CHAPTER 9
From the moment they left the car in the courtyard and entered the building, chaos ensued. Jane and the puppy followed Cecily and her boyfriend, Shane, into a room that Jane managed to register as being full of very, very attractive men. Ally suddenly dropped back behind Jane. A waifish redheaded girl in a black jumpsuit launched a mile-a-minute speech at a muscular guy wearing a band T-shirt about how inappropriate it was that “civilians” were all piling into the “war room.” At least it sounded like she said “war room.”
Through the drama Jane finally pegged Mr. Dawes leaning against a desk next to a guy she recognized from photos as Cecily’s brother Dex.
Jane had fully intended to lead with an admittedly pissy-sounding take on the phrase “Say hello to your new dog, Mr. Dawes!” But when he stood up and came toward her, she realized he looked like death. The most beautiful, bruised, sad, sexy version of death you could ever imagine. He was just a mess of bruises, cuts, and bandages, plus he had an end-of-the-road look in his eyes that just cut her to the bone.
“You look terrible,” she blurted instead.
“Yesterday was a rough day.”
“Yesterday I called and yelled at you,” Jane said.
“Yeah, that was actually a highlight,” he said.
Jane stared at Nick; he stared back at her. And then he smiled.
“This is where you work?” she asked. “The Armory?”
“Sometimes.”
It was then Jane noticed that the dog wasn’t pulling against her hold anymore. The dog was sitting by Mr. Dawes’s feet, tail wagging, excitedly nuzzling the pocket of his cargo pants like he expected there to be a treat therein. Mr. Dawes was still staring at her, but his hand was absently petting the dog’s head. They looked . . . suspiciously . . . like . . . old friends. “You’ve already met,” she said.
“Yeah. This is Rochester. My neighbor’s dog.”
A sinking sensation pooled in Jane’s stomach. “You didn’t order a new dog.”
“No dog. Like I told you yesterday.”
Jane winced. She could feel herself getting hot all over, and not in a good way.
“You okay there, Jane?”
“I’m aware that extreme embarrassment is not my best look.”
“I’m not looking my best either,” Mr. Dawes said.
Jane’s eyes went back to examining the damage to his face and body. “Dangerous people?”
“It’s my problem alone. It’s not going to touch you, Jane,” he said very seriously.
“I wasn’t thinking that,” she said.
He relaxed a little.
“I’m sorry. I misinterpreted.” She gestured lamely to Rochester, who was pawing at Mr. Dawes’s abdomen, clearly hoping for a tussle. “He came with a suitcase and a lady who looked like a breeder or something.”
“I like to dog-sit. Especially like goldens. Known Rochester since he was weaned. He’s almost a year old now. My neighbor doesn’t give me notice anymore—just comes over, and if I’m there, I’m there. If I’m not, she takes him to someone else or boards him. Guess you were there, so . . .”
He likes to dog-sit. Jane watched as Mr. Dawes led the dog into an adjacent conference room, knelt on the ground and started playing with him. It was a display she would have liked to enjoy from the comfort of a plush velvet chair, with a bucket of popcorn—yes, butter, please. Unfortunately, that was not to be.
The redhead made her way over to Jane’s side, giving unusually wide berth to an Ally-Dex conversation as she passed. She’d obviously made peace with the situation in the, uh, war room, because she said to Jane in a friendly enough voice, “Hi, I’m Missy.”
“I’m Jane. Mr. Dawes’s fish sitter. Well, I think I got a promotion to pet sitter. Although come to think of it, I didn’t get a raise.”
“I know who you are,” Missy said. “And since you’re here, I need to make sure you’re cool with everything.”
Jane got the impression that meant a lot of things. Not just “Jane, are you okay with the weirdness?” More like “Jane, we need to feel okay that you know about the weirdness.” Though Jane couldn’t imagine what would happen if the answer ended up being no.
So, she and Missy talked for a while, each of them keeping one eye on the Nick Dawes Show playing live through the glass windows of the conference room. Missy asked her a lot of questions, which Jane had no trouble answering. Questions that basically took the pulse of how comfortable Jane was with how much she already knew, or which prodded Jane to reveal additional information that perhaps she shouldn’t know but had figured out.
