So cute.
She was killing him.
Branch interrupted the cuteness because he could take no more.
“Rewind, what do you eat?”
And she kept fucking smiling.
“Mostly everything else.”
“I’ll figure something out,” he grunted.
“Branch?” she called.
He focused on her.
“Thanks for liking getting your ass whacked.”
Shit, he was going to kiss her.
To stop himself, he rolled, taking her with him, surprising an adorable little “Eek!” out of her, and he set them on their feet beside the bed.
There, he smacked her ass and ordered, “Key.”
She slapped her ankles smartly together, saluted and rapped out, “Aye, aye, Captain.”
Then she shot him a grin and strolled to the stairs as he muttered, “Smartass.”
“Until the day I die,” she called, skipping, goddamned skipping, down the stairs.
Narrow stairs.
Shit, she was going to break her neck.
He’d have a word with her about skipping on those fucking stairs.
And setting her alarm.
And getting motion sensor lights.
He took a second to take a breath before he enjoyed the burn in his ass as he walked to the bathroom.
He looked in her mirror that had curlicues etched into all its scalloped edges.
Curlicues.
Not one inch of her house wasn’t decorated.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
He took in his reflection.
“You’re an asshole,” he said.
His reflection shared that he was totally goddamned right.
And still.
He didn’t give a damn.
nine
Hope for Something
BRANCH
Branch got out of his shower and inspected his ass in the mirror.
He saw what he felt.
It was red and raw.
He shook his head because he got off on the look of it, mostly because he got off on the memory of how it got that way.
He also shook his head because he knew he was taking being an asshole to the highest heights, seeing as, even an hour after leaving Angie, time he should have taken to get his head straight, he still didn’t give a damn.
What he did give a damn about was the fact that the ring of red lipstick she’d planted around his cock, yanking him out of his jeans and dropping in front of him to do it before he’d walked out her kitchen door, had been washed away in the shower.
He didn’t like losing it but with some of the shit he had to do that day, it wouldn’t be good he smelled of lavender, mint and Evangeline.
He wrapped a towel around his hips, walked into the kitchen to see if he had any food (this would be a negatory, but he could always hope there was a stray leftover, fast-food chicken tender that didn’t need to be thrown away a month ago), his phone chirped on the counter and he looked down at it.
He picked it up, engaged the screen and realized, with all things Evangeline, he hadn’t checked it since he hit her pad last night.
He had three missed calls from Aryas, one from Gerbil and two voicemails.
Shit.
He went to the voicemails.
Aryas’s was first.
“Call me as soon as, brother,” he demanded.
Gerbil’s was second.
“News, no biggie, I don’t think, but you’ll wanna know.”
Neo-Nazis could take over the world and Gerbil would describe it as “no biggie” because he lived in a bunker and had enough freeze-dried rations for him and five generations of his spawn (if he ever got around to making any) to wait out a nuclear strike. So his message could mean anything.
Since it was Aryas’s third call that was the last that came in, Branch started with him.
“Yo, thank fuck you called. I’m about to board a plane to Seattle and I got some worries I don’t want to take with me,” Aryas stated as greeting.
“Hit me,” Branch replied, staring at his countertops empty of anything but his toaster and mail, all of it fliers to “Occupant” because no one knew he existed.
Still, there was a shitload of it.
He didn’t need mail.
He needed a coffeemaker.
And a bagel.
“Word came in. I know you buzzed her but contacts of mine shared someone fitting the description of Evangeline was seen entering the last Pound. Won’t mean contact for you with her, but I gotta know if my girl is taking risks for reasons I gotta shut down. So gotta ask you to get on her.”
Damn.
“You with me?” Aryas asked when Branch didn’t answer.
“Someone’s reporting to you about her?” Branch asked, not liking that idea at all.
“Not a lot of petite, curly-haired Dommes who look like they got their outfit off a Dolce and Gabbana catwalk hit the Pound, brother. A boy of mine calls one of the Pound’s security an acquaintance. They were having a beer. Shit was shared. Tweaked my guy. Don’t even know if it was her. So yeah, in a roundabout way, if she’s doing something seriously stupid and it was her, someone’s reporting on Evangeline.”
That wasn’t a problem. At the Pound, she’d cause a stir even if she hadn’t given a skilled demonstration on how to wield a whip.
“She was there for me,” Branch told him.
“Say again?”
“Apparently, she didn’t agree with my decision not to go there with her. She found me. Shared that. I’ve spent the last two nights at her place.”
A sucking void of silence.
“It’s good, Aryas, and she’s fine,” Branch assured.
“Best five grand I ever spent.”
“Come again?”
“Nothing. Last two nights, you say?”
Branch had been in the army and he’d worked on a “government task force” that was mostly men.
Regardless, the women he’d worked with usually knew how to keep their mouths shut and listen.
The men ran their mouths like idiots and felt knowledge was power, no matter how inane that knowledge was.
And if it was gossip, they fell on it like vultures.
And that never changed.
