The Dom Who Came in from the Cold, page 5
part #57 of Masters and Mercenaries Series
Kyle…his name was Kyle, and she wasn’t going to forget it because he was actually pretty cool…took a sip of the ridiculously expensive Scotch he’d found by running his hands over the panels of the walls of the office until he found the hidden safe.
How he’d cracked that sucker she was afraid to ask.
Captain America had a bad-boy side, and it was totally doing something for her.
Mostly taking her mind off that damn phone call.
“There it is. I thought we’d chased it away with pizza and Scotch and crimes we won’t go to jail for, but there it is.” He pointed with his pinky as he held the crystal rocks glass.
She sighed and sat back. He’d been open with her about the not sleeping thing and that he feared his brother’s cat’s judgment.
Perhaps it would be easier to talk about this with someone who didn’t really know her. It might also help if he was an asshole about it. She was starting to get some warm feelings toward this guy that she shouldn’t feel. Dangerous feelings. He still wasn’t her type, and she was sure she wasn’t his. If he blew off her pain, she would be able to view the guy the way she had from first impressions.
“My dad called.” She took a thoughtful sip of the Scotch. Even as emotional as this discussion was going to make her, she wasn’t about to disrespect the Scotch. She let the caramel flavor tease her tongue and then waited for the burn to warm her chest. “So the short story…”
“I want the long story.”
“It’s not that long, and it’s pretty ordinary. Do you have a good relationship with your bio dad?” She’d never met Grace Taggart’s first husband, and no one talked about him around the office which seemed pretty normal since Grace and Sean had been married for over a decade.
“He died when I was a kid. I remember it being good. He was a good dad. My brother had more time with him. I mostly remember how hard it was to lose him, how hard my mom worked to keep us on steady ground,” he said quietly. “It’s why I’m all for her marriage and happy to be part of the family. I don’t see it as… I wouldn’t say David thinks it was disrespectful for Mom to remarry. Not at all. He thinks Sean is great for our mom, and he loves our siblings. I think he worries it’s disrespectful for him to love Sean as a stepdad. Like it erases our dad, but it doesn’t. It gives us more family.”
If only that had been her problem. “Well, my father didn’t handle things the way your stepdad did. My dad has always been gentle and kind and utterly in need of someone to lead him through life. I didn’t know what to call it for the longest time, but now I know my dad requires a strong top, and not in a keep-it-to-the-club way.”
“Yeah, I don’t like to think about parents like that. In any way. It’s why I do not go to Sanctum. Never will. If I can run into my parents or aunts and uncles while they’re wearing fet wear, I say no.”
She hadn’t even thought about what a problem that would be for him. “Huh. I guess you don’t get that part of the employment package. Not everyone’s in the lifestyle.”
“Sanctum’s not the only club in town, and you’re getting distracted. You got a call from your father. Your dad needs a strong hand. What happened to your mom?”
“Cancer. He was great with her. He never left her side, did everything she needed, was there for me. I had graduated from college and found a place to live in the city. When I went home for the holidays, he’d already met someone, and he was married by New Year’s Day.”
“So she wasn’t as welcoming as Sean?”
“Not in any way. She has two daughters. They were twelve and seven at the time, and she pretty much took one look at me and decided I was a bad influence. I was told if I wanted to be a part of her family, I would need to change the way I dress and my hair color, and she didn’t think it was a good idea for a girl like me to work in such a male-dominated field. I was advised to get a new job if I ever wanted to find a husband.”
“Seriously? And your dad married her?” Kyle asked.
“Oh, yes, and asked me to get along. He begged me to get along with her. He tried compromising. I would be allowed at family functions if I would dress normally and play down my hair. I tried that twice, and it was uncomfortable to say the least. My stepmother actively hates me. She seems to think if I’m around she doesn’t have full control over my dad, and that’s important to her. She rules her family with an iron fist, and my dad doesn’t have the willpower to fight with her. I don’t even know if he loves her. I think she was strong enough to lead him and he followed.”
