Chapter Twenty
Rebecca
I slept content and satisfied with my men around me. My brain had moved on from Reg Jacks…for now. At some point I’d have to unwrap that onion of trauma and face each moment, but I wasn’t ready for that right now. Perhaps it was survival instinct or self-preservation.
“Hey,” I said, turning and coming face to face with Cillian.
“Hey yourself.” He grinned. “Hungry?”
“I fucking am,” Finn murmured behind me and squeezed closer.
“I’ll go find food,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Just a slice of toast and coffee, I need coffee.”
“I think you should eat something a bit more nourishing. You skipped dinner.”
“Okay, whatever you think.”
He stood, his face serious. “I’ll get food organized.” He pulled on jeans and tucked his pierced cock into them before carefully doing up the zipper. His hair was definitely in a I’ve-been-fucking-long-and-hard style.
“What do you want to do today?” Finn asked.
“The partners have told me not to go into work, so I guess I’ll go and see Amy and then head home. I feel like I haven’t been there for ages, and it will be nice knowing my stalker is…gone.”
“Yeah, he’s gone.” Finn sat and stretched. “No need to worry about him anymore.”
I flipped over, the duvet twisting around my waist and legs, and watched his torso elongate, highlighting all of the muscles beneath the surface.
I was so grateful for him and his brother.
They’d called Mary to let her know I was safe and well, and she’d sent a text later with a message from my boss telling me not to come into work until I was up for it.
Which wouldn’t be long, I loved my job, and now I’d be able to get on with it without looking over my shoulder.
A little while later Cillian ambled in with a tray full of coffee and bacon and egg pancakes. The smell was heavenly.
I hopped up and pulled on my knickers and Finn’s gym t-shirt again.
“I love you in that.” He kissed my brow then sat opposite me at the small round table.
The food was delicious, and we all wolfed it down. Sex clearly built up an appetite in us all.
There was a knock at the door.
“Yeah?” Cillian called.
“It’s me, Mitch.”
“Come in,” Finn said then drained his coffee.
Mitch wandered in. His black jeans, black rollneck sweater, and dark hair gave the impression of some kind of badass undercover James Bond. And I’d guess he had the body to go with it. The width of his shoulders and the bulge of his biceps proved he was a gym-goer.
“How you doing?” He set his attention on me.
“I’m good. Thanks.”
“Amy wants to see you, she’s called me twice already this morning.”
“She has?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh…and yes, yes, you’re right. I do need to go over there.”
“I’m free if you want me to walk you,” Mitch said.
I studied him and tried to read between the lines. He liked Amy. Mitch wanted to see Amy. That was what he was really saying. He wasn’t offering to walk me out of the good of his heart. He had an ulterior motive.
How did I feel about him wanting to see my Amy?”
He seemed like a decent guy, He was a cop.
He was friends with my men, and from what I’d heard he’d had a role in getting me back safely the day before.
But he was in Galahad, a masked vigilante group.
He was a cop who played down and dirty in the gray lines of the law, and I didn’t really know how I felt about that.
I cleared my throat. Being too protective over Amy was something I needed to work on. She was a grown-ass adult and had to expand the number of people in her life. But should Mitch be one of them?
“We need to get to the gym,” Finn said. “Or at least one of us does.”
That decided it for me. “You guys go, both of you, it’s work after all. I’ll head over to Amy’s with Mitch, give her a hug, prove I’m alive and well, and then I’ll go to my place. Perhaps I’ll cook for us all this evening.”
The twins glanced at each other.
“What?”
“I guess we’ve got used to having you close and we like it.” Cillian shrugged.
I laughed. “And I like it, too, but I have things to do, and thanks to you guys I can get on with it.” I stood and pressed a kiss to first Finn’s lips and then Cillian’s.
Cillian squeezed my butt quite openly in front of Mitch.
I turned to him. “I’ll shower quickly and then come down, is that okay?”
“Sure thing.” Mitch shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “I’ll be waiting.”
Forty-five minutes later, I pressed the intercom on Amy’s apartment.
She answered immediately. “Becca. You’re here.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, thank the dear Lord above. Come up. Come up.”
“Mitch is with me.”
He wore Ray-Bans now, and all I saw was my own reflection in them. His mouth was a flat line, and he slipped his phone into his back pocket.
