On Her Master's Secret Service (28 page)

Sean flipped his brother off. Ah, brotherhood.

“Fine, Sean can run the pictures. The GPS bugs we planted today will send us reports.” Alex wanted to get everything out of the way so he could spend some more time with Eve. He’d realized something today. He really only had the next weeks of this mission to convince her. When they got back to the real world, she would question everything and start putting up roadblocks. He had no intention of going backwards. He needed to use this time to bind her to him again.

Adam slapped his hands together with obvious glee at getting to use his new toys. “I got the reports on the bugs already. I told you they would immediately start reporting back. You got two tagged. Way to go, Alex. I was hoping you could get one. The bad news is one of the bugs tracked right to a dry cleaner and now it’s dead. Apparently the dry cleaning process is hell on delicate but brilliantly crafted new technology. But the second one just landed at LaGuardia. It looks like we’re getting some movement.”

“Well, really?” Eve asked, a satisfied smile on her face. “Now I wonder which one is still giving deeply helpful information and which one is dead?”

“I can still spank you.”
Damn it.
She’d been right, but he stood by his rule. She could have gotten hurt. Just because she’d been right didn’t prove a damn thing. He’d already known she was smarter than him. Everyone knew it. Hell, he was pretty sure there had been a billboard taken out proclaiming it.

“You like to spank me for no reason at all,” Eve said with the most adorable pout.

He did. He would get his hands on her for any reason he could think of. “Get me the information, Adam. I need that information and anything Sean could find. Do we have a workable connection on
Chazz’s
cell phone? Jake gave me the signal that he’d tapped
Chazz’s
cell.”

“All I’ve gotten so far is Chazz ordering pizza with double meat and trying to hook up with two of his servers. Someone named Bambi likes to say
ewwww
a lot and hang up on him. He’s very positive. He just keeps calling back,” Sean explained. “Why did I pull baby-sit the douchebag duty? Couldn’t Kris do this? She has a way better sense of humor when it comes to two idiots trying to hook up.”

He had plans for Kristen. This was his night off so it would look suspicious if he showed up. “Kris is going back to the club tonight. She’s going to try to lift
Chazz’s
keys and make a copy of the key to his office.”

Ian frowned. “Shouldn’t you do that yourself?”

“She’s my best shot tonight.” They had worked it all out during the drive from St. Augustine to Palm Coast. “I don’t have any reason to be in the club until tomorrow night when Eve and I start our nightly performances. The club is closed for a private party for some of
Chazz’s
friends. According to Kristen, he likes to get really drunk. Jake didn’t get a shot at it last night, so Kristen is taking hers tonight.”

“You’re putting an awful lot of trust in someone you don’t know,” Ian said.

How did he explain Kristen? There was something deep in his gut that told him she was worth trusting. “I think she’s the best person to do this job. She’s been nothing but helpful up to this point.”

“Eve, what do you think?” Ian asked, deferring as he often did to Eve. She knew people. She rarely screwed up.

Eve glanced up, obviously looking for Kristen, but she hadn’t reappeared. “I think she’s hiding something, but I don’t think she means any of us harm. I truly believe she wants to do this job and catch Michael Evans. I don’t know if I completely believe her reasons for doing so, but I don’t sense anything from her that would make me distrust her. If I had to go off what I know right now, I would say she’s screwed up in the past. She’s looking for redemption and she goes about it by uncovering corruption and helping people. I would say she probably lives a fairly solitary life. Her parents are either dead or she has a distant relationship with them. She’s looking for a family, seeking to cobble together a group of friends to call her own. Earlier today, Alex did something that really pissed her off, but she still got to her knees to talk to me.”

“Why were you on your knees?” Liam asked.

The cutest little frown crossed Eve’s face. “Alex didn’t like how I handled a situation so he punished me by making me crawl across a dirty floor.”

He felt himself flush. He wouldn’t have knowingly sent her to a dirty floor. “It looked clean to me.”

Eve pouted adorably. “Well, you should have looked closer. Anyway, Kristen could have just walked beside me, but she got down to my level. She’s a little bit of a puzzle, but if I had to, I would bet that she is firmly on our side.”

