Page 72 of Brushed By Moonlight

Every one of them had echoed that line.Understood.

Well, I didn’t understand, dammit! None of it. What had happened to the kind, considerate Gordon I knew? And my clients… I’d started seeing them as — well, not friends, but tolerable, basically decent neighbors. (Okay, not Henrik. But the others.) Had I been wrong about them?

“If anything goes wrong, you’re the ones in trouble, not Gordon,” I pointed out.

Bene shrugged. “That’s the way this works.”

I gaped.

Roux switched to his most reasonable tone. “Look, we recognize that there are some gray areas…”

“Gray? This is closer to midnight, dammit. Stealing is wrong. Just wrong.”

“What if I told you Ronald Baumann is a murderer and arms dealer?” Marius offered.

I frowned. That shouldn’t play into the equation, but somehow, it did.

“And what if I told you the target was stolen, and we’re just there to return it?” Bene threw in.

I narrowed my eyes. “Is it?”

He looked at his feet. “No. Well, not that I know of.”

Roux shook his head impatiently. “Look, you don’t have to be part of this. We let you listen in on the call as a courtesy, but we don’t expect you to participate — other than keeping what you heard to yourself.”

He meant me spilling the beans to Clem, didn’t he? I crossed my arms indignantly. How dare he question my morals?

On the other hand, my morals were pretty messed up. As wrong as this mission was, I already knew I wouldn’t call it in.

“Of course I’ll keep it to myself.” I stood, took two steps toward the door, then spun around. “But one thing — once you’re gone, you’re gone. I don’t want you coming back.”

They all stared at me, and it took everything I had to hold my ground. Because all of a sudden, we were back to Day One, when they were just a bunch of strangers — powerful, scary strangers — and I was no one to them.

But when my eyes locked on Marius’s, I wavered. His lips twitched, reminding me of our stolen kiss — er, kisses, plural.

Was he a mercenary and criminal or my guardian and protector — the sweet, gentle soul who’d held me all night long?

My knees started to wobble. My lips too.

“Understood,” Roux said in a clipped, emotionless tone.

The other three whipped around and stared at him.

“Wait a minute,” Bene protested. “I like it here.”

Even Henrik looked unsettled. And Marius… He looked at me through eyes filled with pain…hope…desire…

Roux’s phone pinged with the details Gordon had promised to send through.

I forced myself to step toward the door. This was all for the best. It was the reality check I needed. It had been a mistake to start to trust my housemates — er, clients — and downrightstupid to think of Marius as anything but a very attractive, very dangerous man.

“Okay, here’s the file,” Roux said to the others.

Their phones pinged with the files he forwarded, punctuating the sound of my footsteps.

“The first document is a file on Baumann…” Roux explained. “The second is a picture of the target.”

I moved toward the threshold, though my body protested every step. Then I cursed and headed back for my plate. It had taken me a week to train the guys to clean up after themselves. I couldn’t set a bad example now.