Cuckoo (Kindred Book 3) (16 page)

Spurred by his advance, her hopes rose. “If we’re quick—” A knock on the door stopped her words and when she wilted beneath him, he exhaled a laugh into her mouth and kissed the end of her nose before vaulting up onto his feet.

She sat up and snagged his wrist. With a forlorn sigh, she eyed his groin. “I’ll get the door. You deal with that.” Tuck wouldn’t appreciate being welcomed by the bulge in Brodie’s jeans. Using the strength in his arm, she pulled herself up and darted around the couch.

“How do you want me to do that?” he called after her.

“Think about something unarousing, like Wren.”

“That’ll work,” he muttered.

Snagging a pillow from the bed as she passed, she tossed it at him and it was a good thing he caught it or she might have KO’d his beloved Maverick, and he’d have no sense of humor about that. Opening the door to Tuck, she allowed him to slip in carrying a big black sports bag and a couple of paper bags that smelled like Chinese food.

“You brought food,” she rejoiced, snatching the bags from him after closing the door.

They moved out of the space in front of the bathroom. “We won’t have to worry about jumping on the bed now, will we?” he said.

The aroma of their joining still filled the space. It was either that, her flushed face, or the mussed bed, but something gave away what she and Rave had been up to. While Tuck was being snide in a teasing way, she smiled and took the food to the bed with her.

Sitting in the center cross-legged, she began to take food from the sack. “Just doing my duty,” she said.

Brodie linked his hands on the top of his head to lean back and look over the back of the couch. “Folks next door got no sense of humor,” he said.

Tuck dumped the bag on the floor between the bed and where the couch had been and frowned at his buddy. “Paper walls?”

“Should be all right, she was loud… even for her.”

Tuck relaxed and took off his jacket to grab a couple of boxes of food and join Brodie on the couch. “What does that mean?” she asked, taking the chopsticks from their paper and separating them.

“You’re loud,” Tuck said, opening up his box to inhale the scent of his food.

“Okay,” she muttered, grabbing up some noodles. “I like to make my point.”

“We get it already,” Tuck said around a mouthful of food. “You like sex.”

She liked sex with Brodie and as they ate, she tried to think if any of her exes had commented on her volume level, though none came to mind. Comparing Brodie to the men who’d come before him was a bit like comparing this dime-store Chinese food to Art’s homemade spaghetti and meatballs. They were both designed to do the same sort of thing, but the end result wasn’t the same. One left her satisfied and sated while the other would leave her nauseous and hollow. Laughing at her own comparison, she ate more and told herself not to be so harsh on her exes, not all of them made her feel sick at the time, but in retrospect—

“What are you laughing at?” Tuck asked. Both men were twisted to examine her enjoying her own little world.

“Nothing,” she said because if she said sex, the jokes would never end. She chose instead to change the subject “What did you bring?”

Casting her food aside, she clambered off the bed and knelt beside the bag Tuck had discarded. “Supplies,” Tuck said.

She unzipped it and found clothes, towels, snacks, weapons, playing cards, everything they might need to fill the long night ahead. “Swallow and I are going across the street,” Brodie said. “After we’ve eaten.”

“Copy,” Tuck said, sucking down a noodle.

Leaving the bag, she retrieved her food and went over to flop down on the couch between the men. “If we go across the street, you’ll have to leave Maverick here with another man,” Zara said, peeking into Brodie’s food box in case there was something she wanted, but that left hers open and he snagged some chicken from her box with his chopsticks.

“He’s handled Maverick before,” Brodie said. “He knows what he’s doing. She’ll be in good hands.”

Except she wasn’t allowed to touch… she didn’t even begrudge that rule, the black metal monster daunted her. “I hope you don’t share all of your women with him,” she said.

Brodie didn’t give her a laugh, but he winked at her before he stood up and put his food on the desk. Pushing her head down onto the couch, he gave himself the space he needed to vault over the back of it to cross the room. The bathroom door closed, and she reached over to swap her food box with Brodie’s.

“Can I ask you a personal question, Swift?”

“I’ve never slept with any of his women,” he said, snagging her legs to pull them aside, so he could sit where Brodie had been. These men shifted her around like a ragdoll. It was warming that they were so comfortable with her and it suggested a closeness, but they’d all seen death together so that made sense. “Not since we hit our thirties anyway.”

That modifier drew a brief scowl from her, but he was too busy dipping into the food she’d left on the desk to notice. “That wasn’t what I was going to ask,” she said, pushing her skirt down as she moved to a perpendicular position with her legs crossed.

“Ok, shoot.”

Probably not the best thing to say while they had a rifle peeking through the curtains, and it was when she saw the slither between the two rectangles of fabric that she realized why they hadn’t turned the lights on: it would make their position obvious.

