Her relationship with Cedric was a bit of an open secret. As in, everyone knew, but Cedric and Elena were aware of the fact that Rook was being generous letting them carry on the way they were. So outside of Elena’s bedroom, regardless of whether or not Cedric was on duty, they attempted to keep a lid on things.
It was funny to Elena that she had difficulty with this. Never in her life had she been so crushed out on someone. By nature, she was independent and often accidentally aloof. When she took a lover, it was for the private, sexual gratification of it. It was never for the pleasure of lacing fingers under the dinner table, or pressing her cheek between his shoulder blades while he made a sandwich, or sliding into his lap while he organized the papers on his desk. But suddenly, those were all things that Elena had to forcibly keep herself from doing.
There was just something about Cedric. He was incredibly masculine. All those muscles, all that height, the sheer substantive mass of him. But there was also something so sweet about him. So approachable. Elena thought it might be because she’d known him as a young man. She’d seen his high school nervousness. She’d known him before he’d quite grown into that wingspan of his.
And he was a man who knew how to be quiet. When Cedric spoke, it was to say exactly what he meant, and she valued that. There was no long, drawn-out circling of a point the way so many men did. Cedric listened well. He meditated on his thoughts, and then he spoke, and when he was done speaking, he was ready to listen again.
This pattern put an almost dreamy cadence to all their conversations. Which was good, Elena thought, because if anything added to her level of thrumming tension for him, she was liable to explode. Cedric calmed her, soothed her with his words. But everything else about him worked her up to an almost untenable degree.
She’d never wanted a man this badly.
And she’d never been wanted this badly. Of that she was certain.
It was getting harder and harder for both of them to restrain themselves. Perhaps a week and a half after their new arrangement had begun, Elena and Cedric found themselves side by side in the kitchen. Sequence had foisted off the salad-making onto the two of them so, each with their own cutting board, they sliced and diced.
Sequence manned the stove behind them and Atlas and Geo were setting the table and arguing about something inane.
Elena didn’t even register their words as English, considering how intensely focused she was on Cedric’s presence beside her. She attempted to concentrate on making the rounds of baby carrots she was cutting perfectly even, but her hands were shaking. Cedric’s gaze was heavy on her neck, down into the shadows of her shirt. His eyes were on her hands, then on her bare feet. His reached past her for the salt and pepper, careful not to touch, and she felt his eyes dip down her shirt. The effect was almost as if he’d licked his way down there. She felt her nipples gather tightly, shifting her weight on her feet.
The hint of his breath at her ear as he moved back had her pressing her knees together, attempting to ease the ache of his nearness.
Elena dropped her knife and leaned forward to gulp at the glass of ice water she’d set there a few minutes ago. There. That helped.
Until Cedric pointedly took the glass from her hand, and, his eyes on hers, took a long sip as well. He let his tongue lick over the exact place her mouth had just been. A fat, lazy drop of condensation inched its way down the side of the glass, cutting a path through the fog.
God. He was seducing her in the kitchen in front of all these people and there was absolutely nothing she could do about this torture. There was nothing she wanted to do about it. Except fall to her knees, unzip his pants and make him meet his god.
Elena got lost in a brief daydream about Cedric’s fingers in her hair, holding her tightly to him however he wanted.
She cleared her throat when Rook came in, straightening and adding an inch or two of space between her and Cedric. She caught Ced’s pursed-lip smile, his sly eyes. Why wasn’t he more worried about showing off in front of Rook?
They put dinner on the table and Elena considered sitting across the table from Ced, but then she could only imagine the eye contact. No. She was better off going with her first instinct and sitting next to him. There was a foot of space between them as the conversation rose and fell around them. Cedric passed her the hot sauce and the salt without being asked to, he topped off her ice water and handed up her napkin before she’d even realized it had fallen to the ground.
Elena couldn’t fight the rising tornado of feeling in her chest.
God. He was just so damn focused on her. Even as he laughed at something that Atlas said, argued with Geo about some superhero movie, responded to a question of Rook’s, she could feel every single ounce of Cedric’s attention turned toward her like a spotlight.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Rook said to her as everyone finished off the last few bites on their plates.
Elena shrugged and told half of the truth. “I guess my mind is elsewhere.”
“Your work is going all right?”
Elena nodded. “I think we’re making some good headway. The conservation project should be implementable in about eight months. If the funding doesn’t run out.”
“The one in Belize?” Geo asked.
Elena nodded again. “Yup. The one that focuses around leopard habitat and conservation.”
“I wish we could have a prom or something,” Atlas said, out of freaking nowhere.
“Um. Okay?” Elena responded, as she so often did to Atlas’s non-sequiturs.
She looked in confusion over to Cedric. Cedric laughed. “Give him a second to make his point. He usually gets there.”
“What I mean is that we need something fun for you to do. You need to party down a little bit. All you ever do is work.”
“That’s not all I do!” Elena insisted, and then promptly went bright pink as she realized exactly what else she was occupying her time with these days. Namely huffing Cedric’s scent and trying to get her body to melt into his.
The group laughed at the sheepish expression on her face, and luckily, even Rook joined in.
