by Lexi Blake
It seemed to take Erin a moment to understand, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh, no. No. You don’t want Case. Jeez. Case acts like a five-year-old most of the time and I swear the dude needs a maid service. No. I’ve got the perfect Dom in mind. But you should know, he’s definitely not a forever kind of guy.”
She wasn’t looking for that. She was looking for some fun, for some relaxation, and maybe an orgasm or two. “Do I get a choice?”
“Absolutely. Spend the next few weeks talking to Master T and we’ll see how it goes from there. You’re going to like it at Sanctum.” Erin stood and brushed off her cargo pants. She always dressed in a utilitarian fashion. “And Faith, you should know that I’ll make sure you’re okay.”
“What?”
“At Sanctum, I mean. Whatever happens, you’re going to be okay. See you in the morning. I’ve got a few things to sort out with my Master.” Erin strode off in the same direction Theo had walked.
And Faith made a decision. It didn’t matter. Erin was right. Her life was her own and she wasn’t going to let petty rules keep her from something she needed. Sanctum would be private. Her business wouldn’t get out in the press and embarrass her father. She would be safe to indulge, and when the time came to head to her annual birthday party in the Caymans, maybe she would have a handsome Dom on her arm.
It was only for a while. She wouldn’t get what Erin had obviously found, but that was all right, too. Not everyone found true love. She wasn’t expecting that at all. She wanted a little companionship.
Some really good sex would be amazing, too.
Mostly she wanted some peace. That was really all she could ask for.
* * * *
Tennessee Smith sat in the cool conference room and stared at the file. Faith. What a fucking joke. Hank McDonald had named his daughters Faith and Hope. Very likely the bastard thought having daughters named after virtues helped him with the voting public. It certainly hadn’t been because the man placed any value at all in either word.
Two sisters. One was polished and perfect looking. In the photo he held, Hope McDonald was dressed in a tailored Chanel suit. Everything from her hair to her manicured nails, right down to the heels she wore screamed money and power. In the shot he had of Faith, she looked weary. No makeup, scrubs, her hair frazzled like it hadn’t seen conditioner in a few days. But the light hit her skin making it luminous. Her eyes seemed to stare out as though asking for something from him.
What did she need?
“So I dug up some interesting information on Hope McDonald.” Michael Malone passed him a file folder from across the table.
“You dug it up?” Hutch huffed and rolled his eyes.
“Well, I compiled it and did the actual analysis. You just gave me a bunch of websites to click on, and I’m pretty sure one of them infected my laptop.”
“Nah, that was from all the porn,” Hutch shot back.
“Boys, do I look like I need to listen to this argument?” Ten gave his men a stare guaranteed to have them falling in line.
He might not be a CIA agent anymore. He might have been disavowed. Hell, there was probably a price on his head, but he was still in charge of his damn team. Well, the ones who had been dumb enough to follow him.
At least he still had them. It was funny how knowing they’d been willing to give up their careers had made the whole “US government turning against him” thing easier to swallow. If he was half a man he would send them all away, but he’d proven time and time again what a ruthless son of a bitch he was. He needed them. And he needed Taggart.
The conference room door opened and Big Tag strode in followed by his half brother, Case. Any issues the two had in the beginning seemed to be resolved, and things had gone exactly the way Ten had always feared they would.
Case Taggart was Big Tag’s man now, the way his twin Theo was. It was precisely the reason Ten hadn’t mentioned them to Tag in the first place. He’d needed time to get two of the best soldiers he’d ever recruited loyal to him. He should have known in the end it wouldn’t matter. Blood won out. It always did.
In the end though, he knew every man here would be Tag’s, and that was all right.
After all, Tennessee Smith was fairly certain he wouldn’t come out of this mission alive.
“Seriously? How am I supposed to take you seriously when you’re wearing a baby?” Ten asked. The six and a half foot pain in Ten’s ass was wearing something he’d only recently learned was called a sling. It was pink and covered Tag’s chest in a large swath. There was also a tiny baby hand poking out of the top, as though the infant was reaching for her father.
