Trusting Xavier Read online

  Trusting Xavier (Special Forces: Operation Alpha)

  Fierce Protectors Book 8

  Casey Hagen

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by Casey Hagen

  More Special Forces: Operation Alpha World Books

  Books by Susan Stoker

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  © 2020 ACES PRESS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this work may be used, stored, reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the publisher except for brief quotations for review purposes as permitted by law.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy.

  Dear Readers,

  Welcome to the Special Forces: Operation Alpha Fan-Fiction world!

  If you are new to this amazing world, in a nutshell the author wrote a story using one or more of my characters in it. Sometimes that character has a major role in the story, and other times they are only mentioned briefly. This is perfectly legal and allowable because they are going through Aces Press to publish the story.

  This book is entirely the work of the author who wrote it. While I might have assisted with brainstorming and other ideas about which of my characters to use, I didn’t have any part in the process or writing or editing the story.

  I’m proud and excited that so many authors loved my characters enough that they wanted to write them into their own story. Thank you for supporting them, and me!

  READ ON!

  Xoxo

  Susan Stoker

  For April…you’re a badass who comes through for me every single time. Thank you for always having my back!

  About the Book

  Xavier Thorne, former SEAL and chief of medicine at New Hope Hospital, buries his turbulent past safely where it could no longer touch him—until Jane Doe’s case resurrects the whispers and doubts haunting him, until his every moment is consumed with bringing her back from the brink of death, with the hope of getting answers that may just free them both from the demons of the past.

  Laramie Caine, reformed wild child, finally stumbles on danger she can’t handle, the fire hot enough that it almost costs her everything including her life. Her need to get well to return to the daughter she’s left behind ignites a furious will to live. The voice in the dark spurs her on, and when she wakes up and finds that voice is none other than the doctor who saved her, she’s tempted to be reckless just one more time, and gamble with a real shot at losing her heart.

  The clock is ticking while the enemy lies in wait. As Laramie’s strength grows, the bond between doctor and patient evolves into a stunning bond capable of unthawing Xavier’s frozen heart. When the enemy draws near, Xavier must take a side in the war between taking life and saving it. The time is here where he must decide if he’s the SEAL to protect her or the man to put her back together after her final dance with the Devil, hoping there are enough pieces to stitch together one last time.

  Chapter 1

  “Where is she?” Lucas Burke said, marching into the lobby of New Hope’s medical center.

  Xavier Thorne’s head snapped up at the agitation in Lucas’ tight voice as he barreled through the sliding doors. Lucas’ girlfriend, Chloe Crew, followed along behind him, her eyes wide with worry.

  “Whoa, take it easy,” Xavier said, rounding the desk and pushing his palm against Lucas’ jutting chest before the guy could head deeper into the facility, in particular, the intensive care unit he currently headed for.

  He expected Lucas to barrel in guns blazing the minute he learned that the Jane Doe Xavier had been treating was none other than Lucas’ baby sister, but sister or no, Laramie was Xavier’s patient, and he’d call the shots inside these walls.

  “You’re not going to keep me from her,” Lucas growled, his hard gaze landing on Xavier’s hand.

  “If you don’t get control over yourself, yes, I will,” Xavier promised, surprised by his own lethally cool voice, a tone he hadn’t used in years that should be rusty with disuse. Instead, he resurrected the fierce intensity from his other life with an ease that seized his lungs, making him grateful that the words rendered Lucas silent so he wouldn’t have to say more.

  At least, not yet.

  “Lucas,” Chloe said quietly as she curled her small hand around his elbow, stepping into him in an intimate display of support.

  Lucas turned and lowered his forehead to Chloe’s, and his eyelids slid shut, his fingers gripping her biceps until the tips turned white. Anger didn’t fuel his grip, not at all; it was the desperation of a man on the edge.

  Xavier wanted to look away, unease coursing through him at witnessing the intimacy between the two, the way they spoke without words, the way Chloe’s touch quieted Lucas’ soul.

  A decade-old ache echoed inside him. Gnashing his teeth, he swallowed and returned his focus to safety. To Laramie. Specifically, her chart.

  “We tried to bring her out of sedation once already,” Xavier said, then Lucas returned his attention. “But we had to put her back under when she panicked. I need you here. I need you under control. To reassure her. Can you do that?”

  He needed her awake to know the real extent of the damage done so Lucas was just going to have to bite back his hot head and be a help, not a hinderance. From the looks of it, Chloe soothed his rough, angry edges so he might just be able to pull it off.

  Letting Chloe go, Lucas blew out a frustrated breath, ran his hands through his hair, lacing his fingers behind his neck, and gave Xavier a reluctant nod.

