Pax
A week had passed since my sexy minx of a nurse Jamie had agreed to stay and care for Kato. We’d discussed money and payments, and I even made it official. I drew up the documents, listing her as a temporary employee whose job description was listed as “live in caretaker and nurse.” The dollar signs attached to the document made her eyes go wide a little, but I barely blinked.
The money wasn’t an issue. I wouldn’t have offered it if it had been.
Jamie had wanted to go to her apartment to pick up a few things, but I’d convinced her to stay that first night and finally get some rest. By the time she woke up late the following afternoon, I’d had Alex run out and pick up feminine toiletries, several sets of clothing, and a variety of different foods. I told him to think healthy, since she was a nurse. Maybe she liked junk food, but I was betting she was a little too conscious of the health risks involved for that. If she didn’t like it, I’d send Alex out for something else.
I’d do anything to keep her in the house. I couldn’t risk that she’d leave and reconsider our deal, not before I knew what was really going on.
Since Jamie was staying here, I’d decided to stay, too. I needed to keep an eye on her, and I wanted to be there when Kato woke up. Plus, I was still planning on seducing her, and being around all the time would help on that front.
If I were being honest with myself, I wasn’t interested in getting in her panties just because I wanted to know what she knew. I was confident that Kato would tell me that—assuming he woke up. Instead, it was the growing desire to feel her wet folds gripping my length that was pushing me to claim her.
She hadn’t helped herself out by resisting me, either.
Jamie was in the kitchen on the first floor when I came downstairs. It smelled like breakfast and made my stomach grumble slightly with hunger. She was dressed in one of the outfits that Alex had picked out, and I could have hugged the boy for his choice. The jeans were tight—she’d insisted they were a size too small, but no one else who saw her agreed—and accentuated not only the swell of her ass but also those long legs that I’d been salivating over. Her shirt was fitted, the fabric thin enough that I saw the outline of her bra, just barely. I loved that it stretched across her breasts, emphasizing the size and weight of them.
She was barefoot at the moment, her toenails covered in chipping baby blue nail polish. Her hands moved under the water spouting from the faucet, rinsing away soap suds. When they were clear, she shook them off, turned off the water, and then grabbed a towel. She dried them and turned to the stove where she had a skillet heating up what looked like scrambled eggs. She stirred them a couple of times before scooping them onto three different plates beside her. The plates already had bacon and biscuits and gravy.
I frowned. “You making breakfast, lunch, and dinner ahead of time?” I queried.
My voice startled her, making her nearly drop the plate she was holding as she spun around to face me. Her eyes were wide, and her lips parted as she let out a shaky breath. “Jeez, you scared me.”
I motioned to the plates with my chin. “What’s with the plates?”
She gave me a wry smile. “Not everyone eats like barbarians,” she offered.
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, fine. Why are there three of them?”
She blinked at me, seeming confused. “Uh, there are three of us here?”
It was my turn to be surprised. I stared at her long and hard as I realized that she’d made breakfast for all of us. Something stirred in my heart and I felt sort of…touched. A moment later, I forcibly shoved that feeling away and folded my arms across my chest. “Actually, it’s just you and me.”
Her shoulders slumped a little, which pissed me off. If there was someone else, one of my guys that she was thinking about spreading those long legs for, I’d kill him. She was mine, dammit. She just didn’t know it yet.
“Oh,” was all she said.
“And I’m not paying you to be a fucking maid,” I snapped at her, striding farther into the kitchen and snatching the plate from her. “You’re a nurse. That’s it. Don’t get familiar.”
“Why do you do that?” she demanded hotly as I took the plate to the table.
The kitchen itself was rather large, though by no means industrial-sized, and the dining room made it look even bigger. It was attached with nothing to distinguish it from being part of the kitchen, except that it had a long table with eight chairs set up along it. Three on either side and one on each end.
I shoved the plate on the table carelessly, then turned around and aimed for the coffeepot. I pointedly ignored her.