“Ah.” Cedric cleared his throat. “Right. Maybe you’re right, Atlas.”
“Prom though?” Elena asked, her face all squinched up. “I’m down for something fun, but prom? Yeah, no.”
“You didn’t like your prom?” Atlas asked. “I had so much fucking fun at my prom. I wore a musty rented suit, danced my ass off, and got drunk and laid. Classic.”
“Were you in the same prom group as your brother?” Geo asked Sequence.
Sequence merely raised an eyebrow and, as usual, Atlas answered for him. “No way. This guy said fuck prom then went out and got himself arrested.”
In a rare show of humor, Sequence’s somber face lightened for just a second. “Worth it,” he chuckled.
“What did you do?” Cedric asked.
“Long story.” And that was all he was going to say about that apparently.
“Don’t ask me,” Atlas said, shrugging. “Bastard never told me either. So, you didn’t go to prom?” Atlas asked Elena.
“I went,” Elena said, swallowing the last of her food.
Beside her, she felt Cedric’s attention swing to her. “You did?” he asked in surprise.
She nodded. “Did you?”
Cedric’s cheeks colored, though he wished they wouldn’t. “Yeah. My grandfather had me do the whole nine. My tux was too small. I went with a bunch of friends. But we didn’t stay for more than twenty or so minutes.” He coughed. “No date, though.”
“I didn’t have a date either. My older brother dropped me off and picked me up. I spent most of the time with my friend Alexa, remember her?”
“Tall girl? Glasses and combat boots?”
“That’s the one. I still talk to her sometimes. Anyways, Brian Atwell lurked around me the whole night and called me a bitch when I wouldn’t kiss him before I left.”
Cedric face-palmed. “That kid was such a little dic
khead. I wish I’d known.”
“You would have beaten him up for me?” She smiled widely at Cedric. As much of a tough guy as he was, she had trouble picturing his high school self wailing on shrimpy Brian Atwell.
“I would have scared the shit out of him for you,” Cedric offered, a little, unstoppable half smile on his face. “But no, I meant that I wish I’d known we both didn’t have dates.”
They weren’t exactly aware of the fact that their attention had completely excluded everyone else. As far as they were concerned, the rest of the table had suddenly gotten blurred out, like nudity on network television. The world’s population was suddenly down to two. Atlas and Geo exchanged eye contact, though, as they watched Cedric and Elena interact. Rook just silently observed, a deep sadness in his chest for all the things he’d lost in his life. He and May used to be able to do that, blur out the rest of the world. These days, whenever they were in the same room, Rook was the person who May was ignoring, not the rest of the world.
“You would have asked me? After the history project debacle?”
Cedric couldn’t help but laugh at himself. “Well, yeah. Maybe? I didn’t really have anything left to lose, did I?”
“And his dance moves might have redeemed him in your eyes,” Atlas cut in, poofing their insular cloud of focus. “Have you ever seen him dance, Elena?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’d know,” Geo told her. “Trust me. I’m not into Cedric, but he starts dancing and suddenly he’s a total Romeo.”
Elena swung her gaze to Cedric and was thrilled to see his cheeks lit with color, a goofy, boyish grin on his face. Except for the beard and the Marine Corps muscles, he looked exactly like he used to in high school. “You can dance, huh?”
He shrugged. “Verbal communication was never my strong suit. Gotta communicate with the ladies somehow.”
The table burst out laughing because it was just such an Un-Cedric joke to make. Elena laughed because she was happy. And safe. And for the next few teasing, joyous hours, the rest of the world just sort of faded away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was a day like any other that Cedric almost killed a man.
Elena was in her office, working away and probably forgetting to eat, the way she always did. Cedric was in the office he shared with Sequence, elbows on the desk and one hand scrubbing at his eyes.
He was tired. And frustrated.
Almost four weeks into Elena’s stay at the bunker, they still weren’t any closer to securing her safety in the outside world, and the whole team had started to get a little restless. Sequence and Cedric were spending almost all of their time either on surveillance of the Sheepshead Bay smugglers or on research on their organization. But they’d yet to find anything that could help connect the group to the threat on Elena’s life.
The police hadn’t caught the person who’d ruined Elena’s house—not a huge shocker. And the man who’d tried to break into the bunker was in the wind.
According to the cops, he was just another meth-head wandering around Brooklyn. The team at Rook Securities didn’t buy that shit for a minute, but what, really, were they supposed to do?
They gave up the idea that they could potentially connect the smugglers to the threat on Elena’s life and switched their focus. If they could connect the smugglers to, well, smuggling, then the cops would have to act. Throw some of them in jail and break up the group long enough to scatter the smugglers’ focus. If their organization was completely broken down, the threat on Elena’s life would be on the back burner, at least for a while.
“You all right?” Sequence’s deep voice asked across the room.
Cedric sighed and leaned back in his chair, wincing at the crick in his neck. “I’m fine. These fuckers are airtight and it’s really starting to irritate me.”
They weren’t the longest standing successful Brooklyn smuggling organization for nothing, that was for sure. Cedric and Sequence had been gathering intel on them for weeks and they still had yet to witness them doing something that was technically illegal. These guys knew how to cover their tracks.
