A View to a Thrill (Masters and Mercenaries Book 7) (25 page)

“You would, wouldn’t you?” Simon stood up, leaving the majority of his food untouched. “I believe I’ll go clean up before our debrief. JT, could you show Miss Dennis to your father’s office? She has a call to make.”

He nodded her way and then walked off, one of Ten’s men following him at a distance.

JT shook his head as he finished off his beer. “Dayum, that man is pissed off. I’ve never seen him so mad.” He chuckled a little. “Of course, I’ve also never seen anyone take my brother down. That was fun. It makes up for the total clusterfuck of a party.”

“I’m sure he’ll apologize,” Chelsea murmured as she stepped out of the stupid shoes. There was zero reason to wear the things if Simon wasn’t around.

“Nah. Mike was asking for it. He should have sat Simon down and told him what was going on.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Because despite what he said back in Dallas, he still views Simon as a kid, too. Mike likes to play the badass, and I’ll admit that he’s good at it. He was the one who beat the shit out of anyone who bugged our cousin. Si was a scrawny thing when he first showed up here. Scrawny and shy. He was different, and different isn’t always celebrated in a small town.”

She could imagine that this place had seemed like an alien world. Like Russia had been for her. She’d been young and she’d lost her mother, and she hadn’t even known the language. Charlotte had been the one to stand up for her. “So he still thinks Simon’s soft. I can assure you he’s not. He’s done some truly heroic things in the short time I’ve known him.”

JT started walking toward the main house, opening the door and letting her through. “I can imagine, but it’s hard for us because we still see the kid we need to protect. I assure you it wasn’t Mike’s choice to knock him out, but Mike apparently has orders to follow.”

And it was easy to see JT didn’t approve. “You don’t want your brother in the military.”

He laughed but it was a rueful sound. He walked toward a grand set of stairs. They might call this place a ranch, but the main house was a mansion. “I don’t understand a bit of it. All the lies, the subterfuge. I don’t get it. It’s the one thing I don’t like about running my business and it’s the very thing Mike runs to and wraps his legs around.”

She wondered if Charlotte thought the same thing of her. Charlotte hated the information brokering and Chelsea loved it. They started up the stairs, Chelsea moving slowly because her leg was aching. She was fairly certain she wouldn’t get a rubdown tonight. She was on her own, but then she’d known that would happen. “Why did Simon spend so much time out here?”

“You gotta understand a little about our childhood. My aunt and uncle are good people, but Simon’s brother was sick for a long time as a kid. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but Clive had cancer when he was a kid and Simon pretty much got shipped off to boarding schools and then to us for long periods of time. He was five the first time they sent him to school, and I would be shocked if he spent more than a handful of days a year at home until he was a teenager.”

And yet he dreamed about it. When he talked about the place, he made it seem magical. How lonely had it been for him? A little boy with no real home. A boy who had been shoved to the side. “He would come here when he wasn’t in school?”

“My momma insisted on it. The only real fights she’s had with her brother have been over Simon. It got really scary with Clive for a couple of years. I think my uncle thought he was sparing Simon from seeing what his brother was going through. I don’t know. Maybe I would do the same thing. I’ve never almost lost a child, but I do know Simon probably felt left out. I know he and his brother don’t get along to this day. I also know that he damn near killed Michael and it was over you, so we’re about to have a little talk.”

He stopped at the top of the stairs and his demeanor turned on a dime. All she’d seen of him up until this point had been the flirty cowboy and a man who was worried about his family. The air around her nearly froze with the intensity of his stare and she remembered that JT Malone had been groomed to run a multibillion-dollar company. He understood the art of war, and the man definitely had intimidation down.

“You don’t want me anywhere near your cousin.” It was a good bet. The Malones were the kind of family that married British royalty and likely wouldn’t want their blood lines cheapened by a criminal with no family ties beyond a Russian mobster.

“I think Simon needs a woman who knows what the hell she wants and that obviously isn’t you,” JT replied. “Or maybe you do know what you want and you think you can have your cake and eat it, too.”

She’d never really understood the point of that saying. “Why bother to have cake if you can’t eat it?”

