Moreau kept very fit, and truly enjoyed exercise of every kind, but the accident had weakened him greatly. It cost him quite a lot to lift himself from the bed into the wheelchair. If Leary were here, he would take the brunt of Moreau’s weight. But Val’s arms were the circumference of a cucumber. There was no chance that she could heft Moreau’s considerable weight.
Just as beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, a shoulder lodged into his armpit and a wiry arm looped his back. Moreau rolled his head to the side and there was Geo, her brow drawn in concentration as she lowered him into the chair carefully.
“Thank you,” he murmured, laying his leg on the tray that was pulled out from the chair for him to balance it.
She said nothing and neither woman followed him into the bathroom, thankfully. Moreau brushed his teeth and washed his face. It was much easier to lift himself onto the toilet because of a handicap bar that was between the toilet and shower. When he emerged a few minutes later, he was much more composed.
Geo and Val stood on opposite sides of the room. Geo sipped her coffee, looking alert and watchful, like a bird of prey. Val, on the other hand, looked like she was doing her best to blend in with the wallpaper, so to speak.
“Any chance I can have a cup of coffee while I have an IV?”
Val nodded. “Of course.”
“And any chance that IV rolls?”
“Sure, it can.”
“Good. Then I’d like to roll down to the kitchen and have a cup of coffee.”
Geo raised her eyes but said nothing. After Val had changed his bandages, she and Moreau found themselves in the hallway.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Val?” Moreau called back into the room where she was changing the sheets on his bed.
“Oh!” She blushed to her hairline and straightened up like she’d been electrocuted. “Oh, no thank you, M-Moreau. My break is not for another hour. Please, just have one of your security text me if you need anything at all.”
Geo waited until they were in the service elevator before she said anything. “You should have asked her to sit down before you asked her on a date. Almost gave the poor girl a heart attack.”
“A date?” Moreau, seated in the wheelchair, looked up at Geo in confusion. “Who?”
“Val. You asked her to have a cup of coffee with you and she almost levitated.”
“I didn’t ask her on a date!” he insisted. “My god, that would be like dating a rabbit or a baby chicken or something.”
Geo snorted into her coffee again. “I take it waify and wholesome aren’t your thing?”
“I fear I’d step on her and end her life by accident,” Moreau said with a straight face.
Again, he was stunned by the elusive sight of Geo’s smile. “Well, go easy on her. The girl has a major crush on you.”
Geo strode off the elevator and Moreau pushed himself after her with his hands on the wheels of his chair. He stopped abruptly when his ribs screamed in protest. Geo, without skipping a beat, noticed his lack of progress and came to stand around behind the chair, pushing him along.
He might have protested, but she pushed the chair in a leisurely way, with her body bent down and her elbows on the handles. He could feel her breath on the side of his face and for the first time, caught the scent of her shampoo. It was surprisingly feminine. Floral.
“I am afraid, in my old age, I am no longer so delicate with the crushes my fans endure,” Moreau said, desperate to pick up the thread of the conversation and not let on that he was drowning in her nearness.
“Well,” she said and he could practically hear the smirk in her voice. “You definitely aren’t as young as you used to be.”
He had to laugh at that. If she were almost anyone else in his life, she would have insisted that forty was not old and that she was sure he was wildly kind to every fan nursing a crush on him. But, Geo being Geo, she did neither. She simply agreed that forty was kind of old.
She pushed him into the kitchen where there was a delicious scent on the air and many friendly faces.
“Hey, brother,” Sequence said immediately, coming around from his place at the stove to pound fists with Moreau.
That was all Sequence said, but Moreau was impossibly touched. Sequence was not known for being loquacious and hadn’t been up to visit with Moreau yet. Coming from Sequence a simple hey, brother was akin to a hallmark card.
“How you feeling?” Cedric asked as he cleared away chairs at the kitchen table to make space for Moreau’s wheelchair.
“Compared to yesterday? Quite well. Compared to last week? Quite terrible.”
“Well, it’s all relative,” Geo said with a groan as she sat down at the table.
“You are hurt?” he asked her, carefully observing her wince of pain as she took a seat.
“No,” she said obstinately, tossing a stink-eye toward Cedric, who simply laughed.
“She’s salty because she pulled a muscle trying to beat me in a foot race,” Cedric told Moreau.
Not a month ago, Moreau had attempted the exact same feat. “No one can beat Cedric.” Moreau thought for a second. “Or at least that is what I tell myself when I lose to Cedric every single time.”
Both Geo and Sequence laughed at that and Moreau felt as if he’d won the lottery. If he’d known that being in a life-threatening accident was all that he’d needed to do to get on the team’s sweet side then—Nope. No. He looked down at his leg. Their apparent softening toward him was a nice consolation prize, but it definitely wasn’t worth the price.
Sequence came around with a carafe of coffee and a platter of breakfast foods. Moreau’s stomach grumbled. He was hungry. And he hadn’t been truly hungry since before the accident.
A moment later, the swinging kitchen door swung open again and deep in conversation, Rook and Atlas came through.
They both looked pleased to see Moreau up and about. They all sat at the table and, for the first time ever, Moreau felt as if he were not the client. He felt as if he were part of the team.
