Page 53 of Her Three Rangers
Chapter 15 - Jaeger
It had been a restless two days. We’d all been on pins and needles waiting to hear back from Sam, but minutes had turned into hours and hours had turned into days, and we still hadn’t heard a word.
Even my little secret skinny dipping rendezvous with Grace had only taken my mind off the business at hand for a while.
Okay, so it had taken my mind off everything except her amazing body, and I had been pretty much worthless for the rest of that day and into the next.
Still, that had been the day before yesterday, and I was pretty sure I was going to go stir crazy if we didn’t hear something soon.
Really soon.
“Will you stop, please?” Cody asked, giving me a hard look as we sat around outside our tents. None of us had spoken for… hours? It was too damn hot to do any unnecessary talking, and until Sam called, there wouldn’t be anything to talk about.
“Stop what?” I asked, shooting him the same look he’d just given me.
“You keep sighing. It’s really loud. And dramatic. Nobody needs to sigh that much.”
I sucked in a breath, ready to sigh extra loud, just to piss him off. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I knew he was just as agitated as I was, and getting into some stupid fight wasn’t going to help anything.
Plus, that fucking heat.
We probably would have both died of heat stroke if we had even thought about throwing down.
“I’m gonna call him,” Ty announced, standing up and dialing the number we’d all been waiting to hear from.
Finally.
Why couldn’t he have made the decision to call Sam hours ago? Or yesterday?
But whatever. He was calling now. We’d have some answers soon. Then, maybe we could actually do something besides sit around on our asses all day and wait.
Trying to follow Ty’s half of the phone conversation was maddening. Did the man never speak in complete sentences on the phone? Was it always just a bunch of grunts and one-syllable answers?
No wonder long distance relationships had never worked out for him. I was ready to yell at him after just three minutes.
“Okay, listen up,” Ty said, hanging up the phone as he paced back and forth in front of us. This had to be good. Ty never paced. “Sam is getting ready to mount a sting operation. It’s going to be big—covering all of Garrick’s properties, his warehouses, everything.”
“Fuck, yeah,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “This is the shit I’ve been waiting for.”
“Same,” Cody nodded. “It’s about time we get the chance to go in there and take care of business.”
Ty grimaced. “Yeah… about that.”
I had just been starting to smile, but my face fell at those words. Why did there always have to be a flip side? Why couldn’t we just go in there and bash some heads together? That would be the simplest solution.
And the most personally rewarding, too.
“We’ve been invited as observers, not as participants,” Ty said.
“The fuck does that mean?” I asked, furrowing my brow. “This isn’t some kind of U.N. peacekeeping mission. We need to make this fucker pay.”
I looked at Cody for some backup, but he just sat there, stone-faced and silent.
Fuck.
“It means we have to stay out of the way,” Ty continued. “I know it’s not what any of us would prefer, but Sam made it clear to me that we either go as observers—as government witnesses, essentially—or we don’t go at all. The choice seemed clear to me.”
“What choice?” I muttered, but it didn’t matter. The decision had already been made before Ty had even spoken to Sam. It had been made for us, and we either toed the line or got shut out completely.