Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Jess
W e drove the mountain pass in silence.
Truly shocking.
And by that, I meant I fully anticipated his broody silence radiating at me from his place at the wheel. The quiet had an almost gelatinous quality, like the summer humidity in the South, but this was just us in a small, enclosed space.
So. Neat.
He filled every millimeter of the luxury sedan’s driver’s side, his head only a few inches from the roof while I stretched out rather comfortably in the passenger seat next to him.
For a split second before I got in, I’d considered sitting in the back and pretending he was my chauffeur. Would’ve been kind of fun, except we did have a little work to do, and it wouldn’t be great for our cover once we arrived at the resort.
We’d e-mailed a handful of times with plans, less out of a desire for efficiency and more for the sake of avoiding any additional face-to-face time before we couldn’t avoid it any longer.
I couldn’t speak for him, but I assumed we were on the same page. That was likely folly, but what else could I do? Saunter into his office, thump out a cheery knock on his door, and say, “Hey, Beast, can I sit and chat with you about our fun weekend plans?”
Not likely.
The last time we’d had a congenial chat had been somewhere around ten years ago. Maybe closer to nine, because our friendship didn’t shift until about the time I got engaged to my ex. It was like all of a sudden, I became this off-limits person and he wouldn’t be seen talking with me unless we were in a group.
I couldn’t think of a single time we’d spoken kindly to each other in the last five years. We’d cooperated on missions locally when needed, but there’d always been buffers with other Saint staff.
Locked in a small moving box with no music and certainly no friendly catch-up on the horizon, I questioned the sanity of the assignment on and off between songs streaming into my earbud. I kept one ear free just in case, but as a decently intelligent person, I’d planned ahead for the verbal drought of the ride.
The drive took an hour and a half one way, and we had less than twenty minutes left. Some of this we did have to actually speak about, and so, I mentally hyped myself into a place of noncombative assertiveness and began.
“We need to run down our plan. We both have the checklists of things to review, and we can take care of some of those individually after check-in, but then we’ll hit our dinner reservation at seven.”
His hands didn’t move or flex on the steering wheel. His chin didn’t dip down like Tristan’s would’ve, nor did he respond with words like Bruce or Adam or Kenny or literally anyone else. Even Stone likely would’ve given me a visual hint he was listening.
But I’d pep-talked myself into oblivion last night. If I’d been in a movie, it would’ve been a montage of an athlete psyching herself up through lifting heavy and running stairs and fist-pumping at the top of a mountain. Granted, I did none of that save a solid run before dusk, but mentally I’d “Eye of the Tiger’d” my way to bed knowing I could handle anything Jude The Beast Rawlins threw at me.
Even deafening silence.
There’s no way he hadn’t heard me. With nothing else to hear, he had to be tracking everything I was, too. I may not’ve liked the guy, but I had no issues with him professionally save the small failure to communicate. Still, I didn’t doubt he’d come prepared, and that was the only thing saving my sanity at this point.
“I figure we check in together, make a show of things, then we’ll be seen at dinner. We’ll be able to look into the property under the guise of touring around together, but again, I think we can get away with the solo tasks we outlined earlier this week.”
Aaaaaand nothing.
Despite his refusal to acknowledge anything so far, I continued. I was nothing if not persistent, and eventually, the fact that responding to one’s coworker was the very least one could do when on assignment with them would penetrate his thick skull .
“Cookie said Jenna Halter’s biggest concern is room access, so obviously staying in the same suite she’ll have will give us that angle, but I’d like to expose floor access points. We’ll do the usual security review tonight and double check at zero-two.”
He might not need the refresher, but I preferred to verbally review the plan. It was how team leaders did it in the EMU and we’d both come from there, so this should be no surprise to him. It was how I ran ops when I did them, even still, and I figured it was a common language we spoke.
But silly me assuming he’d deign to speak.
I tapped through a few more pages of our op plan and did my best to ignore the frustration pumping through me. It buzzed in the pads of my fingers, making me feel electrified with irritation by the time he parked the car outside the sprawling, gorgeous mountain resort.
Back at home in Silverton, Silver Ridge Resort was truly beautiful, but it still had a cozy feeling thanks to the historic lodge located right next to the newer, fancier hotel. An hour and a half southeast from Silver Ridge sat Snowberry Mountain and Snowberry Resort. Silverton had become a destination for A-listers of all types—that’s how we at Saint Security had so much business and were ever-growing—but Snowberry? Snowberry was similar to the fanciest resorts in Utah, like Sundance or Deer Valley. And now, we were about to recon this place to make sure it was safe for Jenna Halter.
“It’s really pretty,” I said, momentarily forgetting I spoke to a brick wall. The whole drive had been a parade of Utah’s glorious fall colors, from gold to the pinky-oranges and deepening into burnished reds. But I’d appreciated none of it until right now with the wind rustling in the chilly autumn air in this tucked away place .
Astoundingly, this earned a grunt.
“Oh, so you’re not ignoring me anymore?”
His dark head turned slowly—a little creepily, if we’re being honest—and panned toward me until he stopped, his unsmiling face pinned to me.
“I was never ignoring you. I’m on board. You can calm down.”
“I can calm—” I snapped my mouth shut and clenched every muscle in my body in search of the self-control I’d convinced myself I had last night and this morning.
Has anyone in the history of forever actually calmed down when someone says they should calm down?
“Thank you so much for the helpful commentary. I’m so glad you’re on board with the job we were assigned to and are being paid to do.” And with that, I got out before I started snarling.
Good grief, he made me want to literally scream. Nothing sent me into an unnecessary rage like his smug, rude responses.