“Dude,” Geo said across the table to Atlas. “Don’t hang your hat there.”
“What’s the problem?” Atlas asked.
Moreau looked up and burst out laughing. Atlas had hung his Royals cap on top of Moreau’s IV pole. “It’s okay, really. Make yourself at home.”
“We just got off the phone with a detective from the LAPD,” Rook told the table and the mood went from jovial down to more somber.
Moreau’s head started to ache. But it had been such a pain in the ass to get down here, he said nothing in the hopes that no one would notice. When he looked around the table, only Geo’s eyes were on him.
“Ray Wilkes?” Moreau guessed.
“That’s right.”
Moreau nodded, but stopped when his headache intensified. “He’s a good man. But if he’s the one working this case then it must have already been declared—”
“Attempted murder,” Rook said somberly.
Moreau felt twin fountains of emotion inside him. On the one hand, he was infinitely relieved to have Wilkes’s brilliance on his side again. He was also extremely disconcerted to have to need it.
“You’ve worked with this detective before?” Cedric asked, shoveling some food onto his plate.
“Yes,” Moreau said, wanting to dig his fingers into his eyes but not wanting to give away his headache. He took a sip of coffee instead. “Unfortunately, I am not a stranger to Wilkes’s area of expertise. He has helped me a number of times with stalkers.”
There was no surprise on any of the faces around the table. Moreau was certain that they were all extremely familiar with his past. They were his personal security after all. But still, he’d never actually addressed it with any of them besides Rook.
“Is that the angle that Wilkes is taking on this current case?” Geo asked in a low voice. “He thinks it was a stalker?”
Rook shrugged. “He’s tight-lipped. But I got the impression he has several leads. If you have questions for him
, you can ask him tomorrow. He’s getting in on the red-eye tonight.”
Moreau gaped. “He’s coming here? To New York City?”
Rook nodded. “He won’t stay at the bunker, but he’s going to come and speak with you as soon as you feel up to it.”
And just like that, Moreau’s headache went from a six to a nine on the pain scale. He pinched his eyes closed.
Attempted murder.
God. He’d thought this was over. It had been ten years since he’d had a stalker. He’d aged out of his boy-band looks and that had helped. And then he’d started taking much more serious and dramatic roles. He wasn’t doing rom-coms anymore, he wasn’t playing a sex bomb. There were no more cologne and watch ad campaigns with him shirtless on a yacht. He had done everything he could to keep working while attempting to calm the furor of his amorous fans.
And still, here they were.
He’d lost days of his life, his memory gone, his leg nearly crushed. And he couldn’t escape it. He was trapped in his life. In this building. In his body.
CHAPTER FOUR
One of the perks of being on lockdown with a client was that Geo didn’t have to visit her father and she didn’t have to feel guilty about it. She called Loretta that Friday afternoon and asked her to pass the message on to her dad. She could have called his cell phone, but she didn’t feel like getting into a long thing with him. Whenever she had to go on lockdown, he gave her such grief about her job. As if he found her work ethic alarming. He was always trying to talk her into finding something less labor-intensive. Which was ironic considering he was the one who benefited from the fruits of her hard labor more than anyone else.
Regardless, Geo found herself with a free Friday night for the first time in months. Well, not free, exactly, considering that she couldn’t leave the bunker. But she didn’t have to nudge through an hour of traffic to visit a man who gave her stomach ulcers. And she wasn’t scheduled to work tonight. In her eyes, the whole thing was a win.
Feeling inexplicably light, Geo put on some workout clothes and went down to their small gym on the first floor. She pounded out five miles on the treadmill, did two circuits of the weight machines, and twenty minutes of yoga to cap the whole thing off.
Dinner wouldn’t be for another hour, so after she’d showered off and changed back into her work clothes—the only thing they ever really wore around the bunker, even when they were off duty—she went to see what Atlas was up to. He was off duty as well.
She found Atlas, as she might have guessed she would, attempting to catch Cheetos in his mouth as he leaned back on two legs of a desk chair.
“Hey dummy,” she said jumping in the way of a Cheeto and eating it alive. Look ma, no hands.
A golf clap had Geo turning on her heel to see who else was in the room with them. They were in the game room, which was where Atlas almost always was when he had time off in the bunker. A pool table was in one corner, a ping pong table in the other, and a poker table sat in the middle.
That’s where four men sat staring at her. Sequence shuffled a deck of cards that Cedric—who was on duty—eyed with trepidation. Moreau sat in his wheelchair staring into her soul and beside him was a man who Geo had never met before.
He had bright red hair, a chipped tooth, and very blue eyes. He was also stupid hot. Geo couldn’t stop her brows from rising up her forehead. “You must be Detective Wilkes.”
He nodded and rose up from his seat as she approached the table. “That’s right.” They shook hands and his eyes widened at her firm grip. She got that a lot. “I’m afraid you have me at a loss.”
“You can call me Geo. I’m the fifth member of Rook Securities and apparently the only one not invited to the poker game.”
“Sorry,” Sequence said, not sounding one bit sorry at all. “Wasn’t in the mood to lose my money tonight.”
