Red Handed by Jessa Wilder
Raegan stormed out of my suite, red hair streaming behind her like a fiery fucking tornado. Sophie darted after her, throwing one scared look at me over her shoulder. I ground my teeth. That was really all I needed right now.
The moment the door slammed behind that idiot guard they brought with them, everything erupted.
“What the fuck?” Beck shouted at me as he picked up a lamp off the side of an end table and chucked it at my head. I ducked instinctively, and it smashed against my TV.
“Son of a bitch,” I screamed as the screen spider webbed. I took a furious step in Beck’s direction, intending to smash his face into my fucking ten thousand dollar 85” flatscreen, but Rush stepped between us, throwing his arms out.
“We just made the rule about fighting,” he yelled. “Only in the gym, remember? Fuck!”
“Why would you call her the enemy?” Beck bellowed around Rush’s outstretched arms.
My eyebrows hit my hairline. “Because it’s the truth? Anyway, you know that asshole security guard of theirs is funneling information back to her father.”
I used the term “security guard” loosely. I couldn’t stand that kid, Connor. Not because he was in any way a threat, but just because he was a complication I didn’t need. I wasn’t planning to kill him, though, not until today. Now he was going to fucking die.
“You made it sound like we’re all against her.” Beck picked up a fruit bowl, but this time I was ready for it, catching it before it went through my sliding glass door.
“Stop fucking throwing shit,” I yelled back. “We are against her, or have you forgotten too? What the fuck is wrong with you? Jesus.”
Beck looked at Rush for support, but he shook his head. “You need to wrap your head around the fact that she’s Mount Summer royalty and stop panting over the enemy.”
Beck growled at the back of his throat. “Oh, like you fucking have? You aren’t fooling anyone.”
I grabbed a bottle at random and poured myself a generous glass of something amber, not even checking the label. I needed a second, or I was going to hit Beck, and Rush was right. I had just promised last week to stop doing that.
I gave it to the count of ten, then turned back to my two best friends. They both looked pissed, but for different reasons. It had only been a few days of the O’Rourke girls being here, and already shit had imploded.
“You can’t keep her here, Man. She’s not a prisoner,” Rush said, eyeing me.
“Who? Raegan or Sophie?” I asked, semi-seriously.
“Raegan.”
Rush was usually the most rational of all of us. The one with the least scars—emotional and physical. He was off base right now though. He didn’t fucking get it. “I’m keeping her until she helps get our laptop back. That’s the agreement,” I snarled.
I had no idea why I made that agreement. I had my own thieves. Raegan might be better—I couldn’t tell until I saw her in action—but still, I could have done the job without her. I didn’t really need to bring her with us. I wouldn’t have if Jimmy hadn’t screamed at her…if I hadn’t seen her at the party. Fuck.
This was why I didn’t improvise. Improvising is how I ended up with a random girl screaming at me and ignoring all my rules and my two best friends acting like fucking idiots all in the span of five goddamn days. Now I was stuck avoiding her while I came up with bullshit ways to make it seem like I really needed her here in the first place.
“And Sophie?” Beck asked. “What are you going to do with her?”
What? Who cared about Sophie? Jesus. That sounded bad, even to say to my brothers. I needed to reel it in.
I stared at Beck for too long, trying to remember what he was asking me. “Sophie is here because we’re doing Jimmy a favor,” I said finally. “If they’re getting shot at, what do you want me to do?”
Beck reached for the bottle I’d abandoned and poured two more drinks, handing one to Rush. “Don’t you think you need to tell them why they’re getting shot at?”
“No,” I growled. “No one says a fucking word.”
“That’s going to blow up in your face, bro,” Rush said ominously.
Probably. Still, I didn’t want to deal with it. Not yet.
“We wait,” I snapped. “First, we get the laptop back and assess the situation at the Mount Summer base. I want to know how it’s going with so many of our men over there.”
Beck looked wary. “Don’t you think keeping it from the girls will make it worse when they eventually find out? I mean, they have all the baggage from their brother too, it wasn’t just Dante that died.”
My eyes narrowed. I fucking hated when anyone brought up Dante, and Beck liked to do it at least once a week. Motherfucker was lucky I liked him. I probably earned it this time for throwing Marcus in Raegan’s face, though. Not that he needed to hear that. “Shut up,” I barked. “It’s not your job to make the plans. Stick to waterboarding, or whatever the hell you’re getting off on these days.”
Beck’s eyes hardened, and I wondered for a second if he was going to snap, but then he just grinned and took a sip of his drink. “Whatever, man,” he said cheerfully. “Your funeral.”