“But he called you today. Do you talk to him often?”
“Less and less as time goes by. He’s always working or doing something with the girls. I see my stepmom’s socials, and he’s close to her daughters.” There was an ache inside her heart that she was pretty sure would never go away no matter how nice the people she worked with were. She was starting to find a family here, but it could never wholly fill the space her father had occupied. “My dad’s sixtieth birthday is this Saturday, and they’re throwing a big party for him. I got an invitation.”
He stared at her for a moment. “Did he call to ask you not to come?”
He was good at extrapolating. “Apparently one of my stepsisters thought it would be funny if I showed up. I guess she didn’t think about the fact that I would send back the RSVP card. Needless to say Evelyn wasn’t amused and rescinded the invite. My father offered to meet me somewhere for breakfast, but I turned him down. Mostly because he canceled on me the last three times we made plans. I shouldn’t let it get to me, but I did today. I would have gone home and drank my own beer and shot things online, but my roommate is having a party, and they can get out of hand. I couldn’t stand the thought of fending off coked-up morons all night. I was planning on sleeping on the cot they keep for overnights. Sometimes we have to monitor an op overnight, and we take turns sleeping.”
“You need a new roommate. Or a new place to live. I thought it was awful when I had to move in with my brother, but beyond the whole place smelling like books and that mangy cat of his, he’s pretty much the most boring roommate in the history of time, and that’s how I like it.” He sat up, pouring himself another bit of Scotch. “As to your dad, I’m sorry about that. Having solid ground to walk on is so important. You were mourning your mom and lost your dad, too. Do you go to family functions that aren’t planned by your stepmom?”
She hadn’t expected his empathy. “I tried for a while. I’ve got a couple of aunts and uncles, but they live close to Austin so it’s hard to get down there. I’m lucky I have friends. I had a medical procedure, simple thing but I needed someone to take care of me for a couple of days. I asked my dad and he said no.”
“You were hurt and he didn’t take care of you?”
“They had a family cruise planned and he said he needed time to get ready. I stayed with a friend.” Those old wounds suddenly felt so fresh. Open and bleeding, but in a slow, painful way.
“He’s weak. If my stepfather had ever suggested my mother not pay attention to me and my brother, she would have left him. I’m sorry he wasn’t strong enough to take care of you the way he should have. He sucks.”
She sniffled and laughed because that was a simple truth. “He does suck.”
“My stepdad is so afraid of my mom that he sent someone else in to convince her that me going into the military was the best thing for me. I was in college at the time. Grad school, believe it or not.”
“You went to grad school?”
“Well, I didn’t finish,” he admitted. “I was damn glad I’d gotten through my undergrad so I could go in as an officer. Your stepmom would have liked me. I was studying business.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a business degree. It just wasn’t for me. Why did you need the military?”
He was quiet for a moment, and she wondered if their sharing was over. Then he set the glass down, and his eyes went to the windows and the lights outside. “I was in a car accident with a friend of mine. He was driving but it was my car. I drank too much, and he had to get us home. We got hit and he died. I found myself in a self-destructive spiral and needed to find some discipline. My mom wanted me to go into therapy, but I wasn’t anywhere close to being ready for that. I talked to one of my stepdad’s sous chefs at the time, and he convinced me the Navy was the way to go. As I’m still alive and not incarcerated, I think he was right. But now I’m back and I have no idea what I’m doing here.”
“I thought you were being a bodyguard.”
“Not the career I thought I would have. I don’t know how long I’m going to be here. I’m in a state of flux.”
She was starting to find this man fascinating. “Why did you leave the Navy?”
“I had an op go wrong, and now I don’t trust my own instincts. It was time to leave. It was time to try something new, but new feels like old—as in I have no car and no house and I’m living like I did when I was in college. I think I’m having an early midlife crisis.”
