Damage: (Lakefield Book 5)

by Jennifer Vester

  “It’s still Suzanne’s call,” Cade said.

  “If she would like to waive her right to a protective order, that's her call. If she does not want to help in any way, we’re not going to force her. We’re not in the business of strong-arming American citizens to participate—”

  “I think we got it,” Holden interrupted.

  “The problem we do have in this room, is a breach of contract on a nondisclosure agreement. Not to mention several other violations of secrecy by a person who willingly agreed to adhere to the terms of said contract when they began employment.”

  Brock shook his head and sighed. “I can’t imagine how these guys get laid. Walking, talking mini-lawyers.”

  Mick slammed his hand down on the table. “Listen up! This is my job. For the most part we leave you alone, and you leave us alone. And frankly I could give a fuck either way unless it interferes with what I’ve been doing for most of my life. We’ve all worked together at one point. So I’m not part of the brotherhood in the room. Who cares! But you will respect the boundaries here and the lawful process.”

  “Please enlighten us on what the fallout is,” Logan interrupted. “I’m assuming that’s where you were headed.”

  “It is,” Mick said, and leaned back in his chair. He looked down at the table for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. I almost felt sorry for the man, who seemed so nice in my living room just hours before.

  “So, here it is. Plain and simple,” he said in a dull voice. “I’m going to be removed from the case. I should say, I’ve been removed since it’s pretty much a done deal at this point. After reporting that Cade broke protocol, and that a meeting had been set for the occupants of this room, it was done. Cade will likely be taken into custody—”

  “No!” I yelled.

  “Shh, baby,” Cade said as he leaned toward me and took my hand in his under the table.

  I looked up into his calm face and shook my head. “No. I can’t do this. It's too much. Not after you just came back.”

  He gently squeezed my hand and gave me a small smile. “But you’ll be safe. And that’s all that matters to me at this point.”

  “What if we were never here?” Brock asked.

  Mick’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean lie to the FBI on your behalf? So, it’s the devil you know, is better than the devil you don’t, now? Everyone in this room should have thought about the consequences before you came here. Cade should have thought about it before he made the call. It’ll be Agent Wyatt Kennedy taking over after me, and he’s not half as lenient or patient.”

  Brock let out a sigh. “Fuck. He’s an asshole.”

  Mick gave him a shrug, “Apparently we’re all assholes to you, aren’t we? Regardless, there isn’t much we can do unless Ms. Porter would like to extend a peace offering to Agent Kennedy in the form of cooperation. In addition, Cade could remain on the case citing confusion on Ms. Porter’s part when she made a call to a friend.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment then Cade muttered, “Fuck.”

  Mick stood up from the table and smoothed down the front of his shirt. “This building is used locally for a few things. It’s currently on blackout for the next two hours. That was the only concession I was able to procure in hopes that a good faith gesture would be met with a possible solution.”

  Aiden nodded. “In other words, we’re not currently monitored until the time is up. Your superiors were willing to do it in order to negotiate a compromise? What is it that they want?”

  Mick shrugged. “Brock out of the country would have been too much to ask, but in lieu of that fantasy, cooperation from Suzanne and Cade. And absolutely no involvement from your security firm.”

  Aiden glanced at me for a moment then nodded at Mick.

  “Well, I’m headed back to my hotel to have a drink and write a very long report. I’m not sure if I’ll be here in the morning. Agent Kennedy said that he was going to be briefing several teams tonight and tomorrow on the latest development.”

  “Which hotel?” Aiden asked.

  Mick shrugged. “Some local one off the highway. It looks like shit, but it has a bar downstairs. You guys have, at best, twenty-four hours before the shit hits the fan. They may keep me around to consult, but any other conversations with any of you, in any capacity, will not happen on this case.”

  Aiden stood up to shake Mick’s hand, while walking him to the door. “Thank you, for letting us know our options.”

  Mick nodded, and stared back at Brock, who was tapping on his computer. His cold mask slipped for a moment, to reveal a person with a deep dislike of the man he was glaring at. An annoyed expression passed over his face, then his unemotional mask was back on. He was removed from the case, mainly because of Brock. And Brock, didn’t care enough to look him in the eye either way.

  “If you’re looking for a key, you can get it in college,” he said.

  Brock’s head jerked up, with a look of surprise on his face, as Mick walked out the door. He stared after him for a moment, then started typing fast on his keyboard.

  “Well, well. Not such a douche after all.”

  Aiden sighed. “Shut the fuck up.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “I’m not trying to be an ass,” Brock replied, while still tapping on his keyboard. “An electronic file, showed up in one of our databases today, that had no business being in our system. It was password encrypted. I was going to work on it when I finished here. The file was called “Leprechaun” oddly enough.”

  “Weird,” Aiden said, as he sat back down and glanced over at us.

  “Yeah, unless you know a little something about Mick. He was on the Notre Dame football team before he became the agent we all know and love.”

  “Otherwise known as The Fighting Irish?” Holden asked.

  “Correct. So, I’ve just plugged in his college student ID number, and a couple more tries here.”

  “And?” Aiden prompted.

  Brock smirked. “And we now have the details of something near and dear to his heart. Everything.”

