Chapter 39 Cassie
CASSIE
I was still blushing when I led Jagger up to my apartment.
And not just blushing: horny.
I hadn’t fooled around with any of the Hawks since the hot tub — I thought maybe they were giving me space after the mess at Bram’s — and I was starting to feel like I was wandering in a desert, in desperate need of a cool drink except in this case what I really wanted was to fuck the Hawks.
All of them. At the same time.
Now that I knew what it was like to get naked with a guy or three, my usual self-care routine wasn’t cutting it, and Jagger’s casual mention of the way he’d made me come with his mouth had been a reminder of what I’d been missing.
Plus, I had to admit it had been a turn-on to see the way he’d staked his claim with the friendly guy who’d been chatting me up at the counter.
It was regressive and I couldn’t explain it but here we were.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said, unlocking the door to my apartment.
“I don’t do anything because I have to. Not anymore.”
He was so close behind me I felt the brush of his body against my backside, and my pussy pulsed with possibility.
Down girl. You’re here to work.
I was here to find some connection to the Russian guy who’d hired Travis Dorsey — not to fuck Jagger.
“I appreciate it.” I stepped into my apartment and set down my bag as Jagger closed the door behind him. “Can I get you anything? I’m sorry I don’t have beer.”
“I’m good.” Jagger looked around. “I like this place.”
“Thanks. It’s not much compared to the house but I love it.”
“It’s you,” Jagger said. “And that makes it everything that matters.”
My cheeks heated. “Let’s get the boxes out of the closet and bring them out here.”
He followed me down the short hall, past the guest bedroom and into my room, small compared to my room at the Hawks’ house
I opened the closet and reached for the boxes that had been there ever since I’d moved in and gotten them out of the storage unit Bram rented to hold some of our parents’ furniture, just in case I wanted any of it later.
Bram didn’t want it. He said it wasn’t his style but I think it was more about the fact that he didn’t want the reminder of what had happened that night in the car.
I handed the first box to Jagger.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“Four.”
“Stack them on top.”
“You sure?” I asked. “They’re heavy.”
“I’m sure.”
I stacked the boxes on top of the each other and followed him back into the living room.
He set them down, then pulled out his phone. “Pizza or sandwiches?”
“Pizza or sandwiches?”
“This is your lunch break,” he said. “You need to eat.”
“Maybe pizza?”
“You got it.”
I opened one of the boxes while he placed the order and was almost bowled over with visceral memory: the bleak days in my teens when I’d first discovered the boxes and was trying to make sense of what happened to my parents.
Back then Bram and I had lived in a little house off Main Street because Bram insisted I was a kid and kids needed a yard.
I’d hoarded the boxes in my room, looking through the papers in secret, convinced I could find the answer to the way things were — the way Bram was — if only I looked hard enough.
The smell inside the boxes took me right back to that place and I had to take a deep breath to shake loose the feeling.
“Mind if I put on some music?” Jagger asked.
“Nope. You can pair with the speaker by the TV.”
He scrolled through his phone and a minute later angsty alternative rock started to play from the speakers.
He sat next to me on the floor. “Anything in particular you want me to start with?”
I shook my head. “Pick a box, any box.”
He removed the lid from one of the remaining three boxes as I pulled the first stack of papers out of the box open in front of me.
The sheer quantity of paper, documents I’d already been through more than once, was overwhelming. “I don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
“I don’t either,” Jagger said, bending his head to read from the stack in his hands. “But I think we’ll know it when we see it, especially now that we know we’re looking for a Russian connection.”
“Maybe we should swap when we’re done,” I said. “I’ll go through my box and then pass it to you and you can pass yours to me when you’re done. That way if one of us misses something the other one might catch it.”
“Good call,” Jagger said.
We spent the next half hour mostly in silence, working our way through the boxes in front of us until the buzzer sounded downstairs announcing the arrival of the pizza.
Jagger went down to get it, then came back up carrying a large pizza box.
My stomach grumbled as the smell of warm dough and melted cheese hit my nose, and I got off the floor to get plates from the kitchen. “I’m starving.”
“Same,” he said, setting the box on the stove.
I handed him a plate and we each took two slices of pizza.
“Coke?” I asked. “Water?”
“I’ll take a Coke,” he said.
I handed him a cold can from the fridge, plus a couple of napkins, and we settled back on the floor to eat while we continued working.
“Hmmm,” I said, taking a bite of the pizza. “Tastes like heaven.”
“You’re making me hungrier,” Jagger said, his blue eyes dark and trained on my mouth. “And not for pizza.”
I licked the sauce from my lips “I won’t lie and say I haven’t wanted to be with you.”
“Just me?” A smile teased his lips.
I blushed. “All of you, I guess.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “You should have said something. We’ve been giving you space.”
“Because of Bram?”
He nodded. “Thought you might need some time to process. It was a pretty big mess.”
“It could have been worse.”
Bram could have killed you, dismembered you, hung you from a telephone pole as a warning to others.
Jagger grinned. “I’m very aware of that.”
