Page 76 of Roots of the Wicked

Chapter Thirty-One

Jax

Five days had gone by since I had last seen Chase. We had been calling each other non-stop. Phone sexing, and texting in the midst of the serious conversations we had been having about us. Chase was getting good at pushing me to talk about us more.

Despite not being able to get him off my brain, my fascination with him didn’t stop me from putting in the necessary work to keep my name out of the public’s eye.

I had invited TK to my apartment; the spare one I used for company and mingling. It was the one-bedroom studio I had rented before NG’s profit margins increased. This was where I took my dates I didn’t want knowing my main residence. Only Chase, and a select few were special enough to know where my home was.

TK, in my opinion, was one of those people who was so smart, he blurred the line between intelligent and insane. His life was sort of a mystery. I kept things from him, because I sensed he kept them from me as well.

Everyone had a digital profile of sorts. TK had nothing. My curiosity had gotten the better of me once, but just as I had a past I wanted to keep buried, I had to respect that maybe TK did also.

All I knew about him was what he volunteered, and I accepted that it was enough. I believed the less I knew about him, the more unlikely I was to get any closer to him. After knowing him for nearly four years, I remained clueless as to how he made his living. I believed the bulk of his work was based on illegal operations, but I didn’t judge and never called him on it.

There were times when he would disappear for weeks at a time and return unexpectedly. I stopped asking, when I gathered he wasn’t going to tell me his secrets until he was ready. He often got this look like he wanted to tell me something, but so far, he hadn’t.

Why would I choose to keep associating with a man like TK? Chase had asked so often, I was sick of hearing the question. The best answer I could come up with, was he was one of the smartest men I knew in my field and, in all the time I had known him, he had never given me a reason to distance myself from him.

I had met TK at a tech convention. He had introduced himself, and I quickly became engrossed in his vast knowledge in the field. When he swerved across the line and admitted his attraction, I let him know I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted, but I valued his mind, more than I was interested in taking him to bed. If there was such a thing as minds having the ability to marry, me and TK’s would have been hitched.

The music of our fingers striking keys made the only sound until the doorbell sounded. Who the hell could be at my door? My eyebrows pinched into a tight V in my forehead.

A quick peek revealed Chase standing outside the door. My heart skipped a beat before it set to a pounding rhythm. I glanced back at TK sitting at my small dining room table.

This wasn’t going to be pretty. After having only met him once at the tech expo, Chase didn’t hide the fact that he didn’t like TK. Every time his name was brought up in conversation, Chase’s face would tense with a mixture of irritation and disapproval.

Chase knew I kept two apartments. He had discovered this one while rifling through my mail when he visited my main residence. We were supposed to lay low because of the hornet’s nest our leaked pictures had stirred up. But telling Chase to stay away was useless. Crazy thing was, I didn’t know if I could have stayed away from him for long either.

An elongated creak sounded, when I opened the door and stepped to the side. Chase was poised to speak, but his words halted. A firestorm brewed in his gaze, so strong, it reached across my living room and collided into TK’s sharp glare.

Before I could utter a word, Chase crushed me to his hard body. His hand slid across the swell of my ass, squeezing me through my jeans. He was putting on a performance for TK, but his possessive actions had me cracking a sly smile. Why was I getting turned on? I believe I enjoyed being marked and claimed by him, a revelation that I would never have admitted a month ago.

As always, Chase smelled like sugary sin; his fresh fragrance had washed over me as quickly as the strength brimming from him. His long strong body pressed against mine, was all it took to get my juices flowing.

“Chase.”

His lips sat against my neck as his fingers remained spread wide across my ass. “Um hum,” he answered huskily.

“I’ve got company.”

“So,” was what I think he’d muttered.

I backed out of his hold. “Chase, you remember my friend TK from the expo?”

He glanced in TK’s direction before his lip turned up like a snarling dog’s. Who said rich people weren’t petty? His dismissing gesture was so slight; I’d have missed it if I weren’t standing so close to him. The men’s gazes were welded so tight, my head swiveled between the two. Did either intend to blink again?

When I closed my door and walked away from Chase to return to my laptop, he was right on my heels. The tension in the room was thick enough to choke on by the time we reached the table. Chase took the chair giving him a view of us both since the table was a perfect square.

“We’re attempting to track down the drone-driving spy who leaked those photos.”

Chase’s glare finally left TK’s to acknowledge my words. “Didn’t you send a virus to find and murder his computer?”

“We won’t know who it is until the asshole powers it up and the virus starts doing its job. I’m hoping he doesn’t know how to keep us from identifying him, or that he hasn’t trashed the computer to avoid detection.”

Right when Chase was about to speak, TK pointed at the laptop’s monitor. He spun it around so I could study his findings.

When my eyes left the monitor, I caught the mean squint Chase had leveled on him. This was going to be a long day, if I didn’t find a way to separate the two.

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