  “Yeah,” Lucas said with a rough sigh. “Yeah, I can do that,” he said with a bit more confidence.

  Xavier nodded and shut the laptop. “Good, because she has a little girl who’s been waiting. Let’s not disappoint her.”

  Lucas’ mouth fell open. “I forgot she had a daughter.”

  Xavier froze. “You forgot? How is that possible?”

  Lucas slid his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t know about her. I only remember what you said about her when we did the tour more than a month ago.”

  Xavier crossed his arms and cocked a hip against the registration desk. “How long has it been since you saw Laramie?”

  Lucas clenched his teeth. “Eight years.”

  Xavier studied Lucas, wondering if he was about to make a huge mistake trusting him with this. Fierce had hired Lucas to install the bunkers and help with the advanced security at New Hope Hospital, Endurance, the wing holding family residences along with health and self-defense training, and Successful Beginnings, the wing dedicated to therapy and job training. If he’d passed the multitude of background checks that Dylan North, the founder of Fierce, had ordered on him and any less-than-legal searches they would have hired their old SEAL contact, Tex Keegan, to do, Xavi
er had to trust that there was a good explanation for their estrangement.

  “Okay, look, reassure her that everything is okay and that her daughter is here and unharmed,” Xavier instructed. They’d figure out the rest later. Successfully bringing Laramie out of sedation was just the beginning. There’d be an evaluation and a resulting investigation even as they developed a plan for rehabilitation.

  “Is she unharmed?” Lucas said, his voice thick.

  Xavier scratched his chin and wondered how much he should say. “Physically, yes. At least from what we can tell. But she hasn’t spoken.”

  She gazed. He didn’t know how else to describe it other than most of time it was as if she were in a trance, but not. Or maybe that’s what she wanted them to think. Something told him she was in there, not missing one single detail. They just had to find a way to draw her out.

  He’d called in a team of special therapists for her, but so far, they’d had little luck, leaving him no other option than to depend on giving her her mother back to snap her out of it.

  “Maybe she’s just quiet,” Chloe said.

  “At all. She hasn’t said one word. She’s the one who called 9-1-1 for your sister, but she never spoke. We thought she had given the operator the address, but it turns out they traced the call. She hasn’t made a peep since she arrived, and it’s been more than a month,” Xavier said.

  “Emotional trauma?” Lucas asked.

  Xavier nodded. “I’m assuming so. It’s hard to tell. We can’t get a read on her. Something tells me seeing her mother awake is going to be instrumental in moving her past it.”

  “Can I meet her?” Xavier asked.

  “Let’s get your sister awake first, and then we’ll see. The therapists working with her need to make the final call on that,” Xavier said, taking the phone Lola handed him from behind the registration desk.

  Becoming his personal assistant hadn’t been in her job description, but from the minute the woman had come out of her early retirement and set foot through the doors of New Hope as a new employee, she’d proven to be a whirlwind of energy and promptly took over every aspect of running the front end of the medical wing.

  Including reading Xavier’s mind by picking up the phone and calling the nurses’ station.

  After two buzzes, their head nurse, Deidre, picked up. “I’m on my way with Laramie’s brother. We’re going to try to bring her out of sedation again.”

  “We’ll get prepped now, Dr. Thorne,” she said.

  “Thank you.” He gave Lucas a nod. “Follow me.”

  They all turned to the sound of the entry doors to find Zane Crew, the security designer for Fierce, and Chloe’s brother striding in.

  “I’ll stay here,” Chloe said, making eye contact with her brother.

  “You don’t have to stay behind,” Lucas began.

  Chloe stepped into him, her slim hand cupping the back of Lucas’ neck. “You need to focus on your sister. I suspect, the less strangers in the room, the better.”

  The look in their eyes spoke of an indestructible bond between them, and why not? When the drug lord hunting Lucas put together a personal army weaponized with flames and surrounded the property, threatening to burn it to the ground with everyone in it if they didn’t give him up, Chloe had sacrificed herself. She’d put herself in the hands of men who would have no qualms about raping her repeatedly and putting a bullet in her head.

  She’d done it to buy Lucas time, to keep them both alive, and her plan worked.

  But more importantly, she’d proven her devotion to him. He hoped Lucas knew just how damn lucky he’d been to find her.

  Xavier turned away from the private moment between them and shifted his focus to Zane. “Something up?”

  “You could say that. The team is on their way. Laramie’s case is…complicated,” Zane said.

  Xavier straightened at Zane’s careful tone. “Complicated how?”

  “She was in witness protection when she was attacked. That’s why it took so long to identify her.”

  Lucas’ sharp, steely eyes snapped to them. “Protection from who?”