Missy also asked her not to leave the room without an escort.
If Jane was supposed to think this was all too strange and suspicious to deal with, these people were going to be disappointed. And they should know better; they’d already “vetted” her for Nick Dawes’s job and obviously decided that her questionable parents weren’t enough to keep her from being invited into—if not the inner circle where Ally and Cecily lived—at least one of the rings next to it. Weirdness is relative, thought Jane. I am not one to be spooked.
She suspected there was an intersection between her boss being a mercenary in one part of his life and some sort of investment banker or fund manager in the other. She knew Cecily’s fiancé, Shane, had skills in a variety of areas, including stunt driving and hand-to-hand combat. Mr. Dawes undoubtedly did tricky things with money. Hopefully, he did not steal from the poor and elderly, because that would be a deal breaker. Not that she had any business wondering what her deal breakers with her boss would be in the first place.
The more Jane listened to Missy talk (vaguely) and ask questions (pointedly), the calmer she felt. Nick Dawes might be a white-collar mercenary with the ability to use his expertise for things Missy referred to as “gigs” and “missions,” but he also liked to roll around on the floor and snuggle with a dog, who thirty minutes ago she was so sure he didn’t give one shit about.
Roll around. And snuggle.
Live and let live, Mr. Dawes. If you expect me to have concerns about your mercenary ties, you are sorely mistaken. Granted, whether he was aware of it or not, Nick Dawes was playing to his strengths.
At this point, his coat was off. His tie was off. His button-down shirt was off. His fancy shoes and socks were off. He was wearing a T-shirt and pants and was in bare feet, like he had the day off from being a rich jerk. Okay, he definitely had the day off from being a rich jerk, because he was rolling around on the ground, playing with his puppy. Really playing with his puppy. Mr. Dawes was playing tug-of-war with the dog, and each had one end of his tie. What had undoubtedly been a two-hundred-dollar necktie was covered in doggy saliva, the Zegna label ripping off. Mr. Dawes looked like he had no doubt it was worth it, and the dog was making joyous growly noises as his pal pulled him across the room by the gummy tie.
Jane felt like she couldn’t move. She wouldn’t move. No way was she doing a thing that might nudge this hot-man-playing-with-cute-puppy floor action off course. “Man, that’s a fine sight,” Jane whispered without thinking.
Missy chuckled.
“Sorry. That was probably really inappropriate. He’s my boss.”
There was another pause while they enjoyed the sight of her boss rolling across the floor, with the puppy jumping on top of him in shared camaraderie. Mr. Dawes’s T-shirt scooted up to reveal a swatch of perfect back muscles.
All of a sudden, Ally was tugging on Jane’s sleeve. “I need to go,” she said.
Apparently, Ally’s giddy had worn off, and all that was left was a giant bucket of tense.
“You okay?” Jane asked.
“This is not quite how I thought this would play out,” Ally said, her eyes notably not on Mr. Dawes and the puppy. “I just really need to go.” Jane followed Allison’s gaze to a big, handsome man with thick dark hair and salt-and-pepper stubble on his face.
She guessed immediately it was the boss, the one they called Rothgar. He’d just entered the room from the back. And when he turned, he saw Ally staring at him and headed straight for her.
Ally sucked in a quick breath, turned on her own heels, and would have run for the door if Rothgar hadn’t caught up and grabbed her arm.
The entire room went still as Ally yelled, “Take your fucking hands off me, Rothgar,” and wrenched her arm away.
Jane winced; it looked like that hurt. Cecily pulled out of the circle of Shane’s arms with an alarmed look on her face and started toward her friend, before Shane pulled her back and whispered something in her ear.
“We’ve got to talk,” Rothgar growled.
“There’s nothing left to say.”
“You are standing in my home, Allison,” Rothgar thundered. “You’ll listen, and then you’ll get the hell out.”
Ally blinked, clearly stunned.
“To be clear,” Rothgar continued, “I’m not interested in rehashing the past. I’m interested in the future. Do you want to do this out here, or do you want to step into my office and keep it private?”
Ally looked confused. “Just get on with it,” she said with much less than her usual sass.
Rothgar studied her face for a moment and then said in a slightly calmer, quieter voice, “Are you sure? What I have to say might . . .”
