Untouchable (The Blankenships Book 8)

This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Untouchable copyright @ 2015 by Evelyn Glass. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Book 8 of
The Blankenships
series

CHAPTER ONE

For a little while, things moved too fast for Zoey to really keep track. It wasn’t so much that they were moving fast, she thought, afterward; she just couldn’t keep up. Her brain felt like a video whose data stream was stuttering, and she was only picking up 1 out of 10 frames. She went to the bedroom. She looked for clothes. She even found them and a suitcase small enough to be a carry-on in Alex’s closet. But then she stared at it for a full minute, trying to understand how the clothes were to get into the bag.

She sat down on the bed, buried her face in her hands, and let her shoulders just shake with the tears she didn’t have time to shed. She could feel it all tangling around in her chest, snapping around like the end of a whip through her ribcage, leaving her dizzy and lightheaded, afraid that she was going to fall into shards at the least of provocations.

She had to force herself back to breathing, and that pushed the tears somewhere farther away. It wasn’t pretty, but she didn’t know what other choice she had. She was not equipped to fight this fight. The police hadn’t saved the twins, or Claire, or Olivia. They hadn’t saved Cindy. The police hadn’t done anything to make this fight any better. She didn’t know what to do, and if Alex and Leo said that they had to get out of the city—well, she was going to listen to them.

But she didn’t know how to fold the clothes and put them away. She knew that packing was something she’d done in the past, and she knew that it was simple, that you just made the clothes small and fit them in the suitcase, but pushing that knowledge from her hands into the clothes, then putting the clothes into the suitcase—she just couldn’t make it happen.

Leo came in, after a few moments. Zoey looked up, feeling her cheeks tighten from the dried salt tears—when had she been crying—and tried to calm herself down. Leo didn’t look like he’d spent the evening in debauchery, drinking himself silly and then fucking until everyone was exhausted. She was sure he was going to start yelling at her, telling her that she should have been ready to go by now, and she was positive that if he did, she was going to hit him, hit him and then run away.

He didn’t shout at her, which was good. He also didn’t sit down next to her and put her arm around her shoulders. That was probably good, too. She wanted him to do that, but if he did, she was going to start crying, big ugly hiccupping cries that wouldn’t help any of them. He stood over her, his face calm. “What can I help with so that we can get packed and get on the road?”

The quiet question somehow gave her something to focus on. She took a deep breath and found something, deep down, that felt like bedrock. “I don’t really know what to do,” she said. Leo looked so calm, so quiet. After all, it hadn’t been him who’d lost his entire family in just a few days. He could take a little of her grief, so that she could focus on Alex. “I keep staring at things, and I don’t know what to do. Where are we going? What do I need to pack?”

Leo cast a careful look around the room, and then shook his head. He picked up her hand, turned it over so the palm was facing up, then carefully laid his other hand over her palm. It was a strange gesture, so oddly artificial—and then she felt his finger tracing over her palm, and once she realized what he was doing—spelling letters—the pattern told her what she needed to know. She nodded, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek. She felt more focused now, more calm. She started to gather up the clothing she’d instinctively reached for—whenever people ran to escape the justice department, didn’t they go to blistering warm Latin American countries, where they could relax on the beach?—and then thought better of it. Leo was finger spelling in her palm because he was concerned that someone was watching them. Putting away warm weather clothing and reaching for sweaters and wool socks would tell them—not everything, but something.

She packed the warm things first, then went back to the bureaus for sweaters and extra long sleeve T-shirts for layers. Leo watched her for a few moments, the weight of his gaze keeping her calm and quiet, and then he squeezed her hand one more time, and went on his way. He probably had quite a lot to organize.

Even though Alex hadn’t mentioned it, she grabbed the bare minimum of toiletries and tossed those into the bag as well. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, mouthwash. Sophia kept the bathroom stocked with the little trial sizes that made it through security without drama, though Zoey did wonder if they’d even be going through airport security. Still. Just in case.

And then she sat on the bed, packed bag next to her, and she waited.

