Resisting Ruby Rose (The Ruby Rose Series) (5 page)

“Uh, yeah. Unfortunately, that’s true,” I said, resting my head on his chest. “And I’m so sorry that you have to go through what I went through five too many times. The guilt and sickening memorie
s . . .
it’s almost too much to bear.”

“No, it’s not,” Liam said, pulling away, his expression stern. “I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel sick. I was protecting you from him, and I don’t feel bad about it.”

Something about his intense glare scared me. I didn’t know how to respond.

“In fact,” he continued, “I’m glad the phones are all down. I’m glad that we didn’t get the chance to call the authorities. And most of all, I’m glad that I finally got my hands dirty.”

“Liam, you can’t mean that.” I removed myself from his clutch, which was bordering on frightening.

“I do mean it,” he said quietly, looking down at his dirt- and blood-caked hands. “I know it’s not what I am supposed to say or feel, and I wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, but it’s true.”

He knew full well that I would never repeat what he said. Just like
I’d
confided in him for all those months, and he was fiercely loyal and understanding about my roller-coaster emotions, I would listen to him. Even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I would hear him out and try not to judge.

But inside, I knew from the moment he said LeMarq was probably dead that he went there with the intent to do it all along. That LeMarq was a second chance at releasing the aggression Liam never let go of when he almost killed his own father. That he always regretted letting his father stay alive and ruin his life for so long.

“What does Chase know?” I asked. “How did you two meet up again?”

“He doesn’t know much,” Liam said, exhaling a ragged sigh of relief. “He was with Sofia the whole time. Apparently, they talked for a while, then she took off right before I got back to where I left them. I tried to act cool about everything, but look at me. He knows I got in a fight.”

He held his arms out to give me a better look at the dried blood across his shirt.

“Can I help you clean up?” I asked meekly, uncomfortable with my position as comforter and not the usual comfortee.

“No, I can do it alone.” Liam’s voice had a tired rasp that broke my heart. We could have spent last night in each other’s unclothed arms, but we spent the night in a way that tore us apart more than ever. I felt the distance between us, and I was sure he felt it, too, as he shut the bathroom door behind him.

CHAPTER 8

As evening arrived, unanswered questions swirled around my head. Was Martinez here in the mountains? Did he intend for
me
, not Liam,
to kill LeMarq’s twin? What happened to Mathews’s men? How were we going to get help? How were we going to explain another homicide after we got out of here? (
If
we got out of here.)

The sun was setting on a long day of sitting around in tense disagreement. Alana and Chase both argued for taking our chances at jumping in the car and getting out of here. But Liam and I knew better than that.

Martinez wasn’t going to just let us drive on out of this one. Not without a fight.

And surely Mathews would be in full-blown panic mode at this point, since the lack of cell service meant I hadn’t checked in with him. He and his whole team were probably already on their way to join the fun. And if Martinez had targeted every other person in my life, Mathews was probably next. But of course, I couldn’t reach Mathews to warn him.

“You’re such a pig! Don’t you ever stop eating?” Alana teased Chase in a not very teasing way.

“What? I’m hungry!” Chase said with a mouth full of chips. “No one made me a five-course meal tonight.”

I was trying not to pay too much attention to the excessive amount of noise the chips were making in Chase’s mouth when the doorbell rang.

Liam, Chase, and I all stood up in alarm while Alana dipped under a blanket to hide.

“Liam, take the north window; Chase, take the dining room window; I’ll take the door,” I said, seizing command. Both Chase and Liam looked at me like they were going to argue, but I grabbed one of the guns off the coffee table and headed to the door. “Go,” I ordered.

“Shit, man,” Chase said, gulping down his chips and grabbing a shotgun. “You weren’t kidding about her control issues.”

Liam didn’t respond but moved toward me—
not
what I told him to do. He pushed past me and used his handgun to move the curtain off the side window to see who was at the door.

“Again?” he asked, putting his gun down.

“What?” I looked past him through the window.

By the time I saw her, the door was already open.

“Sofia, what are you doing here?” Liam asked.

“We need to talk,” she said, her sultry accent gone, replaced by an almost perfect American accent with an even more perfect authoritative tone.

Chase came running up to the door as if he were a puppy and Sofia were blowing one of those silent dog-training whistles.

As she pushed her way in, Liam hesitated to shut the door. He just shook his head and stared outside. What was he doing? What or who did he see?

Before I could ask him or peek out the window myself, the
what
and the
who
came walking in behind Sofia with a gun pointed firmly at Liam. I blinked my eyes to make sure I was seeing it all correctly. I knew the guy. As he shut the door behind him with his foot, our eyes met. He knew me, too. It was the well-dressed boy from the waiting room at the hospital, who was now wearing all-black gear. The one who delivered the manila envelope from Skryker. The one who said w
e’d
likely meet again. The one I was sure meeting again would mean danger (of the non-lethal kind). He was standing in the foyer of Chase’s uncle’s cabin with a gun pointed at my boyfriend.

