Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  Geo shrugged. She played with her fingers for a second. “He dumped me.”

  Rook shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Geo, I’m not sure that we should be talking about this. Look, I’m gonna look the other way on your dealings with him because I really don’t think Davy is gonna sue us but—”

  “Rook, I didn’t want to be his girlfriend so he dropped me like a hot potato. I thought—I thought that agreeing to pose as his girlfriend on the red carpet might give him some tiny inkling of how I feel—” She growled and dropped her head into her hands for a second. “I’m confused and mad and I need the day off to talk to some people who can help me figure this shit out so that I can be at the top of my game for the event, all right?”

  Rook cleared his throat. “Yeah. All right. Be back tomorrow morning at 8 am. We’re flying out at 5 pm and spending the night at a hotel while we clear Davy’s mansion. The next two nights we’ll spend there.”

  “I know.” She was scrambled, but she hadn’t lost her hold on reality. Or her job. “I’ll be ready when it’s time, Rook. I just need a break. Just for today.”

  By the time he was done nodding, she was out of the chair and jogging to her car.

  ***

  “It’s so weird to have a book club meeting without Atlas,” Naomi said as she set down a pitcher of margaritas on her coffee table.

  “I know,” Elena agreed. “It feels like cheating.”

  “Atlas is still on lockdown,” Geo said from where she stood by the window.

  “Right.” May said, eyeing Geo in a friendly but speculative way. “Just like you should be.”

  Geo shrugged. “I got the day off.”

  “Sorry I’m late!” Bex called as she stepped through Naomi’s front door, she was damp from the shower and wearing purple leggings and a turquoise shirt that was obviously Atlas’s just from the sheer size of it. And the fact that it had a giant golden retriever puppy silk screened on the front of it. Atlas had ridiculous taste in clothing.

  “How could you possibly be this late?” Naomi demanded. “You literally live fifteen feet away from me!” She kissed Bex’s cheek and shoved a margarita in her hand. The two women had a special camaraderie considering they’d fallen in love with two twin brothers.

  “I got the emergency meeting call when I was three miles away on a run! I had to sprint back here and shower.” She took a big gulp of the margarita, winced, coughed, and looked around at the group. “What’s the big emergency? I didn’t even know we could call emergency book club meetings.”

  One by one, the women all turned to look at Geo, who had been the one to call the meeting to order.

  She sighed and came to sit on the couch next to Elena. “The book club part is irrelevant. I just really, really need some advice. From all of you.”

  “Shoot,” May said.

  And so, Geo told them. She told them about her original feelings for Davy. That he was hot and annoying and entitled. But that she’d always kept him at arm’s length, for reasons she was just now beginning to understand. She told them how she’d felt the night she’d heard about his accident. That she hadn’t been able to breathe. She’d felt like her heart was getting ripped out. She told them what it had been like to see strong, cocky, athletic, glowing Davy all laid up and wrecked. She told them how cute he’d been when he’d been concussed. That it had kind of dropped a wall between them that she’d never been able to build again. She told them about their first kiss. About his idea about their challenge for one another. She told them about her determination to win, but she admitted how close she’d been to folding.

  And she told them about him throwing in the towel. That he’d suddenly changed his mind about wanting her in his life. Seemingly in any capacity. That this mess had happened with his personal assistant and then bang! He didn’t want to hook up anymore and he certainly didn’t want her as his girlfriend. Finally, she told them about the plan to pose as his girlfriend.

  “Oh,” she summed up. “By the way, you’re all sworn to secrecy, considering if any of this information got out, it could compromise our security and the men you all love could end up dead. Yeah?”

  She was greeted with nods and wide eyes and lots of swapped eye contact.

  “Holy shit.” Bex was the first person to break the silence after Geo’s story.

  “Yeah. Wow.” That was Elena.

  “I think that’s the sexiest story I’ve ever heard,” Naomi mumbled into her hand.

