AllFreeNovel
Share Us
HARPER
The restaurant was mostly empty, except for the bar. It made blending in a little harder, but really, I was the only one who needed to blend in. The man I knew as Telengard knew what I looked like, I was sure of it. But not the others.
“Be back in a minute,” said Jax, sliding off the stool beside me. He jerked his head in the direction of the men’s room.
I nodded, surprised at how incomplete I felt when he suddenly wasn’t there. Adrian was just outside, checking things out, and Preston was several blocks away, doing something else entirely. The presence of any one of them was extremely reassuring, even in a place this crowded, this safe.
That’s when I realized I trusted these men in every way.
The bartender swiped my empty glass, so I ordered another beer even though my stomach was in knots. I hadn’t drank the first one, I’d poured it into Jax’s glass. More than four hours ago we’d checked into a hotel in lower Manhattan, just to regroup, splash water on our faces, and feel human again. But we took that time because, thankfully, Adrian had a friend already parked in front of Telengard’s tiny brick house in Bay Ridge, watching that his car never left the driveway.
We ended up with a high floor suite, overlooking the city. The room was beautiful, as well as a place Adrian had stayed often. He met with one of his colleagues in the lobby, who’d already checked us in. But the more important favor he’d cashed in had been with another friend and colleague he’d known for years now, a man by the name of Angel Rivera.
We’d met the man briefly, when we’d dropped Preston off with him. Angel Rivera looked every bit the beautiful male model with smooth brown skin, a chiseled jaw, and a flawless white smile. He looked even more amazing for a guy who spent half the day parked against a curb, crammed into his own car. But that part was over now. Angel had called less than thirty minutes ago, and Telengard was finally on his way here.
The thought of it being this close to getting my work back made me want to throw up.
The four of us had thrown around a lot of plans on the way down from Buffalo. Adrian suggested working with the police, but I knew they’d never enforce property rights. Besides, there was no real way to prove anything was mine. At best they’d fill out a report, and the civil court system might deal with it months or even years from now. The police were a total dead end.
Jax had wanted to storm straight in, and I was behind him on that. But Preston had other plans. Better plans.
He’d disappeared into one of the suite’s bedrooms for over an hour, with nothing but his laptop. When he emerged staring into a strange new cellphone, he looked hurried and triumphant.
“Bring the truck around,” he’d told us. “He’s moving, and I know exactly where he’s going.”
I couldn’t even begin to imagine the level of hacking it took to clone a phone remotely, but I was sure that’s exactly what’d he’d done. A few minutes later we were racing through the Battery Tunnel, formulating a plan. It involved splitting up, and I wasn’t crazy about that. But as long as I got to face the asshole who’d stolen my work, I didn’t care about very much else.
I barely nodded as the bartender slid me a new beer. Right now I was dividing my attention between the front door and the bathroom hallway. Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice the woman who’d hopped up on the stool, right beside me.
“Umm… there’s someone sitting there,” I told her.
She laughed glibly. “There sure is.”
The woman didn’t even look my way. She gave me her back and began talking with her friend.
“Alright,” I shrugged, and this time I did take a sip of my beer. “It’s your funeral.”
Jax returned not half a minute later. He tapped the sassy little brunette on the shoulder.
“Sorry, but this is my seat.”
“Then your ass would be in it,” the woman shot back with a smirk. “Wouldn’t it?”
She went back to talking with her friend like nothing happened. In the meantime, I was literally choking on my beer.
Holy shit…
Sixteen different looks crossed Jax’s face, in the span of two seconds. None of them were good. Somehow though, and only in the interest of staying low key, he managed to keep his composure.
“Look,” Jax said diplomatically. “For the sake of civility—”
“Ugh,” the brunette cut him off. She stuck up her palm dismissively, in a ‘talk to the hand’ type gesture, while making a gross-out face. “Stop talking! I’m not going to sit here and worry about what you think—”
“Don’t worry about me. Worry about your eyebrows.”
I could see the confidence drop away, the haughtiness dissolve. The woman reached up to touch an eyebrow, then snapped her hand back as she quickly realized what she’d done.
By then, it was too late. Between that and Jax’s shit-eating grin, he already had her.
