Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  May rose up and made her rounds, kissing everyone on the cheek as she went.

  “You really are invited, you know.” That was Geo getting a last word in.

  May was halfway down the block when Elena caught up to her. “May!”

  “What’s up?” May adjusted her purse.

  “I just wanted to say something,” Elena huffed as she caught her breath. “I think it’s fine whether or not you decide to come with us, though I hope you will.”

  “But…”

  “But, I just hope that you’ll be honest with yourself, whichever decision you make.”

  Intrigued, May cocked her head to one side. Honestly, this was the kind of thing that May was usually saying to her friends. Elena typically had a much gentler touch. “Oh?”

  “Yes,” Elena said, nodding her dark hair. “Something is holding you back from saying yes, but I’m pretty sure it’s not because you think it would ‘seem weird’.” Elena made quotes with her fingers. “The May I know and love doesn’t give two shits about something seeming weird. She figures out what she wants and she goes after it. Hard.”

  It was true. That was the person who May identified with. It was how she’d gotten her business off the ground, how she’d gotten her degree while basically being a single parent, hell, it was even how she and Rook had stayed together for so long. But for some reason, the idea of spending so much relaxed time with Rook was screwing with her.

  Romantically, since her divorce, she hadn’t been able to muster the same get-up-and-go that she was used to applying to every other aspect of her life. Maybe it was time to start dating again? Maybe she should say yes to the trip and to a date with some dude at the same time? Maybe that was the magic combination? She could spend time with Rook if she had somebody else warming the bench. That way she wouldn’t be… tempted.

  “I’ll think about it, I guess—”

  “That man is staring at you,” Elena cut her off, squinting over May’s shoulder.

  May turned around but the man had turned away. There was something about the way that he was pulling his ball cap down over his brow that sent off an alarm bell in May’s head, but she didn’t recognize him and he was walking away, so who cared.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” May said, making her laugh.

  “Oh, to have your confidence, May.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  “No way,” Elena disagreed. “Make no mistake. It’s a skill.”

  May walked home alone, it was only about a twenty-minute walk to her place, and was chagrined to see that Ricky had beaten her home. She liked to be there to greet her kid. Her own parents hadn’t given a rat’s ass about May’s comings and goings, and it was a personal mission of May’s to make sure that her daughter knew that she cared where she was. May cared about Ricky’s life. And she always would.

  In so many ways, motherhood healed wounds from May’s childhood, inflicted by her parents. In other ways, it kept those wounds raw, because to May, being a good mother wasn’t hard. And she could never quite figure out why it had been so hard for her parents.

  She jogged up the stairs and tried to walk right in to the house and laughed when she encountered the door locked. “Like father like daughter,” May grumbled, though she was secretly glad that Ricky always followed her dad’s advice and kept the house locked up tight.

  Of course, the alarm system was set and Ricky was in the shower so May spent a hair-raising sixty seconds trying and failing to guess the password while the damn thing beeped faster and faster at her.

  On the sixty-first second, as she’d known it would, her phone rang. Rook.

  “What?!” she yelled into the phone, over the beeping of the alarm, although she knew exactly why he was calling. The same thing happened at least twice a month since he’d had the damn thing installed.

  “Did you forget your code?”

  “Obviously.”

  She could hear him smiling through the phone and it did nothing to improve her foul mood.

  The beeping abruptly cut off—he’d done something remotely—but the thing was still blinking at her. “Why is it still blinking?”

  “Because in two minutes it’s going to notify a 911 dispatcher that you need assistance unless I remotely verify you and deactivate it.”

  “What do you mean verify me?” She could hear the temper in her voice and so could he, but she was beyond caring. At this point, she couldn’t even enter her own house without tripping over him.

  “I mean you need to give me some piece of verification so that I know that I am, in fact, speaking with May Jones.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Just doing my due diligence.” But she could hear his smile growing.

  “Fine. My name is May Margaret Jones. You were married to me for nine years. Our safe word used to be peaches and once upon a time, you occasionally enjoyed a finger up the ass during a blow job. Is that personal verification enough for you?”

  There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line and May would have bet the farm that he was holding the phone away from his mouth while he laughed.

  “Please tell me our daughter isn’t next to you right now.”

  “She’s not.”

  “Thank god.”

  Now, May was smiling as well and she wished she wasn’t. He made it too easy to smile. The blinking on the system cut off and May was officially snug as a bug in her house.

  “This security system is ridiculous, Javi. Couldn’t you just get me the kind that responded to my fingerprint? That way I wouldn’t have to bother with this ever-changing password situation.”

  Damn it! She’d been so disarmed by him that she’d accidentally called him Javi. Something she hadn’t done in years. On purpose.

  The low gravel in his voice when he answered was proof enough that her use of his old nickname had affected him. “You’re the one who said I wasn’t allowed to spend more than ten thousand on the security system.”

  She pursed her lips. “Maybe I should just move out the ‘burbs where this kind of thing isn’t necessary.”

  There was a long pause. “If you think that’s best.”

