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So tell me how she’s managed to invade every single damn waking thought I’ve had since I heard that first whimper when she called?Chapter 30Anna
“Nice choice in bodyguards.” Dani tilts her head before giving Finnegan a little wave. He doesn’t even acknowledge her, and it takes great restraint not to smile. “They seem a little more severe than the ones you’ve had before.”
“They’re not my bodyguards. They work for Deacon.”
“Ah.” She takes another sip of her stupid drink before looking back over at me. “I heard he had a business. Security or something.”
I clamp my jaw closed against the urge to explain what the man does. Security or something doesn’t even come close to explaining what these guys do. I haven’t seen much, but what I have witnessed makes her description seem disrespectful, like they’re guarding a shopping center during Black Friday or something.
“What the hell happened, Dani? I was sure you were dead somewhere.”
“Why are you here with Deacon?”
Classic Dani, avoiding my concern in order to appease her own curiosity.
“I told you. I was worried.”
“My dad hired him?”
Because there’s no way I’d reach out to her sworn enemy? I’m sure that’s her reasoning.
“You and I both know your dad doesn’t have the money to look for you.”
She glares at me as if it’s in bad taste to mention her family’s money troubles.
“But financial insecurity doesn’t seem to be bothering you much.” I wave a hand toward the private beach and the personal waiter waiting to the side to serve her every need.
“I have my own money,” she seethes.
I can’t help but laugh at this. “Says the woman who has only dated guys who are capable of lavishing her with gifts and attention.”
“I’ve always dated men with money.” She states the fact like I’m being irrational.
She hasn’t though. The man she told me she was planning to spend her life with didn’t have money. He didn’t grow up dirt poor, but Deacon was raised by two working parents that couldn’t just hand everything to their son.
“And how many of them have you stolen from?”
She doesn’t react at all. Her eyes are glued past me at the waves rolling lazily against the sand.
“How many of them have you left for dead?”
Her right eye twitches, and if I didn’t know her well enough, I’d think she was affected, but Dani and I have been close since we were kids. Her masks, the ones she wears to keep others at arm’s length don’t hide her from me as much as she wishes they would.
“He’s not dead,” I hiss. “Nikolay Petrovich didn’t die in your apartment, Dani. Hell, he checked himself out of the hospital over a week ago.”
Dani and I have been through so much together. Happiness, and fear, several times when we thought we’d end up dead from drinking too much and the one time we got lost in a part of town we had no business being in. She handled thugs on the street once when we were in college much the same way she lived her life, with indifference and an air of superiority that would make dignitaries stand up and take notice.
That bravado disappears the instant she hears my news.
“Wh-what?”
“Not dead,” I repeat. “The bullet you shot into him missed every single vital organ. He’s alive and well. He’s looking for you. He trashed my apartment, sent some gangbanger to kill me.”
A wave of confusing emotions contorts her pretty, tanned face. First, she seems relieved, and I have to wonder if the fear of killing someone managed to infiltrate her who gives a fuck demeanor, but then I see her skin turn ashen.
“Alive?” she says as if she can’t believe what I’m telling her.
She doesn’t even look at the drink that topples over when she stands.
“Where are you going?”
She looks all around as if she expects Petrovich to pop out from behind a palm tree and surprise her. I’m barely able to keep up with her as she hauls ass toward the resort. She frowns at me when my hand slides between the doors to stop the elevator from moving before I can climb on with her.
“What’s going on?” I ask when she just stands there watching the numbers flash as we ride up.
“He’ll kill me,” she whispers. “He’s a dangerous man.”
“I know,” I say and reach for her hands. She lets me clasp them but it’s easy to tell her focus isn’t inside this elevator. “That’s why we came to get you.”
She doesn’t look grateful. If anything, she looks terrified and bordering on agitated that we had the nerve to dip into the fun she was having. As if us showing up caused all of her problems, not the fact that she got tangled up with a dangerous man, stole his diamonds, and then tried to kill him when she got caught.
