Stripping Her Defenses Read online

  In other words, he was balls deep in Candy from the club. Or, at least, he had been, and now he was rushing to get his ass here before Jaxon sent him to a mission in Antarctica where his dick would get frostbite before falling off. That threat wasn’t something I’d conjured up, either. Jaxon had actually used those exact words to Dec on more than one occasion.

  Shaking my head, I sat in one of the available chairs by the door and thought about how my brother was a moron. I didn’t get him at all. He’d been chasing tits and ass since after he figured out what to do with a hard on. How could he not see what he had back home in the pretty redhead with a will of steel? Sure, Teagan was standoffish and seemed to enjoy their fuck-buddy status, but it amazed me how Dec had yet to realize the woman was perfect for him.

  Little Miss Teagan might think she was closed off; however she gave herself away from time to time. Like the time right before we’d left to come here when she’d sung the song I’d been playing on the guitar. It was moments like that when she momentarily dropped those impenetrable walls of her, and I could see inside to the woman who wanted love, even if she said she didn’t believe in it.

  As movement to my right caught my attention, I turned my head to see Baker plopping his ass in the chair next to me. “Sooooo… found the old ball and chain, did ya?”

  Lucas laughed. “Yeah, shaking her ass and flashing her tits on the stage. I thought Sullivan was going to go all caveman and drag her away. It was a fuckin’ miracle he didn’t blow our cover. Of course, after seeing what she had to offer, I can’t say I blame him. I’d want to drag her off the stage, too, if I could.”

  “Stuff it up your ass, Lucas. I can’t wait for the day some woman’s got you by the balls.”

  “Not happening, man,” he replied darkly. “When I find my girl, I’m not letting her drag me around by my dick. I’m going to show her who’s boss. If that means chaining her ass to my fuckin’ bed, that’s what the fuck I’ll do.”

  I was a little surprised at his vehemence. “You make it sound like you’ve already got a girl.”

  He shrugged. “Something like that.”

  Baker leaned forward, fascinated by the news that Lucas had just shared. “When did this happen?”

  “A while ago,” Lucas vaguely replied.

  Baker’s eyebrows shot up. “What’s a while ago? After our mission in Mexico?”

  Lucas shrugged. “Before then. Actually, I’ve known her most of my life.”

  Looking over at Baker, I could see that answer had confused him just as much as me. In all the time we’d known Lucas, he’d never mentioned having a girl back home.

  Looking back to Lucas, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Then where is she, man? How come we’ve never met her? You keepin’ her locked in your basement or something?”

  Lucas’s face became shadowed with an emotion I couldn’t quite read. It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t regret, but maybe something in between? “No, but maybe when I find her, I’ll do that. If she’s chained in my basement, she can’t up and fuckin’ disappear on me.”

  “She’s missing?” Baker asked, suddenly worried.

  “Something like that,” Lucas mumbled.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “Five years,” Lucas mumbled again.

  “Five years?” Bobby barked out. “How the hell do you lose your girl for five years?”

  Lucas shot him a murderous look. “Excuse me, asshole; how long was it before you found Belle? Fifteen years?” Shooting that glare my way, he then snapped, “And what about you, Sullivan? Closing in on ten or some shit?”

  “Eight. Now stop being a jackass,” I barked back. “We’re just concerned because it’s not common for someone to fall off the grid so far that you can’t utilize the resources we have to find them. Baker couldn’t find Belle because she’d changed her identity. I didn’t actively look for Kara for personal reasons. If you can’t find your girl, it tells me she might be in some serious shit.”

  Lucas’s shoulders dropped a little, and he ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up in different directions. “I know, man, but I keep comin’ up with nothin’.”

  Jaxon’s voice was the next to speak. “You should have come to us for help if you thought she was in trouble. After this mission is over, we’ll talk about you not doing just that.”

