Hitman's Secret Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (16 page)

He rolled before I could kick him, quicker than me because he was less injured than I was. My phone was still grasped in his hand, and he lurched to his feet, putting some distance between us.

“Let’s call her, shall we?” Monroe goaded, dialing and setting the phone on speaker.

I gasped when she answered, knowing that the expression on my face was giving away everything I was feeling right now: desperation, fear, rage,
love
.

“Mason? Mason, are you okay? Is it done?”

“Taryn,” I choked, but Monroe interrupted.

“Hey, honey,” he drawled, and I felt sick.

The ruins of the blown-up factory smoked in the distance behind him, and the wreckage of the Jeeps was strewn all around us. It felt like I was at the very end of the world, beaten and bloody and crushed, and my only ray of light was being dangled, cruelly, in front of me.

“Who is this?” Taryn’s voice came over the speakerphone.

“Did you know your fella was quite the calculated mass murderer?” Monroe asked, with a twisted grin and a hysterical laugh.

“Mason?” Taryn yelled. “Mason, are you there?”

“I’m here,” I said hoarsely, my chest aching with the pain of breathing. I watched every one of Monroe’s movements, looking for an opening to attack. “I’m okay. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

“Everything is
not
going to be okay,” Monroe snapped. “My men are dead, and that weak little brother of mine is set to inherit
my
business, and you, my love…” he said into the phone, “are going to die when I find you.”

“You’re not getting away from here, Monroe,” I told him.

“Don’t listen to him, Taryn. I’m coming for you, girl.”

“Fuck you,” she spat fiercely down the line, and I was so damn proud of her.

Monroe chuckled. “She’s a feisty one, isn’t she? That’s how I like ’em.”

Under a nearby piece of scrap, I spotted a gun. It must have been in one of the Jeeps, thrown from the car in the crash, and Monroe hadn’t seen it.

The universe, for once, had smiled on me.

I edged close to it, acting like I was stepping up to Monroe. “I’m going to kill you,” I told him, and he laughed again.

As long as he was distracted, as long as he thought he was on top, I had the advantage. There was blood leaking from his temple, too, and I hoped it meant he was at least a little concussed.

“No, Baldwin,” he said in a low voice. “I’m going to make you wish you were dead.”

He started to back away. If he ran off now, I’d never catch up with him in my physical state. He’d reach the road, hitch a ride, maybe find a way to call in some backup. I’d never see him again, at any rate, and then it would be too late to save Taryn—save any of us.

I thought fast. I gripped my shoulder and groaned loudly, crouching down low to the road to make a show of being in pain.

“Look at you!” Monroe cried. “You’re pathetic! You couldn’t even finish the job, and now you’ve put your woman in danger.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I pushed the stab of guilt aside. I fumbled my hand along the asphalt until I felt the handle of the weapon.

“You shouldn’t be so cocky,” I told him softly.

He threw his head back and laughed. Laughed and laughed, his arrogant fucking face tipped to the stars. I stood, pointed the gun at him, and shot him right through the throat.

The ringing gun-crack sound echoed through the trees, and the heavy thud of Monroe’s body hitting the road was like music.

“Mason?
Mason
!”

Taryn’s terrified voice broke through my euphoria, the overwhelming relief at the sight of that son of a bitch on the ground. I limped to the phone, prying it out of Monroe’s cold, dead fingers.

“Taryn,” I sighed, turning off the speakerphone and bringing it, shaking, to my ear.

“Oh my God, Mason—”

“I’m okay. He’s dead, they’re all dead.” I gasped for air, hardly able to catch my breath. “They’re all dead.”

She sounded like she was crying and laughing all at once. “You did it.”

“Yeah.” I grinned. “It’s over. It’s really,
really
over.”

I knew I had to wipe everything down here that I’d touched to get rid of my prints. I knew that I had to haul my broken ass to my car that was at least half a mile down the damn road. I knew that I had to get somewhere to patch myself up without being recognized in the area. I knew I had to track down Kieran and make sure he didn’t expose my presence here tonight.

I knew I had to do all of those things, but I stood under the blinking stars instead, Taryn’s voice held tight against my ear and the ruined building smoldering filled with enemy bodies on the horizon.

“I’m coming home, Taryn,” I promised her, and this time I knew nothing could stand in my way. “I’ll see you soon.”

