Atticus (steele Protectors 2) Read online

  “I will.” Lucan gently wiped away those tears with his fingertips. “I might have to give him a pounding first, though.” He gave a grin at the thought of it. “But no doubt we’ll get around to talking eventually.”

  Jenna watched Lucan leave, really hoping he would be able to talk Atticus down from his obvious fury with all of them.

  But most especially with her.

  “I thought I might find you here.”

  Atticus didn’t even glance at Lucan as his brother came to sit on the barstool next to his in the crowded bar he occasionally frequented. A game of something had been blaring away on the huge screen that almost took up one wall of the establishment for the past hour, but Atticus had no interest in it.

  The bar was noisy and crowded this time of night, but the whisky was good and all the other patrons had seemed to sense not to go near the tough-looking bastard sitting alone at the bar.

  Lucan motioned for the bartender to bring them a couple more whiskies. “You knew what choice Jenna would make.”

  Knowing what the softhearted Jenna would decide and Atticus actually having to stand back and let Worthington leave were two different things.

  “She wanted me to tell you she’s sorry,” Lucan added softly.

  Atticus’s fingers tightened about the whisky glass. “Great.”

  “Maybe it’s time you told Jenna exactly why it is you—we’re all so protective of her,” Lucan reasoned. “We all respected the parents’ decision fourteen years ago, but Jenna is an adult now, and it’s time she knew—”

  “Knew what?” He glared at his brother. “That her father is a murderer many times over and serving a life sentence in prison? A life sentence that means exactly that!”

  “She has a right to know—”

  “So she can go and visit him once a month?” Atticus bit out. “No. Absolutely fucking no,” he repeated for emphasis. “It would destroy her to learn who and what her father was.”

  “So you would rather let her go on thinking you’re an unreasonable arsehole?”

  He snorted. “She’s going to think that anyway. And Jervis deserves to rot in hell for the rest of his life after what he paid to have done to Jenna.”

  “If those two men had got their hands on August, their real target, then Logan would be the one sitting here right now saying exactly the same things you are.”

  Atticus’s nostrils flared. “It isn’t the same.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s test out that theory, shall we?” Lucan drawled. “Maybe it’s time for you to take a break and for Jenna to come and stay with me for a while—”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely not,” Atticus snapped. “She stays with me.”

  His brother nodded. “Exactly my point.”

  Atticus turned to face him. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Lucan’s expression softened. “Isn’t it time you just admitted defeat and put a ring on it?”

  Atticus’s mind went completely blank for several seconds, his head filled with white noise rather than the raucous conversation going on around them. “I’m not… We haven’t… Jenna doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life with a rough bastard like me.” He scowled darkly. “She doesn’t even like me half the time.”

  His brother grinned. “Jesus, Att, considering you’re the eldest brother, you don’t have a fucking clue, do you?”

  “About what?”

  “Women. One woman in particular.”

  He turned away. “I’m not going to talk about Jenna when she isn’t here, with you or anyone else.”

  Lucan shrugged. “Then what do you suggest we talk about?”

  Atticus’s expression lightened. “Your report on the successful conclusion of the kidnapping in South America was a little sketchy, so maybe you would like to fill me in on why that is.”

  His brother’s mouth tightened. “Why don’t we both just get drunk and not bother talking at all?”

  Atticus grinned at Lucan’s obvious discomfort. “Hit a nerve, did I?”

  “Several,” his brother grated, signaling for the bartender to leave the bottle of whisky this time rather than just refilling their glasses.

  “Okay, let’s get drunk.” Atticus shrugged. “Jenna probably went home with August and Logan anyway.”

  “You didn’t give her much reason to want to stay with you, bro,” Lucan acknowledged.

  No, he hadn’t. And if Jenna had now decided to leave him, he couldn’t exactly blame her.

  It was after midnight when Jenna heard the ascent of the lift, and the sound of the doors sliding open, indicating Atticus was finally returning to his apartment.

  Stumbling back to his apartment might more accurately describe it, along with several muttered oaths as he obviously crashed into something, immediately followed by the sound of something smashing on the tiled floor. Probably the bowl on the table in the entrance hall where Atticus habitually dropped the keys to his cars or motorbike when he came in.

  Jenna didn’t hesitate in getting out of bed to pull on her robe over her nightclothes before hurrying out to the entrance hall. If Atticus was as drunk as he sounded, he was going to hurt himself.

  “Need any help?” She looked down to where Atticus knelt on the tiled floor attempting to pick up several sets of keys from amongst the shattered remains of the patterned bowl. She could smell the whisky he’d been drinking from several feet away.

  He looked at her with bloodshot eyes. “You’re still here.”

  She frowned. “Where else would I be?”

  He gave an exaggerated shrug. “I thought you might be spending the night at August and Logan’s.”

  Jenna gave a pained wince. “Would you rather I had?” August had suggested her doing exactly that after Atticus walked out the way he had, but Jenna had declined the invitation in favor of going back to Atticus’s apartment. But if he had decided he no longer wanted her here…

  He used the table to help himself get back onto his feet, china crunching under the soles of his heavy boots. “I had the impression earlier that you didn’t give a fuck what I thought or said about anything.”

