Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  She came first, and then he followed, rolling onto his back, taking her with him and holding her still for his three, pulsing thrusts that had him groaning her name into the dim bedroom.

  She felt his heart racing against hers, his breath in her hair. They were sweaty and sticky and everything was utterly perfect.

  Then she cracked her eyes and looked around at where she was.

  His bedroom. His most loathed bedroom.

  She narrowed her eyes as she sat up, straddled across his waist. He slipped out of her and Rook, one forearm over his eyes, grunted at the sensation. He had yet to realize that she had things to say, he was still lost in his post-coital euphoria.

  “Why didn’t you ever date someone in order to make me jealous?” she demanded, her eyes on his blue walls, narrowing in on the art prints that lined one wall.

  “What?” His forearm came off of his eyes and he eyed her, almost suspiciously.

  “Come on, Rook. You know me. After we divorced, you didn’t date anyone. It would have driven me up the wall if you had. How come you never dated someone and wagged it in my face the way I did for you?”

  “Not my style.” His hands came to her hips. “And what the hell do you mean the way you did for me?”

  May scoffed. “Come on. My boyfriend? The one you ran off over vacation last year? You can’t possibly think he was a love connection for me.”

  “I thought he might be a love connection. He looked a hell of a lot like Mr. Grieves.”

  “Who?” He tried to get her to lay down on top of him, but she resisted and stayed in her position over top of him. She wasn’t ready to relax into bliss-land just yet.

  “That substitute teacher you used to lust after in high school.”

  “Oh good gawd.” She threw her hands in the air and laughed, half in delight and half in frustration. “You can’t possibly still be on about some dork I had a crush on when I was fifteen.”

  “Sixteen. And you’re the one who just admitted to doing everything you could to make me jealous. So, of course I’d still be hung up on it.”

  She sucked her teeth and eyed him. “Well, I’m an open book when it comes to that kind of thing. I was just asking why you never did that sort of thing to me. Why not drag me through the coals?”

  “By dating other women?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did.”

  She slid off of him, onto her knees, murder in her eyes. “What.” She somehow managed to vocalize each and every letter of that word.

  “I did date. Sort of.” He cleared his throat.

  “Explain. Now.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Do it or die.”

  “May.”

  “Javi.”

  He sighed. “It was nothing. None of it meant anything. We were divorced at the time, if you’d care to remember.”

  May crossed her arms over her bare chest and secretly delighted in the way his eyes got lost on her body for a moment. “I’m not saying it was infidelity, Javi. I just want to know what happened.”

  “God, this is bizarre. For the record, having this conversation was your idea and not mine. But yeah. I’ve hooked up over the years. Not a lot. Just enough to… get me through.”

  She paused. “Get you through?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get you through what exactly?”

  He laughed and scrubbed hands over his face. “Excruciating loneliness. Self doubt. Boredom. Unending heartbreak because the woman I loved didn’t want me anymore. You name it, May. I was unbelievably lonely and horny and once in a blue moon I went out and found someone to sleep with so that I didn’t implode. End of story.”

  She chewed her lip. Her jealousy and outrage dissolved. It was clear to her that his last few years hadn’t been easy at all. He’d been so alone. The thought of it pricked at her. As much as it drove her insane to think of Javi, her Javi, having sex with someone else, she knew enough to know that he would never make love to someone else the way he did with her. To these faceless women in her head, she was sure he’d just been Rook. Businesslike and kind, but not intimate. She knew that she was the only person on Earth who got to have Javi. Who got his secret blue eyes on hers. Who got his heart.

  “With strangers?” she asked after a minute.

  “Yeah.”

  And just like that, she made up her mind. “That never happened.”

  “Um. I’m not trying to argue, but yeah. It did.”

  “No.” She reared over him, gripped his half hard manhood in one hand and swallowed him down. He cursed and grabbed her hair and she popped off of him. “It didn’t. None of that happened. There has been no other woman but me. Do you understand?”

  He mumbled something incoherently when she swallowed him down again, coaxing him back to full hardness. He was swearing and burying his hands in her hair. His head slammed back onto the mattress as his hips bucked upwards. She sat back, tossed her leg over his hip and speared herself down onto him, taking every inch at once in a way that only she had ever managed to do.

  “Tell me,” she demanded, holding herself still and impaled to the hilt. She was saying exactly what he’d said to her in the hallway before.

  His eyes attempted to clear but they were still foggy with lust and emotion. “Only you,” he choked out. “In every way that matters. There has only been you.”

  “No one else,” she told him, lifting her hips and stroking back down on him.

  “Ever,” he agreed, gripping her hips and starting to rock her against him.

  She planted her hands on his chest and reveled in the way they knocked the bed frame against the wall. She could see it scratching that pretty, blue paint she hated so much. She knew that she was going to screw him on every surface of this bedroom. She was going to dent the walls and crack the glass in those frames. She was going to mark her territory viciously. And then she was going to go out and buy some moving boxes.

  “We have to go to Office Max tomorrow,” she told him, her body rhythmically clamping onto his as she rode him toward her ecstasy.

