Fall To Pieces Read online

  Fall to Pieces

  Jami Alden

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright ©2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  To Special Ops soldier Dylan Decker, spending a month in his home town of Big Timber, Montana while he recovers from an injury sounds like torture. After ten years as an elite operator, asking him to live a civilian life - even temporarily - is like asking him to live on another planet. All he cares about is getting cleared for duty and getting back to his team. Then temptation appears in the form he least expects it.

  Sadie Thornton's life has been on hold since she had to move back to Big Timber to help her ailing father. She can't wait to get back to her life and career in California, away from a father who never got over the disappointment that Sadie wasn't born a boy. Then Dylan Decker, who never noticed her for anything but her brains, rolls back into town. Sadie can't wait to her high school crush that she's nothing like the girl he remembers.

  Dylan can hardly believe Sadie's transformation from the awkward, skinny girl he remembers. But while she's changed in ways that make his hands itch to explore her newfound curves, inside she'd still the sweet, vulnerable girl who followed him around with her heart in her eyes. Not the kind of woman who can have a temporary, no strings affair without getting hurt. And right now, that's all he has to offer.

  But it isn't long before temptation overwhelms Dylan's good intention, and what starts out as a casual quickly becomes so much more. And when everything falls to pieces, Sadie is the only one who can help Dylan put it all back together.

  Prologue

  March 2013

  Southern Afghanistan

  It was hard to believe that Hamad Mohammed Al Abdul, who was no more than five and a half feet tall and a buck twenty soaking wet, was one of the highest value targets in the ongoing war on terror. But with his close ties to Ayman al-Zawahri, who had stepped into the void left after Seal Team Six had taken out Bin Laden, Al Abdul was high value enough to warrant the involvement of Dylan Decker and his 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta—aka The Unit —teammates to retrieve him.

  They'd apprehended him five days ago, and now their task was to deliver him to the CIA agents waiting to interrogate him at an undisclosed location.

  After a grueling 5 day, fifty mile march through the mountains of southern Afghanistan, they were less than five miles from the meet up point.

  The terrain was gut bustingly beautiful, Dylan couldn't help but notice. The sky was so blue it almost hurt your eyes, almost as blue as the sky back home in Big Timber, Montana. Steep, jagged peaks the color of flint stretched to the sky.

  But as beautiful as they were, the mountains were as treacherous as any terrain he and his team had ever covered.

  Especially in this last stretch, where their route took them nearly three miles through a narrow pass, surrounded on both sides by sheer cliffs.

  Dylan and the guys who made up their team of five—Zander "Mac" McWilliams, Mike "Cheese" Bender, Chris "Slick" Andrews and Tommy "Skip" Westphal—moved at a steady clip, constantly scanned their surroundings, their M41A rifles held at the ready.

  Al Abdul, tethered to Dylan by his bound hands, was forced to keep up. When they'd started out, he'd tried the old floppy kid trick in an effort to slow them down, only to realize pretty damn quick that Dylan was able to drag him for as many miles as necessary.

  It only took Al Abdul a hundred meters or so to decide it was better to walk than have his hide chewed into hamburger by the rocks and gravel.

  It was eerily quiet, nothing but the sounds of their boots crunching against the ground.

  They froze as a sudden spray of rocks came bouncing down the north side of the pass.

  Weapons raised, trained on the shadowy ledge thirty meters above them.

  He looked through his scope to get a closer look and heard Cheese's voice in his headset asking if they were picking up any hostiles through the surveillance satellites.

  "Negative. Proceed ahead," was the reply.

  Dylan couldn't get a visual through his scope, and he followed Mac's signal to keep moving forward. But the prickling sensation that something wasn't right dogged his steps.

  And in the space of a breath, their as yet uneventful operation turned into a total goatfuck.

  "Shit," Mac yelled as a hail of AK-47 fire ripped through the silence.

  Dylan dove behind a boulder as the others scrambled for cover. Al Abdul yelled and tried to jump up. Dylan yanked him back down and pinned him as bullets hammered into the rock in front of them. Not because he thought the terrorist piece of shit didn't deserve to be shot, if not worse.

  Because the fucker had key intel about the whereabouts of his boss, and his team was under orders to bring him in alive at all reasonable cost.

  "Must be a fucking cave up there," he heard Skip—so nicknamed because he was a prep school boy from Connecticut—yell as they returned fire on the dozens of Taliban soldiers now lining the ridge.

  If there was, it wasn't on any of the intel they'd gathered before planning their route. But it appeared the enemy was accessing the ledge from a hole in the mountain.

  How the fuck they got there undetected was a mystery he had no time to solve as AK fire continued to rain down on them.

  He heard Skip grunt, and looked over to see his teammate bleeding where a bullet had caught him in his upper arm.

  "We are pinned down and taking heavy fire," he heard Cheese yell. "Requesting air support immediately."

  But it would take at least twenty minutes for the jets to get here from the base.

  Twenty minutes that passed in a blur as they struggled to hold them off.

  Bodies fell from the cliff side as they fired kill shot after kill shot, but more appeared to take their place. There was no way to know how many hostiles were hiding in the recesses of the mountain.

