Their Virgin’s Secret, Masters of Menage, Book 2 (15 page)

“Fucker. Like you don’t. We both have the same dreams.” He pinned Jessa to the bed with his intent stare. “We dream about you, sweetheart, and we wake up hard.”

Her gaze slipped back and forth between the two of them, then dropped. “Could I have some coffee please? From someone wearing pants.”

Damn it, he should have kept his fucking mouth shut.

Cole brought her a cup and a sandwich. “Cream and sugar. Two spoons. And please eat, Jessa. You didn’t eat on the plane last night.”

Burke knew that Cole wanted to demand, order her to eat, but they didn’t have the right to command anything of her that didn’t pertain to her immediate safety. Curbing himself, holding back from Jessa, hurt Cole like hell. Burke didn’t like it any better.

She accepted the coffee but put the sandwich down. “I don’t feel much like eating.”

Burke didn’t either. He wanted to work through their problems with Jessa somehow. But now wasn’t the time. And he wanted to see Caleb. God, a single day as a dad, and he was already freaking out about his kid. He shook it off. Their son was safe with the James family. They were insanely wealthy and very powerfully connected. They would take care of Caleb. But the James brothers weren’t the only powerful people they knew. “Did you get Rafe or Kade on the phone? I tried last night, but no one answered.”

Cole nodded, finally looking away from Jessa. Thankfully, the question directed his brother’s attention elsewhere. “They were…busy last night.”

Burke took a long sip of the fast food coffee. Swill, but still better than some he’d had in the past. He could bet how Rafe and Kade had been occupied. They had business interests in the States, but they loved American women. Lots of them. And they loved to share. It was just one reason they had all bonded as friends. “What did they say?”

“They’re in town. They have some meeting with Black Oak about the new refineries in Bezakistan. They’re going to come out here and bring some equipment with them. Sat phone, better computer equipment, new car, and a whole lot of cash. And cell phones. I don’t want Hilary to know our number after we get out of town. It’s better for all of us. They’re bringing some credit cards, too, and passports in case we want to leave the country. I know we can’t stay in one place too long, but I think it’s worth the wait to meet with them before we move.”

Jessa turned, her eyes wide. “I can’t leave the country without my baby.”

“Jessa, we’ll do what we have to do to keep you alive.” Burke didn’t want to leave her again. He was sick at the thought, but she stood the best chance of staying alive somewhere far away.

She shook her head frantically. “No, I
can’t
leave the country.”

Cole frowned. “You’ll be surprised what you can do when I tie you up and shove you on a private jet.”

Burke looked at Jessa for a moment. She was still tired, despite her sleep. It was written in the circles under her eyes. She was still the most beautiful thing in the world to him, but she looked fragile, haunted. And very afraid. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “What haven’t you told us, sweetheart?”

“How did you know?” Jessa asked.

Because he’d made a careful study of her. He had a brilliant mind and a very good memory. Every exchange they’d ever had, he’d kept vibrant and alive in his brain. “You wring your hands when you’re upset or unsure.”

She also did it when she didn’t want to admit things. Like she had that night she’d admitted she was a virgin.

Jessa unclasped her hands. “Damn observant men. Someone texted my phone last night. I had my purse in Caleb’s diaper bag, and when we had to leave him, I grabbed it. The phone has pictures of Caleb, and I thought keeping it was harmless. I wasn’t planning to call anyone. I thought if you knew he’d contacted me, you’d take the phone away, so I didn’t say anything. But then you started talking about what sounded like leaving the country…” She sighed, then reached into the small bag Hannah had given her and pulled out her phone. Jessa held it out, her eyes full of tears. “I knew I needed to say something. I just want my pictures.”

Cole grabbed the phone.

Burke sat beside Jessa. He would let Cole do the investigative work while he handled their woman. Even if she refused to be, he still thought of her that way. This was one of the joys of sharing. There was always one of them to handle the necessary business, which freed the other to comfort or protect the female.

