Alea had finally cracked a smile as she lifted her gown a fraction and showed off her ridiculously hot shoes. Then all Dane could think about was just how nice those stilettos would look wrapped around his neck as he drove his c**k deep. And then she’d utterly shut down as though she’d realized she’d sought their opinions and enjoyed their attention. After that, she’d straightened her gown and dismissed them with a wave of her hand.
He was getting real damn tired of Alea always pushing them away. If he believed for a minute that she didn’t want them, he would take a mental step back and protect her from afar. But he’d noticed the way she sometimes watched all three of them when she thought no one was looking.
Now, Lan stood a good ten feet behind her, watching her as she visibly calmed herself. She turned to him and said something, her hands coming up in a little plea.
“Oh, here we go. I’ve lived this scene before. Allow me. ‘Don’t follow me, Lan. Please, let me get my gorgeous self horribly murdered by the first psycho who comes along. It’s my right.’” Coop sometimes provided offbeat dialogue when they were too far away to hear the object of their affection actually speak.
Landon had moved past Dane, but he could still see the way his friend moved his head in a sharp, unmistakable shake. Coop continued his translation. “And then Lan says, in his too often verbose diatribe against her stubbornness, ‘no.’ You know, I think the dude should explain himself from time to time. Oh, look, he got the designer shoe stomp.”
Sure enough, Princess Alea stomped her right foot, threw her hands up, and stalked off, tossing open the door to the ballroom and flooding the hall briefly with glittering lights. Dane saw the way Lan sighed and opened the door again, his stare following her as he pursued.
Dane’s hand twitched, and he made a fist to quell his urge to smack her sexy but rebellious little ass. “I swear to god, Coop, sometimes I want to lay that girl over my knee and not let her up until we’ve reached an understanding.”
“Only sometimes, Dane?”
Nope. Pretty much all the time. From the minute he’d seen Princess Alea Binte al Mussad, his c**k had been hard and his heart had taken a nosedive. She’d hit him like a bolt of lightning. He’d stood there staring at her, feeling like a damn fool, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. Then he’d looked at his two best friends, ready to tell them that he’d finally found the one woman he wanted to put a collar on—as crazy as that would have sounded—and realized they were just as head over heels. That quickly, all three of them were f**ked.
But they had all backed off, unwilling to step on each others’ toes. They had been through too much together. Coop and Lan were the only family Dane had left. Oh, there was a father and three brothers back in Georgia, but he’d come back from the Korengal Valley a different man. Shortly after his second tour, the family drama and his divorce had ended any affection or allegiance they had for him. In their head, Dane was as good as dead. Coop and Lan were his brothers now, and he couldn’t fight with them. They had been at an impasse.
Until they had really understood the way relationships worked here in Bezakistan. It was tradition among the wealthy and the landholders in this small country for the brothers of a family to share a wife so they didn’t have to divide the family riches or leave any sibling to suffer poverty. After a few weeks, Dane had decided they could adopt the Bezakistani way. He, Lan, and Coop might not truly share blood and they might not be preserving a fortune, but they all wanted Alea and weren’t willing to stab a brother in the back to have her.
So after a full month here, he’d decided he liked the idea of sharing. The families in Bezakistan seemed happy, and he wouldn’t have to relinquish his backup. He’d spent the majority of his adult life in the military, his whole childhood before that following his dad from base to base. The idea of having a family that functioned as a team really suited him.
And then just as they’d settled everything between the three of them, they realized they had forgotten to talk to the most important member of the team. And Alea didn’t want anything to do with them. Or at least that was her story, and she seemed to be sticking to it.
Landon touched his earpiece and suddenly his voice came on the line. “I want you to do a background check on that British f**ker, Oliver Thurston-Hughes. Get me everything you can. I want to know it all, right down to what the ass**le eats for breakfast so I’ll know what to poison.”
“Slow down,” Coop said. “Why are we going to poison that Brit’s oatmeal? Do they even eat oatmeal in England?”
Lan ignored the question, getting right to the point. “He’s a little too interested in the princess.”
Fuck. If he was calling her “princess,” then their conversation had been a clusterfuck. “What’s going on, Lan?”
His pal didn’t look back. Instead, Lan stared across the ballroom, never taking his eyes off her. “That cousin of hers is trying to get her to go to England. The princess walked out onto the balcony to get some fresh air. First Mr. Small Dick followed her, then Crazy Bitch crashed the party. They laid all kinds of guilt on Her Highness.”
“She’s not going to England.” There was no way Dane would allow it. Especially now that he was pretty sure she was still in potential danger. He would talk Talib into putting her on lockdown if he needed to. And if, for some reason, she left anyway, he would have to quit and follow her because he couldn’t leave her unprotected and alone.
“I don’t think she really wants to go,” Landon replied. “But the British f**kwad sure seemed interested in her being a bit more than a traveling companion.”
“I got a shot, boss. I can take him out in one,” Coop said, his voice serious.
“I think that’s a damn fine idea, Coop,” Landon interjected. “Can you aim for his pecker?”
“Don’t know, brother. I suspect that is a mighty small target, but I’m a damn fine marksman.”
Dane hated it when he had to be the voice of reason. “You can’t kill him. Not here anyway. I’ll run a check on him, guys, but seriously, we can’t go around assassinating every man who looks at her twice.”
“I don’t see why not. We’re good at assassinations. If Tal had let us take out Khalil when we wanted to, we could have avoided a whole lot of heartache.” Coop sighed over the line. “Are our ‘friends’ here yet?”
Lawson and Riley Anders were private investigators with the prestigious Anthony Anders firm. It was made up of the brothers, Lawson and Riley, and a badass named Dominic Anthony. They had come with the highest references from the two PIs who had tracked down Alea when she’d been kidnapped. Burke and Cole Lennox were good, but they also had married a really sweet girl named Jessa and now had one son with another on the way. They couldn’t do the kind of twenty-four seven work that Dane had demanded after the death of Khalil al Bashir.
With the prime suspect dead, he had to know once and for all if Khalil had been the one responsible for Alea’s abduction. In fact, he prayed that Khalil had been the guilty f**ker. That would set his mind at ease. But it didn’t add up.
The report the Lennox brothers had filed had stated plainly that Alea had been held for months in a state of “training.” She’d been moved from New York to Colombia and housed in a brothel. Yet the physician who had treated her after she’d been returned to Bezakistan had said there was no sexual abuse evident. According to him, Alea remained a virgin.
So he feared the random act of slavery was bullshit. Dane’s guess was that someone had paid for her to be taken. Someone had wanted her to disappear and suffer. Money had been on the line. Money and maybe something else. Revenge? Pride? He couldn’t be sure until he had more information.
Once, Khalil had seemed like the best suspect, but Dane hadn’t been able to connect him yet to the crime either via physical evidence or motive. He prayed that Law and Riley gave him the proof tonight. He would be thrilled to find out that Alea’s abduction had been a random act or that the ass**le who had sold her out was dead.