THE NEXT MORNING, I roll over in the giant bed and stretch with a groan, feeling every single sore spot on my body but smiling when I remember where they all came from.
After Seth made love to me for the first time in the gym, he carried me into the sauna, spreading me out on the wooden bench before soothing my swollen pussy with his mouth. He claimed after research, meal prep, and working out, muscle recovery should come next, which included sweating out toxins by relaxing in a sauna. And sure enough, the sweat poured off me as he brought me to another orgasm, a feat I never thought possible in such a short amount of time.
Afterward, and the last step in this hands-on lesson, he gathered up my melted body and carried me into the bathroom, where he used his muscular frame to prop me against the cold tiled wall of the shower. The cool surface felt incredible against my feverish skin, and I let him do as he pleased as he lathered me up, taking great care to be super gentle between my legs.
I have never in my life felt more taken care of. He treated me like a queen, worshiping every square inch of my body until not a single pore went without a caress or a kiss. He wrapped me up in a soft terry robe and handed me a towel for my hair, and when it was up on top of my head like a turban, he scooped me up once more to carry me to the guest bedroom. We’d decided when we first arrived after touring the beach house that we would respect Doc’s master suite and chose the one across the hall from it, which was just as luxurious.
And this is where I now lie, sprawled naked between the cool sheets, realizing I’m alone. I prop my head up, seeing it’s only 7:33 a.m. I force myself to stand, put on my glasses, and slip into the robe laying on the foot of the bed before going in search of Seth.
I find him in the office like I had last night, his shirtless back facing me as he hunches toward the computer screen. As I come up next to him, I reach out and run my hand up and down his spine, smiling when I see his skin erupt in goose bumps as he looks up at me through his reading glasses.
“Good morning, beautiful,” he says, and with one swift move, his arm wraps around me and he yanks me into his lap. I suck in a sharp breath and wince as my bottom hits his muscular thighs. “Ooo, sorry. You sore?” He puts his hand between my legs, cupping me gently, the heat of his palm soothing the ache there.
“A little tender. What are you working on?” I ask, pressing a kiss to his bearded cheek.
“Your case.”
My muscles tense as I turn toward the computer, but I can’t figure out what I’m looking at. “What’s going on?”
“Doc and I are trying to figure out where Brandon is while he’s in town so we can serve him with a restraining order. Since he lives in California, it would be pointless to have it sent to his home address while he’s on the other side of the country,” he explains.
“Do you think that would be enough to make him leave us alone? Just a piece of paper telling him to stay away?” I ask, not so sure of the answer myself.
“We’ve done a background check. He has no prior arrests. No calls to the address for domestic violence. Just a couple of speeding tickets. And since your sister never filed a police report about her assault, we’re going to have to get crafty, because of the pesky burden of proof we have to have in order to file for the restraining order.” He takes his glasses off and tosses them on the keyboard.
“I took pictures of Astrid when she was all bruised up,” I offer.
“That will definitely help.” He nods. “And we’ve got the letter he left on your windshield. I told Doc to ask your sister if she has any e-mails or text messages saved from Brandon that could be used as well.”
“And then what?”
“When the restraining order gets approved and we have him served, we hope for the best, that he’ll choose to wisely tuck his tail and move on,” Seth says, nuzzling his face into my neck.
“But if not?” I question, my heart thudding in my chest.
“You let me worry about that, doll.”
“But—”
“To paraphrase the badass Bryan Mills, portrayed by the great Liam Neeson in Taken…” Seth drops his voice and looks me dead in the eye, his face solemn. “What I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like him. I will look for him, I will find him, and I will kill him."
My eyes grow wide. “Are… are you serious?” I whisper, unable to tell if he really is just quoting another movie. He seemed so sincere as he said the words. If he’s not being serious, he’d give a damn good Oscar-winning performance if he ever went into acting.
His face softens only slightly. “Me? No. I only handle the technical side of the business. Although, that side still has the ability to make someone’s life a living hell.” He winks.
There’s something in the way he’s looking at me that tells me there’s more to what he’s saying than just the words he’s speaking. And then I remember him saying in his office yesterday morning that there was a story behind his security team he wasn’t ready to tell me about yet.
“But one of your partners…?” I prompt.
