Chapter Two
Noah
–a year later
“Every woman loves the guy who rescues her,” says the senior coordinator.
Spoken like a man who’s probably still a virgin. I resist the urge to face-palm myselfagain over the lack of creativity and medieval sensibility of the people I have to work with. I don’t need their help picking up a woman. I certainly don’t need them to come up with a moronic scheme to have three would-be thugs “attack” her while she’s on vacation in Mexico, so I can “rescue” her.
I tell them it’s unnecessary, but they look at me like I just told them to kill her. The fake thugs are already on their way, and if I don’t do my part, horrible things could happen to her.
“Make sure to get punched in the face or get knifed on the side because then there’ll be a logical reason for her to stick around.”
You’d have to have the brain of a single fat cell to come up with this. I’ve never had to do more than flash a twinkle-eyed smile to get laid. There’s no need to get punched or knifed.
I keep track of the target in the crowded club. Bobbi Bright, the only child of Otto Bright. I need to retrieve his dossiers, which nobody has been able to recover so far despite a fine-toothed combing through all his known associates. His daughter’s the only one left to check.
She might have them…or she might not. She didn’t seem that close to her father. After finishing college, she started working as a bodyguard for Hollywood celebs and influencers while Otto continued with his career at the State Department. But you can’t trust a traitor—or even a potential traitor, and not even if they come in a package as beautiful as Bobbi.
All that soft golden hair tumbling down her back, the smooth lean muscles of her long arms and legs flexing as she dances. Her breasts aren’t big, but they only need to be big enough to feel good in my palms with sensitive nipples. The lithe torso dips into a tight waist and somewhat narrow hips, her body wrapped in a tight black top and flaring skirt. She’s not voluptuous, but she keeps in shape. And that’s sexy.
As she tilts her chin at the climax of the music, a smile curves her soft lips. Her long lashes cast crescent shadows around her wide eyes, and the dim lights from the ceiling creates shadows that showcase the perfection of her cheekbones.
Unlike the many women who contour to bring out their facial structures, Bobbi is one hundred percent natural. She buys a cocktail, smiling at a bartender who grins at her like he’s in love, then fans herself.
She finishes her drink and steps outside. The air in the club is cold and stale with sweat and alcohol. I follow her out.
Her hands on her hips, she inhales and exhales slowly. The parking lot isn’t too well-lit, and drunken tourists and laughter from the locals shatter what little silence the night would’ve brought.
I stay out of view and do my best to avoid becoming impatient. The “thugs” should pop out of the shadows any time now. I would, if I were as boring and unimaginative as the people who orchestrated this farce.
On cue, three scruffy looking types strut forward. All big beefy guys with thick muscles underneath stretchy shirts and jeans. Three gold rings flash on the sausage-like fingers of the guy in the middle. Impressive. Maybe even scary if you didn’t know they’re fake gangbangers.
They approach Bobbi, then say something in fluent Spanish, getting a little too close. They’re the kind of folks the State Department website warns you about, and the Mexican authorities want to eliminate to allay the fears of the gringo tourists.
The one in center steps into her personal space, then grabs her wrist.
Guess that’s my cue. I take a step forward—
There’s a sudden movement; Bobbi twists his arm, bringing the guy’s head down a bit and then kicks him hard on the point of his chin, her leg shooting up at an impressively vertical angle. He drops like a rock.
I blink. That wasquick. So much for me playing the hero.
The other two pull knives, the blades glinting. She’s going to back away now, which will give me my chance. I start forward—
Nope. She traps the arm of the first guy who comes at her, grabs him by his shoulder, twisting violently, and tosses him in a spectacular judo throw. Holyshit. Her foot connects with his belly, and he curls into a ball with a pained groan. The third one lashes out with his blade, and I am finally in position to help out. I grab his wrist, spin him around and punch his jaw in one motion. He collapses, feigning unconsciousness—I didn’t hit him that hard.
She huffs out a breath, then looks at me. “You okay?”
