Adored: A Masters and Mercenaries Novella (1001 Dark Nights)

by Lexi Blake

  She looked over at him. Why was this man precious to her? Why couldn’t it have been someone simpler? Someone happy and whole? Why did he move her?

  At the end, it was a mystery and she wouldn’t solve it. There were some things that simply were. If it didn’t work out between her and Mitch, she would miss him forever. She would move on because she wasn’t the type to lie down and fade, but she would always love him.

  Why hadn’t she told him?

  It seemed like the last wall she had, the very last defense.

  “You can’t sleep?” Mitch’s voice rumbled as he turned over. Even with the lights out, she could see the hard line of his jaw, watch as his hand came out to touch her shoulder.

  “I’m fine.” She wasn’t sure what to say.

  He sat up. “That means you’re not fine. I know that much.”

  She had to laugh at that. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. Physically I’m good. I’m a bit restless, that’s all.”

  He pulled her into his arms, resting against the back of the bed. His warmth surrounded her as he stroked her hair. “Because we’re not settled. Laurel, I’m worried you want something I can’t give you. Nothing is ever settled. I learned that a long time ago. We can be good one minute and broken the next. There’s no guarantee.”

  And that was precisely why he refused to talk about the future. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t trust it.

  “I know.” It wouldn’t do any good to lecture him about it. She felt him sigh.

  “I’m sorry about today. Baby, I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. I did the one thing I promised I wouldn’t do.”

  Yes, he had. She sat up and looked at him, an idea in her head. Sometimes ideas got lost in the muddle of communication. People didn’t always use the right words to make someone truly understand. Words got filtered through the drain of a person’s history, giving them weight or lightness that others wouldn’t place on the definition. “You withdrew affection. You promised you wouldn’t do that, Mitch.”

  “I know. I’m very sorry, Laurel. If it means anything to you, they were just words.”

  And so was the rest of it, but words could drag a man down. A couple could drown in words if they weren’t speaking the same language. “Affection is something that can go away.”

  “No. I don’t think so,” he argued in a low rumble. “Not this kind. I can’t imagine a time when I won’t feel this way for you.”

  Marriage was a hard word for Mitch. Love was a word he didn’t even understand. So she would find the ones that would get to him.

  “Even when I walked away, I adored you, Mitchell Bradford.”

  He hauled her close again, his arms so tight around her. “I adore you, Laurel. I don’t know why you’re still here with me. It scares me, to tell you the truth. I don’t trust it.”

  But he could. He wanted to. He simply needed time, patience. “You don’t have to right now. Just know that when we fight, I’m going to be here when it’s time for you to come home. I promise.”

  She let her head rest against his chest, listening to the strong beat of his heart.

  “I’ll go with Flynn.”

  He held her tight when she tried to get up. She eased back down, understanding he needed her in his arms. She hadn’t expected him to give in on that. Not at all. She’d expected to have to tell Flynn to go home alone. “Why?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Did it? “Not really. I’m happy. I think it will be good for you. I know it’s going to be hard, but I’ll be waiting at home for you. You simply have to let your father talk and then you say whatever you need to. I don’t want you to have regrets after he’s gone.”

  “I won’t. I wouldn’t. I’m not doing it because I need closure, Laurel. I’m doing it because I want to make you happy. Tell me this will make you happy.”

  Mitchell Bradford was a man who took his responsibilities seriously. He followed the letter of their contract and tried to hold her to hers. He was unbending about certain things and didn’t lie about them. He’d told her flat out that discussing the past was out of bounds, that she had no place there.

  And now he was facing it because he wanted to make her happy.

  “Yes. Yes, Mitch. You make me happy, but this will make me even happier.”

  “Then it’s good. I’ll go. And Laurel, I think while I’m gone, I want you to talk to a decorator. We should pick one of the rooms for a nursery. It’s still a long time away, but we should start making plans and stuff. Babies need lots of things, I think. God knows Tag’s kids do. Last time I was at his place, there was baby stuff everywhere. I think we should clean out my office.”

