“I’ll rein it in and say simply, yes.”
Her finger pressed into his wrist and his wild heartbeat thumped against her skin. She took that as a very good sign. “And if you didn’t rein it in this time?”
“The need to strip you naked and spread you out on that mattress is kicking my ass.”
What was she even saying before that? “Subtle.”
“There’s nothing subtle about how much I want you.”
She thought back to the first time they met and the warnings he’d issued while pretending to be someone else. “You hid it well.”
“I really didn’t.”
“Well . . .” She’d lost the ability to form intelligent sentences. “The feeling is mutual.”
“That sounds like a ‘go’ signal.” He leaned in. Looked ready to finally kiss her.
She longed for the moment but still forced her hand to come up and press against his chest. To hold him off. Not with a lot of strength. More like she rested it against him. Even that had her heartbeat thundering in her ears.
“Except that I need to know a man before I get naked.” He could tell her just about anything and she’d consider it good enough. “Something real, and I mean that. Tell me something few people know about you. Like your name.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Levi. Levi Wren.”
She’d expected something else, but she wasn’t sure what. “Really?”
“That’s it. You’re one of about ten people in the world who know it.”
Finding out felt almost anti-climactic. “Huh.”
“You don’t think it fits?”
“I do.” The more she thought about it, the more it worked for her. It was a good name. Solid and a bit sexy. “Levi. May I call you that?”
“Only when we’re alone. I mean it. Just the two of us and very private, then it’s okay.”
He made that sound sexy. “That’s your real name?”
“It’s my legal name.”
Even on the verge of sex he proved to be exhausting. “Are we saying the same thing? I did ask for something real.”
“I gave you my name.”
She sighed at him. Drew it out and made it loud to let him know she wasn’t impressed. “Wow, really?”
“That’s bigger than you think.”
“What if I told you that I didn’t believe Levi Wren was your birth name?”
He didn’t even flinch. “I barely know Levi anymore. I’ve been just Wren and now Brian for years now. Before that I went by other names. The distance between me and Levi is very long.”
She had to give him credit for being honest. He didn’t even try to trick her. But still . . . “Why?”
“Maybe I can find another way to impress you. Like my shoe size?”
Now she really wanted to know what was going on with his name. Not that she’d admit it. She guessed the more interested she acted, the less likely he’d be to share it. But he wasn’t getting off without sharing something. “You went from carefree jock to someone else. Tell me how that happens to a guy. How do you become a different person?”
He leaned his head against the back of the love seat. “It’s a long story.”
Finally. She curled her legs under her and watched him. “We’ve got nothing but time.”
“You’re ability to prolong pleasure is . . .” He lifted their hands one more time and kissed hers. “Let’s say annoying, though I’m tempted to use a stronger word.”
“Wait until you experience my stamina.”
“Okay, you win.” He let go of her hand.
She hated the loss of his touch but understood. He needed some space and she respected that. “I thought that might do it.”
“It isn’t pretty.” He rubbed his palms up and down on his thighs.
For a guy who held it together and thrived on conflict and danger, the idea of spilling secrets made him twitchy. Some of his usual rock-hard control faltered. She could see it in the way he moved. The fact that he moved at all.
“I don’t want pretty. I want truth.” She touched him then because not touching him proved too hard. She reached out and rested her hand on the cushion by his hip. Let her fingers make slight contact. Through his pants, but still they touched.
“You say that, but—”
“If I knew who took Tiffany I would kill the person myself. I dream of doing it and don’t feel an ounce of guilt.” There it was. Every ugly word about how fury and the need for vengeance pumped through her. She didn’t share it often, but with him it felt right. Like some odd form of encouragement. “Is your past less pretty than that?”
“About the same.” He didn’t move, but he seemed to slouch down until his shoulders rested against the cushions. “The best way to describe it is to tell you a story.”
“Nice.”
“Let’s hope you think so in a few minutes.”
For the first time since she met him, she sensed wavering. The dip in his usual confident demeanor shook her. Still, a rush to know more caught her in its wake. “Try me.”
For a second he didn’t say anything. Stray noises from the downstairs apartment and a slam of a door in the hallway blurred in the background. The usual hum of apartment living didn’t throw her off. She blocked it all and focused on him, willing him to talk. After another almost minute of silence, he did.
“There once was a very angry young man.” He seemed to be searching for the right words, but then shook his head. “Not the usual hormone-driven entitled type. He wasn’t angry about something stupid that happened on spring break or some slight in the weight room. Rage filled him, consumed him. Guided every decision.”
The sharp whack of his words echoed through the room. Tension encircled her, pressed on her like an invisible hand until the weight on her chest threatened to explode.
“How old was this man?” She didn’t bother to ask who he was because she knew. While she couldn’t imagine a younger, less assured version of him, he didn’t hide the fact there was one.
“Twenty-one.”