“Is sex different when you’re in love?” she asked.

Drawing his focus around, she wasn’t sure if he was surprised or affronted. Whichever it was, the food certainly wasn’t as enthralling for him as it had been a moment ago. “You were a virgin before you had sex with Raven? I never read that in your file.”

“No!” she said, pressing a hand to his shoulder. Every member of the Kindred had to know she’d slept with Brodie before she knew he was Brodie. All she knew was his alias. It would have been quite a leap for a virgin to take from pure to vixen in the space of one kiss. But if there was any man who could’ve done it for her, Brodie would’ve been it. “I mean is it different for a guy… like you.”

“For a guy like me? No.” He sniggered and scooped some more food into his mouth. “You mean for a guy like Raven.”

She’d just been making relevant conversation; she didn’t know he’d take her question so seriously. “Okay, yeah, so I mean a guy like Raven.”

Twisting toward her, he wasn’t buying it. “No, you want to know if he was with any other woman the way he is with you.”

She hadn’t thought to frame it that way, but yeah, she guessed that was what she meant. What had been a casual question was turning into something she didn’t like. “Forget it.”

“Why do you think I would know?”

“Because,” she said and dug into her food again. “You loved Kadie.”

He loosened and didn’t show surprise, but she could tell her words had caught him off guard from the way his face blanked. “Loved Kadie.” He turned his head toward the window but wasn’t anywhere near the sight. “Yeah. I loved her.”

Zara hadn’t meant to bring up a sensitive subject, she’d sort of avoided it, but she couldn’t ignore how forlorn he was now. She lowered her food carton. “You shouldn’t have broken up with her, you know. She’s stronger than you think.”

She and Kadie had never met, but he didn’t point that out. “Kade is as strong as women come,” he said, wearing a distant but proud smile.

“What’s she like?” Zara asked. “Does she have family?”

“Never knew her dad, her mom ran off when she was a kid, she has an older cousin who looks out for her. He’s everything a good guy should be.”

“What did he say about you dumping her?”

“Dempsey will be looking to tan my hide, no doubt about that,” Tuck said on a hissing inhale then glanced through the sight.

His return to form gave her a reprieve, except she hadn’t thought he was the type to cut and run like a coward. “So you didn’t see him after? You just broke her heart and split?”

“Listen!” His shout made her jump, he wasn’t as at peace with her presumption as she thought. “You don’t know squat about Kade or about our life, stay out of shit that’s nothing to do with you!”

She’d never heard Tuck shout or been the subject of his scrutiny like she was now. “Sorry,” she croaked, bending to put her food on the floor.

The bathroom door opened and she did her best to leave the couch with composure. Making a beeline for the room Brodie had just vacated, she snagged her purse from the floor and didn’t make eye contact as she went into the bathroom and locked the door.

Dropping her purse to the vanity, she fell against the locked bathroom door. “Stupid,” she hissed at herself.

Art and Brodie had both told her that Tuck was a private person. She’d always assumed they were exaggerating because he was open with her. Now she saw that he was open about the Kindred, open about Brodie, all things that involved her. His life beyond the Kindred was a closed book, and she should have taken the advice of those who knew the hacker better than she did.

When she got to the bathroom mirror, the reflection staring back didn’t look like her. Her hair was a matted mess. Her makeup was smeared. She’d taken on the appearance of the persona she wanted outsiders to think she was. It was no longer an orchestrated façade, instead she was one hot mess. Random, rough sex and backcombed hair were a recipe for a grooming disaster.

Turning on the faucet, she washed her face and took her comb from her purse to try to tease her hair into some semblance of order. The battle was a losing one, it would take serious time to score victory and she didn’t have that to spare. Her scalp was beginning to hurt, and she was already grumpy enough after her dumb misstep with Swift. If she went back into the room with a headache, her bad attitude would probably get her into an argument. In close quarters with these guys, for an undefined period of time, Zara didn’t want to test their tempers any further.

She pulled her hair into a ponytail and fastened it with a tie from her purse, then she took out her rolled ballet flats and put them on. Wherever she and Brodie were going, being covert was going to be more important than being sexy, so the thigh-highs just wouldn’t do. Content that she’d done the best she could, she psyched herself up to leave this room and apologize to Tuck before departing with her love.

With a deep breath, she opened the bathroom door and dropped her purse to the floor again. Striding into the body of the room with her mouth open ready to launch into her apology, she came up short when she saw that Tuck was the only one here.

“Where’s Raven?” she asked, deflated.

“Doing a job,” Tuck said and slid along the couch. “See for yourself.”

He’d ditched her? She was supposed to be going on this job with him. She was more than a little pissed and disappointed that she’d been left behind when she hadn’t been in the bathroom for a prohibitive period.

