Page 18 of Direct Action

My disappointment was second to my relief.

I went back to staring at my clothes.

He’d folded three loads of laundry, something I hadn’t had time to do in the last week.

And I’d been a total bitch to him.

Damn.

Chapter Seven

“How’d it go?” Pete wasted no time getting down to it.

I didn’t need to look around the long makeshift table Pete had pieced together in one of the Quonset huts. This was new—normally we met in his living room when we had briefs.

“If we’re making this HQ, we need a table and not sawhorses with OSB on top,” I commented by way of deflection.

“Afraid of getting a splinter, Sailor Boy?” Cat jabbed.

“No, Kitty Cat, it’s just the Navy taught me standards,” I shot back as I made my way around the table, opting for a seat at the opposite end of the table near Gavin. “I know the Army’s budget made it so you grunts had to make do with your shitty accommodations, but I think we can do better than this.”

I swept my hand around the setup.

“Aw, someone woke up with sand in his—”

Mason quickly cut off Gavin. “There are ladies present.”

I was looking directly at one of those said ladies and she was rolling her eyes at Mason, but it was the other lady, Calli, who quipped, “If he has sand in his clit, he should flush that before he gets a UTI.”

Beside me Gavin grunted his amusement. Aiden, Fallon, Jack, and Pete just let theirs be known by outright laughing. Beckett Yates, not an official member of our team, cracked a rare smile. But Mason just stared at his woman in what looked to be shock she’d be so vulgar as to say clit out loud in front of the team.

“Careful, Calli, our guy Ryan is a hella fact-checker,” Cat warned. “He’s probably already planning his DuckDuckGo search to prove that sand can’t cause UTIs.”

“DuckDuckGo?” Calista laughed. “What the heck is wrong with Google?”

I sighed and sat back, preparing for the onslaught of jabs. Which I’d walked straight into at the onset. All because I didn’t want to talk about Chloe.

Actually, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about her, it was that I didn’t want to think about the exhaustion I saw last night. I didn’t want to think about her slumped forward, falling asleep mid-conversation. Or the piles of laundry she’d admitted she hadn’t had time to fold and put away. I didn’t want to think about why she was so adamant about not quitting the Vault, referencing—more than once—a lack of money.

She drove an ace ride. Her apartment was three blocks from the Dirty Plank, one block up from the beach. The building was old but well kept. And rent had to cost a whack, but I knew how much she made at the bar. She wasn’t rolling in it, but neither was she destitute.

Something wasn’t adding up. Chloe didn’t strike me as someone who blew her money on frivolous purchases. I knew she didn’t have an issue with drink or drugs, and that knowledge went beyond the random drug test all employees agreed to. There was no way she’d be able to hide an addiction from five men who had spent their adult lives around the dregs of mankind. Add in Jack and Cat, both of whom would’ve sniffed out an issue immediately, it was safe to say Chloe didn’t abuse drugs. I highly doubted she gambled away the money she made working on her feet all day.

As far as I knew from the conversations I’d heard around the bar, she worked, she surfed, and she spent time with her friends. And as of this morning I knew she also spent time with her mom.

Yet she needed money. More money than she made working at the Plank. So much so she mentioned dog walking and cleaning office buildings. And she refused to listen to reason about quitting the Vault. To be fair, I never actually got to the reasoning part of quitting.

It took me a moment to realize no one around the table was heckling me.

“What? Why are you all staring at me?” I asked.

“You tell us?” Pete’s loaded question hung in the air.

This was the downside of having good friends who were more like brothers. Men who not only paid attention to every nuance but also were highly intelligent—despite behaving like toddlers most of the time.

“I figured you not coming home last night meant the two of you got shit sorted.” Gavin dropped a fucking grenade and did so with a smirk.

Dick.