As soon as she was gone, he threw Han an impressed look. “You got her jumping on command like that. Nice. She’s loyal, hot, and knows how to take an order.”
Han knew Jasmine was gorgeous—that any man in his right mind would want her. He was also aware that he owed the gang leader a debt of gratitude for tending to his wounds. But he had to warn him, “She’s mine. Do not even think about approaching her.”
Ant held up his hands with a chuckle. “Relax, homes. I’m not coming for your ruka. She made it obvious by her death grip in the car ride here that she wasn’t here for nobody but you. I’m just saying I might have to go to Hawaii. Get me one of those aloha hotties.”
For danger of saying something Phantom might have to shoot them out of, Han gritted out, “I need a moment alone with Phantom.”
“Yeah, of course, I’ll just go next door,” Ant answered with a shrug. “Make sure your girl gets what she needs….”
The instantaneous rage must have made its way to Han’s face because Ant broke off with another grin, “JK, JK, homes. Waylon got clipped in the gunfight, so I’m going to go check on him.”
“He was shot?” Han said, disbelieving. “Why did you not give him the hospital bed?”
Another shrug from Ant. “I don’t know him. You never got around to properly introducing us, ‘member?”
With that, he loped toward the basement stairs, laughing at his own joke.
“Want me to clip him?” Phantom asked, signing as they often did when they were in unknown territory and wanted to converse in secret.
Han almost laughed at his fellow Dragon’s no-questions-asked loyalty. But laughter produced the kind of pain that the drugs couldn’t entirely mask.
And that pain cleared his mind enough to say, “No, just give me the report.” Signaling to Phantom that they were back to business.
“Well, the 24K tried it,” Phantom answered with a shake of his head. “Lucky, that Waylon guy doesn’t adapt well to change. He opened fire. A lot of those thieving-ass 24Ks got away, but a few of them got dead for trying to cross us—by the way, if this was all a plot to snap Victor out of his shit, good job, it worked. All I had to do was tell him somebody tried to come for you, and he was up and out of bed, issuing orders to round up every 24K involved. Don’t worry. We’re gonna serve some serious payback for what they did.”
Han wasn’t worried. Phantom was the big guy they sent in for intimidation work, but Victor was even more lethal than his brutal cousin. He’d know how to track down their enemies, and he’d know even better how to make them suffer.
But… “Jasmine. How bad was she hurt?”
“I’m guessing not that bad,” Phantom answered. “According to that Ant guy, they found her hiding with you behind a bunch of bags of grain after all the shooting was done. I guess you’d passed out, and that was as far as she could drag you by herself, so she built up, like a grain fort around the two of you to protect you from the gunfire. They said she refused to let you go, even in the car, even while his sister was working on you. And that was over twelve hours ago, so I’m thinking if she had any real injuries other than cuts, they would have made her pass out by now.”
Han wasn’t ready for the volcano of emotions that erupted inside of him at Phantom’s words. His heart raced even though he was lying in bed and hopped up on calm-inducing pain meds.
“So no need for you to worry about getting revenge,” Phantom said, mistaking the reason for his silence. “That sister of the Ant’s is pretty legit. And she says she’d ‘prefer you see a real doctor to double-check,’ but her call is that if you take it easy, you’ll be all healed up in a couple of months. And the guys have already got the Delaware house all set up for you.
A couple of months. So they’d be staying here for longer than he originally intended.
He wondered what Jasmine would be mad about the most. Having to spend the fall in Delaware, or what he was about to do next.
“Thank you for coming out here to see about me,” Han told Phantom.
“No problem, honorary cuz,” Phantom answered, reverting to the American label he slapped on Han when he visited Hong Kong for the summer, and Han was introduced to him as Victor’s new “honorary brother.”
Han smiled, blissed out for reasons that had nothing to do with the pain meds. Then he told his honorary cousin, “I need you to arrange a few things for me.”
A few hours later, Han had switched out his basement recovery space for the master of a four-bedroom house. He’d bought the home overlooking Rehoboth Beach after he’d come up with the plan to use Delaware as the place to receive and dispense all the product they were getting from their cooks in Europe.
