Dallas shifted beside me, giving me even more of his weight, his hand slipping around the inside of my thigh, and I felt how tight his grip was, how possessive and claiming.
The shutter of a camera clicked above me, and I realized, as I looked up, that Astor had taken my picture with her phone. She was creating a contact, me, and I couldn’t remember when that had last happened.
“What’s the number?” she prodded me, not glancing up, entirely focused on entering the digits, taking for granted that I would answer. “Hurry up, I have a plane to catch.”
I rattled them off in a daze, and when I lifted my gaze to her, she smiled before she bent and kissed my cheek. Her eyes were on Dallas as she straightened, and she made a purring noise.
“What?” I asked her.
She pointed at him. “That’s trouble right there.” I gave her a slight nod. “But the best kind, and he looks like he needs you.”
I opened my mouth to respond.
“Oh, come on,” she snapped, her perfectly shaped brows furrowing as she waved her hand at him. “You don’t get to dole out the relationship advice to me and not accept a little in return, Croy. He’s broken, I can tell just from looking at him. How can you resist?”
I would have said something, but she’d already spun and flounced off, chin up, looking every bit the socialite as she waved Nolan toward the door. The fact that he turned, smiled at me and gave me a nod, was surprising. They were gone seconds later.
As I sat there in a sea of talking and laughter, dance music and drinking, keeping an eye on the room, I realized that I was useless as a bodyguard. I was much too relaxed, sitting in a languid sprawl with Dallas Bauer, oblivious to what Brig and Eric were doing behind closed doors, although I was sure I had a pretty good hunch. I had no idea why Dallas unnerved me so, why the simple act of sharing his space made me feel closer to him than I did to the last guy I held down in bed. It made no sense. It distracted me, so I pushed it out of my head and focused on my surroundings, not on the gorgeous man intruding on both my personal space and my psyche. I pulled my phone from the breast pocket of my suit jacket and tapped out a text message to Jared Colter. I explained what was going on and what I wanted to do to keep Brig Stanton safe. My phone rang seconds later.
“Esca,” Jared ground out my name.
Lucky for me the music in the suite had changed to softer classic jazz, or I wouldn’t have been able to hear all the facets of condemnation in his voice. It was also fortunate, because I didn’t have to leave Dallas to hear my boss. I wanted to be right where I was.
“This is hardly my fault,” I began defensively, my breath hitching as Dallas got comfortable, his head tipping so his lips brushed the side of my neck. “Baker Stanton wasn’t honest with you. He knew his daughter was in trouble, but he doesn’t care about her, and now his son is in danger because of that. Me going undercover successfully fulfills our contract, does it not?”
“It would if I were to allow that.”
“The FBI has it handled from a personnel standpoint,” I explained. “They have enough people, enough moving parts, they even have an inside man, they just don’t have anyone to handle this piece of the op and make the exchange.”
“Which would be you.”
“Yessir.”
There was a silence.
“It’s no different than me being here guarding Brig,” I reminded him. “If he does it himself, if the FBI uses him, I’d still have to go in as his bodyguard; that’s stipulated in our contract, yes?”
The contracts Jared Colter drafted, and the clients signed, were basically written in blood. His. He stood by them, and his reputation was flawless; I knew this. So bringing that up was as close as I could get to challenging him.
He stayed quiet, which meant he was thinking about what I said, rolling it over in his head, weighing it all out.
“This isn’t any different than our standard arrangement. I was assigned to protect our client. The only thing that’s changed now is what I’m protecting him from,” I pressed further. We all knew, before we accepted an assignment, that if things went south, a fixer traded their life for the life of the person they were protecting. That was the job. No one liked to say it out loud, or to be reminded, but it’s why we made a decent living. I knew Jared had lost men over the years, when he was with the CIA. He’d told me so himself when I was hired. But as of yet, as far as I knew, he’d never lost one of his fixers because he was able to vet his clients much more robustly now that he was in the private sector. When he was with the CIA, the ops came up; no one got to choose. As he owned Torus, no one gave him orders; he was at the very top of the food chain. “Half of me is wondering if I can’t just send Brig home once I step in for him. And the FBI will, of course, watch over him until the op is done, but—I don’t see why he’d have to stay here.”