Ian’s eyes widened slightly, and a little grin curved his lips up. “He punished you? Like actual punishment, not something you decided on and manipulated him into?”

Now it was Eve’s turn to blush. “It’s just for show.”

“Like hell it is,” Alex muttered under his breath. “She put herself in danger, and she’s my sub. I’ll punish her as I wish.”

Ian slapped his hands together. “Well, hell. At least part of the week is looking up. Adam, please get my identity back and find whatever fucker Nelson hired to wreck my life. I doubt he did it himself. We need to find him and then torture him into giving up Nelson, and then I’ll slice his balls off and feed them to him because I’m pretty sure he put my name on a bunch of mailing lists. I’m getting spammed like crazy.”

Liam nodded, smiling in agreement. “Damn near took our systems down. He got five thousand ads for male enhancement and two thousand offering him forklift operator training. This is a serious matter, my mates.”

Ian rolled his eyes and flipped his computer down, breaking the connection.

Eve shook her head. “Are we sure this is Nelson? It seems so impish. Nelson would just come at him hard.”

“Have you ever had a deep cavity search?” Sean asked, shuddering a little. “It’s sounds pretty nasty to me.”

Eve’s eyes narrowed, and she let her sarcasm flow. “No, Sean. I’ve never had anything shoved into my body parts by some overly enthusiastic Dom. Yeah, no sub ever had to endure that.”

And on that note, it was time to take his sub and make a few things clear to her. “You all have your assignments.”

Kristen walked in, a stack of files in her hands. She gave Eve a little smile, but held back from the rest, and Alex wondered just how much she’d overheard. “I have the files. It’s pretty much everything I could get off the FBI’s site. Don’t hate me, McKay, but I got the
SAC’s
personal folders on all the victims. I know they were random, but I thought I needed to read their files. You know, they deserve that much.”

He nodded and took them from her. “Eve can look through them later, but we’re going to have a conversation right now.”

After the session in the shower, he knew he had to push through her barriers. She thought they were through, but they hadn’t even started yet. In order to let go of the past, they had to face it, finally.

He reached down and took her hand.

“I really would like to look at those files.” Eve’s eyes strayed to them.

“After.” He tugged on her hand, pulling her along.

“Alex.” Eve sighed his name. “We really should talk about what’s happening.”

He walked her into the bedroom. “I don’t think so.”

Eve pulled away. “We can’t just ignore it. We’re being truly intimate for the first time in years, but it’s not real.”

“You’re right.” It couldn’t be real as long as they had so much of the past between them.

Her breath caught just enough to let Alex know she was upset that he agreed. But she smoothed out her expression and was right back to being the logical one. This was the game she’d been playing for five years. It seemed to have become a habit. One he intended to break.

If he hadn’t been watching her closely, he wouldn’t have seen the truth behind her mask. When had he stopped studying her every expression? When had he become lazy and so scared of losing her that he’d forgotten how to take care of her? “I’m glad you can be reasonable. Alex, we’re just holding on to what we know. We’re both afraid to let go of the past.”

“There were a lot of things about the past that were pretty damn good, you know.” He closed the door behind them. This wasn’t a conversation that needed an audience. He placed the folders on the dresser, trading them for something far more important. He zipped open his leather kit, pulling out the lube and a pack of wipes and walking it over to the nightstand.

Eve’s eyes widened. “You seem pretty sure of yourself.”

He was sure of one thing. She would be underneath him tonight. He would get balls deep inside her and then she wouldn’t be able to lie to him—or herself—ever again. “We had years and years of good.”

He reached back into the bag and pulled out a length of rope. He had three lengths, each thirty feet. He’d learned that was exactly what he needed to tie up his pretty sub.

Her eyes went to the rope in his hands. “I know we did. We should honor those years by accepting that we’ve changed. Alex, I don’t want to lose you as a friend, but you have to know that once we get back to our normal lives, all our problems are still going to be waiting there. This can’t work long term. This kind of passion burns itself out.”

