“I drove to Render and dropped the car off in front of the elementary school like he told me to. The rest of the money was in the garbage can in front of it like he said it would be.” The asshole spat out quickly. “I didn’t do nothing else.”
Fuck, Render was four hours away from us and an hour away from where the guy had been picked up.
“Wait, he said a name. Munt somethin’.”
“Montgomery?” Mace took a step so he was right in front of the asshole now.
“Yeah, Montgomery! That’s fucking it!”
“You hear any other names?”
“No man, that’s it. He said it was a surprise for the Montgomery’s.”
Our questioning was interrupted by Baz’s phone ringing and he pulled it out of his inside jacket pocket looking irritated that we were being interrupted.
“Guntur,” he greeted and gave Mace a signal which must have meant to stand down because Mace took a couple of steps away from the asshole in the chair and leaned against a wall. All we could hear was Baz asking things like “What?” “Where?” “When?” before yelling “FUCK!” as he hung up.
No one said anything as he paced in front of us. I was used to him being calm and rational so my gut dropped watching him; this was going to be bad.
Taking a deep breath, he finally turned around to us and all of Coleman and Mace’s guys came forward until we formed a semi-circle around the asshole in the chair. “The three fucks in Bali were released from prison yesterday,” he started. “Guntur and his guys went to find them, but they were too late.” Rubbing his hands down his face he continued on. “One of them was found at the bottom of Uluwatu Cliff this morning. Two hours later, reports of a foreigner being killed by a truck carrying bricks were picked up by them so he sent some guys in to check it out and the description matches one of the bastards. A certain ID couldn’t be made cause the truck ran over his head. An hour ago the last one was found washed up on the beach in Kuta by Swedish tourists; COD unknown.” He looked around at us grimly and I knew it got even worse, if that was possible. “The fourth hired gun that was found dead when Guntur’s team rounded up the others…COD has been confirmed.” He stopped and rubbed his mouth.
“And?” Mace said looking more pissed off than ever.
“Cyanide.”
We all stood staring at him in silence, even Mace and Coleman’s guys didn’t make a noise as we all stood digesting this information.
A thought hit me. “How the fuck did they get out of a prison for one of the worst offenses?”
“Guntur is looking into it. There is no leniency in Bali with the law surrounding drug possession, whoever it is, their stretch is far,” Baz replied, and he was fucking right.
The penalty for drugs in Bali was so severe that there were even warnings on the customs forms and throughout the airport. The police releasing them when they’d been found with substantial amounts of heroine on them didn’t make any sense; it just wouldn’t happen.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Brett growled from beside me. “Who the fuck are we dealing with here?”
This was the problem…and he’d used my name.
Chapter 19
Mace
P ulling up in front of Ava’s house, I cut my bikes engine. I hadn’t seen her properly in a couple of months, and after hearing the shit I’d just heard I needed to see her.
The fuckwad had been delivered to the police station, along with a copy of the security footage showing him loading up the car and driving it off. A couple of my guys were staying to make sure that he told them everything that he’d told us, too.
The interrogation had brought back memories of the shit I’d done when we’d been sent in to find targets, and I needed the one thing that got rid of the feeling that I was being suffocated - Ava.
Walking up to the door, I was just about to knock when it opened and Tony came rushing out and screamed when he looked up and saw me.
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” he said, holding his chest.
“Ohh now don’t you look all rough and growly.” He gave me a good looking over. “I like it; you look… grrrrrr!” The grin on his face and swipe of his hand like a lion’s paw almost made me grin, almost. “Ava in?”
“Yes, she’s in the kitchen,” he looked back down at his watch and made a noise. “Shit, I’m gonna be late getting back! See you later!”
I gave him a chin lift before he turned around and ran towards his car. The guy was a trip!
Walking into the house, I went toward where I knew the kitchen was and paused when I saw Ava standing there stirring a pot that smelled like heaven.
She obviously hadn’t heard the shit with Tony or me walking in because she continued to hum and stir. It was when she turned in my direction to get something that she saw me and screamed; seems I had that talent today.
“Fucking hell, Mace,” she yelled. “You scared the shit out of me.” I saw it when she realized that she’d sworn at me because she grimaced. I hated it when she swore and she knew this. In fact, the last time that she’d sworn at me, I’d ended up threatening to spank her, going as far as laying her across my lap. Because I hadn’t seen her in a while, and after what I’d just heard, though, I didn’t call her on it. “Ava.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Came to say hi, see how you are.” I replied taking her in. Ava had always been beautiful, but from the day she’d turned sixteen she’d become even more beautiful. She was half Brazilian, so her skin was a beautiful tan color all year round and was five foot nine with a body that had pretty much every guy drooling. It was her face, though, that got guys tongue tied around her. She was the definition of beautiful with dark green eyes and long black hair that was, at this moment, tied up in a messy mass on top of her head with pieces falling down.
I saw that she was taking in the changes to my appearance as well. Months of living on the road meant that I’d grown a beard and needed a haircut, but judging by the expression on her face, these things weren’t an issue for her.
“You look…different,” she said cocking her head. “I like it.”