I feel like an actor who just realized he’s been studying the wrong script, but I nod. Didn’t anybody study this woman’s background before setting this up?
Her critical gaze rakes me top to bottom. “Thank you.” She speaks in a calm, gentle voice. “But you didn’t have to do that.”
“Apparently not. You can obviously handle yourself in a fight. But it was one against three. Not really fair.”
She smiles. Feeling the full impact, I realize why the bartender grinned like he was in love. A woman who can take care of herself with ease, then smiles at you like an angel is positivelynuclear. My heart thunders hard and fast.
Suddenly, the smile vanishes, and a frown pinches her eyebrows. “You got cut.”
She reaches out, fingertips brushing my bare arm gingerly. A delicious prickling sensation spreads through me.
“Probably should put a Band-Aid on that.” She looks up at me. “I have some at my place.”
“That’d be great—”
A jolt that travels from tailbone to skull wakes me up. Dammit. I blink at the bright light of the Airbus cabin as I remember I’m on a commercial flight. What was the pilot thinking? The older passengers probably had their backs thrown out.
There’s a roar of deceleration and creaks from the fuselage as the plane tries to slow down on the tarmac. Rain drops splatter the window, streaking and blurring the view.
I wish I were on my private plane. My personal pilot would’ve done a better job of landing, for one thing. But this is work, and incognito is the name of the game. To the point that I’m traveling under a fake name and ID.
The cabin attendant smiles as I deplane. “Have a great evening. We’d love to see you again soon, Mr. Everson.”
I give her my flirtiest grin and start walking up the ramp. See? I can easily charm any woman, no faux heroism necessary. If my idiot handlers hadn’t set up the moronic plan behind my back, I wouldn’t have fallen for Bobbi so hard and so fast.
And I wouldn’t be here, in the dreary, rainy Pacific Northwest.
* * *
Two hours later, I’m standing in front of a fancy intercom at my mom’s mansion. “I’d rather fornicate with Mozart,” I say loudly into the mic. Otherwise, Mom will claim she couldn’t hear me over the howl of the storm and keep me outside until she’s satisfied.
Two beats…and nothing happens. Goddamn it. She’s kept the old passcode. I sigh and say, “There’s no one I’d rather fuck than my mom.” I grit my teeth to avoid gagging. It’d only amuse her, and I’m not in the mood to entertain her perverse sense of humor.
Finally, the lock clicks open. I walk inside the huge chateau, topped with soaring witch-hat turrets, overlooking the Pacific from a cliff. Mom doesn’t like the sun—or people—so she loves this place. It’s remote, very defensible and made with marble and stone in various hues. Fifty Shades of Grey, the Real Estate Edition.
I stride past the solid double doors at least fourteen feet in height. The ceiling is even higher. The place holds very little warmth by design. The moist chill of the rain lingers in the air.
It’ll be easy to locate Mom in the vast home—she’ll be in the kitchen, her favorite place. Not because she’s that into cooking or eating, but because there are a lot of sharp objects close at hand.
“Careful you don’t track mud onto the floor,” she calls out.
“You think mud is what’s on my mind?”
“I have no clue what’s on your mind, and don’t particularly care. My concern is you dirtying my floor.”
“What’s on my mind,” I say as I walk into the kitchen, “is why you didn’t change the passcode like we talked about.”
“Because I never agreed to the change. You can’t just use some common phrase—then it wouldn’t be a passcode.”
“But fucking your mother?”
“I was accommodating your objection to fucking a cow,” she says carelessly.
“Yeah, well, I don’t play with my food.” My brothers were smart to not work with their mothers. I should’ve followed their lead. Nora Blane is an exceptional agent, but she’s a terrible boss and handler. “What’s wrong with ‘I’d rather fornicate with Mozart’ anyway? It’s not like anybody says that.”