A pause, then, “Okay…both come up.”
The door buzzed, and I pushed in, Mitch close behind.
As soon as Amy opened her door, she flung herself at me, squeezing me with her slender arms. She almost took my breath.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Thank goodness you’re safe. I’ve been so worried, so worried I thought my heart was going to give out.” She pulled back and stared at me, studying the very depths of my eyes. “If that bastard hurt you…I’ll…I’ll bloody kill him.”
“He didn’t, just frightened me, and I’m fine.” I didn’t see any need to tell her he was already dead, that my new boyfriends had made sure of that. Again, that was me being protective of her.
Her attention went to Mitch. She cleared her throat and knotted her fingers. “Hello again.”
“Amy. Just wanted to make sure you were okay. You were upset yesterday.”
“Thank you.” A rise of color appeared on her cheeks. “That’s kind of you.”
“Just doing my job.”
“But you’re off duty,” I said then pressed my lips together to stop myself from saying more.
“Always on duty, Rebecca,” he said. “The bad guys don’t take days off.
” He removed his shades and poked them into the collar of his sweater.
His attention went to Amy again, and he tipped his head as though taking in her pink dress that was dotted with daisies and her bare feet with pink toenails.
She was eternally more delicate and girly than me, and I didn’t try and compete, she won hands down even without trying.
And it was clear Mitch liked what he saw.
Amy cleared her throat again. “So you’ve been checked over, right?”
“Yes, I said. All clear, blood’s good, too. Just got the results back.”
“That’s a relief.” She turned and walked to the kitchen area in her compact apartment. “Anyone want a drink?”
“Just water,” I said. The bacon had made me thirsty.
“Same here,” Mitch answered.
Soon we were sitting in her living area; Amy and I on a dark-burgundy sofa, and Mitch in a wide burnt-orange armchair. An ancient sycamore tree was in full leaf, and the window practically glowed green. Above it, a sliver of blue sky gave a burst of sunlight over the carpet.
“I was beside myself.” Amy took my hand. “I could see your phone in the middle of a field somewhere. I went straight to the police station, and Mitch was there with Finn and Cillian.”
“You had great information, Amy,” Mitch said, his big hands curling over the arms of the chair. “Helped a lot in finding Rebecca. That app is a handy thing to have.”
“Yes.” She squeezed my hand. “We trust each other, and have no secrets, so it’s useful…very useful, it seems.”
Quiet descended. The air was practically fizzing with chemistry, and I forced myself not to fill the silence.
Eventually, Mitch spoke. “You lived here long, Amy?”
“Yes, ten years now.”
He nodded. “Move from far?”
Amy glanced at me, and I saw a flash of uncertainty.
“It’s up to you,” I said, knowing she didn’t share her past easily.
“From Yorkshire.”
“Fair distance then.” He reached for his water and took a sip.
“A good distance.”
He raised his left eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I had to put miles between myself and where I grew up.”
“Which was Yorkshire?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t exactly a conventional childhood.”
“In what way?” His focus on her was intense.
I wasn’t sure if it was because he was wildly attracted to her or it was professional curiosity.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” Her jaw tensed. “I grew up in a cult.” She stared straight at him, her chin tipped in determination.
“Not that they called it that, it’s known as The Way Forward, a group who believed it was their calling to repopulate a dwindling human race without the interference of outsiders.
A new tribe that was self-sufficient and self-ruled. ”
“Must have been difficult,” he said, “to grow up in that.”
“Yes, it was. My parents…they weren’t married.”
“Lots of people have children out of wedlock.” His voice was gentle, coaxing.
“They believed in gene sharing, in other words my father had multiple children with multiple women, and my mother, she gave birth to ten children. Only my twin is my full sibling.”
“You’re a twin.” Mitch set his drink down and stayed leaning in with his elbows on his knees, hands dangling between. “Did he, she, come to Oxford with you?”
“No, he didn’t, he believed in the cause.”
A frown had formed on Mitch’s brow. “So you must have had a big house, all those kids.”
“No, us kids lived in dorms, long sheds, and ate communally and had to grab whatever clothes we could of a morning.” She went quiet and closed her eyes. “It was…”
I rested a hand on her leg. “It wasn’t a conventional childhood. There was no real closeness with your parents, isn’t that right, Amy?”
