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“Dammit, Axe,” Reagan murmured. “What the hell are we doing?”

  “Damned if I know,” Axl replied.

  “Every time we find ourselves alone we end up doing this.”

  “It would help if you weren’t a walking wet dream.”

  “Right back at you, hotshot.” Reagan unlocked her legs and stood up straight, pushing a curl off her face. Axl stepped away, rearranging his pants because he felt like his dick was being slowly strangled, and turned his back to rest it against the wall. He stood next to her and folded his arms.

  He rolled his head to look at Reagan. Her attention was on the window, her eyes on the bare maple tree in the backyard.

  “So, what are we going to do, Hudson?”

  “You need to be more specific than that,” Reagan replied, sounding tired. “About me trying out for the team? Or about this heat between us?”

  Her mentioning the tryout made his teeth slam together and Axl thought he tasted tooth enamel on his tongue. “I lost a bet and I’ll honor it. You’ll have your day to show me what you’ve got.”

  “Axl, I want to—”

  Axl shoved his hand through his hair and felt a frown pull his eyebrows together. He didn’t want to rehash their argument, didn’t need the heartburn. “I said I’ll honor the bet, Reagan. All I can do, right now, is take it one step at a time. The first step is the physical test; let’s get that done first.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Can we, temporarily, drop the subject? I need a break from arguing with you.”

  Reagan looked like she wanted to respond but she surprised him when she just pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and nodded.

  “But maybe we should decide whether we are going to take the heat between us to its logical conclusion,” Axl said, trying to keep the need out of his voice. He didn’t need Reagan, he told himself, he just needed to sleep with her and get her out of his system. He didn’t need anyone.

  “We’ve got to let the crazy out.” Axl stepped away from the wall and walked over to his desk and dropped into his leather office chair. The heels of his boots hit the corner of his desk and he linked his fingers, resting them against his stomach. He ignored his rapidly beating heart, dismissed the rogue thought that his heart had never, not even when booms and bullets were flying, pumped so hard.

  Shit.

  Reagan followed him across the room and stood on the other side of his desk, her fingers gripping the edge. Her eyes traveled up and over his body to his feet, and when their eyes clashed and held, the corners of her made-to-sin mouth inched upward.

  “Look at you, trying to act so insouciant, so cool. Pretending that that was a run-of-the-mill statement and not a course of action that would flip our world upside down.” Nobody but Reagan would have the balls to say that to him, who would dare. He liked the fact that he couldn’t intimidate her.

  Still, he felt the need to argue, to protest. Because she was overreacting . . . Wasn’t she? “It’s just sex, Reagan.”

  Reagan opened her mouth to reply, possibly to argue, but his phone, on the desk between them, buzzed. He looked down, saw the name of his adopted brother, Aiden, on his screen. Aiden was the one member of his family that he never minded hearing from, possibly because he was the only one to whom he was not blood related. But Aiden, understanding that normal people worked, rarely called him during office hours. Something had to be wrong. He snatched up the phone, hit the green button with his finger, and sent Reagan an apologetic look. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Have to take this.”

  “What’s up, bro?” Axl asked, dropping his feet to the floor and leaning forward, rubbing his temples with his thumbs.

  “So much,” Aiden replied, his deep voice in his ear.

  “Words to shrivel my sac. What now?”

  Axl listened, cursed, and listened again. When Aiden stopped talking, Axl spun his chair around so that his back was to Reagan and he was facing the window. “Wait, let me get this straight. Mom and Dad don’t want to replace the tiles but think the flood is a perfect excuse to upgrade? And they want me to foot the bill? Problem two, Dad has a commission for two pieces from a well-respected gallery owner but he isn’t feeling inspired?”

  “More like too damn lazy to get off his ass,” Aiden interjected.

  “And Matt was fired from his job at the mill two months ago and needs cash?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the kicker . . . they want to adopt another child?” Axl roared the last sentence, forgetting that Reagan was still in the room. “Are they fucking nuts?”

