“JACE!” REMY SQUALLED. “Get your friggin ass in here and help me.”
Muttering darkly, she tried shoving the enormous crate with her hip only to have it move less than three inches. What the hell was this doing in here anyway? Wasn’t Ben in charge of deliveries to the compound?
The door opened and shut with a loud bang, and a voice yelled, “Where are you, cuz?”
Peeking around the imposing wood box, she flagged him with a furious wave of her hand. “Help me move this damn thing so I can get to my desk.”
“What the hell is this?” he asked. Putting his shoulder to the crate and adding a hip shove, the thing finally started inching forward steadily.
“I dunno,” she grumbled while trying to guide the unwieldy object out of the way. From the height and size, she made a quick assumption and sarcastically answered. “Statue of David. Giant Buddha. A Remington bronze. Who the hell knows.”
Jace snickered. “Your cynicism is showing again.”
The crate finally out of the way, she dusted her hands off on her jeans and stuck her tongue out. “Shut up.”
Jace scooted around the box and grabbed her in a headlock, administering a vicious noogie that made her yelp and attempt to swat him away.
“Cut it out!” she scolded.
He laughed, released her, and stepped back. “Y’know, if you weren’t my cousin, we’d be dueling pistols every damn day out behind desert dune.”
Arching one eyebrow, she slapped on her best sardonic expression. “Dude. Get real. If you weren’t my cousin, you’d never be within a thousand miles of a place like this.”
Their easy laughter filled the office.
Laying it on thick with a practiced and very effeminate sounding French accent, he made her laugh even harder. “But Cherie. You’d be lost without my flair! All this, ugh …” He grunted distastefully with a limp wristed wave of his hand. “All this brown.” Shuddering dramatically, he sneered, “It needs a pop of color. No?”
Remy wrapped an arm around his neck and pulled him in for a peck on the cheek.
“I’d be up the creek and paddling with two spoons if it wasn’t for you.”
Jace shrugged off her statement. “And I’d be feeling the noose tighten around my throat every day without this very convenient rescue.”
What a pair they were. Remy and Jean Claude or Jace, as the family called him, were raised with equal advantage and disregard on two different continents. Her French father had left Europe as a college student and become a successful banker with global clients. His family was duly horrified when he married a Midwestern girl with Native American ancestors in her bloodline. Her whole life was a study of in between. Her French relatives rolled their eyes at her name. Remington. They referred to her as a ‘pistol.’ Bunch of uptight assholes. They knew full well her name was an homage to a famous artist and not a goddamn gun company.
And her mother’s family held her, her parents, and her little sister at a respectful arm’s length thinking that their Euro roots somehow made them separate and apart from everyone.
In between. That was how she’d always felt.
Despite never quite fitting in with her European relatives, she’d developed a close bond with her cousin, Jace, when they found themselves at the same summer camp when they were twelve years old.
Jace’s mother, her aunt, was the quintessential socialite. In Remy’s opinion, she had more makeup in her arsenal than commonsense. Her husband, a wealthy developer with aristocratic roots and a serious hard-on for the American western cowboy culture, had been her cousin’s saving grace. Raised by nannies and shipped off to private boarding schools by the time he was eight, Jace was being groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Luckily for him, that also meant getting an immersion experience every summer when he went to America for what the family referred to as cultural training.
The two outcasts had bonded the summer they’d been campers together. Jace was her confidence man, and she was his coach. Years later, he picked her up when she fell apart and got her back into the world at a time when Remy nearly lost everything. And she was the voice he listened to, as his prescribed life became a chokehold, slowly strangling the life from him.
She threw him a lifeline the second Justice reeled her in. Raised around horses, she knew plenty about riding and enough of the basics to bluff her way through the interview that led to this job. But when it came to running a stable, she knew exactly nothing.
Jace, on the other hand, was more than an expert on these things. He also grew up around horses, but in his case, the stable was where he found an escape from the superficial life his mother insisted they lead and a connection to the life of a cowboy which so fascinated his father.
Eager to break out of the numbing nine-to-five life he’d been so carefully groomed to lead, Jace jumped at the chance to relocate half a world away to the American Southwest where Remy promptly made him her assistant and put him in charge of the horses.
The guy might look like a European hipster, but with each passing day, he lost little bits and pieces of his former life and picked up more and more of what she liked to call cowboy crush. Being outside, doing demanding physical work over long days, and living a healthy lifestyle—these things were changing both their lives.
“Hey,” he said with a chuckle. “You have to come by the barn and check out the Welsh pony Calder dropped into the mix. Snowflake. She reminds me of the dappled gray you rode at camp.”