Wanted. Kala or Kenzie…whichever kid it was…that baby was wanted. That child got carried around and cuddled close. No one had ever tossed her away like a piece of garbage.
Tag put a big hand on the sling as he lowered himself into the conference room chair. “She’s fussy. When Kenzie’s fussy, she likes to be in the sling. You’re lucky because Kala’s hanging off her mama’s boob right now or I would likely have them both. What can I say? They like their dad.”
Their dad had turned this whole office into a freaking day care center so he didn’t have to place his precious babies out in the world. He could tell Big Tag was going to be a helicopter parent. An Apache attack helicopter parent.
“So are we a go? Did your girl do her job?” It was the question he’d wanted answered for weeks.
Erin Argent and Theo Taggart had been sent undercover months ago. Their mission—to get Faith McDonald to trust them. To bring her back to Sanctum. They’d been hired on as bodyguards for the small clinic Faith ran in Liberia. Now they were stuck in quarantine because they’d done their job in the middle of the worst urban Ebola outbreak in history.
Tag sat back in his chair. “Erin says we’re a go. By the time they land in Munich, I’ll have sent Faith a temporary contract and information about you. You’re going to be her contact with Sanctum and you’ll be her escort the first few nights here. I suggest you find some of that charm you used to have and get her interested before she steps foot in the club.”
“Why not explain to her that I’m the only Dom available?”
“Because she understands the way things work and that would be highly suspicious. I don’t want to scare her off. We need to figure out what her type is and go from there. All Erin will tell me is she doesn’t like douchebags. Unfortunately for her, that’s all I have here.”
In the past such sarcasm from Tag would have gotten Ten’s middle finger to make an appearance, but he couldn’t work up the will to care anymore. He only cared about one thing now and that was bringing down Hank McDonald. With Phoebe safely and happily married to Jesse Murdoch, he could focus all of his attention on burning the man who’d burned him. More importantly, Hank McDonald was the man responsible for getting Jamie Grant killed.
James. His brother, not by blood but by choice. Jamie and Phoebe had been his only family in the world, and McDonald had sold out Jamie’s unit, given them over to be tortured by the enemy.
McDonald was going to pay, and Ten didn’t care how many virtuously named daughters he had to go through to do it.
“So what you’re saying is if she comes to Sanctum and has zero interest in me, I have to let her find another Dom.”
“Yeah,” Tag replied. “I put in the no-caveman-calling-dibs rule years ago. I thought we’d spent months on training, man. What about safe, sane, and most importantly consensual do you not get?”
Case leaned forward. “Look, according to Erin, Faith is pretty attracted to Theo. Ian and I have been talking and I’ll take a crash course in D/s over the next couple of weeks. If you can’t get her to bite, maybe I’ll be able to.”
She was attracted to Theo? Well, it wasn’t so surprising. Theo was young and strong and he didn’t have a body covered in horrific scars. Theo was an open-hearted idiot who smiled for the sake of smiling. Naturally she would want Theo.
“This is my op.” And he didn’t wan
t anyone else messing with it. If he couldn’t get into Faith McDonald’s bed, he couldn’t get on to that island and into her daddy’s house. All his intelligence pointed to the information he needed being in that house.
Faith McDonald spent her birthday at her father’s vacation home in the Caymans. She’d always taken a boyfriend with her. He was going to be that boyfriend.
Not boyfriend. Dom. He was going to be her Dom.
He was also going to be the man who betrayed her because he would use her to bring her father’s house of cards down all around her.
“It’s always your op, Ten,” Tag said in the most patient voice Ten had ever heard him use. “But if she doesn’t want you, you’re not going to force her.”
He might. There were nights lately when he thought about simply putting a gun to Faith’s head and seeing if Daddy loved his baby girl. The problem was Ten was fairly certain McDonald didn’t really love anything beyond money and power. “I’ll make her want me.”