That just pissed her off, which was about par for the course. I’d yet to experience a day with this woman where I didn’t lose my temper or one where she didn’t return in kind. She’s a pain in my ass, I thought as I grabbed a mug out of one of the cabinets and reached for the pot.
“Did you hear me?”
“Of course I did. I’m not deaf,” I told her irritably. I left my coffee black and headed back to the table to take a seat and devour what looked to be delicious and very fluffy eggs. And the bacon—it looked perfect, crispy around the edges and still a light tan color in the middle.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her throw up her arms, thoroughly exasperated with me. I half thought she might start pulling at her hair. Instead, she grabbed a plate and tossed it onto the table across from mine. “Then why don’t you answer me?”
I shoved a bite of eggs in my mouth. They were as good as they looked. Chewing, I spared her a quick glance. She was leaning with her forearms planted on the table, staring me down with a look of irritation that was quickly turning to rage. I couldn’t say why I pushed her some days more than others, except that I liked the way she was when she was angry.
Frustrating as hell, maybe, but fucking sexy.
Swallowing, I finally asked, “What the fuck are you rambling about, woman?”
Her eyes narrowed at me. “I’m talking about your macho attitude! I do something nice for you and you get pissed off at me! What the hell is that?”
I froze. A thousand responses tried to make their way out of my mouth, all at once and all of them angry, snide comments meant to cut her down into bite sized bits. But when it came to saying them, something stopped me. It wasn’t the softness of her mouth or the plumpness of her breasts. It wasn’t the way her delicate hands squeezed into tight fists or the way she stared me down like she was challenging a wild animal for dominance.
It was something softer that spoke to me. Maybe it was the shining in her eyes or catching something in her, otherwise pissy, voice. I didn’t know, and I didn’t fucking care.
I didn’t need softer, and I didn’t need her doing nice things for me.
Finally, I spoke. “Do I look like the kind of guy who likes politeness? Hmm?”
Her eyebrows rose, and for a second, she looked a little startled, like she wasn’t expecting that from me. Which was stupid if that was the case. It wasn’t like me being a dick was new information. “Everyone needs a little—”
“I don’t do nice, baby,” I told her, leaning over the table slightly towards her. “I do naughty. I do dirty. If you want to play those games with me, c’mon over. Otherwise, fuck off.”
Looking every bit like she was going to bite my head off for what I said, Jamie stood up so fast that she tipped her chair over onto the tiled floor. She opened her mouth to call me all manner of foul things, I was sure, but was stopped by a loud groan.
Both of us froze this time.
The groan came again, and this time I stood hurriedly, rushing out of the dining room and into the family room it was next to. Jamie followed behind me as I half ran to the mudroom. As soon as I could see into the doorway, I noticed that he was up.
Kato was awake.
I hurried in first, stopping at the side of his cot. I was about to grill him on what the fuck had happened but never quite got the chance. Shoving past me, Jamie hurried to his side and began checking him over. She pulled out a mini flashlight from her pocket and checked his eyes as she began to speak to him, softly and sweetly.
“Hello, I’m Jamie. Can you tell me your name?”
It took him a second to respond, but when he did, he said, “Kato McMullen.” His gaze darted between Jamie and me. He looked pale and disoriented but alive—just like he’d had a bad case of the flu or something.
“Good. Can you tell me what happened?”
I stiffened at Jamie’s question. It was my question, too, of course, but I didn’t want her around when I asked it. Kato’s eyes tightened around the edges as he shot me a sharp look, one that spoke volumes, like he didn’t want to talk with this damn woman here, either.
It was almost a nonverbal confirmation of my suspicions: this wasn’t just an accident.
But I still needed to get the whole story, and I wasn’t going to do that with Nurse Jamie hanging around.
“What are you? A fucking cop?” I demanded, pulling Jamie’s attention back to me.
She shot me an angry glare, pursing her lips together before saying, “It’s a memory thing. He’s been out for a bit, so he’s not going to get the date right, probably, and besides, I need to know if there are other injuries or factors that might influence his health.”
