Monk (K19 Security Solutions Book 7) Read online

  MONK

  HEATHER SLADE

  K19 SECURITY SOLUTIONS BOOK 7

  MONK

  © 2019 Heather Slade

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  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, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-942200-68-0

  ALSO BY HEATHER SLADE

  BUTLER RANCH

  Coming Soon!

  Prequel: Kade’s Worth

  Available Now!

  Book One: Brodie

  Book Two: Maddox

  Book Three: Naughton

  Book Four: Mercer

  Book Five: Kade

  Butler Ranch Boxed Set: Books 1-5 with Bonus Book: Ainsley

  K19 SECURITY SOLUTIONS

  Available Now!

  Book One: Razor

  Book Two: Gunner

  Book Three: Mistletoe

  Book Four: Mantis

  K19 Security Solutions Boxed Set: Books 1-4

  Book Five: Dutch

  Book Six: Striker

  Book Seven: Monk

  Coming Soon!

  Book Eight: Halo

  MILITARY INTELLIGENCE SECTION 6

  Available Now!

  Book One: Shiver

  Book Two: Wilder

  Book Three: Pinch

  Book Four: Shadow

  Military Intelligence Section 6 Boxed Set: Books 1-4

  THE INVINCIBLES

  Available Now!

  Book One: Decked

  Book Two: Edged

  Book Three: Grinded

  Book Four: Riled

  Coming Soon!

  Book Five: Smoked Fury

  COCKY HERO CLUB NOVELS

  Coming Soon!

  Book One: Undercover Agent

  Book Two: Undercover Saint

  Book Three: Undercover Angel

  Book Four: Undercover Devil

  KB WORLDS EVERYDAY HEROES

  Coming Soon!

  Book One: Handled

  COWBOYS OF CRESTED BUTTE

  Available Now!

  Book One: Fall for Me

  Book Two: Dance with Me

  Book Three: Kiss Me Cowboy

  Book Four: Stay with Me

  Book Five: Win Me Over

  Cowboys of Crested Butte Boxed Set: Books 1-5

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part I

  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

  Part II

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Want more?

  Decked

  About the Author

  Also by Heather Slade

  PROLOGUE

  DECEMBER

  The ICU nurses were used to Monk showing up each morning without saying a word to anyone and then leaving the same way. So, like every other day of the last twenty-three, he walked past the desk silently when he went to get some dinner. Sure, it was Christmas, but he really didn’t give a shit about holidays, especially this year, with his friend in intensive care.

  When he got off the elevator on the main floor, he buttoned up the pea coat that had belonged to his grandfather, put on his beanie, and pulled it down over his ears. He reached into his pockets, took out his gloves, and put the left one on first. He was about to put on the right when he felt his cell phone vibrate. He pulled it out and swiped the screen.

  Look up, it said; he did.

  “Hi,” said the woman who’d sent it, slowly approaching him.

  “Saylor.” Given he was unable to decide whether to tell her how good it was to see her or ask her what in the hell she was doing there, he said nothing more than her name.

  “Merry Christmas, Monk.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My mom, the girls, and I are spending Christmas in Annapolis again this year.”

  Last year, he’d been with Saylor and her family at the same place. One of the founding partners of K19 Security Solutions, a private security and intelligence firm where he was a junior partner, had hosted a Christmas celebration. Not only had Monk been there. Onyx had too.

  “How’s Onyx?” Saylor asked, as though she knew what he was thinking.

  “No change.”

  “I’m sorry, Monk. I was praying for a Christmas miracle.”

  He eased the glove off his left hand, put them both in his pocket, and then stepped forward. He gripped Saylor’s nape with one hand, wrapped his other arm around her waist, and kissed her. It wasn’t a chaste kiss. He didn’t waste time with shit like that. Not with her. He tightened his hold so Saylor’s body was flush with his and deepened their kiss.

  He pulled back and looked in her eyes. “I’m sorry—”

  She put her fingertips on his lips. “Don’t.”

  No one was ever as easy on him as Saylor. And no one deserved to be hard on him more than she did.

  “Where were you going?”

  “Dinner.”

  She tucked her arm in his. “Good. I’m hungry.”

  His loft was a ten-minute walk from the hospital. If he were alone, he’d stop and eat somewhere on the way.

  “It’s cold.”

  “I’m okay to walk,” she told him, snuggling up against him when they went outside.

