Devoted: A Masters and Mercenaries Novella by Lexi Blake Read Free Book Online

“She’s not the girl I thought she would be. She’s open and funny and weird. Like quirky weird. She has quirks.”
    He’d expected a tight-assed Type A. Since that first day in training class, he’d looked into her a bit. Nothing more than reading her bio. And finding pictures of her and the ex. Now that he didn’t expect. The ex looked like a flipping male model.
    He was surprised at how strongly jealous he could be about her. He’d been a complete ass that first day. He’d walked up those stairs and she’d been talking about objectifying the other guys and they’d all been leering at her. Maybe not leering, but definitely looking and admiring and it had bugged the holy fuck out of him.
    He’d been engaged. He’d asked a woman to marry him, helped her plan a whole wedding, and when he’d found out she was marrying him for money and had a lover on the side, he’d very calmly broken everything off. Oh, he’d been angry, but it had been a controlled burn.
    What he’d felt for Amy hadn’t been controlled. It had been a flash fire and he’d behaved like a fucking caveman. He’d almost lost her.
    He still wasn’t sure what the hell he was doing, but he felt more alive than he had in a very long time so he was kind of going with it.
    He was careful. They met at the club for class and they’d had dinner a few times afterward. They’d talked about innocuous things. She liked baseball and watched an enormous amount of science fiction and fantasy shows. He’d been shocked at that fact. Outside the club and in street clothes she looked very much like the type of woman who would run a company. Her clothes were all designer and flattering, but they reminded him of armor. She didn’t look like a girl who had watched every episode of Star Trek .
    The truth was he was pretty geeky himself. His tastes ran to superheroes. Normally he tried to hide that fact, but Amy just put it all out there. She loved a show called Dart that he followed too, and they seemed to have similar tastes in movies. They’d passed a very pleasant evening talking about Doctor Who .
    He liked her. He had to face that fact. Maybe she was the single smartest woman in the world and she knew how to play him on every level, or maybe she simply was who she was. He needed more time to sort it out.
    He needed more time because he wanted so desperately to get back to that place where she stared up at him like he was something to memorize right before she kissed him.
    “Everyone has quirks,” Mitch shot back. “I’m the quirkiest motherfucker on the planet but that doesn’t mean anyone should risk their business reputation to sleep with me. I assume you’re already sleeping with her.”
    His brother was an optimist. She’d been sweet and friendly, but he’d fucked up that first day.
    Shouldn’t she have forgiven him much more quickly if insinuating herself into his life had been the plan all along? Should she have taken his jealousy and used it against him? Instead she’d told him to fuck off.
    Had that been calculated, too?
    “As a matter of fact, we’re not sleeping together,” he said as he closed the lid to his laptop. He should have known his brother would figure it out. It wasn’t like he could hide it forever.
    But he had to admit, it had been nice for a while. It had felt intimate, like he had a secret. Like they’d been the only two who knew what was going on.
    He kind of liked playing this game with her. He’d started to wonder if she hadn’t done this so she could get to know him. Maybe if she came to care about him, she would back off and figure out they didn’t have to be enemies.
    Stranger things had happened.
    Mitch sighed. “You want to explain to me what you’re doing then? Because if you’re playing her, it’s going to blow back on me with my friends. Big Tag will have issues with you using a training relationship for some kind of revenge plot. If she’s playing you, it could have very bad ramifications to