“Not really. Now, tell me where those secrets lead, and I’ll be there to kick whoever’s ass I need to. As long as you promise I get to blow someone up.”
“One person wasn’t enough for you? I thought you said you had it under control. Perfectly safe…I believe that’s what you said.”
“It’s a bomb, Rae. What about that said perfectly safe?”
“The man who put it together!” I snapped. I spun and faced him, getting more pissed off by the second. “I let you strap a bomb to me. The least you could have done was make sure there was no way for him to activate the bomb! And pulling the wires was a really fucking obvious way to kill me!”
He stared at me for a moment. “Alright, I’ll concede that there may have been a better deterrent for that situation, but honestly, I didn’t expect him to pull them.”
“It’s Rafe,” I snapped. “You should always expect the unexpected.”
“I know that now.”
“You should have known it before,” I argued. “How many times have we dealt with him?”
He groaned, tossing back his head. “How long are you going to yell at me? Because I really have other things to be doing.”
“Like what?”
“Like dipping my head in acid. Anything other than listening to you rail at me for what you perceive as a mistake.”
I stared at him incredulously. “You almost let him blow me up! I’d say that’s a pretty fucking obvious mistake!”
“You have your opinion. I have mine. Now, since we’re at an impasse, I’ll leave you to your fuming.”
He turned and walked away, strutting around like he hadn’t almost gotten me killed. Huffing in irritation, I turned on my heel and headed for the IT room. I was done with men and their idiotic ways of thinking. Except, when I got to the IT room, Duke was leaning against my table, arms crossed over his chest as he glared at me.
The man was sex personified. With dark scruff on his jaw and slightly messy hair that looked like he was constantly running his hands through it, my ovaries nearly exploded the moment I stepped into the room. And that was just the beginning of it, unfortunately. Big muscles had never been a turn-on before, but nobody wore them quite like Duke. The way he stood in his black t-shirt with the material stretching across his biceps…damn. And the way his jeans were slung low on his hips, making me want to lift his shirt and touch that dark trail of hair I knew led down to the most exciting parts of his anatomy…
I had to stop staring, but it was so damn hard.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, snapping out of my lust-filled haze.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“Um…I work here. You don’t. How did you even get access to this room?”
“You’re not the only one with skills.”
I rolled my eyes at his arrogance. He was the type of man that always had a smile on his face, but at times, I caught him looking like a man on the verge of murder. I’d done my research on him. The only thing that popped was the ex-wife and kid she took off with. Maybe he just didn’t trust women, and that’s where the evil stare came in.
That didn’t mean I had to put up with his shit. The way he stood there, as if he didn’t have to explain a damn thing to me, really made me want to punch him. I’d been around them long enough to know that all military men were alike. Full of themselves and unable to help but congratulate themselves on how awesome they were.
I was better.
“Did you have a point in coming down here other than to prove how amazing your skills are?”
“What was the fucking plan?” he asked, getting right to the point.
“Gee, don’t beat around the bush.”
“Why would I? I want to know what was really going on.”
I chuckled at that. “Duke, you made it pretty clear to Cash that you didn’t want to work here. You don’t have the right to ask me questions like that.”
He stormed over to me, crowding my space, which I didn’t approve of. Mostly because I was on the verge of ripping that already tightly stretched shirt from his body and having my way with him.
“Fuck, you drive me insane.”
“Well, I’m glad to see my winning personality is still getting to you.”
I shoved around him to get to my computer, but as soon as I sat down, he spun the chair around so I was facing him. His lips slammed down on mine, immediately encapsulating me in his scent. My fingers wound through his hair just a moment before I realized what I was doing and pushed him away.
“Nice try, but it’s not going to work.”
I spun back around and wiped at my mouth, not really wanting to erase the memory of his lips on mine.
“What’s not going to work?”
“Kissing me. That won’t get me to suddenly fill you in on what’s going on.”
“That’s why you think I kissed you?”
I sighed, opening up my screen to renew my search into this strange key. “Duke, as fun as this is, I have work to do.”
“I wouldn’t want to hold you back.”
“Yet, clearly, you are.”
I pushed up from my chair and grabbed him by the arm, leading him out of the room. I would have just shoved him out and left it at that, but part of me wanted just a few more minutes with him. Even if he was a mechanic, and the opposite of what I needed in my life.
“You don’t have to drag me out of here.”
“I think I do. You shouldn’t even be in the building. I’m not sure what you did to convince Cash to let you in, but my room is off-limits. No one goes in my office.”
“And for that, I’m being marched out of here. You know, you have trouble trusting people, Rae.”
“Yep,” I said, not even denying it.
“Maybe you should see someone about that.”
One week later…
“I’ve been through all the evidence a hundred times,” I snapped. “Whatever’s going on here, Rafe is behind it.”
I paced Cash’s office, furious that I couldn’t figure out where FNG was. The whole thing was a clusterfuck, and the more time that passed, the more likely it was we’d never figure out what really happened to him.
“Look, you were the one that went along with the brilliant plan to release him,” Cash sighed. “Now you want me to find out some way to question what’s really going on?”
He had a point. I went along with the harebrained scheme, the one that nearly got me blown up. That was a week ago, and ever since then, I’d been kicking myself for allowing Rafe to slip through our fingers when we still had so many unanswered questions. But it was a gamble. If we kept him there and he was, as we suspected, planted deep in some sector of the syndicate, we were putting his life and all of ours in danger by keeping him with us.
Cash leaned forward, resting his arms on his desk. “Alright, let’s assume that Rafe really is involved in FNG’s disappearance, how do we prove it?”
I bit my nail as I considered this. “I have no clue. But when I was helping him escape, I said something along the lines of him having something to do with FNG’s disappearance. It was the look he got on his face, Cash. It was like he hadn’t expected for us to figure it out, or at least not that quickly.”