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I kissed her.
Vic froze, her body tightening in a way that sent a surge of panic through me, giving me an indication that I might’ve made a huge mistake. The tension didn’t last for long though. She relaxed and opened her mouth to accept my kiss.
She tasted like heaven, like strawberries and cream and sex.
The second our tongues touched, however, a voice snapped me back into the moment.
“Kid!”
I turned, surprise in my eyes as I spotted Ajax standing on the far end of the mat, his hands on his hips.
“What thefuckare you two doing?”
15
PYKE
Ileaned forward, a grin on my face as I watched the chewing-out unfold.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Ajax asked, pacing back and forth in front of Kid down in the gym.
I’d been in the panic room, going through the security feeds of the house, switching from one screen to the other, and just so happened to land on the camera in the gym. I hadn’t seen what exactly led up to it, but Ihadspotted Kid in the middle of a lip and leg lock with the princess.
More entertaining than that, I had a view of the entire gym that’d allowed me to see that Kid and Vic had both forgotten that Ajax had been in there with them. He’d wasted no time breaking up the kiss, ordering Vic to go upstairs while he finished chewing Kid out.
Nice and cozy in the panic room, a mug of coffee close at hand, I leaned in, turned up the volume, and enjoyed the show.
“I wasn’t.”
“No shit, you weren’t!” Ajax let out a sigh of frustration as if he didn’t know where to begin. “We’re in charge of guarding the Princess, not putting the damn moves on her. Now, tell me how it even occurred to you to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Are you kidding me? Kid, you were on top of her like you were twenty seconds away from ripping off her Lululemons and giving it to her right here on the gym mats! God only knows what would’ve happened if I hadn’t been here to stop you from doing something so stupid!”
He stopped, closed his eyes, and took in a deep breath.
“Now, tell me how that happened. Tell me how you just performed a total breech of protocol like that.”
Kid sat stone-faced. I knew that expression well—any guy who’d been in the service and screwed up, only to get chewed out by a superior officer knew that look. It was a good thing, though. It meant he knew he was in hot water and wasn’t about to throw some smart-ass comment at a senior member in the middle of busting his balls.
Good for him. The kid was the lowest-ranking member of the crew, which meant he was the lowest on the totem pole. We were all smartasses who hated authority but giving shit to one of us was a luxury Kid didn’t have. Especially when he’d been busted red-handed.
“I don’t have an excuse. We were sparring, and she pulled a move that tripped me up. We hit the ground, and before I realized what had happened, I was on top of her.”
“I canalmostunderstand that. Lord knows we’ve all tripped up during CQC.”
CQC meant “close-quarters combat”—what the kid and the princess had been in the middle of before he’d turned the leg lock into a lip lock.
“But you most definitely didnotneed to kiss her! Seriously, do you have any idea what you’ve just done? If she were to get in touch with the king and let him know what happened…God, I don’t even want to think about that. And you know the worst part? She’d have every right to tell him. We’d all be up shits creek andyou’dbe the one to blame for it!”
“Can I just—”
Ajax zipped in with surprising speed for a guy his size.
“Did I give you permission to speak freely? Did you hear anythingcloseto something like that come out of my mouth?”
Damn. We liked to all be on the same level in our outfit—no ranks, no chains of command, nothing like that. But there was still an “unofficial” chain of command all the same, and Kid was clearly on the bottom of it. For Ajax to pull that out was no small thing.