Hurt? Jane thought. She looked at Cecily, who was looking around at some of the other reactions. The tension was insane.
“Roth,” the guy with the band T-shirt said. “Maybe—”
“No,” he said, ice-cold and brutal. “She doesn’t get a pass. Not anymore.”
“Get on with it,” Ally said. She’d gone totally pale.
“Once you leave the Armory today, you no longer have privileges to come and go as you please. You’ll be stopped at the perimeter of the entrance just as any nonmember would be stopped. I’ve spent three years treating you with kid gloves, and you’ve made it clear you don’t like what we do here and you don’t want to be part of it. So you can’t have it both ways. You don’t get free rein to waltz in here and remind me that you blame us for your brother’s disappearance.” He paused then, his eyes searching Ally’s face like he was judging just how deep his words were sinking in.
She looked like she wasn’t actually seeing him at all, when she answered robotically, “Death. I don’t blame you for Graham’s disappearance. I blame you for his death.”
A muscle in Rothgar’s jaw leaped as he clamped his teeth together. “Right.”
It was like the entire room stopped breathing.
Rothgar continued. “When Cecily moves out of the apartment, the security we’ve got on your place will go with it. You’ll go dark for us. I thought you should know. If you get into trouble, we won’t be able to see. We won’t know.”
Ally looked a little wobbly, and her cheeks were burning red, but she held her chin high.
“You can still call for help. You call for help, I’ll send someone. But you’re going to have to make that move. Also, Missy won’t be sending anyone to you anymore.”
Jane looked at Missy, who looked like this was the first she’d heard of this.
“No more lost lambs, which means no more subsidized rent. You want to stay in your place, you pay for it. You want to go, fine. The thing is you don’t want to be our ally, so with what you know, you’re just a liability. To be blunt, I won’t allow you to share what should be Hudson Kings business with other people without consulting me, and I’m not going to put up with your shit anymore. So, it’s time to cut the cord.”
Jane bit her lip; it was probably her fault for that one.
Rothgar took a folder that one of the guys had been holding out to him, and it was just brutal when he said, “It was good seeing you again, Allison. In some really fucked-up way, I’m gonna miss you.” Then he turned his back on her and chose a desk, opened the folder, and got down to work.
Missy had started muttering, “No way . . . holy shit . . . oh, man . . . ,” about a quarter of the way through Rothgar’s speech. She was still doing it.
Ally looked at Cecily and Jane. “I gotta, um, I gotta . . . um . . . get . . . drive, drive . . .” She raised her car keys. “Jane, maybe Nick’ll ride you . . . I mean, give you a ride.”
As she fumbled her way to the door, Jane watched Rothgar carefully. He was definitely working, but it looked like it was taking all of his concentration to do it.
The look on his face . . . wow.
“Are they exes?” Jane whispered to Missy.
“Who?”
“Ally and Rothgar.”
“Whoa!” Missy blurted. She seemed literally tongue-tied after that.
“Oh! It just seemed like there was a . . . situation . . . ,” Jane babbled, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. But the tension there. Holy crap.
“There’s no situation between Rothgar and Ally,” Missy whispered back. “I mean. There’s a situation. The situation. But not the other kind of situation. I mean, he’s like a dad figure. Like a dad. Like a hot dad, I guess. But a dad. Or a big brother. A totally big brother.” She stood staring at the door, which was still flapping from the force of Ally’s hasty departure.
“I should go,” Jane said lamely to Missy.
“Shane will drive us,” Cecily said. Shane kissed her gently on the mouth as his way of agreeing to that task. Cecily smiled up at him like she was the happiest person in the universe, and Jane turned away and headed to the conference room to give them a little space before that gentle kiss turned inevitably hot.
Back in the conference room, it was clear the puppy was finally getting tired. Mr. Dawes was lying on his back on the floor; the puppy was lying on his playmate’s chest. He was running his hand through the puppy’s fur, giving the puppy an ear rub. The puppy looked like he’d discovered puppy heaven on earth, and Jane, who absolutely, positively wasn’t supposed to be having such thoughts about her boss, looked at Mr. Dawes’s strong hands, those long fingers, and figured the puppy had it right.