  She gave a heavy sigh. “That isn’t what happened, and you know it isn’t.”

  His eyes narrowed to dark slits. “Sounded pretty much like it to me.”

  Jenna grimaced. “Maybe we should talk about this again in the morning? You’re obviously…tired, and we’ll probably just end up having another argument if we continue talking tonight.”

  He gave a humorless smile. “If you mean drunk, then fucking say drunk.”

  “Atticus, please…”

  “Please what?” he challenged, body tense. “Please don’t be angry with me because I’m a softhearted fool and allowed myself to be swayed by Worthington’s bleeding-heart appeal?” Bitterness edged his voice. “Please forget that you’re the one who sat up with me every night for the first week after I came out of hospital because I woke up screaming, my sleep haunted by nightmares of the abduction and beatings? Please forget that not an inch of my body wasn’t battered and bruised in the attack? Please forget that I can’t bear the thought of being alone—”

  “Atticus, stop!” Jenna placed her hands over her ears to block out his taunting tone. “Just stop,” she choked.

  Atticus closed his eyes, drawing in several deep breaths before opening them again. “Go back to bed, Jenna,” he instructed heavily as he turned away. “I can’t talk to or be with you right now.”

  Jenna gave another choked sob as she turned on her heel and ran back to her bedroom.

  No, not her bedroom, but one of the guest bedrooms in Atticus’s apartment.

  A guest who had obviously outstayed her welcome.

  Chapter 7

  “Can I ask what Atticus was doing this morning while you packed up your stuff and left his apartment?” Rourke queried mildly after Jenna had answered his knock on the door of her apartment.

  Her nose wrinkled. “From the smell of hi
m when he arrived home last night, I would say he’s sleeping off an excess of whisky.” She moved away from the door so that Rourke could come in, aware of him closing the door behind him. “I’m presuming Ben told you where I was?” Jenna had been aware of the Steele Protectors bodyguard following her here when she left Atticus’s apartment two hours ago. Luckily, it was a Saturday, and she didn’t have to go in to work.

  “You presume correctly.” Rourke made himself comfortable in one of her armchairs, looking as elegantly handsome as always in one of his designer label suits. “As I’m on call at Steele Protectors over the weekend, I was the one Ben contacted with the news of your…relocation. You know Atticus is going to come after you, right?”

  “Atticus and I have…decided that our temporary living arrangement no longer suits either of us.” Jenna avoided looking at Rourke by continuing to unpack the food she’d ordered and picked up on her way home to her apartment earlier.

  An apartment that seemed extremely empty without any of August’s things here.

  But she would get used to that, along with the loneliness, Jenna told herself firmly. Just as she would get used to not seeing and being with Atticus every day.

  “I somehow doubt it was by mutual agreement,” Rourke said knowingly.

  Jenna closed her eyes as she willed herself not to become emotional. “Then let’s just say Atticus made his feelings on the subject known last night.”

  “Let’s not,” Rourke drawled. “From what Lucan said this morning regarding how much the two of them drank last night, anything Atticus had to say when he got home should be ignored. You’re playing with fire by moving out without telling him, squirt,” he cautioned.

  She gave a brief smile at his use of the affectionate name he’d called her when she was younger. “It’s time for me to get on with my life, Rourke. Past time,” she added as he would have spoken. “The men who attacked me are…gone. The man who hired them is in prison awaiting trial. I’m physically healed enough to go back to work. You have someone following me to keep the press at bay. Haydn has his security cameras outside and inside this apartment building. There’s absolutely no reason for me to stay at Atticus’s apartment any longer.”

  “All that was just as true yesterday.”

  But yesterday, Jenna had still held on to the hope that Atticus might one day have a lightbulb-going-on moment and realize he loved her as much as she loved him. She no longer had that hope. “It was time for me to come home, Rourke.”

  “I doubt Atticus will see it that way.”

  She gave a heavy sigh. “Atticus being Atticus will see it in whatever way he wants to see it. But ultimately, he’ll get over it. Do you want coffee before you go?”

  He grinned. “Is that a subtle way of saying you want me to leave?”

  She chuckled. “I didn’t notice anything subtle about it!”

  Rourke rose gracefully to his feet. “We’re your family, squirt, and if we’re a tad overprotective, it’s only because we love you and want to keep you safe.”

  Much as Jenna loved her adopted family, she sometimes wished she had relatives of her own. But her mother had been an only child, and her grandparents were dead, and Jenna had never known who her father was, let alone ever met him. She had asked her mother about him when she was five and started school and realized most of the other children had two parents. But the evasive answer her suddenly pale-faced mother had given her had warned Jenna against ever asking about her father again. And then Sarah was gone, and Jenna had found herself removed from Ireland and living in the Steele family mansion in London, with six pseudo older brothers. Over the years, her life in Ireland with her mother had become a distant memory.

  But maybe it was time for her to do something about that? She knew the name of the village where she’d been born and brought up until she was eight. Surely someone there would remember Sarah Riley and her young daughter, Jenna? She could even try looking up some of that stuff on the internet first.

  Rourke gently touched her cheek. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, Jenna, don’t.”