  His office? His office was a train wreck of things he kept. He loved his office. “Mitch, I can use the guest room.”

  “Too small. And it’s not close. I want the baby close to us. We can get rid of the stuff. Well, I’d like to keep some of the comics. They’re worth money, but no more than a box or two.”

  “Mitch, you love that stuff.” She thought it was junk, but it was important to him.

  “I want to love the baby more. I need to. I need to not need those things, Laurel. I need for us to be enough.”

  She held him in the quiet of the night and for the first time, felt real hope for them.

  Chapter Eleven

  He had exactly forty-five minutes to get to the airport. He glanced down at his watch. He wasn’t more than fifteen minutes away, but in Dallas, one always had to allow for some traffic. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”

  “I’m good, babe. Lisa is spending a couple of days with me and Remy assures me he won’t let us out of his sight. I’m actually interested in seeing how Lisa takes to the big guy. She’s always had a thing for that sexy Cajun accent.”

  “You think it’s sexy?”

  “Absolutely not, Master. I think it’s terrible and it makes my ears bleed.”

  He grinned. Such a brat. “See that it continues to. I’m going to miss you while I’m gone. Why did I talk you into going back to school?”

  He’d tried to convince her to come with him, but she was in the middle of saving some tenants from their evil landlord or something. That was his Laurel.

  “I believe at the time you hoped I would find someone younger and less broody to turn my attentions to.”

  He’d been an idiot. “I’m sure that wasn’t it at all. You stay safe and I’ll call you after we land.”

  “Bye.”

  He hung up as Sharon looked in from the doorway. “Mr. Bradford, you have a very insistent man in reception. He does not have an appointment.”

  He hit send on his laptop. The contracts were in place and all negotiations were finalized. He’d just billed one very lucky company a couple of thousand hours. Damn, he was looking forward to that check. He might expand. Maybe it was time to think about taking on a couple of associates. He would keep the core clients for himself, but he could use some help around here, and Laurel was far too happy making the world a better place to ever come and help him sue people for cash. Lots of cash. Heaping wads of lovely cash that he was going to need because babies cost money.

  Babies. He’d started to think about babies. Not just the singular. Laurel had a big family. She would want one for her kid. After the long talk with his brother and spending a few days with him while he got ready for the trip, he’d kind of turned around on the sibling thing. Flynn was cool and he seemed to truly care about Chase. He’d been on the phone with Chase, too. They’d talked about handling his problems. Mitch had told him about some of the things that happened to him in school. They’d agreed that Chase should come out to Dallas and spend some time getting to know Mitch during the summer.

  After their father…

  He wasn’t thinking about that now. He would have to later on today, but not now.

  “Flynn is going to be here to pick me up any minute now. I’ve got to be at the airport very soon, so it’s going to have to wait.”

  Sharon shook her head, th
at brown helmet of hair not wavering at all. It was solidly sprayed down. “I’ll tell him.” She turned. “Mr. Dixon, he cannot see you now and you’re going to have to leave. As soon as the boss goes, I’m heading out of here. My grandson has a baseball game and he forgot his favorite bat. I have to get it to him.”

  Dixon? What was Patrick Dixon doing here?

  He took a step back when he realized the man charging into his office wasn’t Patrick. This was a big man, much bigger than his slender, intellectual-looking brother. He was messy, his eyes red, as though he’d gone days without sleep.

  Harvey Dixon.

  “Sharon, call the police and then get out of here.”

  Harvey Dixon shook his head. “No, you don’t have to do that. Or maybe you should. He’s not going to stop. He’s going to keep going until one of us is dead. Are you Mitchell Bradford?”

  He wished he was someone else. Someone who carried a gun. That might come in handy right now. Hopefully someone from McKay-Taggart was currently watching his security feed and would be on hand soon.

