7
“ C lear.”
Thank fuck he now had the earpiece Dalton had brought for him. He hated relying on his phone, even with Trev on the line when he was driving. It was much safer to have comms. Although, he didn’t know where Nem had gotten them from, as they hadn’t expected to be working this weekend. He hit the gas and followed Dalton out of the underground parking lot.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m not sure.” He hoped Rose didn’t think he was crazy for not finding out. When the chips were down, there were few men he trusted. Almost all of them were either in the truck in front of them or behind. “But the boss and the guys won’t put us in danger.”
Kacey snorted behind him. “Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”
“Shut up.” Killing your brother was allowed under extreme circumstances, right? If it wasn’t, it should be. “Don’t scare her more than she already is.”
“She needs to be,” his brother growled. “Only a stupid woman wouldn’t be scared with an asshole chasing her. Are you a stupid woman, Rose?”
“Um—no. I don’t think so.”
When they got to where they were going, there was going to be a come-to-Jesus meeting between him and Kacey. His big brother could just take his asswipe attitude and shove it where the sun didn’t shine. Although, knowing Kacey, the sun probably did fucking shine up his ass.
“Keep it that way,” Kacey ordered Rose in his typical no-nonsense manner. “Don’t be too fucking stupid to live, and we’re good.”
“Jeez, you’re rude.”
Caleb grinned at Rose’s comment under her breath and started silently counting in his head because he was sure his bat-eared brother probably heard it anyway. He smirked at Kacey in the rearview mirror when his brother grunted.
Yup. He heard that. Serves him right.
He knew Kacey would respect her more for having some spunk to her. He still hadn’t figured out why that was important right now, but he’d worry about it later.
Dalton bypassed the turn-off for the hotel and kept going. “Boss, Bravo Five, can I have confirmation on our target location?”
“Bravo Five, Nemesis, the wolf’s den.”
“Copy that.” He checked his rearview mirrors, but all he could see was the team truck behind him and what appeared to be normal traffic. Wolf’s house worked for him. He chewed on the corner of his lip. As long as the trouble Rose was running from didn’t follow him to Wolf’s house and put his wife in danger, that is.
“I don’t understand,” Rose said. “Where are we going?”
“Some of the men who came with my boss are local. We’re going to one of their houses.”
“Boss, Charlie Five,” Kacey said behind him. “Going where we have innocents may not be a good idea until we figure out what the hell is going on. We don’t want to lead?—”
“Charlie Five,” Dalton interrupted with a growl, “While I appreciate the fact you seem to have received some brains in the damn post, do you think I’m stupid enough not to make a pitstop first?”
Caleb bit back a grin and winked at Rose when his brother got an earful for questioning their boss. Dalton had way too many years of Special Forces and running multiple mercenary teams not to be on the ball when it came to safety.
“Sorry, Boss.” Kacey winced. “Just making sure. The woman seems important to my brother. Just making sure we’re covering all angles.”
“Fuck you, Hunt. Just fuck you.”
“I’m totally lost,” Rose told him.
“We’re,” he glanced at a street sign, “umm…”
“No. I mean, I have no idea what’s going on. Charlies, Bravos, or who is talking to who.”
“I’ll make sure to introduce them all to you when we get to where we are going.” He hit the flicker when Dalton did and followed him into the parking lot of Aces Bar and Grill, then parked up in the spot next to him as the other truck did the same.
She peered up at him. He fucking hated the wariness in her eyes. “What happens now? Why are we at work?”
“Wait a sec before you get out, baby.” He made a mental note that she worked here. That was information he’d need later when he wanted to bring her on a date when all this shit was cleared up. He jerked his chin toward his brother, who nodded, got out of the truck, and slammed the door after him, making her jump. Caleb made a mental note to add that to the list he had running in his head for shit to beat his brother up for the next time they sparred. He pressed the button to release her seatbelt and tugged her toward him, brushing the whisps of hair that had fallen out of her messy bun back from her face. “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” She shuddered. “I’m not even sure where to start.” She looked over his shoulder, and her eyes widened. “Um, I think they are waiting for us.” She gestured toward the outside.
“Let them wait,” he murmured. “A couple of minutes either way isn’t going to kill them. It might actually teach them that not everyone asks ‘how high’ when they bark ‘jump.’ They are impatient at the best of times.”
