Brazen (B-Squad #1) (4 page)

If she just focused on that, she could get through this. Otherwise, she was going to curl up on the floor under her desk and turn into a pathetic gooey mess of tears and snot. That wasn’t an option. No man would break her—not even the one she’d thought she’d loved.

Glad she wasn’t the one leading the briefing, Bianca settled back in her chair when Lexie stood up. Platinum-blonde hair shot through with acid-green streaks, a tattoo or five peeking out from the top of her low-slung jeans and the short sleeves of her
My Cat, My Overlord
T-shirt, she strutted to the front of the room.

“Okay demon seeds, let’s get this show started.” Lexie looked out at the crowd and then sent Bianca a questioning look. “Where’s your dude?”

Bianca’s stomach collapsed in on itself, but she refused to break down because of it.

“Upstairs…with his wife. It seems their anniversary is next week.” Her voice didn’t crack at all. Sure, she sounded a bit like a robot being squished in a trash compactor, but who hadn’t sounded like before?

Keir, Marko, Duke and Lash, the four men Taz called his brothers—who all shared his tawny skin, smoldering good looks and muscles, even if they didn’t share DNA—froze.

Her girls Lexie, Elisa and Vivi, on the other hand, exploded into a near-deafening cacophony of obscenity-laced questions and vivid threats about what they should do to Taz’s testicles—some of which sounded pretty fucking tempting right about now.

* * *

Taz tried to process what had just happened. He was married. He’d lost Bianca. Everything had changed. But Tamara was still the same. He’d bet money on it.

“What do you really want?” he asked.

“You, Honey Bear.” A saccharine smile from her Barbie-pink lips. “Even though you’re breaking my heart with all this talk of divorce.”

He snorted and headed back to the bedroom. “If you had one, I’d be worried.”

Grabbing a pair of jeans from the pile of clothes he’d dropped into the obnoxious designer suitcase, he kept his back to Tamara as he willed himself not to give in to the frustration and anger about the shitstorm threatening to drown him. He whipped off the towel and pulled up the jeans.

“You deposit a million dollars into this offshore account and then I’ll file the divorce papers and walk away,” Tamara said, her voice full of brass and bravado. “You’ll never see me again.”

His fingers stilled on his jeans zipper. Money. Of course. Isn’t that what it always came down to with Tamara? Shaking his head, he zipped and buttoned his jeans. His bank account could take the hit and a lot more, but he knew Tamara. If he gave in too easy, she’d see him as easy prey and circle back for more.

“Half a million.”

“Do I look like the kind of girl who can live off five hundred thousand dollars?” She laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. “One million, Taz, and I need it transferred over today.”

“I’m not giving you anything until I have confirmation those papers weren’t filed.” He picked up a black T-shirt from the suitcase and put it on.

Tamara shrugged her thin shoulders, her blue eyes never wavering. “If that’s how you want to play it, then I guess I’ll have no choice but to contest the divorce.”

She hadn’t always been this unfeeling. Selfish? Narcissistic? A mean girl? Yes to all the above. But blackmail and insisting the money gets to her today? It was desperate, and didn’t jive with the Tamara he knew—at least not with the woman he’d known five years ago. Of course, he wasn’t the man she knew back then either. The night he’d met Bianca, he’d told her he wasn’t one of the good guys. She’d shown him how wrong he’d been. Would he be as cold as Tamara if Bianca had never pushed her way into his I-only-look-out-for-myself life? It wasn’t a question he wanted to even contemplate, let alone answer.

“You’re a real piece of work, Tamara. This kind of shit is going to come back to haunt you one of these days.”

“Don’t I know it,” she said, a raw edge to her quiet words.

He grabbed his phone and punched in a text message to his accountant. “Look, it’ll take time for my accountant to get the money together. It’s not like I have it as cash under the mattress.” It would also give their freelance investigator, Isaac Camacho, time to look into her claims about the paperwork not being filed and what in the hell she was really up to while he and the team were at Indulgence. “As soon as I get back from this mission, you’ll have your cash.”

