He was torn between his promises to his employers and the girl who had broken his heart.
Damn his heart.
“Zoe...” he said with a sigh.
She stopped pacing and looked at him. As though she could read that there was something up on his face, she moved closer. Her scent wafted toward him carrying the floral notes of Marc Jacobs Daisy...her signature scent.
He could feel his pupils dilate as he took her perfume deep into his lungs.
“What’s wrong, Eli?” she said, touching his shoulder.
Her fingers were barely touching him, but he could feel them burn into him like they were sparking against his skin. She was the only woman who had ever had that effect on him, but no matter how much he cared for her, he couldn’t be sure if those sparks were the kind brought on by lust, love or the magnetism of the forbidden. Knowing his luck, it was probably a combination of them all—but none more than the latter.
“Nothing,” he said, drawing himself back as he looked at the hard pink lines of her lips. Damn, what he would give to kiss those lips and to have them both make promises of a future, a future without the pain that no amount of “I’m sorry” could make them forget.
“I know you better than that. Don’t lie to me.” She stepped even closer, like she was feeling the same pull he was. “If there is anyone in the world that you can be honest with, you know it’s me.”
Nothing could be further from the truth—but it wasn’t because he didn’t want to tell her everything. It was just...well, time had proven that trusting Zoey Martin with his heart wasn’t wise.
He reached up and cupped her cheek in his hand. She drew in a long breath, as though his touch had surprised her. The sound made him drop his fingers from her face and, as they lowered, he grazed his fingertips down the front of her T-shirt, slipping over the hardened surface of her nipple that pressed against the cotton. His body quivered to life as his mind drifted to all the times he had touched that exact place in the past—times he had taken for granted.
“I thought you were here to protect me,” she said, her tone as much a question as it was a warning.
They were too close to the past, the future and a place where both of their hearts were threatened. And as she was so kind to remind him, he was there to alleviate the threats to Zoey, not to create more.
He took a step back.
They both needed to sleep. With fresh minds, they could make better decisions. Nighttime was fodder for wicked thoughts and even darker deeds.
“I am.” He moved toward the bed, looking back over his shoulder. “You need to get some rest.” He pulled back the sheets, fluffed her pillow and motioned for her to get into bed.
“You aren’t trying to tell me what to do, are you?” She sounded annoyed, but at the same time there was a lightness to her tone like she found his actions charming.
“Never. I’m smarter than that.” He gave her a wicked grin as she walked toward the bed and took off her slippers.
He turned away before she moved between the sheets.
“I’ll be just outside your door.” He motioned to the hall.
As smart as he thought he was, he would never be gifted enough to see the future—or to know the right answers. For now, the only thing he knew with any certainty was that he was playing with fire.
Chapter Seven
It had been a hell of a long night and she had spent most of it setting up her new burner phone’s security until she finally slipped into bed. The little dreaming that she did and that she could remember was all about Eli and being wrapped in his arms. The dreams were just as disconcerting as the reality that he sat just outside of her bedroom door.
They had been close—too close—last night. If he hadn’t backed off after he had cupped her cheek, she was sure she would have been putty in his hands.
Her body ached from the refusal of the desires that had pulsed through it like poorly timed techno beats.
She was too old for this kind of feeling. It wasn’t like she was eighteen years old and new to fluctuating emotions, no. And it wasn’t that she had expected the longing she held for Eli to go away over time, but since they had lost their baby and she had left, she had thought them greatly tempered. How could she want someone so much when there were so many heartbreaking memories that came to mind every time she heard his name?
After getting dressed and checking to make sure that not even a strand of her Barbie-pink hair was out of place, she went to the door. It was no big deal to see him again this morning. He probably hadn’t been feeling anything even remotely close to what she had. And, as such, there didn’t have to be any awkwardness between them—at least nothing outside of her own head.
She trailed her fingers down the door to the handle just as he had trailed his fingers down her chest last night. Maybe there was something more to his feelings.
She pushed the thoughts away.
Even if there were, it couldn’t matter. They had already loved and lost. They had been broken.
The doorknob twisted in her hand as he opened it from the other side.
She cleared her throat and took a step back as the door swung open.
“You don’t knock now?” she asked, trying to sound annoyed.
Eli’s hair, what little there was of it thanks to his high-and-tight haircut, was ruffled from a night spent pressing his head against the wall. His eyes were bloodshot and there was the scent of morning on him.
“I have to talk to you.” His voice was hoarse, as though he hadn’t slept at all.
Apparently, her night of tossing and turning was nothing compared to his.
“What?” If he said anything about what had transpired between them last night or in the past, she wasn’t sure exactly what she would do. She had to head it off at the pass. “You don’t have to worry about last—”
He stopped her with a shake of his head and she couldn’t have been more grateful.
“It’s about Chad.” His words came so fast that they bordered on frenetic.
