by Laura Kaye
“Then you need to talk to your contact and get them out of there before it goes down. We’re not going for body count but that doesn’t mean there won’t be collateral,” Dare said, echoing Maverick’s own thoughts. “Just telling it straight up.”
“I hear you. I’m just not sure how much sway I have, Dare.” The concern was clear in Nick’s voice.
“I know you understand honor, justice, and loyalty, Nick. I’ve seen you live by it. Fight for it. Be willing to die for it. We might not have worn a uniform, but our code’s not all that different.” Dare’s expression was fierce, unyielding. Maverick couldn’t help but nod.
“Fuck, all right. I’ll see what I can do. And I’ll talk to the team and get you some thoughts.”
“Good. And Nick? Don’t wait. We’re riding on this as soon as possible.”
They hung up, and Dare tossed his phone to the table. “Board members and anyone else who can stick around to plan this thing out, stay here. Everyone else is dismissed. But be prepared to ride within the next twenty-four to forty-eight. We’ll stay in touch.” Eight members remained after the others filed out, and Dare nodded to the door. “Let’s head to my office and take a look at what Nick sent.”
It turned out to be gold.
Standing behind Dare’s desk chair while his cousin opened files revealing locations, layouts, numbers, and more, Maverick already felt the adrenaline of the coming fight surging through his blood.
Dare sat back in his chair, his gaze glued to the monitor. “Their headquarters is in the middle of a largely abandoned industrial area right on the water, and they’re not going to be there tomorrow night because they’ve got some big deal going down that the Feds are focused on.”
“That’s fucking perfect,” Maverick said. For what they had planned, it was exactly what they needed.
“Jesus, if I was a religious man I might almost say this was providence,” Phoenix said. Everyone nodded.
“Moving this fast makes me itchy as hell,” Caine said in a quiet voice. “But we might not get this kind of opening again.”
“The faster we get it done, the better,” Dare said. “Maximum impact with minimum possible risk.”
“Unless everything goes tits up,” Jagger said.
“As tits are wont to do,” Phoenix agreed.
Hands clasped over his belly, Dare nodded. “Then we spend tonight and tomorrow working on contingencies. But otherwise, let’s get the word out to all the brothers.” He peered up at Maverick. “We ride tomorrow night.”
Satisfaction was a tight coil in Mav’s gut. “This is the right call, D.”
His cousin nodded, and then he looked back to the open documents on the computer screen. “I know. I just hope it doesn’t cost us too much, because I’m not sure how much more we can stand to lose.”
CHAPTER 5
Why are you up so early?” Grant asked, coming up behind Alexa where she stood at the bathroom mirror carefully brushing on mascara. His arms wrapped around her stomach.
“This is the morning I have to take my mom to her doctor’s appointment,” she said, capping the tube.
“Mmm, that’s right,” Grant said, something that sounded like disappointment in his tone. He was estranged from his parents and had been for way longer than she’d known him, though he wouldn’t talk about why so she didn’t know what’d happened. But it meant he didn’t really get her relationship with her mother. Mostly, he tolerated it. He settled his chin on her shoulder, and it was possible that the phrase tall, dark, and handsome had been coined just for him. Even just out of bed he was undeniably attractive, with his square jaw, his classical profile, his calculating brown eyes, and his stylishly cut short brown hair. “You came to bed too late.”
“I know,” she said, feeling the sleepy weight of having gone to sleep after two in the morning. “I’m sorry. I was working on my project. A rough draft is due two weeks after the wedding, so I’m trying to get ahead so most of it is done beforehand.”
His hands roamed up to palm her breasts through her shirt. Pressing a kiss against the side of her throat, he said, “I need you.”
Alexa watched him in the mirror, kissing her, grabbing her, rubbing against her. In another moment, it might’ve been sexy, but she didn’t have time to have sex, which he would know if he remembered any of the three times she’d told him that she’d be late to work on Friday morning because of her mother’s appointment. And now he was putting her in the position of turning him down, which he wouldn’t like. Which he never liked.
