Naomi dropped suddenly to her knees. Out of the view of the camera. She didn’t want him to see her face. He’d been patching her calls through to his phone so that he could take them no matter what? She’d always assumed that he was just on duty whenever she came home. Though come to think of it, she’d been arriving home at all hours, and except for one night, he was always there to answer her.
That meant… what? She couldn’t think. Her brain felt like it was suddenly filled with taffy. Did it mean that he wanted to be taking her calls? Or that he felt obligated to? Was this unprofessional? Or was she just an additional professional burden for him after a long day’s work?
No. No way. He was a hard person to read, but she knew, somewhere deep, that he enjoyed talking with her.
“Naomi?” his voice vibrated out of the keypad above her. “You all right? Where’d you go?”
She cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “I’m here,” she said as she rose back up. “So, you’re at home?”
A long pause. “Yeah.”
“Doesn’t seem fair that you’re relaxing in your Lazy Boy and I’m standing in my cold front hallway.”
“Not in a Lazy Boy.”
And she just knew that that meant he was in his bed. For a cheek-pinking moment, she let herself picture it. Sequence shirtless in a bed with black sheets pooled around his waist, his arms stretched across a headboard, a ten-gallon bucket filled with condoms on the floor next to him.
Was it hot in here?
“I’m gonna sit on the floor,” she told him. “My legs are starting to hurt.”
“Then I can’t see you.”
“I can’t see you!” She put her hands on her hips and scowled. She heard that rough chuckle of his again.
“Maybe you’re right that it’s uneven. Maybe we both shouldn’t see each other.”
Her brow furrowed. Was he really just ending the call? Just like that? With barely a goodbye? But she wasn’t calm yet! She was a nervous horse and she needed a dang cowboy to chill her the heck out!
She was opening her mouth to make sure he wasn’t hanging up when her cell phone rang in her hand. It was a number she didn’t recognize. All the blood ran out of her face when she realized that it was him. It was definitely him. Sequence was calling her on the phone.
She wished desperately that she could pause time, run into her room, and scream into her pillow for a good ten minutes. At that point, she figured she could be calm and collected when she answered the phone.
That wasn’t possible, of course, so when she answered the phone, it was on a Minnie-Mouse-esque squeak. “Hello?”
“This way you don’t have to sit in your entryway.”
Naomi cleared her throat. His voice was even yummier over the phone. Seriously. The man could rake in the dough if he ever wanted to operate a phone sex hotline.
“That’s… thoughtful of you.” What it was, was downright sexy, but she and Sequence seemed to be treading a very thin line right now. If either of them named the fact that they were drifting—hard—out of professional territory and into something else, well, Naomi was certain that it would all end in a snap. And she didn’t want it to end. “Perhaps I’ll go sit in my kitchen then.”
“You hungry?”
“I didn’t have anyone to make me dinner tonight.” It was true that Naomi had eaten dinner with the team, courtesy of Sequence, almost every night that week.
“What did you do for food before you hired Rook Security?”
“Oh, I can scrounge just fine for myself usually. But I’m spoiled now. I’ll never be the same after that curry you made the other night.”
She did wander into her kitchen and cracked open the fridge. “Don’t eat now,” he told her. “You’ll mess up your sleep cycle.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the impending meeting with a mobster that’s gonna mess with my sleep cycle.”
“You’re gonna be fine, Naomi. I swear it.”
“I know. I really do.” She took a long, slow breath. “I just think that feeling nervous is part of my process. It’s my body’s way of reminding me that I’m about to do something really scary and I need to be ready, you know?”
“I get that.” She heard a scratching sound and wondered if he was rubbing at his beard. “You ever do yoga?”
“Sure. I think they kick you out of Manhattan if you don’t try at least once.”
“I could walk you through some hatha to calm you down.”
This time Naomi was the one pausing.
Sequence broke the silence with a low chuckle. “Did I just render you speechless? Dang, really turned the tables.”
Did that mean that there had been times when she had rendered him speechless? And more importantly, did this mean that he knew how to do yoga?
“Yoga?” was all she could manage.
He laughed again. “Yeah. I started because I have a bad shoulder and it was helping. I kept doing it because it’s a stress reliever.”
“I imagine you’d need a lot of stress relievers in your line of work.”
He hummed in agreement.
“To answer your kind offer, no, I don’t think I should do yoga before bed. Then I’ll only get sweaty. There’s nothing worse than being nervous and sweaty when you can’t sleep.”
“Just ten minutes of it. Let’s try.”
He was actually attempting to talk her into it. Naomi, getting the very distinct impression that Sequence generally didn’t attempt to talk anyone into anything, was finding herself intrigued and, to be honest, quite malleable.
“Well. All right. Thank god you won’t be able to see me looking like a sick baby giraffe while I galumph my way through these poses.”
“I’m actually irritated that I can’t see that. But yeah. Get into child’s pose somewhere comfortable and tell me when you’re ready.”
Naomi decided that now was the time to break the seal and she finally wandered into her bedroom, arranging herself on the colorful rug next to her bed. “Ready.”
