The Hero Was Handsome (Triple Threat Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Kristen's Reader's List

  About This Book

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  Review

  Up Next

  Also in This Series

  Other Books by Kristen Casey

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reading Order of Kristen's Books

  The Hero Was Handsome

  A Triple Threat Novel

  Copyright ©2020 Kristen Casey

  THE HERO WAS HANDSOME ©2020 by Kristen Casey

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, situations, and dialogue are a product of the author’s imagination and are not real. Actual locations and organizations are used only in a fictitious capacity. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. By purchasing this book, you have been granted non-exclusive and non-transferable permission to access and read it. If you did not purchase this book, please return it and purchase your own copy from a reputable vendor. Book piracy is a violation of copyright law and steals earnings directly out of the pockets of authors.

  No part of this novel may be reproduced, stored, shared, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author and publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-949529-11-1 (Kindle Edition)

  Cover Design ©2020 Tugboat Design

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  About This Book

  The Hero Was Handsome

  Lead the way…

  Yeah, right. All leading the way had gotten Tate was a seat too close to a roadside bomb and a psych eval gone sideways. He was benched from the Army for months while he healed, but he wasn’t going to mope around about one unlucky incident. He was going to get better and return to active duty in just a few more weeks.

  In the meantime, he needs to keep busy so he can stop climbing the walls. Tate agrees to pick up a couple extra bucks and hit the road, working security for a hot little author his buddy wants protected. What could go wrong with a cake job like that? After all, Lyla is a writer, not a terrorist.

  However, Tate’s little temp job soon turns all kinds of complicated. When a mysterious fan starts getting too close for comfort on her book tour, he begins to suspect that he’s not the only one who’s fallen for Lyla’s charms. It looks like some of the pretty bookworm’s gritty research has followed her into the real world—and it’s none too happy to find Tate barring the door.

  Can he find the person scaring Lyla out of her wits before something truly bad happens? Or will his inconvenient crush keep him from completing the one mission more important than any other?

  Suddenly, this job’s about more than guarding an asset…

  Tate’s protecting the woman who holds his heart in her hands.

  About the Series

  The three men of TDH are scorching hot and true Triple Threats: one Tall, one Dark, and one Handsome. They’ve got all the moves, and they’re ready to take the women of New York by storm. If only the women would get with the program.

  ONE

  TATE AWOKE, AS he often did these days, with the white-hot bang that came at the end of his dream. Sadly, it wasn’t the sort of bang that had him balls-deep in a good-hearted woman. Instead, it was the kind that knocked him flat on his can if he was lucky—and sent him straight to his maker if he wasn’t.

  He sat up and blinked away the lingering fog of the recurrent nightmare and did a quick assessment. By all accounts, he was luckier than most. Tate was alive and whole, for one thing, and back home in the States, for another.

  He’d been born to a nice, solid set of parents who’d been coddling him for months and, courtesy of his kick-ass best friends, he’d spent the night on a posh hotel mattress instead of on the rocky ground of the Middle East.

  On the other hand, Tate’s career would soon be swirling down the toilet like a college kid’s bar-binge piss if he couldn’t get his shit together today, and his current condition didn’t make that look terribly promising.

  It wasn’t like he had a ton to do—no mountains to scale, no insurgents to neutralize, no wounded teammates to hump out of the desert on his back. No, by his count, Tate only needed to accomplish three small, non-life-threatening tasks in the immediate future.

  One, move through his day as calmly as possible, so his dumb-ass brain would keep healing. Two, nail the job interview his buddy Red had set up for him this morning—and three, act like an upstanding civilian convincingly enough for the next few months that the Army finally let him go back to being a soldier.

  Where life made sense.

  True, it was a peculiar sort of sense, but it was what Tate knew and what he was good at. Fuck if he was any good at being normal anymore—these last few months he’d discovered the hard way that he was too far gone for that.

  Tate groaned and scrubbed his hands over his face. In the Army, he didn’t have to confront the fact that his two best friends were both killing it in their careers and personal lives while Tate was just killing.

  He didn’t have to face that Red and Luca would soon be settling down with the loves of their lives, while he was stuck in a bizarre pseudo-adult stasis—responsible enough to carry firearms capable of grisly destruction, but completely oblivious when it came to, say, shopping for groceries.

  It shouldn’t be okay that a 99-cent cheeseburger from the drive-through had taken on all the ambrosia-like qualities of a once-in-a-lifetime five-star meal. It definitely wasn’t okay that Tate had ended up at said drive-through last week because sitting at his mom’s table for a holiday meal had made him want to claw his way out of his own skin.

