DOTTY (The Naughty Ones Book 3) Read online

  Remy is mine, I know it, she knows it and by the time we walk out of this club with my come streaking her thighs and my marks covering her neck, every limp dick in the place will know it too.

  Chapter 12

  Remy

  “He won’t leave me alone!”

  I roll my eyes at Liv and keep packing my overnight bag as she flops down on the sofa and blows out a frustrated breath that I won’t point out sounds just as breathy as it does putout.

  After that hot, scorching, molten-lava-scale episode in that closet at the club, I’d been so boneless with satisfaction and drunk on both alcohol and simmering lust that I’d allowed Chase to drag me out and into his car, wanting nothing more than to go home with him and take a nap before starting all over again.

  He’d been so smug and satisfied that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I think Trav is either gay or very interested in someone else. Instead of arguing and letting him know how unimpressed I was with his recent behavior, I’d let him screw hard in that closet and well into the early hours of Saturday morning. I’d reveled in the lust and pure decadence that is Chase Marshall when he’s pissed and intent on proving a point.

  I get it. He’s a sex god who won’t hesitate to use that magnificent body to show me exactly why I now belong to him completely. And belong I do; I was forced to admit it, because when the lust and need had finally abated and we were wrapped around each other, I’d finally felt safe, content, and at peace for the first time since he let me walk out of his house.

  I get it. While I may not be ready for everything that being with him entails, I am also not ready to even contemplate a new beginning without him in it.

  Seems that in the short time I’ve been with him, the man has effectively wormed his way into my very essence, and now that he’s there, I don’t think he’ll ever willingly leave.

  And that’s fine by me since I literally need him with every breath that I take.

  “Are you listening?” Liv yells, glaring at my soft smile and dreamy look. “This is somehow your fault. Gabriel Stevens will not leave me alone.”

  I laugh at her hysterics and zip my bag before flopping down beside her and staring at the ceiling.

  “He’s hot though.”

  “Yeah, but he’s so hot and heavy and just…intense, Rem. We had sex one time and the guy started talking about clearing closet space for when I move in!” she shrieks, jackknifing to her feet to start the pacing that marks exactly how agitated she is.

  Liv, for all her girly goodness and downright traditional views, is a commitment-phobe of note. The longest she’s been in a relationship is three weeks because, as she continuously says, ‘men need to be cut loose before they cut you.’

  I personally think she must be very taken with Mr. Stevens if she’s getting this agitated about the guy. Her last relationship ended with her sending a text that said ‘Sayonara, bitch,’ all because the poor man had wanted to take her on a weekend trip.

  According to Liv, a guy who’s willing to invest that soon into a relationship is stalker material and not someone you want biting at the hook.

  Her views on relationships are a direct result of her one failed, committed relationship with a guy named Joe whom she'd caught banging the delivery guy after they’d eaten pizza he paid for with her money.

  Liv no longer does pizza—or guys who look like they’re interested in more than one or two mutually satisfying hook-ups. I have an idea that that is about to change though, no matter how hard she fights it.

  Gabriel, Chase warned, is a man as passionate about what he wants as Chase is, and if that’s any way to measure, I’m pretty pleased to assume that Liv’s days of one and done are a thing of the past.

  She’s gonna fight it though, hard, and I just hope Gabe has the patience to reel her in with the love and care that a complicated creature like Liv needs.

  “Why don’t you just relax and go with the flow, Liv? Gabe is a great guy who obviously adores you.”

  She snorts and I stifle a giggle at her dirty look.

  “He bought me a freaking car! A car! I did him once and he thinks he can start buying me things.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want you driving around in that lemon you have. It’s a heap Liv,” I point out reasonably, trying not to laugh when she throws her hands in the air and glares daggers at me.

  “It’s weird! Who buys a car for a one night hookup?”

  A guy who means business, I think silently, enjoying her ranting for a few more minutes before standing to take her shoulders gently.