  “Sexy? There was barely even any sex in it!” Geo insisted.

  “Yeah,” Naomi rebutted. “But there was so much desire.”

  “Until the end, when he decided he didn’t want me anymore,” Geo grumbled.

  May laughed. “Geo, you’ve never been a dumb girl. Don’t start now.”

  Geo looked up in surprise. “What?”

  “Do you honestly think that a man who wanted you that badly just up and decides like that,” —she snapped her fingers— “he doesn’t want you anymore? That’s not how it works, darlin’.”

  “But that’s exactly what happened!”

  “No.” May shook her head. “I really don’t think that’s what happened.”

  Geo groaned and leaned back on the couch. “I wish Atlas were here. He’d be able to translate all this for me.”

  “All right. Let’s make this real simple.” May rose up and clapped her hands. “Naomi, we need more margaritas. Is anybody else hungry? I could go for sushi.” She pulled out a credit card and handed it over. “Elena, why don’t you order some in for us?” She turned to Bex. “I’m gonna leave you in charge of downloading at least three Moreau Davy movies for us. None of that action crap he’s been doing recently. I’m talking the sappy shit from his late twenties. Gimme the rom-coms, capiche?”

  She turned back to the stunned group, one hand on her hip, her eyes on Geo’s. “Honey? We’re gonna fix you right up.”

  ***

  Three hours later, every single one of them was drunk as a skunk. Takeout containers were strewn across the coffee table like carcasses on the side of the road and the women were sprawled in various states of disarray.

  Moreau was claiming undying love on the television screen and a volley of popcorn streamed through the air at his perfect, handsome face.

  “Don’t worry, G,” Naomi slurred. “He doesn’t really love that girl. He’s just acting.”

  Geo laughed. “Yeah. Figured that one out on my own.”

  “He loves you, Geo,” Elena called. “I knew it from the minute I first saw you two together.”

  “Wait. What?” Geo sat up from where she was laying on the floor to look at Elena. But Elena was sprawled on her side in the big armchair and Geo could only see one of her bouncing feet.

  “Seriously,” Elena said, scrambling up to a sit. “Whenever you’re around, his entire energy is focused on you. Sure, he can carry on a conversation and act like everything’s normal. But he’s really only paying attention to you.”

  “That’s true!” Naomi interrupted. “Remember when he used to hit on me? Well, that was pretty much only when you were around, Geo. He was totally trying to make you jealous.”

  “Well, that’s all fine and good, but why doesn’t he want me now? It was like a light went out.” Geo tried to keep the confusion and hurt out of her voice, but drunk as she was, she didn’t think she was fooling anyone.

  “It’s not because he doesn’t want you,” May said clearly. She was one of those miraculous people who could be fall-down drunk without slurring a word, every hair on her head in meticulous place. “It’s because he wants you too much. Geo, honey, the man has obviously realized that his heart can’t take doing casual with someone he’s in love with. He’s probably realized that it makes more sense to pull away from you than it does to put his heart on the line and have you punt it back toward him.”

  “I am not going to punt his heart anywhere!” Geo insisted, sitting up on her knees and watching the room spin for a minute.

  “Really?�
�� May said.

  “Really!”

  The looks on all the ladies faces were confusing to her. They were all looking at her in various stages of shock.

  “So… you’re saying that you want him? All of him? Girlfriend and all?”

  Geo threw her hands up in exasperation. “Yes! No! I mean it freaking terrifies me, but yes. I don’t know, you’re the experts on this shit. That’s what all of this means, doesn’t it? That my heart was breaking when he was hurt. That I want to be by his side when he gets all this crazy news about his case. That I want to protect him and be close to him and…” she trailed off. “Why are all of you crying?”

  “Because you’re in love!” Naomi exclaimed tossing herself off the couch and into Geo’s arms.

  Geo oofed and carefully set Naomi aside.

  “I…” She scratched at the back of her neck. “Yeah. I kind of figured that.”

