Chapter 22
“Hey,” Hew said quietly as he caught Sabrina on the bottom tread of the stairs leading up to the third floor. She was still barefoot. Still wearing that short silk robe that was doing its damnedest to kill him by inches. And her cheeks were flushed a pretty pink.
Flushed because of her conversation with Martin?
He could feel a muscle twitching in his jaw. The one beneath his right eye tried to follow suit, but he stilled it by briefly glancing away from her expectant expression toward the short hallway leading to the offices.
It’d taken every ounce of self-restraint he possessed not to eavesdrop on her call with the vertically challenged hedge fund manager.
And maybe he’d even started down the hallway before turning on his heel because Boss and Graham had been posted up outside the door like a couple of goddamn bouncers.
Now, he hadn’t a clue what she’d said to Martin. Where she stood with Martin. Whether her confession upstairs to him had changed everything or nothing between them.
He was flying blind.
He hated flying blind.
“Hew?”
Her voice drew his attention back to the moment. Back to her quizzical expression.
After clearing his throat—too noisily if her rapid blink was anything to go by—he finally managed, “We need to talk about—”
“All right, everyone!”
Boss’s deep voice boomed across the mezzanine, slicing clean through Hew’s words and his rapidly fraying nerves.
For fuck’s sake! Can’t a guy catch a break?
“Team meeting!” Boss marched to the railing and hollered down to the shop floor. “Let’s gather in the War Room!”
The windy blast of the blowtorch quieted. Whoever had been using the metal grinder switched off the tool. And the only sound left in the whole place was Ozzie’s music. But a second later, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”—RIP Ozzy Osbourne—was silenced in the middle of the third verse.
“Do I have time to change?” Sabrina asked over Hew’s shoulder. When he glanced back, he saw her tug at the belt on her robe.
He wanted to tug it.
With his teeth.
Ayuh. He’d spent nine months refusing to allow himself to have thoughts like that. Or, at the very least, shutting them down quickly when they reared their ugly heads. And all it’d taken was a few words from her and suddenly he was all Horny McHornerson.
Then again, he couldn’t chastise himself too much. Because, at the end of the day, he was just a man. And she was a beautiful woman who—
“Two minutes.” Boss dipped his chin toward Sabrina. “You’re a major player in this discussion.”
She gave a curt nod, squared her shoulders like the trooper she was, and ran up the stairs.
Don’t watch her go. Don’t watch her go. Don’t—
Hew watched her go.
Loving the flash of her smooth, bare legs. Loving the way her peach-shaped ass pressed against the silk. But he managed to wrench his eyes away when she climbed high enough for him to sneak a peek beneath the hem of her robe.
He might be just a man, as debauched as the next—probably more so—but he drew the line at Peeping Tom.
After dropping into a seat at the long conference table, he frowned when Fish slid into the chair beside him. The chair usually reserved for Sabrina.
After a quick glance his way, Fish’s eyebrows drew together over his nose. “You okay, bruh?”
Hew refrained from sighing heavily. “You’re the second person to ask me that question in the last ten minutes.”
“Probably because your face is screaming even though your mouth is clamped so tight I can almost see your teeth through your cheeks.”
“Don’t you usually sit over there?” Hew hitched his chin toward the seat across the table.
Fish craned around to look at his chair. He bent side to side and then used his hand to feel around beneath the seat.
“What are ya doin’?” Hew finally asked in annoyance.
“Seeing if someone pinned a sign with their name to this chair.”
“Oh, haha. Very funny. You plannin’ to take your show on the road sometime soon?”
Fish just smirked as he settled back into place. “Who ate your bowl of sunshine this morning, thundercloud?”
Hew dragged a hand down his face, hoping to wipe away his expression. He realized he was only slightly successful when Fisher continued to study him with narrowed eyes.
“Is Sabrina okay?” Fish finally asked. “No lingering effects from her abduction or the dehydration?”
All the jealousy Hew had felt since she flounced downstairs to take the hedge fund manager’s call came out in his clipped tone.
“Seems fine. She certainly raced down here, quick as her legs could take her, to talk to Martin Massey.”
“Ah.”
It was a single syllable. But it held a wealth of meaning.
None of which Hew liked.
He opened his mouth to say…he wasn’t sure.
Probably something that would make him sound like an even bigger asshole.
Thankfully, Sabrina saved him the embarrassment when she stepped off the last tread onto the second floor and announced, “Okay. I’m here.