She leaned into his kiss and put on a smile. “I would like nothing more than to be with you, but I’ll be late.”
He hugged her harder, grinding himself into her rear, and sucked her earlobe into his mouth. “We’ll be quick.” His hands slid down to her skirt and grasped it. Slowly, he worked it up.
“Grant,” she said, her tone full of regret, a niggle of dread stirring in her belly.
He rucked her skirt up around her waist. Pushed her panties down. Slipped his fingers between her thighs.
“Honey, this feels good, but I’m gonna be late,” she said, gently grasping his wrist, trying to still his movements.
“You’ve got time,” he said, twisting his wrist out of her hold. “Her appointment isn’t for an hour and a half.”
So he did remember. “I know, but you know how my mother is.” Her mother had anxiety about all kinds of things, including leaving the house and going to the doctor, which meant she was going to need lots of coaxing and reassuring just to get her out the door. There was no such thing as rushing Alexa’s mother to do anything.
He pressed his fingers more firmly against her core, firm enough that the sensation went from arousing to uncomfortable. “Grant—”
“Fine,” he said, stepping away so abruptly that Alexa stumbled back a step. Without another word, he opened the glass shower door and turned on the water.
Something that felt inexplicably like humiliation rolled through her as she awkwardly pulled her panties into place and smoothed down her skirt. Quickly, she bagged up the last of her makeup, knowing he didn’t like anything out of place. “I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad. It’s just my schedule . . .”
“I know,” he said, not sounding particularly convinced. Or appeased.
She walked to him and kissed his bare shoulder, torn between feeling guilty for upsetting him and feeling upset for having to apologize. “I promise to make it up to you tonight,” she said, making her words upbeat and playful. Flirtatious. Sometimes stroking his ego was enough to make his mood rebound and smooth things over.
He looked at her, one eyebrow arched, his expression fierce, masculine, intense. “Yeah?”
She smiled, wanting so much to make him happy again, needing so much to be enough for him. Just as she was. “Yeah. Okay?”
For a long moment, he just stared at her. Then, in one quick motion, he turned, grasped the back of her neck, and hauled her into him. The kiss was aggressive, claiming, possessive. His hold was tight, his mouth hard, his tongue penetrating. Grant liked to be rough, and she usually found pleasure in it, too. Though lately, that’s all their lovemaking ever was—rough, aggressive, quick. The slow, exploring, sensual sex they’d sometimes had earlier in their relationship had largely disappeared from his repertoire. Not that she’d complained. Because she couldn’t begin to imagine how she’d ask for something different in bed. There was almost no chance he’d take it as anything but criticism.
Alexa barely had time to react to it before Grant released her again. “You better.” The corners of his mouth tilted upward, like he was teasing, but his eyes were dead serious.
She ignored his eyes and kept up with the flirtation. “You know I will.”
He grinned, and it was the smile that had helped win her over to him years before, when he’d pursued her maybe harder than any man ever had. The more she’d held out—worrying over the fact that he owned the company she worked for, then as an administrative assistant for a sales mana
ger several levels down the corporate chain—the more Grant seemed to want her. “I’ll look forward to that, Alexa.” He dropped his boxers and stepped into the shower, his gaze latched onto her.
“Good,” she said, giving him a smile and a sultry look. Playfully, she blew him a kiss. And then she was out of the bathroom and closing the door between them.
And feeling the oddest sensation of . . . relief.
Ugh. It was just the stress of dealing with her mother and knowing it wasn’t going to be easy, on top of being late to work and knowing how that was going to make the rest of her day a scramble to catch up. Nothing more. Besides, no one liked starting out their day in a tiff with their partner. She was just relieved that things seemed okay between them now.
In the foyer mirror, she fixed her lipstick, and then she grabbed her purse and made her way to the garage. The Acura SUV she drove was another of her many gifts from Grant. She’d never minded the old Toyota sedan she’d driven for years—in fact, she’d been proud of the fact that she’d bought it and paid it off entirely with her own money. But a year ago, she’d finally given into Grant’s insistence that she needed something safer and nicer and accepted his gift of a car.