  No one liked being reprimanded by their Commanding Officer, especially in front of their team. It was apparent in Lucas’s curt nod that he hadn’t appreciated being put in the spotlight like that. However, I understood Jaxon’s frustration. Lucas had proven himself as an asset to our team on more than one occasion, although he was a loose cannon. He liked to try to handle shit on his own instead of allowing us to take his back with the unit, facing whatever the problem was as a true team. If he wasn’t careful, it was going to bite him in the ass big time one day.

  No one had a chance to say anything else, because Declan’s dumb ass finally decided to show up. I thanked God he had the smarts to take a quick shower. If he’d shown up covered in perfume or lipstick marks, Jaxon would have throttled him. Still, his clean appearance and lack of evidence of what he’d been up to didn’t mean Jaxon hadn’t caught on to where he’d been.

  “Did you make sure to brush your teeth after eating Candy, Sullivan? I’d hate for you to get a fucking cavity.”

  Dec didn’t even bother to look chastised. He gave Jaxon a huge, shit-eating grin and answered, “Yes, sir.”

  Dec was lucky because Jaxon decided to move on with our meeting instead of busting my brother’s chops.

  “Our Intelligence Officer managed to verify some of Ice’s information about the pattern of missing women and also agreed it was most likely they were being taken by someone below the border. They dug in and cross-referenced any known movements of the Rivera Cartel during those time periods and managed to get a hit matching the routes to several of the missing women’s cases. There are enough matches that it has to be more than coincidence.

  “They’ve sent the known whereabouts of the remaining higher ranking cartel members, but the bad news is most of them stay behind the safety of the Mexican border.

  “Now, here’s the good news. Intelligence also managed to find out about a tip the DEA received on one, Julio Medina, a high ranking soldier. Apparently, Medina is supposed to meet a well-known drug king in Louisiana tomorrow. The DEA is already in motion to stake out the meeting and take both players down.”

  “What’s our game plan, boss?” Declan asked.

  Jaxon leveled us all with a stern look. “We’re kidnapping Medina from the DEA. The meet is supposed to take place in a warehouse just outside of the New Orleans city limits on the north side. I had the Intelligence Officer look up the closest federally contracted detainment facility, and it’s in St. Tammany Parish. We’re taking them before they reach that jail.

  “Preparations are already in motion. The jet is being fueled, and we leave at zero-five hundred hours. We’ll get there, stake out the area, set up, and then wait until this meet is supposed to take place at night fall. Transportation is already being put in place, and I’ll give you those coordinates on our flight there.

  “When we get Medina, we have to keep our head on straight. This mission cannot be about retribution. This is an information gathering mission once we get our target. A safe house is being set up as we speak near here, so Declan can interrogate him for the players involved in the sex slave ring.

  “I know you all want justice for Baker’s woman, for Laura Moore, and for God knows how many other women who have disappeared, but we do not have the luxury of fucking this up. This could be our only chance at this kind of inside intel, and we need it if we have a hope in hell of shutting down at least a leg of this operation. Am I understood, gentlemen?”

  We all gave Jaxon a heartfelt, “Yes, sir.”

  Just as he opened his mouth to presumably dismiss us, my cell phone rang in my pocket, causing Jaxon to shoot me a withering glare.

  Feel
ing the burn of my Commander’s eyes on me, I answered the phone anyways because it was the ring tone I had assigned for Kara. We might have been apart for eight years, but I didn’t think the woman would call me when she knew I was working unless it was an emergency.

  Needing to stay somewhat professional in front of my team, I answered the phone with an abrupt, “Kara?”

  A sniffle came through the line. “I’m so sorry to call you while you’re working, Riley, but you were the first person I thought of.” Her voice cracked at the end.

  While I stood quickly, ready for action, I saw out of the corner of my eye Declan do the same. “What’s wrong, baby?”

  “I got to my studio and found it destroyed,” she sobbed.

  Chapter

  15

  Kara

  I’d had a shit day.

