The Love Language of an Assassin

5

“You physically dragged her through your house and threw her out the door?” Sacha hugged his ribs while nearly rolling on his best friend’s sofa while they caught up Saturday evening.

Torben eyed his friend coolly. “I don’t think the poor girl’s feet touched a stair as I dragged her down them. No wonder her arm had bruises on it. Her mother damn near tore a strip off me and it took me begging and an increase to her salary for her to say she would not cancel her contract.” He sipped his glass of red wine and crossed his ankles as he stretched out.

“You really don’t apologize well,” Sacha wiped tears of laughter off his cheeks. “Why was she smelling your soap?”

He shrugged uncomfortably, “said she could smell the sandalwood and wanted to know what else was in it. She’s just a kid. Kids are weird.”

“How old was the child you tossed out of your house on her ass?”

He groaned with embarrassment, “I have no idea. She had no make-up, hair in a high ponytail like that singer your kid sister likes. Her jeans had more holes in them than they had fabric and she wore the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen. Her t-shirt was faded and old. Whatever had once been on the front of it was long faded. If she’s a junior in college she gets carded everywhere she goes. There’s no way she’s more than twenty.”

“You seemed to notice everything about her, my friend,” Sacha perked up in his seat.

“She was an intruder in my home,” Torben argued with irritation. “I had to notice everything in case I needed to file a police report. She was easily five eight, lean, and mouthy as hell.”

“Mouthy?”

“Mm,” he took a mouthful of wine, his blue eyes miserable as he suffered his friends teasing. “Asked me if I hit my head on doorframes a lot. Little bitch.”

Sacha rolled on the sofa laughing again and he couldn’t help but smile in response.

“Laugh it up buddy. I happen to know you have a PA you stupidly screwed last night and is now likely to try to take your money or file s*x harassment charges.”

“She showed up in my office wearing lingerie, what was I supposed to do?” Sacha stopped laughing at his friend’s comment. “She’s been my PA for ten years. She said she was tired of me pretending I didn’t want to see her bent over my desk. She was not wrong.”

“You’re f****d,” Torben commented with a shake of his head.

“No, she was f****d, hard and fast on my desk before I took her home and had her on every single piece of furniture in her house.”

“I did not need all the sordid details.” He pursed his lips distastefully.

“When we were in college and we were the geeks on campus, we said someday we would be so rich women would throw themselves at us and we were right.” Sacha rose from the sofa and moved to the bar to add more vodka to his glass. “I might marry her.”

Torben choked on his mouthful of wine, spitting the deep maroon all over the front of his shirt. He coughed and sputtered as his friend grinned lazily from where he leaned on the bar. “You? Married? You have a different girl in your bed every other weekend, including last weekend.”

“But” Sacha tilted his glass in his friend’s direction, his blue eyes dancing with glee he’d made his friend react so violently, “she can keep up with me. She is the one who woke me up this morning for round sixty-nine.” He grinned wickedly as he threw a bar towel at his friend, “club soda might get the stain out.”

“You spent the entire night with her?” Torben’s blonde eyebrows were dramatically high in his forehead, and they almost disappeared into the blond hair falling onto it. He scrubbed frantically at his shirt before simply unbuttoning and tossing it aside, remaining only in a white undershirt.

“I did and she made me waffles for breakfast.” Sacha sat back down on the sofa. “Tell me more about your intruder with the ugly shoes.”

“Jessamine,” he grinned suddenly as he recalled her reaction to his use of her name, “but she prefers Jesse. She almost punched me in the face for using her full name. I could see her fingers clench tightly around the bags she was carrying. I half expected one to make contact with my face.”

“So, not your type then.” Sacha mocked him. “She sounds like she has a personality. You don’t like personality. You like women who say nothing, do as their told and orgasm on command.”

He rolled his eyes at his friend. “I make one claim in college about knowing how to make a girl c*m and for the rest of my days you haunt me with it.”

“I will put it on your gravestone.” He spread his fingers across the air as of spelling it out, “’here lies Doctor Torben Haugen, brilliant scientist who can orchestrate an orgasm in less than ten seconds.’”

“Sadly, I believe you would do it to me. I will be cremated instead and spread in the ocean so there can be no gravestone.” He reached for the bottle of wine and was chagrined to find it empty. “Why is it the best wine always disappears the quickest?”

“I don’t know but the same holds true for the vodka you stock,” Sacha leaned lazily on the sofa now. “Now, tell me about the problem you had at the office this week.”

“I am confident one of my lab techs is a spy for Barrister’s team. It’s twice now we’ve come up with something and within days of me being made aware, his team is flouncing it all over the internet.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m calling in the big guns. Your brother suggested it.” He shrugged, “I have an appointment on Monday morning with Clara Draxton of Draxton Enterprises. She is the best of the best in cyber security and I’m not f*****g around. Both times the discoveries were miniscule which leads me to believe it’s someone with little to no actual clearance, but I don’t want to take any chances.” He pushed off the chair he occupied and grimaced, “I’m going to find another bottle of wine.”

“Why don’t we go skip your wine cellar and go out?” Sacha stood up and stretched, “you mentioned my brother. Stavros has been on my ass to go check out his new club. How a grown man in his late thirties needs to open this many clubs is beyond me.”

“Because he uses them as a cover for his drugs and gun smuggling,” Torben said dryly.

“Alleged,” Sacha retorted blandly, “although we both know it’s true. His father made him who he is. I was fortunate enough to have a different father and a much better role model than a mob boss. However, he is still my big brother and he’s been after me for weeks to come check the joint out. Go put another shirt on and let’s go. We can kill two birds with one stone.”

“One bird being getting your brother off your back. What is the other?”

