Ripped: A Blood Money Novel

by Edie Harris

  Cupping her cheeks with callused hands, Vick dipped his head to seal his mouth to hers in a firm kiss. His lips were warm, undemanding yet bearing the stamp of possession, and Beth was struck once more by the wonderful rightness of being kissed by this man. Held by this man. Loved forever and ever by this man—who wanted to buy a house with her and live there together.

  Their mouths parted on a sigh, his thumbs petting the arch of her cheekbones. “Then let’s go in, love.” Settling an arm around her shoulders, he led her through the front gate, up the sidewalk and onto the front porch.

  Beth paused to take in the white-painted rails, the two-seater swing hanging from silver chains, the recessed lights in the beadboard ceiling. It was so fucking domestic, she could barely breathe through the longing for it, so she crossed the threshold into the house’s front hall.

  Vick’s hand slipped from where it cupped her shoulder, trailing down her arm to tangle his fingers with hers. The dark-stained wooden floorboards creaked lightly under their feet as they gazed at the stairs, then left into the large living area, and right into what was probably a home office made bright by the square window looking out onto the porch. Painted trim of the purest white guarded the entrance to each room and pressed snug into the lines where wall met ceiling.

  In silence, they wandered through the living room into the formal dining room, footsteps echoing in the empty space. Pale walls, grand windows, tall ceilings, warm lighting, and as they made their way deeper into the house, Beth’s chest grew tight. And then tighter still, until they stood in the substantial kitchen and attached eating area. At which point Beth was forced to say, “You remember that I don’t cook, right?” She waved a hand at the updated, top-of-the-line appliances and blue glass subway-tile backsplash. “All of this is—”

  “For me.” He chuckled when she shot him a suspicious glance. “What, I can’t want a nice kitchen to feed you in?” His hand squeezed hers, palm to palm. “Partners, Beth darling. It means we both get to ask for things, demand things, desire things...and then we tell each other and make those things happen.” Drawing her farther into the kitchen, he boosted her up on the island’s quartz countertop and made a home for himself between her thighs. His hands shaped the curve of her hips, but his hold was gentle, so gentle.

  She resented his gentleness as much as she appreciated it, because she knew he worried about hurting her, physically. One of her arms still bore a plaster cast, and would for two weeks more, and the cuts on her calves and her unbroken forearm were healing quickly but the marks remained. The once-flayed skin on her back, infected at the time she had escaped John Nash’s bunker, would leave permanent scars, but at least those scars indicated survival. Her survival. Sure, she was weaker than she’d ever before been in her life, but she had survived. She had left her giant mess of a past behind—all the lives she’d taken working as an assassin for the family business, all the guilt she’d carried over her actions and inaction, the blame that many, including herself, had laid at her feet. She’d gone into that bunker with bloodstains on her soul and left it having received some twisted form of self-forgiveness.

  So even though she was well on her way to sleeping better at night, and even though she now sat securely in the hold of the only man she had ever loved, Beth was...irritated. “You’re touching me like I’m made of glass again.”

  Pale blue eyes darkened, and he strengthened his grip. “Twenty-five days. We found you twenty-five days ago, and while I know—baby, I know—just how tough you are, twenty-five days isn’t nearly long enough for me to unsee what I saw. So I’m sorry that I worry I’ll hurt you if I hold you too close, when all I want is to...to take you inside me and never expose you to the evil of twenty-five days ago ever again.” His brow pressed to hers. “You’re the love of my life, Elisabeth. You can’t possibly expect me to behave reasonably over this.”

  “You’re the love of my life, too,” she grumbled, frustration with him dissipating like smoke on a breeze as she fisted the front of his coat. “But one of these days, you’re going to be a little too careful with me and I’m going to break one of your fingers in punishment.” Stealing a kiss, she pressed her knees into his hips, aligning his body with hers. “Then again, maybe I won’t, since I have a feeling I’ll need your fingers in working order.”

  “Oh, you will, I promise.” A flash of white teeth as he grinned, then straightened to look around the kitchen more thoroughly, though he didn’t put so much as an inch between them. “I’ll admit, when I was looking at this listing online, it was the cooking range that sold me. Six burners.”