  He stilled, his arm clamped around her waist as he sat halfway up. “That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

  He was sitting all the way up now, so she clamped her legs around his waist and traced her fingers through his hair. “Moving boxes,” she told him. “We need to pick up moving boxes.”

  He stopped the movement of his hips abruptly. “What?”

  His eyes were wide.

  “I want you to come home,” she told him. “I hate this house. I hate your other life. I’m glad you had it, because I hate thinking about you sad and alone too. But I want you back, Rook. Completely. I can’t fight it, or protect myself anymore. I just want you to come home.”

  He said nothing, but he buried his face in her neck and anchored her against him. Their movements were desperate and fulfilled all at once. They worked themselves against one another until she couldn’t hold on any longer. When she started to go, panting his name and clamping down on him, he went too, gripping her roughly and telling her he loved her again and again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In the end, they decided to wait to move him into the house until they could talk to Ricky. There was a chance that they’d need to move this thing along slowly to let her get acclimated. She’d been so young the last time they were together and the divorce had been hard on her. They knew that it was likely she’d have complicated feelings about them getting back together.

  But the days they had together while they waited for her to get back from camp were some of the happiest either of them could ever remember. They went on dates and had ferociously passionate sex. They went to restaurants that they’d never had the time or energy or money to try when they were married. They made out in movie theaters. The best, by far, was the day they spent at Coney Island.

  Rook could feel, so viscerally, the teenagers they used to be. Because in many ways, those kids had never really left them. Some days he still felt
like the confused, well meaning boy who wanted nothing more than to get closer to May. He laid on the hot sand next to her and felt as if this were the honeymoon that the two of them had never really taken.

  He would never in a million years have changed the way that Ricky came into their lives, but there was no denying that it had been a trial. And all these years later, it was officially a trial that they had survived.

  Two days after Coney Island, they picked Ricky up from the bus. She was bursting with tales from field hockey camp. She also smelled terrible. Apparently, the showers had been few and far between. But she was glowing and excited and looking just like she did as a child who’d just come in from a day at the playground. They waited to tell her until they got back to May’s house.

  Rook rustled up some leftover pasta from the kitchen, gave Ricky a bowl of it and asked her to sit on couch with them. She was eyeing the dried out daisies on the dining room table curiously but did as he asked.

  “You guys are freaking me out,” Ricky said, setting aside the food. “Who died?”

  May rolled her eyes. “No one. Well, lots of people, I’m sure, but no one we know.”

  “Then what the hell is going on?”

  “Don’t curse,” Rook reprimanded her. Then he reached for May’s hand. Ricky’s eyes zeroed in immediately. “Your mother and I—”

  “What. The. Fuck.” Ricky sat up so fast, one of the pillows flew off the couch.

  “Ricks!” May said in surprise.

  Ricky strode to one side of the room. “I can’t believe this is happening. This is not real.”

  Rook rose up and walked over to his daughter. He drew her in for a hug that he was immensely grateful she accepted. “It’s real, baby. We’re getting back together.”

  “Don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” Ricky whispered. When Rook looked down, there were hot tears in her eyes and her bottom lip trembled like a child’s.

  “We mean it,” May said quietly. “Ricks, we would never, ever do this to you if we weren’t a hundred percent sure we’re—”

  “Propose to her,” Ricky demanded, leaning back from her dad’s hug. “Right now.”

  “Ricks!” May shouted again, her hands going to her face. “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t just make an adult do something like that because you’re scared.”

  But Rook just shrugged his shoulders. “Okay,” he said to his daughter. “I guess now is as good a time as any. We’re all here.”

  “What?!” May shrieked, her hands still up at her face.

  Rook reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring he’d been carrying around since yesterday. He cleared his throat. “Naomi made it for us.”

  “When?” May asked, her eyes pinned on him.

  “I called her after our walk in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I asked her if she’d make it.”

  May’s eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s purple,” Ricky said, picking it up from her dad’s hand and inspecting it.

  He smiled and put his hands in his pockets, his eyes on May’s face. “Naomi mentioned that an amethyst engagement ring represents transformation, evolution, the ability to grow and change with one another. I thought it was perfect.”

  May dashed tears from her eyes. “I wasn’t sure if you’d ever want to get married again,” she whispered. “I knew we’d be together forever but—”

  “I want to be married to you,” he informed her crisply. “It’s really all I’ve ever wanted.” He cleared his throat. “Will you, May? Will you marry me?”

  She put her hands over her face and just sobbed for a second, her shoulders shaking. “Yes,” she whispered through tears. “Yes.”

  “Give her the ring,” Rook whispered to Ricky, who still held the ring, staring back and forth between her parents, looking pretty dumbfounded.

  Ricky held it out to her mother, slipping it onto May’s finger.

  Then, suddenly, May was in Rook’s arms, her fingers digging into his shoulders her sobs in his ear. Then Ricky was there too, the two of them weighing Rook down onto his knees. They landed in a pile of crying, laughing family. Rook didn’t know it was possible for his heart to be this freaking full.

