They’d talked to Cassandra Harrington early that morning. They thought she acted kind of suspicious, but she had a solid alibi for the night before. A man who was at her place with her had verbally vouched for her.
But that wasn’t cutting it for me, even though they said they’d keep her on their radar, whatever the hell that meant.
We were in the playroom after giving Braiden lunch. He went down for a nap, and Gannon was working on his laptop, taking care of his business from home. I got on my cell and started texting my sister.
Brianna was an avid mystery reader and an amateur sleuth. I thought some covert work would be right up her alley. And I was spot on when she responded to my first text that asked her if she’d heard about what was going on with me and Gannon and Braiden. She was quick to reply that I needed to call her. We had to talk.
So I excused myself to go to the bathroom and went to the one down the hallway, leaving Gannon and Braiden in the playroom.
As soon as I knew I was out of earshot from everyone as I closed the bathroom door, I made the call to my sister. “What the hell is happening, baby sis? Brad’s called everyone, telling them about you and the ordeal you’re going through. Is it true that bullets came into your bedroom last night?” she asked.
“Right through my window.” I chewed on my pinky fingernail nervously. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through.”
“You’ve got to tell me all about it. Every last detail.”
I told her all about it, leaving out the little detail that Gannon had been right there with me every step of the way. But I did tell her that Braiden and I had slept in Gannon’s bed with him for the rest of the night as he wasn’t going to let either of us out of his sight. That was true, after all.
When she responded that she was glad he was taking such good care of me, I felt like a tiny step had been made. At the very least, my family was seeing that Gannon could protect me.
I went on to tell her about Cassandra Harrington, and Brianna looked her up on the Internet and found out there was a park near her house. She could go there and keep an eye out for Cassandra to come out of her house. Then she could follow her and accidentally meet her. She’d get moving and let me know as soon as she knew anything.
Heading back to hang with Gannon while Braiden slept, I found him coming down the hallway as I stepped out of the bathroom. “There you are.” His brow was furrowed, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “I know I’m being overly protective, but if anything happens to you …” He stopped himself as I got to him and ran my arms around him. His lips touched the top of my head, and he wrapped his arms around me, swaying with me. “I see why your family is so protective of you now. You’re just so darn loveable.” He gave me a squeeze as he picked me up, my feet dangling in the air.
He carried me back into the playroom and took a seat on one of the sofas, keeping me on his lap. Braiden was still fast asleep on his pallet. We were mostly alone, and I saw the gleam in Gannon’s blue eyes.
His lips touched my ear. “Wanna fool around very quietly?”
“Gannon!” I smacked his chest as I blushed with the thought of doing anything sexual with the boy right in the same room with us. I didn’t care if he was sleeping or not, it felt wrong. My eyes shot to where he was and then back to Gannon. “No way.”
He looked at Braiden and smiled. “He’s dead to the world, baby. Come on.” He pulled me close and nibbled my earlobe. “Even daddies need naughty time.”
I had to laugh at his silly ways. And his love bites were working magic on me. “What did you have in mind?” I found myself asking, then quickly added, “Not that I’m saying okay or anything like that. I just wondered what you had in mind.”
His teeth grazed my neck, then soft lips pressed the spot just behind my ear. My thighs shuddered as heat swept through me. “That dress will make things pretty easy to get to and pretty easy to hide stuff we might or might not be doing.” He turned me around, facing away from him, and spread my dress out where I felt my panty-covered ass sitting on his bulging male member. “See what I mean?”
“I do, but I don’t …” The touch of his mouth on my neck as he reached around, cupping my boobs, had me going silent.
I went so wet, it was insane. “Gannon, no,” the words were said, but there was absolutely no conviction in them. “We can’t.”
“I need you, honey. Please.” He could’ve been manipulating me to get his way, but the fact was, I wanted it to. And I could see in his eyes that after everything we’d been through, this was a reassurance he badly needed to know I was still whole and safe. And I needed to know the same about him.