“Sweetheart, no one’s going to take your pictures, but we’re going to turn off anything that sends or receives a signal. You’ll still be able to look at the pictures and use a few apps.”

“Motherfucker!” Cole’s curse reverberated through the room. “Goddamn it. I’m going to kill that dog-fucking son of a bitch. I’m going rip him into little fucking pieces with my bare hands and shove them down his shit-sucking throat.”

“Wow, he knows a lot of bad words,” Jessa said, eyes wide.

“And he’s not afraid to use them,” Burke drawled. “What does the message say?”

Cole put the phone down and picked up his own—the disposable, untraceable phone Dex had given him. He dialed a number and continued cursing.

Jessa watched Cole, but spoke to Burke. “It said that he knew you two would try to get me out of the country, but that if you called in favors to have me taken abroad, he would have no choice but to go after Caleb.”

Burke closed his eyes, cursing mentally, using all the same words his brother had. “Marco knew we’d eventually come up with this plan.”

“You were really going to send me away?”

He hated the way her lips trembled, the hurt in her voice. He hated the fact that she was so scared. “Yes. We talked about it while you were sleeping. We were going to send you with some friends who could have kept you safe. Once you were in their country, Gavin James was going to fly Caleb to Bezakistan himself. We didn’t have enough time to pull it off at the onset, and the fucker knew it. That’s why he only gave us twenty-four hours. But it still might be the best plan.”

She shook her head. “No. I believe him. He’ll come after us.”

Burke raised an arrogant brow. “He couldn’t get to you in Bezakistan.”

“I can’t stay there the rest of my life,” Jessa said, frustration evident in her tone. “He wants to kill me. I don’t get why, but I have to fight this. I can’t risk letting him come after my son, not even for a second. Unless you manage to kill this asshole, we’ll be looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives, worried that he’s gunning for us.”

“I will kill him, Jessa. I won’t let anything happen to you or our son,” Cole vowed, hanging up the phone.

She was quiet for a moment. “Exactly who is this man?”

“Fucking dead,” Cole said, his face still red.

Jessa turned to Burke. “Could you please tell me? Without the gorilla chest thumping.”

He didn’t want to. It would have been so much easier if he’d just been able to pack her off with Rafe and Kade, then pick her up when it was over. Then he wouldn’t have to admit just how much they’d screwed up.

“Tell me! I have the right to know why this man wants me dead.”

“We usually handle security problems for corporations,” Cole explained. “But in this case, we were helping our friends from Bezakistan find their cousin, like we explained.”

“Alea, yes.” She waved him off, hugging the blanket to her chest. “Now give me the rest of the story.”

Burke took a long breath and plunged in. “Marco believes we’re responsible for his father’s death.”

“That’s bullshit. I wish I had been. I would have fucking enjoyed pulling the trigger,” Cole growled. “But no, I was a good boy and sent the asshole off to prison. If I had known he’d be dead so soon, I would have put a bullet in him myself—and Marco right after him—and ended everyone’s goddamn misery.”

Burke stared pointedly at his brother. “What Cole is trying to say in his Neanderthal way is that the elder Delgado was a very bad man and that a rival stabbed and killed him behind bars.”

“He deserved everything he got. The fucker trafficked young women. He filled client orders and sold them to brothels all over South America. He bought and sold girls to fulfill male fantasies, made them prostitutes and sex slaves.” Cole never flinched.

But Jessa did. She paled visibly. “Oh, my god. It’s so horrible.”

“A single word can’t describe that kind of hell.” Cole continued. “We got involved because we did some security work for Bezakistan when we were Navy SEALs. Some extremists kidnapped Sheikh al Mussad, and we rescued him.”

“Why? Is he a dictator? How does Delgado come into this picture? Were they in business together?”