“Well, hello there, Ruby Rose,” he said with a playful smile, despite his posture being all business. The way he held his gun led me to believe he knew all too well how to use it. As opposed to Liam, who held the shotgun limply in his hand, knowing he wouldn’t have a chance if he so much as flinched to raise it.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, gathering my thoughts enough to take my aim off Sofia (who appeared to be unarmed) and put it on the dude, whose name came too easily to the tip of my tongue: Quinn. Had he been following us? Was Sofia his spy? Or, worse, his girlfriend? I flinched at my own inappropriate and totally ridiculous stab of jealousy. The fact that he was taking my breath away with his smile, his style, and his commanding presence was unacceptable! He couldn’t be trusted. He said he was with Skryker, but he might be Martinez’s assassin acting as a double agent. The fact that he was drop-dead sexy while he was doing it was neither here nor ther
e . . .

Focus, Ruby!

“OK, now listen,” he said. “We are not here to harm you. We are here to help.” He took his steadying hand off the gun and held it out to indicate a transition toward truce. “I’m going to put my gun down, and so is everyone else. Then Sofia and I are going to secure the perimeter. Then we are going to talk. Is that clear?” He took off his backpack and let it drop to the ground with a thud.

No one answered, but no one disagreed either. We were not only too stunned to argue, but also completely outmatched. This gorgeous couple knew what they were doing. They were professionals. Professionals at
what
was the question.

As Sofia and Quinn disappeared from view (Sofia up the stairs and Quinn to the rear of the ground floor), I moved closer to Liam.

“He works for that CIA agent, Skryker. She must, too,” I whispered. “They must’ve been assigned to follow me. To protect me.”

“Right,” Liam said, clenching his jaw. “So pointing a gun at my face somehow protects you?”

“Well, I’m sure he was simply protecting himself. If he hadn’t come in armed, you might have drawn your weapon on him.”

Liam brought the shotgun to his side, now gripping it with two hands. “Why are you defending him? He could be here to kill us all.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but the look in his eyes stopped me. It was the same look he had during the drive home from the hospital after my run-in with Quinn. It was a look that said he knew how attractive a guy like Quinn could be to the opposite sex under any set of inappropriate circumstances.

“He’s not here to kill us,” I argued under my breath, not wanting anyone to hear. “If he did, he would have done it by now. Plus, if he’s connected to the CIA, why would he do that?”

Liam looked over to Chase, who was now sitting next to Alana, and exchanged a dude-let’s-take-them look that I didn’t like. They wanted to take the upper hand, but I couldn’t let them. They had no training or experience with anything involving guns. Another nod between the two of them confirmed their intentions.

“Please, Liam,” I said, grabbing his hand just as he was about to walk away. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

He spun and shot me a look of fury. “I know exactly what I’m doing:
protecting you.
”

My grip on his hand tightened as I felt him slipping away. “I understand, and I appreciate that, but you’re going to get yourself hurt or killed if you handle this the wrong way.”

“Ruby, you’re not the only one capable of pulling a trigger,” Liam seethed, and broke my grip.

“
Pulling a trigger
?”
My jaw dropped as I tried to find the words to articulate all the things wrong with that phrase. “Do you think killing someone is just as easy as pulling a trigger?” I rounded on him to block him from going either upstairs or to the back of the house.

“Get out of my way, Ruby,” he ordered.

“Would you just slow down for a second and think things through? These guys are trained—”

“I realize you don’t think I’m capable, that you’re the only one allowed to make decisions or act.” Liam’s voice rose. Instead of calming him, like I was truly trying to do, every word I spoke seemed to be inflaming him. “Now if you don’t move, I’ll—”

An arm around Liam’s throat cut him off. An arm I hadn’t seen coming. “You’ll what, Mr. Slater?” Quinn’s face appeared over Liam’s shoulder. Where the hell did he come from?

Liam grunted and fought for positioning, the shotgun falling to the floor. But Quinn had him in an armlock, and Liam’s lack of oxygen soon stopped his flailing. I would have jumped in the fight, but one look confirmed that Sofia wasn’t going to let me, as she held her gun to Chase’s head. And in my gut, I knew there was no fight to be had. They were on our side, whether Liam was able to see it through his pride or not.

“Are you quite done, Mr. Slater?” Quinn asked seamlessly, as if restraining a dude who had at least fifty pounds of muscle on him was rather easy.

Liam nodded, indicating that his need for oxygen had now outweighed his desire to kill. Quinn kicked the shotgun over to Sofia and let go of Liam, who instantly fell to his knees, gasping for air.

“Perimeter secure,” Sofia said, picking up the shotgun and shouldering it while shooting a warning glance at Chase. Taking the hint, Chase placed his rifle on the coffee table and sat back in the deep cushions of the couch next to Alana. I couldn’t tell if he was more scared or turned on by Sofia. One thing was for sure, he wasn’t comforting Alana.

“Like I said before,” Quinn said, walking away from Liam to peek out a draped window and lower the lighting in the entryway. “Guns down. Secure perimeter. Then talk. Not very complicated.”

