Page 3 of Her Tempting Protector

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Cullen Lyons was the last one to enter the briefing room. He hated it when that happened. Why couldn’t he have been an only child? How about the youngest child? That would have been good, right? Then he wouldn’t have little sisters. Instead of taking care of them, they would have had to take care of him—that would have been great.

As he slid into a chair at the back of the room between Kane McNamara and Asher Thorne, he shuddered. Come to think of it, Chelle would have been an evil big sister. She would have tortured him to death. She probably would’ve tried to make him sit down at those imaginary tea parties she’d always had with her dolls and teddy bears.

“What’s your problem?” Kane asked out of the side of his mouth as their lieutenant shuffled papers at the podium.

“It’s Chelle. She and the guy she picked up from the boyfriend-of-the-month-club broke up, and I was her shoulder to cry on.”

“Isn’t that like the fifth one this year?” Asher asked.

“Sixth,” Cullen whispered. “I deleted her dating profile when she wasn’t looking.”

“You didn’t,” Kane laughed.

“McNamara, you got something to share with the class?” Max Hogan asked from the front of the room.

Cullen figured that Kane probably would have, except for the fact that one of the newer SEAL teams, Omega Sky, was peppered in with theirs. It wasn’t personal, but they still hadn’t earned the trust of the men of Night Storm. Maybe after they’d worked a mission together.

“Nope, nothing to see here,” Kane said.

“Okay, so listen up,” Max began. “Things have been heating up in Africa, specifically Chad and Sudan. Both embassies are on alert, with Chad on high alert.”

“Big surprise there,” Cullen whispered to Kane. Raiden Sato sat in front of them and nodded his head imperceptibly. Yep, they all knew the Boka Haram wasn’t just relegated to Nigeria.

Max hit the lights and satellite photos appeared on the screen in the front of the room. “Right now, we aren’t moving because we don’t have any Americans in harm’s way,” Max explained. “But here are Boka Haram training camps in Chad. You can see they’re close to the Nigerian border. According to the satellite monitoring, they’ve tripled in size over the last two months.”

“Shit, that’s bad.” Kane murmured.

“Your analysis is correct, McNamara,” Max said from the front of the room.

Cullen smothered a grin. Kane should have known better, their lieutenant had ears like a bat.

For the next twenty minutes, Max went over all the terrorist movements that had been captured by satellites, as well as all of the ground intel they had available. When Max hit the lights again, Cullen raised his hand and Max pointed at him.

“What’s going on in Sudan? I thought things had calmed down with the election?” Cullen asked.

“The old special forces group, i.e. the Rapid Support Forces, were supposed to have been disbanded with the election of the new prime minister. They were the ones were responsible for the massacre that killed over a hundred people last summer. The war crimes trial still hasn’t happened and they’ve gone to ground. Unfortunately, the general who oversaw all of the special forces is now part of the new government, and the people in our embassy say he’s not working hard to bring his former special forces group to justice.”

“So, are they still part of the current army?” Asher asked.

“Some are, some aren’t. It’s a rat’s nest. Several cities far outside of Khartoum have been attacked. According to our sources, the new government is coordinating a peace talk with them in the next couple of days.”

Cullen wrote Fuck that noise on his notepad.

Asher and Kane nodded at what he’d written.

“But Chad is still the one that we’re most worried about?” Ezio Stark, the second-in-command of the Omega Sky team, asked.

“That’s the one the brass is telling us to focus on,” Max confirmed.

Cullen heard the slight hesitation in his voice. Obviously, his spidey senses told him that Sudan was going to blow up first.

Good to know.

Max nodded his head toward the lieutenant of Omega Sky, Kostya Baranov. He’d been leaning back in his chair up front, but at Max’s nod, he unwrapped his towering frame and stood up.

“My hope is that these problems in Africa come to nothing and we can keep playing in our normal Middle Eastern sandbox. Gray Tyler of Black Dawn has been telling me about all the fun he and his team have been having lately, and I would hate to miss out on anything.” Kostya’s smile encouraged everyone to join in with his laughter. He had a good way of easing tense situations.