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KPD SWAT GENERATION 2.0: Book Twelve

CHAPTER 1

Due to personal reasons, I’ll be drinking again this weekend.

-Caro’s secret thoughts

Carolina

“And then he started to laugh.” Brielle wiped her eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.”

I’d met Brielle through a grapevine of friends, and for some weird fucking reason, she’d latched onto me.

I wasn’t sure why, or how, I’d somehow become her keeper, but I didn’t like her.

Not at all.

She was petty and fake, and she was also not a person that I would normally spend time with.

I especially didn’t like how she treated people.

I looked down at my corndog and wondered, idly, how long I had to wait to take another bite.

I mean, she was really crying here. Like, big, fat drops.

I looked at my watch and realized that regardless of whether Brielle was crying or not, I had shit to do, and listening to her cry about some man that didn’t return her attentions wasn’t one of them.

“I gotta go,” I said to her. “I’m due back in court in fifteen minutes. I haven’t even gotten to eat my lunch yet.”

Brielle wiped her eyes and shoved her lunch away with a ferocious scowl.

I stood up and wondered if I should address her attitude, but decided that I didn’t have time for that, either.

Honestly, I really wasn’t quite sure what the hell was going on with me.

I shouldn’t have agreed to this lunch date in the first place, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself when it came to her. I felt bad for her.

She truly was a mean person. But when I met her a few months ago when I got home, she’d somehow gotten me my new job… and I couldn’t blow her off after she’d done something so great for me.

“Fine. But you’re paying. I paid last time.” Brielle stood up and left her trash on the table.

“Are you going to throw all of that away?” I asked curiously, not bothering to argue with her ‘I paid last time’ comment. She was wrong. I’d paid last time, too. At some point, I was going to have to stop being grateful that she’d found me a job.

She looked at the table, then the trash can only a few feet away.

“No,” she said. “That’s not my job to do, it’s theirs.”

I nearly rolled my eyes but chose to pick her trash up instead. Mine, I packed back into my bag and rolled it up before tucking it into my purse.

Just as I was about to push out of the hospital lunchroom door, Brielle caught my attention once again.

“You have toilet paper on your shoe.”

I looked down and, sure enough, I did have toilet paper on my shoe.

And something brown was on it.

Gross.

I kicked my leg and attempted to flick the tissue off.

I stepped out of the way as I tried to get stupid toilet paper off without touching it as the door at my back was pushed open and an amused man said, “Need help?”

I looked up into the piercing green eyes—eyes that practically glowed with enjoyment—of Saint Nicholson, and froze.

His chestnut color hair was curly and beautiful, and I practically itched to sink my fingers into the locks. To wind a couple of those curls around my fingers. And holy God, he was wearing black, horn-rimmed glasses. Where had those come from?

“I’ll make it,” I grumbled, trying not to allow my eyes to slide down the length of his body like I wanted to.

But, it was inevitable.

The man was hot as fuck.

He was tall, way taller—by at least a foot—than my five-foot-three. He was bigger around, too.

Where I had curves, he had lean hardness.

Where I had fat, he had nothing but muscle.

And the uniform he was wearing only added to his sexiness.

I had a thing for cops.

I’d dated three in my life.

None seriously or anything. A couple of months each.

But none of them had been as drop-dead gorgeous as the man currently grinning at me.

He moved forward, pressing his body close to mine, and then stepped onto the toilet paper with his booted foot.

His big, booted foot.

Like, way bigger than my size sevens.

Just as quickly as his body touched mine, he was away from me, and the toilet paper was no longer clinging to my foot.

He’d taken a step back, closer to the counter, when a screaming man hustled into the room.

And his eyes were aimed on Brielle.

“You bitch!” the man yelled, shoulder-checking me on the way to get into Brielle’s face.

Brielle flinched and backed away, her back hitting the counter where she’d been standing next to me watching me struggle.

Before the man could get into Brielle’s face, however, Saint had him by the arm and he was hauling him backward.

The barista behind the counter, a young man in his early twenties who’d grudgingly served Brielle despite her nastiness to him, watched in interest.

The only two other people in the room, a mother and daughter, stood up from their table.

