HAYDEN (Dragon Security Book 5) (3 page)

She continued to type. Then she scooted some papers in my direction.

“These explain the program. I want you to know everything you’re getting yourself into.”

“Of course.”

“After we get that check, I’ll go back to the office and print out the paperwork, and then I’ll bring it to you first thing in the morning.”

“Sounds good.”

Sam came back into the dining room just as Dominic announced in my ear that she’d emailed him proof of Rita hacking into the bank’s accounts and changing the credit report that was generated under our fake names. It did nothing to change Bill and Lucy’s federal credit rating, but it would be enough to get the bank to approve a loan that was much riskier than they thought it was.

Sam slipped into her chair and smiled at me, tucking her iPad back into its little case there on the table.

“Everything okay?”

“As I was telling your husband,” Rita said, “I think there’ll be no problem for you to get approval. I’ll be bringing the paperwork by in the morning and once it’s signed, you should have a preapproval your hands by the end of the week.”

“Awesome!” Sam turned into me, a bright smile on her beautiful face. “That’ll be wonderful, darling! We can finally get out of this place and move into a proper house. Our forever home.”

“Wonderful,” I said, leaning into her and stealing another soft kiss. She didn’t respond right away, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I leaned closer and nibbled at her bottom lip briefly, drawing it into my mouth and capturing it between my teeth. She sighed against my lips, her breath sweet and warm, just as I’d always imagined it.

But then Dominic was there, clearing his throat, an envelope in his outstretched hand.

“Thanks, Dom,” I said, taking the envelope and then handing it over to Rita. She took it as Sam, thinking quickly, took a couple of discreet pictures with her iPad. Then Rita stood and gathered her things.

“I’ll call before I come by in the morning.”

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

She smiled, shaking my hand before turning to Sam and even Dominic. Then she was gone, humming softly under her breath.

The moment she disappeared, Dom and I were high fiving each other.

“This calls for a drink.”

“One,” Dominic said. “Then I need to get this stuff to Megan.”

“Sam?”

She shrugged. “I’ll take a glass of wine.”

“Wine? This demands champagne!”

I waved the waiter over and ordered their best bottle of Dom Pérignon. Sam’s eyebrows rose, but Dominic didn’t seem bothered. But he’d celebrated these things with me before.

“You can’t celebrate with cheap wine,” I said, leaning close to her. “You were damn brilliant.”

“I was playing a part.”

“You played it really well.”

She blushed and that made me smile.

The champagne came, and I poured a glass for each of us. “Here’s to team work.”

“Here’s to an easy case,” Dominic said.

We paused, looking expectantly at Sam. She caught on after a second.

“Here’s to my first time in the field and to the hope that Megan never asks me to do this again.”

Dominic laughed, tapping his glass to hers, then mine, before downing the entire thing. Sam reached to tap my glass, but I moved it out of the way.

“You did an awesome job. I’ll only drink to the first part of that.”

Then I tapped her glass, watching another blush burn over her cheeks.

She took a long sip and set her glass down.

“I’m out of here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Away.” Her eyes fell on me for a long second, then she stood. “Have fun, gentlemen. I’m going to the spa to get a proper massage.”

“Good for you,” Dominic said, standing to offer her a hug. “Have fun.”

She glanced at me, but didn’t offer so much as a weak wave. She walked away, so beautiful to watch. I just wished she’d glance over her shoulder, give some indication that she didn’t think I was lower than scum. But she didn’t.

I picked up the bottle of champagne and poured myself another full glass and downed it before she was completely out the door.

“You did a good job, brother.”

“Yeah. I seduced a crook into doing what comes naturally.”

“You did what Megan asked you to do.”

I nodded. “I did that.”

Dominic swallowed the last of his champagne, then stood.

“You abandoning me, too?”

“Gotta get this stuff to Megan. Then I have a wife waiting for me at home.”

“Yeah, rub it in, brother.”

Dominic slapped my shoulder. “Go find some pretty girl and celebrate. That’s what you do.”

