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“Am I allowed to take them out?” West murmured.
“Give them a warning first. If they don’t listen, then yes.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll give him a hand with it, too,” Alexei offered. He glared at West. “No way I’m letting him have all the fun.”
“Remember, discreet, baby,” Soren said, pressing a kiss to the side of his head.
Alexei gasped, pressing a hand to his chest as if he were about to clutch his nonexistent pearls. “Are you saying I don’t know how to be discreet? The trained assassin. The one who caught your sneaky ass on multiple occasions.”
“No, I’m saying you have your moments when you don’t feel like being discreet because you’re being protective, and you’re already thinking about adopting Max.”
Alexei made a moue of disappointment as he seemed to consider Soren’s words. “True. You have a point. I’ll be…subtle. Covert. Clandestine.”
“Sneaky,” West supplied, and Alexei answered with a wicked giggle.
Ed nearly groaned. There were going to be bodies hidden around Cairo that would be left for an entirely new generation of archeologists to find.
But if it meant Max would be safe, that was fine with him.
10
MAX SUTTON
Aknock on the door pulled Max out of his fog. He straightened from where he’d been bent over a table set up in his room as a desk. A moan pushed past his lips before he could catch it as his body protested the sudden movement. How long had he been stuck in that position? Hours. It had to be hours.
His brain was trapped in a haze of numbers and names from thousands of years ago. Pulling himself to the present took work. Where was he? Who was he with?
The door opened and a familiar head poked into the crack.
“Ed.” He sighed happily. Just seeing that man’s smile brought him back to the present. For the past twenty-four hours, he’d been working on the notes he had, as well as corresponding with a handful of people he trusted. Last night, he’d only stopped at one in the morning because Ed had come in, physically picked him up, and placed him on the bed. Then the evil man left with the laptop. Max might have cursed him at the time, but the words had barely left his tongue before he was snoring.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I was wondering if you were hungry,” Ed asked, still hovering in the doorway.
Was he hungry? He needed to think about it.
His stomach took that second to loudly protest being ignored for so many hours by growling.
“I’ll take that for a yes,” Ed chuckled. He pushed the door the rest of the way open to reveal that he was holding a plate filled with food. “I hope you’re in the mood for Greek. Izzie located an authentic Greek restaurant and ordered a ton of food. Apparently, he felt we hadn’t experienced enough of his home while we were there.”
“I can eat Greek,” Max said. His eyes widened at all the food set in front of him. The gyro was easy enough to identify, but he didn’t know the proper names of the rest. He’d spent very little time in Greece in his life. His family and even personal travels largely kept him in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
His head popped up to gaze at Ed as he accepted the plate. “Have you eaten yet?”
“Not yet. I made a plate for you first.”
“You want to join me for, like a private picnic?” He paused and realized that it might seem antisocial to not join the rest of the team protecting him for lunch. That was rude. “Or I can go downstairs. We can all eat together.”
“No! I like a private picnic! I’ll be right back.” Ed darted out of the room in a flash, Max’s chuckle chasing after him.
Max turned to his table and frowned. He could clean off the disaster area he’d created, but they’d still be short a chair. Plus, he’d just gotten everything where he needed it so that it was within easy reach as he worked.
Standing with the plate in hand, he moved to the bed. They could sit there, but it was a narrow single. Not the most comfortable for someone of Ed’s size. And well, the bed and Ed made him think of things that had nothing to do with eating lunch. No doubt, he was interested in jumping Ed’s bones, but it would be nice if they spent some time getting to know each other instead of turning this into a high school boink fest.
However, he could turn this into a picnic, as he’d suggested.
Placing his plate on his chair, Max lunged at the bed and ripped off the blanket. He spread it out on the open space in the middle of the room. That looked like a picnic blanket…sort of. He grabbed the plate Ed had loaded up for him and the bottle of water he’d barely touched.
