Free To the Edge by Cindy Gerard Page A

the hundred out of Jillian's shorts.
    "I'll take this kind of easy money anytime, big guy." Char shot Garrett a cheeky grin as she lifted a portion of the bar that Jillian hadn't noticed was hinged. "Go," she said, and shoved Jillian out into the room.
    "Go," Garrett repeated, and for once, Jillian didn't argue. She ran for the door.
     
    "And once, in Panama, he—"
    "Jase," Garrett cut the young Ranger off with a firm but exhausted patience. "Give it a rest, OK?"
    Jillian had been listening to Jason's combat stories with half an ear as she studied Garrett. She wasn't sure when it had happened, but he had a small bruise high on his right cheekbone. The knuckles on the hands wrapped tight around the steering wheel were raw and bleeding. His jaw was clenched. And evidently, the authority in his tone finally shut the young Ranger up.
    Sitting sideways in the front seat of Garrett's Mustang as they sped through town toward the airport, she peered around the seat where Jason "Plowboy" Wilson slumped in a splay-legged sprawl. He was bloody and battered and quite obviously drunk enough that he felt only the fuzzy edge of pain. No more than five feet nine or ten, the fair-skinned blond with the baleful brown eyes and military buzz cut personified the term built like a bull.
    "Lugged a lot of hay bales and wrestled my share of calves back home on the farm, ma'am," he'd said, the picture of modesty when he caught her staring at his massive biceps.
    He'd been talking nonstop since Garrett had dragged him out of the middle of that knot of flying fists and booted him toward the door.
    She was still amazed that Garrett had never drawn his gunor his knife. Thank God. In fact, he'd never worked up a sweat. Once he'd grabbed the pool cue, it had pretty much all been over but the obscenities.
    They'd been on the road for about five minutes when Garrettcarefully pried the .22 from her fingers—she'd forgotten she still held it—and, leaning over her, stowed it, without a word, in his glove compartment. Not that he'd had any opportunity to speak. Jason had been on a filibuster, extolling Nolan— No-man —Garrett's virtues, vices, and, in his humble opinion, godlike status.
    She'd managed to piece together that Jason was a part of Charlie Company, First Bat—"that's Battalion, ma'am," he'd explained—at Fort Benning and Garrett had been his sergeant and squad leader until three months ago. Jason was on leave and headed for the Keys but had planned a layover in West Palm with the express intent of connecting with Garrett. Only problem was, he'd hit the bars first and the phone second and had called Garrett as an afterthought when he failed to come up with a compelling reason why the local populace shouldn't just kill him, feed him to the gators, and put everyone out of their misery.
    No-man, she'd learned after Garrett had booted Plowboy into the backseat of the Mustang with orders to not even think about bleeding on the upholstery, was—in Plowboy's words—"... one motherfuckin', badass, genuine balls-out fightin' machine, excuse my French, ma'am."
    She'd also been assured, as Plowboy babbled in obvious hero worship, that Nolan Garrett was No-man to those who'd trained with him and fought with him and would die for him because no man challenged him, no man bested him, and no man who knew him was dumb enough to try. No-man was the stuff, if Plowboy was to be believed, that legends were made of.
    From what she'd just witnessed in Nirvana, there might be as much truth as hero worship in Plowboy's summation.
    For perhaps the hundredth time in as many minutes, Jillian took a mental step back and wondered if she'd somehow stumbled through a time warp and landed a minor role in a B-rated adventure flick without so much as a casting call.
    She was a professional career woman, for God's sake. She did not lead a life that invited cryptic death threats or participation in bar brawls. While surreal, the past couple of weeks of dealing with the