“I can go with him if you want,” Robbo said.

Nya put a hand on her security guy’s arm and scanned the nightclub to check out the others scattered around Sizzle who didn’t appear to be doing much except moving chairs from one side of the room to the other in the closed club.

“Thanks,” she said. “But I need you to keep on top of the other guys. The tables have to be ripped up and tossed in the dumpster out front.”

“You look worried,” Robbo said.

Nya had just finished meeting with the contractors and was watching them making their final assessments beside the DJ booth in the corner. “No, I met with them before today. I know what they’re doing, he’s just taking a last look and talking to his foreman about what needs to be done.”

Looking at the security men who were roughhousing and jeering, she wished that they would get with it. “You know all my servers showed up? Double time was good enough for them. How come only half the security guys showed up? Don’t they have bills to pay? It’s not like you have a shift tonight, the club is closed until the work is finished, no more night shift for a while.”

“I don’t know,” Robbo said. “Maybe they’re just not used to working days. I’ll call around and see what’s going on.”

He’d turned out to be a lifesaver today because when she turned up at Sizzle, she hadn’t been in the mood to deal with builders and demo work. It needed to be done and in a way, Nya was glad to have something to do, but she wasn’t at her best.

Even though she’d left two hours ago, her mind was still in Archer’s apartment. After storming out, she’d gone to her place to shower and change, and had come into Sizzle early to clear out some of the paperwork in the office. By the time her staff started showing up, Nya hadn’t even got around to making a proper list of tasks to delegate.

They had the next few days to get the whole club stripped out before the real work would begin, and while she was paying her staff anyway, she figured it didn’t hurt to ask them to pitch in.

“You’ve been frowning all day,” Robbo said. “You’re not worried about this, are you?”

The guy topped out at five nine, but his arms had to be a full foot wide. Nya had never seen a man with so much bulk. He was absolutely solid; the female servers liked to taunt him into flexing those muscles. With narrow hips and shoulders as wide as a door, Nya could understand why the girls giggled and squealed as they fingered his tattoos.

“No, I’m excited about this,” Nya said, trying her best to force a smile onto her lips.

“It’s nothing to do with that guy, is it?”

Her attention flashed from the construction guys in the corner to Robbo in front of her. But he was looking beyond her toward the door to his left, forcing Nya to spin around.

Archer strode in like he owned the place and in an inadvertent way, he did. The security guys went over to greet him with secret handshakes and shoulder pats. While he received a hero’s welcome from them, she set her scowl, folded her arms, and began to tap a finger on her elbow.

“Uh oh,” Robbo said. “If you guys are gonna go nuclear, give the rest of us a chance to take cover.”

But she wasn’t in the mood for jokes. Archer already had her in his sight. One sure stride followed another until he got to them. “Alright, man?” Robbo asked. Archer nodded, but remained fixated on her. “I’ll get one of the guys to stay with the contractors.” Nya didn’t know if he was talking to her or Archer, it didn’t matter. “I’ll get our guys working.” Robbo hit Archer’s shoulder once. “Good luck, man, she’s been pissy all morning.”

Robbo marched off and Nya waited for Archer to say something. “Can we go in back?” he asked.

“No,” she said, satisfied that she could refuse him with good reason.

“You won’t be pissed when you hear me out,” he said. “Come on.” Taking her elbow, Archer tried to pull her forward. His strength forced her to move a step, but she tore her arm away. “Come on, Ny, you’re not that pissed at me. You can’t stay mad at me, remember? This you taking your turn to dump me ‘cause I put my hands on your precious boy?”

“Dump you?” she said, arching a brow and exhaling a snigger. “You wish, Fella. No way am I letting you off the hook that easy.” He smiled and leaned down to try and kiss her, but she slanted away from his mouth. “I can’t believe you did it, Arch. I can’t believe he’s there right now.”

“We can’t talk about this here,” he said. “This is your dirty laundry and you don’t want it aired.”

He tried to move her forward again, but she resisted. “The club is packed with staff, Arch. They’re clearing out the office too. It’s the middle of the day, didn’t you notice all the people around?”

He scanned the space. She was sure he’d seen all the bodies, but they were irrelevant to him. Fixating on something above, he slid his fingers between hers. “Upstairs,” he said.

Although the VIP floor was open to the rest of the room, it would afford them more privacy than standing here in the middle of the tables opposite the bar. Nya went upstairs with him and he pulled her towards the couch on the far wall, but didn’t sit down.