  He pushed to his feet and shuffled over to the hotel room desk, where he’d left his list the night before. It was crumpled and messy, and he’d scrawled it on the hotel stationery before he’d crawled into bed, but it still seemed to be accurate.

  A while back, Tate’s doctors had suggested he make lists to help himself stay on top of the things he needed to do while his memory remained unreliable. Lately, it felt like Tate’s whole life revolved around these goddamned lists.

  Wake up. Shave and shower. Take a cab to Red’s office for the interview.

  Tate’s eyes hitched on what he’d written in parentheses after that: “Uber?!?” His old friend ha
d suggested he take one of those, and while Tate knew very well what an Uber was, he didn’t have the faintest idea how a dude went about securing one.

  But maybe that was more of a city-versus-country thing, instead of a soldier-versus-civilian thing. He decided a taxi would get the job done old-school this morning, and later—if he remembered—Tate could google the whole Uber issue to death for next time.

  On the nightstand, his phone dinged out a reminder, and he went over to check it. Ten a.m. appointment. Don’t be late, Fucktard.

  Tate huffed out a laugh. His prior-day self had clearly left nothing to chance. Yesterday’s Tate had probably also asked Red to text this morning—not that he’d needed to.

  Ever since Red and Luca had shown up at Landstuhl with a company jet and world-revolves-around-them demeanors, they’d been all over Tate like white on rice. If they had their way, they weren’t going to let him forget his own name, much less today’s interview.

  The idiots had always had his six, right from day one of freshman year at college. You couldn’t pay for that kind of loyalty with blood, and that was another reason why Tate couldn’t screw up today. He absolutely refused to let Red and Luca down.

  One more glance at his list, a hasty line drawn through the words Wake up, and Tate headed for the fancy marble bathroom attached to his suite. When he showed up at Red’s office later this morning, there’d be no trace of the sweating, blood-stained, barely human thing that had played the starring role in his dream this morning. Tate was going in spit-shined and tight, and there’d be no way on earth anyone could refuse him.

  NO TWO WAYS about it, the chick was an absolute babe. And sure, Tate knew you couldn’t say that kind of thing about a woman you were trying to work for. He knew he had no business whatsoever noticing the looks of a stranger on the street right now, much less one of Red’s most important employees.

  But facts were facts, and Ms. Lyla Lawson’s shiny brown hair and hot secretary glasses were totally doing it for him. She had a sweet ass and pretty hazel eyes and a soft, husky voice that was so sexy it ought to be criminal.

  His buddy appeared to be utterly immune to her charms, but then again, Red had always had a ferocious poker face. Tate listened to his former roommate define terms and kept his eyes on Ms. Lawson’s back while he surreptitiously readjusted himself in his pants.

  No use having her bust him rearranging his junk. Nothing in the world said Not Qualified quite like sporting untimely wood in your dress slacks.

  While he sat there trying to rein shit in, Tate attempted to convince himself that Lyla had breath like festering sewage or a nasally, cackling laugh. He hadn’t gotten close enough to determine either of those things for certain, however.

  Since Tate had retreated to the chair Red offered him once he’d shaken Lyla’s hand, and she had immediately paced over to the big windows overlooking downtown Manhattan, his dick still knew there was doubt.

  Lyla was keeping her distance and keeping quiet, while Tate attempted mightily to ignore her charms and Red talked.

  He talked a hell of a lot. Once Tate was sure his ill-advised condition had gotten a little less obvious, he checked his buddy’s face to see what was up—and met Red’s narrow-eyed glare of death. Shit.

  Red gave him a tiny shake of his head, delivering the most subtle and dangerous Back Off in history. Tate widened his eyes and shrugged, one-hundred-percent the innocent boy scout.

  The glare got darker and more threatening. Clearly, his old roommate had seen him on the prowl one too many times to buy the whole Who me? charade. Tate would have to remember that. He wasn’t with his unit anymore.

  People knew him better here—knew his habits and his history. Plus, they were peers instead of subordinates. They didn’t have to accept his bullshit just because he told them to.

  Tate wanted to believe that he might have one or two new tricks up his sleeve that his friends hadn’t seen yet, but that might be wishful thinking. Like so many other things were, these days.

  “Here’s the thing,” Lyla said suddenly, spinning around and placing her back to those precarious-looking windows.

  Tate took a moment to admire the way she’d cut off Red’s big-man bluster so handily. It diverted him from obsessing about how any fuckface with a decent scope out there could so easily get a bead on them.

  “I’m supposed to be going on a book tour next week to drum up buzz for Red Devil and my new series with them. I’ve been telling Red that we ought to just cancel it, but he’s…”

  “An over-bearing ass who doesn’t want you to be in danger,” Red supplied. He pulled out his chair and sat down heavily.

