Takedown: A Tapped Out series standalone Read online

  Takedown

  A Tapped Out series standalone

  Cari Quinn

  Taryn Elliott

  eBooks are not transferable.

  They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Takedown

  © 2014 Cari Quinn & Taryn Elliott

  Rainbow Rage Publishing

  Cover by LateNite Designs

  Photograph by Lindee Robinson Photography

  Model Travis Bendall

  All Rights Are Reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Second ebook edition: June 2021

  First ebook edition: Previously released by Cari Quinn in the Hot Ink anthology in 2014.

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  I'm not giving up until she's mine, forever.

  Walking away from being a SEAL—and the injury that led to my discharge—didn't scar me nearly as much as knocking on my estranged baby brother's door and finding my ex, Abby, on the other side. And naturally, she's every bit as beautiful as she was when we broke up a couple of years ago. I'd never wanted to let her go, and now that she's standing in front of me with the wreckage of my former life behind me, I'm ready to fight for my woman.

  No matter what it takes.

  But Abby is understandably gun-shy, though she claims she's only platonically living with my brother. Turns out I only have one weekend to prove that I'm the man she needs. Forever.

  Good thing I'm up for the job. In every way.

  Previously released in the Hot Ink anthology in 2014.

  Author’s note: Takedown is book 1.5 in the Tapped Out MMA series and is a novella with a happily ever after ending and no cliffhanger. Previously released by Cari Quinn in the Hot Ink anthology in 2014.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Sneak Attack

  Tapped Out

  The Underworld

  Quinn and Elliott

  Taryn Quinn

  Follow Us

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgments

  Sometimes we make up fictional places that end up having the same names as actual places. These are our fictional interpretations only. Please grant us leeway if our creative vision isn't true to reality.

  To second chances and that guy you just never could quite get over.

  One

  I’d been shot at. Nearly drowned. Dealt with a serious injury. And none of those things unnerved me as much as trying to mend fences with my little brother.

  I stopped outside the door to Slater’s apartment and lifted my hand to knock. Just before my knuckles made contact, I hesitated. A nice elderly woman had buzzed me into the building, but she wouldn’t be any help here.

  Did I really want to go down this road again? I’d tried before to erase the distance between Slater and me. Tried and missed the mark. I didn’t think I could stomach another failed mission.

  Then again, I didn’t have much choice. I’d flown out to the city for the express purpose of reconnecting with Slater and our little sister, Jenna. I wasn’t about to turn tail and go back—

  Where? I’d been stationed in Virginia Beach. After I’d gotten out of the hospital, I’d sold most of my belongings and put the stuff I couldn’t part with in storage. I was down to the duffel bag over my shoulder. If Slater didn’t want to talk to me—and if Jenna followed suit, as she usually did when it came to taking sides between us—I’d be bunking in a hotel tonight and for the foreseeable future, at least until I found a job.

  I wanted something mindless while I figured out what my life was going to look like now. Something I could punch in for and check out from at the end of the day without worrying I’d be taking the job home with me.

  Or that the job might take me out.

  Shit, I didn’t want to live in fucking New York. Anywhere else would be better than a place that was cold and dark half the year. I’d been in enough dark places already.

  Annoyed with myself, I rapped on the wood. Hard. Fast. Like ripping a bandage off a wound. The quicker I set this in motion, the quicker I could retreat and regroup.

  If Slater could hear my thoughts right now, he’d shake his head.

  Jesus, Lime, why you gotta come up with a strategy for everything? People aren’t battleships. No one’s going to tie your hands and feet and throw you in the ocean to make sure you can swim.

  Except it felt exactly like that. This was my chance to prove who I was to my family. The only family I had left—other than my grandmother, whom I barely knew—after my parents had died in a wreck years ago. It had been the three of us until I became a SEAL, and then I found a whole new set of brothers.

  And lost my own flesh and blood.

  When the first knock yielded no results, I rapped again. No response. Maybe Slater wasn’t even home.

  The door swung inward, and, at first, all I saw was a pale, slim arm shielding a face. Female, naturally. A tuft of reddish-gold hair haloed her head, and the ragged hems of a pair of torn jeans revealed bare feet with candy-pink toes. My dick stirred. Damn, had it really been that long since I’d had a woman?

  Yeah, way too long.

  “Can you come back later? I’m not really up to seeing visitors.” Still yawning, she dropped her arm and blinked heavily lined, sleepy blue eyes.

  Holy fuck. No. This could not be happening.

  “Abby?” I whispered. Of all the places I might’ve run into Abby Sinclair again, my brother’s apartment should not have been one of them.

  Sure I was having an out-of-body experience, I stepped back and looked up and down the hall. Right floor. Right building. This was supposed to be Slater’s apartment. He lived in a not-so-great section of Brooklyn, but this was New York, and the place probably cost primo bucks, anyway.

