She gave him the kind of long, dirty look that only she could pull off.
He got serious after that and asked her to let Noel James know that my purse had been listening to every conversation I’d had over the past few days. “It’s probably nothing—ZOX wants nothing to do with police investigations—but they should be aware.”
We headed off to a new hotel, still with me driving, all the better to free up my men for holding guns on Agent Denko. Even with his duct-tape bindings, gag, and blindfold, they stayed hyperalert.
“Can you think of any time you were separated from your purse?” Thor asked.
“Remember when we stopped for breakfast before meeting Diego?” I said. I reminded them of the guy who’d come up to grab ketchup. We’d all marked him.
“Goddamn,” Odin said. “That’s what he was up to.”
“So they’ve had ears since then,” Odin said.
“What the fuck,” Thor grumbled.
Odin had me take a completely insane route to the next hotel, a sort of curlicue of turning this way and that, presumably so Denko couldn’t estimate the distance and direction. I pulled up in front of an Asian-themed hotel on Hill Street.
“You two do the check-in,” Odin said softly. “First floor, end if possible.”
We went in for the second time that night as the young married couple. We wrote down a fictitious car and license plate, and luckily the desk clerk wasn’t in the mood to confirm that.
I stopped Thor outside the lobby entrance. Just us two, out in the night, full of adrenaline. Even the stars in the sky above seemed brighter and wilder somehow. “What are you going to do with him? Are you gonna…” I didn’t say kill. I didn’t need to.
“Only if we have to,” Thor said. “I mean, if it’s a matter of us or him, that’s one thing, but I don’t think it’ll come to that. Part of our point to these fuckers is that we’re not the killers that they are.”
“Because of what you saw way back when,” I said.
“Yeah, and you don’t know about that. You shouldn’t even know that much.”
“I want to know. I’m in this with you. I should know. It’s not because I don’t care that I don’t ask.”
“I know, baby.”
“So we keep him as a hostage?”
“As long as we need him. Then we’ll pack him off somewhere. Maybe in the back of a freighter going to Omaha or something. Or put him in an abandoned building and call in his location once we’re safe elsewhere.”
“Safe elsewhere…like in Jerba?”
Thor furrowed his brow. “You think a little setback like this will send us to a boring vacation paradise? Please.”
Playfully, I hauled off to hit him and he caught my arm and kissed me, a deep, hard kiss that had all the excitement of the night built into it.
And oh my god, I shouldn’t have been horny, but I was.
A few minutes later, the three of us were in the hotel room, all of us sitting on one queen bed with Denko bound up on the other. His hands and feet were encircled with silver duct tape, and he himself was bound to the headboard, right around the chest, but at least his blindfold was off. He kept mumbling, wanting to talk. Thor and Odin had already let him pee, so it couldn’t be that.
Mumble mumble. All urgent.
“I don’t fucking-g think so,” Odin said, scrolling through his phone investigating bus routes. Eventually he found a route that was running at two in the morning going past us with the right timing. He sent Thor to dump the Mustang and bus it back.
Odin let me pick a TV show. I went for a Silver Spoons rerun. The TV equivalent of comfort food. He didn’t say anything against it. Partly to indulge me and partly because Agent Denko had appeared extremely unhappy with my choice.
Odin pulled off his jacket and shirt and hung them up nicely. You could see part of his tattoo poking out under his T-shirt. Our tattoo—You WISH we were dead, motherfuckers. I wondered whether Denko knew about it. It was odd to think it was a message to him and his people, in a lot of ways. Though it was more a message to anybody in the world who would ever oppose us.
I threw him my fine suit jacket and he hung that up, too. My filmy, silk tank top was a bit sheer, but Odin didn’t seem to mind, and I sure the hell didn’t. And then Odin and I sat in our bed and watched TV, nestled close. It felt good to have skin-to-skin contact with him. I felt like we were a unit against Denko, like as long as we were touching, nothing could hurt us.