“So talk,” I said, reaching down to help Liam up. He didn’t jerk away, exactly, but he got up on his own power.

“After you,” Sofia said, motioning for Liam and me to join the others in the seating area. Walking alongside Liam, I passed Sofia, absorbing her glare. She didn’t like me. Or at least she didn’t like me as much as she pretended to last night over dinner.

As Liam and I sat next to each other on a love seat, I felt the opposite of love coming from him. He was sizzling with restrained rage.

“All right, regardless of how badly I’m in need of a cup of tea, let’s get started,” Quinn said, running a hand through his hair and effortlessly moving a few unruly strands back into their stylish place. “I’m Quinn, and you already know Sofia.”

Sofia smiled tightly while she went around turning off lamps so the room became barely lit.

“We’re here to clean this bloody mess up and get you home safe,” Quinn said, checking his watch—his titanium, jewel-encrusted, multi-dial-face watch that I couldn’t help but be impressed by. “However, that’s not going to happen just now.”

“What? Why not?” I demanded.

“It’s a risk assessment.
I’d
rather not take the chance.”

“Chance at what?” Liam piped in.

“Chance at getting shot at, ambushed, etcetera,” Quinn casually responded, looking around the room, then focusing on me. “All things considered, the scenery at this place isn’t so bad.”

I shook off the intense moment. Liam staring at Quinn. Quinn staring at me. Me now staring at the empty fireplace.

“What’s out there?” Chase asked Sofia, hardly taking his eyes off her for more than a blink.

“It’s not so much a
what
as a
who
,” Sofia said. Her poise didn’t override the tension in her posture. She was worried. Far more so than her partner.

“Then who?” Alana asked, less polite than Chase.

“You know who, Alana!” I snapped. “It’s Martinez. It’s always Martinez. And it’s time to stop him. So why can’t the six of us handle one man?”

Sofia and Quinn exchanged a look that contained a whole conversation. “What?” I asked. “What am I missing here?”

Quinn exhaled and sat down on an armrest opposite me. If he was trying to distract me with his rustic cap-toed black suede boots with gray lace
s . . .
it worked.

“It’s quite a bit bigger than your man Martinez,” Quinn said. “While I don’t doubt that Martinez is behind this clever little LeMarq trap, he didn’t come alone. In fact,
I’d
be surprised if he’s still here at all. His mercenaries are, however, with orders to end us all.”

“Wait,” Liam said, in response to Quinn’s nonchalant explanation. “So how many ‘mercenaries’ are we talking about out there with the intention of ‘ending’ us?”

“Not sure,” Sofia answered flatly. “Several have come close to the cabin, which has made it easier to take them out.”

So those shadows in the trees I saw before dinner weren’t imagined either. Why hadn’t I put two and two together? “How many have you ‘taken out’?”

“Five so far.”

A wide, gaping silence spread out among us. This couldn’t be happening. I had sworn off murder. And there were at least five murdered bodies outside this cabin, plus LeMarq’s twin. While I hadn’t killed any of them myself, my presence was the reason they were dead.

“Can we talk privately, Ruby?” Quinn asked from very near. How did he move around so unnoticeably?

I smelled his spicy-sweet cologne and felt his warm breath on my cheek. Caught between Liam and Sofia’s pointed glares, I swallowed hard.

“Excuse us for a moment,” Quinn said, taking me by the elbow, not asking for anyone’s permission. Including mine.

“No, excuse
me
,” I said, standing to pull away from his grip. Liam stood as well, ready to attack, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him. I turned back to Quinn. “If you want to talk to me, it’s going to be on my terms.”

Quinn raised his eyebrows in amusement. “And what terms would those be?”

“You follow me,” I said, taking control of the situation the best way I knew how. Getting Liam and Quinn apart, so I didn’t have to play referee. Quinn obviously knew what he was doing, and talking to him in private wasn’t a bad idea.

When I looked back to Liam to cast an apologetic expression, his ice-blue eyes startled me. He didn’t understand. I wasn’t betraying him or purposely disrespecting him—I only wanted to find the solution for our survival. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t have the training or experience to get us out of this situation alive. He was strong and courageous, but brawn and bravery weren’t the right tools here. And how could I trust him when he seemed hell-bent on getting his “hands dirty,” as he put it?

As I turned the corner into the dark dining room, I felt Quinn’s hand on mine. Before I could break his grip and inflict the same injuries I did on Liam all those months ago at the beach house party, I was already pinned against the wall. I thought about screaming, but his hand was on my mouth.

I twisted and elbow-thrust him in abs that felt like a washboard. He absorbed the blow and used the backward momentum to grab my waist and swing me toward the table. Grabbing a chair, I gathered my balance to hook-kick him in the chest, but his strong hands blocked my blow. Spinning, I threw a left jab and a right cross, both swiftly stopped before they landed. One more attempt at an uppercut, and he had both my hands behind my back, turned away from him, and I felt his breath on my neck again.