  Tate snapped to attention. While he’d been dwelling on shades of hotness and degrees of unsafe exposure, the real reason he’d been summoned here had somehow dropped into the room without him noticing.

  When Red had broached this idea to him last week—indeed, while his buddy had been expounding on it for the last ten minutes—the job had not, in fact, been about some cake security guard position, as Tate had assumed.

  All this time, he’d been envisioning a geeky gray uniform with a stupid patch on the breast pocket. Tate had been thinking he would fritter away his days sitting at some desk in an office lobby, with Lyla working upstairs getting Red Devil, the new publishing imprint, up and running.

  He’d been entertaining fantasies of telling her, “Morning, Ms. Lawson,” and “Evening, Ms. Lawson,” when she walked by his station. Five seconds ago, Tate had every intention of flirting with her for the next few months like his pants were on fire.

  But that kind of job involved no danger whatsoever.

  Tate cleared his throat, and inquired, “What kind of danger are we talking here?”

  “It’s no big deal,” Lyla scoffed, at the same time Red explained, “Unfortunately, Lyla’s acquired a stalker.”

  Holy crap. This woman didn’t need a security guard—she needed a bodyguard. For her very female and attractive body.

  “I see,” Tate said, so he wouldn’t blurt out his thoughts on that subject.

  Lyla looked troubled. She pivoted around again and returned to her post near the windows.

  He asked, “Could you, uh…”

  She peered over her shoulder at him and bit one of those full, peach-glossed lips of hers.

  Tate swallowed and looked to Red, instead. “Can we close the blinds, maybe? There’s an awful lot of open space…there.”

  Red blinked and sat back, studying him. In an undertone, he murmured, “Light hurting your eyes?”

  Tate sat back, too. Injuries sucked, but they were better than letting people know how freaking paranoid he’d apparently become. “Yeah. Little bit,” he said.

  Red hit a button near his desk phone, and a thin, tinted screen began its slow descent from the hidden niche near the ceiling. As Tate had hoped, Lyla came and sat safely beside him once she was deprived of her view.

  She smelled like a meadow of wildflowers, damn it. Not even a hint of sewage wafted his way.

  Once she was settled, he continued, “Are the police involved?”

  Red muttered pissily, “Those guys.”

  Lyla sighed, “I didn’t want to call them. And when the letters stopped coming to Trident, I thought whoever it was had moved on. But then…” She stopped. Paused and took a big breath. “Then one came to my house.”

  Tate looked at Red. The man stared back at him, six-and-a-half feet of bristling fury. Lyla might be trying to downplay the situation, but whatever was going on had his friend plenty worked up.

  “You insisted she go to the cops?” Tate confirmed.

  “You bet I did.”

  “And they said?”

  “Without any fingerprints or overt threats, they can’t do anything,” Lyla told him.

  Tate couldn’t read her expression. Was she scared—or embarrassed? Hard to say.

  He zeroed in on the most obvious issue. “Guys, what makes you think I can help here? I have no experience whatsoever with t
his kind of thing. I don’t do investigative stuff in the Army. I just shoot things.”

  “Tate’s right,” Lyla told her boss. “The last thing this mess needs is a gun.”

  “I disagree,” Red countered. “I think the last thing it needs is for some deranged punk to show up at one of your signings with a gun, and all anyone has to protect you are a stack of paperbacks and some permanent markers.”

  “We should just let the police handle it,” she tried again.

  “Lyla, we’ve been over this,” Red said. “NYPD does not have the manpower to assign someone to you day and night, and they’re not going to send a cop on the road with you, either. I am, however. I think it should be Tate.”

  Tate’s gaze pinged back to Lyla to see her return salvo.

  “This is overkill,” she countered.

  “I wish you’d chosen any word but that one,” Red retorted.

  Tate held up his hands. “Okay, kids, let’s back things up a step.” He pointed at Lyla. “How long have you been getting freaky letters from this person?”

  “About six months, as far as we know,” Red replied.

  “Not talking to you,” Tate fired back. This time, he emphasized the author’s name, “Lyla, what do they usually say?”

  “They’re angry and they get personal. They talk about my books and they always tell me I ‘got it wrong,’ whatever that means.”

  “How angry are we talking?”

  Lyla opened her mouth to reply, then shut it again when Red drummed his fingers loudly on his desk. She ran an unsteady hand through her silky-looking hair and tucked it behind one ear.

  “Okay, fine—they are pretty creepy. And the person seems like they’re getting madder. Or more frustrated, maybe? I don’t know. But the last few letters have come to my apartment, and now, once or twice they even…”