As she backed out of the driveway, her phone dinged an incoming message. She braked and grabbed the cell, then brought the screen to life.
MAVERICK: Can’t stop thinking of you, Al. Want you to be okay.
On a gasp, she did a scan of the neighborhood around her, but didn’t see Maverick’s motorcycle or the old pickup he had. Or anything else that looked out of place in the upscale Slater Estates.
Heart racing in her chest, she stared at the text unsure what to do. Because she’d pushed him away, and here he was still trying to take care of her. After what’d happened in the bathroom just now, the point of comparison wasn’t a comfortable one. And it meant a lot. It meant . . . maybe even more than it should.
Which made it hard to know how to respond.
She should just delete the message and pretend she never got it. But instead she found herself wanting to keep it, wanting to be able to reread it, wanting to know it was there. She slipped her phone back in her purse and put her car into reverse again.
Maybe Maverick would hear her silence and stay away. Just like she’d asked.
Is that really what you want? a little voice whispered inside her.
It didn’t matter. This was about what was right. Because if Grant ever found out that Maverick had been inside their house, let alone that he was texting her, she was certain there wouldn’t be much she could do to smooth that over.
On a sigh, she deleted that message after all.
FROM OUTSIDE, THE house appeared perfectly normal. A brick-and-siding rancher on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. It was a house Grant had bought and renovated to flip—but when the trailer where Alexa had grown up got condemned as uninhabitable, Grant had done what he always did and came to their rescue after Alexa had promised she wouldn’t let his house get so bad. Grant agreed in part because he said he couldn’t stand to see the mother of his soon-to-be wife living in squalor.
So her mother had been living here, rent free, for almost two years. Though part of Alexa felt bad that Grant was supporting her mom this way, his help ensured that she lived in a nice, safe place and allowed Alexa to cover the food and medical expenses her mother’s disability checks couldn’t.
It would’ve been so much harder to support her mom alone, even with her salary and the remainder of Tyler’s small life insurance policy. With that, Alexa covered what she needed for her mom, paid for her own tuition, and saved as much as she could in case of emergency.
At the front door, Alexa took a deep breath and braced herself for how bad it might’ve gotten since her last visit two weeks before—she hadn’t come the previous week because of how fresh the marks from her fall had still been on her face. She knocked twice and opened the door. “Mom? I’m here.”
“In the kitchen,” her mother called.
Alexa closed the door behind her and stepped from the small, tidy foyer—the foyer was always tidy to keep up appearances—into the living room. Her shoulders fell. The piles were . . . everywhere. Piles of stuff. All kinds of stuff. Waist-high and worse. Clothing. Boxes of pictures and keepsakes. Used furniture. Lamps. Pictures and mirrors that weren’t hung and would never get hung. Garage sale and flea market finds, some of them not even taken out of the bag—because it seemed to be the acquiring and possessing of stuff—rather than the actual items themselves—that her mother prized and needed.
Her mom called what she did collecting, and she considered herself a pack rat. But, really, Alexa’s mother was a hoarder. Had been for as long as Alexa could remember. Her mother hoarded everything and anything to fill the empty spaces inside her—empty spaces caused by her mother dying when she was young, her husband leaving her, and her only son dying in a motorcycle accident.
Wearing an old stained house robe, Cynthia Harmon came into the living room from the kitchen on the opposite side of the room. “Don’t look like that. It’s not so bad,” she said. She ran her fingers self-consciously over unkempt shoulder-length gray-brown hair. Wrinkles cut into her plump fifty-eight-year-old face. She walked a little stooped over, the result of being really overweight and having a bad back she always complained was sore. Anxiety and hoarding and irregular stints on antidepressants hadn’t been kind to her.
Queasiness curled into Alexa’s stomach. How had the piles in here grown so much in just the last two weeks? This was why Alexa tried to get over here for at least a few hours every Saturday . . . She shook her head, refusing to get sucked into an argument about the house the second she walked through the door. “Why aren’t you dressed? We need to leave soon.”