“I feel bad?—”
“Don’t.” He grinned at her. “Blame me if it makes you feel better.” If it made him a sap to think he could get lost in the pools which were her eyes, then sign him up. He’d wear that label proudly. He curled one hand around the back of her neck and leaned down to press a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll keep you safe,” he promised her. It was important that she believed that. He wanted her to believe it. Craved it. Because her feeling safe was suddenly at the top of his ‘most important shit on the planet’ list.
Rose jerked in his arms when someone knocked on the glass behind him. He scowled over his shoulder at the fucker who turned out to be his boss.
Yeah, I get it. We are on a time crunch if she’s being tracked. But give her a second to fucking breathe. Not every woman is a Lina.
He silently admitted to himself that he was kind of relieved that Rose wasn’t a kick ass and take names kind of woman like Dalton’s wife was, because that hint of vulnerability Rose had going on was driving his inner caveman insane with the need to fix all that was wrong in her world. “Ready?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’ll come around and get your door,” he told her as he opened his door.
“I can get it.”
He paused half in and half out of the truck. “I know. But I want to.” He waited for her to nod in agreement before he got all the way out. Thankfully, the guys knew what he was up to and didn’t ask questions as he jogged around the front of his truck and opened the door to help Rose out.
“Thank you.”
He interlinked their fingers and led her to where the guys waited. He didn’t know how else to make it clear to them without actually giving voice to the words that she was important to him. But he figured they were all smart enough to figure it out. “You’re welcome.”
“Arms out like this,” Dalton ordered as soon as they were within a foot of him.
“Um, what?” Rose looked all kinds of confused and stepped back. Caleb did an inner fist pump when she moved slightly behind him as if she trusted him to be the buffer between her and the others.
“What my boss means,” Caleb glared at Dalton, silently warning him to tone it down, “is we need to scan you to see if you have a tracker on you somewhere.”
“Have I somehow ended up in the movies and nobody told me?” Rose muttered.
“It won’t hurt,” he reassured her. “He won’t even touch you, just run the wand a couple of inches off your body. I can do it if you prefer.” He kind of hoped she’d ask him to be the one to scan for bugs. But even though she had no idea of how things often worked in his world, the woman he was rapidly coming to think of as his once more slapped on a brave face, sucked it up, and did what needed to be done. He had the impression she was used to sucking it up because things went sideways when she least expected it.
Not anymore, baby. Not on my watch.
“It’s okay.” She clenched the fingers of the hand behind his back into his shirt for a split second, then released it again and stepped up next to him. “I’m ready.” She held her arms straight out from the shoulder.
“I’ll be fast.” Dalton slightly redeemed himself to Caleb by promising to work quickly. “I won’t even touch you. Ready?”
Rose nodded. Caleb kept one eye on the device and one on Rose as Dalton ran the scanner wand around her.
Damn.
He cursed silently in his head when the device stayed the same color, and it didn’t beep. The best-case scenario would have been for the tracker to be on her clothes or something because he had a feeling she would lose her mind at what was to come next.
“Clear,” Dalton confirmed.
“What does that mean?” Rose asked the question, then immediately huffed. “What am I saying? I know what it means. But how is he tracking me if it’s not on me?”
“Then it’s on something you own,” Dalton said before Caleb could.
Caleb winced as he figured out where that tracker might be. Thankfully, Dalton wasn’t a complete asshole and gave her a couple of seconds to figure it out. His boss opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut again when Rose’s eyes widened.
“My camera?”
“If that’s the only other thing you had with you today.” He fucking hated the stricken look on her face. Some asshole was going to pay for being the reason it was there. He just had to figure out how to find him before he found Rose. “Or if it’s something you brought from your old life.” He didn’t even care that they had an audience and tugged her in for a hug. “We’ll be careful. I promise,” he whispered against her hair.
“It’s all I have left,” she hiccupped, “from before.”
“Bingo, that’s how he’s finding you,” Kacey informed her.
His brother really was a prick. “Kace…”
Rose surprised the crap out of him by laying her hand on his arm and shaking her head. “It makes sense,” she said. “I hate it, but it makes sense.” She turned to the guys. “It’s on the floor where I was sitting.”
Kacey dipped his chin and went around to the passenger seat of his truck to grab her camera case.
Caleb sighed. Every instinct he had told him whoever had planted that tracker was going to be so fucking pissed that it was found and disposed of. It would be disposed of because there wasn’t a hope in hell he’d allow it to keep running—especially not if Rose wanted to keep her camera, and he knew she would. The only question which remained was if the asshole had some other means of tracking her too.
