Chapter Seven
Oh, she was mad. So, so mad. Mercedes slammed the door shut and glared at the men ruining her life.
“Are you three crazy?” She began and realized she desperately wanted to know the answer. How could they be sane and act the way they did?
“You had no right to scare Todd off like that.” She fumed as she searched for her phone. Maybe she could salvage her plans with some damage control. All she had to do was call Todd, tell him to come back, it was a misunderstanding on the part of her brother’s Neanderthal friends, get rid of those three caveman bullies, and resume with the program.
“Did you threaten him? Is that what you did? Why? Why would you do such a thing?” she asked, pulling up Todd on her contacts. Before she could connect the call, Myles snatched it out of her hand with lightning speed, did something, then handed it back to her before she could ask him what he thought he was doing.
Whatever, but rude. Except, when she tried to find Todd’s contact details. The six-foot-four tyrant deleted Todd from her phone. She hadn’t memorized his number; who did that nowadays anyway?
Okay, this was getting crazier.
“You deleted Todd’s details from my phone,” she said incredulously.
“Yes,” Waylan said. “We don’t want the fucker coming back here thinking he’s saving the damsel from distress.”
“Are you nuts ? You had no right to do that.”
“We have every right to do that. Look, Missades , we’re just back from a mission from hell. We’ve been shot at, wrestled with a crocodile, got bitten on the fucking ass by an ant, and ate wild berries for days on end,” Waylan said. “All we want to do is sleep. In peace. In this cabin. Alone. Just the three of us.”
“First of all, and again for the millionth time, my name is Mercedes. Mer. Ced. Es. Not Misshades.”
Come to think of it, they’ve never pronounced her name right, not since she was a little girl, and followed them and her brother around everywhere. She loved her brother, but she utterly and completely adored his friends, clearly not knowing any better at that time.
At a party her mom had thrown for Jeff for his sixteenth, she’d overheard a group of girls in bikinis talking about how they’d like to bang her brother’s friends, over and over again, so she banged them instead. With a stick. Her defense? She’d hurt anyone who wanted to hurt them. In her defense also, she’d only been six years old, and she had no idea what the term banged meant.
“Second of all—”
Her attention was taken off what she wanted to say next as she now followed their movements.
They moved around the cabin, touching her things.
“What do you think you’re doing? Don’t touch that.”
She snatched her panties from Myles—the one she’d been wearing before she changed into her seductress garb. But then Waylan grabbed her track bottoms, the thermal long-sleeve top, and her hoodie and shoved them into her hands. Holden piled her boots onto the armful of clothes and spun her around in the direction of the bathroom.
“Get dressed. You’re next out the door.”
“Excuse me,” she said, spinning around to face them. What the real heck was wrong with these men?
She knew they were some big shots in the military doing dangerous covert work for the government, but maybe they’d forgotten how civilized people behaved in the rest of the world. Certainly they’d forgotten the simple concept of first come, first served.
“But I was here first. You should be the ones leaving.”
“Does Jeff know you’re here?”
“No, but that doesn’t change anything.”
“It changes everything. Jeff knows we’re here. He was the one who left us a vehicle at the air base with the keys to this cabin. We’re supposed to be here. You? Not.”
“Now put on your clothes and get a move on. We need to sleep.” They started to remove their jackets and then their boots. She dumped her clothes onto a chair and haughtily wrapped the blanket tighter around her, then crossed her arms over her chest like a school teacher.
“Well, I can’t get a move on out of here,” she said, air quoting ‘move on.’ “I ran out of gas coming here.”
“You what?” Holden thundered.
“I ran out of gas coming here.”
“I heard what you said,” Holden growled, running his hands through his short hair.
“Then why did you ask me to repeat it?” she said cheekily.
“Because we’re trying to understand your recklessness. You could have gotten caught in a storm in the middle of the road and shivered your irresponsible ass off to death. Do you understand you’re in the middle of nowhere? Did you tell anyone you were here?”
“No, but—”
“The only butt should be yours, streaked red with our handprints.”
“Excuse me?” She said, again, completely affronted. Were they talking about spanking her?
She gasped as the image took hold in her mind, filling her with outrage, hot, mind-altering outrage. They wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.
“I’m not that stupid,” she carried on. “I had a plan. I was supposed to go back home with Todd. But no. You had to scare him away, so this really is your problem now.”
All she heard were their very low rumbles of frustration littered with the word fuck as if they were throwing confetti on her. Hello? This was their fault. Serves them right that she was now their problem, and if they wanted to get rid of her, they would have to drive her off themselves. Or better yet...
“If you want me gone, you’ll either have to drive me or give me your car keys. Your choice. You know—” She stopped talking as the wind picked up drastically outside. And then it started to howl, so much so that she thought she felt the floor move underneath her feet.
Oh god. Snow started to bang against the windows with such sudden ferocity, her heart started to thud. She had the foresight to check the weather at least, and there hadn’t been anything to worry about, no warning about a snowstorm or anything close to it.
Great. Now she was stuck with them for who knows how long.
All the storm did, though, was increase their crankiness by the bucket load.