  “We know they are,” Aiden replied. “She’s a friend’s grandchild.”

  “I don’t care if she’s the goddamn daughter of the queen, they are not adopting another child! They are too old, too batty, too irresponsible . . .”

  “And you don’t want to be responsible for another messed-up Rhodes,” Aiden said.

  Well, yeah. He was supporting enough people and he didn’t want to have to feed, clothe, and educate another child. Wasn’t he already doing, giving enough? Axl rubbed his eyes with his fingers and thumb, feeling the insistent pounding of a headache behind his eyes.

  “Hey, I’m the first one to say that you do more than enough for the clan and you have a right to be pissed,” Aiden said. “They are off their freaking rockers. If I was you, I’d tell them that there is no damn way that they can adopt anyone.”

  “I can’t exactly stop them, A.”

  “Of course you can, dude. You can stop funding them. They’ll change their minds soon enough when they know that their source of money is drying up.”

  “We both know that if I cut off the cash, they will starve.”

  “Crap,” Aiden shot back. “If you cut off the cash, Dad will get off his ass and start sculpting again. He’s talented, Axe, but he’s bloody lazy. You’re enabling him, them, Axe.”

  It wasn’t something Aiden hadn’t told him before, but how could he cut the funds? They were so damn useless that they wouldn’t cope.

  “I know what you are going to say now, Axe. You’ll talk to them again, try and make them see the error of their ways.”

  Crap. He had been about to say that.

  “Talking doesn’t help. How many times have you had that conversation?” Axl heard Aiden’s sigh of frustration. “I don’t understand you, Axe. I know that you are this big, bad, scary Spec Ops warrior who takes no shit, but with them you’re a pussy.”

  “Up yours.” Axl tossed the curse into the phone.

  “Up yours back,” Aiden cheerfully replied. “It’s like they have a hold over you. Why do you let them treat you like their personal bank?”

  He couldn’t tell Aiden that his money was the only link he had to his parents and his siblings. He didn’t understand them and they didn’t know him and they had absolutely nothing in common except for his money. If he cut off the cash, there would be nothing binding them together. He’d lose his family, the only family he had, and over what? Money? It wasn’t a good enough reason.

  On the other hand, his family wasn’t much of a family . . .

  From the time he was little, he’d known that he was different from his parents, sensed that they didn’t particularly like him and definitely didn’t understand him. He was bigger, bolder, brighter than them . . . more independent at six than they were at sixty. He understood, from an early age, that his parents took their opinions from those around them, that they molded their thoughts and actions to get the approval of others. Naturally assertive and innately protective, when he was a teenager and more half sibs appeared on the scene, he watched them waste the little money they had and he’d stepped into the role of being the responsible adult in the house. He controlled the money and at fifteen he was the man of the house, the one who brought a little order to their lives.

  His family, especially his father, resented him taking charge, but while he bitched and moaned, he m
ade no effort to wrest back control. He’d shouldered the responsibility for his family until he was twenty. After two years of working two part-time jobs between his studies to keep food on the table and studying at night, he’d rebelled and joined the Navy. Young and dumb and sick and tired, needing to have some sort of life, he’d broke off contact with his family and he’d felt free. After a few years, he thought he’d mend some fences, and when he tracked them down, what he found shocked him.

  They hadn’t fared well in his absence. They’d lost their house and were renting a double-wide trailer that looked like it had gone six rounds with a nuclear bomb and lost. One sister was pregnant, they were broke and on food stamps, and his half brother was a guest of the county jail. Unable to walk away again, he’d used most of his savings to move them into a decent house, to buy some furniture, to fill the fridge. As his income grew, so did their needs. A car, some equipment so that his dad could sculpt again, visits to the hairdresser so that his mom could feel “pretty” again.

  Bigger, better cars, furniture, holidays they claimed they needed, new tiles in their house, new kids . . .

  Axl realized that Aiden had dropped the call at his silence, and he turned back to his desk, dreading the questions he knew Reagan would ask, but Reagan, like Aiden, was gone.

