Page 15

15

Landon

S itting around in a house overlooking the ocean while other people risked their lives to save my woman felt wrong. I should have been there. On the front line. Proving to Thea that I cared.

After the shitty way I’d behaved the night she went missing - sorry , got kidnapped by an insane mobster hitman - I wouldn’t blame her for hating me. Hell, I hated me too.

“Landon, for fuck’s sake, stop pacing around the room like an eejit,” Eden snapped.

Milo ignored the both of us. He was in his zone. The zone where he did his techy thing and cared little about the world around him. The noise-canceling headphones probably helped.

“I can’t help it,” I told her.

“Well you’re making me nervous, so quit it!” Her snappy tone cut through my anxiety. Since when had Eden become such a sassy little spitfire? Before she became friends with Thea, she never spoke to any of us. If I’d looked at her a year ago, I knew for sure she would have ducked into a room to avoid my attention.

I guess meeting Thea had changed all of us.

Milo was less of a social misfit these days. Kyril was less grumpy. Even Cassian had been in a better mood lately. At least until Dario dropped a grenade on us all.

Thea’s arrival had been good for us. All of us. Even me.

I couldn’t recall the last time I read any of my DMs. Before Thea, the daily DMs from thirsty bitches were a fertile hunting ground. Sure, Abernethy was in the middle of nowhere, but I spent enough time in the city to schedule regular hookups with hot women.

And if that wasn’t an option, there were enough girls on campus to choose from. Girls like Polly, who never said no to a booty call late at night, when I needed some stress relief and my hand wasn’t cutting it.

All that had changed since I met Thea. She was the only girl I’d thought about since the day we met. If I couldn’t have her, I didn’t want anyone else.

Thea always assumed I was joking when I called her my future wife. I wasn’t joking. As far as I was concerned, she and I were end game. No matter what my father thought.

“Fuck,” Milo muttered as he watched his screen.

“What’s gone wrong?” Eden jumped up from the bed, spilling her chocolate milk everywhere. Declan’s housekeeper, Mrs O’Malley, was going to be thrilled. I’d already dropped cola on the cream carpet in the living room, and that shit stained.

“The local cops are on their way. It seems someone finally managed to get through to a higher-up officer.”

“How? I thought there were enough distractions set up to keep them away!”

“Some hikers saw the fire and heard gunshots, according to the call. Unfortunately, the call got put through to the one diligent officer left on duty while the rest chased their own tails, so he called in backup from the anti-organized crime department.”

“Shit. They need to get out of there before the cops arrive. If they are caught, Declan will wash his hands of this.”

“It’ll be fine,” Eden said, not looking at all concerned about the prospect of the guys being swept up in an anti-mafia operation.

We watched as Milo monitored the local CCTV and listened to what the local cops were saying over their encrypted channels. I had no clue how he did any of this, or how he understood Italian, but when I’d asked, all he said was I didn’t need to know. Which told me jack shit.

He really was a dickhead at times.

“Are they OK?” I pressed. The stress of the rescue operation was giving me an ulcer. Doctor Google had warned me I was in serious danger of internal bleeding and a perforated stomach. Eden had caught me Googling ‘death by perforated stomach’ and recommended I drink more whiskey. While I assumed she was joking, I had, in fact, taken her word for it. This was probably why my head hurt almost as much as my gut. Or maybe I had a brain tumor?

Shit! I pulled out my phone to Google the symptoms of a brain tumor.

Agonizing pain in one’s head: check.

Nausea: check.

Blurred vision: check.

Mental confusion: check.

Personality changes… Hmm… I had been feeling depressed the last few days. And I couldn’t recall the last time I jacked off. Did that count?

Eden looked over my shoulder to see what I was reading and snorted loudly.

“Try Googling hypochondria.”

“Hypo-what now? Is that serious?” Fuck me, I didn’t need any more problems. Hypoconduit sounded awful. Did it mean I might start losing my mind? Before I could question Eden about the exact spelling, Milo’s phone pinged.

“They just boarded the plane.” We all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“They got Thea, right?”

“Yeah.” The complete lack of inflection threw me for a moment until I remembered this was Milo. My friend had the emotional range of a slug.

“Oh thank God! Now I can relax!” Eden collapsed dramatically on the sofa and grabbed the remote control.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Um, what does it look like?” Her forehead scrunched up as she stared at me in confusion.

“We need to get to the airport!”

“It’s a three-hour flight. Cool your jets.”

“She’s right,” Milo confirmed, pulling his headphones off and shutting down his computer. “Three hours and 19 minutes to be exact, although there’s a headwind, so my calculations suggest they are due to land in two hours and 59 minutes.”

Eden wasn’t listening. I watched as she settled on some dumb-as-fuck reality TV show where a selection of fame-hungry men and women stayed in a villa on some tropical island while cameras watched them 24/7. It struck me as a hideous concept. Did these people not understand how fucked up fame was? How intrusive it was when paparazzi followed you every time you set foot outside?

As Lord Stuart Rothmore’s son, I’d always attracted a lot of interest, but since the sex tape, I couldn’t take a shit without someone trying to pap me. Now I knew how Cassian felt. And for him, it was a whole lot worse. To say my father was pissed about the sex tape was no exaggeration, but it didn’t come close to Lucian’s reaction.

At least I wasn’t under house arrest with all my tech devices confiscated. Or so Lucian thought. I’d had no problems leaving the UK with our band of brothers. And Eden. Dad had barely spoken to me since the sex tape story broke. He’d been too busy consoling investors after news of this year’s Whiskey of the Year winner leaked, and funnily enough, it wasn’t a Rothmore one.

It was all bullshit. Our family was rich as fuck, irrespective of whether Rothmore won stupid awards. Deep down, I didn’t think my father was that bothered. He seemed more concerned that I’d gone against his wishes by not keeping Elaine on his side.

If he lost control of me, he no longer had a lapdog to order around. Isla wasn’t under his influence anymore, and my mom never really had been.

“Can we please watch something else?” I asked as some stupid drama around the hot tub played out on screen.

“No.” Eden reached for a chocolate left over from the night before, but I grabbed it first.

“Landon Fucking Rothmore, give me that chocolate now or I’ll put hair removal cream in your shampoo!”

My jaw dropped. “You wouldn’t dare!”

“Go on, try me!” She bared her teeth at me.

“I wouldn’t push it, Lan,” Milo advised. “She grew up with Declan and his brothers. I bet she’s done a whole lot worse than that.”

Eden grinned. “Damn right. I was the only girl in a family of psychotic boys until Aoife and Saoirse came along. How else was I supposed to survive some of the shit they did to me?”

I shuddered. “Fine. Eat the fucking chocolate. I hope it makes you break out.”

A spark of anxiety in her eyes told me my barb had struck home. She reached up and prodded her chin. There was nothing there but a faint red mark, but from her expression, she fully believed a zit lingered just below the surface.

“I’m sure Michael won’t mind if you turn into a pizza face,” I reassured her.

“ Go dtachtfadh an diabhal thú , Landon,” she shrieked before throwing the chocolate bar at me. “I hope Thea never forgives you for being a spineless jerk!”

My shoulders slumped. She was right. I had acted like a spineless jerk. Instead of defending her, I’d gone along with Dario’s bullshit claims and pushed her away. A decent guy would have whisked her away from campus the night the sex tape story hit the press. Protected her. Shielded her from the press.

But no. I’d believed Dario and made her think I no longer gave a shit about her. If Thea never forgave me, then I’d spend the rest of my life making up for my lack of faith in her.

She’d cave eventually. How could she not? I was pretty fucking awesome, after all, even if I was now penniless.