Kacey placed the unopened camera bag on the hood of Dalton’s truck, stepped back, and nodded to Caleb.
Good, his brother had figured out Rose was important to him. Caleb glanced at Rose. “You want to open it for us?” He had a feeling the camera would need to be disassembled, and if he did it, he might break it.
“Just let me take out the sim card, and you can have it.” She lifted her chin. “I won’t risk Indy’s wedding photos, even to avoid him. ”
She didn’t need to say who ‘ him’ was. Caleb had to admire the grit she’d found some time in the space of twenty minutes between the two parking lots. He nudged her toward the hood. “Open it and grab the sim card. The guys can take it from here.” She nodded and unzipped the camera bag.
“How do we know the tracker isn’t in the sim card?” one of his teammates, Bryan *BB* Boyer, asked.
“That’s a question for Trev,” Dalton said, then glanced at Wolf, “or Tex.”
“Tex is coming in tomorrow for a visit,” Wolf replied. “He’ll know what to do to check it.”
“No,” Rose said softly. “Not until I have every single one of these photos downloaded and know they are safe.”
“I will not risk bringing a tracker into my home,” Wolf said mildly. “But we’ll figure it out. I’ll call Tex. He might have an idea of where it could be.”
“Go ahead,” Dalton agreed.
“We will protect her,” Caleb said as a statement rather than a question. Dalton and the guys better not disagree with him. “I don’t care who is following her or why. We do not leave any woman with her ass swinging in the breeze with a fucker like that asshole after her. Especially not her. Period.”
“I’m not sure what gave you the impression that we were going to do that,” Dalton said. “When the fuck have any of us ever not helped when someone is in the shit?”
Caleb scrubbed his hand down his face. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…” He trailed off.
“She’s yours to protect?” Wolf punched in numbers on his phone.
“Yeah.”
“We get it, man.”
“You’re talking about me as if I’m not standing right next to you,” Rose said bitterly. “You’re all just like every other man in my life.” Rose pulled the sim card out of the camera. “Why did I hope for something different? Stupid. I’m so freaking stupid to allow hope—” She cut herself off as if she was swallowing a scream which built up inside her. “I will not allow you all to put yourselves and your families in danger because of me.” She lowered her eyes to where his fingers plucked at a loose thread on her sweater. “I’ll just leave, and you all will be safe.”
Caleb growled under his breath. He couldn’t believe this woman. From what little they knew, she was in more than a little trouble, and she was trying to protect them. He reached for her, but she sidestepped him. He matched her move for move until he could snag her wrist and tug her into his chest. “You don’t have to do it all alone.” He tucked one finger under her chin and tipped it up. He needed to see her eyes because everything inside him screamed that if she walked away now, then she’d disappear. He didn’t want that to happen. “Please don’t leave. Let us—let me help you.”
“Why should I trust you?” She pulled out of his arms and stepped back. His heart sank as she stubbornly reminded them, “You all have families. It’s safer for everyone if I go.”
Admirable as your intentions are, that’s not gonna fly, sweetheart.
Fuck . He balanced himself lightly on his feet, ready to pounce if she tried to flee, and glared at her. “You act like we,” his gesture took in all of the guys, “are a bunch of pussies who can’t handle some shit or have no idea what’s coming.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She tried to cut him off, but he spoke right over her.
“Don’t be one of those too stupid to live people like in the fucking movies,” he growled. “You are better than that.” She had to understand he could freaking help her if she’d let him.
She must be thinking she was getting freaking nowhere or maybe trying to figure out how he didn’t understand her point of view, but Caleb figured if she’d just given him a second, he could make her understand. He narrowed his eyes when she slipped the sim card into her pocket, and then her hands opened and closed into fists. She’d made a decision; hopefully, it was to thump him and knock some sense into him. But as she sidestepped to go around him, he knew she was going to run. “It’s bett?—”
He caught her by the wrist. “No, it’s not. Please don’t run from me, Rosey-Posey. Let me help you.”
“I can’t. I won’t risk you all.”
“Damn it.” That caveman he’d been resisting for the last hour decided, fuck it, he’d make her see sense. It took over, short-circuiting his brain. He scooped her up and tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Anyone would think I can’t keep you safe.” He strode toward his truck. “You’re coming home with me until we figure this shit out. Because if you think I’m leaving you out here on the streets to do it alone, you’ve lost your damn mind.”
She’ll think you are a caveman .
I am a fucking caveman.
I don’t care if she knows it.