Page 26 of The Most Wanted (The Kinky Bank Robbers #4)

Chapter Seventeen

Denko’s hands and feet were encircled with silver duct tape, and he himself was bound to the headboard, right around the chest, but at least his blindfold was off.

He kept mumbling, wanting to talk. Thor and Odin had already let him pee, so it couldn’t be that.

And he was glaring at us. Hard.

Mumble mumble. All urgent.

“I don’t fucking-g think so,” Odin said, scrolling through his phone investigating bus routes. Eventually he found a route that was running at two in the morning going past us with the right timing. He sent Thor to dump the Mustang and bus it back.

Odin let me pick a TV show. I went for a Silver Spoons rerun. The TV equivalent of comfort food. He didn’t say anything against it. Partly to indulge me and partly because Agent Denko had appeared extremely unhappy with my choice.

Odin pulled off his jacket and shirt and hung them up nicely.

You could see part of his tattoo poking out under his T-shirt.

Our tattoo— You WISH we were dead, motherfuckers.

I wondered whether Denko knew about it. It was odd to think it was a message to him and his people, in a lot of ways.

Though it was more a message to anybody in the world who would ever oppose us.

I threw him my fine suit jacket and he hung that up, too.

My filmy, silk tank top was a bit sheer, but Odin didn’t seem to mind, and I sure the hell didn’t.

And then Odin and I sat in our bed and watched TV, nestled close.

It felt good to have skin-to-skin contact with him.

I felt like we were a unit against Denko, like as long as we were touching, nothing could hurt us.

When the show got extra boring, Odin took off his glasses and kissed my hair, leaving his mouth on my head, making a circle of warmth, like a warm link between us, his gorgeous lips, his strong soft arms.

I tipped my head over to look at steely, stern Agent Denko. Odin put a hand on my forehead and tipped my head back. “Don’t look at him,” he said. “He is nothing to us and nothing against us.”

Another episode of Silver Spoons began, but it wasn’t very calming; I’d never felt more wired, every nerve on a knife edge.

We were on our second Silver Spoons episode by the time Thor got back .

He put a plastic grocery bag on the dresser and got right into bed on the other side of me and pulled up the covers over us.

“Zeus isn’t back yet?”

“He just checked in,” Odin said. “Running a few things down.”

“One thing I don’t get,” I whispered. “I thought they wanted to kill you guys. If they had my purse bugged and were following us, they could’ve taken us down at any time.”

Odin kissed me. “They don’t have anything on you. They wanted something on you.” He spoke at a normal volume. Like he didn’t give a fuck if Denko heard.

“So they could arrest me, too?” I asked.

Odin got this sad, wistful look. “That would be merely secondary, goddess.”

I widened my eyes. I’d seen enough cop shows to know the answer to this.

“Because they thought they could flip me? Make me tell things about all of you in exchange for a deal.” I leaned forward and glared past Odin clear to Denko.

“We are a family. You think I’d ever tell something that would hurt my men in any way? The fuck I would ever !”

Denko’s expression was unreadable. Of course. Probably a prerequisite for a law man, the unreadable expression.

But I needed him to hear me, needed him to understand that I’d go down with my guys to the end. “It would never happen!” I sat back in a huff, heart thundering.

“It’s not that, goddess,” Thor said from the other side of me. “Not quite that, much as we appreciate the sentiment.”

“Then what?”

Odin took a lock of my hair and twirled it around in his finger, shiny platinum against golden brown.

“My guess: they thought if they got something on you—some evidence that would end with you doing hard time—that they could use it for leverage on us. They imagined…” he turned his head away from me, toward Denko, “I am guessing they imagined that we would be willing to turn ourselves in without a firefight if we thought it could get you a deal. Something like that.”

I placed my hands on Odin’s beautiful whiskery cheek and turned his head back to me. “Is it true?”

“What do you think?”

Yes.

Shivers sailed through me as I stared into the depths of his amber eyes. There were no words, only the wild and untamed love I had for these men, for this family of ours. “I couldn’t live with that. We go down together.”

“Do not quarrel, goddess,” Odin said. “In any case, you would have no choice.”

“I wouldn’t let you make a deal. I would bring myself down first.”

“Nobody’s fucking going down,” Thor said from the other side. “Do we look like we’re going down?”

“True,” Odin said. “We won’t go down.” In a slightly huskier voice he added, “At least not metaphorically. There are other ways I would gladly go down.”

I gasped softly.

Odin kissed me then, taking my lips roughly, hand heavy on the side of my neck. Then he slid his hand down heavily, down down down, trailing kisses as he went, approaching my breast.

“Odin!” I whispered. “Denko.”

“What’s he going to do? Arrest us?”

He pushed me against the headboard, kissing me harder.

I closed my eyes, blissing out at the rough contact. I felt Thor take my lips, then felt his hand land on my belly.

Agent Denko mumbled, but he didn’t matter anymore.

Thor pulled away. “Whatever you say, Denko. ”

I opened my eyes and smiled into Thor’s beautiful blue gaze, crazy with love and unbridled energy, and it was so insane, us in one bed and Agent Denko in another.

Unlike Maria, I really did believe that in the caveman days, women chose mates based on which guy could beat up the other guys, and that was definitely the case in some of my very favorite books. And right now it was ultra-hot that Odin and Thor were utterly in control of this seriously scary guy.

I probably shouldn’t have been turned on by it.

A ding from Odin’s phone. Zeus. Without taking his arm from around my shoulders, Odin texted back and forth with Zeus in some kind of code. I stayed against him, enjoying the way his steely arm muscles fired with his texting movements, enjoying Thor’s hand on my belly, his breath against my neck.

How could he be so casual about it? Personally, I had a 24-hour news crawl of pure exclamation marks looping though my lizard brain. And then there was inappropriate sexual excitement, with more exclamation marks.

Odin put away his phone. “He’ll be a while. He’s following the gossip grapevine, which, as you know, is quite thriving in our community.”

It was true—the gossip among the criminal set made The Real Housewives of New Jersey look like monks on seven-year vows of silence.

“We’re taking whoever did this so fucking down,” Odin said. “And then we’ll go somewhere fucking-g amazing.”

“Yeah,” I said, heart pounding, breathing in Odin’s warm man scent. Was it possible men gave off extra pheromones from the act of having dominated a lesser man?

Just a question.

No reason.

“This is cozy,” Thor said. “Don’t you think it’s cozy, Agent Denko?”

Denko turned his head to stare. I got the feeling he was trying to look confident. Or maybe he was confident.

“Don’t fucking-g address him,” Odin said.

“Why not?” Thor asked. “It’s a free country. Isn’t that right, Denko? Oh, no, you say? Not if you know too much? Then it’s not? Is that what you’re saying?”

Odin reached over my head and bopped Thor’s forehead.

Another episode of Silver Spoons started up, leading us to discuss who the fuck of the subset of people up at two in the morning would ever watch it. Maybe it was there for all of the wrongdoers of the world to take comfort in after a hard day of violence.

“Any requests, Denko?” Thor asked.

“Do not engage him,” Odin said.

“But he looks so stern,” Thor said, and I could hear this smile in his voice. That was never a good sign. “Isis, doesn’t he look stern ?”