Page 24 of Into the Woods

“Em and I had an amazing night, but Elodie woke up. I mean, she’s a good sleeper, but she’s teething, so I got up. I wanted Em to sleep because she’s been busting her ass being a single mom, you know?” He waited for me to nod. “So, I go into the nursery, and Elodie’s wide awake, chattering and smiling. I swear to fuck, bro, she’s such a cool kid. Super chill. I picked her up and figured I could read her a story. That turned into three, and she started getting sleepy. I went to put her down and—” He cut off abruptly, tearing his gaze away from me and looking out the window.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but I knew that haunted look. I’d been wearing it myself for a while. It was the look of a man who had lost the one thing that made any bit of goddamn sense, and he had no idea how to get her back.

“Emerson decorated Elodie’s nursery, and she hung up pictures for her. So, I’m putting this amazing baby girl back to sleep, and I’m planning to go wake her mom up for round… five? Six? And I see this picture of my best friend and Emerson over Elodie’s crib. It’s their wedding picture, man,” he confessed, swallowing hard. “All I could do was stare at the picture of a man who was as close to me as you or Royal or… Anyway, I was like… What the fuck am I doing? Fucking his wife? Playing daddy to his little girl? Taking over his life like he can be replaced?”

I grimaced as he shook his head, looking utterly destroyed.

Rook met my gaze, the raw pain swirling in his navy eyes staggering. “I put Elodie in her crib and realized I was the biggest fucking asshole on the planet.”

Ouch. Yeah, that was rough. “What did you do?”

“What could I do? I got dressed and left. And it clearly was the right call—Emerson texted me the next morning and said she was taking a job with her brother’s band. She’s going to join them as their social media manager for the rest of their world tour.” He scrubbed a hand over his face.

“You know what sucks?” Rook continued. “Like just really fucking sucks? It’s not just that I lost the girl of my dreams and the little girl I was head over heels for,” he admitted. “It’s like I lost one of my best friends. There’s no more random phone calls, or videos of Elodie doing something silly or learning something new. No texts… It’s like part of me was amputated.”

“I know that feeling well,” I muttered. It was exactly how I felt about Bex not being in my life. Yeah, I had Linc, Ryan, and Ash. I had Maddie and my brothers.

But none of them were Bex.

“Anyway,” Rook said suddenly, straightening his shoulders and shoving down the rare vulnerability he’d shown. He pushed some of the papers at me. “Here’s the timeline for the meeting, best as Ash could figure out.”

I twisted my neck side to side, cracking the joints, before looking at the papers. It took me a second to realize what I was seeing, and when I did, I swore like a drunken sailor. Not because Ash’s intel was bad—Ash was one of the best hackers on the planet, so if this was where Jasper would be, I believed it.

But he wasn’t in Brussels.

“Paris,” I spat in a flat tone, my head buzzing as my heart pounded. My gaze snapped up to Rook. “We’re going to Paris?”

He gave me a confused look. “Uh, yeah. Didn’t Royal tell you?”

“No,” I seethed. For as much of a badass super soldier as my oldest brother was, he was also a meddling little bitch at times. “He told me we were going to Belgium.”

Rook looked confused. “Why would he—oh.” Then the asshole started chuckling.

“Not funny,” I snapped, hurling the papers back at him as the pilot came over the speakers and declared we’d been cleared to taxi for takeoff.

“It’s pretty fucking funny,” Rook laughed.

Fucking Royal, sending me to Paris. Of course the dickwad had known I’d refuse to go if I knew I’d be in the same city as Bex. Probably thought it was hilarious.

“It doesn’t matter,” I retorted. “We’re there to do a job that’ll last two, maybe three, days. I won’t even see her.”

“Sure,” Rook agreed, grinning like a fool.

“I hate you,” I muttered as Bishop exited the plane’s back bedroom and ambled up to us. He threw himself into the chair across the aisle from me as the plane started rolling forward.

“What’d I miss?” he asked, his dark-eyed gaze bouncing back and forth between us.

That only made Rook laugh harder.

I kicked him under the table. “Fucker.”

CHAPTER 8

BEX

I had no idea who the girl in the mirror staring back at me was, but she was hot. Like, stupid hot, in a way that made me blink a million times, worried she’d vanish.

“Holy shit,” I murmured, absently reaching up to touch the cropped edge of the black leather halter top that crisscrossed my chest. The built-in bra made my C-cups look a lot bigger.

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