He leaned forward and pressed his scruff into her shin, laced his fingers with hers.
“If I wasn’t allowed to show you how I felt at all, now that would be a problem, I think,” he told her.
“You think Rook understood that when he made these rules for us?” she asked. “That there was no way to pretend we don’t feel this way?”
Cedric internally threw a parade over her use of we. There was something about hearing it that made him feel really freaking good.
“Yeah. I think he knew my limits. I would be able to control myself from sleeping with a client, but I wasn’t going to be able to pretend you didn’t mean something to me. I would have quit before I had to pretend I didn’t—” his throat closed hard for a second, but he didn’t let himself get cut off. When he finished the sentence his voice was deeply gravelly. “—Love you.”
He hadn’t told someone he loved them since his grandfather died. Though he felt a familial love for the people on his team at Rook Securities, it wasn’t exactly something he went around telling them. And he’d never once told a woman he loved her. He’d never felt it before. But even as he had that thought, Cedric knew that he had felt this before. Because in among all his romantic feelings of love for Elena, there was also a deeply familiar strain of love that wasn’t because she was a woman and he was a man. He could admit that he was most likely in love with her, but also wrapped up in there were a hundred different kinds of love. It felt ridiculous and unnatural to keep them all secret.
His eyes had fully adjusted to the dim room at this point and he saw perfectly well the moment her eyes flared with surprise and fear and heat and happiness all at once. He knew that she was holding her breath, as if she were waiting for an addendum of some kind. He gave none. He gave no explanation either. He just sat there, perfectly quietly, waiting for her reaction.
“Cedric, you ass!”
That was not the reaction he’d expected to get.
“What?”
“You tell me you love me when you know for a fact that I’m not allowed to kiss you or have sex with you?!” She rose up onto her knees and shoved at his shoulder so that he fell onto his back.
He laughed and lifted his hands palm up. “My bad?”
“What the hell am I supposed to do now? When all I want to do is screw you into next week?”
She had her hands on her hips as she loomed over him and Cedric swallowed hard at her words. He laughed again and this time, the pained quality was back. She was totally right. Saying it and not being able to do anything about it was horribly torturous.
A moment passed and the silence between them thickened. Elena’s hands fell away from her hips and she played in the buttons of his shirt. “Cedric…” she bit her lip and let her eyes eventually meet his again. “I—”
But he cut her off when his hand firmly covered her mouth. “Don’t say anything.”
Cedric knew that if she said it back to him right now, he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself. He was going to make love to her. Probably for an obscene amount of time. And then Rook was going to kick him off the case, or even fire him, and Cedric wouldn’t be allowed to protect her anymore. Hell, he wouldn’t even be allowed to see her while she was still living at the bunker. So, he couldn’t. He had to resist. He had to follow the rules.
She wiggled away from his hand. “I’m going to undress you.”
“Elena.” He stilled her hands as they started tugging at his buttons.
“No!” She slapped his hands away from hers and scowled at him. “Cedric, I can’t kiss you. I can’t make love with you. Apparently, I can’t tell you how I feel. You’re going to lay there and take it while I undress you. Because I have to do something loving for you before I lose my fucking mind. Capiche?”
“Did you just say capiche like an old school mobster?”
“Damn right I did.”
He held his hands palms up again, surrendering to her. “Then I guess you mean business.”
“Damn right I do.”
So, that night, she stripped his shirt off. And then his shoes. She carefully arranged and folded everything, just the way he’d like it. She stared him in the eye as she undid his belt, which made him groan. She yanked down his pants and folded those too. When she turned back to him, he was up on his elbows, his feet hanging off the bed and his boxer briefs gigantically tented.
Now, Elena was the one groaning. “You’re right. This was a bad idea.”
Both of their eyes were on his underwear, which were only getting tighter and tighter under her watchful gaze.
“Are you sure I can’t help you with that?” she asked, one knee on the foot of the bed and sin in her eyes.
“If you help me with this I’m off the case, probably fired, and I won’t be allowed to see you until you’re completely cleared for safety. And I’ll have to find myself another job.”
“Damn.”
Elena turned and marched off to the bathroom. Cedric heard the shower come on before she marched back into the room.
“All right, then,” she told him. “I can’t sleep next to something that hot so take care of it, please.” She pointed behind her to the shower.
“You want me to… get in the shower and take care of it.”
“No. I want to get in the shower with you and take care of it myself. But as it is, our hands are kind of tied here. So you handle your business in there. I’m gonna handle my business out here. And when you crawl into bed, hopefully we’ll both be too tired to get ourselves into any more trouble tonight.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Over the next two weeks, all signs were pointing toward the world being a generally safe place for Elena again, but Rook Securities wasn’t taking any chances. It would take weeks, or even months, for the dust to settle on the big smuggling bust. And in the meantime, they wouldn’t be able to know if she was still on the organization’s mind or not.
Odds were, the smuggling operation was permanently destroyed, what with the fifteen arrests the NYPD had done and the fact that Elena and David had already disintegrated their main product pipeline the year before. But that didn’t mean that individual members of the group wouldn’t have vendettas against her.
