Dominance Never Dies (Masters and Mercenaries #11)(102)

Well, it would worry Mia if she gave a shit about him. Erin gave a shit about him and that was why he was suddenly eating like an actual adult. Erin had found the envelope with his test results. In her defense it had been sitting on the bar for two weeks. She’d opened it and then all the Taggart women had been on his ass. They’d shown up with medical studies and recipes he wasn’t sure how they expected him to cook since he didn’t cook. Charlotte had brought a juicer to work and Case had discovered that vegetables and fruits actually tasted worse when pulverized into liquid.

And yet if Mia had been there yelling at him for his dietary choices, it all would have been okay. It was actually kind of nice to have someone give a crap about him.

Living with Erin and TJ for six months had proven a couple of things to him. One—he and his brother had completely different tastes in women. Case loved Erin like a sister, but if he found her talking to her gun one more time, he was going to go insane. Then there was the fact that she enforced her very strict policies on where he left his sneakers by tying them together and launching them into the highest branches of the elm in the backyard. Though effective—he put his sneakers in his room now—it was obnoxious.

The second thing it proved to him was that he was ready for a family. He loved sitting down at night to have dinner and getting up in the morning and seeing his nephew’s smiling face.

He wanted that with Mia.

If only he hadn’t followed his brother’s advice and left that condom off he might have gotten Mia pregnant and then she wouldn’t have been able to avoid him.

Of course she likely would have hated him more than she already did.

He strode into his building. It didn’t matter. He was going to Sierra Leone in the morning. He was going to get his brother back and then he would come home and go to New York with Riley and the rest of the Lawless clan. He would help them with the StratCast op, and there was zero chance of Mia not being there. He would win her back.

He had to.

He started for the elevator when his cell rang. He pulled his phone out and immediately answered. “Hey, Michael. What’s going on?”

His best friend’s voice was smooth over the line. “Absolutely nothing. I thought you would want to know that Erin and the baby are great. She’s packing. Everything is cool. I’ll escort her to the airport the day after tomorrow and I’ll make sure she and Avery are safe. Are you all right?”

“It’s just an apartment.” But he felt his muscles tighten. One of the joys of living at Erin’s for the last six months had been not walking by Hutch’s place every day and wondering what kind of torture he was going through. Someone from the team went by every week to make sure the place was fine, and the company had taken over paying his rent. Hutch didn’t have a family outside of his team, so they’d ensured he would have a home to come back to.

“It’s an apartment that’s going to have its resident back in a couple of days. We’re going to get in, set up, and be ready when McDonald makes an appearance,” Michael assured him.

“And if she doesn’t?” It was the scenario that went through his head a million times since the moment they’d gotten confirmation of a meeting between Stephanie and Hope McDonald.

“She’ll send her team. You know damn well Theo is the lead member of her team.” Michael sounded way more sure than Case felt.

“And if not killing Mia made her demote Theo?”

“One, you don’t know that she knows Mia’s still alive. They immediately ran. She very likely didn’t actually see what happened. Two, even if she did, I think she would keep Theo in his place. She’s obsessed with Theo. She wants him to be the face of her organization.”

Yes, he’d heard all the reports and profiles from both Eve and Kai. Still, he worried. This was their shot. If Theo didn’t show, he had no idea what they would do. Everything depended on this one chance.

So why couldn’t he concentrate? Why did his brain constantly go to Mia?

“Let’s pray that’s true,” Case replied. “I’m going to head up. It’ll be weird to sleep the entire night. TJ tends to wake up around three. No idea why. Most of the time he doesn’t even want to eat. Just rock him for a little while and then he’ll sleep the rest of the night.”

“Uhm, I’m here to make sure no one gets murdered,” Michael said, uncertainty plain in his voice. “I’m not doing the baby thing. I don’t think I’d be good at it.”

Lightweight. “You will if you don’t want to deal with a cranky Erin. Did I mention she shoots people when she’s cranky?” He laughed at the thought of Michael trying to deal with TJ and his militant mama. “I’ll see you when you get to Freetown. Take care of them.”

“Will do. Before you go, I wanted to let you know that Fain’s in town. I saw him slinking out of my building about an hour ago. He had a ball cap pulled down low, but I recognized him.”

“We still have no idea who he’s seeing?” It was a mystery and Case didn’t like mysteries.

“No, but then I haven’t asked to see the security camera tapes.”

He missed Hutch. His team was seriously down a man and he felt it. “Adam’s busy getting ready to leave. Do we have anyone else who could hack into those feeds?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Michael replied. “But there are over three hundred tenants in this building. I watched to see what floor he got off on, but there were two other people in the elevator with him. I didn’t recognize either one. He’s getting off on five, ten, or eighteen. I’ll see if I can track his movements. It felt wrong to me. He was trying to keep his head down.”