CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

NICK

“There might be a slight delay in my arrival,” Warren told me, his face looking haggard and his eyes tired. I was cooking breakfast for Alicia in the kitchen when Warren called me for a video chat. Early morning light was streaming through the windows, lighting the open floor plan of this part of the bungalow with an ethereal glow. Or maybe that was just me.

Last night was hands down the best night of my entire life, and the others in the top five already also belonged to Alicia. She was still sleeping, so I showered and got dressed, wanting to wake her up with breakfast in bed. Then maybe have her for breakfast in bed.

My hard-on took a nosedive the second Warren’s face showed up on my phone, however. I was all business again, and my senses were tingling as soon as he said the word delay. “A delay? How so?”

“There was another incident early this morning,” he said.

“What? So soon?” My spine snapped straight. We were getting to the pointy end of this thing if the mobsters were getting brazen enough to orchestrate another attack on the same day that many of the others in their organization had been arrested. “Are you okay?”

Warren dragged a hand through his rapidly graying hair, the stress of the situation glued to his features. “I’m fine. I very nearly wasn’t, though. Thank god for well-placed fire alarms.”

“Where was your team?” He shouldn’t have needed to pull a damn fire alarm. They should’ve gotten him out at the first sign of trouble.

Warren sighed a heavy sigh, both of his hands in his hair. “That’s the thing. They’re not with me anymore. They’re guarding an undercover FBI agent that was supposed to be a decoy for me. We have a serious leak somewhere, Nick.”

“How many people knew of your location?” I didn’t doubt that he was right about there being a high-level leak.

Warren shook his head, his eyes drilling into mine. “Only one.”

My stomach turned, and my grip on the phone tightened, the bacon sizzling in the pan forgotten. “Who?”

“Emilia,” Warren said, his voice firm. “But it’s not her. She would never betray us. She’s like a mother to Alicia. Someone must have hacked into my server to find the booking information.”

He wouldn’t be the first person to be betrayed by someone he thought he could trust, but I’d look into Emilia on my own time. “Have your IT people found evidence of a hack?”

“Not yet, but they will,” he said.

I wasn’t so sure about that. I’d checked into Warren’s entire staff when the first murmurs of a leak started happening. His IT guys were good, and the FBI would’ve been all over them and his servers.

Something was definitely off. “Okay, keep me in the loop.”

“Will do. I’ll be there in a few days. A week tops. You just focus on keeping Alicia safe. On that note, however—” His eyes focused on something behind me, and his voice bellowed out. “Alicia!”

I spun to find her behind me, half-dressed in only a shirt and panties, with no pants to speak of. Her hair was still wild and tousled, and her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes flashed in anger as soon as she heard Warren’s voice.

“What?” Her voice was harsh and clipped as her arms folded over her chest defiantly.

“What’re you doing running around the house with no pants on? Go get dressed immediately, young lady.” Warren commanded, then snapped at me. “Eyes on me, Nick.”

Alicia shrugged, staring daggers at her father. “I will walk around in whatever the hell I want to.”

Predictably, Warren lost his shit, his face going so red it was almost maroon, his voice dangerously close to screaming. “You will not. You will not prance around half-naked with a man in the house. Are you out of your damn mind?”

Alicia’s level of anger matched, or perhaps outweighed, Warren’s rage. “Maybe I am, but if I am, it’s because of you. You put me in a life-threatening situation. You’re to blame for the fact that I’m trapped here, and you hired said man.”

“To protect you, Alicia. Not to fuck you.” Warren seethed, his eyes never leaving hers. I was simply the go between, holding up the phone for them to scream at each other.

“I will fuck whoever I want, whenever I want. I keep telling you this. I’m an adult and you can’t control me anymore.” Alicia spoke passionately, flipping her hair over her shoulder as she glared at him.

“So, you fucked your bodyguard to get back at me? What the fuck is going on there, Nick?”

Alicia didn’t hesitate to answer. “Did I say I fucked Nick? Because the point that I was trying to make was that I was free to do whatever the hell I wanted, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

“Nothing’s going on here,” I tacked on, outwardly as cool and stoic as ever. Inside though, I wasn’t quite so calm. Alicia could out me to her father at any time. I would be yanked from this job so fast, I would get whiplash from it, and I would lose her to someone else.

