Chapter 15 ARES
Pulling back into Josie’s driveway made him feel like a pervy stalker but he didn’t want to leave and by coming back to check on her, it satisfied his need to make sure she was okay. Even though he wanted to break through her door and demand that she came with him.
He wanted to give her another orgasm—at least one more—and relish how her body lost the every day tension for that moment in time and she became all softness and languid. The pride he felt when she reached that state was like nothing he ever experienced before.
The last thing he wanted to do was to leave his girl, but duty called.
Obligation and loyalty were the ties he won’t break. Ares grabbed a water bottle from the back seat, took the cap off and slugged it back, trying to ease his tight throat. He didn’t want to lose Josie over another interrupted date.
He wanted her to understand and thought that asking her was asking for too much. But he was selfish that way. For too many years, he had put his own happiness above everything else. Having her in his arms felt so damn right. He wanted everything.
And he didn’t know if that was possible because it would depend on whether Josie could trust that he cared about her and would protect her and be loyal to her too, as well as maintaining his obligations to his brother.
It was a role he couldn’t abandon.
When a light upstairs flickered on, he started the car and drove away, heading through the traffic, his destination the training compound.
His phone buzzed just as he got on the highway.
He wasn’t in the mood to talk but it was part of being co-CEO and considering his brother hadn’t responded to any of his texts or calls, since Erik’s call had crashed his plans, he was the only one to take it.
Ares glanced at the number, frowned, and accepted the call immediately.
“River, what is it?” His stomach knotted because River had a team on Drustan and Ida and he didn’t want Xander’s suspicions about Drustan to be true.
Whatever the reason River was calling, he didn’t want to hear it, not when he was on his way to review another security breach.
“Mr. Tennyson was seen following an employee of Axis Management to her home. Then he went out for dinner. He had a few drinks with two men, then he drove back to the employee’s residence and knocked on her door. I thought you would like to be informed.”
“Fuck.” This isn’t what he wanted. Drustan brought a lot of power, money and experience to the table and but talk about being a creepy stalker. Drustan’s laser focus on Ida was cause for concern.
“What employee?”
“Meg Carlson.”
“I’ll send someone to check in on her.”
“No need. Finn was the team on Drustan. He called for another team to pick up the trail of Drustan while he checked in with Meg after Drustan left.”
Finn was one of their former bodyguards. Meg knew him and trusted him.
“Does Drustan know he’s being followed?”
River snorted. “I don’t expect insults from you.”
“Long night.” That was the closest to an apology as Ares could muster right now. His car was at the gates of the training grounds and the security camera and sensor did its job. The gates swung open to let him roll through.
“You’ll have a full report in your inbox by the morning.”
“Talk soon, River,” Ares ended the call, rolling through the parking lot that was at the start of the first wooded acreage and the trails and also home of Dax’s obstacle course. He drove through a packed dirt road, passing all that until he came to a slope. Something crunched under his tires.
Up on a hill a former rec hall that had been converted to their needs. Ares parked in the gravel driveway, noticed Erik Knight’s car, and slammed the door. He could make out the three cottages that were on the property, all of them dark.
Pressing his thumb to the biometric lock, he let himself in, walking through the hall.
The place smelled like pine needles. A fireplace glowed in the idle of the room, but that was the last of the remnants of its former life.
Stepping up to a wall, Ares again pressed his thumb to it and the doors slid open, revealing the communications command centre.
Huge screens took up the space, a circular desk in the middle. Erik turned as the doors hissed open, peeling his eye away from the screen.
“Hey boss,” Erik Knight stood, wincing.
Ares bit his cheek, refrained from telling the man to sit down. Erik was still recovering from the brain injury he had suffered.
“Sorry to call you out at this hour. I couldn’t get a hold of Xander.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
For whatever reason, his brother had gone offline. Probably having the time of his life with his submissive and Logan in their chalet in Whistler. Ares shoved down an icy chill of resentment.
“This is what I wanted to show you. Should have caught it right away, but all of our focus was on Dax’s team.
