Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

She laughed, one quick chuckle, through her tears and leaned back. “Are you talking about Mr. Rogers?”

  He leaned back too, one hand on her shoulder as if he were attempting to keep her from tipping off the counter. “Um. I dunno. I’m pretty sure I just blacked out. I was saying whatever came to mind.”

  “You blacked out?”

  “You scared the daylights out of me, Bex. I freaked.”

  She scrubbed a hand down her puffy, wet face. “Apparently you’re very calm when you freak.”

  He made a noncommittal noise and reached behind her to fill another glass of water. Rebecca lifted her hand, thinking it was for her, but Atlas lifted it to his own lips and drained it in three huge gulps. Then, seeing her hand still in the air, he grinned sheepishly, refilled the glass and handed it to her.

  She sipped the water and then held the cool glass to her forehead, which had begun to pound with stress and fatigue.

  “Let’s get you back to bed.”

  “No!” She took a deep breath. The idea of going back into that dark, lonely room did not appeal at the moment. She cleared her throat. “I think I’m gonna watch TV for a little bit instead.”

  “‘Kay.” Without another word, Atlas slipped his hands under her knees and behind her back and carried her across the kitchen, his sneakers crunching glass with each step. Rebecca peeped but she didn’t outright protest. He wasn’t attempting to be a Romeo. He was just saving her feet from the glass.

  “I’ll clean that up in the morning.”

  “Sure thing,” he replied, as if he couldn’t care less. Atlas kicked his sneakers off as they hit the rug in the living room and carted Rebecca the rest of the way to the couch, depositing her gently on one end. Then he went and sat himself on the other end. He tossed her an afghan and grabbed the remote. “Anything in particular you wanna watch?”

  Rebecca eyed him for a moment. The couch was huge, so them sitting on either end was basically like sitting on opposite sides of the room. “Are you staying?”

  “If that’s okay. Sometimes I have trouble falling back asleep if I get woken up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Not complaining.” He stretched down the couch and handed her the remote control. “Here, you pick.”

  Rebecca turned the TV on and flicked through channels for a while until she came to an ambient channel. All it showed was video of a tropical fish tank on loop. She turned up the volume so that they could hear the small bubbling sound as well.

  “Are you serious?” Atlas asked, when he realized that this was what she was landing on.

  “Dead serious,” she said, laying her head on the arm of the couch and letting her eyes fall closed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Yup. He was fucked. Officially, majorly, undeniably fucked.

  It was the first thought that came into Atlas’s mind when he woke up the next morning. It was just after dawn, he could tell from the dim light against his eyelids. He wasn’t in his room, he could tell from the rough upholstery under his cheek. And he wasn’t alone, he could tell from the warm, soft foot that was pressed up against his.

  Moving as little as possible, Atlas cracked his eyes and looked down the couch. Bex was asleep at the far end. She was curled into a ball under the afghan, except one of her feet had extended across the meridian line of the couch and was now pressed against his. The sole of her sweet little foot was pressed against the sole of his foot.

  He’d held hands with women before, but somehow, this seemed infinitely more intimate. When the hell did two people ever get to press their feet bottoms together?

  It was weird and awesome and Atlas felt his crush expand out another fifty feet. It was eating the world as it went. Nothing was safe.

  In an effort not to disturb her, Atlas closed his eyes and attempted to go back to sleep. Images from the night before played on the backs of his eyelids and he knew there was no more sleep for him.

  He’d heard her get up and go into the kitchen. He’d always been a heavy sleeper, but since Bex had moved in, any little noise in the night was waking him. It was the first time she’d left the room at night since she’d come to stay with him and he was instantly awake as he heard the kitchen sink run.

  He figured he should check and make sure she was all right. And man alive, she was not all right. He’d watched her, all swallowed up in oversized pajamas, as she’d folded in on herself. Her shoulders curled inward, her little body shaking. She’d been almost silent, but he’d seen her trembling with pain and fear.

  God. His eyes came open and he looked down at her again. A question burned within him. He fought the urge to wake her up.

  If he were his brother, he could probably have laid completely still all morning without waking her up. He could have reveled in the heat of her skin, the fact that she was sleeping deeply after her long night.

  But he wasn’t his brother. He was himself. And he was antsy and twitchy and needed answers now.

  Atlas slid himself up, off the couch, and stretched. Bex stirred and he looked hopefully over, hoping that she was stirring awake. But nope. She was still out like a light.

  It was officially dawn now, so he figured it was coffee time.

  Atlas put his shoes on and strode into the kitchen and ground up some coffee beans, not bothering to muffle the sound at all. He wandered back toward the living room and poked his head in. He frowned. She was still snoozing.

  So, he set the coffee maker going and started cleaning up the glass. Every few minutes, he got up to check and, yup, still sleeping.

  He did the dishes that were still in the sink, not bothering to keep from clinking them in the sink. But nothing, she still slept like a rock. He poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter where he could lean to the side and still see the mound of her feet under the afghan. Stymied, he wasn’t sure how much longer his impatient heart could wait for her to wake up. He had a burning question and he needed it answered now.