“The man just fucking woke up! Why don’t you give him half a second to breathe?”
She looked like she wanted to punch me in the face. Even if she did, I doubt she was strong enough to do damage. Mostly, I thought it would be an amusing turn of events.
“Don’t be an ass! I just want to make sure he’s alright—isn’t that what you’re paying me for?”
Point—Jamie, not that I was going to tell her that. I was saved by Kato attempting to sit up. He only managed to get his elbows beneath him before he paled and looked like he was going to roll off the cot. Jamie hurried to him, her tone all warm and fuzzy again. “Shh, don’t try to get up. You’ve had a rough few days. You’re going to feel pretty tired and a little dizzy. That’s normal. But it’s important that you take it easy or you’ll pull out all my pretty stitching.”
“Stitching?” he questioned. He let her gently push him back down onto the cot, which told me he was pretty bad off. He didn’t like being bossed around by a woman. Glancing at me, he asked, “You’re paying her to take care of me? What is she, a stripper?”
Jamie sputtered in indignation, but I actually laughed. “I wish,” I told him with a wicked grin. “Unfortunately, she’s the real deal. And she keeps her damn clothes on.” I sent Jamie a hungry look. It pissed her off, at least my words did, but it also had a deep red blush rushing over her cheeks and down her neck.
“Damn,” Kato muttered. “I’d really thought I’d gotten lucky for a minute there.”
Clearing her throat, Jamie shot me a warning glare, then said to Kato, “You did get lucky. Lucky to be alive, despite your buddy over here insisting on you not going to the hospital.”
If she thought Kato was going to be outraged by this, she was sorely mistaken. He looked over at me and gave a hint of a nod. Then he winced; moving didn’t seem to be doing him any favors. “Good call, boss.”
Again, I was pretty sure this meant his injuries weren’t from a mere motorcycle accident.
“Good call?” she repeated incredulously.
I smirked at her, folding my arms across my chest. “I told you. I knew what was best the whole time.”
Her eyes narrowed at me, and she pointed a finger towards the door. “Out. You’re paying me to be a doctor? Well, doctor says he’s not well enough for visitors. So get out.”
I opened my mouth to argue with her, but when Kato’s eyes started fluttering closed, and he let out a low groan. I caved. He wasn’t any good to me dead, and if he didn’t give me all the information from that night, I wasn’t going to get it anywhere else.
My eyes narrowed at her, but she had already turned away from me and was tending to Kato. “Fine,” I spat, then turned to leave.
# # #
It wasn’t until the end of the fucking day that the bitch let me in to see Kato and even that was reluctantly. It was only with threats that I would refuse to pay her and get her fine ass fired that convinced her in the end.
I glanced at her as she lingered near the door. “What the fuck are you doing?”
She pursed her lips together, then said, “I’m staying with my patient. You can’t—”
“Oh, just shut up,” I snapped at her. “I’m not going to do anything, and I’ll let you know if shit goes bad. I just want a goddamned second with him, alright?”
She opened her mouth to argue with me some more. That was the only thing the two of us seemed to do well together. Well, that and me pressing her up against the wall and kissing her like there was a pot of gold in her body somewhere. I was willing to bet we could do some other things well, too.
My plan to seduce her had been going less than smooth, not that I’d given up. I’d have her undulating beneath me yet.
“A second,” I repeated.
Her mouth snapped shut, and she shook her head. Turning to go, I thought she muttered something about pigheaded macho men, but I couldn’t be sure.
Turning back to Kato, I asked him bluntly, “What the fuck happened?”
Kato was well enough that he could sit up—sort of. It was mostly thanks to the mountain of pillows pushed up beneath his head and shoulders. He looked better, if a little weak and pale still. “I don’t know exactly, boss,” he told me, wincing when I slammed my hand on the table beside his cot.
“Dammit. You don’t remember anything?” I demanded, my anger spiking.
“I remember some,” he told me quickly. “I remember being out that night and riding when I noticed some other lights. Three of them were bikes, but there was a set of two behind me that… I think it was a car, but I’m not sure. It’s a little fuzzy.”