  It was a total good mood killer kind of shit day, which sucked since I had been in the best ‘morning after’ mood of my life. Then I went to work and found my assistant, Lisa, standing outside my studio’s front door, panicking on her cell phone.

  At first, I thought this might be the ‘I’m three days late for my period’ panic because, when your other job is stripping at After Midnight, and you love said stripping job, you do not want to get pregnant. This panic gripped Lisa at least three times a year since I’d known her, and every time she did, she called her boyfriend Big Jim and gave him shit.

  I quickly found out, as I walked up to her, that, yes, she was on the phone talking to Big Jim. But, no, she was not panicking about her sometimes late period. Lisa was panicking because she’d arrived three minutes before me to find the studio wrecked.

  Of course, wrecked was probably a nice way to put it.

  She tried to stop me from going in, but after I heard the word ‘vandalized,’ there was not a person on this earth who could keep me out of my studio.

  Pushing past her, I marched through the door and immediately stopped, almost wishing I had listened to Lisa about not going in.

  My studio had not just been vandalized, it had been destroyed.

  The couches in the waiting room had been slashed to death. My lighting kits had been mangled to the point that there was no hope of fixing them. My queen sized wrought iron headboard and footboard had been fucking melted. The mattress had been slashed similarly to the couches. Every camera I owned, which had been several, had been smashed to smithereens and were now nothing more than miniscule pieces scattered across my floor.

  As if the destruction had not been bad enough, there were messages spray painted in red on every wall.

  leave or die bitch

  we’re watching

  After a quick call to the cops to report the crime, I hung up and called the only person on this planet I wanted to come hold me and tell me it was going to be okay. Riley.

  Too bad he didn’t show up before the cops or the Regulators.

  Ice, Hammer, and Big Jim were actually the first to arrive since my studio was close to their clubhouse. Big Jim went straight to Lisa, trying to comfort her, while Ice took one look at my studio with the messages written on the walls and said something to Hammer about “lockin’ me down,” whatever that meant.

  I didn’t get the chance to ask because then the cops showed up, turning a ‘disaster’ into a ‘fucking disaster.’ The two officers climbed out of the squad car, took one look at the guys in their Regulators’ cuts, and pulled their guns. It only got worse when Hammer turned to ask Ice if those “pussies in blue” were serious.

  By this point, I was standing in front of Ice as he tried to tug me behind him without making any sudden movements. A gun was pointed at my chest while an officer told me to step out of the way and stop interfering, and that was when Riley, Declan, and the other guy I’d seen them with walked in. It was also where the situation went from ‘fucking disaster’ to ‘my life is totally fucked.’

  The already tense situation went absolutely electric when Riley saw that pistol aimed at me. He didn’t seem too happy to see Ice’s hand on my arm, either. I could tell by the scathing look he shot Ice after he looked down at the hold. Thankfully, he had went straight to work dealing with the crazy ass cops instead of coming after Ice, who had finally managed to pull me behind him.

  Lisa and I tried to tell the cops that the Regulators had nothing to do with my shop being vandalized. After about forty-five minutes, I saw Riley whip out his cell phone and make a phone call, which was weird since we were in the middle of a tense situation. As Riley hung up, Lisa was still trying to convince the cops that Big Jim was her boyfriend. Of course, they didn’t believe it, because they were convinced we’d been threatened somehow.

  Not five minutes later, the officers’ radios squawked loudly that Unit 92 needed to call the station immediately. Apparently, we were dealing with Unit 92 because one of the officers peeled off to use his cell phone.

  Ice still had a gun pointed at his chest as I watched the officer speak with someone. The officer’s face drained of all color, and he hastily walked back to his partner and whispered something in his ear. The partner’s face drained of all color, and then the man holstered his weapon and actually apologized to Ice.

  Not understanding what had just happened, I scanned the room to look at the guys. Ice, Hammer, and Big Jim all had blank masks on their faces, as did Riley and the other guy I didn’t know. However, Declan had a small, amused smile that made me think he knew exactly what had occurred.

