“Trouble!” Anomaly squawked, nearly blowing out my eardrum. “Kev, I’m being attacked by Hospitality Squirrels! I need you to kill them and save me!”
I pulled my hand away from Kev’s, hoping like hell Champ hadn’t noticed, and engaged my mic. “Anomaly, for fuck’s sake. Hospitality Squirrels won’t hurt you; they just want to take you to their den—”
“I know, dumbass! But I’ve never seen so many! They’re overpowering me! I’m going to have to fight them.” On the monitor, I saw Anomaly reach into his pack.
Kev shut his eyes for a half second and straightened in his chair, trying to overcome his anxiety so he could help his team. “No! If you get aggressive, they’ll turn on you! Stay calm and—” He broke off with a gasp as a Nix Shell exploded, sending creeping amaranthine shock waves across the field, temporarily paralyzing everything in their path.
“Oh, you absolute jackass! You fucking selfish piece of— That shell is going to paralyze us too!” I yelled, too furious to think.
Kev didn’t hesitate. He switched to his cache, extracted a woven blanket, coated it with protective Niobe Tears, and threw it over our avatars one second before the purple haze spread across the screen.
At the same moment, in a quiet neighborhood in Texas, Yolanda finished transferring the data and bolted off the Dacostas’ porch. She and Sasha hit the sidewalk half a second before Cam’s luxury SUV pulled onto the street. They turned the corner and were halfway back to their vehicle by the time Cam pulled into her driveway.
Kev made a whimpering noise and closed his eyes in relief. My jaw ached with wanting to reassure him, to thank him, to tell him how fucking impressive he was… and to yell at him for insisting on being part of this stressful, high-stakes mission in the first place. I was proud as fuck… and also hated that we’d involved him.
“Done,” Champ said, blowing out a breath. “Good work, you two. Come find me later.” He patted Kev’s shoulder and sauntered out of Kev’s lair as if it had been a regular day at work… because of course, for us, it had been.
I felt a rare wave of resentment toward my boss. Did he not see that Kev hadn’t been trained to deal with this shit?
Cam’s voice came over the headset. “I’m back. What’d I miss? Why is everything all purple?”
Kev and I climbed out from our blanket once the danger had passed. Anomaly tried stammering insincere apologies, but Kev cut him off.
“It’s… it’s fine. These things happen. Let’s just finish this quest, okay? Everyone ready?”
The only thing I was ready for was pulling Kev from the room, throwing him up against the wall in the hallway, and recreating our scene from the club last night, kissing him over and over and over until he was trembling with want instead of fear and had forgotten all about this stupid mission.
“Yeah,” I muttered, yanking my headset more firmly in place. “Ready.”
We finished the bridge crossing and moved to the final and most challenging stage of the quest. It took three more hours to finish, three hours of near misses and tense communication with our asshole scout and our drug-dealing enchantress. Three hours of sitting next to the kindest man I knew, who was trying his hardest to keep it together. Three hours of inhaling his familiar scent and trying not to notice the way he crinkled his nose to lift up his slipping glasses without using his hands.
Three hours of trying to convince my dick it didn’t belong in his irresistible body. Three hours of imagining what it would feel like to hold him down and take him right here in his lair.
And three hours of arguments from the angel on my shoulder—who sounded an awful lot like Champ—who reminded me why getting involved with Kevin Rogers would be an incredibly stupid and shortsighted choice.
“Got her!” Kev cried when he successfully slipped the sleeping duchess out the tower window and into Adam’s wheelbarrow on the pavers below.
“Fuck yeah, you do,” Adam grunted before moving quickly away from the incoming castle guardian horde. Cam stayed behind, pouring enchantments into the horde, while I followed Adam to make sure he didn’t steal the duchess out from under our noses.
Getting her back to Kev’s homestead wasn’t easy, but as soon as we got her behind the fences and golden pips began raining down from the sky, we all cheered in relief. And I set my headset on the desk with a clatter.
“Thank fuck.”
“We did it!” Kev said with a brilliant smile on his face. He threw off his headset and tackled me, throwing his arms around my neck and hugging me so tightly my chair flipped over.
We tumbled to the ground in a laughing heap. Having his body against mine, having him in my arms, was as much of a relief as completing the mission. Maybe more. He felt so fucking good, like he was supposed to be there all the time, that it was hard to remember all the very good reasons why he wasn’t.