“With luck, we can find you a girl and you stop sitting on your sofa on Saturday nights drinking wine and feeling melancholy like an old woman.

“Why do I consider you my best friend?” He grunted but didn’t argue and went to find a clean shirt.

Two hours later, Torben was holding his drink and shaking his head at a story Stavros was telling them about how his now ex-girlfriend had walked in on him with another woman and had chased him with a baseball bat. Stavros lived for the thrill but was ultimately an asshole. It amazed him his friend shared genetic material with the douchebag. He looked around the club with boredom, the young twenty-something crowd grating on his nerves.

A group of taller women in the crowd caught his eye and he frowned as he recognized one of them. He watched as she left a circle of women on the dance floor and made her way to the bar, lifting her hand to be served. He excused himself from the two men and made his way in her direction.

She stood tapping the bar, her foot tapping to the music, and he had to admit the stilettos were an improvement on the combat boots she’d had on the day before.

He tapped her shoulder and saw her stiffen as she turned around. Her expression went from annoyance at being bothered to confused as she tried to place him and then irritation at who he was.

“Does your mother know you are here?” he questioned her, his voice loud as he spoke over the pulsating music.

“Doc! Why would my mother care where I am?” she looked him up and down, her mouth pulled down at the corners. A dark blue shirt opened at his collar showing a gold chain and a thick peppering of blonde hair peeking out the top. She reached up and pushed something off his shoulder, “you must have been around when they shot off the confetti cannon.”

“The bouncers let you in here?” he asked concerned.

She laughed at his question as she took her drink off the bar. She stopped laughing when he took it from her hands.

“What the f**k? That drink just cost me twenty bucks. I want it back.”

“You are not old enough to drink!”

“In what f*****g country?” She reached for her drink he held over her head.

“You swear too much, and your mother would be appalled to know you snuck into a club.”

As realization at what he was saying permeated her brain she took to laughing at him. Torben wondered for a moment if the child was so drunk, she had gone hysterical, as she laughed loudly.

“Hey b***h,” a pink-haired woman leaned over her shoulder, “are you taking Lurch home with you or are you coming back to dance?”

“Cat,” she waved at Torben. “This is one of my mom’s clients,” she giggled laughing at him, “he,” she struggled to regain her composure, “he thinks I snuck into the club and my mom is going to be angry.”

The other woman looked him up and down in the same manner Jesse had just done and then she threw her head back and laughed.

“I told you, you look twelve with your hair in a ponytail. Your brother could use you as bait in a sting operation.” The woman slapped the bar and placed a drink order. She looked back to Jesse, “take your drink from the big guy and get your ass back on the dance floor. Unless you’re going to start sleeping with your mom’s clients.”

When Jesse looked at her friend in horror he was, much to his surprise, quite insulted.

She glared at him now, “now you’ve made it weird, and my friends are going to be mocking me all night. Can I have my drink please?”

“You did not sneak into the club?” he eyed her curiously

“What if I had?” she reached for her drink, but again he pulled it backwards.

“It is against the rules,” Torben stared at her. She had a lot of make-up on tonight. The black lines around her eyes in sweeping thick cat eyes emphasizing the dark brown of her eyes. Her lips were painted a bright red, which matched the very short mini dress she was wearing.

“You’re a rule kinda guy huh,” she shook her head. “What is the fun in that?”

“Rules are important. If you are underage, you could get the club owner in trouble.”

She looked past him, “you know him? He’s a douchebag.”

“I know him, and I agree. He is a douchebag, but this is his place, and the rules should be followed.”

“He asked my friend and I to have a threesome with him. We declined. He didn’t seem to be concerned about our ages. Not near as concerned as you.” She grinned at him now, her teeth straight and white against the blood red of her lips, “in fact, I bet, if I went to him now and offered to go back to his office with him, I’d have bottle service for free for the rest of the night. I guarantee he wouldn’t ask me for my I.D.”

“Jessamine,” he clicked his tongue, “do not make me call your mother and tell her I’ve seen you here.”

At the use of her full name, he noticed right away she flinched, but she recovered quickly.

“Call her,” she encouraged him with a smirk. “She’s going to wonder what the f**k her client is doing calling her on Saturday night at midnight to tell her, her nearly thirty-year-old daughter is at a nightclub.”

He stared at her incredulously, “excuse me?”

“Call her,” she waved at him. “She’ll laugh at you. Maybe she’ll let me out of going to your house on Monday if I tell her how creepy you’ve been tonight, stealing my drink and talking to be about rules.”

“Did you say you are nearly thirty?” he looked her up and down in disbelief. “Where is your ID?”

“f**k you, you can have the twenty-dollar drink,” she laughed and walked away, her ass shaking with far more sass than necessary.

As she sashayed away, Sacha gripped his shoulder, “who is the sweet piece of ass?”

“The cleaning lady’s daughter.”

“Thought you said she was a kid? What’s she doing out here? Playing dress-up?”

Stavros came up, “are you looking at Jesse Chavez? Good luck, gentleman. She’s been coming to this club for at least five years before I owned it. The previous owner told me to watch her because she gets into fistfights a lot. She’s got a hell of a mouth on her. The bouncers love her though. She’s got a black belt and she’s had their backs more than once.”

“She’s too young to have been here for five years,” Sacha wrinkled his brow.

Torben tried to process all of the information Stavros just spilled in ten seconds of speaking.

“Brother,” Stavros clapped both men on the back, laughing loudly “she and her friends are having an early birthday party for her tonight. She’ll be thirty in a few weeks.”

Torben drank the drink in his hand in one gulp and then grimaced as he realized he was drinking the drink he’d wrongly confiscated from her. Straight vodka, definitely top shelf. Suddenly his cleaning lady’s daughter had gotten a lot more interesting.