She took a deep breath then blew it out with a whoosh, nodding as well. “I will do anything to get us back to general thievery,” she said. “This drug shit needs to be over.”
Sam hooked his arm around her neck and pulled her close, kissing her on the forehead as I sat back down on the couch and released my breath to ease the tightness in my chest.
“It’ll be the biggest job we’ve ever pulled,” Jasmine said, appearing in the entryway along with Kristian and the others. Kristian came and sat beside me, sliding a hand along mine and entwining our fingers.
“Are we cool?” I asked, referring essentially to my relationship with him and everybody in the house.
“I told you, doll. It’s a good plan.” They all seemed so tired, but Kristian was smiling at me, so I felt like it would be OK.
Jasmine spoke again, “It’ll take meticulous planning and all hands on deck. Even you, Holland.”
Holland sat forward in shock. “No way. I’m pregnant.”
Nate sat beside her and took her hand in his. “We need you, duchess. Nothing too dangerous for you, but we’ll need you involved.”
Twisting her lips like there was a sour taste in her mouth, she nodded. “If it gets us free of Conway, then fine. I’ll do whatever you need.”
“How long do we have to plan?” Alesha asked. “And what about the Sydney job? We’re all set to go on that.”
“The Sydney job is still going ahead,“ Toby said, rubbing his palms together as he addressed the room. “Based on what we’ve been able to learn, this transport isn’t going to happen until the court case is through. That gives us at least six months. Maybe even a year if it gets dragged out.”
“That long?“ I gasped.
Holland let out a squeak, fear in her eyes as she touched her stomach. Nate slid his arm around her and murmured softly, reassuring her that she and their baby would be kept safe.
Abbot ran his fingers through his messy hair. “It’s a massive case. It’ll be months just for that discovery shit they do. Then there’s jury selections… But it’s good. It gives us time to prepare ’cause it’s gonna be fuckin’ hard.”
“So, what? This is the backup plan to something we might be able to pull off faster, like the mercenaries?” I asked, confused because another six months to a year seemed like a long time to keep paying someone who was milking you dry. We also had to explain the need to wait to Maree and Dazza, but the money at the end of it would be worth their patience.
“No, doll. This is the plan. There isn’t a single permanent option that’s going to take less time to set up,” Kristian explained. “It might shock you, but finding a group of mercenaries willing to risk their lives by going in and shooting up a drug cartel isn’t easy to find. This is the most feasible of them all.”
“As long as Conway goes for it, of course,” Sam said.
“He will,” Jasmine said, knowingly. “In the meantime, it’s business as usual. Once this Sydney job is done, there’ll be no time to rest. We’ll need to spend every working hour preparing for the transport gig. And of course, we have a wedding to organise, and that’s all before Christmas.”
“What? We’re still doing the wedding?” I asked, shocked it was still a priority.
“You want to be a Cartwright, don’t you?” Kristian asked.
“Of course. But, it can wait,” I said. “Isn’t planning this job more important?”
Jasmine smiled and shook her head. “There is absolutely nothing more important than family, Veronica. Nothing.”
Chapter Twenty
A Completely Fucked-Up Kind Of Right
“Your family is insane,” I said to Kristian as I leaned on his chest and played with the smattering of hair across his pecs. “In a good way. I’ve never been involved in something like this before.”
“A bit bigger than nicking cars and shoplifting, hey?”
I nodded. “Way bigger. It makes me nervous. And excited. But I guess this is all normal for you.”
He shrugged. “In a way. I remember the first jobs we pulled. They were exhilarating because it was a new feeling. But, I still get nervous. I even still get a buzz of excitement out of it. But that crazy high I had in the beginning has calmed right down. There’s nothing like your first score.”
“What was your first score?”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.” He grinned.
“OK. Mine is pretty lame. When I was thirteen, I went into the department store and changed the tags on this really expensive dress. I got it for five dollars then sold it for five hundred. I thought I was so badarse because of it.”