“We’re not talking about this,” Branch warned, going to the pile of mail and sweeping the lot of it in the trash bin at the end of the counter, the bin half full and not that wide, this meaning some of it fell on the floor.
“You got plans of going back?” Aryas pushed.
“Again, we’re not talking about this.”
“You do.”
Fucking Aryas.
“So you finally got your head out of your ass,” the man noted when Branch again said nothing.
“Did I say we’re not talking about this?” Branch asked.
“How is she?” Aryas asked back, his tone losing the wiseass quality, concern hitting it.
Branch was not going to share his fuckup of that morning.
But he was going to share that Aryas had nothing to worry about.
“Back in the saddle like she never left it.”
“Which means you’re getting your shit jacked and good.”
Fucking Aryas.
“We’re done,” Branch stated.
“Wait,” Aryas said quickly. “While I got you, Nibs is out on paternity. Pedro’s lost a friend, cancer, bad shit. He has to drive to New Mexico. Tyler’s got some food poisoning that’s fucking his shit up, he’s been out two days and it looks like he’s not coming back for a few more. Which means Tina Marie letting Jake go on that mini-cruise with his girl was poor timing. The boys in the booth are scrambling to cover. It’d be good, tomorrow night, you could help out.”
It would not be good.
That meant a night away from Evangeline.
But Aryas was one of the only people in Phoenix he could call a friend.
And he paid in cash.
He also didn’t blink at Branch’s
fees.
Not to mention, saving for a lifetime of living in a shack on some unknown beach in some unknown country far away meant Branch needed to take all the cash he could get. He was good with a shack but he also felt it important to eat something other than coconuts he could shake from his own trees once he got there.
“I’m there.”
“Thanks, brother. I’d say say hi to Leenie, but I figure you’ll tell me to go fuck myself.”
“You’d be right.”
There was laughter shaking his “Later, Branch.”
There was none shaking Branch’s “Later.”
He disconnected and waited to call Gerbil until after he’d pulled on some shorts and jeans and a comb through his hair that he really needed to find time to get cut (something, if Evangeline was in his life how she’d claimed him, he should ask her if she wanted—Dommes had a thing about hair, as evidenced with how Angie had used his that morning).
He heard a click, a pop and two more clicks before his untraceable call to Gerbil went through and the man answered with a deep baritone, “Wassup?”
Gerbil was not called Gerbil for any reason a man could be called Gerbil.
He was called Gerbil so people who’d never met him would think there was a reason to call him Gerbil, thus making them vastly underestimate him.
He was actually a six-foot-tall, ripped black man who, before he’d slipped off the grid, had more than once been asked to be on “Men of…” charity calendars.
One thing Branch had not done as a submissive was take a man.
One thing Branch never would do, seeing as the only stipulations to his play were single-partner, nonexhibition (unless he was at a Pound, but that was over) Femme-Domme play, would be take a man.
He liked his ass fucked solely if a woman was behind the cock.
Hell, it could even be he liked his ass fucked because there’d always be a woman behind the cock.
Still, he could say feeling no hits to his manhood that Gerbil was the handsomest man he’d ever seen.
He was also the genius who’d been recruited from the marines to be their tech and comm support for tactical missions before he got fed up with smelling the stench of the shit they did and disappeared off the face of the planet.
But he’d kept in touch with Branch, Rob and Lex.
So when Branch, injured and weaponless, needed an extraction out of a jungle after his own command had set him up to be taken out, and he miraculously came upon a working pay phone in a septic tank that sad country called a town, his first and only call was to Gerbil.
And when Gerbil found out what had happened to the team, he was all-in to assist Branch carrying out what needed to be done.
“What’s up is you called me,” Branch told him.
“Yeah. Right. Blips, man. About fifteen alerts,” Gerbil replied. “No, make that twenty.”
“I don’t speak geek or read minds, man, fill in the blanks,” Branch returned.
“’Course,” Gerbil said good-naturedly. “See, I got tags, you know, on all the files that have anything to do with anything I give a shit about, right?”
“I’m with you.”
And he was, but barely.
Gerbil, as usual, didn’t care.
He kept going.
“Which means I get alerts on any files that are accessed that I’ve taken an interest in. Which means I got tags on all the files that were buried, but not deleted, because Raines is a fucktard, but that’s beside the point and you already know that. I digress. In short, this meaning I got tags on all the files on all the missions Rifle Team took on. And twenty of them have been accessed.”
Branch grew deathly still.
This was because he had been the lieutenant in charge in the field of the government’s officially unofficial elite cleanup squad, a squad called Rifle Team.
“And?” he clipped when Gerbil said no more.
“No one has touched those files in over three years. I did some digging. There’s a new man in town, this being the replacement to the replacement that Raines handpicked when he retired, the first replacement having been asked to kindly pack up his shit and get the fuck out before he fucked any more shit up. And we’ll just say from some of the shit they uncovered that even I haven’t seen that it’s seeming Raines didn’t have the approval from higher-ups to green-light some of the things you guys did. It’s also seeming the asswipe took some not-so-small amounts of cash for favors, sending the team into action on these missions that not only had no green light, no one knew fuck-all about them, and other things, which I find unsurprising and I’ve told you that’s been my theory since—”
“Gerbil, focus,” Branch bit out. “What does this mean?”