  In the almost year and a half since he’d met Saylor, they’d been apart far more than together, and yet she was able to read him like no one else ever had. Two words, and she knew what he was asking. It always surprised him, but it shouldn’t.

  “THIS IS NICE,” she said when he opened the door to his loft and invited her in.

  Monk nodded. He’d gotten the three-bedroom unit because he wanted to be on the top floor of the building, and he wanted a view. He didn’t care about it being too big for him or about the price.

  When the listing agent offered to throw in the staging furniture for a nominal fee, he took her up on it. Everything else in it, he’d ordered online. He didn’t have time to shop, not that he would’ve anyway. He spent every day at George Washington University Hospital, waiting for his friend to come out of the coma he’d been in since surviving a plane crash almost a month ago.

  He took Saylor’s coat and hung it in the closet with his and then walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He kept it well-stocked, again by ordering online and having the groceries delivered.

  Saylor came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “When did you last eat?” she asked.

  “Lunch. You said you we
re hungry.”

  “I can wait.”

  Monk closed the refrigerator door and led her into the master bedroom.

  —:—

  Sex with Monk had always been incendiary. From the first time and every time since. Saylor had never been with another man who lit her on fire the way Monk did. It was as though an electrical current ran from every part of his body and traveled directly through her bloodstream whenever and however he touched her.

  Saylor watched as he undressed, like she always did. There was no pretense with this man as he unbuttoned his white dress shirt, revealing so much that she didn’t know where to look first.

  Around his thick neck, he wore four chains, each increasing in length. The first was an Aztec medallion on a thin piece of leather. She walked closer and fingered it, remembering the first time he’d explained its meaning.

  “It’s a tonalpohualli,” he’d said. “It’s a divination tool, keeping the delicate equilibrium of the divine forces residing inside of me.”

  The next was black braided leather with what looked to her like black onyx resting in patterned silver.

  “Is this new?” she asked, running her fingertip over the black beads.

  “It is.”

  “For Onyx?”

  Monk nodded.

  Saylor walked her fingers lower, to the next—a blue-beaded rosary she’d seen before, but didn’t remember the silver cross that hung from it.

  Last was the thick platinum chain from which hung a simple wedding ring that he’d told her had belonged to his mother.

  The Aztec sun tattoo covering his right pec was one her brother, Razor, had too. It symbolized a belief in an afterlife. The ink continued in a sleeve of intricate symbols that abruptly ended at Monk’s wrist. His other pec and shoulder were bare, as was his back, but the same ink that covered his right forearm, covered his left.

  Monk eased the shirt off his arms and shoulders, revealing his thick, dark chest hair that narrowed as it trailed down his stomach.

  When Saylor unfastened the heavy copper buckle on his jeans, Monk grasped her small wrist in his big hand, and stopped her.

  “Wait, Saylor. We need to talk.”

  Talk? If there was anything Monk didn’t do, it was talk. “Okay,” she said, backing up to sit on the end of the bed.

  PART I

  1

  Two Augusts Ago

  “Okay, you two,” Saylor said to her brother and his girlfriend, Ava, “The girls are tired, so I’m taking them home—”

  “What?” Razor asked, following her line of sight.

  “Who is that?”

  “That’s Monk. He’s hangin’ with us for a few days.”

  “Someone you work with?”

  Razor nodded.

  “He’s kinda hot.”

  “He doesn’t talk very much,” Ava told her. “I think I’ve heard him say a total of three words.”

  “Is that why you call him Monk?”

  Razor nodded a second time.

  “I can live with that, as long as he’s not celibate too.”

  Her brother raised an eyebrow, which she certainly would’ve commented on if the girlfriend wasn’t with him. After all, this was the first time Saylor had met her. Not that she was really his girlfriend. Her brother was a former CIA agent, current partner in a private security and intelligence firm, and Ava was an asset he needed to protect. Although judging from the PDA, it had already turned into a lot more than that.

  “Anyway, we’re goin’ home. Invite me back over sometime to meet the monk.” She turned around to look for her girls and saw both had gotten back into the ocean’s freezing water. Off the coast of Oregon, the water’s temp rarely got above sixty degrees even in the height of summer.

  “What the heck,” she muttered, running over to join them. They’d end up putting their ice-cold feet on her anyway, so she might as well lower her body temperature to theirs.

  Her two girls, Sierra and Savannah, looked like twins, but they were actually a year apart, like Saylor and Razor were. Savannah, her six-year-old, was almost taller than her older sister, and it drove her seven-year-old crazy.