“If you want to chain someone to your floor, use me,” she said, hoping there was still some shred of a connection that might help her to breakthrough and change his mind. “If you’ve got withdrawal or you need a distraction after what happened to Jonno.” She frowned. “What did happen to Jonno?”

“You mean, did I kill him?” he asked, touching her face. He shook his head once. “No. But only because he gave me the name of your seventh man.”

“He did?” she asked, her hands leaping onto his chest.

“Just a first name, but I’m working on it. I didn’t know how you felt. You kinda went off the idea after Vegas.”

It wasn’t Vegas that put her off the idea, Nya had been preoccupied when he’d returned. “If your mom told you what I said about Damien, she must have told you what I said about you.” From his proceeding scowl, she assumed that she was wrong. “Oh.”

“What the fuck did you say about me? I’ve told you, Ny, don’t talk to her about us.”

“It wasn’t like that, I…” Nya didn’t want to remember that night or the feeling of grief that came before the hollow ache. “That was the night I realized I’d lost you,” she admitted. “All those other nights, all those times you slammed the door in my face, I never believed it was over. I told Tag we weren’t over. I missed you like crazy, but I was sure that we would get back together.”

“You were right. Funny, you thought you’d lost me at the same time my head was fucked, wondering if we ever really broke up.”

That didn’t make sense. “What do you mean?”

Edging closer, he brought their lower bodies together. “All that thinking about you made me wonder if we’d broken up, or if you just let me think that to soothe my male ego. You know, the way that I think that I’m in control of this relationship and then you blink those big doe eyes at me and remind me you’ve got my balls in a vice. We might not have been screwing, Ny, but that power you have sure as fuck never went away.”

She grinned and took great pleasure in stretching her arms up around his neck. “If I was in control, there would’ve been screwing.”

“You know there was no one else, right? I didn’t even look at another girl.”

“Even the redheads?” she asked.

“That’s right, even the redheads.”

Dipping to kiss her, she opened her lips to his. They had been broken up. He’d told her they were through and closed the door in her face several times. But he was right that they’d been in a kind of grey area because she hadn’t been with anyone else either.

Archer had done work for her and she’d stuck close. He’d even gone to work for Hexam just to save her ass. Their love had never gone away.

Breaking the kiss, she pushed away to put distance between their bodies, she’d always thought that when they were naked and talking they were too distracted by intimacy to ever come to any conclusions. But here they were standing upright, fully-clothed in a public place, and they were still being distracted by each other.

“Wait, no, I’m pissed at you,” she said.

“You can’t stay pissed at me.”

He was right about that and part of her regretted ever admitting it to him out loud. But Archer was astute enough that he could’ve figured that out himself. “I am pissed and I’ll keep being pissed as long as you’ve got my oldest friend chained up like an animal. You only do that to people if you need something from them. They can free themselves at any time just by giving it to you. How can Tag free himself? What do you want from him? Do you want him to turn his back on me? Have you told him to cut me out?”

“Squirm, if I thought it was that easy to get him out of your life I’d have done it the day after we first fucked,” he said and tried to touch her face again, but she couldn’t let him or they would end up being distracted. “You know, this is so dumb.”

“You better not make this about him coming between us because you’re the one who did this, not him.”

“No, it’s dumb that I’ve been in love with you for months now and you still don’t have a fucking clue who I am.”

That hurt almost as much as a punch to the side of the head would. “What do you mean I don’t know you?” Worrying about what terrible secret he might be keeping made the hairs on her body stand on end. “What don’t I know, Fella?”

Last night she’d worried that Tag was keeping a secret from her, one that Archer knew. Today, she found herself terrified that Archer was going to drop a bombshell about himself.

“Think about it, Ny, I’ve wanted to hurt this guy since before you and me ever met. What stopped me from doing that?”

“Me,” she said.

“That’s right and you think that on the night I get you back I’m gonna think to myself, ‘Ah, fuck it, the bitch is in my bed again, so I’ll choose this night to screw with her boy’?” Nya had seen Tag attached to the floor and jumped to the conclusion that he was there for the same reason as every other person who got chained up. “I hate the guy, I can’t even stand looking at him. I sure wouldn’t ask him for favors. And I know damn well that any part of him I cut off is gonna cut a piece of you too. How likely am I to cut you, Squirm?”

