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24
Gunner
Complacency
The hot tub warms. The hot cocoa is made, and the alcohol is discreetly destroyed while Libby changes.
The woman I promise the rest of my life to blows her macros way out when she eats enough marshmallows in her cocoa to feed an army, and the next day, when I show her the home gym attached to the kitchen, we fuck again.
Lifting weights turns my girl the hell on.
Tuesday is spent working out, making love, walking the woods, and for the twenty minutes she naps on the couch duringThe Officereruns, I check my emails and take care of what needs taking care of.
Wednesday is much of the same. Staying active, eating reasonably well, walking in the silence of the woods, and checking my emails when she’s least likely to notice. Not because she’d get mad that I’m working, but because I don’t want to remind her that there’s a shitty world outside of this cabin.
This is how we spend our quasi-honeymoon. Together, happy, with no outside interference, exactly the way we’re supposed to. She gives her body to me every night when we go to bed, and sometimes in the woods, if my flirt game is strong. She shows her body off each morning while we work out in tandem. She’s not chatty when she’s in a gym – home or pro. She wants the music loud, and the talk low. She doesn’t care to compete with me, she doesn’t watch to see my reps and try to one-up me, she doesn’t get mad if I change the music, so long as it stays loud, but the couple times I’ve attempted to spot her, she growled, and I had to walk away before she ate my head and tried to do away with me.
I wonder if this is how it could have always been. I mean, swap the luxurious home for cardboard boxes and rats. Swap the meals we prepare in my kitchen for scraps we find wherever we could. The gym in that scenario is just a street and whatever we can find, but I started with flipping tires. Everyone has spare tires laying around. If we swap the technology we have now for stargazing, I still think the laughter would have been there, the silliness, the jokes. We still would have tried to talk over each other in an effort to zing the other first, and I would have spent my nights then just as I do now; watching over her, and drawing while her lashes twitch with sleep.
Our week flies by like it was only minutes rather than seven days, so when Monday rolls around again and I realize neither of us are ready to go, I make a few phone calls to my office, and Libby does the same with her chief, and just like that, we extend our time, and my staff remains clueless that I’m not even in the plaza.
It all sounds so easy. So fucking seamless.
You’d think I’d know better by now that life isn’t that easy. You’d think I’d be smarter about gloating about my happiness, even if that gloating was only to myself. But no, I don’t bother to sit back and assess my happiness. I ride it, I surround myself in all things Libby, I consume her in every way I can.
So when Jay Bishop, Sophia Solomon, and Spencer Serrano – that seven-foot-tall fucker that stood guard at Kane’s boardroom entryway – randomly turn up on my doorstep with enough firepower to fight a war, I find myself a little… caught off guard.
Out of instinct, I try to slam the door in their faces, only for it to bounce back when Jay pushes his boot in. He wears camo pants, a black muscle shirt, and that beanie that, for some reason, hurts me on a soul-deep level. I don’t know the guy, I certainly don’t like him, but knowing the scar he hides under it, and knowing the blame for that lays on Colum Bishop, makes my stomach cramp.
He tried to assassinate his own fucking son.
I literally might have gotten the best deal out of all of us. My mother is dead, but I knew the man for one hour, and of that hour, I spent only minutes with him. Jay and Kane were raised in that household, they were tormented and trained under his rule.
I see the machines he created in them, but then I see the scars, and realize we’re on the same team.
“Open up, Griffin.” Jay’s black eyes glitter with anger. “We’ve gotta talk. And you don’t get to raincheck this shit.”
* * *
Three of them.Two large men and their one little ballerina. They fill my home, but despite the size discrepancies, Sophia is still the leader of their pack.
I picked the worst possible target when I went to Checkmate that day. The very worst target, short of hitting on a visibly pregnant Jess.
We sit in my living room now, in a circle of sorts. Jay and Soph sit on the couch, Lib and I sit on the coffee table opposite them, and Spence stands guard against the wall. It’s what he does; he’s the soldier, and he won’t fail in this mission.
“What do you mean I’m sending you emails?” I stare into Sophia’s eyes, then Jay’s. “I’ve literally been out of the office for weeks.”
“Funny, we asked around while on the road today,” Soph counters. “Your receptionist said you were out to lunch, and would be back in a little while.”
“She’s paid to say that! Libby and I have been here for weeks. I assure you, I’m not sending you love letters via email. I don’t give a single fuck about you people, and there’s nothing I want to say, in email or otherwise.”
Jay sits so close to Soph he’s almost sittingonher. Part of me wonders why he does that, but then I notice the way Libby sits beside me. She holds my hand the way Soph holds Jay’s. She wears this mask of quiet confidence the same way Soph does. And that’s when I realize the Bishop blood runs thick, and he needs Soph the way I need Libby.
With a perfectly calm voice, Soph turns her ever present laptop around and shows me her screen. Nobody mentions the elephant in the room – the giant Griffin logo obnoxiously taking up the front of her laptop screen. Nobody wants to admit that my tech is the best tech, that they swore they would no longer support Griffin Industries. You can’t replace the best, and smart people know to make business decisions with their brain, and not their hurt feelings.
“Someone is trying to access our files,” Soph says. “They continue to try to slide into our accounts, but here’s the thing, every time someone searches my shit, they leave a fingerprint of sorts.”
I narrow my eyes. I know this. I might almost know more about this shit than she does…almost. “What’s that got to do with me?”