So, unfortunately for Elena, she was voted into another month of confinement in the bunker.
This was unfortunate for a plethora of reasons. Elena felt horrible that all the members of her team were as sequestered as she was. They had lives they were abandoning for her. Rook had a family he was abandoning for her. The weather was turning, it was sunny and green outside and all of them were stuck in the bunker.
She was also going insane from having to work remotely. Everything took twice as long as when she was working from the NYC office and she was sick of it. Every day she sat down at her computer for longer and longer hours. She felt as if she could feel the jaguar habitat shrinking while she was sequestered away.
But the worst of all reasons was the fact that she and Cedric were still abstaining from one another’s bodies.
He was by her side almost every single second that he wasn’t on duty, but they’d begun to admit that that simply increased the ache they felt for one another. Elena was equal parts relieved and disappointed when he was on duty during the day.
She desperately wanted to be around him, but when she was, she found herself in a state of arousal so potent it was painful. Their Cedric-takes-a-shower routine was becoming a nightly occurrence.
Now, four more weeks of it were stretching out before them. It was Atlas and Sequence who were with Elena when she finally snapped.
They were in the game room and the brothers were playing one another in pool while Elena was sprawled over an armchair, reading some email that Sequence had re-coded to be untrackable to her IP address.
She didn’t gasp or stiffen, but there was something in the sudden vacuous silence coming from her direction that had the two brothers straightening and turning toward wh
ere she sat.
Elena had her head in her hands, tears streaming down her face in thick ribbons.
“Elena!” Atlas stepped toward her but she shook her head. She just set her computer aside, stood up and strode out of the room.
Atlas, nosy as he was, apparently didn’t see anything wrong with looking at her computer.
“Shit,” he mumbled as he saw the email. He handed it over to Sequence.
“Shit,” Sequence agreed, tucking the laptop under his arm and nodding in the direction of Rook’s office. “We gotta talk to him.”
***
Rook looked up from his computer as his two biggest team members strode into his office. Cedric had them in inches, but the Bone brothers were yoked. Especially after five straight weeks of living in the bunker. Both of them were spending considerable amounts of time in the gym downstairs.
“Something wrong?” Rook asked. Though he made a point of checking in with his team all the time, he couldn’t remember the last time that both Atlas and Sequence were in front of his desk at the same time. They were definitely in sync with one another and were obviously connected. But they were so different, with such different interests, that they spent more time apart than they did together.
“It’s Elena,” Sequence said, surprising everyone in the room by being the one who spoke first.
“Is she all right?”
“Physically, yeah,” Atlas replied.
“But not emotionally?” Rook frowned. He thought letting her and Cedric play footsie under the dinner table had given her a mental boost over the last few weeks. It was one of the many reasons why he’d allowed their decidedly unprofessional relationship to blossom. He didn’t want them to take things too far, but he was certain that everyone would be happier if they were allowed to spoon at night. He’d thought it was working. “Something happen with Cedric?”
“Nah, no,” Atlas said. “They’re still making goo-goo eyes and drawing each other’s name in hearts and all that crap. This is about work, I think. And maybe about her friend who died in the car bombing.”
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
Sequence set the open laptop in front of Rook and Atlas explained. “Ten minutes ago, she got that email and burst into tears. She kind of ran from the room like she couldn’t take it anymore.”
Rook’s brow furrowed as he read the email. He let out a long sigh. “Get Cedric.”
***
Cedric had no idea why his recon work was being interrupted in the middle of the day to go talk with Rook, but he’d learned over the years that it was best not to guess.
In their line of work, if he let his stomach get tied up in knots every time there was news, or a change of plans, or a change of protocol, well, he’d never be able to keep a breakfast down.
Even so, out of habit, Ced checked his watch, scrolling through the schematics of the building just to check and see that Elena was still in the game room with Atlas and Sequence. He frowned.
Nope. She was in her room. At 3:00 on a Wednesday? That was peculiar. Not like her. Ever since the day she’d hopped back on her computer, she’d been keeping regular business hours. Actually, she’d been keeping insane business hours. To the tune of 7am to 8pm almost every single day.
She wouldn’t be in her room if something wasn’t off. Cedric checked the schedule, saw that Geo was the person on duty for Elena Watch right then, and sure enough, Geo was in the night duty room even though it wasn’t night duty hours yet. Which meant that they were keeping an unusually close eye on her.
Yeah. So something had happened.
Cedric took the stairs in two big gallops and was out of breath as he knocked on Rook’s door.
To his surprise, Rook wasn’t behind his desk, he was sitting on the window ledge, smoking a cigar and staring thoughtfully out toward the water.
“You wanted to see me?”
Rook blew a smoke ring out the window and then turned to look Cedric in the eye. “From the look on your face I can tell you know something is up. Elena’s not in danger, everything’s okay for the most part.”
“Okay.”
Rook left the window open, because it was a nice day outside, but stubbed out his cigar and stood up straight. “I’m thinking of sending Elena to Africa.”