His voice started, along with his even breaths. He talked her through some poses, his voice tightening in places, which told her that he was doing the yoga along with her. Ten minutes rolled into twenty minutes rolled into thirty. They hit forty minutes and he pulled her into a lovely, almost trance-like state of relaxation at the end.
Naomi was warm and loose and relaxed and not sweaty at all as she rose up and pulled herself into bed, swimming her legs against the cool sheets.
“Mmmm,” she groaned happily. “You were right. That was heaps better than the late night ice cream I was going to devour.”
“Good.”
“You should teach yoga.”
“Hm.” He sounded relaxed too.
“Although your classes wouldn’t be very relaxing.”
“Why not?” he sounded almost offended.
“Because of all the women who would battle one another to get a spot closest to the instructor.” She hadn’t really meant to say it, but there it was. She’d said it. She froze for a moment, wondering if she’d pushed things just a touch too far.
“Is that so?” There was a low rumble to his voice, flirtation laced with humor.
“Maybe.” It hit her then that she’d been on the phone with Sequence for almost an hour. He’d spent most of the phone call instructing her exactly what he wanted her to do with her body. She’d lustily complied. And now she lay in her bed, sated and relaxed, with his voice in her ear. This was not how she pictured this night going.
Every light in her house was still burning, but Naomi’s eyes started to get a little heavy. The man was like a glass of hot cocoa on a wintery night. She wondered if he’d ever done this with another client. She knew that Rook Security took their clients’ wellbeing very seriously. They wanted their people happy and healthy. And maybe that occasionally included talking them to sleep at 11:30 the night before their big events? But she didn’t want to ask. If he’d done this with other clients, she didn’t want to know. And if he hadn’t,
if this was special, she didn’t want to risk wilting it by shining a bunch of hot sun all over it. It was best to just live in the half-light with Sequence in her ear.
“What do you do when you can’t sleep?” she asked him, her voice low and lazy as the sheets warmed to her body heat.
There was a long pause and Naomi knew it was laced with humor and with something else as well. Her eyes shot open as she realized exactly what Sequence probably did when he couldn’t sleep. If he had company, he probably had sex. And if he was alone, he probably showed himself a damn good time.
Naomi shoved both of those mental images in a drawer like they were burning hot cookies straight from the oven. They were too hot to handle right now when she needed to be coherent and not a total perv. She took a deep breath and imagined calmly taking off oven mitts, setting them aside.
“On second thought,” she told him. “Don’t answer that.”
He chuckled again. “Maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow after your meeting. For now, let’s just say that I do yoga when I can’t sleep.”
She let out a squawk that devolved into laughter. She hoped the laughter was the sexy kind, but at this point, he probably already knew she was a nervous, nerdy parrot of a woman. So. Oh well.
She replayed his words in her head. Tomorrow after the meeting.
The meaning clunked into place like the heavy clank of the tumblers on the door of a bank vault. He meant when she wasn’t a client anymore.
If she was following the map of this conversation correctly—and she prayed that she was—then Sequence was suggesting that he could fill her in on the sexier parts of his life the moment that she wasn’t a paying customer anymore.
Um.
YES.
She suddenly wanted that so badly that she shifted in the sheets, her body hot and achy. “I guess I’ll just have to use my imagination in the meantime.”
Her own eyes widened at her audacity. She’d never have thought she’d have the courage to say something as blatantly flirty as that. But here they were. No take-backs.
Sequence paused for a long moment. And when he spoke again, his voice was lower and more gravelly than she’d ever heard it before. “Do you have a good imagination, Naomi?”
“The best. I’m very creative.”
She heard a long breath whistle through the phone. And then, “Maybe we should hang up so that you can use your imagination over there. And I can use my imagination over here.”
Shwing. So this was what get sprung meant.
Naomi felt all the blood in her body start rushing, the place between her legs wet and achy. She squeezed her thighs together. She didn’t want to hang up with Sequence. But she knew that she needed to relieve this ache. And neither of them were so far gone that they could just definitely have phone sex while she was paying his firm to protect her. There were lines. And he’d suggested hanging up the phone in order to preserve some of them.
“Yes,” she whispered. “But if I can’t sleep… after.”
“Then you have my number, Fancy.”
“Okay.”
“In a second. You’re gonna hang up the phone. And then you’re gonna lay back in your bed and use your imagination and just let all of your tension out.”
“And you’re going to do the same thing.”
“Damn right.”
“So we’ll both be using our imaginations at the same time.”
“Yeah.” His voice was so low Naomi could barely hear it and she couldn’t help but wonder if he was already using his imagination just a little bit. Maybe just over his underwear. “Do you play with toys to help your imagination, Naomi?”
Did he just ask her if she used a vibrator? She wasn’t breathing right. There wasn’t enough oxygen in her room. “Sometimes. But tonight I want something a little more… personal.”
“You’ll get it, fancy girl.” He let out another long breath. “Goodnight, Naomi. Call me back if you can’t sleep.”