Her breath caught in her throat. “Did you find him?”
“No.” Eli slipped his hand into hers and led her downstairs and to the dining room, away from Jarrod’s and Trevor’s bedrooms.
He sat her down at the table and brought them each a cup of coffee, but she didn’t touch it.
“What’s going on, Eli?” She couldn’t handle the suspense.
He moved the chair like he was going to sit down beside her, but then he stopped and started pacing. He took a long drink of his coffee as though it could steel his resolve to say whatever it was that he was trying to hold back from her.
“There’s a hit out on Chad.” His words came out unexpectedly and at a clip.
Numbed by his news, she stared down at the table. She wasn’t surprised, but the words sounded hollow, meaningless...as though, if she refused to internalize them, they wouldn’t be true.
She took her new burner phone out of her pocket and turned it on. She dialed Chad’s number and put it on speakerphone as she waited for it to ring. The call went straight to voice mail. She was going to tell him to call her, but his mailbox was full.
That wasn’t like Chad. Sure, he was busy once in a while and unable to get to his phone, and some people would even call him a bit of a pain in the ass when it came to getting back to them, but he never ignored his work long enough for the mail to be full.
Something was wrong...very wrong.
She closed her eyes and tried to feel Chad, like she had some kind of internal barometer that could read if another of her siblings was alive or dead. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t feel anything.
Not for the first time in her life, she wished that she had just a little bit of a sixth sense, something like the twin bond that Chad and Trish had sometimes seemed to have...nothing crazy, just enough magic to calm her nerves.
/>
“It’s going to be okay, Zoe.”
Eli could try to calm her, but he wasn’t magic, either. She couldn’t lose another sibling. She couldn’t lose her brother.
There was only one thing she could do—she had to kill whoever took out the hit on him.
“Who took the job?” she asked.
She wasn’t sure, but she could have sworn Eli’s face paled.
“It’s an open contract.” He paused. “Five million.”
That was a lot of money—killing a diplomat kind of money. Not the kind of money that was normally put out on a man like Chad. And an open contract?
Her stomach churned. With an open contract it meant that every jerk and his father would be on the hunt for her brother.
She would have to take down any possible mercenaries one at a time.
Before Eli could say another word, she rushed from the table and sprinted upstairs. She pounded on Trevor’s and Jarrod’s doors. She couldn’t handle this news alone. Not now.
Trevor wasn’t going to take this well—he was still having guilt over the loss of Trish. He thought her death was his fault. Though he was taking steps toward forgiving himself, there was no changing the fact that he had watched her die.
Zoey couldn’t imagine the state Trevor would be in if they lost Chad, too.
Some losses were too great even for the toughest of men and women.
“Meet me downstairs,” she said, calling out to them through their doors.
She hurried back down. Eli was staring into his cup like it could give him a readout on Chad’s whereabouts.
“That’s not all,” he whispered.
“What? What do you mean? Did someone already get to him?” Zoey stopped moving, but her blood pounded in her veins.
“Watch Dog took the contract.”
She was breathless. “The company you work for?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
He nodded.
“Which operative is working the hit?” she asked, afraid she already knew.
He looked up at her, pain in his eyes. “I am.”
What little was still together inside her shattered. “Get out. Get out of my house.”
Eli’s face pinched, and he shrank back as though she had punched him in the gut and not the other way around. What in the hell was he thinking?
She had been wrong to think that she could bring Eli back into her life. She should have known that when it came to him, the only thing they were good at was bringing the other to their knees. She had been stupid to think this time would be any different.
He stood before her, unmoving. He had to have heard her tell him to get out. He had to have heard the pain in her voice and the anger that leached through the cracks he’d just reopened in her soul.
Well, if he wasn’t going to get the hell out, that didn’t mean she couldn’t.
She turned to walk out of the room.
Screw him and the horse he rode in on.
She had been his fool too many times.
As she started to leave, Trevor and Jarrod strode into the room. Jarrod’s hair was disheveled and matted against the side of his head, uncharacteristic for the stoic and typically well-groomed man it belonged to.
“What’s up?” Jarrod asked as Trevor yawned and wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Wait, Eli? What in the hell are you doing here?” Jarrod shot her a look.
“You talk to him,” she said, jabbing a finger at him. “I wash my hands of his nonsense.”
She ran upstairs to her room, shoved some toiletries into her purse and grabbed her passport. Though she didn’t have a clue where Chad was, it didn’t matter. All that was important was getting the hell out of Dodge. If her ex and a hit man had tracked her down and suckered her in, who knew who else was on their way here.
For safe measure, she went to her closet and unlocked her gun safe and pulled out a box of rounds and the M4 she kept there for emergencies.
It had been at least a year since she had actually fired a gun, but she had no doubts about her capabilities as a marksman.
Though her brothers were always the men who pulled the trigger, keeping her at the keyboard, the reality was that she had always been the best shot.