  “Six whole burners?” she teased, looking past his shoulder through the sliding glass door leading out onto the rear deck, and at the narrow fenced-in spread of green beyond that. “A yard.” The words left her in a reverent whisper.

  “Yes. A yard.” He kissed her temple.

  “We can get a dog.” The dog she’d been dreaming about for weeks, the one that required a yard. Pushing at Vick, she hopped down from the island and wriggled past him to unlatch the slider and step out onto the sizable deck. His heavy tread on the treated slats told her Vick, her personal shadow, would never let her too far out of his sight. Not twenty-five days out from an experience that still haunted her man—and her. When he approached her from behind, his muscled arms wrapping tenderly around her torso, she leaned into him, noting that for the first time the wounds on her back didn’t twinge once. “Try to sell me on the six-burner thing all you want, pal, but you don’t fool me.”

  “No?” She heard the smile in his voice. “You’re saying I saw pictures of this yard and knew right away, without a doubt, that this was the place for us to start our lives together?” When she nodded, he pressed his lips to the side of her head, his breath warm. “Damn it. I’ve become predictable already.”

  Turning in his arms, she grinned up at him, the cool spring air doing nothing to dampen the heat in her cheeks, or the happy pink flush in his. “Predictability is sexy. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Her fingers flexed against the firm contours of his chest. “Can we look at the rest of the house now?”

  “Upstairs or downstairs?” he asked as they left the deck and shut the door behind them.

  “What’s upstairs?”

  He toyed with the collar of her coat. “Four bedrooms, two full baths.”

  “And down?”

  “Finished basement, three-quarter bath, guest room. Laundry.”

  “Ooh, laundry. Almost as sexy as predictability,” she teased. “Let’s go up. Lead the way.”

  Lead he did, out of the kitchen and to the tall set of stairs in the front hall that would carry them to the second floor. Her cast-covered hand drifted up the railing as they ascended. A melodic ringing sounded from within her coat pocket, and she paused halfway to the upper level to dig out her new phone. She answered without looking at the caller-ID screen, knowing only family had her new number for now, and a smooth baritone voice filled her ear. “Happy birthday, Beth.”

  “Tobias!” She lowered onto the stairs, motioning Vick to continue on up and explore the second level. “You didn’t have to call.”

  “Of course I did. Is your...whatever you’re calling him—your boyfriend?—treating you well today?”

  “I think—” she lowered her voice conspiratorially “—I think he’s buying us a house.” Giddy excitement curled in her stomach.

  Faint amusement colored her older brother’s tone. “He is aware your personal net worth is in the range of the low billions, correct?”

  “Don’t be crass, Tobias. There is nothing less romantic than talking about one’s net worth.” She glanced down at her cast-covered forearm, the short fingernails she’d had the hotel manicurist paint a deep hunter green that morning, and smiled. “But yeah, he knows. Vick knows everything about me. No secrets.”

  There was a pause on Tobias’s end. “Is it...
nice? Having someone know all the things you’ve spent so many years hiding?”

  Beth heard the hesitancy he probably never meant to reveal lurking within his question, and answered him with as much honesty as she knew how. “It’s wonderful. And uncomfortable. Mostly wonderful, though. But we’re still new, Vick and I. Maybe it will get less wonderful as time goes on and I realize I’ll never be able to pull a fast one on him.” But she doubted it. A relationship with Vick—the forever kind—was the culmination of a decade’s worth of dreams. “So, yeah, it’s nice.”

  “He makes you happy.”

  “Like whoa.” The stairs creaked behind her, and two strong, denim-clad thighs bracketed her shoulders as her whatever-she-was-calling-him sat on the step above her. His fingers caressed the short hairs at her nape, and her eyes fluttered closed. “I’m thinking I’ll keep him.” And she laughed when Vick flicked her ear, gently, in reprimand, obviously having picked up on the fact that she was discussing him. “Honestly, I’m surprised you’re not here, Tobias. I figured you’d be helicopter-parenting all over this new office Vick’s in charge of setting up.”

