Page 19 of Bared

“Dude, I’ve been seeing it your way since the start of this tea party. That’s not the issue here.” He scraped a hand up the side of his neck and started rubbing at his nape. “Why the hell are you inviting me to your cake cart?”

Oz maintained his casual slump, though his gaze got incisive. “You didn’t seem to have a problem with the Reece Richards cake course.”

“That gig was protection only, not extraction.” Most importantly, it was in a new hotel in one of Paris’s most elegant areas, not a terrorist cave beneath a squalid sci-fi landscape. “And it sure as hell wasn’t an investigation. Not to the tune of finding a very determined woman in a very big city.”

Fox absorbed his gripe with a small roll of his shoulders. “Well, the Cimarrons have authorized me to contract you for more lucrative…cake.”

“It’s not about the money,” Brick bit back. “Oz knows that already.”

“I certainly do.” Oz passed off the remark as a casual comment, adding a charming grin as a group of flirty college girls strolled by. “But I also know that you enjoy a nice thick slice of sweet stuff from time to time. This sugar will guarantee you enough flow to afford that place you’ve been eyeing up in Whistler.”

“Damn it.” He shook his head in time to Oz’s lazy chuckle. “I should have never told you about that.”

“Bah,” Oz blurted. “You were blotto that night. We both were.”

“Which is why you remember what I said?”

“Pffft. It was interesting.”

“Fuck you.” He dragged his hand forward, angrily scratching at his skull again. “For the record, empty compliments won’t soften me up.”

He didn’t say it to make Oz back down. But he didn’t expect the guy to jog his head back like Brick had simply let out a ten-second belch. “Mate, I think you’re already softened fine—and my words, empty or otherwise, had nothing to do with it. Only person who has yet to see that is the one in your skin.”

Brick ignored the telling tickles along the back of his neck. “Thanks, Yoda,” he groused. “I’m still not levitating the star speeder out of the bog for you.”

Fox cut into the air with an audible clutch of breath. “Did you just compare Princess Jayd to a mud-covered spaceship?”

Oz held him back with an iron hand across the shoulder. “I think our friend is battling deeper demons,” he stated before turning a similar regard on Brick. “Specters, I reckon, that could be banished with the right mission as a nudge?”

Goddammit.

Brick craved to spit it aloud at the Aussie, but his teeth were going at each other like grinders on sheet metal. How did Oz know? It hadn’t gotten spewed during a night of “blotto” ramblings, since Brick had stopped getting that drunk with anyone after Bamiyan. And all his sessions with Doc Sally were strictly confidential.

Maybe the bastard was gambling on a calculated guess. In which case, he’d struck a damn artery. Nothing Brick could do about it either. He was a blood spill of major tells even before the gnashed teeth. He’d sucked up too much air through his nose. Averted his gaze way above the quotient for normal. Oz didn’t miss a single speck of it.

Because he was right?

Fuuuck.

Probably because he was right.

But Brick wasn’t ready to admit that. Not to himself, and certainly not out loud. Not yet.

“I need a few hours,” he finally said. “Can you give me that, at least?”

“Of course.” But Oz dotted that by scooting his gaze out to Fox. “I mean, that’s all right, yeah, babe?” After the Arcadian nodded, he told Brick, “It’s all right, mate. Here’s the twenty of the safe house we’ve secured.”

Brick peered at his friend’s phone screen, committing the Montmartre address to memory while faking a hey-look-at-that-fun-vacation-picture laugh. Didn’t hurt to give the security cams a good lasting impression. “Got it,” he affirmed.

Past an equally feigned grin, Oz said, “So if we don’t see you by midnight, we’ll assume you’ve pussied out.”

“Or actually found some common sense?” he returned.

“Yeah, yeah. Fuck you too.”

It was their version of a mushy goodbye hug, and that was just fine by Brick. He was never one for mushy, even before Bamiyan. He’d always done better getting to work shit out for himself, which had been his biggest strength—and ultimately, downfall—in the black ops game.

Right now, he chose to look at it as the former.