Chapter 23
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
By the time I make it back to the bungalow, my body has staged a mutiny and my brain is holding a press conference to explain why none of this means anything.
Investigative curiosity, obviously.
Reporters follow leads into corrupt offices and private islands. Jake dropped to his knees in the sand, put his mouth on my arm, and looked up at me like he understood something about me I haven’t figured out yet. Any competent journalist would be curious about that.
Would a competent journalist also get hard while investigating it?
I shut the bungalow door behind me and keep moving across the room, past the maroon bedsheets and out through the sheer curtains onto my private deck.
The pool gleams in the sun. Beyond it, wild green shrubs crowd the cliff before the island drops away to blue water.
Everything is so peaceful that the pounding in my chest feels even more embarrassing.
Jake is trapped.
It wasn’t seduction or whatever my body thinks it saw. Jake’s been tricked into mistaking captivity for preference, because admitting he’s caught would mean admitting he doesn’t know how to get free.
One test left. And then what? Alistair claps him on the shoulder and hands him ten million dollars for being the best desperate person on the island?
This isn’t a game Jake can win. It’s a net. A beautiful, catered, sunlit net, and Alistair has him wrapped so tightly in it that Jake thinks asking me to give him what he needs is an act of honesty instead of another symptom of the damage.
That’s what this is. Damage.
I pace around my pool with my fingers laced on top of my head.
The flex of my arm under his hand was surprise. The heat that went through me when his teeth closed carefully over my skin was adrenaline. The erection is evidence of nothing except poor timing, healthy circulation, and a damn convincing cover story.
Some broken little part of me recognizes whatever brought Jake to his knees. That doesn’t mean I want it. It means I’m investigating.
Digging my laptop out of my bag helps me believe my own bullshit.
I have every intention of following Jake’s good example and using the few hours before dinner to work, internet or not.
There are two nights left before we leave the island, and no chance in hell I’m ever coming back here. I should get started.
The napkin I stole from dinner sits beside my laptop, Alistair’s embroidered initials right where mouths are meant to kiss it.
As proof, it’s pathetic. More party favor than evidence.
I smooth it across the desk and consider the details I’ve witnessed through panic and arousal. The limo. The private jet. The island. The restraints. The game. It’s progress, but any expensive lawyer could make it disappear, and Alistair surely has the best money can buy.
A truly good story, one that sticks in people’s minds and changes opinions, needs a human face.
Jake’s is perfect.
Too perfect, actually, which is an obnoxious thing to notice while I’m busy trying to save him.
The blond hair. The blue eyes. The mouth that keeps ruining my ability to think of him as a source.
Readers would look twice, then feel guilty for looking once they understood what Alistair had done to him.
There’s the story.
A brilliant founder trapped by grief, money, and one billionaire’s appetite for control.
A man who can build technology to save strangers’ lives but can’t save himself.
Jake Quinn on his knees in the sand, asking for something he thinks he needs because he can’t see the thing he wants is still part of Alistair’s game.
And in swoops Marcus Wilder, with his notebook and his lies, to save the day.
Oof.
I sit down to write exactly that, open a blank document, and stare at the white space until it blurs into Jake dropping to his knees and my pulse starts hammering all over again.
So I start somewhere else, with his health tech startup inspired by losing his brother, but my fingers won’t let me retell it.
I growl and slam my fist on the desk.
Alistair has him now.
Jake walked away under his own power, laptop tucked under his arm, his face carefully arranged for Samuel and anyone watching from the beach house. But that’s what this place does. It makes captivity look voluntary. It teaches men to carry themselves wherever Alistair wants them next.
What does he want with Jake?
Had he been watching some live feed of us on the beach? We hadn’t actually done anything wrong, had we?
My stomach twists.
I try to type: Jacob Quinn is—
No.
I delete it, leaving the cursor blinking in the space where Jake should be.
I’m supposed to be good at this. Jake is the perfect center of the story. People forgive systems until you show them a person being crushed by one.
All I have to do is write him down.
Instead, I see his hand closing around my arm. The sand on his knees. The quick obedience in his face when I said I needed help.
Anything.
He’d offered me anything without knowing what I was asking for. Without knowing I had a story waiting to swallow him whole.
“Come on,” I say to the empty room.
Bad choice of words. The memory of Evan and Dae coming in those chairs flashes through my head, graphic and absolutely not helpful.