I watched him walk away, thinking about the women in my past. I’d never had a problem finding a pretty woman to warm my bed. I’d simply grown bored with anonymous sex. There was something about watching Megan fall apart after Luke left her at the altar that changed the way I looked at sex, love, and relationships. Knowing Megan changed a lot of my perceptions of the world.

A part of me wished I’d never met her.

I poured myself the last drops of the champagne and downed them in one gulp. I threw a few bills on the table and walked out, determined to find a louder, more exciting place to drown myself tonight. I was celebrating for goodness sakes!

Sam

I couldn’t get away from Hayden fast enough. There was something about the way he kept looking at me that made my belly turn to liquid. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to try. He was a bully, a jerk who spent more time flirting with all the girls in the office—except me—than working. The only reason I agreed to do this was because of Megan. But it was typical of Hayden to think it was okay to kiss me like that. Not once, but twice!

I was so upset that I was walking too fast and not really looking to see where I was going. It was late afternoon, and cool enough for me to wish I’d brought a sweater. Christmas was two weeks away, so there were people everywhere, trying to get their shopping done before all the best gift ideas were completely sold out. I hadn’t even thought about shopping yet. Not that I had a lot of people to buy for. Megan and I always exchanged a gift or two. And I tried to buy something for everyone in the office, little trinkets I set on their desks Christmas Eve when we traditionally had a small office party. But my mother believed that the only person who should receive gifts on Christmas was Jesus, and our gift to him was attending church services on Christmas Day.

This year, Megan and I were flying to New York. We’d leave in less than a week. That would be my Christmas.

I was three blocks past the spa when I realized I’d gone too far. I turned around and ran right into a man who’d been walking close behind me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, trying to move around him. He grabbed my arm and dragged me backward, pulling me into a space between two tall buildings. He shoved me up against a wall and tugged at my bag strap, trying to take it from me. I cried out as his nails scraped my shoulder and collarbone. I kicked out, trying to push him away. He had one of my arms pinned, and the other caught in a fruitless attempt to protect my bag. I got him good in the thigh, prompting him to let go of my bag and smack me with the back of his hand.

“You damn bitch! Just let go of it!”

But I couldn’t. I held on to it with everything I had. He tore at me with both hands, trying to yank it away, tearing Megan’s dress in the process. I kicked out again, but then he was gone, yanked away so quickly, so violently, that I fell forward a little with the momentum.

Hayden had come out of nowhere, still dressed in the suit that looked so awkward on his bulky frame. He had the would-be mugger on the ground, slamming his fists repeatedly into the guy’s face. I was so startled by the whole thing that all I could do was stand there and watch. But then it became pretty clear that the mugger had had enough.

“Hayden,” I said, touching his shoulder. He brushed me off, going in for another round of punches. “Hayden!” I grabbed his shoulder this time, tugging at him, pulling him back. He turned and looked at me, but it was a long second before he recognized me. Then he was holding my face, moving his palms over my jaw, his thumb smearing the blood leaking from a small cut on my lip.

“Are you okay?”

Before I could answer, he lifted the limp, torn piece of my dress that had been exposing the top of the pretty bra Megan let me have. I blushed, horrified that he was seeing me in such a state.

Hayden stood and helped me to my feet. He shrugged out of his suit jacket and wrapped it around me before slipping his arm around my waist and pulling me out of the narrow alleyway. The SUV was parked—if you could call the slanted, awkward position it was in parked—half a block away. People stared at us as he led me to it, helping me into the passenger seat. Then he ran around to the other side and quickly threw the car into gear, causing dozens of horns to blare at us angrily as he cut them off by pulling back into traffic.

I didn’t have a chance to ask where we were going, but I wasn’t surprised when he pulled back into the underground garage at the Galleria, parking near the elevator for the hotel. He guided me to the elevator and pushed the button for the ninth floor, taking me directly to the room that I, ironically enough, rented yesterday for the purpose of the undercover operation.

