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When I saw him sitting among the other gamers, my stomach almost erupted. My phone buzzed in my pocket with a message from Hux.
Hux: You got this. Laurel’s agents are close and you have your panic button.
Me: I’m fine. Take a breath.
Adam stood and waved me over with a big smile on his face. “There you are. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
When I took the seat next to his, I leaned my shoulder against his. “Sorry again about last night. I feel like an idiot.”
He chuckled. “It’s okay. Nerves and travel can throw your body out of whack.”
“Thank you for being so understanding.” I swallowed and lowered my voice to barely a whisper. “I’ve never… done it with anyone, you know? And… I was nervous.”
Adam’s eyes flared like I’d hoped. Cartel villain or not, it was hard for a man to resist the siren song of a virgin. “Oh, sweetheart,” he murmured, reaching over to take my hand in his. “We can take it slow, okay?”
I nodded. “Can we… I mean… I’d like to get to know you better. Maybe later tonight, or…?”
He pursed his lips in thought. “There’s actually some more security stuff I wanted to ask you about for my article. I was hoping you could bring your laptop to my room so we could work together on it. Maybe we could skip this afternoon’s practice session and…”
“I’d like that,” I blurted. The sooner we could get this over with, the better. “Yes.”
He grinned like the Cheshire cat. “Excellent.”
If the information session had anything of value in it, I didn’t notice. None of the words penetrated my gut-clenching fear. Knowing that Hux and Champ were around somewhere keeping an eye on things meant I was less afraid of Linus, at least for the moment. But I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to stay in character as sweet, naive Kev, and Linus would realize something was amiss. The stakes were high for Champion Security, for the FBI, for my family, and for the future I wanted to build with Hux, and I desperately didn’t want to fail.
“So, lunch in my room, sweetness?” Linus said once the session ended.
“I, um… think I need to go back to my room to take another shower,” I admitted, trying to look a little embarrassed. “And… stuff like that.”
He shot me a knowing look. “Sounds good.” After giving me his room number, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to my cheek. I could almost feel the cloying scent of his cologne—something that might have been incredibly expensive but smelled exactly like the body spray I’d used as a teenager—attaching itself to the fibers of my shirt.
Suddenly, the shower wasn’t just an excuse.
“I’ll be waiting,” Linus promised, smoothing a fingertip over my cheek. It was a gesture Hux had done to me several times—a claiming, affectionate gesture—and the overwhelming wrongness of having someone else touch me that way made my skin crawl.
How the fuck was I going to endure him touching me intimately?
I imagined that if Hux were anywhere in sight of this, he was going to go nuclear, which would make all my worry a moot point.
“Later!” I mumbled, and then I rushed out the door and down the wide hallway to the hotel lobby, not looking around me for familiar faces even though I wanted to see one desperately.
When I opened the door to the suite, someone grabbed me and yanked me into the room before covering my mouth with their… mouth?
My hammering heart slowed to its Hux-pace as the familiar taste and feel of him sank in.
“And here you thought they weren’t getting along, Riggsy,” Champ teased.
“Trust Huxley to go from ‘I want to punch his face’ to ‘I want to eat his face’ without pausing anywhere in between.” Riggs’s eye roll was audible, but he didn’t sound unhappy either.
Hux pulled away but didn’t go far. His arms remained banded around me. “You good?”
I nodded, and it wasn’t a lie. Being with Hux grounded me, calmed me. Reminded me why I was doing what I was doing.
“All set for this afternoon. He’s waiting for me to…” I wasn’t going to mention showering or douching to put any of those images in Hux’s head. I’d learned that lesson last night. “Change.”
Hux knew what I wasn’t saying. Anger simmered behind his eyes, but he kept his mouth closed. Instead, he led me to a chair at the table, where tons of laptops were already set up and unfamiliar agents were busy at work. One of the new agents walked me through their successful attempt to place mics and cameras in Linus’s room while we were at the morning information session.
“We got the room number from Vince and bribed a member of the housekeeping staff to let us in. It’s not legal, though,” she explained, “so nothing captured will be admissible in court. It’s only for your protection.”