“Oh, fuck off,” I tell my brain, then shove back from the desk, hit the floor, and start doing pushups.
The first ten are punishment. The next ten are strategy. By fifty, my arms burn hard enough that only one thing is clear.
I can’t write him down yet.
Not when Alistair stole my chance to tell him the truth. I need one chance to look him in the eye, tell him about my story, and ask whether he wants any part in it.
That’s what the hero I’m making myself out to be would do. Competent journalist, right?
By eighty, sweat drips off my nose onto the polished floor, and I’m furious with myself for needing this, furious with Jake for making me care, and furious with Alistair for building a place where caring about someone is the easiest way to get them hurt.
I keep going until my muscles shake.
Then I shower, dress for dinner, and tell myself the man in the mirror looks ready. If he does, it’s only because Marcus Wilder is the one going back to Alistair’s table.
Jake’s absence weighs on the whole walk to dinner.
The group streams down the torchlit path in linen and laughter, passing champagne like this is a bachelor weekend, and I move with them because that’s what Marcus Wilder does.
But I can’t keep from counting again: Linus, Dae, Brad, the others.
No Jake. And fuck, no Evan either.
Jake’s absence makes me want to scan the trees, the staff, and the glass office hiding up the hill.
Evan’s makes me remember why I’m here. Last night didn’t continue with the guys laughing on the deck.
It continued when Alistair stood up from the table and walked off with Evan.
Whatever happened then might be happening to Jake right now.
That fear makes me work.
Because this story matters in a way it didn’t when Evie first sent me here. Now that I’ve seen the men trapped inside it, it has to be more than some sensational exposé. It has to be worthy of them.
Jake will be at dinner. He has to be. Once I tell him enough of the truth, he’ll say yes, and I’ll have my witness.
But I could have two, and there’s only one useful person within reach.
Brad’s quiet at the back of the pack, and I slow until I’m beside him.
His steps crunch along the trail, weighted by sheer muscle mass. Up close, he’s no roided gym rat with balloon arms or toothpick legs. He’s proportionally huge and proportionally menacing enough for me to trip over my opener.
“So, uh, how many times have you been here?”
“Lost count,” he grunts.
“It’s amazing.”
He grumbles again. A real charmer. I should leave him alone, but there’s got to be a human beneath all that bulk. His mom’s sick, and he’s stuck getting a billionaire off to take care of her.
I go for it.
“I know it’s a boundary, but Alistair mentioned your mom.”
His eyes narrow, sharp and fast, gaze sliding past me up the hill to where the glass office hides in the shadows.
“Just wanted to say I’m sorry. I lost mine to cancer.” The truth tastes wrong using it this way. “I’d pay anything to have one more day with her.”
His brows draw together while his mouth hangs open.
“Thanks,” he finally says. “She was diagnosed two years ago. I don’t want to talk about it. But, I appreciate the kind risk. Don’t do it again.”
Kind risk. That’s the realest thing I’ve heard from him.
Damn good for a five-minute stroll. It won’t be long before Brad and I are braiding each other’s hair… if he had any.
Seeing the glowing beach house with its pool set alight and a bonfire crackling beside it has lost none of its magic from the first time.
“Oh, heyyy!” Jake waves from the deck.
“Hey, boo!” Linus races past the pool and bounds up the stairs.
The sight of Jake and Linus embracing hooks something sharp beneath my ribs. Is he another of Jake’s allies? I thought I was the only one. Stupid, since I’d spent the stroll trying to enlist more than Jake. Why shouldn’t he do the same?
I’m just glad to see he’s okay, I tell myself.
I lose sight of them on the second-floor deck until I’m up the steps to find the table set the same as last night.
“Fuck, Marky.” Jake’s holding two cocktails, turquoise eyeshadow glinting when he turns. “We’re supposed to hold our fire, and you show up looking like that?”
He hands me one of the glasses and pulls me into a hug, exposed chests pressing together.
Before I can breathe him in, I whisper, “You okay?”
His eyes dart to the head of the table, but he does give me a nod.
Thank God. I want to pick him up and run from dinner, from whatever test is waiting on the other side, from any other allies he might have, and ask him the question I couldn’t make myself write around. Instead, I push that misfired thought aside and say something normal.
“Got to know Brad on the way.”