“You are a terrible liar.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had much practice.”
“You better ask Yuri for pointers because you’re going to have to learn how to bluff in high-stakes meetings, Bee.” Slanting his head, he studied my face. “Why in the world are you jealous of Vivian?”
Like a petulant child, I pouted. “You took her out for dinner and dancing.”
“Bee, those were group activities. We have friends in common. It was never a one-on-one thing.”
“You’ve never taken me out like that. When I tried to kiss you and you shut me down, I thought maybe it was because of her. She’d just been kidnapped and all that so I thought—”
“I see.” Kelly nuzzled my neck in that way he had discovered made me tremble with need. “You have nothing to be jealous about, Bee. Sure, I think she’s beautiful—but we’re only friends. That’s it.”
I swallowed hard as he sucked on my neck and grazed his teeth over the spot before laving it with his tongue to ease the small hurt. “Just friends, huh?”
“Just friends,” he whispered and then skimmed his lips along my breast. “You can rest assured I’ve never done anything like this with her.”
“Why not?”
As his hand slid along my inner thigh, Kelly turned that piercing gaze of his on me. “You know why.”
I inhaled a shaky breath when he gently probed my slick folds. “Tell me.”
With a lascivious grin, he murmured, “I think I’d rather show you…”
Chapter Seven
Kelly considered himself to be in excellent shape, especially with Lev’s physical fitness requirements for all LSG guards and Jack’s training regimen, but—God help him—Alexei was going to kill him.
Slinging sweat from his eyes, Kelly rubbed the back of his sparring gloves across his forehead and hopped from foot to foot, keeping his weight properly shifted as he awaited his partner’s next strike. Alexei had brought four fighters with him, men he trained on the side at Ivan’s warehouse, and they were whipping his ass.
The first mock fight had gone well, with Kelly winning it easily. Alexei seemed to have used it as a rubric. The rounds had gotten more intense and more brutally violent. The Russian trainer had insisted on proper sparring equipment so at least he was being spared the worst of it. Even with his shin guards and helmet, Kelly would be sporting bruises tomorrow.
Alexei had been rotating his men out halfway through every round. Facing a fresh foe every few minutes forced Kelly to exert himself in ways he hadn’t since the long, hard slog of war. The former fighter’s point wasn’t lost on Kelly. If he couldn’t win multiple sparring rounds in the safety of the ring, he was going to get his damn neck snapped by Sergei.
If he was lucky.
From the corner of the sparring mat, Alexei’s voice boomed at him. He snapped directions in Russian but Kelly couldn’t understand them. Uncertain if Alexei was speaking to him or the guy throwing punches, he glanced to his left—and gave his opponent just enough of an opening to land a killer fucking kick right to his thigh. It knocked him off balance and the blast of pain radiated right into his stomach. Before he could recover, his opponent hooked his foot around Kelly’s ankle and took him down to the mat.
Stopping the round, Alexei stormed onto the mat in utter disgust. “What did I say? Huh?”
Kelly pushed aside the guy trying to put him in a hold, shoved to his feet, and spit out his mouth guard. “I can’t fucking understand you. Speak. English.”
Alexei smacked Kelly’s face with such speed and force that his head snapped back. He heard his brothers’ gasps of outrage from the sidelines, but they didn’t intervene. “Did you understand that?”
Getting up in Alexei’s face, Kelly pushed down the rage and frustration boiling in his gut. Through gritted teeth, he answered, “Yes.”
“Are you pissed at me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to hit me?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” With a growl, Alexei shoved him back into the center of the ring. “Pretend he’s me—and watch that leg.”
Rolling his neck, Kelly shoved his mouth guard into place. Jack clapped two wooden blocks together, signaling they could go at each other again. Alexei continued to shout pointers from the sidelines, but he did it in English most of the time. The remainder of the sparring session went fairly well, but by the time Kelly finished his cool down, he feared his jelly-like legs were going to collapse at any moment.
“Get cleaned up,” Alexei ordered. “Come join us when you’re done.”