But what would that do aside from eliciting yet another one of his non-responses and give him something else to judge me about? Not that I cared if he judged me, but I wanted him doing it out of my space, and there’d be no such distance between us for the next eighteen-ish hours.
The crisp mountain air hit my face, and I gulped in a calming breath. I’d never get over the dry air here. I’d lived in a lot of places growing up as my mom moved place to place chasing jobs to keep food on the table. I’d spent most of my military career in the South and finally the last eleven years in North Carolina. I hadn’t ever lived west of the Mississippi, and now that I did? I had no plans to venture back to the swamp-like summers of the South and East.
Give me skin-splittingly dry winters and cooling-air-in- the-shade summers all day, every day. Add to that the glorious variation in fall colors as opposed to the last place I lived that was ninety percent pine trees, and I could hardly love it more.
A grumble alerted me to Beast’s presence, and I turned in time to see him nudge the door of the trunk closed, the straps of both our bags looped in his giant left hand.
“I can carry my own bag,” I said quietly, not wanting any chance of being overheard.
“I’m aware you’re capable.” He moved to my door and set a hand on it, everything about his expression impatient.
Taking the silent cue and choosing not to comment on the miracle of him using multiple complete sentences in the last few minutes, I grabbed my purse, shoving the tablet into it, then raised my brows at him. With zero change in his expression, he pushed the door closed, then strode past me to the sidewalk. I followed quickly, uninterested in trailing in his broody wake.
When his hand brushed against mine, I jumped and leaned away. He stopped, exhaled a gusty sigh so full of exasperation I could practically see it, then pinned me with his gaze. Without looking away, he grasped my wrist with his warm, rough fingers and waited. I didn’t jerk away like I had earlier, stubborn to the end, and though he didn’t move a muscle, I sensed his approval.
Which did not matter to me.
Then his hand slipped down and laced our fingers together. It should’ve been uncomfortable, his massive digits knitted with my comparatively delicate ones, but it actually felt pretty natural.
In an alternate universe where we hadn’t lost everything but enmity between us, it might’ve even felt… good.
He straightened and began walking without a word, and I didn’t speak because… what would I say? He wasn’t holding my hand because he wanted to, and I definitely didn’t want it either. He did it because we were here to present a united front as a loving couple arriving to celebrate our anniversary. The contact had me inwardly squirming, squiggly lines looping around in my belly like they’d fallen off a page. Based on the way his jaw flexed under the longer than usual beard he was sporting, he wasn’t loving this either.
But as he guided us inside and up to the reception desk, we were greeted by friendly hotel staff who beamed at us, evidently just delighted to see we’d arrived. They called us by our cover name—Mr. and Mrs. Hanson—and prepared our cards. They congratulated us on a happy five-year anniversary and told us our room was ready.
“Can we take your bags, Mr. Hanson?” Jerry the bellhop asked.
“Thank you, Jerry, but I’ll get them. If I don’t make myself useful, I might not get another five years.” Beast winked at the man who chuckled and nodded good-naturedly, like the joke had landed and I, the shrewish woman at his left, would leave a man for not carrying our bags.
His voice speaking such congenial words should’ve sounded like a record scratch. It should’ve been discordant and odd, but the idea that this Mr. Hanson was the counterpart to mine, that I was acting as his wife, made the sharp lines in my head go fuzzy.
Of course they did, because everything with him was messy and muddled, and it was all his fault.
Plus, I hated little more than the sour stereotypes of the ball and chain or the nagging wife and of course that’d been his charming, haha don’t let the wife ruin our fun joke. Cue eye roll my mother used to warn me about getting stuck like that.
Maybe my dislike of the drag-you-down wife joke came down to having had a relationship that crashed and burned through no fault of my own but that had, when I allowed myself to remember it honestly, contained a lot of that dynamic. Not to mention the fun of finally accepting the truth that my former fiancé had never wanted to get married and had only gone along with an engagement because I’d expected it… cool. Fun combo.
However, I pointedly did not allow myself to remember these things because I didn’t hate myself. Anymore.
Either way, I shot Mr. Hanson a look.
His giant paw found my lower back—another thing that a different person in another life might’ve enjoyed—and he ushered me toward the elevator. That fictional person in a different universe might relish the warmth of his hand pressed to the curve of her spine or the sheer bliss of his large hand covering so much surface area. Said person might even imagine the absence of material between the rough pads of his fingers and the soft skin of her back, or anticipate the slide of his palms over her curves, hungry and wanting in a way that made her stomach drop.
Cheers to the multiverse—I’d pour one out for the poor sap stuck in that version of the story at dinner.
When the doors swung closed, he let it drop and straightened, almost like he couldn’t find a comfortable way to stand still.
“Quite a performance, Mr. Hanson.”
His eyes cut to mine, but he said nothing.
Fine. He didn’t have to. We didn’t want the staff touching our bags because A, we were only staying one night and B, they contained a few little gadgets that would help us gain access to locked doors and do other nifty things around their property we didn’t want them aware of.
When the elevator opened, he placed a hand over the door as I walked through, then followed me down the hallway to our room.
Our room.
Because we were undercover as a married couple. And we’d need to stay in this suite because it was the same suite Jenna Halter would use when she came next month. We’d check every angle, every part of it, for security risks. We’d outline every possible place a hidden camera could be tucked away, then we’d move out from there—access points to the floor, the building, the property itself. After what she’d been through as her fame skyrocketed along with her security risks, we’d take nothing for granted in terms of her safety.
Tonight, I’d share this room with a man I’d loathed for years. I’d peacefully coexist in close proximity with him longer than I had in nearly a decade since we met, and I’d stomach it all because it was a part of the job.
Even if it made me want to scream into a pillow.