  A bolt of inspiration hit him and thirty seconds later he was mixing pancake batter. Food would wake her up. It was his one reliable pathway into Bex’s interiority. His only open door to her heart.

  He set the griddle out, fired it up and not ten seconds after he’d poured the first round of pancake batter on, there she was in the doorway, yawning and scratching and balancing one foot on the opposite knee like she always did.

  He turned and grinned as she scrubbed her face. “I didn’t mean for you to clean up that glass and then make me bre—” she cut off and gaped at him before she squeaked and hid behind the wall next to the doorway. “Jeez, Atlas, you’re naked!”

  Utterly bemused, he looked down at himself to make sure that his clothes hadn’t up and dissolved in the last thirty seconds. “I’m not naked. I’m wearing basketball shorts.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “They go past my knees!” He rounded the corner into the living room and Bex squeaked again, covering her eyes.

  “Get a shirt on, for goodness sakes!”

  Still amazed and shocked at her apparent modesty, he just shook his head, looking down at his bare chest. What was so offensive about it? He rather liked his chest. There was a good hair-to-skin ratio and it was the one place that he actually liked his tattoos. They were nice tattoos. And it was a nice chest. Yet she was looking at him like he’d just flashed her a look at his joystick.

  “This is exactly what I was wearing last night, you know.”

  She blinked at him between splayed fingers. “You weren’t wearing a shirt last night?”

  “No, I came straight from bed.”

  She didn’t seem to have an answer for that. She just looked at his chest, went even pinker, and covered her eyes again.

  “The pancakes are gonna burn,” he told her. “You want me to cover up so bad, grab me a shirt from my room.”

  He turned and went back into the kitchen. A minute later she roughly tapped his shoulder and when he turned, she averted her eyes to the ceiling, her cheeks pink as could be, a
s she held out a shirt for him.

  He tugged it on and the effect was instantaneous. Suddenly she could make eye contact with him again.

  “Were you raised Mormon or something?” he asked her.

  She sputtered, her eyes growing wide. “What?”

  “You’re just so… you know… prudey.”

  “Prudey? Me?” Her mouth fell open and her eyes doubled in size. She laughed, but there was more shock in it than humor. “Oh, Atlas, if you only knew.”

  And that, right there, was the rub. If only he did know. He wanted to know. Desperately. He wanted to know everything she wasn’t telling him.

  “So,” he tried to understand, tipping the first round of pancakes onto a plate and starting on the next round. “You’re not prudey, but you can’t bear to look at a shirtless man? What is that?”

  “I can look at shirtless men,” she insisted, almost defiantly. Then she wilted a little bit. “I just can’t look at a shirtless you. We’re roommates.”

  He inwardly deflated. This crush he was working with was nascent but potent. He didn’t want her to flee from him when he was shirtless. He wanted her to eye him up and down and add him to her spank bank.

  He kept his back to her while he finished up the pancakes and added them to the plate. When he turned, he saw that she’d poured them both juice and gotten out the butter and syrup. He cocked his head. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it until now. “You don’t drink coffee?”

  “I love coffee,” was her extremely evasive answer.

  “But you don’t drink it,” he pressed her.

  “I stopped about six months ago. It’s expensive.”

  He’d heard her mention this a few times. Six months ago. Something had definitely happened to her six months ago that had changed everything and he wanted to know what the hell it was. “Did you used to drink it black?”

  “Mmm, a little cream and sugar.”

  She started piling pancakes onto their two plates. “Do you think we need to add some fruit to this? Sometimes I think we eat like shit.”

  Her voice faded out as Atlas came to stand beside her, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand. It had a little cream and sugar in it.

  He ignored the jolts that her use of we had given him and pressed the coffee forward into her hand.

  She cast her eyes down but accepted the cup. She folded her hands around it, the way someone did when they were cold. And then she took one tentative sip, her eyes falling closed while she savored the taste. “Good coffee,” she whispered.

  “Bex, please, I need the answer to something. Please.”

  Her humongous eyes lifted to his and he violently resisted the urge to bring a palm to one of her cheeks. She was already doing him the tremendous honor of letting him stand within two feet of her. Now was not the time to ante up.

  “I might or might not answer,” she whispered. Her eyes fell down to her coffee. “I’ll try my best.”

  “Please tell me if you’re in danger.”

  She didn’t answer but her silence said everything. She watched her coffee and Atlas watched her.

  “Shit,” he murmured, scraping a hand over his face and beard. “All right, well, you ended up in the exact right place then. Considering my career is in personal security.”

  Her eyes stayed on her coffee. “I’m not asking you to protect me.”

  He dismissed that statement. She didn’t have to ask. That was the end of that. “Is it people or person that you’re running from?”

  He was going to ask as many questions as she was going to answer, he didn’t care if he was pushing his luck.

  “I don’t know.”

  “So, it’s definitely at least one person?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know who it is? Are you related to them, or met them before?”

  “No. I’d never seen him before…” she paled and bit her lip, like she’d said too much.

  “Do you think he knew who you were?” Atlas had no idea what kind of situation she might have found herself in, but he knew exactly what kind of questions they asked clients when they were trying to get a handle on their cases.