He chuckled, his eyes shining. “Why didn’t you just take it in the first place?”
“Because it had one of those anti theft tags on it and I needed them to take it off.”
“Makes sense.”
“Not long after that, though, I did manage to grab one of the magnets to remove them myself. That made the whole scam a lot easier.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Now tell me yours. Put my first time to shame.”
“Mine is way lamer than yours. Abbot and I went around with those card readers that allow you to duplicate credit cards. It was real easy. We’d go to a busy shopping centre, stand too close to people on the escalators. Boom. We could capture an easy fifty cards on a good day.” He shrugged like it was no big deal.
“That’s actually way cooler than mine. You had tech. I just had a greedy mind.”
Running his fingers lightly along the edge of my jaw, he pressed his teeth into his bottom lip. “Nah. I’ve read your file, I don’t reckon you were greedy back then at all. Just stuck.” That was an interesting way to look at it, although, it felt strange having someone know things about me I hadn’t told them. This was all stuff I kept hidden from people. Only a select few knew a little about my past, none knew it all, and the Cartwrights had pieced together more than most.
“What excuse do I have now?”
“I don’t know. Do you still feel stuck?”
Stuck. Many would feel that in the position I was in, taken by a man, told I couldn’t leave, tied by the promise of marriage. But no, I didn’t feel stuck at all. I felt…afraid. Not of them, not of what they wanted me to do. Afraid that this would all go away. It felt like a timer ticking in my mind, waiting for the moment I wouldn’t be seen as useful anymore.
“I don’t feel stuck,” I whispered, just as he ran his thumb over my bottom lip.
“Even though you are?”
I looked away. What was the point of this? “What do you want me to say?” I asked, meeting his eyes again. “I want to be here. I don’t feel stuck.”
“I want to be sure you understand the situation.”
“I do. I can’t leave. I’m being watched all the time. Even though you asked me, I didn’t really have a say about marrying you. If I fuck up, my life could be over. I’m quite literally in bed with my lover, my captor, and my enforcer. Does that about sum it up?”
He nodded and took a deep breath through his nose. “Do you hate me?”
I shook my head. “You want me to keep playing that game with you, or do you want the truth?”
“The truth.”
I traced a circle in the centre of his chest with my index finger, watching it instead of looking into his eyes. Because I couldn’t. I’m not brave enough to watch his reaction to my words. “I haven’t hated you since the first day I worked with you and you kept sneaking looks and telling me about yourself. Before then, you were this enigma I blamed for fucking up my life. Then I saw you as a person looking for something more in life. Same as me. I felt connected to you.” I laughed to myself as I remembered some of our earlier interactions. He’d tried so hard to stay angry at me for keying his car, but always ended up slipping into the easy-going, kind-hearted guy I knew now. It was the person we were when we thought no one was looking who defined us. “Plus, you couldn’t be mean to me. You kept trying, but you failed so hard.”
�
�That’s your fault for being so fucking gorgeous. I kept looking at your arse and wanting to bite it.”
“You really think I’m gorgeous?”
“You don’t think you are?”
“I don’t think I’m ugly.” But compared to him, I was plain.
“Yeah, doll, I think you’re gorgeous.”
“So, this is all about my body?”
He reached down and pinched my arse. “Too right,” he said with a chuckle, lightening the mood. I was grateful, because while I wanted to know exactly what he saw in me, it was getting a little too deep into feeling territory for me.
“Explain to me how this whole marriage bargain came to be,” I said, changing the subject to a broader topic. “I’m trying to make sense of it.”
It was early in the morning, but with my head still spinning from recent events, I wasn’t tired. I wanted to keep talking. I needed to know everything about this family I was becoming a part of. I wanted to embrace their world the way they seemed to be embracing me. Me. The girl no one ever wanted. I didn’t care that they were the bad guys by typical standards. To me, they were a major step up. I wasn’t sure I deserved them to be honest.
