CHAPTER 36
Chase apparently had been harboring some resentment toward Nick the entire time Rothgar was talking. When the team took a break from mission planning, Chase instantly whirled around in his chair and glared right at him. “I saw you looking at me with that sad-dog expression during breakfast, and I’m just going to preempt you right here: I’m not calling Jane again on some trumped-up BS. Shane’s on it; I’ll bet you he only leaves her side to take a piss. You know she’s fine. Screw her if she can’t see a good thing when it’s staring her right in the face. I mean, seriously, what the hell else is she looking for? You’re the complete package. I mean, you’re me, except with a massive amount of money! How is that not appealing? Who doesn’t want that? I have no more energy to waste on that shit. That was a one-time deal, you got that?”
Nick couldn’t help but smile at Chase’s rant. The guy was a man of big expression, and when he was happy, he was big happy. When he was pissed, he was big pissed. “You need to go dance this off or however you handle it. I’m over it already. It’s in the past. I asked you to set the new tone. You did—and I thank you for that—and now I can go back to calling her only as a boss, and it will all just roll right over me.”
Chase’s even gaze flicked across Nick’s face. “Fake it till you make it? Good luck with that.”
Nick’s smile faded. “So right, brother,” he murmured before downing a slug of water from a bottle that he wished was holding a martini. “So right.”
“Or you could clear the field.”
“What does that mean?”
“She obviously cares about you.”
“You said she was obnoxious to you on the phone.”
“Pretty much proved she cares about you. I mean, seriously, man. Fish. Okay? I’m sorry, but no woman is going to go ballistic over the well-being of a man’s fish if she doesn’t care deeply about the man. Take my advice. If you think she’s the one. If you think that if everything in your life was smooth you could avoid the kind of missteps you’ve been forced into by circumstance and make her feel safe and secure that you . . . you know, really care about . . . her, then do what I do.”
Nick forced himself not to smile at Chase’s implied suggestion that he had his love life under control in any way. The man never had his love life under control. “What do you do, Chase?”
“Whatever she says doesn’t work, you fix it. And then when she says great, but something else doesn’t work, you fix that. And you fix and you fix until there are no more excuses, and at the end of it all, it’s just, dude, does she want to be with you or not? Because when you remove all the obstacles and there aren’t any barriers, it just comes down to . . .” The man got a funny look on his face. Like his tongue literally had gotten stuck in his mouth.
Nick stared at Chase. “That was the closest you’ve ever come to poetry. Except you seem to have a problem using the word ‘love.’”
Chase shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Yeah. But you knew what I meant.”
Nick almost laughed. “You can say it out loud. It doesn’t make you less of a man.”
“No, I know. I just, uh, you know, it’s strange. I actually find that I can’t say it.” Chase looked entirely serious, but then he shrugged and said, “You can’t go on like you’ve been going on. It’s like Romeo and that cold of his. Never lets up. You need your life back, and you need that girl with you. She pissed me off something awful, but I tell ya, I’d give my left nut for a girl who cared that much about me.”
Nick’s cell phone rang. He frowned at the caller ID; Maksim had never called him before.
“Nick here.”
“The girl from the party?” Maksim asked.
“Jane’s safe, under surveillance,” Nick said cautiously.
“Then why did she just walk through the door of your penthouse?” Dex said from his seat at the computer.
Nick went to Dex’s screen, but Missy suddenly barked his name and turned around in her chair to face him. “Shane’s on the line; says Ally told him Jane went to feed the fish. Took a car service so she could do it fast. He’s on his way back to the Armory.”
“What?”
“You told her you two were done?” Rothgar asked, from the riser at the back.
Nick went cold. “Of course.” A flood of curse words escaped his lips as he watched his lovely Jane, still wearing her coat, smiling and laughing at the fish in the fish tank.
“Please call her, Missy,” Nick said.
He put Maksim back to his ear. “Is there a particular reason you’re calling?” Nick managed to ask. Of course there was. He wanted to throw the phone through a window and run to the street, run as fast as he could to his place, but Maksim’s call wasn’t a coincidence. He watched Rothgar put the Hudson Kings into motion, watched him summon Geo, watched Geo collect his weapons.
“She’s not picking up,” Missy said, the stress evident in her voice. “Someone else try. She thinks I’m telemarketing or something.”
Nick forced himself to focus on what the Russian merc was saying.
“Five minutes ago, suddenly a lot of chatter, Nikolai. You called Sokolov’s bluff.”
Nick’s breathing was coming out in fits and starts. “I thought I had a little more time.”
“No time. They followed the girl in the car. Now chatter, chatter in Russian on the underground channels. They are on their way to meet her. That’s all,” Maks said, and hung up.
That’s all? That’s everything.
Nick forced himself to calmly press the buttons for Jane’s phone. On the screen he watched her turn to her purse and pick up the phone, his heart singing for a moment when she instinctively smiled at his name on her caller ID before catching herself and frowning.
She did, however, take his call. “Yes, sir, Mr.—”
“Jane, get out of there,” Nick blurted. “Get out of the house. Leave the building. Someone’s coming.”
“Nick?”
“Get out.”
At which point the doorbell rang. On video cam, Jane’s eyes widened. She stood frozen, her eyes on the door, the phone smashed to her cheek. Through the speaker, Nick heard pounding on the other side of the door.
“Too late,” she whispered.