Her mouth pulled tight before her ice queen mask fell back in place. He was about to follow up on the change when his phone buzzed. Shoving the question about her reaction aside, he clicked on the new text message icon.

KEIR: GET DOWN HERE STAT. SHIT’S ABOUT TO BLOW.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he said as he crossed the loft to the elevator. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Oh Honey Bear,” she said, following a few steps behind. “I’m not leaving your side until the transfer is confirmed.”

O
bviously sensing danger
, everyone with a Y chromosome had vacated to the hallway. Bianca couldn’t blame them. Those guys might be brawny, but that didn’t mean they were dumb.

“Don’t you have something like a billion acres on your parents’ ranch?” Elisa asked, her big hazel eyes and button nose hiding the scheming heart of a girl who’d never met a version of the truth she couldn’t twist to her advantage. She was a born con artist, pickpocket and master of disguise who’d learned the tricks of the trade at her doting father’s knee before he’d died.

“White Willow is my Sutherland grandparents’ and yeah, it’s huge,” Bianca said, wondering where this was going.

Elisa gave her a knowing look. “Lots of places to hide a body on that kind of space.”

“Let me do a search to find the most hospitable burial spots on the property.” Lexie’s fingers flew across her laptop keyboard, no doubt hacking into whatever state website she needed to get that information from the land surveys, adding in some private corporate satellite imagery if needed.

“I’m handy with a shovel,” Vivi said from her spot by the door, where she was eavesdropping on the guys in the hall.

Even though Vivi had quit the agency, she was still too much of a DEA agent at heart to actually let anyone go on a murder spree…probably. Petite and delicate, she didn’t look the type to be drawn to violence, but her hair-trigger temper and take-no-prisoners attitude about anyone she’d put on her shit list coupled with insane fighting skills told a different story. Well, that and the fact that the girl loved a good dust-up.

If it had been any of them who’d just had their live-in boyfriend exposed as a cheating, scum-sucking, married asshole, she would be making the same serious-but-not-serious suggestions. Hell, she’d be throwing in the recommendation to start a Kickstarter for bail money just in case.

However, this wasn’t just some guy being a jerk. It was Taz. She couldn’t even joke about offing him while commiserating with her best friends. The invisible fingers pinching her lungs closed tightened. What the hell did that say? Something she didn’t want to hear right now.

Bianca swallowed past the bitter chunks of broken heart clogging her throat. “I’m not going to kill him.”

From her listening post, Vivi shot her a wicked grin. “Would have been
my
first plan of action”

“Whacking someone is always your first idea,” Lexie said, her laptop screen giving her green highlights an otherworldly glow.

“True.” Vivi shrugged her deceptively small shoulders, a snarky grin curling her blood-red lips. “That’s what makes me so damn charming.”

Now that was something only an idiot said about the four of them. Correction. The five of them. Gidget may not be in Ft. Worth, but she was still part of the original B-Squad. Their bonds had been forged at the living nightmare that had been St. B’s and those ties didn’t unravel—ever.

None of them had ended up at St. B’s because their parents wanted to make sure they were well taken care of at a 365-days-a-year boarding school. Enrollment there was the modern-day equivalent of getting rid of the family bad seed in a nunnery. It didn’t matter what happened to the rich’s misbehaving daughters as long as they stayed out of sight.

She, Vivi, Lexie, Gidget and Elise had made up half of the residents in a ten-person bunkhouse. They wore uniforms, worked on the on-site farm in the mornings, and went to classes in the afternoons and evenings. That was boring and tough, but not the kind of thing to send three students to their self-inflicted deaths. No, that had happened because of the administrators who saw St. B’s as their own little dictatorship and enforced corporeal punishment, along with more creative things to keep the population submissive—right up until the feds got an anonymous tip, raided the place and shut it down for good.

