Book Title: Pros & Cons of Desire (Pros & Cons 3)
Author: A. E. Wasp
Publisher: Self-Published
Cover Artist: Angsty G
Release Date: February 20, 2020
Genre/s: Contemporary romantic suspense/comedy
Trope/s: Law officer/thief. A gay cross of Charlie’s Angels and Leverage
Length: 65 000 words
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Five Men. Five changes for redemption. One things for sure, these guys are no angels.
Blurb
Two jobs down, three to go, and job #3 is mine. My name is Ridge Pfeiffer. I’m a dirt poor jewel thief from the wrong side of the tracks, and I don’t play well with others.
Theoretically, the deal works like this. I do the job Charlie planned for me and Miranda erases my past, makes my biggest problems go away. Too bad my biggest problem is the one thing I don’t want to go away: Diplomatic Security Agent Davis Ethan.
When Davis caught me breaking into a safe during job #2, I should have ended up in jail. instead, I ended up in his bed. Rich, gorgeous, and privileged, the only thing we have in common is a love of beautiful lingerie and beautiful men. He’s everything I hate, everything I want, and he could destroy me with a word.
There are a hundred red flags surrounding this job, I should walk away and take my chances, but I’m going to do it anyway. Anything to buy me one more night with Davis.
One more job, one more night, and then I’ll leave for good.
We gathered in the war room, the library Wesley had commandeered and turned it into a combination CSI lab slash video game arcade. There were screens of all sizes, cords and controllers, and see-through plastic carts of parts,
Aside from the side where he had pushed a collection of desks and coffee tables to make an office, one corner of the room had been set up as some kind of lab, with special task lighting, insectile clamps on gooseneck stands, and tiny soldering irons. That was where he worked his magic on our comms.
Hung along one wall was a smart board we weren’t allowed to touch and two old-fashioned whiteboards we were. Currently, one was being used to keep track of Danny and Breck’s wins on Mario Kart. The other had a list of tasks for each of us.
The list was as follows:
RIDGE: RESEARCH SECRET ROOMS OF THE ERA. 1900-1920s? Maybe earlier to be safe.
STEELE: Read translated letters. Try not to molest Breck while reading love letters. Review security for gala with Wesley.
CARSON: Research guest list, prepare Facebook, b.g. on guests and host.
DANNY: Get all info on murder and dudes. Family tree?
LEO: Glower. Rock silver-fox look. Check if any investigations against all 3 families.
WESLEY: Get b.g. on house. Blueprints? Security system.
BRECK: Sit around and look pretty. Read translated letters. Keep an eye out for more dick pics. Examine social media for anything useful.
JOSIE: Get letters translated. Do mysterious Josie things with hot women.
MIRANDA: Research Silva family.
Comfort hadn’t totally been abandoned. There were also three plush leather couches piled high with blankets and pillows. We sat on them in various combinations depending on the situation. Steele and Breck sprawled across an entire couch. Leo and Carson sat primly at opposite ends of another. Josie lay stretched out on the third dressed in a giraffe-patterned onesie, her five-foot-two length almost lost amongst seven feet of leather and acres of blankets.
Danny sat in the co-pilot’s seat next to Wesley’s high-tech rig.
Me? I couldn’t sit, my mind racing the way it had been all night, so I paced. As I looked at the list, flipped pointlessly through the letters and scanned the stack of notes Danny had prepared; one thought overwhelmed all others.
This was a Bad Idea.
With a capital B and capital I.
I listened to them chattering and joking and tossing ideas around until I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Stop. Just… Stop.”
All eyes turned to me. Josie sat up slowly, the antenna or whatever they were on her hood dangling down the side of her neck. “What’s wrong, honey?”
“I don’t like this,” I said.
“Which part?” Breck asked.
“All of it. Any of this,” I said. “This job.”
Steele and Breck exchanged glances.
“What?” Danny asked. “Why?” I felt Leo’s gaze on me. When I glanced over at him, his expression was serious and he dipped his chin slightly. I took it as encouragement.
“Not only is it impossible, this is too close to home. It’s less than an hour away. We shouldn’t do it.”
“You have to do it,” Danny said, eyes wide. “So that the, the, you know, whatever Charlie had on you, gets destroyed.”
“What does Charlie have on you?” Breck said, kicking me in the shins as I foolishly passed too close to his spot on the couch. “Did he find out about you and Coach Hibbings?”
I shook my head at him. “First of all, no. Second of all, why would I be the one getting blackmailed in that scenario?”
Breck shrugged. “I don’t know. Wasn’t he married?”
