On Her Master's Secret Service (Masters and Mercenaries #4)(73)

“Eve, what do you think?” Ian asked, deferring as he often did to Eve. She knew people. She rarely screwed up.

Eve glanced up, obviously looking for Kristen, but she hadn’t reappeared. “I think she’s hiding something, but I don’t think she means any of us harm. I truly believe she wants to do this job and catch Michael Evans. I don’t know if I completely believe her reasons for doing so, but I don’t sense anything from her that would make me distrust her. If I had to go off what I know right now, I would say she’s screwed up in the past. She’s looking for redemption and she goes about it by uncovering corruption and helping people. I would say she probably lives a fairly solitary life. Her parents are either dead or she has a distant relationship with them. She’s looking for a family, seeking to cobble together a group of friends to call her own. Earlier today, Alex did something that really pissed her off, but she still got to her knees to talk to me.”

“Why were you on your knees?” Liam asked.

The cutest little frown crossed Eve’s face. “Alex didn’t like how I handled a situation so he punished me by making me crawl across a dirty floor.”

He felt himself flush. He wouldn’t have knowingly sent her to a dirty floor. “It looked clean to me.”

Eve pouted adorably. “Well, you should have looked closer. Anyway, Kristen could have just walked beside me, but she got down to my level. She’s a little bit of a puzzle, but if I had to, I would bet that she is firmly on our side.”

Ian’s eyes widened slightly, and a little grin curved his lips up. “He punished you? Like actual punishment, not something you decided on and manipulated him into?”

Now it was Eve’s turn to blush. “It’s just for show.”

“Like hell it is,” Alex muttered under his breath. “She put herself in danger, and she’s my sub. I’ll punish her as I wish.”

Ian slapped his hands together. “Well, hell. At least part of the week is looking up. Adam, please get my identity back and find whatever f*cker Nelson hired to wreck my life. I doubt he did it himself. We need to find him and then torture him into giving up Nelson, and then I’ll slice his balls off and feed them to him because I’m pretty sure he put my name on a bunch of mailing lists. I’m getting spammed like crazy.”

Liam nodded, smiling in agreement. “Damn near took our systems down. He got five thousand ads for male enhancement and two thousand offering him forklift operator training. This is a serious matter, my mates.”

Ian rolled his eyes and flipped his computer down, breaking the connection.

Eve shook her head. “Are we sure this is Nelson? It seems so impish. Nelson would just come at him hard.”

“Have you ever had a deep cavity search?” Sean asked, shuddering a little. “It’s sounds pretty nasty to me.”

Eve’s eyes narrowed, and she let her sarcasm flow. “No, Sean. I’ve never had anything shoved into my body parts by some overly enthusiastic Dom. Yeah, no sub ever had to endure that.”

And on that note, it was time to take his sub and make a few things clear to her. “You all have your assignments.”

Kristen walked in, a stack of files in her hands. She gave Eve a little smile, but held back from the rest, and Alex wondered just how much she’d overheard. “I have the files. It’s pretty much everything I could get off the FBI’s site. Don’t hate me, McKay, but I got the SAC’s personal folders on all the victims. I know they were random, but I thought I needed to read their files. You know, they deserve that much.”

He nodded and took them from her. “Eve can look through them later, but we’re going to have a conversation right now.”

After the session in the shower, he knew he had to push through her barriers. She thought they were through, but they hadn’t even started yet. In order to let go of the past, they had to face it, finally.

He reached down and took her hand.

“I really would like to look at those files.” Eve’s eyes strayed to them.

“After.” He tugged on her hand, pulling her along.

“Alex.” Eve sighed his name. “We really should talk about what’s happening.”

He walked her into the bedroom. “I don’t think so.”

Eve pulled away. “We can’t just ignore it. We’re being truly intimate for the first time in years, but it’s not real.”

“You’re right.” It couldn’t be real as long as they had so much of the past between them.

Her breath caught just enough to let Alex know she was upset that he agreed. But she smoothed out her expression and was right back to being the logical one. This was the game she’d been playing for five years. It seemed to have become a habit. One he intended to break.

If he hadn’t been watching her closely, he wouldn’t have seen the truth behind her mask. When had he stopped studying her every expression? When had he become lazy and so scared of losing her that he’d forgotten how to take care of her? “I’m glad you can be reasonable. Alex, we’re just holding on to what we know. We’re both afraid to let go of the past.”

“There were a lot of things about the past that were pretty damn good, you know.” He closed the door behind them. This wasn’t a conversation that needed an audience. He placed the folders on the dresser, trading them for something far more important. He zipped open his leather kit, pulling out the lube and a pack of wipes and walking it over to the nightstand.