If it hadn’t been for her girls, Bianca easily could have been one of the three students found hanging from the rafters in the school gym. She looked around at the women who’d saved her sanity at St. B’s. Sure, their senses of humor were black, their attitudes huge and their ability to trust seriously impaired, but they’d earned every one of their personality quirks the hard way.

Now it was her turn to pull on her cast iron big girl panties, ignore her shredded insides and do whatever it took to get Gidget home.

“I appreciate it, but we have more important things to deal with. Let’s get this briefing going,” Bianca said, girding herself for the mission ahead. “Are the guys still out in the hall?”

Vivi cracked open the door. “Yoo-hoo, big bad muscly men,” she called out. “Are you going to hide out for much longer? We have a mission briefing to do.”

“We’re not hiding.” Six-foot-three, heavily tattooed with a too-pretty-for-words, male model face and the kind of muscles that made other muscles jealous, Keir—the resident fixer—swaggered into the room. He always maintained his so-confident-he-left-cocky-in-the-dust vibe, but the worry was there, as visible as the gold flecks in his brown eyes. “It was a tactical retreat.”

“You were scared by sweet little ol’ us?” More than a foot shorter, Vivi made up for the inches in attitude.

“Said the spider to the fly,” Keir muttered.

The rest of the guys filed in behind him, each as tall and muscular as the one who came before. Vividly tattooed and bearded Marko Pike, with his gruff, one-syllable answers, was the man to know if you wanted to blow things up or bash heads in. Fast-talking Lash Finch, with his dark good looks and killer brains, could take out a target with a sniper rifle from an obscene distance or use his hands up close and personal without a twinge of conscience. Duke Trino, the resident ginger, had enough sex appeal and devious charm to get a person to agree to just about anything, and gathered secrets about people like squirrels collected acorns in the fall, which made him the perfect infiltration operative.

Their Romany heritage showed through in their unique names and their tawny brown skin. Trained on the street and in elite units of the military, they were dangerous, skilled and strutted down the skinny gray line between legal and not with a don’t-give-a-fuck shrug. They were not the kind of men you wanted to mess with and—not for the first time—she was glad they were all on the same side.

Lash stopped in front of the chair she sat in and stared down at her. The fact she was sitting down made him look even taller than his six feet, four inches. She knew what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth and it was the last thing she needed—or wanted—to hear.

She held up her hand. “Not now, Lash.”

“Look, it’s none of my business—really none of any of our business—but I’ve known Taz my whole life and Tamara for as long as she’s been in Taz’s,” he said in a rush. “There has to be more to this than it appears.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, her voice steadier and stronger than she’d thought possible. “We have more important things to worry about right now.”

Bianca turned her attention to the map of the Indulgence Resort on the wall opposite her desk. Lash didn’t fidget at her side, trying to figure out what to say next. Men like him didn’t do that. Instead, he glowered at her.

“Lexie, can we get this show on the road?” she asked, ignoring the man-shaped concrete wall in front of her. “The jet won’t leave without us, but I don’t want it sitting on the tarmac loaded up like a flying armory for any longer than necessary. Taz will have to catch up when we’re in the air.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Taz from the door. “I’m here.”

Her world jolted to a stop hard enough to give her whiplash. Hurt and anger razed a fiery path through her, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell. There weren’t tears. There wasn’t fruitless hope. There was pain and there was nothing. She curled her fingers around the armrest of her chair. She could do this. She didn’t have a choice. For this mission, he would be her pretend husband and they would be on the most decadent of honeymoons.

She swiveled her chair to face the door. Taz stood just inside the opening with Tamara in all of her beauty queen glory at his side.

“What’s she doing here?” Elisa asked, ice chips in her voice.

“After our lengthy separation, I just can’t stand to be away from him for even a moment.” Tamara wound her arm around Taz and made cow eyes at him.

“Are you shitting me?” Lexie asked.

Keir pinched the bridge of his nose and the vein at his temple bulged. “He’s posing as a happily married newlywed during the mission; a second wife really isn’t in the picture.”