I took another bite of pizza and chewed, wondering at the wisdom of asking the question that had been on my mind ever since the Hunt.
“Why’d you do it?” I finally asked. “Why’d you decide to hunt me if you knew you’d have to face Bram?”
He finished chewing the bite in his mouth, then took a long swig of Coke. When he was done, his lips were wet, and now I was the one who couldn’t take my eyes off him.
Now I was the one who was thirsty. And not for Coke.
“It didn’t feel like a decision,” he said.
“Explain.”
He nodded, like he was looking for the right words. “In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t really think things through. It’s not really our thing.”
“Taking action without thinking?”
He laughed. “Well, when you put it that way… But yeah, we just don’t live that way. We do what we want to do, what’s interesting, what feels good. If anything, we try to avoid things that require a lot of thought.”
“Why?”
“Because the things that require a lot of thought aren’t usually for us. The thought means we’re trying to talk ourselves into — or out of — something. We left that kind of navel gazing behind a long time ago.”
“What does that have to do with choosing me in the Hunt?” I asked.
“We agreed to let you play because it sounded fun to do something that would cause problems later. But hunting you — claiming you — wasn’t a choice. You walked in and we just had to have you.”
I blushed. “Why? Why me?”
He shook his head, his gaze locked on my face. “It’s wild to me that you don’t know how fucking pretty you are, how fucking sexy.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “I’m honest enough to admit I have some good qualities, but being sexy isn’t one of them.”
I was surprised when he leaned over, stretching his body out over mine, forcing me onto my back on the floor.
He ground his hips into mine and I gasped at the friction of his hard dick against my pussy.
“You have that wrong. Why else would I be walking around with a twenty-four-hour hard-on?” He stared down at me, stroking my hair as he stared into my eyes. “See what you fucking do to me? I want to fuck you so much it hurts. But that’s not all. I also just want to kiss you.”
He leaned in, slipping his tongue into my mouth, and I opened my legs for him, allowing him to sink deeper into the cleft between my legs, his jeans and the thin fabric of my skirt the only thing between us.
He pressed his dick against my throbbing pussy and I shoved my fingers into his hair, meeting every sweep of his tongue with my own, my nipples hard as his chest pressed against mine.
I was desperate to feel him inside me, desperate to do all over again the things we’d done in his room.
We were both gasping when he pulled away. “So yeah,” he said, “I think you’re pretty cute and my dick wants to rail you every second of every day. No big deal.”
I laughed. “You’ve made your point.”
His expression grew serious. “I’m not going to fuck you for the first time on the floor of your apartment with your dead parents’ papers all around us. No offense.”
“No offense taken,” I said. “We should go through everything anyway.”
We sat up and I reached back to straighten my ponytail, then reached for the pile of papers I’d been working on before we got distracted. My pizza was cold, but it had been worth it for the kiss and we spent the next hour working in silence before we switched boxes.
“A lot of bank transfers in this one,” Jagger said, his head bent to some of the papers I’d already looked through.
“I noticed that too,” I said. “They’re all from companies though, and I can’t tell what’s important and what’s not.”
“This is interesting,” Jagger said, his brow furrowed
“Which one?”
He shuffled the papers in his hands. “The transfers to Aventine.”
“I thought so too, but I’m pretty sure I checked the company’s listed on the transfers and didn’t find anything.”
He froze, then swore.
I lowered the stack of papers in my hand. “What?”
“It’s not just the companies making the transfers that matter,” he said. “It’s the bank the money is drafted from.”
“What about it?” I asked.
He held out one of the pieces of paper and pointed to two highlighted entries: transfers for more than a hundred thousand dollars from a bank called Kensington Trust.
“It’s not a bank, not in the traditional sense,” Jagger said. “It’s more like… a private banking institution.”
“‘A private banking institution’? That sounds like a bank.”
“I know, but there are lots of different financial institutions loosely called banks. The ones you probably think of when someone uses that word are the ones where you deposit your money to pay bills, write checks, Venmo money to friends,” Jagger said.
“But there are private institutions too, institutions that pride themselves on discretion. Some of them are even invitation only.”
I studied him. “How do you know all of this?”
“I used to be a trader.”
“Like… a stock market trader?”
He laughed. “You sound so surprised.”
I looked at him, his tattoos snaking out of his T-shirt, climbing over his huge biceps and up his neck. “Well… yeah. It’s pretty much the last thing I would have expected you to do.”
“Me too,” he said. “Which is why I don’t do it anymore. But I did for a while, and I remember this firm. Specifically, I remember something about this firm.”
“What about it?” my heart was starting to beat faster, the possibility of discovery giving me a shot of euphoria.
“For one thing, they specialized in complex offshore structures.”
“In English,” I said.
“They knew how to hide money. Serious money. And there was something else.” I held my breath. “They were heavy on wealthy foreign clients and multi-currency holdings. Especially rubles.”
My mind was spinning as I tried to make sense of what he was saying. “Rubles as in…”
He nodded. “Keep going.”
And now I had it. “Russian currency.”
“Bingo.”