Chapter Sixteen Reed
Chapter Sixteen
Reed
The kitchen was too damn quiet. Just me, the boiling water for pasta, and the faint crackle of the stove as I heated the sauce.
I grunted at the silence and grabbed my portable Bose speaker, pairing it with my phone as a new notification popped up on my work cell. A group text.
Ryder: I called in a favor to the Costas to see if they have anyone they trust in Italy to check with the staff at Hollis’s hotel. Constantine was already in Italy with his family, so he’s personally heading to the hotel tomorrow morning.
We’d relied on help from the billionaire family a few times before. I was relieved they could be of service now. Not only were they rich and connected, but they were also former operators themselves.
Ryder: Constantine’s checking in with his contacts there. Enemies, too. If anyone there knows anything, they’ll tell him.
Me: Good. What about X-Man?
We had orders from above not to mention Tristan’s name via text or over the phone, not even through encrypted messages, so we’d settled on an unoriginal code name.
Ryder: Hard to ask Constantine about X-Man when I’m not allowed to talk or text his name.
Shit. Jet lag was messing with me. Or I was just off because the woman I’d been telling myself I hated the last four months was in my shower.
Alex: You talk to the secretary yet about pulling in FFS on this too?
Falcon Falls Security had helped us on cases before, and they had direct ties to not only Secretary Chandler but also the president himself.
Ryder: FFS is already aware of what’s happening since Trevor reached out to his cousin about when she was taken and lost her memories. Falcon is ready to join if they get the greenlight from Chandler.
At least we had a few more heavy hitters in the world of special operations on our side. Both Falcon Falls and the Costas also worked with a secret organization known as The League that battled criminals on that side of the globe.
The Irishman that was pretty much in charge of The League fortunately had a private jet in London and had lent it to us today so we could make a rushed exit without too much pushback from Hollis’s family.
We’d also brought him up to speed on the situation, and if he heard any chatter tied to our op, he’d let us know.
If we were going to go up against one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the world—Hollis’s own flesh and blood—in a race to get to the truth, we needed all the help we could get.
Me: And for now, what do you want me to do?
Ryder: Just keep an eye on her. Keep her comfortable.
Yeah, she was comfortably naked in my bedroom.
Trevor: Your wife coming to church in the morning? Eden and Chase are asking.
Ryder: Yeah. Could you keep an eye on her while Alex who could blame me with Hollis strutting around in my shirt?
I carried the pan over and dished out some pasta with the sauce into our bowls. “More to your liking?” I asked as she took her first sip.
“Much.” She sat opposite of where I set my bowl at the four-person table in front of the bay window, blinds closed.
“Makes sense, since it’s yours.” I grabbed my beer and joined her. “You brought it here last weekend. It was originally meant for Alex, but we wound up drinking it together instead. Right here at this table, in fact. You insisted I keep it here for the next time you break in and—”
“Break in?” she echoed.
“That’s your thing. You never ring the bell. You like to sneak in to—”
“Drive you crazy?”
I nodded, fighting a smile at the memory of the one time she’d broken in and found me in only a towel.
She eyed me over the rim of her glass as she sipped.
“Well, I have excellent taste.” She traded her glass for a fork.
After a few bites, she asked, “Where’d you learn to cook?
For Americanized Italian, it’s still fantastic.
Not that I remember what Italian Italian tastes like.
” She licked some sauce from her lower lip.
“I had to learn to fend for myself as a kid or starve,” I admitted in a stone-cold voice, hating opening up, sitting there shocked that I’d done it again. “Went for option one.”
She studied me for a handful of seconds, then swept the pity under the rug as if understanding I’d hate that, too, and drank the bourbon and left well enough alone.
Thank you very much.
She even let us eat our meals in peace without another word, which I’d be eternally grateful for. She finished every last bite, seemingly satisfied with my food, which shouldn’t have made me so damn happy, but it did.
She leaned forward, grabbing the crossword book from the other side of the table. “Valiant.” She flicked the page with her finger. “The last one you didn’t fill in, that’s it.” She grunted a breath of frustration. “It drives me crazy I know that and not anything about myself.”
I honestly couldn’t begin to imagine what that was like.
She swapped the book for her bourbon. “You have a lot of country on your playlist,” she said as I left the table to pour plain pasta in Ranger’s bowl before beginning to clean up.
“I do.” Hopefully, she’d stop with the comments and questions and just let this night end as smoothly as possible.
But then she had to go and bend over to place our dishes in the bottom rack of the dishwasher.
I bit down on my back teeth and was a good boy and immediately looked away.
Ranger lifted his head from his bowl, and I swear, he was smiling. Loving every minute of my pain. “Payback, dude,” I mouthed. See if I give you any treats tonight.
“So, where’d you grow up?”
I turned around, hating how much I didn’t hate seeing her in only my shirt, standing there with a dish towel over her shoulder. Frustrated at myself, I went the asshole route in answering her. “You don’t need to know where I’m from.”
I removed the dish towel from her shoulder and tossed it on the counter. The woman was an heiress to wealth and power; her mother would have a coronary seeing her like this in my home.
“Well, did I know before?”
I stepped around her to close the dishwasher, then chucked my empty beer bottle in the recycling. “Nope.”
“Did I ever ask?”
“Negative.”
“You don’t like talking about yourself because we supposedly dislike each other, or you don’t talk about yourself in general?”
“We’re just two different people. We’ll never understand each other.
There’s no point in trying now.” I thought back to her mother’s words.
The fact she’d done her research on me. Considered me beneath her.
Beneath her daughter. “This situation is temporary. When you remember who you are, you’ll walk away, and .
. .” I cleared my throat. “I won’t stop you. ”
She cast her eyes to the floor, forehead drawing tight. “Got it,” she said in a strained voice, then turned and left me alone like I deserved.
Ranger rushed by me to go after her, whacking his tail against my leg in the process.
Yeah, I was a jerk.
But I couldn’t go after her. No amount of chasing that woman would ever do any good.
When she remembered who she really was, she’d never want to be with a man like me.
So why the hell would I let myself fall for her and risk losing everything I’d worked for, only to get my heart broken?