“That was right after your mom passed away, right?” Atlas asked. Atlas and Moreau had talked about that a bit in the past, considering both of their mothers had died.
“Yeah. I signed on to those movies about six months after she died. I think I just wanted something to take my mind off of losing her. But then it was like the franchise that wouldn’t quit. The fans were rabid.”
“You had a stalker at that time too, yeah?” Geo looked supremely sober. Moreau could only hope that it was because of how much she didn’t like hearing about hard times in his life.
“Ah,” he wracked his brain to remember. Unfortunately, he had to think hard to distinguish the different times in his life he’d been stalked and for what reasons. “Yes. Right. Actually, that was the worst time. The stalker was able to get in my house. She was hiding in my bedroom.”
“Jesus,” Atlas and Geo said at the same time.
“Yes. It was very scary.”
A silence descended for a moment before Geo spoke up again. “But you still do blockbusters occasionally.”
“Yes,” he smiled with something like chagrin. “My agent and manager can be very persuasive. And sometimes blockbusters are fun to shoot. I learn new skills, meet new people.”
“And end up a shriveled prune in the ocean, terrified of sharks,” Geo deadpanned.
Something within him thrilled at the fact that she remembered that. That she’d been listening to him all those weeks ago, even when he’d been certain she didn’t give a rat’s ass about him. “Seriously, Moreau, your professional team sound like a bunch of self-serving assholes.”
He shrugged. “I’ve known them a very long time. All of us benefit when I’m working.”
“But it sounds like they talk you into roles you don’t want to take.”
He just shrugged again.
“Next time they’re trying to talk you into anything, you hand the phone over to me.”
Atlas snorted, rolling his eyes at her bravado. “What the hell are you going to do?”
But Moreau was frozen at one end of the couch, his eyes on the beautiful woman who scowled and looked like she was ready to kick the entire world right in the dick. For him. On behalf of him.
“I’m gonna tell them to go to hell and to let our boy choose his own damn projects.” She strode over and plunked down, coming to sit in-between them on the couch. “What’re we watching?”
The TV had been playing in the background, but they hadn’t really been paying attention. Atlas turned the volume up, but it all just sort of faded away for Moreau.
He couldn’t take his eyes off of Geo’s profile. She was defending him. No one had truly defended him since his mother had been alive. And that was fifteen years ago now.
Sure, people on his publicity team stuck up for him, but those actions were always tied to his career, and therefore, their paychecks. But Geo was outraged on behalf of his… happiness. His humanity. She wanted him to be treated well because she believed he deserved to be treated well.
A confusing rush of emotions swamped him and he turned his blind eyes to the television screen. He groaned when he registered what they’d stopped on. A film he’d shot about eight years ago that had catastrophically flopped. He should have known better than to do a sports movie. This one had been a drama about an American football team. Moreau had played the aging quarterback.
Yikes.
Atlas and Geo laughed at his reaction to seeing himself on screen.
“Can we change this?” he asked them.
They both adamantly shook their heads no. “No way, man. This is the best part!” Atlas insisted. “Your big speech.”
“Lord.” Moreau lunged across the couch for the remote control, a good amount of his weight across Geo’s lap. He had a good hold on the remote but so did Atlas, they laughed and struggled, yanking it one way and then the other. It was when he felt the controller start to slip through his fingers that Moreau gasped in pain and clutched at his hurt leg.
“Atlas! His leg!” Geo shouted, placing her hands on Moreau’s back gently.
Atlas immediately stopped grappling with Moreau and Moreau leaned back into his original seat, the remote control in hand.
He instantly dropped the I’m-in-pain-act and grinned at them. “Suckers.”
He changed the channel while they laughed and scoffed.
“Hey,” he shrugged. “You’re the ones who fell for it. I’m a professional actor.”
He settled on American Ninja Warrior and they all leaned back to watch it. The scuffle had landed him quite a bit closer to Geo and Moreau found he didn’t mind one bit.
His hand slid across the cushion on the couch and as if she’d been waiting for that, her fingers snaked around his. Palm to palm, they watched the show.
***
Geo paused outside of Moreau’s open door. He was talking on the phone in his room. She bristled at the tone of his voice. She knew he was talking to someone he didn’t want to be.
“They can’t hold me to a contract I never signed. You know as well as I do that—”
Moreau turned from where he stood in the window and saw Geo at his door. For a moment, she thought he might be irritated that she was eavesdropping on him but then his face broke into a gentle smile and he gestured her forward. She came into the room and pulled out his desk chair, leaning back into it lazily. She picked up a deck of cards from his desk and started shuffling it.
He continued to smile down at her as he leaned his butt against the desk. His smile began to fade as he listened to whatever the person on the line was saying.
“I obviously can’t do publicity tours right now.” He paused, leaned forward and tucked some of her hair behind her ear. Geo battened down her face and tried not to let on that the gesture made her insides turn to pudding. She was still getting used to the fact that her insides could turn to pudding. It was a very new phenomenon for her.