Just this morning, Ced and Sequence had spied on them down at the docks for hours, all before sunrise, and hadn’t been able to pin anything on all of their admittedly suspicious, early morning busy-ness.
At this point, it would have been icing on the cake to be able to pin Elena’s vandalism and the near break-in at the bunker on these guys, but Cedric would take what he could get. If the NYPD could dismantle the organization for smuggling, then the threat to Elena would be significantly less credible.
“Fair enough,” Cedric replied, his eyes straying to the windows. It was a gray day today, sort of strange for the middle of May. NYC springs were usually either sunny or thunder storming. There was something about the heavy gray weather that was unsettling Cedric. He felt antsy and irritated. “I’m not worried about Mortell, I’m just worried about how long all the paperwork will take.”
Cedric was well aware how many criminals were able to slip through all the bureaucratic red tape that the NYPD was beholden to. He knew that the system was complicated for a reason, but he also knew that he wanted the threat to Elena’s life neutralized and he wanted it neutralized yesterday.
As Cedric eyed the gray sky, a strange, trepidatious feeling skittered up his spine. Something was tripping his spidey senses and he wasn’t sure what it was.
He’d been on edge all day, ever since they returned from their surveillance that morning. Maybe it was because he’d had to leave Elena in the middle of the night to go do it. Or maybe it was because he hadn’t been able to wake up in her arms. But either way, he rose up from the desk, needing to see her.
“What—?” Sequence started and cut off immediately when their two watches buzzed at the same time.
Cedric’s eyes speared the blueprint that immediately zoomed up on the screen of the watch.
An alarm had been tripped in the atrium. Occasionally that happened. The heat from a cooling down engine of one of the cars would send off a heat signature that confused the alarms, especially on a warm day like today. But as he zoomed in, Cedric saw that this was right by the SUV that he and Sequence had driven that morning.
And he knew. He just knew. There was an intruder. An intruder who’d somehow hitched a ride on their vehicle.
Cedric turned and sprinted like he’d never sprinted before. The walls blurred beside him. His feet weren’t pounding so much as humming. His toes barely touched the ground as he slammed through one swinging door and another. He jumped a complete flight of stairs in one leap. And then another.
“Fucker must have hitched a ride this morning,” he shouted into his earpiece as he jumped the final flight of stairs and exploded out onto the ground level. “Eyes. Somebody tell me you have eyes on Elena.”
“Got her,” Geo said in his ear.
“We’ve got movement in bay 4,” Rook said, obviously having taken the post of surveillance.
That left Sequence, Atlas, and Cedric to line this asshole up. Cedric took one valuable second to let out a long, low breath before he plastered himself against the wall of the hallway. He slid along in the direction of bay 3. He knew the path the intruder was going to have to take to get through the building.
The alarms that the intruder had tripped were silent, so the odds were, he had no idea he was about to have a hell of a lot of company.
Cedric slipped silently through bay 3. He had no idea where Atlas and Sequence were, but he could bet they were approaching from the other angles, bays 5 and 6. As opposite as those two were, in high intensity situations like this, they were freakily in sync.
Cedric melted backwards as a shadow caught his eye. He was on the edge of bay 3 and 4. The hulking forms of sleeping vehicles separated him from where he knew the intruder to be. Cedric crept forward through the dim room, lit only by skylights and the gray spring day.
There was a strange clicking and beeping sound as the man crouched over a sma
ll screen that lit his face in a blue light.
Cedric’s stomach tightened down. This was the same man who’d broken in before. He clicked more on the screen and suddenly the earpiece in Cedric’s ear screeched with feedback. The man had somehow scrambled their feed!
Cedric grunted at the noise and ripped the piece from his ear. Whether it was the sound he’d made or his sharp movement, but the intruder wheeled around, his eyes narrowing on Cedric.
And then off like a shot, the man sprinted along the wall of bay 4, straight at Cedric. Whether he was intending to incapacitate him or get past him, Cedric didn’t care, he was ready.
The world melted into slow motion, the way it so often did, at moments like this for Cedric.
The intruder sprinted toward him, each step fluid and long. The cars threw long shadows across the room. His equipment was scrambled, his earpiece silent, his watch and phone disabled. Cedric was alone with this man. Somewhere upstairs, Elena was hiding.
Cedric knew, in the second before the intruder reached him, that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for Elena. He would have swum the ocean for her. Laid down in traffic. Served himself up for dinner to a pack of wolves if necessary. And yeah, he’d go toe to toe with this asshole for her any day of the week. He almost welcomed it.
The two men crashed into one another with the blunt knock of bone on bone. And Cedric had his answer. This man was not trying to sneak past him, he was trying to incapacitate him.
Cedric took him by the neck and slammed him backwards into the wall. The intruder sneered and got one good punch to Cedric’s eye before Cedric kneed him hard, dropping him to the floor. The man kicked Cedric’s knee and had him falling to all fours. The men grappled, and Cedric clanged the man’s head back on the ground hard enough to have the man’s eyes blurring.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 16