  “I know you’re scared, believe me I do. Chase is just as intense, if not more so, and seems to want to move this relationship to levels I’m not sure I’m ready for, but I adore him and I’m willing to bet that he’s the best thing that’s happened to me. Fear or not, I’m taking the leap. Give it a chance, Liv. Who knows, Gabe could be your Mr. Right.”

  She snorts at that and grabs her own overnight bag and locks up before following me to the elevator.

  “Fine, but if he gets any weirder I’m cutting him loose.”

  “Fine, now chin up, girl, we’re going on a two-day vacation to Bali!”

  She gives me a hell yeah and high five as the doors open and we make our way outside into the crisp winter air, our breaths fogging with the sudden cold front that’s hit Washington almost overnight.

  Chase, the wonderful man, the man I think I may just love, has arranged an impromptu weekend trip for us, saying that he’s dying to see me in a bikini and frolicking in the ocean.

  You think I’m complaining? I hate the cold, and since I’ve never even been out of state, I’m pretty darned psyched about having a weekend of fun and sun with my very sexy guy.

  Liv’s invited because, as he says, ‘the knuckleheads need all the help they can get’ and he’s sick of having to deal with Gabe’s ranting every time Liv ignores his calls.

  I’m just glad I don’t have to leave Liv alone in the apartment after the creepy calls I’ve been getting. Four days of that shit has me on edge, and while I’m pretty sure it’s just another pissed off crack head who’s annoyed that I’d filed a request to have their kids removed from their care and placed a temporary foster home, I’m a little leery to leave her to deal with that alone.

  The one time it happened before, Brian had yelled at me for forcing him to hire security till the cops got the situation under control. Scary and totally weird—yeah, my job can be dangerous with some of the charming human beings I get to see every day—but it’s not at a point that I find it necessary to tell Chase.

  The police have been informed, and I’m pretty confident that they’ll put a stop to it, so I intend to keep mum and just enjoy this weekend.

  “Bali, Bali, Bali!” Liv chants, doing a jig as I click the alarm to release the lock and we tumble into the car. “Oh man! I am so excited.”

  “Good.”

  I turn the key, eager to get to Chase and ready for this next adventure—and definitely ready to spend the next two days doing nothing but relaxing and letting my boyfriend have his wicked way with me.

  There’s a click, and then nothing. I frown, twisting the key again.

  “Aw, man!”

  “Whyyyyy!” I moan, banging my head into the steering wheel with a groan.

  Stupid car, I just had it serviced two months ago.

  “Chill, girlfriend. I’ll call a cab.”

  I groan and nod, leaving the car and slamming the door with a frustrated growl. Great. Now, Chase is gonna have a fit and try to pull a Gabe on me too. If I know the guy, and boy do I after that wild sex in the club and his feral growls of ownership, he’ll try to by me a tank to drive around in.

  We wait ten minutes before the cab arrives, and I settle with a groan after giving the cabbie the address.

  “Chill out. We’re getting there. So we’ll be five minutes late—big deal,” Liv murmurs, giving me a noogie and chattering away a mile a minute about the bright pink thong bikini she’s been dying to w
ear and the tan she intends to get.

  She chatters so much, trying to keep me from worrying that it takes me a while to realize that we’re headed in the wrong direction.

  “Hey, Mister, I think you’re going the wrong way.”

  Liv finally shuts up and looks around, her nose scrunching with annoyance.

  “Yo, dude, you are so going the wrong way man. You need to turn around and step on it, we’re running late.”

  My confusion increases, turning to plain dread when I hear the automatic click of locks slamming into place and the cabbie looks back at us through the rearview mirror.

  “Stop the cab. Now!” I yell, banging my hands into the thick plexiglass separating us.

  “Sorry, lady. No can do.”

  Liv finally gets the idea and starts freaking out, her hands clawing desperately at the door, her voice a shrill yell when it doesn’t budge and the cab starts picking up speed.

