Murphy's Wrath (Murphy's Law Book 2)

by Michelle St. James

  “We’ll have comms with each other,” Ronan said. “Not with Nora. She’ll be anchored too far away from the Elysium.” He looked at his sister, glad at least one of the two women who meant the world to him would be safe from harm during their breach of the Elysium. “You’ll have to keep tabs via the satellite feed.”

  “How will I know when to call for help?” Nora was a professional, a seasoned former FBI agent who had an additional four years experience working for Locke Montgomery, but calling in help meant legal exposure for MIS.

  There would be questions about who they were and what they were doing there. Those questions could lead to criminal charges, but if it meant getting Julia and Elise out alive, Ronan would accept whatever came, even the end of the business he’d built with his brothers.

  Even prison.

  “Use your best judgement,” Ronan said. “The mission’s objective is to get Elise out alive.” He hoped his sister heard Julia’s name as an unspoken addition. “If it looks like that mission can’t be accomplished without assistance, call them in.”

  “That’s putting me in a tough spot, Ro,” Nora said.

  “I trust you.”

  She looked at Nick, a question in her eyes.

  Nick nodded. “At least if we go down, we take them with us.”

  She turned to Braden, who sighed.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “These bastards deserve to be destroyed.”

  “It’s a last resort,” Ronan clarified. “But do it if you have to.”

  “What’s the plan once we’re on the boat?” Nick asked.

  “You and Braden take point on the guards,” Ronan said. “Keep them as clear of Julia and me as possible while we look for Elise. We’ll want to get off the Elysium as quickly as possible, so once we have her, we take one of the two motorboats.” He tapped the Elysium where the lifeboats were suspended. “Here or here.”

  “We should get rid of the one we don’t use,” Braden said.

  Ronan nodded. “No reason to make it easy for anyone to come after us." He looked around the table. “Any questions?”

  Julia met his gaze and the steadiness in her eyes sent an arrow of dread into his stomach. He wanted her to be scared, to understand the danger she was assuming in boarding the Elysium. Then at least she might be careful, weigh the risks of her movements aboard the boat against the potential of a positive outcome.

  But he saw only clear-eyed resolve, a determination he’d come to know well over the past few months. It was determination that said she would do whatever it took, that she would look past fear and even common sense to see something done.

  It was a look that said she wasn’t afraid, and that scared him most of all.

  26

  Julia looked around the table at the people laughing and drinking, the people who had come to mean so much to her over the previous weeks and months, and felt a swell of gratitude. Braden and Nora were laughing over something, their heads tipped together. Julia enjoyed watching them, their movements synchronized in a way that spoke to their history not only as lovers, but as friends and colleagues.

  Ronan’s hand rested on Julia’s thigh, but his attention was on Nick, who was recounting a story from their childhood, the details of which were being hotly but laughingly debated between the two brothers.

  Nora paused from her conversion with Braden to insert her version of the story, uniting the brothers against her recollection.

  Over the previous weeks, they’d become her friends, and in a way, her family.

  They’d been sitting at the beachside restaurant for the past three hours, drinking cold beer and ouzo and eating an array of delicious food that included octopus salad, fried clams, and crusty bread dipped in olive oil sprinkled with fresh rosemary and sea salt.

  They might have been on holiday, five friends, taking a break from their busy lives to eat and dive and lay in the sun, except tomorrow at this time they would be on a boat headed for the open water of the Aegean. Nora would park it far enough away that it wouldn’t set off alarm bells for the crew of the Elysium, and Julia, Ronan, Nick, and Braden would don their diving gear and plunge into the dark waters, then swim toward the yacht that was Elise’s prison.

  It was possible not all of them would make it out alive.

  It was possible none of them would.

  Guilt rolled through her body like a wave and she had to ball her fists together in her lap to keep her hands from shaking. All of the people around the table were risking their lives for her, for Elise.

  She had the sudden desire to call it all off, to tell them it had all been a terrible mistake, they should let the police do their job and hope for the best.

  But she knew she wouldn’t do that.

  The police weren’t doing their job, and Elise was too well hidden — hidden by power and wealth and a brotherhood whose bond was victimization — for anyone to find her within the bounds of the law.

  The people around the table had made their choice. Elise hadn’t had one, but that didn’t make it any easier to know that someone else might get hurt — or worse.

  She stood and forced a smile. She needed a minute. Needed to get away from the smiling faces of the people she’d come to love, of the people who were willing to risk everything for her and her sister.

  They’d made a lie of everything Julia had believed, of everything she’d told herself she believed, anyway. That people were inherently selfish, that they always looked out for themselves first, that you had to look out for yourself too, because no one else was going to do it for you.

  “Excuse me.” She left her napkin on her chair and made her way through the small group of people on the restaurant’s beachside patio, trying not to think about the silence that had descended around the table.

  Tonight of all nights, Ronan, Nick, Braden, and Nora deserved to have fun.

  Stepping around the rope that marked the restaurant’s dining area, she continued onto the beach, her feet sinking into the sand as she made her way toward the darkened waterline.