  “You mean…” Cade said beside me.

  “Shh. Not a word. Brock, let’s take this offsite,” Aiden said.

  Brock sat back in his chair with his eyes glued to the screen. “No worries, I’ve made sure this is a blacked-out building. He wasn’t lying. And if someone was trying to trick him, they can’t now. Don’t ask, you don’t want to know.”

  “Friends in high places?”

  Brock eyed Aiden. “You don’t want to know.”

  “You owe him an apology. A big one. He’s five years younger than you, and you clocked him for doing his job.”

  Brock shrugged.

  “I mean it. I'll suspend you again, and make you retake the anger management program.”

  “Fine. He’s really pretty ingenious. I’m impressed,” he said, and glanced up to five surprised faces. “What?”

  “Forget it,” Aiden said. “Fill us in.”

  Holden cleared his throat, before Brock could begin. Normally not an expressive man, unless he was around Julia, he seemed to be struggling to say something. “Maybe we should address the elephant in the room. Like, why the fuck we’re here in the first place. Cade, what the hell is this about?”

  Everyone seemed to look at Cade at the same time. The palpable tension in the room, which had been there from the beginning, began to focus on one person, and more specifically, on one event.

  Cade’s hand gave mine a squeeze, and I returned it. Then he started from the beginning, telling them everything that had happened, from the time they'd last seen him to the present.

  As I watched their faces, I could tell they were shocked about what he’d done. Holden maybe more angry than surprised. But as the minutes wore on, they seemed to accept the events that had brought us to this room. If they were hesitant to forgive him outright, they didn’t show it. But I suspected that much like me, they would need some time to absorb their new reality.

  Logan didn’t comment
much, as the rest of the group asked questions. He had the look of a man that had been burdened by guilt and was trying to find forgiveness within himself for keeping Cade’s secret.

  When Cade noticed it, he reached over grasped the man’s shoulder. It wasn’t verbalized, but it was clearly a gesture of thanks for what Logan had done for him.

  “So, what now?” I asked when there were a few minutes of silence after their talk.

  “You go with Holden and Jake.”

  Jake, who had been sitting back and been mainly observing up to this point, pulled out his car keys. “Ready. We’ll get you to the compound first, then we have a safehouse set up for this sort of thing.”

  I shook my head and stared at Cade. “No. I can’t leave you here. They said they were going to arrest you. Besides that, my mother can barely remember to eat lately. I can’t leave her.”

  Cade sighed and touched my face. “And I can’t risk it, sunshine. We’ll move your mom too.”

  I turned to Holden, the one person that was closest to Cade and asked, “You’re going to let him go to a federal prison over this? You can’t possibly want that.”

  He was thoughtful for a moment before his eyes shifted to Cade. “No, I don’t. But I also understand wanting to protect your own.”

  I threw my hands up. “All of you are fucking nuts. Great wives! But you should go home immediately and tell them that you don’t deserve them.”

  Brock chuckled, then cleared his throat and looked away when I glared at him.

  I heard a similar noise coming from Aiden’s direction.

  Cade stood up and pulled at my arm enough that I was forced to stand up with him. I wanted to punch him again for being the stupid, sweet, noble man that he was. One that would go to jail if Mick had been telling us the truth, which I suspected he was.

  “We’re going to head out for a while, so she can think clearly. Tomorrow, we’ll figure this shit out. Now that you have the case files, maybe you can help them before the guy targets someone else.”

  I started tugging at his arm trying to loosen his grip. “There’s no thinking—”

  “Yes, there is,” he said gruffly, as he tightened his grip.

  I stared at Logan for some intervening help. Some rational thought. Anything. He just gave me a small smirk.

  After giving the guys a brief goodbye, and telling them where he was staying, Cade hauled me to the car. The silent treatment was clearly not going to work with him. The radio had just gotten turned up to fill the vacuum of absent conversation, and we rode like that all the way to his hotel.

  With a stern objection on my lips, but stubbornly refusing to be the first person to talk, I followed him to his room and went inside. It wasn’t much on décor. A bed, a small table, a desk, and TV were really the only significant things in the room. It smelled somewhat better than it looked with the fragrance of lemon cleaner in the air. It wasn’t depressing necessarily, but seeing the large man in front of me, moving around such a tiny impersonal environment, seemed like a tragedy. He deserved a home, not this box with a bed.

  I sighed and did my thing in the bathroom before we traded places. I ended up sitting against the headboard with a pillow behind me. He took his time, and I heard the sink turn on and off several times. He was probably avoiding me or letting me cool off.

  “You don’t have to go to jail,” I told him, as he came out of the bathroom. I was looking down at my hands but when he didn’t respond I glanced at him.

  He was wearing a pair of cotton sweats that hung low on his hips and nothing else. He’d trimmed his beard in such a way that he looked a lot like a well-groomed businessman rather than a rough, bartender bad boy. I liked both, but at the moment I was more interested in his chest.

  He turned toward the desk, giving me a quick wink but still didn’t respond. Running a hand through his hair he rifled through some papers on the desk, and I got a full view of the tattoos that covered his back. They were a mix of a lot of things, but mainly line art that spread from his shoulders down to his hips. The main centerpiece was an angry eagle that looked like it was trying to rip into his skin with its claws.

