Body of Trust - Jeannine Colette Page 0,68

Kentucky for the academy, I had a grand idea of the man I would become. The mistakes I’d made would be left in the past. Moving forward, I was going to be a man living a life of intrigue and adventure. I’d get the bad guys and never have a dull day at work.

I haven’t.

In seven years, I’ve worked as a pimp, a bouncer, a crackhead, a car thief, and an arms dealer. Some jobs are short, and others, you bury yourself in the world so deep that you don’t know if you can get out. That’s what I did.

It’s fun, pretending to be someone else. It’s more fun to watch the bad guys go to jail. While I’ve had a wild ride in the life of an undercover agent, I’ve never felt more alive than I have in one week with Amelia.

I remember the first time I saw her. She walked in after work, wearing a green dress that fell to the middle of her thighs. I couldn’t not notice her legs. The woman has a killer body, and she doesn’t even know it. She sat at the bar and kept her eyes down. I slid a napkin across the bar.

“What can I get you?” I asked her.

“Um, just a house wine, I guess.” Her voice was timid. It was like she didn’t want to bother me by making me go out of my way to do the job I was being paid for.

I shook off her request. “Do you settle for everything in your life or just your drinks?”

That was when she looked up, and fuck me, I nearly gave the whole gig up, hopped across the bar, and asked her to run away with me.

A heart-shaped face and big brown eyes with lashes that curled at the end. Her lips were full and pink, and it didn’t even look like she had a stitch of lipstick on. And her hair was long and silky, the kind I could imagine running my hands through while I held her.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my entire life.

That was when I knew I wasn’t going to make it out of this job alive.

“We got him, boss.” A criminal in a leather jacket pulls me by the bicep, knocking me into shit because I have a goddamn bag over my head.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” a man’s voice echoes across the room.

The space is big. Based on the solid floor, I’m guessing it’s concrete slab, which means we’re in a warehouse or maybe an abandoned airport hangar.

“I told you to take him out to the farm and feed him to the pigs.”

“We were, but he said he had an insurance policy,” the criminal next to me says.

“Is that so?” the boss says. “What are you waiting for? Make him talk.”

I’m shoved against a wall as the bag is ripped off my head. My cheek is pressed firmly into the cold concrete. I can smell the lead paint as I inhale.

The guy holding me to the wall is monstrous, easily six foot five and three hundred pounds of muscle. I could take him though, if only he didn’t have his gun pressed to my cheek and an audience of seven other criminals, who’d love to fulfill their boss’s wish and end my life, staring at us.

Seriously, nine to one.

This sucks.

“Talk, Davenport,” the criminal says with a sneer, breathing his rancid breath in my face.

“I changed my mind.” My words have bite.

“You wanna think on that?” The gun is pushed further into my face. An intimidation technique if I ever knew one.

I spit, “Never.”

The gun is butted into my head, busting the bridge of my nose.

Fuck, that hurt. My eyes close as I centralize the pain. “Fuck you!”

He doesn’t like that answer, so he punches me in the face. The adrenaline in my body fights off any feeling as I steady my feet and land a right hook on his crooked nose. If he were going to shoot me, he would have done it when he cornered me at the meeting spot.

Ambushed was more like it.

Four men descend on me and force me to my knees, each pointing a gun to my face. I’m held down by two others like a rabid animal while staring down the steel barrels.

The criminal in leather is wiping blood from his chin. I don’t have the same luxury. I can taste my own copper tinge seeping from my lip.

Taking in