working out the details of their trip. He’d gotten there early since he couldn’t sleep.
One by one, Bull, Eagle, and Gramps finally arrived, and it was all Smoke could do not to get right to the Boko Haram situation. After some small talk, they finally got down to business.
“What do we think about Nigeria?” Gramps asked. “It’ll be a long, hard mission, with no guarantee we’ll find Shekau.”
“Any word on the girls?” Eagle asked.
“Nothing concrete,” Gramps said.
“And Molly Smith?” Smoke asked.
Gramps shook his head.
“I’m in,” Smoke said eagerly.
“Me too,” Gramps agreed.
They looked at Bull and Eagle.
“I’m not thrilled at the open time frame,” Bull admitted.
“Me either. What if we give ourselves a time limit?” Eagle asked.