“You would never hurt me,” she murmured, trying to put the pieces together.

“Another right answer,” he said and held up a hand to count off his fingers. “So we’ve got a guy I hate who I keep saving because of you.” He moved on a finger. “We’ve got a guy I wanna hurt, but I don’t lay my hands on him because I know it will upset you.” Archer moved onto a third finger. “I’d take pleasure in inflicting serious pain on the man who’s disregarded you since I’ve known you, but why don’t I do it?”

She made eye contact. “Because you love me.”

He lowered his chin. “Because I love you.”

Nya’s lips curled and when she inhaled, cleansing air seeped through her. “Ok. Thank God,” she said, pouncing forward to throw her arms around him. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about this place and I was so worried about you both. I should never jump to conclusions.”

Using the couch beside them, she kicked off her shoes and side-stepped onto the seat so she could reach his mouth with ease. “You feel better now?” he asked, stroking his hands from her hips to her ass. They went up underneath her skirt and since the only thing behind her was the back wall of the club, he wouldn’t mind exposing her.

“Yes. I’m sorry. You’re right. I do know you and I trust you. I didn’t mean to assume the worst.”

“That’s your default when it comes to Taggert. You take protecting him seriously,” he said. Curling his thumbs around the waistband of her underwear, he pulled it down a couple of inches.

She smiled and tightened her arms around his neck. “There are thirty people in the club,” she murmured on his mouth. “And in a few minutes, they’ll be coming up to take the furniture from here too.”

“I never asked for nothing,” he said, rubbing his palms up and down her ass cheeks. “Just making up for lost time… You don’t want to know why I’ve got Taggert there?”

She did want to know, but worried that if she asked too many questions, he might think she was doubting him again. “You can tell me whatever I need to know.”

“Now she trusts the flow of information,” he said to himself. “I thought we were going back to the way things were. You never used to cut me any slack about sharing with you.”

“You always found a way to tell me what I needed to know,” she said. “But you kept a lot to yourself.”

“I did it to protect you. I can’t lie to you. I told you before, since we got together, I’ve never been able to do it.”

“Then tell me why Tag is on your floor,” she said. “And if he’s there, what are you doing here?”

“I’m here because you hustled your fine ass out of my place so fast, I put my fist through the wall.” Picking up his hand, she stroked a thumb over his rough knuckles. She was used to their scars and bumps, and it didn’t appear that he’d hurt himself too bad. “Just like that time you walked out of Taggert’s with those big eyes all wet… It’s the disappointment,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I’ve figured out that’s what it is. I don’t care when you’re pissed at me. I don’t even really care when you’re sniveling about something. I mean, I care, but I care in a, ‘I’m gonna go out and beat something until she smiles again’ kinda way. But when you wanna rip out my guts through my balls, baby, you look at me all disappointed and I can’t fucking fix that. I can’t make you proud of me.”

“I’m proud,” she said.

“You weren’t this morning. You weren’t that time in Tag’s before Bogota. All I want is to make you smile.”

When she got excited, he got aroused. If he did something positive that made her happy, his male ego got stoked. Nya loved how his usually guarded emotions were so affected by her mood. She didn’t mean to manipulate his mood with hers; he’d given her into trouble for reacting on emotion and not being able to hide how she felt, so Archer was aware of what motivated her and it wasn’t any kind of malice.

But when she got excited to the point that she laughed and rubbed herself all over him, somehow it made him feel like more of a man. And for a guy like Archer who exuded nothing but masculinity, that was an achievement she wished she could bottle.

“How do you think I felt when you left my bed and told me we were through? What do you think it was like having your door closed in my face? And then in your apartment…”

She almost couldn’t draw breath. Her guts got light and she experienced that hollowness again.

“In my apartment, when?” he asked, concern creasing his brows.

Coiling shivers vibrated against her diaphragm in sporadic little bursts. It was anxiety or terror, mixed with primal hormones. “When you kissed me…. After I told you I stabbed Jamie’s killer and you kissed me, Arch.”

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to fuck with your head.”

“I liked kissing you, I always like it. You didn’t fuck with my head; you can kiss me any time you damn well please.”

“Then why are you getting that wet look again, Squirm?” he asked.

Holding her head in both hands around her ears, he brushed his thumbs over her cheeks as if in anticipation of tears he’d want to wipe away.