  The only good thing about these guys was that though they were heavily armed and outnumbered Dylan's team, they were shitty shots, peppering the air haphazardly with round after round.

  Plus, they didn't have the advantage of state of the art body armor that Dylan and the others did.

  But Al Abdul wasn't as well equipped, and they needed to get him the hell out of here, stat.

  After what felt like hours, the F15's screamed overhead like a chorus of angels.

  "Incoming! Get down!" Mac shouted.

  There was a whooshing sound as the missile honed in on the target. Dylan braced himself, his gaze focused on the ledge above.

  "Enjoy your seventy-two virgins, motherfuckers!"

  There was a sound like a thunderclap and his whole world turned red.

  Chapter 1

  The Last Chance bar was in full swing as Dylan Decker followed his older brother, Damon, through the front door. Bodies jostled for position at the bar and on the dance floor.

  Music blaring from the jukebox and the din of voices straining to be heard above the sound of Garth Brooks hit Dylan like a full frontal assault.

  He took a deep breath, inhaling the scents of spilled beer and crushed peanut shells, overlaid with the sweet smell of perfume and hair product.

  As he followed his brother through the crowd, he felt the familiar, unwelcome, squeezing sensation in his chest, followed by a sudden pounding of his heart against his ribcage.

  Calm the fuck down, he scolded himself.

  There was no reason in hell he should be having one of his rifuckingdiculous mini panic attacks here at the Last Chance, where he had spent countless nights drinking, dancing, and trying to coax the cutest single girl on the floor into taking him back to her place.

  In the ten years since he'd left his tiny town of Big Timber, Montana, for basic, a stop at the Last Chance to see what was what was part of his routine, signal
ing his re-entry back into civilian life if only for a few short days. The signal he could relax, let his guard down, enjoy a break from the unrelenting intensity that dominated his life as a Delta Force operator.

  But tonight, even as he pasted on a smile and waved hello at the familiar faces dotting the crowd, he couldn't shake the restlessness that had dogged him for the last few months, ever since he'd been released from the hospital. The fire in his belly that had pushed him through the pain of his recovery and rehab until he'd commandeered his body back into the shape it was in before the accident.

  Other than a mess of scars running the length of his right leg, no one would ever know he'd nearly bled out after the misfired bomb turned his leg into hamburger.

  Lying low, focusing on healing all these months, had left him itchy and edgy, ready to get back into action with his team before the boredom finally pushed him over the edge.

  Which made his CO, Zander McWilliams's decision to send Dylan off on an extended, four week leave before his final medical evaluation all the more frustrating.

  Go home. Get healthy. Get your head on straight so you can come back a hundred percent.

  A few days ago, Dylan had requested to leave Fort Bragg for a few days to attend a surprise party for his brother, Deck. McWilliams had floored him by telling him to take nearly a month.

  "No way," Dylan protested. It was bad enough having to hang around base, knowing he was missing out on a covert op only because he'd wake up one morning to find his teammates had vanished.

  But being banished to civilian life, even farther out of the loop for four weeks?

  Unbearable.

  But McWilliams refused to back down. "If you don't want to do it for yourself, do it for the rest of us. We're tired of seeing your grumpy-ass mug around here. Besides, once you're back in action, who knows when you'll see your family again."

  Dylan conceded he'd been in a surly mood since his injury. Who could blame him? He'd always been a man of action, always wanted to be on the front lines, in the thick of the fight. When he'd become a Delta Force operator, he knew it was the job he was meant for.

  Was it easy? No. Fun? Not by most people's definition. But he couldn't imagine doing anything else.

  And right now, spending a month in the sleepy mountain town where he grew up?

  Sounded like torture.

  Pull up your shorts and stop being such a whiny bitch, an internal voice that sounded a lot like his CO snapped. You've got a month off with your family and friends—something the other guys would kill for. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and make the fucking best of it.

  He wove with Damon through the crowd, trying take comfort in the fact that no matter where he went, no matter how much fucked up shit he saw in the world, things at home stayed remarkably the same.

  As always, the Last Chance was crowded with locals—the place was far enough off out of town and sketchy enough looking not to attract the tourist crowd that overflowed the places downtown this time of year.

  And as usual, Damon was headed for a corner table next to the jukebox, which had been the Decker brothers’ unofficial spot since they'd scored fake IDs back in high school.

  "Dylan!" he felt his mouth pull into a smile, a real one this time, as two female voices squealed his name in stereo and he found himself with an armful of curvy blonde exuberance. His grin widened as Molly Tanner, who'd been one of his best friends since her mother moved them back to Big Timber in the fourth grade, squeezed him so tight he could barely breathe.

  Over her head he caught sight of Molly's friend, and his breath caught for another reason. Long, reddish brown hair, big dark eyes with the kind of lashes most women had to buy.

  And her mouth... red and full lipped even though it was stretched in a grin that took up the bottom half of her face. The kind of mouth that put the kinds of thoughts in his head that sent all the blood in his body flowing south.

  Maybe this month won't be so torturous after all, he thought as Molly released her death grip and stepped away.