  She paused for a long time and then shook her head. “Not that night. But it wouldn’t have been hard for him to figure out.”

  She still wasn’t telling him shit but at least she was talking. Thank god she was talking. The way in which she referenced that night made Atlas want to find whoever this asshole was and beat the shit out of him. He didn’t care about the details of what happened. As far as Atlas was concerned, anytime a woman said that night with that level of fear in her voice, somebody deserved to get the shit beat out of him.

  “And you think this guy is looking for you.”

  She nodded again.

  “Does he know you’re in Brooklyn?”

  “No. He probably doesn’t know I left the state.”

  Okay. So, she wasn’t from New York. He opened his mouth to ask more questions but she looked up at him with those big, sad eyes and a different question came out than the one he’d been intending to ask.

  “Is what happened with him what you were crying over last night?”

  “Yes.”

  Atlas nodded and let out a big breath. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in trying to get you to talk to the police about whatever it was that happened that night.”

  She frowned at him, took half a step away.

  “Okay, okay. I get it.” He raised his hands up. “I’m not going to make you do anything that makes you feel unsafe. I swear it. Let’s just eat some pancakes and… yeah. Let’s just start with eating pancakes.”

  He took his plate and sat on the counter across from her, his usual spot when they ate in the kitchen, and this action seemed to calm her down a little bit.

  She took her plate to the breakfast bar and for a moment after she’d sat down, Atlas lost himself in the memory of finding her asleep there. So skinny. So scared. So lost.

  Anger roiled in his stomach for whoever had put her in this situation. His thoughts twisted one over the other like a pit of snakes. Little by little, though, the wildness cleared. He wasn’t going to be able to get this story out of her by begging and pleading. He was going to have to make her safe and wait for her to open up to him.

  The most important part of that sentiment was the part where he made her safe. His brain, frantic for a problem to solve, latched onto the idea like a pitbull on a bone. “Okay. So, we’ll get some more security measures installed around here. And we’re gonna get you a panic button.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s an emergency alert system. You press it and all hell breaks loose. The cops, EMS, the whole nine yards come charging in to save you. We can put a few of them around the house and then we’ll give you one to wear around your neck.” He looked up and froze.

  She’d gone white. “No,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “No cops.” Her voice was ash in the wind. “If you get cops involved, I’m gone, Atlas. You’ll never see me again.”

  A tingling started in his fingers and toes. It was a feeling he recognized as pure adrenaline. His senses were humming and bright with fear. The food turned over in his stomach.

  “Don’t say that, Bex.”

  “It’s not a threat, Atlas. It’s the truth. I can’t get involved with the cops.”

  She was still as a statue and swimming in her oversized clothes. Her choppy haircut fell over her forehead as she tucked one of her knees under her chin and hugged it.

  “Bex, how old are you?”

  She eyed him distrustfully and didn’t answer. He wilted. She couldn’t even tell him that. Fact of the matter was, she didn’t trust him. And he was pushing too hard. He needed to pull back on the throttle and let her come to him.

  But how the hell was he supposed to do that now that he knew just how scared she was? Just how much trouble she was in?

  The adrenaline was still pulsing in his veins. He wanted to tear his hair
out. He needed a run. And not on a treadmill. No, he needed to run as fast as he could in any direction. He needed to get somewhere.

  He set his food aside and slid off the counter, heading out of the kitchen.

  “Twenty-six.”

  Her voice stopped him in the doorway of the kitchen but he didn’t turn. If he turned, he knew he’d see her, small and pale and scared and he’d have to fight with himself over going to her and holding her. And she didn’t want to be held, so he didn’t turn and look.

  “Twenty-six going on fifty it feels like,” she whispered. “This has been the longest year of my life. I feel too old and too young at the same time. I feel scared all the time. Do you know what it does to your body to feel scared all the time? It makes you ache. Like you have arthritis. Sometimes, when I’m working, I can barely get my fingers to squeeze down on the Windex bottle. That’s how scared I am all the time. I see his face everywhere I go. He’s always right behind me. And I’m scared I’ll feel that way for the rest of my life.”

  He knocked his forehead against the doorjamb to keep himself from sprinting across the kitchen and slipping his shirt over her head just to give her someplace safe and warm to live out the rest of her life. “If you trust me, I can make you safe, Bex.”

  “I’m not innocent,” she whispered. “I… didn’t do what they say I did, but if we get the cops involved, I’ll go to jail.”

  His blood turned to ice.

  “I won’t risk it,” she whispered again.

  His forehead still on the wooden jamb, he squeezed his eyes shut. He took a deep breath, and grabbed the top of the doorframe, did a quick pull up in an effort to quell some of the heat in his veins.

  “I really, really wanna hug you,” he said without turning around.

  She was silent for a minute and then he heard the barstool scraping across the ground. She was coming to him? All he’d had to do was ask? He started to turn but her palm pressed into his back and kept him facing away. Then, her strong little fingers pressed into the forearms that he’d dropped to his sides and she lifted his arms up so that they were up against the top of the doorframe again, the way they’d been moments ago.