“A boy.” Not that much younger than her, but she rarely thought of the guys she knew in college as grown men. Half of them seemed to be mentally stuck in high school, reliving the glory days. Not that she saw him like that at all.
“One who had grown up fast and ugly.” He sank deeper into the cushions as his usual perfect posture and knife-sharp control faded. “During class, he’d plot. His attention centered on one man.”
“Who?”
“A man who didn’t deserve having even one person thinking about him. An evil piece of shit.” The words punched out of him as the anger he spoke about seemed to snap to life and curl around him.
A mix of frustration and wariness clogged her throat. Her mind stayed trapped in the hazy middle ground between fearing what came next and the driving need to hear more. She brushed the back of her hand up and down the outside of his leg. The move wasn’t sexual. She just needed a connection with him, to give him a sign of silent support.
“The angry young man made plans. Lots and lots of plans. He ran, worked out, bulked up, performed drills. He practiced at the gun range and became an expert shot.” His hands lay on his lap and every now and then his fingers would clench and unclench on the front of his thighs. “He ignored everything else and stoked his fury until it blocked out every other emotion flowing through him.”
With each word, the anxiety grew inside her. It bounced and pinged until her muscles begged for her to get up and move. But she sat there determined to listen to every word. To chip away at the painful information packed away inside him.
He blew out a long breath. “Then he met someone.”
Her stomach took another wild turn on its roller-coaster ride. “A woman?”
“A man named Quint.”
She was already half lost in a story that didn’t fit how she saw Levi or Wren or whoever he was now. “Isn’t that a fruit?”
“That’s quince, but Quint is not his real name anyway.”
�
��Of course not. I guess that’s where you learned that trick.” Fearing the way she blurted that out amounted to a huge miscalculation, she rushed to keep him talking. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Quint ran a very specialized company. He . . . made things happen.” For just a second the corners of Wren’s mouth curled up in a smile but then disappeared.
The heaviness of his words contrasted with the lightness of his expression. Like so much with him, she didn’t know how to analyze the barrage of information in front of her. “That sounds a little scary.”
“It was.” After one last balling of his hands into fists, he let them fall open, palms up. “For a price he set up very awful people. Turned their lives inside out, ruined their reputations. Broke them.”
“I don’t get it.” She couldn’t ferret out the good from the bad in the story.
“He served as judge and jury. Once he determined guilt, he acted.”
She knew she should ask if this Quint guy physically hurt people or made them disappear. Should but didn’t. For a few seconds longer she wanted to hold on to the fiction that Wren—Levi . . . it was going to take forever to switch his name over in her mind—might talk tough but never stray to the dark side.
“So, Quint was a criminal of sorts?” This time her stomach flipped and she had to swallow back the rush of bile that threatened to overcome her.
“To the public he was a solid, very successful businessman. A financial whiz with all the right contacts and many brilliant people working for him.” Wren lifted his hands then let them drop again. “No one questioned him. No one doubted his professionalism or his commitment to the community.”
A strange panic slammed into her. “But . . . ?”
“But he had this side business based on vigilante work. For it, he recruited angry young men like myself. Guys on the edge. The kind of desperate that ended in chaos. Young men who were about to do something very stupid, and would have without his intervention.”
She couldn’t dance around this anymore. “Including you.”
Wren looked forward and stared at the wall separating her family room from the bedroom area. “Me and a few others. We were the Quint Five. We worked for him, trained with him. We were employees, but it was much more than that. He gave us a sense of family.”
She could almost envision them. Boys on the edge of full adulthood with more ego than common sense. “I’m guessing this was some sort of secret group.”
Levi looked at her then. “As you said earlier, I learned many tricks from Quint. Privacy was one of them. So was loyalty. But really, it was the place I learned a lot of my skills. We all worked for Quint and he provided more than money and supplies.”
“You said was?”
“Quint sold his company and retired to Mexico years ago after we all took other positions and found our own careers.”
“He must have hated to lose you.”
“Not really. He viewed his job as sort of a teacher. A lethal one, but still. He wanted us to succeed and move on to find what interested us.”
“So it was almost like foster care.”
“But we weren’t kids and we earned paychecks. We also played with guns.”
That part sounded so normal. Well, except for the guns. Wren described this self-appointed guardian and vigilante who functioned on the outside as a businessman but behind closed doors as some sort of enforcer. The idea of that guy selling his house and sitting on a beach wouldn’t come together in her head. “And the other members of the group? Where are they now?”
“All successful and no longer desperate. None in jail.”
In other words, businessmen like Levi Wren. Secretive, powerful. “But are they dangerous?”
“Some more than others, but probably not in the way you think.” His hand fell to the cushion right next to hers, but he didn’t reach out to touch her. “Some, like me, walk the line between what others consider right and wrong. Some ignore the line completely.”
“So, the Quint Five no longer exists.”
