The Fearless King (The Kings #2)(50)
“Thank you.” She looked at both of them. “Is there anything else requiring my immediate attention?” After they both gave a negative, she closed out the call and stood back with a slow exhale. That hadn’t gone as well as she would have liked, but it was far from the worst situation she’d had to muscle her way through. The next step was smoothing Ronnie’s ruffled feathers, and getting George’s head in the game instead of on the layoffs he’d been deprived off, but both of those things could wait. They needed to stew a little bit in the meantime, otherwise she risked undermining her authority.
The oven dinged, drawing her back to the present. She frowned at the clock above the microwave. Frank had been upstairs a seriously long time at this point.
She pulled the brownies out of the oven, set them aside to cool, and then rushed upstairs. The room she’d set Frank up in was empty, but faint light shone beneath the bathroom door. Journey hesitated for all of a second before she turned the door handle and strode into the bathroom.
And stopped short.
Frank was in the shower.
She stared at the outline of his big body, only slightly distorted through the clear curtain. He had his hands braced on the tiled wall and his head bowed beneath the spray. She couldn’t actually see the lines of water lovingly tracing the muscles of his back, but Journey had no problem mentally tracing those same lines.
The absolutely insane desire to strip off her clothes and join him in the water rose, and she had to clench her hands to keep from doing exactly that. She’d all but kidnapped the man and brought him to another state. Her father wanted him dead in the most literal way. There were a thousand things she should be doing right this second to ensure that the world didn’t fall out from beneath them, and jumping into the shower with Frank didn’t number among them.
No matter how much she wanted to.
I need to get dinner in the oven. Yes. That’s what I need to do. And maybe if she took a couple of minutes, she could regain the equilibrium she’d been missing since all this began.
Too bad she didn’t like her odds all that much.
*
In the hours since they’d arrived at the house, Frank had managed to get through two rescheduled meetings about property he’d recently acquired, answer two dozen emails, and shower. Everyone once in a while, he’d hear Journey downstairs puttering around, a check-in that relaxed him in a way that he wasn’t prepared to deal with. Later, when the fate of their little corner of the world wasn’t hanging in the balance, he’d examine his complicated feelings for Journey King at length.
Now wasn’t the time or the place for it. He’d just pulled his shirt over his head when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen. This conversation had been coming from the second he agreed to help Journey. “Hey, Beck.”
“It’s time you’re straight with me, Frank. I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt because of our history and our friendship, but only if you stop dicking me around now.”
He bit back a sigh. “I’m not intentionally keeping things from you.”
“Bullshit. You drop me a cryptic phone call about Journey King, and then, next thing I know, Samara tells me that you’re dating her. The timelines don’t match up, because you sure as fuck would have told me if you were dating my cousin while my aunt was trying to have me killed.”
No use arguing with that. He never really intended to. It had taken Beck a little longer than Frank expected to put it all together, but he was understandably distracted with his new woman and running Morningstar Enterprise. “I have things under control.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.” Beck hesitated. “Shit, Frank. When I was in trouble, you didn’t hesitate to drop everything and help me. Obviously something’s going on with Kingdom Corp and you’re neck deep in the mess. My cousins won’t ask me for help, but I damn well expect you to.”
Despite everything, he smiled. He enjoyed the fuck out of his friendship with Beckett King. Even when the rest of his life had gone to shit in the worst way possible, Beck remained the one true thing that he could set his compass by. They didn’t talk about their teen years much, about when Beck was still reeling from his mother’s death and clashing weekly with his father, or when Frank had watched his old man taken away in cuffs and had to weather the media shit storm that rose in the aftermath. Or the fact that Frank’s mother had chosen to let death take her, rather than fight to stay in the world with her son.
But they’d been there for each other through it, constants in each other’s lives in the way they couldn’t be in their own.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You know Elliott Bancroft is back.”
“Yeah.” The anger changed in Beck’s voice, becoming colder. “He paid me a visit today, all smiles and charm, wanting to put the sins of the past to rest and all that bullshit.”
“What did he want with you and Morningstar?”
Beck laughed, but not like anything was funny. “To partner up to usher in a new age where Kingdom Corp and Morningstar Enterprise are the behemoth that crushes anything in its path. He didn’t say merger, but it was there between the lines.”
“He didn’t think you would agree to that.”
It wasn’t a question, but Beck answered all the same. “I didn’t get the impression that he was particularly torn up when I told him to kick rocks, but I’m still keeping an eye on my key employees in case he decides to pull a page from Lydia’s playbook and poach someone.” The slightest of pauses. “We aren’t talking about me, though—we’re talking about you and my cousin.”