  The sun had gone down over an hour ago, but it was still warm, the breeze a caress against her shoulders, bare under her sleeveless blouse. She waited until she’d stepped out of the light cast from the restaurant to take off her shoes, the soft clatter of silverware and murmur of conversation falling behind her like a shadow.

  She inhaled the briny scent of the ocean and walked through the shallow surf rolling onto the beach, Ronan’s face as she’d stood from the table fresh in her mind. She’d wanted to smooth the worry from his brow, to apologize for causing him to risk everything on a job even Nick must think was a fool’s mission.

  She thought about her conversation with Nick on the terrace two days earlier, a conversation that hadn’t been far from her mind since. If he knew she was holding something back from Ronan, Ronan must feel it too.

  Sorrow squeezed her heart in a vise. She’d thought her fear of the future, her doubt about the foundation of their relationship, had been private. She hadn’t wanted Ronan to see it, but now she saw that that was the most foolish thing of all.

  He saw everything.

  She’d been a coward, hiding behind the wall she’d started building when she was a little girl, each brick carefully laid, a barrier against the kind of pain she’d seen her mother suffer time and again, a hedge against ever giving herself fully to someone, a self-fulfilling prophecy that would guarantee no one ever got close enough to really know and love her.

  Except Ronan had gotten close enough. He did know and love her, and somehow his love had made cracks in her precious wall.

  “Julia!”

  She turned toward the sound of his voice and saw him making his way toward her in the dark.

  “Hey,” he said when he caught up. He placed his hands on her shoulders. “You okay?”

  “I’m sorry. I just… I needed to walk.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” He took her hand. “Want company?”

  She nodded and they continued along the beach.
The surf rolled over Julia’s feet, the water warm on her skin.

  “I feel bad,” she confessed. “About tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just… everyone risking their lives, their freedom, for me, for Elise.”

  “It’s our choice,” Ronan said. “And it’s what we do, all of us.”

  She didn’t know the details of Braden and Nora’s work with Locke Montgomery, but she’d gathered that they worked with similar goals as MIS using very different methods.

  “I know, but I can’t help feeling responsible.”

  He stopped walking and took her face in his hands. His eyes were dark and unreadable as he looked down at her.

  “Don’t,” he said. “With or without you and Elise, none of us would be able to leave this alone now that we know about Manifest.”

  “I keep wanting to say thank you, but thank you seems so small,” she confessed.

  She was surprised to see something like anger flash across his features. He stepped away, running his hands through his hair.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What did I say?”

  He turned to face her. “You don’t have to thank me, Julia. Thanks is for a casserole someone brings over when you have a death in the family, for a ride from a friend when your car’s broken down.”

  She turned her hands toward the sky. “I don’t know what else to say.”

  He walked toward her, his eyes blazing, stopping when he was so close she could feel the heat of his body. “Don’t say anything. You’re my family, Julia. I’d do anything for you. Don’t you know that?”

  She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I do.”

  “Then why are you so determined to hold yourself apart from me?”

  She opened her mouth to deny it, then thought better of it. Ronan didn’t deserve lies.

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I guess I’m scared.”

  “Of me?”

  She shook her head. “Of myself.”

  He reached down and tucked a piece of windblown hair behind her ear. “Help me understand.”

  “I’ve never seen two people love each other in a way that was anything other than toxic.” She’d been young when her grandmother died, too young to view her marriage to Julia’s gramps through the lens of adulthood. “I’ve never seen a woman love a man without losing herself.”

  “Those women aren’t you, Julia. Those men aren’t me.”

  She nodded. “It’s just hard to let go.”

  “We’re all scared. Every one of us. But Julia…” He shook his head. “I won’t settle for part of you. I can’t. Not when I’m giving you everything.”

  “I want to give you everything too.” There were other words stuck in her throat, words she’d wanted to say since her conversation with Nick, words she’d wanted to say since long before that, but this was all she could manage. “I’m just I’m not sure how to do it.”

  He pulled her into his arms and looked down at her. “Just let go.”

  His voice was hoarse and he lowered his mouth to hers, sweeping her into a kiss with so much urgency it stole her breath. It was a kiss that said he was done waiting, a kiss that said he’d burn down anything between them with the force of his love.

  She slid her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his, molding herself to every sculpted peak and valley until there was no space for anything else.

  By the time she broke away, she was on fire, heat radiating outward from her belly, her underwear wet with her desire, her body clamoring for him to fill her.

  “Take me to bed, Ronan.”

  He pulled her against his side and hurried up the beach.

  There was peace in surrender.

  27

  The house was quiet when they returned, everyone else still at the restaurant on the beach. His hands were roaming her body before he’d even closed the door behind them.

  A breeze blew through the open terrace doors as they made their way through the house, their kisses growing more frenzied as they crossed the living room and made their way down the hall to the room that was theirs while they were in Greece.

