A Dom is Forever (Masters and Mercenaries #3)(49)

And that explained the hard press he’d witnessed. “You didn’t have a lot of luck in the romance department.”

Because that f*cker wasn’t Avery’s type. He was.

Weston frowned. “No, I didn’t. You’ll have to tell me what kind of approach you used. I tried every bloody charming trick I know.”

But she didn’t need charming. She needed a man who could protect her, who could claim her. She was submissive deep down. She needed to be needed, and f*ck all if Liam didn’t need her. “I didn’t have the same problem.”

“Yeah, I got that. She seems to like arses with dark hair.” His eyes had narrowed, frustration evident. So the near royal bastard hadn’t liked being turned down. Fucker probably hated the fact that Avery had chosen a common Irish thug to bed down with. God bless Americans and their egalitarianism because if he thought for a single second that Avery had flirted with this bastard, he might have gone over the table and been at the bastard’s throat, but he knew the truth. Avery hadn’t wanted anyone except him. She’d waited. She’d waited for him.

“She apparently knows a good thing when she sees it.” He let his arrogance out. Weston needed to understand that he controlled the flow of information that would come from Avery Charles. If he ended up working with MI6, the team needed to get the fact that Avery was his asset and he would be the one to handle her and make the decisions. “I’m in. I have her right where I want her. Though she’ll likely be pissed as hell with me if I don’t get back to her before dawn.”

Now that he was away from her, he knew it would be a terrible mistake to allow her to wake up by herself. She would assume he’d used her. She would pull away and every inch of ground he’d gained would be lost. He could see it clearly now. He needed to be there.

“I’ll have you back before dawn,” Weston said, his eyes narrowing. “I wouldn’t want to hurt the girl. Though I haven’t figured out if she’s in on it yet.”

Which just proved that he was an idiot, but Liam had no intention of giving anything away. “I’m withholding judgment until I spend a little more time with her. Are you the one who bugged her phone?”

Weston’s face went blank. “No. It was that way when I managed to get it out of her bag. I placed a piggyback on the device, but I haven’t gotten anything interesting off it. I’ve heard a whole lot of her talking to her boss, but nothing beyond work and plans to have her walk him through various parks. And she’s been talking to some gay guy the last couple of days. Given when he came into her building, I suspect he belongs to Taggart and the Agency.”

And Liam suspected that Weston already knew everything. This was a chess game. “Adam. He’s been working her from the friend angle. He’s been invaluable in getting close to her. Adam knows how to get a woman to trust him.”

“Or I went about this shit all wrong. You’ve been under Taggart’s tutelage and everyone knows what that means. Tell me something, O’Donnell, did you tie her up yet?”

He felt a snarl in the back of his throat. “None of your f*cking business. Tell me something. Did you bug her house? Did you enjoy the f*cking show tonight?”

“Again, we weren’t the first. That place had been bugged before she moved in. I suspect Molina, but I can’t prove it. And yes, I listened in this evening. It made me utterly certain that if I’m going to get the information I need, I have to work with you. Or I have to bring you over to my side.” Weston leaned forward. “Come back to MI6, O’Donnell. This is where you belong. I’ll make all your Irish problems go away. I know bloody well you didn’t kill those kids.”

“How?” He wasn’t sure himself. It was a question that plagued him every day since he’d started to remember. He wasn’t completely sure he hadn’t killed them.

Weston stopped, his fingers tapping on the folder in front of him. “How much do you remember about the night you lost the bonds? I’m going to forego the recitation of the mission. I suspect you know what you were supposed to do. You and your brother were assets, and according to all records, you did your job. You got in good with the Russian organization that we suspected of terrorism. Leonov gave you roughly ten million dollars in bearer bonds that were intended to purchase a measure of uranium. Your main mission was to discover where the uranium was coming from.”

“I remember.” He did. Not much more, but he knew that much. “I was drugged at a pub. It was the night before we were supposed to meet with the arms dealer. My brother died that night.”

He couldn’t get the sight of those boots out of his mind. Even in his sessions with Eve, he got hung up on those boots and the ringing of his phone. And he still couldn’t figure out if it was real or a fiction his head had made up because nature abhorred a vacuum.

“Tell me something, O’Donnell. Who were you working for that day?”

He shrugged. He was an asset. He rarely knew exactly who was behind an op. “I was supposed to answer to a high-ranking agent in Irish intelligence, but I always knew MI6 was involved.”

“But we were only covering for who had really planned the op. It was all CIA.”

Liam went very still. “No. It was a Brit op. You needed someone with an Irish accent and believable IRA ties in order to get into the cell. My mother was IRA. Rory and I gave that up a long time ago. We were loyal to our country and friendly to the crown. The CIA had nothing to do with it.”