“Are you good at poker, then?” Moreau asked Geo.
She plopped down into the chair across from him. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m good at everything.”
She expected Moreau to be smirking at her, the way he always did, but when she looked up at him, she was mystified to see that there was a slight blush on his cheeks. Weird. Must be the concussion.
“We weren’t actually going to play,” Atlas said as he came to join the rest of the group, clapping Cheeto dust off of his hands.
“Why not?”
“Well, Bex and I are saving up for a car for her, so I don’t have money to burn right now. Cedric hates playing cards,” —that was true, he had a learning disability that made card games torture for him— “Moreau can’t see shit with his concussion, and Wilkes was just on his way out.”
“Bingo, bango, bongo,” Geo said, popping her lips together in finality.
“I’m going to go finish my conversation with Rook. I should see you all tomorrow.” Wilkes rose and waved, making his way out of the room.
Geo looked around at all the bored faces. “It’s Friday night though. We should do something fun.”
“Since when do you care about Friday nights?” Sequence asked.
“Yeah. Or fun,” Atlas added.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you do something fun in… two or three years?” Cedric guessed, squinting into his memories.
“Shut it,” Geo ordered. She’d kept the guys mostly in the dark about her issues with her dad, but she didn’t need anyone connecting the dots on how all the happy-go-lucky parts of her life had come to a screeching halt the second he’d resurfaced in her life.
“Oh! I know what we could do!” Atlas was up and jogging toward the big cabinet where they kept all the board games. “Let’s do a round robin of every game we have in there!”
He turned around, a huge smile on his face, to see every other person with highly skeptical expressions.
“Or you could all come have a beer in the kitchen while I make dinner,” Sequence suggested, tossing the deck of cards down.
Which is how Geo found herself seated next to Moreau at the kitchen table, a beer in front of her and tea in front of him. She hadn’t felt this relaxed in a very long time. She laughed with Atlas and gobbled the curry that Sequence prepared for them. She and Cedric found themselves in a long, very serious conversation about the Knicks. She helped Sequence clean up the meal in companionable silence while the rest of the men shot the shit at the table, eating ice cream that Sequence had tossed into bowls for them.
She couldn’t help but notice that Moreau wasn’t talking. Not much. She watched his profile as he listened carefully to something that Cedric was saying. His perfect profile was sharp and shadowed, his hair falling into his face. She watched as he went from somber to smiling at the exact perfect moment in Cedric’s story. His face crinkled and cracked open and yeah… What was it they said about Helen of Troy? She had a face that launched a thousand ships? Well, Moreau had one of those.
Moreau began to droop, propping his head up on one fist, and Geo made eyes at Cedric until he noticed.
Cedric, the one on duty, suggested that Moreau head upstairs so the nurses could do their thing and Moreau agreed.
With them went the party atmosphere. Both Atlas and Sequence went off to bed but Geo was still wired.
She went back to her room, thinking she was going to watch a movie or something when a small package on her desk caught her eye.
That was right! Moreau’s glasses had been delivered today, but she’d been in the middle of something and hadn’t been able to clear them.
They were, of course, not delivered to Moreau’s real name, in order to protect his privacy, but still, she was a good bodyguard because she was exceedingly cautious. Geo sat down at her desk and slit the package open carefully. She used a flashlight to peer inside and when she didn’t see anything suspicious, she slowly opened the package bit by bit.
His glasses fell out in a crushed velvet case. When she opened them, her breath caught. They really were gorgeous. They made her glasses look like they were made out of tin cans. Mo
reau’s new glasses had translucent, olive-colored frames and unscratchable glass. They were shiny and clean and light as a feather. She’d bet the hinges on the left arm didn’t creak either. She sighed and packed the package back up.
Not wanting him to have to wear her old glasses a second longer than he had to, she tucked the package under her arm and strode over to Moreau’s closed door. Cedric wasn’t posted outside, so Geo assumed that meant there was a nurse in the room.
Her question was answered when, two seconds later, the door swung open and Val, blushing to beat the band, scurried out.
“Night, Geo!” Val squeaked and disappeared down the hall.
Next came Cedric through the door and Geo stepped aside to let him pass.
“What’s up?” he asked, assuming that she was there to talk to him.
“Moreau got his glasses. I just wanna hand them over.”
Cedric nodded and posted up in the chair they kept out in the hallway. In three hours, Atlas would wake up and take over the night shift.
They were all very much looking forward to when the nurses were no longer required and they could all sleep through the night again.
Geo knocked briskly on the door and stepped into Moreau’s room.
“Hello,” he said in a surprised, sleepy voice.
He was tucked into bed and drowsy. She didn’t like seeing him look so vulnerable. It had only been a week since his accident and she was impatient for him to recover. She never thought she’d miss seeing his bossy-self striding around the bunker in his immaculate designer clothing.
“You look wrecked,” she informed him as she sat on one corner of his bed.
“I will tell my stylist that you said so.”
“Yeah. Don’t think this current look has gotten your stylist’s stamp of approval. Pajama pants, a hoodie, and a three-day beard?”
He chuckled. “That’s true. My stylist doesn’t approve of beards. No matter how well maintained.”
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