“And I don’t want you dead.” He stepped up, leaving very little space between them. “I know you are always going to see me as your snot-nosed kid brother. I know that deep down you’ll think you’re responsible for me until the day you die. And I know that I haven’t done the one thing I should have done for all those years you treated me like a brat kid and bossed me around.”

Fuck, he didn’t want to have it out with his brother. He’d spent the last year and a half trying to make up for choosing Sean over Grace when his brother had asked him to protect the woman he loved. Sean couldn’t know how much the distance bothered him, how much he missed his brother. “What is that, Sean?”

Sean put a hand on his shoulder, his face grave. “Thank you, brother. You didn’t have to take over after Dad left. You could have watched out for yourself but you took over and made sure I had what I needed. Don’t think for a second I don’t know who bought my birthday presents or made sure I had school supplies.”

Ian looked down at the man he’d raised. There was six years between them. It didn’t seem like much now, but when their father walked out on them, Sean had only been ten and then it was a chasm. Their mother had been depressed and barely functional. He’d had to grow up at sixteen. He’d had to take control. He remembered that first night when he sat waiting and hoping that his father would come home. And then he’d gotten up the next morning, begged his mother to get out of bed so she could go to work. She’d stayed in bed for a month. He’d gotten a job working after school until midnight at the local grocery. His childhood had been over. “It’s not a big deal, Sean.”

Sean shook his head. “It’s a big fucking deal, Ian. I know our relationship has been strained, but I’m done with that. I love you. I admire you. If anything happens to me and Grace, you should know that we’ve left Carys in your care.”

That shocked the fuck out of him. “I thought you would leave her to Alex and Eve.”

“No. It was never even a thought in our heads. You’re her uncle and I happen to know that you’re damn good at raising a kid. I hope like hell you get your head out of your ass and start raising some with that crazy bitch in there because she is your match, man. Charlie is everything you need.”

Somehow he didn’t mind his brother calling her Charlie. It bugged him when other people did it. Charlie was his name for her, but when Sean called her that it was an acceptance, a brotherly front. But he didn’t want to think about this right now. He wanted to live in the damn moment for once in his life. “I’m not kicking her out.”

“Ian, you can’t honestly believe she’s here to hurt you. What does your gut tell you?”

“My gut was wrong before.”

“No, it wasn’t. You said you knew something was wrong with her. What does your gut say now?”

“My gut isn’t in control. My cock is and my cock doesn’t give a shit. Do you understand, Sean? My cock doesn’t care that she could have slept with Nelson. She could roll out of his bed and into mine and my cock would be ready to go. I don’t care that she might have slept with half the syndicate, that she had her father killed, that she nearly got me and Li killed. I don’t care. I just want to get inside her again. If you told me this had all been a lie, that she was walking me into a trap, I would probably go into it willingly because I don’t know that I can survive losing her again.”

A smile crept over Sean’s face. “I think we call that love.”

Yep, the vomit was right there at the back of his throat. “It’s stupidity, Sean.”

“You say potato, I say true love. I know you. I know you’ve played through every horrible scenario in your head. I know you’ve gone through all the ways she could be tricking you and everything she would gain by betraying you, but have you thought through the fact that she just loves you and wants to be your wife?”

The plane jumped a little. He was out of time to get his brother away unless he wanted to toss him on the tarmac. “That’s not the likely scenario.”

“You can’t play this on percentages and chances, Ian. Did you read Eve’s work-up on her? Did you read about the way she behaved, the things she did when you weren’t around?”

He glanced into the cabin. Charlie was looking out the window while Ten seemed to be staring down her shirt. And he was sitting in Ian’s fucking seat. What did she really do when no one was watching?

Ten reached out and put a hand on her arm, pointing at something outside the window. Ian felt a low growl start to build in his chest. But then Charlie frowned at him, removed his arm, and seemed to give him a good talking to.

The raging jealousy that had been inside him since the moment she’d walked back in eased a little. Charlie wasn’t interested in Ten. As far as he could tell she hadn’t looked at another man, and Eve had said she was perfectly celibate in Florida. It had been her reputation there.