When the show got extra boring, Odin took off his glasses and kissed my hair, leaving his mouth on my head, making a circle of warmth, like a warm link between us, his gorgeous lips, his strong soft arms.
I tipped my head over to look at steely, stern Agent Denko, glaring at us from his bed. Odin put a hand on my forehead and tipped my head back. “Don’t look at him,” he said. “He is nothing to us and nothing against us.”
Another episode of Silver Spoons began, but it wasn’t very calming; I’d never felt more wired, every nerve on a knife edge.
We were on our second Silver Spoons episode by the time Thor got back.
He put a plastic grocery bag on the dresser and got right into bed on the other side of me and pulled up the covers over us.
“Zeus isn’t back yet?”
“He just checked in,” Odin said. “Running a few things down.”
“One thing I don’t get,” I whispered. “I thought they wanted to kill you guys. If they had my purse bugged and were following us, they could’ve taken us down at any time.”
Odin kissed me. “They don’t have anything on you. They wanted something on you.” He spoke at a normal volume. Like he didn’t give a fuck if Denko heard.
“So they could arrest me, too?” I asked.
Odin got this sad, wistful look. “That would be merely secondary, goddess.”
I widened my eyes. I’d seen enough cop shows to know the answer to this. “Because they thought they could flip me? Make me tell things about all of you in exchange for a deal.” I leaned forward and glared past Odin clear to Denko. “We are a family. You think I’d ever tell something that would hurt my men in any way? The fuck I would ever!”
Denko’s expression was unreadable. Of course. Probably a prerequisite for a law man, the unreadable expression.
But I needed him to hear me, needed him to understand that I’d go down with my guys to the end. “It would never happen!” I sat back in a huff, heart thundering.
“It’s not that, goddess,” Thor said from the other side of me. “Not quite that, much as we appreciate the sentiment.”
“Then what?”
Odin took a lock of my hair and twirled it around in his finger, shiny platinum against golden brown. “My guess: they thought if they got something on you—some evidence that would end with you doing hard time—that they could use it for leverage on us. They imagined…” he turned his head away from me, toward Denko, “I am guessing they imagined that we would be willing to turn ourselves in without a firefight if we thought it could get you a deal. Something like that.”
I placed my hands on Odin’s beautiful whiskery cheek and turned his head back to me. “Is it true?”
“What do you think?”
Yes.
Shivers sailed through me as I stared into the depths of his amber eyes. There were no words, only the wild and untamed love I had for these men, for this family of ours. “I couldn’t live with that. We go down together.”
“Do not quarrel, goddess,” Odin said. “In any case, you would have no choice.”
“I wouldn’t let you make a deal. I would bring myself down first.”
“Nobody’s fucking going down,” Thor said from the other side. “Do we look like we’re going down?”
“True,” Odin said. “We won’t go down.” In a slightly huskier voice he added, “At least not metaphorically. There are other ways I would gladly go down.”
I gasped softly.
Odin kissed me then, taking my lips roughly, hand heavy on the side o
f my neck. Then he slid his hand down heavily, down down down, trailing kisses as he went, approaching my breast.
“Odin!” I whispered. “Denko.”
“What’s he going to do? Arrest us?”
He pushed me against the headboard, kissing me harder.
I closed my eyes, blissing out at the rough contact. I felt Thor take my lips, then felt his hand land on my belly.
Agent Denko mumbled, but he didn’t matter anymore.
Thor pulled away. “Whatever you say, Denko.”
I opened my eyes and smiled into Thor’s beautiful blue gaze, crazy with love and unbridled energy, and it was so insane, us in one bed and Agent Denko in another.
Unlike Maria, I really did believe that in the caveman days, women chose mates based on which guy could totally beat up the other guys, and that was definitely the case in some of my very favorite books. And right now it was ultrahot that Odin and Thor were utterly in control of this seriously scary guy.
I probably shouldn’t have been turned on by it.
A ding from Odin’s phone. Zeus. Without taking his arm from around my shoulders, Odin texted back and forth with Zeus in some kind of code. I stayed against him, enjoying the way his steely arm muscles fired with his texting movements, enjoying Thor’s hand on my belly, his breath against my neck.