“Goodnight, Sequence.”
Naomi hung up the phone and let her imagination run wild.
CHAPTER SIX
Sequence was glad to see Naomi looking calm and prepared when she slid into the backseat of the SUV the next afternoon.
She’d just finished her last few appointments at Ellsworth’s and she had a cardboard box of belongings from her workspace in her hands. Geo helped her secure them on the floor. The entire team was piled into the truck. Sequence wished that he could erase everybody but he and Naomi for just a few minutes. He desperately wanted a moment or two to study her face. To attempt to interpret the pink in her cheeks.
So… they’d had phone sex last night. They’d hung up before things got really raunchy. But still, he’d told her to hang up and masturbate at the same time that he did. He could totally get fired for what he’d done. But looking at Naomi’s rested, glowing face, he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. She’d been a tense, nervous hummingbird in his hand and he’d done everything he could to calm her down.
Not that the phone sex had been completely altruistic. Nope. That had been because she was so cute and hot and he was insanely attracted to her.
“How’re you feeling, Naomi?” Rook asked, twisting around in the front seat.
She took a deep breath. “Just a few more hours,” she said by way of an answer. But when she said it, her eyes flicked across Sequence’s in the rearview mirror and something hot started pulsing in his veins.
Was she saying that it was just a few more hours before they were just two people who wanted to get it on? Just a few more hours until she wasn’t a client anymore?
He thrust the thought from his head. As much as he wanted her, he needed all of his concentration for the task at hand.
They drove into Queens, out where Naomi was supposed to meet Bastone. It was one of several personal residences of his scattered around the city.
His house was deceptively welcoming, complete with a manicured front lawn and flower boxes on the windows. They’d pulled over ten blocks back and dropped off all the members of the team except for Rook, who now sat in the back with Naomi.
Geo and Atlas were circling through the neighborhood on different paths, they would both be positioned within one block of Bastone’s front door. Cedric was in the coffee shop on the corner pretending to work on a laptop, but really monitoring the security feeds from her equipment bag.
Rook had slid into the backseat because only Sequence should be visible in the front seat. He was posing as her driver and would idle in front of the residence until she came back out. They’d even gone so far as to print out the sticker of the cab company that she always used whenever she had to come out to Queens with her equipment.
“Naomi,” Rook said, leaning forward and placing her bag into her hands. “We want you to get a good feed on Bastone, of course. But the only thing that really matters is your safety. If you start to get a weird feeling, get out of there, okay? And if you need us, what do you say?”
“I say purple,” she repeated dutifully.
Sequence could feel her eyes on the side of his head and he knew that he needed to say something to her. Something to calm her down. But what could he say in front of his boss?
He turned in his seat and locked eyes with her. “Keep it simple in there. Don’t get fancy.”
She smiled at him, bright and luminous. Apparently she’d understood his code. That it didn’t matter what he’d just said, he simply wanted to find a way to work her nickname into the conversation.
Naomi took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m ready.”
Sequence tried not to wince when the car door slammed. He lowered his shades and watched her walk up the sidewalk toward Bastone’s house. Some big bruiser greeted her at the door and his eyes snagged on Sequence’s. The bruiser smirked, as if he’d caught her driver ogling her.
Then the front door closed and she was inside. Sequence immediately opened his phone to the surveillance feeds coming from her bag. The camera was still black, from the inside of h
er bag, but the audio was crisp.
“How’re the kids, Rick?” she asked.
Sequence smirked. Of course she would have gotten friendly with Bastone’s hired muscle. It was so like her.
“The little one’s still not sleeping through the night. But the older one just got into one of them special charter schools for kindergarten. The wife’s all excited over it.”
“Congrats! I know that the school system in NYC can be a real jungle.” For a moment the audio cut out, as they’d known it would, while her bag went through the X-ray.
When it cut back in, Naomi was speaking.
“Is he back in the library?”
“Yeah. You can head back.”
There were footsteps. Rook was still as a painting in the back seat and Sequence was the same in the front. He wished that he could be on the ground like Atlas and Geo. Ready to sprint in and yank Naomi out of danger if she needed it. But if she needed a quick getaway, he had to be ready behind the wheel. Still, one of his hands found its way to the butt of the gun at his hip as he listened to her knock on a door.
“Frank? Ah. Hi there.”
“The lovely Naomi Cutler. Come in. Come in.”
“You’re looking well. What have you got for me today?”
“Some of the usual and some of the spectacular.”
Sequence didn’t like the oily tone of the man’s voice. Sitting in the front seat, he was so tense, his toes were curled in on themselves.
“Wow. Spectacular is right. I haven’t seen a sapphire of… That’s a blue diamond.”
Bastone chuckled and the hairs on Sequence’s arms rose up. She needed to get her bag open and he needed eyes on this room before he unzipped himself from his skin and revealed the Terminator that lived within him. She was all alone in there.
“I thought you might like to see that,” Bastone told her. “When it came into my possession, I immediately thought of you.”
Sequence started to growl in the front seat but turned it quickly into a clearing of his throat.
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