The way Breck’s mind worked would always be a mystery to me. “Yes,” I said slowly. “And I was sixteen. Therefore he is the one who should be being blackmailed in this hypothetical situation.”
“True. So, what was it? Shoplifting? Did you steal a painting from the Louvre or something?”
“I don’t even have a passport!”
“Yes,” Leo said dryly, the only way he knew to say things as far as I could tell. “Because the passport is the main impediment in that scenario.”
“I can get you one if you want,” Carson said. “What name would you like on it?”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Leo said with a pained wince.
Seriously? It was like every now and then the man forgot he was in bed with a bunch of criminals, and then one of us would say something and he’d remember all over again.
I could practically see him thinking What the hell am I doing here? and Should I just get it over with and arrest all of them now? Though technically I think Wesley and I were the only ones with anything potentially arrest-worthy on our records.
Well, anything provable. I’m sure Carson and Steele had done things not sanctioned by law in several countries on several different continents.
“We have to do it,” Danny insisted. “We have to fix this. Somebody was murdered!”
As if someone wasn’t being murdered somewhere that very second. No wonder he and my brother got along so well. They both had savior complexes, something I’d only recently discovered about Breck.
“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to,” I reminded him.
Leo leaned forward, resting his elbow on his knees and steepling his hands together. “What specifically don’t you like about it, Ridge?”
I checked my objections off on my finger. “One, it’s too close to home. The Anhele el Mar is practically in our neighborhood, less than an hour away.
“Rule one,” I reminded Danny. “Don’t shit where you eat.”
Carson nodded, ruefully.
I pointed at him. “Two. It’s a fucking maze. It’s thirty-five thousand square feet of places to hide things.” I’d known the mansion was enormous, but I hadn’t thoroughly grasped just how enormous a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot home was until Josie had taken me on a flyover recon trip in one of Charlie’s tiny planes.
So I hadn’t been inside myself, but I’d seen plenty of pictures. One good thing about historic homes, there was a shit ton of information available about them. People had been writing about Anhele del Mar in architecture and design magazines since the foundation had been laid.
Danny was flipping through one now. “Holy shit,” he said. “The fireplace was brought over from France. It was built around fifteen hundred for King Henri the Second’s mistress. Damn. Oh, crap, it’s got an entire chapel from some old church in Brazil!”
“Not helping,” I said. “Reason three why it’s a bad idea. There’s only one road in and out of the place.” A1A was the only road on the spit of land that comprised Palm Beach proper. All it would take is a minivan to block our way in or out. Josie, Steele, and I had gone over the logistics of that scenario a dozen times, but really it came down to driving out or leaving by boat or seaplane. Neither of those last two options was inconspicuous.
It turns out it’s almost impossible to go unnoticed in a neighborhood with one road, an ocean on one side and a waterway on the other. Let alone one where billionaires and millionaires with private security lived cheek to jowl and everyone knew each car and delivery vehicle by sight.
Josie had hooked me up with a plumber friend of hers and I’d snuck out the back of his truck. The chances of me being seen were low enough that I decided it was worth the risk. I needed to see what the place looked like at night.
“Is that it?” Leo said.
“Is that not enough? Don’t answer that, it was a rhetorical question. My last objection is the biggest, in my opinion. Obviously the house is too big for me to sneak in and search alone, so we’re going to need to get as many of us undercover as possible, right?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “The night of the gala. It’s really the only night we can get into the house.”
“Right. Great. We have cover stories, but we also have faces. Faces people in West Palm Beach have seen. It’s not like we’ve been living like hermits, here. Though we probably should have been.” That fact had been niggling at me for a while now. Every time one of us opened the door to a delivery man, or said hi to someone on the beach, or went shopping, it was another chance for someone to remember our faces.
“What if someone recognizes one of us? What happens when something goes wrong? Some cop comes around with a picture of one of us and starts asking guests, ‘did you see this man at the party?’ and the guest is like, ‘oh, yeah, he was my waiter.’”
“I agree with Ridge,” Leo said. “This isn’t Mission Impossible; we don’t have disguises so perfect our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us.”
“Speak for yourself,” Carson said.
A dreamer and an idealist, Amy writes about people finding connection in a world that can seem lonely and magic in a world that can seem all too mundane. She invites readers into her characters’ lives and worlds when they are their most vulnerable, their most human, living with the same hopes and fears we all have. An avid traveler who has lived in big cities and small towns in four different continents, Amy has found that time and distance are no barriers to love. She invites her readers to reach out and share how her characters have touched their lives or how the found families they have gathered around them have shaped their worlds.
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