We’re used to a deer or critters setting off the sensors and because it was only on the perimeter, it didn’t alert as highly as it would if the gate was breached.
” Erik leaned over to the bank of screens on his left, tapping a few keys on the inlaid keyboard.
Ares stood with his hands in his pockets, watching a grey feed flick across the screen. A deer run out onto the road, near the entrance gate.
“There was a deer.”
Erik glanced at him, nodded. “Yeah, and that’s why I didn’t stop immediately. Watch.”
The screen flickered, the deer ran off, and a dark vehicle rolled into the frame. It stopped. Then it drove again a few metres around the parking lot. It stopped near the gate. A figure got out and leaned against the car door, staring up at the sky.
“Did he do anything else?”
“Nope. Dude stays like that for five minutes. You can see him get in his car and drive away here,” Erik moved the feed forward.
“You couldn’t just send me the feed?”
Erik rolled back, his eyes widened in surprise, and Ares immediately felt like an ass.
“Xander left orders to see the feed in person for the next three months if there was a security breach.”
Ares shoved a hand through his hair, knowing it wasn’t Erik’s fault. It took time to encrypt the feed to send to their phones or onto their system. Erik was right to call him and he was just mad that his date had been interrupted.
He shouldn’t have been though. He was the calm one. The brother who was quick with a smile, the one who eased the tensions in the room, not the one who caused them. But he hated being here.
With every fiber of his being, he wished he was a landscape architect designing a garden for spring. Not in the middle of nowhere on a winter night, having been pulled from the warm bed of the woman he wanted to spend every second with.
“I don’t know if you’d call that a security breach.”
“I treat anything out of the ordinary as a security breach.” Erik’s tone was sharp.
“What happened before this? Could he have followed someone here?”
Erik stabbed the keys and brought up the feed to an hour earlier. “No. I’m the only one on this side tonight. The team that is on Ida came in at four-thirty and there’s no sign of the guy’s car.”
Ares watched the feed, knowing he was grasping at straws. But how did Drustan find himself up here? And it had to be Drustan. The car looked the same, the guy resembled his build.
“I have a team on that guy. There’s no car behind him?”
“No.” Erik glanced at him.
“I don’t get it.”
“Either someone lost the tail on this guy, or he’s not the guy you have being tailed or the security guys thought it was too risky driving on a country road that they would be spotted. So, they waited at the nearest gas station.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Yeah.”
“Review the footage from the last week. I want to know if he followed anyone from Axis Management to here and then circled back tonight.”
“Yes, boss.”
Ares strode out of the room. “And Erik? Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Erik waved.
Ares nodded, left the room, as his phone buzzed. Pulling it out of the pocket, he frowned at the code from the sweeper team.
That was his job. To be the public part of the business, to maintain its public face. To be the one who showed up at charity events and wrote cheques and handed out presents to kids and on the side, he’d deal with cleaning up the mess.
He liked it that way.
And it had worked for all these years.
Now he wanted something different. His brother had found his happiness, and Ares wanted that for himself.
It was a selfish thought. Xander had given them a life beyond their wildest dreams.
Right now, he felt like he was being pulled in three different directions, that his orchestrated life was going to crash down, and he didn’t like the feeling.
But nothing made him feel more out of control than Josie.
The way she responded to their rope play made him feel…
like a young man again. Like he was just discovering kink.
It made him feel curious, as if he had something to learn and with this woman, that’s how he felt, like he was engaging in a connection that was so different from anything he had experienced before.
The call from the team he managed wasn’t urgent, so he sent it to carry over to tomorrow. Before getting in the car, he tried calling Xander again, only for it to go right to voicemail.
He fired off a text to his designer asking for an update on the property. As soon as he could he was going to bring Josie there. It had a gorgeous cork heated floor and no stairs.
Thinking about his plans eased the knot of tension between his shoulder blades until he drove through unexpected traffic on the bridge to their house and saw Logan’s SUV in the driveway.
So, the three of them were having fun while he was dealing with their business, instead of being in bed with Josie.