Moreau outright frowned into the phone. “Because, you know better than anyone, that I am at the center of a murder attempt right now. I might even have a stalker again. I’m on total lockdown. For my own safety. I’m not going to willingly agree to be anywhere but wherever my security team is. All right? My security team is on lockdown. I’m on lockdown. I’m not going anywhere.”
A few moments later, Moreau hung up the phone and grimaced at her. “Sorry about that.”
She shrugged. “Nothing to apologize for. Are your phone calls with whoever that was usually so combative?”
“Never.” A small smile flirted with the corners of his lips and he leaned forward to pull the hair tie out of her hair. His eyes were far away as he slid his fingers through her dark hair. “Someone recently inspired me to stand up for myself a bit more vigorously.”
Geo looked up at him and watched his smile grow. She realized that he was grinning at her because she was stretching into the touch of his hand like an alley cat with a brand new owner. But she kinda didn’t care. His fingers on her scalp felt amazing. It was the kind of touch she could feel down into the soles of her feet. This kind of touch had echoes.
“Moreau?”
“Yeah.”
“If we were to go with you, would you want to do some of this stuff that your agent and manager and publicity people want you to do? Would you want to be interviewing and taking meetings and stuff like that?”
He considered the question, his hand absently playing in her hair. “If you all were to come with me to do things like that, well, that would mean that Rook had made one hundred percent sure it would be safe for me. So, in that case, I wouldn’t mind, because I would feel safe.”
“No,” she shook her head and the movement dislodged his hand from her hair. “I mean, do you actually enjoy all that stuff?”
“Some of it yes and some of it no.”
She watched carefully for any reaction from him. Damn him and his acting skills. It made him very hard to read. “Moreau… Our main goal is to keep you safe, you know that. But we also want you to be
living the life you want to be living. If you’re unhappy—”
“Do I seem unhappy to you?”
She paused. “Is this a trick question?”
“No.”
“You don’t seem unhappy. But… you’re very hard to know, Moreau. How many years have we known each other and I’m, like, just learning that you’re not a complete asshole.”
He threw his head back and laughed. Hard. “It’s the hair, isn’t it? I knew it made me look like an asshole.”
She stood up and leaned into him, her hipbone knocking against his in a rough, affectionate way. “I like the hair. It’s dumb and hot. Leave it.”
To her surprise his cheeks seemed to get a little pink at that. As if he hadn’t had the entire world calling him hot for his entire life.
“I’m the happiest I’ve been in many years, Savannah,” he said in a low, gruff voice.
As conscious as she was of the door being open, she still let him press the flats of his hands against her back, let him guide her body into his. They were a hard fit against one another. Both of them muscular, neither yielding, but that fact in itself thrilled Geo. Women, she’d learned over the years, were supposed to be soft and accommodating when they found a man they wanted to cuddle up to. Knowing that would never be her, eventually, she’d just sort of kissed the whole idea goodbye. But Moreau didn’t seem to be searching for a way to make her softer. He seemed to thrill in her rigid strength. Her push, her structure, her way.
She lifted her mouth to his and let him kiss her as sweetly as he wanted to. She’d decided before that she was going to take every opportunity she could to attempt to seduce him into sleeping with her. That she’d be ruthless in her attempts to get her way. But right now? With his hands so warm on her back and the feeling of his fingers on her scalp still echoing through her, she decided to let him gain a point. She didn’t intensify the kiss or sexualize it. She simply opened her mouth to him and let him love on her.
His tongue was a sweet, romantic sweep across hers. His groan was both helpless and amazed at once.
“I see you took my advice.”
Geo and Moreau broke apart, though Moreau’s hand stayed firm on her back, keeping her from completely leaping away from him. Their heads snapped up to see Sequence lazing against the doorframe, a smug look on his face.
“Your advice?” Geo asked Sequence in confusion, assuming he’d been addressing her.
“Sequence is quite the love doctor, it turns out,” Moreau told her, stroking his hand up and down her back.
She swatted his hand away. “You told Sequence about us?” she hissed. “Moreau, I could lose my job!”
Sequence stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “Don’t insult me, Geo. I’m not going to tattle on you for doing something that pretty much all of us have now done at one point or another.”
She clapped her mouth shut and scowled at Sequence.
“Besides,” he continued. “If anything’s gonna lose you your job, it’s making out with Moreau at four in the afternoon with the door open. At least confine this shit until when everyone is asleep.”
She had no response for that perfectly logical argument so she turned her ire on Moreau. “Who else have you told?”
He shrugged, apparently unconcerned with her anger. “No one, but I don’t think it is a state secret. My feelings for you were never very hidden.”
“Everybody knows, Geo,” Sequence cut in. “I mean, not everybody knows you’re currently working out your daddy issues on Moreau, but yeah. Everybody knows how you two feel about each other.”
She sneered at his daddy issues comment, but it was mostly to hide her reaction to the second half of that statement. Everybody knows how you two feel about each other.
What the hell did that mean? That everyone saw how badly she wanted to screw Moreau? Or was it something else that they all saw? This small, soft, vulnerable feeling that had been growing inside of her; she’d been careful to keep it hidden, but maybe it was visible?
Could Moreau see it?