  “Hey! You better let us out asshole! My boyfriend will kill you if you touch a hair on our heads.”

  I’m so terrified at this point that I can’t even laugh at the fact that she’s now referring to Gabe as her boyfriend. All I can do is scramble for the cellphone in my bag and pray that Chase answers quickly.

  For some reason, a normal cab ride is turning into something I don’t even want to think about, and I am well and truly petrified at this point.

  “Chase!” I yell when the call goes through, my heart pounding a mile a minute when the cab takes a rough corner, throwing us against the right door with a resounding bang.

  “Rem? Remy? What’s wrong, babe?” he yells, responding to what is now pure panic as Liv and I scream, trying desperately to keep from killing each other with every turn.

  The phone flies out of my hand and I cry out, diving to grab it.

  “Chase! The cab won’t let us out.” I cry, feeling hysteria engulf me. “Help us.”

  It the last thing I say before the cabbie laughs darkly and stops the cab, his hand holding a small black box up high.

  “Say bye to your lover, Miss Harrow.”

  “Remy!”

  The cabbie flicks the switch and my phone goes completely dead, the screen blinking off and staying that way no matter how many times I frantically try to switch it back on.

  “What is this?”

  Confusion is rife, battling with the hysteria now suffusing not only me, but also a screeching Liv.

  “You pissed off the wrong people, Miss Harrow. You just pissed off the wrong people.”

  Chapter 13

  Chase

  My heart is thumping so hard I can feel its beat in my throat, pounding through my head. It's pulsing so hard my teeth ache with the way I’m gritting them.

  On the heels of that is not only anger and frustration, but the starkest fear I’ve ever felt. Fear that clogs every neuron and makes thinking impossible but for the urgent, repetitive voice that keeps screaming find her!

  “The signal sputtered out in a neighborhood downtown. We’re canvassing the area now and Joseph has found the abandoned cab.”

  “What the fuck were they doing in a cab in the first place? And where the hell was security?” I yell, pacing like mad man.

  My first impulse had been to run out of the house and start combing the streets, but that’s useless and won’t yield any results anyway so instead of doing something to find the girls, I’m stuck at home yelling into the phone, slowly going crazy with every minute that ticks by.

  “We just finished a rotation boss. Dooley was on that shift. We found him behind her building with a gut wound. He’s in critical condition right now.

  Fuck!

  “That makes whoever took them a hostile target. No signal on the tracker in her cell?”

  I hear Neil mutter a curse and the sound of tires.

  “No. Whoever took them is using some kind of jammer to kill it. And my guess is the phone’s been dismantled and tossed at this stage. The only way we’ll find them now is if we have a lead to follow,” He admits, and I hear the futility in his voice. “Who would want to take them? Exes? Enemies? This could be about Liv…”

  I wince and tell him to hold on, right before my office door flies open and ricochets against the wall to admit a furious Gabe.“Someone, anyone, whoever fucking dared take them will die. Slowly, for every hour my woman is forced to feel a scrap of fear.”

  I think he means to growl it, because yes, I feel the same and want to growl myself, but the words come out in a deadly voice, barked so loudly I hear Neil curse again through the forgotten phone line.

  “Agreed, but we need to keep calm and figure this out first. The cab they disappeared in was just found in a neighborhood I wouldn’t send a Rottweiler into alone. And their phones aren’t traceable either. We’re flying blind here,” I admit, feeling every ounce of his frustration as he scrubs at the back of his neck and start stalking around.

  “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Me either, pal. For the briefest second I’d considered pegging Carson for this, but I just can’t see it. The guy’s too involved with trying to save his image after the press got hold of the news about the divorce. Besides, he’s so busy trying to see Helena on the sly, he doesn’t have time for much else.

  “Boss?” I hear from a distance and realize I’ve been daydreaming, completely forgetting Neil.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know how to say this without freaking you out even more, but Ericson just finished sweeping the cab and there is quite a bit of blood in there.”

