Page 24 of Never Enough

“Once we get you out of here, we’ll get you somewhere safe where you can clean up, and then you and I are gonna head out on that date.”

She huffed at him.

“Hey, I’m not kidding. I’m way hungry for tacos. It’s Tuesday,after all, and I can’t let the girl with the hottest ass in town eat dinner all alone on Taco Tuesday.”

“That sounds so wrong,” TB muttered.

Nemo’s focus on Haskell never wavered. “Ready?” he asked, his expression serious for the first time.

“Yes. Thank you,” she said.

“No need to thank me. Just don’t want you losing one of those nine lives.” The words were flirty, but the expression was still serious. “Okay, here we go. One. Two. Three.”

As he said three, he watched and felt her sag forward. In the space of the second it would have taken to say “four,” he drove his shoulder underneath her falling form, wrapped that arm around her knees, stood, and sprinted for the chair in front of the dumpster. He heard the explosion and felt its impact as he leapt from the chair’s seat, diving with Haskell’s body beneath his into the garbage bags inside the dumpster, and TB dropped the lid just as the fireball was extending toward their iron box.

The concussion of the explosion lifted the dumpster off the ground a couple of feet, and it came back down hard, about ten feet back from where it had been, as well as on its side.

After the dumpster stopped moving, Haskell lay beneath Nemo’s body. He raised his head to make sure she was okay. Reassured when her eyes opened, he said, “You look great, kitty cat, but we need to talk about this new perfume you’ve got on,” he quipped.

Haskell replied, “You don’t smell any better, burglar boy. But I sure as shite look better than you. What animal attached itself to your face and died? Scruffy. Yuck.”

Nemo looked down into her eyes. She smiled. He smiled.

Fuck, I’m in love with a kitty cat.

8

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Haskell

“I shit you not, Midas. The asswipe is lying in days-old food and who-knows-what, makes a joke about how she smells, and without missing a beat, that little pint of piss ribs him about his beard.”

Waters was laughing. “She’s perfect for him.”

TB rumbled, “Maybe, but she’s totally not his type.”

Waters asked, “Midas, does your brother even have a type?”

There was a snort, and Midas answered, “If it’s human, and it has a vagina, it’s his type.”

Haskell bit her lip, a bolt of pain whizzing through her.

Child, of course he’s a player. Why else would he be interested in a tomboy like you?

She was currently sitting at the conference room table in a ten-story office building in the middle of L.A. The past two hours were just about all she could take, and hearing this conversation float from an office down the hall was not helping the situation.

Barely given time to collect her scattered wits after the explosion, Nemo and his co-worker, TB, had vaulted out of the dumpster, dragging her behind them at a full-blown sprint down an alley. A Bronco had been waiting, to which she was unceremoniously thrown into the back seat. A furry missile flew in on her heels and deposited itself in her lap, followed by two hundred pounds of glorious superhero. He didn’t even have the door slammed shut before the Bronco was tearing down a back street. Once it hit Fifth Avenue, the one Nemo had called Midas pulled out into traffic and proceeded to drive to this office building looking for all the world like he and his passengers were just out for a midday drive in L.A. on an ordinary Tuesday.

When they arrived at the office building, a flurry of orders began being issued. There’d been no time to process anything over the leader’s instructions, the confirmations of the other men, and the squawking and growling of Cherry and Demon.

Nemo had been glued to her side for the entire time, but when he lowered himself to his knees to praise Scheherazade, a cool hand brushed down her arm. Haskell had turned to see Cherry at her right and a very grumpy medic in sunglasses just behind her.

“Haskell, let me take you somewhere to clean up.”

She allowed herself to be led away by Cherry. When she turned around in the lift, she saw Nemo on one knee next to his dog, his eyebrows scrunched down and a frown on his face, but he didn’t move from the spot. Their eyes remained locked until the closing lift door blocked him from her view.

A warm shower and some borrowed clothing from Cherry made all the difference. She transferred her trusty screwdrivertool to her pants pocket. She had to tight-roll the jeans to keep them from dragging on the ground, and the long-sleeved Harvard T-shirt sleeves hung so long her fingertips barely peeked out the ends, but she was clean and no longer smelled like rotting food, so she was thankful for that. Clean and comfortable, she’d been brought back here to the conference room where she waited for them to come in and question her, and she was stuck overhearing conversations she shouldn’t be a party to.

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