Instead, he gave her that cocky grin. “Shall we go see an advisor then and give him a concussion or two?”
She laughed at his overexuberant tone. “Absolutely.” She gestured with her thumb toward the surveillance camera that was mounted high on the wall over her head. “Provided the crew of lackwits allow us to leave that is.”
“I heard that,” Hauk said over the intercom. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you to be respectful of the man who holds the key to the lock on your cage?”
She scoffed. “Qillaq, Hauk. I was taught to kick him in the groin or the teeth until he handed it over.”
Caillen laughed as the door lock buzzed open.
Fain and Chayden were waiting for them just outside the door. “By the way, we’re going with you.”
What the…?
Those words seriously offended his ego. Mostly because it was something his sisters would say and he was not helpless by any means. “I don’t need help.”
Hauk scoffed as he joined them. “Yeah right. Every time we leave the two of you alone something bad happens. You get lost or blown up or some other shit. I’m tired of cleaning up the bloodstains. So we’re taking up a post at your back.”
“Great,” Fain muttered. “Now the blood will splatter us.”
Caillen would argue with Hauk, but he knew better. Hauk was as stubborn and crazy as they came. Any attempt to discuss this would only delay them.
Not to mention the small fact that Hauk happened to be right. Things hadn’t exactly gone right since he’d met Desideria. Another pair of blasters, or in this case, three, might come in handy.
“Fine. Your funerals.”
Chayden snorted. “Not so loud. The gods might oblige.” He led the way down the hallway.
In no time, they were rounded up in Chayden’s ship and headed for Exeter to make an unannounced meeting with Talian’s head advisor. If ever there was hope of getting to the bottom of this, the advisor should be able to give testimony about who’d ordered him to hire the assassin and why Caillen and his father had been targeted. That would be enough to get the League involved and allow Caillen to clear his name.
Yeah, payback was coming and itwas going to be bloody.
Caillen left everyone on the bridge and went to the head so that he could check the wound on his leg. He could feel it bleeding again, but he didn’t want the others to know. Better to camouflage it now before it became obvious.
As soon as he was finished and had left the room, he met Desideria in the hallway. Concern lined her brow as she scanned his body with an interest that made him go instantly hard. An image of her naked flashed through his mind and did nothing to help his sanity.
Yeah, that sucked the pain right out of him.
She paused her gaze on his thigh as if she somehow knew what he’d been about. “How’s your leg holding up?”
Currently better than his groin…
But he didn’t want her to worry about him. “It’s throbbing, but I’ll live.”
She appeared less than convinced. “How do you manage your pain so well?”
“I focus on other things.”
“Such as?”
He dipped his gaze to her breasts that he was dying to sample again.
Heat stung her cheeks. “You’re awful.”
Like he regretted telling her the truth. “You’re the one who asked.”
She growled at him in the back of her throat. “Why is it I don’t think it’s quite so simple?
Shrugging, he decided to give her a reprieve from his lecherous tendencies. “Because it’s not. You want the truth?”
“Always.”
Caillen swallowed as old memories haunted him. He wasn’t much into sharing with anyone, but for some reason he never minded allowing Desideria inside him. Not even something as personal as the unspoken past that always hovered right on the edges of his conscious thought. “What keeps me going is this image I have in my head of my adoptive father dying alone in the gutter. I was there that day, hiding and watching him through a small crack as his enemy rolled him over and ended his life with one cold, brutal shot. It was the second worst day of my life.” Shahara’s rape had the designation of being in first place.