was no future. He’d made that abundantly clear from the very start. She might have had a change of mind along the way, but she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he had.
Or that he ever would.
“Borrow your sister’s baby for a week,” he advised. “The allure might wear off after 24/7 of diapers and bottles and crying.” He tugged the garish shirt over his wide shoulders. “Hell. Get a puppy. Angeline’s gonna have a whole new litter of ’em in a month or so that’ll be needing homes. I’ll hook you up with one.”
She just eyed him. Angeline, she knew, was his sister who lived with her husband and family over in Sheridan. They’d met once in passing some time ago. In passing because family get-togethers weren’t part of Casey and Jane’s deal. He didn’t invite her to any—even though, with the Clay family, who had fingers in nearly every pie in town, there seemed to be many.
And if he had invited her, she’d have told him he was out of his tree anyway. They weren’t dating. They were just sleeping together. Nothing more.
“This isn’t like deciding I want a new pair of shoes. Or a new dog. I’ve never even had a dog.”
He gave her a vaguely shocked look and she wished she’d kept that tidbit to herself.
“I want a husband,” she added quickly. “A family of my own. I want it when I wake up and when I go to sleep and I’m too old now not to do something about it!”
Something came and went in his eyes as he put on his worn tennis shoes. He didn’t even bother tying the laces. “If you’re bound and determined, I could probably set you up with a couple candidates.”
She nearly choked. “I don’t need your help finding a husband.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself, sport.” Then his head swooped and his mouth caught hers in a fast, thorough kiss that left her knees weak and her insides hot. When he lifted his head again, she was certain there was amusement lurking at the corners of his lips. “Just let me know if you change your mind.”
About what? Ending things with him? Allowing him to set her up with someone else?
“I won’t change my mind,” she said stiffly. Removing him from the equation would best be accomplished cold turkey. Like a swift yank that removed an adhesive bandage. “So the next time you’re looking for a bedmate, you’ll have to look elsewhere.” The fact that he wouldn’t have to look hard wasn’t lost on her. Despite his unfathomable dedication to the ugly shirts of the world, Casey Clay was stupefyingly gorgeous. Intelligent and humorous despite his secretive nature. In her very own bar, Jane had witnessed countless women throwing themselves at him.
She had never been one of them. Their relationship, their sexship, hadn’t been planned. It had been more like a head-on collision neither one of them had predicted.
“It won’t be the same.” His lips crooked. “Nobody gives good...bickering...like you.”
She pressed her lips together, not wanting to be amused, particularly now, and headed downstairs to the back door. He never parked in front on the street, where his truck might be noticed. She yanked open the door. It was almost midnight and outside, everything was quiet and still. “I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure—”
“It’s been more than that,” he drawled as he stepped past her. “Since passion isn’t factored in this plan of yours, you’ll probably want to remember what it feels like when you’re working your way through your matrimonial prospects. But if you find yourself in need of a reminder, you know where to find me.”
“Working at Cee-Vid,” she said smoothly. “Because nothing’s more important than keeping those video games coming.” Then, before she changed her mind, she pushed the door closed behind him.
If she’d wanted confirmation that Casey would never be interested in redefining their friends-with-benefits relationship, she’d certainly gotten it.
She just wished that it didn’t hurt quite so much.
Inside his office at Cee-Vid, Casey entered a code on his computer that revealed a security panel in one wall. Cee-Vid had been producing some of the most popular video games in the world for the past few decades. But behind the front, the company did a heck of a lot more as a location of Hollins-Winword, an equally successful organization that hardly anyone in the world knew existed. International security. Black ops. Hollins-Winword did it all and they did it well. And right now, they had an asset on the ground in Nepal named Bax Kennedy who had missed his last two check-ins. Casey’s mind should have been strictly on that fact. But it wasn’t.
It was on Jane Cohen.
He stepped up to the security panel that looked like a small wall mirror and stared into the iris scanner.
She wanted to get pregnant. Have a baby.
The scan completed and a numeric panel lit behind the false mirror’s surface.
Why hadn’t he seen it coming? She was a woman. Past thirty. There were enough females among the Clay clan for him to know perfectly well that her desire for a family wasn’t unnatural. Hell, his entire extended family believed in having kids.
It was what the Clays did.
Except for him.
He tapped in another code on the smooth surface and heard the nearly soundless, hollow release that came from somewhere inside the wall. A moment later, part of the wall moved, revealing itself as the door it actually was, and he stepped through into the cavernous communications center they called Control.
“Status?”
Seth Banyon leaned back in his chair and stretched, looking relaxed even though his eyes never stopped roving the bank of screens covering the wall in front of him. “Same.”
Casey felt the automatic door closing behind him and he moved across the large blue-lit room to stand behind his associate. Like Casey, Seth collected a paycheck that showed that he worked for Cee-Vid. But also like Casey, his real employer was hidden deep and well beneath that. “This was a simple assignment,” he said. “All Bax had to do was escort the emir’s niece back to college.”
“Without drawing attention to the fact that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be in the first place. Money,” Banyon muttered. “More trouble than it’s worth, if you ask me.”
The emir had plenty of it. His affection for his only sister’s three children was well-known. When whispers of a possible kidnapping attempt had reached him, he’d reached out to Hollins-Winword to discreetly resolve matters.
Casey had two sisters and from them, four nephews and a niece. They were still children but whatever their ages, he knew there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to help keep them safe.
He stepped around Banyon and tapped a few keys on one of the keyboards that surrounded the room. The uppermost screen on the wall in front of them shifted from a satellite image to a photograph of the emir’s niece and nephews. “This isn’t about money. It’s about a power struggle between the emir and his despot of a second