Why was he believing a pathetic piece of trash assassin over her?

“You know she sent a bunch of information to the Agency? She stopped a couple of terrorist plots in their tracks. That wasn’t Chelsea. That was Charlie. When I sat down with the Agency, they didn’t want to torture her."

“They wanted to hire her,” Sean surmised.

“I didn’t tell her that.” He didn’t want that life for her. He was allowing her to believe that he’d saved her from torture when he might be keeping her from a job she would love.

“She wouldn’t go. She is right where she wants to be and that means you have some decisions to make.” His brother slapped him on the back, a manly gesture of affection.

He might have to choose between her and Sean because she would still be wanted, still be under the syndicate’s kill order. “Sean, if I run with her…”

“Slip me a postcard every now and then. Let us know you’re okay. You should always know that we’re here if you need us. You have to choose her now. If you love her then you have to pick her over me, like I picked Grace. Let’s finish this and then you run with her. Your job is done. I’m fine. Better than fine. We’re all happy, Ian. You played a part in all of us finding what we need. Your little family is set. So you can run and know that we’ll be fine. You have a new family now.”

Charlie’s eyes came up, finding his. She gave him a smile and mouthed the words “save me” and pointed at her erstwhile suitor.

Save her. It was all he’d wanted to do back then.

Knight’s voice came over the system. “This is your pilot. We’re about to take off. If you want to keep your ball bag in the right place, you’ll sit down and buckle up.”

So he was set. He was going to meet with Eli Nelson and his brother was at his back.

And he kind of wanted to keep his ball bag where it belonged, but Ten might lose his. He strode down the aisle. He wasn’t going to fight with Ten. He didn’t need to.

He took the seat across from Ten. “Charlie?”

She didn’t need more than that. She unbuckled and immediately moved to sit beside him without a backward glance.

Sean settled in across from Charlie, a smirk on his face.

“Buckle up, baby,” Ian said.

It might be a long flight, but at least he liked the company.

Most of it.


* * * *


The sun beat down on Nelson’s head, the heat nearly unbearable, but he stayed in position, watching the massive yacht in the distance.

He was getting too old for this shit. He was starting to envy the king and his carefree world. Kamdar didn’t have to hustle, didn’t have to worry that every day might be his last.

He was a little naïve to not worry about that last bit since Nelson’s job was to make sure the king didn’t have a good many days left.

The king was lying back on a chaise as his harem lounged around him. Beautiful women in bikinis that barely covered anything at all. They were all there awaiting the king’s pleasure. Including the new blonde he’d picked up when he’d refueled yesterday.

It had been the simplest thing for Nelson to get his own pretty blonde on board. His attempts at getting close to the king himself had met with failure. The king, he’d been told, was on vacation and not meeting anyone for business.

It would be so simple if he could just murder the fucker, but until he figured out where the research documents were stored, Kash Kamdar had to be kept alive. The last thing his bosses wanted was the research being made public. He needed every copy either in his hands or destroyed.

Hopefully Olga would do her work and do it well. She simply needed to get into the king’s bed and then wait until he made a mistake.

Or if he took too long, then Olga was not only magnificent in bed, she was also a well-trained torturer. She could lick a man’s balls and then make him wish he’d never been born with them.

He just wished she would get on with it. The shit in Russia was getting to be a pain in his ass. His employers didn’t understand that the pipeline raids were a delicate balance. He had to keep both the syndicate and the insider he’d placed at Malone Oil happy. The young engineer he’d found spied for him and let him know when security was weak, and then Nelson let Denisovitch know where to strike. All his bosses wanted was more profit. They didn’t understand that the minute Malone Oil found his spy, they would likely find him and figure out that rival oil companies were using the mob to weaken their competitors.

The world was changing. Governments controlled very little now. Oh, they made a good show of it, but they no longer had real power. Nelson had seen it coming a long time ago. The Agency paid shit, and they weren’t known for their loving care of retired employees. So when The Collective had first recruited him, it had been a godsend. The Collective understood how the world worked. They also knew how to keep an employee happy. Money. Profit. That was what The Collective traded in. He’d found his place.