22. Chase
I slidmy fingertips over her soft cheeks, watching her as she slept. I’d pretty much fucked her until she passed out, but I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about that. She fucking lied to me when I asked her a question, and she already knew she wasn’t supposed to make that phone call.
But I wasn’t really upset. It was all fucking foreplay, down to teasing her about hiding something from me. Hell, I didn’t think she actually had, but when I saw the way her eyes drifted away from me, I knew she was hiding something. And that only made the game more fun.
Now that she was good and fucked, she wouldn’t be leaving my bed anytime soon, which was fine by me. We’d have to stay here for a day or two until Nick recovered, and as long as we weren’t followed, we’d have no problem laying low.
A soft knock at the door pissed me off. I didn’t want to be interrupted right now, not when I was obsessing over the woman in my bed. But I tossed off the rumpled sheet and dragged my ass out of bed, pulling on a pair of jeans. Softly opening the door, I glared at Patrick.
“What the fuck do you want?”
His eyes slid to just over my shoulder where Mercy was sleeping.
I pulled the door behind me. “See something you like?” I growled.
“No!” he said quickly. A little too quickly. “No, nothing like that. I just…” He cleared his throat, his face turning red.
What the fuck happened between the two of them? “What do you need?”
“Cash is on the phone.”
He turned and scurried away, which was so unlike Patrick. Whatever was going on, I would get to the bottom of it, then kick his ass for lying to me. Snatching the phone off the table, I glared at him one last time.
“Yeah?”
“Any developments?”
I narrowed my eyes at Patrick, but spoke to Cash. “You could have asked Patrick that.”
“I did. Now I’m asking you.”
“Why?”
“Jesus, is everything an interrogation? Because she’s your woman. Because you’re the reason I sent your team out, along with one crazy motherfucker. Is it too much to ask that I get some fucking answers from you?”
Mercy being in danger had made me fucking paranoid. I had to get my shit together. “Nothing yet.”
“That’s not what Patrick said,” Cash grumbled. “He said you suspect Rafe.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Would you back off? I’m trying to help,” he snapped.
I turned away from Patrick’s lying face and focused on the conversation. “I don’t know. I…have my suspicions.”
“Why?”
“Can’t tell you that.”
“Listen, if you want my fucking help, then you’re gonna tell me what I need to know.”
I would ask for the same thing in his position, but I couldn’t do that to Asher. He asked me to keep his reemergence a secret, and until he gave me a reason to betray that trust, I wouldn’t do it.
“I have nothing to go on other than this feels like something Rafe might do.”
“To what end? Seriously, you don’t even know what’s going on. A building blew up and some guys were chasing you, but you have no reason why.”
“Like I said?—”
“I know what you said. Now you’re gonna give me some fucking reasons why I should go down that route with Rafe. I don’t exactly like having more contact with him than necessary.”
“Sorry, I can’t give you what you want.”
“Then you need to get your ass back here.”
“I can’t do that?—”
“I don’t give a shit what you can or can’t do. Mercy patched up Nick. You have one day. After that, you get on the road and head home. Mercy can stay here while you figure shit out.”
I grunted in response, hanging up the phone. I turned and glared at Patrick. “You want to tell me what that was about?”
“Not sure what you mean,”
“Sure you do. The question is why were you talking shit to Cash?”
His eyebrows shot up. “Talking shit? I was filling him in on the details of the job.”
“The job?” I scoffed.
“That’s what this is, Chase. For you, it might be more, but for the rest of us, this is still a job. Friend or not, we have to treat Mercy like a client.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “And what exactly have you been doing to treat her like a client?”
His eyes grew big as he swallowed hard. “What—what do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the shit that went down while I was gone.”
“Nothing happened,” he said quickly.
“Right,” I smirked. “Nothing like…she didn’t call a friend?”
His jaw dropped and he cursed under his breath. “She sold me out!”
“That’s right,” I smirked. “She told me all about what happened. The thing is, I want to know why I had to draw it out of her instead of you just explaining what happened. Do you think I’m that fucking unreasonable?”