Chapter Fifteen
Taryn

I hung up the phone reluctantly.

I was—reeling. And that word hardly touched what I was actually feeling.

What had happened on the end of that line had shaken me to my very core. Hearing Mason so scared, that
gunshot—

I’d thought he was dead. In my head I’d been planning how quickly I could call Anna, pick up Daisy and Justin, find myself a goddamn gun, and get on the road.

Mason would probably be proud of that.

But Carl Monroe, a man equally as vile as William Foster, was dead. We were finally free.

I called Anna up immediately, telling her Mason had done it and was heading back to us once he’d wrapped everything up over there. I didn’t have the energy to tell her about Monroe’s phone call; that could come later. It could all come later. We had all the time in the world now.

She said goodbye to me in a voice cracking with emotion, and once I’d hung up, I cried for real.

I cried so hard my head started to ache and my eyes couldn’t cough up any more tears. It was like a torrent of bottled up emotion, all of it bursting out of me at once. With my face blotchy, my eyes raw, I felt better than I had in weeks.

It would be a while before Mason came home. That night I didn’t sleep a wink.

Eventually I stopped trying, and I wrapped myself in a blanket and lay out on the sofa, listening to the nighttime sounds of the street outside.

I thought about how I’d introduce Daisy to her father, about Thanksgiving and Christmas, about my parents and how they’d handle all this.

I thought about a
future
and the process of it was intoxicating, scenario after scenario a real possibility.

The next day I busied myself as best I could, visiting Justin and Daisy, checking on the diner.

By late afternoon I was back on my sofa, exhausted and tense with it, with nerves, with the possibility something might still, even now, go wrong.

I drifted off to the silence of my house, the sun setting outside and Mason thick in my thoughts again.

“Taryn.”

I blinked. It was dark but not dark, silvery moonlight filtering through the front window. I hadn’t drawn the curtains. I didn’t know what time it was.

“Hey, Taryn,” came a gentle voice again. A warm hand touched my shoulder. “Get up, lazy.”

A finger tucked a piece of hair behind my ear and I finally opened my eyes properly. “Mason.”

There he was, soft with shadows and bathed in moonlight. He was a dream, some apparition conjured from my deepest yearning. I reached out, my fingers stretched like they might float right through him.

They didn’t.

“Mason?”

He smiled. “Hey, baby.”

I breathed deep and released. “Oh my—” I sat up so quickly my head began to spin, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t expecting him so soon. By rights, in the grand scheme of everything, I shouldn’t have been expecting him at all.

And yet here he was. Back in my life, back from the dead, back from the edge of everything.

I flung my arms around his neck, toppling off the sofa and pushing him down flat on his back on my living room carpet.

“Ah!” he cried, and I tried to lean up but he wouldn’t let me, securing an arm around my middle.

“You’re hurt,” I murmured, barely inches of space between us.

“I got shot.”

I moved impulsively, sitting up to straddle his waist. I tore at his leather jacket until it was off his arms, shoving up his shirt until I could see the bright white strip of a bandage wrapped around his chest and bicep.

I shook my head, speechless. There were healing cuts and deep bruises stark on his skin, visible even in the darkness. I pressed my palms gently over the steady rise and fall of his chest and tried to push warmth into his battered body.

“I’m okay, Taryn.”

Leaning down, I kissed one of the blackest bruises. My hair covered me like a curtain, fluttering over his skin. I spread my fingers over his ribs, sucking a soft path with my mouth over his ribs, tending to every mark, every bleeding wound, every tiny scratch.

Mason’s hand cupped the back of my head.

I realized I was crying again, my tears falling onto his bruises.

“I’m okay,” he told me again.

“I know.” I opened my mouth over his strong heartbeat. “That’s why I’m crying.”

He tugged me upward, toward his own mouth, and I went eagerly, sighing between his lips. It still felt like a dream, kissing him in the moonlight.

I helped him slip his shirt over his head. The bandage stood out on his tanned skin, a few dots of blood where his wound had leaked when I’d thrown him down.

I kissed that, too. I kissed his collar bone and his throat, his pulse and his jaw. I kissed his mouth, his cheek, his nose, his eyelids. I kissed him until he felt real, until I could stop trembling with shock and feel the desire touching my veins instead.

