Royal Recruit - Susan Grant Page 0,20
to meet you.”
The man wore an army uniform with rows of medals that seemed to stretch from his square chin all the way down to his shiny black dress shoes. Four gold stars shone on each shoulder. No. It couldn’t be…
“Nathanial Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” He twisted the lid off a bottle of beer and handed it to Jared. “But you can call me Nate.”
Numbly, Jared shook his hand. He was a lowly major in the air national guard. A weekend warrior. And the top military officer in the nation wanted to be on a first-name basis. Sure, benefits came from his family’s celebrity, but this was too much.
He took the offered beer and plunged into a comfortable leather seat. He stared straight ahead, barely aware of the flight attendant—who, curiously, but somehow not surprisingly, resembled a martial-arts expert—and buckled his seat belt across his lap.
He didn’t ask any more questions. He knew somehow they’d be ignored. The most important one—the welfare of his family and Cavin—had already been answered.
The sleek jet took off into the night sky. In disbelief, Jared closed his tired eyes. One thing was for certain: wherever his final destination was tonight, they hadn’t skimped on the escorts.
“Who the hell gave you authority to apprehend my brother? Who?”
Jana’s voice carried from the other side of the closed door in a reasonably comfortable waiting room in a small, empty passenger terminal at a tiny, unmarked airport in the middle of nowhere.
After escorting Jared here after landing, Sarto had disappeared. The flight attendant had come in sometime later with coffee and a vending machine doughnut. Real gourmet chow, Jared had thought sullenly and wolfed it down.
When Jared had tried the door, it was locked. They didn’t tell him where he was, but judging by the amount of hours they’d spent in the air, it was somewhere near the east coast, but not a city he recognized—or any city at all. Awaking from a bleary sleep at dawn, he’d seen nothing but emerald-green hills rolling by below.
“This is bullshit!” Jana yelled. “Total bullshit.”
Jared didn’t think he’d ever heard his sister that furious. He was glad he wasn’t on the receiving end.
“If anything else is done without my or Cavin Caydinn’s direct authorization, we’re pulling up the stakes and leaving Earth to fend for itself, General. Go near my brother again without my knowing and you can save your own ass from the invasion!”
Ooh-ee. Jana, it seemed, could trash talk as well as he could. She’d never abandon the world, but the threat sure did sound convincing.
“Sure,” he heard her say. “Tell the president what I said. I don’t care.”
To the sound of mumbling voices and sincere apologies, the door burst open and Jana stormed inside the room. Her hair was spilling out of what had probably been at one time an upswept hairdo. Her mascara was smeared, and her suit was wrinkled. She looked as if she’d slept in her clothes. Scratch that. She looked as if she hadn’t slept at all.
Cavin strode in on her heels. While he hadn’t said a thing, he didn’t need to; his angry eyes and tight jaw gave it all away.
“Hey, you two,” Jared drawled. “Maybe you can help me out here. A couple of goons grabbed me off the street, threw me in a car, stuffed me in an airplane, and, voilà, here I am. If you needed help babysitting a saucer, you shoulda said so.”
“Jared, I am so sorry,” Jana said. “I was supposed to escort you, then we got sidetracked with some last-minute arranging—where to hold the meeting, the protocol involved—and the next thing I know, they went to find you. I guess they were terrified you’d go missing.”
A few seconds ticked by. “And I’m suddenly Mr. Popular because…?”
“Because you’re crucial to our survival. Our future. Jared, this is big. Really big. No one expected this, least of all Cavin or me.” Jana crouched by his legs. “It’s going to be a bit of a shock, I know. It was to us, trust me.”
“Are you sure you have the right person? When I climbed out of Cavin’s ship, my involvement with Operation Phantom ended.”
“Um. Not quite.” She was rubbing his hand as if not sure what to say next.
The woman was many things, but never speechless. The first real flickers of unease filtered through him. “What happened to my favorite little motor mouth?” he joked nervously.
When she lifted her big blue eyes to his, they were