“You can clean up in the bathroom,” he said, pushing the door open and directing me inside with hands on my upper arms. I pulled away, not sure I could stand on my own, but determined to get away from his touch.

Once behind the locked bathroom door, I stared at myself in the mirror. I was no longer myself, but I was no longer the girl I’d seen in the mirror at Megan’s house, either. I was just this mousy girl with big, wide, frightened eyes.

I slipped out of Hayden’s jacket and looked at the state of Megan’s dress. It was torn in more than one place, the material laying in tatters along my breasts—revealing deep scratch marks the mugger had left behind—and up the length of one thigh. I didn’t remember the mugger touching the skirt, but there was a rip there that showed more flesh than the dress was ever meant to do.

I pulled the tattered material away from me, feeling violated. Abused. And the state of the dress was just a reminder of that. I needed it away from me.

My hands shook. I could hear Hayden walking around in the room. I could almost feel his stare at the closed door. I hated that he’d seen me this way, hated that he was the one who rescued me. The last thing I wanted was another reason for him to look down on me. Another reason for him to see me as weak.

I was overcome with this sense of filth. I felt dirty. I felt as though all the things my mother had ever said about the way other girls dressed—about the way I wanted to dress, the way I had dressed tonight—was true. That I’d brought this on myself somehow.

I showered, scrubbing my skin pink with the complementary bottle of body wash the hotel provided. And then I scrubbed again and again, my mind playing the scene over and over again. The look on Hayden’s face when he leaned over that man, beating him with a viciousness I’d never known him to be capable of…I was sick to my stomach with the memory of it. Not because I was afraid of Hayden, but because I’d been the reason he was in that position.

He tapped on my door, halfway through my shower, asking if I was okay.

Was I okay? I honestly didn’t know.

I stepped out of the shower, my eyes falling to the pile of clothes I’d left on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t bring myself to put them back on. But there was nothing else. I ended up slipping the bathrobe the hotel provided from its cubby under the sink, wrapping it around me like some sort of cocoon, grateful for the fact that it hid everything, covering me from neck to ankle.

Even then I couldn’t make myself go back out into the room. It wasn’t Hayden, exactly. It was…I didn’t know. But it took me several minutes to force myself to turn the doorknob.

“Come sit down,” Hayden said. “I ordered some tea. It should be here in a minute.”

“Tea?”

“Hot tea. My grandmother always said nothing can be so bad that tea can’t fix it.”

He was watching me, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room as though he didn’t know what to do with himself. His phone buzzed, but he ignored it. He’d stripped off his tie and pulled his shirt free of his pants, standing there so rumpled and casual that I could almost believe that this was just a normal day and we were just sharing a normal moment. But there was nothing normal about it. The look on his face, the concern and the uncertainty written in every line, made me feel things I didn’t want to feel.

And the idea of Hayden sipping a cup of tea—a delicate little tea cup in his big hands, his pinky raised properly—amused me.

I smiled, but the cut on my lip split with the movement and I hissed, touching it lightly.

Hayden was immediately in front of me, his finger touching the spot lightly. When he pulled back, there was blood on his fingertip.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, turning to find a tissue.

“When I saw that guy pull you into that alley…” He seemed to choke on something, his own emotions, maybe. “I can’t stand the idea of anyone hurting you.”

I snorted as I grabbed a tissue from a box sitting on the small desk in the corner, near the windows. I pressed it to my lip, slowing the blood.

“Only
you
can hurt me, then?” I asked softly.

“Me?”

I glanced at him. “All the jokes about my clothes? You always calling me a grandma?”

“That’s just in fun.”

“It doesn’t feel fun.” I turned to the small mirror that hung over the desk, dabbing at my lip to make sure it had stopped bleeding again. “It feels like I’m back in school, back with the kids who thought it was funny to torture me with jokes like that.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

I wadded up the tissue and tossed it into the wastebasket. “But that’s what you do. You flirt with every other girl in the office, but when it comes to me, you can’t seem to help yourself. You have to make me feel as ugly and frumpy as you can.”

