Grey nodded. “But positive. All the way around.”
“Agreed. But I’m going to turn in my notice. As of the date and time I turn in my report on this, I would like to leave you with great thanks for what you’ve done for me.”
“I hate to accept your resignation, but I will.” Grey stared at him. “I thought you made a superb operative.”
“The fact that you believed that, despite my injuries and my mental diagnosis, was a great satisfaction to me. Put me back in my right mind.” Mike laughed. “Much as I can be.”
“You’ll get better. Studies show. But you have to be good to yourself. Less stress. No booze. No drugs. No cause for self-pity. Lots of fun.”
“I want to go for it.”
Grey grinned. “I bet I know how. But humor me. Tell me anyway.”
“I want to start my own security company. Hire wounded vets. Guys I’ve worked with, some that come with others’ recommendations. I’d like your advice on how to set things up.”
Grey ran a hand through his silver hair. “Tall order.”
“I know. What do you think?”
“Where would you headquarter?”
“Washington. My home town.”
“Makes sense. Lots of contacts there for jobs that the Feds can’t handle. Coffee? It’s decaf.” Grey pointed to the pot on a credenza in one corner.
“Yes. Thanks. I have a lot of friends there. Contacts. All useful. I wouldn’t have to market so much as show up at parties to network. I’d like to think that when I got jobs I couldn’t or shouldn’t handle, I could send them to you.”
“I’d be grateful. Sure.” Grey strode over to pour them both cups of coffee. “All this takes funding though. Lots of it. How are you fixed?”
Mike took his mug from Grey’s hand. “Believe it or not, I have a nice nest egg. I always saved all my combat and hazardous duty pay. That mounts up. Plus I kept the family house on N Street in Georgetown. That’s just upkeep and taxes. My mother and father left me a nice six-figure trust fund. And my grandfather left me another. I’ve never touched them. So I think I’m set.”
“You’ll need staff. Someone to run the office. Someone you can trust who knows the not only the business, but also the challenges you’re up against when you have to step in for an operative who needs an assist.”
Mike took a long drink of his coffee. His head felt clear. His thinking was calm. His hand steady. “I have that person in my sights.”
“Ah.” Grey took a sip from his cup. “But she hasn’t said yes yet?”
Mike nodded, a sigh escaping him. “I wanted to settle all issues with you first.”
“Thanks for that. You’re a good man. You know it. You’ll do well.”
“Your vote of confidence is the best way to walk on.”
“That you worked for me was a shot in the arm, Lyons. Anything I can ever do for you, just ask.”
“I do have one question,” he said, putting his mug down on Grey’s desk.
“What?”
“Who was the client who ordered me on this case?”
Grey looked sheepish, then burst out laughing. “Do you really need to ask?”
Mike glanced out the window to the Tampa sunlight, chuckling. “Oh, hell. Who else could it be but her?”
* * * * *
“Go away,” Becka said through the barrier of her closed door.
“Quiet!” she said to Roger.
“Men,” was what she said to herself.
“Open this door, Becka.” Mike banged on it with his fist. “If you don’t, I’ll keep on until I bring out every one of your neighbors and Roger, there, will keep on barking. Won’t you, pal?”
The dog answered.
She gave the animal a quelling look. He yelped and padded away.
Then she yanked open her door…but only a crack. “Hurry up.”
“Let me in.”
“No.”
“Fine.” He leaned a huge shoulder against the door and with his weight alone pushed the damn thing wider.
She didn’t have the strength to counter him and threw up her hands. “Okay, okay. Speak and then leave.”
He strode in, closing the door behind him and scratching Roger’s head absently. He wore a black tee shirt stretching across those incomparable muscles, tapering down to dove grey slacks. He looked good enough to lick.
But she wasn’t interested.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
She whirled away. Her pants had always been on fire for him and look where it’d gotten her. No freaking where.
“I had a few errands to do and a few of them took me longer than I expected.”