“So I’ll stay in the background with you guys.” Tamara turned, giving the room a good view of her perfect curves, and snuggled up against Taz. “If I don’t go with you…” She looked up at Taz and narrowed her eyes. “…all bets are off.”

Searching his face, Bianca looked for any sign of the man she’d thought she’d known only a few hours ago. The air of dominance and his palpable refusal to back down from any challenge remained. What she didn’t see was the lazy smile that had become more and more frequent the longer that they’d been together. Part of her reveled in the fact that it had disappeared along with any hope of them having a future together.

“Whatever.” She pivoted her chair so she again faced Lexie standing in front of the projected map. “You’ll stay with the rest of the team on the yacht a few miles offshore.”

“Sounds lovely,” Tamara said.

Bianca swallowed back the bile that rose at the other woman’s response. Lovely? Oh yeah. Just as much as getting a root canal while walking across hot coals during a blizzard in the arctic.

* * *

Trapped and unable—at the moment—to dig his way out of the mile-deep hole he’d found himself in, Taz took the first open seat in the back of the room where he could watch Bianca even if he couldn’t touch her.

His brothers avoided his gaze, but their questions would come. They always did. When Freddie died, it had devastated him and his brothers, all of whom were rotating out of secret military units by then. They’d found themselves again at the Devil’s Dip Gym looking for an outlet for their unique skills. Bianca had provided that to them by welcoming them into B-Squad Security and Investigations. She’d given him so much more.

And he’d fucked it up royally—with help, of course. He glanced over at Tamara sitting next to him as if that was her rightful place.

“If everyone’s done staring at Taz’s secret wife, I say we get moving,” Lexie said from her spot at the front of the room.

Without waiting for an answer, she launched into the plan they’d been working on for the past few days. He and Bianca had jumped through a thousand hoops and a background check about as invasive as a colonoscopy performed by aliens. Only Keir and Lexie’s fast work had made getting through that a possibility. Everything relied on their cover as Trey and Bethany Alderson giving them enough leeway to perform a full search of the resort and an up-close-and-personal investigation of the Indulge Resort’s guests.

“So once Mr. and Mrs. Adlerson arrive, they will join in on the inclusive aspects of the resort,” Lexie said as photos of the Indulgence Resort flashed behind her. “As you know, the resort is welcoming lifestylers this month so you might be invited to participate in the sexual games. However, your status as honeymooners will make it easier for you to decline without arousing suspicion…” She paused and smirked in Bianca’s direction. “If you choose to.”

His muscles clenched and he fisted his hands. The idea of someone else touching Bianca’s soft skin, tasting her sweet center or hearing her moan out their name ate a hole six miles wide in his belly. That was not going to happen. He’d find a way to get her back. He would.

“The rest of the team will be on the Sutherland Industries corporate yacht,” Lexie said. “Thanks again, Bianca, for biting the bullet on that one and finding a way to get your dysfunctional family to loan it out to us.”

Oh yeah, nothing like Bianca having to deal with the turmoil of his nonexistent divorce right on the heels of a Sutherland family interaction. Her asshole parents, William and Becca, had put her through the ringer, throwing her into St. B’s as an eleven-year-old when she began acting out after her brother committed suicide. They hadn’t gotten any more loving after the cops closed St. B’s. Saying Bianca’s interactions with her parents were limited was putting it mildly—and he’d be in for the same if he couldn’t find a way to show her he deserved a second chance.

“Okay,” Lexie continued. “So here’s how we’ll run the search while we’re on site.”

Lexie launched into the nitty-gritty and Taz mentally checked out. The parts of the plan he hadn’t developed, he’d memorized already. This was for the rest of the team, to make sure everyone understood exactly how it was all going to go down if they found Gidget—and that was a big if.

He wasn’t doing this to find someone he’d never met. He was doing it for Bianca.

“That about wraps it up,” Lexie said, planting her hands on her hips as she surveyed the room—narrowing her eyes when her gaze passed over him. “If there aren’t any questions—”

“Hold up,” Marko said as he held up his cell. “Just got this from my contact at the resort.”