“Yep,” he said.
The grump in his voice made her look at him again, this time with a smile. “That’s not why you’re worried about me.”
“No, it’s not,” he said and when he tried to look away again, she caught his face and climbed on top of him to tease.
“You worry ‘cause you love me.”
Though he considered it for a second, his sullen expression didn’t relax. “Yeah, so fuck, how am I supposed to keep an eye on you here if I’m there watching Tuck’s back?”
“This house is a fortress. I carry GPS wherever I go. CI is one of the most secure buildings in the city. Besides—”she cast a look over her shoulder—“You have eyes on me everywhere.”
She still hadn’t established where the cameras were, but Brodie had disclosed that he watched her, even in their private space. Instead of being shocked or feeling violated, she found his variety of attentiveness to be arousing.
At any time or in any place, he could be watching her. Since learning this secret, she’d done her best to tantalize him through her actions, especially if he was too far away to touch. She hoped it might entice him to come home to her.
Brodie wasn’t easily persuaded after he’d made his mind up about something, but she wasn’t finished trying. Staying here at base and working at CI was safer than hanging around with Rigor and his men. Using these facts and some intimate persuasion, she was confident he’d leave her here and go to New York alone.
She was a distraction to him there and being the solitary female in the house, she got more than her share of leers and suggestive comments. If she stayed here, Brodie would be less likely to put his fist through one of the men they were supposed to be working with.
Being the lone woman in the Kindred was something she was getting used to, but sitting in Rigor’s new home surrounded by skilled men who could be counted upon to protect the sanctity and secrets of their kin was highlighting to her just how confused her role in the world had become.
“If we’re separated, I can’t help you if you get into trouble,” he said.
Slanting her lips, she pressed them into his body and slid her hands up to squeeze his shoulders, which allowed her to lever up enough that her breasts hung close to his mouth. “You’ve taught me how to look after myself and I’m always armed. Think of how much fun it will be if I call you up and tell you to kick someone’s ass for upsetting me. You’ll have an excuse for some sport. If I’m at CI, I’m out of the way of Rigor’s handsy men.”
Grabbing her body, he pulled her down. “Someone touched you?”
“No,” she said. “But we both know they’ve thought about it.”
And that was probably the decider because he didn’t even try to argue. “Forty-eight hours,” he said, coiling his hand in a fist around the locks at the nape of her neck to force her cheek onto his chest. “Go to sleep. I won’t be here when you wake up.”
Complying, she nestled close to him and closed her eyes. “Brodie,” she sighed.
“What?” he asked, loosening his fingers to comb them down her back.
Being away from base meant following Kindred rules and adhering to them was often frustrating, so she wanted to exploit this rare moment that they weren’t constrained. “Nothing. I just like being able to say your name.” His hand moved to her neck and squeezed.
“My girl,” he said, stroking her until she drifted off to sleep.
THREE
Invigorated by Brodie’s agreement, they’d enjoyed each other again in the dark. Before he stroked her back to sleep, he added some provisos. She was to stay at the manor every night and had to report in several times a day. Once she was satisfied that CI wasn’t going to burn to the ground without her and Grant there to hold it up—which Brodie assumed would take no more than two days—she was to join him and Tuck at Rigor’s place.
Her task was to return to her old life, sans Grant. Brodie wasn’t the only one who needed to be free of distractions to get the job done. Keeping her eye on the company would be easier without him noticing and questioning every nuance of her actions.
Brodie departed the manor before she was out of her morning shower. He advised her that he’d leave a car for her in a concealed parking space outside the perimeter of McCormack land. Having a car to get to and from work would be easier than having a cab drop her off each night.
She still had her parking spot at CI and the codes hadn’t changed, so getting inside was just like old times. For a while she fooled herself that going through the motions would be enough. That was until she reached the executive floor. The staff there stopped to greet her and express condolences, but when they were all gone, she was left staring at the interior glass wall of Grant’s office. The blinds were closed on the other side concealing her view. Not that she needed to see to know what was there.
Returning to her place of employment was supposed to be a comfort that would chase off the demons that had plagued her. It was supposed to bring her peace and restore her to contentment. Except as she stood staring at the shielded window she felt like a detached stranger, irrelevant to the company that had given her purpose for so long, and all of her insecurities came rushing back.
The appeal of the job came in her importance, in her value to the corporation through the CEO. Without this job and with the man gone, the last part of Zara Bandini, corporate lackey, had died too. She’d been struggling with the loss of that part of her identity.
“Zara!”
Whirling around, she cast off her thoughts of Grant and the uncertainty of her future to smile at Julian who was striding toward her. “Hello,” she said when he came to a stop in front of her and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m so glad to have you back,” he said, giving her a pat then turning her body toward her office and walking at her side to accompany her inside. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that things are piling up.”