“Bo-ring.” She puts down the glass of chardonnay she’s been sipping, and cuts into a loaf of crusty bread, creating a slice that without measuring will be precisely half an inch thick. A sleeveless black turtleneck and black leotards stretch over her tall, lithe frame. She’s wearing a pair of stylish boots, but if she ever kicks you, you’ll know the pointy tips aren’t for fashion. Short black hair frames her pixie-like face. Some say I got my coloring from her, but it isn’t true—my six half-brothers all have the same dark hair, and we’re related on our father’s side. The smoothness of her skin is more befitting a teenager than a woman with a grown-up son.
Mom tosses the breadknife in the air, catching it smoothly while her green eyes are still on me. Those eyes, which hold whatever emotion she wants them to, are currently impassive.
“Show-off,” I mutter.
“We all have our fortes. Mine happens to be blades.” She gestures with the knife. “Want some?”
She knows how much I love carbs. “Thank you.” I take the rest of the loaf from the cutting board.
She shakes her head. “Bread was probably what went through your mind when that plane was going down.”
I pull out jars of honey and raspberry jam from the pantry. Not bread, but the birthday cake Bobbi made for me. It was the last time we spent any meaningful time together.
Mom hands me a glass of the chardonnay, which I realize is chilled once I take it. We sit at the counter with a couple of knives and our respective glasses. I smear a generous dollop of honey on the bread and bite into it. It’s excellent, with a good subtle flavor of grain. Maybe the bakery this came from is another reason Mom doesn’t want to leave this godforsaken area.
“We flushed out the mole. So next time there won’t be another plane crash.” This is about as emotional as she’s going to get about what happened to me.
She can fake situationally appropriate sentiments, convince you she feels them from the bottom of her heart, but in reality, she feels nothing. Sometimes I’m tempted to poke her with a needle and see if she bleeds something like oil or hydraulic fluid.
“Nicely wrapped up?” I ask.
“With a pretty bow.” She smiles like a divine messenger. The mole probably wishes he was dead. If he isn’t already.
“Then there won’t be a problem with me taking some time off.” My tone is casual, like a billionaire carelessly expressing desire to purchase a private island.
She frowns. “Some time off?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much time, exactly?”
“Not sure, actually.”
Understanding dawns in her penetrating eyes. “You want an indefinite leave.”
“Unpaid,” I add, like that has to be the most pressing thing on her mind.
All warmth leaches from her face. “That isn’t the point. Making it unpaid won’t make you return any faster.”
True enough. I invested my money with two of my brothers, Emmett and Grant, who founded a venture capital firm together. They made me filthy rich. If I didn’t have my job, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself all day. Hell, I might spend the time making babies, which would make my father so happy. I spread my arms. “Some people just have clever brothers, and they’re smart enough to know who to listen to.”
Mom lost a huge chunk of her retirement savings when her financial advisor bet against the companies Grant said would be good to buy. Dunno why she ignored Grant. He made at least a million a year trading stocks in college. Beating the market is his forte, just like delicately fileting a man is hers.
Mom looks like she’d love nothing more than strangling me. Not that she will, because she hates working with her bare hands.
“Besides, some quality time at home will ensure my brothers won’t suspect anything. A billionaire wildlife photographer is bound to say no to projects here and there and spend time slothing around on a beach.”
“Sloth is not a verb.”
“And yet you understood my meaning.”
Her eyes narrow. “I doubt ‘slothing’ will be necessary. Your brothers are about as perceptive as deaf, one-eyed donkeys.”
“Or I’m just that good.”
Her snort says I’m still an amateur compared to her. “Is this about Bobbi Bright?”
I consider denying it for a second. I’m good at lying, having inherited the ability from my mother. Polygraphs and barbiturates are powerless against her—or me. Torture is basically futile since we both have incredibly high pain thresholds. Not only that, when our bodies have had enough, they start to register pain as some kind of weird high. Mom says it’s convenient, but I think it’s unnatural. Still, it’s preferable to screaming and writhing like most people.
But if she suspects I’m lying, she’s going to poke her nose into my business until she’s satisfied, a.k.a. until she’s proven correct.