Remy dropped into her desk chair with a thud and swiveled to look at him. “A pony? What do we need a pony for?”
Snatching her bottle of water right from her hands, Jace tore off the cap and slugged back half of it before he answered.
“It’s for Stephanie’s grandson. Did you know she’s a Junior Rodeo champ?”
“Shut up!” she drawled. “No way. I heard she was a pageant queen or something like that.”
Tossing the bottle back, she caught it easily and quirked half a grin when she saw how little of the water was left. Dick.
“Yeah, I heard that too. But she shows up every morning at the crack of sunrise for a mount. Lady’s got mad horse skills. I watched her, and, this is no lie, grab the pommel and vault from standing still right up onto the saddle like she was swinging around a stripper’s pole. Shit. Now that I think about it, the blond one. Lacey. Her too. Only she’s more like Tinker Bell floating than a stripper.”
A stripper’s pole! Holy shit. The visual Remy now had in her head of the Justice wives and the thousands of possibilities a pole offered doubled her over with laughter.
“Knock, knock,” a voice called out.
Jumping to her feet, she looked at Jace with frantic eyes. Fuck! With the big crate blocking her view, she hadn’t seen anyone approaching. Next thing she knew, Tori St. John wiggled around the box and stepped into their midst.
Like pretty much everyone she’d met since coming to Justice—well, everyone but that asshole Finn O’Brien—Remy liked the diminutive spitfire. Something about the twinkle of mischief she found in the woman’s eyes intrigued her. The wife of Draegyn St. John needed a hurricane named after her—she rolled with that sort of unspoken power.
“Remy. Jace. Glad you’re both here,” Tori said. “Got incoming for you to deal with. Our canine director shipped his car from back East.” Handing her a folder full of paper, she added, “My husband wants you to start the process for transferring registration info to Arizona.”
Putting her hands on her waist, the little woman eyed the large crate. Leaning this way and that, she read the documents stapled to the box.
“What in the hell is this?” she asked out loud. “Saudi Arabia?” For no reason, she kicked the crate and then leaned in again to get a closer look at the labels.
Jace drew attention to the other side of the wooden box. “Yep. Has a royal seal burned into the wood. Look.” He pointed so Tori could check it out.
Looking twice as confused as she had ten seconds ago, she glanced at Remy and asked, “Does Ben know about this?”
“He wasn’t around. At least that’s what the delivery guy said. So he brought it here because he needed an official’s signature.” Shrugging, she added, “Guess I was the only one around.”
Tori did a double take ending with her eyes narrowing as she studied Remy’s face. Used to such intense scrutiny from her military days, she remained alert but passive and wondered what caused Tori’s long, hard look.
“Want me to move this thing out of here?”
She and Tori looked at Jace and then at each other.
“No,” both of them blurted at the same moment.
Laughing, they shouted, “Jinx!” in unison pointing to the other and touching their noses with a finger at the same time.
“Is that some secret handshake thing you Americans do?” Jace asked dryly.
“Yuck, yuck, yuck,” Tori joked. “Don’t pull that high-fallutin’ European crap with me, buster! I lived in London for years and did my fair share of rubbing elbows with royalty. Much prefer dressing in jeans and washing down the desert sand with a shot of warm whiskey to a feathered fascinator perched on my head and a glass of watered down gin.”
“Yeah. I read about you. Some earl, right? Punched the smarmy shit right in the financial throat when you whistle blew his ass.”
Remy thought her life might be passing in front of her eyes. Didn’t Jace have any goddamn filters? What the hell was wrong with him? Bringing up an uncomfortable past with the wife of a Justice brother was such a bonehead move.
Tori was silent for so long Remy started mentally packing, figuring she was seconds away from being hustled off the property for having stepped over the line with Family Justice.
And just that quickly, those thoughts vanished when Tori barked out a laugh bigger than her whole body, threw her hand up in the air for a high five, and hooted, “Dude! That took balls.”
Climbing down from the ledge of doom became easier when Jace vigorously returned the hearty hand slap.
Desperate to move past the awkward moment before her cousin’s stupid motor mouth did more damage, Remy backtracked to the issue at hand.
“This thing can stay here until Ben comes to get it, but we have to at least move it out of the way.”
“You two aren’t moving shit,” Jace informed them. “I’ll go grab Finn. Saw him wandering around the barn earlier. We’ll shove it to the back of the room.”
Finn. Remy rolled her eyes, sniffed her displeasure at hearing his name, and reacted like a cow pie was hidden nearby before she realized what she was doing. Unfortunately, Tori St. John witnessed the whole thing. A twinkle gleamed in her eyes, making Remy swallow hard and wish she’d been a bit less obvious about her dislike of the obnoxious guy.