She could understand that. “I live with a woman who still parties like she’s nineteen and doesn’t know what silverware is. She steals plasticware from restaurants because that way we don’t have to clean anything. I don’t have any forks. I thought I would have forks by now.”
He chuckled, and the darkness seemed to have fled. “David has lots of forks. They match and everything. We should all learn from my brother. Except for the tweed jackets. How does he think that’s cool? They have leather patches on the sleeves.”
He started talking about his brother and MaeBe sat back.
And realized she was in real trouble with this man.
Chapter Three
Kyle Hawthorne was the most frustrating man she’d ever met.
She looked over to where he sat at one of the tables arranged around Top’s private banquet room, a beer in his hand. He wasn’t sitting with the rest of his team. He’d selected a place toward the back of the big space where he could almost disappear in the shadows. She was worried he might disappear altogether.
“Hey, how’s it going with the lawyer? I heard things went weird.”
She turned to her side and Kori Ferguson was standing there, a drink in her hand. There was an umbrella in that drink, but then there were a whole bunch of those since Beck and his girlfriend, Kim, had a sense of whimsy when it came to engagement/going away parties. His future wife was also his old one. This would be their second wedding. Big things had been happening at McKay-Taggart the last six or so weeks. Kimberly Solomon had been located and retrieved. Tasha Taggart had been catfished by a CIA operative, and Big Tag was still bemoaning the fact that he hadn’t been able to murder the dude because Kim had gotten there first.
Not that she’d been a part of that op. She’d been in her cube working tech for her friends and wondering why Kyle watched her but didn’t approach since that night when they’d connected. He’d been polite and nice and standoffish, so she’d let herself be set up.
She’d also gotten herself a brand-new apartment. Without a roommate. She was inching toward whole-ass adult status, and it felt good. Even if rejection still hurt. There were more fish in the sea than Kyle Hawthorne.
She just wished they didn’t remind her of guppies compared to Kyle’s obvious shark.
“He was all right, but I don’t think I’ll see him again,” she admitted. The lawyer had been her third blind date this month. It had also been her worst date, and it seemed like that story had already made the rounds. “He gave me a kind of creepy vibe and now he seems to always be around. He keeps calling and texting and showing up. Now Hutch wants me to take someone with me when I’m out of the office. It’s annoying. I will not let a guy set me up again. Women have way better instincts on who’s going to potentially murder us.”
A brow rose over Kori’s eyes. “Murder?”
She shrugged. “I’m being overly dramatic. It was just something about the guy.”
“Yes, if we’re going to talk about instinctively knowing which guy is potentially covering a dark past, we should discuss the way you watch Kyle Hawthorne walk by,” Kori pointed out. “Because damn, girl, he’s got do not touch may explode written all over him.”
“I’m not touching Kyle. I barely know the guy.” It was kind of a lie. She felt like she’d gotten to know the man that night in Tag’s office. She’d opened herself up to him.
“That is not what I heard. I heard a tale of an epically annoyed Big Tag who had his booze and treats stash raided by young Kyle so he could woo you with criminally obtained luxury items.”
Big Tag should have been a bard. “I had a bad night, and I couldn’t go back to my place. He happened to be working late, and we sat in Big Tag’s office and talked. That was all. His brother gave me a ride home, and we haven’t said much more than hi since then. He’s been training, and he went with Liam to New York when Erin couldn’t go, and that was a two-week assignment. Since then I’ve been down in the bodyguard unit to fix stuff two or three times, and we briefly chatted about how his trip went. I asked him if he wanted to come to game night and he said he wasn’t into those kinds of games.”
Kori’s eyes went wide. “Oh, and then the relationship was totally over.”
She had been surprisingly disappointed. Since that night over a month before when they’d sat up late talking and drinking, he’d put a wall between them. From what she could tell he’d put a wall between himself and everyone. As far as she knew Kyle Hawthorne worked and went home to his brother’s place and then got up and started it all over again. He ate lunch at his desk if he was in the building and worked out every day in the bodyguard gym. He didn’t seem to have made friends. She’d seen him at Top when she’d gone on a Saturday night with Hutch and some of the subs from Sanctum. They’d gone in for dinner before heading to the club, and Kyle had been hanging out at the bar. When she’d asked if he wanted to join them, he’d suddenly remembered he was supposed to be somewhere else.
