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    The MIA Groom
    The MIA Groom
    The MIA Groom
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    The MIA Groom

    By Teri Riggs

    ()

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    About this ebook

    After waiting nine months for the perfect chance to infiltrate the Russian Mafia's sex slave operation, former Navy SEAL, Tucker Abrams, gets his chance. There's one slight problem. At the same time he's going deep undercover, he's supposed to be at the church, marrying the love of his life.

    Jillian Gilmore's wedding day has arrived. Unfortunately, her groom has not. After surviving three months of hurt and humiliation as a jilted bride, her missing in action groom returns, wanting to pick up where they left off. 

    Can Jilly forgive Tuck and move on? Will she ever be able to trust him again?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTeri Riggs
    Release dateJul 29, 2018
    ISBN9781386285472
    The MIA Groom

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      Book preview

      The MIA Groom - Teri Riggs

      Prologue

      -B eautiful weather with plenty of sunshine… Check.

      -Wedding planned and paid for… Check.

      -Sexy new bikinis packed for honeymoon… Check.

      -Four hundred family and friends gathered in the church… Check.

      -Bride dressed in gown of her dreams… Check

      -Veil in place, hair and make-up perfect… Check.

      -Father of the bride nervously holding her hand… Check.

      -Groom waiting at the altar for his bride… That would be a no. A. Big. Fat. No.

      1

      Jilly, four weeks later…

      Yep. I became one of those brides a month ago. I have become the woman everyone whispers about when I walk into the room. The puffy-faced, red-eyed girl people pity and pat on the back as I move past them, clutching my box of tissues with numb fingers. The bride with a broken heart.

      Excluding movies and books, how many women are actually left standing at the altar on their wedding day and never know why? I, for one, have no idea why he bailed. Nor do I have a clue where my groom has run off to. Is he hiding from me, or more likely running from my father—who is all about strangling my missing betrothed?

      Tuck seems to have vanished off the face of the earth without the courtesy of an ‘I have cold feet,’ ‘I met someone new last night and fell madly in love with her,’ or even a ‘your father offered me ten million dollars to disappear from your life and I always wanted to be a millionaire’ kind of explanation. No call. No text. No Dear Jane letter. Not even a mortifying public Facebook breakup. Nothing. Nada. Zipola.

      If any of his friends or family in attendance knew anything, they were not sharing.

      And they say Navy SEALs are honorable. Hmph! Shouldn’t matter that Tuck joined the civilian ranks a little over a year ago. He still had the heart and work ethic of a SEAL. According to Tuck, he always will. I guess the expression ‘Leave no man behind’ doesn’t cover women.

      My family refers to my wedding disaster as the MIA groom incident. The humiliation and hurt from my missing-in-action man have begun to fade a bit, only to be replaced with anger and a gut-wrenching fear. I’m having trouble reconciling with the way Tuck left me. It isn’t reflective of his character. No matter how badly he may have wanted out of the engagement, he would’ve told me in person. After Tuck opted out of the Navy, he took a job with the CPD Bureau of Organized Crime. Though he may be a tough guy on the outside, on the inside he has a gentle heart. He would never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it—and when I say, ‘deserve it,’ I’m talking about the worst types of criminals Chicago has to offer. Child molesters, serial killers, rapists, human traffickers… the list goes on and on. With the BOC, he’d seen it all.

      I want to look him in the eyes and give him a piece of my mind. At the same time, I’m worried about him. I have so many questions I won’t find answers for if I can’t reach Tuck. What if he’s fallen out of a tree, hit his head, and is a John Doe lying unconscious in a hospital? Or been thrown from a speeding train and is dead, toe-tagged, and residing on a slab in the morgue? What I’m getting at is, he may’ve been injured somehow and lost his memory. Or he could be dead. The thought of Tucker dead turns my belly into sludge.

      Still, in my new role as an embarrassed almost-bride, I liked these possibilities considerably more than the ‘he’s a lying dickhead’ option. Blaming death or physical incapacity for my unfortunate abandonment in front of four-hundred-plus guests sounds much better than the jilted woman-he-probably-never-loved scenario. Yep, I can work with death. Besides, if I find out Tucker put me in this situation for any reason other than he has no memory or he’s dead as a bag of rocks, I will kill him slowly and painfully. And when I finish, I will feed his body to the fish in Lake Michigan.

      2

      Tuck, two months later…

      T ucker Abrams is in the house! I shout the words and throw a few fist pumps up into the air. I’m standing in the living room of my small apartment, excited to be home. I love the sound of my real name. Knowing I will soon have my life back rocks. Two months is one fucking long undercover assignment—and it was nine months if you count the time I put in as a bartender at Vasily Savin’s bar earning the low-life bastard’s trust.

      I grab one of the three bottles of beer in my otherwise empty refrigerator, pop the cap, and suck down a long gulp of the ice-cold drink. Damn, the beer tastes good. If I never toss back another shot of vodka in my lifetime, I’ll die a happy man. I may speak fluent Russian, but I’m one hundred percent pure American. I also speak fluent Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Farsi, Dari, and Pashto. For some reason, foreign languages have always been easy for me to pick up. My multilingual skills came in handy during my deployments as a SEAL and helped propel my rapid rise to the top in the Bureau of Organized Crime.

      I move to my bedroom, fling open the suitcase the crime scene techs sent over, and throw out the two three-thousand-dollar suits I had to wear while acting the part of Bratva Captain Anton Belyakov. There’s no way I’ll let the damned things hang in my closet anywhere near my retired dress blues. Back at Anton’s studio apartment are another dozen similar suits and fancy shoes. I have zero plans to ever set foot back in that place. My BOC chief will send someone there to close it down. If I ever agree to another covert gig, it’ll be playing someone who gets to dress in comfortable jeans and tee shirts. I bag the clothes in double-ply trash bags and place them at the door to take to a donation station later. The idea of homeless men wearing the over-priced suits of Russian mob head Vasily Savin pleases me to no end.

      I check the phone charging in its cradle on my night table. It died after close to three months of inactivity when I had to leave it behind—no surprise there. A smile tugs at my lips. It won’t be long until there’s enough of a charge I can call her. God, how I long to hear her voice. I can’t begin to count the number of times I wanted to call her on the burner phone I used while I was undercover.

      I should be able to call her while it’s charging. I pick up the cell phone, then give myself a mental slap. Telling her I’m back should be done in person. Isn’t that why I’d come to my apartment in the first place? I need to get rid of the last traces of Anton before I go see her. Even though I stayed at Jilly’s place most nights, I still have some clothes here. We’d planned to move the rest of my crap after our beach honeymoon.

      Jilly went above and beyond the call of duty during my undercover assignment. When she’d agreed to follow me to Chicago and marry me, she had no idea exactly what my job might involve. I think her happiness at my leaving the Navy, combined with the proposal, blinded her to asking questions. Her parents living here may have played a big part, too, but I prefer to believe she wanted to be with me, no matter where I ended up.

      According to the chief, she’d handled the postponed wedding much better than I did. A warmth races through my body as I think about her. God has never made a more perfect woman, and that’s a fact, Jack. I toss the phone back in the cradle to finish charging.

      Humming some sappy love song, I return to the task of turning myself back into Tucker Abrams. I shave off my neatly

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