  “That depends. You still planning on murdering me?” He didn’t see a gun in the man’s hand. Both hands were empty, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t pull one lickety-split. “You should know I sent off the contracts. They’ll be signed in a few minutes and filed with the court system. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Contracts? For what?”

  Great. He was delusional, too. Maybe he should keep him talking until the cops got here. “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Dixon, and we can have a talk.”

  Or the minute the fucker sat down, he could clock him with his umbrella. Except it was sitting in the stand out in reception because Laurel had put it out there along with a pretty coat stand she’d found.

  Laurel’s OCD problems were going to be the death of him. If she’d simply let him toss things wherever he liked, there would be an umbrella on the floor right now. If he lived he was so going to spank her pretty ass.

  Harvey—who needed a shave—shook his head. “No. I think we should go somewhere else to talk. He could be behind me. By now he knows I got out.”

  “Out?”

  “Of the prison he locked me in while he was setting me up.”

  “I thought you were in rehab.”

  “I have never touched a drug in my life. Never. My brother made it look like I did and he somehow convinced Frances I was in danger. This is all about the company. Mr. Bradford, I never meant you harm.”

  What the hell was going on? “I was told you were trying to kill me because I’m the lawyer pushing through the sale of a certain solar energy technology you feel like you pioneered.”

  “I toyed with it in the past. I will admit that, but I haven’t touched solar in a few years. This isn’t about solar. This is about money. I’ve come up with a device to measure domestic power consumption. It’s an inexpensive device that measures energy pull.”

  Mitch wasn’t following. “Energy pull?”

  Harvey paced, his boots dragging the floor. “Homes waste incredible amounts of energy from appliances that bleed it. A refrigerator that doesn’t work properly, a laptop that pulls energy even though it’s fully charged and off but plugged in. My device could help people figure out what needs fixing and what to unplug completely when it’s not in use. People simply pay their energy bills without discovering where they’re wasting the most. And they could fix that problem with one machine that reads the electrical currents. They wouldn’t even have to walk through testing devices and plugs. I can do it all from one fuse box.”

  “That sounds great.” As a person who’d made a lot of money on start-ups, he would look into that. One of his clients was Keith Langston, an angel investor. He’d taken some of Sanctum’s wealthy members and formed an investment pool for promising new technologies. Keith was known for having an almost preternatural ability to find start-ups that would pay off. This was one of those ideas he would float by Keith. “It should make Dixon Technologies a fortune.”

  “My brother wants the fortune for himself.”

  Shit. “Patrick wants to sell the idea to an energy company, doesn’t he?”

  Now that he looked back, he could remember the way Patrick Dixon had sweated the day he’d come in, how his hands had been shaky. At the time, Mitchell had chalked it up to Patrick being upset about what his brother was doing. What if he’d been nervous about selling his brother out?

  Harvey nodded. “I didn’t know until he had me committed. He hired a police officer on the take to set me up and force me into rehab. He thought he could wrest the company away from me. All it would take was Frances and him forcibly buying me out. Our father put it in our bylaws in case one of us was incapacitated or doing something wrong.”

  “Frances is your sister. Why didn’t she get you out of there?”

  “Patrick has her believing I’ve gone crazy with rage about the solar project. I’ve been secretive the last two years because I knew Patrick would want to make as much money as possible off this tech. I want to help people. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I want to share this, keep the cost down. Patrick would never let me do that. Somehow, he found the plans and he started talking to an energy company. They’re going to bury it. The only reason I’m still alive is he doesn’t know where I hid the specs.”

  “Why would he send people after me? Someone’s been making my life very difficult. There’s been a campaign of harassment against me and the woman in my life. What’s the purpose of that?”

  “Our father always taught Patrick to have a contingency plan. If I’m convicted of a violent crime, they split my piece of the company and Patrick can still make his deal. It could be worth millions. It could take much longer to make that kind of money if we take the product to market. Development and retail takes money and time. He wants the money now.”