  Warmth curled in his gut as he stepped toward the brunette, tearing his gaze away from her face to scan the body that more than matched what was above her shoulders. Tall—he guessed her to be almost six feet—with long, lean legs and curves in all the right places.

  He stepped forward, ready to introduce himself, when something about that smile snagged at his memory. He froze, and all thoughts of spending the next month wrapped in those mile long legs came screeching to a halt.

  "Holy, shit, Sadie?"

  "Hey," she said with an awkward little wave.

  "Come here," he said and pulled her in for a hug, immediately questioning that decision when every nerve ending went on high alert at the feel of those slim curves pressed up against him. He quickly pulled away but couldn't quite let go, settling his hands on her shoulders.

  He looked her up and down repeatedly, waiting for the real Sadie Thornton, the one who was all pin thin limbs and awkward angles, to reappear. "You look..."

  He shook his head as her cheeks turned beet red and her gaze dropped to the floor.

  Ah, there was the Sadie he remembered. Awkward, blushing, barely able to string a sentence in front of him that didn't involve explaining a math problem or the significance of the green light in The Great Gatsby.

  Sweet Sadie, following him around with her heart in her eyes. Definitely, he decided with no small amount of disappointment, not the kind of woman who would be up for his dating MO Which consisted of not much dating, lots of sex, and ended whenever the woman started angling for "a relationship" or he got shipped off.

  "I believe the word is, smoking," the gravelly voice of Damon's best friend from the Army, Brady McManus, broke through Dylan's haze.

  Dylan had always liked Brady, but now, as the other man grabbed Sadie by the hand and said, "Come on, sweet thing, let's dance," he fought the almost overwhelming urge to punch the guy in the throat.

  Only because he knew Brady's MO was similar to his own, he told himself, and he just wanted to keep Sadie from getting hurt.

  He turned to Damon. "Is that seriously Sadie Thornton? What happened to the stork legs and the glasses?"

  "A lot can happen after high school," Molly said with an elbow to his ribs.

  You have no idea, he thought as his brain flashed on some of the things he'd seen and done in the time between.

  His gaze lit on the other woman sitting at the table and he felt his smile dim several watts. "That it can," he said as his gaze rested on Ellie Tanner, Molly's older sister. And Damon's ex-girlfriend, the one who had ripped Damon's heart to shreds when he revealed he'd enlisted in the army.

  Twelve years later, Ellie had been widowed and left flat broke by her Wall Street shyster husband and had, according to Dylan's mom, come back to Big Timber to get back on her feet.

  And apparently, despite all of Damon's protestations to the contrary, she and his brother were once again tying each other up in knots.

  He shook his head and signaled Cassie, who called everyone "hon" and whose red bouffant hadn't changed in his memory, over to take his order.

  He and Ellie exchanged small talk and Dylan patted himself on the back for being civil while Damon stared at her like he didn't know if he wanted to kiss her or throttle her.

  Considering he avoided his own relationship drama like the plague, Dylan sure as shit didn't want to get drawn into his brother's. So he was relieved when JT Osborne, a friend from high school who now ran his family's guest ranch a few miles out of town, came over and greeted him with half hug/back slap.

  They started to catch up when Molly grabbed Dylan's hand. "You guys can talk later," she said, yanking him to the dance floor. "This is my favorite song!"

  Dylan pulled her into his arms as his feet fell automatically into the two step. Considering all the shit he had to put his body through to stay in shape for his job, it was kind of comical the amount of relief he experienced when he felt no pain as he executed the steps.

  B
ut after his accident and the excruciating pain after, every pain free movement was yet another reminder that he was fit, he was healthy, and it was only a matter of time before he was back to doing exactly what he wanted to do.

  But in the meantime, dancing with a pretty girl wasn't the worst thing in the world.

  As he twirled Molly, he caught a flash of something sparkly on her left hand. That's right—somewhere in his mother's gossip filled letters/emails/phone calls (though she would smack him across the mouth if she heard him calling it that) she'd mentioned that after over ten years of dating, Josh Patton had finally proposed to Molly. It was, in his mother's opinion, long over due and she couldn't imagine why Molly had stuck it out for so long considering—also her opinion—Josh was a bit of a doofus.

  Dylan wasn't about to share any of that with Molly, so he simply said, "Congratulations on you and Josh."

  "Thank you!" Molly beamed. "Took him long enough, and I still can't get him to nail down a date, but at least it's a step in the right direction."

  Was it just him, or was there a slightly desperate note in her little laugh? Not his business.

  "What about you? You seeing anyone?"

  "Nope."

  She was quiet for a few seconds, then, "I hear you're in town for almost a whole month."

  "Yeah," he said, and felt a little niggle of warning at the shrewd look in her eye.

  "Plenty of time to renew old acquaintances." She shot a meaningful look over his shoulder.

  He was not surprised when he turned his head to see Sadie, laughing at something Brady said as he whirled her around the floor.

  He couldn't keep his lip from curling. "Sadie looks pretty well occupied right now."

  "Brady?" Molly's own lip curled. "Sadie would never. Brady is..." she trailed off with a little sound of distaste. "Anyway, you have no competition from that front, or any other," she said with a meaningful look.