“Goody for you.” She crossed her arms, wincing when she pressed her arm to her chest.
“You need to be careful,” he said, grinning, carefree as she hadn’t seen him in years.
“I am. Now.”
He walked around her sofa, looking into her bedroom and straightening when he saw her suitcase on the bed. “Careful now, huh? So careful that you’re going on vacation?”
“I’m flying to London.”
“I doubt that’s wise.”
“I doubt you have a say.”
“In your condition, you need to be taking a few days, having fun.” He said that like he understood down time.
Right. “You wouldn’t know fun if it came up and bit you on your tight ass.”
“That’s a joke, I know,” he said like a contrite soul. “But I agree with you. I don’t.”
“Yeah.”
“I need to learn.”
“You do.”
“I’d like to learn it with a good teacher,” he said as he came around the sofa and walked straight for her.
She backed up to the wall.
“You.”
She laughed. “Good one, Lyons.”
He put a hand up, palm to the wall, over her head and leaned down over her. His lips. Damn his lips. He brought them closer to her. “I want to be good for you.”
She swallowed. “You can’t.”
“What if I promised to change? Hmm?” He was crooning to her. “What do you say?”
Was he serious? She took a step to get away but he put a hand to her shoulder, pinned her to the wall and tucked one leg between her own.
“Hear me out. Please. I promised I’d come back from Tampa. I’m here and I need you to listen to me.”
She let her head fall back against the wall. “Talk.”
“I quit Omega.”
“What? Why?” The revelation snapped her out of her doldrums. “You love that kind of work.”
“No, I don’t. I’m not very good at it. Not the action part. The head injury, the PTSD mean I can’t take a lot of stress.”
“Okay. But what will you do? You’re not built for lolling in the sun.”
“No. I’m built for a little less chaos. Running my own business. Like Omega, but not as an operative. Running my own firm from here. D.C. Where I know people who need help occasionally. Where I have a home. A house. Connections. And where you are.”
She gazed into his large blue eyes and searched around in there for deeper meanings.
He touched a fingertip to her nose. “I want to live here. I want to come home. Better yet, I want to make a home. Here. With you.”
Was it the painkillers that made her woozy? She had to be dreaming this from Mikael Lyons.
“I love you, Rebecca Tierney.”
The room spun. She’d been on a funky ferris wheel years ago where she’d been strapped in to a seat and the whole capsule turned upside down. She’d loved the sensation but she was so dizzy when she got off that she staggered.
Her knees buckled.
He caught her up in his arms and walked with her to her sofa where he sat with her in his lap.
He smoothed her hair from her cheeks. “I love you, Rebecca Tierney. And I want to marry you. I want to live with you night and day. I want to laugh with you and go to parties with you and the movies and take the paddleboats out o
n the Potomac and—“
She cupped his face and she kissed him.
Kissed him.
“Say that again,” she whispered.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
He chuckled and hugged her close. “All of it?”
“Well, that would be helpful. You know I’m injured and on medication so that—“
He tickled her mercilessly.
“Enough! Enough!” She gasped.
He reached inside his trouser pocket and brought out an old velvet jewelry box. Then he flipped it open. “This was my mother’s engagement ring. I want us to go downtown tomorrow and have it resized for you.”
She stared at the single diamond in the Tiffany setting.
“I’ve loved you since we were kids. Since you first offered your pretty self to me when you were eighteen and I was so focused on other things that I couldn’t see straight. I’m seeing straight now, Becka. I love you.”
She caught her breath. “Will you…will you take it out and put it on me?”
“You want to try it out?” He sounded so lost, so unsure. The big bad SEAL who was hesitant.
She didn’t like him like that. But if he was allowing himself to be vulnerable, she’d protect his back. “No.”
His face fell.
“I don’t want to try it out. I want to have it. Own it. I want to be yours. Have you. All of you. All of you.” Her lips quivered. Words she’d never said aloud spilled out. “I love you, Mikael Lyons. I’d be your wife in any universe. I love you.”