“Right, John. Just to say, they can’t open an investigation because no way the government could expose that shit without huge threats to intelligence, but more, foreign relations. But Raines has gone off radar.”
Cold carved through his stomach.
“What the fuck?” Branch bit out.
“Not from me, brother. Relax,” Gerbil assured. “I know exactly where he is. But retirement stopped bein’ as cushy as it seemed when he was unofficially officially asked to haul his ass into the office to have a few chats.”
“Fuck,” Branch whispered.
“No matter, John. Retirement wasn’t cush anyway, seein’ as he’s scared shitless any day you’re gonna rise from the dead, again, and make him eat a bullet. By the way, did I tell you he got another Rottweiler? Another Rottweiler. Now he has four. Didn’t take much when he bailed but took all four dogs with him. Like a dog can stop you. It was like he fell asleep the day they outlined your training.”
For some reason, this made Gerbil burst into deep, booming laughter.
Branch didn’t find shit funny.
“What’s your read on this?” he asked into Gerbil’s laughter.
Gerbil was still chuckling when he replied lightheartedly, “Welp, way I see it, no governmental investigation, but serious mishandling of government assets and traceable linkage to unofficially official activities in foreign territories that, if discovered, means some relations that are iffy at best might get iffier, those files won’t get redacted. They’ll be destroyed. And another team like Rifle Team will be dispatched to deal with anyone who could be considered a vulnerability. So, seeing as you’re dead, and I’m also dead, even though I enjoyed Christmas with my folks in the Bahamas, thank you for not asking, the only one left is Raines.”
Damn it to hell.
Gerbil kept talking.
“Raines sees the writing on the wall and he’s done living in terror behind his gazillion-dollar alarm system that I set off occasionally for shits and giggles and his four Rottweilers and his seven thousand guns, lying in wait in a puddle of his own piss for you to take him out. He’s disappeared.”
Shit.
Gerbil wasn’t done.
“What I need to know is, do you want me to keep track of him, which isn’t hard but I can’t say our new man in town is finding it as easy as I am, or do you want me to leak his whereabouts so you can strike the task of blowing his head off when you find a free day from your to-do list?”
“Death is relief. It’s the fear that’s the vengeance,” Branch reminded him.
Gerbil fell silent.
“Why didn’t he destroy the files himself?” Branch asked.
“That’d be a good question if he didn’t have someone almost as good as me to bury them. And encode them. Though, even buried and hard to crack, it was still fuckin’ stupid. The problem is, the new man in town might not be able to find Raines, but he’s no dummy and he’s got someone almost almost as good as me who dug them up. And by the way, that someone almost as good as me that worked for Raines is now MIA. My guess, weighted to the bottom of the Potomac.”
Christ.
“Why?” Branch asked. “And why now? If no one knows there’s something to dig up, why are they suddenly digging?”
“Good question.”
“Can you find out?”
“Brother, I can do anything.”
He said no more.
Branch sought patience.
Gerbil was a genius but like all the ones Branch had met, and there’d been a few, he was both ragingly eccentric and not real good with common sense.
When he found his patience, he ordered, “Well then, Gerbil, find out.”
“On it,” Gerbil muttered. “Now, what do you want to do with Raines?”
“Living in fear of a U.S. government kill squad finding him and me coming after him, what do you think I want to do with him?”
“Let him lie in wait in a puddle of his own piss for when he’ll buy a bullet,” Gerbil deduced.
“They don’t call you genius for nothing.”
“Mensa cried the day they thought I died.”
“Every single member or are you talking figuratively?”
“That’s always been you, John. I’m pretty and a mastermind and you’ve only ever just been pretty so you try to make it up by being a smartass.”
Branch found his mouth actually forming a grin.
It felt rusty and wrong so he stopped doing it.
Then he stood halfway to the door to his bedroom and realized he had a decision to make.
Considering he was going to her house that night and cooking dinner, though, he actually didn’t.
“I have something to share,” he said, walking back to the kitchen.
“I’m all ears.”
“There’s a woman.”
Another sucking void of silence.
“It’s very early,” he continued. “And it’s going nowhere. But she’s in my life. No idea how long it will last but want you to keep an eye out for her.”
“John, you’re dead,” Gerbil said quietly.
“I know that, man.”
“No one is looking for you. You can have a woman, brother,” he said quietly. “I keep tellin’ you, you want it, I can give you an entire life.”
“They find Raines, he could give me up.”
“John, you’re dead,” Gerbil repeated. “Raines is living in fear because you came back to life once. They killed you then I killed you and I do it better. He’s got four Rottweilers because he believes in ghosts since he’s seen one. But he sent men to look for you, files, by the way, he also didn’t destroy, but I did, even if they all reported the John Doe cadaver found in that Chicago morgue was irrefutably you. There’s no trace because I left no trace. You’re home free.”