“Let’s see,” Kristian said, running his fingers up and down my arms causing the fine sun-bleached hairs to stand up against my tan skin. “Nate and Holland had this fucked-up game going on. He spent the night with her then cleaned out her apartment while she slept.”
“What?” I laughed. It sounded so ludicrous. “He took everything? No way.”
“He did it to her twice, actually. Furniture, car, books, and clothes. But Holland hid some tracker in her stuff the second time, and then she and Alesha used it to find our operation and followed us here. Since they knew enough to get us all sent to prison, Jasmine ordered them killed.”
“She sounds like the queen of hearts. ‘Off with their heads!’”
Kristian chuckled. “Yeah. A bit drastic if you ask me. Of course, Nate didn’t want that because he was crazy into Holland. He offered to marry her instead, make her one of us, so that even if she did go to the cops, she couldn’t testify against her husband—not that I think that really would have worked out, but Nate sold it pretty hard, and Jasmine relented. Sam and Alesha got the same deal, although they had no say in the matter, but it worked out great for them. And Leesh is the perfect Cartwright, really. I think any of us would have stepped up to save her from the red queen.”
There was an uncomfortable feeling associated with that comment. Jealousy. Another first for me. “If I wasn’t the one lying here naked with you, I might think I had some competition with Alesha.”
“I already told you she’s like a sister.”
“You also just said you would have married her.”
“It’s hypothetical, because it would really suck if she wasn’t around. She’s Sam’s, always was, always will be.”
“You talk about her like she’s the standard by which all women should be measured.”
He laughed and ran his fingers up my spine. “Are you jealous, Veronica Sutton?”
My eyelids fluttered closed involuntarily. It was hard to be even slightly annoyed when something so simple felt so good. “Do I need to be?” I whispered, inhaling deep before my eyes landed on his. They were sparkling with mirth.
“No,” he whispered. “I only have eyes for you, doll. Just you.” Placing his hand on the back of my head, he pulled my mouth to his and kissed me deeply. God, this man can kiss.
“Why do you call me doll?” I asked, licking my bruised lips as we parted.
He wrinkled his nose. “You probably don’t wanna know.”
“Why? Do you think I look like a sex doll?” I made the face.
He laughed. “No. Not at all. But you know that movie Annabelle?”
“The one where the porcelain doll kills everyone?”
Pulling his bottom lip between his teeth, he nodded. “You’re beautiful to look at, but you’ve got this ferocious side—like the doll. It’s kind of stuck in my head.”
“I don’t know whether to love it because it makes me badarse, or whether I should be offended that you’re likening my personality to a horror movie plot.”
His hands slid down my body and he gripped my arse while he smiled. “You’re badarse, doll. This thing between you and me wouldn’t be workin’ so well if you weren’t. I like the fire inside you.”
“I think this is working well because you finally picked a woman with some brains.”
“Well, you can certainly think on your feet. You proved that when you sorted out both Nate’s and my fuck-up without breaking a sweat.”
I lifted one shoulder. “That was nothing. I just blurted the first thing that popped into my head. I could have seriously messed things up.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I got lucky.”
“Wasn’t luck. It was smarts.” He tapped the side of my head.
“That must be odd for you when most of your girls can’t chew gum and walk at the same time,” I said, poking fun and deflecting at the same time. I wanted him to give me compliments, but I also struggled listening to them. It was like I needed to balance each one out with a self-deprecating joke so I didn’t forget my place or become too complacent. There was that old saying: ‘if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was.’ That was how I felt here. I wanted all of this to be true so badly, but there was this little voice in my head that kept telling me to watch out. There are wolves behind those smiles.
“You think you know all about the kind of woman I used to date, huh?” Kristian said with a chuckle, cutting through the maze of my mind.