  There was some scarring high on the right-hand side of his back. I knew that it was from being shot in Colorado but hadn’t really thought about what it might look like. With the tattoos covering most of his back, it seemed to blend in so well that had anyone else seen it, they might not have noticed it.

  “Nice tats,” I said somewhat subdued.

  He turned around and leaned up against the desk, crossing his arms over his chest. He had to have known what the effect was in that pose. Other than a scar that matched the precise position of the wound on his back, years of working out had sculpted muscles that stretched like hills and valleys over the smooth expanse of his skin. He appeared bigger without his shirt on, full of life and brimming with sex appeal.

  “Thanks,” he said quietly, as he stared at me. “We need to talk.”

  Talk? I glanced down at the edge of his waistband and wondered what kind of torture this was. It had to be some twisted joke if he thought I could concentrate.

  “Uhm, okay,” I said after a minute and took a deep breath. “You should put a shirt on.”

  He shook his head slowly and smirked. “No. You should take your shirt off.”

  “I’m not sure how that would help at all.”

  He moved toward the end of the bed, keeping his eyes on mine, and started crawling toward me. I tried to curl my legs against my chest, but as soon as I moved he grabbed my legs and tugged so hard that I went sliding underneath him.

  His face was above me now, hovering just over my mouth. He teased me by going in for a kiss and leaning out every time I opened my mouth to let him.

  “What are you doing?” I frowned up at him.

  He moved my legs apart and settled between them, the hard bulge in his pants pressing into me. He turned his head to the side and started kissing my neck as my hands found his chest. He was so warm, his skin so utterly soft and his muscles incredibly hard.

  “I’m trying to distract you from saying anything ridiculous,” he said as his lips continued to tease below my ear. “Your safety is not something I’m willing to fuck around with.”

  My mouth opened when I felt his hand slide up my shirt. “So. So you’re using sex to convince me?”

  He chuckled, and I felt it deep in his chest. “We’re just having a talk. If it ends up in sex, then we can talk some more afterward.”

  My hips lifted into him when his fingers found my bra, roughly pulled it aside and started teasing my nipples.

  “You play dirty,” I hissed.

  He lifted and tugged my shirt over my head, then slid the band out of my hair before his lips found mine in a rough kiss. His tongue demanded entrance and I gave him what he wanted. I was rewarded with a deep groan from him.

  My bra was unhooked, and he broke off our kiss to stare down at my chest for a moment.

  “Fuck, pretty girl. I don’t know where to start with you.”

  He took my nipple in his mouth, the coarse hairs on his beard rubbing against the softest parts of my skin. He sucked first one, then the other as he pressed his hips urgently into me.

  As my eyes closed, savoring the feeling, I wasn’t sure what planet I was on, what year it was, or where I was at, with his tongue working small miracles on my overly neglected breasts. Sensations swarmed through me, need, want, hunger. My back arched as I let out a low moan.

  His mouth left my breast and he blew over it, causing a lightning bolt to shoot through me.

  “You’re going to leave Bakersville for the safehouse,” he whispered.

  “No, no. Stop talking.”

  He chuckled, and I felt the vibration all along my torso down to my legs. I still had too many clothes on and I wanted them off immediately.

  “We have to talk, Suzie.”

  “Need you first, then talk,” I whimpered as his palm slid over one already engorged breast.

  He let
out a low growl and lifted off me. “This didn’t go quite like I planned.”

  My eyes flew open and I watched as he removed my shoes and pants. He stared at me long and hard in my cotton panties, spread out before him. He resembled a conqueror as his eyes burned a path up my body to my face.

  “You’re gorgeous, Suzanne. Every part of you.”

  My cheeks warmed for a moment under his gaze, and I reached up to the edge of his pants. Hooking a finger in, I pulled, but he moved my hand away.

  The look in his eyes was so serious, so completely reverent that I nearly missed him dropping his pants to the floor. I caught the briefest glance of his cock and gasped as he bent to remove my now soaked panties.

  The small glimpse that I got promised a sore day tomorrow. He was huge and incredibly hard. The girth alone was going to take some getting used to.

  He crawled between my legs and settled again. The skin on my inner thigh encountered his crotch and I felt a burning warmth.

  My hips tilted up as tingles ran through my stomach. He ran a hand over my thigh that gripped me from time to time as he licked up my side. Then he slowly licked down until I felt the warmth of his breath on my center.

  Hooking both of his arms around my legs, he spread me until I couldn’t possibly be more exposed.

  “Mine,” he growled, before his mouth descended and his tongue lay siege to my clit.

  I cried out, I moaned. My hands were spread out on the bed, clutching the sheets in agony and pleasure. I was so close. When he sucked hard, nearly biting me, I screamed as my body nearly came off the bed and my legs fought his tight grip. Even then he didn’t stop and kept up the onslaught of his attentive tongue.

  When I glanced down at him between my thick lashes, he stared up at me and gave me a wicked smile, then started sucking my clit again.

  He was trying to kill me. My back arched off the bed as another orgasm violently tore through my body.