But maybe she could find a new normal.
“I don’t like who I am now,” Logan said starkly.
Nat didn’t much like herself, either, and there was only one way to fix that. “I need to see him.”
Logan nodded. “Please do. Please show me you can change because I’m becoming certain that I can’t. I can play the happy guy on the outside, but I’m still screaming. It’s just no one hears me. I can’t let them.”
She understood. Logan wasn’t ready to share what happened. He hadn’t found someone to share that burden with. But Nat had. She just had to pray that she hadn’t ruined everything.
She loved them. She loved Chase and Ben. She needed them.
Chase sat down at his computer and started running files, his fingers flying across the keys. Work. Work was what he needed. Calming, interesting work. Work had always been his refuge. Ever since he was a child, he would sink into a problem and let his mind roam free, logic and not emotion being his haven. Work had never ripped his heart straight out of his body and stomped on it with pretty little feet. Work had never made him feel idiotic and helpless.
He’d come across the yard to the guesthouse hoping he could get away from her, but he could still feel her eyes on him, accusing him of all manner of crime. The small space in the dining room of the guesthouse wasn’t far enough to run.
He’d pushed her hard, but how else could he convince her she couldn’t do this job? Taking her in with them would be a death sentence. The brown sedan had convinced him of that.
Someone at that club had put a tail on them. The minute they had pulled away, the brown car had slid out, like it didn’t mind that they knew it was following. It had been a warning to a smart man that they were watching. Ben and Chase could play their games, but the rules were harsh.
And then there was that wall of pictures. He’d noticed it as they were walking out, drugs stashed neatly away. The bartender had been welcoming once they’d flashed a bunch of cash. They’d been given the dope they wanted and promised more pleasures once Cooder had checked them out. Then Chase had looked up and been assaulted by a pictorial history of Wispers, crap-ass rural strip club. It was a wall of pinned-up snapshots of drunk men partying with the girls of the club. The higher-up photos were Polaroids, and the ones closer to the bottom looked like they had been taken off phones and printed from a computer.
Chase hadn’t had time to study them all, but he’d looked at them while Ben was getting the car, carefully storing them away in his memory for later perusal. A few seconds were all he needed to memorize them and to know that something was off.
Yes, that was what he needed. He needed something to get his mind off the way Natalie had looked at him.
Unfortunately, his eidetic memory would have that vision stored away forever. Big green eyes wide with horror and anger as he’d pushed her past her limit. When he’d reached for her, she’d fought. He’d wanted to pull her close and beg her forgiveness and she’d clawed and scratched at him like he was trying to kill her.
He closed his eyes and concentrated. The pictures. There was something about them. The sooner he figured the problem out, the better. The sooner he got Natalie off the hook for murder and safe from whoever did the deed, the sooner he could go back to Dallas, crawl into his nice little shell, and never come out again.
He would support Ben. The next time Ben found a woman he was interested in, Chase would be nice to her and take care of her so Ben could have the family he wanted. Chase would be fine being the second cock, only taken out for bedroom fun because it was far easier to deal with that humiliation than the horrible ache he felt in his gut now.
She would never have to know that he loved one woman and she was so far from him he could never have her. The one woman he wanted was the one who could never accept what he needed.
Concentrate. Why couldn’t he fucking concentrate? He could always concentrate. It was what he did. He could filter out everything else and focus even when the world was exploding around him. Several black ops teams and the CIA had tried to recruit him for his skills. He was cold and nothing ever got to him. He could memorize a battlefield and know its strengths and weaknesses in mere seconds. He could assassinate a man without a second thought.
One girl with pink hair and a shy smile blew all those talents right out of the water and now he was just like the rest of the men of the world, unable to think about anything but a woman.
She was his Delilah and somehow, without even sleeping with her, she’d cut all his powerful hair right off and left him weak and helpless.
“Hey, brother, are you all right?”
Chase kept his eyes closed. The last thing he needed was Ben’s sympathy—or worse, his anger. Ben was crazy about her, too. “I’m fine. I’m thinking.”
“Don’t you think we should talk?”
His brother always wanted to talk. Talk was overrated. Burying shit deep down until he no longer acknowledged the pain—that was what worked. “There’s nothing to talk about. She failed the test. We need someone else. I doubt they’ll let us in without a female. You know how clubs work.”
“I know how you work. Come on, Chase. We need to get down there. She got spooked. She’s going to leave.”
And that would be for the best. “Have Logan take her back. Can we get back to the case? Something was off about that club, and I can’t put my finger on it. I saw something. I just need to figure out what it was I saw. And we need to rerun the background checks on every single employee at that spa, including the suspect’s closest friends. Pay close attention to the other massage technicians. They would have had keys or had access to keys to the massage rooms.”
“Suspect, Chase? Really?”
He opened one eye. “I’m distancing. I suspect you should do the same.” A terrible thought hit him. “Unless you’re planning on pursuing her alone. She probably isn’t as mad at you. You might have a shot.”
His brother frowned. “I agreed with you. I agreed with Jack. You did exactly what you needed to do. You had to find out how she would react to strong control, to control that didn’t feel fair. We can’t walk in there and spend all our time tiptoeing around our submissive. Even if she could handle the two of us, how do we know how she’ll handle watching other subs with even tougher Doms? Now we know she would have likely gone commando on everyone, and we all would have been killed.”
“I know.”
Chase’s eyes flew open because that hadn’t been Ben. Natalie stood in the doorway to the dining area on the first floor of the guesthouse. She’d washed every bit of makeup off her face and looked fresh and so fucking young and fragile it hurt him to look at her.
It really hurt him. She’d hurt him. Not in a little tiny “hey, I don’t like you like that” way, but in a gut-wrenching “my world is fucking over without her” way. He’d never been in love before, and now he realized that might be a good thing. Love hurt.
“I’m not ready to go into something like that.” Her green eyes were wide as she shifted from one bare foot to the other. “I need more time. I need to work through it and it won’t go fast, but I want to be better.”
Ben walked straight up to her, pulling her into his arms. She went up on tiptoes and wrapped her arms around Ben. Her eyes closed as though she’d been afraid of her welcome.
So she’d figured out they weren’t really pricks. Well, Ben wasn’t. Ben would have come up with something else. Chase was the one who went straight for her weak spot.
She was his weak spot. Chase wasn’t sure he wanted a weak spot.
“Are we all right, baby?” Ben asked, putting his head to hers.
“I want to be,” she whispered. “I want you to forgive me. I’m so sorry I said the things I did. I wasn’t talking to you two. Not really. I went to someplace bad. I know it sounds stupid, but it was like I was back there for a minute.”