“You said it meant nothing.” When the words came out of her, ice clenched around her heart. Her lungs swelled and her throat closed. “I don’t ever want to hear that I mean nothing to you, Fella.”

“You’re the only thing that means anything,” he said, without breaking eye contact. “I love you.” His voice was clear and deep, conveying his certainty. He wanted the words to resonate through her to wipe away any sorrow. “I thought I was protecting you. You were so cute when you were pissed about Ella, ‘cause I knew it wasn’t true. But I saw that I’d hurt you before you walked out and I couldn’t let you hate me for kissing you, or be so cruel as to let you think I’d moved on, and not with just anyone, but someone you’d have to see every day. I mean, think about it, Ny, if I’d been screwing her, you’d be watching me come in and out of her apartment all the time.”

Her shoulders quaked at that disgusting thought, but he smiled. “Don’t,” she croaked.

“You got that same look of sickness outside my apartment that day.”

“When you started asking about my meds,” she said. “I was thinking about you with another woman.”

“And that made you feel sick?”

“Hey, buddy, you told another guy if he thought about seeing me naked you were going to stab him in the gut, I mean, really? Couldn’t you be more subtle than that?”

“When it comes to warning guys away from my pussy, I don’t want to be subtle.”

“Can we just promise it’ll never happen again?”

He’d already told her that he wouldn’t be dumping her. But Nya wasn’t quite secure enough to forget what losing him was like, not yet. “You’re the one who walked out on me this morning.”

“Because you had my best friend attached to your floor. Is he really still there?”

Archer nodded. “And he will be for the next few days.”

“Why? Are you going to tell me that you’re protecting him from himself? You said that Gio was brave to be walking these streets, but that means Tag is too.”

“Tag doesn’t walk the streets,” Archer said. “He goes from his apartment to where he’s going and back again. The only people he sees these days are his coke dealers who come to his apartment, sometimes two or three times a day.”

Nya didn’t want to confront that, it was seedy. If he was allowing dealers to come to his door to do business, he had more of a problem than she’d realized. “Oh, God, Arch,” she murmured.

“Nothing I was gonna say was gonna stop him last night. It was take him back to my place and chain him down or put a knife in his throat. I picked the one I thought you’d prefer. ‘Cause even if he’d found Gio and tried to kill him, he’d never have done it. Your boy’s not a killer and I wasn’t joking about his state of mind. He was ranting and raving in the streets, waving his arms about, paranoid like a crazy motherfucker, making a scene. He didn’t even have a fucking weapon and he’d have fucked up the crime scene. He has no experience with this shit. He’d have got himself arrested and what does that mean for the rest of us? You might not give a fuck about going down, but I do and I know you don’t want your boy in a cell either. And then there’s the other thing…”

“What other thing?” she asked, kind of liking how she could look Archer straight in the eye because standing on this low couch elevated her almost to his eye level.

“You asked me to get him clean.”

Nya didn’t remember making that request of him. “I did?” She squinted. Archer had a way of interpreting things she said as requests, like when he’d paid her rent to her last landlord after a brief exchange at the bar downstairs. “When did I do that?”

“You asked how the fuck to get him off it, when we were in the office downstairs.”

It took her a few seconds to recall what he was talking about. “The night you were going to fight in the street? We weren’t even together then.”

“I still heard you.” And he still kept his eyes open for an opportunity to fix her friend for her. “Long as he stays on my floor, he’s clean. That shit never goes away once you have a serious problem and he’s right on the verge of a serious fucking problem, I don’t know if you’ve fucking noticed. So you do it now, while it’s still a recreational habit, or you let it go for a couple of months and then getting him off the shit’s not so easy.”

He was right and Nya recognized that she’d been lazy about taking action. It was typical that Archer should be the one to leap in and fix her problem before she had really even accepted that she had one.

But this was going to cause more animosity between the men. “He won’t think you’re doing him a favor. He’s a terrible houseguest. I saw what he was like when he was locked up in that other apartment, hiding from Hex. Sure, he knew he had to be there to protect himself. But, he hates having people in his ear telling him what to do. Hates having them around all the time, watching him. It will only be worse now that he’s paranoid and anxious.”

Her love was pragmatic. “Ny, we’ve got three choices. One, we keep him where he is against his will, but we get him clean. Two, we pay for some high-end yuppie-boy program, an in-patient deal to have it done professionally with all the counseling shit.” Which wouldn’t work because Tag couldn’t confess half the shit that was going on in his life. “Or three, we cut him loose and let him deal with his own crap.”