“You look good, baby.” Her eyes flared as always when I called her that. “How are you doing?”
I walked over to the island in the middle of the large kitchen and sat on one of the stools putting my jacket on the one beside me.
“Good, thanks.” She turned back and went to the coffee pot, pouring me a cup without asking. My baby knew me well. “I’m just making Tony seafood paella for dinner.” She placed the coffee down in front of me and then picked her own up and took a sip. Everything that Ava did was graceful, it was beautiful to watch from a distance, but even more amazing to watch close up. “How have you been?”
“Busy.” I didn’t want to dirty her by telling her what I was doing, but I knew she knew all about it from Maya seeing as how they’d gotten pretty close. She’d also spoken to my sister Gia about it, who’d told me about it during our last phone call. “Found a guy and got some info, turned out to be a small fish.”
She stood staring at me and I knew she saw the weight that I couldn’t shake off from today. When she’d been staying with me, she’d seen first-hand how my PTSD affected me and the nightmares that I’d wake up screaming from. But even if she hadn’t witnessed it all, she’d always seen more in me than anyone and I’d been fucking stupid not to open my arms to her.
“What’s wrong?” She asked softly, stepping over to me and carefully putting her hand on my arm. This was one of my PTSD issues - I didn’t cope well with people making fast movements around me, especially when it resulted in someone touching me. What she didn’t know was that I didn’t have that problem with her.
“Just memories.” I shrugged. I didn’t come here to put my memories onto her, far from it. I never wanted her to have the mental image of the filth that I’d done and gone through, and this was one of the reasons that I’d pushed her away.
“Wanna talk about it?”
“Nah
, just wanted a catch up.” I replied looking around me, then a question occurred to me. “You still seeing the hospital fucker?”
“Penn? Yeah, we’ve been on some dates.” She turned away from me and went back to the pot.
After the shit today, I was out of patience and drained my coffee and put it back down heavily on the bar in front of me.
“I was wrong, baby, I pushed you away when you were the only thing that made it possible to breathe.” I fucking sucked at romantic shit so I didn’t have a clue how to get it across to her without being blunt. She turned back to watch me as I stood up and started walking toward her. “You know I had shit as a kid and because of that I don’t let people in. But what you’ll never begin to imagine was the fucking evil that I had to do, and that I went through, too, when I was deployed. That evil leaves a stain on you, and you deserve better than that, so I pushed you away.”
“Mace…”
“No, let me finish. I’ve spoken to the other members of my team about what happened, and they helped me see that I’m not as stained as I thought, and that I deserve to breathe clean air instead of the polluted gas that I was breathing before.” I walked into her space and put my arms around her. “You’re that clean air.”
I would have continued, but she chose that moment to lick her lips and seeing it up close broke whatever modicum of control that I had left standing so close to her. Tightening my hold around her, I slammed my mouth down onto hers, taking advantage of her gasp to sweep my tongue into her mouth. We’d kissed a couple of times, mostly when I was drunk, but I’d always been hit by the feeling that I was dirtying her and had been an asshole and walked away. Not anymore and never again; she was mine. Groaning at the taste of her, I pulled her tighter to me as she wrapped her arms around my neck before she ground her crotch against mine.
Picking her up quickly, I put her on the counter behind me, never breaking the kiss, and pushed between her legs. Now that I was as close as I could get right now, I took full advantage to deepen the kiss, our tongues flicking against each other. I ground my hard on into her and then remembered that regardless of how hard I was, I was here to do this right with Ava. She deserved nothing but the best and I was going to give that to her.
Pulling back from her, I watched as her eyes slowly opened and tried to focus on me; fuck, I loved that.
“Ava.” I cupped her face in my hands. “We’ve started. You and me, this is it. Do you get me?”
She sat looking at me and I saw the moment it all hit her. “We can’t, I’m dating Penn!”
“Lose him, baby.” She was biting her lower lip, a lip that was swollen and red from us kissing. The longer it took her to reply, the tenser I was getting. Failure with her wasn’t an option. “Ava, are you with me?” I gave her a gentle shake.
Looking back up at me, she finally whispered the words that made me realize that I truly was gonna breathe easy. “Okay, Mace.”
Chapter 20
“?”
W aiting for the asshole to pick up the phone as it rang in my ear, I thought about my latest plan and grinned at my desk.
“Yeah.”
“Hold back.” I had this all planned out perfectly.
“What?”
Holding back my temper as much as I could, I repeated it enunciating it precisely.
“Hold back.”
“You want me to do nothing?”
My temper snapped. “Listen, you fucking idiot, yes, I want you to do nothing. I want them to fucking think that it’s all over so that we can catch them with their motherfucking guard down. Do I make my-fucking-self fucking clear?”
“Yes,” he hissed, fucking me off even more.
“You will stand back and you will treat me with some goddamn motherfucking respect!” I finished it on a roar that hopefully had his fucking ears ringing.
“Affirmative.” He said and then hung up on me. Before I ended his life, I was going to teach him about respect.
