Close Cover (Masters and Mercenaries #16)(5)

“No, you won’t,” Charlotte said with a wry smile. “We have a job and it looks like you’re the only one who can do it. This is why we called the meeting up here. We need you to meet with a client who’s also a bit like family. I thought we could let them interview you and Declan to see who would work for them, but it looks like you get the job by default.” She waved to someone outside the conference room. “Excellent. Here they are.”

He glanced up but couldn’t see who she was waving at. Something raced along his spine, some small tendril of instinct that told him this was important. He didn’t have the pure sight the way his great grandmother had, but he knew when change was coming and it was about to walk right through that door. Whatever this job was, it would be meaningful. To him? To the company? He couldn’t be sure, but change was coming.

“The rest of the douche is dismissed,” Tag said, getting up to open the door.

His coworkers all grumbled as they left, showing Big Tag how they felt, but in semi-polite ways as there were three women and two men waiting there in the lobby.

Remy frowned because he knew that group. They played at Sanctum, the BDSM club started by the founding members of McKay-Taggart. Well, four of them did. Will and Bridget Daley walked through first, Bridget looking pretty in her jeans and cotton top that couldn’t hide her second pregnancy. Mitch Bradford was wearing his customary suit and his sweet wife, Laurel, looked like she’d come straight from her office. Mitch was McKay-Taggart’s go-to lawyer and Daley’s best friend.

The third woman was one he hadn’t seen at the club before, but he could bet who she was. Lila Daley. He knew that because she looked a lot like her sisters—Laurel and Lisa.

Lisa. Freaking Lisa Daley, with the doe eyes and the slender feminine curves that made his mouth water every time she walked into a room. Lisa Daley, the good girl he couldn’t have because he didn’t do good girls.

At least she wasn’t here. He got antsy when she was in the room. Sometimes he actually walked out of a room when she walked in because he knew if he didn’t he would do something incredibly stupid like ask her to play or worse, ask her out on a real date.

He didn’t date. He didn’t take a sweet lady out to the movies and hold her hand and share popcorn with her and drop her at her door with nothing more than a kiss. Nope. He went to bars and picked up women who wanted a hot night of fucking. Or negotiated with submissives who knew the score.

But not with her. Never with her. The one time she’d asked, he’d practically run the other way.

I’m not interested.

He’d seen the hurt on that pretty face before he’d turned and walked away. The fact that she could be hurt made it plain she wasn’t for him.

“Thanks for meeting with us on such short notice,” Will Daley said as he settled his wife into a chair. The neurosurgeon looked worried, his eyes a bit bloodshot, as though he hadn’t been sleeping. “We were all shocked at what happened. We thought this damn nightmare was over.”

Remy sat up. What had happened? He liked the Daley family, his unwanted attraction to Lisa aside. Actually, her family was one of the reasons he stayed far away from the young woman. Lisa came from a family of high-powered doctors and nurses. Her brother-in-law was a top-tier lawyer and her sister-in-law a best-selling author. Lisa herself had a master’s degree and would likely marry someone important.

What she wouldn’t do was ever give up her comfortable life in the city to marry an ex-soldier who wanted nothing more than to tend bar and keep his hole-in-the-wall small town together. She would be horrified by where he came from, likely disdainful of the town’s residents. Lisa was a big-city lady who wouldn’t be able to handle his low-class baggage.

It didn’t stop him from thinking of her.

“I knew it could happen,” Bridget said. “I told you that judge is on the take. I can see it in his eyes. They’re all in on it.”

“Pregnancy makes you paranoid, baby,” Will said, pulling her hand to his mouth for a kiss. “Remember when we had Brendon and you were absolutely sure the woman who had moved in across from us was working for Russian intelligence?”

“She worked for the IRS,” Bridget shot back. “That’s even worse. I bet she went through our trash looking for receipts.”

Lila sighed as though this was a long-fought argument. “We don’t know that the judge is on the take. We do know that jerk has a good lawyer.”

Mitch shook his head. “Nah, that asshole got lucky. He should have found that problem in the beginning. He stumbled on it during cross.”

“What’s going on?” If Remy let them go on, they would start arguing among themselves and it would take forever to get to the point. “Who’s in jail?”

“The problem is who got out of jail,” Laurel replied, a frown on her face. “Have you been following the Jimmy Vallon case?”

“No,” Remy admitted. It wasn’t too surprising. Unless it was a sports score, he didn’t follow the news. “What’s it about?”

“Jimmy Vallon owns the largest valet service in the DFW area. He supplies restaurants and entertainment venues all over the Metroplex. About a year ago, he hired a new accountant who quickly figured out he was using some shady practices with his cash flow. She was smart enough to ask an expert and then went straight to the police to turn her boss in. Turns out Vallon was laundering money for a local drug distributor,” Mitch explained. “So the police arrested him and up until yesterday he was absolutely going to be convicted and looking forward to doing some serious time. Then at the last moment, his attorney got lucky. He got one of the cops on the scene to admit to breaking chain of custody. Vallon kept a second set of books all by hand that the accountant discovered. Turns out there’s about six hours missing between when they took the books from Vallon’s office and when they were finally logged in at the police station. At some point in time two pages were pulled out and went missing. The main evidence was thrown out and a mistrial was called.”