He didn’t. She knew how the backlog mounted if she chose to go home early one night of the week. That she hadn’t been here for a month left her with no illusions. “I’ll delegate as much as I can. The team works efficiently so long as there’s someone driving them.”
“And there’s no one better at that than you,” he said. “If you need anything signed at an executive level, bring it to me. I’ll act as liaison with the board. It’s not that they don’t trust you—”
“Just that I’m beneath them,” Zara said, nodding and turning to her desk, which was just as she’d left it. With events at Sutcliffe’s compound and Grant’s vicious duplicity, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat at that workstation with nothing but CI business on her mind.
“They want to check everything out before we make any executive decisions. We don’t want anything too drastic to change before the new owner comes in.”
That piqued a different kind of interest, but she tried to subdue her vehemence in the face of Julian’s ignorance. “Have you found him? The new… owner?”
“No,” he said. “Mr. McCormack had a brother, but pinning down his location is proving impossible. He had cousins too. I hadn’t realized he had so many living family members, he never talked about any of them.”
Julian was obviously parroting what someone else had said because he had no close relationship with Grant that would afford him the chance to make such an observation. But Grant was known as a private man who kept his personal life away from work. That there were lawyers probing into his history and his family tree would mortify him, as it would Brodie. Picking up on the similarity between the brothers when she so often noticed their differences didn’t help to assuage her turmoil over Grant’s death.
“You never know, it could be that he finds you,” she said and noted that she should talk to Brodie about asserting his authority over CI before any of the lawyers or board members delved too deep into what he and his family had been doing for the last twenty years.
He smiled. “That would certainly save a lot of time and money,” Julian said,
squeezing her shoulder. “Do you need anything? If it’s too difficult being here, we can find you somewhere else to work.”
Again, she felt categorized as the grieving widow when that couldn’t be further from the truth. When she’d heard Grant’s body hit the floor, she’d feared it was Brodie and when she turned to see that it wasn’t, her prevailing emotion was relief. Horrified by such a hideous response to the death of a man she’d been close to for half a decade, she struggled with the nature of her own character and how it had developed since the night she met Timothy Sutcliffe. That was the night her life changed.
“This place is home to me,” she said, glancing toward Grant’s office. “There’s work that has to be done and there’s nowhere else I’d rather do it.”
Getting stuck in a broom closet with a laptop wouldn’t ease her confusion about where she fit in without her corporate identity. She had to sit down and wade into the mounds of work that would have been growing since she and Grant last walked out of here.
If she kept her focus, the structure of CI would help her settle again, she was sure of it.
She was wrong. Every day for a week, she’d gone into CI hoping to rediscover the sensation of fluency. Each day she failed. Struggling to find her identity again in such a familiar place thrust her further into the uncertainty of her future that raised questions about who she was.
Her internal conflict spilled from business to personal when one night she drove the Kindred car she’d been using back to her apartment instead of the manor. That she did it on autopilot betrayed how deep into her subconscious this battle had gone.
Zara hadn’t even considered staying at her apartment. She’d just driven away from CI, parked, and turned off the engine. Then when she got out and looked up, she found herself in front of her apartment instead of at the manor.
Because of Leatt and their mission in New York, she’d called to cancel the listing of her residence using the excuse of not being around to pack up and hand over keys etc. Now she wondered if she’d been entirely honest with herself and the others about her need to retain her apartment.
As she’d ended up there anyway, she went upstairs to look around the space she’d fallen in love with at the first viewing and decided to stay that night. While going through old routines, she considered that it might be easier to “find herself” in the place that had once been her private sanctuary. One night in the apartment turned into two, then three, and then four. Without making a conscious decision, she’d found herself living in her own pad again.
It was dark out and the CI building had been pretty much empty when she left, but she was getting through the work, though that was little consolation. Having parked out back, she ascended the stairs and let herself into her apartment. Closing and locking the door, Zara stopped trying to figure out what she should do next.
She hadn’t been eating much, as food hadn’t been high on her priority list. Indecisiveness was a new personality trait for her to grapple with too. Sort of tempted to work out, because she’d picked up the habit as Brodie’s girl, Zara’s feeble treadmill didn’t inspire her. It was nothing on the fully kitted-out functional gym at the manor. So much in her life had changed quickly. She’d suffered losses but gained so much. Sometimes when looking in the mirror, she didn’t recognize who was looking back.
Sloping toward her bedroom, she figured she’d take a shower and make a decision while soaping herself. It had become another habit to check the chair in the corner of her bedroom every time she entered. Usually she dismissed the piece and went on with her business. Today, she stopped short and dropped her purse at the sight of her man filling the seat.
Contending with her own issues had left her with little mental leeway to think about Brodie’s and the Kindred’s. Though if she had, she’d have concluded that it was only a matter of time before Brodie appeared to chastise her for ducking calls and avoiding the manor.