I stepped forward, forcing him to step back. “I wouldn’t say unreasonable, but?—”
“But what?”
“But this was a tricky situation! The last thing I wanted to do was piss you off.”
“Oh, you did that, alright,” I laughed. “And then you hid it from me. You know what I respect more than anything?”
“Loyalty?” he answered, swallowing hard as I backed him up against the wall. Fuck, whatever else happened, he was shitting his pants over it.
“Trust. Can I trust you with Mercy?”
“Yes! I swear, I didn’t mean to do it.”
“That means fuck all to me,” I growled. “But you see, if you had just come to me and told me what happened, I would have understood. I wouldn’t be fuming because my friend—my teammate—fucking hid the truth from me. I would have a little fucking respect for you.”
“I was just getting the phone!”
My eye twitched as I considered what that meant. “And?”
“And it fell in the tub. I swear to God, I didn’t mean to touch her.”
My nostrils flared in anger as I clenched my jaw, trying not to lose my shit right now. “You…touched her?”
His eyes went impossibly wide as he stared at me. “Oh shit.”
“Oh shit is right. What the fuck do you mean you didn’t mean to touch her?”
“I—she was—it was an accident. The phone slipped and—it’s a satellite phone. It’s fucking expensive! I was just trying to get it and…I grabbed the wrong thing!”
I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to keep the anger bottled up. “You…what exactly did you touch?”
When he didn’t answer, I slammed my hands on either side of his head. For a guy who served in the military, he was acting like a pussy right now.
“I touched her…nether regions! I swear, it was a quick grab, and then I realized what I did and backed the fuck up!”
I slammed my fist against his jaw, watching in satisfaction as he dropped to the ground. “You never should have shoved your hand in the bathtub to begin with, asshole.”
Then I stepped over his body and climbed back into bed with Mercy.
“Chase!”Mercy hissed in my ear.
“Hmm?” I mumbled, struggling to wake up.
“Wake up!” she whispered.
Rolling over, I peeled my eyes open and smiled at her. “What’s up?”
She jerked her head to the other side of the room, forcing me to follow her gaze. What I saw had me sitting upright.
“Fox! What the hell are you doing?”
He sat cross-legged with his eyes closed and…completely naked. “Centering.”
“Why are you centering in our room? And why the fuck are you naked?”
“Cursing is never the answer,” he said, still not opening his eyes. “As for your first question, I’m centering in here because there’s something wrong and I’m trying to figure out what that is.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, irritated as fuck that I had to put up with his ass first thing in the morning. “What’s wrong is that someone is trying to kill us.”
“It’s beyond that. In my head, I can see something evil approaching. It has nothing to do with Mercy. At least, not in the way you think.”
“Fox,” I snapped, but he still didn’t open his eyes. “Fox!”
Sighing, he looked at me and he was pissed. “I was almost there. Why did you have to interrupt me?”
“Because you’re naked in my room! Get the fuck out!”
“You know, I was trying to do you a favor.”
“Well, you can do me a really big favor by covering your dick,” I said, throwing a pillow at him.
He caught it and set it in his lap. I was never touching that again. “You should listen to me. Your aura is all off.”
“You don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about. You’re just spouting a bunch of crap.”
“Crap to you. But since I dug deeper into meditation, I’m really picking up these crazy vibes. I’m telling you, it’s a high unlike anything I’ve felt before.”
I stared at the crazy fucker on my floor and snapped. “Get out. Get out, get out, get out!”
When he didn’t immediately move, I threw the covers off and stalked toward him. He scrambled to his feet, dropping the pillow. In that moment, it struck me how weird as fuck it was that we were both standing naked in a standoff in front of Mercy.
The door swung open and Nick walked in, staring at both us with a pained expression. “I expected this from him,” he eyed me. “He’s crazy. What’s your excuse?”
“I woke up to him in my room. I was sleeping.”
Nick shoved a hand through his thick, black hair. “Whatever. We should get on the road.”
“Are you ready for that?”
Sighing, he held his hand up. “Can you put some damn pants on?”
“It’s my fucking room!” I shouted as Nick walked out.