  “I would be, but unfortunately, there was a pressing matter in London requiring my oversight.”

  She smirked. “A pressing matter, huh? Is that what you’re calling her these days?” Beth didn’t need to clarify who the her was; she had learned shortly after being transported to Boston after her hospital stay in the UK that Tobias and the Quinns were keeping double-agent Chandler McCallister in permanent lockup in the Underground. She wouldn’t deny she took gleeful pleasure in knowing McCallister was being squished under the Faraday thumb—the British spy had rubbed Beth wrong since day one. The hard light in her dark eyes plainly said, Trust at your own risk.

  On the other end of the phone, Tobias sighed. “We visited Colleen Yang today.”

  Beth tensed. Where McCallister just pissed her off—to the point of trembling rage, let’s be honest—the section chief of T-16 caused Beth’s stomach to churn. It was Yang who for years had manipulated Vick into building a relationship with the Faradays for her own gain, who had manufactured the hit placed on Beth, who had permitted herself to be blackmailed by a psychopath out of fear she would lose her vaunted position with the Secret Intelligence Service’s hierarchy. Yang was a threat who, in Beth’s opinion, ought to have been stripped of her title and fired from her job following the events of a few weeks ago, but Tobias had insisted it was to their benefit—the Faradays’ benefit, that is—to let her keep her power, for reasons of personal leverage.

  Tobias thrived on leverage, cold-blooded creature that he was. Beth rather thought it was the attorney in him; law school was known to turn the best and most earnest of people into sharks by the time they were 3Ls, and he had come out of Harvard Law at the impressionable age of twenty-one. Except Tobias had never been impressionable, but the one leaving the impression, instead.

  Shifting to brace her weight against one of Vick’s strong thighs, Beth gripped the phone, pressing it tighter to her ear. “What did Yang want?” She didn’t like the slight nervous rasp to her voice, and closed her eyes briefly to regain composure.

  “She’s trying to regain the upper hand with us, and I’m willing to let her, for now.”

  “Regain the upper hand how?”

  “By offering Ms. McCallister her former position at MI6, along with a thorough scrubbing of her personnel files, should she successfully assist Faraday Industries in infiltrating Polnoch’ Pulya’s inner circle.”

  “I...wow.” Just wow. “Hold up, I’m putting you on speaker. Vick needs to hear this.”

  A tap to the phone’s screen, and Tobias was suddenly talking to both of them. “Vick.”

  “Tobias.”

  Ugh, dudes. Beth rolled her eyes. “Repeat what you just told me for the class, please.”

  “Yang is willing to permanently blackline Ms. McCallister’s history and restore her job, in exchange for reviving her cover in Moscow and getting us inside Midnight Bullet.”

  Huh. Tobias was willing to call Yang by her last name, but McCallister got an honorific? Interesting. And odd.

  Vick’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, a reassuring pressure that told her he knew her thoughts were jumbled over this. “Repealing her disavowal is what McCallister wants most, I can only assume.”

  “Second-most. The first is to attend her sister’s wedding on Saturday.” A faint clicking carried through the speaker, sounding rather like a pen top being depressed and released, again and again. “It’s a blatant attempt to ingratiate T-16 with Faraday. Yang went so far as to send her message through Freya, to show she’s playing by the rules.”

  Beth doubted Colleen Yang played by any rules but her own—there was a reason the woman had been made the head of one of MI6’s most secret internal organizations, after all. “I get the politics of it, but I’m not tracking on the logistics. McCallister is in our custody, and no law enforcement is going to make us give her up.” Even the media wouldn’t know what to do with a story like this, should the news outlets catch wind. “How much of a conscience are we supposed to have when it comes to her?”

  The clicking sound stopped. “We are not the law, Beth, as much as our father might have led you to believe otherwise. While I was willing to maintain custody of Ms. McCallister for her own safety—as I’m sure you can understand, given MI6’s nasty habit of assassinating those who would best serve them dead—she now has the opportunity to potentially live without a price on her head.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at, Tobias.” Beth’s frustration mounted. “You haven’t had her locked up in the Underground for a month for her fucking health. She’s a danger to those around her, who colluded with a...a monster—” she shuddered, helplessly, and despised the weakness of it “—and ran around Chicago shooting at people on the steps of an art museum. And you want to let her go once she takes you to Kedrov?” Pausing, she considered. “You said Yang wants McCallister to help you infiltrate the inner circle. Do we take that to mean she doesn’t know Kedrov’s alive?”

