“Robert,” Tucker began.
Robert wasn’t having it. “Do you understand that you’ve fucked this whole op up? Are you so arrogant that you had to have this one? Ian had reasons for shifting this to me.”
Before he could say a word, Robert was off again, explaining in minute detail every single way Owen had screwed up and put the team at risk. He was worked up in a froth, his face going red.
The man was going to have a heart attack. He bet Becca could handle that. She worked with brains, but she probably knew a lot about hearts, too. She would be pretty when she did CPR. Her breasts would bounce while she did the compressions. And her sweet mouth would come down on his while she tried to breathe life into him.
Not Robert. If Robert had a heart attack, Tucker could save him. He wasn’t letting the bastard watch Becca’s breasts bounce.
“Have you heard a single word I’ve said?” Robert asked.
“Of course. I’m a right bastard and I fucked everything up.” He didn’t have to listen to a ten-minute rant to know that. “But it wouldn’t have worked. If I had played things the way we talked about, she would have run the other way the minute the lift doors opened because she wanted me. She might have been friendly, but we wouldn’t have gotten her to spend time with us. She’s not a masochist and she wouldn’t have willingly spent time with a man she wanted and could never have.”
“You think pretty highly of yourself.” Robert had his hands on his hips, challenging him.
And Owen felt a growl start in the back of his throat. He had no idea where it was coming from. He was the quiet one, the one who sat back and didn’t give anyone hell because he was never sure of his place in the group. The alpha was challenging him, telling him to back down, and bugger all he wasn’t going to do it. “Well, I am the one who fucked the lady a few hours after I met her, so I think I might have just become the expert here.”
“Good for Becca,” Jax was saying. “She seems really stressed.”
“She isn’t stressed now,” Sasha said, still laughing.
“How exactly are we going to explain my presence?” Robert asked, his eyes still steely.
Shite. He’d taken Robert’s op. Owen took a deep breath and tried to soften his expression. “It wouldn’t have worked, mate. I’m sorry you feel like I screwed everything up, but I had to make a call and I was alone with her. Two seconds into meeting her and she was flirting with me.”
Robert shook his head with a long sigh of frustration. “That doesn’t mean she wants you to fuck her.”
“No, but her asking me to kiss her and clawing at my shirt to get it off sent me a real fine signal. You want to see the marks she left on my back?” Robert needed to see that the original plan wouldn’t have worked. “If I’d turned her down, she would have walked the other way the next time she saw me. She would have been embarrassed.”
“And you think she won’t be now?” Robert asked, but his tone had changed to something close to a grudging acceptance.
“Becca is pretty confident,” Jax said. “At least that’s how she comes off. I watched her trip over her own feet on the street and she just got up and bowed like she’d meant to do it. I also think if Owen had turned her down, she would have walked away and not looked back. I don’t know her well, but I think I have a pretty good read on her.”
“We have a way in. Do we need to fight about it because it wasn’t the one we thought it would be?” Tucker moved in, obviously willing to play the peacemaker. “If Owen is dating her, we’ll have a lot of access. Jax and River can play the friendship role. Sasha, Dante, and I will operate from the Huisman Foundation building. This still works.”
“All she knows is I’ve recently moved to Canada,” he explained. “I’m sure she assumes I’m a resident in the building, but I didn’t talk about my roommate. It’s a simple thing, man. Instead of you working for a bank, we both work as bodyguards. We share the place because one of us is usually working.”
Robert seemed to think about it for a moment. “It could work. It’s a new job and we’re both single men. The job would likely require odd hours, so maybe the company put us together here for a couple of months until we figure out the lay of the city, so to speak.”
“Or you could go with the boyfriend thing and offer to share her,” Sasha said with a smirk.
“Over my dead body.” He hadn’t meant to say that. Certainly he hadn’t meant to sound like a crazy person.
Sasha chuckled. “Sorry. We spent too much time in that Bliss place. Of course you wouldn’t want to share a woman you just met with a man who is your friend. It’s perfectly logical that you would already be incredibly possessive.” He stood up and stretched. “I’m going back to the house. It’s obvious you don’t need me. Dante, come along. We have a few days before we have to be back at our shitty jobs.”
Dante started to follow him. “He means that literally. The toilets there are horrific, and I won’t even go into handling medical waste. I want to be the one who gets to fuck the girl in the lift next time.”
“That wasn’t part of his job,” Ezra pointed out as the duo opened the door.
Owen let the door close before turning to Ezra. “I’m not sorry.” He couldn’t apologize for it. He knew he should in order to keep the peace, but somehow he couldn’t make the words come out of his mouth. “I did what I had to do.”
“Tell me you’re not more involved with the woman than you should be.” Ezra brushed some of the dog hair off his pants.
He couldn’t lie but he did have an excellent distraction. He wished he’d had a chance to look at the file he’d snuck out of her bag, but he would always have turned it over. This was a job. Yes, she’d been hot as hell and he couldn’t wait to spend more time with her, but this was a job. “I wasn’t so involved I didn’t nip a file from her tote bag. And before you nag at me, that bag was overflowing, and it would have been easy for her to drop it. Unless she stopped between the subway and the apartment building and checked to make sure it was still there, she’ll have to conclude it fell out or got pinched while she was on her way home.”
“That bag she carries seems to be an issue,” Jax acknowledged. “River said she’s helped her pick stuff up when it fell out at least twice. But I’m not sure what her medical research is going to do for us.”
Tucker stepped up. “I’d actually like to get my hands on it. So far all I’ve done is cleanup work and getting the researchers coffee and lunch. I’m not sure why I needed to fake I’m in med school for that.”
“Internships are more about making connections than actually learning the technology,” Ezra said. “But I would like to see what you get from her files, too.”
What Ezra really wanted was to see how far Tucker’s medical knowledge went. He couldn’t forget the fact that Jax had discovered a Dr. Reasor had worked for McDonald. They’d looked for the man and couldn’t find a trace of him.
But then McDonald had been good at making people disappear.
He put his bag down on the coffee table and reached in. “I haven’t looked at the files. Being in such a tight space bothered her. She did this meditation thing and that’s when I slipped this out of her bag. I would have gone for more, but she’s not good at meditating either. It only lasted a minute or two and then she was back to talking about comic books and her favorite TV shows.”
He pulled the folder free and opened it.
Shite. Not medical research at all.
“What is it?” Robert asked, stepping in.
“It looks like financial reports.” It was a bunch of numbers and accounts. Nothing at all that would tell them about Becca’s research.
He’d fucked up again.
Ezra held out a hand. “Let me see it.”
He passed the folder to his boss. “Sorry. It’s not what I hoped it was.”
Ezra opened the folder and started to look through the paperwork.