  “Geo,” Elena said, crossing her leg diplomatically and setting her drink aside with the absurdly careful attention of the extremely drunk. “Have you ever considered making your feelings obvious? You can be pretty hard to read.”

  “I did make them obvious. I agreed to pose as his girlfriend! I made a grand gesture!”

  Bex closed one eye and shook her head very hard. “I mean, yeah. When you explain it that way. But from the outside, it kind of just looks like you agreed to do something Rook told you to do. And the reason you agreed is because you feel guilty. Not because you’re grand gesturing Moreau.”

  “Right,” Elena said, pointing hard at Bex, her finger ending up a scant inch from Bex’s nose. “What she said. Exactly what she said.”

  “So, you think I need to walk up to him and say…” Geo cut off. She couldn’t even say it now, to her friends when she had about a liter of liquid courage coursing through her bloodstream.

  “And say, I’m in love with you and I wanna be your girlfriend and then your wife and then your baby mama,” Naomi slurred the whole thing from flat on her back on the ground, one hand waving in the air like she was conducting an orchestra.

  “Or, you know,” Elena cut back in. “Your own version of that.”

  “The point is,” May said, picking up the remote control and starting the next Moreau Davy rom-com. “Make it obvious, Geo.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Make it obvious, Geo.

  This was on loop in Geo’s head for the next twenty-four hours. Now that the girls had laid things out for Geo, she thought she understood. She hadn’t been clear enough with Moreau that she was experiencing a change of heart on the whole being with him thing. She had to be clear with him.

  The crazy part was, she was ready to be clear with him. She was sick of the confusion. She was sick of sitting apart from him. She was sick of watching him be alone. A one-man empire with a hundred employees scurrying this way and that but none of them actually knowing him.

  She was ready to know him. And even though it damn near turned her stomach into a nest of snakes, she was ready for him to know her too.

  The only problem was that they were currently moving Moreau across the country to a strange hotel and then his mansion, both places the team had never even seen before, much less worked before.

  They were also returning to the city where his suspected attacker supposedly lived. And, worst of all, they were publicizing Moreau’s red carpet return in hopes that the LAPD could catch the attacker.

  Maybe Geo and Moreau could comfortably fight about their feelings and kiss and make up when they were in the bunker. But here? On a mission of this importance, with so far to fall with one misstep? Nah. Geo was doing everything she could to keep her head in the game.

  Which was getting increasingly difficult the more and more evidence she got of what Davy’s California lifestyle was really like. She’d known the man was rich. But. God. The man was rich.

  Even now, she sat aboard his private plane, two seats down from him. The shock of this kind of opulence still hadn’t worn off. Everything was sleek and polished, dark wood and upholstery in saturated colors. The jet wasn’t anything like any plane that she’d ever been on before. It was more like one big, fancy living room. There was a big screen TV with a couch. An eating area. There was a back room that she’d confirmed had a big bed. The seats they were all buckled into were much more like lazy-boys than airplane seats.

  The flight attendant, a man named Ben, had set them all up with sandwiches so delicious that even Sequence had raised his eyebrows in surprise. Besides the occasional light turbulence, it would have been totally possible for Geo to forget that they were in the air.

  It was not possible, however, for her to forget that she was two seats down from Moreau. She was impossibly aware of him.

  He, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be aware of anything at all. He wore big headphones and was reading through a script that had been sent to his iPad. Apparently there was a big back log of potential projects lined up and his agent was pressing him to choose one of them.

  He’d been very kind when they’d boarded the plane, explaining where everything was and telling the team that anything they wanted was theirs. But then, he’d sat down and hidden behind his tablet immediately.

  Geo was getting the distinct impression that the level of opulence and wealth that was currently on display was embarrassing Moreau. She’d never seen him quite so withdrawn before.

  It pained her to think that she was part of the reason for it.

