by Honor James
The door to the room finally opened, and Nathan came in. “Sorry, was getting the third, fourth, and fifth degree from the cops. They were not happy that my first call was to you guys, and that you ended up calling them.”
“Shit happens. They can suck it,” Lee said.
“I agree. I’m happy that you are here too.” Olivia reached out for Nathan as well. “And I wouldn’t want anyone there but you and your friends. The police couldn’t have protected us as well as your team did, so they can suck it.” She mirrored Lee’s thoughts. “God, my head is pounding.” The morphine was sadly wearing off and she was none too happy about it.
“Not like I was doing all that better of a job,” he muttered. He took her hand in his and sat on her other side. Stroking his fingers up and down her arm, he looked to her. “I am sorry, Olivia. The possibility they’d do something like that never even entered my mind. I should have thought of it though.”
“We all should have,” Lee said. “Our biggest problem is not knowing who the fuck Phyllis is running around with.”
“Timmons not having any luck yet?”
“No, he’s still got it running internationally, but so far domestically there’s nothing on the guy. He’s also getting fucking cranky about it too. I feel for Clara having to put up with his snarly ass right now.”
“He’ll find the guy soon enough, and then we’ll know what we’re dealing with,” Nathan said, sounding like he truly believed it.
“Why doesn’t he let Clara work on it as well? She knows Phyllis well. She knows her quirks and foibles and could help to figure out just what the hell is going on with that woman. Clara is super intelligent, I swear she’s far more than the “Dear Abby” sort of person that she portrays herself as. She’s never let on that she’s more than that but sometimes when she gets on her iPad she gets this look on her face, and I swear it’s a look of glee and then she’s gone.” Olivia and Clara had kept in close touch since their time in hell together, had coffee together often, and there were times when Clara would have to leave after finding something on her tablet.
“Clara is working it with him. But she was also shot, so he’s keeping her on a very strict schedule of when she can and can’t be working on it. He also has to do some of the work from the office computers, things he can’t do from home. It’s extremely slow going too. They’ll get there eventually though,” Lee told her. “You’re only concern right now is to get better.”
“Great, what the heck is up with us getting shot?” she muttered. “I’m good actually. I really am. My head hurts and my shoulder is killing me, but I really am okay. I would be better if they gave me more morphine or at least a pain pill, but they won’t because of wanting to ensure that I’m okay after hitting my freaking head. Only me,” she grumbled. “I’m such a freaking klutz.”
“You are not a klutz,” Nathan said.
Lee was shaking his head. “She’s a total klutz. A very sexy klutz, but she has issues with tripping over her own two feet. There may not be anything in front of her, or within a mile of her, but she’d still trip. How she’s not constantly covered with bruises, I’ll never know.”
Nathan shot Lee a dirty look. “I’m quite sure it’s nowhere near as bad as that. I’ve been around her for a while now and haven’t seen anything like that. You’re exaggerating,” he muttered. Squeezing her fingers gently, Nathan turned his gaze back her way. “This one’s on me. I’m just thankful you survived. Those first few seconds took years off my life.”
“No, really he’s not,” Olivia said with a grin. “Seriously, I’m a klutz, you just have gotten lucky that I haven’t yet tripped over my own feet. I guess that you just bring out the non-klutz in me, Nathan.” She was toying with his fingers with her own, enjoying the touch of both of the men with her. “I will have to learn to do just that though so that I can get more of having both of you holding my hands.”
“What? Tripping over your own feet?” he asked. Then he shook his head hard. “Hell no, no more falling down, and getting hurt. You want us to hold your hands, just ask, Olivia. You do not need to go out and cause a major injury to have us close to you.”
“Okay, then I want you to hold my hands often if you don’t mind.” She closed her eyes again and sighed. “I will do my best to try to keep myself upright so that I’m not tripping and falling all over my feet all the time.”