Rush and I glanced at each other. Sometimes I thought we should get Beck someone to talk to, but then there was always something else to deal with and the issue kept getting pushed to the back burner. At least I was angry on the surface. Beck was repressing a lot of shit.
Through the wall, Raegan’s voice yelled something about calling her dad. I smiled. I hoped she was ripping that Connor kid a new asshole.
“Thin walls,” Rush commented. “That’s not a problem in the rest of the hotel, is it?”
It definitely was not a problem in the rest of the hotel. I couldn’t have prostitutes working side by side if they could all hear each other. Most floors were sound proofed. In retrospect, I’d totally fucked up on this floor. “When I built this place, I thought I would want to hear what was going on over there. Turns out I don’t give a fuck,” I said.
“Huh. Well, good security measure I guess.” Rush finished his drink.
“Exactly.”
“Speaking of security.” Rush stood and unplugged his laptop from the now destroyed TV. “We should look at this again.”
“What about it?” Beck asked, walking around the kitchen island to look at the computer screen.
“Did you notice anything weird about Raegan in the footage?” Rush asked.
I glanced at him. “I don’t have fucking time to play twenty questions with you, just spit out what you have to say.”
He raised an eyebrow, but hit play on the security footage, pausing it right as Raegan stepped out from behind the pillar to shoot and fired three shots. “Fine, fuck, calm down.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Do you see that? That’s fucking crazy.”
“So? She shot the guy.” Beck shrugged.
“No.” Rush rewound the tape, and we watched it again. The Cafe was under fire. Raegan and Sophie got under the table. They crawled behind the pillars. Raegan stepped out and fired three shots, and then it stopped.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“She killed him. No other explanation,” Rush said. “She stepped in front of an active shooter using a military grade assault rifle and hit him in the T-box before he hit her. She didn’t even have a clear shot. That’s insane.”
“No, that’s decent training,” Beck supplied.
I mulled that over. That was more than decent training. That was the kind of training I had. The kind of training that only came from having people repeatedly shoot at you while you tried to figure out how to shoot back. Why would Jimmy O’Rourke have trained Raegan like that? Sophie was the heir to Mount Summer—sort of. Her husband would take over the organization. That was just how things worked. So why train Raegan like an heir? It made no fucking sense.
I glanced at the wall. Raegan was leaving Sophie’s room now. I could hear the door opening and her footsteps in the hall. Connor was with her. There were two sets of feet. I had the strangest urge to go out there and kill him right here and now. Fuck. I needed to get a grip. That was not part of the plan, and what had I learned from all of this? Never fucking improvise.
* * *
It was barely six in the morning on a Sunday, but I was wide awake.
Fucking Sophie got up early to do cardio yogalates. I had no idea what the fuck that was, but I could hear every note of her bullshit pop music through my bedroom wall starting at 5:30AM for the last week. I was this close to storming in there and shooting her TV until it bled.
Better yet, I could steal it from her. My new TV wouldn’t be delivered until tomorrow, and I was still seriously pissed about the death of my previous one. Plus, I’d probably made her room too nice. Both of them. I should have made this harder on them.
Sophie’s music got louder—some woman whining about her boyfriend leaving her. Made perfect sense to me with a voice like that. How would you ever hear yourself think? I got up and pressed my hands into my eyes. I wasn’t going to be getting any more sleep any time soon. I needed to get a contractor in here immediately to fix the fucking walls. Or I could move Sophie to another floor. I’d clearly been having some sort of psychotic break when I put her up here. The room beside mine had gone unoccupied for years, and I preferred it that way.
The real issue was when I decided to put Raegan downstairs with Beck and Rush. She was attractive, smart-mouthed, and carried guns. I could already see where that was going and should have anticipated it. Jesus, what a fucking nightmare. I might need to call this whole week a wash. I needed a Xanax. Or to get fucked.
Skipping the shower for the moment, I got up and grabbed a bathing suit from the hook in my bathroom and pulled it on. One of the positive things I’d done when building this hotel was put stairs from my room up to the pool. If not for that I undoubtedly would have relocated everyone to one of the other hotels by now, just to avoid listening to the yogalates.
The smell of chlorine filled the air as I jogged up the steps to the pool deck, towel and gun in hand. Only the earliest rays of sun were rising over the horizon, casting the roof in soft light. All of St. Adrian was still asleep. Lucky bastards.
A gigantic wall covered in greenery divided the roof in two. This side was my personal oasis. The other was for guest use. A large infinity pool lined the edge of the roof, appearing like you could swim right off. The Hotel on Main was one of the tallest buildings in this part of the city, allowing me to look out over the enormous park below. One of my better design ideas.
I tossed my towel on one of the lounge chairs and dove into the pool. The water hadn’t quite reached its peak temperature yet so early, and the slight chill shocked me fully awake.