His hands moved down, and I felt him doing something underneath my ass. Then I felt the warmth of his bare flesh against my cheeks as he pushed my panties to one side. “Sure we can, baby.” He moved his erect cock around my ass, and I moaned softly. “Now, I want you to move up a bit and come down slowly on what I have for you.” He pulled my hair to lie over the other side and kissed the spot where my neck and shoulder met. “If he starts to stir, you’ll see him, and we can stop.”
So, with my eyes glued to the sleeping child across the room, I did as he said to and had to hold in the moan that wanted to come out as I slid myself over his cock. We both went silent as he moved me, holding me by the waist as he kissed my neck.
What I felt was crazy. Sort of reckless and very, very bad. I could see what girls saw in bad boys then. They were hot as hell!
I was on the verge of an orgasm from the get-go. With the threat of Braiden waking up and ending it all, I was ready to explode if he made the slightest movement.
Gannon’s mouth was working wonders on me as he went from scraping his teeth over my skin to sucking it in places that had my toes curling inside my shoes.
The way he picked me up with ease made me feel weightless in his strong hands. Before I knew it, I was coming all over him, moaning quietly and then holding down a scream as he came inside of me with a hot burst and a hard bite to my neck.
His tongue trailed up my neck then flicked into my ear. “I love you, Brooke.”
I laid my body back, resting it on his. “I love you too. Damn, baby. Damn. I’ve got to go get cleaned up a bit.”
His hands trailed down my arms as he leaned his head on my shoulder. “You do that. I’ll be right here. I can clean up in the bathroom right here.”
One of his hands moved up, and he pushed my face to the side. Then our lips met, and I felt his cock pulse inside of me. Oh, the man was good.
But we both heard Braiden as he turned over. I hopped off Gannon. “Damn. I’ll be right back,” I whispered, then ran out of the room to go to my room.
As I ran down the hallway, I thought I heard something, and when I ran into my bedroom, I stopped as I saw someone was inside. A man was fixing my window. “Oh, hi,” he said. “Almost done with this one.”
Fuck me!
“Oh, great.” I tried to act all cool. “I gotta grab something real quick.” I opened my top drawer and balled up a pair of panties in my hand until you couldn’t see them at all. “Bye.” I went into Gannon’s bedroom and went to his restroom to clean up and change
Just as I finished up, my cell rang, and I saw it was my sister already calling me back.
“Hey,” I answered the call.
“Oh, baby sister. This woman has to have something up her sleeve,” she began. “I talked to Brad and got the backstory on Gannon’s baby momma.”
Oh, I did not like her calling that woman that. Not one bit. “K. First, don’t call her that. Call her bitch, or whatever, but not that.”
“Hmm.” She paused. “Okay. Well, this bitch and I met in the park where I joined her for a run. And it was more than easy to get her talking. Her first and only subject was how much she missed her little boy. His mean old rich daddy stole him from her after she introduced the two. She said she’s been a single mother since she found out she was pregnant and that she only recently let the daddy know about t
he boy. She was feeling guilty about not letting him know.”
“No way.” I chewed my pinky nail again as I listened.
“Yep. And there’s more,” Brianna went on. “She said she’s been sneaking out there and peeking in the windows. She wanted to make sure her little boy was safe. She found his window and the one right next to his that must be his nanny’s. And guess what she said?”
I was shocked that Cassandra knew so much. She had to be involved in this whole thing. “What else did she say?”
“She said that through the sheer curtain, she could see everything. Her son. The nanny. And her baby’s father humping the nanny.” Her words made my heart stop beating. “So, baby sister, have you and Bad Boy Moneybags been screwing?”
Fuck my life!
Chapter 30
Gannon
It wasn’t long before Brooke came rushing back into the playroom. Her face was on the pale side as she gave one sideways glance at Braiden, who was still sleeping on the pallet she’d made for him.
I had my laptop on my lap and closed it as she came and sat next to me, her eyes as big as saucers. “Gannon, Cassandra has been spying on us!” Her words were only a hiss yet they stopped my heart.
