I don’t understand this. I don’t understand any of it. I came here to take his woman. To humiliate him. Diana Jensen was supposed to be a tool. A means. A weapon I aimed at my father’s life and fired without looking back. She was never supposed to be this.
I look down at my hands, and they won’t stop shaking.
6
Kai
THOSE FUCKING MEN don’t leave until eight.
A catering spread arrived by lunch, another by dinner, and I didn’t eat because the barrister carried a plate from the kitchen to the office himself, and that tells me he knew where the plates were kept. He’d been here enough times to know.
I sit with that for a while.
While I battle the aftermath of hearing her come for a man who isn’t me, I Google him. He’s from Weston Bay. Jack Rutherford brought him in specifically for this case. He is about Jack Rutherford’s age, give or take, and he is a Queen’s Counsel. Forty-seven years at the bar. By every measurable standard, the man is one of the finest barristers in Weston Bay and the country.
I scroll through every result.
I can’t find anything about a wife. I don’t know what to do with that information, but I don’t like what it tells me. I close the browser and put my phone face down on the nightstand, and then I pick it up again and search his name one more time, addingmarriedto the query. Nothing. Addingpartner. Nothing useful. AddingDiana Jensen, and my thumb hovers over the search button for a beat before I lock the screen and set the phone down.
I don’t need to know. It isn’t relevant to the mission.
It isn’t relevant to anything.
I sit on the edge of my bed with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped together, and I try to work out what the hell I am doing here.
The plan was to get even. Make Jack Rutherford bleed. When the tabloids ran a photo of him with a woman and captioned her his girlfriend, I saw my opening.
And so I planned. I made sure I was the one standing in this penthouse, hired to protect a woman I was never supposed to care about.
I press my palms flat against my thighs. The woman part, that’s the problem.
Because what I had not planned for was Diana Jensen. I hadn’t planned for any of it, and now my plan isn’t in the driver’s seat anymore. It’s in the trunk, suffocating.
I am not hurting Jack Rutherford from here. I am hurting my fucking self.
I should have gone to Weston Bay instead. Walk into Rutherford & Blake and get close to him directly, no roundabout route through a woman. But there’s a problem with that, and it’s the reason I decided on this route in the first place. I’d walk into that building and someone would know before I opened my mouth. One look at me and the element of surprise is gone.
So I went the long way around. And the long way around has a name and a mouth and a face, and now I am entangled with a woman I was supposed to be using.
I am so restless right now.
I need to run. A few laps around the block, enough to burn off the edge of whatever is building in my chest. I get up and open the door, but stop right there because Diana is standing in front of my door, about to knock.
Barefoot. Silk pajamas the color of cream. Loose shorts that end at her mid-thigh and a top with sleeves reaching her elbows.The whole thing is hanging off her slender frame, making her look small. She also looks devastating.
“You’re still awake?”
“I was going to get water.” I lie.
She looks at me for a moment, and then she nods toward the home office. “Come have a drink with me.”
I follow her in. She pours two glasses of whiskey at the small bar cart near the window and hands me one without asking. Then she settles into the armchair across from me with her legs crossed, the silk of her pajamas catching the low light from the city outside.
“I’m low on stock,” she says, meaning the liquor.
“I can go get some ice—”
“Nah.” She takes a sip and looks out at the city through the floor-to-ceiling glass. “Sit down, Kai.”