“You need to choose and you need to do it fast. If you’re going to choose Simon, then stop flaunting your relationship with that fucking CIA agent. I won’t let you play my cousin for a fool. He’s in deep with you, and I won’t let you screw your lover under my roof while you’re keeping my cousin on a string.”

Chelsea couldn’t help it. It was so deeply unfair as to be ridiculous, and she had to laugh. “You think I’m sleeping with Ten, but I’m keeping Simon around if I need a little extra on the side. Is that it?”

His eyes narrowed to hard emerald’s that let her know he didn’t appreciate her laughter. “If you want to call it that, I won’t argue. I won’t let you use him and I sure as hell won’t let you play him in my house. You want to sleep with that douchebag CIA asshole, go ahead. Hell, I saw how Mike’s friends looked at you. Sleep with them, too. Leave my cousin out of it.”

“God, I love being called a whore.”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t care what you do or how casual your relationships are. Hell, I would be a hypocrite if I did, I just know that Simon can’t handle them. He needs stability.”

Tears pricked her eyes, and she kind of hated JT in that moment. “I’m not sleeping with Ten, and you can breathe a sigh of relief because I’m not sleeping with Simon either. I don’t sleep with anyone. You get that? Anyone. Not in my whole pathetic life, so you can go to hell. If those men are looking at me, it’s with pity. Do you get it? Just stay out my way and I’ll stay out of yours.”

She turned to walk down the hall. She could find Ten on her own. Naturally, her very graceful retreat was completely fucked up when her leg gave way, and she started to head to the floor. Humiliation swept over her when JT caught her and lifted her up, setting her on her feet.

“I am so sorry, Chelsea.” He kept his hands on her as though he was afraid to let go. “Are you serious? Are you really not playing him?”

“I have never played a man in my life, Malone.” She was suddenly ridiculously weary. “And it really doesn’t matter because he won’t talk to me now.”

“Because he’s jealous as hell.”

“What are you talking about?”

JT gave her a brilliant smile. “You really don’t know? How the hell are you so naïve? A woman like you should have been manipulating men for the last twenty years.”

“I would have been seven.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Trust me, Southern girls are taught two things from birth: how to tease their hair properly and how to get what they want out of a man. You have no idea what was going on out there, do you?”

“I didn’t have some debutante childhood. I was too busy trying to survive my mobster father, and then I was on the run for years. I didn’t have a lot of time to take Flirting 101.”

“I’m going to have to have that story sometime, but for now, you have to fix him.”

“How? I know Simon is mad at me. I guess he’s mad because I put us in this position. I was supposed to hide and run when I could, but I couldn’t leave him behind.”

For every bit of intimidation he’d used on her before, he was grinning at her brightly now. “He’s not mad at you. He’s a little boy who got his favorite toy taken away.”

She didn’t understand a word he was saying.

Ten stepped out of a room down the hall. “Dennis, you got your call.”

“I have to go. I don’t think you have anything to worry about, JT. Nothing’s going to happen.”

JT grinned. “I don’t have anything to worry about. Now I can just sit back and watch the show.”

He was weird. So was Simon. She rushed down the hall as fast as her bum leg would take her because at least she could talk to Charlotte.

Ten ran a hand through his hair in a way that let her know his call with Ian hadn’t gone great. He gestured her inside David Malone’s big office. “All you need to do to connect the call is press send. The call will terminate in two minutes.”

She sighed. Amateurs. “Really? If you let me set it up, we could talk all day and they wouldn’t be able to trace us. Did Ian not agree to let you handle things?”

“The bastard promised he’d find you and take my balls off when he did. I tried to explain the whole national security issue, but he believes only in the United States of Ian. Chelsea, this is important. If you tell your sister where you are and Ian fucks everything up, I could lose control and you won’t like who takes over after me.”

That she believed. Besides, she didn’t particularly want to involve her sister. She didn’t even understand what was happening yet and why Ten thought it involved the whole nation. “I won’t tell her.”

“Two minutes and don’t think no one’s listening.”

She really didn’t care. She was so damn confused about everything that she really didn’t give a flying crap if Boomer or Hutch or any other silly-named soldier heard her crying to her sister. She was already tearing up as she sat down at Malone’s oversized desk and hit the button that connected the call. “Charlotte?”