“You recognize them?”
He shook his head. “Male. Maybe my age. I never saw who was in the car.” He paused. “If there was a car.”
“What the hell happened?” I asked him again.
He put a beefy hand against his head. It was bandaged up like the rest of him, and I was willing to be it still stung. I didn’t know how many meds he was on right then, and I worried that they were affecting his memory or cognitive processes, but it was better than him screaming in pain. I wouldn’t get a damn thing from him then.
“They ran me off the road.” He shook his head; he sounded a little bewildered and really pissed. “The fucking ran me off the road! Who the fuck does that?”
I could hazard a guess. I knew that none of my guys had surrounded him and deliberately ran him off. The odds of it being a bunch of unaffiliated punks was about slim to negative. That left the Disciples. Of course, a little more confirmation would be nice…
“What else happened?” I pressed.
He shifted against the pillows, trying to make himself comfortable. His face was scrunched up, like he was searching his mind for answers that kept running away at the last second. Grasping at straws, he looked up at me and said, “They ran me off. I swerved, skidded. Ended up with the bike laying on its side next to me. I was a little scraped up but…but not like this.” He winced as he gestured to his badly broken and bruised body. “They slowed and came down after me. Someone hit me on the back of the head.” He shook his head, rubbing his hand over it, probably tracing the wound. “I went down. Don’t remember a damn thing after that.”
I frowned. “You can’t think of any other details? Did you see their leathers?”
If they were in an official motorcycle club, then they’d have leathers. Not all groups required their members to wear them all the time. I didn’t, though it was mandatory for meetings or riding together. But some groups did. And some jackasses wore them all the time regardless. They wouldn’t have nametags or anything, but they would have stitching that said exactly which group they belonged to.
He shook his head gingerly. “No, sorry, boss. They looked all black to me. Maybe it was the lighting. It was pretty late.”
Or they didn’t want anyone tracing it back to the Disciples, I thought but didn’t say anything. I raked a hand through my hair. “What about the bikes? The car? Anything that might tell you something.”
Kato started to shake his head again, but then stopped abruptly. “No, wait. I do remember something. Their bikes. They reminded me of something out of the headless horseman or some other stupid Halloween shit.” He fixed me with a stare. “They were black and orange.”
Just like tigers.
And there it was. That was the last little bit of proof I needed. It wouldn’t have mattered if just one bike had been orange but all three? Those were the Chaos Disciples’ colors, and if all three of those bikes were sporting them, then they might as well have left a damn calling card.
Anger heated my blood. I was going to make those sons-of-bitches pay.
# # #
I let Kato rest after that. He didn’t have anything else to tell me, and I needed to start making some phone calls. But as I walked out, I remembered something else I had to take care of.
Jamie was fiddling with her long hair, twisting it around her fingers and unwinding it again. She was facing the window towards the front where her car had been parked that first night—it had since been moved to the garage—but I could see her profile thanks to her slightly turned body. It was nice, emphasizing her flared hips and her perfectly round breasts. She had a body sexy enough that I wanted to ask what the fuck she was doing in medicine. Didn’t hot women go into modeling? Or prostitution, whichever.
I watched her a moment longer, remembering that I was supposed to figure out what she knew, and that I’d had almost a week to do it with absolutely no luck. She told me that she found Kato as he was that night when I asked her casually what had happened, but she seemed suspicious of me, and I didn’t trust her.
Was she faking it? Had she been part of the whole thing? Was she working for the Disciples?
I rolled my eyes at the idea. That woman was vanilla. Sure, her body was sinfully delicious and begged to be touched, among other things, but her sharp as a tack mind was a pain in my ass. She resisted, where other girls would—and had—swooned. She was catty and smart where others had gone giggly and weak in the knees.
All of that more or less convinced me that she at least wasn’t working for the Disciples, even though she may know something. It didn’t, however, convince me not to try and settle myself between those long legs of hers. And it should have.
