Page 24 of Total Obsession

I felt my heart swell as he leaned into me again. He broke the kiss and wrapped me in a hug, his arms beneath mine so that he practically picked me up off the tarmac. I didn't want this moment to end. I felt somehow safe in his arms, and I didn't want to return to my life where I felt jealous eyes on me all the time.

The moment ended and before I knew it, I was being driven away from him. A tear fell onto my cheek and this time, there was no one there to wipe it away.

My phone buzzed, and I fished it out of my purse. I looked at the screen. It was a message from Axe.

You're too beautiful for tears.

seven

AXE

"Where have you been?" Beau grunted at me as I strolled up to the location we'd both been texted from a burner phone.

"I was delayed," I responded. I popped the collar of the wool overcoat I was wearing to try and keep out the crisp fall air of London. I felt like I was on the set of Peaky Blinders. We were in some back alleyway by the Docklands. Containers were stacked high around us and a bit of a mist had settled over the night, creating a calm, yet eerie feeling.

The whole thing was sort of perfect.

I knew I was supposed to be focusing on this job, except my mind was not cooperating. It kept returning to the last 24 hours and the time spent with Zoey. Which was really dangerous.

Not just because I absolutely needed to be focused on the perilous situation that was about to happen, but because my thinking about a woman in any capacity was not how I operated. For Christ's sake, it wasn't like I'd even fucked her.

My mind tried to argue that that was probably the issue, and I told it to shut up as I tried to convince myself that the last thing I want to do is fuck Zoey Campbell.

"How could you possibly be delayed?" Beau asked, pulling me back into the present.

"Are you writing a novel or something? What's it to you?" I said, a bit too defensively.

"It's not like you," he replied. "And you've always been like you, since the day I met you. So what the fuck is up?"

I rolled my eyes. This was the last thing I needed right now. "Nothing's up," I hissed back.

"Are you thinking of turning?" he asked. What Beau was referring to was the idea of me flipping sides to work for the feds as a snitch, which was an absolutely ludicrous idea.

"I should gut you for even suggesting something like that," I replied. "I was with a woman, happy?" I finally admitted, desperate to get him off my back.

"No. How's a bitch gonna delay you?"

"She was that good," I said dismissively.

"Nah, man. Something doesn't sit right with me on this one, and I don't like that you're lying to me about it."

Beau was an annoyance to me before. He was one of those average-looking charismatic types that always seemed to get everyone to like him. I never quite understood why he landed on the work he did. All that aside, his line of questioning tonight was pushing me over the edge of annoyance, bordering on rage.

It was lucky for him that there was movement to our right, otherwise things could have gotten ugly.

This entire meeting was supposed to be pretty standard. I'd done my own research, as I always did, on our target. I'd been assisted in those efforts by Will Stevenson, who was a computer hacker I'd hired myself. If there was information to be found on the internet, Will would be the one to locate it.

I found out what made our target tick, what his goals were, how his family life was, why he got involved in crime, and why he decided to try and sell some of our boss's product to a competing organization in London at a markup that he kept for himself.

I never really felt like selling drugs was enough of a crime to be murdered, which made my job sort of difficult. I always needed to find the justification for my actions, and sometimes it was harder to find than one might expect.

This bloke, however, was easier. Turned out he had a particularly gruesome habit of going to strip clubs and taking a girl or two home with him. Unfortunately, those girls never showed up to work the next day.

I'd found the justification I needed, and set the entire meeting up. He thought Beau and I were buyers and he was going to meet us here for a swap. We'd grab him, and let's just say that some of the things he did to those girls were waiting for him on the other side of this evening.

Beau and I both turned as we watched him walk out from between the stacks of containers. His movements were slow and measured. He was a sad looking man. Short, balding, slender with no discernible muscle under his coat.

"Gentlemen," he said, and the hairs on the back of my neck immediately stood up.

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