Extract from The Temptation of Dr. Colton by Karen Whiddon
Asher Konig looked around Bourbon Street in the heart of New Orleans as something akin to shock crept into his gut. What was this place? Granted, he hadn’t been home in years, but he felt like he’d landed on an alien planet.
The buildings were mostly the same—painted bright colors and adorned by elaborate wrought-iron balconies. The sweet smell of beignets still wrestled with the sour smell of vomit. People and music still poured out of bars into the street. But somehow, it was not the same. The vibe was all wrong.
Damn. He’d heard things had changed since Hurricane Katrina, but he hadn’t guessed how much.
It wasn’t just that so many storefronts and restaurants had new names. Or that the music forming a cacophony in the background was more generic pop now and less jazz or twangy zydeco. Or even that the throngs of people had changed. Even at a glance there were more out-of-towners, fewer locals, less authenticity. Less unapologetic seediness.
The French Quarter had been transformed into a sanitized tourist version of itself.
The whole casual, laissez les bons temps rouler culture was missing. Oh, the tourists were living their cartoon version of it, drinking and laughing and flashing bare breasts for beads. But if he looked closer, he saw hawkers urgently coaxing tourists and their wallets inside their establishments, vendors shoving schlocky souvenirs in people’s faces. It was all hustle, hustle, hustle.
Hell, maybe he was the one who’d changed. A decade on the SEAL teams did that to a guy.
Not that he had actually wanted to come home after all this time. But his boss, Commander Cole Perriman, had sent him here with orders to “Eff-ing relax and don’t come back until you do.” Translation: get your head together and stop taking stupid, suicidal risks, or else you’re off the teams.
Secretly panicked by the unspoken ultimatum, he’d agreed to take this rare vacation in the hope that it actually would help him get his head together. He’d always been all about the job. He was the job. Also, his old man had died nearly six months ago, and he had yet to put his father’s final affairs in order. It was time to get that unpleasant task out of the way.
It had been pure luck that he’d been downrange and way deep undercover, unable to get home after his father had his last and fatal heart attack. He’d been relieved not to have to face the people who would have genuinely mourned his old man’s passing. Thank God Mom went first. She would never have survived burying her husband.
It wasn’t as if Asher would have had anything decent to say to the bastard in farewell. Thanks for sucking as a parent. Thanks for never noticing anything I tried to get your attention and approval. Thanks for being incapable of love. Yup, it was just as well that he hadn’t been able to make it home.
But he was home now. Such as it was.
How in the hell was he supposed to relax? Perriman had ordered him to do it as if he actually knew how to wind down. As if he wasn’t always walking on the razor’s edge, always a warrior, always ready to act or react. Even now, wading through the noisy, raucous French Quarter on a Friday night, he scrutinized every person he passed for hostile body language, for darting or furtive looks, for unusual bulges under jackets, anything to indicate a threat.
Frankly, being among this many people was making him more tense, not less. Crowds this dense were the perfect target for a suicide bomber—
Wait. United States soil. Lawful, secure, peaceful soil. No terrorists lurking about as a rule. Jeez, he was wired tight. He shook his upper body in an attempt to release the tension across his neck and shoulders. Yeah. Like that worked. He was the goddamn job.
Frustrated, he yanked out his cell phone and texted Commander Perriman, More uptight than ever. I hope you’re happy.
He’d known Frosty Perriman for his entire SEAL career. The guy had been one of his BUD/S instructors and had handpicked him to be in a super classified unit Frosty had been in charge of putting together and training. They specialized in rescuing kidnapped American civilians. The rescues themselves hadn’t been the tricky bit. The hard part had been staying out of the damned news and keeping the existence of their group secret.
But the task force had run afoul of a congressional investigation a few months back when a journalist they’d been assigned to rescue had been killed before they could get to the guy. Never mind that their team hadn’t been given enough intel to actually find the guy, and that they had scoured the mountains in the middle of nowhere for weeks, trying to track down the journalist and his captors. In the end, it had been a colossal CIA failure, but the SEAL team had taken the heat for it and was disbanded.
Of course, it probably had more to do with the current Congress not liking the SEALs doing anything secret and off the books. Meddling politicians. They wanted to poke their fingers into everything. It wasn’t like the bastards did anything useful. They just wanted front row seats at the show. To feel like they were part of the Cool Kids’ Club. And when the navy wouldn’t let them randomly interfere, they threw a Congress-sized tantrum.
Bunch of freaking amateurs.
Someone jostled Asher from behind and he whipped around, hands at the ready to take names and break necks. The accosters turned out to be some sort of bachelor party. Plastic cups of beer sloshed, and someone slurred an apology as he bathed his own T-shirt with a generous portion of beer. Shaking his head, Asher stood down and moved on. Relaxing, dammit. He was supposed to be relaxing—not killing drunk kids. The same drunk kids he’d sworn an oath to protect and defend, along with the Constitution that gave them a sacred right to act like idiots.
Desperate to get away from the bright lights and sheer noisy wrongness of the place, he ducked down a side street toward a neighborhood that no sane tourist should have ventured into. But then, he was neither entirely sane nor a regular tourist. When the streets had turned into dark, dank alleys and the men lounging in doorways eyed him with as much hostility and suspicion as he eyed them, Asher breathed a sigh of relief. This was more his speed.
“Hey, big guy,” a raspy female voice crooned from just ahead. “Wanna free drink? First one’s on the house.”
He eyed the hard-looking woman slouching beneath a hanging sign for some joint called the Who Do Voodoo. “Strippers or just booze?” he asked.
“We