“Good plan,” Lee said. “It’ll make us both a hell of a lot happier. Besides you don’t need to take any more abuse to your gorgeous self. Unlike when you were a kid. You were such a little tomboy. She’d have these temporary mood swings where she decided she was a queen and try to get me to play as her royal guard or something like that. Then she was back to climbing trees two days later. I never quite knew what to expect when we met up for our adventures.”
“Admit it, you loved it,” she told Lee with a wink. “You enjoyed not knowing what I had planned for us at any given moment in time. It made each day unique and amazing. You know it as well as I did.” Sadly they had lost so much time though. “Now, enough talk about that. However if you ever want to have a tree-climbing contest I bet that I could still take you.”
“Or end up dangling by one foot again, needing to call out every firefighter in the city in an attempt to rescue from the only tree in the entire city that was under protection from any pruning. How you managed that one I still don’t know.”
Nathan was chuckling. “Somehow I can actually picture that, as strange as it seems. Hopefully it wasn’t one of her dress-wearing days, was it?”
“It was. One of those big puffy concoctions. Fell right over her head so she couldn’t see a damn thing. Had her bright red undies out for all to see too.”
“They had cherries on them. I thought that it was a riot. After that, for like two months, you and a bunch of other people from school called me Kitten, as in having to call out the firefighters to get the kitten out of the tree. And by the way, you are just jealous because I was able to make it all the way to the top of the tree and you couldn’t. The branches kept swaying and bending on him,” she told Nathan.
“I had a few pounds on you, still do,” he said. “The lightweight here was showing off. Karma smacked her on the ass though.”
Laughing all out now, Nathan looked like he was about to fall off the bed. “You two kill me. Some of the shit you two got up to—it’s a shock both of you survived to adulthood.”
“Pure fucking luck most of the time, with the Kitten in charge of things,” Lee said.
“Oh lord love a fucking duck please don’t start that again,” she muttered and frowned up at Lee. “I haven’t climbed a tree in a long while.” She paused and then frowned. “Crapballs, what about my flower shop? Who’s watching over it right now? I mean they are good for a day or so, but not more than that.” Her employees were good but she still worried about them taking over for longer than a few days.
“It’s fine,” Nathan said. “I gave them a ring earlier and they said everything was kosher. I’ll go round tomorrow to see if they need a hand with anything not involving fluffing flowers and shit. One of the wives said they’d also help out. But she was going to stop around the condo first to check with you if it was all right, and to get the lowdown on what was needed.”
“That sounds good. I should be able to go back soon, right?” She knew that neither man would let her go back until Phyllis and her minions were caught. “How could a man that was in the service like you guys were be so bad? The two of you, heck your whole group, have so much honor that it’s not even funny. How could someone serve and not have the same honor?”
“I think she’s referring to the guy Phyllis is hanging with,” Nathan said to Lee when he only stared at her in confusion.
“We don’t know that he ever was in the service,” Lee said. “He could have also served in another country’s military, been booted, hooked up with the wrong crowd, got bored, and went looking for the big payday. There are any number of things this guy could have done. H
ell he might have police training for all we know, but got involved with a mercenary group, or even went out solo. We don’t know anything right now. All we know for sure is he has some serious connections, and he can fire a sniper rifle. Though not very well.”
“Thank fucking God,” Nathan muttered.
“I agree on that. I’m glad that he can’t fire a gun for shit too.” She yawned again, once again squeezing their hands. “For some reason I thought that I heard someone say that he was in the service. Maybe I’m just dreaming. Maybe it was the morphine that was talking?”
“Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t,” Lee said. “We won’t know until we figure out who the hell he is. But you are not to worry about that. You go to sleep for the time being. I’m sure there will be a nurse in here soon enough poking you to wake up, and ask you a bunch of annoyingly repetitive questions.”
“If she does will you please ask her to leave? If I have to stay here I should at least get to sleep, right? I mean seriously.” She already hated the sound of the beeps and whistles of the IV pump and blood pressure cuff that was on her. “How will the two of you sleep? Are the chairs at least ones that fold out as recliners so that the two of you will be able to rest?”