How could he be so casual about it? Personally, I had a 24-hour news crawl of pure exclamation marks looping though my lizard brain. And then there was inappropriate sexual excitement, with more exclamation marks.
Odin put away his phone. “He’ll be a while. He’s following the gossip grapevine, which, as you know, is quite thriving in our community.”
It was true—the gossip among the criminal set made The Real Housewives of New Jersey look like monks on seven-year vows of silence.
“We’re taking whoever did this so fucking down,” Odin said. “And then we’ll go somewhere fucking-g amazing.”
“Yeah,” I said, heart pounding, breathing in Odin’s warm man scent. Was it possible men gave off extra pheromones from the act of having dominated a lesser man?
Just a question.
No reason.
“This is cozy,” Thor said. “Don’t you think it’s cozy, Agent Denko?”
Denko turned his head to stare. I got the feeling he was trying to look confident. Or maybe he was confident.
“Don’t fucking-g address him,” Odin said.
“Why not?” Thor asked. “It’s a free country. Isn’t that right, Denko? Oh, no, you say? Not if you know too much? Then it’s not? Is that what you’re saying?”
Odin reached over my head and bopped Thor’s forehead.
Another episode of Silver Spoons started up, leading us to discuss who the fuck of the subset of people up at two in the morning would ever watch it. Maybe it was there for all of the wrongdoers of the world to take comfort in after a hard day of violence.
“Any requests, Denko?” Thor asked.
“Do not engage him,” Odin said.
“But he looks so stern,” Thor said, and I could hear this smile in his voice. That was never a good sign. “Isis, doesn’t he look stern?”
“I’m not engaging him,” I said, nestling into Odin’s shoulder, glad Odin was on the side between us and the agent. “Fuck that.”
“You should look at him,” Thor said. “He has a certain gravity, don’t you think? So stern and disapproving.”
I sat up with my mouth hanging open. “Oh my god.” Because I got it then—he was talking about my type to watch.
Thor slid a warm hand onto my thigh under the covers. “Look over at him,” he whispered.
“Fuck you,” I laughed.
“Thor,” Odin said…but there was a certain huskiness to his voice.
In his rumbly, velvety voice that always turned me on, Thor said, “Denko is stern and very statuelike with a lot of gravitas, wouldn’t you say, goddess? And very disapproving. In fact…” He moved his hand an inch up my thigh and lowered his voice, “I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody to be quite so disapproving of us as Denko. I mean, it’s his life goal to bring us down.”
“That is a sign of disapproval,” Odin said.
I gasped softly as Thor inched his hand up my thigh some more.
“You can’t get more disapproving than that,” Thor continued in that sexy voice of his where he managed to be both velvety and gravelly. “Or authoritarian. What do you think, Odin?”
I looked over to meet Odin’s smoldering look.
“Have you both gone insane?” I said.
Thor brought his hand up nearer to the cleft between my legs.
My heartbeat thundered.
“I ask you,” Thor continued, “can you be more authoritarian than to belong to an organization more powerful and more secretive than the CIA? But with way more badass initials, of course. ZOX. How can CIA compete? Come on, Ice, look at him.”
I looked over to see him still glaring. Yes, he was stern and authoritarian. He was disapproving, clean cut. A little bit dangerous, but utterly under the control of my men. And tied up…and super-stern. So stern.
I clunked my head back against he headboard. “You guys.”
But of course, it was a fantasy of mine. And they knew it. And the fact that they knew it gave them a strange kind of control over me. Naturally, this was hot, too. The whole thing was a hotness party.
In a low rumbly voice, Odin said, “He does not like it when we talk about his agency. He wonders how many people know. Worries how to contain this information. Always wants to contain information. We spit on him,” he said. “We spit on him and all that he stands for.” Here Odin raised his voice, addressing Denko without bothering even to look at him. “You are dirt to us.” And then he kissed me full on the lips—a hot, possessing kiss. And at that moment Thor touched a finger between my legs.
