19. Mac
19
Mac
Yeah, darlin’. It’s dangerous. But so am I.
Wes
That’s it. I’m marrying her
He sends a text with a picture of his dinner. I know he’s just trying to goad me, but there’d better be some of that left for me when I get back. I swallow the knee-jerk possessive response.
What makes you think she’d marry you?
Wes
Blackmail. Obviously.
Dimitri has left the chat.
I roll my eyes. Wes has to re-invite Dimitri to the chat every time we get off topic—luckily, he finds it hilarious instead of tedious. For someone so severe, Dimitri can be pretty dramatic. Once, he joined and immediately left when he saw Wes had added him under the name Papa Bear.
It was just another day in the glamorous life of surveillance duty, watching the guards at a storage unit. Chairs were sat upon. Phones were scrolled. Balls were scratched. Nothing fucking happened.
But at least I got some good shots of the faces of the men on duty. I sent them to Wes and he added their personal details to the file we’ve been keeping. It all gets wiped when the job is done, but we’re never upset that we had too much information.
I make a pit stop at the address Felix texted me, park next to the car he described in the mostly-empty strip mall parking lot, and find Eleanor’s bags in the unlocked trunk. There’s a paper bag next to them with a little sharpie doodle of an eyeball. The suitcases go into my trunk, but the paper bag gets placed on the seat next to me. I’m going to need to remember to put them on ice.
More of the house is lit on the third floor than usual, so I know my girl is in our bedroom. The comfort of knowing she’s been safe at home—untouchable and getting her scent all over my bed—almost made up for the fact that I had nothing to listen to while I worked today. Almost. It is going to make coming home interesting, though, because I’m so juiced but she’s still playing hard to get.
Once I’m inside, I make a beeline for the source of the amazing smell in the air and find only clean pans laid upside down to dry next to the sink and a spotless stovetop. With a frown, I open the fridge. There are a dozen neatly-stacked Tupperware, and I check each one, but can’t find the brown onion-y thing Wes sent the picture of. Grumbling, I toss one of the other containers into the microwave and eat the contents standing up. Whatever it is, it’s good—damn good—but I’m still pissed.
Jealousy makes my temples pound. I’m going to have to have a chat with her about cooking meals for the other guys and not me. Especially if she’s doing it on purpose now, like it seems. I’ve seen the flash of defiance in her eyes when I remind her it’s only a matter of time until she’s mine. So, if this is her fucking around, she’s about to find out.
I rifle through her bag long enough to find what I want, then I take the stairs two at a time. When I get to the third floor, I slow down to a creep. Our bedroom door is open, and the hallway is still lit from the motion sensor, so if I’m quiet she won’t necessarily know I’m coming. It’s almost comically nostalgic—me framing her in my view, her blithely unaware.
My heart pounds as I watch her. She’s sitting in the very middle of the bed that she must have made, cross-legged, with a pad of paper in her lap. She chews on her lower lip thoughtfully and crosses out something that she’s written. The pen makes a loose rattling noise as she taps it against her knee.
It feels so different now. Before, it was all about being the eyes in the shadows—captivated, covetous, greedy—and now that I have her… well, it’s not better. The satisfaction of having her in my bed, the feeling of rightness, that she’s wh ere she belongs, is only second to the primal need to be inside her, hearing her cry out my name and knowing that the rest of the house hears it, too.
The noise of nails against skin drags me out of my fantasy, and I remember I have the cure to her suffering.
She looks up when I enter the room. “Hi,” she says. Her tone isn’t quite what I expect, it’s bright and casual. Her eyes scan me, settling on the bags now on the ground at my feet. “Is that my stuff?”
“Yes.”
Eager, excited almost, she scrambles off the bed, leaving the paper behind. I glance at it as she kneels down and unzips the first suitcase. It’s a meal plan. Hot jealousy climbs back up my throat as I glance over what she’s planned to feed everyone but me, and I sit on the bed.
“Mac, what’s this?” She pulls the canvas case out of one of the bags and flips it open. Inside, I know she’ll find her entire knife drawer. She glances up at me. “These weren’t on my list.”
I’m impressed. She’s good. No hint of unrepentant rebellion, or the overconfidence brats wear when they know they’re about to get the punishment they want.
“You said the ones here suck, so I added it. Thought you’d like having your own.”
A ghost of a smile traces her lips and she sets the canvas roll back down. “That was… really thoughtful. Thank you.”
I let her dig through the bag a little longer. She pulls out clothes, finds the travel bag of toiletries and unzips it. She frowns as she moves aside the tubes and bottles.
“Looking for this?” I produce the medicated cream from my pocket.
She freezes, seeing it in my hand, the color rising to her cheeks. Now, she gets it.
I pat my lap, like I did the first time. “Legs.”
Her chest rises and falls. Slowly, she stands, and moves towards me and the bed. It fires me up even more that she keeps her eyes locked with mine—a good girl like her should lower her gaze, accept the repercussions with deference.
So, I make a decision. I shake my head as she moves to place her knee next to me. “Shorts off, this time. ”
She pauses and I wait for the defiance. I wait for her to tell me to kick rocks, to declare that she doesn’t need the cream that badly, to call me an asshole for holding her medication over her head. Instead, she looks down, swallows, and hooks her thumbs into either side of the waistband of her shorts. As she pulls them down, I eat up the sight of her exposed skin hungrily, feeling the blood rush and the pressure building in my dick, giving it its own heartbeat. I can only see the very bottom of her pale green underwear below the hem of her shirt, which she tries to tug lower.
I let the tension mount in my silence as she decides how best to follow my order. Does she place her foot on my knee, knowing how it’ll open her up? Does she sit back against the pillows so she can keep her legs together, knowing how much easier it’ll be for me to get her under me? I’m tempted to let her make the call.