Alone with Tori now that Jace ran off like an Olympic sprinter, she tried to appear nonplussed knowing all the while it was just a matter of time before someone called out her attitude where Beantown was concerned.
That someone was apparently going to be Tori St. John.
Making little attempt to wipe the smirk from her face, the other woman eyed her with obvious glee. That sort of impish humor always made Remy twitchy.
“Why, Remington Bisset,” she drawled with a touch of twang, “I do believe young Finn has managed to tear a hole in your panties.”
Remy’s mouth dropped open, and she blinked repeatedly. A hole in her panties? Was that like a twist in her knickers? Shaking her head to shoo away the confusing inner dialogue, she tried to act stern and businesslike. Basically, all that got her was a belly laugh from the woman so effectively rattling her cage.
“Oh, give it up, Remy. I know what hot and bothered looks like from up close and personal.” Tori smirk-shrugged. “You could do worse, y’know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she bit out a touch too forcefully.
“Seriously? Well, let me spell it out for you then,” Tori quipped. Clearing her throat for dramatic emphasis, she started singing, “Remy and Finn sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G …”
“What? Uh, no!” she barked with outrage. “Did he tell you that? Why, that miserable little shit.”
“A little shit, is he?” Tori teased. She seemed to consider the idea for a second and then said, “Yep. I can see it. Maybe not so little but most def a shit.”
Then she slapped her hands together and threw them up in a hallelujah salute. “Oh, my god. Irish is gonna fucking love this! Woot! Woot!”
“No,” she choked out. “Um, no. Hold up, Mrs. St. John,” she burbled like a tongue-tied twit.
“Mrs. St. John?” Tori laughed. “Oh, my god. You have it worse than I thought! The only time I’m Mrs. Anything is when someone’s fucked up or trying to be shady. Which is it, Remy? Did you fuck up or am I touching a nerve? An Irish nerve?”
She was sputtering like a hose left out in the sun filling with hot water and was in mid-explanatory sentence when Jace and Finn came marching in.
“Found some muscle,” her cousin sneered in his fake accent.
Tori never stopped laughing. “Priceless,” she muttered.
How much shit would start if she marched up to Jace and smacked him for stirring the pot?
Under any other circumstance, she’d find this whole thing funny. Especially when Tori began speaking to Jace as though he had a limited grasp of the English language. Remy felt like everything was spinning out of control as the ridiculous pantomime wore on.
Finally, Finn groused at Jace. “Move your hairless balls out of the way.” Crouching like a linebacker preparing to crush bones, he put his shoulder near the corner of the box and started shoving it aside. Each time it moved, he grunted, and with each grunt, Remy swore her insides tingled. Or tightened. Or pulsed. One of those three things was accurate.
When he’d pushed the crate nearly against the wall, Finn turned a questioning gaze at Tori. Without missing a beat, the Justice troublemaker conferred with Jace, in French, and then proceeded to indicate it should go a bit to the left.
Was it too late to surrender?
Sending a dirty glare at her cousin, Remy watched as Jace shrugged her off with a sneering lip curl.
“Need anything else, Tori?” Finn asked politely.
Tori wrapped her arm through Finn’s and started singing his praises. ‘So helpful. So strong. Those muscles! What did they feed him back in Boston that made him so big? What would she ever have done without him?’
Huh? What would Tori have done if Finn hadn’t played He-Man and moved the crate disrupting Remy’s office? Good grief. The woman was pure, pot stirring evil.
Shuffling piles of nothing on her desk, she tried to ignore the theatrics playing out ten feet away until she heard Jace’s abrupt snicker-cough and the very end of what Tori was saying.
“That’s okay with you. Right, Remy? It’ll be fun. We haven’t done a Justice night at Whiskey Pete’s in ages.”
Oh, shit. What did she miss? The look of snarky triumph on Beantown’s face hit her like a bucket of ice water.
And just like that, Tori St. John organized an outing that made Remy want to chew nails rather than participate. Knowing Tori had trapped her only made it worse.
“Oh. I’ll call Heather and Brody. See if they want to come. We’ll make it an early night so all the kids can go. Dinner with Family Justice. Time you met the whole crew!”
Remy did not share Tori’s enthusiasm. The look on Finn’s face suggested he too was suddenly less than thrilled with Tori’s plans. Needling her about socializing was one thing. But apparently hanging with the family was something else entirely. Maybe a group dinner wouldn’t be all that bad if it made the loathsome toady uncomfortable.