“Not in any sort of formal business way. We help each other now and then. We meet.”
“In other words, you act like family.”
“I don’t know because I don’t really get family.”
“I have about a billion more questions.” About Quint and the anger and what started Wren spinning in the first place.
“The bottom line is Quint taught me skills and gave me focus. He did it for all of us. Saved us.”
The words brought her winging back to reality. The idea that he might have taken a different turn in life and not be sitting in front of her nearly dropped her to her knees. He’d almost sacrificed everything. For what, she didn’t know, but she was clear that nothing in the story bordered on exaggeration. If Wren stated he’d been on the edge then he really had been.
“Quint also provided me with this group of people like me who I know I can count on, even today, if I need anything.”
“Does that ever happen?” She couldn’t imagine him reaching out for help, despite the history he may share with the other person, but he acted like the bond had never been broken.
He nodded. “Now and then. We work in different areas of business, but we trade intel and feed each other leads.”
He might deny it or not understand it, but this was his version of family, which made her wonder about his actual one.
“We now think of ourselves as Quint Associates. It’s sort of an informal social club. An ode to the old man.” A note of affection weaved into his voice. “But I do use what I learned from him to fix problems.”
The fixer thing. A murky concept even without the history. “By ruining people’s lives and reputations?”
“By finding weaknesses and exploiting them.”
“You’re the judge and jury these days?” There wasn’t any heat behind her question. True, the concept of vigilantism scared her. There were so many risks and the idea of being wrong paralyzed her. But she’d seen awful things in her job. She knew well that evil lurked out there, ready to pounce. She didn’t exactly hate the idea of a group of competent men waiting to even the score.
“I’m not Robin Hood, Emery. I don’t pretend to be a saint either. I get paid to solve problems, and I’m damn good at that job.” His hand lay open, palm up, right next to hers. “So?”
The question hung there as she stared at his palm then at his face again. “What do you expect me to say?”
“I’m waiting to see if you kick me out and run as far away as possible.”
She waited for that instinct to kick in, for the wailing alarm to scream in her head. But nothing. She didn’t feel fear or worry. Watching him now, with his protective wall lowered just enough for her to peek in, the driving need to know more plowed into her. The thought of walking away, abandoning him, came into her head and left just as fast.
Not being either a danger or adrenaline junky, her reaction didn’t make much sense. He was all but telling her how he lived his life in the gray areas. The reality didn’t scare her at all. “I don’t want to.”
His eyes narrowed. “Is that sufficient to let me stay?”
The time had come for a decision. She could step out and keep their relationship about business and Tiffany. That would allow her to watch over him and make sure he stayed on the right side of the line. Or she could plunge in.
When it came right down to it there wasn’t much of a debate in her mind. She knew what she wanted. A self-made man wrapped in a mystery. A true lover of secrets. Imperfect, determined and flawed. She wanted him.
She stood up.
He looked up without making a move. “Am I leaving?”
Silly man. She held out a hand. “We’re going into the bedroom.”
“This isn’t the reaction I expected.” But he was up with his arms around her, her body folded against his.
This felt right. Perfect even.
“Don’t talk.” She eased her body deeper into his. Let her fingers slide around his shoulders to the ba
ck of his neck to slip into his hair. “For a few minutes I don’t want to think and analyze or regret the past. I just want to enjoy. Feel.”
All the tension and worry eased from his face. “I think we can do better than a few minutes.”
That lightness inside her came zinging back. “I was counting on that.”
“If my clothes are coming off we’re going to make it worthwhile.” He winked at her.
That did it. “Enough talk. Now is the time to really impress me.”
CHAPTER 16
Wren hadn’t meant to share any of that. He’d stopped before spilling every last detail, but still. He’d run on about the life he had before. The life he declared over when he dropped his father’s last name and moved out of Michigan years ago.
Now that he talked about Quint and the past, his mind dwelled there. Memories lingered. The splash of blood his father burned off the wall with cleaning products. To this day, the sharp smell of bleach started a rapid punching in Wren’s gut that he had a hard time controlling.
Then there was the rug that disappeared from his parents’ bedroom, along with every photo that proved it ever existed. All the questions from detectives. The way his father drummed his version of their family life into his head until the line between truth and fiction blurred and blinked out.
He’d been young when it happened, but Wren remembered it all. A therapist once told him about how some people blocked out emotional trauma. The pieces slipped away and never came back. He’d never been that lucky. He’d never found anything to drown out the memory of the camera lights and all those microphones as the press descended.
But now he had Emery, at least for a little while. Looking at her, standing there so vulnerable yet so strong, he noticed the hope that usually filled her eyes had been replaced with something else. Sympathy, maybe? He hated that.
Pity was wasted on him. The last thing he needed was for her to see him as one of the victims she worked with every day. He wasn’t her client. He wasn’t a case or a problem she needed to solve.
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