  “No.” Tobias’s tone was smug. “No one knows but Faraday, and we’re keeping it that way. As to the future of our prisoner...” Another sigh, and more pen clicking. “Frankly, she’s in more danger than I am when we reach Moscow. I have determined we will handle the issue of her reinstatement to T-16 if she leaves Russia in one piece.”

  There was the Tobias she knew and loved: blunt to the point of bruising. “So when are you leaving?” Beth had mixed feelings about her brother’s plan to seek out Kedrov and kill him, but she refused to stand in front of a door when she knew he would then simply find a window.

  He hesitated. “That’s the thing.”

  Intrigued, she straightened on the step, eyebrows high. “What’s the thing?”

  “Take me off speaker, Elisabeth.” When she did, Vick chuckling behind her, Tobias muttered, “I need your advice.”

  “You’ve never asked me for advice before.”

  “Well, we’re trying something new, all right?” The sullenness in his voice made her grin. “I mentioned her sister’s wedding. I am permitting her to attend...on the condition that I attend with her.”

  Beth’s amusement vanished. “You what?”

  “I’ll be posing as her significant other.” Beth could almost see his distasteful expression. “I need you to tell me what that entails.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the obvious choice. No one ever knows what’s going on in Casey’s personal life, Gillian is married to her work, and Adam has the dating habits of a drunk rabbit on spring break in Cabo San Lucas. Though I’ve no doubt it is as surprising to you as it is to me, you appear to have the healthiest, most stable relationship of all of us.” Tobias sighed. “It’s a week in the English countryside, and I have to behave as though Ms. McCallister and I are...are...”

&nbs
p; “In love?”

  “Dear God, I hope not.”

  Beth’s mouth curved in unwilling amusement at the sheer horror in Tobias’s voice. The blonde double agent might not be Beth’s favorite person in the world—Chandler was responsible for Beth being in Nash’s terrible custody for as long as she was—but Beth had to admit, it was amusing to hear her unflappable older brother sound so discomfited. “Her sister’s wedding, you said.”

  “Her twin sister,” Tobias clarified, as though that point made all the difference. Perhaps it did. “There is, apparently, nothing Ms. McCallister wouldn’t do in order to attend the next week’s events in support of her sister, Philippa. I needed her agreement and assistance, and this was her condition.”

  “Have you ever been to a wedding, Tobias?”

  “No.” He paused. “Have you?”

  “Nope.” Slightly uncomfortable to acknowledge, but it was what it was; being a Faraday wasn’t all guns and roses, and invitations to marriage celebrations weren’t exactly thick on the ground. “But I’ve watched a lot of chick flicks, so I’ve got you covered.”

  “I don’t think I can wear a suit the entire time.”

  She laughed at his 100-percent serious—and slightly worried—statement, unable to help herself. “No, hon, I don’t think you can, either. But the real issue is whether or not you can fake being into Chandler in front of her family, for a whole week.”

  “Not her family. Just her sister.” Something entered his voice that Beth had never heard before, something she couldn’t quite identify. “She doesn’t have anyone but her sister. So you need to tell me what sort of behavior would be considered convincing enough to maintain our cover story.”

  What the hell. “Attentiveness.” She heard the pen clicks again and realized he was taking notes. Oh, God, he was taking notes on how to be a good boyfriend. Beth’s heart melted a little. “Watch her, listen to her, be attuned to her nonverbal cues. The upside of this is you need to do that anyway, because she’s technically still your prisoner, right?” She didn’t wait for him to concur. “Subtle PDA. Light touching in non-obtrusive places, like the lower back, or maybe her hand.” She could feel Vick behind her, straining to listen in, and allowed herself to smile at the sheer ridiculousness of the conversation. “As for kissing—”