“Uh, yeah, I guess…I want you to be happy, sweetheart. We’ll pick you up some next time one of us goes into town.”
My eyes focused on the travel arrangements on the screen. “You know, if you brought that guy from Omaha in on the earlier flight, you’d save $500. They arrive at about the same time in Bogotá.”
He squinted at the screen before reaching for his black-framed glasses. “Well, I guess… It’s only $500 though, and this guy is a big real estate mogul. I don’t want to piss him off—well, until he gets out in the jungle. Then I’ll piss him off royally.” An evil grin slid across his lips. He looked from the screen to me. “This stuff makes sense to you?”
“Perfect sense. Hospitality, travel, dealing with high-rollers—I’ve seen it my whole life. I was born and raised in a casino, for fuck’s sake.”
“Such language,” he slapped at my thigh. Rex used fuck in every form, at least in every third sentence—but apparently he didn’t like it when I did.
“Rex, every little bit adds up. If you can save $500 without sacrificing quality, always do it. These rich folks have airport clubs they hang out in anyway—he’ll get his last alcohol fix before you scare him straight,” I winked.
“I see your point. I hate this shit—I just want to be in the field. I tried having one of the staff do it, but I’m worried about confidentiality, and their English isn’t the best. And, Mr. Omaha isn’t an alcoholic—he’s addicted to Oxy after a back injury. You repeat any of this, I’ll—”
“Throw me to the snakes?”
“Deny you sex, you horny little thing. Now, show me what would you do about this guy from Toronto—the time difference is brutal.”
I took the mouse over, clicking until I had his future student from Toronto arriving closely enough to the rest of his class members to transport them to base camp together in one van. “You, Penelope Sedgewick, are smart as fuck.” He gave me a quick squeeze from behind.
“My dad would never let me help with any of the business—he said I was an airhead and would never get it, said to go back to shopping and drinking for a living.”
“He’s an idiot,” Rex pronounced with finality, “for more reasons than that, believe me.”
“I’m so bored…can I help with your business?”
“Hm,” he murmured. “You’d be a great help, sweetheart. Help me finish this, and we can play.”
I finished the routing, then looked at his ground transportation network, as well as his departure lounge set-up before he reached up and clicked the screen off. “Turn around,” he commanded. I clamored around to straddle him, looking into his eyes. He was silent, his arms wrapping around my waist.
“I loved the date last night,” I said to break the silence.
“It was out of my comfort zone, but I mostly did it for Nate.”
“For Nate?” I asked, the tinge of jealousy rising in me.
He nodded, his fingertips brushing across my face to pull my lips out of their childish pout.
“I wanted to show Nate that we were three—not you and I, and sure as fuck not you and him. It’s just been the two of us for so long, not in a sexual way, but we’ve been close. I guess our…it’s more than a friendship, more than brotherly, but not… I can’t explain it, but I knew he wanted more, I just couldn’t provide it. But with you here…it’s like a missing piece clicked into place last night.”
“Do you mean through me, you can let Nate get close to you in a more physical way?”
“I’m not sure—maybe, at least to some degree. Last night was much more than sex…it was…”
“Spiritual,” I whispered.
He nodded and went silent.
“This is all new to me, and so fucking far out of what I know—but I do know that Nate helped pull me back to life, and without him, I’d be dead. I’m willing to try to give him some of what he needs, at least as much as I can without losing my own boundaries. And you, Penny, are making me feel happiness for the first time in years.” He pulled me close, my head resting on his hard chest. “Will you stop being so bossy?” I prodded, pushing my luck.
“Never. I can’t function without control—too much shit has happened to me that’s been beyond my control. I only feel safe if I’m in charge. Nate gets that—he doesn’t obey because he’s weak or even submissive. Nate is a strong, testosterone filled bulldog of a man, but he realized early on that to have any type of relationship with me, he had to let me lead. And he did…until he tricked me into going with him to Las Vegas to rescue a blonde in danger that he’d never forgotten.” His lips brushed the top of my head as he held me.
“Am I in danger still?”
“Yes, baby, you are. We all are. The second word gets out that you’re here, and it will eventually get out, it’ll be war. Not only did I turn down the offer to kill you, but I turned around and prevented the guy who was hired from doing the job. Shit will hit the fan, sweetheart.”