  The door opened and Flynn walked through. “Ready to go?”

  His brother looked particularly dapper this morning. He’d spent the last few nights in their guest room, getting to know both Mitch and Laurel, and one of the things Mitch had discovered was his brother’s penchant for wearing clothes that weren’t selected for their utility. Maybe they could shop while they were in San Francisco. Laurel would probably be shocked if he showed up in a non-black suit. Or was it navy he was wearing today? He must be getting old. He never bought navy suits. Were his eyes going?

  “Give me a couple of seconds, Flynn.” He saw an opportunity. If Harvey was telling him the truth and he wasn’t a big old crazy pants who had gotten out of the asylum, then Mitch could help him get his company back, and it looked like old Harvey would be needing a lawyer in his near future. “I’m going to put in a call to Lieutenant Brighton and we’ll get this cleared up.”

  Flynn sighed. “This is a lawyer thing, isn’t it? I can already see billable hours lighting up your eyes.”

  Harvey’s eyes widened. “Lawyer. Yes.” He reached into his pants, but the pockets were empty.

  Flynn seemed to understand. He pulled out his wallet and handed Harvey a bill.

  Harvey smiled and slapped a five-dollar bill on Mitch’s desk. “There you go. That’s a retainer. Now you’re my lawyer, right?”

  For five dollars? Someone had been watching way too much TV. “That is five dollars. That will retain approximately thirty seconds of my time.”

  Flynn frowned. “Mitchell.”

  Mitch shrugged. “I did not go to law school for five dollars, and I’ve got a baby on the way. Those little suckers are expensive.”

  “Five dollars now and a promise to let you handle Dixon Technologies contracts and sales in the future. I’m firing every single person who sided with Patrick.”

  A firm of that size and with those types of ideas would be worth thousands of billable hours…visions of college funds danced through his head. He took the five dollars. “You’ve got yourself a lawyer. Now let’s get some cops here because this is going to get so messy.”

  Lawyers liked messy. Messy took time
. Messy made money.

  He wondered briefly how many lawyers actually represented the men who had harassed them. And Harvey better be telling the truth because he damn straight wasn’t repping the man who had sent someone to shoot Laurel. He would shove that five dollars so far up Harvey’s asshole it would come out his nose.

  “I wouldn’t dial that number if I were you,” a new voice said.

  He looked up and his day went to complete hell. Sharon walked in, her eyes wide, tears running down them. Patrick Dixon was behind her, a gun pointed at the back of her head.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bradford. This one didn’t have an appointment either,” she said.

  Nope. He really needed some new security to keep the riffraff away. It looked like they were going to have a Dixon family reunion, and he hoped it didn’t turn deadly.

  * * * *

  “See, I told you he would still be here.” Laurel rushed up the steps to the building, Remy following behind her. She had a bag in her hand. Chocolate chip cookies from Mitch’s favorite bakery and his earbuds. He’d left them behind this morning. He could buy more, but this particular pair were the ones that fit the best. He always complained that he must have a weird ear canal because most didn’t fit.

  He wouldn’t be comfortable without them. She wanted to make sure he had everything he needed. He didn’t particularly like to travel. He was doing it for her, so she was going to go out of her way to make it nice for him.

  But she’d wanted to surprise him and get in one last good-bye kiss, hence the subterfuge.

  “You’re lucky he’s on a private plane because the rest of the world has to go through security, and that means getting to the airport two hours ahead of the flight,” Remy complained.

  Remy, it seemed, wasn’t looking forward to a whole weekend of watching two women. He’d seemed awfully flirty until he’d seen the lineup of movies she’d chosen for her sister’s sleepover. He wasn’t a big fan of the romantic comedy. From what she could tell, Mitch’s sudden trip had also screwed up a date Remy had planned, though it had taken him a few minutes to remember the woman’s name.