Dragging ass, Kelly made his way to the men’s locker room and showered the sweat from his ragged body. Every muscle in his body ached as he dried off and got dressed. The knowledge that tomorrow morning would feel even worse and the next morning after that ten times as bad as this made his chest tighten.
“Suck it the fuck up, man,” he hissed to himself. He’d survived so much worse than this. Explosions, firefights, the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents—he’d beat them all. He’d get through this. Three weeks of training. Two nights of bloody battle. He could do this.
Because he didn’t have a choice. His father’s life, the gym, Jack and Finn’s livelihoods—they all rested on his shoulders.
Leaving the locker room, he found Alexei talking seriously with Jack. He joined the pair just as Alexei asked if Jack had any sledgehammers.
“Sledgehammers?” Jack glanced around his gym. “This look like a Home Depot to you?”
Alexei actually laughed. “I’ll bring my own—and tires too.”
“Tires?”
The Russian nodded. “It’s an old training technique but a good one.” He glanced at Kelly. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ll live.”
Alexei considered him for a moment. “You’re not bad.”
Kelly figured that was the best compliment he was going to get from the trainer. “Thanks.”
“Your defensive techniques are shit.” Alexei practically sneered the words. “You take too much punishment. You’re too focused on powerful hits and kicks. You need to think about stamina. That’s the only way you survive four fights in two nights, understand?”
Kelly was starting to get it. He trusted that Alexei knew what he was talking about so he nodded. “I understand.”
“If you can’t knock a man out in the first minute, you’ve got to change tactics. You have to wear them down. Look for those openings. Then? Strike!” He slammed his fist into his palm. “Tomorrow we work on take-downs, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you here at five in the morning. Jack and I have agreed on your morning conditioning and strength training regimen. I gave your other brother,” he gestured to his leg, “the rules of nutrition I want you to follow. You’ve got to eat clean. You need to fuel your body.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be here at six tomorrow evening to start our night session. All right?”
“Yeah.”
Alexei clapped his back a few times. “You’re a good fighter, Kelly.”
His final compliment paid, Alexei left the gym. Jack grasped the back of Kelly’s neck and massaged his tense muscles. Concern darkened his face. “You sure you want to do this, bro?”
“I’ve done it before,” he reminded his oldest brother.
“That was different. You were fighting one guy a night, maybe two in a month. This is four guys in two nights. The money in the pot is huge. Every mobster and criminal in Houston has a piece of this action. These guys are fucking animals who are out for blood.”
Exasperated, Kelly shook off Jack’s hand. “What the hell else are we going to do? Huh? You want to stand by and let the Albanians kill Pop? Or maybe you’d like to take on the mob? And all this?” He gestured to the building. “It’s gone if we don’t win enough cash to pay back whatever the hell Hagen wants.”
“I’d rather go bankrupt and live in a fucking box on the street than watch my baby brother get
killed.”
Irritated, Kelly chafed under his worrying. “Don’t be so melodramatic. No one is going to die. Not me, at least. Am I going to get hurt? Yes. I’ll be lucky to make it through the first night without breaking something—but I’ll heal.”
Jack turned his back and sifted his fingers through his black hair. Kelly noticed Finn standing nearby, watching them and mashing that cinnamon gum he liked between his teeth. Finn had always been the calmest of them. He liked to watch and listen, and had more patience than any man Kelly had ever met. It was one of the reasons Finn had excelled as a sniper.
“You two about done?” Finn strode toward them. “Because Kelly needs to go home and rest, and you’ve got to be up here before five to get the gym open for him.”
Jack narrowed his eyes at Finn. “Yes, Mother.”
Finn shot him the finger. “Get the keys and lock up. I’m beat.”
“I don’t know how the two of you work together without killing each other,” Kelly remarked.
“I pray. A lot,” Finn added with a smile. He motioned to the entrance across the gym. “How is Bee handling her new living situation?”