“Which will probably mean watching him die,” she said. “He has nothing to pull him out. It’s sad, Arch, if you think about it. He feels like he doesn’t have anything to fight for. Farrah’s left him. His business has gone to shit. His best friend’s stolen money from him. And I’m with a guy who won’t give him the time of day.”

“Yeah, well the dude is in my fucking apartment,” Archer said. “That’s a lot of fucking time out of my day, Squirm.”

“You don’t usually leave people alone in your place. Why does Tag get a pass?”

“Derren’s there.”

That didn’t make Nya feel better. “Does he know not to hurt him?”

“Yeah, he’s just babysitting,” Archer said and if he trusted his mentor then so did she.

Nya had bonded with him during their drink here and she was pretty confident that Derren would leave Tag alone as long as he didn’t make too much noise.

“Is that wise? Having Derren there when Ester’s staying?” she asked. “And with that big bottle of chloroform you have stashed somewhere in your apartment…”

Her grin made her words come out as an almost-laugh.

But Archer remained deadpan. “You know it’s twisted that my mother talks about her fantasies in front of me, right?” Nya nodded. “Why do you encourage her?”

“I don’t,” she said, leaning forward, except Archer didn’t move so he just ended up supporting more of her weight. Though he didn’t seem to mind. He squeezed her ass again. “It’s weird, she always does most of the talking and I like hearing her talk about stuff like that. It’s almost like watching a cartoon, you know? When things are so extreme that you almost can’t believe that they’re true, but it’s entertaining anyway.”

“Yeah? Well for me it’s more like a car wreck, when bodies are strewn across the street and everyone is slowing down to try and catch a glimpse of the carnage except all they’re doing is holding me up. I want to keep my head down and drive right through without seeing any of that shit… What kind of sick, fucking woman would want a guy to take advantage of her while she was out of it anyway?”

He heard the description of the sex act and made assumptions, he didn’t see the root of where it came from. “It’s not about being out of it,” Nya said. “It’s a fantasy, not reality. It’s about handing over control to someone, trusting them that much. You know, your mom makes these comments and I believe she’s probably one of the most sexually liberated people I know. But”—Nya caught his face when he tried to look away and brought it back—“I think she’s looking for something that she just hasn’t found yet. She wants to be loved. I mean, she was so young when she met your father and she was so besotted with him that she’d have done anything to keep him happy. I think it really messed with her head when he left. You know, since then she’s always believed she wasn’t good enough.

“And I think that’s why she tried so hard with you for the first few years, she probably thought he’d come back and wanted to prove to him how good a job she was doing and how together she was. She wanted to be like his wife, you know? Together and sophisticated. And that all fell apart when—” His smirk made her stop rambling. “I guess you don’t want my psychobabble, huh?”

“I think someone’s been taking lessons,” he said. His arms drifted higher so he could encircle them around her waist, squeezing her so tight that she couldn’t take a deep breath. “When’d you turn into Miss Detective? Have you been gathering intel on me, Squirm?”

Instead of being pissed off, he was impressed. Archer didn’t want to hide the dark parts of his past from her. He may not share them, but he wasn’t offended that she’d ferreted them out for herself.

“I might have asked a question or two,” she said, grazing a fingernail down his jaw. “Someone once told me that it’s not always about being mean, sometimes all it takes is a conversation.”

“I guess you’ve got a lot of sources,” he said.

That was accurate. She’d spent time with Ester, with Derren, even Kristof had come to her old place and these were three people who’d known Archer longer than anyone else. And Derren had said she was family. “I’m kind of disappointed that Ester will get to screw in your bed before I do,” she said, and he grimaced again.

“I sent her out shopping before Derren got to my place and they don’t fuck every time they see each other. Far as I figure, they can go months or years without touching each other. But I know it happens, always has, once in a while they get hot and heavy again, then remember they can’t fucking stand each other.”

Nya couldn’t believe that there was any hatred between the couple who kept coming together. “Do you think Derren loves her?” she asked. The romantic in her wanted to believe he did. “Ester told me he showed up on her last wedding day, and she didn’t get married. So something he said must have—”

“Derren doesn’t say anything. He shouts at her or he screws her. Why do you think she’s so nuts for him?”