His face stoic, he turns to his computer. The man has a poker face like none I’ve ever seen before. I can read not a single emotion cross his face or in his eyes as he silently thinks about how to reply. When he finally does, my stomach drops.
“I think it’s time we have a little talk.”
I nod, and he swivels the computer chair—the same chair he had me face-down on not twelve hours ago as he undressed me for the first time—and stands, placing me on my feet. He takes my hand and leads me through the beach house. We stop in the kitchen, the weight of the air pressing down on me as the tension builds, wondering just what the hell he’s going to tell me.
Seth grabs a bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator, along with a bottle of orange juice that wasn’t there last night. He must’ve gone to the store this morning before I woke up. Pulling two flutes down from a cabinet, he mixes each of us a mimosa before replacing the ingredients back into the fridge. He hands me one of the glasses and holds my other hand as he pulls me out onto the back porch. It’s almost like he doesn’t want to let go of me for fear I will run. Could what he’s about to say really be that bad?
We sit down on the swing, the salty air filling my lungs as I take a sip of my drink. He pulls me close against his side, resting his arm along the back of the seat. Taking a deep breath, he begins.
“Doc had been following my educational career since he saw me in an article when I was sixteen. By then, I was only two years away from getting my masters at MIT. When I graduated, he approached me with an idea. He’d been a therapist for several years, and the work was getting to him. He could help all his clients the way he had been trained to do, but something kept him up at night. There were several victims of sexual assault whose attackers were never held accountable for their actions. More often than not, these terrible people were getting off with minimal punishment, if any. He offered me a job. In the beginning of our partnership, using my computer skills, we made these men pay in our own way. Draining their bank accounts and giving the money to the victims. Public humiliation done by an anonymous source. Things like that.” He puts his mimosa to his lips and drains the flute in one gulp, setting the glass down on the wicker table next to the swing.
“But then came Sandra,” he says, his voice low. “Sandra and her college roommate had been assaulted by their boss at their job at a supermarket a few towns away from where we live. Sandra went to the police to file a report alone because her roommate just wanted to forget it ever happened. Turns out nothing ever came about from the rape kit they did on Sandra as she waited too long to have it done. And it probably didn’t help her case that her boss was the police chief’s brother. Being discouraged, too ashamed of what had happened to pursue anything further, she gave up and decided to go to therapy, which is when she found Doc. The girls quit working there, found new jobs, but her roommate became depressed. Sandra tried to get her to come with her to therapy, but her friend refused, turning to self-medicating instead. She ended up OD’ing while Sandra was away visiting her parents. When she came home, she found her with the needle in her arm.”
I gasp, tears filling my eyes for what the two girls had been through. I can’t even imagine something like that happening to me and feeling like there was nothing I could do about it, my attacker getting away with it scot-free.
“As you can imagine, Sandra’s world went from pretty shitty to begin with, to bottoming out. Not only was she in therapy, trying to heal from being raped, but now her best friend, the girl she lived with, worked with, had been through everything with, had taken her own life,” Seth tells me, shaking his head. “She was beyond therapy, and her family feared she too would end her life, so they had her committed.
“Something inside Doc snapped. And when he told me the story, we mutually agreed taking this guy out our normal way just wouldn’t be enough.” He glances at me, as if to see my reaction. I don’t know what he finds written in my expression, but whatever it is, he continues on. “That’s when we hired Glover. Doc had been following his career the way he had mine, and Corbin’s as well, who was eventually brought on a few years ago.”
Seth goes silent, and when I look up at his handsome profile, he’s staring out at the ocean, his poker face back in place. I take a breath and finally find the courage to ask, “And what were Glover and Corbin hired to do?” I have a feeling I already know the answer, but I want to hear him explain it.
I see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, the only hint that he’s struggling to tell me the truth.
“We have a code,” he replies instead of answering my question directly. “We only take out the people who deserve it, the ones who escape justice unfairly.” He pauses, seeming to search his mind for his next words. “Last year, do you happen to remember the case about the swimmer who was charged with drugging, raping, and murdering a girl at his frat party? It made national news.”
Something niggles at my memory, and my brow furrows. “I don’t watch the news, but I think I recall some of my coworkers talking about it. Something about him getting off with a super light sentence?”