When they left, it was in a hurry. Leo speaking rapidly into a phone—not his smart phone, but one of the cheap flip phones you could buy at a corner bodega for cash—and she couldn’t catch more than a random English word interposed with the Slavic dialect. Sophia hadn’t woken, and when she asked Alex if they were going to say good-bye to the woman, he shot her such a hard look that she took a single step backward. It made sense, of course; the fewer people who had any idea they were fleeing, the better, but it seemed cruel beyond measure to leave her behind without a word. She’d already lost so much. It turned Zoey’s stomach in a way that fleeing the country didn’t on its own.

It wasn’t David waiting for them downstairs, but Leo strode confidently towards the car. Zoey felt her stomach start cartwheeling through her midsection, leaving her weak with fear. After what happened to Claire—how could she—

Alex must have known exactly what she was thinking. He squeezed her hand tightly, and when she glanced at him, he gave her a small nod. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “I know the driver. We’re safe.”

She didn’t believe it, and she wasn’t really sure that Alex believed it either, but there was no turning back now. She slipped into the car, the two men following behind her, as the driver settled their luggage into the trunk.

As the car pulled away from the curb into the flow of traffic, the fear that had been consuming Zoey for as long as she seemed able to remember faded ever so slightly. It was replaced with the tiniest, most delicate flare of hope. A small, nourishing sense that they were finally taking action, after so much time on the defensive. Yes, fine, their action was to run, but sometimes, running was the right thing to do. Sometimes, you had to live to fight another day, wasn’t that how the saying went?

Alex’s hand was still in hers. She squeezed it, hard, and turned to give him a smile. She reached across him, and squeezed Leo’s hand as well. “Thank you,” she said to both of them, and felt the bright light of both of their smiles shine on her.

Hope seemed like a dangerous thing to feel, after the last few weeks, but there came a point, she decided, when one chose to feel hope or feel nothing at all. She just hoped that her small, burgeoning chance wasn’t coming too late to make a difference.

CHAPTER TWO

Instead of JFK, where she and Alex had flown out of before, Leo’s car drove them out of the city, to a small, private airport. The car pulled into the hangar, and they were able to board directly onto the jet. It wasn’t as big or as luxurious as the one she and Alex had taken to London, but it was still a private plane. It certainly didn’t seem to lack for amenities. Rather than the mobile living room feeling that AEGIS’s jet had given her, this felt like an elongated version of first class with more seats. She caught Alex giving her a sideways look; was he remembering his jokes about the mile-high club on his way to London? God knew she couldn’t forget them at the moment.

How was she shivering with the thought of these two men moving their bodies over hers yet again? She’d had more orgasms in the last 24 hours than she’d thought possible, more than she’d had in weeks of her life before she’d met Alex, and she was still wishing for more, dreaming of hands sliding over her bare skin, sliding into her, fucking into her—

She shook her head to clear the thoughts that were not going to help her right now. She buckled herself into a seat near a window and tried to relax. She wished she’d thought to bring a paper book of some kind. The men were quiet, staring off into space, and she didn’t particularly have anything she wanted to discuss anyway. But she wanted something to do, some way to distract herself from the flurry that hadn’t let up in her mind.

But she hadn’t brought a book, and the magazines tucked into the pocket next to her were English, but she found that even as she stared at them, she couldn’t make out the words on the covers. The pictures seemed to blur together. She’d been up for more than 24 hours, with a few cat naps here and there. She let the weight of the increasing speed of the plane press her back into the seat, and let her eyes close, but her nerves were too stirred up to sleep.

It was only as the plane leveled off and the flight attendants let them know that it was safe to move about the cabin that she saw Leo’s shoulders relax. She hadn’t really noticed how much tension the big man was holding until it settled down, but he almost sagged in his chair as his spine relaxed. Alex, too, took a huge breath and gave her a watered down smile.

Leo smiled back. “Now that we are in the air, you should know the plan. We will stop briefly in Moscow to refuel, and then touch down outside of a small city in Uzbekistan. Tashkent. My family has people there. For a fee, they keep certain… properties available for our use. We will be able to stay out of sight while we determine who is behind the actions against the Blankenship family.”