  There was no tenderness in his kiss. He’d used up all his tenderness in the months she’d been withholding from him, the months he’d done everything in his power to get her to let go.

  Now all he had was his hunger for her.

  They were on the threshold to the bedroom when she reached for the hem of his T-shirt. She pulled it over his head, her fingers traveling over his chest as he unfastened the buttons of her blouse, kissing his way across her silky shoulder as he slid the fabric off her arms.

  She smelled like coconut, vanilla, and the sea and he inhaled her scent like it might be the one thing to save him.

  The room was bathed in moonlight, the sheer curtains billowing around the open doors. He cradled her face in his hands as he led her to the bed.

  “Nothing between us this time, Julia.”

  He knelt at her feet and unbuttoned her jeans, then slid them from her legs along with her underwear. She stepped out of them and he looked up at her body, a refuge from everything ugly in the world.

  She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  He kissed his way up the inside of her thigh, letting his lips sink into the plush flesh, inhaling the musky scent of her sex as he drew closer to the cleft between her thighs.

  She sighed and slipped her hands into his hair.

  “You thought I wouldn’t know,” he murmured, closing his mouth over her sex through the thin fabric of her panties. “You thought it was enough to give me your body.”

  She gasped. “Yes.”

  His cock strained against the confines of his jeans, begging for her paradise.

  “No more,” he said softly, pulling her underwear aside.

  He ran his tongue through her soaking folds and his shaft got harder still as she let out a long moan.

  He lifted his face from her pussy and her fingers tightened in his hair. The sensation sent a powerful surge of desire to the tip of his cock. “Tell me there will never be anything between us again.”

  She looked down at him, her eyes hooded with the weight of her desire. “Never.”

  “Never what?” He wanted to hear her say it.

  The haze in her eyes cleared. “There will never be anything between us again.”

  He tugged the underwear off her body and buried his face between her legs, plunging his tongue into her channel as he worked her clit with his thumb.

  “Oh my god…” she breathed.

  He lapped at her juices like a man dying of thirst, covering her sex with his mouth, teasing her clit until it grew as hard and swollen as a spring bud under his tongue.

  She was already close to coming. He could feel it in the coil of her body, the rhythmic motion of her hips matching the motion of his mouth as he licked her pussy.

  He stood and raked his teeth over one of her lace-covered nipples, then sucked it until it grew to a hard peak under her bra.

  She dropped her head back. “Ronan…”

  He reached behind her, unhooked the bra, and tossed it aside, savoring the feel of her warm skin against his chest.

  She reached for the button of his jeans and he closed his mouth over hers, sweeping it with his tongue as she worked his zipper.

  Lust tore through his body when she closed her hand around the shaft of his cock and he nudged her back onto the bed and pulled off his jeans, eager to feel her stretched out underneath him.

  He stood over the bed and looked down at her, wanting to memorize the way the moonlight streamed in through the open doors, bathing her body in pearly light. Her breasts were full, her nipples jutting hard and pink, begging for his mouth. Her waist narrowed to a soft belly. He knew exactly how it would feel when he nipped at the pillowy flesh with his teeth, knew that it would be like silk under his cheek.

  The hair between her legs was fair, her legs long and muscular, tapering to strong calves and
shapely feet that he could almost feel on his shoulders as he drove into her.

  She lifted her arms, reaching for him, and he turned toward the nightstand for a condom.

  “No,” she said.

  He looked at her. “No?”

  “Nothing between us tonight,” she said. “Remember?”

  A knot of emotion in his chest made it hard for him to breathe. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “Come here.”

  He stretched out over her body and kissed her, slanting his mouth over hers to take their kiss deeper, wanting to take up residence inside every hidden corner in the secret garden of her body.

  She arched her back, meeting the urgency of his kiss with a demand of her own, pulling her knees up around his hips so that his shaft nestled into the wet heat between her legs, a tease of the nirvana that was to come.

  He kissed his way across her jaw, up her cheekbones and over her closed eyelids. Her breath was a whisper across his skin and he touched his lips behind her ear and down her neck, lingering over the pronounced well of her collarbone before turning his attention to the erect buds of her nipples.

  He closed his lips around one of them and her fingers found their way into his hair as he tongued the peak, sucking until she moaned.

  He cupped the breast in his hand, rolling the dusty pink nipple, wet from his mouth, between his fingers as he took the other one between his lips. Her body writhed under his, her hips lifting off the bed in a silent plea.

  Her need stoked his own, and his cock throbbed against her silken sex, so close that he could be inside her with one thrust. He let his engorged tip brush against her clit, relishing the way she tried to position her hips under his to force him inside her.

  When he couldn’t stand it a second longer he knelt between her legs and positioned his cock at her entrance.

  Her body was laid out like a feast, chest flushed with pleasure, nipples wet and thrusting into the air. The soft curls covering her mound were damp, moisture beading on the petals of her sex, her thighs spread for him.

  He pushed into her with a slow, hard thrust, tunneling through her enveloping softness until he came to a stop against the barrier of her cervix.