I needed to take some deep breaths to calm myself down. Most people would want this out of the way quickly, but I wanted to play with them. To torment them and then take them down when they were at their weakest knowing that their last weeks on earth had been full of misery and the loss of the people that they loved the most. Adding in the Townsend’s just made it that bit sweeter.
On that thought, I needed to give the other asshole a call to clue him in to the new plans. It wouldn’t do for them all to still be on guard because the Townsend’s were still being played with; no, this had to be a mutual attack. The best way to win a war is to catch your opponent off guard. Thank fuck I was patient.
“Mr. Lewis”
I was going to kill that bastard when this was all over. Being in the Military meant that I had honor, so I would complete the contract that I’d been hired for, rather than just go and end my fucking misery by gutting the fuck like I wanted to. But when it was all over, I was going to take my dullest knife and slowly open him up.
Sitting back, I looked at the photos of my Red that I had on the table in front of me and instantly calmed down. Now that I was on what could technically be called r and r in this job, I was gonna get to spend more time with her and that suited me just fine.
Once this was all over, I was going to take her to the house that I had set up for us that no one would ever find, and then I’d go and gut the fuck.
Looking at my favorite photo of her where she’s standing in her bedroom trying on some shit from her store, I started getting hard like I always did, so I took the photo over to the bed and started stroking myself. Soon she could do it for me.
Chapter 21
Isla
O ne week later….
Things had thankfully been quiet for the last week, but we were still pretty much on house arrest since whoever was responsible was still out there. I was currently sitting on the couch with Cole, watching the grape balanced on my bump waiting for one of the babies to kick it off. We’d been playing this game for the last ten minutes and it was still as funny as it was the first three times.
“Does it hurt?” Cole asked, tickling Pippa’s stomach as she lay on her back in his arms. Like Ren’s dog, it appears that the little pig had fallen in love with him although, much to the upset of Maya, the pig had stopped humping him.
“When they kick?”
When he nodded, eyes still firmly on the grape, I replied, “No, more like a tap. They’re only tiny still, so it’s not too bad.”
“Do they move a lot?”
“Yeah, there’s not a lot of space inside for them both, so they tend to squirm and stretch and, obviously, punch and kick.”
“Do you ever get scared?” His tone had changed to an almost nervous one and it caught my attention because that just wasn’t like Cole.
“Of losing them or something going wrong?”
Again, he nodded. “All the time. If I don’t feel them move for a while I start to panic.
It got so bad last week that Luke rang the OBGYN and she said to drink ice water to get them to move and if nothing happened then to go in. My poor babies get a rude awakening now.” I grinned at him and noticed that the smile he was giving me back didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Is this about Ebru?”
He shrugged and looked back down at the snoring piglet in his arms. Before I could question him further, the door opened and Maya walked in with a big grin on her face.
“There’s only one inside me!” She fist pumped the air.
“What did Dr. Conlan say?” I asked referring to the OBGYN that we were now both with. Poor Maya had to wait to see her until everything settled a bit more with all of the drama and had been looking forward to this day.
“I’m fourteen weeks, oh, and she did a scan.” She pulled the images out of her purse and passed them over to me before sitting down on the chair next to the couch that Cole and I were sitting on.
I looked down at the image and grinned, it looked like baby Townsend had swallowed a golf ball, but you could see their limbs and no
se and lips perfectly. “She’s gonna be beautiful like her mama.”
“She?” Cole said sounding like I’d lost my mind. “No, it’s a he. Ren and I already decided.”
We both looked at him and just stared in silence. What could you say to that?
“What? It’s true!” He said scowling at both of us.
Shaking my head in resignation, because when he got like this it was impossible to change his mind, I passed over the pictures to him. “Here you go, Uncle Cole.”
He took them from me and then froze when he looked at them. Maya and I watched as he traced over the baby with his finger and then swallowed audibly. “He’s perfect,” he whispered.
Maya and I looked at each other wondering what the hell was going on with the lovable clown when a majorly loud snore from such a small pig broke the quiet.
“Jesus,” Maya said shaking her head. “She sounds just like her daddy.”
“Speaking of which,” Cole said, putting the pictures carefully on the table in front of us. “How has he taken the news of his impending ‘real fatherhood’?”
“First he was excited, then he was scared, then he was in shock, then he was sick…it’s a work in progress,” Maya shrugged. “Today, though, he stood staring at the screen and almost broke my hand. The moment she said there was just one in there and it came into view, he passed out.”
Cole and I burst out laughing and I had to reach quickly for the grape that was about to roll off my bump. “Why was he so worried it was more than one? Do twins run in your family?” I asked before I popped the grape in my mouth getting a look of disgust from Cole. “What? It’s my belly and I know it’s clean. Jeez!”
“I blame Amy. She keeps saying that it’s triplets and calling up telling him to practice juggling dolls so that he can get around with them, seeing as how he only has two arms and all.” I think the look of horror on our faces at the thought of someone juggling triplets just so that they could walk around said it all because she started laughing that hard her face went red. “I know right? Ren says that if I let her babysit he’ll sell Pippa to a Meat of the Month Club.”
Providence Series Books 1-4 Page 41