He unwound the first length, shaking his head the whole time. “It didn’t for me. I’ve been this passionate about you for fifteen years. I want another fifty more, and I’m willing to fight for it now. I can see where I went wrong. I thought you needed time, and one day blurred into the next until I just gave in on everything because I got confused. I thought I was appeasing you, but I was really appeasing the guilt I felt. Eve, we haven’t talked about those days, not really. Seven days. Seven horrible days and we’ve let them ruin the thousands of good ones.”

She stared at the rope, her mouth turning down and her hands flexing, a sure sign that she was getting anxious. “We talked in therapy.”

They had spent long hours talking, but it had been clinical and she’d skimmed the surfaces. After a while, they’d just stopped going and given up. “I hated those sessions. I said whatever I thought would get me out of those sessions as quickly as possible. I didn’t do the work to get us through this because it was far easier for me to concentrate on killing Michael Evans. Even after I found and arrested the bastard, I concentrated on his trial and my job.”

“I know. I understand why you did it. You could control that aspect.”

He’d made some mistakes, but so had she, and she was still making the same ones. “Strip.”

“That isn’t going to help anything.” But she didn’t move away from him. Her eyes stayed on the rope and then lowered to his cock. She was watching him carefully and those eyes were a little like a remote. His dick responded immediately.

“I did your therapy. I did it for years. I did it when it made my stomach turn and my heart hurt. I’m asking you for a couple of hours to pay me back for years of topping you on your terms. I need this.”

He watched her soften immediately, and then her hands went to the buttons on her blouse. “All right, if this is what you need to get closure, I’ll help you. I can’t tell you what the last week has meant to me, but they were moments out of time. We were just trying to hold on to something that’s gone.”

He hadn’t been. He’d been trying to build something new, and it was past time she knew that.

He watched in silence as she shed every stitch of clothing. Her blouse dropped and her hands carefully unclasped the bra she wore. It was pink, delicate with scalloped edges that didn’t hold a candle in beauty to the flesh it covered. Her breasts were smaller than before, but he loved their shape and the way they felt in his hands. She had perky pink nipples that tightened the instant she was aroused. The areola constricted as he watched, her nipples elongating, preparing for the tug of his fingers and his mouth.

She pushed the tiny skirt off her hips and stepped out of her heels. She bit her bottom lip as though waiting for him to judge her. The perfectly made mound of her sex caught his eyes, and he was almost certain she was becoming wet and soft for him. No matter what else had happened between them, they always had this. All he had to do was think about Eve St. James and he was hard and ready to fuck because she was his mate. More than a wife. More than a sub. She was his other half. They had been hiding behind fear and shame and all those stupid clothes. They didn’t need them.

“You’re so beautiful. Turn around for me, angel.”

She smiled slightly, her anxiety obviously dialed down. She turned for him.

He could see that the curvy cheeks of her ass were still a light pink. Running a hand over those cheeks, he was pleased to see her shiver slightly. “Did you enjoy the flogger?”

It used to be one of her favorite toys. She’d found it relaxing. When she would come home from a rough day at work, he would simply look at the set of her shoulders and order her to the St. Andrew’s Cross they kept in the private playroom, and after fifty or so strokes, she would be relaxed and happy and she would curl up in his arms for the night, her day forgotten. God, he missed that.

“It was a very short session, Master.”

He couldn’t help but grin. “You still started subbing out.”

One shoulder shrugged as she turned her head to look at him. “You’re quite good with a flogger. We could try it again, you know. That also wasn’t much of a spanking if you ask me.”

Such a little brat. She had just the tiniest bit of a pain slut in her, but he never let her go too far. That was what he was here for. To give her what she needed while protecting her from going too far.

“Still trying to decide your own punishments?” He sank his hand into her hair and tugged.

She gasped because he knew damn well she liked that pain, too. “Maybe I’m trying to pick my pleasures, Master.”

“Your pleasure belongs to me.” He tugged her hair again and let his free hand find one of her breasts, twisting it and making her writhe. “Bend over. Grab your ankles.”

There was no way to mistake her sigh for anything but satisfaction. Eve bent over, grabbing her ankles and exposing herself fully to him.