I like a challenge, I thought, letting my eyes drag over the swell of her ass, which was perky and looked especially good encased in those jeans.
After I stared at her for too long, she seemed to sense me and turned slightly so that she was facing me, not the window. “Did you get your answers?” she asked me calmly, her voice laced with a fine layer of ice.
My eyebrows rose, and I took several steps towards her, stopping just shy of arm’s length. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged her delicate shoulders, causing her breasts to move in perfect swells. “I mean that you must have had questions. Did he answer them?”
I narrowed my eyes. Maybe I’d misjudged her. Maybe she did know something. I stepped to the side, towards her, beginning a slow circle around her, like a predator stalking its prey. I kept my eyes trained on her, watched as her body shuddered. “Maybe I was just asking if he was alright.”
She glanced over her shoulder as I continued to stalk, rounding to her other side. “Doubtful. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”
I cut across her side close enough that our arms brushed. It was deliberate. I wanted to make her body hot for me, clenching and bothered, wanting me even as she struggled not to. Her eyes followed me as I moved to stand in front of her again. “I already told you—it’s none of your business.” My voice was low and gruff, but not as snide as I’d hoped.
Her eyebrows pulled together. “Don’t be a jerk. Whatever’s going on, I’m involved now, aren’t I?”
I came to a stop in front of her, so close that our bodies were a hairsbreadth away. Just a little closer and I’d feel those tits against my chest—a heady thought. “No. You’re not. This is a job for you. Unless you want to mix a little business with pleasure?”
Her mouth was frowning, but I saw something I recognized as desire flashing in her eyes. “We’ve been over that already. I’m not sleeping with you.”
I grinned wolfishly at her. “Okay. No sleeping. There are other things we can do.” I let my eyes drop to her chest before jerking them back up to her. “Lots of other things.”
Making a frustrated sound, she shook her head. “Stop changing the subject! Just tell me what’s going on.”
My smile dropped. “No,” I told her plainly. “You’ll just put yourself in danger.”
Her eyebrows shot up at that, and she looked genuinely surprised. “What?”
Running a hand through my hair, I tried to get her to back off. “Danger. You know, get yourself into trouble?”
“Like this isn’t trouble?”
I ignored her. “You don’t need to know what the fuck’s going on.”
“I think I do,” she countered.
“Well, since my opinion’s the only one that matters, I really don’t give a shit.”
“You’re such a dick!”
I shrugged, unconcerned. “Admit it, you like it. You like that I push you and order you around and take what I want.” She was right; I was trying to change the subject.
This time, it worked.
“I do not. I promise you, I don’t.” She shook her head, her hair fluttering across her shoulders softly. “I don’t need,” she gestured to my body, “whatever this is.”
I laughed at her. “Oh, baby, you do need this, you just haven’t realized it yet.”
“I need an arrogant asshole?”
“You need a body like mine and a man who’s going to use it to do all the things your dirty little mind has played out over and over again,” I told her, dropping my voice low until it was all but a growl in my throat. “You need me to play out those naughty fantasies that you don’t want to admit you have.”
She started to scoff, but I caught her blushing cheeks and her sudden intake of breath. I plowed ahead, determined to get to her.
“The ones where I’m calling the shots and the decisions are out of your hands. You know what I’m talking about.” I put my hand on her hip, finally unable to resist the urge to touch her. She didn’t shove me off. “Maybe it’s being tied up? Or do you just want me to order you around? To tell you to touch me…and yourself.”
A shuddering breath escaped her, and I knew she was mine. I leaned forward, my hand on her hip gripping her tightly. My mouth was so close to her lips that I could practically taste them as I said, “Here’s your first order—open your mouth.”
She did. I sealed it with mine and devoured her with my tongue. My other hand went to her hair, gripping it tightly to hold her in place. The hand on her hip moved around to her backside, squeezing that perky, round ass of hers. It felt good in my hands and had the added effect of pushing her hard against me, my cock twitching, growing, and straining.
Fuck, I wanted her.
And dammit, I was going to have her.