  When my gaze landed on her again, I noticed two things at approximately the same time—she was frowning as if she didn’t recognize me, and she was naked from the waist up.

  Okay, not naked. She had what appeared to be a bandanna wrapped around her breasts. The tie-dyed fabric barely held them in, so the ample flesh popped over the top, highlighting the musical-note tattoos that decorated her cleavage. Hell, she had the full C Major scale printed between her collarbone and her tits.

  “Liam?” she whispered back after a moment. “Am I dreaming?”

  “No. It’s me.” I regretted the hardness of my voice, but there was no alleviating it. After the way we’d parted, finding her again was both the best thing that had ever happened and the frigging worst. Even worse than my injury. “What are you doing here, Abs?”

  For an instant, something that seemed like pleasure and…relief filtered into her expression. An answering pang in my chest made me want to pull her into my arms, bury my face in her hair, and just thank God I’d made it back to her, somehow.

  But that wasn’t how things were. She was no longer mine, and I had no right to hold her until our heartbeats synchronized to the same rhythm, the way they always had in the past.

&nbs
p; I’d broken up with her, for her own good. It damn well hadn’t been for mine. I’d spent the months after our split losing myself in training and the special ops missions that took one hundred percent of my focus. How many nights had I spent in my cramped bunk, my body still wet from the quick shower that never managed to get all the sand off my skin, lost in memories? Only unconsciousness gave me any respite.

  Now I was looking at her again, and her face was already closing off and closing down on me, that momentary light in her blue eyes turning to ash.

  “Don’t call me that name.” Abruptly, she turned away and shuffled into the half-empty apartment, reaching up to undo the clip in her hair. Waves of brown, blond, and red fluttered past her shoulders, cut in uneven layers that gave her a wild, uninhibited look. More tattoos decorated her back. A G-clef curved up her side, the bottom of the symbol disappearing below the waist of her low-rise jeans, which were so low I could see the top of her crack when she bent over to water the plants.

  She was watering plants in my brother’s apartment instead of talking to me, who had been her boyfriend for a year and a half. What was wrong with this picture?

  She turned back, and reality slammed into me every bit as swiftly as her beauty. It had been two years and some change since we’d seen each other. I wasn’t the man she remembered, and from the looks of things, she sure wasn’t the same woman.

  “So, what am I supposed to call you then?” I dropped my duffel bag and pushed my hands into the pockets of my cargos, well aware I’d walked inside and left the front door wide open behind me.

  I was afraid if I turned my back on her she’d vanish. I’d seen plenty of mirages in the desert in my time, and none of them had been as welcome as the sight of her curvy body and snapping blue eyes.

  She was life, when I’d been mired in death for so fucking long.

  “Don’t call me anything.” She set aside her watering can and braced a hand at the base of her spine. Her pose indicated exhaustion, but I couldn’t help focusing on her vanilla perfume and the faint smell of grapes. Wine, maybe. Was she drunk? The old Abby scarcely touched the stuff.

  “Just pretend you didn’t see me here,” she added.

  “Yeah, and how am I supposed to do that?”

  “Easy. Walk right back out the door.” Her razor-sharp smile cut me deep. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

  “Is that why you decided to hang around with my brother?” The question erupted from my lips before I could hold it back. I’d tried so hard to play it cool. I didn’t want to come in and start shit. We’d been apart for years, and logically, I knew she wasn’t mine anymore.

  But in my head and heart, she was. Abby being at Slater’s this early in the morning—and wandering around as if she belonged—dug shrapnel deeper under my skin than the fragments already buried there.

  “Whether or not I’m hanging around with Slater isn’t your concern. You let me go.” She lifted a shoulder. “He invited me to stay.”

  “Oh, I just bet he did.” I stared at her, trying like hell to fight the pull on the past. I didn’t want to be there in the first place, and that was when I’d thought I would have to contend with only Slater.

  This made that prior concern seem almost minor.

  Slater wasn’t around, and she was—and God, her badass fragility nearly knocked me out. She’d always had that fragile air, bringing out my already dominant need to protect. But the badass was all new.

  “You have no right to cop an attitude with me. You made your bed.”

  I had no argument for that. Nothing coherent anyhow. I was rapidly descending to the point where I wanted to put my fist through a wall, and that wouldn’t do either of us or this fucked-up situation any good.

  To give myself a moment, I glanced around Slater’s apartment. The hardwood floors were in rough shape, scuffed from probably hundreds of feet. Wide windows let in tons of light, showing the cobwebs and dust motes in the corners that weren’t filled with surfboards and assorted other crap. A long, sunken couch and a pair of equally rundown club chairs faced a huge flat-screen TV. Beneath it, I saw a stack of MMA DVDs.

  What the hell?

  It wasn’t the fact that he still had some DVDs that surprised me, but the content of them. My little brother never adopted new tech easily.