The next kiss was ferocious, open-mouthed and gasping, sheer possession coming from both of us. Mason’s hands tangled in my hair. I ground him down into the floor with my hips. I stroked his wounded body with my restless hands, feeling him arch up despite his discomfort.

I dealt with the fastenings on his jeans and he shuffled out of them, kicking them away. I peeled my dress off my body and threw it to one side, my bra and panties following it.

“Taryn,” he breathed against the corner of my lips, our kisses frantic even through the trial of undressing. I knew exactly what he was about to say. “I love you.”

I broke away, tipping my forehead against his. “I love you, too.”

He sat up with a groan, me secure in his lap and his swollen cock trapped between our bodies. “I’m never gonna leave again.”

“I know,” I told him.

“And I’m sorry.”

“I know that too,” I told him. “I don’t want you to say that anymore, okay? It’s the past. This right here is the future.”

He nodded. I reached between us, stroking his cock and listening to his appreciative sighs. I rose up on my knees and slid the head along my folds, slicking him up with how wet I was for him.

“You feel that?” I asked him breathlessly. “That’s what you do to me.”

Mason bit my bottom lip, grinning savagely. His eyes were bright, the forrest green all swallowed up by pupil, and I rolled my hips back and forth, rubbing myself against him.

He jerked his hips up, slipping just inside my pussy and making me gasp. “Feel that? That’s what
you
do to
me.
”

Our naked skin pressed together, the heat from Mason indescribable. His arms were strong around my waist, his hands huge and possessive on my body. I knew I’d never get tired of the feeling of being consumed by him, of being the center of his world.

He would—
did
—kill for me, and I felt frantic at the thought.

“I’d do anything for you,” he swore, before I even knew I’d spoken out loud. “Anything at all.”

“Oh, God,” I groaned, sinking deeper onto his cock, inch after inch a sweet torture. I held his good shoulder, my other hand in his hair, and seated myself fully in his lap.

“Anything to keep you safe,” he went on, his voice rough. “I’d kill a hundred men.”

“Not anymore.”

“I would,” he promised fiercely. “If anyone tries to take my family away from me again, I’ll finish them.”

I tipped my head back, gasping as I fucked myself on his cock. He may have changed, but that part of him never would. He was both of those versions of himself now, the young Mason and the older one. He was a man who would kill to protect what he loved, and a man who would cherish those things also.

I loved him thoroughly, every piece of the puzzle.

Mason kissed my throat, his hot mouth and sharp teeth marking me. “I’m yours.”

Frantically, speechlessly, I nodded. “Yeah.”

“I love you.”

My muscles clenched around his cock, my stomach starting to hurt with the intensity of it. My orgasm built and built, a flood of heat I’d never known before threatening to drown me. I felt Mason start to shudder, his mouth going clumsy on my skin, and I clung to him desperately, sinking his cock into me as deep as I could take.

Right at the brink, I gasped. “I love you.”

I came with all the force of an avalanche, my vision blacking out. I heard, in some vague, far-off way, my own voice crying out. I felt, absently, Mason’s hands and mouth on me.

I trembled and gulped down air, my head spinning as I came back to myself.

Mason’s hair was chaos from my hands, his features slack with shock. It seemed his own orgasm had been as intense as my own and I sighed a laugh, feeling so satisfied I could have slept for days.

Mason looked equally as tired.

“How’s your shoulder?” I asked.

“I can hardly even feel it,” he quipped with a grin.

“A bed might be more comfortable.”

“Our bed, huh?”

I laughed again. “Yeah. It has a real nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t have to stay here,” Mason said, turning serious. “Daisy’s gonna need some time to get to know me before I just swoop straight into her life.”

I loved that he recognized that. It made me love him all the more. “I know.”

“I’ll stay at the hotel for as long as it takes.”

“Not tonight, though,” I said, kissing the corner of his mouth. “Tonight you’re coming to bed with me.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”

“And you’re gonna get a good night’s sleep,” I quipped. “And you’re gonna get all healed up.”

Mason chuckled. “Sexy.”

To me, it was. I could see the appreciation in Mason’s eyes as we stood, gathering up our clothes and heading upstairs. He’d taken care of me last night, and now it was my turn to take care of him.

We were going to make one hell of a team.