We’d spent a couple of hours dealing with Mason’s place, making sure we scrubbed it thoroughly of our presence and loading his papers into the Jeep. Now all I wanted to do was get home and sleep in my own fucking bed. However, we had a stupidly long journey home to contend with, not to mention there was a body in the back of the car.
West had called Penn when we were finishing up. He’d given us details for someone he knew who could help us dispose of Mason’s body. I didn’t question how or why he knew someone in Scotland. The guy was resourceful. He was London’s best known and most sought after Fixer for a reason. No wonder he basically lived in Zayn Villetti’s pocket, according to West.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been thankful for his friendship with West. Penn might be batshit crazy, but he was useful as fuck. He’d helped us out on more than one occasion. We still owed him a favour, and no doubt he would come to collect when he was ready.
Francis was taking the first few hours behind the wheel. Prescott had fallen asleep with his face smashed against the window in the front seat a few minutes after we’d set off. He’d barely got any sleep since we’d left home, so it was unsurprising he was the first one to crash out. West was dozing in the back with me and Scarlett, who was sat in the middle. She was curled into my side with her head resting on my shoulder. I’d covered the both of us with one of the blankets we’d bought with us so she didn’t get cold.
I needed her close to me. Needed her body against mine. I was the last person to see her, and it killed me to know she’d been taken right after the moment we’d shared on the rooftop. After she’d given me exactly what I needed. To punish her, fuck her and hold her afterwards. She was my heaven, wrapped up in a beautiful human being who loved fiercely and gave everything to those she cared about. And having her gone for a week was a fucking wake up call.
“Drake?”
I looked at her. It was dark outside, but I could just about make out her wary expression. Her voice was hushed as if she didn’t want to disturb the others.
“Yes?”
She curled an arm around me, stroking my side with her fingertips.
“How did you find me?”
My mind circled back to the past week. The hours we’d spent tracking down Mason’s place. It wasn’t an easy task, by any means. He’d covered his tracks well. The house wasn’t even in his fucking name. It made finding it far more difficult than it should have been.
“We saw you being taken on the security footage and after trawling through it, we got a good look at who took you. He not only drugged you but one of our security guards. It took us some time to work out how he got into the building in the first place. After we went snooping around Tonya’s old place, we found she’d leaked our building plans, along with our security details, to him. That’s how he got to you.”
I decided to lay it all out for her. Scarlett should know the lengths we went to in order to find her.
“You searched Tonya’s?”
“Mmm, we broke in. I wasn’t going to ask Fletch, even though he has the keys. I’m not fucking talking to him after he landed me in the shit with my mother.”
Scarlett’s stroking grew more insistent. It was making me uncomfortable, but not because I didn’t want her touching me. My problem had to do with the fact she’d looked like a damn queen when she’d butchered Mason. All that blood covering her clothes. The blood that had got on me when I kissed her. Not to mention the provoking words she’d come out with. All of it fuelled my desire to paint her lithe little body with welts and fuck her until she cried from my brutality.
Fuck, I need to rein this in.
“When are you going to tell her about me?”
“After we’ve handled Stuart.”
“Are you going to be honest about all of us being a thing? You know, we can’t exactly hide that from her, Rosie and Frankie’s parents.”
I hadn’t exactly thought about it, even if she was right.
“I don’t see how we can keep the truth from them.”
“I can’t even imagine what she’s going to say.”
I didn’t want to. In fact, it was a conversation I would quite happily avoid forever. Our families likely wouldn’t approve of our unorthodox relationship with Scarlett. And they would be unhappy about us hiding the truth about her return from them too.
“Are you going to let me get on with telling you about the past week?”
She nodded, her hand leaving my side and running down my stomach. I tensed under her exploration, not wanting her to find out what her proximity was doing to me right at this moment. Before she could get too far, I removed her hand from my stomach and placed it on my thigh instead. Scarlett didn’t protest, but I could feel her eyes boring into the side of my head.
“Once we worked out how Mason gained access to the building, we had to put in extra measures to prevent anything like this from happening again. We’re going to keep you safe this time, little wisp. We don’t care what it takes or the cost. We won’t let anyone take you again.”
“I know,” she whispered into my shoulder. “I trust you.”
Her hand curled around my thigh, her fingers stroking along it. I fought against the urge to press her hand against my cock. It was getting really fucking uncomfortable now.
“It wasn’t easy to find you. Mason has a property in the city, but the one he took you to isn’t in his name. We searched his London flat for clues about where he’d taken you. Then we tracked down his associates when we turned up nothing. West beat some sense into them, but even they had no fucking clue. Francis searched his flat again and had to break into the safe he had hidden under the floorboards. That’s where we found the deed. It was in his mother’s name. And his mother isn’t Garrett’s wife. Not his real mother, anyway. We found his birth certificate there too. Quite the fucking scandal Garrett had to cover up there.”
Even as I told her this, all I could focus on was where her hand was. I didn’t question why I found Scarlett so fucking distracting. She was my very own siren. A woman I couldn’t resist under any circumstances.
“He had an affair with a woman he worked with, and she ended up pregnant. Two months after she gave birth to Mason, she was found dead in the canal by a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. It was from a police issue weapon, so pretty fucking suspicious, but they never found her killer and Mason was raised by Garrett alone.”
“No wonder he turned into such a creep.”
I almost snorted. Mason was more than a creep, but that was neither here nor there.
“The moment we found out where you were, we came for you, little wisp. We drove all night to get to you. None of us has slept much in the past forty-eight hours.”
Her hand moved higher as if she wanted to soothe me with her touch.
“You must be exhausted. I’ll let you sleep.”
I caught her hand in mine, pulling it away so she wouldn’t notice how fucking hard I was for her. Scarlett shifted next to me, tugging her hand from mine. I thought she was going to move away from me, but no. The girl damn well decided she was going to touch me right where I was aching for her.
“Or not. Did I do that?”
“You know very well you did,” I muttered, trying not to groan when she started stroking her hand along my length.