The Protected

gone, and the life he’d thought would be his was just . . . a dream. So he distanced himself from his family. The world saw a scheming, womanizing bastard who’d had a few runs of good luck and he’d used it all to his advantage. His pretty face got him in doors and he played with the rich and famous, made connections—and while they weren’t looking, he slid a stiletto into the heart of a man who’d been planning to kill el presidente.

A few years later, he’d been some rich woman’s man-whore—that was the story she told everybody, including her husband. When she whispered to him one night about a menage a trois at a pretty, private little villa, he agreed. And then he arrived thirty minutes sooner than planned, slit her throat, broke the husband’s neck, and set the stage to make it look like a robbery. He wasn’t even questioned and they were mourned by many at their funeral. He often wondered how the world would react if they knew the husband and wife had been in control of a child slavery ring, selling runaways or indigent children they found on the streets of Mexico into the sex trade.

Deeper and deeper into that life he fell.

And now, he was out of it and all he could do was hope he was fast enough, strong enough to keep Alex alive if trouble found them.

Because it would.

Whether it was karma or just shitty luck, he didn’t know, but they wouldn’t be able to run forever.

Sometimes he wondered if this was God’s way of punishing him. He’d taken lives . . . but if this was a punishment, then he would have been the one who had died that night.

Not Consuelo. She’d been the one who had made that ultimate sacrifice, and here he was, trying to make sure he honored her wishes.

Please . . . you must promise . . .

“I’m trying, love.” He tried every single day, and every single day, he was so very certain he was screwing this up. Keeping one step ahead of people who had endless resources, the money to buy and sell more than a few small countries, people who would just as soon kill you as argue with you.

And the boy was angry.

So very angry.

Sighing, he stood up and tugged off his cap, leaving it on a peg near the door before he retreated into his bedroom. He’d give Alex a while to calm down, then they could tackle his schoolwork. They’d eaten over at Mrs. Werner’s after he’d repaired the fill valve on her toilet, while she ogled his ass . . . again.

Inside his room, he stripped out of his dirty, sweaty clothes and pulled on a pair of worn cotton pants before dropping to the floor. Sit-ups. Push-ups. He had a few weights that he kept with him and he did the most thorough workout he could with them. He moved on to conditioning, although he was limited in how much he could train there. Without a partner, again he was limited.

He was working on teaching Alex. Alex was still a child, though, and his sessions with the boy were all about training Alex to defend himself more than anything else.

More than an hour passed before he was done and he was dripping with sweat, tired and sore.

And still frustrated. Still angry.

Judging by the silence of the house, Alex was still unhappy with him as well.

He moved out into the hall, passed by the boy’s narrow, small room, and saw the kid lying on his cot, staring up at the ceiling with no expression on his face.

Gus turned away.

There was nothing, he knew, that could be said or done.

Nothing.

* * *

“WELL . . . THE cameras work.” Vaughnne stared at Gus’s naked, muscled back.

His very nice naked, muscled back.

As the bathroom door shut behind him, she groaned and leaned back in her seat, covering her face with her hands.

The cameras worked. The audio feed worked.

The motion sensors she’d placed at the doors and windows worked. The cameras were tucked snug inside the smoke alarms, and she’d been watching him through the tiny little slats and feeling like a pervert.

She’d also had a front row seat to what the boy had done.

He’d seen the tape. Her mistake. That fatal little flaw.

Her heart had dropped like a stone when he moved over to it, but then she’d realized what he was doing.

Fixing it.

And then he lied.

When Gus asked him if everything was okay, he’d turned around, looked the man in the eye, and lied.

She didn’t know what was up with that. Part of her wanted to continue with her own little lies, insisting to herself that she didn’t care. But she couldn’t. She needed to know everything about these two males and she needed to know it now. And it was already for reasons that went beyond the job. It had been from the very beginning. For Alex, it was because she understood that fear in his eyes. With Gus . . . hell. She couldn’t even explain that mess, although it might have something to do with the way her heart skipped up a few beats when he looked at her and it might have something to do with the way he watched over that kid.

It got to her. She couldn’t deny that. Her father had tossed her out like she was nothing more than trash. But this guy . . . there was no denying that he would tear down mountains to protect that kid. It got her, right square in the heart.

Maybe that’s all it was. Admiration for him. A little bit of lust.

“Yeah, right,” she muttered.

Swearing, she skimmed her hands back over her hair and tried to focus her brain on the job. The job. These two males were the job. That was what they were and what they had to be. She couldn’t do her job if she kept letting other things get in the way.

“Just the job.” She shoved back from the computer and rose to pace.

She’d done the main thing she needed to do—she had eyes inside the house now, and so far, they hadn’t been discovered. The first few minutes, she knew, were critical. That was when somebody was going to sense something was off. That was when their instincts would scream the loudest, if it was going to happen, and at this point, nothing had happened.

Between the eyes she had inside the house and the motion detectors she’d set up on the perimeter, hopefully she’d done enough to catch anybody before they could move in on the two.

There were times when she wished she had something other than a psychic’s banshee wail. Being able to talk to anybody she needed to talk to was nice enough, she guessed, although she couldn’t hear anything unless the person was also a telepath. This was flying blind, though. She had no ability to sense anything more than what her instincts were able to tell her, and while those instincts were pretty damn sharp, she hated relying on just those and her wits.

Something caught her eye and she glanced down at her monitor.

“Damn.”

The word gusted out of her in a rush as she stopped to stare.

It was Gus.

He’d come out of the bathroom, a towel slung around his hips and water rolling down his chest in tiny little drops. One bead rolled down the midline of his torso, arrowing down over the flat plane of his belly before it caught up on the towel. Her heart slammed once, hard, against her ribs, and she licked her lips. She was pretty damn certain she’d never been so thirsty in her life.

He glanced down the hall before heading toward his room, and she groaned as she found herself treated to another view of that fine, muscled back. And his ass. Nice, nice ass.

She needed to quit ogling. She needed to—