Page 26 of Watch Over Me

"Sounds good." James turned back to Eddie. "We'll handle all of it, including your brother."

Gnawing on his lower lip, Eddie slumped in his seat. "Thank you."

James dropped onto his chair and patted Eddie's knee. "No thanks needed."

Over Eddie's shoulder, he watched Ryan leave the room with a phone to his ear, while Jasmine had her headset onand nodded along to something either Jeremy or Martinez was saying. This was probably the most privacy he and Eddie were going to get for the rest of the night, so he leaned a bit closer.

"How are you, really?" he asked in a low voice.

Eddie stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged. "This sucks."

James huffed, almost despite himself. "Yeah, we've had better assignments."

"We've hardly had worse," Eddie said, but there was a bit of a real smile on his face now.

"Well, what about that time in Arlington—"

"Oh, no." Eddie shook his head vehemently. "Absolutely not. We promised we're never going to speak of that one again."

James lifted his hands in the gesture of surrender, which reminded him he still had his fancy suit on. He stood up and pulled off the jacket to toss it over the top of the chair, and as he turned back, he caught Eddie watching his body closely.

The body that responded instantly, to James's dismay.

Fuck. This was not the time.

Eddie rolled his chair back towards his desk quickly, but not fast enough to hide his face going red.

As James sat back down, he reminded himself the adrenaline was running high tonight. Everyone reacted differently to it, and he wasn't alien to his reaction being heightened sexual desire.

The heat traveling up his spine had everything to do with that and not anything else.

The same thing had apparently happened to Eddie. His first outing as a security personnel outside of the preliminary phase, and he'd already stumbled onto a conspiracy—one involving his brother, to make things even worse. Considering all this, arousal was a much better reaction than hysteria or something.

Before James could go further down that road, though, Ryan slipped back into the room.

"Kalei didn't want to wait, so he may get here about when Jeremy and Martinez do. He's going to alert the lawyers, as well, since we're on a shaky ground, here."

That was putting it mildly. The implications of this were frankly mindblowing.

"Whatever the boss wants, the boss gets," James said, but sat up a little straighter in his seat, relieved that Kalei was taking over the things that were above the field operatives' level.

"What he needs to get is a life," Ryan muttered with a shake of his head. "He admitted that it hadn't been long since he left the office."

"On a Saturday?"

"Exactly."

It was an open secret that after Kalei had lost his husband a few years ago, the company had basically become his life. He'd built it with his brother-in-law, Noa, but he had no more family to speak of and no apparent interest in dating anyone. James wasn't sure if Kalei even had any social life aside from the KRK meet-ups he threw at his house.

Still, staying late in the office on a Saturday, when he didn't have to be at work at all…

"You think Vic knows?" James asked, glancing towards Eddie who was busy on his computer—or appearing so.

Ryan shrugged. "Is there anything about Kalei that Vic doesn't know?"

"Fair point."

Vic had been Kalei's assistant from the very start of the company. How long he'd been in love with Kalei, though, nobody knew or dared to ask. They could—and often did—tease each other about their love lives, but even the most bull-headed of them knew better than to touch particularly sensitive subjects.

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