He dropped the box to the floor, grabbed her, hugged her so tightly, she thought she’d go to dust. “When?”
“When what?”
“When will you marry me?”
“Oh. Ah. Well. I need a dress.” She loved making him sweat.
His blond brows wrinkled. “How long does that take?”
“Days. A week.”
“Why?”
“Because I intend to get married only once and I want a gown. Do you mind?”
“Yeah. Big time. What else?” He rose with her in his arms and strode to her bedroom. “Anything else?”
“Flowers. A cake.”
He put her on the bed and with one arm, swept her suitcase to the floor. She heard Roger’s nails on the floor right behind them, but Mike pushed the door shut with his foot.
“The dog is sensitive,” he said as he striped his tee-shirt off over his head and went to work on the button and zipper of his trousers. Then his jockey’s came off, too.
She giggled. “How do you know?”
“I’m guessing.” He gave her a lop-sided grin as he crawled up over her on the bed. He caught her jaw in his fingers and kissed her right out of her mind. “I love you.”
“Mmm. I heard.” She ran her hands over the contours of his shoulders and waist, the fabulous butt that was all hers now. “We have to send out invitations, too.”
He nuzzled her ear. “Besides you, who needs to come?”
She barked in laughter. “Is that a double entendre?”
“Yeah. You work on the guests who’ll come, baby. I’m working on getting you to come.”
As he unbuttoned the front of her blouse, she figured he had that last part knocked. “Not many folks. My cousin who lives in Dallas. A friend who lives in London. A woman I really like.”
He took her lips once more and lingered there while he skimmed her hip, lifted her skirt and did a little journey up her bare thigh. “You’re gonna quit your job, right?”
“Right,” she murmured as he slid off her panties and found the center of her with his talented fingertips.
“And work with me.”
“Is that a question?” she asked, breathless, as he slid two fingers inside her.
“No.” He rocked his fingers inside her and she gushed with need of him. “There’s proof we work well together.”
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed as she caught his long hot cock in her hand and massaged him. “We’ll make a lot of things happen.”
Flipping up her skirt, he sat up on his haunches and gazed at her naked body. He licked his lips. “Mmm. Mmm. What I’ve got planned for you.”
She pinched his shoulder. “Hurry up, sailor boy. I’ve waited a long time for you.”
“Yeah. Funny thing,” he said as he kissed her bare belly. “You’re the second person to say that today.”
She paused. “Who else?”
“My grandmother.”
She blinked. “You went to see her?”
“I did.” His blue eyes locked on her own. “I had to go thank her for what she did for us.”
That was a mystery. “What did she do?”
“She was the client who hired Omega to get me to guard you.”
Laughter bubbled up inside her like fine champagne. “Your Nana hired you through Grey Holden to protect me?”
“She knew I was in town, that you were having problems settling your case. What’s more she knew that my father suspected Vince Mayhew of fraud and theft of major art. She thought it was time you finished your job and I got on with loving you.”
Becka sank her fingers in Mikael Lyons’ thick blond hair. “Come here and kiss me. Make love to me. And then we both better go visit your Nana and thank her.”
“She wants to come to the wedding,” he said as he kissed his way up one thigh and down the other.
“Front row. Honored guest.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
THE END
More About Cerise DeLand
Cerise DeLand loves to cook, hates to dust, lives to travel—and write! She has penned dozens of novels, contemporary and historical, and is the #1 Best-Selling author of sexy Regency romances!
Visit her website for a complete book list: www.cerisedeland.com
Don’t Miss All the Omega Team Stories
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The Lion by Cerise DeLand
Before the Bang Shift by Mandy Harbin
Texas Stand-Off by Sable Hunter
Buffalo Undercover by N. Kuhn
Keeping Karen by Heather Long
The Soviet Connection by Kate Richards
Assisting Aimee by Susan Stoker
Hot Rod by Sabrina York
Precious Cargo by Brenna Zinn
The Omega Team: The Lion (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 10