Burke laughed at the thought. “Talib? No. He’s not a dictator, and he would never harm a woman. And he’d certainly never go into business with Marco. Though I will admit his family has a long history of kidnapping females. The women all ended up being very happy brides, however. Tal and his brothers were educated in London, so he runs Bezakistan like a business. A ridiculously profitable business. They’re a small country, but they’re sitting on a wealth of resources. Talib’s father decided to spread the wealth many years ago. Every citizen in the country gets a portion of the money from the oil they put out. It’s the single wealthiest country per capita in the world.”

She bit into her bottom lip as she considered what he’d said. “Then why would someone kidnap him?”

“The region doesn’t look kindly on the way the royal family runs the country. They cling to some very old practices.”

“Oh. The polyandry. Yeah, I know their neighboring countries think it’s a mortal sin.”

“Yes.” Cole smirked down at her. “But the mortal sin of all the brothers in a family sharing a single wife means there’s no need to divide the kingdom or the wealth. Anyway, my team was sent in to rescue the sheikh. Our government didn’t like the idea of a less friendly leader in control of all that oil.”

Cole’s eyes went dark as they always did when he thought of that day. Burke was pretty sure he was the only one to whom Cole had told the whole story. “Tal was in bad shape by the time we rescued him. We were trapped for a couple of days under fire until we got away.”

“Until you managed to kill everyone.” His brother still had nightmares.

Cole shrugged it off. “Same difference. We got cut off from my team, and I got him out of there. Anyway, we got to be friends. He does a lot of work with Black Oak Oil, the company Gavin and Dex run with their brother, Slade. When they were looking for a firm to handle outside security, Talib recommended us.”

“So when his cousin disappeared in New York City, he asked us to look for her,” Burke explained. “The morning we left you, we’d just gotten word that Delgado had a girl for us.”

“So you used a fake last name while you were investigating Marco’s father,” Jessa said. “You didn’t tell me the truth because…?”

“We were posing as men looking to buy a slave,” Cole said bluntly. “We had to build a whole cover story that would check out to Ricardo Delgado’s people. Any loose end could have unraveled the whole case.”

Burke winced at the indelicate way his brother put everything. “We had to work very carefully to even get the elder Delgado to talk to us. It was months before the cautious bastard agreed to a meeting. We took possession of our ‘slave’ about three hours after we left you that morning. When the buy went down, we recorded everything and turned it over to the feds. It started a whole shit storm. The FBI stormed the Delgado compound and arrested Ricardo. He was dead in prison six weeks later.”

“And now his son wants you to feel his pain.” Her fists clutched the folds of the blanket.

“Yes. He figured out that you were our weakness. I’m sure he started investigating us. It wouldn’t have taken much to find out that we’d hired a private investigator named Landry to keep tabs on you while we were gone. And apparently he bribed the PI to keep us apart.”

“What do you mean?” Jessa looked between the two of them as if searching for answers.

Cole scrubbed a hand through his hair. “We got regular reports, Jessa. We knew you went to Scotland, and Landry said that you’d gotten married there.”

Bitterness welled inside Burke. So much time lost. Marco Delgado had cost him in ways Burke couldn’t have imagined. Marco Delgado had made sure he hadn’t been there at the birth of his child. That he hadn’t held Jessa’s hand and comforted her. That he hadn’t been there when Caleb woke up in the middle of the night. Fucking Marco had played them like pawns on a chessboard.

Jessa rolled her eyes, a little huff coming out of her mouth. “He’s the reason you kept insisting that Angus was my husband. So this PI was on Marco’s payroll?”

“Right.” Burke sighed. “And Landry didn’t bother to mention your pregnancy. We would have come home. We were going to leave South America after we rescued Alea and come back to you. But he said that you’d married…” He shrugged. “We didn’t have anything to come home to but a fucking empty condo, so we decided to stay on and rescue as many as we could.”

She shook her head. “I went to Scotland early in March. That was long after you left me without a single phone call or e-mail. Or even a shred of real information about you. Don’t try to cover your asses now. You could have contacted me, asked me about my ‘marriage’ yourselves. I get that you were doing something important. I really do, but I was important, too. Well, I thought I was. I realize now that I misunderstood. I was a stupid little virgin who thought sex meant love.”