  “Jesus Christ! Just…” I flounder for a minute as nightmarish pictures of Remy and Liv hurt, bleeding and needing help almost buckles my knees and sends me to my ass.

  I sway in place and lock my knees, breathing through my nose to keep from hyperventilating.

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Disconnecting the call, I immediately dial a number that I only use in very extreme circumstances. Brick is a personal friend, ex-military and one of the meanest sonsabitches I’ve ever encountered. I say I only dial this number under duress because it’s not the usual number that I dial to set up basketball and hockey games or to hang out.

  This line is the one he gave me for emergencies if one should ever arise, and I know the minute he answers and I tell him what’s going on, I’m going to be unleashing a fucking hurricane on the unsuspecting citizens of the greater D.C. area.

  “Tell me who needs killing,” he growls after the first ring, and I smile the same shark smile I reserve for enemies at the thought of this man locking sights on whoever had the balls to touch what’s mine.

  “My girlfriend and Gabe’s lady got into a cab this morning and disappeared. The cab was found downtown with evidence of a struggle and what Neil says is a startling amount of blood. That’s all we have so far and it’s been hours. Cell phones are out so I can’t even track that.”

  I hear a swift tapping of keys and what sounds like another phone line before he answers.

  “Give me ten minutes to get my guys up to speed.”

  I wait as patiently as I can, watching Gabe pace the floor like a caged beast before my phone beeps and I answer in a rush.

  “Dec pulled the city’s surveillance. The women entered the cab and the cameras tracked it east. One camera even caught Remy beating at the windows before the fucker took a hard right and disappeared. We got a hit on facial though. Dec’s running it right now. Hold on a minute. Yeah. No, Dec. Good. Look, this guy who took your girls is a real lowlife piece of shit man.”

  Yeah I figured, but hearing it from a hardass like Brick just makes my blood turn colder.

  “Find them, Brick.”

  “I sent the guys out to take a look. Hensley will track that motherfucker down before you know it. Anything special you want from this situation, Chief?”

  I get his meaning immediately and take another look at Gabe, feeling my mouth curl in such a vicious smile my best friend stops and looks over at me before his own mouth mirrors my own.<
br />
  “Hold him.”

  Chapter 14

  Remy

  Sounds filter into my conscious, luring me from the void that’s even now trying to pull me back under and keep me trapped. The first thing I feel when my body sluggishly screams back to life is the sticky residue of sweat despite the bone chilling cold at my back.

  It takes a while of real effort and blinking, but I finally manage to open my eyes to slits and see my surroundings. Nothing. The concrete chewing into my aching back is part of a tiny room with dirty white walls and nothing else but a battered steel door.

  No windows. No furniture. Nada.

  It’s so cold in here that my sweat immediately cools, making my teeth chatter as I shiver and roll to my knees and forearms with a groan, my body screaming in protest.

  I don’t know why I was sweating before this, maybe it was whatever that asshole had injected when he’d wrenched the cab door open and shoved a needle into my neck before I could kick him in the nuts.

  My only source of pleasure comes from the blurry memory of Liv launching herself at him, nails clawed, teeth bared as she sank the talons into his face and went to work on shredding his skin.

  He’d reared back, his cheeks a bloody mess of deep grooves before backhanding her so hard she’d fallen on me and gone limp. I’d just barely registered the metallic tang of the blood that sprayed from her nose and cut lip before the drugs took effect and knocked me out.

  “Liv.”

  My body reacts like a live wire and I’m up and on my feet in an instant, swaying dangerously before catching myself on the wall. The room is small enough that I can touch opposite sides at the same time if I stretch out my arms.

  I’m alone though, and that only worsens the choking fear that’s gripping me now that I’m not comatose with drugs.

  “Liv!”

  It’s so stupid to scream and let that ass know that I’m awake and ready for whatever he has in store for me next, but right now I wish he’d come in here so I can at least try to kick his ass.

  “Liv! Liv!” I yell, banging at the door with what little strength I have.