“Just to be clear,” Fox said, “are you against me being in your room or being in your room naked?”
I narrowed my eyes and he quickly scrambled out before I could punch him in the face. Mercy was laughing behind me. Sure, it was funny to her. She didn’t have to deal with this shit all the time.
“Just remember what happened last night,” I growled.
“Yes, I do,” she grinned. “I think that was some of the best sex yet. And you thought you were punishing me.”
I tried not to let my lips twitch, but failed miserably. She had this way of making me release my anger and calm the fuck down when I thought I’d lose my shit.
“Is Nick okay to travel?”
“I’ll check on him, but I highly doubt he would let me tell him to sit around for another day.”
“Not if it involved being around Fox for another day.”
She cocked her head curiously. “What’s with that anyway? I thought they were friends?”
“You can be friends with someone and still want to strangle them.” I knew that from personal experience with Asher. I had a love/hate relationship with the way he chose to shut me out and keep me in the loop at the same time.
Speaking of which, I needed to find a way to get ahold of him. If he was going to keep disappearing on me, I would never get the answers I needed. How the hell was I supposed to know if it was safe to go anywhere when he wouldn’t tell me if Rafe was involved or if I was looking in the wrong direction?
“I’ll go make sure Nick is good to go,” Mercy said, sidling past me. “You should put some pants on before I come back here and decide that last night wasn’t enough.
“Then I guess I’ll stay naked.”
“Please don’t.”
I looked up into Patrick’s pitiful eye as he stood in my doorway. The other eye was purple and swollen. I wasn’t the least bit sorry. He deserved it for even thinking of sticking his hand in the bathtub with Mercy, whether our last form of communication with Cash was on the line or not.
Mercy slipped out of my grasp and past Patrick, who had the decency to blush as she passed. Grabbing my pants off the floor, I quickly dressed. “What do you want?”
“The same as everyone else. To get the fuck out of here and forget this trip ever happened.”
“Do you have a route planned?”
“Yeah, I went over it with Nick this morning while you were…sleeping.”
I took that as a sign that he heard the multiple times I woke Mercy up to fuck throughout the night. “Any obstacles along the way?”
“A bit of slow traffic in spots, but I assume you want to get to OPS as quickly as possible.”
“Yeah. I don’t like the thought of being on the road for too long.”
“There’s a lot of open road along the way,” he said hesitantly. “We might be better off asking Cash to send another team out.”
“Getting another vehicle would be pointless,” I said more to myself than him. “Nick and Fox are out, which leaves you and me to protect Mercy.”
“Don’t let Nick hear you say that,” Patrick grumbled.
“But staying here another day to wait for another team could be just as dangerous.”
“If we move now, we might be able to keep whoever it is from tracking us,” Patrick agreed. “Since we don’t know how they’re tracking us, we can’t guarantee the safety of this house for too long.”
“If this is about Mercy—” he hedged.
“I don’t think it is.”
“But if it is, are you certain there’s no one else that could be trying to kill her? I mean, it all started at her apartment.”
“It’s more likely that it’s about Rafe. He’s the one always fucking with our lives.”
“What if it’s not either of you?”
My gaze shot to his. “What are you talking about?”
He shrugged. “A series of random events.”
“Yeah, I took her on the run because I wasn’t fucking sure.”
“Were you? Chase, you bashed your head in during the explosion. No one would think?—”
“Are you fucking serious?” I snapped. “I saw that fucker outside her apartment. And I saw him after the explosion. It was intentional. And we didn’t get chased into the state park by a ghost. Someone was trying to kill us.”
“Alright, alright,” he said, holding up his hands. “I’m sorry. It’s just, without anything to go on, I’m trying to figure out some other explanation for what’s happening.”
“What’s happening is exactly what I already told you. If you want to help, make sure we get home in one fucking piece.”
His face hardened and he gave a slight nod. “Right. I’ll start getting our shit together.”
Right or wrong, I told him what I needed. Figuring out who was after us wouldn’t help us right now. In a day, we’d be back at OPS and then we could pool all our resources into figuring out who would want us dead. I wouldn’t do anything else to put Mercy’s life at risk.