When they had been young, their father had taken them out to the range and soon had them honing their skills at five hundred yards. It had taken her only a day or two at that range before she had dialed her aim into a grouping the size of a nickel.
Yet no matter how accurate her shot, it was another story when it came to taking aim at a man and pulling the trigger. To her, being a woman meant only one less dangling appendage. She was capable of almost anything they could do, except when it came to delivering death. There, she was a world removed from her brothers. They could share a sandwich with a man and then draw and fire upon him with their next breath.
She set the M4 back in the case, and the metal safe made a hollow ring as the gun’s butt came down on the cold steel.
It was one thing to order a drone strike on a faceless enemy, but something entirely different when she could look into the eyes of her target.
If only she could order a drone strike on the Gray Wolves.
Her bedroom door swung open and Jarrod walked inside. “Did you actually talk to Eli, or did you just go shooting off at the mouth like you normally do?” Jarrod asked.
Oh, no, he didn’t.
She closed the gun safe, rolling the combo wheel to lock it, each action deliberate and slowed by fury.
“You really want to talk to me about going off half-cocked?” She could feel her neck bulge as she seethed. “What, were you down there a full five minutes? I’m sure, in that epic amount of time, Eli could tell you everything... How he just randomly happened to see me in Billings, how he saved me from a killer in the barn and how he was forced into taking a five-million-dollar contract someone put out on Chad? Isn’t he just a freaking hero.”
“You dropped him, not the other way around. You don’t get to be angry with him about everything that happened.”
“This...” she spat, motioning to her face like it was a flashing danger sign. “This has nothing to do with that. This has to do with the fact that he just agreed to kill our brother...and his former friend.”
Jarrod laughed, causing another rise in her nearly stroking-out-level blood pressure.
How could Jarrod possibly laugh at a moment like this?
He must have finally noticed how angry he was making her. He stopped laughing. “Dude, Zoey...”
“Don’t dude me. You are the one being ridiculous right now. It’s obvious that Eli is here to manipulate us and get as close to Chad as possible in order to take him out.”
Jarrod walked over to her bed and sat down on the edge, just like he had done when she was a child. “I’m not saying that you’re not right to be concerned. However, if I were in Eli’s shoes, and I needed more information about the contract and how best to close it out, I would have done the same thing. It was smart to agree to the hit.” Jarrod rested his hands between his knees. “If he really wanted to kill Chad for the money, do you really think he would have told you about the hit? Eli could have kept it a secret until he had pulled the trigger.”
Or he was lulling them with a false sense of safety.
It was smarter that way, keep them in the loop about the hit, make her and her brothers work to keep any other hit man from getting close, while getting closer himself.
There was a whisper from just outside the bedroom door. “Trevor, Eli, if you are going to stand out there eavesdropping you may as well come in and join the damned conversation.”
Eli stepped in, but his gaze was firmly planted on the floor. Trevor was close at his heels. They looked like little boys who had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, but this wasn’t some misdeed that she could just shrug off. They were ta
lking about murder.
“Zoey, I promise you that I took the gig with the purest of intentions.” Eli finally glanced up at her as he gave her a placating look.
She said nothing.
Trevor stepped beside Jarrod. “I for one think Eli is telling the truth. Now, he could be our greatest source of information. We can watch the posts coming through, maybe even be able to get to Bayural by pinpointing the IP address.”
That wasn’t exactly how IPs worked, but she didn’t bother explaining it to Trevor.
“Actually,” Eli started, “I don’t think that this job was posted by a Gray Wolf. According to my info, the contract was put out by a foreign government, not an individual.”
She huffed. “Turkey, I am sure. Bayural has his hands in every diplomat’s pockets.”
Eli shook his head and sent her an apologetic glance. “No... I just got word that it was put out by someone in Algeria.”
“Algeria?” she asked, surprised. There was a collection of countries that Bayural and the Gray Wolves could have maybe been working with, but Algeria didn’t seem like the kind of country that would be on that list. They had nothing, at least that she could think of, that would be gained by allying themselves with a terrorist group and then doing their dirty work.
“From the way I see it, it doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but at least we have a bit of information to start working off. It’s better than nothing.” Eli gave her self-effacing smile.
Though she was still miffed, Eli was proving to be more helpful than she cared to admit. Without him, they’d have no knowledge of what was coming down from behind the enemy’s lines.
“Eli has a point. Good work, man,” Jarrod said with a slap to his back, as though he was just another of her brothers. He turned to Eli. “But what was that talk about a dead body?”
Chapter Eight
He wasn’t even close to being out of the woods when it came to getting back into Zoey’s good graces. Though Jarrod had managed to get a pass from Zoey, from the way she looked at him, she still clearly thought he was trying to make a move against the family.
Her Assassin For Hire (Stealth Series Book 3) Page 6