Total pages in book: 160
Estimated words: 149137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 746(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 149137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 746(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
God, what must his life be like that he thought everyone in the world was out to use him? “He’s the Dom in Residence. He signed a nondisclosure. It covers everything that goes on with members in and out of the club. If you like, I’ll have your lawyer send over one that specifically covers the events of tonight.”
“Why would he sign that?”
“Because he’s not a massive ass.” Sometimes Josh was exhausting. “Not everyone in the world is out to get you. There are people in the world who are good and who do good things without thinking about how much they can cash in at the end.”
“I only really knew one of those,” he said quietly. “And even then she got something out of me.”
“Tina?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I sometimes wonder if she would have bothered to help me out if I hadn’t had this face. This face has been my curse. My blessing. I often wonder what my life would have been like without it.”
“We can’t change the past, Josh. We can only face it and accept all the good and the bad it did and move on. Believe me. I understand that.”
Josh’s head shook. “You can’t possibly understand what I went through.”
“I can’t understand the minutiae of it. The details would be different for me, but don’t think for an instant that I don’t know what pain is. That I don’t know how it feels to be locked in a cage with no way out. To be used even by the people who cared about me.”
He went silent again, but some of the tension was gone.
“How long has this been going on?” Kayla asked.
“Almost five years.”
She kept her eyes on the road, finding the turnoff to Old Malibu. “You don’t have to tell me what you’re hiding.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything at all.”
“Except that I’m fired.”
He went silent again.
“I was scared. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Of course it does,” he replied with a sigh. “Do you think I don’t feel something for you? Fuck, you’re all I think about, but that can’t matter now.”
This didn’t feel like she was working a target. Her heart ached. This wasn’t some conversation meant to manipulate her way back into the job. She felt like a girlfriend desperate to fix what was wrong between them. “Why? Why can’t it matter?”
“I…I have to let you go,” he said haltingly. “It’s not about what I want anymore. She could hurt you. She could kill you. You think you were scared? God, Kay, I couldn’t breathe until you showed back up on that trail. I sat there waiting to hear a gunshot, waiting to listen to her kill you.”
Finally, they were getting somewhere. “I don’t think she intends to kill me. I think she wanted to show me my place.”
“What makes you think that? Spy intuition?”
“She had the chance tonight and she didn’t take it.”
He shook his head as though there was no way he was buying that line. “Only because she wasn’t prepared, Kay.”
Oh, but she knew something he didn’t. “I think she’s always prepared. Why else would she have at least two snipers with her? She’s got a team. You might have thought she was there alone, but I doubt she’s ever alone. I bet she’s got muscle around her every time she pulls one of these jobs. Think about that. Two snipers when she thought there would only be one of you. Look, when I was at that shrine thing, she had an easy bead on me. She was there when I made the drop. She had probably hidden there the whole time, waiting to watch you like some icky creeper. I couldn’t see her, but she spoke directly to me. She couldn’t have been more than a few yards away. I was perfectly helpless. All she had to do was pull the trigger and I would have gone down.”
He turned, his face stark white. “She was there with you?”
“In person. And that thing she uses to modify her voice is definitely portable,” she replied. The road was narrow and curved. She slowed down because she wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t kick her out of the house the minute they got home. If they got home before Shane and Declan did, Josh might lock them all out. It was important to keep him talking because he was starting to calm down. “She was waiting for me, which means she was waiting for you. She quoted Silence of the Lambs, letting me know I was not Clarice in her opinion. I got the whole ‘you’re nothing but a whore’ speech—it’s the theme of the night—and then she promised to blow your head off if I didn’t get you out of that canyon in way less time than it really took us. She wanted her money. I assume it’s money. I guess it could be information of some kind.”