I rose up to look at him, afraid and stricken with the reminder that this wasn’t a vacation. My life was in danger. Who would hire someone to kill me? And why?
These two men had become my everything in such a short time, I couldn’t let them be harmed. “I’ll go back—my father will protect me. I don’t want you two to be—”
He jerked my face to his, his jaw clenched. “I want you to be mine, to be ours. Don’t ever talk about leaving here for us—we will fucking protect you, not that…” He bit his lip to keep from continuing with his feelings for my father—whom he seemed to know, or at least know about.
“Do you want to be with us?” His voice was calm, serious.
I nodded, a tear meandering down my cheek. He wiped it away with a fingertip. “We’ll keep you safe, Penny. We…” He paused, as if once again suppressing the words he longed to say. “We care about you. You belong here with us.”
After a long silence, my eyes fell again to the many plaques on the wall.
“Who’s Roger?” I asked, desperate to be let in to his shrouded world.
“Me.”
“Oh! I though maybe he was your father. You don’t seem old enough to be a Colonel—”
“Lieutenant Colonel—that’s the rank I left the military at. My father was a dead-beat heroin junkie sperm donor who beat the living shit out of me every chance he had. He never amounted to anything.”
I brushed my lips across his scratchy neck—falling more in love with him every time he shared himself with me. He leaned in to touch his nose against my forehead. “Rex is a nickname the para-rescue guys gave me in honor of my innate jungle skills—Rex, King of the Jungle—I guess it stuck.”
He gave me a playful swat on the ass and said, “Okay, Princess, climb off. I promised we’d play—and I desperately need some play.”
“Um, should we get Nate?” I licked my lips and salivated at the thought of sex with both of them together again.
“No, he doesn’t play.”
“What?” I asked, my face scrunched in a question. The kind of play I wanted to do was very much something Nate did—did very well, in fact.
“I mean, he can shoot, but he doesn’t really like to just go out and blast things.”
It dawned on me that Rex wasn’t talking about sex. “Guns? I-I’ve never shot a gun!”
“Oh baby, let me pop your cherry then.” He stood up and walked over to a heavy wool rug on the floor in the corner. He pulled it up, revealing the solid wood floor underneath. He pushed at one of the planks before pulling up a metal door. Below the door were a half dozen military-looking rifles next to as many handguns. “That’s your arsenal?” I asked, surprised. “Arsenal? Hell, that’s just my safe here in this part of the house. It is one of many, sweetheart, one of many. Tools of the trade, baby.”
We walked out of the compound, Rex loaded down with guns, ammunition, and other shooting equipment, until we came to a clearing where he had various targets and objects to shoot at set up. I was a little nervous, my only exposure to firearms was the many security people that were around my dad’s businesses, but I’d never held or shot any myself. “What if—what if the gun just goes off?”
“That’s what we’re here for today, Penny. Guns don’t just go off by themselves, baby,” he stuck up his index finger in front of him and curled it as if pulling the trigger on the gun. “It doesn’t do anything until you make it—you pull the fucking trigger, it fires. Once you know what you’re doing, guns are only dangerous to the people that you point them at, which is why you’re going to learn.”
Rex pulled out a handgun, examined it for a second, and then handed it to me grip first. The grip of the pistol felt like rough sandpaper. It smelled like a combination of oil and charcoal. It was a lot heavier than I expected, and partly made of plastic and partly made of metal.
He handed me safety glasses and I put them on, thinking that they were extremely ugly. “Okay, this line,” he traced a line etched in the dirt with the toe of his heavy boot, “is the firing line. You don’t go past it unless I tell you to. Point your weapon that way,” he pointed toward the targets. “Not at me, not at your feet, not at the compound—only that way. Always assume that every gun you touch is loaded, and assume that if you pull the trigger, it’s going to shoot. This,” he showed me a lever on the pistol, “is the safety. This way, the safety is on and you can’t pull the trigger,” Rex flicked the lever with his thumb, “and this way, the safety is off; when you pull the trigger, it will shoot. This gun has fifteen rounds—it’s a semi-automatic, so you don’t have to cock it each time.”