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CHAPTERFIFTEEN
Isaac
“Haveyou been checking the monitors again?” Luca asks as I rejoin the team in the meeting room for Connor’s weekly huddle. I haven’t attended one of these since I took on Aurelia’s detail, but I’m curious to figure out this Axel guy.
“Yeah. So?”
“Dude, Hudson’s with her. Not even a Mossberg 930 shotgun will get past him. She’s safe.”
“It’s not shotguns I’m worried about right now.” It’s a strange blonde woman who has an uncanny ability to sneak past our perimeter to get onto the island without our knowledge.
Luca knows this. “No one’s seen her for a few days, and we’re all on it. Relax.”
I sit down and look around the room. Carter has his forehead on the desk; he’s either asleep or dead. Luca has returned to typing out a message on his phone while maintaining a separate conversation with Jax. Connor is bashing something out on his laptop and Axel has yet to appear.
“How’s everything going?” I ask no one in particular.
“Yeah, good,” Connor says, snapping the laptop closed. “Axel’s taken over the cleaning business…”
“For Bianchi?”
“Yeah. It’s going well. Bianchi’s given us more, but I’ve made it clear we’re almost at capacity. We still have our legit work to do and I don’t want anything getting in the way of that.”
“Good to hear.”
“How are things with the residency?” Connor asks.
“Great. I can’t believe we’re almost halfway through.”
“It has gone super-fast,” Jax agrees.
“Aurelia happy?”
I nod, not trusting myself to say anything further about her. It’s getting harder and harder to not let my hands wander when I catch her from falling, or when I argue with her about dancing with men she doesn’t know. Her lips are starting to taunt me. And when she does that thing where she licks them or she chews the flesh of her bottom one, I can barely hold myself together. The idea of keeping all of this in for another two months is excruciating. But I can’t act on it. I can’t.
First, it would be a complete violation of our agreement, our contract. Second, I really am old enough to be her dad. Hell, I might even be her dad. God knows what I was getting up to at the age of fifteen. I may have donated sperm for cash, who knows? But, then again, I would have remembered. I was no ordinary fifteen-year-old. With a high IQ, a photographic memory and a weird obsession with math, I was never too interested in underage drinking and debauchery. Too boring. Plus, Aurelia is as fair as a sea breeze, while I have the standard issue jet black hair and deep olive skin bestowed by Italian descent.
“Her manager happy too?”
“As far as I know,” I say, holding back a disdainful grunt. “He doesn’t have much involvement.”
“That’s probably a good thing,” Connor, says, one eyebrow raised. I’m about to agree when the door opens and in walks Axel, my temporary replacement, and currently, my fucking nemesis.
“Gentlemen,” he greets, in an impossibly deep, low voice. The man towers over all of us at seven feet tall. He is built like a house too.
“Hey, man,” Connor says. “How’s it going?”
“Good,” Axel rumbles. “I just came from the marina. One of the dive boats got stuck in the mangroves so I just helped them tow it out.”
“That would explain the river that just followed you in here,” Jax said, staring at the sodden floor.
“Yeah, sorry about that. Didn’t have time to go change my boots.”
“We were just talking about the residency,” Connor continues.
“Aurelia Bird,” Axel says. “I heard it’s going down well. Met her the other night at the bar. She’s a firecracker.”
I narrow my eyes at him. Luca catches it and kicks me under the table.