“We’ll be fine, but you know it’s policy for them to wake you up, put you through an interrogation, and then tell you to get back to sleep. You get what sleep you can, and we’ll attempt to waylay her as much as we can. Sleep, Vi,” Lee told her. Leaning in, he pressed a kiss to her mouth. “I love you, sweetheart. Sleep.”
“I love you too, Lee,” she whispered to him and closed her eyes. Yawning, she rubbed her cheek to Lee’s hand and nodded. “I think I might love you too, Nathan. There’s a very good chance of it at least,” she told the other man, smiling and turning to look at him. “Life’s too short not to say anything. Lee and I lost ten years over miscommunication and I refuse to let that happen again. So get used to me blurting out whatever is on my mind.”
“I think I can handle that.” Leaning in once Lee sat back, he gave her a gentle kiss. “For the record, I love you too, Olivia. No need to think on it at all,” he said softly. Another kiss and he leaned away from her. “Close your eyes and rest. You need to at least give the illusion of being well rested for the doctor to release you in the morning.”
“You do?” she asked as she tugged Nathan closer. “I’m glad. That you love me that is. I’m keeping you, ’kay? Now I’m going to try to sleep. If I really am asleep, will you make her leave us alone, please?” He loved her. Olivia was just over the moon that both men loved her, and she loved them. It was going to be good, very good.
Smiling he nodded. Another gentle kiss to her lips, and he slipped off the edge of the bed. “Sleep now, Olivia.” Giving her a wink, he pulled in a chair to sit in, still holding on to her hand. He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles gently.
“Sleep does sound rather good,” she whispered, and then with one last yawn allowed herself to drift off and into sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
Lee handed her a cup of tea. Even a full week after the incident, Olivia was being catered to by both men hand and foot. They wouldn’t let her lift anything, do anything, and would leap up if she went to move to ensure one of them was by her side the entire time.
The blinds in Lee’s condo had been pulled from the moment they’d come home. Someone had replaced the glass, and the door while she’d been in the hospital so there was no sign of anything having happened in the space.
Nathan came wandering out of the kitchen with a bowl in hand and his phone between his shoulder and ear. “Uh-huh,” he grunted, scooping up cereal into his mouth. Chewing, he settled down on her other side and adjusted the phone. “Well that’s not good,” he said to whomever he was talking to. “Fucking hell, Timmons. How the hell did the guy get into the damn country?—Well then that person needs to get a size-eleven boot up his ass pronto for that kind of mistake.—Shit, yeah,” he grumbled. Pulling the phone away, he hung up and tossed it onto the coffee table so it skidded off the other side and across the floor.
“Okay, so what was that about?” Olivia asked as she ate her PB&J sandwich that Lee had made for her earlier. “What’s not good and who got into the country that you are shocked about?”
“’Annoyed’ about would be better,” he said, shoveling more cereal into his mouth. He really wasn’t in a good mood from what she could see. Once he swallowed he looked to her. “Patrick O’Donnell is the guy that Phyllis is running around with.”
“Fuck me,” Lee breathed out on her other side before sitting forward. “Timmons is sure?”
“100 percent sure. The guy is supposed to be dead. It’s why no flags went up immediately on this side of the pond. Over in Europe though, he’s a gun for hire, goes by a few aliases, but used his actual passport to get back into the country.”
“How did that not raise a flag up? He’s been declared dead by the United States military for the love of God.”
“No clue,” Nathan told him. “Timmons is looking into it, but as best he can figure, there’s some sort of lag between the military sector, the public sector, and the TSA systems that it didn’t send up a smoke signal when he came through. Which I’m betting he knew would occur and he’d be able to fly under the radar for a while.”
