No Love Lost (Masters and Mercenaries: The Forgotten Book 5) Read online

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  No Love Lost

  Masters and Mercenaries: The Forgotten, Book 5

  Lexi Blake

  No Love Lost

  Masters and Mercenaries: The Forgotten, Book 5

  Lexi Blake

  Published by DLZ Entertainment LLC

  Copyright 2020 DLZ Entertainment LLC

  Edited by Chloe Vale

  ISBN: 978-1-942297-32-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or establishments is solely coincidental.

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  Acknowledgments

  It feels like forever ago that I started this little offshoot of the Masters and Mercenaries series. It all began when Theo Taggart took a couple of bullets. It should have ended with Theo’s book, but as so often happens, my characters had other ideas. So here we are five books later and I’m going to miss this bunch of misfits so much. It’s been good to watch them achieve their happily ever afters when joy seemed so far away from each. These books have been soaked in memory and time and how precious each of those things are in our lives. It’s made me reflect on the importance of both in my own life and how building a trove of memories is one of life’s great achievements. As I write this, the world seems to have changed in so many ways, but this truth will always hold true. No matter what happens we are made of memory, each precious moment stamped indelibly on our souls. Each hard time is yet another brick in our foundations, something we overcome that makes the structure of love stronger. I thank the Lost Boys for giving me that revelation. So here’s to one last mission with Theo, Jax, Owen, Rob, Tucker, and their leader, Ezra/Beck. And when this book is through, know that the missions will continue, a younger generation taking over. Thank you so much for sticking with me.

  Thanks to everyone who helped make this book come to life. To my team – Chloe Vale, Maria Monroy, Stormy Pate, Riane Holt, Kori Smith. Thanks to the amazing marketing brains of Liz Berry, Jillian Stein, Jenn Watson and the team at Social Butterfly. Thank you to Denise Lacavalla for her help with the Italian translations in this book, and to Marie-laure Bellon for the French.

  This book is dedicated to Rich for reasons that will only be obvious to him.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Submission Impossible

  Treasured

  About Lexi Blake

  Other Books by Lexi Blake

  Part One

  Chapter One

  London, England

  Kimberly Solomon stood outside the door that led to the tidy offices of MI6 and wished she was back in DC. Something was wrong. She could feel it in her gut, the deep instinct of a long-term operative who’d seen an op go south more than once.

  She couldn’t go back to the States because she was weak, because she’d always been weak in one specific part of her life. If she’d had a lick of sense she never would have gotten involved in this op, but no, she was the idiot who offered herself up. A masochist. That’s what she was.

  But then maybe Beck was a sadist deep down, and wasn’t she interested in seeing how hanging around a bunch of Doms had changed him? He’d been alpha in bed before, in every part of their life, really, but how had studying at clubs, under Ian Taggart and Damon Knight, transformed him?

  She needed to let go of that thought because she wasn’t welcome in those clubs. Neither of those men trusted her as far as they could throw her, and she couldn’t even blame them. She’d had a job to do, and it hadn’t always been to their betterment. She’d shared what information she could, protected them as much as she was able, but in the end she would always be the bad guy
for Beckett Kent and the men he worked with. She was Agency, after all.

  Once Beck had been Agency, too. Once he’d understood what it meant to be an operative, to have to make the hard calls.

  Now she worried that she wouldn’t even be able to protect them at all.

  She stared at the door in front of her and thought seriously about walking away. Just walking away from all of it. Maybe it was time.

  The cell in her hand buzzed and she was thrilled to have a reason to put off making that decision. She’d watched her ex-husband walk through with Damon Knight mere moments before and had stood there, trying to figure out why she couldn’t simply walk away.

  Because you love him. Because you’ve always loved him, and you won’t ever love another man the way you love Beck.

  Because you betrayed him, and he won’t ever love you back again.

  She slid her finger across the screen to accept the call.

  “Are you actually going to go in or are you simply going to stand around? You know they usually frown on that here,” a familiar feminine voice said. “If you’re going to have to deal with MI6 and the Agency, at least let me buy you lunch.”

  She loved the sound of that lady’s voice. Ariel Adisa. Once she’d been the baddest assassin to ever work for an intelligence agency. She’d also been one of the few people on the planet Solo could call friend. Then she’d hung up her guns and used her brain for good, and ended up all married and happy and working for the very man who’d so recently walked into that conference room with Beck. She looked around, trying to figure out where Ari was hiding. “You’re here? I thought you were spending a couple of weeks in Wyoming. Did the big family reunion go bad?”

  She didn’t like the thought of something going wrong between Ariel and her husband, Robert. They’d made it through a storm and seemed so solid.

  “I got back yesterday, but Rob’s staying on for the rest of the week,” Ariel replied in her crisp British accent. “And it was perfect. My new mother-in-law is lovely. Tucker and Roni are staying on for a time. I’m going to miss them terribly. I came home because I’m consulting on a case and they’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. I came up to read through some confidential files they couldn’t send over to me. I thought avoiding the Tube would be a good idea. It wasn’t. Ezra is even more morose than usual.”

  She moved away from the door and saw Ari down the hall. Her friend waved and slid her cell into her fashionable bag. She was dressed in a lovely pink sheath and smoking hot white stilettos. Ariel was gorgeous, and now she glowed in the way only a woman who was well loved ever managed.

  The way she used to glow when he’d loved her. Before she’d taken his brother from him.

  Sometimes she hated Ezra Fain. After all, it had been Ezra’s death that had been the final nail in the coffin of her marriage. The fact that her husband now went by the name was simply another way to twist the knife.

  She strode toward Ari and wondered if it wasn’t fate that had brought her here. Ari, that was. It hadn’t been fate that brought Solo. It had been an order from her boss to stay in London and finish the job she’d started. “Well, I’m sure he’s upset because he knows I’ll be here today. He’s been good at freezing me out since Paris.”