Kelly lifted the strap of his gym bag a little higher on his shoulder. “She’s adjusting well. I don’t think she even realizes how much danger she’s in yet.”
“She’s always been sort of—”
“Watch it,” Kelly warned as his brother searched for the right word to describe his sweet Bee.
“Idealistic,” Finn offered. “She’s a dreamer, Kelly. I won’t say that she’s naïve. God knows she’s seen more than her fair share of death and sadness and the cruelty of this world—but she’s also lived inside an insulated bubble for years. Even now, she’s being protected and coddled.”
“Coddled? Some fucking asshole broke into her house, stole her panties, and jacked off on them! You can call it coddling if you like, but I’m not about to let a psycho like that get close to her.”
Finn held up a hand. “All right. It was a bad choice of word.”
“You’re damn right it was.”
“What are you two arguing about now?” Jack had caught up with them in the parking lot.
“Nothing,” Kelly said with a wave of his hand. “We’re fine.”
Jack glanced from one brother to the next and finally shrugged. “Go home and take some anti-inflammatories. If you feel like you need to ice, do that. I’ll see you in the morning. You might want to go easy on breakfast—unless you plan to mop my floors after your workout.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.” Before he broke away from his brothers, Finn reached out and patted his arm. He accepted the silent apology with a nod. “I’ll see you guys later.”
Sitting in his truck, he didn’t immediately leave the parking lot. He dug his phone out of his gym bag and swiped the screen. There were no messages or missed calls, which he took as a good sign. Because he had the LookIt app on his phone and followed Bee, he received a notification any time she posted. He tapped the icon and waited for the page to load.
Kelly grinned the moment the image appeared on his screen. Bee had framed her smiling, beautiful face with her fingers in the shape of a heart. There was no caption to the photo or even a line of text accompanying the post, but it had already drawn nearly nine thousand likes and hundreds of comments. He checked the time stamp. It had only been live for a few hours.
Though he enjoyed her secret message to him, Kelly begrudgingly admitted that Finn might have been right in his assessment of her and the current situation. Had she even considered that her stalker might believe this message was meant for him? He hated the thought of laying down the law with her, but it had to be done.
When he reached the penthouse, his muscles protested every single step. Sully greeted him at the door this time. Despite being off the clock and already in his pajama bottoms and T-shirt, the man was armed and ready for anything that might come across the threshold.
“You need me to carry you?” Sully leaned against the wall and seemed to delight in the agony Kelly experienced.
He lobbed a one-fingered salute the other man’s way. “Where’s Winn?”
“He’s in the kitchen going over the dossiers Spike sent over.” Sully locked the door and reactivated the alarm. “Bee left some ibuprofen for you and had the restaurant on the ground floor send up fifty pounds of ice before they closed for the night. It’s stowed in the second freezer in the kitchen.”
Touched by her consideration, he decided to thank her very nicely later. “She still awake?”
“No idea. She came in about an hour ago to get something to eat and then disappeared back into her room. She was on her phone, so I didn’t ask about her plans for the night.”
“Who was she talking to?”
“Someone named Haley?” He shrugged. “I only heard snippets of the conversation.”
“Hadley,” he corrected. “It’s one of her friends.”
“The DJ?”
He shook his head. “That’s Coby.”
Sully made a face. “Who names their daughter Coby?”
“It’s Jacob, actually. She’s named after her dad. He was a SEAL.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Was?”
“He was killed over there. 2005,” added. “Iraq.”
Sully looked a bit surprised. “I might have known him.”
“I never met him, but I gather he was a damn good operator.” He gestured to the kitchen. “I’m going to talk to Winn and then hit the sheets.”
To his credit, Sully didn’t crack any jokes. In the kitchen, he found Winn seated at the island. Sheets of paper, neatly stacked and already labeled with brightly colored notes, surrounded him. The quiet Brit didn’t even glance up as Kelly entered the kitchen and dropped his bag near the door. “You need help putting together some ice packs?”