“That’s right, we were just a number.” She opened her eyes and set her attention on Mitch. “We had to conform or we were locked up on our own for days. I didn’t…don’t know parental love like most people do.”
“I’m really sorry you went through that,” Mitch said, his dark eyes flashing. “It shouldn’t be allowed.”
“No it shouldn’t,” I said. “So when I met Amy, I wanted to help.”
“How did you meet?” he asked.
“I hit eighteen and left with just the clothes on my back,” Amy said. “I went to the roadside and hitched a lift.”
“Risky!” He downturned his mouth.
“I was lucky, a professor of botany picked me up. She’d been lecturing up north and was heading back to Oxford.
I told her my entire story, and instead of just dropping me off on a street corner, she helped me get on my feet, and that included getting me a lawyer.
” She smiled at me. “Which is how I met my best friend in the whole world.”
“I was newly qualified and doing pro-bono work. We met, hit it off straight away, and have been close ever since.”
“And the professor?” Mitch asked.
“Janie, she’s retired now, mostly, and I still see her often. I reckon I used up half a lifetime of luck the day she picked me up.”
Mitch was quiet as if taking in Amy’s shocking story. He nibbled on his bottom lip.
“I might…” I hopped up. “Just use the bathroom, if that’s okay.”
“Sure.” Amy also stood and went to the window with her arms folded and her long blonde hair swishing down her back.
I slipped past the kitchen area and into the neat, pine-scented bathroom.
I stared in the mirror. Amy had revealed more to Mitch than she had done to anyone else that I knew of…
apart from professor Janie. There was clearly something between them.
They’d met a few times now, and the electricity, the sexual energy, was palpable.
I ran the water and cooled my hands. I needed to leave them to their fireworks before they set me alight, too.
But could I tear myself away from her when she’d just been so vulnerable? Could Mitch be trusted to hold her together?
I opened the door, took half a step out, and then froze.
They were both standing by the window, silhouetted to me. Their bodies were close, Mitch tall and solid, Amy delicate and petite. But it wasn’t that which made my heart do a little skip, it was the way Mitch had gathered Amy’s hair at the crown of her head and was holding it in a fist.
She’d tipped her head to look up at his face, and her sweet profile held both captivation and surrender.
His dark gaze bore into her, and he spoke, nothing I could catch, and lowered his face so their noses were practically touching.
My stomach clenched. Their unguarded moment was deeply private and somehow hugely erotic.
I stepped back into the bathroom, pulled the flush, ran the water and then went back out, humming a loud, happy tune.
They snapped apart. Mitch then sat and crossed his ankle over his knee.
I smiled at Amy and tried to read her expression. Her cheeks were rosy, and her lips shone as though she’d just licked them.
“I’m going to head off.” I gestured to the door. “I haven’t been home for a while. I’ve got things to do, you know.”
“Er, yes, of course, unless you want anything to eat here,” Amy said. “I have a pizza in the fridge. I could heat it up.”
“No, no, I had a big breakfast with Finn and Cillian.” I smiled to reassure her. “But thanks.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.” I paused. “So…you’ll be okay?” I flicked my eyes to Mitch.
She glanced at him. “Yes.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure.” She walked to the door with me. “He’s a good guy,” she said quietly. “I think he understands me.”
I looked over her shoulder. He’d pulled out his phone and was peering at the screen, but I knew full well he’d be trying to hear our words. “I think he is, too, but…”
“But?”
“He doesn’t play by the same rules most people do.”
“He’s a cop.” Amy frowned.
“I guess that makes it easier for him not to.”
“I don’t understand.”
I squeezed her elbow. “But he’s a very good friend of Finn and Cillian, and I trust their judgment in people.” I paused. “You call if you need me.”
“Thanks.” She gave me a hug. “I’m just relieved you’re okay. I don’t know what I would have done if anything had happened to you.”
I held her for a moment then slipped from the apartment into the warmth of the day and headed down the avenue toward home.
It felt strange to leave Amy with a guy in the apartment.
She’d never had a proper relationship, one that meant something other than scratching an itch.
Perhaps Mitch was the one; maybe his darkness would match her black past.