“How are we going to do that?” Zoey asked. “We left everything behind, the laptops, the information Helen got from Cindy, everything.”

Leo’s smile showed a few more teeth. “You will get a chance to exercise your memory, I think, Ms. Gardener.” The way he said her formal name, almost a slur, made her smile slip sideways. She was torn between wanting to stick her tongue out at him, and run it up the pulse of his neck, to see if tension had given a salty flavor to the delicious taste of him.

Alex nodded. “Thank you, Leo. I owe you—”

“No,” Leo said, that toothy smile growing cold, and then vanishing. “Surely you’ve learned this much, living as you have. You never admit to a man of power that you owe him. He knows it, of course, and he will collect the debt one day. You must downplay the favor, act as if you could have done it without him, if you’d been willing to bother, or he will own you.”

It was a strange moment. She’d never seen Leo speak to Alex in quite that way, as if he were much older than the other man, instead of the same age. Alex took the advice the way one would sip at a fine wine, touching it to his tongue and enjoying the bouquet before he swallowed it down.

“We should rest. The flight is long, and we will need to move quickly once we are on the ground.” He flashed a smile at Zoey again, but it was Alex his eyes lingered on. Zoey found that she didn’t mind. Having one powerful man in love with her was more than enough, and Alex needed all the supporters he could get. “Sleep well.”

CHAPTER THREE

Zoey dozed off after a few minutes. There were headphones available for the in-flight radio, and she turned in to a classical channel playing soft piano concertos. She wasn’t really sleeping so much as she was able to disregard the worries and fears that had plagued her mind for so long. She closed her eyes and let herself drift. Eventually, she fell into a deeper sleep.

She woke up rather suddenly as a hand skimmed over her shoulder. She grabbed at it and recognized the shape of Alex’s slim fingers before she even opened her eyes. The cabin was dark, illuminated by the narrow bands of emergency lights around the floors and pathways. She’d laid her seat out flat, like a bed, and once she opened her eyes, Alex laid down next to her. “Hi,” she whispered, and he put a finger to his lips, gesturing towards Leo. She leaned up onto her elbow and saw the other man thoroughly asleep, his lips parted, a small shine of liquid on his cheek. The big man looked rather adorable. She wanted to find him something stuffed and furry to cuddle and pull a blanket up to his chin.

“How are you?” Alex asked. He stroked a finger down her cheek, and she almost purred with the sensation. He was close to her, but she wanted him even closer. She lifted the thin, wool blanket so that he could slip under it with her and then hooked her ankle over his calf. He snuggled in closer, sliding an arm around her hip and the small of her back, the other curled under his head.

“I feel better for the sleep,” she said. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere over the Atlantic,” he said. “We’ve been in the air for about five hours. We still have quite a ways to go.”

“Have you gotten any sleep at all?”

He shook his head after a moment. “But I’m okay.”

She managed not to scoff. “You’ve been up just as long—longer—than either one of us. You need to get some rest.”

“I’ll rest when we’re safe.”

She knew the stubborn jut of his chin was supposed to be sexy, coded in her very genes as if he was stalwartly protecting her from all evil that might dare to step out of the shadows, but he looked so haggard, the skin under his eyes so dark and shadowed, that he looked more like a toddler protesting for the tenth time that no, he absolutely was not tired, that she couldn’t contain a little giggle. She crossed the slight distance between them and kissed him.

The fear and the exhaustion sparked between them, and what started as a soft kiss, lips pressing together, became much more. He pulled her tight against him, and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders as he turned the angle of the kiss, meeting each movement of her lips and tongue with his own. The contact was passionate and intense, but it wasn’t exactly sexual. His hands moved, gripping her ass, his hips shifting against hers. She could feel the thick rigid heat of him pressed against her hip.

