Chapter One

John ‘Griff’ Griffin made himself a third cup of instant coffee, and headed back to his desk to go over the case paperwork one more time. His meeting with his boss and the new client was in less than twenty minutes, and he was determined to be ready for it.

He sat, sipped, shuffled the mountain of papers. Griff knew that he knew this back-and-forth – he’d spent the weekend poring over it, after all – but if there was one thing that he’d learned in his time in the navy, it was that you were never too prepared. That thinking had saved his life, and more than once.

Absently, he rubbed at the long, thick scar that ran the length of the left side of his neck. It was ugly and it was bright purple, but he was covered in enough scars to not be self-conscious about it. In fact, he cherished and valued it in a way, cherished and valued it as much as he did his dog tags from his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like them, he treated that rough, raised flesh as a reminder of just what happened when preparation was half-assed, and when one’s guard was dropped. Sometimes you got damn lucky and nothing happened… and sometimes you got stabbed in the neck by some creep psycho.

Not that Griff had been the one to drop his guard or the ball. Nor had it been his partner here at Solid Security, Selena Perez. No, the blame was squarely on the shoulders of the bar bouncers who’d wandered away from the VIP parking area for illicit smoke breaks, and to flirt with hot women. And the stalker who’d been cheerfully terrorizing Griff and Selena’s client for months had just slipped right on into position in a parked car and waited.

Griff had been lucky to survive the stabbing, and it was all down to Selena. Despite being hurt herself, she’d taken down the stalker, then staunched the flow of blood from Griff’s neck. Without her guts and calm, he’d have bled out right then and there, on the filthy ground.

Yeah. Being prepared was the way to go… in everything.

“Hey, Griff.”

He glanced up, his green eyes squinting a bit in the bright morning sun streaming through the Solid Security office windows. The woman standing there was short – much shorter than he was – but he wasn’t fooled by her small stature. Not at all.

Roxanna Hale was an ass-kicking demon of a receptionist, and since Griff had had to recover from his injury and get psychological clearance before being allowed back into the world as an operative, he’d been at her mercy for the past few months. She’d knocked his ass from one end of the office to the other, and had begun each day by handing him a never-ending ‘to do’ list: photocopying, filling in stacks of paperwork, filing, taking notes at client meetings then typing them up after, responding to client queries, handling the team’s bodyguard and security schedules.

All in all, Griff was deliriously glad to be heading back out into the field. Hell, he’d wrestle down an entire parking lot of knife-wielding stalkers if it meant never having to handle anything HR- or administrative-related ever again. Ever.

“Hi!” he said, jumping to his feet. “How you doin’, Roxanna?”

“Good,” she said, then tilted her dark head at him. “Dallas just told me that you’re out of the office again, huh?”

“Yep. Working with a client directly.”

“I heard. Congrats.”

“Thanks,” Griff said, then decided to tease her a bit. It was the equivalent of poking a sleeping dragon and he knew it, but what the hell. “You gonna miss me, hon?”

“Ha!” Roxanna huffed, all fiery and bang on cue. “As if!”

He grinned at her. “C’mon, Roxie. You can admit it now… you’ve loved having me around here every day. It was like having your own personal serf, huh?”

She narrowed her dark-blue eyes at him. “First, John Griffin, don’t call me Roxie. Second, you’ve been a passable assistant – though I’ve given up any hope of you ever being able to make a decent cup of coffee.”

“I know,” he said agreeably. “So maybe now’s a good time to tell you that I did that on purpose.”

That gave her pause. “You did what on purpose?”

“Screwed up the coffee.”

“And just why would you do that?” she demanded.