“Chelsea?” Charlotte sounded a little panicked. “Chelsea, are you all right?”

Ten was standing in the doorway. “Tell her you’re fine. Calm her down.”

Yeah, that wasn’t happening. “I’m not okay because you always said Simon liked me and then I thought you were right and you were wrong, Charlotte. He hates me, and I don’t even know why.”

“Jesus,” Ten said under his breath.

She ignored him.

“Hey, honey, what’s happening?” Charlotte was using that patient voice she always used when Chelsea got upset. “Ian’s flipping out.”

“I’m fine physically. I really am. Tell him we’re all fine and Ten is making sure we stay that way, but I need you to tell me how to deal with a man who’s mad at me. Normally I would just get on the Internet and do something horrible to him, but I just want to make him like me again.”

“Is she talking about Simon?” a feminine voice asked. Serena.

“Chelsea, everyone’s here. We’re all worried about you, and Ian wants me to force you to give us verbal cues about where you are, but now I am so much more interested in this. Are you sleeping with Simon?”

“I told you,” another voice said. Grace. The gang was all there.

“He’s being weird about it. He won’t sleep with me until I buy him flowers or something but then Ten shot him with a tranquilizer dart and he took me to a party and I knew Simon would show up so I got pretty and wore heels and everything and Simon’s mad at me.”

“Ten took you to a party?” Charlotte asked. “If Ten was with you then he probably got twelve kinds of handsy. Did Simon see?”

“I did not,” Ten said under his breath.

“When Simon showed up, dragging a hostage by the way, I was dancing.” She was starting to see where this was going. Was JT right? Could he seriously be jealous? “With Ten.”

She heard Serena and Grace start to talk in the background about spankings.

“They’re right,” her sister said, and Chelsea could practically see the grin on her face. “You’re getting spanked. But first, you have to soothe the beast. I know this goes against your nature, but you need to be so submissive around him. He won’t expect it, and it’s going to throw him for a loop.”

“Give him wide eyes and then let them slide away like he’s too much too look at,” Grace said. “It’ll make him feel like he’s in charge.”

“She does that to me all the time,” Sean said in the background. “Brat.”

“He’s jealous and men hate feeling that way, especially Doms. You have to soothe him, Chels. Is he being good to you?” Charlotte asked, her voice serious again.

He was better than anyone except her sister. “Yeah.”

“But he won’t sleep with you. You have to fix that.”

She couldn’t help but smile a little and she wished the whole damn world wasn’t listening to her conversation, but given her prior profession, it was probably karma. “He kissed me and I liked it. I loved it.”

“He kissed you? Where?”

“Charlie! Give me that phone.” Satan was in the house.

She could hear Charlotte moving, likely running from her husband. “Tell him to kiss you everywhere and I love you. My time is running out and he is not getting my last few minutes. You stay with Simon and Jesse. You trust them. No one else. And know we’re coming to get you.”

“You tell Taggart that if he impedes me in any way, I can shove him in a cell somewhere,” Ten swore.

“Tell Ten to screw himself,” Charlotte yelled back. “Love you.”

“I love you,” she managed to say before the connection was cut.

Ten was rolling his eyes her way. “I did not need to hear half that conversation.”

She missed her sister. She missed the girls. She almost never actively took part in their conversations because they talked about their husbands and their kids and weird things like which wine paired with fish at a dinner party. All she knew how to do was microwave Hot Pockets, but she liked to listen to them. She liked to listen to Avery and Serena and Grace and Eve and Charlotte. Now that she had something to say to them, she might not get to see them again.

“Hey, I’m sorry, Chelsea.” Ten stepped back in the room. “Damn it. I know you won’t believe this, but I don’t like to make women cry.”

“I don’t cry.” She never used to. She even missed Satan.

“I kind of thought you didn’t myself.” Ten took a knee in front of her. “You might take me up on my offer but you’re not going to take me up on my more personal offer, are you?”

“No. I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“Because you’re in love with him.”

She shook her head. “I can’t be in love with him. We don’t fit, but I want to spend time with him. I know I’m wrong for him, but I want a night, a day, a week. Whatever time I have.”