Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139606 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 698(@200wpm)___ 558(@250wpm)___ 465(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139606 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 698(@200wpm)___ 558(@250wpm)___ 465(@300wpm)
She leaned over and brushed her lips against his. “That is one order I would refuse, Sir. Go to sleep.”
He watched as she walked out and turned the light off.
And he sank into a peaceful sleep knowing they would take care of him.
Chapter Eight
Tasha closed the door behind her and got ready for the real fight. Dare had gone down as easily as she’d hoped. There had been the tiniest fear he would do the classic martyr, protect-the-women thing, but she’d batted that away.
She’d learned early on in this job that the way to manipulate a target was to fulfill their needs. Oh, there were some assholes out there who were utterly unmanageable, but for the most part if a person had their needs met, they tended to fall in line.
Dare needed to be taken care of. Not in a baby-him way. In a simple, human, needed-to-know-he-wasn’t-alone way.
He was so much more vulnerable than he would ever believe, and she was taking advantage of him.
She took a deep breath and let her mask settle into place because she was fairly certain she was about to face off with another person who wanted to manipulate Dare Nash.
The question was why. She needed to figure out who Brian Peters was working for because it sure wasn’t Dare.
“I’m sorry I was so aggressive. I’m worried about him, and I’ve had a rough night.” Brian stood across the room from her, and he had his mask in place, too. He was giving her a charming smile, likely the same one he’d been giving her sister all day.
But she’d seen the real Brian Peters. So they were going back to playing nice? She could do that. They didn’t have enough information to drag him out into the light. Yet. “I’m sorry I questioned you. I was worried, too. Of course you didn’t take off running after the guy who tried to hurt Dare. I would have been scared as well. It’s a perfectly normal reaction.”
There was a little tic in his cheek that let her know he so wanted to respond. He didn’t like being thought of as soft and somewhat weak. It was there for a moment and then gone. Brian shook his head and gave her a self-deprecating laugh. “I wish I’d had a different reaction. I’ve always thought I would be a fight guy. I didn’t even go to the flight response. I froze up.”
He hadn’t. He’d coolly and calmly taken the man out, got on his cell phone, and twenty minutes later he’d had Dare in bed while he was passing the attacker off to a man who did know how to avoid facial recognition.
He had a team with him. Tasha needed to figure out if it was an intelligence team that was backing him up or if he had a mafia cleaning team helping out.
Who the hell was this man and why couldn’t her team break his cover?
The fact that they couldn’t made her lean intelligence—and a high-level one—but she couldn’t discount what a well-run syndicate could do.
The important thing right now was her cover. Did this man know exactly who she was? Was that why he was suspicious? Or did he buy into her act? She’d found most men took women at face value.
“I think that’s what happens when you’ve never had to face real danger before,” she replied. “Training helps.”
“So you think you could have handled it better than I did?” There was a hint of challenge in his tone.
“I’ve spent my life around military men and women.” She had to be careful about revealing actual parts of her background. It was important to give this man enough that he was satisfied she was being open, but not so much he could put together pieces she didn’t want made into a complete puzzle. “By the time I came on the scene my dad was out of the Army, but he mostly hired ex-soldiers. All of his friends were ex-military, so I was trained from a young age in how to handle myself in various situations.”
“And have you ever been placed in one of those situations?”
More times than she could count now, but her mind had gone back to one in particular. She wouldn’t tell this man about how young she’d been the first time she’d had to hide to avoid the man all the girls in the orphanage feared. She wouldn’t tell him that she remembered the day they came for her mother and she’d been hidden in the cabinet under the sink and told to stay quiet as they’d murdered her the way they had Tasha’s father.
She went back to a more recent memory, one that was relevant to this mission.
“When I was a kid I was dumb and got catfished by a man who wanted to hurt my dad,” she said quietly. “He found me online and worked to gain my trust for months. I thought he was my age. I thought he liked me and was trying to help me out. I went to meet him and he pretty much did the needle version of what happened to Dare. I couldn’t run, couldn’t make any decisions at all. I was sure I was going to die.”