  She gave him a searching glance. “What makes you believe I’m thinking of doing anything?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what you do when you’re angry with Atticus. Remember the time you packed a bag and ran away from home, after he advised the parents not to sign the consent form so you could go on a ski trip to Italy with your school?” he teased.

  “I was twelve!” she protested.

  “And ten years later, this red hair is still going to get you into trouble.” He gave a tress of her hair a sharp tug.

  Jenna shook her head. “I still have no idea why he was so unreasonable about a simple school ski trip.”

  “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

  “Well, he didn’t bother sharing them with me!”

  Rourke shrugged noncommittally. “Do you remember what happened when Atticus finally tracked you down at the bus station trying to buy a ticket to Liverpool so you could get the ferry back to Ireland?”

  Her cheeks warmed. “I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere but school and back for six months.”

  Rourke nodded. “Think how much more severe your punishment’s going to be now that you’re an adult.”

  “That’s the whole point, Rourke. I am an adult. The law says so. I say so,” she added firmly. “And Atticus now has no say in what I do or don’t do.”

  Rourke bent to place a kiss on her brow. “Well, don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

  If anything, this conversation with Rourke had only made Jenna all the more determined to stand on her own two feet and make her own decisions. And if those decisions annoyed Atticus, then that was just too bad.

  Atticus rolled over in bed, opening one eye and then giving a pained groan as the digital clock on his bedside table showed it was almost ten o’clock in the morning. His head felt as if it had a dozen clog dancers in it, all competing with each other for the title of champion clog dancer.

  How much whisky had he drunk last night?

  Too much.

  Now his head was thumping, he’d overslept, and why is my apartment so quiet?

  Admittedly, it was a Saturday but Jenna was usually up and about by eight o’clock even on a weekend, commandeering his bathroom, then listening to the radio in the kitchen as she prepared her breakfast.

  Maybe she’d taken pity on him this morning and decided to keep the noise down?

  Putting the words “Jenna” and “taken pity on him” together didn’t quite ring true. Especially as he now remembered the two of them had argued—again—when he got home last night.

  Atticus sighed. What had they argued about this time?

  He’d been angry and frustrated when he left the Steele Protectors offices, had gone straight to a bar and already downed a couple of glasses of whisky before Lucan joined him, the two of them then finishing off the bottle. It had been almost midnight when they’d taken separate cabs to their homes. He remembered stumbling into the apartment, knocking something off the table, the sound of china breaking, then Jenna appearing in her robe—

  Oh hell.

  He remembered the things he’d said to Jenna. The hurt in her tear-wet eyes as she pressed her palms against her ears in an effort not to listen to any more of the vitriol spewing out of his mouth.

  He hadn’t meant any of it.

  But he had still said it.

  Jesus, he was going to have to do some major groveling to get her to forgive him this time.

  Except, as Atticus quickly discovered once he’d climbed out of bed and pulled on his robe, Jenna wasn’t anywhere in the apartment for him to apologize to.

  Not only was Jenna gone, but everything and anything that was hers or might remind him of her had been removed from his apartment.

  Including every scrap of her sexy underwear from his bathroom.

  “So you just…left without telling Atticus you were going?” August gave a pained wince.

  The two women were sitting t
ogether at the breakfast bar, drinking coffee in the kitchen of the apartment August and Logan now shared. Logan had discreetly made himself scarce and left the two friends alone to talk.

  Jenna lifted a teasing brow. “I had the feeling last night that Atticus isn’t exactly your favorite person.”

  August frowned at the rebuke. “Only in that situation. Normally, Atticus is—”

  “Arrogant? Cruel? Has a foul temper—”

  “And here.”

  Both women turned round so quickly, it was surprising they didn’t suffer whiplash.

  Jenna felt the color drain from her cheeks as she looked at Atticus standing in the kitchen doorway. His long hair was as messy as usual, there were dark circles beneath his eyes, his face was pale, and his mouth was a thin and disapproving line. No doubt all caused by an overindulgence of whisky last night.

  Her gaze returned to those dark and unreadable eyes. “Logan called you.” It was a statement, not a question, as she saw Logan behind Atticus, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned against the wall in the hallway. He continued to look unconcerned even after Jenna had mouthed the word traitor at him.

  Atticus snorted. “Everyone called me.” Something he’d discovered after he’d thought to check the messages on his cell phone.

  There were messages from Ben, Rourke, Haydn, and lastly Logan, all telling him the same thing: Jenna had left his apartment at seven o’clock this morning, gone back to her own apartment, before then leaving again at ten o’clock to go and visit with August. There hadn’t been a single message or even a note left by Jenna herself to tell him she was leaving or where she was going.

  “I can’t imagine why,” she now snapped.

  “No?” Atticus arched one dark brow. “August, would you mind very much leaving the two of us alone for a few minutes?” he requested in a deceptively gentle tone.

  Deceptive, because Atticus’s emotions had been in turmoil since he’d discovered Jenna had moved out of his apartment, and because he knew it was all his fault. He’d been too harsh with her, said things he shouldn’t have, with the result Jenna had decided to leave rather than spend any more time in his company.