Maybe some subconscious part of herself wanted this, needed him to show up and shake her because she wasn’t having much luck in doing it herself. She always did feel more grounded when he was around. Even if she was still hesitant to share her vulnerabilities with him, at least he was proving that he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” he asked, putting on the lamp next to the chair.
“I don’t know,” Zara said in response, and the even tone of his deep voice, which ordinarily soothed her, agitated her insides. Maybe it was arousal, maybe she was wary that he’d take one look at her and know she was having the wobble she’d bypassed after losing Art, or maybe she was scared that he’d look through her and see a fraud who didn’t belong with the Kindred after all.
Slipping off her shoes, she kicked them under the bed. “With you, Rigor, and Tuck spending so much time drinking and playing cards, I wasn’t sure you’d notice that I wasn’t there.” Lifting her foot from the floor to put it on the bed, she began to unroll her stocking.
“Leave them on.”
She paused. Good humor hadn’t joined her this week and that wasn’t his fault, she just hated feeling so hollow all the time. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
He remained expressionless. “Worked the first time I said it.”
She slid her foot to the floor. Worked was a matter of opinion, taking a long-term view, yeah, the mysterious stranger act had worked. But his memory wasn’t that sharp if he thought the night he’d first said those words to her had had a happy ending. “We didn’t have sex the night you said that.”
Inhaling, he rose from the chair to cross to her. “Didn’t take you long to surrender your panties to me.”
“Why are you here?” she sighed when he took her neck in one hand and her face in the other, holding her in place with his entitled grip.
“That’s what I came to ask you,” he said, drumming his heavy fingers on her cheekbone. “You should be with us.”
Nothing made sense to her anymore. Fraught by the conflict within herself, she couldn’t handle conflict with him too. Which was why she hadn’t coveted talking to him this week. She’d never gone as far as to ignore his calls, though she did have a missed “Unknown” call after her morning shower a couple of days ago that she had never tried to return.
“Us?” she asked, wondering if he was here for the Kindred or for himself. “You don’t need me out there anymore. I understood staying in the neighborhood to monitor the compound. I understood going in after Benedict choppered out. Investigating the building satisfied your curiosity. But Sutcliffe is dead and his plan went with him. He’s no threat anymore. Rigor has moved in and turned the place into his own private drinking den.” Rigor got pissed when he talked about Leatt, but he and his men didn’t have the drive of the Kindred. Another question had plagued her this week, in the nights she was missing her love’s attention. “Why are you still there? How can you hang out and laugh a few feet from where your brother fell?”
Now he became incredulous. “You ditched me because of Saint?”
“No,” she sighed and tried to remove his hands from her, but he wouldn’t let her go.
She tried to stay relaxed so as not to further arouse his suspicions. If she put up too much of a fight, then he’d begin to think she was hiding something from him or she was in some sort of trouble.
“Then why?” he asked, strengthening his hold.
She hadn’t ditched him, she’d just been trying to find something that didn’t want to be found. His entitled touch marked her. He had to feel her skin to restore his connection to her. It was his way of reassuring himself that she was safe and within reach. Having such a physical show of his feelings for her typically encouraged her, too, but the half-truth she had to tell him poisoned her tongue.
“I had to be at CI,” she said. “Someone has to keep up appearances.”
CI was supposed to remind her of who she was because she’d always been assured there, it hadn’t. Warring with her feelings about Grant’s death had made being there a struggle too.
She shouldn’t be pleased that he was dead, but part of her was because he’d threatened her love. In her mind, he’d become two men. She mourned the first with the weight of devastating grief, the man who had been her friend and employer. The second, was the conniving, back-stabber who’d wanted power and to destroy Brodie.
It was this second guy that made her question the essence of herself. Before the Kindred she would never have imagined herself pleased that someone had lost their life. Being relieved after watching someone be murdered made her question her own moral center. Was she as evil as Sutcliffe and the others because she was willing to go to any lengths to protect what she held most dear, Brodie and the Kindred.
He drew his index finger around the curve of her jaw, it came to a stop on her chin. “I’ve made a call. Soon, you won’t have to worry about CI.”
FOUR
As proud as he sounded of himself, she was suspicious. That statement could mean any number of things. Could he be planning to abandon the company? Or was he thinking about ruining it, planting a mole who could dismantle generations of work? Whatever he meant, she planned to find out.
Brodie didn’t make external phone calls, as far as she’d seen. So, did he set the plan into motion? “You made a call or Wren did?” she asked because if the doctor had signed off on the plan…
“No, this is a phone call I had to make myself,” he said, running his finger down her throat and into her cleavage.
“I’ve never seen you make a phone call,” she said. Never having seen it with her own eyes, she knew he did make them because he’d called her. Except she liked to think she was in a unique position being his girlfriend. “Did Wren refuse?”
She trusted that if Thad was against making the call, he didn’t support whatever Brodie had done. Brodie scoffed. “Wren does what he’s told.”
Cuckoo (Kindred Book 3) Page 3
