think that I don’t know you, Bianca Sutherland. And if you can’t see that, then maybe you’re not really running from us, you’re only running from yourself.”
Without another word, he walked out of the bedroom, leaving her to try to unravel what had just happened and what she wanted to happen next.
Fingers pressed to her kiss-swollen lips, pulse pounding in her ears and the last waves of her orgasm still lapping against her, she sank down onto the bed and fought to remember all the reasons why Taz was wrong.
* * *
Taz…
Three hours into the ten-hour flight with no Bianca sightings since he’d walked out of the bedroom, Taz gripped the leather armrest a little tighter, leaned back in his seat and schooled his face not to betray a thing.
Not a lot of things in life made him nervous, but the sight of one of Bianca’s pissed-off best friends standing over him with a wide popsicle stick weighed down on one end with hot wax was one of them.
Elisa flashed an evil grin, then began humming as she slathered the wax over one section of his short beard. The con artist with a heart of black coal was a master of disguise and her transformational skills had helped on more than one mission for the B-Squad, but she seemed to be enjoying the prospect of yanking out every single strand of hair in his beard a little too much.
After hacking off most of his hair and dyeing it from ebony to a brown only a few shades darker than his skin, she’d said she needed to wax off his beard to make sure a black five o’clock shadow didn’t fuck up his disguise. There was no doubt after what went down at Bisu Manor six months ago that Sterling Walsh had a file on him as well as Bianca, but he still wasn’t buying Elisa’s explanation for the extreme makeover.
“Do we really need to do this?” he asked as she rubbed a strip of white cloth over the wax.
“Probably not.” She gripped the edge of the cloth with one hand and pressed the other down hard on his jaw, pulling his skin taut. “But you sure as hell deserve it.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before she jerked her hand back and peeled off half the skin on his face along with the wax—at least that’s what it felt like. He blinked away the black dots on the edge of his vision as he worked his jaw back and forth.
For her part, Elisa just stood there gleefully holding up the cloth covered in wax and hair, but not—surprisingly—his skin. How in the fuck some people voluntarily did this to their balls, he couldn’t comprehend. The idea alone made his nuts nervous.
“Fucking A.” He pressed his hand to the sticky part of his face that throbbed like he’d just gotten the business end of his dad’s belt. “You could warn a guy.”
“Oops.” She dropped the cloth into the trash and loaded the stick up with another glob of hot wax. “My bad.”
Gritting his teeth, he forced his hand down and turned his head to give her better access to the virgin territory on his face. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Keir, Marko, Lash and Duke watching. Each of them wore matching horrified expressions. He would have laughed if Elisa wasn’t pressing another cloth strip to his wax-covered beard.
“I promise it’ll only hurt half as much as I wish it would.” The words came out as smooth and sweet as if she’d just told him that mint chocolate chip was the best flavor ice cream ever. Then she ripped the cloth back with a gleam in her eye.
He should have expected this. Bianca, Vivi, Lexie and Elisa were a tight unit. Lash called them the coven—but only behind their backs, because he had a genius IQ to go along with that pretty-boy face of his.
While his chipper tormentor, Elisa, gathered more hot wax, he searched his periphery vision for Bianca and came up with nada. She was either still hunkered down in the bedroom or was keeping out of his sight line.
Fighting Bianca’s righteous anger with orgasms may not be the best plan he’d ever thought of, but
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