“I’ve got it, but thanks for the offer.” Snatching up the bottle of ibuprofen, he twisted off the cap and shook a couple tablets into his palm. “Anything interesting in the dossiers?”
“That depends on your definition of interesting, I suppose. I’m sorting these into three stacks according to their threat rating—red, yellow, green. I want to triage these for Spike so he has less work to do.”
“Let me get situated, and I’ll help.”
Winn pointed to the corner. “There are plastic bags in that drawer.”
“Thanks.” He found the zip-top bags and filled two with ice. Grabbing two dishtowels and a bottle of sports drink, he eased onto a stool opposite Winn. He draped a towel over his thigh and another across his sore shoulder, and covered them with the ice bags.
“Did you know that Bee’s company only has six male employees?”
“I did.” He tossed back the ibuprofen with a long drink of the berry-flavored fluid. “She was part of a symposium earlier this year about encouraging women to enter STEM-related studies and careers. There are a series of articles posted online. It’s good reading.”
Winn tapped his pen against his notepad. “The men who work at the company aren’t likely stalker candidates. There are a handful of ex-employees who fit the bill, that Trevor and Richard among them.” He handed over a stack of folders. “These aren’t complete yet, but Spike has sent over what he has.”
As Kelly flipped through the pages of information Spike had collected, he marveled at the man’s ability to scour publicly available databases and the internet. Without a legal warrant, there were barriers to what he could find, but somehow Spike always managed to come through for the team. The rumors around LSG pegged Spike as a former intelligence officer, maybe even CIA. Seeing Spike’s handiwork first-hand, Kelly had to wonder if those rumors weren’t based in reality.
“She had a high-turnover two years ago,” Winn mentioned. “I flagged the employee names that coincided with that time so Spike can dig deeper.”
Kelly scratched his chin. “That’s around the time she moved into the offices downstairs. Yuri convinced her
that it was time to stop operating out of coffee shops and dorm rooms, so she took the twelfth floor.”
“She started to see phenomenal growth after that. It was clearly a good business move.”
“Yes, it was.” Kelly reached for the copies of the text messages and photos she had received. He turned the erection snapshots face down because they infuriated him. Reading through the messages, he started to get a strange feeling. “Winn, you notice anything odd about these texts?”
Winn finished making his note, peeled off the sticky sheet, and slapped it onto a file. “I had a distinct feeling they were written by two different people.”
“So do I,” Kelly murmured. He separated the messages into two stacks. “These read as threats, and these read almost like…love letters. He’s telling her how beautiful she is in her dress and how the green ribbon in her hair makes her brown eyes pop.”
“He sounds like he’s totally obsessed with her.” Winn tapped the threatening stack. “This guy sounds angry. ‘Without me, you’d have nothing.’ It’s an entirely different tone.”
“Agreed.” Picking up the photos, Kelly flicked through them. He ignored the creep’s dick that was front and center in each snapshot, and studied the backgrounds. “Look at the way he’s framing his junk.”
“I’d rather not.”
Kelly slid the photos across the island to Winn. He reached for his cell phone and brought up the photo of Bee using her fingers to form a heart. Showing his screen to Winn, he said, “See the way Bee communicated with me?”
Winn’s reddish eyebrow lifted toward his hairline. “Yes.”
“Now look at the way her stalker is presenting himself to her. It’s almost as if he’s making an offering. It’s…reverent.”
“It’s fucking disgusting.” Winn flipped over the photos. “But I see your point.”
Kelly studied the information in front of them. “What if we have two stalkers? One of them is probably an ex-employee or someone she’s crossed paths with during her rise to fame.”
“The other one, the one who is infatuated with her, is the one we should be worried about the most.”
Kelly conferred with Winn’s assessment. The man had broken into Bee’s home at least twice and had left behind his semen without any fear. He was following her around and getting close enough to make remarks about changing her perfume. The knowledge that one of her stalkers had been within sniffing distance of Bee spurred Kelly’s protective instincts into overdrive. If he’d gotten that close, he could have snatched her.
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