Submission Impossible (Masters & Mercenaries Reloaded 1)

“Give yourself some time. I know that breakup was hard on you,” Michael said.

That was part of the problem. “It really wasn’t. It was a relief.”

Michael crossed to the bar and pulled out the good Scotch. “How so?”

“I didn’t start dating Katy for the right reasons.” He’d worked through all of this, but he wondered if Michael might be the one who needed to talk. “I did it because she made sense, and it felt like it was time to settle down. I kind of floated through it, you know. When I found out she was cheating on me, I wasn’t even mad. She brought her new boyfriend to pick up her stuff from my place and I sat down and played a couple of rounds of Halo 7 with him.”

Michael whistled. “You were not invested in that relationship.”

He shrugged because he knew he’d been guilty, too. He’d made mistakes. “We weren’t truly compatible, and I never felt a spark with her. But then I’ve never felt a spark with anyone, so I have to wonder if I’m just not that guy.”

Michael offered Hutch a glass and held up his own. “You described my entire relationship with Tessa. Except for the cheating part. She’s a good woman. I just couldn’t love her the way she deserved. May they forgive us.”

He would drink to that. Katy was a nice lady, but they were not meant to be. He clinked his glass. “May we forgive ourselves.”

Michael chuckled. “You’ve been in therapy too long.”

He shrugged and drank back a bit of the excellent Scotch. It burned in a pleasant way. “You can never get too much therapy.”

Especially not when a person had grown up the way he had. Abusive father, check. Death of his mom. Check. Bad relationship with distant stepmother leading to life on the streets and then in and out of juvie. Check and check.

Sometimes he didn’t even count that year he’d been undercover for an insanely criminal doctor who performed tests on soldiers. It was sad that the time he’d spent with Hope McDonald wasn’t the worst of his life.

“I heard you’re going out into the field.” Michael settled on the barstool.

“Sort of. I’m not sure.” It was still confusing. He wasn’t the “field” guy. He was the guy who sat behind a computer, but he’d kept up the training McKay-Taggart Security required of all its employees. Even the receptionist had to take self-defense after that one time a CIA team had raided the office.

He’d been on the wrong side of that battle, but they’d all worked it out. God, that seemed like another lifetime. Everyone had changed, but he was stuck in the same place.

He didn’t understand what Tag meant by going into the field since he could do almost anything he needed to do remotely. He didn’t have to sit in front of a computer to hack it. Security had gotten better over the last couple of years, but so had his hacking skills. He was the dude who stayed in the background when the bullets started flying.

“What does that mean? I thought you were taking on that family case Tag was talking about,” Michael said. “Something go sideways? I didn’t get back until late Friday.”

Michael had been on a case and hadn’t heard the latest developments. “I was supposed to meet her two days ago, but something happened at her lab and she ended up going home for a couple of days. We rescheduled for Monday. The fact that there was an accident in the lab means Tag thinks I might need backup. He’s paired me with a bodyguard.”

Michael set his glass down. “Yes, I heard you’re working with Kyle Hawthorne. He’s…interesting.”

“He’s a walking time bomb, and everyone knows it.” Unfortunately, he was also Big Tag’s brother’s stepson. If anyone needed therapy, it was Kyle Hawthorne. He’d recently left the Navy, and everyone thought he would go back to college. But instead he’d shown up at McKay-Taggart and went straight into the bodyguard program.

Things happened around Kyle. Dangerous things.

“Boomer went out on a job with him a couple of weeks ago,” Michael mused. “He said Kyle was pretty solid in the field. He said Kyle watched his back when they got in some trouble.”

Boomer had been on the team as long as Hutch had been. He was the group’s firearms specialist. But he had his quirks. “Kyle probably bought Boomer a pizza and now they’re best friends.”

There was something dark in Kyle that made Hutch wary. It wasn’t that he thought Kyle was a bad guy. It was that something simmered beneath his surface, and Hutch had learned that simmering tended to lead to exploding. He didn’t want to be around when that man exploded.

“You could talk to Tag if you feel uncomfortable.” Michael sat back. “He might send in someone else.”