“Well, I’d hardly call it dating if the busty blonde and the brunette with the arse were an example of the calibre of girls you and Abbot normally party with. I can completely understand why you’re both still single at thirty-three.”
“It’s not easy finding a girl who ticks all the boxes.”
“Best friends, sisters, or twins?”
“Nah, my personal boxes. Abbot and I might be twins, but we don’t like the same women. It’s why that stupid code was never gonna work out.”
“OK. So what’s your personal checklist?” I suspected this was about to get interesting.
“I’m pretty shallow. Are you ready for this?”
“Yeah.” I grinned, placing my hand under my chin as I looked down at him.
“Great tits is at the top.”
Smiling, I rubbed my chest against his. “Check.”
“Great arse.”
“Check.” He pinched me and I giggled. “Or, so I’ve been told.”
“Gorgeous smile. A body I want to sink myself into.”
“Wow. You’re super shallow.”
“Told you I was,” he said, grinning as his fingers dug into my skin, tickling me until I tried to squirm away.
“Stop,” I cried, laughing as tears poured from my eyes. “I’m too ticklish.” I twisted my body, trying to escape his torture, finally jerking back so hard I fell out of the bed with a thud.
“Ow,” I said, still laughing as he leaned down to help me up.
“Oh dear. Great arse might have to get unchecked now,” he said while trying not to laugh too hard at my mishap.
I slapped him against the chest as he picked me up and settled me back against the pillows. “Is that really all you want in a woman?” I asked.
“A sexy thigh tattoo is a definite bonus,” he said, tracing his index finger over the elvish script that wound around my thigh.
“So, so shallow,” I whispered, my voice getting a little thicker as his hand danced closer to my pleasure zone. My clit was probably going to need a break from all the friction soon, but with the way he made me feel, I would risk having to walk around like a cowgirl for one more orgasm by his touch.
His fingers made contact and I moaned lightly, my hips squirming. He leaned down, his tongue running down the centre of my chest, starting at my collarbone and going down, down to my belly button
where he paused. “I also want someone I can laugh with,” he said, pushing his fingers inside me. I gasped. “Someone I can play with.” He looked up at me, his hand working my insides while his lips brushed against my stomach, featherlight. Our eyes locked, but I had trouble focusing. “I want someone I don’t have to pretend around.” He filled me a little farther, pumping his fingers in and out until I was gripping the sheets and arching my back. Then it hit. I called his name and came around his hand while he pressed a slow kiss between my breasts, his breathing heavy as he brought me back down. “Someone who understands my life and doesn’t expect me to leave it or to go straight because they’re scared of the consequences.”
Looking at him, my chest heaving, I asked the obvious questions. “Is that why you want me, Kristian? Because you like to fuck me, and because I’m a crook like you?”
He lifted his head and looked at me quizzically. “That’s a massive oversimplification, doll. I like you. I like everything about you.”
“Why? You might have looked into my past, but you don’t really know anything about me.”
“What’s to know, doll? We’re the same, you and me. And this feels right. Are you tryin’ to tell me it doesn’t?”
Running my hands over his impressive shoulders, I shook my head. “No. You’re not wrong. This does feel right. Inexplicably, nonsensically, a completely fucked-up kind of right.” His strong body was above mine and he was leaning up on his elbows.
“Yeah,” he whispered, looking at me with a perplexed understanding in his eyes. “That’s exactly how it is.” And then he entered me in one hard thrust, and I was filled…in more ways than one.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Take It
“Ready?” Kristian asked as I double-checked the contents of my bag.
“Looks like it,” I said, tapping my jeans to make sure I had my phone. “I’m all good.”
“No phones. Jazz will give us burners when we get in the car.”
I dropped my phone back on the bed. Then I tightened my ponytail, and blew out my breath while hooking my bag over my shoulder. “I’m ready.” It had been ages since I’d boosted a car, so I was a little nervous, but mostly, I was excited.
Foolish Games: Cartwright Brothers, book 3 Page 16