Cedric blinked. He ran his brain through the protocol he’d learned a long time ago for helping him process words that people said to him. He was certain that his learning disorder was tricking his brain into believing something that he hadn’t actually heard. He ran the words back, slowly, exactly as he’d heard them. He did it twice and still, there was no clarity.
Rook, familiar with the long pauses in any conversation with Cedric, waited patiently.
“I’m sorry?” Cedric finally said. “Would you mind repeating that?”
“Atlas found this email on her laptop today. Says she burst out crying after she received it.”
Rook handed Cedric a print-out of an email. Cedric immediately considered the old forgot-my-reading-glasses line that he used to do, but after a moment, he heard Elena’s voice in his head. Why pretend to be different than you are, Cedric? She didn’t want him to be normal, so why the hell was he pretending to be normal?
Cedric firmly handed the paper back to Rook. “I won’t be able to read it fast enough. Why don’t you just tell me what it says?”
If it surprised Rook to have Cedric’s reading difficulties said aloud so baldly, he didn’t flinch. He just put the paper back on the desk and leaned one hip against it.
“The email is a personal one. It’s from a friend she made while she and David were in the Sahel last year. Apparently, the herd of elephants that they saved from poachers, one of the last of its subspecies, is on the last leg of their yearly migration again and the friend invited Elena to come see it. The people there are throwing a big celebration for the return of the elephants and they want Elena there.”
“She read the email and burst into tears,” Cedric confirmed.
Rook nodded.
Cedric slicked a palm over his chin. “There’s a lot of reasons that that note could have made her cry, Rook. She misses David. A year ago she was saving the world and living a free life. Her work was out in the field and extremely proactive. These days she’s holed up in a bunker, terrified of assassins, and working from behind a computer screen. She’s stressed.”
“I spoke with Dr. Waters about this already. And Miranda Leary.” Something like satisfaction warmed in Rook’s eye as he surveyed the best man on his team. “They both completely agreed with you.”
“You think the solution is to send her to Africa?”
“Miranda came up with that and Dr. Waters seemed to think it was worth running past Elena to see if she’d want that.”
“But you didn’t want to run it past Elena before you ran it past the team to make sure that it was feasible.”
“Bingo.”
Cedric sidled to the window, his hands in the pockets of his slacks and his eyes distant. “You want to send the whole team?”
The cost of that would be astronomical. And the stress. God.
“I think sending the whole team would draw a lot more attention than I’m willing to draw to her.”
Cedric turned back, confused.
“Look, Cedric, the bottom line is that her known attackers are scattered to the wind right now. They’re either long gone or in police custody. Fact is, we don’t know where some of them are, but they know where she is. They sent two semi-successful attacks our way. If we can get her out of here quickly, with no one being the wiser, in some ways, she’ll be safer.”
“But you’re saying that you want to send her back to the Sahel, yes? The place where all of this started?”
“Thanks to Elena, the Sahel is almost completely free of poachers. It’s actually one of the safer places we could send her. And we won’t be sending her back as The One The Only. We’ll send her there incognito. As a tourist there to see the elephant migration. She won’t get to see
her friends over there, but she’ll get a little vacation while the rest of us here are cleaning things up on our end. If we don’t have to bother guarding her and protecting the bunker, we can go on a full offensive. Make sure that the assholes threatening her go to jail. And make sure there aren’t any loose ends. With any luck, by the time you two get back, Elena will be in the clear.”
Cedric’s head spun. Eventually, his brow furrowed as Rook’s words filtered through to him. “I’m sorry. Did you just say us two? As in me and Elena?”
Rook took a minute to respond, but when he did, it was in a business-like tone. “Swift, a single woman traveling with a bodyguard is going to draw attention. We need her to blend in, okay? A woman and her man are not going to draw attention.”
The whole head-spinning thing was still very much in play. “You want me to escort Elena to the Sahel. As her bodyguard. While pretending to be her boyfriend?”
Rook looked confused. “You have to pretend? I thought you two were official?”
“We’re not allowed to have sex! How the hell could we be official?”
Both Cedric and Rook stared at one another for a full second before they suddenly burst into laughter.
Rook leaned back onto the window sill and Cedric eventually collapsed into one of the guest chairs on the other side of the desk. “Elena’s right,” Cedric eventually said as he took deep breaths and attempted to control his laughter. “She and I are not normal. This is all so damn weird.”
Rook, still chuckling, nodded his head. “I know this whole thing has been crazy. But Cedric, we have every reason to believe that Elena will not only be safer internationally right now, but she’ll also be happier. I can send you with her and you two will muddle along as best as you can. Or I can send Atlas with her.”
Cedric immediately sobered. “Fuck that.”
“That’s what I thought.” Rook laughed again at the look on Cedric’s face. “Swift. You take this job, after-hours cuddling has to stop. It’ll be a hell of a mind-fuck. When you’re on duty and in public, you’re going to pretend to be her man. But I need you alert. No distractions. And behind closed doors? I still need you focused. You cannot afford to take your attention off of her safety at any point. You’ll have to keep your hands off of her. It’s a different set of rules over there, but they can’t be any less strict. All right?”
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