Page 96 of Nothing More

“Yes, wonderful, but did you learn anythinguseful?” Raven asked.

“We need to find Nikolai,” Tenny said, regrouping. “I’m off soon to meet Kat. We’ll troll the bratva haunts and see if we can suss him out.”

“Try not to wind up taped to a chair,” Toly said, sourly.

“Me? I’m insulted you’d suggest such a thing.”

Toly offered a dismissive tsk and turned away, tugging his tie loose. “I’m showering.”

Raven knew a momentary, red-hot urge to slide beneath the pounding hot water with him, and pass her hands up the tense knots in his shoulders; see if she could loosen them, one way or another.

Honestly, if she was going to tumble into bed with a Lean Dog, finally, why couldn’t it have been at a time when she wasn’t surrounded by nosy, twenty-four-seven security?

When he was gone, Tenny said, with a shocking note of sincerity, “Poor bugger doesn’t like being on the sidelines. I wouldn’t either, if it was me.”

Raven dragged a chair out from the long, marble-topped breakfast table and sank down into it, spine caving in. God, but she was still so bloodytired. Didn’t think she’d ever feel well-rested again. A fruitless fantasy of a French villa, wine and cheese, summer breeze in the lime leaves, flitted through her head, wholly unhelpful at the moment.

“It really is the Russian mob, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Looks like it, yeah,” Tenny said, bending at the waist to rest his elbows on the counter. “They’re involved, at any rate. Who else might be is still up in the air.”

Reese stepped forward to stand beside his husband. “We could take them out,” he said, and it wasn’t bragging, only a statement of fact. An innocent sort of confidence – but not misplaced.

“There’s a logistics problem there, I’m afraid,” Ian said. “No one’s been able to get definitive numbers. We have no idea how deep their ranks are, nor who their outside allies might be.”

“Now that I’m here, we’re working on it,” Tenny said, the cocky little shit. “But,” he tipped his head, “they’ve not targeted any old ladies, or children, or hangers-on. They’re only after Raven, which means they’re really after Toly.”

She frowned. “I told you, we’re not–”

“Deny it all you want,” he said, cold instead of goading, this time. “But every time he walks into a room, your face goes all pink and gooey, like a kid at Christmas. You’re wrapped up with him, however you want to label it, and that’s drawn all this unwanted attention your way.”

She scowled at him. “Well, we weren’t –wrapped up– before I received that finger.”

“Doesn’t matter. He was posted on you, and someone drew a conclusion there. The easiest thing to do,” Tenny continued, “would be to send him away. Make a big show of it. Let him go do a stint with the California chapter or something.”

The idea sent a pulse of panic through her that she ruthlessly tamped down. “And then what? Send a memo round to the Russians? ‘Don’t worry, he’s gone, kindly stop harassing the woman he’s sleeping with.’”

Slowly, Tenny grinned, and she cursed to herself when she realized her slip.

“She admits it,” he said with relish.

“She is going to shove you off the terrace if you don’t stop being a horrible gremlin,” she shot back.

In a low, even voice, Reese said, “He really can’t help it. He was born a gremlin, I think.”

Raven snorted, and heard Ian chuckle beside her.

Tenny tuned a scandalized look on his husband.

Bennet came wandering in from the next room, gaze fixed with awe on the coffered ceiling.

Raven sent Tenny a warning look, and mimed zipping her lips.

“Damn,” Bennet said, shaking his head with wonder. “I never would have thought when I patched in that I’d spend so much time inside such a fancy place. Yours is great,” he said to Raven, coming to a stop on Tenny’s other side, openly admiring the cabinets, the gleaming appliances. “But this is…” He whistled.

“The Dogs have moved up in the world,” Ian said, sounding proud.

“Yes,” Raven agreed, “and gained heaps of new problems to go along with it.”