“No,” she said, hurrying over to sit on the couch and peek through the lens to see her love inside Kahlil’s bedroom, hunkered down right next to the bed. “Why did he—”

“He thought we could use a minute alone.”

It made her feel somewhat better that she hadn’t been cut from the team for fear she might be incompetent, but that did leave her facing an awkward conversation in her immediate future. “Oh,” she said, slumping. As soon as her spine hit the back of the couch, she was inspired to jump to her feet. “You should be sitting there. Keeping an eye on him ready to… you know.”

Her conversation with Tuck could happen wherever she was in the room, but Brodie still needed someone to watch his ass while he was prowling in enemy territory, and if someone needed to take a shot to save his life, Tuck was a better bet than she would be, as she’d explained to Brodie already.

“He’s nearly done,” Tuck said but moved over to seat himself behind the rifle, and she appreciated him being there even if he was just humoring her.

A serendipitous side effect of him leaning forward and paying attention to Brodie was that she felt more comfortable about what she had to say because she didn’t have to look him in the eye. “You were right, Swift, I should’ve kept my nose out of your private business. I wasn’t judging you, I… I should’ve respected your boundaries.”

She gave him time to process and kept quiet, praying he would forgive her prying, and that they could move on without things becoming awkward between them.

“She always just understood me. Kadie. She always understood me,” he said and because he didn’t move away from the rifle sight, she guessed that he, too, was more comfortable having this conversation while they had the job to distract them. “For the first few weeks after we split, I had to keep telling myself not to hack her email or her phone like I did when we were together.”

That was an odd admission but fit with who Tuck was. Zara often wondered what he did during all the hours he spent gazing into his different laptop screens. This confession was beginning to answer that question. “She was ok with you doing that?”

He wasn’t embarrassed or hesitant about discussing his invasion of Kadie’s privacy. “It was a game,” he said, lowering his chin. “She knew I did it and encouraged it by acting all affronted when I spoke about things I could never have known without accessing her personal data. Getting her riled always ended well for both of us, if you get me.”

Zara’s guess was that teasing and banter were a part of their foreplay. “I get ya.”

Tuck was fixated on a single point just beyond the scope. “If I didn’t do it, if I didn’t track her movements and conversations, she’d get so pissed. Violating her privacy was a way of… showing how much I cared, I guess. She liked that I couldn’t help myself, that I had to pry into her life because I loved to feel like I was a part of it. We couldn’t see each other every day, but I always knew what she was up to.”

Zara wasn’t too sure of what else to say. One thing was clear. “You don’t have anyone to talk to about how you feel… about her.”

He’d broken up with Kadie in reaction to his grief over losing Art. Zara could understand how that tested his security in his own mortality. But Tuck was a bit of a loner. During Brodie’s seclusion, Tuck went off on his own. Zara always thought he was going to Kadie or going to other friends or family he might have. Now it seemed to her that he’d been dealing with his bereavement and his break-up by himself.

He cleared his throat. “Told Rave when we were through.”

“That’s not the same thing,” she said, sliding over to take his hand from his thigh. He chose to watch their physical connection rather than to meet her eye. “I didn’t mean to upset you or to take liberties talking about her… It’s just… I’m in a kind of unique position to understand her… I know what it is to love a man who could disappear one day.”

“She doesn’t know what we do.”

“She knows what you do, doesn’t she? If she knows you can hack her email…”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said and took his hand out of hers.

He’d shut down, and Zara had learned her lesson about pushing him. “I’m sorry I was an idiot. But if you want to talk… I can keep a secret. You should hear the soppy shit Raven says to me all the time. I never tell anyone about that.”

This time she got a laugh, and she appreciated his smile. “That I’d love to hear.”

“You and me both. It’s wishful thinking on my part,” she said. “Seriously, the most romantic thing he’s ever said to me is, ‘On your knees, bitch.’ Honestly.” Tuck laughed again, and she appreciated it when he put his arm around her neck to pull her forward.

He was still laughing. “We always wondered how he seduced you.”

The time for serious discussion was over. She wanted to return to their ease, so she kept joking. “There was a lack of sleep involved, alcohol, too, I’m sure. He definitely took advantage of me when I was at my weakest.”

“Ah, now it all makes sense.”

The knock at the door caused Tuck to let her go, giving her clearance to answer it. Zara went over to open the door to Brodie, who moved to come inside, but she didn’t budge out of his way, keeping him in the hallway. “Newcomers must submit to a strip search.”

He groaned. “I knew you were in this kind of mood. I just knew it. I should know better than to fuck you on an empty stomach.”

“Maybe you should’ve let me swallow,” she said, walking her fingers up his torso.