He didn’t respond. I looked at him and saw how stunned he was by my words. He must have been shocked that I’d actually stood up for myself for once.

I was a little shocked that I stood up for myself for once.

He stormed toward me, his hands raised. I backed up, not sure what his intentions were. He grabbed my arms and forced me to turn and look at us both in the mirror.

He leaned close and whispered in my ear.

“You’re beautiful.” He touched my face, my eyes falling to his bruised and raw knuckles, damaged by the beating he’d given the mugger.

For me.

He brushed his fingers over my jaw. “You have this heart shaped face like nothing I’ve ever seen before, a beautiful face with the most serene green eyes. Your every emotion is in those eyes, always shining out onto the world without the shame or fear that most people hide behind. You look at the world with a sense of innocence that I admire. I wish I could do the same thing…that I could see the world the way you see it because, quite frankly, this world scares the shit out of me.”

He lifted my wet hair, laying it gently over one shoulder.

“Your auburn hair is a perfect contrast to your pale skin. Your shoulders are so dainty that sometimes I wonder how you can hold up all the chaos and stress of the office the way you do on such fragile shoulders.” He touched my throat ever so lightly, his fingertips lightly gliding over the tender skin. “When you wear your hair up, I find it incredibly difficult not to stare at your throat, to not imagine what it would be like to kiss you here”—he brushed his fingers over my throat again—“to taste you here.”

I shivered even as my eyes fell from the mirror.

“Don’t lie to me just because you feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you, Sam.” He slid his fingers carefully under the top edge of the bathrobe, his fingertips brushing the swell of my breasts. “I feel so many things for you, but none of it is sorry.”

“Please, Hayden…”

He turned me around and forced me to sit on the edge of the desk. “You’ve gotten under my skin, Sam. I can’t think about anything but you.”

I started to shake my head, but he grabbed my jaw and forced me still. And then he kissed me, his lips demanding against mine. I couldn’t help myself. I responded to him; I allowed my lips to part ever so slightly and that was enough. He buried himself against me, pressing his tongue against places that had never been touched before. I didn’t know where to put my nose; I didn’t know how to breathe. But I didn’t want it to stop.

I’d been an observer all my life, always watching other people fall in love: Megan and Luke all through high school, all the way through to their aborted wedding; Cole and all the girls in his life, a few of my friends in high school, and then Amber, the one who finally stole his heart. There was Peter—oh, I had such a crush on Peter once upon a time!—and the girl he’d fallen for, the one he thought would be his forever, but who walked away before forever could even begin.

Then there were all these big, handsome men. The men in the Marines who looked at me as the brain they had to push through basic training, but who could return the favor when it came time to go through specialization training. None of them had seen me as anything more than that. And then Dragon. All these big, handsome men, all of them single until recently. None of them saw me. But, to be honest, I never really expected them to.

And then there was Hayden.

All this time, watching him flirt with everyone else—Megan, the other girls in the office, our female clients—it killed a little bit of my soul. I didn’t want to like him; I didn’t want to get a secret thrill every time he smiled at me with that charming smile he had. But I couldn’t help myself.

And now…how many times had I imagined this moment? And how sick had I been to have my very first kiss be from him, but be wrapped in the guise of an act, an undercover operation that we were both getting paid to participate in?

Was this just an extension of that? Did it matter?

I’d wanted this for so long that I couldn’t make myself pull away. I couldn’t convince my heart that I was only rushing toward heartbreak. I couldn’t make my hands stop slipping over his shoulders, my fingers from burying themselves in his hair.

He moaned softly against my mouth, his hands slipping over my thighs, tugging my hips closer against him as he leaned into me. I fell back against the cool surface of the mirror, pulling him with me. It was an awkward angle, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was kissing me almost roughly, his hands sliding over my thigh, searching for the bottom edge of the bathrobe. My heart was pounding, my breath coming in small gasps. I’d never been touched this way. Was it normal to feel like I was suffocating?