  ***

  “Are you going to live here?” Ricky asked a little while later, as they all ate leftovers sitting on the couch. Her hair was pulled up into a wet bun after her shower and there were slippers on her feet.

  “Yeah,” Rook said. “But I don’t have to move back in right away. If you need some time to get used to this…”

  “Are you kidding?” Ricky asked, shaking her head. “Dad, I’m so sick of getting ferried in between your houses. The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned. How about this weekend? After Cedric and Elena’s wedding? They’re getting married tomorrow night, right? So how about Sunday. We’ll get you all packed up. That way we can all adjust to our new life before I have to go back to school. I’ll probably be used to it by then.”

  May laughed. “Sounds like a plan, kid.”

  The sound of breaking glass had the three of them freezing. Rook looked down at his watch, and sure enough, it was blinking to notify him that one of the security sensors in May’s backyard had been tripped.

  He looked down in concern when he saw that he’d apparently also missed a bunch of calls while his phone was sitting in the other room. He never, ever did that, but he’d made an exception tonight, considering how special it was for all of them.

  He calmly set his food aside and rose. “Why don’t you two head upstairs.”

  It wasn’t really a suggestion, but he knew how to keep things calm.

  “Ricky, you heard Dad,” May said in a low voice.

  Ricky looked like she was going to protest but then she stood. “Should I call the cops?”

  “Text the group instead,” Rook told her, knowing that she would understand that to mean all the members of Rook Securities. “And lock your closet door.”

  “Okay,” Ricky said and dashed up the stairs.

  Rook waited half a second before he turned to May. The words in his mouth simply dissolved when he saw the look in her eye.

  “I’m not going upstairs, Javi. I am staying with you. It is not your job to protect me.” She stepped up to him and took his face in her hands. “We protect each other. Family over duty, Javi.”

  “Family over duty,” he whispered.

  A scuffling sound from the back of the house had him stiffening and turning on his heel. He felt May at his back and he held out one hand to her, warning her back, as he stepped into the back hall, peeking quickly around the corner before he straightened again. She pressed a baseball bat into his outstretched hand and he was eternally grateful.

  His brow furrowed at what he saw though. There was broken glass on the floor of the hallway, and evening air breezing through the smashed window, but no signs of entry other than that. The hole in the window wasn’t big enough for a person to get through. The small sound came again and Rook blinked in surprise as his eyes followed the sound to the corner of the hallway where a fat, gray cat sat, swishing its tail.

  A stray. Was there any chance that a stray cat had broken the window and found its way into their house? He blinked at in confusion before he turned back to May.

  But she wasn’t there. It was just a black, shadowed hallway behind him and no May.

  Intuition clenched in his stomach half a second before he checked his watch again. It was then he realized that not one, but two sensors had been tripped. One of them on the other side of the house.

  “May,” Rook hissed into the dark.

  He was just stepping toward the other tripped sensor when something stiff and unforgiving clamped around his neck.

  A garrote, he knew instantly as his fingernails failed to get underneath it. He felt it cutting into his skin at the same second he smelled the rank breath at the side of his face.

  “That pretty little wife of yours sure was easy to take down,” Cyril said in his ear.

  Rook’s feet kick
ed out for purchase and he caught the edge of May’s hall table. He shoved his weight as hard as he could, smashing Cyril’s body into the wall behind him. He ignored the ice in his stomach at Cyril’s words. He refused to believe that May was hurt. Or worse.

  Cyril’s grip was jarred just enough that Rook managed to get two fingers under the garrote. He felt it pull tight and start to slice the skin on his hands, but it was enough for him to get a breath, just enough to keep his windpipe from being crushed. Rook smashed his head backward and felt Cyril’s nose break against the back of his head. Cyril gasped in pain but it ended in laughter.

  Something flashed in the corner of Rook’s eye and he saw it was May. She was standing up shakily against the door jamb of the kitchen. Her eyes looked dazed but furious. She took in the scene in front of her with reserved calm.

  Then she was gone. Rook prayed that she was calling the police, getting help. He knew they were already on their way because of the alarms, but there was no harm in her calling an ambulance as well.

  But May was back in record time. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen as Rook’s vision began to swim with lack of air. Something was clutched in her hand, but he barely had time to see it before his eyes pinned onto the blood that was leaking from her hairline and down into her eyes.

  She was bleeding. His life, his heart, his love was bleeding. He lifted his free hand and gouged at Cyril’s eye, winning Rook a shout of pain before the garrote tightened even further.

  “Close your eyes, baby,” May warned. And then something hissed through the air.

  Wet, hot pain clouded Rook. He couldn’t breathe but he was aware that the garrote had fallen away from his neck. And so had Cyril. There was a thump as the man behind him writhed on the ground.

  Rook stumbled away but the pepper spray that May had shot at them was doing the trick and he couldn’t see or breathe. He heard three sharp thumps and then May’s voice. “Stay down, Cyril!”

  There was a scuffle and one more thump and then silence.