” She checked the old-fashioned analog clock on the wall above Ozzie’s bank of monitors. “With fifteen seconds to spare.”
She wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt. No frills. No nonsense. Just her.
It was a wonder Hew’s jockey shorts didn’t burst into flames.
Just her was everything he hadn’t allowed himself to want. Everything he’d told himself he couldn’t have.
She’d swept her hair into that messy bun she wore when she wanted it off her neck. And lord help him, that pale strip of skin from her collarbone to her delicate jawbone made his mouth go dry.
Her cheap, plastic flip-flops clacked on the floor as she made her way to the chair across from him. And he couldn’t help noting her toenails were painted a dark, sparkly purple.
He’d never had a thing for feet. Never really got the appeal.
But Sabrina’s feet?
They were long and graceful, with high arches and smooth skin and—
Damn, man. You’ve spent months convincin’ everyone—includin’ yourself—that all ya feel for her is friendship. Then she tells you that there for a while she wanted more, and suddenly you’re waxin’ poetic about her damned feet?
After she sat, pulling her rolling chair close to the table, he tried to catch her eye. But she was either refusing to look at him, or she simply had no idea he was still stuck on their conversation from upstairs.
More than stuck. Mired. Cemented there until it was impossible to think about anything else.
Boss stood behind the chair at the head of the table. He cleared his throat once Graham, the last of the Knights to wander into the War Room, grabbed a seat.
“All right.” Boss folded his big arms over his even bigger chest. “We got ourselves a hostage downstairs who’s probably going to need some gentle persuading to answer a few questions.”
“Gentle persuading.” Ozzie snorted, but there was no humor in it. “That’s one way to say waterboarding.”
“We’re hoping it won’t come to that.” Boss’s face was grim. “We’re hoping that after nearly eight hours in the damp and the dark, she’s ready to pony up some answers.”
“She won’t be.”
There was quiet certainty in Sabrina’s tone. It had every head in the room turning in her direction.
“She’s slick,” Sabrina went on. “She had every man on her team eating out of her hand. If y’all want her to talk, you’re going to have to find the chink in her armor, the thing she wants above all else.”
“Tell us about her,” Boss said, no doubt hoping to build the arsenal of information that he would use against the woman during interrogation.
Sabrina hesitated. Then, slowly, steadily, she laid it all out. Everything she’d gleaned during her time as a hostage. From the tone of Black Widow’s voice when she spoke to each man in her crew to the glint in the blonde’s eye when she allowed the one they called Diesel to abuse Sabrina’s breast.
By the time Sabrina finished, Hew’s breath was ragged. He white-knuckled the edges of his chair to keep himself from flying down to the Bat Cave and throttling the hired assassin with his bare hands.
“Hummer, Diesel, and Black Widow are probably code names,” Boss muttered, rubbing a hand under his chin.
“And given what you just told us about them, I’d say they’re either ex-military, ex-fed, ex-spook, or some combination of the three.
Which means there are records. See if you can find anything on them, Ozzie. ”
“Already on it.” Ozzie’s fingers flew over his laptop’s keyboard.
“And then there’s the one who hired them,” Sabrina said.
Boss’s bushy eyebrow arched up his forehead. “They told you who hired them?” he asked incredulously.
“Not directly.” Sabrina shook her head. “But I heard them talking. And the only time I saw Black Widow look unnerved was when she spoke to the guy.”
“Guy,” Fisher said. “So it was a dude who put them up to the job. A single entity and not some group.”
“I mean—” Sabrina twisted her fingers together. It was her habit when she was unsure of herself. She saw what she was doing and quickly hid her hands under the table. “I think it was a guy. They referred to him as a him.”
She wrinkled her nose. “But now that I think about it, the name isn’t gender specific. I mean, depending on the denomination, women can be bishops, right?” She frowned. “Or maybe Bishop refers to a chess piece?”
The name dropped like a two-ton anchor through the hull of the War Room.
Silence. Followed by a collective intake of breath. Then Sam uttered a curse not fit for mixed company.
“What?” Sabrina’s startled gaze swept around the table. “Who’s Bishop? Someone y’all know?”
“Someone we know of,” Hew told her gruffly.
And just like that, her eyes landed on his and held for the first time since she’d returned downstairs.
He wasn’t sure if finally having her full attention made him feel steadier…or like someone had yanked the floor out from under him. Was it possible to feel both?
“Who is he?” she asked warily.
“That’s the million-dollar question.” This from Fish.