  “Her husband, a police detective in Atlanta,” Zane said, rubbing the back of his neck. “She was supposed to testify in the case against him.”

  A low hum filled Xavier’s ears. His skin prickled. “When?”

  “A week ago. When she didn’t show, they dropped the charges,” Zane said.

  “That’s bullshit. She would have shown. She should have been transported by feds,” Lucas bit out.

  Zane turned to him with a sneer, telling them all just what he thought of the decision. “Which tells you just how fucked this whole thing is. As for the district attorney, I don’t know if he’s dirty or if he doesn’t want to mar his winning streak.”

  “If they put her in witness protection, there had to be some other proof, right?” Chloe asked.

  “I’m sure there was. There are pieces not adding up. Look, Dylan has the whole team digging up information now. When they get here, we’ll figure out the next steps. A big part of this is going to depend on Laramie and what she remembers. Do we have any reason to worry about her memory?” Zane asked, turning his hard gaze to Xavier.

  “According to her scans, no, but I’m going to need her conscious to know for sure. Lucas and I were just on our way in.”

  Zane took a step toward the elevator. “I told the team to meet me in conference room B when they get here. Join us when you’re done, and we’ll see where we’re at.” The doors slid open without hesitation, the intuitive security recognizing his form.

  The laser security system scanned the open space, the beams moving within the walls, seeking anything that had any kind of body heat, always measuring the residents, staff, and few visitors. The readings identified them by height, weight, hair length, muscle structure, you name it, the system could detect it, making the facility a virtual fortress, but in an unobtrusive way so the survivors recovering here didn’t feel like they were under a microscope while they worked to rebuild their lives.

  For the staff of New Hope that meant no security badges to access different wings of the facility because the system tracked them and knew which employees had clearance to access specific sections of the compound. Convenient when a whole team of former SEALs were about to converge on the place.

  The medical center where they treated initial check-ins, abused patients with a wide range of traumas, was the most restricted area and normally would require clearance for a family member to get in, but since Zane had created it and Lucas had a direct hand in the system and the safety bunkers underground, they both had clearance to every single inch of the property.

  Wide doors slid open to a short hall leading to the inner sanctum, the nurses’ station sitting in the center of their intensive care unit.

  Leading Lucas to the corner room, the glass door glided open, and Xavier waved to Lucas to enter first. Diedre and Mallory waited for them, quick to prepare since Laramie was their only patient at the moment.

  “She’s intubated,” Xavier began. “As long as we can keep her calm as we draw her out, we can remove the tube, and she’ll be able to talk. She might not manage more than a whisper at first; she’s been intubated for weeks.”

  “How bad was it?” Lucas whispered, his gaze glued to his sister’s slim form lying slightly upright and still.

  Her heart pumped along at a healthy sixty-eight beats per minute, something Xavier took comfort in after bringing her back three separate times when she’d coded.

  “Broken bones throughout her face. Frankly, I’m amazed she healed with everything in alignment. She shouldn’t need any corrective surgery to have full function. She may choose to have laser treatments down the line for the laceration scars along her cheek, chin, and forehead. But they’re thin and will fade to faint white lines. The major concern was the bleeding on her brain. We managed to get that under control by controlling her blood pressure.”

  “It’s been weeks. She’s been lyi
ng here alone. No one to talk to her. No one to hold her hand,” Lucas said in a harsh whisper.

  “She hasn’t been alone,” Diedre said with a smile at Xavier.

  Lucas turned his assessing stare at him.

  “Diedre,” Xavier warned.

  “Oh, he was a perfect gentleman, of course,” Diedre added.

  Xavier cleared his throat and headed for the sink to wash his hands. “Let’s get started. Lucas, why don’t you stay right next to her and hold her hand. Start talking to her as we work. Reassure her.”

  “Can she hear me?” Lucas asked, taking Laramie’s delicate hand into his own.

  “It’s different for each patient, but I tend to believe they can, yes.”

  Lucas bent over Laramie and smoothed his hand along the crown of her head. His jaw jumped and he swallowed hard. His voice low and calm, he started. “Hey, kiddo. It’s your obnoxious big brother. Hell of a way to have a reunion, huh? You’re in good hands…”

  Xavier took a deep breath. Something told him they’d be successful this time around. God, he hoped so. Maybe then something would feel normal again. He hadn’t been home once since she’d been admitted. Instead, he’d taken up residence at the hospital.

  No matter how many times he told himself he could go, no matter how many times the nurses urged him to get away for a while, he just couldn’t, knowing she lay here, alone. No name, no family, and her daughter, silent and still, waiting for her mother.

  “Everyone ready?” Xavier asked.