Grabbing her wrist, he spun her around and marched her into the room, slamming the door behind himself. “I paid the room for the rest of the week,” he said, keeping her arm loosely twisted up her back all the way over to the couch. “I told him we were gonna party, there might be noise, music, banging—”

“Banging?” she asked, elevating her chin in hope.

“Yes,” he said, squeezing tighter and wrapping his other arm around her waist. “You’re in for a wild ride this week, baby. Any time we need cover, we’re calling on you to do more of that screaming.”

“You’re calling her for that,” Tuck said, turning away from them. “The mark hasn’t lifted his head, you got in and out clean.

Brodie lowered his lips into her hair. “What did I tell you, baby? We’re pros and we’re in for the long haul.”

While the men setup the audio equipment to monitor the bugs Brodie had planted, she laid herself down on the bed. She must have fallen asleep because the next thing she became aware of was the light glowing through her eyelids. She yawned and stretched, dropping a hand onto the torso of the man lying beside her.

“Wrong guy,” a voice beside her muttered. A strong hand took her wrist to shunt her hand back over to her own side. As soon as he released her, she sat up in a flash.

Tuck was the one lying beside her, fully clothed but still asleep. He rolled over, putting his back to her and continuing to snooze. Whipping her attention around, she saw Brodie on guard duty with one hand on the back of the couch so he could check out the sleeping pair.

“Why didn’t you move me?” she whispered, grabbing her pillow and schlepping across the room to sink onto the couch on her side. Putting her head in his lap, she hugged her pillow for warmth, drawing her knees up around it.

“Because when your mouth is that close to my dick I get distracted,” he said but stroked her hair away from her face while she slipped into slumber.

“What’s the plan today?” she asked on another yawn.

“Swift and I will keep watch. Tracking Kahlil’s movements will give us more information, and he might lead us to the other players.”

It beat sitting around and waiting for attack. Brodie needed to be doing something practical that didn’t involve him thinking too hard about what he did or didn’t know about his parents’ death.

“Did Wren and Falcon find out anything more from the data at base?” she asked. They’d gone through most of it before facial recognition had brought them here. But if Grant knew something about Future’s Hope, they needed to know it too. That answer would weigh heavily on their ultimate decision of how to deal with Kahlil.

“Wren took a commercial flight back west this morning,” Brodie said.

Her eyes were still closed, but she presumed he was still watching Kahlil. “That’s a shame,” she said, because Thad was a fun guy to be around and he always injected a bit of humor into tense situations. With guys like Brodie, Zave, and even Tuck, she was often left smiling alone.

“He asked if you wanted to go with him. Something you should tell me?”

She smiled. “Bess invited me to visit.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t commit to anything. I had other things on my mind.”

“Do me a favor,” he said, coiling his fingers in her hair. “Check with me before you jet off. I want to check Zave’s calendar to see what he’s got going on before I let you go over there alone. There are certain times that his place is just plain off-limits, hear me?”

Rolling to her back, she opened her eyes. “Are you ever going to tell me what it is he does that makes you say these cryptic things?”

“You know me, baby,” he said, sliding his hand down to her breast so he could toy with her nipple through the sheer material she wore. “Cryptic keeps you on your toes. I like that.”

A loud bear yawn from the bed made her sit up in time to see Tuck get up and stretch to the ceiling. “What’s the update?” he asked, opening his arms to each side. The ripple of the muscles in his arms reminded her of Brodie, and she recalled the first time she’d laid eyes on Tuck, when he happened to be shirtless.

Brodie’s fingertips crossed her face to press her opposite cheekbone until she was facing him. “What?” she asked, but he just glared and went to his sight.

“What we got?” Tuck asked, rubbing the stubble on his jaw. 

Brodie settled back, bringing his hands up to the back of his head in a relaxed pose. “Guy just started jerking off. We’re good.”

Shocked and interested, she hadn’t considered what would happen if their subject got intimate with himself or others. “Seriously?” she asked, clambering onto Brodie’s lap to peek through the sight.

“Least he’s up, we might get some action,” Tuck said.

“This takes invasion of privacy to a whole new level,” she said, knowing that she should be more demure but intent on the movement of the bedclothes over Kahlil’s lap. As disgusting as it was to watch, it was useful. His ability to intimidate dwindled with every jerk of his fist.

Brodie’s hands held her hips, they slid around to her abdomen and up under her top to cup her breasts. She grabbed his arms to try to tug them away. “What?” he asked, countering her strength without breaking a sweat.

His hot, entitled hands shouldn’t be touching her in intimate places during this spectacle. “Don’t stimulate me while I’m watching… this,” she protested.

“You’re the one choosing to watch,” Brodie muttered. “You want the full stereo experience?”