“When the plane was going down and I was facing possible death, I didn’t really feel anything. I vaguely thought I’d miss my brothers—but I was confident you’d come up with a good reason for why I wasn’t around anymore. You always have a good cover story.”
She sips her chardonnay, her unblinking eyes on mine.
“My mind emptied, and I couldn’t decide if I should care whether I lived or died. Then I thought about a birthday cake Bobbi made for me.” I give Mom a small, empty smile. The cake wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I also remembered Bobbi’s sweet smile. As I gazed at her beautiful face, for the first time in my life I was glad to have been born, and I told her so. The rose that spread across her cheeks was mesmerizing, and my heart thudded as though it yearned to leave the confines of my chest and run to its true master.
And my heart pumping hard on that plane with black smoke billowing out of its engines was just like that time, but it was more of a mourning that she wasn’t going to smile at me like that anymore. She might not even miss me. Hell, she might go out dancing when she heard I was dead.
The possibility was soul-crushing, even though I definitely gave her just cause.
I was exasperated with myself as the plane dipped lower. If I missed her so much that she was the only one on my mind when my plane was nosediving, why was I staying away?
If I survived this, I’d go see her, I vowed. I didn’t know what I’d do next, but I’d go say hello. If she felt nothing for me…
Well, I’d deserve that. But one step at a time, and first things first.
I survived the spectacular crash that wasn’t covered in the media. And returned to the States in one piece.
“I just wanted to have her cake again.” A lie, but one with enough truth to sound plausible. Plus, Mom is aware of my carb addiction.
“You’re eating bread from her bakery. I special ordered it from Bobbi’s Sweet Things.”
I pause for a moment, wondering if Mom has some ulterior motive. But her face betrays nothing. I take another bite, savor it. It’s amazing bread, with thick crust and perfectly soft inside. It tastes even better knowing it’s Bobbi’s. “Thank you. But bread isn’t cake,” I say between bites.
“You didn’t want it before.”
“I was on a diet.”
She narrows her eyes. “Mike Swain and his fiancée had nothing to do with it?”
My gut does that tight and uncomfortable twist it did when I first heard of their deaths. Fear runs its fingers up my spine. It’s all I can do to not shudder. I bite into the bread to buy some time.
I meant it when I told Bobbi I’d come by for the bakery opening, but then Mom called at the last minute to have me dispatch some terrorist trying to get his hands on a dirty nuke. I told her to have another asset handle it, but she said that wasn’t possible. Something ugly had happened to Mike Swain, the one who was supposed to do the job. His face was removed, and his fiancée raped and shot—collateral damage. Their deaths hit close to home.
The fiancée had tried to flee. She was just a civilian, but the assholes didn’t care. An image of Bobbi’s honey-gold hair spread around in a pool of blood with her dark eyes staring blankly haunted me as I read the report.
I felt secretly relieved and ironically unwanted that Bobbi didn’t text or call to ream me out for breaking my word. It’s like my absence didn’t bother her. But I didn’t dare contact her because I had no clue what to tell her.
Hey, sorry, someone got killed along with his fiancée, and it sort of messed me up. Oh, how’d that happened? It was a hit. But you know… Things like that happen all the time, they don’t even report it on the news, ha ha ha…
Yeah, try to explain why a carefree billionaire wildlife photographer thinks the possibility of getting gunned down with his significant other is a thing. Not even I can come up with a good story for that. The only sensible solution was to stay away—or so I thought.
But my biggest regret when that plane was plunging was breaking so many promises to Bobbi. And I would’ve given anything to be able to see her again.
“Things have changed. I think of cake, I have to have it. You’ll understand, if you’re about to die and your favorite food pops into your head. We give prisoners whatever they want before they’re executed.”
“So? You weren’t being executed, and Bobbi is a civilian.”
Guess she didn’t buy my bullshit about wanting cake.
“You’ll get restless,” she adds. “You always do.”
“Then I’ll be back. But until then, let me have my cake.”