Ester was as complicated as any woman Nya had ever met. “So you think that she loves him and he was right that it’s all attention seeking?”

“Maybe. I gave up trying to figure out their relationship years ago. Sometimes I think they deserve each other, you know? Most of the time I just want them to leave each other the fuck alone.”

“I like him,” she said. “He’s a really straightforward guy and he cares a helluva lot for you.”

“Because he won’t fuck you?”

Although she was sure her cheeks reddened, she gasped as her face fell forward into the crook of his neck. “I was testing a theory!”

Kissing the skin she found beneath her lips, she inhaled the scent of her man and her whole body relaxed.

“And what would you have done if he’d have kissed you, hmm?” he asked, rubbing his face against her.

“I would never have kissed him,” she said. “There was an entire bar between us. If I thought he wasn’t going to back off I’d have done it. It’s not like I put myself in a corner with a stranger.”

“Next time, no testing theories,” he murmured right in her ear.

A zing of enlivened hormones fired down her spine. “Damn,” she said, trying to hide the smile of her tease. “And the first chance I got, I was gonna test how much Kristof cared about you.”

“See, now, that’s a different ballgame,” Archer said. “Kris would’ve fucked you.”

She leaned back, tilting her head. “You think?” It wasn’t that she wanted to have sex with the man, but there was something sad about his willingness to betray the fraternal relationship. “I thought you guys were close.”

“He wouldn’t have done it to spite me. He’d have done it to protect me,” Archer said. “Same as I’d do for him. Hos aren’t worth our time.”

That made her blink and after her surprise went away, she bowed forward to snag his bottom lip with her teeth. “You won’t be fucking any of his girlfriends. I don’t give a damn what scheme you two cooked up to test the women you care about, your dick belongs to me.”

He kissed her. “I meant before you.”

“He’d have done it to prove what a slut you’d fallen in love with?”

“Sure, ‘cause if you’d let Derren go there or let any part of Kristof touch you, you know you’d never have got near me again,” he said.

“Shame I don’t have a sister who can test you. I guess your sex show in Vegas will have to do as my reassurance.”

“Two redheads,” he said. “I’d be fucking reassured if I was you.”

Someone was coming up the stairs, deliberately stomping their feet, presumably to announce themselves. Archer twisted, but kept an arm around her, which allowed her to keep leaning on him. The cushion on the couch was soft, and made her footing unstable, so she needed his support.

Robbo appeared a second later. “Do I need protective gear?” he asked.

“No,” she said, but read his smile.

The couple was relaxed and in each other’s embrace; the fight was over. “We don’t know what to do with the tables,” Robbo said. “They’re bolted onto the floor. I don’t have a fucking clue how to get them up. They’re covered with that metal sheeting stuff; we can’t even see the screw.”

Archer kissed her and then with his single arm around her waist, he lifted her off the couch to put her on her feet. “Nya doesn’t even own a screwdriver, Rob. Don’t ask her for advice. Show me what the problem is.”

Archer went after Robbo who was going down the stairs. He paused at the top to wink at her and she mouthed, “Thank you.”

This was her man’s rightful place, leading the men he’d recruited to protect her and this establishment. Robbo had said he would make calls to the guys who hadn’t bothered their butts to show up. Nya would bet that they’d show up as soon as they heard Archer’s voice on their phone. The work that was supposed to take a week would probably take half that time if she had Archer at her side whipping the guys into line.

They had to clear the office, she had paperwork to deal with and files to organize, as well as documents to shred. All the stock had to be inventoried and packed away. The bar had to be cleared, glassware needed to be wrapped and boxed. The flooring had to be taken up and the sound system was on the list to be dismantled. Storing the electricals would have to be done carefully because the equipment was expensive and most of it would be installed again.

The to-do list was immense and it would have to be done before the re-fitting began.

Sizzle had been the same way for as long as she could remember, changing things up was a big decision and one that Nya hoped not to regret. With the money Hexam had put into the club account at Archer’s urging, she had enough wiggle room in her budget to put in some of the high-tech gear that would protect her staff. Tag and Hexam had been reluctant to go too far with security, but this was her place now.

Nya couldn’t stay up here all day, there was work to do, and Tag was still in Archer’s apartment; they’d have to get back to him. So, heading for the office, she was pleased she could bury herself in the management work while Archer took care of delegating the physical tasks. They were a great team.