Flipping over onto my back, I floated there for a minute. Today I was going to send some of my guys to dig around on the East Side of the city and see if they could find out who the shooter was yesterday. Rush and I had watched the security tape at least fifteen times on Wednesday night, and all we could see was Raegan.
Raegan protecting her sister. Raegan stepping out and shooting at an active gunman like it was nothing. Raegan wearing the shortest shorts I’d ever fucking seen outside of a strip club.
I still couldn’t fucking believe her security guy just left her like that. I’d probably have to wait a couple of weeks to kill him. Make it seem unrelated to today, otherwise Jimmy would have questions. I fucking hated playing politics with other gang leaders. It would be so much easier when I didn’t have to pander to people like Jimmy fucking O’Rourke anymore. Granted, when I didn’t have to pretend anymore, I’d have a whole host of other problems.
Fuck, that yogalates song was stuck in my head. That shit was going to have to stop, or I would blow my brains out by the end of the week.
Something moved on the pool deck, and my eyes flew open. I flipped in the water so I was no longer floating on my back and swam to the edge. What was that? No one was allowed on this side of the pool except Beck and Rush, and they wouldn’t be awake yet. I wasn’t usually awake now either. I rose halfway out of the water, reaching for my gun on the lounge chair and froze. Holy shit.
Raegan stood by a lounger near the bar. She was stripping out of a sheer robe, revealing the fucking smallest black bikini I’d ever seen. My heart hammered and I bit my fist to hold back a groan when she bent all the way over to put her phone on the lounger. Fuck.
I rubbed my hand over my face. This wasn’t fucking happening. What had I just said yesterday? She was the goddamned enemy, and I wasn’t going to be like my idiot friends and forget that just because she had a nice ass.
She turned, mouth dropping open, when her gaze landed on me. Hooded eyes under long lashes scanned my body as I stepped into the shallows and started up the stairs. Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, and my gaze snapped to her mouth. She bit down, piercing her bottom lip between her teeth, and I stared, transfixed.
“If you keep looking at me like that I’m going to take it as an invitation,” I said casually, not really expecting an answer.
When she gasped, I glanced up at her and held my breath for half a second, morbidly curious to hear what she would say. Her gaze hardened, and I was hit with a strange combination of relief and disappointment. Fucking hell, I needed to get out of here and get laid.
“Ugh, stop,” she scoffed. “I remember I hate you every time you open your mouth.”
I walked closer and hummed when her gaze inadvertently dropped down to my bare chest. If she thought she was pulling off unaffected, she was dead wrong, but that was fine. At least she had given me the second I needed to remember who the fuck she was. If I’d picked up anything from watching all that security footage the other day, it was that Raegan was not an innocent little princess like her sister. She was a threat—in more ways than one.
“The feeling is mutual, O’Rourke.”
Anyone else, anyone, and she’d already be laid out under me on this lounger. Instead, I took another step, boxing her in. She looked up at me with some mixture of lust and disdain, the internal battle practically visible on her face. I could hardly blame her for that, but I was still going to exploit the shit out of it.
Another step closer and her breath came out in pants. I stepped in close enough for my mouth to graze her ear, and goosebumps covered her skin.
I straightened abruptly and pointed to the chair beside her. “You’re in the way of my towel.”
“What—” She turned bright red, mouth dropping open, and took off toward the water.
My smile slipped a little as I strode from the pool area. I balled my hand into a fist, strangling my towel. Maybe that had worked a little too well.
I stormed into my room and pulled out my phone, dialing the number of one of my guys over at the downtown Hotel Esposito.
“Boss.” Anthony answered on the second ring.
“I’m coming down there for a couple of days.”
“What? Why?”
“It doesn’t fucking matter, does it? I want to see how the renovation is going.”
I didn’t really care how the renovation was going. The new hotel was my least favorite location. The Hotel on Main was my favorite, followed by the Lexington Avenue location. Technically they were all called “The Hotel Esposito,” but the best way to tell them apart was by the street name. The new location where the bombing happened was on the corner of Washington and 8th, which would have been fine, but there was already a Washington hotel up the street. There just wasn’t a good name for it, so I never really liked it. Maybe I’d lean in and call it The Hotel Dynamite. Was that too fucked up? Maybe.
“Boss?” Anthony asked.
“What?”
“When will you be here?”
“An hour.”
I needed some space away from everything. Away from Raegan and her bikini, and Beck and Rush panting after her like sixteen-year-old virgins, and Sophie and her fucking music. Maybe I’d call those twins from last week while I was gone and try to work off some of this clearly misplaced energy. Maybe by the time I got back, all of this would have just magically gone away.