“Well that’s not good. I assume that you guys know who this person is, right?” The way that they were acting made her think that whoever this man was, it was bad, all around. “How could she afford a hired gun? Phyllis isn’t exactly a rich person. She worked for a living, as far as I knew. I mean she had relatives somewhere overseas that I think had money, but they are alive.”
“We don’t know,” Lee said to her. “Yet something else we need to figure out now that we know who the fuck she’s working with. And yeah, we know him, sort of. I met him a couple of times in the early years with Michael’s team. Michael and he went through basic together, but were definitely not what one could call friendly. O’Donnell got his own team, and on occasion we’d cross paths with them. He was a dick, nicest thing I can say about him. According to the military, he died six years ago during a firefight that also killed another member of his team and left three others injured. The injured members were extracted, but the two bodies had slipped down a ravine of sorts so the extract team left them for the time being. When things cooled in the region, they went back but were only able to recover the one body, not O’Donnell’s obviously. It was assumed his body had slid down into a tighter section they couldn’t reach without blowing up half the mountain so they left it.”
“Fucker must have seen it as a prime opportunity to get away, reinvent himself, and do this shit. The aliases that Timmons uncovered are wanted for various murders, and some other crimes from London down to Rome. Hell he even has a most wanted in Moscow. No picture on that one though, only one of the aliases,” Nathan said. “I never met the guy, but I did hear about him through the grapevine. He was actually under investigation for a few missing weapons. Nothing concrete, but the investigation shifted to other leads once he was declared dead. He was not one of the poster boys for the military, that’s for sure.”
“So we have an ex-military man who knows how to use all the cool toys that you boys used with a major issue with authority, if I’m reading the situation right, who gets off on causing havoc. Am I right so far?” she asked with a frown. “Because if that’s true, you guys will know how to find him far better than anyone else would since you are all former special forces as well. Right?”
“Lee was the special one, I’m just regular,” Nathan said with a grin. “I think it’s even stamped on his official file, very special.” He leaned to the side to avoid the hand Lee tried to smack him with.
“I’ll give you some very special right now, you little shit.” Growling at him, Lee sat back with a sigh. “We should be able to find him. Only problem is he’s had a number of years of living under the radar to use to keep him and Phyllis hidden. If anyone’s going to fuck up, it’s going
to be her. We need to focus on finding her, scaring the shit out of her so she rolls on him, and then taking him down hard and fast.”
“Then you are going to have to use me.” Damn, she didn’t like those words falling from her lips, but she knew that Phyllis had a serious hard-on for her. “However we use me though, it will be in a controlled environment, right?” If they had thought about doing this, she knew that her men would go over every possibility that was out there in order to keep her safe.
“We’re not using you until you’re back in perfect health,” Lee said. “And even then it’s fucking iffy at best if we do it that way. For the moment you are going to continue to heal, and once you have full mobility back if we haven’t caught this jokers, then we’ll reassess. Until then you are not up to whatever they might throw at you. Your injury still pains you, and they could use that against you. So we keep searching, knocking down doors, kicking over rocks, and scouring this fucking city from end to end.”
“Love you too, honey.” She rubbed her temple and nodded. “I am still healing but really in the whole scheme of things I’m not as bad as I could have been. The shoulder was an easy through and through in the fleshy part of my arm and if I hadn’t hit my head, I would already be back between the two of you with us all nice and naked and sweaty.” Another thing that frustrated her, they refused to once again share her until she was feeling better. Damn men.
“Look at her, talking like one of the guys,” Nathan teased. He was still shoveling cereal into his mouth as he watched her.
“She’s been hanging around too many of us for too long. Always was a quick study too, got her in trouble as a kid when she learned all the swear words in only a couple of days. Once she learned one, she was determined to learn them all.”
“Well yeah, do you blame me? You could use all kinds of colorful words but didn’t want me to say them? I showed you.” Granted she didn’t use them as frequently as he did, but still she liked to shock him from time to time. “And it was something I picked up from the doctors by the way, the through and through part.”