“Oh my god,” I breathed, nearly twisting up with the sheer pleasure of it. “We can’t.” “Why not, goddess?” Thor said. “Is it not like what you imagined?”
Odin whispered into my ear, “You love this. I can see it in your eyes. You have never met a thrill you do not like, baby.”
Thor took hold of my hair and turned my head to him again. “Do you feel his eyes on us?” He brought his lips to my ear, tickling the shell. “Do you feel the gravity of his gaze?” With a smile in his voice he added, “Do you feel it on your skin? Remember how you told us about that feeling that you love? Up on the top of a ski jump—one push and then gravity takes you? Isn’t this like that? Our stern, dangerous enemy. Tell me you don’t want to fuck right now. Because I very much do. I want to take you in front of him. We will never find a man sterner. Certainly not more unwilling.”
“Not without taking more hostages, anyway.”
I closed my eyes. The combination of adrenaline and lust was like a drug. “Yeah, but…” I was thinking about Zeus.
“Feel his eyes on your body,” Odin said. “He doesn’t want to watch but he will not be able to help himself, because we are so fucking-g badass together.”
“What about Zeus?” I said. “He’s so against this.”
“We’re outlaws,” Odin growled. “The last time I Googled outlaw, it said we do whatever we please and nobody gets to stop us. Nobody tells us no. Zeus doesn’t get to make up new rules, and he knows it.”
“You’re an outlaw, Ice,” Thor whispered. “We’re all outlaws. Let’s be fucked up together.”
“I want to be fucked up,” I said. “I do.”
Odin rose up from where he was and went around to the foot of the bed and pulled off the covers. Then he grabbed my ankles and pulled me down so that I was laying flat on my back.
I loved Denko’s eyes on us—I did. The stern, dark watcher. It heightened everything so much.
Thor crawled over me and kissed me. “There we go, goddess.” He thumbed my cheek, taking my lips in his. It was so forbidden and so thrillingly wrong, for a minute I wanted to sink into him, into his everything.
T
hen I stopped. I pressed my hands to either side of Thor’s cheeks and pushed away his face. “This will seem like cheating to Zeus,” I said.
“Zeus will get over it,” Odin said from where he was about to do god knows what with my feet or maybe legs. “You can’t change the rules in the middle of the chess game.”
“But still…” I said.
“You don’t want to?” Thor asked. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “We just can’t.”
Thor sighed and flopped over by my side. “Okay.”
“You’re sure?” Odin said.
“I’m sure I want to, but I can’t not think of Zeus.”
“We may need to teach you outlaw lessons.” Odin went over to the dresser where Thor had deposited his bag of waters. He twisted the cap off one of them. “I respect that, Ice. We will not fuck in front of Denko, then. I would offer for us to fuck you in the shower, but it seems imprudent to leave our guest alone.”
“Oh well,” I said.
Denko began to grunt from under the duct tape gag, shifting around, rocking the headboard he was tied to like something urgent was up.
“Fuck off,” Thor said.
Odin frowned. “We’ve had him a few hours. We could see what the fuck. Give him water.”
Thor nodded. “I guess.”
Odin went over. “You yell or scream, and I will tape your entire fucking-g face, got it? I will give you a duct tape mummy head with nostril holes and that’s it. You understand?”
Denko nodded.
I cringed as Odin picked up a corner of the tape with a fingernail. When he had a grabbable bit, he just ripped it right off.
Ouch.
Denko grunted and licked his lips.
“What?” Odin asked. “What’s so fucking urgent?”
“Bit of water?” Denko said.
Odin gazed over at Thor and me. Feeling suspicious. “Thor. Open one of the other bottles and let him have a little. Tip a little in.”
Thor did as requested, and Denko thanked him.
“That it?” Odin grabbed the duct tape, ready to re-up the gag.
Denko’s voice was gruff. “Amazing how you two coddle Nick.”
The Most Wanted (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers #4) Page 15