  Axl looked at his Rolex and hissed a curse. He was also, thanks to his mental trip down memory lane, ten minutes late for their nine o’clock meeting with Knox Callow and the attractive PI.

  Chapter Seven

  BoredWife: Carol-Jane Carmichael booked into the Mercy B&B last night.

  TessG: Did she happen to pop in to the Fox?

  CoolGranny: Knox Callow is, sadly, keeping a low profile. But there are still photographers hanging out at the entrance to the Freedman estate. Vultures.

  AmysBooks: Hey! No knocking our visitors; those journalists buy an awful amount of coffee from me . . .

  Reagan left Axl’s office and walked to the conference room, taking the seat closest to the window, and waited for the nine a.m. meeting to start.

  Axl’s family sucked the life out of him. Every time he heard from one of them, there was drama, a problem he needed to solve or cash he needed to fork out. She was surprised that Axl, hard-assed and generally impatient, put up with it. He didn’t suffer fools, was hot-tempered and tough, and Reagan couldn’t work out why he let his family walk all over him.

  It was weird and just another piece of the complex puzzle that was Axl Rhodes.

  Thinking about complex and convoluted puzzles . . .

  Her conversation with Flick and Pippa earlier left her feeling a little unbalanced and a little lost. Okay, she’d never looked at her joining MKR from Axl’s point of view and that was on her, she should have. She wished she could dismiss Axl’s concerns about her lack of training but she couldn’t. It hurt like hell to admit that his concerns were valid; it was painful to admit that there was absolutely nothing—barring joining the SEALs and going to war—that would put his mind at ease.

  Maybe it was time to accept that she was never going to be part of his inner circle, that . . . God! . . . that wasn’t where she belonged. In the days following Mike’s funeral, there was only one item on her agenda that she was completely certain about: She was determined to maintain her connection to Mike through Mike’s friends. Yes, she’d returned to college and Kai, Sawyer, and Axl departed for wherever shit-hot SEALs went.

  She worked to finish her degree in psychology but she made time to write to each of the unholy trio every week. She’d felt emotional when they sent her an invitation to the cocktail evening to launch their new company and nearly cried when she realized that they’d named their company, as Mike wanted them to, Caswallawn International. Over warm wine and canapés she heard that they would be training personal protection officers, and she’d signed up for their first course. And their second. After completing their advanced course, she’d applied to join the company, and Sawyer and Kai voted to hire her, their first female PPO, over Axl’s vocal objections. She was assigned to a few principals before landing Sir Perry in London, and that gig lasted three years before Sir P’s new wife objected to her constant presence in her new husband’s life.

  She’d learned, through Sir P, that Axl and his team rescued the kidnapped son of one of Sir Perry’s Russian business associates, and she’d been intrigued. Initially, her joining MKR had been a great way to bait Axl, to get a reaction from him.

  But when she’d run into Axl here in Mercy a few months back, something shifted between them. She’d been arguing with him, as per usual, but she realized, to her shock and excitement, that Axl was on the verge of kissing her. And that she, desperately, wanted him to.

  Yes, she wanted to join MKR—she was a Hudson and reaching the top of the tree was in her DNA—but had she been lying to herself? Yes, joining would mean that she’d be a part of the unholy trio and she’d finally belong somewhere . . . and that was important to her. But, hell, she super reluctantly admitted that she also wanted to do something, be somewhere that brought her closer to Axl. She wanted to strengthen the connection between them . . .

  Or she wanted to jump him, who the hell knew?

  Right, this was another reason why she avoided guys; they confused her, made her lose focus, and the emotions they raised clouded her thinking. She needed to see herself and this situation clearly. But Axl was a sexy, sexy guy and his hottie factor melted her thought processes. Reagan ignored Sawyer and Kai’s conversation and stood up and walked over to the coffee machine, needing a caffeine hit.

  She couldn’t keep operating like this; Axl’s kisses accelerated her from feeling mildly frustrated to a hot mess of pent-up sexual frustration. The only solution was to sleep with Axl, and by sleep, she meant that she needed him to blow the cobwebs away.

