Riding The Edge - Elise Faber Page 0,10

sign to Mud.”

I snorted.

“It’s not funny.”

I shifted so I could rest my feet on the floor. “It’s pretty funny.”

“Not so much,” she said, typing something on the keyboard. “Though your new name is hilarious as far as I’m concerned.”

Oh shit.

My stomach sank. “What are you talking about?”

“Come in, Boner.”

“Fuck no,” I said, carefully standing . . . and immediately wavering so much that I leaned my ass back against the mattress.

“You know the rules,” she said. “You don’t make the nicknames, you just—”

“—live with them,” I finished. “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

Cool.

From Wolf to Boner.

The chair squeaked as she turned to face me, and though she wasn’t smiling any longer, her expression serious as she studied me standing—okay, more propped up by the bed than actually standing on my own—I could see amusement still dancing in her eyes. She stood and crossed over to me, stopping a foot away, near enough for me to smell her shampoo, the fruity scent I’d come to associate with her.

Fruit and ice.

Sweet and vulnerable and so fucking cold.

But there wasn’t frost on her face now.

“How’s the wound?” she asked.

I shrugged before I could stop myself then had to bite back a curse because fuck that hurt. “Fine,” I said when I could speak evenly.

She snorted. “Not fine. Hence the reason for two weeks of light duty.”

I groaned but didn’t deny that Ava was right. If I could barely stand upright, hardly move my body without fiery pain shooting through my nerves, then it wasn’t like I was up to taking down bad guys.

Fuck, it had been a long time since I’d been shot.

The last time Brit had nearly lost her shit.

Speaking of which, maybe I should fly home to San Francisco and visit my sister. It had been too long since I’d seen her, and if I had to be cooling my heels for a couple of weeks—

Yeah, no, dumbass.

I’d wait until I didn’t have two healing bullet wounds—one on my chest, one on my back—in my body. My sister had freaked when I’d shown up with one extra hole; the last thing I needed to do was mess up her season by showing up with two.

Not to mention, sitting cooped up on a plane for twelve hours didn’t exactly seem like fun at the moment.

“Have you gotten any rest?” I asked.

“Yeah, I crashed after Olive stitched you up. Slept almost ten hours.” A shrug. “Woke up. Showered. Ate. Now work.”

Considering we’d mobilized at the last minute for the retrieval, both of us catching barely an hour on the plane, and the strain of being ambushed, me getting shot, then trying to get to the rendezvous point unseen, I was half-surprised we both hadn’t slept longer.

But the mission wasn’t complete.

So maybe half-surprised was too much.

“What was on the file?”

“Nothing I can make sense of yet. Everyone’s working on it. I’ll make sure you get a copy.” She pulled out her phone, tapped the screen. “I just pinged Olive. She wanted to check you over one last time before she and Laila fly back to England.”

“I’m fine.”

Fine being a relative term.

One at the moment that meant I was conscious and standing.

“You’re currently sequestered with no fewer than three extremely stubborn women, one of whom is in charge of our team’s medical care, another who is our team leader, and me, who may be the most stubborn of them all,” she said. “Do you honestly think you’re going to win this argument?”

My only answer was to make a face.

“Exactly,” she said. A moment later, her cell buzzed, and she glanced up at me. “Olive will be here in a few.”

“Great,” I grumbled.

“It’s not so bad.”

“You’re not the one with Boner as a call sign.”

She giggled, and I felt a bit of the misery leave me.

Her amusement filled me with joy. Not all of me, since I was feeling very pouty about the forced downtime—even though I understood it was necessary—and the call sign.

“I might be able to convince them to stick with Wolf.”

“How?”

“You’ll refuse to use Mud.”

I nodded gravely, knowing she was letting me off the hook for my very unsmooth compliments while high on morphine. It wasn’t an offer I was going to squander. “Deal.”

One half of her mouth curved up. “You know, you’re lucky to only have two weeks of light duty. Olive could have easily grounded you for a month or more,” she pointed out. “It’s better to just take the time to rest, heal up, and be ready to go so she won’t