  Both were blonde, blue-eyed towheads, like their father had been when he was a little boy. Saylor had dark brown hair that looked almost black, and dark eyes. No one ever asked if they were her daughters. Maybe they just assumed she was the babysitter—until one of them called her Mama.

  As she tiptoed into the water, Saylor looked over her shoulder and saw the man her brother called Monk standing where he had been before.

  The fact that he didn’t talk much didn’t bother her at all. She wasn’t interested in him for conversation, at least from what she could see from a distance. And she definitely wasn’t interested in a relationship. She’d done that, failed miserably, and did her best to raise the two little girls who were a product of that relationship, all on her own. The liar-cheater-beater bastard, as she called him in her head, hadn’t been in any of their lives for almost five years, and if he ever showed up again, a restraining order would keep him at least one hundred yards away from her. That is, if he ever got out of the white-collar prison her brother had made sure he got locked away in.

  His lying and cheating had been going on for years, Saylor found out later. He didn’t lie only to her; he’d swindled a lot of people in the community out of a great deal of money via a Ponzi scheme similar to Bernie Madoff’s.

  As far as cheating on her, he’d been smart enough not to do it in Yachats where they both knew practically everyone, but after they’d divorced, people told her they’d seen him with other women in several of the small towns that dotted the Oregon coastline.

  As for the final straw—he’d hit Saylor exactly one time. But that physical abuse put him in a whole other category.

  She didn’t hesitate to call Razor that day as she held her one- and two-year-old girls on each arm and ran from the house. She knew two things. One, he wouldn’t strike her when she was carrying the babies, and two, the woman who lived next door and spent all her time sitting near her picture window, watching both the ocean and the neighborhood happenings, would call the cops in a heartbeat if she saw the bastard come after Saylor.

  “I’m on my way to you, and I’m putting you on speaker,” she’d said to Razor, stuffing her cell phone inside her bra so he could hear anything that might happen.

  Razor didn’t ask any questions. He was smart enough to stay silent so her ex wouldn’t know she was on the phone with him.

  She’d lived with her brother for the six months it took for the divorce to be finalized, and then another year after that, until she was finally ready to let go of her fear and start living again.

  The fact that Razor bought her and the girls a duplex two doors down from his—where their mother would also live—had made the decision to regain her independence much easier.

  It had taken her that much time to feel like herself again, and she vowed never to go back to the dark place her marriage had left her in.

  She shook her head, willing the bad memories to skedaddle like she and her sweet girls were about to do. She looked over her shoulder one more time, but the hotter-than-shit guy wasn’t there.

  —:—

  Monk walked back inside the house, but couldn’t take his eyes off the pretty woman down on the beach. She had to be related to Razor; she looked just like him.

  She had long dark hair and the crisp, angular facial features her brother had. From where he stood, her skin looked like porcelain. Not pale, just flawless. Her body looked lean in the one-piece black bathing suit she wore, but she had the kind of breasts Monk loved. Not too big, not too small.

  She looked up at him more than once, and as tempted as he was to walk down to the beach and meet her, that wasn’t why he was in Yachats, Oregon.

  His job was to protect Ava McNamara from the sons of bitches who’d kidnapped her twin sister and two of their friends, and who the team believed wanted Ava dead. If it became necessary, he’d lay his lif
e on the line to protect her, without hesitation.

  That’s what he’d been trained to do, and it was the only kind of life he’d ever wanted. To protect the innocent and kill the bad guys, like the ones who’d killed his sister, right before her eighteenth birthday.

  Monk was eleven at the time, skinny, scrawny, and unable to protect her from the men who came in to rob their house but found her instead. They’d raped her first and then shot her.

  He’d been shot too, but unlike her, he’d lived. He made a vow that day to dedicate his life to protecting those unable to protect themselves, and he’d lived it every day since.

  Monk didn’t remember a whole lot about the years immediately following his sister’s death, other than that vow. His mother told him that he didn’t talk for close to two years, and even when he started again, he said as little as possible. Now, it wasn’t something he thought about; he spoke when he had something to say; otherwise, he didn’t.

  A WEEK before he retired from active duty with the Marine Corps, his commander at the time arranged for him to meet Doc Butler, K19’s original founder. They’d had dinner, and by its end, Monk knew what he’d be doing once his retirement was official. He was headed straight to the farm, as it was known, where he’d undergo training to become a CIA agent.