“Whoa,” Saint said as he took hold of the man’s arm and pushed him backward so that he wasn’t crowding either Brielle or me too closely.

“Get the fuck out of my face, moron,” Brielle snapped. “Why are you even here?”

“Why am I here?” he growled. “I’m here because you set me up with someone that has goddamn Ebola! Now I’m in quarantine, or supposed to be, for the next three weeks! And if I have to be there, so the fuck do you!”

Saint let go of his arm as if he had, well, Ebola.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” a guy wearing a yellow decontamination suit said. “You’ll have to come with me.”

The man sneered at Brielle. “This is all your fucking fault. Would it have fucking killed you to go out on a date with me? You had to send me on a fake date?”

I had no clue what was going on, but I wasn’t sure that I was going to like it.

• • •

“What do you mean?” I asked, looking at the man in front of me with alarm.

“You’ve been exposed,” the man from the Center for Disease Control, Jace Levine, said.

I looked over at Saint to see him staring at Jace with alarm.

“But it’s Christmas!” the mother with the young daughter said. “We won’t be out of here until Christmas!”

Well, it was December first, actually. But still, she was right.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Jace apologized as he looked at her, then at all of us. “But this isn’t really something that I’m able to control. You have to be quarantined to prevent the spread of this virus. And here, we can watch all of you to make sure that you’re doing what you should be doing.”

In all, there were eight of us that were ‘exposed.’

Saint and me, Brielle, the mother and daughter duo, Misha and Tisha. The man that exposed us all, Martin, the barista, Tate, and the security guard that had been guarding the hospital entrance, Darrel.

“You’ll all be put into rooms,” he said. “After today, you will no longer have contact with anybody but your roommate.”

I prayed hard that I wouldn’t be stuck with Brielle. For the love of God, I’d kill her.

“Do we get to keep our electronic devices? Do we get to go home and get our things?” Brielle asked.

“You have what you have on you,” Jace said, “for now. We’ll be bringing you all provisions. Changes of clothes. Toiletries. Things of that nature.”

“What about tampons?” I asked. “I’m gonna need those today.”

Jace looked taken aback for a long moment, then nodded. “Medical supplies as needed, yes. I’ll get you those things today.”

All of this was said from behind his protective equipment.

He was sweating badly, and he looked like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

So did all of us, now that I thought about it.

“Who are we pairing up with?” Tate asked.

“You two.” He pointed at Tate and Darrel. “You two.” He pointed at Misha and Tisha. “You two.” He pointed at Saint and me. “And you two.” He pointed at Martin and Brielle.

“Oh, hell no!” Martin argued.

“You two are the most likely to be contagious.” Jace shrugged. “We have obtained a hotel for y’all to be quarantined in. Now, we are going to transport you all to your rooms,” he ordered as he gestured to the exit of the cafeteria.

They had us in a hotel. One that hadn’t opened yet, actually. We were transported by ambulance to the new location, put through rigorous decontamination then escorted to our new homes for the next three weeks.

It was brand new, and out of all the rooms it had, the ones at the very top, the executive suites, were the only ones open.

“I’m not pairing up with him for three weeks! I’ll go with her!” Brielle pointed at me.

Saint, God love him, hooked his arm around me. “Sorry, but my fiancée and me are going to be together. We’re not separating.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that, despite our differences, he wasn’t going to let me go.

Thank God.

Over the last year that I’d known Saint, especially the last four months that I’d been home, I’d made it a priority to give him shit every time that I saw him. He’d made it a point to give it right back.

And, from what I’d learned, he didn’t give shit to anybody but me.

Which made me feel special in a way.

“What?” Brielle screeched. “You’re getting married?”

Four more yellow-suited people came into the room then, all coming up to us.

We’d been showered, changed, decontaminated to the best of their abilities, and now they were leading us to our jail cells for the next three weeks.

Without another word, we followed the silent man that led us to the top suite at the very end of the hallway.

He opened the door with a code, then gestured for us to go inside.

“After you,” he said.

We went inside, and without another word, the door slammed shut behind us.

We both turned to look at the closed door, then back at each other.

“Holy fuck,” he said, shaking his head.

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