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My conflicting emotions were a tumble of crazy. His coldness was at odds with the man who’d lowered me into the warm bath the night before. The man whose kiss had landed on mine and meant the world after a sea of filth for the cameras. The man who’d loaded me into his car from the alleyway after having saved my skin with his own bare hands.
I wanted his body next to mine afresh. I wanted to feel his heat with mine. To feel his mouth all over again. To feel the strength in his steel. In his will. In his control.
No matter how crazy it was and always would be, and how it should never be the case in a million crazy years, I wanted him. I wanted him enough to take my breath.
Instead of coming closer he got up from the bed and paced across the room to his wardrobe. “Like I said earlier,” he told me. “Business is a cunt to navigate when there’s anything worth navigating. It’s time I did some navigating.” He fished a phone from a jacket pocket hung on the wardrobe door. “I’ll get some food sent up to you.”
“Wait…” I whispered, wanting to say so much. So much crazy rattling from my crazy heart all fit to burst. “Wait just a minute…”
But the door was already closing behind him.Chapter Twenty-FourBrandonI couldn’t keep going with this. Not with the spiking pit of frenetic emotions bubbling under my steel. I needed out. I needed my walls back in place and solid.
For her sake as well as mine.
It was the same fucked up whirlwind of emotional bullshit within her as all of the others. It had to be. Her own world of wants, needs and truths may have seemed somehow different from those pushed to the limit before her, but they couldn’t be.
Genuine affection had no place here. Not in this world. Not around me.
Genuine affection — hell, love — had no place anywhere that cold hard cash couldn’t counter. It could always be converted, bought, sold.
She wasn’t different.
She couldn’t be different.
And neither could I.
My frazzled senses around her couldn’t be any more real than those I’d made it my life’s mission to deny. Only they seemed real enough that I was beginning to defy every scrap of common sense I thought I stood for.
I moved downstairs at pace, scrolling through my phone and hating the way I felt such aversion to the cunts who wanted in on the action. I paced right on past the office doorway and through the house onto the back porch, hating the fresh wave of aversion I felt toward my jackass of a brother.
He didn’t follow me out and I was grateful. My throat was scratchy as I lit up another cigarette, my lungs crying out against the invasion of smoke as much as my mind craved the nicotine.
Under regular circumstances I’d have been quick to chase down Drake’s river of threats on the encrypted portal, but under regular circumstances I’d have been considerably stronger in my ability to counter his shit with my own. I imagine that’s why I turned my attention to other portals of communication on the business radar and let it lie. I imagine that’s why as a result I noticed the fresh ping on the shadowy social media profile where I’d first heard from Miss Emmerson.
Let’s talk, the message header said. It took me a moment to recognise the college boy face staring back at me from the user profile, but when I did it set my pulse off all over again.
Jake Wharton.
One of the three idiot kids I’d set on their way on the beach that first night with my beautiful siren.
The jackass Lance had photographed switching numbers with her on the university campus.
You have Paige Emmerson for sixty days like you had Rebecca Lane, his message continued. I want to see her. I’ll pay. I may be young but I have money. My family are the Wharton haulier business. I can afford it. Just let me see her. I’ll sign up wherever I need to, just tell me how.
The idiot really didn’t have any idea of the money involved in the sign up process. Sure, the kid had cash. I’m sure the haulier business was more than enough to keep him in an affluent lifestyle, but my client base were another species altogether.
On any regular business day I’d have laughed out loud and sent him a dismissive response at best. This wasn’t any regular business day.
The fact that a kid like him was willing to put his family wealth up for grabs for the chance of seeing a girl was borderline insane.
If I hadn’t been feeling borderline insane over the same girl myself, I’d have written him off as a joke and little more.
