Page 36 of Redemption

This house served as a central meeting place for the team, and it was Saturday morning, but Mia had likely put the kibosh on random visitors since Victoria had been in bed and hiding. That meant Rocco and his wife, Caterina, were strategic.Or not.Ryder didn’t always know how Mia worked. But she was a maverick of healing. He would have to wait and see.

Victoria’s eyes bugged. Still wearing the pajamas, she faced the front of the house. “Guess I should go change.”

He saw from the set look on her jaw that didn’t mean she planned to come back downstairs.

“Catch up with you later then. Maybe we can go do something if you’re up to it? An adventure?”

“Maybe.” She shuffled out the other side of the kitchen and headed the back way upstairs to the addition that Winters had recently added.

Not that this house wasn’t big enough. It was. The place had enough bedrooms to house a bunch of the team when they came in, and the basement would camp the rest. The whole damn property was huge. But for purely tactical reasons, Winters wanted multiple egress points, and Mia wanted something more than a main staircase. Thus, she had a new addition, and he was able to outfit the house with more options. Talk about relationship goals.

Where could he bring Victoria? Outside of a few Titan guys’ homes, HQ, and GUNS, it wasn’t as though Ryder knew the area. She didn’t seem in the right headspace to go to a gun range.

Maybe just out to lunch or something. Or back down to the boardwalk.

They could go swimming. That was how he blew off steam. It would be like a vacation until she got her head in a good spot.

He pressed his lips together. He was prepping her to go back to Iowa. He rubbed his temples then pushed back from the table.“What am I doing?”

Nothing smart was the answer. He tossed a fork onto the table, and it bounced onto his plate, clattering as Rocco came in.

Again, Ryder heard the front door open and the dogs go nuts. Voices filtered down the hall—Luke and his wife, Madeleine—and Ryder knew Mia had put a play in motion. Caterina and Madeleine had both been in very different, yet very similar situations to Victoria’s.

Worry clouded his thoughts, and he couldn’t focus on his teammates’ arrival or Rocco in the kitchen as all the small talk went in one ear and out the other. He couldn’t focus on anything but the woman he’d met in Russia and how she’d devolved into this quieter, untrusting version of herself.

Delta didn’t rehab people. They saved them.

End of story.

And he didn’t want torehabVictoria either. He wasn’t a fixer. But she didn’t need to be fixed, even if he believed that and she didn’t. Whenever she was ready to bounce back, she would.Wouldn’t she?

All Ryder knew was that he liked sitting next to her in the dark, liked when he had excuses for her to fall asleep against him. Even when he was so tired he couldn’t stay awake, he had, and he had watched her sleep.Jeez…What was wrong with him? Ryder rubbed a hand over his face.

“Does that look mean you don’t want to?” Rocco stood practically in front of Ryder.

He blinked, trying for the life of him to recall anything that Rocco had said.Nothing.“Sorry, mate. What?”

“Swimming? You down to go in the lake?”

Victoria in a bathing suit flashed through Ryder’s mind. “Absolutely.”

Apparently, his thoughts were far less platonic than he wanted to believe.

CHAPTER TEN

The window overlooking the backyard had a cushioned chair, and Victoria was curled up in the highback with extra pillows and a blanket, a romance novel, and a cup of coffee. But reading about a sexy alpha male who wanted to sweep a woman off her feet was surprisingly not holding much interest—or maybe, not surprisingly, considering what had happened to her in Russia. Maybe a romance novel would never hold her interest again. Or not. She had thought men might never hold her interest again. And Ryder was interesting.

Backyard was a poor choice of words to describe what Victoria was looking at. Colby and Mia had land. Some of it was mowed and manicured, and out past the lake before the tree line, high grass waved in the breeze. This was less like a house and more like an estate, except it felt like a home—something she didn’t have much familiarity with. But she knew it when she saw it.

Victoria held the book in front of her face and stared at the cover model. “You don’t have anything on Ryder.” She tossed the book over her shoulder, dropping her head back as she thought about how they’d sat on the boardwalk, and everything in her felt aflutter.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“Come in,” Victoria said as she shifted her legs and faced the door. She had become accustomed to Mia’s knock and Ryder’s, but this was new.

A slender woman she hadn’t met yet pushed the door open, and the first thing Victoria thought was that her eyes were exotic and had seen burdens beyond her years. There was something about people who worked with Delta and Titan. They were warriors and saviors, but they dealt with hell. That could age a person’s soul even if it didn’t leave so much as a wrinkle.

“Hi,bonjour,” the accented English and French flowed off the beautiful woman’s tongue in a lyrical fashion, yet there was nothing dainty or stereotypically French about her until she spoke. “I’m Madeleine, and I go by Maddy. You came upstairs before we arrived.”

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