The weight of his body was delicious over her, grounding her and anchoring her into her body. His hands slid over her soft and silky skin, and she moved, finding a rhythm that felt like her heart beating. “I want to touch you,” he whispered. “Is it okay for me to touch you?” She read the words on his lips as much as she heard them, given the noise of the plane.

It was the kind of question no one would have ever considered asking her before today. She relished it, let herself fully weight the question, and let herself take the time to run though her heart and mind before she checked in with the heavy, damp feeling of her sex. She was tired, still, and still sore. Not painful, but stretched. As if she’d run a vaginal marathon. Which, in a way, wasn’t entirely inaccurate. “Just touching,” she murmured. “I’m too sore still for anything else. I think. But you don’t have to, Alex, it’s okay—”

“I want to,” he said. There was so much want in his eyes, in the thick, raw emotion of his gaze, that she almost felt the weight of it more than his hand, slipping down the front of her jersey pants and slipping into her panties. He gasped as his finger parted her, running through her curls into the dampness of her slit, as if she’d entered him in some way. She felt that exchange of energy begin between them, something that she’d felt now and then, and it aroused her in a way that his simple touch hadn’t. She rocked on his hand as he circled his finger over her clit, and she felt a deep emotional swelling inside of her. Her breath tangled up as the sensations gathered and released, gathered and released. He was hard, hot and hard, she could feel him pressing into her thigh as she shifted and moved, and heat boiled through her, deeper, more. She wanted to feel the release he so often brought her, but her thoughts were tangled, caught up in worry and fear about what had happened before, what she had seen, what she had heard, and it was hard to focus, hard to feel.

“Beautiful,” he whispered, kissing her forehead as he circled just a little more firmly. “Beautiful. Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she whimpered, needing him, needing the touching to continue, needing the tight swirling tension to burst, needing to trust that she would survive all of this. “More.”

He pushed forward, finding the fullness of her cunt and sliding deep inside of her. She cried out as he stretched into her, as the heel of his hand pressed softly into her clit. “Like this?”

She was beyond words. She needed everything, wanted everything that had ever existed in the world. She heard a low sound, torn from her throat, and everything unraveled. Her breath caught in her throat as her back bowed, and she was glad, so glad that he held her down, that he kept her grounded, even so high above the sky. She felt the strength of her cunt grabbing at him as the waves of the orgasm pulsed through her, milking at his hand, and he made a noise in her ear that was part moan and part prayer.

She reached for him, massaging the thickness of him through his pants, but he shook his head. “Not now,” he said. “I love you. Not now. I want to taste you.”

She felt her body pulse again against his fingers and whimpered at the aftershocks that sent through her. “I don’t…know if I can come again…”

“If you don’t want me to, it’s fine,” he said.

She still wanted more. She was still hungry for him. “You can. I want you to. But I just—don’t be upset if—”

He pressed one finger, still slick with her arousal, over her lips. “I know,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten. I promised you.” While he had her gaze locked, he turned that one, sticky slick finger, and popped it into his mouth, licking it clean while his eyes focused on hers. “I want to taste you.”

“Aren’t you worried about the flight attendants?”

He shook his head. “Leo gave them very explicit instructions. Told them they were to leave us alone unless someone pressed the call button.” He gestured at a lit switch about three feet above her reclined seat. He paused and watched her for a long moment. “Am I pressuring you?”

“No.” Zoey took a moment, took a long breath, letting feedback pour in from the various parts of her body and mind. “No. I’m—worried. There’s so much happening.”

He slowed, and some of that intense need faded out of his eyes. He pressed his forehead to hers, and his eyes shuttered closed. “I love you.”

“I know.”

“I want to say that I will keep you safe, but what if I say that, and it’s a lie?”

The words twisted her up inside. “Oh, sha—”

He shook his head. “No. No, I don’t want to talk. Can we just—is it okay for me to just stay here with you? Stay close?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course.” She wrapped her arms tight around him as he settled in against her. She ran her fingers through the dense curls of his hair and listened to his breathing as it slowed and steadied. When she was sure he was asleep, she let her own eyes drift closed again as well.