He could summon up some charm. It wasn’t like it ever came easy to him in the first place. He’d learned it. If there was one thing he was good at doing, it was adapting. He’d figured it out at a tender age. When being rambunctious got his arm broken by a particularly brutal foster parent, he learned to be quiet and not make waves. When he found out shooting rifles was one of his kind guardian’s obsessions, he’d become a marksman. As a teenager, he’d learned women were a damn good way to forget his troubles, so he studied and figured out how to please them.
He could wrap Faith around his little finger if he wanted to. After all, she identified as a submissive. She wanted to please the people around her according to Tag. The rich girl needed praise, it appeared.
She would get it. Eventually. The beautiful thing about D/s was it put him in charge. He would control Faith McDonald. He would train her to obey him. Oh, she would give him trouble in the end, but he would be ready for that, too. He stared down at her photograph. Unlike her sister, Hope, there were no press photos of Faith. Hope stood by her father in many of his publicity photos, but the shots they had of Faith were all casual, taken by Theo or Erin in Africa. Faith wore scrubs when she wasn’t rocking a hazmat suit. Her dark hair was almost always back in a utilitarian ponytail, and if the woman knew what makeup was, he couldn’t tell.
So why did she practically glow? She wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup and he was pretty sure he’d never seen a prettier woman. Not glamorous. There wasn’t anything artificial about her. Or so she wanted people to think. He would withhold judgment. The good news was he likely wouldn’t mind fucking her, which was good because fucking her was absolutely integral to the op. A woman who looked like that might show some loyalty to the man in her bed.
Until she realized the man in her bed was going to tear her world apart.
“What do we know about McDonald’s movements?” He didn’t like thinking about Faith. She was a tool, a means to an end. She wouldn’t be the first woman he’d screwed to complete a mission, but she might be the most innocent looking.
Hutch had his ever-present laptop out. Ten could swear the machine was surgically attached to Hutch. “He’s back in DC, but several members of his senior staff are currently in Pakistan. According to his office, they’re gathering intelligence on the situation in the Middle East.”
Ten didn’t believe that for a second. Any intelligence McDonald gathered would be to enrich his own bank accounts. “My contacts say McDonald’s looking for new clients. Since we took out Hani al Fareed, McDonald’s money supply dried up. I’ve been talking to Ibrahim al Fareed.”
“Any way we can convince Ibrahim to go undercover?” Tag asked.
Ten shook his head. The al Fareed brothers had gotten tangled in one of McDonald’s plots. Hani had been working with radicals and experimenting on US servicemen in order to create sleepers to send back to the States. His brother, Ibrahim, had been horrified at Hani’s activities. After Hani had been killed, it had been Ibrahim who took Ten in and allowed him to learn about the world Hani had chosen. It was a nasty underbelly filled with radicalized sons of Islam and money-hungry politicians who didn’t mind blowing up parts of the world for fun and profit. And corporations. He’d been shocked at how many were thriving because the world was focused on groups like ISIS and Boko Haram. Terror was quite profitable, Ten had discovered.
“I won’t bring Ibrahim into this any further than I already have. He’s a moderate, and beyond that, he’s not trained to handle this. He’s an intellectual.” With three happy wives and fourteen curious children. Every member of that family had accepted Ten into their home and made him feel welcome. He wouldn’t bring them into danger now. “I’ve been talking to some of my contacts and also to Damon.”
Damon Knight ran the European branch of McKay-Taggart Security Services. He was former MI6, and his contacts ran deep.
Tag nodded and the squirmy thing wrapped around his chest seemed to have gone to sleep. “Good. I talked to Damon about embedding a couple of his men on the island. He’s sent the new guy and Brody in. They’ve taken jobs at a resort close to McDonald’s compound.”
“McDonald spends a ton of time at that resort. He plays golf there often and he uses them for catering.” Case frowned. “I guess crime really pays. I want a personal chef.”
“Yeah, you really need that, brother. You need gourmet chicken strips and hot wings.” Tag liked to needle his siblings, but he was right on this one.
“You eat like a five-year-old.” If Case knew how to do anything in a kitchen beyond warm up frozen food, Ten would happily eat his own shoe.
