Love and Let Die (Masters and Mercenaries #5)(73)

“I want them back.” Chelsea didn’t seem to be in the same good mood as her sister. Maybe Simon should have tied her to a bed.

“Not going to happen. I traded them for your sister’s freedom.”

Chelsea huffed a little. “Bullshit. I could have gotten us out of that. Charlotte, you can’t believe this *. He’s one of them.”

He waited for Charlie’s deeply detailed defense of him, but she just put her head against his back and sighed. “No, he’s not.”

Neat. Succinct. To the point. He liked it.

“Charlotte, you can’t let him do this to you,” her sister pleaded. Her face twisted in a little frown of disgust. “Can’t you put that thing away?”

His cock was tenting out of his boxers, poking its way through the fly. “I told you how to make it go away, but you’re still here.” Charlie chuckled behind him, her mouth on his back sending the little laughter reverberating through his skin. It did nothing to get his dick to slow down. “Besides, it looks like Simon there has wood of his own. You’re not complaining about that.”

Simon flushed. “God, you’re a f*cking bastard, Taggart. It’s my deep pleasure to tell you that f*cking your wife is going to have to wait. Liam’s on his way in. He bagged a Russian and he managed to not kill his, so we’re bringing him into the interrogation room in five.”

Fuck all. He really couldn’t screw his wife. Damn it. His day was already going to hell. “Fine.”

“You have an interrogation room?” Charlie asked, her voice incredulous.

“Doesn’t everyone?” He wasn’t going to apologize for having a proper home. Dungeon. Check. Interrogation room. Check. She didn’t even know that he’d turned the shed in the back into a detention cell. Now that he thought about it, he really had made this house into a home. He just needed Charlie to pick out shit like curtains. Should he put curtains in his detention cell?

“I’ll take this one off your hands.” Simon had an oversized paw on Chelsea’s elbow.

She pulled away from him. “Don’t think this is over. Charlotte, I don’t care how good he is in bed. You can’t let him wreck our future.”

“The future in which you blackmail high-ranking officials?” Charlie asked, finally showing some irritation. “The one where I get renditioned because you can’t keep your hands out of the pie? Just tell me you haven’t been hacking MSS. I don’t think even Ian can work a deal with the Chinese.”

Her sister flushed. “No. I stayed away from them. You have to understand that the officials I’m working over deserve it. If you only knew the kind of things they do, Charlotte.”

“I don’t have to know,” Charlie shot back. “You shut that shit down now. We’re out of the information business. If Ian can settle everything, we’re going to keep our noses clean and stay off the radar.”

Chelsea huffed away looking like a kid who had just had her favorite toy taken. Simon followed after her.

Ian turned to Charlie, allowing her to twist until she hugged him, his cock up against her belly, the easy intimacy comforting. “So you’re on board now?”

She turned her face up. God, he loved how pretty she looked without an ounce of makeup on. “You’re right. At least half of the people looking for me will go away if we give up the business, but Ian, you have to know that my uncle won’t stop. I can’t hide here forever.”

He had no idea what he would do with her if she could stay. There was still so much between them, so much he couldn’t trust about her. Still, he didn’t want to fight more. He hugged her close. “We’ll figure it out as we go along. Now go and take a shower and then deal with Miss Frowns A Lot. She and Simon would be so much happier if they would just get it over with and f*ck.”

“That’s your solution to everything.”

It was his solution to his massive hard-on. Now that he was kind-of, sort-of done with shoving her away, he should really be able to f*ck his wife. He had five years of f*cking to make up for. He pressed his cock against her, his hands finding her hair. “It’s a really good solution.”

He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to hold her still and explore her mouth lazily. They could start the morning right. His lips hovered right over hers.

“Ian!” Liam’s voice rang out. “I caught us a nice fat fish.”

There was a flurry of Russian curse words and Charlie tensed.

Fuck. He pulled her close, forgetting about his stupid, needed-more-than-it-was-going-to-get cock. “It’s going to be okay, baby. I’ll deal with this f*cker.”

“Are you going to kill him?” There wasn’t an ounce of judgment in her question, just an offhand curiosity.

He’d thought about it, but he didn’t really want to bury the dude in his backyard and Alex’s was already full, so he was going to make another deal. “Li’s going to hold him here until the Agency can pick him up. They’ll take him along with the files and then it’s out of our hands. I really only have a couple of hours to talk to him, so go and get cleaned up. We have to be at the office by noon.”

She nodded and squeezed him one more time. “All right, Ian. I’ll watch out for Chelsea and make sure she doesn’t get into more trouble.”