“Sit,” I nod next to me, and tap my lap again. “Legs. Don’t make me tell you again.”
I uncap the tube as the bed dips under her weight. I catch a flash of pale skin, but then she’s on her ass, turned around. It was a calculated move, on my part, that we’re sitting far enough that she can’t lean against the headboard. She shifts her weight onto her hands and drapes her knees over my lap.
Once there’s sufficient cream on my fingers, I grab her opposite ankle with my free hand, locking both legs down. I know she can feel my hard on when she inhales sharply.
As I smear some cream on the area, she relaxes a bit. Enough, anyway, to focus on other things. “Mac?” she asks, voice small. “Will you tell me… How did you get into this job? What did you do before?”
Her timid curiosity catches me a bit off guard. “Special forces sniper for eight years.”
“Hundreds,” she says softly, and I know she’s remembering before when she asked how many I’d killed. And she’s right. Most of that number is from my military days. “What’s the pipeline from military to hitman?”
I rub gently, focusing on my task, but the question is a good one. It’s one that Wes and Dimitri know the answer to, more or less, but I haven’t really talked about it to anyone else before. “They gave the order, I shot. Boom, done. No questions, no opportunity to do any due diligence. If the intel was bad or incomplete, we usually found out too late. It started to… bother me. I wanted to understand, to know what I was doing.”
She laughs, and it’s so far from the reaction I’m expecting, that I look over with a confused frown. “What? You gonna call me an asshole for killing without asking questions?”
“No, it’s not that… it’s actually, weirdly, I kind of understand. You got out for the same reason I’ve been thinking about leaving my job. You want to see the impact of what you do and to understand its significance. Don’t get me wrong… our jobs have wildly different levels of significance, but, I don’t know. It just seems related somehow,” she shakes her head, preparing to backpedal. “Maybe that doesn’t make any sense, but in my head it does.”
I crack a smile. This isn’t at all where I expected this conversation to go. I’m glad I let her speak first. “I’m surprised you’d even want to compare what we do like that. You’ve been pretty clear on your feelings about my job.”
“I guess I was just coming to terms with the fact that there really are people out there who kill for money. Maybe I didn’t think the why mattered, since the what isn’t great. And it didn’t help that you’re so… so blasé about it. Killing. Death in general.”
I hesitate to admit how easy it’s gotten because I know that’s a fucked-up thing to say. It’s a fucked-up thing to feel. And I know she’s grappling with some heavy, good-and-bad/right-and-wrong shit right now.
“I’m not trying to be blasé. It’s not like I think human life has no value at all… but I guess the way I see it, I’ve got an opportunity that a lot of people don’t have. I get to do something that I’m good at, and it makes the world a little better.”
“Killing people makes the world better?”
“Depends on the person, but I think so,” I reply honestly, in spite of the skepticism in her voice and written all over that lovely, open face. I cap the tube carefully and toss it onto the bed behind me. She tries to move her legs, but I don’t release my grip.
“But don’t they have their own lives? Their own families and hopes and dreams?”
“Does having those things make you a good person?”
“Does being a bad person mean you deserve to die? ”
I grin, because she comes back with that so fast that it was clearly locked and loaded. She’s been thinking about this a lot, which fills me with an odd sort of vindication. “Touché. You’re against the death penalty then, I take it.”
“I don’t know,” she admits, dropping her head back between her shoulder blades. “I don’t know what to think. I don’t think people should be allowed to kill without consequences, but that’s also what you’re stopping them from doing. Where does it end?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” I acknowledge, running my hand soothingly up and down her leg. I can feel her skin tense under my hand and my cock twitches in interest, knowing how easy it would be to just reach up a few more inches and pull down those panties. Down, boy, we’ll get to that in a minute. “For what it’s worth, you’re asking good questions. Most people never have to go through a big challenge to their moral code like this.”
She barks a laugh with no mirth, head still back. After a second, she lifts it and looks at me down her nose. “You believe in what you do? It… it saves people?”
“Rossi brought in five shipments last year. Those guns make their way to cities and suburbs all over, to the border, to drug lords and hate groups and gangs. Sometimes, they even end up in the hands of a teenager, looking to take their rage out on their classmates.”
She gasps and straightens, the color draining from her face.
“Rossi doesn’t pull the trigger, but he gives them the means. Is the blood still on his hands?”
Her lower lip wobbles and she sucks it into her mouth. I love how deeply she feels for people, how open her heart is for those she’s never met and will never meet.
“I think it is,” I continue. “Just like I know that stopping these shipments will prevent a lot of that shit in the future. Sure, the guys with guns to sell will find another way in. They always do. So, we follow the trail Rossi leaves and go after the suppliers next.”
“But…” she chews that lip and I brace myself for her next argument, her next indictment against my character. “Isn’t it dangerous?”
Her concern washes over me like a wave and I nearly sway from the force of it. She’s worried about me? I can’t help myself. I tuck my hand in between her thighs, dangerously close to a very hot, very wet center. “Yeah, darlin’. It’s dangerous. But so am I.”
She inhales sharply.
“Now that we got that out of the way…”
I reach forward and grab her right upper arm, then snake the other around her legs and up to her hip. In one synchronized jerking motion, I flip her over and drag her torso towards me. It places that sweet ass right over my lap. Her shirt has ridden up, showing me enough skin to make my palms twitch.
She’s surprised enough for a beat that she just lets it happen, but when she feels my arm belt across her back and my other hand follow the curve of her ass, she starts kicking her legs wildly.
“Let’s talk about why you made dinner for everyone but me.”