  I crossed the room to make sure my sketchy vision hadn’t let me down once again. One of my eyes was still decent, but the other created a distortion that had left me uncertain enough to willingly give up my driver’s license.

  Like so much frigging else.

  But, nope, I wasn’t wrong. As I sorted through the stack, the tension in my shoulders grew. Slater had always been a damn hippie, preferring his surfing and his lazy days on the beach with Barnabas, his golden Lab, to anything resembling actual work. He’d been happy to take a low-paying job at the Surf Shack in Coronado where we’d grown up, spending his money on beer and peanuts and new boards.

  Until our parents had died coming back from a romantic weekend at our family’s beach house in Malibu, leaving the three of us as orphans. Then Slater had become the dad of the family, bossing Jenna around right and left. I’d already been in SEAL training at the naval base, and I couldn’t just walk away to take care of my family—despite what Slater believed.

  Besides, the money I’d earned had helped out big time. Our parents had been comfortable financially due to my dad’s real estate company, but there had been debts to pay, and it had taken a good amount of cash just to maintain our lifestyle. I’d worked my ass off to make sure my siblings could stay in our family home. Then, without a word, Slater had picked up stakes and moved him and Jenna back East, supposedly to bond with a grandmother we’d barely known.

  Now he was stockpiling MMA tapes. What the hell would my longhaired, soft-skinned younger brother know or care about such a brutal sport?

  “What are these?” I grabbed a handful of fight discs and waved them as I turned. Some of the discs weren’t of televised UFC bouts and had handwritten labels with dates and times of matches. Though I had buddies who were into the fights, I didn’t recognize these names. Fox Knox. Giovanni Costas. And a chick no less, Mia Anderson. An address label for The Cage, a gym located in Brooklyn, had been slapped on one of the cases. “Who are these fighters?”

  She didn’t answer right away. In the silence, I continued checking out the apartment, my gaze eventually landing on the upright piano wedged into the next room. It had to be a bedroom, judging by the size of the apartment and the cost of things in New York, yet all I could see was the piano and the papers strewn all over the glossy, black top.

  “Whose piano is that?”

  I glimpsed a glass of wine sitting atop it. Glass of something. A year ago, I would’ve been able to make out the color of the liquid at fifty paces. Now I could barely tell there was a glass.

  “You’re asking a lot of questions, Walsh.” Abby walked into the next room, her hips swaying in a sinuous way I didn’t remember.

  Had she always moved like that and I just hadn’t been paying attention? Or maybe I was so freaking starved for female contact I couldn’t think straight with her rich vanilla scent wrapping around me.

  Rather than follow her, I turned to the TV and DVR. If she wanted to shut me out, fine. But I wasn’t going home empty-handed. I’d come to talk to Slater. If I had to wait all night, I would.

  I popped in a DVD and messed around with the remote until I tuned it to the right channel. Then I sat down on the couch, leaning forward to try to decipher the action. The angles sucked. The footage was grainy and choppy and clearly had come from a handheld camera, possibly even a phone. With my fucked-up vision, I could hardly make out the fighters’ faces. I rose and moved forward, planting my ass on the coffee table to get a better view. When even that didn’t help enough, I hit the zoom button on the remote, blowing the action up to one-and-a-half times its size.

  And then I saw my brother hunched over a blond guy slumped in one corner, guzzling water. Slater
had a towel around his neck and pushed a mouth guard between the fighter’s lips, offering muffled words of encouragement.

  “You can do it, man. You’ve got this. I don’t back losers.”

  Don’t back? What did that mean? Slater wasn’t some kind of trainer…or coach. And the fight sure didn’t look like the glitzy ones I occasionally streamed. This one seemed to be taking place in an abandoned warehouse, and there were folding chairs and some kind of graffiti symbols on the wall.

  Footsteps sounded behind me and I turned, but I wasn’t fast enough in clicking off the picture. She’d caught me, and I felt more embarrassed about my vision than if she’d come upon me with my hand down my damn pants.

  “Liam, what’s wrong with your eyes?”

  Two

  I stopped behind the sofa and stifled the urge to move closer to rub the kinks out of Liam’s shoulders. He’d always had them, day and night. He did everything hard, so it wasn’t a surprise to find him hunched over while he glowered at the TV. But the fact that he was sitting on Slater’s coffee table and had blown the picture up on the screen until I could practically see the pores on the fighters’ faces—yeah, that was new.

  After two years apart, things had changed. I understood that. I certainly hadn’t remained static. I’d cut my hair and added highlights and started wearing more makeup and running until my quads ached. I’d gone back to music, my solace since childhood, and I’d inked my body so that I never forgot who I was, down deep at the roots. Appearances could be altered, but the basic molecules of a person, the measure of a woman—or man—was set in indelible ink. I just happened to wear mine on the outside as well as in.