  She inwardly wilted with the knowledge that she’d wanted to hurt him and her aim had been true. The worst thing that she could ever do to Javier Rook would be to take Ricky away from him. And his business, his entire livelihood was in Brooklyn. There was no way that he would be able to follow them somewhere else. She wished she hadn’t said it. Especially because no part of her meant it. She’d just been mad that he’d made her smile. That this phone conversation felt suspiciously like flirting.

  “Oh.” May looked up at the ceiling as she heard the pipes creaking, Ricky’s feet across the floor. “That’s Ricky. I’m gonna go, all right?”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  It just killed May that hearing Javier Rook say the word love still had the capacity to shred her to pieces.

  “I will.”

  “Goodnight, May.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Over the next few days, Rook watched as his army buddies responded to the email, one by one. All except for him and Jim Rather. But as far as Rook had heard, Jim Rather was battling a nasty case of PTSD and there was no telling whether or not he would respond.

  Rook, on the other hand, diligently attended therapy and took care of himself in all ways. Roughly translated, his PTSD was present, but it wasn’t driving the bus. There was a different reason that he wasn’t responding to the reunion email like his buddies were. Because he felt guilty.

  Of the six men on the email strand, he’d been the least affected by the IED. Some of the other five men had lost limbs. And when they’d returned home, they’d landed hard. Rook had been banged up bad, had to have surgery and had ended up with a fair amount of scarring, but he’d returned home to Brooklyn to his pretty wife and perfect daughter. He’d moved on. Healed. Life had gone on for him.

  And he couldn’t say the same for every
one on this email list. It made him feel like shit.

  Another thing that made him feel like shit? It was T minus a couple of days until the group jettisoned from New York in Moreau’s private jet and May still hadn’t decided whether or not she was going to join them. He wanted to know. He wanted to emotionally prepare himself for a week with May in a bathing suit if that’s what he was in store for.

  “Working late?”

  Rook looked up and saw Cedric standing in the doorway of his office. Cedric was easily the most versatile member of the Rook Securities team. He was the man you wanted for recon, the man you wanted for cyber crime protection, the man you wanted to be the muscle that protected a client. Cedric had it all. He was also the longest running member of Rook’s team, and by no coincidence, Rook’s closest friend.

  “Always.”

  “You need a vacation, my friend. Good thing we happen to know a rich movie star who wants to make all our dreams come true.”

  “Good thing,” Rook agreed with a chuckle. “You and Elena cool with leaving town this close to your wedding?” Cedric and Elena were going to be married not two weeks after they all returned from Moreau’s vacation.

  Cedric waved his hand through the air. “Honestly, Elena’s mother is planning the entire thing. We’re basically just bystanders at our own wedding.”

  Rook chuckled again. “That was the same as my wedding.”

  “May’s mother planned it?”

  Rook snorted. “God no. May’s parents are very… hands off. No. I mean that I was a bystander at my own wedding. May and my sister Tabby planned the whole thing from head to toe and loved coordinating every single detail. All I had to do was show up.”

  Cedric leaned against the door jamb. “It didn’t bother you to be that uninvolved in the process?”

  “I tried to help and got kicked out of every room I tried to enter.” He smiled at the memory of it. “I didn’t care. I just wanted to marry May. I would have done it barefoot in the snow if she’d wanted. In the end I didn’t care about the flowers pinned to my suit, or whether we had chicken or steak.”

  When he looked up, it was to see Cedric with an incredibly thoughtful look on his face. Which was not a surprise. Cedric was an incredibly thoughtful person.

  “Date her, Rook,” Cedric said, shocking the hell out of Rook.

  “Excuse me?”

  Cedric looked behind himself into the hallway and then stepped into Rook’s office, closing the door behind him. “I’ve been holding my tongue for five years. Because it was none of my business. And because you were my boss. But fuck it. I’m happy. In love. Getting married. Call me smug, I don’t care. Maybe I don’t know shit. But, Rook, you are obviously not over May.”

  Rook’s hackles rose immediately, but a moment passed and he let out a long breath, leaning back in his chair. “I know.”

  Cedric looked very surprised. Obviously he’d been expecting Rook to argue with him. Deny, deny, deny.

  But what was the use?

  “Then what’s stopping you?” Cedric asked, coming up behind the chair across from Rook’s desk and sliding his hands along the back of it. He looked like he wasn’t sure if he should sit down or pace around. They’d never really had a heart-to-heart before, at least not when Rook’s heart was the one they were discussing.

  “It’s not about how I feel. It never has been. It’s about how she feels.”

  Cedric’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Rook—”

  “The divorce was what she wanted. She fought me tooth and nail for it. And we’re finally in a place where it’s not awkward as hell to see one another. I’m not screwing that up. Not when Ricky’s happiness could be on the line.”

  “Rook, I know it’s not my place but I really think she still—”

  They both snapped their attention to their watches, which had begun to beep, alerting them that one of the alarm systems they oversaw had been set off.

  Rook picked up his phone, entered into the alerts and felt his blood turn to ice. “It’s May’s house. The alarm is going off at May’s.”

  He checked the time. It was 12:03 am. Way too late for it to have been May or Ricky who set off the alarm.

  He was up from his desk and running down the hall to the car as he dialed May’s number, dimly aware of Cedric’s pounding feet behind him. But before he sent the call, his phone rang in his hand.