She got it. That night had been a one-off and they weren’t going to be friends. The attraction was all one way.
So why did she catch him watching her?
Still, it wouldn’t be a good idea to let the world know she thought of the gorgeous bodyguard way too much for her own good. “Yes. Any chance that man had with me was totally gone when he looked at me like I was some weirdo asking him to play Chutes and Ladders.”
Kori snorted. “Yeah. He would soon discover how seriously you take board games.” She sobered. “But honestly, I think that dude has got some shit to work through, if you know what I mean.”
She felt the odd need to defend him. “He was in the Navy. He said he’d seen some things. He had an op go badly. I think he’s also still dealing with the car accident that took his friend.”
“That was a long time ago, but I suppose since he won’t go to therapy, he could still be dealing with it.” Kori waved as a couple of people they knew from Sanctum walked by.
MaeBe leaned in so no one would hear her. Dinner was over and there was a small dance floor and an open bar. She’d heard they’d already done a couple of weddings in this space, but Kim and Beck were planning on getting married in their new home in Bliss, Colorado. This was a way to say good-bye to a longtime employee and member of Sanctum, so there were lots of ears around. “I thought no one got into Sanctum without going through Kai or one of the other therapists.”
The Ferguson Clinic was next door to Sanctum. It provided an array of mental health services, and Kai Ferguson and his partners also evaluated anyone who wanted to play at Sanctum.
Kori nodded. “Yes, but they’ll accept another therapist’s eval. Kyle sat down with the therapist attached to The Club, where his actual membership is going to be. He’s only training at Sanctum because The Club doesn’t have a training program right now. They send all their people to us. So Leo Meyer cleared Kyle for play. He’s starting the program soon. We’ve got an interesting group coming in. Besides Kyle, there are a couple of doctors and a chemist. I don’t even know exactly what she does with chemicals, but she sounds smart.”
Would that incredibly smart woman end up being Kyle’s partner? There would be at least a couple of nights he would spend playing at Sanctum as part of his class. She would get the schedule and avoid those nights. It wouldn’t be hard. Mistress Lea ran the class, and MaeBe always came in and did the maintenance on the computers in the club. She made sure the Mistress’s system was running at optimal speed, and in exchange she pretty much got away with murder.
It could be handy to be seen as harmless and helpful.
Sometimes it was hard to be the only person around who wasn’t a walking weapon. Oh, sure, some of the support staff at the office hadn’t been in the military and/or intelligence agencies, but even the accountant Tag watched like a hawk had done his time in the Coast Guard.
It was pretty much her and Yasmin and Genny. There were actual protocols in place to protect the three of them in case of a paramilitary team invading the office. She was supposed to run and hide and not engage.
“She sounds like fun, but like I said, I don’t have anything to do with Kyle. I hope he has a blast with training and enjoys The Club.”
Kori stared at her like she was looking for a crack to shimmy through. “You know he watches you when you’re not looking.”
MaeBe didn’t intend to leave any holes open. She knew how gossip worked with this group. She loved watching the people around her get into all kinds of crazy adventures. But she wasn’t one of them. “I know, but I don’t think that’s about being attracted to me.”
“I think it is,” Kori argued. “I think he’s a scaredy cat and can’t figure out how to go for it. Or if he should go for it. I’ve talked to him a little, and I’ve been married long enough to pick up some of my husband’s skills. Kyle knows what he wants but he doesn’t think he deserves it. It being you in this case.”
She didn’t buy it. Kyle seemed like a man who would go after what he wanted with ruthless will. “I don’t know about that. I’ve been pretty open that I’m attracted to him, and he’s brushed me off.”