Carefully picking her steps, her mother made her way through a narrow path lined with stacks of newspapers, magazines, junk mail, and years and years’ worth of photo albums, to her favorite recliner and sat down. Alexa couldn’t remember a time when her mother didn’t keep herself surrounded by those photographs. “I was thinking I might not feel up to going today.” She sniffed and pushed herself back in the overstuffed chair, almost knocking over a full ashtray resting on the arm.
Alexa wasn’t surprised by her mother’s words—it was normal to have to convince her to do things she needed to do. But offer to take her to a yard sale or a flea market or an after-Christmas sale and she was dressed and ready to go faster than you could blink. “Mom, you need to go. We already canceled this appointment once, and I’ve scheduled off work this morning to take you. I’ll choose an outfit for you if that will help,” she said, moving farther into the room toward the hallway that ran to the bedrooms.
“No, I don’t want you to do that,” her mother said, shooting out of her chair. The ashtray toppled over onto a stack of newspapers. “I don’t want you back there. I don’t need you to pick my clothes.”
Alexa frowned and gingerly stepped out of the way so her mom could get around her, and nearly tripped over the broken poles of a lamp as she did so. Making decisions as simple as what to wear sometimes caused Mom a great deal of difficulty, so her strident refusal to let Alexa help probably meant her bedroom was as bad as the living room. Or worse. Alexa had been so busy getting settled into Grant’s house—well, their house now—that she hadn’t spent the time she usually did over here cleaning and trying to cull through the piles. It was only through Alexa’s constant battles with her mother that the place had remained as livable as it was for as long as it had. Left to her own devices, her mother would’ve filled the place floor-to-ceiling by now. Just like when Alexa and Tyler were kids.
It was why her father had left them when Alexa was almost nine and Tyler was thirteen. Their dad hadn’t been able to deal with the hoarding. Alexa could still remember them fighting about it. After each new loss, it just got worse.
“Have you eaten breakfast?” Alexa asked. Entering the kitchen, she cursed under her breath as a rancid smell hit her smack in the f
ace. Dirty dishes filled the sink and spilled over onto the adjacent counter. She hoped it was just days’ old food causing the smell and not a dead mouse somewhere.
“Yes,” her mother called back.
Alexa opened the refrigerator, which was emptier than she usually let it get. She mentally added a grocery trip to her to-do list for the weekend. “What did you eat?” she asked loud enough for her mother to hear.
“A frozen breakfast. Now get out of my fridge,” came the agitated reply.
Rolling her eyes, Alexa closed the bottom door and opened the upper freezer door. A few frozen meals remained. She hated that her mother’s diet consisted largely of microwavable food, but considering that the stove was often covered in crap—like today, for instance, when there was a huge bag of . . . something sitting on it, the microwave was often the only accessible means she had of cooking anyway.
Between her mother’s habit of stacking things on the stove and her smoking, Alexa was terrified that her mom was going to accidentally start a fire and get trapped inside the blaze by the mountains of junk. A fire had broken out in their place when Alexa was fifteen. Luckily, Tyler and Maverick had been at the house that day and had been able to put it out before it damaged much more than the kitchen, but Alexa still sometimes had nightmares about it. Sighing, she lifted the bag off the stove and put it on the floor.
“Now it’s in the way.” Her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing a floor-length black maxi dress and a pair of flip-flops. She’d pulled her hair into a neat, low ponytail and put on a pair of earrings and a matching necklace.
“It’s not safe to put things on the stove like that,” Alexa said.
Waving a hand, Mom shook her head. “It’s not like the stove can magically turn itself on.”
Alexa didn’t take the bait. “Better safe than sorry, that’s all. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do it today, but tomorrow I will come back with groceries and do a little cleaning for you.” Do a little cleaning was code word for get rid of as much stuff as I can without causing you to have a panic attack, and her mother knew it.