  Ricky.

  “Ricks.”

  “Dad, the alarm is going off.”

  She sounded scared. His little girl never sounded scared. Not when she’d jumped off the jungle gym at Prospect Park and broken her wrist, not when she’d had to give the Gettysburg Address from memory to her entire class, not even when they’d told her that Rook was moving out. But right now? That was fear in her voice.

  Rook ran harder, sliding into the driver’s seat of his SUV, aware that Cedric had slid into the passenger’s seat.

  “I know. I’m on my way. Where are you in the house?”

  “Mom shoved me in the closet in my room.”

  “Good. Make sure both locks on the doors are pulled.” Thank god. He’d had both Ricky and May’s closets designed so that they were completely safe once they were locked from the inside. If Ricky was locked in, she was safe from intruders. He peeled out of the atrium of the bunker and nearly took the gate off its hinges as he fishtailed onto the road.

  Then Ricky’s words landed. “Wait. Where’s Mom?” he demanded.

  “She got the bat and went downstairs.” The fear was back in Ricky’s voice.

  “Goddammit, May,” Rook cursed. Of course the alarm would go off and she would go investigate. Of course she would. The woman had never learned to stay put and take care of herself.

  “Rook,” Cedric said from the passenger seat. “May’s not answering her phone. But wait. There’s an outgoing call to 911.” He was monitoring the security feed from his phone. The 911 call was good in that it meant that she was at least all right enough to make a phone call, but it was bad in that it meant she’d deemed whatever was happening to be an emergency. And it took a lot for May Jones to consider something an emergency.

  “Should I go down and see if she’s okay?” Ricky’s voice sounded so small. So young.

  “No, baby. No. You stay where you are. No matter what, okay? I’m going to be there in less than six minutes. You just hang tight.”

  “Don’t hang up, Daddy.”

  His heart broke then and there. She hadn’t called him Daddy since before the divorce. Whoever or whatever had set that alarm off and put that fear into his little girl’s voice was about to meet its maker. The wrath of God was about to be set down on that poor soul.

  The phone got slipped out of Rook’s hand.

  “Your dad is driving like a Nascar racer right now, Ricky, you mind if I talk to you instead?”

  Cedric laughed. “I know, he usually is a ridiculously slow driver. Tell me about this field hockey camp you have coming up.”

  He was distracting Ricky from whatever might be happening downstairs and for that Rook was immensely grateful. He used every ounce of his concentration to keep from hitting cars through every single red light that he ran.

  He didn’t make it there in six minutes.

  He made it there in four, parking up on the curb and sprinting up the stairs of the brownstone he used to call home. There were sirens wailing in the distance.

  From the front, everything looked fine, and he used his key to get through the locked front door. He didn’t bother with the alarm code, since the damn thing was already going off.

  “May!”

  “Back here!” she called from the back of the house.

  He toppled two of the dining room chairs in his rush to get to her. He shoved through into the kitchen.

  She stood, with boots on in a sea of shattered glass, and was beating a flame out with a dishtowel and it wasn’t working.

  The sirens got louder and closer.

  He realized that the kitchen air was muzzy with blac
k smoke.

  “You can put your gun away, Rook.”

  He did just that, barely remembering having drawn it. He strode into the kitchen pantry and emerged with the fire extinguisher.

  “Oh yeah,” she frowned. “I forgot we had that.”

  It took three concerted efforts from the extinguisher to get the fire to go out and Rook gaped at what looked like the remnants of a glass bottle with a rag shoved into the mouth of it.

  He could barely believe what he was seeing. He looked up at the smashed kitchen window, then down at the smoking, stinking, bottle.

  Lastly, his eyes went to May who was standing in the wrecked kitchen with unlaced boots, underwear, and a roomy sleep shirt. Her hair was piled on top of her head and the baseball bat was tucked under her arm.

  Rook strode over her to her, took her roughly by the shoulders and slammed his mouth down on hers. The kiss was filled with rough adrenaline, fueled by fear and relief. There was nothing sensual about it. He didn’t even taste her. Their teeth clacked, she made a muffled noise, and Rook broke the kiss to squeeze her into his chest. Hugging her in a hard, rough way that he’d never hug another woman. With other women, Rook would be gentle and careful. But with May, he knew she could take it. She’d always been able to take it.

  “First floor is clear.”

  Both May and Rook looked up to the doorway to see Cedric with his gun drawn.

  “There was only one guy,” May said in a gruff, husky voice. “He went out the window and ran that way down the alley.”

  She pointed and Cedric immediately strode to the window, looked around, and ran through the house to the front door. Rook was so freaking grateful that Cedric was there. Without Rook having to ask, Cedric knew that someone needed to check out the back before the cops got there, and Rook sure as hell wasn’t letting go of May long enough to do it himself.

  “Fire Department!” a loud voice shouted from the open front door.

  “Back here!” May yelled.

  Rook looked down and tipped May back just a bit to see her face. May Jones, steady as a rock. Even her eyes looked normal and undilated. “You’re going to need to talk to the cops, May. You should go get dressed while I get Ricks.”