He, on the other hand, had learned to cook at a young age. Another way to please the people around him so they might keep him for a few months. Survival tactics. He was damn good at those.
He bet Faith hadn’t had a decent meal in months. Unless her father provided them with a personal chef during their quarantine.
“So we’re set in the Caymans. I wish we could have gotten someone in the actual house,” Ten mused.
Case shook his head. “That’s a no-go, boss. McDonald’s very careful about employees. Everyone’s local. I think he thinks he can buy their loyalty more easily. Guests are a different matter. Expect a few for the week you’ll be there. Faith’s sister will be invited. Likely a few of her friends.”
“And the senator?”
Tag was rocking back and forth in his seat. “He’ll show. He might not be there the entire time. Your best bet to get the data is before he shows. He’ll have staff and security with him. Have we had any luck doing that computer thing to him?”
Hutch rolled his eyes. “Seriously? Does anyone know what I do?”
“You eat a lot of candy and make sarcastic remarks. You’re a lot like all the other computer geeks,” Tag replied.
“Yeah, but I’m cuter.” Hutch grinned. “So I’ve been trying to infect the senator’s computer with a virus that will allow me to control his system.”
“Like Citadel?” Citadel was malicious software used by cyber criminals everywhere. Unlike Ian, Ten actually liked to try to keep up with his techs. They tended to speak a language he didn’t understand most of the time. He hated to feel like he was behind, so he read all the reports the Agency sent out on the latest ways technology could fuck a person over. Well, he had before he’d gotten the boot.
“Citadel is child’s play compared to what Chelsea and I came up with. If we put this sweet piece of malware out on the Dark Web, we could charge at least twice what Citadel goes for,” Hutch bragged. “Not that we would because that would make us criminals. And I don’t do that anymore.”
Sure he didn’t.
“Could someone explain what Citadel is to those of us who don’t spend all our time in cyberspace?” Tag asked.
“Citadel is USDA prime malware,” Hutch began. “It’s basically a virus, but it doesn’t shut your computer down. It’s so much sweeter. It allows someone like me to take control of your system without you ever knowing I’m there. You move
along like it’s just another ordinary day, but your computer is now a zombie, controlled by me.”
“Because you want to know what porn I watch?” Case looked at Hutch like what he was saying was no big deal.
“No, because he’ll steal every password you have and drain your accounts. He can make it look like he’s you,” Ten pointed out. It was exactly what he needed.
“Dude, I’m not stupid enough to click on the places where I’ll get infected,” Case groused.
Hutch leaned over and started typing. “Give me a sec, Little Tag.”
“Wait. When the hell did I become Little Tag?” There was the sound of a chime and Case pulled out his cell phone. His eyes widened as he looked at the screen. “What? What the fuck? This is a banking alert. It says I pulled five hundred dollars out of my account.”
Hutch sat back, reaching for a licorice stick like a satisfied dude having a cigarette after sex. “You probably shouldn’t have gone to that monster truck site.”
“Son of a…” Case started to stand up.
“Sit down,” Tag barked. “He’s putting it back now. How many of us?”
Hutch was already playing on the keyboard again. “You’ll find it all detailed in the report I sent. I thought it would be a good way to probe the team’s weaknesses. Oddly enough, you and Charlie were among the ones I couldn’t get to bite. You’ve got some serious protections on your systems. Chelsea?”
Tag nodded. “Yes. Please tell me you got Adam. Please. It will do my soul good.”
“No can do, boss. Adam’s system is secure, but I managed to get both Jake and Li with puppy videos. I’m not kidding you. I tried porn on them but nothing worked until I came up with videos of baby animals. Porn totally worked on Erin. That girl likes some seriously nasty shit, if you know what I mean.”
If he allowed it, Hutch would go on all day. “Tell me you got Faith McDonald at least.”
“There’s your five hundred back. And you should really save more money than that. It’s pathetic.” He turned back to Ten. “Of course I got her. I’ve had her for days.”