  They worked together on her last mission. It had been the mission that brought Tucker and the rest of the remaining Lost Boys out of the shadows. She’d started the job because she’d wanted to see if she and Beck could try one last time. She’d ended up staying because she’d believed in those men, wanted what was best for them. They’d been through a lot of shit and all because an evil doctor had decided to treat them like guinea pigs. Although now that she thought about it, she didn’t like people who treated guinea pigs like test subjects either.

  Now she wanted to know who’d supported Dr. Hope McDonald with money and assistance. She wanted the names of everyone McDonald worked with. It had been the whole point of her being in Europe. She’d worked with McKay-Taggart and Knight to get the list of McDonald’s consortia from the pharmaceutical company who’d backed her in the beginning.

  Ariel’s expression turned serious. “Why aren’t you back in the States? The Agency took the data. I assumed you would go with it.”

  Yes, she’d assumed that, too. “The boss wanted me to wait here in England and liaise with MI6 and German intelligence. Not to mention I’ve had to deal with DGSE.”

  “Well, you had to know the French would want in on whatever you found,” Ariel pointed out.

  The French intelligence agency had been key in trapping the man who’d tried to trade Roni Croft’s life for the data Tucker had hidden all those years ago. “Yes, and they’ve been perfectly reasonable. It’s Beck who isn’t. He thinks I’m hiding something from him.”

  She was hiding so many things from her ex, but this wasn’t one of them.

  “I think it’s hard for him to trust anyone from an intelligence agency,” Ariel replied with sympathy. “Kim, I have to ask you what you’re doing. Not with work, but with Ezra. It’s been years since you divorced. Don’t you think it’s time to move on?”

  Her heart clenched at the thought, but she knew her friend was right. “When I found out he was getting involved with McKay-Taggart, I knew he would be in danger because of who they were investigating. I’d stayed away for years, Ari. I gave him space. He was grieving and he needed a place to put it all. Then he was angry because he found out about the mistake I made with Levi.”

  The biggest mistake of her life, and she’d made so many. She’d been divorced and she’d gone out with a man she’d thought was her friend, and he’d taken such advantage of her. She didn’t even remember the night. She was a deadly CIA operative and that night had proven she was still a woman and still fucking vulnerable.

  “I don’t know that he’s in a place where he can forgive,” Ari said slowly, as if she knew the words would be a blow. “I’m not sure he ever will be. Obviously I didn’t know him before his brother was killed, but I know the man he is now. He’s perfectly reasonable until it comes to you. Normally I would say that means he’s still got feelings for you and as long as there’s an emotional connection, the relationship isn’t truly dead.”

  “But his feelings for me are hurting him.” It was the conclusion she’d come to after long hours of self-reflection.

  Ariel reached out, putting a hand on her shoulder. “They’re hurting you, too. I don’t like saying this, Kim, but he’s not in a place where he can find any peace with you around. And I don’t think you’ll find any either. Do you want to go have lunch? We can talk. I’ll wait around if your meeting takes longer than mine.”

  The last thing she wanted to do was cry to her gorgeous, happily married friend who would likely start having babies and raising a gorgeous family with her loving husband. She hated the jealousy that gnawed at her. It wasn’t Ariel’s fault she’d done everything right.

  But Kim had thought she would have a family by now. She’d thought she and Beck would have had their two point five kids and retired to the country where they would raise them, and she would sell homemade jam or some shit.

  Instead she was thirty-four and had nothing but a bunch of medals she couldn’t bring out at parties to show for it. She’d tried dating over the years, tried to forget him, but the minute she’d found a way to work herself into his world she’d taken it.

  “Come on, Kim. Please have lunch with me. We don’t have to turn it into a session,” Ari prompted. “I’ll stay at your place tonight and we can order in and drink as much as we like and watch ridiculous movies. I won’t say a thing to upset you.”

  God, it was nice to have a friend. She was going to miss Ari because when she was back at the Agency, she would go deep this time. She would take an assignment that would last years and lose herself in it. She would start over again, and this time she wouldn’t let herself ever get pulled back in.

  “I can’t tonight.” It would be too hard to keep from talking to Ari. Ari had a way of dragging the truth o
ut of her, and there were some things she couldn’t admit to anyone. Some secrets that had to stay hidden or the world would crash in again.

  She had promises to keep. Even if they cost her everything.

  Ari nodded. “All right, but I won’t let you mope forever. Call me sometime this week. I want to get together before you go back to the States.”

  She nodded, though it was another lie. Hopefully she would go back to the States as soon as this meeting was over. “Sure. I should go in. I’ll think about everything you said.”

  She wouldn’t be able to do anything but think. That was why she needed to get out of Europe, away from him. Maybe then she could finally move on.

  She watched as Ari took the stairs and then forced herself to walk into that office. She stopped at the reception desk and showed the badge she’d been given downstairs at the security check and then let herself be led down the hall to the conference room.

  Solo felt every eye on her. It wasn’t that being looked at bothered her. She hadn’t worn the Louboutin boots that came up over her knees to be ignored. But this felt different. Had Damon Knight warned his old crew not to trust her?

  Or had it been Beck?

  She strode in, her Prada bag over her shoulder. What had her mother told her? Use clothes and makeup and looks like a shield.

  No hate can get through a Prada bag, my darling.

  Her mother had been wrong, of course.

  Her mother had hated Beck. She loathed his middle-class background, and the fact that he hadn’t gone to an Ivy league school. Her mother had cheered on their divorce. Not that it had helped her mother’s cause. She’d died hating her daughter for not following in the family traditions and marrying the wealthiest man she could find.