  After all of this, the two officers went on as if they hadn’t pulled a gun on three badass bikers moments before and took both mine and Lisa’s statements. They walked the studio, noted all of the damage down on their report, took pictures, and wrapped up their visit by handing me their business card and asking me to call if I came across any information as to who might have done this.

  Before they left, they advised me to stay safe by not staying alone. It took every iota of control not to snap back, “You think so, jackass?”

  I couldn’t figure out what Riley had done to get those pain-in-the-ass cops to back off Ice, Hammer and Big Jim, and Riley wouldn’t give me a straight answer when I asked. My troubles had not ended there, though. No, Riley silently squared off with Ice, having some sort of caveman argument that only involved eye ticks and jaw grinding, before he asked me if I was ready to go home. Then he took my studio keys, handed them to Declan, and dragged me out of there.

  Now we were back at my place, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry or punch something. Maybe both since someone had just destroyed everything I’d worked so hard for.

  Plopping down on my couch, I propped my elbows on my knees and laid my head in my hands. Riley was coming from the back; he’d been checking the apartment like he’d done the night before.

  “You should have stayed by the door until I’d finished checking, babe.”

  Tears were stinging my eyes, and I was trying not to let them free yet was quickly losing the battle.

  Blowing out a frustrated breath, I said, “Lecture me next time, okay? My day sucked, which is crazy because it’s only ten o’clock, and I just want to forget about it.”

  I waited for him to say something, but he was quiet. That didn’t surprise me. Riley had always been a quiet kind of guy, and I was used to it. What did surprise me was that Riley took a seat next to me on the couch, pulled me into his arms, and laid us both back so I was sprawled across his chest.

  Thinking he was trying to put the moves on me, I pushed up with my hands on his chest and glared at him. “You can’t fuck this all better, Riley.”

  His hands came up and pulled me back down. He started petting my hair in slow, soothing motions. “I’m not trying to get in your panties, Kara. I’m giving you a safe place to let it all go. I see the tears in your eyes, babe. I’m here; nothing’s going to happen to you. Let it all out.”

  Those words broke the dam on my emotions, and I did just what he’d told me to do. I let it all out. Tears poured from my eyes as I started hiccupping sobs. I poured it all out b
ecause Riley was right: I did feel safe in his arms.

  I was not sure how long I cried. I only knew Riley lay there underneath me the entire time, not saying a word, just comforting me with his touch. I felt a piece of the heart I’d thought died years ago warm under his care. It made me realize something important.

  I wasn’t certain I could live without Riley anymore.

  However, I also wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t walk away after I told him everything, either.

  This realization made me cry that much harder, so much so that I became sleepy. My eyes dried up to what I was positive was a red, puffy mess, and I finally lay there silently and numb.

  Riley used his hands to guide my head, turning me in his direction. He looked me in the eye and said, “Take a nap, baby. I’ll fuck it all better later.”

  With that, I laid my head back down and took a nap.

  ~~~

  A delicious smell woke me. Sitting up on the couch, I rubbed my hands over my face before slipping off the couch and heading towards the kitchen. The sight that met me there was something I thought I’d never see again.

  Riley was cooking. Such a simple thing. A task one did every day, multiple times a day, to feed themselves and those they loved. What people didn’t realize was that it could also be an intimate thing.

  What said ‘I care’ more than someone cooking your favorite foods because they knew you had dealt with a bad day?

  There my ex-husband stood, cooking chicken parmesan because he knew how much I loved it. My heart clenched at the sight. The more time I spent with Riley, the more I wished we could move on with our lives. Together.

  He had to know everything before I could allow myself to hope for that, though. That wasn’t the only worry I had, either. Two people could spend years apart yet fall back into familiar patterns.

  What if we fell back into the very things that had contributed to our downfall the first time? Part of me liked to think that wouldn’t happen, because I had a better understanding of my issues. With knowledge came power, the power to catch myself if I started to fall.