No way!
I shook my head. “Baby, there’s no way she’s been spying on us. Now where would you get a crazy idea like that?”
“My sister.” She nodded. “I called her. I told her to try to talk to Cassandra. And she did. She ran into her at the park near her home.”
I held up a hand to stop her as she was talking way too fast and making not a lick of sense. “Slow down. Now what the hell are you talking about?”
“How they met doesn’t matter. The meat of the story is that Cassandra told my sister, virtually out of the blue, that she’d introduced her son to his father after feeling guilty about keeping them apart. And the mean old rich man stole him from her.”
“Oh, God …” I gritted my teeth as I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “That bitch!”
“Yes, she is one. A very big one. And I do believe she is behind this whole thing, Gannon. And I think I was right. She wants you dead. That’s why the first shots were made to my bedroom.” She sat back and smiled as she crossed her arms in front of her as if she was so pleased with herself for solving the mystery. But she hadn’t solved it or finished her story.
“More details, babe. I’m a little lost here,” I urged her.
Her brows shot up. “Oh! I forgot the best part. She was spying on us. She knows about me and you. And that is why my …”
I stopped her. “Yes, yes. I get it now. That’s why your room was shot into first.” I rubbed my forehead as it all sank in. “She was trying to kill me. Not Braiden.” That was a relief, but not entirely.
Sure, Braiden was safe, but not fully. If she got her hands back on him, then he wasn’t safe at all. She was a monster, through and through. “I’m calling the lead investigator to let him know about this.”
“Yeah, you need to do that right away.” She got up and started picking up some toys that were scattered around. “When my sister asked me if you and I had really been screwing—I won’t tell you what she called you, by the way—I just about fainted.”
I paused my fingers over the cell screen and looked at her. “Wait. What? She asked you about us screwing?” My heart pounded.
Were we finally free to be open about our relationship?
“Yes, she did.” Her eyes rolled. “It was terrifying, Gannon. I was all like a deer in the headlights when she asked me that.”
“And you said?” I crossed my fingers. Please say you told her we are indeed screwing!
“I told her no way.” My heart plummeted with her answer. “I told Brianna that the crazy bitch must be seeing things. You and I do not do that. We’re very close and are friends above having an employer/employee relationship, but it’s nothing more than that.”
Well, fuck!
“You know that would’ve been a great opportunity to come clean, right?” I watched her as she put away the toys she’d collected.
Her narrow shoulders moved with a shrug. “I didn’t see it that way.”
Of course, she didn’t.
It was quite obvious that it would have to be me who outed us. I didn’t know when or how, but I knew it was all up to me.
After making the call, I had the investigative team heading our way to get all the fingerprints they could from the windows outside Brooke’s and Braiden’s bedrooms. I hoped against hope that Cassandra hadn’t had the smarts to wear gloves when she was being a peeping Tom.
While I was on the phone, I saw Braiden waking up and Brooke going to lie on the floor beside him, stroking his back and talking to him quietly.
After I’d hung up, I sat there, watching them. I knew it then. I had known it for a while, but then at that moment as I watched the two of them as he smiled at her and touched her face so gently and she ran her hand through his dark hair with such tenderness, that I had to make things right.
“So,” I said as I got up, “I’ve got the team coming over, and if they find her prints anywhere at all, she’ll be picked up and taken first to be hooked up to a lie detector and then to the police.”
I went to sit on the floor with Brooke and Braiden. They’d sat up, and he’d crawled onto her lap. When he saw me on the floor, he kissed her cheek then came to sit in my lap. “Did Daddy’s little man have a nice nap?”
While he and I conversed with nods and nose nudges, Brooke glanced at her cell and got up. “I should get to finding something to make for dinner. Care to join me in the kitchen, you two?”
So off we went to the kitchen, just like a normal family, a thing I’d never been a part of but had seen on television. Meals cooked by a mother weren’t a thing I knew about. My mother had never cooked a day in her life.