“Yep, that’s the one,” he confirms.
“Wait… didn’t he end up killing himself?” I can’t remember specifics. I normally tuned out the people gossiping while I was trying to work.
“Not quite. This motherfucker had drugged, raped, and ended up smothering this poor girl to death, and because he was a rich little prick who had daddy’s money to hire the best defense lawyers around, he got off with only a few months in jail. That’s when we were hired to take care of things,” he tells me, his voice full of conviction. “Long story short, no one really questioned it when they found the former swim team captain floating dead in a pool he’d been practicing in after-hours. The head injury was accurate to one caused by someone miscalculating and running into the pool wall. Everyone just assumed it was karma doing its thing. The way all of our jobs play out.”
I absorb everything he tells me, bracing myself for the horror of sitting next to a man who helps kill people for a living to sink in.
And yet it never comes.
In fact, what I feel right now is nowhere near horror. It’s closer to… pride? Yes, pride. The wonderful man sitting next to me is part of a team doing something any human with a conscience would fantasize about doing, doling out justice to those who escape persecution.
“You’re a vigilante,” I breathe, and his eyes meet mine.
“Mercenary, doll. We get paid for it. But I’d still do it in a heartbeat for these victims’ families, even if they couldn’t afford our services. But they pay without hesitation, because we do for them what they are too scared to do themselves, or in most cases, what they lack the skills to do themselves. We’ve perfected the art of making it look like an accident. As long as we don’t veer off of our strict policy, a life for a life, then we have nothing to worry about,” he explains.
“And you’ve never actually… taken care of one of these people yourself? Like, you only stay behind the scenes?” I clarify.
“Correct. I do all the legwork. Surveillance, digging into backgrounds… anything that can be found and used through technology. I help set up a strategy, and Corbin and Glover do the dirty work.” He shrugs. “I promised you open and honest. This is my truth. There’s only one other person besides our team who knows who we are and what we do, and that’s Corbin’s wife. With my skill set, I’m able to keep us completely anonymous and under the radar.”
I narrow my eyes. “That’s why you never came up in my Internet search. I couldn’t believe a child genius who went to MIT when he was twelve wouldn’t be in some kind of news article.”
He grins as he nods before his face sobers once again. “I know this sounds crazy because we haven’t known each other that long, but I feel like fate has something to do with all of this. You literally lived on the other side of the country, and somehow you managed to run away to the very town where I live, and got a job working at one of only two places I go outside my club. I’m a fucking genius and I can’t even begin to calculate those odds. Too many coincidences. I know it has to be fate.” His arm that’s around the back of the swing comes forward, and he takes my hand, bringing it up to his lips as he speaks against my knuckles. “What I’ve confided in you is my way of telling you I trust you, and I hope you take me seriously when I say I’m never letting you go. I would’ve never told you any of this if I wasn’t sure you are the one I want to be with.”
It’s this confession that makes me gulp and take a deep breath more than anything else. Not the fact the man I just gave myself to last night has turned out to be a mercenary who assists in killing people for a paycheck. No. It’s that this handsome, incredibly sexy, ridiculously smart, caring, hilarious, wonderful man is telling me that he wants… me. Just me. Where I don’t find myself particularly special in any sort of way, he makes me feel extraordinary. And it’s as I’m swelling with the emotions he’s brought out of me with the trust he’s put into me, I blurt out the only thing swirling inside my mind that makes any sense.
“I love you, Seth.”
I feel the air leave his lungs through his nose across the back of my hand as his eyes shut, still holding my knuckles pressed to his lips. And just as I’m starting to feel unsure about this whole open and honest thing, I squeak as I’m suddenly midair and straddling Seth as I face him on the swing. One of his hands shoots into my hair at the back of my neck as the other presses against my lower back. His strong arms pull until I am plastered to him, not even a breath of air between our fronts as he attacks my mouth with a passion so powerful I feel it down to my very soul.
He breaks our kiss just long enough to reply, “I love you, Twyla,” before he nips at my bottom lip, drawing it into his mouth before letting it go to soothe with his tongue.
And then he stands, my legs wrapping around his waist as he carries me back to the beach house and to the bedroom. Where he makes love to me until I can’t figure out when one day ends and another begins.