  Maybe their attraction was something that could be burned off, the same way the morning sun dried up dew on the grass. Maybe sleeping together would be the solution to normalize their volatile relationship? The only way to find out was to get naked and busy.

  And when they’d done the deed, and after they’d found Knox’s stalker, maybe she could take another look at what she wanted, career-wise, without the confusion that lusting after Axl created. Although she sort of knew that she’d never make the grade, she’d try out for MKR—she’d made such a song and dance about it that she’d look like an idiot if she backed down now. After that was done, and Axl hired Jack—because who wouldn’t hire Jack over her?—then she would do some serious thinking. Did she want to be a PPO for the rest of her life? Was there something else she wanted to do? Was she content to live and breathe her work or did she want more?

  The first step was to sleep with Axl so that she could think clearly; thoughts of him naked were a huge distraction. She couldn’t think of him as her boss, as her brother’s best friend. She had to think of him as a sexy bod, a nice face with a fabulously gorgeous, and talented, mouth. Okay, decision made. She would do this, could do this, but how would she tell him?

  An email? Text message? Jungle drums? Please take me to bed and screw me stupid were not words that were ever going to pass her lips.

  “Hi again. Reagan, right?”

  Reagan jumped at the hand on her shoulder and she knocked the mug of coffee over and it created a large pool on the credenza. The liquid dropped to the floor, splashing her boots. “Dammit,” she muttered.

  CJ grabbed a pile of paper napkins stacked behind the coffee machine and plunked the pile on top of the coffee puddle.

  “Sorry. Miles away,” Reagan said, pulling a face at the mess. She looked a CJ’s white top and white pants, checking for brown spots. Thankfully she looked like she’d escaped the splatter. “Hi.”

  “Hi back,” CJ said, smiling. “I was going to make some coffee but it looks like Sawyer wants to start.”

  Sawyer and Kai were seated at the table, as was Knox. Huh, when did arrive? When she was daydreami
ng about getting Axl naked? Speaking of, where was Sex-on-a-Plate? Still arguing with his family?

  “Take a seat,” Reagan said to CJ. “I’ll make you a cup. How do you like it?”

  “Black and sweet, thanks.” CJ walked back to the table and Reagan caught Knox’s eye and lifted a mug. He nodded and she busied herself at the machine.

  “Carry on, Sawyer, I’ll join you in a second,” Reagan said, speaking over her shoulder.

  “I’m waiting for Axl,” Sawyer said from the head of the table.

  “I’m here,” Axl spoke from the door, and Reagan tossed a quick look over her shoulder. She pulled in a quick breath and cursed the bats swirling around her stomach. Dressed in brown chinos and a burgundy long-sleeved shirt, he looked hot and tense and oh-so-doable.

  Reagan looked at him again and wrinkled her nose. He did not look like a man who’d had a woman up against a wall, his erection pressing into her stomach, seconds off stripping her naked. His eyes were shuttered, his expression inscrutable, and nobody in the room would suspect that he had the screaming hots for her or that his family drove him batshit insane.

  Axl played his cards ridiculously close to his chest. For some reason she found that very sad indeed.

  Reagan placed CJ’s and Knox’s coffees in front of them and, without bothering to ask him if he wanted one, made Axl an espresso. She took his tiny cup and her mug to the table and slid into the empty seat next to him, nudging the small coffee in his direction.

  “I think you need this,” she murmured.

  “You’re not wrong,” Axl replied, handing her a small smile. “Thanks.”

  Sawyer called the meeting to order and asked CJ for her report. CJ tucked the black hair of her blunt-cut bob behind her ears before tapping the tablet she’d placed in front of her. She frowned, looked down, and bit her bottom lip. After briefly shaking her head, she looked across the table at Knox. “I’m genuinely stuck. I have no idea who has enough of a problem with you that they send you threatening letters, break into your house, and worse, would torch your trailer.”