I placed Braiden in his highchair then carried him in it to the kitchen. “I want to help.”
Brooke opened the fridge. “Hmm. Okay. What do you know how to do?”
“Not much. But you can teach me.” I washed my hands to get ready to learn from her.
She laughed as she pulled out some frozen chicken. “Funny, huh?” She put the bag into the microwave and started it.
“What’s funny?” I had to ask her as she didn’t go on.
She ambled up to me, throwing her arms around my neck and gazing up at me. “You teach me in the bedroom. I teach you in the kitchen.”
I kissed her and picked her up as I did, holding her tightly. “I can teach you some things in here too. Maybe one night—after this shit is over—you and I will head to the kitchen for a midnight snack, featuring you.”
“Always the naughty boy,” she said with a giggle. “Now put me down. Braiden is looking at us through his fingers. We’re embarrassing the kid.”
I put her down and went to whisper in Braiden’s ear a little secret that only he and I would be privy to. The smile I wore hid so much behind it. But Brooke smiled back at me without a clue as to what I’d told my son.
“You like cabbage?” She pulled out some light green stuff out of the fridge.
“Not sure.” I went to smell it. “It doesn’t have a smell, does it?”
“When you cook it, it does.” She wrinkled her nose. “On second thought, not a good idea. My brother gets very gassy after eating cabbage, and I have to sleep with you tonight.”
I laughed and smacked her ass. “Are you insinuating that I would stink you out of the bedroom?”
She laughed and nodded as she put the stuff back up. “I bet you would. My mom made cabbage rolls one night when we were kids. Later that same night, Brad stunk us out of the den a few hours after dinner. We were all watching a movie on T.V. when that cabbage went to work on him.” She pulled out a yellow thing and tossed it to me. “There, you chop that up, and we can mix that in with the chicken breasts that you will also chop up, and we’ll have us some good old-fashioned stir-fry for dinner.”
The smile just refuse
d to leave my face that night as we made dinner and acted like a real family. She was what made us a family. Without her, there would just be my little boy and me.
Chapter 31
Brooke
Another night of the three of us sleeping in Gannon’s bed had me waking up with Braiden’s feet wedged into my back. As I moved, a groan came out of me as I found my body felt a bit beaten and bruised.
Seems the kid slept on the restless side and I had gotten his feet in the deal while Gannon must’ve gotten the softer side, his head. I rolled off the two inches of mattress that I’d been forced onto and stood up, stretching and yawning and feeling the most exhausted I’d ever felt upon waking up.
When I turned around, rubbing my eyes, I found the bathroom light was on, and the door was wide open. Then I saw an empty place on the other side of the big bed.
Gannon was gone.
Padding to the bathroom, I thought I might find him in there. But I didn’t. What I did find was a wet towel that told me he’d showered and some empty hangers that told me he’d dressed. But where the hell was he?
I went back into the bedroom to grab my cell to see if he’d left me a message, but I found he hadn’t. I also found it to be ten in the morning. I had no idea how Braiden and I both had slept so late.
I suppose the night of kickboxing had worn little Braiden out. And my night as his punching bag had done me in too. Gannon must’ve escaped the battle we had and had gotten up on time and was most likely somewhere in the house, talking to Samson or Josh.
When I opened the door to go across the hall and gather us some clothes to put on, I found Josh in the hallway, sitting on a chair and reading a book. “Morning, ma’am.”
Shoving my hand through the mess of my hair, I looked down, embarrassed, as I had on one of Gannon’s t-shirts and a pair of his boxers. “Morning, Josh.” I headed to my bedroom and grabbed my clothes.
The windows had been fixed, the mess of glass cleaned up. Everything was back to normal. But I still felt anxious being in the room where bullets had zipped through only one night ago. I looked at the wall where the bullets had lodged and saw that the holes were still there. A project for that day, no doubt.
Nightclub Sins: A Billionaire Romance Series Page 14