She crossed her arms over her chest, to keep her feelings in as much to keep everyone else’s out. “Was there something you needed, Sequence? Or did you just come up here to cockblock me?”
He laughed at that and turned to Moreau. “I wanted to thank you, man. Rook just told me about family day. And that it was your idea.”
Moreau’s face broke into a brilliant smile. “You’re kidding! He’s going to do it?”
“Yeah. Actually, Geo, he’s calling a logistical meeting to figure out how to make it work security-wise, but in a few days, all of our families are invited to visit us. And yeah. That’s because of you, brother. It means a lot to me.”
Geo watched in amazement as Sequence and Moreau met in the middle of the room and did that dude-hug back-pat thing.
Moreau had taken it upon himself to get Rook to plan a day for the team to see their families?
She felt prickly and soft at the same time. It was so sweet it was irritating. Why did he have to be such a good freaking person? Honestly, everything had been easier when she’d thought he was just a spoiled rich kid.
“Rook needs us in the tactical room, G.”
And then Sequence was gone and it was just Moreau and Geo in the room again.
“You’re angry I asked Sequence for help.”
She furrowed her brow. “You asked him for help?”
“Oh. Yes. I had to tell him about us because I needed advice.”
“You asked Sequence for advice. Of the romantic variety?”
He nodded, seeming fairly wary of her potential reaction to that information.
“Davy,” she said, stepping up to him and smoothing her hands over his shirt before she grabbed the collar aggressively. “You won’t sleep with me, you’re asking people for love advice, suddenly you’re all affectionate and sweet… I want you to answer a question honestly—and just so you know, this is a judgment-free zone. Davy, are you a virgin?”
He laughed again, hard, surprised at her irreverence. Her ridiculousness. He rolled his eyes, clamped his hands around her and leaned her back as far as he could with a splint on his leg still. “Savannah Georgia, you slay me.”
She broke their kiss because she needed air. She was dizzy when he stood her back up. “I’m gonna take that as a no.”
She backed away from him, before he could kiss her stupid again, and jogged to her meeting.
It was twenty minutes later that Geo was frowning down at her team-issued iPad as Rook brought them through the logistics of their family day. It was complicated as hell, and she knew why. Because he’d planned every aspect of Davy’s security assuming that all of them were going to want time with their families that day.
“Rook,” she raised her hand and waited for him to turn to her. “Sorry you went to all this trouble, but it’s unnecessary. I’ll just man-to-man Davy on family day.”
“If you’re on duty the entire day, you won’t be able to spend time with your family,” Rook frowned.
“Yeah. Not a problem. I won’t be inviting anyone to come.”
She was aware of all the team’s eyes on her. They were the people she was the closest to in the world and she’d barely told them anything about her life. Anything they knew, it was because they’d have had to pick it up through context clues over the years. Only Rook knew even half the story.
“You sure?” Cedric asked her. He also didn’t have much family, but he had Elena and Elena’s family.
“Yeah,” she shrugged, like it was no big deal. “You guys are as close to a family as I really have, and you know I love being around your wives and girlfriends and kids and shit. There’s no need for you to take time away from your people when I can just be on duty that day. No biggie.”
Rook was still frowning and Geo knew exactly why. If any member of the team ever had to fall on a sword, Rook infinitely preferred for it to be him. But in this case, he had a daughter that he was most likely dying to see and he was sorely
tempted to take up Geo on her offer.
“Seriously, you guys, it’s not a big deal. I only have my dad and he’s not allowed to leave the center where he lives. I’ll see him another time. I’m happy to work.” Then, because she knew it would help Rook to swallow the pill, she leaned back and made demands. “Though, if I’m doing the work of four team members, I’m gonna want the pay of four team members.”
Rook grinned and shook his head at her irreverence. “Are you seriously pumping me for quadruple pay right now?”
She shrugged. “Seems fair to me.”
“So it does.” Rook scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “If you’re really sure about this, then that does make everything a lot easier. All of us will technically be off duty, but the bunker will still be in full security-lockdown mode. Geo, you’ll be man-to-man with Davy. So wherever he goes, you’ll need to be until the rest of us are back on surveillance.”
She nodded, knowing the drill.
“That means,” Rook continued. “You’re really going to have to stay on top of him.”
Geo viciously ignored Sequence’s eyes—she could practically feel his dumbass smirk—and nodded solemnly. “Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER TEN
Geo laughed into her pillow that night as she listened to Moreau attempt to creep across her floor. His crutches clicked on the floor, his splint caught on the edge of her rug, and he knocked a book off her desk.
“Damn it,” he mumbled to himself in that accent that she was just beginning to admit absolutely wrecked her.
She rolled over. “I think you can safely cross cat-burglar off your list of future careers.”
He grinned at her and even in the dark his white smile gleamed. “I am quite nimble when my legs are unbroken. I assure you.”
He laid his crutches on the floor and pulled the blankets back with a surprising familiarity. He slid in next to her, the course hairs on his legs scraping across her. His body was shockingly warm, like he’d been snuggled up to a roaring winter fire.
“Have I ever told you that I like your accent?” she asked him, rolling onto her side and resting her head on one hand.
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