  They touched down in California and, thank goodness, everything went smoothly on their drive from the airport to some swanky hotel that accommodated celebrities who were attempting to keep a low profile. They went swiftly from the SUV they’d rented and cleared into the penthouse suite they’d rented.

  And this was where things got intense.

  It was nighttime and Moreau looked wrecked. He looked exhausted and strained and, -it pained Geo to see, extremely sad.

  The team was going to have to split up now. And none of them were thrilled about that.

  Moreau nodded to the group, thanked them for the day and disappeared into his bedroom in the penthouse suite. Two of them were going to have to peel off and go do a comprehensive sweep of his house, one of them was going to have to stay alert and guard Moreau, monitoring all security feeds, and two of them were going to take the first shift of sleeping.

  To no one’s surprise, Rook took the worst job of going to Moreau’s and performing a meticulous sweep of his home. It would be long and grueling and would mean that he wouldn’t sleep until the morning. To everyone’s surprise, Geo was the one who volunteered to go with him.

  She cast a sad look at Moreau’s already closed door and knew that there was nothing more she could do tonight. If she stayed, it was her job to rest or to guard him quietly. Professing her feelings for him was not on the table tonight. So it made a lot more sense for her to take her restless, racing energy and actually protect the man she wanted so badly.

  She and Rook got back into the SUV and drove through LA, up into the hills, where Moreau’s house was tucked away.

  She was surprised when they got there. The house had a killer view, of course, and it was very private, surrounded on all sides by large, sweeping trees. But it wasn’t the mansion she’d been expecting.

  “Huh.”

  Rook smirked at Geo as he keyed in the updated security password to get through the first gate. “You were expecting a palace, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she answered absently. “After that private jet I figured we’d be pulling up to, like, a castle or something.”

  But a castle, it certainly wasn’t. It was a modest one-story house, large by New York standards and small by LA standards. It took a long time for Geo to see the entire house simply because they were checking each security checkpoint with great care. They monitored each piece of equipment, making a few mechanical updates here and there, altering the direction of a few cameras. They were also sweeping each room for anything dangerous that Luke Rogers may have left
behind on behalf of his brother, though Wilkes admitted that that was an unlikely situation.

  Geo was more than a little surprised by Moreau’s house. It was very, very nice. All the furniture was high end and perfectly clean, like a showroom. But it was undeniably a lived-in home. There were photographs on the walls, mostly of Moreau and his mother. But there were some of him with friends at various ages. One guy a few different times who Geo recognized as Joey. There was the blonde princess woman, too, in a few of the photos. And Geo was relieved to see, without the presence of salaciously suggestive tabloid headlines running along the bottom of the photos, she and Moreau did seem to be pretty platonic.

  There were books on the bookshelves that lined the wide windows. And the couches faced the views, not the lone television that was along one wall of the living room. The kitchen was more of the same. There was a row of well-worn cookbooks and stools that lined a breakfast bar. Underneath another gorgeous view was a breakfast nook that would only be big enough for two people to sit comfortably. She was surprised to see that though he had the top-of-the-line cooking utensils, his dishes were mismatched.

  There was a den that had a view of the hill behind the house, not the sweeping valley below, and it was messier than the other rooms. There were way more books, a messy desk that had two dried out coffee cups on it, and scripts opened to various pages. She got the impression that Moreau spent a lot of time in this room and didn’t have it professionally cleaned as often as he had the rest of the house done.

  Beyond that, there wasn’t that much more to the house. There was a hall bathroom, which was small and clean. And two guest bedrooms with their own bathrooms. They were decorated in a classy but impersonal way and had the distinct feeling of rooms that were almost never entered.

  But then, oh lordy, there was Moreau’s bedroom.

  Rook had charged right in, getting down to the business of performing a thorough sweep of it, but Geo paused momentarily on the threshold. She was nervous, she realized. And for half a second, Moreau Davy the movie star and her Moreau seemed like two different people. And she couldn’t decide which one of them was making her more nervous.