I couldn’t let that happen, but I also couldn’t step into their fight. Not really. If I appeared overly insistent that I wasn’t fucking her, it would arouse suspicion, so I kept quiet and let them wage their war.

“There better not be anything happening between the two of you,” Warren was saying. “You have your rules, Nick. I have mine. You know that my first rule is that I trust no one, but I’m trusting you with what is most precious to me. Don’t make me regret that.”

Alicia rolled her eyes. “Don’t try and guilt Nick into anything. He’s not to blame for the fact that we’re both cooped up here. You are. So, don’t lay into him when he hasn’t done a single thing wrong.”

Guilt sank like a stone to the pit of my stomach, because that wasn’t true. Being with Alicia might not have felt wrong, and she might have believed that it wasn’t, but I knew better. It was very fucking wrong, and yet, I was completely powerless to resist her.

That wasn’t the end of Alicia’s tirade, though. “I’m the one who has no pants on, not Nick. And you know what? I’ll walk around completely naked if I want to because it’s one of the few things in my life I have control over right now. So, I’ll wear pants when I want to and whatever the hell else I want to wear, because all of this is your fault. If it wasn’t for you, I would be back in my apartment, living my own life. But I’m not.”

“Alicia.” Warren’s voice was a low warning.

“Don’t ‘Alicia’ me in that patronizing tone. We’re done here. There’s nothing left to say.” She then turned on her heel and flounced away outside, very pointedly choosing a door that was within Warren’s eyesight at the angle I was holding him.

It was as if she were trying to flaunt whatever meager freedom she felt she had in his face. She was pointedly separating herself from both me and her father, and while I understood exactly what she doing, she was alone out there. Exposed and endangering herself. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone clenched into a fist at my side.

“I’ll go after her,” I told Warren, already moving for the door. “She shouldn’t be alone out there.”

Warren hesitated. “No, she shouldn’t. But can she still hear me?”

I looked through the open shuttered windows to the balcony outside. Alicia was standing at its very edge, gripping onto the wooden railing as her shoulders heaved with heavy breaths. The wind whipped at her loose hair and caused her shirt to flutter, revealing the bottom of the sculpted cheeks of her ass and the tiny, lacy panties she was wearing underneath.

Purposely not tilting the screen so Warren could see the sight that was causing all my blood to run south and my cock to strain against my jeans, I shook my head. “No, she can’t hear you anymore. I can see her, though. She’s safe. She’s just on the balcony.”

I moved for the door to call her back inside like I’d said I would, but Warren’s barked command stopped me. “Wait.”

I stopped in my tracks, my hand resting on the brass door handle. “She’s exposed out there by herself. I really should get her. Balcony or not.”

My voice was firm and didn’t betray a single hint of the emotions I felt when I looked at her, or thought about the fact that she was possibly in danger out there on the balcony. She was a damn easy target from the water.

“Yes, you should. I’ll let you go in just a second, but Nick.” Warren’s voice was edged in steel, and his eyes narrowed and pinned mine, his breathing heavy. “I don’t care what she says about walking around naked. You convince her to put clothes on, and you keep your eyes off of her.”

“Of course.” I nodded. It was a complete lie. Even if I wasn’t in love with her, as much as that complicated things even further, there was no way that any man would be able to tear his eyes from Alicia naked. The memory of her standing there in the center of the bedroom, staring me down in a silent challenge with her perky breasts and neatly trimmed pussy on display was enough to make me hard as a fucking rock, more than ready to go again.

It was so distracting that I zoned out a bit for the first time in my life while talking to a client, who just happened to be laying into me about not doing exactly what I’d been thinking about doing and exactly what I had been doing hours before. And incidentally, that I was hoping to get to do for hours more.

“I’m serious here, Nick. If you so much as lay a finger on Alicia, the only one who will be needing a bodyguard is you.” The steel edge in voice was so hard now, that it was like it had been tempered in the fires of hell.

“I’m aware of that,” I replied curtly. “Now, if you’ll let me get back to my job, I need to get Alicia inside.”

“Fine,” Warren snapped. “Have I made myself clear?”

“Crystal. I will not look at Alicia. I will not touch Alicia.” I agreed completely and without reservation. I also knew that it was possibly the biggest lie that I’d ever told, even if it should’ve been the absolute truth.