Master No (Masters and Mercenaries, #9)(63)

“I think you two are wimps. I’ve worked intelligence my whole life. Did they give me body armor? No. They gave me a Victoria’s Secret pushup bra. Try stopping a bullet with that. No boots for Phoebe. No. Learn how to run for your life down the streets of Beijing with four operatives shooting at you while you’re wearing five-inch Chanel heels. Seriously though, if you have to choose, those Chanels were really comfy. And you haven’t lived until you’ve seen some of the bugs in Southeast Asia. Ewww.”

There was a reason she fit with these women. They’d asked about her work and hadn’t flinched when she talked about blood and gore. It was kind of their world, too, though they seemed to have come out on the other side of the truly dangerous stuff. Faith caught sight of Phoebe’s husband sitting at the bar, slowly nursing a single beer while he watched the baseball game on the TV. He’d been the perfect chauffeur, polite, respectful, quiet, but it was easy to see the way his eyes would shift to his wife and slowly heat. Jesse Murdoch looked like a happy man. But apparently he was the type of man who believed women who intended to drink multiple margaritas and shop needed a driver.

She rather thought Ten, Theo, and Jesse had drawn straws over who got the duty. These were “protect the women” kind of men. Living with Ten had proven that to her. She’d never had a boyfriend who was as thoughtful and protective as Tennessee Graham. He was working from home while she was here, but he took time to spend with her. He cooked breakfast every morning and dinner in the evenings. He tended to take her out for lunch or she would make sandwiches and they would sit at the bistro table on the balcony of his small, neatly kept condo.

Her days were spent relaxing, catching up on movies and TV shows she enjoyed and reading books. So many books.

The nights were all about him. There was one moment every day when Ten Graham turned into Master T. He would walk into the living room and the look in his eyes would let her know it was time. She would sink to her knees in front of him and oh, how they would play.

He would tie her up and spank her until she was hot and ready and then he would tease and taunt her in the most delicious ways before making good on the promises of his crop and cane and fingers and mouth.

Still, she felt an odd distance from him. She couldn’t complain. He was the most extraordinary lover she’d ever had, but there was a distance she couldn’t quite overcome no matter how many times he made her scream.

Not since that first morning when she’d woken up and he was wrapped around her had she felt so close to him in bed. It gave her a restless feeling, but she might have to admit that despite having the time of her life with him, he wasn’t the magical one. She would miss him, but she knew what she needed and that was a real connection to a man, a feeling that she was needed for more than sex and submission.

She had to deal with the fact that she’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted. She’d gotten an amazing Dom to spend a few weeks with and some of the most relaxing days she’d ever had. She would remember the vacation forever.

Why did she want more?

“So are y’all really going to the Caymans?” Phoebe asked. “My brother is not exactly the islands type.”

There it was—an insatiable curiosity about the man. He didn’t talk a whole lot about himself, and Erin seemed to know him more as a coworker than a friend. This was why she was restless. She knew she wanted more than Ten seemed willing to give her. She prided herself on being a smart girl, but she was in a load of gorgeous-man quicksand, and it muddled her brain. Every time she tried to distance, he would walk in the room and she would reach out again. She’d thought about leaving early and without him, but she knew she wouldn’t. She would take every single second she had with him. “Why? Ten seems like a man who likes to relax. There’s nothing as relaxing as lying on the beach.”

“Unless someone’s mortaring the beach, and then it kind of sucks. You know, sand is hard to run in,” Erin explained with a perfectly straight face.

She was going to be fun on the island.

Phoebe ignored the war talk. “Ten likes to relax, though he doesn’t do it much. I’m talking about the fact that my brother doesn’t really like to take his shirt off much.”

“Why?” The question came out as a disbelieving huff. “If I had a body like that I would never wear a shirt.”

“He’s pretty hot,” Erin admitted. “Not as hot as Theo. I get paid to say that.”

Sure she did. “I’m just saying having seen the man fully naked, he should have zero insecurities.”

Phoebe shuddered. “Okay, wow, I guess I didn’t think through this particular part of the bonding experience. Despite the whole no blood between us thing, he’s really my brother. And I was talking about the scars. When he was a preening teenager, he used to go shirtless whenever he could. I swear every appropriate female in the area got a glimpse of Ten’s physique. A whole lot of inappropriate ones, too. I’m not even going to tell you what I caught him doing with my Mandarin tutor. I was too young to see that.”

Faith could see him being a horny teenaged boy. “The scars aren’t that bad. He doesn’t talk about them though. I got him to tell me one story, but he shut down about the rest of them.”

Phoebe nodded after taking a drink of the frosty margarita in front of her. “There’s a reason for that. I think in your world it’s called trauma. We call it an occupational hazard. He got caught by the bad guys once and most of the scars are from that experience.”